Karl Marx

Spree and Mincio

["Das Volk" No. 8, June 25, 1859]

Voltaire famously kept four monkeys at Ferney, to which he had given the names of his four literary adversaries, Fréron, Beaumelle, Nonnotte and Franc de Pompignan. Not a day passed without the poet feeding them with his own hand, regaling them with kicks, pinching their ears, pricking their noses with needles, treading on their tails, stuffing them into priestly cowls and maltreating them in every conceivable way. These monkeys of criticism were as necessary to the old man of Ferney for diverting his bile, satisfying his hatred and allaying his fear of the weapons of polemic, as the monkeys of the revolution are for Louis Bonaparte in Italy. Kossuth, Klapka, Vogt, Garibaldi are similarly fed, provided with golden collars, kept under lock and key, now cajoled, now treated to kicks, according as hatred or fear of the revolution preponderates in the mood of their master. The poor monkeys of the revolution are also supposed to be his hostages; they are to guarantee to the man of the Second of December the armistice of the revolutionary party, so that he may unhindered destroy the arsenals of the Orsini bombs and fall upon and strangle the enemy before whom he so long trembled in the Tuileries, in his own camp.

The Empire
must again mean peace,
or it is not worth the trouble of having committed so many infamies, sworn so many perjuries and endured so many humiliations to found it. An empire made insecure by revolutionary bombs, secret societies, overweening bourgeois and unbridled soldiers is intolerable. Marchons! <Forward!> Here is glory, here are Napoleonic ideas, freedom, nationality, independence, whatever you like, but marchons, marchons!

The idea of making Italy a mousetrap for the revolution is clever enough; only it cannot be carried out for the very reason that whoever allows himself to be caught there, the moment he bites, ceases to have any significance for the revolutionary party. To wish to close the crater of the revolution by throwing Messrs Kossuth, Klapka, Vogt and Garibaldi headlong into it is truly childish and only helps to accelerate the eruption.

Even if, with their help, an Orsini bomb should succeed in being extinguished in Italy, another will explode in France, in Germany, in Russia, or wherever it may be; for the need and the natural necessity of the revolution is as universal as the despair of the downtrodden peoples upon whom you have built your throne, as the hatred of the plundered proletarians with whose misery you have carried on such an amusing game. And only when the revolution has become an elemental force, incalculable and inevitable as the lightning whose thunder you hear only after its deadly bolt has been irrevocably dispatched, only then is its outbreak certain.

Where and how this outbreak may occur is of little importance. The main thing is that it occurs. This time Prussia seems destined, against its will, to give expression to the universal revolutionary need. The Prince Regent, who
of his own accord
“never said anything stupid and never did anything wise”, is compelled out of sheer love of conservatism to seriously take up the revolutionary role with which Louis Bonaparte merely plays a coquettish game out of fear, affectation and caprice.

Prussia’s
armed mediation,
i.e. its alliance with Austria,
signifies the revolution.

The general sentiment of the Berlin press proves that neutrality with the mobilisation of the army has been abandoned as an untenable position. The *National-Zeitung*, the organ of the liberal cabinet vagaries, quite rightly remarks:

“Neutrality may, under present circumstances, be a fitting role for Belgium, Holland or Switzerland; for Prussia neutrality is – death.”

If Bonaparte succeeds in realising his magnanimous intentions regarding Italy, the same newspaper continues, even if the war remains localised and entails no direct territorial acquisitions for France, the only consequence would be a French military protectorate over the entire peninsula. In this way, the Russo-French hegemony over the
European continent, which has already been so palpable for the last three years, would become so strong that it could at any moment proceed to the division of dominion proclaimed on St Helena. The new Empire displays entirely the tendencies of the first and is even more favourably situated, for it is not pressed from without and can therefore choose time, place and occasion at its own discretion, to isolate its opponents and then annihilate them en detail. To thwart the success of this battle plan, which has so far been conducted with such great skill, Prussia sees itself compelled to go along with Austria, by no means with the intention of taking sides with Habsburg policy, but in order to fight for its own existence.

This is roughly the content of the article cited, which is regarded as the programme of the Regency’s policy. No one believes in the success of the last mediation attempt with which Herr von Werther is entrusted. Should Napoleon, however, consent to a peace that, at best, would have to give fresh nourishment to the discontent of his officers and soldiers, there will be no further need to fight him. Then what Horace Walpole said of the Sardinian diplomat Marquis de Very applies to him: He is dead, but he wishes it to be kept secret for a few more days. He would not succeed in this for long.

If this mediation, which has hardly been undertaken in earnest, fails, then the battles between Napoleonic tyranny and Habsburg despotism will be fought on the Mincio, but the battles of freedom will be fought on the Oder and the Vistula. Already enormous masses of troops are concentrated at Kalisch, two miles from the Prussian frontier. A Prussian army corps has been announced in Hanover for the march to the Rhine, another is moving southwards, and the commanders of the various federal corps have been summoned to a military conference in Berlin. All these measures relate solely to the mobilisation of the vanguard. The army that has to fight the struggle against France and Russia does not yet exist and can only be recruited from the people, not from the people that declaims the Teutonic poems of the Teutonic Ludwig, but from the people that rises up with the entire, annihilating energy of revolutionary enthusiasm. If it does not succeed in awakening this enthusiasm, then the Hohenzollern mobilisation, armed mediation, declaration of war, conduct of war, etc., rest on the childish calculation of the Negro of the Gold Coast, who believes he deals his opponent a mortal blow when he succeeds in hanging himself on his enemy’s gatepost.