Karl Marx

Interesting Items from Prussia

From the English.

["New-York Daily Tribune" No. 5986, June 30, 1860]

Berlin, June 13, 1860

This evening the Prince Regent will repair to Baden-Baden, where a sort of congress between Louis Napoleon and a council of crowned German heads is to take place on the 16th and 17th of this month. The suite of the Prince Regent consists of the Chief of the Military Cabinet, General von Manteuffel, General von Alvensleben, Lieutenant-Colonel von Schimmelmann; chef d'escadron von Loë, Court Marshal Count von Pückler; the Privy Cabinet Councillor von Illaire, the Regent's secretary, Herr Borkmann, and the Chief of the Cabinet, Prince von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a member of the royal family. You will remember that on the occasion of the private letter addressed by the Prince Regent to the Prince Consort of England, which was intercepted in London and brought from there to Louis Napoleon's knowledge, the latter pressed for a personal interview with the Prince Regent as the best means of removing the misunderstandings that had apparently arisen between France and Prussia. Shortly afterwards, when the Prince Regent visited the towns of Saarbrücken and Trier, situated on the frontiers of France, Napoleon again intimated his wish to utilise this opportunity for a meeting with the Prince. This proposal was, however, declined. When, in the meantime, the rumour spread of the Prince Regent's intention to spend a month in Baden-Baden, King Max of Bavaria got it into his head to propose to the Regent at the bathing resort a sort of congress with the princes of Southern Germany, who wished to arrive at an amicable understanding with

Prussia and, precisely through this meeting, to display a united front against Napoleon. When the Prince Regent immediately adopted this plan, to which the Grand Duke of Baden, the King of Württemberg, and the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt likewise gave their assent, the French ambassador in Berlin <La Tour d'Auvergne-Lauraguais> one fine day officially informed the Prussian Foreign Minister, Herr von Schleinitz, that his august master considered a friendly conversation in Baden-Baden with the present head of the Prussian state to be of great utility for France as well as for Germany, in order to dispel the mistrust of which France seemed to be the innocent victim. To the reply of the Prussian Minister that unjust suspicions, which probably could not be dispelled by any such interview, likewise weighed upon Prussia, and that besides, a confidential conference of German princes had already been convened, the French envoy, after further information from Paris, rejoined that Louis Napoleon would be delighted to see the greatest possible number of German princes assembled, and that, moreover, he had personally an important declaration to make, which brooked no further delay. At this point the resistance of the Hohenzollern gave way. A Vienna despatch promptly conveyed to Berlin Austria's displeasure at the intended meeting, but the other German courts were more or less tranquillised by a circular letter from the Prussian Foreign Minister. In response to this circular, the King of Hanover unexpectedly arrived in Berlin this morning and spontaneously declared his readiness to accompany the Prince Regent to Baden-Baden, whereupon the latter telegraphed an invitation to the King of Saxony also to attend the conference. It is hardly necessary to mention that the Dukes of Coburg-Gotha and Nassau will follow immediately.

Thus a gathering of German princes, which was originally to be a demonstration against France, has been transformed into a sort of lever held by Louis Napoleon on German soil, and at which the kings, grand dukes, and other petty potentates of the German Confederation throng together. On the part of the Prince Regent, it looks like contrition for the sin of having voiced his suspicion of the aggressive designs of the French usurper, and on the part of the smaller princely brood, like a precautionary measure they have taken to avoid being sold by their more powerful confrère <fellow brother> to the common

enemy. As is well known, Queen Victoria and the King of Sardinia set the example for the humiliation of crowned heads before the Quasimodo of the French Revolution. The personal interview of the Tsar in Stuttgart with the Man of December <Napoleon III> in 1857 could surprise no one but the coffee-house politicians who had allowed themselves to be deceived by the exaggerated coquetry of the St. Petersburg court with the principles of legitimacy. The meeting of the Habsburg with his conqueror after the Battle of Solferino at Villafranca was a business matter and not a question of courtesy. The Prince Regent, together with the smaller satellites swarming around him, has neither an alliance to discuss, like Victoria and Victor Emmanuel, nor a conspiracy, like Tsar Alexander II, nor a defeat, like Francis Joseph, but he can, leaving motives aside, invoke the general precedent created by these great models. In any event, by accepting Napoleon's proposal he has seriously damaged his spurious popularity, and all the more so as the latter only a few weeks ago possessed the impudence, through a message from his Foreign Minister, M. de Thouvenel, to give the Grand Dukes of Hesse-Darmstadt and Baden to understand that in future they were to sign their letters to the French Emperor with the words "Votre frère et serviteur". This was precisely the formula devised by Napoleon I for the German princes who formed part of the Confederation of the Rhine, of which he was the protector, and to which Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt, together with Württemberg, Bavaria, and other German principalities, belonged. To prevent Louis Bonaparte from confronting M. de Thouvenel with the most highly insulted monarchs of Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt, the Prince Regent and his crowned allies have unanimously declined to be accompanied by their respective foreign ministers; but do these gentlemen really believe that the affront was proffered to them by the servant and not by his master?

As for the "important declaration" which the Dutch saviour of society <Napoleon III> intends to make to the crowned heads of Germany, there is every reason to suppose that Louis Bonaparte will imitate Metternich's methods at the successive congresses of Vienna, Aachen, Troppau, Laibach, and Verona, and will do his utmost to convince the Prince Regent of the existence of a widespread conspiracy

among the revolutionaries, who are straining every nerve to bring about a collision between France and Germany in order to establish the Red Republic in Paris and a Central Republic in Germany. All the Bonapartist organs in Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany have for the last fortnight been teeming with articles full of such dark allusions; and a secret Bonapartist agent in Geneva – a well-known German natural scientist <Karl Vogt> – has already triumphantly declared that the competent authorities will very soon put an end to the anti-Bonapartist outbursts of the German press.

While the Prince Regent and his German dii minorum gentium <princes of the second rank> are thus to be convinced of the necessity of rallying around the chief saviour of society, the Prussian people are to be influenced in the opposite sense by M. About's new pamphlet "La Prusse en 1860". Although the pamphlet has so far been held back, a few copies have nevertheless accidentally found their way to Berlin, and I have, in another article, acquainted you with the most important passages of this new manifesto of the Tuileries. The Prussian population, thus says the oracle of the Seine, must choose between the feudalism of Austria and the democratic principle of the French Empire. Only with the aid of the latter can the German people hope – naturally on condition of ceding certain material guarantees to its powerful neighbour – to realise the unity so ardently desired. After sketching the deficiencies of the present Prussian government in a very superficial manner, the author of the pamphlet proceeds to acquaint the Prussians with the true nature of the "democratic principle" so characteristic of the Second French Empire, which, in short, consists in electing its head by a so-called "universal suffrage", as it is termed in modern Gaul. To be sure, M. About scarcely dares to deny that in France every kind of liberty has been sequestered for the benefit of the Dutch adventurer, but now this sequestration is traced back to universal suffrage. In this way, a Teutonic empire is to be erected in Germany with the aid of France and on the same democratic basis, under the leadership of a Hohenzollern. The procedure is very simple. Prussia has only to cede a portion of her "legitimate" possessions to France and simultaneously, by appealing to universal suffrage, to appropriate the possessions of the smaller

princes, and she will instantly be converted from a feudal into a democratic state. It must be admitted that this new democratic principle, discovered by Louis Napoleon and his sycophants, is no innovation at all, but, on the contrary, has been flourishing for two centuries in Holy Russia. The Romanov family was placed on the throne by universal suffrage. Ever since, democracy has reigned from the Niemen to the Amur. Objections may perhaps be raised by the prophets of the new "democratic principle" that the Romanovs were freely elected; that no coup d'état preceded the appeal to the people; and that at their accession no general state of siege prevented the ballot boxes from being kept within the required limits of the democratic principle. Since Louis Bonaparte cannot manage to become a "legitimate" prince, the next best thing for him is to transform his princely brothers in Italy and Germany into "democratic" princes, on the model of the small Empire. The Roman emperors were, of course, not properly "democratic" rulers, since the progress of today requires the grafting of the principle of hereditary monarchy onto the principle of "universal suffrage". Thus, once someone has, in one way or another, seized a throne and cloaked his usurpation with the farce of universal election, his dynasty must for ever be held to be the living incarnation of the general popular will (Rousseau's volonté générale).

In a further article I intend to give an overview of the state of the entanglements in Schleswig-Holstein which lend the Baden-Baden Conference its present importance. At present I will only mention that on 10 June a meeting took place at Kronborg Castle between the Swedish *Karl V.* and the Danish king *Friedrich VII.*. Fourteen days before this meeting, the Swedish Foreign Minister had sent a note to the Danish Foreign Minister to the effect that it would be highly desirable if the retinue of the King of Denmark contained no person whose encounter might offend His Swedish Majesty. In other words, the King of Denmark was requested to remove from his entourage his wife, Countess Danner, ci-devant Mademoiselle Rasmussen. Accordingly, the King of Denmark thought it appropriate to leave her behind.