"Neue Rheinische Zeitung" — The Frankfurt March Association and the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung"

The Frankfurt March Association and the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung"

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung" No. 248, March 17, 1849]

*
Cologne, March 15. We return once again to the hapless March Association, that fitting afterbirth of the "March Revolution". We are reproached with "injuring the cause of freedom" by undermining the March Association. Did we not already in December 1848, to the horror of the *Kölnische Zeitung*, denounce the March Association as an
unconscious tool of the counter-revolution
? Had we not, therefore, long since confided to the "March Association" our views of the "March Association"? Were the March Association an organisation of the party of revolution, were it even a consistent, vigorous fruit of the
March émeute,
we would accept an awkwardness on its part, as was, without contradiction, its
speculation in advertisements
<see "Der Märzverein">. The March Association is, first, devoid of effectiveness, unless addresses constitute the same; it is, further, a promising fool between constitutionalists (those are for us worse adherents of reaction than the club of Ritter v. Radowitz) and some truly honest democrats whose vision has been clouded by the haze of imperial reconciliation. Indecisiveness will always have its inborn majority in that Central Commerce Association <pun alluding to the forces behind the Central March Association>; it may perhaps goad the people to discontent, but in the decisive moment it will betray them and afterwards bemoan its error. Now let the Commerce Association "long live and prosper" as far as we are concerned! Its other sensitivity does not move us, and the free press seems to be understood by those liberal people still only as their private conquest. Herr Eisenmann, for example, openly avowed himself a constitutionalist for all time and an opponent of republicanism in the very session of the March Association in which the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung" was remembered as a model of "genuinely German disunity". So we were expected to support, out of simpleton's unity-mongering, the organ of a man who, whatever the devil he may otherwise be, is in any case a German national simpleton. By way of courtesy we would "take along" the gentlemen as far as they liked, were it not precisely their Frankfurt task to be "irremovable". There are thoughtful lovers of history among the gentlemen. It can hardly have escaped them that not merely in Germany, but everywhere and at all times the Feuillants, despite all March Associations, always had to be eliminated before the outbreak of the actual revolution. What good is it to the adherents of the social republic if the same Vogt becomes the miscarried imperial Barrot of the German Empire Bonaparte, against whom he has rantingly blustered "in the first line" in petty university fashion?