Karl Marx

Prussia [in the Year 1856]

Written on April 15, 1856.

From the English.

["New-York Daily Tribune" No. 4694, May 5, 1856, leading article]

The unheard-of agiotage that transformed France into a gambling den and identified the Napoleonic Empire with the Bourse did not by any means halt at the frontiers of Gaul. Unchecked by political boundaries, this epidemic crossed the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine and, astonishing though it may seem, took possession of solid Germany, where speculation in the realm of ideas had to give way to speculation in securities, the *summum bonum* – to the *boni* <premium>, the mysterious jargon of dialectics – to the no less mysterious jargon of the Bourse, and the striving for unity – to the passion for dividends. Rhenish Prussia, owing to its proximity to France and thanks to the development of its industry and its commerce, was the first to be seized by this disease. The Cologne bankers not only concluded a formal alliance with the great Paris swindlers, joining with them in buying the *Indépendance Belge* as their common organ, and drew the whole of south-western Germany into the whirlpool of the Crédit Mobilier by founding an international bank in Luxembourg, but also had such success in the sphere of Rhenish Prussia and the Duchy of Westphalia that at the present moment all strata of society, with the exception of the working classes and the small peasants, are gripped by the gold rush, so that even the capital of the petty bourgeoisie, diverted from its ordinary channels, seeks mad adventures and every shopkeeper transforms himself into an alchemist. That the rest of Prussia has not escaped the contagion either is evident from the following extract from the *Preussische Correspondenz*, a government paper:

“The most recent observations on the money market permit the conclusion that one of those terrible commercial crises that recur regularly is again in the offing. The feverish movement of limitless speculation, coming from abroad, has spread in Germany over the last year, and not only the Berlin Bourse and the Prussian capitalists have been dragged into this vortex, but also entire classes of society that on all earlier occasions had avoided direct participation in the gambling of the Bourse.”

It was this fear of an immediately imminent financial crisis on which the Prussian government’s refusal to allow the establishment of a *Crédit Mobilier* was based, behind whose dazzling veneer fraudulent intentions were suspected. But what is not allowed in one form can be permitted in another, and what is not admitted in Berlin can be tolerated in Leipzig or in Hanover. The last phase of the speculative frenzy set in at the end of the war, and, independently of the commercial impulse that is inseparable from every conclusion of peace – as was experienced in 1802 and 1815 –, it this time displays the special characteristic that Prussia has formally expressed the desire to open its markets to Western capital and speculation. We shall therefore soon hear talk of the great Irkutsk main line with branch lines to Peking and of other no less gigantic plans, where the point is not what is actually to be carried out, but what new material may be offered as nourishment to the spirit of speculation. Nothing more was needed than the peace to accelerate the great crash feared by the Prussian government.

This participation of Prussia in the European speculative movement, to which it was unaccustomed, would not have been possible without the great upswing of its industry in recent years. The capital invested in the railways alone grew from 19 million Prussian talers to 154 million between 1840 and 1854/55. Other railway lines, the cost of which is estimated at 54 million, are under construction; moreover, the government has granted the construction of new lines to the value of 57 million. Since 1849, 87 joint-stock companies have been formed with a capital of 83 million. From 1854 to 1856 nine insurance companies were registered with a capital of 22 million. Furthermore, in these last two years six joint-stock companies with a capital of 10.5 million have set up spinning mills. From the cotton report one can see in what proportion the quantity of cotton arriving at the various European ports has changed from 1853 to 1856. According to the report, the export of cotton in bales in the first seven months of the year was as follows:

| 1854 1856 |
|---------------------|--------|--------|--------|--------|
| To England | 1,100,000 | 840,000 | 963,000 | 1,131,000 |
| To France | 255,000 | 229,000 | 249,000 | 354,000 |
| To other European ports | 204,000 | 179,000 | 167,000 | 346,000 |

From this it follows that the Continent, which in 1853 received only about one third of the cotton exported to England, in 1856 received five eighths of it. In addition, there is the cotton that was sent on from England to the Continent. The great export to France is only apparent, for a considerable part goes via Le Havre to Switzerland, Baden, Frankfurt and Antwerp. The development of continental industry, which is indicated by the figures cited, therefore means above all the growth of German, and principally of Prussian, industry. The wealth accumulated by the industrial bourgeoisie in recent years is almost surpassed by the profits that the landed proprietors have received during the war period, in the years of bad harvests and high prices. The price of horses, of horned cattle, of livestock in general, not to speak of the price of grain, has kept itself at such a high level in Germany itself that the great landed proprietors hardly need the influence of foreign markets any longer in order to swim in gold. It is wealth – the rapid increase of wealth never before experienced by these two classes – that has created the basis for the speculative epidemic now raging in Prussia.

When this soap bubble bursts, the Prussian state will be subjected to a severe test. The various counter-revolutions that it has undergone since 1849 resulted in placing the government in dependence upon the not very numerous class of the noble landed proprietors, in relation to which the King, who has done everything to establish its preponderant position, presently finds himself in the same situation as Louis XVIII once did vis-à-vis the *Chambre introuvable*. Frederick William was never inclined to come to terms with the dried-up bureaucratic governmental machinery that his father had left him. Throughout his entire life he dreamt of embellishing the edifice of the Prussian state with some romantic-Gothic decoration. But the short experience he had with his Herrenhaus must have convinced him, however, that in reality the landed proprietors, or the *Krautjunker* as they are called in Prussia, are far from seeing their happiness in serving the bureaucracy as a medieval ornament, and do everything in their power to degrade the bureaucracy and transform it into a mere executor of their class interests. Hence the conflict between the Junkers and the government, between the King and the Prince of Prussia. To show the government how much in earnest they are, the Junkers have just – a thing unheard-of in constitutional Prussia – refused to grant a further supplementary tax that had been introduced during the war. Cold-bloodedly and resolutely they proclaimed the principle that in their small estates they are every bit as much king as the King himself in the whole country. They insist that the constitution may well remain a delusion for all other classes, but for themselves it must be a reality. While withdrawing themselves from any control by the bureaucracy, they want this bureaucracy to bear down with redoubled force upon the lower classes.

The bourgeoisie, which betrayed the revolution of 1848, now has the certainty that in the very hour when it achieves its social triumph by an unlimited accumulation of capital it will see itself politically annihilated. More than that, the *Krautjunker* delight in finding new opportunities every day to humiliate it, and do not even observe the elementary rules of etiquette towards it. When the bourgeois speakers rise to speak in the Chamber of Deputies, the Junkers leave their benches en masse, and when they are requested at least to listen to opinions that are not their own, they laugh in the gentlemen of the Left’s faces. When the latter complain of the obstacles placed in the way of elections, it is intimated to them that it is simply the government’s duty to preserve the masses from seduction. If they oppose the restraint that is imposed on the liberal press to the unruliness of the aristocratic press, they are reminded that freedom in a Christian state does not consist in doing what one likes, but what God and the authorities like. One day it is made clear to them that “honour” is a monopoly of the aristocracy, the next day they are deeply offended by a practical illustration of the long-discarded theories of Haller, Bonald and de Maistre. Proud of his philosophical enlightenment, the Prussian burgher has the vexation of seeing the most outstanding scholars driven from the universities and education entrusted to a band of obscurantists; ecclesiastical courts meddle in his family affairs, and on Sunday he must let himself be conducted into church by the police. Not content with exempting themselves from taxes as far as possible, the Junkers have confined the bourgeoisie in guilds and corporations, falsified its municipal institutions, abolished the independence and irremovability of its judges, annulled the equal rights of the various religious sects, etc. When, now and again, the rage that is choking them prevails over their fear, and when from time to time they muster enough courage to try from their seats in the Chamber to frighten the Junkers with an approaching revolution, they are told sneeringly that the revolution has just as great an account to settle with the bourgeoisie as with the nobility.

Indeed, it is not probable that the big bourgeoisie will again, as in 1848, stand at the head of a revolution in Prussia. The peasants in East Prussia have not only lost everything that the revolution had brought them in the way of emancipation, but they are still, both in administrative and in legal respects, under the direct yoke of the nobility. In Rhenish Prussia, where capital was attracted by industrial enterprises, they have entangled themselves ever deeper in the bondage of mortgages with the same rapidity with which interest on loans rose. While in Austria attempts have at least been made to placate the peasants, in Prussia nothing was left undone that could drive them to despair. As for the working class, the government has prevented them from sharing in the profits of their employers by punishing them for taking part in strikes and systematically keeps them away from participation in political life. A disunited dynasty, a government split into hostile camps, a bureaucracy in conflict with the aristocracy, the aristocracy at odds with the bourgeoisie, a general commercial crisis, and the disinherited classes filled with the spirit of rebellion against all the upper strata of society—that is the picture of Prussia at the present hour.