Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

I.

Germany at the Outbreak of the Revolution.

OCTOBER 25, 1851.

THE first act of the revolutionary drama on the continent of
Europe has closed. The "powers that were" before the hurricane of 1848 are
again the "powers that be," and the more or less popular rulers of a day,
provisional governors, triumvirs, dictators with their tail of representatives,
civil commissioners, military commissioners, prefects, judges, generals,
officers, and soldiers, are thrown upon foreign shores, and "transported beyond
the seas" to England or America, there to form new governments in partibus
infidelium, European committees, central committees, national committees,
and to announce their advent with proclamations quite as solemn as those of any
less imaginary potentates.

A more signal defeat than that undergone by the continental revolutionary
party—or rather parties—upon all points of the line of battle,
cannot be imagined. But what of that? Has not the struggle of the British
middle classes for their social and political supremacy embraced forty-eight,
that of the French middle classes forty years of unexampled struggles? And was
their triumph ever nearer than at the very moment when restored monarchy
thought itself more firmly settled than ever? The times of that superstition
which attributed revolutions to the ill-will of a few agitators have long
passed away. Everyone knows nowadays that wherever there is a revolutionary
convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is
prevented, by outworn institutions, from satisfying itself. The want may not
yet be felt as strongly, as generally, as might ensure immediate success; but
every attempt at forcible repression will only bring it forth stronger and
stronger, until it bursts its fetters. If, then, we have been beaten, we have
nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning. And, fortunately, the
probably very short interval of rest which is allowed us between the close of
the first and the beginning of the second act of the movement, gives us time
for a very necessary piece of work: the study of the causes that necessitated
both the late outbreak and its defeat; causes that are not to be sought for in
the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors, or treacheries of some of the
leaders, but in the general social state and conditions of existence of each of
the convulsed nations. That the sudden movements of February and March, 1848,
were not the work of single individuals, but spontaneous, irresistible
manifestations of national wants and necessities, more or less clearly
understood, but very distinctly felt by numerous classes in every country, is a
fact recognized everywhere; but when you inquire into the causes of the
counter-revolutionary successes, there you are met on every hand with the ready
reply that it was Mr. This or Citizen That who "betrayed" the people. Which
reply may be very true or not, according to circumstances, but under no
circumstances does it explain anything—not even show how it came to pass
that the "people" allowed themselves to be thus betrayed. And what a poor
chance stands a political party whose entire stock-in-trade consists in a
knowledge of the solitary fact that Citizen So-and-so is not to be trusted.

The inquiry into, and the exposition of, the causes, both of the
revolutionary convulsion and its suppression, are, besides, of paramount
importance from a historical point of view. All these petty, personal quarrels
and recriminations—all these contradictory assertions that it was
Marrast, or Ledru Rollin, or Louis Blanc, or any other member of the
Provisional Government, or the whole of them, that steered the Revolution
amidst the rocks upon which it foundered—of what interest can they be,
what light can they afford, to the American or Englishman who observed all
these various movements from a distance too great to allow of his
distinguishing any of the details of operations? No man in his senses will ever
believe that eleven men, mostly of very indifferent capacity either for good or
evil, were able in three months to ruin a nation of thirty-six millions, unless
those thirty-six millions saw as little of their way before them as the eleven
did. But how it came to pass that thirty-six millions were at once called upon
to decide for themselves which way to go, although partly groping in dim
twilight, and how then they got lost and their old leaders were for a moment
allowed to return to their leadership, that is just the question.

If, then, we try to lay before the readers of The Tribune the
causes which, while they necessitated the German Revolution of 1848, led quite
as inevitably to its momentary repression in 1849 and 1850, we shall not be
expected to give a complete history of events as they passed in that country.
Later events, and the judgment of coming generations, will decide what portion
of that confused mass of seemingly accidental, incoherent, and incongruous
facts is to form a part of the world's history. The time for such a task has
not yet arrived; we must confine ourselves to the limits of the possible, and
be satisfied, if we can find rational causes, based upon undeniable facts, to
explain the chief events, the principal vicissitudes of that movement, and to
give us a clue as to the direction which the next, and perhaps not very
distant, outbreak will impart to the German people.

And firstly, what was the state of Germany at the outbreak of the
Revolution?

The composition of the different classes of the people which form the
groundwork of every political organization was, in Germany, more complicated
than in any other country. While in England and France feudalism was entirely
destroyed, or, at least, reduced, as in the former country, to a few
insignificant forms, by a powerful and wealthy middle class, concentrated in
large towns, and particularly in the capital, the feudal nobility in Germany
had retained a great portion of their ancient privileges. The feudal system of
tenure was prevalent almost everywhere. The lords of the land had even retained
the jurisdiction over their tenants. Deprived of their political privileges, of
the right to control the princes, they had preserved almost all their Medieval
supremacy over the peasantry of their demesnes, as well as their exemption from
taxes. Feudalism was more flourishing in some localities than in others, but
nowhere except on the left bank of the Rhine was it entirely destroyed. This
feudal nobility, then extremely numerous and partly very wealthy was
considered, officially, the first "Order" in the country. It furnished the
higher Government officials, it almost exclusively officered the army.

The bourgeoisie of Germany was by far not as wealthy and concentrated as
that of France or England. The ancient manufactures of Germany had been
destroyed by the introduction of steam, and the rapidly extending supremacy of
English manufactures; the more modern manufactures, started under the
Napoleonic continental system, established in other parts of the country, did
not compensate for the loss of the old ones, nor suffice to create a
manufacturing interest strong enough to force its wants upon the notice of
governments jealous of every extension of non-noble wealth and power. If France
carried her silk manufactures victorious through fifty years of revolutions and
wars Germany, during the same time, all but lost her ancient linen trade. The
manufacturing districts, besides, were few and far between; situated far
inland, and using, mostly, foreign, Dutch, or Belgian ports for their imports
and exports, they had little or no interest in common with the large seaport
towns on the North Sea and the Baltic; they were, above all, unable to create
large manufacturing and trading centres, such as Paris and Lyons, London and
Manchester. The causes of this backwardness of German manufactures were
manifold, but two will suffice to account for it: the unfavorable geographical
situation of the country, at a distance from the Atlantic, which had become the
great highway for the world's trade, and the continuous wars in which Germany
was involved, and which were fought on her soil, from the sixteenth century to
the present day. It was this want of numbers, and particularly of anything like
concentrated numbers, which prevented the German middle classes from attaining
that political supremacy which the English bourgeoisie has enjoyed ever since
1688, and which the French conquered in 1789. And yet, ever since 1815, the
wealth, and with the wealth the political importance of the middle class in
Germany, was continually growing. Governments were, although reluctantly,
compelled to bow, at least to its more immediate material interests. It may
even be truly said that from 1815 to 1830, and from 1832 to 1840 every particle
of political influence, which, having been allowed to the middle class in the
constitutions of the smaller States, was again wrested from them during the
above two periods of political reaction, that every such particle was
compensated for by some more practical advantage allowed to them. Every
political defeat of the middle class drew after it a victory on the field of
commercial legislation. And certainly, the Prussian Protective Tariff of 1818,
and the formation of the Zollverein, were worth a good deal more to the traders
and manufacturers of Germany than the equivocal right of expressing in the
chambers of some diminutive dukedom their want of confidence in ministers who
laughed at their votes. Thus, with growing wealth and extending trade, the
bourgeoisie soon arrived at a stage where it found the development of its most
important interests checked by the political constitution of the country; by
its random division among thirty-six princes with conflicting tendencies and
caprices; by the feudal fetters upon agriculture and the trade connected with
it; by the prying superintendence to which an ignorant and presumptuous
bureaucracy subjected all its transactions. At the same time the extension and
consolidation of the Zollverein, the general introduction of steam
communication, the growing competition in the home trade, brought the
commercial classes of the different States and Provinces closer together,
equalized their interests and centralized their strength. The natural
consequence was the passing of the whole mass of them into the camp of the
Liberal Opposition, and the gaining of the first serious struggle of the German
middle class for political power. This change may be dated from 1840, from the
moment when the bourgeoisie of Prussia assumed the lead of the middle class
movement of Germany. We shall hereafter revert to this Liberal Opposition
movement of 1840-1847.

The great mass of the nation, which neither belonged to the nobility nor to
the bourgeoisie, consisted in the towns of the small trading and shopkeeping
class and the working people, and in the country of the peasantry.

The small trading and shopkeeping class is exceedingly numerous in Germany,
in consequence of the stinted development which the large capitalists and
manufacturers as a class have had in that country. In the larger towns it forms
almost the majority of the inhabitants; in the smaller ones it entirely
predominates, from the absence of wealthier competitors or influence. This
class, a most important one in every modern body politic, and in all modern
revolutions, is still more important in Germany, where, during the recent
struggles, it generally played the decisive part. Its intermediate position
between the class of larger capitalists, traders, and manufacturers, the
bourgeoisie properly so-called, and the proletarian or industrial class,
determines its character. Aspiring to the position of the first, the least
adverse turn of fortune hurls the individuals of this class down into the ranks
of the second. In monarchical and feudal countries the custom of the court and
aristocracy becomes necessary to its existence; the loss of this custom might
ruin a great part of it. In the smaller towns a military garrison, a county
government, a court of law with its followers, form very often the base of its
prosperity; withdraw these, and down go the shopkeepers, the tailors, the
shoemakers, the joiners. Thus eternally tossed about between the hope of
entering the ranks of the wealthier class, and the fear of being reduced to the
state of proletarians or even paupers; between the hope of promoting their
interests by conquering a share in the direction of public affairs, and the
dread of rousing, by ill-timed opposition, the ire of a government which
disposes of their very existence, because it has the power of removing their
best customers; possessed of small means, the insecurity of the possession of
which is in the inverse ratio of the amount,—this class is extremely
vacillating in its views. Humble and crouchingly submissive under a powerful
feudal or monarchical Government, it turns to the side of Liberalism when the
middle class is in the ascendant; it becomes seized with violent democratic
fits as soon as the middle class has secured its own supremacy, but falls back
into the abject despondency of fear as soon as the class below itself, the
proletarians, attempts an independent movement. We shall by and by see this
class, in Germany, pass alternately from one of these stages to the other.

The working class in Germany is, in its social and political development, as
far behind that of England and France as the German bourgeoisie is behind the
bourgeoisie of those countries. Like master, like man. The evolution of the
conditions of existence for a numerous, strong, concentrated, and intelligent
proletarian class goes hand in hand with the development of the conditions of
existence for a numerous, wealthy, concentrated, and powerful middle class. The
working class movement itself never is independent, never is of an exclusively
proletarian character until all the different factions of the middle class, and
particularly its most progressive faction, the large manufacturers, have
conquered political power, and remodelled the State according to their wants.
It is then that the inevitable conflict between the employer and the employed
becomes imminent, and cannot be adjourned any longer; that the working class
can no longer be put off with delusive hopes and promises never to be realized;
that the great problem of the nineteenth century, the abolition of the
proletariat, is at last brought forward fairly and in its proper light. Now, in
Germany the mass of the working class were employed, not by those modern
manufacturing lords of which Great Britain furnishes such splendid specimens,
but by small tradesmen, whose entire manufacturing system is a mere relic of
the Middle Ages. And as there is an enormous difference between the great
cotton lord and the petty cobbler or master tailor, so there is a corresponding
distance from the wide-awake factory operative of modern manufacturing Babylons
to the bashful journeyman tailor or cabinetmaker of a small country town, who
lives in circumstances and works after a plan very little different from those
of the like sort of men some five hundred years ago. This general absence of
modern conditions of life, of modern modes of industrial production, of course
was accompanied by a pretty equally general absence of modern ideas, and it is,
therefore, not to be wondered at if, at the outbreak of the Revolution, a large
part of the working classes should cry out for the immediate re-establishment
of guilds and Mediaeval privileged trades' corporations. Yet from the
manufacturing districts, where the modern system of production predominated,
and in consequence of the facilities of inter-communication and mental
development afforded by the migratory life of a large number of the working
men, a strong nucleus formed itself, whose ideas about the emancipation of
their class were far clearer and more in accordance with existing facts and
historical necessities; but they were a mere minority. If the active movement
of the middle class may be dated from 1840, that of the working class commences
its advent by the insurrections of the Silesian and Bohemian factory operatives
in 1844, and we shall soon have occasion to pass in review the different stages
through which this movement passed.

Lastly, there was the great class of the small farmers, the peasantry, which
with its appendix of farm laborers, constitutes a considerable majority of the
entire nation. Rut this class again sub-divided itself into different
fractions. There were, firstly, the more wealthy farmers, what is called in
Germany Gross and Mittel-Bauern, proprietors of more or less
extensive farms, and each of them commanding the services of several
agricultural laborers. This class, placed between the large untaxed feudal
landowners, and the smaller peasantry and farm laborers, for obvious reasons
found in an alliance with the antifeudal middle class of the towns its most
natural political course. Then there were, secondly, the small freeholders,
predominating in the Rhine country, where feudalism had succumbed before the
mighty strokes of the great French Revolution. Similar independent small
freeholders also existed here and there in other provinces, where they had
succeeded in buying off the feudal charges formerly due upon their lands. This
class, however, was a class of freeholders by name only, their property being
generally mortgaged to such an extent, and under such onerous conditions, that
not the peasant, but the usurer who had advanced the money, was the real
landowner. Thirdly, the feudal tenants, who could not be easily turned out of
their holdings, but who had to pay a perpetual rent, or to perform in
perpetuity a certain amount of labor in favor of the lord of the manor. Lastly,
the agricultural laborers, whose condition, in many large farming concerns was
exactly that of the same class in England, and who in all cases lived and died
poor, ill-fed, and the slaves of their employers. These three latter classes of
the agricultural population, the small freeholders, the feudal tenants, and the
agricultural laborers, never troubled their heads much about politics before
the Revolution, but it is evident that this event must have opened to them a
new career, full of brilliant prospects. To every one of them the Revolution
offered advantages, and the movement once fairly engaged in, it was to be
expected that each, in their turn, would join it. But at the same time it is
quite as evident, and equally borne out by the history of all modern countries,
that the agricultural population, in consequence of its dispersion over a great
space, and of the difficulty of bringing about an agreement among any
considerable portion of it, never can attempt a successful independent
movement; they require the initiatory impulse of the more concentrated, more
enlightened, more easily moved people of the towns.

The preceeding short sketch of the most important of the classes, which in
their aggregate formed the German nation at the outbreak of the recent
movements, will already be sufficient to explain a great part of the
incoherence, incongruence, and apparent contradiction which prevailed in that
movement. When interests so varied, so conflicting, so strangely crossing each
other, are brought into violent collision; when these contending interests in
every district, every province, are mixed in different proportions; when, above
all, there is no great centre in the country, no London, no Paris, the
decisions of which. by their weight, may supersede the necessity of fighting
out the same quarrel over and over again in every single locality; what else is
to be expected but that the contest will dissolve itself into a mass of
unconnected struggles, in which an enormous quantity of blood, energy, and
capital is spent, but which for all that remain without any decisive
results?

The political dismemberment of Germany into three dozen of more or less
important principalities is equally explained by this confusion and
multiplicity of the elements which compose the nation. and which again vary in
every locality. Where there are no common interests there can be no unity of
purpose, much less of action. The German confederation, it is true, was
declared everlastingly indissoluble; yet the Confederation, and its organ, the
Diet, never represented German unity. The very highest pitch to which
centralization was ever carried in Germany was the establishment of the
Zollverein; by this the States on the North Sea were also forced into a Customs
Union of their own, Austria remaining wrapped up in her separate prohibitive
tariff. Germany had the satisfaction to be, for all practical purposes divided
between three independent powers only, instead of between thirty-six. Of course
the paramount supremacy of the Russian Czar, as established in 1814, underwent
no change on this account.

Having drawn these preliminary conclusions from our premises, we shall see,
in our next, how the aforesaid various classes of the German people were set
into movement one after the other, and what character the movement assumed on
the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1848.

LONDON, September, 1851.

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

II.

The Prussian State.

OCTOBER 28th, 1851.

THE political movement of the middle class or bourgeoisie, in
Germany, may be dated from 1840. It had been preceded by symptoms showing that
the moneyed and industrial class of that country was ripening into a state
which would no longer allow it to continue apathetic and passive under the
pressure of a half-feudal, half-bureaucratic Monarchism. The smaller princes of
Germany, partly to insure to themselves a greater independence against the
supremacy of Austria and Prussia, or against the influence of the nobility of
their own States, partly in order to consolidate into a whole the disconnected
provinces united under their rule by the Congress of Vienna, one after the
other granted constitutions of a more or less liberal character. They could do
so without any danger to themselves; for if the Diet of the Confederation, this
mere puppet of Austria and Prussia, was to encroach upon their independence as
sovereigns, they knew that in resisting its dictates they would be backed by
public opinion and the Chambers; and if, on the contrary, these Chambers grew
too strong, they could readily command the power of the Diet to break down all
opposition. The Bavarian, Wurtemberg, Baden or Hanoverian Constitutional
institutions could not, under such circumstances, give rise to any serious
struggle for political power, and, therefore, the great bulk of the German
middle class kept very generally aloof from the petty squabbles raised in the
Legislatures of the small States, well knowing that without a fundamental
change in the policy and constitution of the two great powers of Germany, no
secondary efforts and victories would be of any avail. But, at the same time, a
race of Liberal lawyers, professional oppositionists, sprung up in these small
assemblies: the Rottecks, the Welckers, the Roemers, the Jordans, the Stuves,
the Eisenmanns, those great "popular men" (Volksmänner) who, after a more or
less noisy, but always unsuccessful, opposition of twenty years, were carried
to the summit of power by the revolutionary springtide of 1848, and who, after
having there shown their utter impotency and insignificance, were hurled down
again in a moment. These first specimen upon German soil of the trader in
politics and opposition, by their speeches and writings made familiar to the
German ear the language of Constitutionalism, and by their very existence
foreboded the approach of a time when the middle class would seize upon and
restore to their proper meaning political phrases which these talkative
attorneys and professors were in the habit of using without knowing much about
the sense originally attached to them.

German literature, too, labored under the influence of the political
excitement into which all Europe had been thrown by the events of 1830. A crude
Constitutionalism or a still cruder Republicanism, were preached by almost all
writers of the time. It became more and more the habit, particularly of the
inferior sorts of literati, to make up for the want of cleverness in their
productions, by political allusions which were sure to attract attention.
Poetry, novels, reviews, the drama, every literary production teemed with what
was called "tendency," that is with more or less timid exhibitions of an
anti-govermental spirit. In order to complete the confusion of ideas reigning
after 1830 in Germany, with these elements of political opposition there were
mixed up ill-digested university-recollections of German philosophy, and
misunderstood gleanings from French Socialism, particularly Saint-Simonism; and
the clique of writers who expatiated upon this heterogeneous conglomerate of
ideas, presumptuously called themselves "Young Germany," or "the Modern
School." They have since repented their youthful sins, but not improved their
style of writing.

Lastly, German philosophy, that most complicated, but at the same time most
sure thermometer of the development of the German mind, had declared for the
middle class, when Hegel in his "Philosophy of Law" pronounced Constitutional
Monarchy to be the final and most perfect form of government. In other words,
he proclaimed the approaching advent of the middle classes of the country to
political power. His school, after his death, did not stop here. While the more
advanced section of his followers, on one hand, subjected every religious
belief to the ordeal of a rigorous criticism, and shook to its foundation the
ancient fabric of Christianity, they at the same time brought forward bolder
political principles than hitherto it had been the fate of German ears to hear
expounded, and attempted to restore to glory the memory of the heroes of the
first French Revolution. The abstruse philosophical language in which these
ideas were clothed, if it obscured the mind of both the writer and the reader,
equally blinded the eyes of the censor, and thus it was that the "young
Hegelian" writers enjoyed a liberty of the Press unknown in every other branch
of literature.

Thus it was evident that public opinion was undergoing a great change in
Germany. By degrees the vast majority of those classes whose education or
position in life enabled them, under an Absolute Monarchy, to gain some
political information, and to form anything like an independent political
opinion, united into one mighty phalanx of opposition against the existing
system. And in passing judgment upon the slowness of political development in
Germany no one ought to omit taking into account the difficulty of obtaining
correct information upon any subject in a country where all sources of
information were under the control of the Government, where from the Ragged
School and the Sunday School to the Newspaper and University nothing was said,
taught, printed, or published but what had previously obtained its approbation.
Look at Vienna, for instance. The people of Vienna, in industry and
manufactures, second to none perhaps in Germany; in spirit, courage, and
revolutionary energy, proving themselves far superior to all, were yet more
ignorant as to their real interests, and committed more blunders during the
Revolution than any others, and this was due in a very great measure to the
almost absolute ignorance with regard to the very commonest political subjects
in which Metternich's Government had succeeded in keeping them.

It needs no further explanation why, under such a system, political
information was an almost exclusive monopoly of such classes of society as
could afford to pay for its being smuggled into the country, and more
particularly of those whose interests were most seriously attacked by the
existing state of things, namely, the manufacturing and commercial classes.
They, therefore, were the first to unite in a mass against the continuance of a
more or less disguised Absolutism, and from their passing into the ranks of the
opposition must be dated the beginning of the real revolutionary movement in
Germany.

The oppositional pronunciamento of the German bourgeoisie may be dated from
1840, from the death of the late King of Prussia, the last surviving founder of
the Holy Alliance of 1815. The new King was known to be no supporter of the
predominantly bureaucratic and military monarchy of his father. What the French
middle class had expected from the advent of Louis XVI., the German bourgeoisie
hoped, in some measure, from Frederick William IV. of Prussia. It was agreed
upon all hands that the old system was exploded, worn-out, and must be given
up; and what had been borne in silence under the old King now was loudly
proclaimed to be intolerable.

But if Louis XVI., "Louis le Desire," had been a plain, unpretending
simpleton, half conscious of his own nullity, without any fixed opinions, ruled
principally by the habits contracted during his education, "Frederick William
le Desire" was something quite different. While he certainly surpassed his
French original in weakness of character, he was neither without pretensions
nor without opinions. He had made himself acquainted, in an amateur sort of
way, with the rudiments of most sciences, and thought himself, therefore,
learned enough to consider final his judgment upon every subject. He made sure
he was a first-rate orator, and there was certainly no commercial traveller in
Berlin who could beat him either in prolixity of pretended wit, or in fluency
of elocution. And, above all, he had his opinions. He hated and despised the
bureaucratic element of the Prussian Monarchy, but only because all his
sympathies were with the feudal element. Himself one of the founders of, and
chief contributors to, the Berlin Political Weekly Paper, the
so-called Historical School (a school living upon the ideas of Bonald, De
Maistre, and other writers of the first generation of French Legitimists), he
aimed at a restoration, as complete as possible, of the predominant social
position of the nobility. The King, first nobleman of his realm, surrounded in
the first instance by a splendid court of mighty vassals, princes, dukes, and
counts; in the second instance, by a numerous and wealthy lower nobility;
ruling according to his discretion over his loyal burgesses and peasants, and
thus being himself the chief of a complete hierarchy of social ranks or castes,
each of which was to enjoy its particular privileges, and to be separated from
the others by the almost insurmountable barrier of birth, or of a fixed,
inalterable social position; the whole of these castes, or "estates of the
realm" balancing each other at the same time so nicely in power and influence
that a complete independence of action should remain to the King—-such
was the beau ideal which Frederick William IV. undertook to realize,
and which he is again trying to realize at the present moment.

It took some time before the Prussian bourgeoisie, not very well versed in
theoretical questions, found out the real purport of their King's tendency. But
what they very soon found out was the fact that he was bent upon things quite
the reverse of what they wanted. Hardly did the new King find his "gift of the
gab" unfettered by his father's death than he set about proclaiming his
intentions in speeches without number; and every speech, every act of his, went
far to estrange from him the sympathies of the middle class. He would not have
cared much for that, if it had not been for some stern and startling realities
which interrupted his poetic dreams. Alas, that romanticism is not very quick
at accounts, and that feudalism ever since Don Quixote, reckons without its
host! Frederick William IV. partook too much of that contempt of ready cash
which ever has been the noblest inheritance of the sons of the Crusaders. He
found at his accession a costly, although parsimoniously arranged system of
government, and a moderately filled State Treasury. In two years every trace of
a surplus was spent in court festivals, royal progresses, largesses,
subventions to needy, seedy, and greedy noblemen, etc., and the regular taxes
were no longer sufficient for the exigencies of either Court or Government. And
thus His Majesty found himself very soon placed between a glaring deficit on
one side, and a law of 1820 on the other, by which any new loan, or any
increase of the then existing taxation was made illegal without the assent of
"the future Representation of the People." This representation did not exist;
the new King was less inclined than even his father to create it; and if he had
been, he knew that public opinion had wonderfully changed since his
accession.

Indeed, the middle classes, who had partly expected that the new King would
at once grant a Constitution, proclaim the Liberty of the Press, Trial by Jury,
etc., etc.—in short, himself take the lead of that peaceful revolution
which they wanted in order to obtain political supremacy-the middle classes had
found out their error, and had turned ferociously against the King. In the
Rhine Provinces, and more or less generally all over Prussia, they were so
exasperated that they, being short themselves of men able to represent them in
the Press, went to the length of an alliance with the extreme philosophical
party, of which we have spoken above. The fruit of this alliance was the
Rhenish Gazette of Cologne, [1] a paper which was
suppressed after fifteen months' existence, but from which may be dated the
existence of the Newspaper Press in Germany. This was in 1842.

The poor King, whose commercial difficulties were the keenest satire upon
his Mediaeval propensities, very soon found out that he could not continue to
reign without making some slight concession to the popular outcry for that
"Representation of the People," which, as the last remnant of the
long-forgotten promises of 1813 and 1815 had been embodied in the law of 1820.
He found the least objectionable mode of satisfying this untoward law in
calling together the Standing Committees of the Provincial Diets. The
Provincial Diets had been instituted in 1823. They consisted for every one of
the eight provinces of the kingdom:—(I) Of the higher nobility, the
formerly sovereign families of the German Empire, the heads of which were
members of the Diet by birthright. (2) Of the representatives of the knights,
or lower nobility. (3) Of representatives of towns. (4) Of deputies of the
peasantry, or small farming class. The whole was arranged in such a manner that
in every province the two sections of the nobility always had a majority of the
Diet. Every one of these eight Provincial Diets elected a Committee, and these
eight Committees were now called to Berlin in order to form a Representative
Assembly for the purpose of voting the much-desired loan. It was stated that
the Treasury was full, and that the loan was required, not for current wants,
but for the construction of a State railway. But the united Committees gave the
King a flat refusal, declaring themselves incompetent to act as the
representatives of the people, and called upon His Majesty to fulfil the
promise of a Representative Constitution which his father had given, when he
wanted the aid of the people against Napoleon.

The sitting of the united Committees proved that the spirit of opposition
was no longer confined to the bourgeoisie. A part of the peasantry had joined
them, and many nobles, being themselves large farmers on their own properties,
and dealers in corn, wool, spirits, and flax, requiring the same guarantees
against absolutism, bureaucracy, and feudal restoration, had equally pronounced
against the Government, and for a Representative Constitution. The King's plan
had signally failed; he had got no money, and had increased the power of the
opposition. The subsequent sitting of the Provincial Diets themselves was still
more unfortunate for the King. All of them asked for reforms, for the
fulfilment of the promises of 1813 and 1815, for a Constitution and a Free
Press; the resolutions to this effect of some of them were rather
disrespectfully worded, and the ill-humored replies of the exasperated King
made the evil still greater.

In the meantime, the financial difficulties of the Government went on
increasing. For a time, abatements made upon the moneys appropriated for the
different public services, fraudulent transactions with the "Seehandlung," a
commercial establishment speculating and trading for account and risk of the
State, and long since acting as its money-broker, had sufficed to keep up
appearances; increased issues of State paper-money had furnished some
resources; and the secret, upon the whole, had been pretty well kept. But all
these contrivances were soon exhausted. There was another plan tried: the
establishment of a bank, the capital of which was to be furnished partly by the
State and partly by private shareholders; the chief direction to belong to the
State, in such a manner as to enable the Government to draw upon the funds of
this bank to a large amount, and thus to repeat the same fraudulent
transactions that would no longer do with the "Seehandlung." But, as a matter
of course, there were no capitalists to be found who would hand over their
money upon such conditions; the statutes of the bank had to be altered, and the
property of the shareholders guaranteed from the encroachments of the Treasury,
before any shares were subscribed for. Thus, this plan having failed, there
remained nothing but to try a loan, if capitalists could be found who would
lend their cash without requiring the permission and guarantee of that
mysterious "future Representation of the People." Rothchild was applied to, and
he declared that if the loan was to be guaranteed by this "Representation of
the People," he would undertake the thing at a moment's notice—if not, he
could not have anything to do with the transaction.

Thus every hope of obtaining money had vanished, and there was no
possibility of escaping the fatal "Representation of the People." Rothschild's
refusal was known in autumn, 1846, and in February of the next year the King
called together all the eight Provincial Diets to Berlin, forming them into one
"United Diet." This Diet was to do the work required, in case of need, by the
law of 1820; it was to vote loans and increased taxes, but beyond that it was
to have no rights. Its voice upon general legislation was to be merely
consultative; it was to assemble, not at fixed periods, but whenever it pleased
the King; it was to discuss nothing but what the Government pleased to lay
before it. Of course, the members were very little satisfied with the part they
were expected to perform. They repeated the wishes they had enounced when they
met in the provincial assembles; the relations between them and the Government
soon became acrimonious, and when the loan, which was again stated to be
required for railway constructions, was demanded from them, they again refused
to grant it.

This vote very soon brought their sitting to a close. The King, more and
more exasperated, dismissed them with a reprimand, but still remained without
money. And, indeed, he had every reason to be alarmed at his position, seeing
that the Liberal League, headed by the middle classes, comprising a large part
of the lower nobility, and all the different sections of the lower
orders—that this Liberal League was determined to have what it wanted. In
vain the King had declared, in the opening speech, that he would never, never
grant a Constitution in the modern sense of the word; the Liberal League
insisted upon such a modern, anti-feudal, Representative Constitution, with all
its sequels, Liberty of the Press, Trial by Jury, etc.; and before they got it,
not a farthing of money would they grant. There was one thing evident: that
things could not go on long in this manner, and that either one of the parties
must give way, or that a rupture—a bloody struggle—must ensue. And
the middle classes knew that they were on the eve of a revolution, and they
prepared themselves for it. They sought to obtain by every possible means the
support of the working class of the towns, and of the peasantry in the
agricultural districts, and it is well known that there was, in the latter end
of 1847, hardly a single prominent political character among the bourgeoisie
who did not proclaim himself a "Socialist," in order to insure to himself the
sympathy of the proletarian class. We shall see these "Socialists" at work by
and by.

This eagerness of the leading bourgeoisie to adopt, at least the outward
show of Socialism, was caused by a great change that had come over the working
classes of Germany. There had been ever since 1840 a fraction of German
workmen, who, travelling in France and Switzerland, had more or less imbibed
the crude Socialist or Communist notions then current among the French workmen.
The increasing attention paid to similar ideas in France ever since 1840 made
Socialism and Communism fashionable in Germany also, and as far back as 1843,
all newspapers teemed with discussions of social questions. A school of
Socialists very soon formed itself in Germany, distinguished more for the
obscurity than for the novelty of its ideas; its principal efforts consisted in
the translation of French Fourierist, Saint-Simonian, and other doctrines into
the abstruse language of German philosophy. The German Communist school,
entirely different from this sect, was formed about the same time.

In 1844, there occurred the Silesian weavers' riots, followed by the
insurrection of the calico printers of Prague. These riots, cruelly suppressed,
riots of working men not against the Government, but against their employers,
created a deep sensation, and gave a new stimulus to Socialist and Communist
propaganda amongst the working people. So did the bread riots during the year
of famine, 1847. In short, in the same manner as Constitutional Opposition
rallied around its banner the great bulk of the propertied classes (with the
exception of the large feudal land-holders), so the working classes of the
larger towns looked for their emancipation to the Socialist and Communist
doctrines, although, under the then existing Press laws, they could be made to
know only very little about them. They could not be expected to have any very
definite ideas as to what they wanted; they only knew that the programme of the
Constitutional bourgeoisie did not contain all they wanted, and that their
wants were no wise contained in the Constitutional circle of ideas.

There was then no separate Republican party in Germany. People were either
Constitutional Monarchists, or more or less clearly defined Socialists or
Communists.

With such elements the slightest collision must have brought about a great
revolution. While the higher nobility and the older civil and military officers
were the only safe supports of the existing system; while the lower nobility,
the trading middle classes, the universities, the school-masters of every
degree, and even part of the lower ranks of the bureaucracy and military
officers were all leagued against the Government; while behind these there
stood the dissatisfied masses of the peasantry, and of the proletarians of the
large towns, supporting, for the time being, the Liberal Opposition, but
already muttering strange words about taking things into their own hands; while
the bourgeoisie was ready to hurl down the Government, and the proletarians
were preparing to hurl down the bourgeoisie in its turn; this Government went
on obstinately in a course which must bring about a collision. Germany was, in
the beginning of 1848, on the eve of a revolution, and this revolution was sure
to come, even had the French Revolution of February not hastened it.

What the effects of this Parisian Revolution were upon Germany we shall see
in our next.

LONDON, September, 1851.

Footnotes

[1] "The
Rhenish Gazette." This paper was published at Cologne, as the organ of the
Liberal leaders, Hansemann and Camphausen. Marx contributed certain articles on
the Landtag, which created so great a sensation that he was offered in
1842—although only 21 years of age—the editorship of the paper. He
accepted the offer, and then began his long fight with the Prussian Government.
Of course the paper was published under the supervision of a censor, but he,
good, easy man, was hopelessly outwitted by the young firebrand. So the
Government sent a second "special" censor from Berlin, but the double
censorship proved unequal to the task, and in 1843 the paper was suppressed.

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

III.

The Other German States.

NOVEMBER 6th, 1851.

IN our last we confined ourselves almost exclusively to that
State which, during the years 1840 to 1848, was by far the most important in
the German movement, namely, to Prussia. It is, however, time to pass a rapid
glance over the other States of Germany during the same period.

As to the petty States, they had, ever since the revolutionary movements of
1830, completely passed under the dictatorship of the Diet, that is of Austria
and Prussia. The several Constitutions, established as much as a means of
defence against the dictates of the larger States, as to insure popularity to
their princely authors, and unity to heterogeneous Assemblies of Provinces,
formed by the Congress of Vienna, without any leading principle
whatever—these Constitutions, illusory as they were, had yet proved
dangerous to the authority of the petty princes themselves during the exciting
times of 1830 and 1831. They were all but destroyed; whatever of them was
allowed to remain was less than a shadow, and it required the loquacious
self-complacency of a Welcker, a Rotteck, a Dahlmann, to imagine that any
results could possibly flow from the humble opposition, mingled with degrading
flattery, which they were allowed to show off in the impotent Chambers of these
petty States.

The more energetic portion of the middle class in these smaller States, very
soon after 1840, abandoned all the hopes they had formerly based upon the
development of Parliamentary government in these dependencies of Austria and
Prussia. No sooner had the Prussian bourgeoisie and the classes allied to it
shown a serious resolution to struggle for Parliamentary government in Prussia,
than they were allowed to take the lead of the Constitutional movement over all
non-Austrian Germany. It is a fact which now will not any longer be contested,
that the nucleus of those Constitutionalists of Central Germany, who afterwards
seceded from the Frankfort National Assembly, and who, from the place of their
separate meetings, were called the Gotha party, long before 1848 contemplated a
plan which, with little modification, they in 1849 proposed to the
representatives of all Germany. They intended a complete exclusion of Austria
from the German Confederation, the establishment of a new confederation with a
new fundamental law, and with a federal parliament,
under the
protection of Prussia, and, the incorporation of the more insignificant states
into the larger ones. All this was to be carried out
the moment Prussia entered into the ranks of Constitutional Monarchy,
established the Liberty of the Press, assumed a policy independent from that of
Russia and Austria, and thus enabled the Constitutionalists of the lesser
States to obtain a real control over their respective Governments. The inventor
of this scheme was Professor Gervinus, of Heidelberg (Baden). Thus the
emancipation of the Prussian bourgeoisie was to be the signal for that of the
middle classes of Germany generally, and for an alliance, offensive and
defensive of both against Russia and Austria, for Austria was, as we shall see
presently, considered as an entirely barbarian country, of which very little
was known, and that little not to the credit of its population; Austria,
therefore, was not considered as an essential part of Germany.

As to the other classes of society, in the smaller States they followed,
more or less rapidly, in the wake of their equals in Prussia. The shopkeeping
class got more and more dissatisfied with their respective Governments, with
the increase of taxation, with the curtailments of those political
sham-privileges of which they used to boast when comparing themselves to the
"slaves of despotism" in Austria and Prussia; but as yet they had nothing
definite in their opposition which might stamp them as an independent party,
distinct from the Constitutionalism of the higher bourgeoisie. The
dissatisfaction among the peasantry was equally growing, but it is well known
that this section of the people, in quiet and peaceful times, will never assert
its interests and assume its position as an independent class, except in
countries where universal suffrage is established. The working classes in the
trades and manufactures of the towns commenced to be infected with the "poison"
of Socialism and Communism, but there being few towns of any importance out of
Prussia, and still fewer manufacturing districts, the movement of this class,
owing to the want of centres of action and propaganda, was extremely slow in
the smaller States.

Both in Prussia and in the smaller States the difficulty of giving vent to
political opposition created a sort of religious opposition in the parallel
movements of German Catholicism and Free Congregationalism. History affords us
numerous examples where, in countries which enjoy the blessings of a State
Church, and where political discussion is fettered, the profane and dangerous
opposition against the worldly power is hid under the more sanctified and
apparently more disinterested struggle against spiritual despotism. Many a
Government that will not allow of any of its acts being discussed, will
hesitate before it creates martyrs and excites the religious fanaticism of the
masses. Thus in Germany, in 1845, in every State, either the Roman Catholic or
the Protestant religion, or both, were considered part and parcel of the law of
the land. In every State, too, the clergy of either of those denominations, or
of both, formed an essential part of the bureaucratic establishment of the
Government. To attack Protestant or Catholic orthodoxy, to attack priestcraft,
was then to make an underhand attack upon the Government itself. As to the
German Catholics, their very existence was an attack upon the Catholic
Governments of Germany, particularly Austria and Bavaria; and as such it was
taken by those Governments. The Free Congregationalists, Protestant Dissenters,
somewhat resembling the English and American Unitarians, openly professed their
opposition to the clerical and rigidly orthodox tendency of the King of Prussia
and his favourite Minister for the Educational and Clerical Department, Mr.
Eickhorn. The two new sects, rapidly extending for a moment, the first in
Catholic, the second in Protestant countries, had no other distinction but
their different origin; as to their tenets, they perfectly agreed upon this
most important point that all definite dogmas were nugatory. This want of any
definition was their very essence; they pretended to build that great temple
under the roof of which all Germans might unite; they thus represented, in a
religious form, another political idea of the day—that of German unity,
and yet they could never agree among themselves.

The idea of German unity, which the above-mentioned sects sought to realize,
at least, upon religious ground, by inventing a common religion for all
Germans, manufactured expressly for their use, habits, and taste—this
idea was, indeed, very widely spread, particularly in the smaller States. Ever
since the dissolution of the German Empire by Napoleon, the cry for a union of
all the disjecta membra of the German body had been the most general
expression of discontent with the established order of things, and most so in
the smaller States, where costliness of a court, an administration, an army, in
short, the dead weight of taxation, increased in a direct ratio with the
smallness and impotency of the State. But what this German unity was to be when
carried out was a question upon which parties disagreed. The bourgeoisie, which
wanted no serious revolutionary convulsion, were satisfied with what we have
seen they considered "practicable," namely a union of all Germany, exclusive of
Austria, under the supremacy of a Constitutional Government of Prussia; and
surely, without conjuring dangerous storms, nothing more could, at that time,
be done. The shopkeeping class and the peasantry, as far as these latter
troubled themselves about such things, never arrived at any definition of that
German unity they so loudly clamoured after; a few dreamers, mostly feudalist
reactionists, hoped for the reestablishment of the German Empire; some few
ignorant, soi-disant Radicals, admiring Swiss institutions, of which
they had not yet made that practical experience which afterwards most
ludicrously undeceived them, pronounced for a Federated Republic; and it was
only the most extreme party which, at that time, dared pronounce for a German
Republic, one and indivisible. Thus, German unity was in itself a question big
with disunion, discord, and, in the case of certain eventualities, even civil
war.

To resume, then: this was the state of Prussia, and the smaller States of
Germany, at the end of 1847. The middle class, feeling their power, and
resolved not to endure much longer the fetters with which a feudal and
bureaucratic despotism enchained their commercial transactions, their
industrial productivity, their common action as a class; a portion of the
landed nobility so far changed into producers of mere marketable commodities,
as to have the same interests and to make common cause with the middle class;
the smaller trading class, dissatisfied, grumbling at the takes, at the
impediments thrown in the way of their business, but without any definite plan
for such reforms as should secure their position in the social and political
body; the peasantry, oppressed here by feudal exactions, there by
money-lenders, usurers, and lawyers; the working people of the towns infected
with the general discontent, equally hating the Government and the large
industrial capitalists, and catching the contagion of Socialist and Communist
ideas; in short, a heterogeneous mass of opposition, springing from various
interests, but more or less led on by the bourgeoisie, in the first ranks of
which again marched the bourgeoisie of Prussia, and particularly of the Rhine
Province. On the other hand, Governments disagreeing upon many points,
distrustful of each other, and particularly of that of Prussia, upon which yet
they had to rely for protection; in Prussia a Government forsaken by public
opinion, forsaken by even a portion of the nobility, leaning upon an army and a
bureaucracy which every day got more infected by the ideas, and subjected to
the influence, of the oppositional bourgeoisie—a Government, besides all
this, penniless in the most literal meaning of the word, and which could not
procure a single cent to cover its increasing deficit, but by surrendering at
discretion to the opposition of the bourgeoisie. Was there ever a more splendid
position for the middle class of any country, while it struggled for power
against the established Government?

LONDON, September, 1851.

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

IV.

Austria.

NOVEMBER 7th, 1851.

WE have now to consider Austria: that country which, up to
March, 1848, was sealed up to the eyes of foreign nations almost as much as
China before the late war with England.

As a matter of course, we can here take into consideration nothing but
German Austria. The affairs of the Polish, Hungarian, or Italian Austrians do
not belong to our subject, and as far as they, since 1848, have influenced the
fate of the German Austrians, they will have to be taken into account
hereafter.

The Government of Prince Metternich turned upon two hinges; firstly, to keep
every one of the different nations subjected to the Austrian rule, in check, by
all other nations similarly conditioned; secondly, and this always has been the
fundamental principle of absolute monarchies, to rely for support upon two
classes, the feudal landlords and the large stockjobbing capitalists; and to
balance, at the same time, the influence and power of either of these classes
by that of the other, so as to leave full independence of action to the
Government. The landed nobility, whose entire income consisted in feudal
revenues of all sorts, could not but support a Government which proved their
only protection against that down-trodden class of serfs upon whose spoils they
lived; and whenever the less wealthy portion of them, as in Galicia, in 1846,
rose in opposition against the Government, Metternich in an instant let loose
upon them these very serfs, who at any rate profited by the occasion to wreak a
terrible vengeance upon their more immediate oppressors. On the other hand, the
large capitalists of the Exchange were chained to Metternich's Government by
the vast share they had in the public funds of the country. Austria, restored
to her full power in 1815 restoring and maintaining in Italy Absolute Monarchy
ever since 1820, freed from part of her liabilities by the bankruptcy of 1810,
had, after the peace, very soon re-established her credit in the great European
money markets; and in proportion as her credit grew, she had drawn against it.
Thus all the large European moneydealers had engaged considerable portions of
their capital in the Austrian funds; they all of them were interested in
upholding the credit of that country, and as Austrian public credit, in order
to be upheld, ever required new loans, they were obliged from time to time to
advance new capital in order to keep up the credit of the securities for that
which they already had advanced. The long peace after 1815, and the apparent
impossibility of a thousand years old empire, like Austria, being upset,
increased the credit of Metternich's Government in a wonderful ratio, and made
it even independent of the good will of the Vienna bankers and stock-jobbers;
for as long as Metternich could obtain plenty of money at Frankfort and
Amsterdam, he had, of course, the satisfaction of seeing the Austrian
capitalists at his feet. They were, besides, in every other respect at his
mercy: the large profits which bankers, stock-jobbers, and Government
contractors always contrive to draw out of an absolute monarchy, were
compensated for by the almost unlimited power which the Government possessed
over their persons and fortunes; and not the smallest shadow of an opposition
was, therefore, to be expected from this quarter. Thus Metternich was sure of
the support of the two most powerful and influential classes of the empire, and
he possessed besides an army and a bureaucracy, which for all purposes of
absolutism could not be better constituted. The civil and military officers in
the Austrian service form a race of their own; their fathers have been in the
service of the Kaiser, and so will their sons be; they belong to none of the
multifarious nationalities congregated under the wing of the double-headed
eagle; they are, and ever have been, removed from one end of the empire to the
other, from Poland to Italy, from Germany to Transylvania; Hungarian, Pole,
German, Roumanian, Italian, Croat, every individual not stamped with "imperial
and royal authority," etc., bearing a separate national character, is equally
despised by them; they have no nationality, or rather, they alone make up the
really Austrian nation. It is evident what a pliable, and at the same time
powerful instrument, in the hands of an intelligent and energetic chief, such a
civil and military hierarchy must be.

As to the other classes of the population, Metternich, in the true spirit of
a statesman of the ancien regime, cared little for their support. He
had, with regard to them, but one policy: to draw as much as possible out of
them in the shape of taxation, and at the same time, to keep them quiet. The
trading and manufacturing middle class was but of slow growth in Austria. The
trade of the Danube was comparatively unimportant; the country possessed but
one port, Trieste, and the trade of the port was very limited. As to the
manufacturers, they enjoyed considerable protection, amounting even in most
cases to the complete exclusion of all foreign competition; but this advantage
had been granted to them principally with a view to increase their tax-paying
capabilities, and was in a high degree counterpoised by internal restrictions
on manufactures, privileges on guilds, and other feudal corporations, which
were scrupulously upheld as long as they did not impede the purposes and views
of the Government. The petty tradesmen were encased in the narrow bounds of
these Mediaeval guilds, which kept the different trades in a perpetual war of
privilege against each other, and at the same time, by all but excluding
individuals of the working class from the possibility of raising themselves in
the social scale, gave a sort of hereditary stability to the members of those
involuntary associations. Lastly, the peasant and the working man were treated
as mere taxable matter, and the only care that was taken of them was to keep
them as much as possible in the same conditions of life in which they then
existed, and in which their fathers had existed before them. For this purpose
every old, established, hereditary authority was upheld in the same manner as
that of the State: the authority of the landlord over the petty tenant farmer,
that of the manufacturer over the operative, of the small master over the
journeyman and apprentice, of the father over the son, was everywhere rigidly
maintained by the Government, and every branch of disobedience punished the
same as a transgression of the law, by that universal instrument of Austrian
justice—the stick.

Finally, to wind up into one comprehensive system all these attempts at
creating an artificial stability, the intellectual food allowed to the nation
was selected with the minutest caution, and dealt out as sparingly as possible.
Education was everywhere in the hands of the Catholic priesthood, whose chiefs,
in the same manner as the large feudal landowners, were deeply interested in
the conservation of the existing system. The universities were organized in a
manner which allowed them to produce nothing but special men, that might or
might not obtain great proficiency in sundry particular branches of knowledge,
but which, at all events, excluded that universal liberal education which other
universities are expected to impart. There was absolutely no newspaper press,
except in Hungary, and the Hungarian papers were prohibited in all other parts
of the monarchy. As to general literature, its range had not widened for a
century; it had narrowed again after the death of Joseph II. And all around the
frontier, where ever the Austrian States touched upon a civilized country, a
cordon of literary censors was established in connection with the cordon of
customhouse officials, preventing any foreign book or newspaper from passing
into Austria before its contents had been twice or three times thoroughly
sifted, and found pure of even the slightest contamination of the malignant
spirit of the age.

For about thirty years after 1815 this system worked with wonderful success.
Austria remained almost unknown to Europe, and Europe was quite as little known
in Austria. The social state of every class of the population, and of the
population as a whole, appeared not to have undergone the slightest change.
Whatever rancour there might exist from class to class—and the existence
of this rancour was for Metternich a principal condition of government, which
he even fostered by making the higher classes the instruments of all Government
exactions, and thus throwing the odium upon them—whatever hatred the
people might bear to the inferior officials of the State, there existed, upon
the whole, little or no dissatisfaction with the Central Government. The
Emperor was adored, and old Francis I. seemed to be borne out by facts when,
doubting of the durability of this system, he complacently added: "And yet it
will hold while I live, and Metternich."

But there was a slow underground movement going on which baffled all
Metternich's efforts. The wealth and influence of the manufacturing and trading
middle class increased. The introduction of machinery and steam-power in
manufactures upset in Austria, as it had done everywhere else, the old
relations and vital conditions of whole classes of society: it changed serfs
into free men, small farmers into manufacturing operatives; it undermined the
old feudal trades corporations, and destroyed the means of existence of many of
them. The new commercial and manufacturing population came everywhere into
collision with the old feudal institutions. The middle classes, more and more
induced by their business to travel abroad, introduced some mythical knowledge
of the civilized countries situated beyond the Imperial line of customs; the
introduction of railways finally accelerated both the industrial and
intellectual movement. There was, too, a dangerous part in the Austrian State
establishment, viz., the Hungarian feudal Constitution, with its parliamentary
proceedings, and its struggles of the impoverished and oppositional mass of the
nobility against the Government and its allies, the magnates. Presburg, the
seat of the Diet, was at the very gates of Vienna. All the elements contributed
to create among the middle classes of the towns a spirit, not exactly of
opposition, for opposition was as yet impossible, but of discontent; a general
wish for reforms, more of an administrative than of a constitutional nature.
And in the same manner as in Prussia, a portion of the bureaucracy joined the
bourgeoisie. Among this hereditary caste of officials the traditions of Joseph
II. were not forgotten: the more educated functionaries of the Government, who
themselves sometimes meddled with imaginary possible reforms, by far preferred
the progressive and intellectual despotism of that Emperor to the "paternal"
despotism of Metternich. A portion of the poorer nobility equally sided with
the middle class, and as to the lower classes of the population, who always had
found plenty of grounds to complain of their superiors, if not of the
Government, they in most cases could not but adhere to the reformatory wishes
of the bourgeoisie.

It was about this time, say 1843 or 1844, that a particular branch of
literature, agreeable to this change, was established in Germany. A few
Austrian writers, novelists, literary critics, bad poets, the whole of them of
very indifferent ability, but gifted with that peculiar industrialism proper to
the Jewish race, established themselves in Leipsig and other German towns out
of Austria, and there, out of the reach of Metternich, published a number of
books and pamphlets on Austrian affairs. They and their publishers made "a
roaring trade" of it. All Germany was eager to become initiated into the
secrets of the policy of European China; and the Austrians themselves, who
obtained these publications by the wholesale smuggling carried on upon the
Bohemian frontier, were still more curious. Of course, the secrets let out in
these publications were of no great importance, and the reform plans schemed
out by their well-wishing authors bore the stamp of an innocuousness almost
amounting to political virginity. A Constitution and a free press for Austria
were things considered unattainable; administrative reforms, extension of the
rights of the Provincial Diets, admission of foreign books and newspapers, and
a less severe censorship—the loyal and humble desires of these good
Austrians did hardly go any farther.

At all events the growing impossibility of preventing the literary
intercourse of Austria with the rest of Germany, and through Germany with the
rest of the world, contributed much toward the formation of an
anti-governmental public opinion, and brought at least some little political
information within the reach of part of the Austrian population. Thus, by the
end of 1847, Austria was seized, although in an inferior degree, by that
political and politico-religious agitation which then prevailed in all Germany;
and if its progress in Austria was more silent, it did, nevertheless, find
revolutionary elements enough to work upon. There was the peasant, serf, or
feudal tenant, ground down into the dust by lordly or Government exactions;
then the factory operative, forced by the stick of the policeman to work upon
any terms the manufacturer chose to grant; then the journeyman, debarred by the
corporative laws from any chance of gaining an independence in his trade; then
the merchant, stumbling at every step in business over absurd regulations; then
the manufacturer, in uninterrupted conflict with trade-guilds, jealous of their
privileges, or with greedy and meddling officials; then the school-master, the
savant, the better educated functionary, vainly struggling against an
ignorant and presumptuous clergy, or a stupid and dictating superior. In short,
there was not a single class satisfied, for the small concessions Government
was obliged now and then to make were not made at its own expense, for the
treasury could not afford that, but at the expense of the high aristocracy and
clergy; and as to the great bankers, and fundholders, the late events in Italy,
the increasing opposition of the Hungarian Diet, and the unwonted spirit of
discontent and cry for reform, manifesting themselves all over the Empire, were
not of a nature to strengthen their faith in the solidity and solvency of the
Austrian Empire.

Thus Austria, too, was marching slowly but surely toward a mighty change,
when, of a sudden, an event broke out in France, which at once brought down the
impending storm, and gave the lie to old Francis's assertion, that the building
would hold out both during his and Metternich's lifetime.

LONDON, September, 1851.

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Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

V.

The Vienna Insurrection

NOVEMBER 12, 1851.

ON the 24th of February, 1848, Louis Philippe was driven out of
Paris, and the French Republic was proclaimed. On the 13th of March following,
the people of Vienna broke the power of Prince Metternich, and made him flee
shamefully out of the country. On the 18th of March the people of Berlin rose
in arms, and, after an obstinate struggle of eighteen hours, had the
satisfaction of seeing the King surrender himself into their hands.
Simultaneous outbreaks of a more or less violent nature, but all with the same
success, occurred in the capitals of the smaller States of Germany. The German
people, if they had not accomplished their first revolution, were at least
fairly launched into the revolutionary career.

As to the incidents of these various insurrections, we cannot enter here
into the details of them: what we have to explain is their character, and the
position which the different classes of the population took up with regard to
them.

The Revolution of Vienna may be said to have been made by an almost
unanimous population. The bourgeoisie (with the exception of the bankers and
stock-jobbers), the petty trading class, the working people, one and all arose
at once against a Government detested by all, a Government so universally
hated, that the small minority of nobles and money lords which had supported it
made itself invisible on the very first attack. The middle classes had been
kept in such a degree of political ignorance by Metternich that to them the
news from Paris about the reign of Anarchy, Socialism, and terror, and about
impending struggles between the class of capitalists and the class of laborers,
proved quite unintelligible. They, in their political innocence, either could
attach no meaning to these news, or they believed them to be fiendish
inventions of Metternich, to frighten them into obedience. They, besides, had
never seen working men acting as a class, or stand up for their own distinct
class interests. They had, from their past experience, no idea of the
possibility of any differences springing up between classes that now were so
heartily united in upsetting a Government hated by all. They saw the working
people agree with themselves upon all points: a Constitution, Trial by Jury,
Liberty of the Press, etc. Thus they were, in March, 1848, at least, heart and
soul with the movement, and the movement, on the other hand, at once
constituted them the (at least in theory) predominant class of the State.

But it is the fate of all revolutions that this union of different classes,
which in some degree is always the necessary condition of any revolution,
cannot subsist long. No sooner is the victory gained against the common enemy
than the victors become divided among themselves into different camps, and turn
their weapons against each other. It is this rapid and passionate development
of class antagonism which, in old and complicated social organisms, makes a
revolution such a powerful agent of social and political progress; it is this
incessantly quick upshooting of new parties succeeding each other in power,
which, during those violent commotions, makes a nation pass in five years over
more ground than it would have done in a century under ordinary
circumstances.

The Revolution in Vienna made the middle class the theoretically predominant
class; that is to say, the concessions wrung from the Government were such as,
once carried out practically and adhered to for a time, would inevitably have
secured the supremacy of the middle class. But practically the supremacy of
that class was far from being established. It is true that by the establishment
of a national guard, which gave arms to the bourgeoisie and petty tradesmen,
that class obtained both force and importance; it is true that by the
installation of a "Committee of Safety," a sort of revolutionary, irresponsible
Government in which the bourgeoisie predominated, it was placed at the head of
power. But, at the same time, the workings classes were partially armed too;
they and the students had borne the brunt of the fight, as far as fight there
had been; and the students, about 4,000 strong, well-armed, and far better
disciplined than the national guard, formed the nucleus, the real strength of
the revolutionary force, and were no ways willing to act as a mere instrument
in the hands of the Committee of Safety. Though they recognized it, and were
even its most enthusiastic supporters, they yet formed a sort of independent
and rather turbulent body, deliberating for themselves in the "Aula," keeping
an intermediate position between the bourgeoisie and the working-classes,
preventing by constant agitation things from settling down to the old everyday
tranquillity, and very often forcing their resolutions upon the Committee of
Safety. The working men, on the other hand, almost entirely thrown out of
employment, had to be employed in public works at the expense of the State, and
the money for this purpose had, of course, to be taken out of the purse of the
taxpayers or out of the chest of the city of Vienna. All this could not but
become very unpleasant to the tradesmen of Vienna. The manufactures of the
city, calculated for the consumption of the rich and aristocratic courts of a
large country, were as a matter of course entirely stopped by the Revolution,
by the flight of the aristocracy and Court; trade was at a standstill, and the
continuous agitation and excitement kept up by the students and working people
was certainly not the means to "restore confidence," as the phrase went. Thus a
certain coolness very soon sprung up between the middle classes on the one side
and the turbulent students and working people on the other; and if for a long
time this coolness was not ripened into open hostility, it was because the
Ministry, and particularly the Court, in their impatience to restore the old
order of things, constantly justified the suspicions and the turbulent activity
of the more revolutionary parties, and constantly made arise, even before the
eyes of the middle classes, the spectre of old Metternichian despotism. Thus on
the 15th of May, and again on the 16th, there were fresh risings of all classes
in Vienna, on account of the Government having tried to attack, or to undermine
some of the newly-conquered liberties, and on each occasion the alliance
between the national guard or armed middle class, the students, and the
workingmen, was again cemented for a time.

As to the other classes of the population, the aristocracy and the money
lords had disappeared, and the peasantry were busily engaged everywhere in
removing, down to the very last vestiges of feudalism. Thanks to the war in
Italy, and the occupation which Vienna and Hungary gave to the Court, they were
left at full liberty, and succeeded in their work of liberation in Austria,
better than in any other part of Germany. The Austrian Diet had very shortly
after only to confirm the steps already practically taken by the peasantry, and
whatever else the Government of Prince Schwartzenberg may be enabled to
restore, it will never have the power of re-establishing the feudal servitude
of the peasantry. And if Austria at the present moment is again comparatively
tranquil, and even strong, it is principally because the great majority of the
people, the peasants, have been real gainers by the Revolution, and because
whatever else has been attacked by the restored Government, those palpable,
substantial advantages, conquered by the peasantry, are as yet untouched.

LONDON, October, 1851.

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Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

VI.

The Berlin Insurrection.

NOVEMBER 28, 1851.

THE second center of revolutionary action was Berlin, and from
what has been stated in the foregoing papers, it may be guessed that there this
action was far from having that unanimous support of almost all classes by
which it was accompanied in Vienna. In Prussia, the bourgeoisie had been
already involved in actual struggles with the Government; a rupture had been
the result of the "United Diet"; a bourgeois revolution was impending, and that
revolution might have been, in its first outbreak, quite as unanimous as that
of Vienna, had it not been for the Paris Revolution of February. That event
precipitated everything, while at the same time it was carried out under a
banner totally different from that under which the Prussian bourgeoisie was
preparing to defy its Government. The Revolution of February upset, in France,
the very same sort of Government which the Prussian bourgeoisie were going to
set up in their own country. The Revolution of February announced itself as a
revolution of the working classes against the middle classes; it proclaimed the
downfall of middle-class government and the emancipation of the workingman. Now
the Prussian bourgeoisie had, of late, had quite enough of working-class
agitation in their own country. After the first terror of the Silesian riots
had passed away, they had even tried to give this agitation a turn in their own
favor; but they always had retained a salutary horror of revolutionary
Socialism and Communism; and, therefore, when they saw men at the head of the
Government in Paris whom they considered as the most dangerous enemies of
property, order, religion, family, and of the other Penates of the
modern bourgeois, they at once experienced a considerable cooling down of their
own revolutionary ardor. They knew that the moment must be seized, and that,
without the aid of the working masses, they would be defeated; and yet their
courage failed them. Thus they sided with the Government in the first partial
and provincial outbreaks, tried to keep the people quiet in Berlin, who, during
five days, met in crowds before the royal palace to discuss the news and ask
for changes in the Government; and when at last, after the news of the downfall
of Metternich, the King made some slight concessions, the bourgeoisie
considered the Revolution as completed, and went to thank His Majesty for
having fulfilled all the wishes of his people. But then followed the attack of
the military on the crowd, the barricades, the struggle, and the defeat of
royalty. Then everything was changed: the very working classes, which it had
been the tendency of the bourgeoisie to keep in the background, had been pushed
forward, had fought and conquered, and all at once were conscious of their
strength. Restrictions of suffrage, of the liberty of the press, of the right
to sit on juries, of the right of meeting-restrictions that would have been
very agreeable to the bourgeoisie because they would have touched upon such
classes only as were beneath them—now were no longer possible. The danger
of a repetition of the Parisian scenes of "anarchy" was imminent. Before this
danger all former differences disappeared. Against the victorious workingman,
although he had not yet uttered any specific demands for himself, the friends
and the foes of many years united, and the alliance between the bourgeoisie and
the supporters of the over-turned system was concluded upon the very barricades
of Berlin. The necessary concessions, but no more than was unavoidable, were to
be made, a ministry of the opposition leaders of the United Diet was to be
formed, and in return for its services in saving the Crown, it was to have the
support of all the props of the old Government, the feudal aristocracy, the
bureaucracy, the army. These were the conditions upon which Messrs. Camphausen
and Hansemann undertook the formation of a cabinet.

Such was the dread evinced by the new ministers of the aroused masses, that
in their eyes every means was good if it only tended to strengthen the shaken
foundations of authority. They, poor deluded wretches, thought every danger of
a restoration of the old system had passed away; and thus they made use of the
whole of the old State machinery for the purpose of restoring "order." Not a
single bureaucrat or military officer was dismissed; not the slightest change
was made in the old bureaucratic system of administration. These precious
constitutional and responsible ministers even restored to their posts those
functionaries whom the people, in the first heat of revolutionary ardor, had
driven away on account of their former acts of bureaucratic overbearing. There
was nothing altered in Prussia hut the persons of the ministers; even the
ministerial staffs in the different departments were not touched upon, and all
the constitutional place-hunters, who had formed the chorus of the
newly-elevated rulers, and who had expected their share of power and office,
were told to wait until restored stability allowed changes to be operated in
the bureaucratic personnel which now were not without danger.

The King, chap-fallen in the highest degree after the insurrection of the
18th of March, very soon found out that he was quite as necessary to these
"liberal" ministers as they were to him. The throne had been spared by the
insurrection; the throne was the last existing obstacle to "anarchy"; the
liberal middle class and its leaders, now in the ministry, had therefore every
interest to keep on excellent terms with the crown. The King, and the
reactionary camerilla that surrounded him, were not slow in discovering this,
and profited by the circumstance in order to fetter the march of the ministry
even in those petty reforms that were from time to time intended.

The first care of the ministry was to give a sort of legal appearance to the
recent violent changes. The United Diet was convoked in spite of all popular
opposition, in order to vote as the legal and constitutional organ of the
people a new electoral law for the election of an Assembly, which was to agree
with the crown upon a new constitution. The elections were to be indirect, the
mass of voters electing a number of electors, who then were to choose the
representative. In spite of all opposition this system of double elections
passed. The United Diet was then asked for a loan of twenty-five millions of
dollars, opposed by the popular party, but equally agreed to.

These acts of the ministry gave a most rapid development to the popular, or
as it now called itself, the Democratic party. This party, headed by the petty
trading and shopkeeping class, and uniting under its banner, in the beginning
of the revolution, the large majority of the working people, demanded direct
and universal suffrage, the same as established in France, a single legislative
assembly, and full and open recognition of the revolution of the 18th of March,
as the base of the new governmental system. The more moderate faction would be
satisfied with a thus "democratized" monarchy, the more advanced demanded the
ultimate establishment of the republic. Both factions agreed in recognizing the
German National Assembly at Frankfort as the supreme authority of the country,
while the Constitutionalists and Reactionists affected a great horror of the
sovereignty of this body, which they professed to consider as utterly
revolutionary.

The independent movement of the working classes had, by the revolution, been
broken up for a time. The immediate wants and circumstances of the movement
were such as not to allow any of the specific demands of the Proletarian party
to be put in the foreground. In fact, as long as the ground was not cleared for
the independent action of the working men, as long as direct and universal
suffrage was not yet established, as long as the thirty-six larger and smaller
states continued to cut up Germany into numberless morsels, what else could the
Proletarian party do but watch the—for them all-important—movement
of Paris, and struggle in common with the petty shopkeepers for the attainment
of those rights, which would allow them to fight afterwards their own
battle?

There were only three points, then, by which the Proletarian party in its
political action essentially distinguished itself from the petty trading class,
or properly so-called Democratic party; firstly, in judging differently the
French movement, with regard to which the democrats attacked, and the
Proletarian revolutionists defended, the extreme party in Paris; secondly, in
proclaiming the necessity of establishing a German Republic, one and
indivisible, while the very extremest ultras among the democrats only dared to
sigh for a Federative Republic; and thirdly, in showing upon every occasion,
that revolutionary boldness and readiness for action, in which any party headed
by, and composed principally of petty tradesmen, will always be deficient.

The Proletarian, or really Revolutionary party, succeeded only very
gradually in withdrawing the mass of the working people from the influence of
the Democrats, whose tail they formed in the beginning of the Revolution. But
in due time the indecision, weakness, and cowardice of the Democratic leaders
did the rest, and it may now be said to be one of the principal results of the
last years' convulsions, that wherever the working-class is concentrated in
anything like considerable masses, they are entirely freed from that Democratic
influence which led them into an endless series of blunders and misfortunes
during 1848 and 1849. But we had better not anticipate; the events of these two
years will give us plenty of opportunities to show the Democratic gentlemen at
work.

The peasantry in Prussia, the same as in Austria, but with less energy,
feudalism pressing, upon the whole, not quite so hardly upon them here, had
profited by the revolution to free themselves at once from all feudal shackles.
But here, from the reasons stated before, the middle classes at once turned
against them, their oldest, their most indispensable allies; the democrats,
equally frightened with the bourgeoisie, by what was called attacks upon
private property, failed equally to support them; and thus, after three months'
emancipation, after bloody struggles and military executions, particularly in
Silesia, feudalism was restored by the hands of the, until yesterday,
anti-feudal bourgeoisie. There is not a more damning fact to be brought against
them than this. Similar treason against its best allies, against itself, never
was committed by any party in history, and whatever humiliation and
chastisement may be in store for this middle class party, it has deserved by
this one act every morsel of it.

OCTOBER, 1851.

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

VII.

The Frankfort National Assembly.

FEBRUARY 27, 1852.

IT will perhaps be in the recollection of our readers that in
the six preceding papers we followed up the revolutionary movement of Germany
to the two great popular victories of March 13th in Vienna, and March 18th in
Berlin. We saw, both in Austria and Prussia, the establishment of
constitutional governments and the proclamation, as leading rules for all
future policy, of Liberal, or middle class principles; and the only difference
observable between the two great centers of action was this, that in Prussia
the liberal bourgeoisie, in the persons of two wealthy merchants, Messrs.
Camphausen and Hansemann, directly seized upon the reins of power; while in
Austria, where the bourgeoisie was, politically, far less educated, the Liberal
bureaucracy walked into office, and professed to hold power in trust for them.
We have further seen, how the parties and classes of society, that were
heretofore all united in opposition to the old government, got divided among
themselves after the victory, or even during the struggle; and how that same
Liberal bourgeoisie that alone profited from the victory turned round
immediately upon its allies of yesterday, assumed a hostile attitude against
every class or party of a more advanced character, and concluded an alliance
with the conquered feudal and bureaucratic interests. It was in fact, evident,
even from the beginning of the revolutionary drama, that the Liberal
bourgeoisie could not hold its ground against the vanquished, but not
destroyed, feudal and bureaucratic parties except by relying upon the
assistance of the popular and more advanced parties; and that it equally
required, against the torrent of these more advanced masses, the assistance of
the feudal nobility and of the bureaucracy. Thus, it was clear enough that the
bourgeoisie in Austria and Prussia did not possess sufficient strength to
maintain their power, and to adapt the institutions of the country to their own
wants and ideas. The Liberal bourgeois ministry was only a halting-place from
which, according to the turn circumstances might take, the country would either
have to go on to the more advanced stage of Unitarian republicanism, or to
relapse into the old clerico-feudal and bureaucratic regime. At all events, the
real, decisive struggle was yet to come; the events of March had only engaged
the combat.

Austria and Prussia being the two ruling states of Germany, every decisive
revolutionary victory in Vienna or Berlin would have been decisive for all
Germany. And as far as they went, the events of March, 1848 in these two cities
decided the turn of German affairs. It would, then, be superfluous to recur to
the movements that occurred in the minor States; and we might, indeed, confine
ourselves to the consideration of Austrian and Prussian affairs exclusively, if
the existence of these minor states had not given rise to a body which was, by
its very existence, a most striking proof of the abnormal situation of Germany
and of the incompleteness of the late revolution: a body so abnormal, so
ludicrous by its very position, and yet so full of its own importance, that
history will, most likely, never afford a pendant to it. This body was the
so-called German National Assembly at Frankfort-on-Main.

After the popular victories of Vienna and Berlin, it was a matter of course
that there should be a Representative Assembly for all Germany. This body was
consequently elected, and met at Frankfort, by the side of the old Federative
Diet. The German National Assembly was expected, by the people, to settle every
matter in dispute, and to act as the highest legislative authority for the
whole of the German Confederation. But, at the same time, the Diet which had
convoked it had in no way fixed its attributions. No one knew whether its
decrees were to have force of law, or whether they were to be subject to the
sanction of the Diet, or of the individual Governments. In this perplexity, if
the Assembly had been possessed of the least energy, it would have immediately
dissolved and sent home the Diet— than which no corporate body was more
unpopular in Germany—and replaced it by a Federal Government, chosen from
among its own members. It would have declared itself the only legal expression
of the sovereign will of the German people, and thus have attached legal
validity to every one of its decrees. It would, above all, have secured to
itself an organized and armed force in the country sufficient to put down any
opposition on the parts of the Governments. And all this was easy, very easy,
at that early period of the Revolution. But that would have been expecting a
great deal too much from an Assembly composed in its majority of Liberal
attorneys and doctrinaire professors an Assembly which, while it
pretended to embody the very essence of German intellect and science, was in
reality nothing but a stage where old and worn-out political characters
exhibited their involuntary ludicrousness and their impotence of thought, as
well as action, before the eyes of all Germany. This Assembly of old women was,
from the first day of its existence, more frightened of the least popular
movement than of all the reactionary plots of all the German Governments put
together. It deliberated under the eyes of the Diet, nay, it almost craved the
Diet's sanction to its decrees, for its first resolutions had to be promulgated
by that odious body. Instead of asserting its own sovereignty, it studiously
avoided the discussion of any such dangerous question. Instead of surrounding
itself by a popular force, it passed to the order of the day over all the
violent encroachments of the Governments; Mayence [i.e.
Mainz] , under its very eyes, was placed in a state of siege, and the
people there disarmed, and the National Assembly did not stir. Later on it
elected Archduke John of Austria Regent of Germany, and declared that all its
resolutions were to have the force of law; but then Archduke John was only
instituted in his new dignity after the consent of all the Governments had been
obtained, and he was instituted not by the Assembly, but by the Diet; and as to
the legal force of the decrees of the Assembly, that point was never recognized
by the larger Governments, nor enforced by the Assembly itself; it therefore
remained in suspense. Thus we had the strange spectacle of an Assembly
pretending to be the only legal representative of a great and sovereign nation,
and yet never possessing either the will or the force to make its claims
recognized. The debates of this body, without any practical result, were not
even of any theoretical value, reproducing, as they did, nothing but the most
hackneyed commonplace themes of superannuated philosophical and juridical
schools; every sentence that was said, or rather stammered forth, in that
Assembly having been printed a thousand times over, and a thousand times
better, long before.

Thus the pretended new central authority of Germany left everything as it
had found it. So far from realizing the long-demanded unity of Germany, it did
not dispossess the most insignificant of the princes who ruled her; it did not
draw closer the bonds of union between her separated provinces; it never moved
a single step to break down the customhouse barriers that separated Hanover
from Prussia, and Prussia from Austria; it did not even make the slightest
attempt to remove the obnoxious dues that everywhere obstruct river navigation
in Prussia. But the less this Assembly did the more it blustered. It created a
German fleet—upon paper; it annexed Poland and Schleswig; it allowed
German-Austria to carry on war against Italy, and yet prohibited the Italians
from following up the Austrians into their safe retreat in Germany; it gave
three cheers and one cheer more for the French republic, and it received
Hungarian embassies, which certainly went home with far more confused ideas
about Germany than they had come with.

This Assembly had been, in the beginning of the Revolution, the bugbear of
all German Governments. They had counted upon a very dictatorial and
revolutionary action on its part—-on account of the very want of
definiteness in which it had been found necessary to leave its competency.
These Governments, therefore, got up a most comprehensive system of intrigues
in order to weaken the influence of this dreaded body; but they proved to have
more luck than wits, for this Assembly did the work of the Governments better
than they themselves could have done. The chief feature among these intrigues
was the convocation of local Legislative Assemblies, and in consequence, not
only the lesser States convoked their legislatures, but Prussia and Austria
also called constituent assemblies. In these, as in the Frankfort House of
Representatives, the Liberal middle class, or its allies, liberal lawyers, and
bureaucrats had the majority, and the turn affairs took in each of them was
nearly the same. The only difference is this, that the German National Assembly
was the parliament of an imaginary country, as it had declined the task of
forming what nevertheless was its own first condition of existence, viz. a
United Germany; that it discussed the imaginary and never-to-be-carried-out
measures of an imaginary government of its own creation, and that it passed
imaginary resolutions for which nobody cared; while in Austria and Prussia the
constituent bodies were at least real parliaments, upsetting and creating real
ministries, and forcing, for a time at least, their resolutions upon the
princes with whom they had to contend. They, too, were cowardly, and lacked
enlarged views of revolutionary resolutions; they, too, betrayed the people,
and restored power to the hands of feudal, bureaucratic, and military
despotism. But then they were at least obliged to discuss practical questions
of immediate interest, and to live upon earth with other people, while the
Frankfort humbugs were never happier than when they could roam in "the airy
realms of dream," im Luftreich des Traums. [from
Heinrich Heine's Aristophanes] Thus the proceedings of the
Berlin and Vienna Constituents form an important part of German revolutionary
history, while the lucubrations of the Frankfort collective tomfoolery merely
interest the collector of literary and antiquarian curiosities.

The people of Germany, deeply feeling the necessity of doing away with the
obnoxious territorial division that scattered and annihilated the collective
force of the nation, for some time expected to find, in the Frankfort National
Assembly at least, the beginning of a new era. But the childish conduct of that
set of wiseacres soon disenchanted the national enthusiasm. The disgraceful
proceedings occasioned by the armistice of Malmoe (September, 1848,) made the
popular indignation burst out against a body which, it had been hoped, would
give the nation a fair field for action, and which, instead, carried away by
unequalled cowardice, only restored to their former solidity the foundations
upon which the present counter-revolutionary system is built.

LONDON, January, 1852.

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

VIII.

Poles, Tschechs, and Germans

MARCH 5th, 1852.

FROM what has been stated in the foregoing articles, it is
already evident that unless a fresh revolution was to follow that of March,
1848, things would inevitably return, in Germany, to what they were before this
event. But such is the complicated nature of the historical theme upon which we
are trying to throw some light, that subsequent events cannot be clearly
understood without taking into account what may be called the foreign relations
of the German Revolution. And these foreign relations were of the same
intricate nature as the home affairs.

The whole of the eastern half of Germany, as far as the Elbe, Saale, and
Bohemian Forest, has, it is well known, been reconquered during the last
thousand years, from invaders of Slavonic origin. The greater part of these
territories have been Germanized, to the perfect extinction of all Slavonic
nationality and language, for several centuries past; and if we except a few
totally isolated remnants, amounting in the aggregate to less than a hundred
thousand souls (Kassubians in Pomerania, Wends or Sorbians in Lusatia)[1]
, their inhabitants are, to all intents and purposes, Germans. But the case is
different along the whole of the frontier of ancient Poland, and in the
countries of the Tschechian tongue, in Bohemia and Moravia. Here the two
nationalities are mixed up in every district, the towns being generally more or
less German, while the Slavonic element prevails in the rural villages, where,
however, it is also gradually disintegrated and forced back by the steady
advance of German influence.

The reason of this state of things is this: ever since the time of
Charlemagne, the Germans have directed their most constant and persevering
efforts to the conquest, colonization, or, at least, civilization of the east
of Europe. The conquest of the feudal nobility between the Elbe and the Oder,
and the feudal colonies of the military orders of knights in Prussia and
Livonia, only laid the ground for a far more extensive and effective system of
Germanization by the trading and manufacturing middle classes, which in
Germany, as in the rest of Western Europe, rose into social and political
importance since the fifteenth century. The Slavonians, and particularly the
Western Slavonians (Poles and Tschechs), are essentially an agricultural race;
trade and manufactures never were in great favor with them. The consequence was
that, with the increase of population and the origin of cities in these
regions, the production of all articles of manufacture fell into the hands of
German immigrants, and the exchange of these commodities against agricultural
produce became the exclusive monopoly of the Jews, who, if they belong to any
nationality, are in these countries certainly rather Germans than Slavonians.
This has been, though in a less degree, the case in all the east of Europe. The
handicraftsman, the small shopkeeper, the petty manufacturer, is a German up to
this day in Petersburg, Pesth, Jassy, and even Constantinople; while the
money-lender, the publican, the hawker—a very important man in these
thinly populated countries—is very generally a Jew, whose native tongue
is a horribly corrupted German. The importance of the German element in the
Slavonic frontier localities, thus rising with the growth of towns, trade and
manufactures, was still increased when it was found necessary to import almost
every element of mental culture from Germany; after the German merchant and
handicraftsman, the German clergyman, the German schoolmaster, the German
savant came to establish himself upon Slavonic soil. And lastly, the
iron thread of conquering armies, or the cautious, well-premeditated grasp of
diplomacy, not only followed, but many times went ahead of the slow but sure
advance of denationalization by social development. Thus, great parts of
Western Prussia and Posen have been Germanized since the first partition of
Poland, by sales and grants of public domains to German colonists, by
encouragements given to German capitalists for the establishment of
manufactories, etc., in those neighborhoods, and very often, too, by
excessively despotic measures against the Polish inhabitants of the country.

In this manner the last seventy years had entirely changed the line of
demarcation between the German and Polish nationalities. The Revolution of 1848
calling forth at once the claim of all oppressed nations to an independent
existence, and to the right of settling their own affairs for themselves, it
was quite natural that the Poles should at once demand the restoration of their
country within the frontiers of the old Polish Republic before 1772. It is
true, this frontier, even at that time, had become obsolete, if taken as the
delimitation of German and Polish nationality; it had become more so every year
since by the progress of Germanization; but then, the Germans had proclaimed
such an enthusiasm for the restoration of Poland, that they must expect to be
asked, as a first proof of the reality of their sympathies to give up
their share of the plunder. On the other hand, should whole tracts of
land, inhabited chiefly by Germans, should large towns, entirely German, be
given up to a people that as yet had never given any proofs of its capability
of progressing beyond a state of feudalism based upon agricultural serfdom? The
question was intricate enough. The only possible solution was in a war with
Russia. The question of delimitation between the different revolutionized
nations would have been made a secondary one to that of first establishing a
safe frontier against the common enemy. The Poles, by receiving extended
territories in the east, would have become more tractable and reasonable in the
west; and Riga and Mitau would have been deemed, after all, quite as important
to them as Danzig and Elbing. Thus the advanced party in Germany, deeming a war
with Russia necessary to keep up the Continental movement, and considering that
the national re-establishment even of a part of Poland would inevitably lead to
such a war, supported the Poles; while the reigning middle class partly clearly
foresaw its downfall from any national war against Russia, which would have
called more active and energetic men to the helm, and, therefore, with a
feigned enthusiasm for the extension of German nationality, they declared
Prussian Poland, the chief seat of Polish revolutionary agitation, to be part
and parcel of the German Empire that was to be. The promises given to the Poles
in the first days of excitement were shamefully broken. Polish armaments got up
with the sanction of the Government were dispersed and massacred by Prussian
artillery; and as soon as the month of April, 1848, within six weeks of the
Berlin Revolution, the Polish movement was crushed, and the old national
hostility revived between Poles and Germans. This immense and incalculable
service to the Russian autocrat was performed by the Liberal
merchant-ministers, Camphausen and Hansemann. It must be added that this Polish
campaign was the first means of reorganizing and reassuring that same Prussian
army, which afterward turned out the Liberal party, and crushed the movement
which Messrs. Camphausen and Hansemann had taken such pains to bring about.
"Whereby they sinned, thereby are they punished." Such has been the fate of all
the upstarts of 1848 and 1849, from Ledru Rolin to Changarnier, and from
Camphausen down to Haynau.

The question of nationality gave rise to another struggle in Bohemia. This
country, inhabited by two millions of Germans, and three millions of Slavonians
of the Tschechian tongue, had great historical recollections, almost all
connected with the former supremacy of the Tschechs. But then the force of this
branch of the Slavonic family had been broken ever since the wars of the
Hussites in the fifteenth century. The province speaking the Tschechian tongue
was divided, one part forming the kingdom of Bohemia, another the principality
of Moravia, a third the Carpathian hill-country of the Slovaks, being part of
Hungary. The Moravians and Slovaks had long since lost every vestige of
national feeling and vitality, although mostly preserving their language.
Bohemia was surrounded by thoroughly German countries on three sides out of
four. The German element had made great progress on her own territory; even in
the capital, in Prague, the two nationalities were pretty equally matched; and
everywhere capital, trade, industry, and mental culture were in the hands of
the Germans. The chief champion of the Tschechian nationality, Professor
Palacky, is himself nothing but a learned German run mad, who even now cannot
speak the Tschechian language correctly and without foreign accent. But as it
often happens, dying Tschechian nationality, dying according to every fact
known in history for the last four hundred years, made in 1848 a last effort to
regain its former vitality—an effort whose failure, independently of all
revolutionary considerations, was to prove that Bohemia could only exist,
henceforth, as a portion of Germany, although part of her inhabitants might
yet, for some centuries, continue to speak a non-German language.

LONDON, February, 1852.

Footnotes

Lusatia, an ancient territory of Germany, north of Bohemia, to which the whole
of it originally belonged. Later it belonged to Saxony, and still later, in
1815, was divided between Saxony (the northern part) and Prussia (the
southern).

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

IX.

Panslavism — The Schleswig-Holstein War.

MARCH 15th, 1852.

BOHEMIA and Croatia (another disjected member of the Slavonic
family, acted upon by the Hungarian, as Bohemia by the German) were the homes
of what is called on the European continent "Panslavism." Neither Bohemia nor
Croatia was strong enough to exist as a nation by herself. Their respective
nationalities, gradually undermined by the action of historical causes that
inevitably absorbs into a more energetic stock, could only hope to be restored
to anything like independence by an alliance with other Slavonic nations. There
were twenty-two millions of Poles, forty-five millions of Russians, eight
millions of Serbians and Bulgarians; why not form a mighty confederation of the
whole eighty millions of Slavonians, and drive back or exterminate the intruder
upon the holy Slavonic soil, the Turk, the Hungarian, and above all the hated,
but indispensable Niemetz, the German? Thus in the studies of a few
Slavonian dilettanti of historical science was this ludicrous, this
anti-historical movement got up, a movement which intended nothing less than to
subjugate the civilized West under the barbarian East, the town under the
country, trade, manufactures, intelligence, under the primitive agriculture of
Slavonian serfs. But behind this ludicrous theory stood the terrible reality of
the Russian Empire; that empire which by every movement proclaims the
pretension of considering all Europe as the domain of the Slavonic race, and
especially of the only energetic part of this race, of the Russians; that
empire which, with two capitals such as St. Peterburg and Moscow, has not yet
found its centre of gravity, as long as the "City of the Czar" (Constantinople,
called in Russian Tzarigrad, the Czar's city), considered by every Russian
peasant as the true metropolis of his religion and his nation, is not actually
the residence of its Emperor; that empire which, for the last one hundred and
fifty years, has never lost, but always gained territory by every war it has
commenced. And well known in Central Europe are the intrigues by which Russian
policy supported the new-fangled system of Panslavism, a system than which none
better could be invented to suit its purposes. Thus, the Bohemian and Croatian
Panslavists, some intentionally, some without knowing it, worked in the direct
interest of Russia; they betrayed the revolutionary cause for the shadow of a
nationality which, in the best of cases, would have shared the fate of the
Polish nationality under Russian sway. It must, however, be said for the honor
of the Poles, that they never got to be seriously entangled in these Panslavist
traps, and if a few of the aristocracy turned furious Panslavists, they knew
that by Russian subjugation they had less to lose than by a revolt of their own
peasant serfs.

The Bohemians and Croatians called, then, a general Slavonic Congress at
Prague, for the preparation of the universal Slavonian Alliance. This Congress
would have proved a decided failure even without the interference of the
Austrian military. The several Slavonic languages differ quite as much as the
English, the German, and the Swedish, and when the proceedings opened, there
was no common Slavonic tongue by which the speakers could make themselves
understood. French was tried, but was equally unintelligible to the majority,
and the poor Slavonic enthusiasts, whose only common feeling was a common
hatred against the Germans, were at last obliged to express themselves in the
hated German language, as the only one that was generally understood! But just
then another Slavonic Congress was assembling in Prague, in the shape of
Galician lancers, Croatian and Slovak grenadiers, and Bohemian gunners and
cuirassiers; and this real, armed Slavonic Congress, under the command of
Windischgratz, in less than twenty-four hours drove the founders of an
imaginary Slavonian supremacy out of the town, and dispersed them to the
winds.

The Bohemian, Moravian, Dalmatian, and part of the Polish deputies (the
aristocracy) to the Austrian Constituent Diet, made in that Assembly a
systematic war upon the German element. The Germans, and part of the Poles (the
impoverished nobility), were in this Assembly the chief supporters of
revolutionary progress; the mass of the Slavonic deputies, in opposing them,
were not satisfied with thus showing clearly the reactionary tendencies of
their entire movement, but they were degraded enough to tamper and conspire
with the very same Austrian Government which had dispersed their meeting at
Prague. They, too, were paid for this infamous conduct; after supporting the
Government during the insurrection of October, 1848, an event which finally
secured to them a majority in the Diet, this now almost exclusively Slavonic
Diet was dispersed by Austrian soldiers, the same as the Prague Congress, and
the Panslavists threatened with imprisonment if they should stir again. And
they have only obtained this, that Slavonic nationality is now being everywhere
undermined by Austrian centralization, a result for which they may thank their
own fanaticism and blindness.

If the frontiers of Hungary and Germany had admitted of any doubt, there
would certainly have been another quarrel there. But, fortunately, there was no
pretext, and the interests of both nations being intimately related, they
struggled against the same enemies, viz., the Austrian Government and the
Panslavistic fanaticism. The good understanding was not for a moment disturbed.
But the Italian Revolution entangled at least a part of Germany in an
internecine war, and it must be stated here, as a proof how far the
Metternichian system had succeeded in keeping back the development of the
public mind, that during the first six months of 1848, the same men that had in
Vienna mounted the barricades, went, full of enthusiasm, to join the army that
fought against the Italian patriots. This deplorable confusion of ideas did
not, however, last long.

Lastly, there was the war with Denmark about Schleswig and Holstein. These
countries, unquestionably German by nationality, language and predilection, are
also from military, naval and commercial grounds necessary to Germany. Their
inhabitants have, for the last three years, struggled hard against Danish
intrusion. The right of treaties, besides, was for them. The Revolution of
March brought them into open collision with the Danes, and Germany supported
them. But while in Poland, in Italy, in Bohemia, and later on, in Hungary,
military operations were pushed with the utmost vigor, in this the only
popular, the only, at least partially, revolutionary war, a system of
resultless marches and counter-marches was adopted, and an interference of
foreign diplomacy was submitted to, which led, after many an heroic engagement,
to a most miserable end. The German Government betrayed, during the war, the
Schleswig-Holstein revolutionary army on every occasion, and allowed it
purposely to be cut up, when dispersed or divided, by the Danes. The German
corps of volunteers were treated the same.

But while thus the German name earned nothing but hatred on every side, the
German Constitutional and Liberal Governments rubbed their hands for joy. They
had succeeded in crushing the Polish and the Bohemian movements. They had
everywhere revived the old national animosities, which heretofore had prevented
any common understanding and action between the German, the Pole, the Italian.
They had accustomed the people to scenes of civil war and repression by the
military. The Prussian army had regained its confidence in Poland, the Austrian
army in Prague; and while the superabundant patriotism ("die Patriotische
Ueberkraft," as Heine has it) of revolutionary but short-sighted youth was
led in Schleswig and Lombardy, to be crushed by the grape-shot of the enemy,
the regular army, the real instrument of action, both of Prussia and Austria,
was placed in a position to regain public favor by victories over the
foreigner. But we repeat: these armies, strengthened by the Liberals as a means
of action against the more advanced party, no sooner had recovered their
self-confidence and their discipline in some degree, than they turned
themselves against the Liberals, and restored to power the men of the old
system. When Radetzky, in his camp beyond the Adige, received the first orders
from the "responsible ministers" at Vienna, he exclaimed: "Who are these
ministers? They are not the Government of Austria! Austria is now nowhere but
in my camp; I and my army, we are Austria; and when we shall have beaten the
Italians we shall reconquer the Empire for the Emperor!" And old Radetzky was
right&ndash;but the imbecile "responsible" ministers at Vienna heeded him
not.

LONDON, February, 1852.

Articles on the
“The Russian Menace” and Panslavism

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

X.

The Paris Rising — The Frankfort Assembly

MARCH 18th, 1852.

As early as the beginning of April, 1848, the revolutionary torrent had found itself stemmed all over the Continent of Europe by the league which those classes of society that had profited by the first victory immediately formed with the vanquished. In France, the petty trading class and the Republican faction of the bourgeoisie had combined with the Monarchist bourgeoisie against the proletarians; in Germany and Italy, the victorious bourgeoisie had eagerly courted the support of the feudal nobility, the official bureaucracy, and the army, against the mass of the people and the petty traders. Very soon the united Conservative and Counter-Revolutionary parties again regained the ascendant. In England, an untimely and ill-prepared popular demonstration (April 10th) [A mass meeting at Kennington Commons, called by the Chartist Convention] turned out a complete and decisive defeat of the popular party. In France, two similar movements (16th April and 15th May) were equally defeated. In Italy, King Bomba regained his authority by a single stroke on the 15th May. In Germany, the different new bourgeois Governments and their respective constituent Assemblies consolidated themselves, and if the eventful 15th of May gave rise, in Vienna, to a popular victory, this was an event of merely secondary importance, and may be considered the last successful flash of popular energy. In Hungary the movement appeared to turn into the quiet channel of perfect legality, and the Polish movement, as we have seen in our last, was stifled in the bud by Prussian bayonets. But as yet nothing was decided as to the eventual turn which things would take, and every inch of ground lost by the Revolutionary parties in the different countries only tended to close their ranks more and more for the decisive action.

The decisive action drew near. It could be fought in France only; for France, as long as England took no part in the revolutionary strife, or as Germany remained divided, was, by its national independence, civilization, and centralization, the only country to impart the impulse of a mighty convulsion to the surrounding countries. Accordingly, when, on the 23rd of June, 1848, the bloody struggle began in Paris, when every succeeding telegraph or mail more clearly exposed the fact to the eyes of Europe, that this struggle was carried on between the mass of the working people on the one hand, and all the other classes of the Parisian population, supported by the army, on the other; when the fighting went on for several days with an exasperation unequalled in the history of modern civil warfare, but without any apparent advantage for either side–then it became evident to every one that this was the great decisive battle which would, if the insurrection were victorious, deluge the whole continent with renewed revolutions, or, if it was suppressed, bring about an at least momentary restoration of counter-revolutionary rule.

The proletarians of Paris were defeated, decimated, crushed with such an effect that even now they have not yet recovered from the blow. And immediately, all over Europe, the new and old Conservatives and Counter-Revolutionists raised their heads with an effrontery that showed how well they understood the importance of the event. The Press was everywhere attacked, the rights of meeting and association were interfered with, every little event in every small provincial town was taken profit of to disarm the people to declare a state of siege, to drill the troops in the new manoeuvres and artifices that Cavaignac had taught them. Besides, for the first time since February, the invincibility of a popular insurrection in a large town had been proved to be a delusion; the honor of the armies had been restored; the troops hitherto always defeated in street battles of importance regained confidence in their efficiency even in this kind of struggle. From this defeat of the ouvriers of Paris may be dated the first positive steps and definite plans of the old feudal bureaucratic party in Germany, to get rid even of their momentary allies, the middle classes, and to restore Germany to the state she was in before the events of March. The army again was the decisive power in the State, and the army belonged not to the middle classes but to themselves. Even in Prussia, where before 1848 a considerable leaning of part of the lower grades of officers towards a Constitutional Government had been observed, the disorder introduced into the army by the Revolution had brought back those reasoning young men to their allegiance; as soon as the private soldier took a few liberties with regard to the officers, the necessity of discipline and passive obedience became at once strikingly evident to them. The vanquished nobles and bureaucrats now began to see their way before them; the army, more united than ever, flushed with victory in minor insurrections and in foreign warfare, jealous of the great success the French soldiers had just attained–this army had only to be kept in constant petty conflicts with the people, and the decisive moment once at hand, it could with one great blow crush the Revolutionists, and set aside the presumptions of the middle class Parliamentarians. And the proper moment for such a decisive blow arrived soon enough.

We pass over the sometimes curious, but mostly tedious, parliamentary proceedings and local struggles that occupied, in Germany, the different parties during the summer. Suffice it to say that the supporters of the middle class interest in spite of numerous parliamentary triumphs, not one of which led to any practical result, very generally felt that their position between the extreme parties became daily more untenable, and that, therefore, they were obliged now to seek the alliance of the reactionists, and the next day to court the favor of the more popular factions. This constant vacillation gave the finishing stroke to their character in public opinion, and according to the turn events were taking, the contempt into which they had sunk, profited for the movement principally to the bureaucrats and feudalists.

By the beginning of autumn the relative position of the different parties had become exasperated and critical enough to make a decisive battle inevitable. The first engagements in this war between the democratic and revolutionary masses and the army took place at Frankfort. Though a mere secondary engagement, it was the first advantage of any note the troops acquired over the insurrection, and had a great moral effect. The fancy Government established by the Frankfort National Assembly had been allowed by Prussia, for very obvious reasons, to conclude an armistice with Denmark, which not only surrendered to Danish vengeance the Germans of Schleswig, but which also entirely disclaimed the more or less revolutionary principles which were generally supposed in the Danish war. This armistice was, by a majority of two or three, rejected in the Frankfort Assembly. A sham ministerial crisis followed this vote, but three days later the Assembly reconsidered their vote, and were actually
induced to cancel it and acknowledge the armistice. This disgraceful proceeding roused the indignation of the people. Barricades were erected, but already sufficient troops had been drawn to Frankfort, and after six hours' fighting, the insurrection was suppressed. Similar, but less important, movements connected with this event took place in other parts of Germany (Baden, Cologne), but were equally defeated.

This preliminary engagement gave to the Counter-Revolutionary party the one great advantage, that now the only Government which had entirely–at least in semblance–originated with popular election, the Imperial Government of Frankfort, as well as the National Assembly, was ruined in the eyes of the people. This Government and this Assembly had been obliged to appeal to the bayonets of the troops against the manifestation of the popular will. They were compromised, and what little regard they might have been hitherto enabled to claim, this repudiation of their origin, the dependency upon the anti-popular Governments and their troops, made both the Lieutenant of the Empire, his ministers and his deputies, henceforth to be complete nullities. We shall soon see how first Austria, then Prussia, and later on the smaller States too, treated with contempt every order, every request, every deputation they received from this body of impotent dreamers.

We now come to the great counter-stroke in Germany, of the French battle of June, to that event which was as decisive for Germany as the proletarian struggle of Paris had been for France; we mean the revolution and subsequent storming of Vienna, October, 1848. But the importance of this battle is such, and the explanation of the different circumstances that more immediately contributed to its issue will take up such a portion of The Tribune's columns, as to necessitate its being treated in a separate letter.

LONDON, February, 1852.

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

XI.

The Vienna Insurrection

MARCH 19th, 1852.

WE now come to the decisive event which formed the
counter-revolutionary part in Germany to the Parisian insurrection of June, and
which, by a single blow, turned the scale in favor of the Counter-Revolutionary
party,—the insurrection of October, 1848, in Vienna.

We have seen what the position of the different classes was, in Vienna,
after the victory of 12th March. We have also seen how the movement of
German-Austria was entangled with and impeded by the events in the non-German
provinces of Austria. It only remains for us, then, briefly to survey the
causes which led to this last and most formidable rising of German-Austria.

The high aristocracy and the stock-jobbing bourgeoisie, which had formed the
principal nonofficial supports of the Metternichian Government, were enabled,
even after the events of March, to maintain a predominating influence with the
Government, not only by the Court, the army and the bureaucracy, but still more
by the horror of "anarchy," which rapidly spread among the middle classes. They
very soon ventured a few feelers in the shape of a Press Law, a nondescript
Aristocratic Constitution, and an Electoral Law based upon the old division of
"estates." The so-called Constitutional ministry, consisting of half Liberal,
timid, incapable bureaucrats, on the 14th of May, even ventured a direct attack
upon the revolutionary organizations of the masses by dissolving the Central
Committee of Delegates of the National Guard and Academic Legion, a body formed
for the express purpose of controlling the Government, and calling out against
it, in case of need, the popular forces. But this act only provoked the
insurrection of the 15th of May, by which the Government was forced to
acknowledge the Committee, to repeal the Constitution and the Electoral Law and
to grant the power of framing a new Fundamental Law to a Constitutional Diet,
elected by universal suffrage. All this was confirmed on the following day by
an Imperial proclamation. But the reactionary party, which also had its
representatives in the ministry, soon got their "Liberal" colleagues to
undertake a new attack upon the popular conquests. The Academic Legion, the
stronghold of the movement party, the centre of continuous agitation, had, on
this very account, become obnoxious to the more moderate burghers of Vienna; on
the 26th a ministerial decree dissolved it. Perhaps this blow might have
succeeded, if it had been carried out by a part of the National Guard only, but
the Government, not trusting them either, brought the military forward, and at
once the National Guard turned round, united with the Academic Legion, and thus
frustrated the ministerial project.

In the meantime, however, the Emperor and his Court had, on the 16th of May,
left Vienna, and fled to Innspruck. Here surrounded by the bigoted Tyroleans,
whose loyalty was roused again by the danger of an invasion of their country by
the Sardo-Lombardian army, supported by the vicinity of Radetzky's troops,
within shell-range of whom Innspruck lay, here the Counter-Revolutionary party
found an asylum, from whence, uncontrolled, unobserved and safe, it might rally
its scattered forces, repair and spread again all over the country the network
of its plots. Communications were reopened with Radetzky, with Jellachich, and
with Windischgratz, as well as with the reliable men in the administrative
hierarchy of the different provinces; intrigues were set on foot with the
Slavonic chiefs, and thus a real force at the disposal of the
Counter-Revolutionary camarilla was formed, while the impotent ministers in
Vienna were allowed to wear their short and feeble popularity out in continual
bickerings with the revolutionary masses, and in the debates of the forthcoming
Constituent Assembly. Thus the policy of leaving the movement of the capital to
itself for a time; a policy which must have led to the omnipotence of the
movement party in a centralized and homogeneous country like France, here in
Austria, in a heterogeneous political conglomerate, was one of the safest means
of reorganizing the strength of the reactionists.

In Vienna the middle class, persuaded that after three successive defeats,
and in the face of a Constituent Assembly based upon universal suffrage, the
Court was no longer an opponent to be dreaded, fell more and more into that
weariness and apathy, and that eternal outcry for order and tranquillity, which
has everywhere seized this class after violent commotions and consequent
derangement of trade. The manufactures of the Austrian capital are almost
exclusively limited to articles of luxury, for which, since the Revolution and
the flight of the Court, there had necessarily been little demand. The shout
for a return to a regular system of government, and for a return of the Court,
both of which were expected to bring about a revival of commercial
prosperity—this shout became now general among the middle classes. The
meeting of the Constituent Assembly in July was hailed with delight as the end
of the revolutionary era; so was the return of the Court, which, after the
victories of Radetzky in Italy, and after the advent of the reactionary
ministry of Doblhoff, considered itself strong enough to brave the popular
torrent, and which, at the same time, was wanted in Vienna in order to complete
its intrigues with the Slavonic majority of the Diet. While the Constituent
Diet discussed the laws on the emancipation of the peasantry from feudal
bondage and forced labor for the nobility, the Court completed a master stroke.
On the 19th of August the Emperor was made to review the National Guard; the
Imperial family, the courtiers, the general officers, outbade each other in
flatteries to the armed burghers, who were already intoxicated with pride at
thus seeing themselves publicly acknowledged as one of the important bodies of
the State; and immediately afterwards a decree, signed by Herr Schwarzer, the
only popular minister in the Cabinet, was published, withdrawing the Government
aid, given hitherto to the workmen out of employ. The trick succeeded; the
working classes got up a demonstration; the middle class National Guards
declared for the decree of their minister; they were launched upon the
"Anarchists," fell like tigers on the unarmed and unresisting workpeople, and
massacred a great number of them on the 23rd of August. Thus the unity and
strength of the revolutionary force was broken; the class-struggle between
bourgeois and proletarian had come in Vienna, too, to a bloody outbreak, and
the counter-revolutionary camarilla saw the day approaching on which it might
strike its grand blow.

The Hungarian affairs very soon gave them the opportunity to proclaim openly
the principles upon which it intended to act. On the 5th of October an Imperial
decree in the Vienna Gazette—a decree countersigned by none of
the responsible ministers for Hungary—declared the Hungarian Diet
dissolved, and named the Ban Jellachich, of Croatia, civil and military
governor of that country—Jellachich, the leader of South Slavonian
reaction, a man who was actually at war with the lawful authorities of Hungary.
At the same time orders were given to the troops in Vienna to march out and
form part of the army which was to enforce Jellachich's authority. This,
however, was showing the cloven foot too openly; every man in Vienna felt that
war upon Hungary was war upon the principle of constitutional government, which
principle was in the very decree trampled upon by the attempt of the emperor to
make decrees with legal force, without the countersign of a responsible
minister. The people, the Academic Legion, the National Guard of Vienna, on the
6th of October rose in mass, and resisted the departure of the troops; some
grenadiers passed over to the people; a short struggle took place between the
popular forces and the troops; the minister of war, Latour, was massacred by
the people, and in the evening the latter were victors. In the meantime, Ban
Jellachich, beaten at Stuhlweissenburg by Perczel, had taken refuge near Vienna
on German-Austrian territory; the Viennese troops that were to march to his
support now took up an ostensibly hostile and defensive position against him;
and the emperor and court had again fled to Olmutz, on semi-Slavonic
territory.

But at Olmutz the Court found itself in very different circumstances from
what it had been at Innspruck. It was now in a position to open immediately the
campaign against the Revolution. It was surrounded by the Slavonian deputies of
the Constituent, who flocked in masses to Olmutz, and by the Slavonian
enthusiasts from all parts of the monarchy. The campaign, in their eyes, was to
be a war of Slavonian restoration and of extermination, against the two
intruders, upon what was considered Slavonian soil, against the German and the
Magyar. Windischgratz, the conqueror of Prague, now commander of the army that
was concentrated around Vienna, became at once the hero of Slavonian
nationality. And his army concentrated rapidly from all sides. From Bohemia,
Moravia, Styria, Upper Austria, and Italy, marched regiment after regiment on
routes that converged at Vienna, to join the troops of Jellachich and the
ex-garrison of the capital. Above sixty thousand men were thus united towards
the end of October, and soon they commenced hemming in the imperial city on all
sides, until, on the 30th of October, they were far enough advanced to venture
upon the decisive attack.

In Vienna, in the meantime, confusion and helplessness was prevalent. The
middle class, as soon as the victory was gained, became again possessed of
their old distrust against the "anarchic" working classes; the working men,
mindful of the treatment they had received, six weeks before, at the hands of
the armed tradesmen, and of the unsteady, wavering policy of the middle class
at large, would not trust to them the defence of the city, and demanded arms
and military organization for themselves. The Academic Legion, full of zeal for
the struggle against imperial despotism, were entirely incapable of
understanding the nature of the estrangement of the two classes, or of
otherwise comprehending the necessities of the situation. There was confusion
in the public mind, confusion in the ruling councils. The remnant of the German
Diet deputies, and a few Slavonians, acting the part of spies for their friends
at Olmutz, besides a few of the more revolutionary Polish deputies, sat in
permanency; but instead of taking part resolutely, they lost all their time in
idle debates upon the possibility of resisting the imperial army without
overstepping the bounds of constitutional conventionalities. The committee of
safety, composed of deputies from almost all the popular bodies of Vienna,
although resolved to resist, was yet dominated by a majority of burghers and
petty tradesmen, who never allowed it to follow up any determined, energetic
line of action. The council of the Academic Legion passed heroic resolutions,
but was in no way able to take the lead. The working classes, distrusted,
disarmed, disorganized, hardly emerging from the intellectual bondage of the
old regime, hardly awaking, not to a knowledge, but to a mere instinct of their
social position and proper political line of action, could only make themselves
heard by loud demonstrations, and could not be expected to be up to the
difficulties of the moment. But they were ready—as they ever were in
Germany during the revolution—to fight to the last, as soon as they
obtained arms.

That was the state of things in Vienna. Outside, the reorganized Austrian
army flushed with the victories of Radetzky in Italy; sixty or seventy thousand
men well armed, well organized, and if not well commanded at least possessing
commanders. Inside, confusion, class division, disorganization; a national
guard, part of which was resolved not to fight at all, part irresolute, and
only the smallest part ready to act; a proletarian mass, powerful by numbers
but without leaders, without any political education, subject to panic as well
as to fits of fury almost without cause, a prey to every false rumor spread
about, quite ready to fight, but unarmed, at least in the beginning, and
incompletely armed, and barely organized when at last they were led to battle;
a helpless Diet, discussing theoretical quibbles while the roof over their
heads was almost burning; a leading committee without impulse or energy.
Everything was changed from the days of March and May, when, in the
counter-revolutionary camp, all was confusion, and when the only organized
force was that created by the revolution. There could hardly be a doubt about
the issue of such a struggle, and whatever doubt there might be, was settled by
the events of the 30th and 31st of October, and 1st November.

LONDON, March, 1852.

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

XII.

The Storming of Vienna—The Betrayal of Vienna

APRIL 9th, 1852.

WHEN at last the concentrated army of Windisgratz commenced the
attack upon Vienna, the forces that could be brought forward in defence were
exceedingly insufficient for the purpose. Of the National Guard only a portion
was to be brought to the entrenchments. A Proletarian Guard, it is true, had at
last been hastily formed, but owing to the lateness of the attempt to thus make
available the most numerous, most daring. and most energetic part of the
population, it was too little inured to the use of arms and to the very first
rudiments of discipline to offer a successful resistance. Thus the Academic
Legion, three to four thousand strong, well exercised and disciplined to a
certain degree, brave and enthusiastic, was, militarily speaking, the only
force which was in a state to do its work successfully. But what were they,
together with the few reliable National Guards, and with the confused mass of
the armed proletarians, in opposition to the far more numerous regulars of
Windischgratz, not counting even the brigand hordes of Jellachich, hordes that
were, by the very nature of their habits, very useful in a war from house to
house, from lane to lane? And what but a few old, outworn, ill-mounted, and
ill-served pieces of ordnance had the insurgents to oppose to that numerous and
well-appointed artillery, of which Windischgratz made such an unscrupulous
use?

The nearer the danger drew, the more grew the confusion in Vienna. The Diet,
up to the last moment, could not collect sufficient energy to call in for aid
the Hungarian army of Perczel, encamped a few leagues below the capital. The
committee passed contradictory resolutions, they themselves being, like the
popular armed masses, floated up and down with the alternately rising and
receding tide of rumors and counter-rumors. There was only one thing upon which
all agreed—to respect property; and this was done in a degree almost
ludicrous for such times. As to the final arrangement of a plan of defence,
very little was done. Bem, the only man present who could have saved Vienna, if
any could then in Vienna, an almost unknown foreigner, a Slavonian by birth,
gave up the task, overwhelmed as he was by universal distrust. Had he
persevered, he might have been lynched as a traitor. Messenhauser, the
commander of the insurgent forces, more of a novel-writer than even of a
subaltern officer, was totally inadequate to the task; and yet, after eight
months of revolutionary struggles, the popular party had not produced or
acquired a military man of more ability than he. Thus the contest began. The
Viennese considering their utterly inadequate means of defence, considering
their utter absence of military skill and organization in the ranks, offered a
most heroic resistance. In many places the order given Bem, when he was in
command, "to defend that post to the last man," was carried out to the letter.
But force prevailed. Barricade after barricade was swept away by the imperial
artillery in the long and wide avenues which form the main streets of the
suburbs; and on the evening of the second day's fighting the Croats occupied
the range of houses facing the glacis of the Old Town. A feeble and disorderly
attack of the Hungarian army had been utterly defeated; and during an
armistice, while some parties in the Old Town capitulated, while others
hesitated and spread confusion, while the remnants of the Academic Legion
prepared fresh intrenchments, an entrance was made by the imperialists, and in
the midst of the general disorder the Old Town was carried.

The immediate consequences of this victory, the brutalities and executions
by martial law, the unheard-of cruelties and infamies committed by the
Slavonian hordes let loose upon Vienna, are too well known to be detailed here.
The ulterior consequences, the entirely new turn given to German affairs by the
defeat of the revolution in Vienna, we shall have reason to notice hereafter.
There remain two points to be considered in connection with the storming of
Vienna. The people of that capital had two allies—the Hungarians and the
German people. Where were they in the hour of trial?

We have seen that the Viennese, with all the generosity of a newly freed
people, had risen for a cause which, though ultimately their own, was in the
first instance, and above all, that of the Hungarians. Rather than suffer the
Austrian troops to march upon Hungary, they would draw their first and most
terrific onslaught upon themselves. And while they thus nobly came forward for
the support of their allies, the Hungarians, successful against Jellachich,
drove him upon Vienna, and by their victory strengthened the force that was to
attack that town. Under these circumstances it was the clear duty of Hungary to
support, without delay, and with all disposable forces, not the Diet of Vienna,
not the Committee of Safety or any other official body at Vienna, but the
Viennese revolution. And if Hungary should even have forgotten that
Vienna had fought the first battle of Hungary, she owed it to her own safety
not to forget that Vienna was the only outpost of Hungarian independence, and
that after the fall of Vienna nothing could meet the advance of the imperial
troops against herself. Now, we know very well all the Hungarians can say and
have said in defence of their inactivity during the blockade and storming of
Vienna: the insufficient state of their own force, the refusal of the Diet or
any other official body in Vienna to call them in, the necessity to keep on
constitutional ground, and to avoid complications with the German central
power. But the fact is, as to the insufficient state of the Hungarian army,
that in the first days after the Viennese revolution and the arrival of
Jellachich, nothing was wanted in the shape of regular troops, as the Austrian
regulars were very far from being concentrated; and that a courageous,
unrelenting following up of the first advantage over Jellachich, even with
nothing but the Land Sturm that had fought at Stuhlweissenburg, would
have sufficed to effect a junction with the Viennese, and to adjourn to that
day six months every concentration of an Austrian army. In war, and
particularly in revolutionary warfare, rapidity of action until some decided
advantage is gained is the first rule, and we have no hesitation in saying that
upon merely military grounds Perczel ought not to have stopped until
his junction with the Viennese was affected. There was certainly some risk, but
who ever won a battle without risking something? And did the people of Vienna
risk nothing when they drew upon themselves—they, a population of four
hundred thousand—the forces that were to march to the conquest of twelve
millions of Hungarians? The military fault committed by waiting until the
Austrians had united, and by making the feeble demonstration at Schwechat which
ended, as it deserved to do, in an inglorious defeat—this military fault
certainly incurred more risks than a resolute march upon Vienna against the
disbanded brigands of Jellachich would have done.

But, it is said, such an advance of the Hungarians, unless authorized by
some official body, would have been a violation of the German territory, would
have brought on complications with the central power at Frankfort, and would
have been, above all, an abandonment of the legal and constitutional policy
which formed the strength of the Hungarian cause. Why, the official bodies in
Vienna were nonentities! Was it the Diet, was it the popular committees, who
had risen for Hungary, or was it the people of Vienna, and they alone, who had
taken to the musket to stand the brunt of the first battle for Hungary's
independence? It was not this nor that official body in Vienna which it was
important to uphold; all these bodies might, and would have been, upset very
soon in the progress of the revolutionary development; but it was the
ascendancy of the revolutionary movement, the unbroken progress of popular
action itself, which alone was in question, and which alone could save Hungary
from invasion. What forms this revolutionary movement afterwards might take,
was the business of the Viennese, not of the Hungarians, so long as Vienna and
German Austria at large continued their allies against the common enemy. But
the question is, whether in this stickling of the Hungarian government for some
quasi-legal authorization, we are not to see the first clear symptom of that
pretence to a rather doubtful legality of proceeding, which, if it did not save
Hungary, at least told very well, at a later period, before the English middle
class audiences.

As to the pretext of possible conflicts with the central power of Germany at
Frankfort, it is quite futile. The Frankfort authorities were de facto
upset by the victory of the counter-revolution at Vienna; they would have been
equally upset had the revolution there found the support necessary to defeat
its enemies. And lastly,the great argument that Hungary could not leave legal
and constitutional ground, may do very well for British free-traders, but it
will never be deemed sufficient in the eyes of history. Suppose the people of
Vienna had stuck to "legal and constitutional means" on the 13th of March, and
on the 6th of October, what then of the "legal and constitutional" movement,
and of all the glorious battles which, for the first time, brought Hungary to
the notice of the civilized world? The very legal and constitutional ground
upon which it is asserted the Hungarians moved in 1848 and 1849 was conquered
for them by the exceedingly illegal and unconstitutional rising of the people
of Vienna on the 13th March. It is not to our purpose here to discuss the
revolutionary history of Hungary, but it may be deemed proper if we observe
that it is utterly useless to professedly use merely legal means of resistance
against an enemy who scorns such scruples; and if we add, that had it not been
for this eternal pretence of legality which Gorgey seized upon and turned
against the Government, the devotion of Gorgey's army to its general, and the
disgraceful catastrophe of Villagos, would have been impossible. And when, at
last, to save their honor, the Hungarians came across the Leitha, in the latter
end of October, 1848, was not this quite as illegal as any immediate and
resolute attack would have been?

We are known to harbor no unfriendly feeling toward Hungary. We stood by her
during the struggles; we may be allowed to say that our paper, the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung, [1] has done more than any other to render the
Hungarian cause popular in Germany, by explaining the nature of the struggle
between the Magyar and Slavonian races, and by following up the Hungarian war
in a series of articles which have had paid them the compliment of being
plagiarized in almost every subsequent book upon the subject, the works of
native Hungarians and "eyewitnesses" not excepted. We even now, in any future
continental convulsion, consider Hungary as the necessary and natural ally of
Germany. But we have been severe enough upon our own countrymen, to have a
right to speak out upon our neighbors; and then we have here to record facts
with historical impartiality, and we must say that in this particular instance,
the generous bravery of the people of Vienna was not only fat more noble, but
also more far-sighted than the cautious circumspection of the Hungarian
Government. And, as a German, we may further be allowed to say, that not for
all the showy victories and glorious battles of the Hungarian campaign, would
we exchange that spontaneous, single-handed rising, and heroic resistance of
the people of Vienna, our countrymen, which gave Hungary the time to organize
the army that could do such great things.

The second ally of Vienna was the German people. But they were everywhere
engaged in the same struggle as the Viennese. Frankfort, Baden, Cologne, had
just been defeated and disarmed. In Berlin and Breslau the people were at
daggers-drawn with the army, and daily expected to come to blows. Thus it was
in every local center of action. Everywhere questions were pending that could
only be settled by the force of arms; and now it was that for the first time
were severely felt the disastrous consequences of the continuation of the old
dismemberment and decentralization of Germany. The different questions in every
State, every province, every town, were fundamentally the same; but they were
brought forward everywhere under different shapes and pretexts, and had
everywhere attained different degrees of maturity. Thus it happened that while
in every locality the decisive gravity of the events at Vienna was felt, yet
nowhere could an important blow be struck with any hope of bringing the
Viennese succor, or making a diversion in their favor; and there remained
nothing to aid them but the Parliament and Central Power of Frankfort; they
were appealed to on all hands; but what did they do?

The Frankfort Parliament and the bastard child it had brought to light by
incestuous intercourse with the old German Diet, the so-called Central Power,
profited by the Viennese movement to show forth their utter nullity. This
contemptible Assembly, as we have seen, had long since sacrificed its
virginity, and young as it was, it was already turning grey-headed and
experienced in all the artifices of painting and pseudo-diplomatic
prostitution. Of the dreams and illusions of power, of German regeneration and
unity, that in the beginning had pervaded it, nothing remained but a set of
Teutonic clap-trap phraseology, that was repeated on every occasion, and a firm
belief of each individual member in his own importance, as well as in the
credulity of the public. The original naivety was discarded; the
representatives of the German people had turned practical men, that is to say,
they had made it out that the less they did, and the more they prated, the
safer would be their position as the umpires of the fate of Germany. Not that
they considered their proceedings superfluous; quite the contrary. But they had
found out that all really great questions, being to them forbidden ground, had
better be let alone, and there, like a set of Byzantine doctors of the Lower
Empire, they discussed with an importance and assiduity worthy of the fate that
at last overtook them, theoretical dogmas long ago settled in every part of the
civilized world, or microscopical practical questions which never led to any
practical result. Thus, the Assembly being a sort of Lancastrian School for the
mutual instruction of members, and being, therefore, very important to
themselves, they were persuaded it was doing ever more than the German people
had a right to expect, and looked upon everyone as a traitor to the country who
had impudence to ask them to come to any result.

When the Viennese insurrection broke out, there was a host of
interpellations, debates, motions, and amendments upon it, which, of course,
led to nothing. The Central Power was to interfere. It sent two commissioners,
Welcker, the ex-Liberal, and Mosle, to Vienna. The travels of Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza form matter for an Odyssey in comparison with the heroic feats and
wonderful adventures of those two knight-errants of German Unity. Not daring to
go to Vienna, they were bullied by Windischgratz, wondered at by the idiot
Emperor, and impudently hoaxed by the Minister Stadion. Their despatches and
reports are perhaps the only portion of the Frankfort transactions that will
retain a place in German literature; they are a perfect satirical romance,
ready cut and dried, and an eternal monument of disgrace for the Frankfort
Assembly and its Government.

The left side of the Assembly had also sent two commissioners to Vienna, in
order to uphold its authority there—Froebel and Robert Blum. Blum, when
danger drew near, judged rightly that here the great battle of the German
Revolution was to be fought, and unhesitatingly resolved to stake his head on
the issue. Froebel, on the contrary, was of opinion that it was his duty to
preserve himself for the important duties of his post at Frankfort. Blum was
considered one of the most eloquent men of the Frankfort Assembly; he certainly
was the most popular. His eloquence would not have stood the test of any
experienced Parliamentary Assembly; he was too fond of the shallow declamations
of a German dissenting preacher, and his arguments wanted both philosophical
acumen and acquaintance with practical matters of fact. In politics he belonged
to "Moderate Democracy," a rather indefinite sort of thing, cherished on
account of this very want of definiteness in its principles. But with all this
Robert Blum was by nature a thorough, though somewhat polished, plebeian, and
in decisive moments his plebeian instinct and plebeian energy got the better of
his indefiniteness, and, therefore, indecisive political persuasion and
knowledge. In such moments he raised himself far above the usual standard of
his capacities.

Thus, in Vienna, he saw at a glance that here, not in the midst of the
would-be elegant debates of Frankfort, the fate of his country would have to be
decided. He at once made up his mind, gave up all idea of retreat, took a
command in the revolutionary force, and behaved with extraordinary coolness and
decision. It was he who retarded for a considerable time the taking of the
town, and covered one of its sides from attack by burning the Tabor Bridge over
the Danube. Everybody knows how, after the storming, he was arrested, tried by
court-martial, and shot. He died like a hero. And the Frankfort Assembly,
horrorstruck as it was, yet took the bloody insult with a seeming good grace. A
resolution was carried, which, by the softness and diplomatic decency of its
language, was more an insult to the grave of the murdered martyr than a damning
stain upon Austria. But it was not to be expected that this contemptible
Assembly should resent the assassination of one of its members, particularly of
the leader of the Left.

LONDON, March, 1852.

Footnotes

[1] "Die
Neue Rheinische Zeitung" (The New Rhenish Gazette). After the March revolution,
1848, Marx returned from Paris to Germany, and settling down—for the time
being—at Cologne, founded this paper. Although the "Neue Rheinische
Zeitung" never went in for propounding "Communist schemes," as Mr. Dawson, e.
g., says it did, it became a very nightmare to the Government. Reactionaries
and Liberals alike denounced the "Gazette," especially after Marx's brilliant
defence of the Paris Insurrection of June. The state of siege being declared in
Cologne, the "Gazette" was suspended for six weeks—only to appear with a
bigger reputation and bigger circulation than before. After the Prussian "coup
d'etat" in November, the "Gazette" published at the head of every issue an
appeal to the people to refuse to pay taxes, and to meet force by force. For
this and certain other articles the paper was twice prosecuted. On the first
occasion the accused were Marx, Engels, and Korff; on the second and more
important trial, they were Marx, Schapper, and Schneider. The accused were
charged with "inciting the people to armed resistance against the Government
and its officials." Marx mainly conducted the defence, and delivered a
brilliant speech. "Marx refrains" (in this speech) "from all oratorical
flourish; he goes straight to the point, and without any peroration ends with a
summary of the political situation. Anyone would think that Marx's own
personality was to deliver a political lecture to the jury. And, in fact, at
the end of the trial, one of the jurors went to Marx to thank him, in the name
of his colleagues, for the instructive lecture he had given them." (See
Bernstein's work, "Ferdinand Lassalle.") The accused were unanimously acquitted
by the jury. Among the better known of the contributors of the "New Rhenish
Gazette," edited by Marx, were Engels, W. Wolff, Werth, Lassalle; while
Freiligrath wrote for it his splendid revolutionary poems. Perhaps one of the
grandest of these is the celebrated "Farewell of the "Rhenish Gazette"." when
on the 19th May, l849, the final number of the paper—suppressed by the
Government—appeared, printed in red type.

"When the last of crowns like glass shall break,

On the scene our sorrows have haunted.

And the people the last dread 'Guilty' shall speak,

By your side ye shall find me undaunted.

On Rhine or on Danube, in word and deed,

You shall witness, true to his vow,

On the wrecks of thrones, in the midst of the freed

The rebel who greets you now."

(Translated by Ernest Jones.)

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

XIII.

The Prussian Assembly—The National Assembly

APRIL 17th, 1852.

ON the 1st of November Vienna fell, and on the 9th of the same
month the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in Berlin showed how much
this event had at once raised the spirit and the strength of the
Counter-Revolutionary party all over Germany.

The events of the summer of 1848 in Prussia are soon told. The Constituent
Assembly, or rather "the Assembly elected for the purpose of agreeing upon a
Constitution with the Crown," and its majority of representatives of the middle
class interest, had long since forfeited all public esteem by lending itself to
all the intrigues of the Court, from fear of the more energetic elements of the
population. They had confirmed, or rather restored, the obnoxious privileges of
feudalism, and thus betrayed the liberty and the interests of, the peasantry.
They had neither been able to draw up a Constitution, nor to amend in any way
the general legislation. They had occupied themselves almost exclusively with
nice theoretical distinctions, mere formalities, and questions of
constitutional etiquette. The Assembly, in fact, was more a school of
Parliamentary savoir vivre for its members, than a body in which the
people could take any interest. The majorities were, besides, very nicely
balanced, and almost always decided by the wavering centers whose oscillations
from right to left, and vice versa, upset, first the ministry of
Camphausen, then that of Auerswald and Hansemann. But while thus the Liberals,
here as everywhere else, let the occasion slip out of their hands, the Court
reorganized its elements of strength among the nobility, and the most
uncultivated portion of the rural population, as well as in the army and the
bureaucracy. After Hansemann's downfall, a ministry of bureaucrats and military
officers, all staunch reactionists, was formed, which, however, seemingly gave
way to the demands of the Parliament; and the Assembly acting upon the
commodious principle of "measures, not men," were actually duped into
applauding this ministry, while they, of course, had no eyes for the
concentration and organization of Counter-Revolutionary forces, which that same
ministry carried on pretty openly. At last, the signal being given by the fall
of Vienna, the King dismissed its ministers, and replaced them by "men of
action," under the leadership of the present premier, Manteufel. Then the
dreaming Assembly at once awoke to the danger; it passed a vote of no
confidence in the Cabinet, which was at once replied to by a decree removing
the Assembly from Berlin, where it might, in case of a conflict, count upon the
support of the masses, to Brandenburg, a petty provincial town dependent
entirely upon the Government. The Assembly, however, declared that it could not
be adjourned, removed or dissolved, except with its own consent. In the
meantime, General Wrangle entered Berlin at the head of some forty thousand
troops. In a meeting of the municipal magistrates and the officers of the
National Guard, it was resolved not to offer any resistance. And now, after the
Assembly and its Constituents, the Liberal bourgeoisie, had allowed the
combined reactionary party to occupy every important position, and to wrest
from their hands almost every means of defence, began that grand comedy of
"passive and legal resistance" which they intended to be a glorious imitation
of the example of Hampden [John Hampden, Member of Parliament and central figure of the English Revolution], and of the first efforts of the Americans in the War
of Independence. Berlin was declared in a state of siege, and Berlin remained
tranquil; the National Guard was dissolved by the Government, and its arms were
delivered up with the greatest punctuality. The Assembly was hunted down during
a fortnight, from one place of meeting to another, and everywhere dispersed by
the military, and the members of the Assembly begged of the citizens to remain
tranquil. At last the Government having declared the Assembly dissolved, it
passed a resolution to declare the levying of taxes illegal, and then its
members dispersed themselves over the country to organize the refusal of taxes.
But they found that they had been woefully mistaken in the choice of their
means. After a few agitated weeks, followed by severe measures of the
Government against the Opposition, everyone gave up the idea of refusing the
taxes in order to please a defunct Assembly that had not even had the courage
to defend itself.

Whether it was in the beginning of November, 1848, already too late to try
armed resistance, or whether a part of the army, on finding serious opposition,
would have turned over to the side of the Assembly, and thus decided the matter
in its favor, is a question which may never be solved. But in revolution as in
war, it is always necessary to show a strong front, and he who attacks is in
the advantage; and in revolution as in war, it is of the highest necessity to
stake everything on the decisive moment, whatever the odds may be. There is not
a single successful revolution in history that does not prove the truth of
these axioms. Now, for the Prussian Revolution, the decisive moment had come in
November, 1848; the Assembly, at the head, officially, of the whole
revolutionary interest, did neither show a strong front, for it receded at
every advance of the enemy; much less did it attack, for it chose even not to
defend itself; and when the decisive moment came, when Wrangle, at the head of
forty thousand men, knocked at the gates of Berlin, instead of finding, as he
and all his officers fully expected, every street studded with barricades,
every window turned into a loophole, he found the Gates open, and the streets
obstructed only by peaceful Berliner burghers, enjoying the joke they had
played upon him, by delivering themselves up, hands and feet tied, unto the
astonished soldiers. It is true, the Assembly and the people, if they had
resisted, might have been beaten; Berlin might have been bombarded, and many
hundreds might have been killed, without preventing the ultimate victory of the
Royalist party. But that was no reason why they should surrender their arms at
once. A well-contested defeat is a fact of as much revolutionary importance as
an easily-won victory. The defeats of Paris in June, 1848, and of Vienna in
October, certainly did far more in revolutionizing the minds of the people of
these two cities than the victories of February and March. The Assembly and the
people of Berlin would, probably have shared the fate of the two towns
above-named; but they would have fallen gloriously, and would have left behind
themselves, in the minds of the survivors, a wish of revenge which in
revolutionary times is one of the highest incentives to energetic and
passionate action. It is a matter of course that, in every struggle, he who
takes up the gauntlet risks being beaten; but is that a reason why he should
confess himself beaten, and submit to the yoke without drawing the sword?

In a revolution he who commands a decisive position and surrenders it,
instead of forcing the enemy to try his hands at an assault, invariably
deserves to be treated as a traitor.

The same decree of the King of Prussia which dissolved the Constituent
Assembly also proclaimed a new Constitution, founded upon the draft which had
been made by a Committee of that Assembly, but enlarging in some points the
powers of the Crown, and rendering doubtful in others those of the Parliament.
This Constitution established two Chambers, which were to meet soon for the
purpose of confirming and revising it.

We need hardly ask where the German National Assembly was during the "legal
and peaceful" struggle of the Prussian Constitutionalists. It was, as usual, at
Frankfort, occupied with passing very tame resolutions against the proceedings
of the Prussian Government, and admiring the "imposing spectacle of the
passive, legal, and unanimous resistance of a whole people against brutal
force." The Central Government sent commissioners to Berlin to intercede
between the Ministry and the Assembly; but they met the same fate as their
predecessors at Olmütz, and were politely shown out. The Left of the National
Assembly, i. e., the so-called Radical party, sent also their commissioners;
but after having duly convinced themselves of the utter helplessness of the
Berlin Assembly, and confessed their own equal helplessness, they returned to
Frankfort to report progress, and to testify to the admirably peaceful conduct
of the population of Berlin. Nay, more; when Herr Bassermann, one of the
Central Government's commissioners, reported that the late stringent measures
of the Prussian ministers were not without foundation, inasmuch as there had of
late been seen loitering about the streets of Berlin sundry, savage-looking
characters, such as always appear previous to anarchical movements (and which
ever since have been named "Bassermannic characters"), these worthy deputies of
the Left and energetic representatives of the revolutionary interest actually
arose to make oath, and testify that such was not the case! Thus within two
months the total impotency of the Frankfort Assembly was signally proved. There
could be no more glaring proofs that this body was totally inadequate to its
task; nay, that it had not even the remotest idea of what its task really was.
The fact that both in Vienna and in Berlin the fate of the Revolution was
settled, that in both these capitals the most important and vital questions
were disposed of, without the existence of the Frankfort Assembly ever being
taken the slightest notice of—this fact alone is sufficient to establish
that the body in question was a mere debating-club, composed of a set of dupes,
who allowed the Governments to use them as Parliamentary puppet, shown to amuse
the shopkeepers and petty tradesmen of petty States and petty towns, as long as
it was considered convenient to divert the attention of these parties. How long
this was considered convenient we shall soon see. But it is a fact worthy of
attention that among all the "eminent" men of this Assembly there was not one
who had the slightest apprehension of the part they were made to perform, and
that even up to the present day ex-members of the Frankfort Club have
invariably organs of historical perception quite peculiar to themselves.

LONDON, March, 1852.

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

XIV.

The Restoration of Order

—Diet and Chamber

APRIL 24th, 1852

THE first months of the year 1849 were employed by the Austrian
and Prussian Governments in following up the advantages obtained in October and
November, 1848. The Austrian Diet, ever since the takings of Vienna, had
carried on a merely nominal existence in a small Moravian country-town, named
Kremsir. Here the Slavonian deputies, who, with their constituents. had been
mainly instrumental in raising the Austrian Government from its prostration,
were singularly punished for their treachery against the European Revolution.
As soon as the Government had recovered its strength, it treated the Diet and
its Slavonian majority with the utmost contempt, and when the first successes
of the Imperial arms foreboded a speedy termination of the Hungarian War, the
Diet, on the 4th of March, was dissolved, and the deputies dispersed by
military force. Then at last the Slavonians saw that they were duped, and then
they shouted: "Let us go to Frankfort and carry on there the opposition which
we cannot pursue here!" But it was then too late, and the very fact that they
had no other alternative than either to remain quiet or to join the impotent
Frankfort Assembly, this fact alone was sufficient to show their utter
helplessness.

Thus ended for the present, and most likely for ever, the attempts of the
Slavonians of Germany to recover an independent national existence. Scattered
remnants of numerous nations, whose nationality and political vitality had long
been extinguished, and who in consequence had been obliged, for almost a
thousand years, to follow in the wake of a mightier nation, their conqueror,
the same as the Welsh in England, the Basques in Spain, the Bas-Bretons in
France, and at a more recent period the Spanish and French Creoles in those
portions of North America occupied of late by the Anglo-American
race—these dying nationalities, the Bohemians, Carinthians, Dalmatians,
etc., had tried to profit by the universal confusion of 1848, in order to
restore their political status quo of A. D. 800. The history of a
thousand years ought to have shown them that such a retrogression was
impossible; that if all the territory east of the Elbe and Saale had at one
time been occupied by kindred Slavonians, this fact merely proved the
historical tendency, and at the same time physical and intellectual power of
the German nation to subdue, absorb, and assimilate its ancient eastern
neighbors; that this tendency of absorption on the part of the Germans had
always been, and still was one of the mightiest means by which the civilization
of Western Europe had been spread in the east of that continent; that it could
only cease whenever the process of Germanization had reached the frontier of
large, compact, unbroken nations, capable of an independent national life, such
as the Hungarians, and in some degree the Poles: and that, therefore, the
natural and inevitable fate of these dying nations was to allow this process of
dissolution and absorption by their stronger neighbors to complete itself.
Certainly this is no very flattering prospect for the national ambition of the
Panslavistic dreamers who succeeded in agitating a portion of the Bohemian and
South Slavonian people; but can they expect that history would retrograde a
thousand years in order to please a few phthisical bodies of men, who in every
part of the territory they occupy are interspersed with and surrounded by
Germans, who from time almost immemorial have had for all purposes of
civilization no other language but the German, and who lack the very first
conditions of national existence, numbers and compactness of territory? Thus,
the Panslavistic rising, which everywhere in the German and Hungarian Slavonic
territories was the cloak for the restoration to independence of all these
numberless petty nations, everywhere clashed with the European revolutionary
movements, and the Slavonians, although pretending to fight for liberty, were
invariably (the Democratic portion of the Poles excepted) found on the side of
despotism and reaction. Thus it was in Germany, thus in Hungary, thus even here
and there in Turkey. Traitors to the popular cause, supporters and chief props
to the Austrian Government's cabal, they placed themselves in the position of
outlaws in the eyes of all revolutionary nations. And although nowhere the mass
of the people had a part in the petty squabbles about nationality raised by the
Panslavistic leaders, for the very reason that they were too ignorant, yet it
will never be forgotten that in Prague, in a half-German town, crowds of
Slavonian fanatics cheered and repeated the cry: "Rather the Prussian knout
than German Liberty!" After their first evaporated effort in 1848, and after
the lesson the Austrian Government gave them, it is not likely that another
attempt at a later opportunity will be made. But if they should try again under
similar pretexts to ally themselves to the counter-revolutionary force, the
duty of Germany is clear. No country in a state of revolution and involved in
external war can tolerate a Vendee in its very heart.

As to the Constitution proclaimed by the Emperor at the same time with the
dissolution of the Diet, there is no need to revert to it, as it never had a
practical existence, and is now done away with altogether. Absolutism has been
restored in Austria to all intents and purposes ever since the 4th March,
1849.

In Prussia, the Chambers met in February for the ratification and revision
of the new Charter proclaimed by the King. They sat for about six weeks, humble
and meek enough in their behavior toward the Government, yet not quite prepared
to go the lengths the King and his ministers wished them to go. Therefore, as
soon as a suitable occasion presented itself, they were dissolved.

Thus both Austria and Prussia had for the moment got rid of the shackles of
parliamentary control. The Governments now concentrated all power in
themselves, and could bring that power to bear wherever is was wanted: Austria
upon Hungary and Italy, Prussia upon Germany. For Prussia, too, was preparing
for a campaign by which "order" was to be restored in the smaller States.

Counter-revolution being now paramount in the two great centres of action in
Germany,—in Vienna and Berlin,—there remained only the lesser
States in which the struggle was still undecided, although the balance there,
too, was leaning more and more against the revolutionary interest. These
smaller States, we have said, found a common centre in the National Assembly at
Frankfort. Now, this so-called National Assembly, although its reactionist
spirit had long been evident, so much so that the very people of Frankfort had
risen in arms against it, yet its origin was of more or less revolutionary
nature; it occupied an abnormal, revolutionary position in January; its
competence had never been defined, and it had at last come to the
decision—which, however, was never recognized by the larger
States—that its resolutions had the force of law. Under these
circumstances, and when the Constitutionalist-Monarchial party saw their
positions turned by the recovering Absolutists, it is not to be wondered that
the Liberal, monarchical bourgeoisie of almost the whole of Germany should
place their last hopes upon the majority of this Assembly, just as the petty
shopkeepers in the rest, the nucleus of the Democratic party, gathered in their
growing distress around the minority of that same body, which indeed formed the
last compact Parliamentary phalanx of Democracy. On the other hand, the larger
Governments, and particularly the Prussian Ministry, saw more and more the
incompatibility of such an irregular elective body with the restored
monarchical system of Germany, and if they did not at once force its
dissolution, it was only because the time had not yet come, and because Prussia
hoped first to use it for the furthering of its own ambitious purposes.

In the meantime, that poor Assembly itself fell into a greater and greater
confusion. Its deputations and commissaries had been treated with the utmost
contempt, both in Vienna and Berlin; one of its members, in spite of his
parliamentary inviolability, had been executed in Vienna as a common rebel. Its
decrees were nowhere heeded; if they were noticed at all by the larger powers,
it was merely by protesting notes which disputed the authority of the Assembly
to pass laws and resolutions binding upon their Governments. The Representative
of the Assembly, the Central Executive power, was involved in diplomatic
squabbles with almost all the Cabinets of Germany, and, in spite of all their
efforts, neither Assembly nor Central Government could bring Austria and
Prussia to state their ultimate views, plans and demands. The Assembly, at
last, commenced to see clearly, at least so far, that it had allowed all power
to slip out of its hands, that it was at the mercy of Austria and Prussia, and
that if it intended making a Federal Constitution for Germany at all, it must
set about the thing at once and in good earnest. And many of the vacillating
members also saw clearly that they had been egregiously duped by the
Governments. But what were they, in their impotent position, able to do now?
The only thing that could have saved them would have been promptly and
decidedly to pass over into the popular camp; but the success, even of that
step, was more than doubtful; and then, where in this helpless crowd of
undecided, shortsighted, self-conceited beings, who, when the eternal noise of
contradictory rumors and diplomatic notes completely stunned them, sought their
only consolation and support in the everlastingly repeated assurance that they
were the best, the greatest, the wisest men of the country, and that they alone
could save Germany—where, we say, among these poor creatures, whom a
single year of Parliamentary life had turned into complete idiots, where were
the men for a prompt and decisive resolution, much less for energetic and
consistent action?

At last the Austrian Government threw off the mask. In its Constitution of
the 4th of March, it proclaimed Austria an indivisible monarchy, with common
finances, system of customs-duties, of military establishments, thereby
effacing every barrier and distinction between the German and non-German
provinces. This declaration was made in the face of resolutions and articles of
the intended Federal Constitution which had been already passed by the
Frankfort Assembly. It was the gauntlet of war thrown clown to it by Austria,
and the poor Assembly had no other choice but to take it up. This it did with a
deal of blustering, which Austria, in the consciousness of her power, and of
the utter nothingness of the Assembly, could well afford to allow to pass. And
this precious representation, as it styled itself, of the German people, in
order to revenge itself for this insult on the part of Austria, saw nothing
better before it than to throw itself, hands and feet tied, at the feet of the
Prussian Government. Incredible as it would seem, it bent its knees before the
very ministers whom it had condemned as unconstitutional and antipopular, and
whose dismissal it had in vain insisted upon. The details of this disgraceful
transaction, and the tragicomical events that followed, will form the subject
of our next.

LONDON, April, 1852.

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Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

XV.

The Triumph of Prussia

JULY 27th, 1852.

WE now come to the last chapter in the history of the German
Revolution; the conflict of the National Assembly with the Governments of the
different States, especially of Prussia; the insurrection of Southern and
Western Germany, and its final overthrow by Prussia.

We have already seen the Frankfort National Assembly at work: We have seen
it kicked by Austria, insulted by Prussia, disobeyed by the lesser States,
duped by its own impotent Central "Government," which again was the dupe of all
and every prince in the country. But at last things began to look threatening
for this weak, vacillating, insipid legislative body. It was forced to come to
the conclusion that "the sublime idea of Germany unity was threatened in its
realization," which meant neither more nor less than that the Frankfort
Assembly, and all it had done, and was about to do, were very likely to end in
smoke. Thus it set to work in good earnest in order to bring forth, as soon as
possible, its grand production, the "Imperial Constitution." There was,
however, one difficulty. What Executive Government was there to be? An
Executive Council? No; that would have been, they thought in their wisdom,
making Germany a Republic. A "president"? That would come to the same. Thus
they must revive the old Imperial dignity. But—as, of course, a prince
was to be emperor—who should it be? Certainly none of the Dii minorum
gentium, [minor gods] from
Reuss-Schleitz-Greitz-Lobenstein-Ebersdorf up to Bavaria; neither Austria nor
Prussia would have borne that. It could only be Austria or Prussia. But which
of the two? There is no doubt that, under otherwise favorable circumstances,
this august Assembly would be sitting up to the present day, discussing this
important dilemma without being able to come to a conclusion, if the Austrian
Government had not cut the Gordian knot, and saved them the trouble.

Austria knew very well that from the moment in which she could again appear
before Europe with all her provinces subdued, as a strong and great European
power, the very law of political gravitation would draw the remainder of
Germany into her orbit, without the help of any authority which an Imperial
crown, conferred by the Frankfort Assembly, could give her. Austria had been
far stronger, far freer in her movements, since she shook off the powerless
crown of the German Empire—a crown which clogged her own independent
policy, while it added not one iota to her strength, either within or without
Germany. And supposing the case that Austria could not maintain her footing in
Italy and Hungary, why, then she was dissolved, annihilated in Germany too, and
could never pretend to reseize a crown which had slipped from her hands while
she was in the full possession of her strength. Thus Austria at once declared
against all imperialist resurrections, and plainly demanded the restoration of
the German Diet, the only Central Government of Germany known and recognized by
the treaties of 1815; and on the 4th of March, 1849, issued that Constitution
which had no other meaning than to declare Austria an indivisible, centralized,
and independent monarchy, distinct even from that Germany which the Frankfort
Assembly was to reorganize.

This open declaration of war left, indeed, the Frankfort wiseacres no other
choice but to exclude Austria from Germany, and to create out of the remainder
of that country a sort of lower empire, a "little Germany," the rather shabby
Imperial mantle of which was to fall on the shoulders of His Majesty of
Prussia. This, it will be recollected, was the renewal of an old project
fostered already some six or eight years ago by a party of South and Middle
German Liberal doctrinaires, who considered as a godsend the degrading
circumstances by which their old crotchet was now again brought forward as the
latest "new move" for the salvation of the country.

They accordingly finished, in February and March 1849, the debate on the
Imperial Constitution, together with the Declaration of Rights and the Imperial
Electoral Law; not, however, without being obliged to make, in a great many
points, the most contradictory concessions—now to the Conservative or
rather Reactionary party —now to the more advanced factions of the
Assembly. In fact, it was evident that the leadership of the Assembly, which
had formerly belonged to the Right and Right Centre (the Conservatives and
Reactionists), was gradually, although slowly, passing toward the Left or
Democratic side of that body. The rather dubious position of the Austrian
deputies in an Assembly which had excluded their country from Germany, and in
which they yet were called upon to sit and vote, favored the derangement of its
equipoise; and thus, as early as the end of February, the Left Centre and Left
found themselves, by the help of the Austrian votes, very generally in a
majority, while on other days the Conservative faction of the Austrians, all of
a sudden, and for the fun of the thing, voting with the Right, threw the
balance again on the other side. They intended, by these sudden
soubresauts, to bring the assembly into contempt, which, however, was
quite unnecessary, the mass of the people being long since convinced of the
utter hollowness and futility of anything coming from Frankfort. What a
specimen of a Constitution, in the meantime, was framed under such jumping and
counter-jumping, may easily be imagined.

The Left of the Assembly—this elite and pride of revolutionary
Germany, as it believed itself to be—was entirely intoxicated with the
few paltry successes it obtained by the good-will, or rather the ill-will, of a
set of Austrian politicians, acting under the instigation and for the interest
of Austrian despotism. Whenever the slightest approximation to their own not
very well-defined principles had, in a homoeopathically diluted shape, obtained
a sort of sanction by the Frankfort Assembly, these Democrats proclaimed that
they had saved the country and the people. These poor, weak-minded men, during
the course of their generally very obscure lives, had been so little accustomed
to anything like success, that they actually believed their paltry amendments,
passed with two or three votes majority, would change the face of Europe. They
had, from the beginning of their legislative career, been more imbued than any
other faction of the Assembly with that incurable malady Parliamentary
cretinism, a disorder which penetrates its unfortunate victims with the solemn
conviction that the whole world, its history and future, are governed and
determined by a majority of votes in that particular representative body which
has the honor to count them among its members, and that all and everything
going on outside the walls of their house—wars, revolutions,
railway-constructing, colonizing of whole new continents, California gold
discoveries, Central American canals, Russian armies, and whatever else may
have some little claim to influence upon the destinies of mankind—is
nothing compared with the incommensurable events hinging upon the important
question, whatever it may be, just at that moment occupying the attention of
their honorable house. Thus it was the Democratic party of the Assembly, by
effectually smuggling a few of their nostrums into the "Imperial Constitution,"
first became bound to support it, although in every essential point it flatly
contradicted their own oft-proclaimed principles, and at last, when this
mongrel work was abandoned, and bequeathed to them by its main authors,
accepted the inheritance, and held out for this Monarchical
Constitution, even in opposition to everybody who then proclaimed
their own Republican principles.

But it must be confessed that in this the contradiction was merely apparent.
The indeterminate, self-contradictory, immature character of the Imperial
Constitution was the very image of the immature, confused, conflicting
political ideas of these Democratic gentlemen. And if their own sayings and
writings—as far as they could write—were not sufficient proof of
this, their actions would furnish such proof; for among sensible people it is a
matter of course to judge of a man, not by his professions, but his actions;
not by what he pretends to be, hut by what he does, and what he really is; and
the deeds of these heroes of German Democracy speak loud enough for themselves,
as we shall learn by and by. However, the Imperial Constitution, with all its
appendages and paraphernalia, was definitely passed, and on the 28th of March,
the King of Prussia was, by 290 votes against 248 who abstained, and 200 who
were absent, elected Emperor of Germany minus Austria. The historical
irony was complete; the Imperial farce executed in the streets of astonished
Berlin, three days after the Revolution of March 18th, 1848, by Frederick
William IV., while in a state which elsewhere would come under the Maine Liquor
Law—this disgusting farce, just one year afterwards, had been sanctioned
by the pretended Representative Assembly of all Germany. That, then, was the
result of the German Revolution!

LONDON, July, 1852.

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Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

XVI.

The Assembly and the Governments

AUGUST 19th, 1852.

THE National Assembly of Frankfort, after having elected the
King of Prussia Emperor of Germany (minus Austria), sent a deputation
to Berlin to offer him the crown, and then adjourned. On the 3rd of April,
Frederick William received the deputies. He told them that, although he
accepted the right of precedence over all the other princes of Germany, which
this vote of the people's representatives had given him, yet he could not
accept the Imperial crown as long as he was not sure that the remaining princes
acknowledged his supremacy, and the Imperial Constitution conferring those
rights upon him. It would be, he added, for the Governments of Germany to see
whether this Constitution was such as could be ratified by them. At all events,
Emperor or not, he always would be found ready, he concluded, to draw the sword
against either the external or the internal foe. We shall see how he kept his
promise in a manner rather startling for the National Assembly.

The Frankfort wiseacres, after profound diplomatic inquiry, at last came to
the conclusion that this answer amounted to a refusal of the crown. They then
(April 12th) resolved: That the Imperial Constitution was the law of the land,
and must he maintained; and not seeing their way at all before them, elected a
Committee of thirty, to make proposals as to the means how this Constitution
could be carried out.

This resolution was the signal for the conflict between the Frankfort
Assembly and the German Governments which now broke out. The middle classes,
and especially the smaller trading class, had all at once declared for the new
Frankfort Constitution. They could not wait any longer the moment which was "to
close the Revolution." In Austria and Prussia the Revolution had, for the
moment, been closed by the interference of the armed power. The classes in
question would have preferred a less forcible mode of performing that
operation, but they had not had a chance; the thing was done, and they had to
make the best of it, a resolution which they at once took and carried out most
heroically. In the smaller States, where things had been going on comparatively
smoothly, the middle classes had long since been thrown back into that showy,
but resultless, because powerless, parliamentary agitation, which was most
congenial to themselves. The different States of Germany, as regarded each of
them separately, appeared thus to have attained that new and definite form
which was supposed to enable them to enter henceforth the path of peaceful
constitutional development. There only remained one open question, that of the
new political organization of the German Confederacy. And this question, the
only one which still appeared fraught with danger, it was considered a
necessity to resolve at once. Hence the pressure exerted upon the Frankfort
Assembly by the middle classes, in order to induce it to get the Constitution
ready as soon as possible; hence the resolution among the higher and lower
bourgeoisie to accept and support this Constitution, whatever it might be, in
order to create a settled state of things without delay. Thus from the very
beginning the agitation for the Imperial Constitution arose out of a
reactionary feeling, and sprang up among these classes which were long since
tired of the Revolution.

But there was another feature in it. The first and fundamental principles of
the future German Constitution had been voted during the first months of spring
and summer, 1848, a time when popular agitation was still rife. The resolutions
then passed, though completely reactionary then, now, after the
arbitrary acts of the Austrian and Prussian Governments, appeared exceedingly
Liberal, and even Democratic. The standard of comparison had changed. The
Frankfort Assembly could not, without moral suicide, strike out these
once-voted provisions, and model the Imperial Constitution upon those which the
Austrian and Prussian Governments had dictated, sword in hand. Besides, as we
have seen, the majority in that Assembly had changed sides, and the Liberal and
Democratic party were rising in influence. Thus the Imperial Constitution not
only was distinguished by its apparently exclusive popular origin, but at the
same time, full of contradiction as it was, it yet was the most Liberal
Constitution in all Germany. Its greatest fault was, that it was a mere sheet
of paper, with no power to back its provisions.

Under these circumstances it was natural that the so-called Democratic
party, that is, the mass of the petty trading class, should cling to the
Imperial Constitution. This class had always been more forward in its demands
than the Liberal-Monarchico-Constitutional bourgeoisie; it had shown a bolder
front, it had very often threatened armed resistance, it was lavish in its
promises to sacrifice its blood and its existence in the struggle for freedom;
but it had already given plenty of proofs that on the day of danger it was
nowhere, and that it never felt more comfortable than the day after a decisive
defeat, when everything being lost, it had at least the consolation to know
that somehow or other the matter was settled. While, therefore, the adhesion of
the large bankers, manufacturers, and merchants was of a more reserved
character, more like a simple demonstration in favor of the Frankfort
Constitution, the class just beneath them, our valiant Democratic shopkeepers,
came forward in grand style, and, as usual, proclaimed they would rather spill
their last drop of blood than let the Imperial Constitution fall to the
ground.

Supported by these two parties, the bourgeois adherents of the
Constitutional Royalty, and the more or less Democratic shopkeepers, the
agitation for the immediate establishment of the Imperial Constitution gained
ground rapidly, and found its most powerful expression in the Parliaments of
the several States. The Chambers of Prussia, of Hanover, of Saxony, of Baden,
of Wurtemberg, declared in its favor. The struggle between the Governments and
the Frankfort Assembly assumed a threatening aspect.

The Governments, however, acted rapidly. The Prussian Chambers were
dissolved, anti-constitutionally, as they had to revise and confirm the
Constitution; riots broke out at Berlin, provoked intentionally by the
Government, and the next day, the 28th of April, the Prussian Ministry issued a
circular note, in which the Imperial Constitution was held up as a most
anarchical and revolutionary document, which it was for the Governments of
Germany to remodel and purify. Thus Prussia denied, point-blank that sovereign
constituent power which the wise men at Frankfort had always boasted of, but
never established. Thus a Congress of Princes, a renewal of the old Federal
Diet, was called upon to sit in judgment on that Constitution which had already
been promulgated as law. And at the same time Prussia concentrated troops at
Kreuznach, three days' march from Frankfort, and called upon the smaller States
to follow its example, by also dissolving their Chambers as soon as they should
give their adhesion to the Frankfort Assembly. This example was speedily
followed by Hanover and Saxony.

It was evident that a decision of the struggle by force of arms could not be
avoided. The hostility of the Governments, the agitation among the people, were
daily showing themselves in stronger colors. The military were everywhere
worked upon by the Democratic citizens, and in the south of Germany with great
success. Large mass meetings were everywhere held, passing resolutions to
support the Imperial Constitution and the National Assembly, if need should be,
with force of arms. At Cologne, a meeting of deputies of all the municipal
councils of Rhenish Prussia took place for the same purpose. In the Palatinate,
at Bergen, Fulda, Nuremberg, in the Odenwald, the peasantry met by myriads and
worked themselves up into enthusiasm. At the same time the Constituent Assembly
of France dissolved, and the new elections were prepared amid violent
agitation, while on the eastern frontier of Germany, the Hungarians had within
a month, by a succession of brilliant victories, rolled back the tide of
Austrian invasion from the Theiss to the Leitha, and were every day expected to
take Vienna by storm. Thus, popular imagination being on all hands worked up to
the highest pitch, and the aggressive policy of the Governments defining itself
more clearly every day, a violent collision could not be avoided, and cowardly
imbecility only could persuade itself that the struggle was to come off
peaceably. But this cowardly imbecility was most extensively represented in the
Frankfort Assembly.

LONDON, July, 1852.

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Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

XVII.

Insurrection

SEPTEMBER 18, 1852.

THE inevitable conflict between the National Assembly of
Frankfort and the States Governments of Germany at last broke out in open
hostilities during the first days of May, 1849. The Austrian deputies, recalled
by their Government, had already left the Assembly and returned home, with the
exception of a few members of the Left or Democratic party. The great body of
the Conservative members, aware of the turn things were about to take, withdrew
even before they were called upon to do so by their respective Governments.
Thus, even independently of the causes which in the foregoing letters have been
shown to strengthen the influence of the Left, the mere desertion of their
posts by the members of the Right, sufficed to turn the old minority into a
majority of the Assembly. The new majority, which, at no former time, had
dreamed of ever obtaining that good fortune, had profited by their places on
the opposition benches to spout against the weakness, the indecision, the
indolence of the old majority, and of its Imperial Lieutenancy. Now all at
once, they were called on to replace that old majority. They
were now to show what they could perform. Of course, their career was to be one
of energy, determination, activity. They, the elite of
Germany, would soon be able to drive onwards the senile Lieutenant of the
Empire, and his vacillating ministers, and in case that was impossible they
would—there could be no doubt about it—by force of the sovereign
right of the people, depose that impotent Government, and replace it by an
energetic, indefatigable Executive, who would assure the salvation of Germany.
Poor fellows! Their rule—if rule it can be named, where no one
obeyed—was a still more ridiculous affair than even the rule of their
predecessors.

The new majority declared that, in spite of all obstacles, the Imperial
Constitution must be carried out, and at once; that on the 15th of July
ensuing, the people were to elect the deputies of the new House of
Representatives, and that this House was to meet at Frankfort on the 15th of
August following. Now, this was an open declaration of war against those
Governments that had not recognized the Imperial Constitution, the foremost
among which were Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, comprising more than three-fourths
of the German population; a declaration of war which was speedily accepted by
them. Prussia and Bavaria, too, recalled the deputies sent from their
territories to Frankfort, and hastened their military preparations against the
National Assembly, while, on the other hand, the demonstrations of the
Democratic party (out of Parliament) in favor of the Imperial Constitution and
of the National Assembly, acquired a more turbulent and violent character, and
the mass of the working people, led by the men of the most extreme party, were
ready to take up arms in a cause which, if it was not their own, at least gave
them a chance of somewhat approaching their aims by clearing Germany of its old
monarchical encumbrances. Thus everywhere the people and the Governments were
at daggers drawn upon this subject; the outbreak was inevitable; the mine was
charged, and it only wanted a spark to make it explode. The dissolution of the
Chambers in Saxony, the calling in of the Landwehr (military reserve) in
Prussia, the open resistance of the Government to the Imperial Constitution,
were such sparks; they fell, and all at once the country was in a blaze. In
Dresden, on the 4th of May, the people victoriously took possession of the
town, and drove out the King, while all the surrounding districts sent
re-inforcements to the insurgents. In Rhenish Prussia and Westphalia the
Landwehr refused to march, took possession of the arsenals, and armed itself in
defence of the Imperial Constitution. In the Palatinate the people seized the
Bavarian Government officials, and the public moneys, and instituted a
Committee of Defence, which placed the province under the protection of the
National Assembly. In Wurtemberg the people forced the King to acknowledge the
Imperial Constitution, and in Baden the army, united with the people, forced
the Grand Duke to flight, and erected a Provincial Government. In other parts
of Germany the people only awaited a decisive signal from the National Assembly
to rise in arms and place themselves at its disposal.

The position of the National Assembly was far more favorable than could have
been expected after its ignoble career. The western half of Germany had taken
up arms in its behalf; the military everywhere were vacillating; in the lesser
States they were undoubtedly favorable to the movement. Austria was prostrated
by the victorious advance of the Hungarians, and Russia, that reserve force of
the German Governments, was straining all its powers in order to support
Austria against the Magyar armies. There was only Prussia to subdue, and with
the revolutionary sympathies existing in that country, a chance certainly
existed of attaining that end. Everything then depended upon the conduct of the
Assembly.

Now, insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject
to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of
the party neglecting them. Those rules, logical deductions from the nature of
the parties and the circumstances one has to deal with in such a case, are so
plain and simple that the short experience of 1848 had made the Germans pretty
well acquainted with them. Firstly, never play with insurrection unless you are
fully prepared to face the consequences of your play. Insurrection is a
calculus with very indefinite magnitudes, the value of which may change every
day; the forces opposed to you have all the advantage of organization,
discipline, and habitual authority: unless you bring strong odds against them
you are defeated and ruined. Secondly, the insurrectionary career once entered
upon, act with the greatest determination, and on the offensive. The defensive
is the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures itself with
its enemies. Surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering,
prepare new successes, however small, but daily; keep up the moral ascendancy
which the first successful rising has given to you; rally those vacillating
elements to your side which always follow the strongest impulse, and which
always look out for the safer side; force your enemies to a retreat before they
can collect their strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest
master of revolutionary policy yet known, de l'audace, de l'audace, encore
de l'audace!

What, then, was the National Assembly of Frankfort to do if it would escape
the certain ruin which it was threatened with? First of all, to see clearly
through the situation, and to convince itself that there was now no other
choice than either to submit to the Governments unconditionally, or take up the
cause of the armed insurrection without reserve or hesitation. Secondly, to
publicly recognize all the insurrections that had already broken out, and to
call the people to take up arms everywhere in defence of the national
representation, outlawing all princes, ministers and others who should dare to
oppose the sovereign people represented by its mandatories. Thirdly, to at once
depose the German Imperial Lieutenant, to create a strong, active, unscrupulous
Executive, to call insurgent troops to Frankfort for its immediate protection,
thus offering at the same time a legal pretext for the spread of the
insurrection, to organize into a compact body all the forces at its disposal,
and, in short, to profit quickly and unhesitatingly by every available means
for strengthening its position and impairing that of its opponents.

Of all this the virtuous Democrats in the Frankfort Assembly did just the
contrary. Not content with letting things take the course they liked, these
worthies went so far as to suppress by their opposition all insurrectionary
movements which were preparing. Thus, for instance, did Herr Karl Vogt at
Nuremberg. They allowed the insurrections of Saxony, of Rhenish Prussia, of
Westphalia to be suppressed without any other help than a posthumous,
sentimental protest against the unfeeling violence of the Prussian Government.
They kept up an underhand diplomatic intercourse with the South German
insurrections but never gave them the support of their open acknowledgment.
They knew that the Lieutenant of the Empire sided with the Governments, and yet
they called upon him, who never stirred, to oppose the intrigues of
these Governments. The ministers of the Empire, old Conservatives, ridiculed
this impotent Assembly in every sitting, and they suffered it. And when William
Wolff, [1] a Silesian deputy and one of the editors of
the New Rhenish Gazette, called upon them to outlaw the Lieutenant of
the Empire—who was, he justly said, nothing but the first and greatest
traitor to the Empire, he was hooted down by the unanimous and virtuous
indignation of those Democratic Revolutionists! In short, they went on talking,
protesting, proclaiming, pronouncing, but never had the courage or the sense to
act; while the hostile troops of the Governments drew nearer and nearer, and
their own Executive, the Lieutenant of the Empire, was busily plotting with the
German princes their speedy destruction. Thus even the last vestige of
consideration was lost to this contemptible Assembly; the insurgents who had
risen to defend it ceased to care any more for it, and when at last it came to
a shameful end, as we shall see, it died without anybody taking any notice of
its unhonored exit.

LONDON, August, 1852.

Footnotes

[1] The
"Wolff" here alluded to is Wilhelm Wolff, the beloved friend of Marx and
Engels, who—to distinguish him from the many other "Wolffs" in the
movement at this period—was known to his intimates as "Lupus." It is to
this Silesian peasant that Marx dedicated the first volume of "Capital."

"Dedicated

To My Never-To-Be-Forgotten Friend

The Brave, True, Noble Fighter In The Vanguard

Of The Proletariat,

WILHELM WOLFF.

Born at Tornau, June 21st, 1809. Died in exile at Manchester,
9th May, 1864."

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

XVIII.

Petty Traders

OCTOBER 2, 1852.

IN OUR last we showed that the struggle between the German
Governments on the one side, and the Frankfort Parliament on the other, had
ultimately acquired such a degree of violence that in the first days of May, a
great portion of Germany broke out in open insurrection; first Dresden, then
the Bavarian Palatinate, parts of Rhenish Prussia, and at last Baden.

In all cases, the real fighting body of the insurgents, that body
which first took up arms and gave battle to the troops consisted of the
working classes of the towns. A portion of the poorer country
population, laborers and petty farmers, generally joined them after the
outbreak of the conflict. The greater number of the young men of all classes,
below the capitalist class, were to be found, for a time at least, in the ranks
of the insurgent armies, but this rather indiscriminate aggregate of young men
very soon thinned as the aspect of affairs took a somewhat serious turn. The
students particularly, those "representatives of intellect," as they liked to
call themselves, were the first to quit their standards, unless they were
retained by the bestowal of officer's rank, for which they, of course, had very
seldom any qualifications.

The working class entered upon this insurrection as they would have done
upon any other which promised either to remove some obstacles in their progress
towards political dominion and social revolution, or, at least, to tie the more
influential but less courageous classes of society to a more decided and
revolutionary course than they had followed hitherto. The working class took up
arms with a full knowledge that this was, in the direct bearings of the case,
no quarrel of its own; but it followed up its only true policy, to allow no
class that has risen on its shoulders (as the bourgeoisie had done in 1848) to
fortify its class-government, without opening, at least, a fair field to the
working classes for the struggle for its own interests, and, in any case, to
bring matters to a crisis, by which either the nation was fairly and
irresistibly launched in the revolutionary career, or else the status
quo before the Revolution restored as nearly as possible, and, thereby, a
new revolution rendered unavoidable. In both cases the working classes
represented the real and well-understood interest of the nation at large, in
hastening as much as possible that revolutionary course which for the old
societies of civilized Europe has now become a historical necessity, before any
of them can again aspire to a more quiet and regular development of their
resources.

As to country people that joined the insurrection, they were principally
thrown into the arms of the revolutionary party, partly by the relatively
enormous load of taxation, and partly of feudal burdens pressing upon them.

Without any initiative of their own, they formed the tail of the other
classes engaged in the insurrection, wavering between the working men on the
one side, and the petty trading class on the other. Their own private social
position, in almost every case, decided which way they turned; the agricultural
laborer generally supported the city artisan; the small farmer was apt to go
hand in hand with the small shopkeeper.

This class of petty tradesmen, the great importance and influence of which
we have already several times adverted to, may be considered as the leading
class of the insurrection of May, 1849. There being, this time, none of the
large towns of Germany among the center of the movement, the petty trading
class, which in middling and lesser towns always predominates, found the means
of getting the direction of the movement into its hands. We have, moreover,
seen that, in this struggle for the Imperial Constitution, and for the rights
of the German Parliament, there were the interests of this peculiar class at
stake. The Provisional Governments formed in all the insurgent districts
represented in the majority of each of them this section of the people, and the
length they went to may therefore be fairly taken as the measure of what the
German petty bourgeoisie is capable of—capable, as we shall see, of
nothing but ruining any movement that entrusts itself to its hands.

The petty bourgeoisie, great in boasting, is very impotent for action, and
very shy in risking anything. The mesquin [small-minded]
character of its commercial transactions and its credit operations is
eminently apt to stamp its character with a want of energy and enterprise; it
is, then, to be expected that similar qualities will mark its political career.
Accordingly the petty bourgeoisie encouraged insurrection by big words, and
great boasting as to what it was going to do; it was eager to seize upon power
as soon as the insurrection, much against its will, had broken out; it used
this power to no other purpose but to destroy the effects of the insurrection.
Wherever an armed conflict had brought matters to a serious crisis, there the
shopkeepers stood aghast at the dangerous situation created for them; aghast at
the people who had taken their boasting appeals to arms in earnest; aghast at
the power thus thrust into their own hands; aghast, above all, at the
consequences for themselves, for their social positions, for their fortunes, of
the policy in which they were forced to engage themselves. Were they not
expected to risk "life and property," as they used to say, for the cause of the
insurrection? Were they not forced to take official positions in the
insurrection, whereby, in the case of defeat, they risked the loss of their
capital? And in case of victory, were they not sure to be immediately turned
out of office, and to see their entire policy subverted by the victorious
proletarians who formed the main body of their fighting army? Thus placed
between opposing dangers which surrounded them on every side, the petty
bourgeoisie knew not to turn its power to any other account than to let
everything take its chance, whereby, of course, there was lost what little
chance of success there might have been, and thus to ruin the insurrection
altogether. Its policy, or rather want of policy, everywhere was the same, and,
therefore, the insurrections of May, 1849, in all parts of Germany, are all cut
out to the same pattern.

In Dresden, the struggle was kept on for four days in the streets of the
town. The shopkeepers of Dresden, the "communal guard," not only did not fight,
but in many instances favored the proceedings of the troops against the
insurgents. These again consisted almost exclusively of working men from the
surrounding manufacturing districts. They found an able and cool-headed
commander in the Russian refugee Michael Bakunin, who afterwards was taken
prisoner, and now is confined in the dungeons of Munkacs, Hungary. The
intervention of numerous Prussian troops crushed this insurrection.

In Rhenish Prussia the actual fighting was of little importance. All the
large towns being fortresses commanded by citadels, there could be only
skirmishing on the part of the insurgents. As soon as a sufficient number of
troops had been drawn together, there was an end to armed opposition.

In the Palatinate and Baden, on the contrary, a rich, fruitful province and
an entire state fell into the hands of the insurrection. Money, arms, soldiers,
warlike stores, everything was ready for use. The soldiers of the regular army
themselves joined the insurgents; nay, in Baden, they were amongst the foremost
of them. The insurrections in Saxony and Rhenish Prussia sacrificed themselves
in order to gain time for the organization of the South German movement. Never
was there such a favorable position for a provincial and partial insurrection
as this. A revolution was expected in Paris; the Hungarians were at the gates
of Vienna; in all the central States of Germany, not only the people, but even
the troops, were strongly in favor of the insurrection, and only wanted an
opportunity to join it openly. And yet the movement, having once got into the
hands of the petty bourgeoisie, was ruined from its very beginning. The petty
bourgeois rulers, particularly of Baden—Herr Brentano at the head of
them—never forgot that by usurping the place and prerogatives of the
"lawful" sovereign, the Grand Duke, they were committing high treason. They sat
down in their ministerial armchairs with the consciousness of criminality in
their hearts. What can you expect of such cowards? They not only abandoned the
insurrection to its own uncentralized, and therefore ineffective, spontaneity,
they actually did everything in their power to take the sting out of the
movement, to unman, to destroy it. And they succeeded, thanks to the zealous
support of that deep class of politicians, the "Democratic" heroes of the petty
bourgeoisie, who actually thought they were "saving the country," while they
allowed themselves to be led by their noses by a few men of a sharper cast,
such as Brentano.

As to the fighting part of the business, never were military operations
carried on in a more slovenly, more stolid way than under the Baden
General-in-Chief Sigel, an ex-lieutenant of the regular army. Everything was
got into confusion, every good opportunity was lost, every precious moment was
loitered away with planning colossal, but impracticable projects, until, when
at last the talented Pole Mieroslawski, took up the command, the army was
disorganized, beaten, dispirited, badly provided for, opposed to an enemy four
times more numerous, and withal, he could do nothing more than fight, at
Waghäusel, a glorious though unsuccessful battle, carry out a clever retreat,
offer a last hopeless fight under the walls of Rastatt, and resign. As in every
insurrectionary war where armies are mixed of well-drilled soldiers and raw
levies, there was plenty of heroism, and plenty of unsoldierlike, often
unconceivable panic, in the revolutionary army; but, imperfect as it could not
but be, it had at least the satisfaction that four times its number were not
considered sufficient to put it to the rout, and that a hundred thousand
regular troops, in a campaign against twenty thousand insurgents, treated them,
militarily with as much respect as if they had to fight the Old Guard of
Napoleon.

In May the insurrection had broken out; by the middle of July, 1849, it was
entirely subdued, and the first German Revolution was closed.

LONDON. (Undated.)

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

XIX.

The Close of the Insurrection

OCTOBER 23, 1852.

WHILE the south and west of Germany was in open insurrection,
and while it took the Governments from the first opening of hostilities at
Dresden to the capitulation of Rastatt, rather more than ten weeks, to stifle
this final blazing up of the first German Revolution, the National Assembly
disappeared from the political theater without any notice being taken of its
exit.

We left this august body at Frankfort, perplexed by the insolent attacks of
the Governments upon its dignity, by the impotency and treacherous listlessness
of the Central Power it had itself created, by the risings of the petty trading
class for its defence, and of the working class for a more revolutionary
ultimate end. Desolation and despair reigned supreme among its members; events
had at once assumed such a definite and decisive shape that in a few days the
illusions of these learned legislators as to their real power and influence
were entirely broken down. The Conservatives, at the signal given by the
Governments, had already retired from a body which, henceforth, could not exist
any longer, except in defiance of the constituted authorities. The Liberals
gave the matter up in utter discomfiture; they, too, threw up their commissions
as representatives. Honorable gentlemen decamped by hundreds. From eight or
nine hundred members the number had dwindled down so rapidly that now one
hundred and fifty, and a few days after one hundred, were declared a quorum.
And even these were difficult to muster, although the whole of the Democratic
party remained.

The course to be followed by the remnants of a parliament was plain enough.
They had only to take their stand openly and decidedly with the insurrection,
to give it, thereby, whatever strength legality could confer upon it, while
they themselves at once acquired an army for their own defence. They had to
summon the Central Power to stop all hostilities at once; and if, as could be
foreseen, this power neither could nor would do so, to depose it at once and
put another more energetic Government in its place. If insurgent troops could
not be brought to Frankfort (which, in the beginning, when the State
Governments were little prepared and still hesitating, might have been easily
done), then the Assembly could have adjourned at once to the very center of the
insurgent district. All this done at once, and resolutely, not later than the
middle or end of May, might have opened chances both for the insurrection and
for the National Assembly.

But such a determined course was not to be expected from the representatives
of German shopocracy. These aspiring statesmen were not at all freed from their
illusions. Those members who had lost their fatal belief in the strength and
inviolability of the Parliament had already taken to their heels; the Democrats
who remained, were not so easily induced to give up dreams of power and
greatness which they had cherished for a twelvemonth. True to the course they
had hitherto pursued, they shrank back from decisive action until every chance
of success, nay, every chance to succumb, with at least the honors of war, had
passed away. In order, then, to develop a fictitious, busy-body sort of
activity, the sheer impotency of which, coupled with its high pretension, could
not but excite pity and ridicule, they continued insinuating resolutions,
addresses, and requests to an Imperial Lieutenant, who not even noticed them;
to ministers who were in open league with the enemy. And when at last William
Wolff, member for Striegan, one of the editors of the New Rhenish
Gazette, the only really revolutionary man in the whole Assembly, told
them that if they meant what they said, they had better give over talking, and
declare the Imperial Lieutenant, the chief traitor to the country, an outlaw at
once; then the entire compressed virtuous indignation of these parliamentary
gentlemen burst out with an energy which they never found when the Government
heaped insult after insult upon them.

Of course, for Wolff's proposition was the best sensible word spoken within
the walls of St. Paul's Church; of course, for it was the very thing that was
to be done, and such plain language going so direct to the purpose, could not
but insult a set of sentimentalists, who were resolute in nothing but
irresolution, and who, too cowardly to act, had once for all made up their
minds that in doing nothing, they were doing exactly what was to be done. Every
word which cleared up, like lightning, the infatuated, but intentional
nebulosity of their minds, every hint that was adapted to lead them out of the
labyrinth where they obstinated themselves to take up as lasting an abode as
possible, every clear conception of matters as they actually stood, was, of
course, a crime against the majesty of this Sovereign Assembly.

Shortly after the position of the honorable gentlemen in Frankfort became
untenable, in spite of resolutions, appeals, interpellations, and
proclamations, they retreated, but not into the insurgent districts; that would
have been too resolute a step. They went to Stuttgart, where the Wurtemberg
Government kept up a sort of expectative neutrality. There, at last, they
declared the Lieutenant of the Empire to have forfeited his power, and elected
from their own body a Regency of five. This Regency at once proceeded to pass a
Militia law, which was actually in all due force sent to all the Governments of
Germany.

They the very enemies of the Assembly, were ordered to levy forces in its
defence! Then there was created—on paper, of course—an army for the
defence of the National Assembly. Divisions, brigades, regiments, batteries,
everything was regulated and ordained. Nothing was wanted but reality, for that
army, of course, was never called into existence.

One last scheme offered itself to the General Assembly. The Democratic
population from all parts of the country sent deputations to place itself at
the disposal of the Parliament, and to urge it on to a decisive action. The
people, knowing what the intentions of the Wurtemberg Government were, implored
the National Assembly to force that Government into an open and active
participation with their insurgent neighbors. But no. The National Assembly, in
going to Stuttgart, had delivered itself up to the tender mercies of the
Wurtemberg Government. The members knew it, and repressed the agitation among
the people. They thus lost the last remnant of influence which they might yet
have retained. They earned the contempt they deserved, and the Imperial
Lieutenant put a stop to the Democratic farce by shutting up, on the 18th of
June, 1849, the room where the Parliament met, and by ordering the members of
the Regency to leave the country.

Next they went to Baden, into the camp of the insurrection; but there they
were now useless. Nobody noticed them. The Regency, however, in the name of the
Sovereign German people, continued to save the country by its exertions. It
made an attempt to get recognized by foreign powers, by delivering
passports to anybody who would accept of them. It issued
proclamations, and sent commissioners to insurge those very districts of
Wurtemberg whose active assistance it had refused when it was yet time; of
course, without effect. We have now under our eye an original report, sent to
the Regency by one of these commissioners, Herr Roesler (member for Oels), the
contents of which are rather characteristic. It is dated, Stuttgart, June 30,
1849. After describing the adventures of half a dozen of these commissioners in
a resultless search for cash, he gives a series of excuses for not having yet
gone to his post, and then delivers himself of a most weighty argument
respecting possible differences between Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, and
Wurtemberg, with their possible consequences. After having fully considered
this, he comes, however, to the conclusion that there is no more chance. Next,
he proposes to establish relays of trustworthy men for the conveyance of
intelligence, and a system of espionage as to the intentions of the Wurtemberg
Ministry and the movements of the troops. This letter never reached its
address, for when it was written the "Regency" had already passed entirely into
the "foreign department," viz., Switzerland; and while poor Herr Roesler
troubled his head about the intentions of the formidable ministry of a
sixth-rate kingdom, a hundred thousand Prussian, Bavarian, and Hessian soldiers
had already settled the whole affair in the last battle under the walls of
Rastatt.

Thus vanished the German Parliament, and with it the first and last creation
of the Revolution. Its convocation had been the first evidence that there
actually had been a revolution in January; and it existed as long as
this, the first modern German Revolution, was not yet brought to a close.
Chosen under the influence of the capitalist class by a dismembered, scattered,
rural population, for the most part only awaking from the dumbness of
feudalism, this Parliament served to bring in one body upon the political arena
all the great popular names of 1820-1848, and then to utterly ruin them. All
the celebrities of middle class Liberalism were here collected. The bourgeoisie
expected wonders; it earned shame for itself and its representatives. The
industrial and commercial capitalist class were more severely defeated in
Germany than in any other country; they were first worsted, broken, expelled
from office in every individual State of Germany, and then put to rout,
disgraced and hooted in the Central German Parliament. Political Liberalism,
the rule of the bourgeoisie, be it under a Monarchical or Republican form of
government, is forever impossible in Germany.

In the latter period of its existence, the German Parliament served to
disgrace forever that section which had ever since March, 1848 headed the
official opposition, the Democrats representing the interests of the small
trading, and partially of the farming class. That class was, in May and June,
1849, given a chance to show its means of forming a stable Government in
Germany. We have seen how it failed; not so much by adverse circumstances as by
the actual and continued cowardice in all trying movements that had occurred
since the outbreak of the revolution; by showing in politics the same
shortsighted, pusillanimous, wavering spirit, which is characteristic of its
commercial operations. In May, 1849, it had, by this course, lost the
confidence of the real fighting mass of all European insurrections, the working
class. But yet, it had a fair chance. The German Parliament belonged to it,
exclusively, after the Reactionists and Liberals had withdrawn. The rural
population was in its favor. Two-thirds of the armies of the smaller States,
one-third of the Prussian army, the majority of the Prussian Landwehr (reserve
or militia), were ready to join it, if it only acted resolutely, and with that
courage which is the result of a clear insight into the state of things. But
the politicians who led on this class were not more clear-sighted than the host
of petty tradesmen which followed them. They proved even to be more infatuated,
more ardently attached to delusions voluntarily kept up, more credulous, more
incapable of resolutely dealing with facts than the Liberals. Their political
importance, too, is reduced below the freezing-point, But not having actually
carried their common-place principles into execution, they were, under
very favorable circumstances, capable of a momentary resurrection,
when this last hope was taken from them, just as it was taken from their
colleagues of the "pure Democracy" in France by the coup d'etat of
Louis Bonaparte.

The defeat of the south-west German insurrection, and the dispersion of the
German Parliament, bring the history of the first German insurrection to a
close. We have now to cast a parting glance upon the victorious members of the
counter-revolutionary alliance; we shall do this in our next letter. [1]

LONDON, September 24, 1852.

Contents | Notes | Next Section

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

XX.

The Late Trial at Cologne

DECEMBER 22, 1852.

You will have ere this received by the European papers numerous
reports of the Communist Monster Trial at Cologne, Prussia, and of its result.
But as none of the reports is anything like a faithful statement of the facts,
and as these facts throw a glaring light upon the political means by which the
continent of Europe is kept in bondage, I consider it necessary to revert to
this trial.

The Communist or Proletarian party, as well as other parties, had lost, by
suppression of the rights of association and meeting, the means of giving to
itself a legal organization on the Continent. Its leaders, besides, had been
exiled from their countries. But no political party can exist without an
organization; and that organization which both the liberal bourgeois and the
Democratic shopkeeping class were enabled more or less to supply by the social
station, advantages, and long-established, every-day intercourse of their
members, the proletarian class, without such social station and pecuniary
means, was necessarily compelled to seek in secret association. Hence, both in
France and Germany, sprung up those numerous secret Societies which have, ever
since 1819, one after another, been discovered by the police, and prosecuted as
conspiracies; but if many of them were really conspiracies, formed with the
actual intention of upsetting the Government for the time being,— and he
is a coward that under certain circumstances would not conspire, just as he is
a fool who, under other circumstances, would do so;—there were some other
Societies which were formed with a wider and more elevated purpose, which knew
that the upsetting of an existing Government was but a passing stage in the
great impending struggle, and which intended to keep together and to prepare
the party, whose nucleus they formed, for the last decisive combat which must,
one day or another, crush forever in Europe the domination, not of mere
"tyrants," "despots" and "usurpers," but of a power far superior, and far more
formidable than theirs; that of capital over labor.

The organization of the advanced Communist party in Germany was of this
kind. In accordance with the principles of the "Manifesto" [1] (published
in 1848), and with those explained in the series of articles on "Revolution and
Counter-Revolution in Germany," published in the New York Daily
Tribune, this party never imagined itself capable of producing, at any
time and at its pleasure, that revolution which was to carry its ideas into
practice. It studied the causes that hall produced the revolutionary movement
in 1848, and the causes that made them fail. Recognizing the social antagonism
of classes at the bottom of all political struggles, it applied itself to the
study of the conditions under which one class of society can and must be called
on to represent the whole of the interests of a nation, and thus politically to
rule over it. History showed to the Communist party how, after the landed
aristocracy of the Middle Ages, the monied power of the first capitalists arose
and seized the reins of government; how the social influence and political rule
of this financial section of capitalists was superseded by the rising strength
since the introduction of steam, of the manufacturing capitalists, and how at
the present moment two more classes claim their turn of domination, the petty
trading class and the industrial working class. The practical revolutionary
experience of 1848-1849 confirmed the reasonings of theory, which led to the
conclusion that the Democracy of the petty traders must first have its turn,
before the Communist working class could hope to permanently establish itself
in power and destroy that system of wage-slavery which keeps it under the yoke
of the bourgeoisie. Thus the secret organization of the Communists could not
have the direct purpose of upsetting the present Governments of Germany. Being
formed to upset not these, but the insurrectionary Government, which is sooner
or later to follow them, its members might, and certainly would, individually,
lend an active hand to a revolutionary movement against the present status
quo in its turn; but the preparation of such a movement, otherwise than by
spreading of Communist opinions by the masses, could not be an object of the
Association. So well was this foundation of the Society understood by the
majority of its members, that when the place-hunting ambition of some tried to
turn it into a conspiracy for making an extempore revolution, they were
speedily turned out.

Now, according to no law upon the face of the earth, could such an
Association be called a plot, a conspiracy for purposes of high treason. If it
was a conspiracy, it was one against, not the existing Government, but its
probable successor. And the Prussian Government was aware of it. That was the
cause why the eleven defendants were kept in solitary confinement during
eighteen months, spent, on the part of the authorities, in the strangest
judicial feats. Imagine, that after eight months' detention, the prisoners were
remanded for some months more, "there being no evidence of any crime against
them!" And when at last they were brought before a jury, there was not a single
overt act of a treasonable nature proved against them. And yet they were
convicted, and you will speedily see how.

One of the emissaries of the society was arrested in May, 1851, and from
documents found upon him, other arrests followed. A Prussian police officer, a
certain Stieber, was immediately ordered to trace the ramifications, in London,
of the pretended plot. He succeeded in obtaining some papers connected with the
above-mentioned seceders from the society, who had, after being turned out,
formed an actual conspiracy in Paris and London. These papers were obtained by
a double crime. A man named Reuter was bribed to break open the writing-desk of
the secretary of the Society, and steal the papers therefrom. But that was
nothing yet. This theft led to the discovery and conviction of the so-called
Franco-German plot, in Paris, but it gave no clue as to the great Communist
Association. The Paris plot, we may as well here observe, was under the
direction of a few ambitious imbeciles and political chevaliers
d'industrie in London, and of a formerly convicted forger, then acting as
a police spy in Paris; their dupes made up, by rabid declamations and
blood-thirsty rantings, for the utter insignificance of their political
existence.

The Prussian police, then, had to look out for fresh discoveries. They
established a regular office of secret police at the Prussian Embassy in
London. A police agent, Greif by name, held his odious vocation under the title
of an attache to the Embassy — a step which should suffice to put all
Prussian embassies out of the pale of international law, and which even the
Austrians have not yet dared to take. Under him worked a certain Fleury, a
merchant in the city of London, a man of some fortune and rather respectably
connected, one of those low creatures who do the basest actions from an innate
inclination to infamy. Another agent was a commercial clerk named Hirsch, who,
however, had already been denounced as a spy on his arrival. He introduced
himself into the society of some German Communist refugees in London, and they,
in order to obtain proofs of his real character, admitted him for a short time.
The proofs of his connection with the police were very soon obtained, and Herr
Hirsch, from that time, absented himself. Although, however, he thus resigned
all opportunities of gaining the information he was paid to procure, he was not
inactive. From his retreat in Kensington, where he never met one of the
Communists in question, he manufactured every week pretended reports of
pretended sittings of a pretended Central Committee of that very conspiracy
which the Prussian police could not get hold of. The contents of these reports
were of the most absurd nature; not a Christian name was correct, not a name
correctly spelt, not a single individual made to speak as he would be likely to
speak. His master, Fleury, assisted him in this forgery, and it is not yet
proved that "Attache" Greif can wash his hands of these infamous proceedings.
The Prussian Government, incredible to say, took these silly fabrications for
gospel truth, and you may imagine what a confusion such depositions created in
the evidence brought before the jury. When the trial came on, Herr Stieber, the
already mentioned police officer, got into the witness-box, swore to all these
absurdities, and, with no little self-complacency, maintained that he had a
secret agent in the very closest intimacy with those parties in London who were
considered the prime movers in this awful conspiracy. This secret agent was
very secret indeed, for he had hid his face for eight months in Kensington, for
fear he might actually see one of the parties whose most secret thoughts, words
and doings, he pretended to report week after week.

Messrs. Hirsch and Fleury, however, had another invention in store. They
worked up the whole of the reports they had made into an "original minute book"
of the sittings of the Secret Supreme Committee, whose existence was maintained
by the Prussian police; and Herr Stieber, finding that this book wondrously
agreed with the reports already received from the same parties, at once laid it
before the jury, declaring upon his oath that after serious examination, and
according to his fullest conviction, that book was genuine. It was then that
most of the absurdities reported by Hirsch were made public. You may imagine
the surprise of the pretended members of that Secret Committee when they found
things stated of them which they never knew before. Some who were baptized
William were here christened Louis or Charles; others, at the time they were at
the other end of England, were made to have pronounced speeches in London;
others were reported to have read letters they never had received; they were
made to have met regularly on a Thursday, when they used to have a convivial
reunion, once a week, on Wednesdays; a working man, who could hardly write,
figured as one of the takers of minutes, and signed as such; and they all of
them were made to speak in a language which, if it may be that of Prussian
police stations, was certainly not that of a reunion in which literary men,
favorably known in their country, formed the majority. And, to crown the whole,
a receipt was forged for a sum of money, pretended to have been paid by the
fabricators to the pretended secretary of the fictitious Central Committee for
this book; but the existence of this pretended secretary rested merely upon a
hoax that some malicious Communist had played upon the unfortunate Hirsch.

This clumsy fabrication was too scandalous an affair not to produce the
contrary of its intended effect. Although the London friends of the defendants
were deprived of all means to bring the facts of the case before the jury
— although the letters they sent to the counsel for the defence were
suppressed by the post — although the documents and affidavits they
succeeded in getting into the hands of these legal gentlemen were not admitted
in evidence, yet the general indignation was such that even the public
accusers, nay, even Herr Stieber — whose oath had been given as a
guarantee for the authenticity of that book—were compelled to recognize
it as a forgery.

This forgery, however, was not the only thing of the kind of which the
police was guilty. Two or three more cases of the sort came out during the
trial. The documents stolen by Reuter were interpolated by the police so as to
disfigure their meaning. A paper, containing some rabid nonsense, was written
in a handwriting imitating that of Dr. Marx, and for a time it was pretended
that it had been written by him, until at last the prosecution was obliged to
acknowledge the forgery. But for every police infamy that was proved as such,
there were five or six fresh ones brought forward, which could not, at the
moment, be unveiled, the defence being taken by surprise, the proofs having to
be got from London, and every correspondence of the counsel for the defence
with the London Communist refugees being in open court treated as complicity in
the alleged plot!

That Greif and Fleury are what they are here represented to be has been
stated by Herr Stieber himself, in his evidence; as to Hirsch, he has before a
London magistrate confessed that he forged the "minute book," by order and with
the assistance of Fluery, and then made his escape from this country in order
to evade a criminal prosecution.

The Government could stand few such branding disclosures as came to light
during the trial. It had a jury — six nobles, two Government officials.
These were not the men to look closely into the confused mass of evidence
heaped before them during six weeks, when they heard it continually dinned into
their ears that the defendants were the chiefs of a dreadful Communist
conspiracy, got up in order to subvert everything sacred—property,
family, religion, order, government and law! And yet, had not the Government,
at the same time, brought it to the knowledge of the privileged classes, that
an acquittal in this trial would be the signal for the suppression of the jury:
and that it would be taken as a direct political demonstration—as a proof
of the middle-class Liberal Opposition being ready to unite even with the most
extreme revolutionists—the verdict would have been an acquittal. As it
was, the retroactive application of the new Prussian code enabled the
Government to have seven prisoners convicted, while four merely were acquitted,
and those convicted were sentenced to imprisonment varying from three to six
years, as you have, doubtless, already stated at the time the news reached
you.

LONDON, December 1, 1852.

Footnotes

[1] "The
Manifesto." This is the celebrated "Communist Manifesto," which the Communist
Congress, held in London, November, 1847, delegated Marx and Engels to draw up.
It was published in 1848 (in London). The fundamental proposition of the
Manifesto, Engels writes in his introduction to the "Communist Manifesto,"
translated by S. Moore, and published by W. Reeves, "is that in every
historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and
the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon
which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and
intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of
mankind has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and
exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that nowadays a stage has been reached
where the exploited and oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot
attain its emancipation without at the same time, and once and for all
emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class
distinctions, and class struggles." As to this fundamental propostion of the
Manifesto, it "belongs," says Engels, "wholly and solely to Marx." The
"Communist Manifesto" has been translated into well-nigh every language, and
is, again to quote Engels, "the most international production of all Socialist
literature."

Contents | Notes

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany

Note by the Editor

Eleanor Marx-Aveling

THE following articles are now, after forty-five years, for the first time collected and printed in book form. They are an invaluable pendant to Marx's work on the coup d'etat of Napoleon III. ("Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte.") Both works belong to the same period, and both are what Engels calls "excellent specimens of that marvellous gift...of Marx... of apprehending clearly the character, the significance, and the necessary consequences of great historical events at a time when these events are actually in course of taking place, or are only just completed."

These articles were written in 1851-1852, when Marx had been about eighteen months in England. He was living with his wife, three young children, and their life-long friend, Helene Demuth, in two rooms in Dean Street, Soho, almost opposite the Royalty Theatre. For nearly ten years they had been driven from pillar to post. When, in 1843, the Prussian Government suppressed the Rhenish Gazette which Marx had edited, he went with his newly-married wife, Jenny von Westphalen, to Paris. Not long after, his expulsion was demanded by the Prussian Government–it is said that Alexander von Humboldt acted as the agent of Prussia on this occasion–and M. Guizot was, of course, too polite
to refuse the request. Marx was expelled, and betook himself to Brussels. Again the Prussian Government requested his expulsion, and where the French Government had complied it was not likely the Belgian would refuse. Marx received marching orders.

But at this same time the French Government that had expelled Marx had gone the way of French Governments, and the new Provisional Government through Ferdinand Flocon invited the "brave et loyal Marx" to return to the country whence "tyranny had banished him, and
where he, like all fighting in the sacred cause, the cause of the fraternity of all peoples," would be welcome. The invitation was accepted, and for some months he lived in Paris. Then he returned to Germany in order to start the New Rhenish Gazette in Cologne. And the Rhenish Gazette writers had very lively times. Marx was twice prosecuted, but as the juries would not convict, the Prussian Government took the nearer way and suppressed the paper.

Again Marx and his family returned to the country whose "doors" had only a few short months before been "thrown open" to him. The sky had changed–and the Government. "We remained in Paris," my mother says in some biographical notes I have found, "a month. Here also there was to be no resting-place for us. One
fine morning the familiar figure of the sergeant of police appeared with the announcement that Karl 'et sa dame' must leave Paris within twenty-four hours. We were graciously told we might be interned at Vannes in the Morbihan. Of course we could not accept such an exile as that, and I again gathered together my small belongings to seek a safe haven in London. Karl had hastened thither before us." The "us" were my mother, Helene Demuth, and the three little children, Jenny (Madame Longuet), Laura (Madame Lafargue), and Edgar, who died at the age of eight.

The haven was safe indeed. But it was storm-tossed. Hundreds of refugees–all more or less destitute–were now in London. There followed years of horrible poverty, of bitter suffering–such suffering as can only be known to the penniless stranger in a strange land. The misery would have been unendurable but for the faith that was in these men and women, and hut for their invincible "Humor." I use the German word because I know no English one that quite expresses the same thing–such a combination of humor and good-humor, of light-hearted courage, and high spirits.

That readers of these articles may have some idea of the conditions under which Marx was working, under which he wrote them and the "Achtzehnte Brumaire," and was preparing his first great economical work, "Zur Kritik der Politischen Oeconomie" (published in 1859), I again quote from my mother's notes. Soon after
the arrival of the family a second son was born. He died when about two years old. Then a fifth child, a little girl, was born. When about a year old, she too fell sick and died. "Three days,"writes my mother, "the poor child wrestled with death. She suffered so...Her little dead body lay in the small back room; we all of us" (i. e., my parents, Helene Demuth, and the three elder children) "went into the front room, and when night came
we made us beds on the floor, the three living children lying by us. And we wept for the little angel resting near us, cold and dead. The death of the dear child came in the time of our bitterest poverty. Our German friends could not help us; Engels, after vainly trying to get literary work in London, had been obliged to go, under very disadvantageous conditions, into his father's firm, as a clerk, in Manchester; Ernest Jones, who often came to see us at this time, and had promised help, could do nothing... In the anguish of my heart I went to a French refugee who lived near, and who had sometimes visited us. I told him our sore need. At once with the friendliest kindness he gave me 2 [pounds]. With that we paid for the little coffin in which the poor child now sleeps peacefully. I had no cradle for her when she was born, and even the last small resting place was being denied her"..."It was a terrible time", Liebknecht writes to me (the Editor), "but it was grand nevertheless."

In that "front room" in Dean Street, the children playing about him, Marx worked. I have heard tell how the children would pile up chairs
behind him to represent a coach, to which he was harnessed as horse, and would "whip him up" even as he sat at his desk writing.

Marx had been recommended to Mr. C. A. Dana, the managing director of the New York Tribune, by Ferdinand Freiligrath, and the first contributions sent by him to America are the series of letters on Germany here reprinted. They seem to have created such a sensation that before the series had been completed Marx was engaged as regular London correspondent. On the 12th Of March, 1852, Mr. Dana wrote: "It may perhaps give you pleasure to know that they" (i. e., the "Germany" letters) "are read with satisfaction by a considerable number of persons, and are widely reproduced." From this time on, with short intervals, Marx not only sent letters regularly to the New York paper; he wrote a large number of leading articles for it. "Mr. Marx," says an editorial note in 1853, "has indeed opinions of his own, with some of which we are far from agreeing; but those who do not read his letters neglect one of the most instructive sources of information on the great questions of European politics."

Not the least remarkable among these contributions were those dealing with Lord Palmerston and the Russian Government. "Urquhart's writings on Russia," says Marx, "had interested but not convinced me. In order to arrive at a definite opinion, I made a minute analysis of Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, and of the Diplomatic Blue Books from 1807 to 1850. The first fruits of these studies was a series of articles in the New York Tribune, in which I proved Palmerston's relations with the Russian Government. ...Shortly after, these studies were reprinted in the Chartist organ edited by Ernest Jones, The People's Paper... Meantime the Glasgow Sentinel had reproduced one of these articles, and part of it was issued in pamphlet form by Mr. Tucker, London." And the Sheffield Foreign Affairs Committee thanked Marx for the "great public service rendered by the admirable expose in his "Kars papers," published both in the New York Tribune and the People's Paper. A large number of articles on the subject were also printed in the Free Press by Marx's old friend, C. D. Collett. I hope to republish these and other articles.

As to the New York Tribune, it was at this time an admirably edited paper, with an immense staff of distinguished contributors, both American and European. It was a passionate anti-slavery organ, and also recognized that there "was need for a true organization of society," and that "our evils" were "social, not political." The paper, and especially Marx's articles, were frequently referred to in the House of Commons, notably by John Bright.

It may also interest readers to know what Marx was paid for his articles–many of them considerably longer even than those here collected. He received 1 [pound] for each contribution–not exactly brilliant remuneration.

It will be noted that the twentieth chapter, promised in the nineteenth, does not appear. It may have been written, but was certainly not printed. It was probably crowded out. "I do not know," wrote Mr. Dana, "how long you intend to make the series, and under ordinary circumstances I should desire to have it prolonged as much as possible. But we have a presidential election at hand, which will occupy our columns to a great extent....Let me suggest to you if possible to condense your survey...into say half a dozen more articles" (eleven had then been received by Mr. Dana). "Do not, however, close it without an exposition of the forces now remaining at work there (Germany) and active in the preparation of the future." This "exposition" will be found in the article which I have added to the "Germany" series, on the "Cologne Communist Trial." That trial really gives a complete picture of the conditions of Germany under the triumphant Counter-Revolution.

Marx himself nowhere says the series of letters is incomplete, although he occasionally refers to them. Thus in the letter on the Cologne trial he speaks of the articles, and in 1853 writes: "Those of your readers who, having read my letters on the German Revolution and Counter-Revolution written for the Tribune some two years ago, desire to have an immediate intuition of it, will do well to inspect the picture by Mr. Hasenclever now being exhibited in...New York...representing the presentation of a workingmen's petition to the magistrates of Dusseldorf in 1848. What the writer could only analyze, the eminent painter has reproduced in its dramatic vitality."

Finally, I would remind English readers that these articles were written when Marx had only been some eighteen months in England, and that he never had any opportunity of reading the proofs. Nevertheless, it has not seemed to me that anything needed correction. I have therefore only removed a few obvious printer's errors.

The date at the head of each chapter refers to the issue of the Tribune in which the article appeared, that at the end to the time of writing. I am alone responsible for the headings of the letters as published in this volume.

Eleanor Marx Aveling.

Sydenham, April, 1896.

Note from a reader

Dear MIA,

There’s another angle to this that you might want to consider. When you go to the “Collected Works,” Volume 11, on the archive, and call up “Revolution and Counter-Revolution,” you get the same version — complete with Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s 1896 “Note by the Editor.” If the Archives’ Volume 11 is supposed to mirror the contents of the printed version that would have to be deleted since it is not in the printed version — and that leads directly to another question about the text of the body of the work. First, however, Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s “Note by the Editor” is included in the Charles H. Kerr edition, which was natural enough since Kerr, like Eleanor, thought he was printing a work of Marx edited by Marx’s daughter. I have to suppose a similar edition was printed in England, which I may have around here somewhere. The point is that this “Note by the Editor” is not included in Volume 11 of the printed edition of the “Collected Works.” It may be in some other volume as a bibliographical curiosity or some such thing, and the Archive may wish to do the same — it is, after all, a part of the history of the work and a reflection on the relationship between Marx and Engels. Beyond that, it’s obvious that you used one of the editions edited by Eleanor Marx-Aveling. The articles themselves were written in English for the “New York Daily Tribune,” so there’s no problem about translation. However, there are differences in editing — capitalization, punctuation, etc. The editors of the “Collected Works” claim their version is “reproduced from the newspaper,” which, if taken at face value, means word for word, comma for comma, etc., noting presumed omissions, what hot-typers know as “pi’s,” etc. However, since there are differences between the Eleanor Marx-Aveling edition and the “Collected Works” edition, both cannot claim to be precisely accurate “reproductions from the newspaper.” Again, all this may seem like bibliographical trivia, and in a way it is. To repeat, however, if the “Collected Works” à la the Archives and the “Collected Works” in print are supposed to reflect each other it seems to me that the Archives version of “Revolution and Counter-Revolution” has to be revised, or some addition noting the distinction must be made for the sake of accuracy.

Sincerely yours,

Bob Bills SLP

Contents