Karl Marx  
On the Trial of Karl Vogt  
versus the Augsburg “Allgemeine Zeitung”  

*Die Reform.* Hamburg.  
No. 139, 19 November 1859. Supplement  

On the Trial of Carl Vogt  
versus the Augsburg *Allgemeine Zeitung*.  

London, 7 November 1859.  

From No. 132 of the *Freischütz*, which a friend from Hamburg sent me, I see that Eduard Meyen felt compelled to throw his ultimately decisive weight into the Vogt affair. The horsepower, or I should say the donkey-power of his logic is concentrated in the great proposition: because he was friends with Blind and Blind did not send him a copy of the anonymous flysheet, the original document which I sent to the Augsburg *Allgemeine Zeitung* must necessarily be a forgery. Of course, in his shallow cunning he takes care not to say this directly; he says it indirectly.  

Incidentally, I wish that Mr Eduard Meyen would provide proof that my time is worthless enough for me to squander it on attacks on German vulgar democracy.  

Since the end of 1850 I broke off all connections with the German emigration in London, which disintegrated all the more rapidly once I had pulled from under its feet the sole common ground, its opposition to me. Its process of dissolution was accelerated in particular by the busyness of such agents as Meyen, who, for example, publicly agitated for the Kinkel faction against the Ruge faction. During the 9 years that have elapsed since then, I have been a constant contributor to the *New-York Tribune*, a paper with 200,000 subscribers, whose readership is approximately that of the *Freischütz*. Have I ever even mentioned the name of any of the German vulgar democrats, have I honoured with so much as a single word the filthy attacks which these upright men heaped upon me for five years in the German, and particularly in the German-American press?  

True enough, during this period I attacked “great” “democrats,” admired as a matter of duty by Mr Eduard Meyen, though I did not slander them. Such was the great democrat Lord Palmerston. My procedure was all the more unpardonable in that not only English newspapers of the most varied party tendencies — from the *People’s Paper*, the Chartist organ, to the *Free Press*, Mr Urquhart’s organ — reprinted my “slander,” but the same “slander” was reproduced, without my intervention, in pamphlet form in at least 15,000 copies in London, Sheffield and Glasgow. Furthermore, during the same period I denounced the great democrat Louis Bonaparte, first in a German work (*The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte*), which was confiscated everywhere at the German borders but circulated widely in the United States and appeared in extract in the then London organ of Chartism. I have continued this slander of the “great democrat” Bonaparte in the *Tribune* to this very day, by analysing his financial system, his diplomacy, his conduct of the war, his *idées napoléoniennes*. Louis Bonaparte sent a public letter of thanks to the *New-York Times* for its opposition to these “slanders.” Seven years ago I even denounced the “great democrat” Stieber in the *Revelations concerning the Communist Trial*, which were pulped at the Baden-Swiss border. That Mr Meyen will certainly pardon me. Nowadays this slander is democratic, since it is done “with high official permission.” How often I was mistaken in the times is proved, alongside the organ of Mr Eduard Meyen, by the organ of Mr Joseph Dumont of Cologne. When I took the liberty, in 1848 and 1849 in the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung*, of standing up for the Hungarian, Italian and Polish nationalities, who snarled more, who howled more than the organ of Mr Joseph Dumont of Cologne? But, to be sure, at that time no Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had yet conferred the “liberal” consecration on the nationalities. That the former editors of the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* have remained true to their views is known even to the former Mr Joseph Dumont, now Giuseppe Delmonte, from the pamphlet *Po and Rhine* published by Friedrich Engels at the beginning of the war. As regards the Eduard Meyen variety of democracy “in the narrower sense,” after ignoring it for nine years I broke my silence only twice, and that recently — once against Kossuth, the other time against Mr Gottfried Kinkel. I did, in fact, write a few marginal glosses, from a purely grammatical standpoint, in the *Volk* on Kinkel’s aesthetic effusions in *Hermann*. That was all I wrote in the *Volk*, apart from an article on the peace of Villafranca under the title “Quid pro quo.” In Eduard Meyen’s imagination, however, a “good democrat” is probably just as much entitled to violate the “despotical” rules of syntax as to defect from the republican camp to the royalist.  

I now find myself at the end of this epistle in the reverse difficulty of Hegel at the beginning of his Logic. He wants to pass from being to nothing, I from nothing to being — namely, from Eduard Meyen to a matter, the Vogt matter. To be brief, I put the following questions to Karl Blind:  

1) Did Blind communicate to me on 9 May, on the platform of an Urquhart meeting, information concerning Vogt which, in its content, entirely tallied with the flysheet “Zur Warnung”?  

2) Did Blind publish in the London *Free Press* of 27 May an anonymous article headed: “The Grand Duke Constantine to be king of Hungary,” which, with the omission of the name Vogt, essentially reproduces the content of the flysheet “Zur Warnung”?  

3) Did Blind, at his own expense, have the said flysheet printed in London by Mr F. Hollinger, Litchfield Street, Soho?  

Despite all the distorting attempts of the Meyen democracy, and even in defiance of the great unknown, the “eminent jurist” of Mr Joseph Dumont, everything turns on the question: Who had the flysheet “Zur Warnung” printed? It is this flysheet alone on account of whose printing the Augsburg *Allgemeine Zeitung* is being sued. It is only the accusations in this flysheet of which Vogt believed he had to clear himself before the world. The publisher of the flysheet has, as Robert Peel would have said, three courses open to himself. Either he knowingly lied. This I do not believe of Karl Blind. Or he subsequently became convinced that the data which justified him in having the flysheet printed were false. In that case he owes an explanation all the more. Or, finally, he has the proofs in his hand, but for private considerations wishes to hush up the whole affair, and with magnanimous resignation bears the rotten eggs which are thrown at me, not at him. But must not all private considerations fall away in so important a matter as clarifying the relations between the German Imperial Regent *in partibus* and the Emperor of the French *de facto*?  

Karl Marx  

—————  

Declaration  

Vogt, who knows his Pappenheimers, manoeuvred very cunningly when he shifted the origin of the denunciation against him from the so-called democratic camp to the socialist one. I, for my part, have no interest whatever in promoting this *quid pro quo*, and can therefore not leave Blind’s declaration in No. 313 of the Augsburg *Allgemeine Zeitung* unanswered.  

1) On 9 May, on the platform of an Urquhart meeting, Blind communicated to me all the accusations raised against Vogt in the flysheet “Zur Warnung.” He told the same details to others, e.g., Freiligrath. Given the complete identity in content and wording between his oral account and the printed flysheet, he naturally passed *de prime abord* as its author.  

2) In the London *Free Press* of 27 May there appeared an anonymous article by Blind with the heading: “The Grand Duke Constantine to be King of Hungary”, which essentially anticipated the flysheet “Zur Warnung”. In this article Blind states that he knows Liberals in Germany and Democrats in London to whom “large bribes” have been offered for Bonapartist propaganda. While the Vogt trial was pending, Mr D. Collet, the responsible editor of the *Free Press*, called on me, on Blind’s behalf, to ask me not to make use of my knowledge of the authorship of the said article. I replied to Mr Collet — who found it entirely proper — that I committed myself to nothing, that my discretion would rather depend on Blind’s behaviour.  

3) Fidelio Hollinger’s declaration is simply ridiculous.  
Fidelio Hollinger knows that he formally violated English law when he issued the flysheet without naming the place of printing. He therefore most personally bestows upon himself the testimonial that he did not commit the peccadillo. By chance the reprint in the *Volk* was pulled from the same type of the flysheet, which was still standing in Hollinger’s printing office. Thus, even without the testimony of witnesses, the proof could be furnished in court, simply by comparing the flysheet with its reprint in the *Volk*, that the former “issued from the printing office of F. Hollinger”. The transfer of the trial from Augsburg to London would, on the whole, resolve the whole Blind-Vogt mystery.  

15 Nov. 1859. Karl Marx.  
9, Grafton Terrace  
Maitland Park  
Haverstock Hill, London.