Karl Marx

Invasion!

["Das Volk" No. 13, July 30, 1859]

Of all the dogmas of the bigoted politics of our day, none has caused more mischief than the one that “in order to have peace, one must prepare for war”. This great truth, distinguished principally by the fact that it contains a great lie, is the battle-cry which has called all Europe to arms and engendered such a lansquenet fanaticism that every new conclusion of peace is viewed as a new declaration of war and greedily exploited. While the states of Europe have thus become so many armed camps, whose mercenaries burn with eagerness to fall upon one another and cut each other’s throats in honour of peace, the only question before each new outbreak is the insignificant trifle of knowing which side to take. As soon as this subsidiary consideration has been settled to the satisfaction of the diplomatic parlementaires <negotiators> with the help of the well-tried: “si vis pacem, para bellum” <“if you want peace, prepare for war”>, one of those civilising wars begins whose frivolous barbarism belongs to the finest age of robber-knighthood, while its refined perfidy belongs exclusively to the most modern period of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

Under such circumstances we must not be surprised if the general disposition towards barbarism assumes a certain method, if immorality is reduced to a system, lawlessness acquires its law-givers, and club-law its codes of law. When, therefore, people so often revert to the “idées napoléoniennes”, this happens because these insane fantasies of the prisoner of Ham have become the Pentateuch of the modern religion of roguery and the revelation of the imperial war and stock-exchange swindle.

L[ouis]-Napoleon declared at Ham:

“A great enterprise rarely succeeds at the first blow.”

Convinced of this truth, he understands the art of retreating at an opportune moment, only to take a fresh run shortly afterwards, and of repeating this manoeuvre until his opponent, grown careless, comes to regard the mots d’ordre <slogans> handed out as trivial and ridiculous, and they thereby become all the more dangerous. This art of temporising in order to deceive public opinion, of retiring in order to advance all the more unhindered – in a word, the secret of: ordre, contre-ordre, désordre <order, counter-order, disorder> – was his mightiest ally in the coup d’état.

With regard to the Napoleonic idea of the
invasion of England
he seems to wish to follow the same tactic. This phrase, so often disavowed, so often made a laughing-stock, so often washed down with Compiègne champagne, is placed on the daily agenda of European gossip again and again, despite all the apparent defeats it has suffered. Nobody knows whence it suddenly comes, but everyone feels that its mere existence still constitutes an unconquered power. Serious men, like the 84-year-old Lord Lyndhurst and the certainly not timid Ellenborough, recoil before the mysterious force of this phrase. If a mere phrase is capable of making so powerful an impression on the government, parliament and people, this only proves that there is an instinctive feeling and knowledge that an army of 400,000 men is marching behind it, with whom one must fight a life-and-death struggle, or else one will not get rid of the uncanny word.

The article in the “Moniteur”, which, by comparing the English fleet budget with the French one, presents England as the responsible author of the costly armaments; the irritated tone of the opening and concluding passages of this document, which originated from the very highest source; the officious commentary in the “Patrie”, which contains a direct and impatient threat; and the immediately following order to place the French forces on a peace footing – all these are such characteristic features of Bonapartist tactics that one can well understand the most earnest attention which the English press and public opinion devote to the question of invasion. When France
“is not arming”
, as M[onsieur] Walewski emphatically declared to us in the consciousness of his misunderstood innocence before the outbreak of the Italian war, then there arises a three months’ campaign for liberty; but when it goes so far as to
disarm
the army that was not armed, we may prepare ourselves for an extraordinary coup.

Without doubt M[onsieur] Bonaparte could lead his Praetorian hordes on no enterprise that would be more popular in France and in a large part of the European continent than an invasion of England. When Blücher, during his visit to England, rode through the streets of London, he exclaimed in the involuntary joy of his soldier’s consciousness: “My God, what a city to plunder!” – an exclamation whose seductive power the imperial Praetorians will know how to appreciate. But the invasion would also be popular with the ruling bourgeoisie, and precisely for the reasons which “The Times” gives for maintaining the entente cordiale, when it says:

“We rejoice to see France powerful. So long as we work together as protectors of order and friends of civilisation, its strength is our strength and
its prosperity our might
.”

With a fleet of 449 ships, of which 265 are steam warships, with an army of 400,000 men which has tasted blood and gloire in Italy, with the testament of St. Helena in his pocket and the inevitable ruin before his eyes, M[onsieur] Bonaparte is just the man to stake his all on invasion. He must play va banque; whether sooner or later, play he must.