At the present moment the Belgian government is aligning itself 
entirely with the policy of the Holy Alliance. Its reactionary fury falls 
on the German democrats with unprecedented brutality. Were we 
not too distressed by the persecution directed specifically against us, 
we would openly laugh at the ridiculous attitude assumed by the 
Rogier ministry when it accuses a few Germans of wishing to impose 
a republic on the Belgians against their wishes; but it so happens 
that, in the special case to which we refer, the hateful aspect of it 
outweighs the absurd. 

First of all, Sir, it is as well to know that almost all the Brussels 
newspapers are edited by Frenchmen, most of whom escaped from 
France to avoid the ignominious punishments which threatened 
them in their own country. These Frenchmen now have the utmost 
interest in protecting the Belgian independence which they all 
betrayed in 1833.3'9 The king,? the ministry and their supporters 
have used these rags to give credibility to the idea that a Belgian 
revolution, in the republican sense, would merely be an imitation of a 
francequillonnerie,” and that all the democratic activity which is now 
making itself felt in Belgium has only been provoked by some 
hot-headed Germans. 

The Germans do not in the least deny that they openly associated 
with the Belgian democrats, and this without the slightest degree of 

? Leopold I.—Ed. 

> A scornful expression in Flemish, meaning stupidly copying anything that is 
French.— Ed. 

To the Editor of The Northern Star 565 

hot-headedness. In the eyes of the King’s Prosecutor this means 
arousing the workers against the bourgeois, making the Belgians 
suspicious of a German king they so dearly love, and opening the 
gates of Belgium to a French invasion. 

Having received, on March 3 at five o’clock in the evening, an 
order to leave the kingdom of Belgium within twenty-four hours, 
I was busy, that same night, with preparing for the journey when 
a commissary of police, accompanied by ten municipal guards, 
burst into the place where I was living, searched the whole 
house, and ended by putting me under arrest on the pretext that 
I was without papers. Apart from the quite proper papers sent me 
by M. Duchatel in expelling me from France,32° I had at hand the 
expulsion papers delivered to me by Belgium only a few hours 
earlier. 

I would not have spoken to you, Sir, about my arrest and the 
brutalities I suffered, were these not connected with an incident 
which would be difficult to understand even in Austria. 

Immediately after my arrest, my wife went to the home of M. 
Jottrand, President of the Democratic Association of Belgium, to 
urge him to take the necessary measures. On returning home she 
found at her door a policeman who told her, with perfect politeness, 
that if she should wish to speak to M. Marx, she need only follow 
him. My wife accepted the offer with alacrity. She was taken to the 
police station, and the Commissary at first told her that M. Marx was 
not there; then he brutally demanded who she was, why she had 
gone to M. Jottrand’s house, and whether she had her papers with 
her. A Belgian democrat, M. Gigot, had followed my wife to the 
police station with the municipal guard, and when he protested 
strongly against the Commissary’s absurd and insolent questions he 
was silenced by guards who seized him and threw him into a cell. My 
wife, under the charge of “vagabondage’”, was taken to the prison at 
the Hotel de Ville and locked up in a dark room with prostitutes. At 
eleven o’clock in the morning she was taken, under police escort and 
in broad daylight, to the office of the examining magistrate. For two 
hours she was held in close custody, despite the most vigorous 
protests from all sides. She stayed there, in bitter cold, exposed to the 
most shameless remarks by the gendarmes. 

Finally she appeared before the examining magistrate, who was 
surprised that the police, in their solicitude, had not at the same time 
arrested the young children. The interrogation was naturally a sham, 
and my wife’s only crime consists in the fact that, although belonging 
to the Prussian aristocracy, she shares the democratic opinions of her 
husband. 

I have not entered into all the details of this revolting affair. I 
merely add that, when we were released, the twenty-four hours had 
just ended, and we had to leave without being able to take even the 
most essential of our belongings. 

Karl Marx, 
Vice-President of the Brussels Democratic Association 

March 8, 1848 . . ; i 
an Published in English for the first 
time