Herr Müller – Radetzky’s Chicaneries against the Ticino – The Federal Council – Lohbauer

Bern, 8 January. The Neapolitan government, growing ever more anxious over the non-arrival of the Swiss recruits, has now despatched one of its Swiss staff officers, Herr Tobias Müller, here to confer with the Federal Council about altering the recruits’ travel route, as the contractually agreed embarkation point, Genoa, is blockaded. This Herr Müller is admirably suited for such a mission. Not only has he fought against freedom in Italy for many years; he already took up arms against the revolution in his native Freiburg in 1831. Radetzky, who knows his men, received him with distinction, embraced him in front of his general staff, and praised him and the Swiss in Naples generally in glowing terms for their “loyalty to their king” (!) and their bravery in the service of their “king”. Herr Müller will probably encounter difficulties, however; even the liberalism prevailing in the Federal Council is no friend of military capitulations, any more than the liberal governments of Bern and Lucerne are.

While Radetzky fraternises with the Swiss in Naples, his chicaneries against the Ticino begin anew. He has denounced to the government there that Mazzini is still in hiding in the canton, and has even indicated his hiding-place. He further complains that arms are constantly being smuggled into Lombardy. The government resolved to investigate the first point and, if Mazzini should actually be in the canton again, to expel him; on the second point it passed to the order of the day, as it is not its business to act as frontier guard for the Austrians. Radetzky has, moreover, threatened that if the arms smuggling does not cease, he will reimpose the blockade.

Herr Müller – Radetzky’s Chicaneries against the Ticino

The Federal Council is occupied with the draft laws to be laid before the next Federal Assembly. These include the customs law, the postal organisation, military organisational proposals, etc. One must admit: while the honourable Frankfurt Assembly, in its transcendent impotence and impotent superabundance, brings to light nothing but its own *misère*, the Swiss federal authorities are quietly carrying through one piece of bourgeois centralisation after another. A mass of centralising laws will be laid before the Councils in March, debated and adopted in May and June, and will enter into force in June. For such petty, small-scale reforms the currently dominant liberal generation of Swiss politicians (one certainly cannot call them statesmen) has an undeniable talent. In a few years the centralisation of Switzerland will be completed, as far as the constitution permits it, and then this constitution itself will become a fetter on the further development of the country, and the one and indivisible republic a necessity. All this on the – impossible – assumption that the European storm that is brewing will leave Switzerland as neutral as the year 1848 did.

But of course, what a nation it is which, at a time of revolutions like the present, strives for nothing more than the abolition of cantonal customs duties, cantonal postal services and other cantonal institutions that have become oppressively burdensome long, long years ago! which, amidst the birth pangs of a new historical epoch, sets its highest goal in an improved edition of the historically inherited federal republic and in the first beginnings of bourgeois centralisation already made necessary by the Sonderbund War! What pettiness in the midst of the grandest European movement!

Incidentally, the Federal Council has taken a most peculiar step. It has appointed the well-known Herr Lohbauer of Berlin as professor of military science. Herr Lohbauer, a refugee of 1830, a radical, later a renegade, was, as is known, called to Berlin in the 1840s by the Eichhorn clique, where he collaborated on the *Staats-Zeitung*, on the *Janus* and on other ultra-reactionary and pietist organs. Herr Lohbauer is, if we are not much mistaken, the author of that lackey’s kick in the feuilleton of the *Staats-Zeitung* with which Herwegh was then sped out of the royal states after his letter to His Majesty. Herr Lohbauer was never a soldier, and yet he is to lecture here on military science. What that is supposed to mean only Herr Ochsenbein, who has appointed him, can understand.

In most cantons the Grand Councils are now assembled and are fighting over the most purely local interests. The Zurich council has elected our friend Dr Alcibiades Escher as mayor (*id est* head of the executive power). The Bernese Grand Council meets on the 15th.