The “Kölnische Zeitung” on the Elections

* Cologne, 30 January. The “Kölnische Zeitung” has at last also received election re- No. 210, February 1, 1849
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
ports, and indeed reports that pour somewhat oil on its wounds.
“The democratic election reports,” cries Ehren-Brüggemann, intoxicated with joy, “the democratic election reports (i.e. the ‘Neue Rheinische Zeitung’) have grossly boasted. The refutations are now coming to us from all sides.”
From all sides! The “Kölnische” will crush us with the weight of its “refutations”. Two pages of closely packed election bulletins, each one an “egregious boasting” of the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, each proving a victory for the constitutionalists, will drive the most purple blush of shame into our cheeks?
On the contrary.
“The refutations are now coming to us from all sides.”
Ehren-Brüggemann is not “boasting”. In actual fact, summa summarum four whole refutations have come to him: from the west (Trier), north (Hamm), south (Siegburg) and east (Arnsberg)! Are these not “refutations from all sides”, against the “egregious boasting of the democratic election reports”!
Let us, for the time being, grant it the enjoyment of believing that the constitutionalists have triumphed in these four decisive places. Anyway, this enjoyment is embittered by the pain that in some places the constitutionalists have fallen victim to the “seductibility of the masses”.
A naive admission by the constitutionalists that for them the “masses” are not “seductible”!
Yet one consolation remains for the “Kölnische Zeitung”. And what consolation? The consolation that the Koblenz correspondent of the “Deutsche Zeitung” is a fellow sufferer, that in this unfortunate constellation he has spoken fitting words, worthy of figuring in the foremost columns of the “Kölnische Zeitung”:
“Note that the political question, here as everywhere, becomes small in comparison with the social question, that it is entirely absorbed in it.”
Only a few days ago, the “Kölnische Zeitung” wanted to know nothing of the social question. It never spoke of this other-worldly being, or at most with a certain frivolity (insofar as it is possible for the “Kölnische” to be frivolous). It adopted a godless, unbelieving, free-thinking attitude towards it. Then all at once it fares like the fisherman in the Thousand and One Nights; just as the genie rose up giant-like from the unsealed vessel fished up from the seabed, so from the ballot-box there suddenly looms before the trembling “Kölnische” the menacing giant spectre of the “social question”. Terrified, Ehren-Brüggemann falls to his knees; his last hope vanishes, the spectre swallows in a single draught his entire “political question”, fondly cherished for years, together with legal ground and appurtenances.
Cunning politics of the “Kölnische Zeitung”. It seeks to gloss over its political defeat with its social defeat.
This discovery, that it is beaten not only on political but also on social terrain, is the greatest “primary-election experience” of the “Kölnische”!
Or did the “Kölnische Zeitung” perhaps go into raptures over the “social question” earlier?
In fact, Montesquieu LVI had declared in the “Kölnische Zeitung” that the social question was infinitely important, and that recognition of the imposed constitution was the solution of the social question.
But the recognition of the imposed constitution – that is above all what the “Kölnische Zeitung” calls the “political question”.
Before the elections, then, the social question was absorbed into the political question; after the elections, the political question is absorbed into the social question. So that is the difference: the primary-election experience that after the elections precisely the reverse of what was gospel before the elections is true.
“The political question is absorbed into the social question!”
Let us disregard the fact that we already set forth as tangibly as possible before the elections how there can be no talk of a “social question” as such, how each class has its own social question, and how with this social question of a particular class a particular political question for that class is simultaneously given. Let us disregard all these frivolous marginal glosses vis-à-vis the serious, solid Cologne lady, and let us, as far as possible, enter into the train of thought and the language of this characterful and profound journal.

By the social question the “Kölnische Zeitung” understands the question: How are the petty bourgeoisie, the peasants and the proletariat to be helped?
And now, since in the primary elections the petty bourgeoisie, the peasants and the proletarians have emancipated themselves from the big bourgeoisie, the high nobility and the high bureaucracy, the “Kölnische Zeitung” now cries: “The political question is absorbed into the social question!”
Fine consolation for the Kölnische! So the fact that the workers, peasants and small burghers have driven from the field, with resounding majorities, the big-bourgeois and other highly respected constitutional candidates of the “Kölnische Zeitung” – that is no defeat of the “constitutionalists”, but merely a victory of the “social question”! That the constitutionalists have been beaten proves not that the democrats have won, but that politics has remained out of the game in the face of material questions.
Profound profundity of the neighbouring publicist! These petty bourgeois, who hover on the brink of ruin, do they perhaps go into raptures over the imposed constitution? These peasants, who are crushed here by mortgages and usury, there by feudal burdens – are they enthusiastic for the financial and feudal barons, their own oppressors, for whose benefit and advantage the imposed constitution was devised precisely? And finally these proletarians, who at once languish under the regulatory frenzy of our bureaucrats and the profit frenzy of our bourgeoisie – have they any reason to rejoice that the imposed constitution ties a new bond around these two classes of people-suckers?
Have not all these three classes above all an interest in the abolition of the first chamber, which does not represent them, but their direct opponents and oppressors?
In fact, the “Kölnische Zeitung” is right: the social question swallows up the political question; the classes newly entering the political movement will, in the interest of the “social question”, vote against their own political interest and for the imposed constitution!
Can the petty bourgeois and peasants, and still more the proletarians, find a better state form for representing their interests than the democratic republic? Are not precisely these classes the most radical, the most democratic of the whole of society? Is not the proletariat precisely the specifically red class? – No matter, cries the “Kölnische”, the social question swallows up the political question.
The victory of the social question is at the same time the victory of the imposed constitution according to the Kölnische.

But the “social question” of the “Kölnische Zeitung” is also of a quite peculiar nature. One should read the report of the “Kölnische Zeitung” on the elections to the first chamber, and their “happy outcome”, which consists in the fact that Herr Joseph DuMont has become an elector. The real social question of the “Kölnische Zeitung” is thereby, of course, solved, and compared with it all the subordinate “social questions” that might have cropped up on the occasion of the elections to the plebeian second chamber vanish.
May the storm of the world-historical “political question” now menacingly rising in Paris not pitilessly crush the tender “social question” of the “Kölnische Zeitung”!