Karl Marx

The Mental Derangement of the King of Prussia

From the English.

[“New-York Daily Tribune” No. 6465, October 27, 1858]

Berlin, October 12, 1858

The King has today left Berlin en route to the Tyrol and Italy. Among the silent crowd who wished to see him off at the Potsdam station were not a few who had attended his coronation in 1840 and heard his solemn oath on the occasion of his first public appearance as a people’s orator, to the effect that he would never permit “a Gallic scrap of paper to thrust itself between him and his people”. The same man has had the misfortune not only to take a “Gallic scrap of paper”—what a romantic designation for a charter or constitution!—upon his oath, but even to become the godfather of the Prussian constitution and, in a certain sense, to be dethroned by the power of this same pernicious “scrap of paper”. You will have noticed the contradiction between the King’s edict to the Prince of Prussia and the Prince’s edict to the ministry. In his edict, the King declares:

“... I request, since this, My impediment, still continuing, prevents Me from personally conducting the government, that Your Royal Highness and Liebden, so long as etc.... will deign to exercise the royal power in sole responsibility before God, according to the best of Your knowledge and conscience, in My name as Regent ...”

In his counter-edict, the Prince says:

“In consequence of this request of His Majesty and on the basis of Article 56 of the Constitution ... I—as the agnate next to the throne—will herewith assume the regency of the country ... Accordingly, in conformity with the provision in Article 56 of the Constitution ... I have convened the two Houses of the Diet of the Monarchy ...”

In the royal edict, the King acts on his own impulse and temporarily abdicates of his own free will. The Prince, however, invokes the “royal request” and, at the same time, “Article 56 of the Constitution”, which proceeds from the premise that the King is imbecile or a prisoner, and therefore incapable of appointing the regency himself. In his edict, the King further calls upon the Regent to exercise his power “in sole responsibility before God”, whereas the Prince, by referring to the Constitution, leaves all responsibility to the existing ministry. According to the article cited by the Regent, “the agnate of full age who is nearest to the crown” must immediately convene the Chambers, which, in a joint session, are to decide upon the “necessity of the regency”. In order to wrest this power from the hands of the Diet, insistence was placed upon the King’s voluntary abdication; but in order not to become wholly dependent upon the King’s whims, the Constitution was invoked. The Regent’s claim thus contains a weak point, since it admittedly arises from two legal titles which mutually exclude each other. Article 58 of the Constitution reads:

“... Until this oath” (of the Regent) “on the Constitution” (before the united Chambers) “shall have been taken, the entire existing State Ministry remains responsible for all acts of government.”

How is this to be reconciled with “sole responsibility before God”? The recognition of the royal edict is a pretext, because the Diet is convened, and the convening of the Diet is a pretext because it is not to decide upon the “necessity” of the regency. The Prince of Prussia, who in 1850 refused to take the oath on the Constitution, now finds himself, by virtue of the entire circumstances, in the unpleasant position of not only acknowledging this Constitution, but also of having to invoke it. It must not be forgotten that the adherents of absolutism, particularly in the ranks of the army, from the autumn of 1848 up to the beginning of 1850, had entertained the plan, and occasionally even openly proclaimed it, of replacing the vacillating King by the sober Prince, who, in any case, was not hindered by any mental elasticity from possessing a certain measure of will-power, and who moreover, through his behaviour in the March days, his flight to England, the popular hatred directed against him, and finally through his feats in the Baden campaign, seemed entirely the man to guarantee a strong government in Prussia, as Francis Joseph is doing on the southern

and Hortense’s son Napoleon III on the western frontiers of the Hohenzollern realm. The Prince has, in fact, never altered his principles. However, the insults to which he and still more his wife, an admirer of Goethe, a cultivated spirit, an ambitious and proud character, were exposed by the Queen and her camarilla, must have pushed him into a certain oppositional attitude. The King’s illness left him no choice but either to allow the Queen to rule or himself to recognise the Constitution. Furthermore, a scruple characteristic of this man, which had weighed upon his mind in 1850, has now fallen away. At that time he was simply the first officer of the Prussian army, and this army swears loyalty only to the King, not to the Constitution. Had he taken the oath on the Constitution in 1850, he would have bound the army which he represented. In the present state of things he can take the oath; if he chooses, however, he can, quite simply by his resignation, give his son the possibility of doing away with the Constitution with the help of the army. Precisely the example of his brother’s government during the past eight years would, had any further argument been needed, have furnished sufficient proof that the Constitution imposed only imaginary fetters on the royal prerogative, while at the same time, from the financial standpoint, it proved a veritable godsend. Only think of the King’s financial difficulties during the period from 1842 to 1848, of the vain attempts to borrow money by means of the Seehandlung, the cold-blooded refusals of the Rothschilds to lend a few million dollars, of the small loans refused by the United Diet in 1847, of the utter exhaustion of the public finances, and then compare, on the other hand, the financial relief that came as early as 1850, in the first year of the Constitution, when three budgets with a deficit of 70,000,000 were covered in a trice by the Chambers. Truly, a great fool he who would forego such a money-making mechanism! As for the people, the Prussian constitution has merely added the political influence of the aristocracy to the traditional power of the bureaucracy, while the crown, on the other hand, has acquired the possibility of creating a state debt and increasing the annual budget by more than 100 per cent.

Already the history of this Constitution is one of the most extraordinary chapters of modern history. First, on May 20, 1848, a constitutional draft was prepared by the Camphausen cabinet, which it submitted to the

Prussian National Assembly. The main occupation of this body consisted in amending the government proposal. The Assembly was still engaged in this work when it was dissolved by Pomeranian bayonets. On December 5, 1848, the King imposed a constitution of his own, which, however, since the times were still rather revolutionary, was intended to serve only as a provisional palliative. To revise it, the Chambers were convened, whose activity fell precisely into the epoch of the most unbridled reaction. These Chambers of the Prussian style were entirely reminiscent of Louis XVIII’s Chambre introuvable. The King, however, still vacillated. Although sweetened, although overflowing with loyalty and adorned with medieval heraldic devices, the “scrap of paper” was still not to the King’s taste. The King tried everything to make the job revolting to the constitution-mongers, while the latter were just as determined not to let themselves be beaten down by any humiliation, not to recoil from any concession, in order to attain their goal, a nominal constitution of any content whatsoever, even if they had to crawl in the dust. In fact, the royal messages, which followed one another like the volleys of a platoon firing, did not annul the resolutions of the Chambers revising the constitution, since the latter merely took a passive attitude, but on the contrary the proposals that were continually made by the King’s own ministers in his own name. Today they proposed a paragraph. Two days later, after its adoption by the Chambers, something was found fault with, and the King made his amendment a conditio sine qua non. Finally, the King, who was bored by this game, resolved in his message of January 7, 1850, upon a last and final attempt to induce his loyal subjects to abandon their constitutional efforts as hopeless. In a message drawn up expressly for this purpose, he proposed a whole series of amendments which, as far as human foresight could judge, he supposed could not be swallowed even by these Chambers. They were swallowed nevertheless, and that with a friendly mien. Thus nothing remained but to put an end to the matter and to proclaim the constitution. The oath still had the aftertaste of all the farcical tricks that had attended the birth of this constitution. The King accepted the constitution with the reservation that he “would find it possible to rule with it”, and the Chambers accepted this equivocal declaration as an oath and took

it at face value; the mass of the people showed no interest whatever in the whole affair.

That is the history of this Constitution. Of its content I intend,
in another article,
to give you a concise survey, since this “windy nothingness” has, through a strange concatenation of circumstances, become at least the overt operational basis for the competing official parties which in Prussia, as everywhere, are chosen to begin the general movement that in due time must enter upon the stage.