1887 and March 1888 script, and the text of the journal 

h th ipt h t 
Nos. 22-26, 1895-96 

455 

Let us now apply our theory to contemporary German history 
and its use of force, its policy of blood and iron. We shall clearly 
see from this why the policy of blood and iron was bound to be 
successful for a time and why it was bound to collapse in the end. 

In 1815, the Vienna Congress had partitioned and sold off 
Europe in a manner which revealed to the whole world the 
complete ineptitude of the potentates and statesmen. The univer- 
sal war of the peoples against Napoleon was the reaction of the 
national feeling of all the peoples which Napoleon had trampled 
on. In gratitude for this, the princes and diplomats at the Vienna 
Congress trampled still more contemptuously on that national 
feeling. The smallest dynasty was more esteemed than the largest 
nation. Germany and Italy were once again split up into small 
states, Poland partitioned for the fourth time and Hungary 
remained enslaved. It cannot even be said that an injustice was 
committed against the peoples; why did they tolerate it, and why 
did they greet the Russian Tsar’ as their liberator? 

But this could not go on for long. Since the end of the Middle 
Ages, history has been working towards a Europe composed of large 
national states. Only such states are the normal political constitution 
of the ruling European bourgeoisie and, at the same time, an 
indispensable precondition for the establishment of harmonious 
international co-operation between peoples, without which the rule 
of the proletariat is impossible. To ensure international peace, all 
avoidable national friction must first be done away with, each people 
must be independent and master in their own house. With the 

a Alexander I.— Ed. 

advance of commerce, agriculture, industry and thereby of the social 
position of power enjoyed by the bourgeoisie, national feeling rose 
everywhere and partitioned and oppressed nations demanded unity 
and independence. 

Hence the 1848 revolution was aimed everywhere except in 
France at satisfying national demands just as much as the demand 
for freedom. But behind the bourgeoisie, which had been 
victorious at the first attempt, there already arose everywhere the 
menacing figure of the proletariat, which had actually won the 
victory, and which drove the bourgeoisie into the arms of the just 
defeated enemy—monarchistic, bureaucratic, semi-feudal and 
military reaction to which the revolution succumbed in 1849. In 
Hungary, where this was not the case, the Russians invaded and 
crushed the revolution. Not content with this, the Russian Tsar* 
went to Warsaw, where he sat in judgment as the arbiter of 
Europe. He appointed his obedient creature Christian of Glicks- 
burg heir to the Danish throne. He humiliated Prussia as it had 
never been humiliated before, prohibiting it even the slightest 
craving to exploit the German aspirations for unity and forcing it 
to re-establish the Federal Diet and submit to Austria.*’’ At first 
sight it seemed that the whole result of the revolution was the 
establishment in Austria and Prussia of a system of government, 
constitutional in form, but in the old spirit, and that the Russian 
Tsar was master of Europe more than ever before. 

In reality, however, the revolution had vigorously jostled the 
bourgeoisie even in the dismembered countries, notably in 
Germany, out of its old traditional rut. The bourgeoisie had 
received a share, however modest, of political power, and every 
political success of the bourgeoisie is used for industrial advance. 
The “crazy year”,’'* which had fortunately passed, tangibly 
demonstrated to the bourgeoisie that it now had to put an end to 
the old lethargy and doziness once and for all. As a result of the 
Californian and Australian gold rush*!’ and other circumstances, 
an expansion of world trade contacts and a business boom set in as 
never before—it was a matter of seizing the opportunity and 
making sure of one’s share. The large-scale industry which had 
appeared since 1830, and particularly since 1840, on the Rhine, in 
Saxony, in Silesia, in Berlin and some towns in the south, was now 
rapidly developed and expanded, cottage industry in rural districts 
became increasingly widespread, railway construction was acceler- 
ated, while the rapidly increasing flow of emigrants which 

a Nicholas I.— Ed. 

The Role of Force in History 457 

accompanied all this gave rise to a German transatlantic steamship 
service which required no subsidies. German merchants settled in 
all overseas trade centres on a wider scale than ever before, 
handled an ever growing share of world trade and gradually 
began to offer their services for the sale not only of English, but 
also of German industrial products. 

But the German system of small states with their numerous and 
varied trade and industrial laws inevitably soon became an 
unbearable fetter on vigorously growing industry and the trade 
associated with it. Every few miles a different law governed bills of 
exchange, there were different trade conditions; everywhere, 
literally everywhere, there were different sorts of chicanery, 
bureaucratic and fiscal traps, and often also guild barriers against 
which even licences were powerless. In addition there were many 
different local settlement laws and residence restrictions which 
made it impossible for the capitalists to move the labour force at 
their disposal in sufficient numbers to places where the availability 
of ore, coal, water power and other favourable natural conditions 
called for the siting of industrial enterprises. The ability to exploit 
the massive labour force of the Fatherland without hindrance was 
the first condition for industrial development, but wherever the 
patriotic manufacturer gathered workers from all parts, the police 
and the poor administration opposed the settlement of the new 
arrivals. All-German civic rights and full freedom of movement 
for all citizens of the Empire, a uniform body of commercial and 
industrial law were no longer patriotic fantasies of eccentric 
students, they had now become vital conditions for industry. 

Besides, there were different currencies, different weights and 
measures in every state, no matter how small, and often there 
were two or three in a single state. And not a single one of these 
innumerable kinds of coins, weights and measures was recognised 
on the world market. [It is] hardly surprising, therefore, that 
merchants and manufacturers who traded on the world market or 
had to compete against imported articles, had, in addition to the 
many coins, weights and measures, to use also foreign ones; that 
cotton yarn was reeled in English pounds, silk cloth was produced 
in metres, foreign bills were issued in pounds sterling, dollars and 
francs. And how could large credit institutions be set up in these 
limited currency zones with banknotes here in gulden, there in 
Prussian talers, next to them in gold talers, “new two-third” talers, 
bank marks, current marks, the twenty-gulden system, the 
twenty-four-gulden system, with endless exchange computations 
and rate fluctuations? *”” 

And even if all this was finally overcome, how much effort had 
been spent on all this friction, how much money and time had 
been wasted! Finally, in Germany too, people became aware that 
nowadays time is money. 

The fledgling German industry had to stand the test on the 
world market, it could grow only through export. For this it had 
to enjoy abroad the protection of international law. The English, 
French, American merchant could still take somewhat greater 
liberties abroad than at home. His legation intervened on his 
behalf, and, if need be, even a few men-of-war. But the German! 
In the Levant the Austrian at least could rely to some extent on 
his legation, elsewhere it did not help him much either. But 
whenever a Prussian merchant in a foreign land complained to his 
ambassador about an injustice he had suffered, he was almost 
always told: “Serves you right, what do you want here, why don’t 
you stay well at home?” The subject of a small state was well and 
truly deprived of all rights everywhere. Wherever one went, 
German merchants were under foreign—French, English or 
American — protection, or else had quickly got themselves natural- 
ised in their new country.* Even if their ambassadors had wished 
to intervene on their behalf, what would have been the use? 
German ambassadors themselves were treated no better than 
boot-blacks overseas. 

This shows that the call for a united “Fatherland” had a very 
material background. It was no longer the obscure urge of a 
member of a Burschenschaft at the Wartburg festival, “where 
courage and power burned bright in German souls”, and where, 
as in the song set to a French tune, “the young man was carried 
away by a tempestuous striving to go and die fighting for the 
Fatherland” in order to restore the romantic imperial grandeur 
of the Middle Ages,— while in his older days the tempestuous 
youth became a common sanctimonious and absolutist vassal of his 
prince. Neither was it any longer the considerably more down-to- 
earth call for unity of the lawyers and other bourgeois ideologists 
of the Hambach festival,?'? who thought they loved freedom and 
unity for their own sake and did not at all notice that the turning 
of Germany into a cantonal republic after the Swiss pattern, which 
the ideal of the least muddled among them amounted to, was just 
as impossible as the Hohenstaufen Empire*” of the students 
mentioned above. No, it was the desire of the practical merchant 

a Here Engels wrote “Weerth” in pencil in the margin.— Ed. 
5 K. Hinkel, “Jugend-Muth und -Kraft”.— Ed. 

The Role of Force in History 459 

and industrialist arising out of immediate business needs to sweep 
away all the historically inherited small state junk which was 
obstructing the free development of commerce and industry, to 
abolish all the unnecessary friction the German businessman first 
had to overcome at home if he wished to enter the world market, 
and to which all his competitors were superior. German unity had 
become an economic necessity. And the people who now 
demanded it knew what they wanted. They had been educated in 
commerce and for commerce, knew how to drive a bargain and 
were willing to bargain. They knew that it was necessary to 
demand a high price but also that it was necessary to reduce it 
liberally. They sang of the “German Fatherland” including in it 

» a 

Styria, the Tyrol and “Austria rich in honours and victories’’,* and 

From the Maas to the Memel, 
From the River Adige to the Belt 
Deutschland, Deutschland tiber alles, 
Over everything in the world—» 

but for a payment in cash they were prepared to grant a 
considerable discount—from 25 to 30 per cent—on that Father- 
land that was to become ever greater.”*! Their plan for unification 
was ready and immediately practicable. 

German unity, however, was not a purely German question. 
Since the Thirty Years’ War,” not a single all-German issue had 
been decided without very perceptible foreign interference.‘ 
Frederick II had conquered Silesia in 1740 with the help of the 
French.** The reorganisation of the Holy Roman Empire by 
decision of the Imperial Deputation in 1803 had literally been 
dictated by France and Russia.’ After that, Napoleon had 
organised Germany to suit his convenience. And finally, at the 
Vienna Congress,* it was again mainly owing to Russia and in the 
second place to England and France that it was shattered into 
thirty-six states with over two hundred separate large and small 
patches of land, and, just as at the 1802-03 Imperial Diet in 
Regensburg,*”* the German dynasties had veritably assisted in this 
and made the fragmentation still worse. In addition, some parts of 
Germany had been.handed over to foreign sovereigns. Thus, 
Germany was not only powerless and helpless, torn by internal 

aE. M. Arndt, “Des Teutschen Vaterland”’.— Ed. 

b (A. H. Hoffmann von Fallersleben,}] “Das Lied der Deutschen” .— Ed. 

¢ Here Engels wrote in the margin in pencil: “Westphalian and Teschen 
Peace.” 323 Ed. 

d Here Engels wrote between the lines: “Germany— Poland.”— Ed. 

strife, condemned to political, military and even industrial 
insignificance. What was much worse, France and Russia had by 
repeated usage acquired a right to the fragmentation of Germany, 
just as France and Austria arrogated the right to see that Italy 
remained dismembered. This alleged right was invoked in 1850 by 
Tsar Nicholas when, refusing in the coarsest manner to allow any 
change in the constitution without authorisation, he endorsed the 
restoration of that expression of Germany’s impotence, the 
Federal Diet.**’ 

Germany’s unity therefore had to be won in struggle not only 
against the princes and other internal enemies, but also against 
foreign countries. Or else—with help from abroad. What was the 
situation abroad at that time? 

In France, Louis Bonaparte had utilised the struggle between 
the bourgeoisie and the working class to raise himself with the 
help of the peasants into the office of President and with the help 
of the army to the imperial throne. But a new Emperor Napoleon, 
one placed on the throne by the army within the borders of the 
France of 1815, was a still-born chimera. The resurrected 
Napoleonic empire meant the extension of France to the Rhine, 
the realisation of the hereditary dream of French chauvinism. At 
first, however, the Rhine was beyond Louis Bonaparte’s reach; 
every attempt in that direction would have led to a European 
coalition against France. On the other hand, there was an 
opportunity to enhance France’s position of power and to win 
fresh laurels for the army by waging in agreement with almost the 
whole of Europe a war against Russia, which had made use of the 
revolutionary period in Western Europe to occupy on the quiet 
the Danubian principalities and to prepare for a new war of 
conquest against Turkey. England entered into alliance with 
France, Austria showed good will towards both, only heroic 
Prussia kissed the Russian rod which had chastised it only but 
yesterday, and continued to maintain a pro-Russian neutrality. But 
neither England nor France wished a serious defeat of the enemy, 
and the war thus ended in very mild humiliation for Russia and a 
Russo-French alliance against Austria.* 

* The Crimean War was an unparalleled, colossal comedy of errors, where one 
wondered at every new scene: who will be cheated this time? But that comedy took 
a toll of uncountable wealth and over a million human lives. No sooner had the 
war begun than Austria invaded the Danubian principalities; the Russians retreated 
before them. This made a war against Turkey on Russia’s land frontier impossible 
so long as Austria remained neutral. However, Austria was willing to become an 
ally in a war on this frontier on condition that the war was waged in all seriousness 

The Role of Force in History 461 

The Crimean War made France Europe’s leading power and the 
adventurer Louis Napoleon the greatest man of the day, which, to 
be sure, does not mean much. However, the Crimean War had not 
brought France any territorial expansion and was therefore 
pregnant with a new war, in which Louis Napoleon was to fulfil 
his true mission, that of “aggrandiser of the empire”.*”? This new 
war had already been planned during the first one, since Sardinia 
was allowed to join the alliance of the Western powers as a satellite 
of imperial France and especially as its outpost against Austria; 
further preparations were made during the conclusion of peace by 
Louis Napoleon’s agreement with Russia,’ who wanted nothing 
more than to chastise Austria. 

Louis Napoleon was now the idol of the European bourgeoisie. 
Not only because he had “saved society” on December 2, 1851,°*° 
when he destroyed the political rule of the bourgeoisie, it is true, 
but only to save its social rule. Not only because he showed that, 
under favourable circumstances, universal suffrage could be 
turned into an instrument for the oppression of the masses. Not 
only because, under his rule, industry and trade and _ notably 
speculation and stock exchange machinations advanced to a 
degree previously unknown. But, first and foremost, because the 
bourgeoisie saw in him the first “great statesman”, who was 
flesh of their flesh, and bone of their bone. He was an upstart 
like every true bourgeois. “A dyed in the wool” Carbonari 

to restore Poland and permanently push back Russia’s western border. This would 
also have brought in Prussia, through which Russia was still getting all imports; 
Russia would have been blockaded by land and by sea and would soon have been 
defeated. This, however, did not enter the plans of the allies. On the contrary, they 
were glad to have escaped the danger of a serious war. Palmerston proposed that 
the theatre of war be transferred to the Crimea—which was what Russia 
desired—and Louis Napoleon gladly agreed. Here the war could only be a sham 
one, and so all the protagonists were satisfied. However, Tsar Nicholas took it into 
his head to wage a serious war and forgot at the same time that this was most 
favourable country for a sham war but most unfavourable for a serious war. What 
is Russia’s strength in defence—the immense extent of its territory, sparsely 
populated, roadless and poor in auxiliary resources—in the event of any Russian 
offensive war turns against Russia itself, and nowhere more than in the Crimean 
direction. The South Russian steppes, which were to become the graves of the 
invaders, became the graves of the Russian armies, whom Nicholas, with brutal and 
stupid ruthlessness, drove one after another—finally in mid-winter—into Sebas- 
topol. When the last hurriedly recruited, haphazardly equipped and miserably 
provisioned army lost about two-thirds of its number (whole battalions perished in 
snowstorms) and the rest was unable to drive the enemy from Russian soil, 
arrogant, empty-headed Nicholas miserably broke down and poisoned himself. 
From then on, the war once again became a sham war and peace was soon 
concluded. 

conspirator in Italy, an artillery officer in Switzerland, a 
debt-burdened tramp of distinction and special constable in 
England,”*' yet constantly and everywhere a pretender to the 
throne, he had prepared himself by his adventurous past and 
moral failings in all countries for the role of Emperor of the 
French and ruler of the destinies of Europe, as the exemplary 
bourgeois, the American, prepares himself by a series of bankrupt- 
cies, genuine and fraudulent, for the role of, millionaire. As 
Emperor he not only made politics serve the interests of capitalist 
profits and stock exchange machinations, but also pursued politics 
entirely according to the rules of the stock exchange and 
speculated on the “nationalities principle”.**? In France’s previous 
policy the fragmentation of Germany and Italy had been an 
inalienable fundamental right of France; Louis Napoleon im- 
mediately began to sell off that fundamental right bit by bit for 
so-called compensations. He was ready to help Italy and Germany 
do away with their fragmentation, provided Germany and Italy 
paid him for every step towards national union by ceding 
territory. This not only satisfied French chauvinism and gradually 
expanded the empire to its 1801 borders** but, in addition, 
restored to France the exclusive role of enlightened power and the 
liberator of the peoples, and depicted Louis Napoleon as the 
protector of oppressed nationalities. And the whole enlightened 
bourgeoisie, enthusiastic for national ideas—because it was deeply 
interested in the removal of all obstacles to business on the world 
market—unanimously exulted in this world-liberating enlighten- 
ment. 

The beginning was made in Italy.* Austria had exercised 
absolute rule there since 1849, and Austria was then the scapegoat 
for the whole of Europe. The meagre results of the Crimean War 
were not ascribed to the indecision of the Western powers, which 
had only wanted a sham war, but to Austria’s irresolute attitude, 
for which no one had been more to blame than the Western 
powers themselves. But the advance of the Austrians to the 
Pruth—in_ gratitude for Russia’s assistance in Hungary in 
1849 °°°__agerieved Russia so much (although it was precisely that 
advance which had saved Russia), that it looked with joy upon 
every attack on Austria. Prussia no longer counted and had 
already been treated en canaille’ at the Paris Peace Congress. 
Thus, the war for the liberation of Italy “up to the Adriatic” was 

a Here Engels wrote ‘Orsini’ 334 in pencil in the margin.— Ed. 
6 Ungraciously — Ed. 

The Role of Force in History 463 

contrived with Russia’s participation, launched in the spring of 
1859 and completed in the summer on the Mincio. Austria was 
not driven out of Italy, Italy was not “free up to the Adriatic” and 
not united, Sardinia had extended its territory, but France had 
acquired Savoy and Nice and thus re-established its 1801 frontier 
with Italy.°*° 

However, the Italians were not satisfied with this state of affairs. 
At that time, manufacture proper was still predominant in Italy, 
large-scale industry being as yet in its infancy. The working class 
was far from fully expropriated and proletarianised; in the towns, 
it still had its own means of production, in rural areas, industrial 
Jabour was a side-line occupation of small peasant owners or 
tenants. The energy of the bourgeoisie had therefore not yet been 
broken by opposition to a modern class-conscious proletariat. And 
since the fragmentation of Italy was preserved only as a result of 
foreign rule by the Austrians, under whose protection the princes 
carried their misgovernment to the extreme, the big landed 
nobility and the mass of the townspeople sided with the 
bourgeoisie as the champion of national independence. However, 
foreign rule was thrown off, except in Venetia, in 1859; Austria’s 
further intervention in Italy was made impossible by France and 
Russia and nobody was afraid of it any longer. In Garibaldi, Italy 
had a hero of ancient dignity, who was able to work wonders and 
did work wonders. With a thousand volunteers, he overthrew the 
entire Kingdom of Naples, in fact united Italy, and tore to pieces 
the ingenious web of Bonapartist politics. Italy was free and 
essentially united—though not by Louis Napoleon’s intrigues, but 
by the revolution. 

Since the Italian war, the foreign policy of the Second French 
Empire was no longer a secret to anybody. The conquerors of the 
great Napoleon were to be punished—but l’un après l’autre, one 
after another. Russia and Austria had received their share, Prussia 
was next in turn. And Prussia was despised more than ever 
before; its policy during the Italian war had been cowardly and 
wretched, just as at the time of the Basle Peace in 1795.’ With its 
“free-hand policy”* it had reached a point when it stood 
absolutely isolated in Europe, and its neighbours, big and small, 
anticipated with pleasure the spectacle of its being given a 
thrashing; its hands were free for one thing only—to cede the left 
bank of the Rhine to France. 

Indeed, in the years immediately following 1859, the conviction 
grew everywhere, and nowhere more than on the Rhine, that the 
left bank would irretrievably be lost to France. Not that this was 

particularly desired, but it was regarded as an inescapable fate, 
and, to tell the truth, it was not particularly feared. Old memories 
of French times, which had really brought liberty, were aroused in 
the peasant and petty bourgeois; among the bourgeoisie, the 
finance aristocracy, especially in Cologne, was already deeply 
involved in the machinations of the Parisian Crédit Mobilier**? and 
other fraudulent Bonapartist companies and loudly demanded 
annexation.* 

However, the loss of the left bank of the Rhine would weaken 
not only Prussia, but Germany too. And Germany was more 
divided than ever before. There was greater estrangement than 
ever between Austria and Prussia owing to Prussia’s neutrality in 
the Italian war; the brood of small princes cast half scared, half 
longing looks at Louis Napoleon as protector of a renewed 
Confederation of the Rhine **’—such was the position of official 
Germany. And that at a time when only the united forces of the 
entire nation were capable of averting the danger of dismember- 
ment. 

But how could the forces of the entire nation be united? After 
the attempts of 1848—almost all of them hazy—had failed and 
some of the haze was dispelled precisely because of this, three 
roads lay open. 

The first road was that of genuine unification through the 
abolition of all individual states, that is, the openly revolutionary 
road. This road had just led Italy to its goal; the Savoy dynasty 
had joined the revolution and thereby walked off with the Italian 
crown. However, our German Savoyans, the Hohenzollerns, and 
even their most daring Cavours 4 la Bismarck, were altogether 
unable to take such a courageous step. The people would have 
had to do everything themselves—and in a war over the left bank 
of the Rhine they would have probably been able to do the 
necessary. The inevitable retreat of the Prussians beyond the 
Rhine, a protracted war at the fortifications on the Rhine, and the 
betrayal by the South German princes that would undoubtedly 
ensue, would have been sufficient to fan up a national movement 
which would have swept away the entire dynastic system. In that 
case, Louis Napoleon would have been the first to sheathe the 
sword. The Second Empire could afford to have opponents only 
among reactionary states against which it appeared as the 

* Marx and I repeatedly saw on the spot that this was the general mood on the 
Rhine at that time. Industrialists on the left bank asked me, inter alia, how their 
industry would fare under the French customs tariff. 

The Role of Force in History 465 

continuer of the French revolution, the liberator of the peoples. It 
was powerless against a people themselves embroiled in revolution, 
in fact, a victorious German revolution could have provided the 
impetus for the overthrow of the entire French Empire. That was 
at best; at worst, if the dynastic princes got the better of the 
movement, the left bank of the Rhine would be temporarily lost to 
France, the active and passive betrayal of the dynastic princes 
would be revealed to the whole world and would create a 
predicament in which there would be no way out for Germany but 
that of revolution, the eviction of all the princes, the establishment 
of a united German republic. 

As things stood, this road to the union of Germany could be 
taken only if Louis Napoleon began a war over the border on the 
Rhine. But, for reasons we shall soon explain, this war did not 
take place. As a result, however, the issue of national union also 
ceased to be a vital question, one that had to be settled 
immediately under pain of destruction. For the time being, the 
nation could wait. 

The second road was that of a union under Austrian 
supremacy. In 1815, Austria had willingly retained the position of 
a state with a compact, rounded-off territory, which had been 
imposed on it by the Napoleonic wars. It laid no claim to the 
former possessions in South Germany which it had ceded. It was 
content with annexing old and new territories which could be 
matched geographically and _ strategically with the remaining 
nucleus of the monarchy. The separation of German Austria from 
the rest of Germany, begun by the protective tariffs of Joseph II, 
aggravated by the police regime of Francis I in Italy, and carried 
to the extreme by the disintegration of the German Empire **' and 
by the Confederation of the Rhine, continued for all practical 
purposes ever after 1815. Metternich built a veritable Chinese 
Wall between his state and Germany. Tariffs kept out the material, 
censorship the intellectual products of Germany, the most 
incredible chicanery with regard to passports limited personal 
contacts to the barest minimum. The country was protected 
domestically against any, even the mildest, political stirring by an 
absolutist tyranny unique even in Germany. Thus, Austria had 
remained absolutely aloof from Germany’s entire bourgeois-liberal 
movement. By 1848, at least the intellectual barrier was torn down 
to a large extent, but the events of that year and _ their 
consequences were hardly fitted to bring Austria closer to the rest 
of Germany. On the contrary, Austria more and more insisted on 
its independent position as a great power. And thus it happened 

that, although the Austrian soldiers in the fortresses of the 
Confederation *** were liked, while the Prussians were hated and 
derided, and although Austria was still popular and respected 
throughout the predominantly Catholic South and West, no one 
thought seriously of German unification under Austrian suprema- 
cy, except perhaps a few princes from the small and medium 
German states. 

Nor could it be otherwise. Austria itself had not wanted it any 
other way, even though it continued on the quiet to cherish 
romantic dreams of an empire. The Austrian customs barrier had 
in time become the only remaining material partition within 
Germany, and was therefore felt all the more acutely. There was 
no sense in the independent great power policy if it did not mean 
a sacrifice of German interests to specifically Austrian, that is, 
Italian, Hungarian, etc., interests. After, as before the revolution, 
Austria continued to be the most reactionary state in Germany, the 
most reluctant to follow modern trends, and, besides, the only 
remaining specifically Catholic great power. The more the 
post-March government* strove to re-establish the old manage- 
ment of priests and Jesuits, the more impossible became its 
hegemony over a country which was one to two-thirds Protestant. 
And, finally, a unification of Germany under Austria was only 
possible through the breaking-up of Prussia. Although this in itself 
would have been no calamity for Germany, the breaking-up of 
Prussia by Austria would have been just as harmful as the 
breaking-up of Austria by Prussia before the imminent triumph of 
the revolution in Russia (after which it would become superfluous, 
because the now redundant Austria would disintegrate of itself). 

In short, German unity under Austria’s wing was a romantic 
dream and proved such when the German princes of the small 
and medium states assembled in Frankfurt in 1863 to proclaim 
Francis Joseph of Austria emperor of Germany. The King of 
Prussia* simply did not show up and the emperor comedy was a 
flop.*** 

There remained the third road: unification under Prussia’s 
supremacy. And because this road was actually taken, it leads us 
from the field of speculation onto the more solid, even if rather 
filthy, ground of practical ‘‘Realpolitik”.°* 

Since Frederick II, Prussia had regarded Germany, as also 
Poland, merely as territory to be conquered, from which one took 
what one could get, on the understanding, however, that one had 

a William I.— Ed. 

Ye a ahipatfp etn yb 
ie me Neybgee oe Dee ge 

A page of the manuscript 
of The Role of Force in History 

The Role of Force in History 469 

to share with others. The division of Germany with foreign 
countries, notably with France, had been Prussia’s “German 
mission” since 1740. “Je vats, je crois, jouer votre jeu; si les as me 
viennent, nous partagerons” (I think I am going to play your game; 
if I am dealt the aces, we shall share them)—such were Frederick’s 
parting words to the French ambassador,* when he went off to his 
first war.*° True to this “German mission”, Prussia betrayed 
Germany in 1795 when the peace was signed in Basle, agreed in 
advance (in the Treaty of August 5, 1796) to cede the left bank of 
the Rhine to France in return for a promise of territorial 
expansion, and actually collected the reward for its treason against 
the Empire under a decision of the imperial deputation dictated 
by Russia and France.**” Again in 1805, it: betrayed Russia and 
Austria, its allies, when Napoleon held up Hanover to it—a bait it 
was always willing to swallow, but became so entangled in its own 
stupid cunning that it was drawn into war with Napoleon after all 
and received a well-deserved thrashing at Jena.” Still under the 
impression of these blows, Frederick William III was willing, even 
after the victories of 1813 and 1814, to forego all West German 
outposts, to confine himself to the possession of North-East 
Germany, to withdraw, like Austria, as much as possible from 
Germany—which would have transformed the whole of West 
Germany into a new Confederation of the Rhine under Russian or 
French protection. The plan failed: Westphalia and the Rhine 
Province were forced upon the King against his will, and with 
them a new “German mission”. 

For the time being, it was over with annexations—except for the 
purchase of some tiny patches of land. At home, the old 
bureaucratic Junker system gradually began to flourish again; the 
constitutional promises made to the people in times of great 
distress were persistently broken. Yet in spite of all that, the 
bourgeoisie was increasingly in the ascendant in Prussia too, 
because without industry and trade even the haughty Prussian 
state was now nothing. Slowly, unwillingly, in homeopathic doses, 
economic concessions had to be made to the bourgeoisie. In a way, 
these concessions offered a prospect of support for Prussia’s 
“German mission”: since Prussia, to remove the foreign customs 
barriers between its two parts, invited the neighbouring German 
states to form a customs union. Thus came into existence the 
Customs Union which, up to 1830, had been no more than a pious 
wish (only Hesse-Darmstadt had joined), but later, as a result of 

aL. Ch. Beauvau.— Ed. 

327 

the somewhat quicker rate of political and economic development, 
joined the greater part of inner Germany economically to Prussia.*“° 
The non-Prussian coastal regions remained outside the Union even 
after 1848. 

The Customs Union was a major success for Prussia. The fact 
that it meant a victory over Austrian influence was hardly the crux 
of the matter. The main thing was that it won over the entire 
bourgeoisie of the medium and small states to Prussia’s side. With 
the exception of Saxony, there was no German state whose 
industry had developed to a degree even approaching Prussia’s, 
and this was due not only to natural and historical preconditions, 
but also to its bigger customs area and internal market. The more 
the Customs Union expanded, and the more it drew small states 
into this internal market, the more the rising bourgeoisie of these 
states became used to regarding Prussia as its economic and later 
also political leader, and the professors danced to the tune of the 
bourgeoisie. What the Hegelians construed philosophically in 
Berlin—namely that Prussia was called upon to assume leadership 
in Germany, Schlosser’s pupils, notably Hausser and Gervinus, 
demonstrated historically in Heidelberg. This naturally presup- 
posed that Prussia would change its entire political system, that it 
would fulfil the demands of the ideologists of the bourgeoisie.* 

All this, however, happened not because there was any special 
bias in favour of the Prussian state, as was the case, for example, 
when the Italian bourgeoisie accepted Piedmont as the leading 
state after it had openly placed itself at the head of the national 
and constitutional movement. No, it was done reluctantly, the 
bourgeoisie chose Prussia as the lesser evil, because Austria barred 
them from its market and because, compared with Austria, Prussia 
still had a certain bourgeois nature, if only because of its meanness 
in financial matters. Prussia had two good institutions ahead of 
other large states: universal conscription and universal compulsory 
‘education. It had introduced them in times of desperate need, and 
‘in better days had been content with emptying them of their 
content—dangerous under certain circumstances—by negligently 
enforcing them and deliberately distorting them. But they 
continued to exist on paper, and this gave Prussia the possibility 
some day to unfold the latent potential energy of the masses to a 

* The Rheinische Zeitung of 1842 discussed the question of Prussia’s hegemony 
from this viewpoint. Gervinus told me as early as the summer of 1843 in Ostend: 
Prussia must assume leadership in Germany, but this presupposes three conditions: 
Prussia must provide a constitution, grant freedom of the press and pursue a more 
definite foreign policy. 

The Role of Force in History 471 

degree unattainable in any other place with the same population. 
The bourgeoisie reconciled itself to these two institutions: around 
1840 it was easy and comparatively cheap for the one-year 
conscripts, that is, for the sons of the bourgeois, to evade service 
by bribery, especially as the army itself attached little value to 
Landwehr’? officers recruited from merchant and_ industrial 
circles. The undoubtedly larger number of people with a certain 
amount of elementary knowledge still available in Prussia as a 
result of compulsory education was highly useful for the 
bourgeoisie; with the advance of large-scale industry it ultimately 
even became insufficient.* The complaints over the high cost of 
the two institutions,” expressed in heavy taxation, were made 
predominantly by the petty bourgeoisie; the ascendant bourgeoisie 
calculated that the annoying, to be sure, but unavoidable 
expenditure connected with the country’s future position as a 
great power would be amply compensated by higher profits. 

In short, the German bourgeois had no illusions about Prussian 
kindness. If the idea of Prussian hegemony had become popular 
with them since 1840, it was only because and insofar as the 
Prussian bourgeoisie, owing to its quicker economic development, 
assumed the economic and political leadership of the German 
bourgeoisie, only because and insofar as the Rottecks and 
Welckers of the old constitutional South were eclipsed by the 
Camphausens, Hansemanns and Mildes of the Prussian North, 
and the lawyers and professors were eclipsed by the merchants 
and manufacturers. Indeed, in the years just preceding 1848, 
there had developed among Prussian liberals, especially on the 
Rhine, a quite different revolutionary atmosphere from that of the 
cantonalist liberals of the South.” At that time there appeared the 
two best political folk songs since the 16th century, the song about 
Burgomaster Tschech and the one about the Baroness von 
Droste-Fischering,”’ whose wantonness appals the now aged 
people who in 1846 gaily sang: 

Has ever man had such hard luck 
As our poor Burgomaster Tschech, 

He shot at Fatty two paces away 
And yet his bullet went astray! 

* Even during the Kulturkampf?5! days, Rhenish industrialists complained to me 
that they could not promote otherwise excellent workers to the job of supervisor 
because of the insufficiency of their knowledge acquired at school. This was 
particularly true in Catholic regions. 

a Engels wrote in the margin: “Secondary schools for the bourgeoisie.” — Ed. 

But all this was soon to change. The February revolution was 
followed by the March days in Vienna and the Berlin revolution of 
March 18. The bourgeoisie triumphed without having to put upa 
serious fight, it did not even want the serious fight when it came. 
The bourgeoisie, which shortly before had flirted with the 
socialism and communism of the time (notably on the Rhine), 
suddenly noticed that it had reared not only individual workers, 
but a working class, a still half-dreaming, it is true, but gradually 
awakening and, by its innate nature, revolutionary proletariat. 
This proletariat, which had everywhere won the victory for the 
bourgeoisie, was already advancing demands, particularly in 
France, which were incompatible with the entire bourgeois system; 
in Paris the first terrible struggle between the two classes took 
place on June 23, 1848, and after a four-day battle the proletariat 
was defeated. From then on, the mass of the bourgeoisie in the 
whole of Europe went over to the side of reaction and allied itself 
with the absolutist bureaucrats, feudals and priests, whom it had 
just overthrown with the help of the workers, against the enemies 
of society, those very same workers. 

The form this took in Prussia was that the bourgeoisie left in the 
lurch the representatives it had itself elected and, with concealed 
or overt glee, sat by and watched them being dispersed by the 
government in November 1848. True, the Junker-bureaucratic 
ministry, which now asserted itself in Prussia for nigh on a decade, 
had to rule according to constitutional forms, but it avenged itself 
by resorting to a system of petty vexations and obstructions, 
unprecedented even in Prussia, under which no one suffered 
more than the bourgeoisie.** But the latter had retired penitently 
into its shell and meekly submitted to the blows and kicks raining 
down on it as a punishment for its former revolutionary cravings, 
and gradually learned to think what it later was to express aloud: 
Yes, to be sure, we are dogs! 

Then came the regency. To prove his loyalty to the throne 
Manteuffel surrounded the heir apparent,’ the present emperor, 
with spies, just at Puttkamer now does the editorial office of the 
Sozialdemokrat. When the heir apparent became regent, Manteuf- 
fel, of course, was immediately kicked out and the New Era set 
in.’ It was only a change of scenery. The prince regent deigned 
to allow the bourgeoisie to be liberal again. The bourgeoisie gladly 
availed themselves of this permission, but they deluded themselves 
that they were now in full control of the situation and that the 

a Prince William, later Emperor William I.— Ed. 

The Role of Force in History 473 

Prussian state would have to dance to their tune. That was by no 
means what was intended by the “authoritative circles”, as they are 
servilely called. The reorganisation of the army was to be the price 
the liberal bourgeoisie had to pay for the New Era. The 
government demanded only the implementation of universal 
conscription to the extent to which it had been practised around 
1816. From the viewpoint of the liberal opposition, absolutely 
nothing could be said against it that would not at the same time 
have flown in the face of its own talk about Prussia’s authority 
and its German mission. But the liberal opposition demanded as a 
condition for its consent that the term of service be limited by law 
to two years. In itself this was quite rational, the question was 
whether it could be enforced, whether the liberal bourgeoisie of 
the country were prepared to insist on this condition to the end, to 
risk their property and their lives. The government firmly insisted 
on a three years’ term of service, the Chamber on two, and a 
conflict broke out. And with the conflict over the military 
question, foreign policy once again became decisive for domestic 
policy too. 

We have seen how Prussia, by its stance in the Crimean and 
Italian wars, forfeited the last remnants of respect it had still 
enjoyed. That miserable policy could be partially justified by the 
poor state of its army. Since even before 1848, new taxes could 
not be imposed or new loans taken out without the consent of the 
estates, and since no one was willing to assemble the estates for 
this purpose, there never was enough money for the army, which 
went to ruin as a result of this boundless niggardliness. The spirit 
of parade and military drill that had prevailed under Frederick 
William III did the rest. How helpless this parade army showed 
itself in 1848 on the battlefields in Denmark can be read in the 
writings of Count Waldersee.* The mobilisation of 1850 was a 
complete fiasco; there was a shortage of everything, and what was 
available was mostly useless.*°’ True, the voting of funds by the 
Chambers helped in this respect, the army was shaken out of the 
old rut, field service replaced parades, at least in most cases. But 
the numerical strength of the army was still the same as it had 
been around 1820, while all other great powers, notably France, 
which now presented the main danger, had substantially increased 
their armed forces. And yet there was universal conscription in 
Prussia, on paper every Prussian was a soldier, and while the 

a See F. G. Waldersee, Die Methode zur kriegsgemafen Ausbildung der Infanterie für 
das zerstreute Gefecht.— Ed. 

population had grown from 10'/, million (1817) to 17°/, million 
(1858), the scale of the army was insufficient to accommodate and 
train more than a third of all the men fit for service. The 
government now demanded an increase in the army’s strength 
corresponding almost exactly to the population growth since 1817. 
But the same liberal deputies who had been continually insisting 
on the government assuming the leadership of Germany, 
safeguarding its external power, and restoring its prestige among the 
nations—these same people higgled and haggled and refused to 
grant anything except on the basis of a two-year term of service. Did 
they possess the power to accomplish their will, on which they so 
stubbornly insisted? Did the people, or at least the bourgeoisie, back 
them, ready for action? 

Quite the reverse. The bourgeoisie exulted in their verbal battles 
with Bismarck but actually organised a movement which, even if 
unconsciously, was in fact directed against the policy of the 
majority in the Prussian Chamber. Denmark’s encroachments 
upon the Holstein constitution and the attempts at a forcible 
Danification of Schleswig made the German bourgeois indig- 
nant.*’* He was used to being bullied by the great powers; but to 
be kicked by little Denmark, that roused his ire. The National 
Association *”” was formed; it was precisely the bourgeoisie of the 
small states that constituted its strength. And the National 
Association, liberal to the bone as it was, demanded first and 
foremost national unification under Prussia’s leadership, a liberal 
Prussia if possible, a Prussia the same as ever if it came to the 
worst. Getting a move on at long last, doing away with the 
wretched position of second-rank people the Germans held on the 
world market, chastising Denmark, showing their teeth to the 
great powers in Schleswig-Holstein, those were the main demands 
of the National Association. The demand for Prussian leadership 
was now free of the vagueness and haziness which had still 
characterised it up to 1850. It was now known for sure that it meant 
Austria’s expulsion from Germany, the actual abolition of the 
sovereignty of small states, and that neither could be achieved 
without civil war and the division of Germany. But there was no 
longer any fear of civil war and the division was no more than the 
conclusion drawn from the Austrian customs restrictions. Germany’s 
industry and trade had advanced to such a height, the network of 
German trading firms that spanned the world market had become so 
extensive and dense, that the proliferation of small states at home 
and the lack of rights and protection abroad had become 
intolerable. And while the strongest political organisation the 

The Role of Force in History 475 

German bourgeoisie had ever had practically gave a vote of no 
confidence in the Berlin deputies, the latter continued to haggle 
over the term of service. 

Such was the state of affairs when Bismarck decided to 
intervene actively in foreign politics. 

Bismarck is Louis Napoleon translated from the adventurous 
French pretender to the throne into the Prussian backwoods 
Junker and member of the German students’ association. Just like 
Louis Napoleon, Bismarck is a man of great practical judgment 
and great cunning, a born and sharp businessman, who in 
different circumstances would have competed on the New York 
stock exchange with the Vanderbilts and Jay Goulds; indeed, he 
has not badly succeeded in feathering his nest. But this advanced 
sense of the practical often goes hand in hand with a correspond- 
ing narrowness of outlook, and in this respect Bismarck excels his 
French predecessor. The latter had himself worked out his 
“Napoleonic ideas”* during his vagabond years—of which they 
bore the stamp—while Bismarck, as we shall see, never managed 
to produce even a hint of any political ideas of his own but always 
combined the ready-made ideas of others to suit his own purposes. 
However, precisely this narrow-mindedness was his good fortune. 
Without it he would never have been able to regard the entire 
history of the world from a specific Prussian point of view; and if 
in this typically Prussian world outlook of his there had been a 
rent through which daylight could penetrate, he would have 
bungled his entire mission and it would have been the end of his 
glory. True, he was stumped when he had fulfilled, in his own 
way, his special mission dictated to him from outside, and we shall 
see what leaps he was forced to make because of his absolute lack 
of rational ideas and his inability to understand the historical 
situation he himself had created. 

If Louis Napoleon’s past had taught him to show little 
consideration in the choice of methods, Bismarck learned from the 
history of Prussian politics, notably from those of the so-called 
Great Elector” and of Frederick II, to have even less regard for 
scruples, though here he could retain the exalting awareness of 
having remained true to the traditions of the Fatherland. His 
business sense taught him to repress his Junker appetites when 
this was necessary; when no longer necessary, they once again 
came sharply to the fore; this was, of course, a sign of his decline. 

a An allusion to N. L. Bonaparte’s Des idées napoléoniennes.— Ed. 
b Frederick William.— Ed. 

His political method was that of the students’ association, the 
comically literal interpretation of the students’ beer drinking code 
designed to get them out of a scrape in their pub, and he used it 
unceremoniously in the Chamber in respect of the Prussian 
constitution; all innovations he introduced in diplomacy were 
borrowed from the students’ association. But if Louis Napoleon 
often hesitated in decisive moments, as, for example, during the coup 
d’état in 1851, when Morny positively had to force him to complete 
what he had begun, or on the eve of the 1870 war, when his 
uncertainty spoiled his whole position, it must be admitted that this 
never happened with Bismarck. His willpower never abandoned 
him, it was much more likely to turn into open brutality. And this, 
more than anything else, was the secret of his success. All the 
ruling classes in Germany, the Junkers and the bourgeoisie, had so 
much lost the last remnants of energy, it had become so much the 
custom in “educated” Germany to have no will, that the only man 
among them who really still possessed one became, precisely 
because of this, the greatest man among them and a tyrant over 
them all, at whose bidding they were ready to “jump over the 
stick’, as they themselves call it, against their better judgment and 
their conscience. True, in the “uneducated” Germany things have 
not yet reached such a pass; the working people have shown that 
they possess a will against which even Bismarck’s strong will is 
unable to prevail. 

A brilliant career lay before our Brandenburg Junker, if only he 
had the courage and sense to help himself to it. Had not Louis 
Napoleon become the idol of the bourgeoisie precisely because he 
dispersed their parliament while raising their profits? And did not 
Bismarck possess the same business talents which the bourgeois 
admired so much in the false Napoleon? Was he not attracted to 
his Bleichréder as much as Louis Napoleon to his Fould? Was 
there not in 1864 a contradiction in Germany between the 
bourgeois representatives in the Chamber, who, out of stinginess, 
wanted to reduce the service term, and the bourgeois outside, in 
the National Association, who demanded national action at any 
cost, action for which an army was essential? Was it not a 
contradiction quite similar to the one that existed in France in 
1851 between the bourgeois in the Chamber who wanted to keep 
the power of the President in check and the bourgeois outside 
who wanted peace and quiet and a strong government, peace and 
quiet at any cost—a contradiction which Louis Napoleon solved by 
dispersing the brawlers in parliament and giving peace and quiet 
to the mass of the bourgeois? Were not things in Germany much 

The Role of Force in History 477 

more assuredly in favour of a bold move? Had not the plan for 
the reorganisation been supplied ready-made by the bourgeoisie, 
and were not the latter themselves calling loudly for an energetic 
Prussian statesman who would carry out their plan, expel Austria 
from Germany and unite the small states under Prussia’s 
supremacy? And if this demanded that the Prussian constitution 
be treated a bit roughly, that the ideologists in and outside the 
Chamber be pushed aside according to their deserts, was it not 
possible to rely on universal suffrage, just as Louis Bonaparte had 
done? What could be more democratic than to introduce universal 
suffrage? Had not Louis Napoleon proved that it was absolutely 
safe—if properly handled? And did not precisely this universal 
suffrage. offer the means to appeal to the broad mass of the 
people, to flirt a bit with the emerging social movement, should 
the bourgeoisie prove refractory? 

Bismarck took action. What had to be done was to repeat Louis 
Napoleon’s coup d’état, to make the real balance of power tangibly 
clear to the German bourgeoisie, forcibly to dispel their liberal 
self-delusion, but to carry out their national demands which 
coincided with Prussia’s aspirations. It was Schleswig-Holstein that 
first provided a lever for action. As regards foreign policy, the 
field had been prepared. The Russian Tsar* had been won over to 
Bismarck’s side by the latter’s dirty work against the Polish 
insurgents in 1863°°; Louis Napoleon had also been worked on 
and could justify his indifference, if not his silent abetment, of 
Bismarck’s plans, with his favourite “nationalities principle” **’; 
Palmerston was Prime Minister in England, but he had placed the 
little Lord John Russell in the Foreign Office only for the purpose 
of having him make a laughing-stock of himself. But Austria was 
Prussia’s rival for supremacy in Germany and precisely in this 
matter it could not afford to let Prussia outdo it, especially since it 
had in 1850 and 1851 acted in Schleswig-Holstein as Emperor 
Nicholas’ henchman more vilely even than Prussia.*” The situation 
was therefore extremely favourable. No matter how much 
Bismarck hated Austria, and how gladly Austria would once again 
have taken it out of Prussia, there was nothing they could do after 
the death of Frederick VII of Denmark but take joint action 
against Denmark—with the tacit consent of Russia and France. 
Success was assured in advance, so long as Europe remained 
neutral; it did, the duchies were conquéred and ceded under the 
peace treaty.°” 

a Alexander II.— Ed. 

In this war, Prussia had pursued an additional purpose—that of 
testing before the enemy the army it had been training according 
to new principles since 1850 and had _ reorganised and 
strengthened in 1860. It had stood the test beyond all expectations 
and that in all manner of military situations. The battle at Lyngby 
in Jutland proved that the needle-gun was far superior to the 
muzzle-loader and that the Prussians knew how to use it properly, 
since the rapid firing of 80 Prussians from behind hedgerows 
turned three times as many Danes to flight. At the same time 
it had been noticed that the only lesson the Austrians had drawn 
from the Italian war* and French fighting tactics was that shoot- 
ing was no good, that a true soldier had to repulse the enemy 
immediately with his bayonet, and this was borne in mind, for no 
more welcome enemy tactics could even be desired against the 
muzzles of the breech-loaders. To give the Austrians the 
chance of convincing themselves of this in practice at the earliest 
possible moment, the peace treaty gave over the duchies to the 
joint sovereignty of Austria and Prussia, thereby creating a purely 
temporary situation, which was bound to breed _ conflict 
after conflict, and which thus left it entirely to Bismarck to decide 
when he should choose to use such a conflict for his big blow at 
Austria. Since it was a Prussian political tradition to exploit a 
favourable situation “ruthlessly to extreme”, in Herr von Sybel’s 
words, it was self-evident that under the pretext of freeing the 
Germans from Danish oppression about 200,000 Danes of North 
Schleswig were annexed to Germany. The one who got nothing 
was the Duke of Augustenburg, the candidate of the small 
states and of the German bourgeoisie for the Schleswig-Holstein 
throne. 

Thus Bismarck had carried out the will of the German 
bourgeoisie in the duchies against their will. He had expelled the 
Danes and defied the foreign countries, and the latter had not 
made a move. But no sooner were they liberated than the duchies 
were treated as conquered territory, not consulted about their 
wishes and simply temporarily shared out between Austria and 
Prussia. Prussia had once again become a great power, was no 
longer the fifth wheel on the European coach, there was good 
progress in the fulfilment of the bourgeoisie’s national aspirations, 
but the way chosen was not the liberal way of the bourgeoisie. 
Thus the Prussian military conflict continued; it even became ever 

a Austro-Italo-French war of 1859.— Ed. 

The Role of Force in History 479 

more insoluble. The second scene of Bismarck’s principal state 
action *™* had to be ushered in. 

The Danish war had fulfilled part of the national aspirations. 
Schleswig-Holstein was “liberated”, the Warsaw and London 
Protocols, in which the great powers had put their seal to 
Germany’s humiliation by Denmark, had been torn to pieces 
and thrown at their feet, and they had not uttered a sound. 
Austria and Prussia were together again, their armies had been 
victorious shoulder to shoulder, and no potentate any longer 
thought of encroaching upon German territory. Louis Napoleon’s 
cravings for the Rhine, which hitherto had been pushed into the 
background by other business—the Italian revolution, the Polish 
insurrection, the Danish complications, and finally the Mexican 
campaign,” had no longer any chance of being satisfied. For a 
conservative Prussian statesman, the world situation left nothing to 
be desired from the foreign policy point of view. But up to 1871 
Bismarck had never been conservative, and was less so now than 
ever, and the German bourgeoisie was not at all satisfied. 

The German bourgeoisie continued to labour under the familiar 
contradiction. On the one hand, it demanded exclusive political 
power for itself, i.e., for a ministry elected from among the liberal 
majority in the Chamber; and such a ministry would have had to 
wage a ten-year struggle against the old system represented by the 
crown before its new position of power was finally recognised; 
hence ten years of internal weakness. On the other hand, it 
demanded a revolutionary transformation of Germany, which 
could be effected only by force, that is, only by an actual 
dictatorship. At the same time, however, the bourgeoisie since 
1848 had demonstrated again and again, at every decisive 
moment, that it did not possess even a trace of the energy needed 
to accomplish either of these demands, let alone both. In politics 
there are only two decisive powers: organised state power, the 
army, and the unorganised, elemental power of the popular 
masses. Since 1848, the bourgeoisie had forgotten how to appeal 
to the masses; it feared them even more than it did absolutism. 
The bourgeoisie by no means had the army at its disposal. But 
Bismarck had. 

In the continuing conflict over the constitution, Bismarck fought 
the parliamentary demands of the bourgeoisie to the uttermost. 

But he burned with the desire to carry out its national demands, 
since they coincided with the innermost strivings of Prussian 
policy. If he now once more carried out the will of the bourgeoisie 
against its will, if he made the unification of Germany, in the way 
it had been formulated by the bourgeoisie, a reality, the conflict 
would be resolved of itself, and Bismarck would inevitably become 
the idol of the bourgeoisie as Louis Napoleon, his model, before 
him. 

The bourgeoisie supplied him with the aim, Louis Napoleon 
with the method of achieving the aim; only the implementation 
was left to Bismarck. 

To place Prussia at the head of Germany, it was necessary not 
only to expel Austria forcibly from the German Confederation *” 
but also to subjugate the small states. In Prussian politics, such a 
refreshing jolly war of Germans against Germans had been the 
principal means of territorial expansion since the year dot, no 
worthy Prussian feared such a thing. Just as little misgiving could 
be caused by the other principal means: alliance with foreign 
countries against Germans. The out-and-out support of sentimen- 
tal Alexander of Russia was certain. Louis Napoleon had never 
denied Prussia’s Piedmont mission in Germany and was quite 
willing to make a deal with Bismarck. If he could get what he 
wanted peacefully, in the form of compensation, so much the 
better. Besides, he did not need to get the entire left bank of the 
Rhine at one go, if he received it piecemeal, a strip for every new 
advance by Prussia, it would be less conspicuous, and yet lead to. 
his goal. In the eyes of the French chauvinists, a square mile on 
the Rhine was worth the whole of Savoy and Nice. Negotiations 
were therefore held with Louis Napoleon, and his permission was 
obtained for Prussia’s expansion and the establishment of a North 
German Confederation.” That he was offered in return a strip of 
German territory on the Rhine is beyond doubt*; in the 
negotiations with Govone, Bismarck mentioned Rhenish Bavaria 
and Rhenish Hesse.*”” This he subsequently denied, to be sure. 
But a diplomat, particularly a Prussian diplomat, has his own views 
of the limits within which one is justified, and even obliged, to do 
a little violence to the truth. After all, truth is a woman and 
therefore, according to Junker ideas, actually likes it. Louis 
Napoleon was not so stupid as to allow Prussian expansion without 
a Prussian promise of compensation; Bleichréder would sooner 

a Engels’ note in pencil in the margin: “Division—the Main line” (see p. 484 of 
this volume).— Ed. 

The Role of Force in History 481 

have lent money without interest. But he did not know his 
Prussians well enough and was anyway cheated in the end. In 
short, after he had been assured, an alliance was formed with Italy 
for the “stab in the heart”. 

The philistines in various countries were highly indignant over 
this expression. But quite wrongly. A la guerre comme 4 la guerre. 
The expression only proves that Bismarck recognised the German 
civil war of 1866 for what it was, namely, a revolution, and that he 
was willing to carry out that revolution with revolutionary 
methods. And he did. His treatment of the Federal Diet was 
revolutionary. Instead of submitting to the constitutional decision 
of the federal authorities, he accused them of violating the federal 
treaty—-a pure pretext—broke up the Confederation, proclaimed 
a new constitution with a Reichstag elected by revolutionary 
universal suffrage and finally expelled the Federal Diet from 
Frankfurt.*” In Upper Silesia he formed a Hungarian legion 
under revolutionary General Klapka and other revolutionary 
officers whose soldiers, Hungarian deserters and prisoners of war, 
were to fight against their own legitimate commander-in-chief.” 
After the conquest of Bohemia, Bismarck issued a proclamation 
“To the Population of the Glorious Kingdom of Bohemia”, whose 
content was likewise a hard slap in the face for legitimist 
traditions.‘ After peace had already been established, he seized for 
Prussia all the possessions of three legitimate German federal 
monarchs and a free city” without the slightest qualms of his 
Christian and legitimist conscience over the fact that these princes 
who had been expelled were no less rulers “by the grace of God” 
than the King of Prussia. In short, it was a complete revolution, 
carried out with revolutionary means. We are naturally the last to 
reproach him for this. On the contrary, what we reproach him 
with is that he was not revolutionary enough, that he was no more 
than a Prussian revolutionary from above, that he began a whole 
revolution in a position where he was able to carry through only 
half a revolution, that, once having set out on the course of 
annexations, he was content with four miserable small states. 

And then Napoleon the Little*” came limping up behind and 
demanded his reward. During the war he could have taken 
whatever he wanted on the Rhine, for not only the land, but also 

@ That’s how it is in wartime.— Ed. 

b Engels’ note in pencil in the margin: “Oath!”— Ed. 

¢ ©. Bismarck, “Ansprache an die Einwohner des glorreichen Königreichs
Böhmen”’.— Ed. 

the fortresses, were exposed. He hesitated; he expected a 
protracted war that would wear out both sides; instead, there was 
a series of quick blows, and Austria was crushed in eight days. At 
first he demanded what Bismarck had named to General Govone 
as a possible compensation—Rhenish Bavaria and Rhenish Hesse, 
including Mainz. But Bismarck could not give that up now, even if 
he had wanted to. The enormous successes of the war had 
imposed new obligations on him. At a time when Prussia set itself 
up as the protector of Germany, it could not sell off Mainz, the 
key to the Middle Rhine, to a foreign country. Bismarck refused. 
Louis Napoleon was willing to bargain; he now demanded only 
Luxemburg, Landau, Saarlouis and the Saarbrticken coal basin. 
But this too Bismarck no longer could relinquish, the more so as 
Prussian territory too was claimed. Why had Louis Napoleon not 
seized it himself at the right moment, when the Prussians were 
stuck in Bohemia? In short, nothing came of the compensation to 
France. Bismarck knew this meant a future war with France, but 
that was exactly what he wanted. 

In the peace treaties, Prussia did not exploit the favourable 
situation as ruthlessly this time as it had usually done in moments 
of success. There were sound reasons for it. Saxony and 
Hesse-Darmstadt were included in the new North German 
Confederation and, if only for this reason, were spared. Bavaria, 
Wurttemberg and Baden had to be treated with indulgence, 
because Bismarck had to sign secret offensive and defensive 
agreements with them. And Austria—had not Bismarck rendered 
it a service by smashing the traditional entanglement that tied it to 
Germany and Italy? Had he not just now secured for it the 
long-sought position of an independent great power? Had he not 
actually known better than Austria itself what was good for it 
when he had defeated it in Bohemia? Did not Austria, if properly 
handled, have to realise that the geographical position, the mutual 
entanglement of the two countries made the Germany united by 
Prussia its essential and natural ally? 

Thus it came about that, for the first time in its existence, 
Prussia was able to surround itself with a halo of generosity, and 
this because it threw a sprat to catch a salmon. 

Not only Austria had been beaten on the Bohemian _bat- 
tlefields—-the German bourgeoisie had been beaten as well. 
Bismarck had shown it that he knew better what was good for it 
than it knew itself. A continuation of the conflict by the Chamber 
was out of the question. The liberal pretensions of the bourgeoisie 
had been buried for a long time to come, but its national demands 

The Role of Force in History 483 

were receiving fuller satisfaction with every passing day. Bismarck 
fulfilled its national programme with a speed and accuracy that 
surprised the bourgeoisie itself, and having proved to it palpably, 
in corpore vili—on its own vile body—its limpness and listlessness, 
and thus its complete inability to implement its own programme, 
he also played the magnanimous towards it and applied to the 
now actually disarmed Chamber to exempt the government from 
indemnity for its anti-constitutional rule during the conflict. 
Touched to tears, it agreed to this now harmless step forward.*” 

Nevertheless, the bourgeoisie was reminded that it too had been 
defeated at Koniggratz.°” The constitution of the North German 
Confederation was modelled on the pattern of the Prussian 
constitution as authentically interpreted during the conflict. 
Refusal of taxes was prohibited. The federal Chancellor and his 
ministers were appointed by the King of Prussia, independently of 
any parliamentary majority. The army’s independence of parlia- 
ment, secured by the conflict, was stressed also in respect of the 
Reichstag. But the members of this Reichstag had the exalting 
awareness that they had been elected by universal suffrage. They 
were also reminded of this, and most unpleasantly, by the sight of 
the two socialists* sitting among them. For the first time socialist 
deputies, representatives of the proletariat, appeared in a par- 
liamentary body. This was an ominous sign. 

At first all this was unimportant. The thing now was to advance 
and exploit the new unity of the Empire, at least that of the 
North, in the interests of the bourgeoisie and thereby to lure the 
South German bourgeois too into the new Confederation. The 
constitution of the Confederation took the economically most 
important legislative relations away from the competency of the 
individual states and transferred them to the Confederation: 
common civil law and freedom of movement within the entire 
Confederation, right of residence, legislation on the crafts, trade, 
customs tariffs, navigation, coins, weights and measures, railways, 
waterways, post and telegraphs, patents, banks, all foreign policy, 
consulates, commercial protection abroad, sanitary police, the 
penal code, judicial proceedings, etc. Most of these questions were 
now regulated quickly, and in general liberally, by law. And 
then,—at long last!—the ugliest abuses of the small state system 
were abolished, those that, on the one hand, most obstructed 
capitalist development, and, on the other, the Prussian craving for 
power. But that was no world-historic achievement, as_ the 

a August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht.— Ed. 

bourgeoisie, now turning chauvinistic, trumpeted forth, but a very, 
very long overdue and imperfect imitation of what the French 
Revolution had already done seventy years before, and what all 
other civilised states had introduced long ago. Instead of boasting, 
it would have been more appropriate to feel ashamed that “highly 
educated”” Germany was the last to do it. 

Throughout all this period of the North German Confederation, 
Bismarck willingly obliged the German bourgeoisie in the 
economic field and, even in questions affecting the competency of 
parliament, showed the iron fist only in a velvet glove. This was 
his best period; at times one could entertain doubts about his 
peculiarly Prussian narrow-mindedness, his inability to realise that 
there are in world history other and more powerful forces than 
armies and diplomatic intrigues relying on them. 

Bismarck not only knew that the peace with Austria was 
pregnant with war with France, he also desired it. This war was to 
provide the means of perfecting the Prusso-German Empire 
demanded of him by the German bourgeoisie.* The attempts 
gradually to transform the Customs Parliament*” into a Reichstag 
and thus to draw the southern states little by little into the North 
German Confederation were wrecked by the loud call of the South 
German deputies: No extension of competence! The mood of the 
governments, which had only recently been defeated on the field 
of battle, was no more favourable. Only fresh, palpable proof that 
the Prussians were not only much more powerful than these 
governments, but also powerful enough to protect them, that is, a 
new all-German war, could rapidly bring the moment of surren- 
der. Besides, after the victories, it seemed as though the dividing 
line on the Main,?”” upon which Bismarck and Louis Napoleon 
had secretly agreed beforehand, had after all been imposed on the 
Prussians by the latter; in that case, a union with South Germany 
was a violation of the formally recognised right of the French this 
time to the fragmentation of Germany, was a casus belli. 

In the meantime, Louis Napoleon had to search for a patch of 

* Even before the Austrian war, when Bismarck was interpellated by a minister 
from a central German state on his demagogic German policy, he replied that, 
despite all the rhetoric, he would expel Austria from Germany and break up the 
Confederation “And the central states, do you think they will quietly look 
on?” —“You, the central states, you will do nothing.” —“And what is to become of 
the Germans then?”—“TI shall then lead them to Paris and unite them there.” 
(Told in Paris before the Austr[ian] war by the said minister from the central state 
and published during that war in the Manchester Guardian by Mrs. Crawford, its 
Paris correspondent.) 

The Role of Force in History 485 

land somewhere near the German border which he could pocket 
as compensation for Sadowa. When the new North German 
Confederation was formed, it did not include Luxemburg, now a 
state in personal union with Holland, but otherwise completely 
independent. Besides, it was approximately as much Frenchified as 
Alsace and was far more attracted to France than to Prussia, which 
it positively hated. 

Luxemburg is a striking example of what Germany’s political 
wretchedness since the Middle Ages had made of the German- 
French borderlands, the more striking because Luxemburg had 
until 1866 nominally belonged to Germany. Up to 1830, it had 
been composed of a French and a German part, but the German 
part had already at this early stage submitted to superior French 
culture. The German Emperors of Luxemburg were French in 
both language and education. Since its incorporation in_ the 
Burgundy lands (1440), Luxemburg, like all the other Low 
Countries, had remained in a purely nominal union with 
Germany; even admission to the German Confederation in 1815 
changed nothing. After 1830, the French part and a substantial 
portion of the German part were annexed to Belgium. However, 
in what remained of German Luxemburg, everything continued 
on a French footing: the courts, the authorities, the Chamber, 
everything was conducted in French, all public and _ private 
documents, all business accounts were kept in French, in 
secondary schools the teaching was in French, French was and 
remained the language of the educated—naturally a French that 
groaned and panted with the High German sound shift. In short, 
two languages were spoken in Luxemburg: a Rhenish Franconian 
popular dialect, and French, while High German remained a 
foreign tongue. The Prussian garrison in the capital made things 
worse rather than better. This may be shameful for Germany but 
it is true. And this voluntary Frenchification of Luxemburg 
showed the similar processes in Alsace and German Lorraine in 
their true light. 

The King of Holland,* the sovereign Duke of Luxemburg, who 
could well use hard cash, was willing to sell the duchy to Louis 
Napoleon. The people of Luxemburg would have undoubtedly 
approved their incorporation into France—the proof was their 
attitude in the war of 1870. From the standpoint of international 
law, Prussia could not object, since it had itself brought about 

a William II].— Ed. 

33* 

Luxemburg’s exclusion from Germany. Its troops were stationed 
in the capital as the federal garrison of a federal German fortress; 
as soon as Luxemburg ceased to be a federal fortress, they no 
longer had any right to be there. Why did they not go home, why 
could Bismarck not agree to Luxemburg’s annexation? 

Simply, because the contradictions in which he had become 
entangled were now becoming evident. As far as Prussia was 
concerned, before 1866 Germany was simply territory for an- 
nexation, which had to be shared with foreign countries. After 
1866, Germany became a Prussian protectorate, which had to be 
defended against foreign claws. True, in the interests of Prussia, 
whole parts of Germany had been excluded from the newly 
founded so-called Germany. But the right of the German nation 
to its own territory now imposed on the Prussian Crown the duty 
of preventing the incorporation of these parts of the former 
federal territory into foreign states, of leaving the door open for 
their future union with the new Prussian-German state. It was for 
this reason that Italy had stopped at the Tyrolean border,*” and 
that Luxemburg could not be allowed to go over to Louis 
Napoleon. A truly revolutionary government could declare this 
openly. Not so the royal Prussian revolutionary, who had finally 
succeeded in transforming Germany into a “geographic concept” 
in Metternich’s sense.*”? From the point of view of international 
law, he had placed himself in the wrong, and the only way he 
could get out of the difficulty was to use his favourite students’ 
beerhouse interpretation of international law. 

If in so doing he was not simply laughed to scorn, it was only 
because, in the spring of 1867, Louis Napoleon was not at all 
ready for a big war. Agreement was reached at the London 
Conference. The Prussians evacuated Luxemburg, the fortress was 
demolished, the duchy was declared neutral. The war was again 
postponed. 

Louis Napoleon could not rest content with this. He was willing 
to tolerate the aggrandisement of Prussia only if he received 
corresponding compensation on the Rhine. He was willing to 
content himself with little, he had even reduced that, but he had 
received nothing, had been cheated of everything. However, a 
Bonapartist Empire in France could exist only if it shifted the 
border gradually towards the Rhine and if France—in fact or at 
least in imagination— remained the arbiter of Europe. The border 
shift had failed, France’s position as arbiter was already 
threatened, the Bonapartist press loudly called for revenge for 
Sadowa—if Louis Napoleon wanted to keep his throne, he had to 

The Role of Force in History 487 

remain true to his role and to obtain by force what he had not 
obtained amicably, in spite of services rendered. 

So eager war preparations, both diplomatic and military, were 
begun by both sides. And then the following diplomatic event 
occurred: 

Spain was looking for a candidate for the throne. In March? 
Benedetti, the French ambassador in Berlin, picked up rumours 
about claims for the throne advanced by Prince Leopold of 
Hohenzollern; he was charged by Paris to investigate the matter. 
Under-Secretary of State von Thile gave him his word of honour 
that the Prussian Government knew nothing about it. During a 
visit to Paris, Benedetti learned the Emperor’s opinion: “This 
candidature is essentially anti-national, the country will not tolerate 
it, it must be prevented.” 

Incidentally, Louis Napoleon showed thereby that he was 
already down at heel. Indeed, what could have been a better 
“revenge for Sadowa” than a Prussian Prince on the Spanish 
throne, the unavoidable annoyances resulting therefrom, Prussian 
involvement in the internal relations between the Spanish ae 
perhaps even a war, a defeat of the dwarfish Prussian navy, i 
any case a Prussia looking quite grotesque in the eyes of rene 
But Louis Bonaparte could no longer afford this spectacle. His 
credit was already so much shaken that he was committed to the 
traditional point of view according to which a German sovereign 
on the Spanish throne would place France between two fires and 
was therefore intolerable—a childish point of view after 1830. 

So Benedetti visited Bismarck to receive further information 
and to make France’s point of view clear to him (May 11, 1869). 
He did not learn anything particularly conclusive from Bismarck. 
Bismarck, however, did learn from Benedetti what he wanted to 
find out: that Leopold’s nomination as candidate would mean an 
immediate war with France. This gave Bismarck the opportunity 
to have the war break out when it suited him. 

In actual fact, Leopold’s candidature emerged once again in July 
1870 and immediately led to war, no matter how much Louis 
Napoleon resisted it. He not only saw that he had walked into a 
trap, he also knew that his emperorship was at stake, and he had 
little confidence in the faithfulness of his Bonapartist Brimstone 
gang,’*' who assured him that everything was ready, up to the last 
button on the men’s spats, and even less confidence in their 
military and administrative skill. But the logical consequences of 

a 1869.— Ed. 

his own past drove him towards destruction; his hesitation itself 
hastened his doom. 

Bismarck, on the other hand, was not only quite ready for 
action militarily, but this time he actually had the people behind 
him, who: saw only one fact behind the diplomatic lies spread by 
both sides: namely, that this was a war not only for the Rhine, but 
for national existence. For the first time since 1813, reserves and 
the Landwehr’ once again flocked to the colours, eager and keen 
to fight. It did not matter how all this had come about, did not 
matter what piece of the two-thousand-year-old national heritage 
Bismarck had, off his own back, promised or not promised to 
Louis Napoleon: the thing was to teach foreign countries once and 
for all that they were not to interfere in German internal affairs 
and that it was not Germany’s mission to support Louis Napoleon’s 
shaky throne by ceding German territory. All class differences 
vanished in the face of this national upsurge, all cravings of the 
South German courts for a Confederation of the Rhine, all attempts 
at a restoration of the expelled monarchs melted away. 

Both sides had sought allies. ‘Louis Napoleon had Austria and 
Denmark for sure, and was pretty certain of Italy. Bismarck had 
Russia. But Austria, as always, was not ready and could not 
participate effectively before September 2—and on September 2 
Louis Napoleon was a prisoner of war of the Germans, and Russia 
had informed Austria that it would attack Austria the moment 
Austria attacked Prussia. In Italy, however, Louis Napoleon’s 
double-dealing policy wrought vengeance upon him: he had 
sought to set national unity in motion, but at the same time to 
protect the Pope from that same national unity; he had kept Rome 
occupied with troops he now needed at home but which he could 
not withdraw without obliging Italy to respect the sovereignty of 
Rome and the Pope; this in turn prevented Italy from supporting 
him. Denmark finally got the order from Russia to behave itself. 

The rapid blows of the German armies from Spicheren and 
Worth to Sedan*” were more decisive in localising the war than all 
diplomatic negotiations. Louis Napoleon’s army was defeated in 
every battle and finally three-quarters of it went to Germany as 
prisoners of war. This was not the fault of the soldiers, who had 
fought bravely enough, but of the leaders and the administration. 
But if, ike Louis Napoleon, one had created an empire with the 
help of a gang of rascals, if this empire had been maintained for 
eighteen years merely by abandoning France to the exploitation of 
that gang, if all decisive posts in the state had been filled with 
people belonging to that very gang and all subordinate posts with 

The Role of Force in History 489 

their accomplices, then one should not engage in a life-and-death 
battle if one does not wish to be left in the lurch. The entire 
edifice of the empire that had been the admiration of European 
philistines for years crashed in less than five weeks; the revolution 
of September 4° simply cleared away the rubble, and Bismarck, 
who had gone to war to found a small German empire, turned out 
one fine morning to be the founder of a French republic. 

According to Bismarck’s own proclamation,’ the war was 
waged not against the French people, but against Louis Napoleon. 
With his fall, all the reasons to wage war thus disappeared. The 
government of September 4, which was not so naive in other 
matters, also deluded itself to this effect, and was greatly surprised 
when Bismarck suddenly showed himself a Prussian Junker. 

No one in the world hates the French as much as the Prussian 
Junkers do. For not only had the hitherto tax-exempled Junker 
suffered heavily during the chastisement by the French (from 
1806 to 1813), which he had brought about by his own arrogance; 
but, what was much worse, the godless French had so confused 
the people by their outrageous revolution that the old grandeur of 
the Junkers had for the most part been laid to rest even in old 
Prussia, so that year in and year out the poor Junkers had to 
struggle hard to keep what was left of it, and many of them were 
already debased to a shabby sponging nobility. For this, revenge 
had to be taken on France, and the Junker officers in the army 
under Bismarck’s leadership took care of that. Lists of war 
contributions exacted by France from Prussia were drawn up and 
the size of the war contributions imposed on the various towns 
and departments was calculated accordingly, but naturally taking 
into account France’s much greater wealth. Foodstuffs, forage, 
clothes, footwear, etc., were requisitioned with demonstrative 
ruthlessness. A mayor in the Ardennes who said that he would be 
unable to make the deliveries was given twenty-five strokes of the 
cane without further ado, as the Paris. government officially 
proved. The francs-tireurs, who acted in such strict accordance 
with the Prussian Landsturm Statute of 1813°°° as if they had 
made a special study of it, were shot without mercy on the spot. 
The stories about clocks being sent home are also true, even the 
Kolnische Zeitung reported it. Only, according to Prussian views, 
those clocks were not stolen but were ownerless, having been 
found in abandoned villas near Paris and confiscated for the dear 
ones at home. Thus, the Junkers under Bismarck’s leadership saw 
to it that, despite the irreproachable behaviour of the men and 
many of the officers, the specifically Prussian character of the war 

was preserved, and that this was driven home to the French, who 
held the entire army responsible for the mean spitefulness of the 
Junkers. 

And yet it fell to the lot of these same Junkers to render to the 
French people an honour unequalled in history. When all attempts 
to make the enemy relieve the siege of Paris had failed, all the 
French armies had been beaten back. Bourbaki’s last great 
counter-attack on the German lines of communication had proved 
abortive, when all Europe’s diplomats had abandoned France to its 
fate without stirring a finger, emaciated Paris finally had to 
surrender.*”’ The hearts of the Junkers beat faster when they were 
finally able to enter the godless nest in triumph and take complete 
vengeance upon the Paris arch-rebels—the complete vengeance 
which had been denied to them by Alexander of Russia in 1814 
and Wellington in 1815; now they could chastise the seat and 
homeland of the revolution to their hearts’ content. 

Paris surrendered, it paid a contribution of 200 millions; the 
forts were handed over to the Prussians; the garrison laid down its 
arms before the victors and delivered up its field guns; the 
cannons on the wall around Paris were taken off their gun- 
carriages; all means of resistance belonging to the State were 
handed over piece by piece. But the actual defenders of Paris, the 
National Guard, the armed Parisians, remained untouched, for 
nobody expected them to give up their arms, either their rifles or 
their cannons*; and so that it would be known to the whole world 
that the victorious German army had respectfully stopped before 
the armed people of Paris, the victors did not enter Paris, but 
were content to be allowed to occupy for three days the Champs 
Elysées, a public park, protected, guarded and enclosed on all 
sides by the sentries of the Parisians! No German soldier set foot 
in Paris City Hall or stepped on the boulevards, and the few that 
were admitted to the Louvre to admire the art treasures there had 
to ask for permission, otherwise it would have been a violation of 
the surrender. France was defeated, Paris starved, but the Parisian 
people had by their glorious past ensured respect for themselves, 
so that no victor dared to demand their disarmament, no one had 
the courage to enter their homes or to desecrate by a triumphal 
march those streets which had been the battle-ground of so many 

* It was these cannons, which belonged to the National Guard and not to the 
state, and had therefore not been handed over to the Prussians, that Thiers 
ordered on March 18, 1871, to be stolen from the Parisians, thereby bringing about 
the rebellion that gave rise to the Commune. 

The Role of Force in History 491 

revolutions. It was as if the upstart German Emperor’ was taking 
off his hat before the living revolutionaries of Paris, as once his 
brother” had before the dead March fighters of Berlin, and as if 
the entire German army stood behind him presenting arms. 

But that was the only sacrifice Bismarck had to make. Under the 
pretext that there was no government in France which could sign 
a peace treaty with him—which was just as true as it was false 
both on September 4 and on January 28—he had exploited his 
successes in the truly Prussian manner, to the very last drop, and 
declared himself ready for peace only after France had been 
completely crushed. In the peace treaty itself, once again 
according to the good old Prussian custom, he “ruthlessly 
exploited the favourable situation”. Not only was the unheard-of 
sum of 5,000 millions in war reparations extorted, but also two 
provinces, Alsace and German Lorraine, with Metz and Strasbour 
were torn away from France and incorporated into Germany.” 
With this annexation, Bismarck appeared for the first time as an 
independent politician, who was no longer implementing in his 
own way a programme dictated from outside, but translating into 
action the products of his own brain, thereby committing his first 
enormous blunder.‘ 

Alsace had been conquered in the main by France during the 
Thirty Years’ War.*” Richelieu had thereby abandoned Henry 
IV’s sound principle: 

“Let the Spanish language belong to the Spaniard, the German to the German, 
but where French is spoken, that belongs to me.” 

In so doing, Richelieu relied on the principle of the natural 
border on the Rhine, the historical border of old Gaul. This was 
folly; but the German Empire, which incorporated the French- 
speaking parts of Lorraine and Belgium and even of the 
Franche-Comté, had no right to reproach France with annexing 
German-speaking lands. And even if, in 1681, in peacetime, 
Louis XIV had seized Strassburg with the help of a pro-French 
party in the city,°*' it is not for Prussia to be indignant over it, 
having raped the Free Imperial town of Nuremberg in exactly the 

a William I.— Ed. 

b Frederick William IV.— Ed. 

© The text below, up to the words “Bismarck had reached his objective” (see 
this volume, p. 497), is printed according to the Neue Zeit, Vol. I, No. 25, 1895-96, 
pp. 772-76, because the relative manuscript pages are missing.— Ed. 

same way in 1796, although, to be sure, without having been 
called by a Prussian party, and without success.* 

Lorraine was sold off to France in 1735 by Austria under the 
Peace of Vienna,” and in 1766 it definitively became a French 
possession. For centuries it had belonged to the German Empire 
only nominally, its dukes were French in every respect and had 
almost always been allied with France. 

Before the French Revolution, there were a great many small 
domains in the Vosges which behaved in respect to Germany like 
estates of the empire subject immediately to the emperor, but 
recognised the sovereignty of France. They derived benefits from 
this hermaphroditic position, and if the German Empire tolerated 
it instead of calling these sovereigns to account, it could not 
complain when France, by virtue of its sovereignty, extended 
protection to the people of these territories against the expelled 
princes. 

On the whole, before the Revolution, this German territory was 
practically not Frenchified at all. German remained the school and 
official language internally, at least in Alsace. The French 
Government patronised the German provinces, which now, after 
many years of war devastation, had seen no more enemies on their 
lands since the early 18th century. The German Empire, 
perpetually torn by internal wars, was really not in a state to 
attract the Alsatians back to the maternal bosom; at least they now 

* Louis XIV is reproached with having set loose his “reunion chambers” 39? in 
times of peace on German areas which did not belong to him. This is something 
that could not be said of the Prussians even by those who had the most malicious 
envy of them. On the contrary. After they had signed a separate peace with France 
in 1795393 in direct violation of the imperial constitution and had rallied their 
equally renegade small neighbours behind the demarcation line around themselves 
in the first North German Confederation, they utilised, for attempts to annex 
territory in Franconia, the tight spot the South German estates of the empire found 
themselves in as a result of continuing the war alone in alliance with Austria. They 
set up reunion chambers according to Louis’ pattern in Ansbach and Bayreuth 
(which were then Prussian), raised claims to a series of neighbouring areas, in 
comparison with which Louis’ legal pretexts were absolutely convincing; and when 
the Germans then retreated after a beating and the French moved into Franconia, 
the Prussian saviours occupied the Nuremberg area, including the suburbs up to 
the city wall, and tricked the Nuremberg philistines, who were trembling with fear, 
into signing a treaty (September 2, 1796) which subjected the city to Prussian rule 
on the condition that Jews would never be allowed within the city walls. 
Immediately after that, Archduke Charles took the offensive again, beat the French 
at Wurzburg on September 3 and 4, 1796, and the attempt to knock the idea of 
Prussia’s German mission into the heads of the Nurembergers thus went up in 
smoke. 

The Role of Force in History 493 

had peace and quiet, knew how things stood, and the philistines 
who set the tone accepted the inscrutable ways of the Lord; after 
all, their fate was not unprecedented: the people of Holstein were 
also under foreign, Danish, rule. 

Then came the French Revolution. What Alsace and Lorraine 
never dared hope to receive from Germany was given to them by 
France as a gift. The feudal fetters were smashed. The serf, the 
peasant liable to statute labour, became a free man, in many cases 
the free owner of his farmstead and field. In the towns, patrician 
rule and guild privileges disappeared. The nobility was driven out. 
In the lands of the small princes and lords, the peasants followed 
the example of their neighbours and expelled the sovereigns, 
government chambers and nobility, and declared themselves free 
French citizens. In no other part of France did the people join the 
revolution with greater enthusiasm than in the German-speaking 
part. And when the German Empire now declared war on the 
revolution, when the Germans, who not only continued to carry 
their own chains submissively, but also allowed themselves to be 
used once again to force the old servitude upon the French and to 
re-impose on the Alsatian peasants the feudal lords they had only 
just expelled, now it was all over with the Germanism of the 
people of Alsace and Lorraine, it was then that they learned to 
hate and despise the Germans; it was then that the Marseillaise was 
written in Strasbourg, set to music and first sung by the Alsatians, 
and that the German French, despite their language and their 
past, fused on hundreds of battlefields in the struggle for the 
revolution into a single nation with the native French. 

Did not the great revolution work the same miracle with the 
Flemings of Dunkirk, the Celts of Brittany, the Italians of Corsica? 
And if we complain that this happened also with Germans, does it 
not show that we have forgotten our entire history, which made 
this possible? Have we forgotten that the whole left bank of the 
Rhine, which took only a passive part in the revolution, was 
pro-French when the Germans again moved in in 1814, and 
continued to be pro-French up to 1848, when the revolution 
rehabilitated the Germans in the eyes of the people on the Rhine? 
Have we forgotten that Heine’s enthusiasm for the French and 
even his Bonapartism were but the echo of general public feeling 
on the left bank of the Rhine? 

When the allies invaded in 1814 it was precisely in Alsace and 
German Lorraine that they encountered the most _ resolute 
hostility, the most vehement resistance on the part of the people 
themselves; because here the danger was felt of having to become 

German again. And yet, at that time, practically only German was 
spoken there. But when the danger of being torn from France 
had passed, when an end had been put to the annexationist 
appetites of the romantic Germanophile chauvinists, the awareness 
appeared that a closer fusion with France was needed also in 
respect of the language, and then the Frenchification of schools 
was introduced, similar to that voluntarily established by the 
Luxemburgers in their land. Yet the transformation proceeded 
very slowly; only the present generation of the bourgeoisie is really 
Frenchified, while the peasants and workers speak German. The 
position is approximately the same as in Luxemburg: literary 
German has been ousted by French (except partially in the pulpit), 
but the German folk dialect has lost ground only at the language 
border and is used as the popular language to a much greater 
extent than in most parts of Germany. 

Such was the land that Bismarck and the Prussian Junkers, 
backed by the revival of chauvinistic romanticism which seems 
inseparable from all German problems, undertook to make 
German again. The wish to make Strasbourg, the homeland of the 
Marseillaise, German, was just as absurd as to make Nice, the 
homeland of Garibaldi, French. But in Nice, Louis Napoleon at 
least observed decency and put the question of annexation to the 
vote—and the manoeuvre succeeded. Quite apart from the fact 
that for very good reasons the Prussians detest such revolutionary 
measures—never and nowhere has there been an instance when 
the mass of the people wanted to be annexed to Prussia—it was 
known only too well that precisely here the entire population was 
more closely attached to France than were the native French 
themselves. And thus this arbitrary act was performed by brute 
force. It was an act of revenge against the French Revolution; one 
of the parts which had been fused with France precisely as a result 
of the revolution was torn away. 

It is true that militarily there was a purpose behind this 
annexation. Metz and Strasbourg gave Germany an enormously 
strong line of defence. So long as Belgium and Switzerland remain 
neutral a massive French offensive can be begun only on the 
narrow strip of land between Metz and the Vosges; and besides, 
Koblenz, Metz, Strasbourg and Mainz form the strongest and 
biggest quadrangle of fortresses in the world. However, half of 
this quadrangle of fortresses, as is the case also with the Austrian 
fortresses in Lombardy,” lies in enemy territory and forms 
citadels there to keep the population down. Moreover, to complete 
the quadrangle, it was necessary to seize areas beyond the 

The Role of Force in History 495 

German-language border and to annex a quarter of a million of 
native Frenchmen as well. 

The great strategic advantage is thus the only reason that can 
justify the annexation. However, can this gain in any way be 
compared with the harm it wrought? 

The Prussian Junker refused to reckon with the great moral 
disadvantage at which the young German Empire had placed itself 
by openly and frankly declaring brutal force its guiding principle. 
Quite the reverse, refractory subjects forcibly kept in check are a 
necessity for him; they are proof of increased Prussian might; and 
essentially he has never any others. But he was obliged to reckon 
with the political consequences of the annexation. And these were 
clearly apparent. Even before the annexation came into force, 
Marx loudly drew the world’s attention to it in a circular of the 
International: The annexation of Alsace and Lorraine makes Russia the 
arbiter of Europe. And this has been repeated often enough by the 
Social-Democrats from the rostrum of the Reichstag until the truth 
of this statement was finally acknowledged by Bismarck himself in 
his Reichstag speech of February 6, 1888, by his whimpering 
before the almighty Tsar,” the lord of war and peace.*”° 

Actually, the situation was clear as daylight. To tear from France 
two of its fanatically patriotic provinces, meant to push it into the 
arms of anybody who held out hope for their return and to make 
it an eternal enemy. However, Bismarck, in this respect a worthy 
and conscientious representative of the German philistines, de- 
manded that the French renounce Alsace and Lorraine not only 
constitutionally but also morally, and in addition wanted them to 
be downright glad that these two parts of revolutionary France 
“had been- returned to the old Fatherland”, of which they simply 
would not hear. Unfortunately, however, the French did not do 
so, any more than the Germans morally renounced the left bank 
of the Rhine during the Napoleonic wars, even though this area 
had not the slightest longing to return to them at that time. As 
long as the people of Alsace and Lorraine wish to return to 
France, it must and will strive to regain them and look for means 
and, hence, also for allies, to achieve this. And the natural ally 
against Germany is Russia. 

If the two biggest and strongest nations of the Western 

a See K. Marx, Second Address of the General Council of the International Working 
Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War (present edition, Vol. 22, pp. 266- 
68).— Ed. 

b Alexander III.— Ed. 

continent neutralise each other by their hostility, if there is just 
one bone of contention between them which incites them to fight 
each other, the advantage lies only with Russia, whose hands are 
so much the freer; Russia who is all the less hampered by 
Germany in its cravings for conquest, the more it can count on 
unconditional support from France. And was it not Bismarck who 
placed France in a position where it has to beg for Russia’s 
alliance, where it must willingly abandon Constantinople to Russia, 
if only the latter promises the return of France’s lost provinces? 
And if in spite of all that the peace has been kept for seventeen 
years, is there any other reason than that the Landwehr system 
introduced in France and Russia requires at least sixteen, and 
after the most recent German improvements even twenty-five 
years, to provide the full number of trained age groups? And now 
that the annexation has for seventeen years been the dominant 
factor in all European politics, is it not at this moment the main 
cause of the crisis threatening the continent with war? Remove this 
single fact and peace is assured! 

The Alsatian bourgeois who speaks French with an Upper 
German accent, that hybrid fop who puts on greater French airs 
than a Frenchman through and through, who looks down on 
Goethe and goes into raptures over Racine, who still cannot rid 
himself of his bad conscience over his secret Germanness and 
exactly for that reason has to run down everything German, so 
that he does not even suit the role of a mediator between 
Germany and France, this Alsatian bourgeois is indeed a 
despicable fellow, be he a Mulhouse industrialist or a Paris 
journalist. But what has made him what he is if not the history of 
Germany over the past three hundred years? And were not until 
quite recently almost all Germans abroad, especially the mer- 
chants, genuine Alsatians, who denied their German origin, who 
masochistically imposed on themselves the alien nationality of their 
new homeland and thus voluntarily made themselves certainly no 
less ridiculous than the Alsatians, who at least are more or less 
compelled by circumstances to do so? In England, for example, 
the German merchants who immigrated between 1815 and 1840 
had almost without exception become Anglicised, spoke almost 
exclusively English among themselves, and even today, for 
example, at the Manchester Stock Exchange, there are old 
German philistines running around who would give half their 
wealth if they could pass for true Englishmen. Only in 1848 did a 
change set in, and since 1870, when even lieutenants of the 
reserve have been coming to England and Berlin has been sending 

The Role of Force in History 497 

its contingents here, the former servility is being ousted by a 
Prussian arrogance which makes us no less ridiculous abroad. 

Perhaps the union with Germany has been made more palatable 
to the Alsatians since 1871? On the contrary. They have been 
placed under a dictatorship, whereas next door, in France, there 
was a republic. A pedantical and obtrusive Prussian Landrat 
system has been introduced, in comparison with which the 
interference of the notorious French system of prefects, regulated 
by strict laws, is solid gold. An end has been rapidly put to the 
last remnants of freedom of the press, right of assembly and 
association, refractory town councils have been dissolved and 
German bureaucrats appointed mayors. On the other hand, 
however, there has been flattery of the “notables”, that is, the 
thoroughly Frenchified nobles and bourgeois, and their exploiter 
interests have been protected against the peasants and workers, 
who, although not well disposed towards Germany, at least spoke 
German, and formed the only element with which an attempt at 
reconciliation was possible. And what has been the result? That in 
February 1887, when the whole of Germany allowed itself to be 
intimidated and put a majority of the Bismarck cartel*’’ in the 
Reichstag, Alsace and Lorraine elected nothing but staunch 
Frenchmen and rejected everyone who was suspected of even the 
mildest pro-German sympathies. 

Now, if the Alsatians are as they are, have we the right to be 
angry over that? Not at all. Their opposition to the annexation is 
an historical fact, which should not be deleted but explained. And 
this is the time for us to ask ourselves: how numerous and how 
colossal were the historical sins Germany committed before such a 
feeling could assert itself in Alsace? And how must our new 
German Empire look from the outside if, after seventeen years of 
re-Germanisation attempts, the Alsatians unanimously tell us: 
Spare us that? Have we the right to imagine that two successful 
campaigns and seventeen years of Bismarckian dictatorship suffice 
to do away with all the effects of three hundred years of 
ignominious history? 

Bismarck had reached his objective. His new Prussian-German 
Empire had been publicly proclaimed at Versailles, in Louis XIV’s 
splendid state hall.** France lay defenceless at his feet; defiant 
Paris, which he himself had not dared touch, had been incited to 
the Commune uprising by Thiers and then crushed by the soldiers 
of the former imperial army returning from captivity. All 
European philistines admired Bismarck as they had admired Louis 
Napoleon, Bismarck’s model, in the fifties. With Russian help 

Germany had become the first power in Europe, and all power in 
Germany was concentrated in the hands of dictator Bismarck. 
Everything depended now on what he could do with that power. 
If he had so far carried out the unification plans of the 
bourgeoisie, even if not by bourgeois, but by Bonapartist methods, 
this matter was pretty well settled, and he now had to make his 
own plans, to show what ideas his own head could produce, and 
these had to find expression in the internal consolidation of the 
new empire. 

German society is composed of big landowners, peasants, 
bourgeois, petty bourgeois and workers; these can in turn be 
grouped into three major classes. 

Big landed property is in the hands of a few magnates (notably in 
Silesia) and a large number of middle landowners, most highly 
concentrated in the old Prussian provinces east of the Elbe. It is 
these Prussian Junkers who more or less dominate the entire class. 
They are farmers themselves, inasmuch as they entrust the 
cultivation of their estates for the most part to managers, and in 
addition they often own distilleries and beet-sugar refineries. 
Wherever possible, their landed property is entailed upon the 
family by right of primogeniture. The younger sons join the army 
or the civil service, so that an even less wealthy petty nobility made 
up of officers and civil servants clings to this petty landowning 
gentry and is supplemented over and above this through the 
intensive promotion of nobles from among the higher officers and 
civil servants of bourgeois origin. On the lower fringes of all this 
bunch of nobles, there naturally emerges a numerically parasitic 
nobility, a noble Lumpenproletariat, which lives on debts, dubious 
gambling, pushiness, begging and political espionage. This society 
in its totality forms the Prussian Junkers and is one of the main 
pillars of the old Prussian state. However, the landowning core 
of the Junkers themselves has feet of clay. The duty to live up 
to its status becomes more and more expensive every day; the 
support for the younger sons through the lieutenant and asses- 
sor stage, the marrying off of daughters, all costs money; and 
since all these are duties which push all other considerations 
into the background, it is no wonder that incomes are insufficient, 
that IOUs have to be signed or even mortgages have to be taken 
out. In short, Junkers stand always on the brink of the abyss; 
every misfortune, be it a war, a bad harvest or a commercial crisis, 
threatens to push them over the brink; and it is therefore no 
wonder that for well over a hundred years now they have been 
saved from ruin only by all sorts of state assistance and, in fact, 

The Role of Force in History 499 

continue to exist only thanks to state assistance. This artificially 
preserved class is doomed to extinction and no state assistance can 
keep it alive in the long run. But with it disappears also the old 
Prussian state. 

The peasant is an element that is little active politically. In so far 
as he himself is a proprietor, he is going ever more to ruin 
because of the unfavourable production conditions of the allot- 
ment peasants, who cannot engage in stock-breeding, having been 
deprived of the old common Mark or community pasture. As a 
tenant, his position is even worse. Petty peasant production 
presupposes a predominantly subsistence economy, the money 
economy seals its doom. Hence the growing indebtedness, the 
massive expropriation by mortgage creditors, the recourse to 
domestic industry, so as just not to be evicted from his native soil. 
Politically, the peasantry is mainly indifferent or reactionary: on 
the Rhine it is ultramontane because of its old hatred for the 
Prussians, in other areas it is particularist or protestant- 
conservative. Religious feeling still serves this class as an expres- 
sion of social or political interests. 

We have already spoken about the bourgeoisie. From 1848 it 
experienced an unprecedented economic advance. Germany had 
increasingly participated in the vast expansion of industry 
following the 1847 commercial crisis, an expansion brought about 
by the establishment during that period of ocean steam navigation, 
the enormous extension of the railways and the discovery of gold 
in California and Australia. It was precisely the bourgeoisie’s 
striving for the abolition of the obstructions to trade caused by the 
system of small states and for a position on the world market 
equal to that of its foreign competitors that gave the impetus to 
Bismarck’s revolution. Now that French milliards were flooding 
Germany, a new period of feverish enterprise opened up before 
the bourgeoisie, during which it—by a crash on a _ national 
German scale *°°— proved for the first time that it had become a 
big industrial nation. The bourgeoisie was even then the economi- 
cally most powerful class among the population; the state had to 
obey its economic interests; the revolution of 1848 had given the 
state an external constitutional form within which the bourgeoisie 
could rule also politically and develop its domination. Yet it was 
still far from actual political domination. In the conflict it had not 
triumphed over Bismarck; the resolution of the conflict through 
the revolutionising of Germany from above had also taught it that, 
for the time being, the executive power was dependent on it, at 
best, in a very indirect form, that it could neither appoint nor 

dismiss ministers, nor dispose of the army. Besides, it was 
cowardly and limp in the face of an energetic executive power, but 
so were the Junkers, though this was more excusable in the case 
of the bourgeoisie because of the direct economic antagonism 
between it and the revolutionary industrial working class. There 
was no doubt, however, that it gradually had to destroy the 
Junkers economically, that it was the only propertied class which 
retained any prospect of a future. 

The petty bourgeoisie consisted first of all of remnants of the 
medieval craftsmen, who had been represented on a larger scale in 
backward Germany than in the rest of Western Europe; secondly, 
of the down-and-out bourgeois; and thirdly, of elements of the 
propertyless population who had risen to be small merchants. 
With the expansion of large-scale industry, the existence of the 
entire petty bourgeoisie lost the last remnants of stability; changes 
of occupation and periodic bankruptcies became the rule. This 
once so stable class which had been the nucleus of the German 
philistines fell from its previous contentment, docility, servility, 
piety and respectability into wild decadence and dissatisfaction 
with the fate allotted to it by God. The remnants of the craftsmen 
loudly demanded the restoration of guild privileges, some of the 
others became mildly democratic men of Progress,*”’ some even 
grew closer to the Social-Democrats and in some instances directly 
joined the working-class movement. 

Finally the workers. The agricultural workers, at least those in 
the east, still lived in semi-serfdom and could not be taken into 
account. On the other hand, Social-Democracy had made enor- 
mous progress among the urban workers and grew to the extent 
that large-scale industry proletarianised the mass of the people 
and thereby exacerbated the class antagonism between the 
capitalists and the workers. Even if the Social-Democratic workers 
were for the time being still divided into two parties fighting each 
other,*” since the publication of Marx’s Capital, the fundamental 
differences between them had nevertheless as good as disap- 
peared. Orthodox Lassalleanism, with its exclusive demand for 
“producer associations assisted by the state’, was gradually dying 
away and proved less and less capable of forming the nucleus of a 
Bonapartist state socialist workers’ party. The harm wrought in 
this respect by individual leaders was rectified by the common 
sense of the masses. The union of the two Social-Democratic 
tendencies, which was delayed almost exclusively because of 
questions of personalities, was certain to take place in the near 
future. But even during the split and despite it, the movement was 

The Role of Force in History 501 

strong enough to strike fear into the industrial bourgeoisie and to 
paralyse it in its struggle against the government, which was still 
independent of it; and after 1848 the German bourgeoisie never 
rid itself of the Red spectre again. 

The class structure underlay the party structure in parliament 
and in the provincial diets. The large landed estate owners and 
part of the peasantry formed the mass of the conservatives *”; the 
industrial bourgeoisie provided the Right wing of the bourgeois 
liberals—the National Liberals,*”* while the Left wing comprised 
the weakened democratic party or so-called Party of Progress, 
which consisted of petty bourgeois supported by a section of 
the bourgeoisie and the workers. Finally, the workers had their 
independent party, the Social-Democrats, which included also 
some petty bourgeois. 

A person in Bismarck’s position and with Bismarck’s past, 
having a certain understanding of the state of affairs, could not 
but realise that the Junkers, such as they were, were not a viable 
class, and that of all the propertied classes only the bourgeoisie 
could lay claim to a future, and that therefore (disregarding the 
working class, an understanding of whose historical mission we 
cannot expect of him) his new empire promised to be all the 
stabler, the more he succeeded in laying the groundwork for its 
gradual transition to a modern bourgeois state. Let us not expect 
of him what was impossible under the circumstances. An 
immediate transition to a parliamentary government with the 
decisive power vested in the Reichstag (as in the British House of 
Commons) was neither possible nor even advisable at that 
moment; Bismarck’s dictatorship in parliamentary forms must 
have seemed to him still necessary for the time being; and we do 
not in the least blame him for allowing it to survive for the 
moment, we only ask what good it was. And there can be hardly 
any doubt that paving the way for a system corresponding to the 
British constitution was the only way which offered the prospect of 
ensuring a sound basis and quiet internal development for the 
new empire. By leaving the larger part of the Junkers, who were 
beyond salvation anyway, to their inevitable doom, it still seemed 
possible to forge what remained of them with new elements into a 
class of independent big landowners, which would become only 
the ornamental élite of the bourgeoisie; a class to which the 
bourgeoisie, even at the height of its power, would have to grant 
state representation and with it the most lucrative positions and 
enormous influence. By granting the bourgeoisie political conces- 
sions, which anyway could not be withheld for any length of time 

34* 

(such at least should have been the argument from the standpoint 
of the propertied classes), by granting it these concessions 
gradually, and even in small and rare doses, the new empire 
would at least be steered onto a course which would enable it to 
catch up with the other, politically far more advanced West- 
European states, to shake off the last remnants of feudalism and 
philistine traditions which still held a firm grip on the bureaucra- 
cy, and, above all, to stand on its own feet by the time its by no 
means youthful founders departed this life. 

This was not even difficult. Neither the Junkers nor the 
bourgeoisie possessed even average energy. The Junkers had 
proved this in the past sixty years, during which the state had 
constantly done what was best for them despite the opposition of 
these Don Quixotes. The bourgeoisie, also made malleable by its 
long prehistory, was still licking the wounds left by the conflict; 
Bismarck’s successes since then had further broken its power of 
resistance, and fear of the dangerously growing working-class 
movement did the rest. Under these circumstances, it would not 
have been difficult for the man who had put the national 
aspirations of the bourgeoisie into practice to keep any pace he 
desired in implementing its political demands, which were in any 
case very modest on the whole. It was only necessary for him to be 
clear about the objective. 

From the point of view of the propertied classes, this was the 
only rational way. From the standpoint of the working class, it was 
obvious that it was already too late to set up bourgeois rule on a 
lasting basis. Large-scale industry, and with it the bourgeoisie and 
the proletariat, took shape in Germany at a time when the 
proletariat could enter the political scene as an independent force 
almost simultaneously with the bourgeoisie, that is, at a time when 
the struggle of the two classes has already begun, before the 
bourgeoisie has conquered exclusive or predominant political 
power. But even if the time for quiet and firmly founded rule by 
the bourgeoisie had already passed in Germany, it was still the best 
policy in 1870, in the interests of the propertied classes in general, 
to steer towards this bourgeois rule. For only in this way was it 
possible to abolish the abundant remnants of the times of decaying 
feudalism which continued to flourish in legislation and adminis- 
tration; only thus was it possible gradually to transplant all the 
achievements of the Great French Revolution to Germany, in 
short, to cut off Germany’s overlong old pigtail, and to place it 
deliberately and irrevocably on the road of modern development, 
to adapt its political system to its industrial development. When 

The Role of Force in History 503 

ultimately the unavoidable struggle between the bourgeoisie and 
the proletariat set in, it would at least proceed under normal 
circumstances, in which everyone would realise what was at stake, 
and not in the state of disorder, obscurity, conflicting interests and 
perplexity we saw in Germany in 1848. The only difference being 
that this time the perplexity would be exclusively on the side 
of the propertied classes; the working class knows what it 
wants. 

As things stood in Germany in 1871, a man like Bismarck was 
indeed compelled to pursue a policy of manoeuvring between the 
various classes. And to that extent he is not open to reproach. It is 
only a question of what aim that policy pursued. If, irrespective of 
the pace, it was aimed consciously and resolutely at the ultimate 
rule of the bourgeoisie, it was in harmony with historical 
development as far as this could be possible at all from the 
standpoint of the propertied classes. If it aimed at preserving the 
old Prussian state, at gradually Prussianising Germany, it was 
reactionary and doomed to ultimate failure. But if it only pursued 
the aim of preserving Bismarck’s rule, it was Bonapartist and 
bound to meet the same end as all Bonapartism. 

The immediate task was the imperial constitution. The material 
available was the constitution of the North German Confederation, 
on the one hand, and the treaties with the South German states,*” 
on the other. The factors which were to help Bismarck draw up 
the imperial constitution were, on the one hand, the dynasties 
represented in the Federal Council 406 and, on the other, the 
people represented in the Reichstag. The North German constitu- 
tion and treaties limited the claims of the dynasties. The people, 
on the other hand, were entitled to a considerable increase in their 
share of political power. They had won independence from 
foreign interference and unification—as far as there could be any 
talk of unification—on the battlefield; they were also above all 
called upon to decide what use this independence was to be put to, 
how this unification would be implemented in detail and how it 
would be used. And even if the people recognised the legal 
grounds underlying the North German constitution and treaties, 
that in no way prevented them from being granted a greater share 
of power in the new constitution than they had in the old one. 
The Reichstag was the only body which in reality represented the 

new “unity”. The greater the voice of the Reichstag and the freer 
the imperial constitution as compared with the constitutions of the 
individual provinces, the more the new Empire would have to fuse 
into one, the more the Bavarian, Saxon and Prussian would have 
to dissolve into the German. 

To anyone who could see further than his nose this should have 
been obvious. But Bismarck held quite a different opinion. On the 
contrary, he used the patriotic frenzy unleashed after the war 
precisely to persuade the majority in the Reichstag to renounce 
not only an extension but even a clear definition of the rights of 
the people and to confine itself to a simple reproduction in the 
imperial constitution of the legal basis underlying the North 
German constitution and the treaties. All attempts of the small 
parties to give expression in it to the freedoms of the people were 
dismissed, including even the proposal of the Catholic Centre to 
incorporate in it the articles of the Prussian constitution guarantee- 
ing the freedom of the press, of assembly and association and the 
independence of the Church. The Prussian constitution, twice and 
thrice pruned as it was, was still more liberal than the imperial 
constitution. Taxes were voted not yearly, but once and for all, 
“by law”, so that any refusal of taxes by the Reichstag was out of 
the question. Thus there was applied to Germany the Prussian 
doctrine, inconceivable to the non-German constitutional world, 
according to which the elected assembly had only the right on 
paper to refuse expenditure, while the government pocketed the 
revenue in hard cash. While the Reichstag was thus robbed of the 
most effective means of power and reduced to the humble 
position of the Prussian chamber smashed up by the revisions of 
1849 and 1850, by Manteuffelism, by conflict and by Sadowa,*”’ 
the Federal Council, in effect, enjoyed full power, which the old 
Federal Diet possessed nominally, and enjoyed it in reality, for it 
had been freed of the fetters that paralysed the Federal Diet. The 
Federal Council had a decisive voice not only in legislation, 
alongside the Reichstag; it was also the supreme administrative 
body, inasmuch as it issued instructions on the implementation of 
imperial laws, and in addition decides “on shortcomings, which 
emerge during the implementation of imperial laws...”, i.e., on 
shortcomings, which in other civilised countries can be remedied 
only by a new law (Article 7, Para. 3, which greatly resembles a 
legal trap).* 

Thus, Bismarck sought his main support not in the Reichstag, 

a Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs in Reichs-Gesetzblatt, 1871, p. 68.— Ed. 

The Role of Force in History 505 

which represented national union, but in the Federal Council, 
which represented particularistic disunion. He lacked the cour- 
age—he, who set himself up as champion of the national idea—to 
place himself genuinely at the head of the nation or of its 
representatives; democracy was to serve him and not he democra- 
cy; rather than rely on the people, he relied on underhand 
dealings behind the scenes, on his ability to scrape together a 
majority, even if a refractory one, in the Federal Council by means 
of diplomacy, the stick and the carrot. The pettiness of his 
conception, the baseness of his view point that is revealed to us 
here is quite in keeping with the man’s character as we have got to 
know him so far. Yet, it is surprising that his great successes were 
unable to make him rise above himself even for a moment. 

However, in the prevailing situation, the point was to provide a 
single firm pivot for the entire imperial constitution, namely, the 
imperial chancellor. The Federal Council had to be put in a 
position in which there could be no other responsible executive 
authority than that of the imperial chancellor and which would 
exclude the admissibility of responsible imperial ministers. Indeed, 
every attempt to normalise the imperial administration by setting 
up a responsible ministry was regarded as an encroachment upon 
the rights of the Federal Council and encountered insurmountable 
resistance. As was soon discovered, the constitution was “made to 
measure” for Bismarck. It was a further step on the road to his 
absolute personal dictatorship by balancing the parties in the 
Reichstag and the particularist states in the Federal Council—a 
further step on the road to Bonapartism. 

By the way, it cannot be said that the new imperial constitu- 
tion—except for certain concessions to Bavaria and Wurttem- 
berg—was a direct step back. But that is the best that can be said 
of it. The economic requirements of the bourgeoisie were in 
the main satisfied, its political claims—inasmuch as it still 
made any—encountered the same obstructions as during the con- 
flict. 

Inasmuch as it still made political claims! For it cannot be 
denied that with the National Liberals these claims had shrunk to 
a very modest size and continued to shrink with every passing day. 
These gentlemen, far from demanding that Bismarck should 
facilitate their collaboration with himself, were much more 
concerned with doing his will wherever possible, and quite often 
also where it was impossible, or should have been impossible. : 
Bismarck despised them and no one can blame him for that—but 
were his Junkers one iota better or braver? 

The next field in which unity of the Empire had to be 
introduced, the monetary system, was normalised by the currency 
and banking laws passed between 1873 and 1875. The introduc- 
tion of gold currency was a considerable step forward; but it was 
introduced only hesitantly and waveringly and is not firmly 
established even today. The monetary system adopted—the third 
of a taler under the name of “mark”, a unit with a decimal 
division—had been suggested by von Soetbeer at the close of the 
thirties; the actual unit was the gold twenty-mark piece. By a 
barely noticeable change in value it could have been made 
absolutely equivalent either to the British sovereign, or the gold 
twenty-five franc coin, or the gold U.S. five-dollar piece, and 
linked to one of the three great currency systems on the world 
market. Preference was given to a separate currency system, 
thereby needlessly complicating trade and exchange calculations. 
The laws on imperial treasury notes and banks*” limited the 
fraudulent transactions in securities of small states and their banks 
and, taking into consideration the crash which had in the 
meantime occurred, they were marked by a definite timidity, 
which well became Germany, still inexperienced in this field. But 
here, too, the economic interests of the bourgeoisie were on the 
whole adequately looked after. 

Finally there came an agreement on uniform laws. The 
resistance of the central German states to the extension of imperial 
competency to the material civil law was overcome, but the civil 
code is still in the making, while the penal code, criminal and civil 
procedural law, trade laws, the regulations concerning insolvency 
and the judicial system have been unified everywhere. The 
abolition of the motley formal and material legal standards in 
force in the small states was in itself an urgent requirement for 
ongoing bourgeois development, and this abolition is the chief 
merit of the new laws—a far greater one than their content. 

The English jurist relies on a legal heritage that has preser- 
ved a good part of the old German freedoms through the Middle 
Ages, that does not know the police state, which was nipped in the 
bud by the two revolutions of the 17th century and has attained 
its apex in two centuries of uninterrupted development of civic 
freedom. The French jurist relies on the Great Revolution, which, 
after the total destruction of feudalism and absolutist police 
tyranny, translated the economic conditions of life in the newly 
created modern society into the language of legal standards in the 
classical code of law proclaimed by Napoleon. But on what legal 
basis do our German jurists rely? Nothing but the several-century- 

The Role of Force in History 507 

long process of disintegration of medieval survivals, a passive 
process mostly spurred on by blows from the outside, and not 
complete to this day; an economically backward society, which the 
feudal] Junker and the guild master haunt as ghosts looking for a 
new body; a legal order in which police tyranny—even though the 
arbitrary justice of the princes disappeared in 1848—1is daily 
tearing new holes. The fathers of the new imperial legal codes 
have come from this worst of all bad schools, and their work is 
quite in keeping with it. Apart from the purely legal aspect, 
political freedom has fared pretty badly in these codes of law. If 
the Schdffen courts provide the bourgeoisie and petty 
bourgeoisie with a means of collaborating in repressing the 
working class, the state insures itself as much as possible against 
the danger of renewed bourgeois opposition by curtailing the 
rights of the jury. The political paragraphs of the penal code are 
frequently enough as vague and elastic as if they were made to 
measure for the present imperial court, and the latter for them. 
That the new legal codes are a step forward in comparison with 
Prussian common law *!°—today even Stoecker would be unable to 
concoct something as horrible as that code, even if he were to 
allow himself to be cut back. But the provinces which had until 
now lived under French law feel very acutely the difference 
between the blurred copy and the classic original. It was the 
defection of the National Liberals from their programme that 
made possible this strengthening of state power at the expense of 
civic freedoms, this first actual retrogression. 

Mention should also be made of the imperial press law.*’' The 
penal code had essentially already regulated the material law 
_ pertaining to it; the elaboration of identical formal stipulations for 
the whole Empire and the abolition of the security and stamp 
duties existing here and there were therefore the main content of 
the law and at the same time the only progress it achieved. 

To enable Prussia once again to prove itself a model state, 
so-called self-government was introduced there. The aim was to 
abolish the most objectionable survivals of feudalism and yet, 
actually, to leave, as far as possible, everything as before. The 
District Ordinance*’? served this purpose. The manorial police 
power of the Junkers had become an anachronism. In name—as a 
feudal privilege—it was abolished, but actually it was reinstituted 
by the establishment of independent rural districts [Gutsbezirke], 
within which the landowner either himself acts as rural superin- 
tendent [Gutsvorsteher] with the powers of the head of the rural 
community [Gemetindevorsteher] or appoints this rural superinten- 

dent, and was also reinstituted by transferring the entire police 
power and police jurisdiction of the administrative district 
[Amtsbezirk] to a district head [Amtsvorsteher], a position held in 
rural areas almost exclusively by big landowners, of course, who in 
this way got the rural community under their thumb. The feudal 
privileges of individuals were abolished, but the absolute power 
connected with these privileges was handed over to the entire 
class. By similar conjuring the English big landowners turned into 
justices of the peace and the masters of the rural administration, 
the police and the lower courts of justice and thereby secured for 
themselves under a new, modernised title further enjoyment of all 
essential positions of authority, which they could not continue to 
hold under the old feudal form. That, however, is the only 
similarity between the English and the German “self-government”. 
I should like to see the British Minister who would dare to 
propose in Parliament that elected local officials should be 
approved and that in case an undesired person is elected he be 
forcibly replaced by an appointee of the state, to propose that 
there be civil servants vested with the authority of the Prussian 
Landrats, heads of administrative districts and Oberprdsidents, to 
propose that the administrative bodies of the state be given the 
right provided for in the District Ordinance to intervene in the 
internal affairs of communities, small administrative units and 
districts and to exclude recourse to law, a thing unheard of in 
English-speaking countries and in English law, but which we see 
on almost every page of the District Ordinance. And while the 

district diets [Kreistag] as well as the provincial diets are still — 
composed in the old feudal manner of representatives of the three 
estates: the big landowners, towns and rural communities, in 
England even a highly conservative ministry moves a _ bill 
transferring the whole county administration to authorities 
elected by almost universal suffrage.*”” 

The draft of the District Ordinance for the six Eastern 
provinces (1871) was the first indication that Bismarck did not 
even think of allowing Prussia to dissolve into Germany, but that, 
on the contrary, he sought to further strengthen these six 
provinces—the stronghold of the old Prussianism. Under changed 
names, the Junkers retained all essential positions of power, while 
the helots of Germany, the rural workers of these areas—such as 
farmhands and day labourers—remained in their former de facto 
serfdom and were admitted to only two public functions: to 
become soldiers and to serve the Junkers as voting stock during 
the elections to the Reichstag. The service Bismarck rendered 

The Role of Force in History 509 

thereby to the revolutionary socialist party is indescribable and 
deserves the warmest gratitude. 

What can be said about the mindlessness of the Junker 
gentlemen, who, like spoiled children, kicked against the District 
Ordinance which had been drawn up exclusively in their interest, 
in the interest of perpetuating their feudal privileges, under a 
somewhat modernised name? The Prussian House of Lords, or, to 
be more exact, of Junkers, at first rejected the draft, which had 
already been delayed for a whole year, and adopted it only after 
24 new “Lords” had been nominated peers. Once again the 
Prussian Junkers proved that they were petty, obdurate, incorrigi- 
ble reactionaries, unable to form the nucleus of a large indepen- 
dent party which could play an historical role in the life of the 
nation, as the English big landowners actually do. Thereby they 
proved their complete lack of sense; Bismarck had only to reveal 
to the world their equally complete lack of character, and a little 
pressure, pertinently applied, would transform them into a 
Bismarck Party sans phrase. 

The Kulturkampf** was to serve this purpose. 

The implementation of the Prussian-German imperial plan 
should have evoked a counterblow—the amalgamation into a 
single party of all anti-Prussian elements, which had previously 
relied on separate development. These motley elements found a 
common banner in Ultramontanism.*’” The rebellion of sound 
common sense even among the numerous orthodox Catholics 
against the new dogma of Papal infallibility, on the one hand, the 
destruction of the Papal States, and the so-called imprisonment of 
the Pope in Rome, on the other, forced all the pugnacious 
forces of Catholicism to rally closer together. Thus even during 
the war, in the autumn of 1870, the specifically Catholic Party of 
the Centre was formed in the Prussian Provincial Diet; in the first 
German Reichstag of 1871 it had only 57 seats, but it grew 
stronger with every new election until it had over 100 representa- 
tives. It was composed of very heterogeneous elements. In Prussia 
its main strength consisted of the Rhenish small peasants, who still 
regarded themselves as ‘Prussians under duress”, then of the 
Catholic big landowners and peasants of the Westphalian bishop- 
rics of Münster and Paderborn, and of the Catholic Silesians. The 
second great contingent was provided by the South German 
Catholics, notably the Bavarians. It was not so much the Catholic 
religion that formed the Centre Party’s strength, but the fact that 
it represented the antipathies of the popular masses against 
everything specifically Prussian, now laying claim to domination 

over Germany. These antipathies were particularly strong in the 
Catholic areas; and then there were sympathies with Austria, now 
expelled from Germany. In harmony with these two popular 
trends, the Centre was decidedly particularist and federalist. 

This essentially anti-Prussian character of the Centre was 
immediately recognised by the other small Reichstag factions, 
which were anti-Prussian for local reasons, not, as the Social- 
Democrats, for national and general reasons. Not only the Catholic 
Poles and Alsatians, but even the Protestant Guelphs*’’ allied 
themselves closely with the Centre. And even though the 
bourgeois liberal factions could never fully understand the actual 
character of the so-called Ultramontanes, they did have an inkling 
of the true state of affairs when they styled the Centre 
“unpatriotic” and “hostile to the Empire’”’....* 

a The manuscript breaks off here.— Ed.