First Deed of the German National Assembly at Frankfurt

** Cologne. The German National Assembly has finally risen! **

No. 23, June 23, 1848  
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

It has finally passed a resolution of immediate practical effect; it has intervened in the Austro-Italian war.

And how has it intervened? Has it proclaimed the independence of Italy? Has it sent a courier to Vienna with orders that Radetzky and Welden should immediately withdraw behind the Isonzo? Has it issued an address of congratulation to the Milanese provisional government?

By no means! It has declared that it will regard any attack on Trieste as a casus belli.

That is to say: The German National Assembly, in cordial agreement with the Federal Diet, permits the Austrians to commit the most outrageous brutalities in Italy, to plunder, to murder, to hurl incendiary rockets into every town, every village (see under Italy), and then to withdraw in safety onto neutral German federal territory! It permits the Austrians at any moment to inundate Lombardy with Croats and pandours from German soil; but it wants to forbid the Italians to pursue the defeated Austrians into their hiding-places! It permits the Austrians to blockade Venice and the mouths of the Piave, the Brenta, the Tagliamento from Trieste; but any act of hostility against Trieste is forbidden to the Italians!

The German National Assembly could not have behaved more cowardly than it has done by this resolution. It has not the courage openly to sanction the Italian war. Still less has it the courage to forbid the Austrian government to wage war. In this embarrassment it adopts – and what is more, by acclamation, in order to drown its secret fear in loud clamour – the resolution on Trieste, which neither approves nor disapproves of the war against the Italian revolution in form, but in substance approves it.

This resolution is an indirect declaration of war on Italy, and for a nation of 40 millions like the German nation, therefore doubly disgraceful.

The resolution of the Frankfurt Assembly will arouse a storm of indignation throughout Italy. If the Italians still have any pride and energy left, they will reply by bombarding Trieste and by marching on the Brenner.

But the Frankfurt Assembly thinks, and the French people acts. Venice has called for French assistance; after this resolution the French will probably soon cross the Alps, and then it will not be long before we have them on the Rhine.

A deputy has reproached the Frankfurt Assembly for holding celebrations. On the contrary. It has already worked so much that we have a war in the north and one in the south, and a war in the west and one in the east have become inevitable. We shall find ourselves in the fortunate position of having to fight the Tsar and the French Republic, reaction and revolution, at the same time. The Assembly has arranged that Russian and French, Danish and Italian soldiers will rendezvous in Frankfurt’s St. Paul’s Church. And they say the Assembly is celebrating?