Karl Marx

Paris, Jan. 11, 1859

The reply of the Austrian Emperor to the extraordinary New Year’s greeting sent to him from Paris by the “Dutch nephew of the battle of Austerlitz,” and the excellent Emanuel’s opening address to the Sardinian Chambers, have by no means contributed to allay the war apprehensions in Europe. In all money-market centres the barometer points to “storm.” The King of Naples is suddenly showing himself magnanimous and anti-Russian; he releases a number of political prisoners, banishes Poerio and his men, and refuses Russia a coaling depot on the Adriatic; he quarrels with the Tedeschi, and the crusade against smokers of Austrian cigars continues in Milan, Lodi, Cremona, Brescia, Bergamo, Parma, and Modena, while at Pavia the university lectures have been suspended by order of the government; Garibaldi, summoned to Turin, has been commissioned to reorganize the National Guard; a new corps of about 15,000 riflemen is being raised at Turin, and the fortification works at Casale are being pushed forward with the utmost speed. An Austrian army of about 30,000 men, a complete corps d’armée (the third), will meanwhile have marched into the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, and Count Gyulay, a general of the Radetzky school and a man with the instincts of a Haynau, has already arrived at Milan to take the reins from the gentle, kind-hearted but weak Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian. In France, troop movements are the order of the day, while the Emperor displays immense zeal at experiments with the new cannon at Vincennes. The Prussian government has at last introduced its new system of liberty by demanding money from Parliament to increase the standing army and to make the Landwehr an appendage of the line troops.

With such visible clouds on the horizon of Europe, one must wonder at the comparatively slight fall in prices on the London Stock Exchange, which usually indicates the pulse of European society more clearly than the financial observatories of Paris and the rest of the Continent.

At first, the sharp-sighted observers at the London Stock Exchange were not wholly averse to regarding Napoleon’s New Year’s coup as a speculative manoeuvre of their sublime ally. In fact, as soon as French securities began to fall, people rushed headlong into the temple of Baal to throw overboard government bonds, Crédit Mobilier and railway shares at any price. After a portion of the speculators who had counted on a rise in the securities were ruined, there was suddenly a slight firming on the Paris Bourse on January 6, owing to the rumour that a government declaration in the *Moniteur* was to take the sting out of the remark made by “His Majesty” to the Austrian envoy. Such a declaration did in fact appear on Friday, January 7; the government securities rose, and many speculators close to the Tuileries pocketed extraordinary gains precisely on that Friday. Thus these gentlemen reimbursed themselves for their New Year’s gifts in the cheapest manner. Now a similar conspiracy seemed to be brewing in London, foiled not by the extraordinary cunning of British financiers, but by their secret power over certain financial managers of the *menus plaisirs* <pleasures> at the Élysée. The relative stability of British securities is mainly due to another circumstance, less flattering to Louis Napoleon, but all the more characteristic of the state of affairs in Europe.

No confessor knows the vulnerable spots in the heart of a fair penitent better than the money-men of Chapel Street, Lombard Street, and Threadneedle Street know where the shoe pinches the European potentates. They know that Russia needs a loan of about £10 million; that France, despite the surplus provided for in her state budget – which, however, always stands in the future tense – urgently requires money; that Austria is waiting for an accommodation of at least £6 or 8 million; that little Sardinia wants a loan, not only to undertake a new Italian crusade, but also to pay the old debts from the Crimean War; and that the crowned heads and military men must receive a sum totalling £30 million from the English money-bag before the armies can march, before blood can flow and the cannon thunder. Now, to carry through all these money transactions, at least two months are needed, so that – quite apart from military considerations – the war, if it should come to that, must be postponed till spring.

It would, however, be a great mistake to jump from this to the conclusion that the war hyenas are thereby safely prevented, through their dependence on the goodwill of peace-loving capitalists, from plunging into the fray. Now, when the rate of interest is barely 2 1/2 per cent, when over £40 million in gold lie idle in the vaults of the Banks of England and France, and when general mistrust of commercial speculation prevails, even the devil himself, if he wanted to raise a loan for a new campaign, would, after some bashful hesitation and a few hypocritical conferences, certainly get rid of his bonds above par.

The circumstances that may avert a European war are the same as those that urge it on. After its brilliant diplomatic successes in Asia, Russia is eagerly striving to re-establish its supremacy in Europe. Just as the speech from the throne of little Sardinia was in fact edited in Paris, so the New Year’s boutade <outburst> of Bonaparte (the Little) was only the echo of a watchword issued in St. Petersburg. With France and Sardinia on the leading-strings of St. Petersburg, Austria threatened, England isolated, and Prussia irresolute, Russian influence would, in case of war, necessarily set the tone, at least for some time. Russia could keep out of it, let France and Austria bleed each other white in the war, and finally “relieve” the difficulties of the latter power, which has hitherto blocked its way to the south and resisted its Pan-Slavist propaganda. Sooner or later the Russian government could then intervene, divert its internal difficulties by an external war, and, through success abroad, enable the imperial power to break the resistance of the nobility at home. But, on the other hand, the financial pressure caused by the Crimean War would thereby be tripled, and the nobility, to whom one would have to turn in such an emergency, would obtain new weapons for attack and defence, while the peasantry, with unfulfilled promises directly before their eyes, embittered by renewed procrastination, repeated levies, and new taxes, would be driven into the arms of open rebellion.

Austria, it is true, fears the war, but can, of course, be pushed into it. Bonaparte, for his part, has most likely arrived at the correct conclusion that the present moment offers an opportunity to play his trump card. *Aut Caesar aut nihil!* <Either Caesar or nothing!> The shoddy glory of the Second Empire is rapidly fading away, and blood is needed to reconsolidate this gigantic fraud. And in what better role than that of a liberator of Italy, and under what more favourable conditions than England’s forced neutrality, Russia’s secret support, and Piedmont’s open servility, could he ever hope to succeed? But, on the other hand, the church party in France energetically protests against the godless crusade; the bourgeoisie reminds him of his saying: “*L’Empire c’est la paix*” <“The Empire is peace”>. The mere fact that England and Prussia must for the moment remain neutral would raise them into arbiters in the course of the war, and a single defeat on the Lombard plains would be sufficient to sound the death-knell of the false Empire.