Karl Marx

On the Trial of Karl Vogt versus the Augsburg “Allgemeine Zeitung”

[“Die Reform” No. 139, 19 November 1859, Supplement]

London, 7 Nov. 1859

From No. 132 of the *Freischütz*, which was sent to me by a friend from Hamburg, I see that Eduard Meyen has felt obliged to throw his finally decisive weight into the Vogt affair. The horsepower—or should I say the donkeypower—of his logic is concentrated in the grand proposition: because he was a friend of Blind and Blind did not send him a copy of the anonymous pamphlet, the original document sent by me to the Augsburg *Allgemeine Zeitung* must necessarily be a forgery. He naturally takes care, in his little cunning, not to say this directly; he says it indirectly.

Incidentally, I wish that Herr Eduard Meyen would produce evidence that my time is worthless enough to waste it on attacks on the German vulgar democracy.

Since the end of 1850 I broke off all connections with the German emigration in London, which completely fell apart as soon as I pulled the only common ground, the opposition to me, from under its feet. Its process of dissolution was particularly accelerated by the zeal of agents such as Meyen, who, for example, openly agitated for the Kinkel faction against the Ruge faction. In the nine years that have passed since then, I was a constant contributor to the *New-York Tribune*, a newspaper with 200,000 subscribers, a readership that will approximate that of the *Freischütz*. Have I so much as ever mentioned the name of any of the German vulgar democrats, have I dignified with a single word the filthy attacks that these worthy men heaped upon me for five years in the German, and particularly in the German-American press?

During this time I did indeed attack “great” democrats, and ones dutifully admired by Herr Eduard Meyen, though I did not slander them. Thus, the great democrat Lord Palmerston. My offence was all the more unpardonable as not only English papers of the most diverse party tendencies—from the *People’s Paper*, the Chartist paper, to the *Free Press*, the organ of Mr Urquhart—reprinted my “slander”, but the same “slander” was reproduced in pamphlet form in at least 15,000 copies in London, Sheffield and Glasgow without my doing. I further denounced the great democrat Louis Bonaparte during the same period, first in a German work (*The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte*), which was confiscated at all the German borders but widely circulated in the United States and appeared in extract in the then London Chartist organ. I have continued this slander of the “great democrat” Bonaparte in the *Tribune* down to the present day, through analysis of his financial system, his diplomacy, his conduct of war, his *idées napoléoniennes* <napoleonic ideas>. Louis Bonaparte sent a public memorandum to the *New-York Times* for its opposition to these “slanders”. I even denounced the “great democrat” Stieber seven years ago in the *Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial*, which were pulped at the Baden-Swiss border. That, I am sure, Herr Meyen will credit me with. Nowadays this slander is democratic, as it is “with high official permission”. How often I have been mistaken in timing is proved, besides by Herr Eduard Meyen’s organ, by that of Herr Joseph Dumont of Cologne <*Kölnische Zeitung*>. When, in 1848 and 1849, I took the liberty of advocating for the Hungarian, Italian and Polish nationalities in the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung*, who screeched more, who howled more than the organ of Herr Joseph Dumont of Cologne?

But, to be sure, at that time no Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had yet conferred the “liberal” consecration on nationalities. That the former editors of the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* have remained true to their view is known even to the former Herr Joseph Dumont, now Guiseppe Delmonte, from the pamphlet *Po and Rhine* published by Friedrich Engels at the beginning of the war. As for Eduard Meyen’s democracy “in the narrower sense”, after ignoring it for nine years I have broken my silence only twice, and that only recently, once against Kossuth, the other against Herr Gottfried Kinkel. I did indeed make, from a purely grammatical standpoint, some marginal glosses in the *Volk* on Kinkel’s aesthetic effusions in the *Hermann*. That was all I wrote in the *Volk*, apart from an article on the Peace of Villafranca under the title “Quid pro quo”. In Eduard Meyen’s imagination, however, a “good democrat” is probably just as entitled to violate the “despotic” rules of syntax as to desert from the republican camp to the royalist.

I now find myself at the end of this epistle in the reverse difficulty from Hegel at the beginning of his *Logic*. He wants to pass from Being to Nothing, I from Nothing to Being, namely from Eduard Meyen to a matter, the Vogt matter. To be brief, I put the following questions to Karl Blind:

1. Did Blind, on 9 May at the platform of the Urquhart meeting, communicate to me details concerning Vogt which in content coincided entirely with the pamphlet *Zur Warnung*?
2. Did Blind publish in the London *Free Press* of 27 May an anonymous article signed “The Grand-Duke Constantine to be King of Hungary”, which, with the omission of the name Vogt, essentially reproduces the content of the pamphlet *Zur Warnung*?
3. Did Blind have the aforementioned pamphlet printed at his expense in London by Herr F. Hollinger, Litchfield Street, Soho?

Despite all the twisting attempts of Meyen’s democracy, and even in spite of the great unknown, the “excellent jurist” of Herr Joseph Dumont, everything turns on the question: Who had the pamphlet *Zur Warnung* printed? It is only this pamphlet for whose reprint the Augsburg *Allgemeine Zeitung* is accused. It is only the accusations of this pamphlet of which Vogt believed he must clear himself before the world. The publisher of the pamphlet has, as Robert Peel would have said, three courses open to himself. Either he knowingly lied. This I do not believe of Karl Blind. Or he has later convinced himself that the data that entitled him to print the pamphlet were false. Then he owes an explanation all the more. Or finally, he has the proofs in his hand but wishes, from private considerations, to hush up the whole affair and, with magnanimous resignation, bears the rotten eggs that are thrown at me, not at him. But must not all private considerations fall in so important a matter as the elucidation of the relation between the German regent of the realm *in partibus* and the Emperor of the French *de facto*?

Karl Marx