The Ex-Principality

[“Neue Rheinische Zeitung” No. 140, November 11, 1848]

From the Republic of Neuchâtel
, November 7. It will interest you to hear for once something from a little country which, until quite recently, still enjoyed the blessings of Prussian rule, but which was the first of all the lands subject to the Crown of Prussia to raise the flag of revolution and drive out the Prussian paternal government. I speak of the former “Principality of Neuenburg and Vallendis”, where Herr Pfuel, the present Minister-President, made his first administrative studies as governor and was deposed by the people in May of this year, before he could win laurels in Posen or reap votes of no confidence in Berlin as premier. The little country has now taken the prouder name of “République et Canton de Neuchâtel”, and the time is probably not far off when the last Neuchâtel guardsman in Berlin will be brushing his green tunic. I must confess, it gave me a humorous satisfaction, five weeks after my flight from the Prussian holy Hermandad, to be able once again to stroll unmolested on soil which is de jure still Prussian.

The Republic and Canton of Neuchâtel is, by the way, manifestly in a far more comfortable condition than the erstwhile Principality of Neuenburg and Vallendis; for at the recent elections to the Swiss National Council, the republican candidates obtained over 6,000 votes, while the candidates of the royalists, the bédouins <Bedouins (Arab desert pastoralists and traders); here in the sense of: preachers in the desert>, as they are called here, mustered scarcely 900. In the Grand Council, too, almost none but republicans sit, and only one small mountain village, dominated by the aristocrats,

Les Ponts, sent the royal-Prussian-princely-Neuenburg ex-Councillor of State Calame as its representative to Neuchâtel, where a few days ago he had to swear the oath of loyalty to the republic. Instead of the old royalist “Constitutionnel Neuchâtelois”, there now appears – in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the largest, most industrial and most republican place in the canton – a “Républicain Neuchâtelois”, which is edited in a very poor Jura Swiss French, but otherwise not at all badly.

The watchmaking industry of the Jura and the lace manufacture of the Travers valley, the principal sources of livelihood of the little country, are also beginning to go better again, and the Montagnards are gradually recovering their old cheerfulness, in spite of the foot-deep snow that already lies here. Meanwhile, the bédouins go about very disconsolately, vainly displaying the Prussian colours on their trousers, blouses and caps, and sigh in vain for the return of Honour-Pfuel and the decrees that began: “Nous Frédéric-Guillaume par la grâce de Dieu!” <We, Frederick William, by the Grace of God!>. The Prussian colours, black caps with white borders, high up in the Jura, 3,500 feet above sea-level, are just as downcast, just as equivocally smiled at, as they are on the Rhine; – if one did not see the Swiss flags and the large placards: “République et Canton de Neuchâtel”, one might imagine oneself at home. For the rest, I am glad to be able to report that the
German workers
played a decisive and very honourable role in the Neuchâtel revolution, as in all the revolutions of 1848. For this they are also rewarded with the full measure of hatred from the aristocrats.