The Cologne Newspaper on the June Revolution

** Cologne, 30 June. Let the reader peruse the following passages from the “London Telegraph” and compare them with what the German liberals, especially Herr Brüggemann-Dumont et Wolfers, have been chattering together about the Paris June Revolution, and he will have to admit that the English bourgeois, quite apart from many other merits, at least have this advantage over the German philistines: that they judge great events from the bourgeois standpoint, to be sure, but in all other respects like men, and not like street urchins.

The “Telegraph” says in its No. 122: “...And here we shall be expected to declare ourselves as to the origin and consequences of this terrible bloodshed. From the outset it presents itself as a full-scale battle between two classes – (An empire for such a thought, inwardly cries the exalted “Kölnische” and its “Wolfers”.) It is an insurrection of the workers against the government which they themselves have created and against the class by which that government is now supported. How the conflict directly arose is less easy to set forth than to indicate its enduring and ever-present causes. The February Revolution was made chiefly by the working classes, and it was openly said that it had been made to their advantage. It is not so much a political as a social revolution. The masses of discontented workers did not step into the world at a single bound and suddenly endowed with all the qualities of the soldier. No more is their distress and their discontent merely the fruit of the events of the last four months. Only on Monday we cited the, perhaps exaggerated, statements of M. Leroux, who, without meeting with contradiction, stated in the National Assembly that there are 8,000,000 beggars and 4,000,000 workers without any secure earnings in France. He specifically designated the period before the Revolution and complained that precisely since the Revolution nothing at all has been done to combat this terrible disease. The theories of socialism and communism that have matured in France and now exercise such a great power over public opinion grew out of the frightfully oppressed situation in which the great mass of the people found itself under Louis Philippe’s government. The main point that must not be lost sight of is the wretched situation of the mass; this situation is the actual, living cause of the Revolution. In the National Assembly it was soon resolved to deprive the workers of those advantages which had been so hastily and unthinkingly conceded to them by the politicians of the Revolution. In social and even in political respects a violent reaction was clearly in evidence. The force, supported by a large part of France, was summoned to set aside those people from whom the said force had received its existence. First flattered and fed, then divided and threatened with death by starvation, dragged off to the provinces where all their labour associations were destroyed, and finally the plan devised for the annihilation of their power – can anyone be surprised at the irritation of the workers? That they believed they could bring about a second, more successful revolution can truly surprise nobody. And their prospects of success against the armed power of the government appeared, after the duration of the resistance hitherto, greater than most people imagined. From this, and from the fact that no political leaders have been discovered among the people, as well as from the fact that the workers sent out of Paris turned back again immediately behind the barriers, it emerges that the insurrection was the consequence of a universal indignation among the working class, and not the work of political agents. They hold that their interest has once again been betrayed by their own government. They have now, as in February, taken up arms to struggle against the terrible misery of which they have already been the victims for so long.

The present struggle is only a continuation of the February Revolution. It is a continuation of the struggle going on throughout Europe for a more just distribution of the annual products of labour. In Paris it will now probably be suppressed; for the force which the new authority has inherited from the old has obviously the upper hand. Yet even if it is successfully suppressed, it will renew itself again and again until the government either brings about a more just distribution of the annual products of labour, or, in the impossibility of doing this, desists from all such attempts and leaves the decision to the free competition of the market... The real battle is being fought for adequate means of subsistence. The middle class itself has been robbed of its means of existence by those politicians who took over the direction of the Revolution. The middle class has become more barbarous than the workers. The most violent passions are inflamed on both sides into ruinous activity. They cast all fraternity aside and deliver murderous battles to each other. The ignorant, if not malevolent, government, which seems to have no conception of its duty in this extraordinary crisis, first goaded the workers against the middle class and is now assisting the latter in wiping from the earth the deceived, betrayed and now infuriated workers. The blame for this great calamity must not strike the principle of the Revolution, not the resolve to strike out against misery and oppression. It must rather be directed against those who, in their political ignorance, aggravated the conditions of distress inherited from Louis Philippe.”

Thus writes a London bourgeois paper on the June revolution, a paper that upholds the principles of a Cobden, Bright, etc., which, after the Times and the Northern Star, the two despots of the English press, as the Manchester Guardian says, is the most widely read paper in England. Compare No. 181 of the Kölnische Zeitung! This remarkable paper transforms the struggle between two classes into the struggle between the honest and the scoundrels! Honest paper! As if these epithets were not mutually hurled back by the two classes. It is the same paper that, at the first rumour of the June insurrection, confessed its total ignorance of the character of the insurrection, then had to have it written to it from Paris that this was a matter of an important social revolution whose compass was not exhausted by a defeat, and finally, invigorated once more by a defeat of the workers, sees nothing in the insurrection but the struggle of “the immense majority” against a “savage rabble” of “cannibals, robbers and murderers.”

What was the Roman slave war? A war between the honest and the cannibals! Herr Wolfers will write Roman history and Herr Dumont-Brüggemann will enlighten the workers, the “unfortunates”, about their true rights and duties, “initiate them into the science that leads to order, that forms the true citizen!” Long live the science of Dumont-Brüggemann-Wolfers, the secret science! – An example of this secret science: The honourable triumvirate relates to its credulous readers over two numbers that General Cavaignac intends to mine the quarter of St. Antoine. The quarter of St. Antoine happens to be somewhat larger than the good city of Cologne. But the scientific triumvirate, which we recommend to the German National Assembly for the governance of Germany, the triumvirate Dumont-Brüggemann-Wolfers, triumphs over this difficulty; it understands how to blow the city of Cologne into the air with a single mine! To its notions of the mine that blows the Faubourg St. Antoine into the air corresponds its notion of the subterranean forces which mine modern society and made the Paris of June tremble and spew forth blood-lava from its revolutionary crater. But excellent triumvirate! Great Dumont-Brüggemann-Wolfers, grandeurs proclaimed by the world of advertisements! Advertisement Cavaignacs! We have humbly bowed our head, bowed before the greatest historical crisis that has ever burst forth: before the class struggle of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. We did not make the fact, we established it. We established that one of the classes is the defeated one, as Cavaignac himself says. At the grave of the defeated we called Woe! to the victors, and Cavaignac himself recoils from his historical responsibility! And the National Assembly accuses each of its members of cowardice who does not openly take upon himself the terrible historical responsibility. Did we open the book of the Sibyl for the Germans only so that they might burn it? When we depict the struggle of the Chartists and the English bourgeoisie, do we call upon the Germans to become Englishmen?

But Germany, ungrateful Germany, you are acquainted indeed with the “Kölnische Zeitung” and its advertisements; but you do not know the greatest of your men, not your Wolfers, not your Brüggemann, not your Dumont! How much sweat of the brain, sweat of the brow, blood-sweat has been shed in the struggle of classes, in the struggle of freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, feudal lord and bondman, capitalist and worker! But only because there was no Kölnische Zeitung. But, most valiant triumvirate, when modern society produces “malefactors”, “cannibals”, “murderers”, “plunderers”, in such masses, with such energy, that their rising makes the foundations of official society tremble, what a society! What an anarchy arranged alphabetically! And you think you will abolish the conflict, you think you have elevated the actors, the spectators of the terrible drama, by dragging them down into the Kotzebue-esque footman’s tragedy!

Among the National Guards of the Faubourg St. Antoine, St. Jacques, St. Marceau there were only 50 who obeyed the call of the burgher’s trumpet – so reports the Paris Moniteur, the State paper, the paper of Louis XVI, of Robespierre, of Louis Philippe and of Marrast-Cavaignac! Nothing simpler for the science that “forms” man into the true citizen! The three largest faubourgs of Paris, the three most industrial faubourgs, whose patterns made the muslins of Dacca and the velvet of Spitalfields pale and char, are said to be inhabited by “cannibals”, “plunderers”, “robbers”, “malefactors”. So says Wolfers!

And Wolfers is an honourable man! He has brought the scoundrels to honour by making them deliver greater battles and works of art, perform more heroic deeds than those of Charles X, Louis Philippe, Napoleon and the spinner of Dacca and Spitalfields. We were just speaking of the London Telegraph. Yesterday our readers heard Émile Girardin. The working class, he says, after having given its debtor, the February Revolution, a month’s grace beyond the due date, it, the creditor, knocked with the musket, with the barricade, with its own body at the house of the debtor! But Émile Girardin! What is he? No anarchist! God forbid! But he is a republican of the following day, a republican of the morning (républicain du lendemain), and the “Kölnische Zeitung”, a Wolfers, a Dumont, a Brüggemann, they are all republicans of the day before yesterday, republicans before the republic, republicans of the evening (républicains de la veille)! Can Émile Girardin compare with Dumont? When the Cologne woman adds the malicious joy of deportation, of hanging, to the deported, to the hanged, admire her patriotism! She only wants to prove to the world, the unbelieving, stock-blind German world, that the republic is mightier than the monarchy, that the republican National Assembly was able to do with Cavaignac and Marrast what the constitutional Chamber of Deputies was not able to do with Thiers and Bugeaud! Vive la république! Long live the republic! cries the Spartan, the Cologne woman, over the bleeding, groaning, burning Paris. The crypto-republican woman! That is why she is suspected of cowardice, of lack of character, by a Gervinus, by an Augsburg woman! The immaculate one! The Cologne Charlotte Corday!

Note well, no Paris paper, not the Moniteur, not the Débats, not the National speak of “cannibals”, of “plunderers”, of “robbers”, of “murderers”. There is only one paper – the paper of Thiers, the man whose immorality Jacobus Venedey castigated in the “Cologne Newspaper”, the man against whom the Cologne woman cried at the top of her voice: “They shall not have him, The free German Rhine,” it is the paper of Thiers, the Constitutionnel, from which the Belgian “Indépendance” draws and the Rhenish science, incarnate in Dumont-Brüggemann-Wolfers!

And now examine with some criticism these scandalous anecdotes with which the “Kölnische Zeitung” brands the crushed ones – the same newspaper that at the outbreak of the struggle declared it was completely ignorant as to its character, that during the struggle declared it was an “important social revolution”, and which, after the struggle, turns it into a boxing-match between gendarmes and scoundrels.

They plundered! But what? Arms, ammunition, bandaging material and the most necessary provisions. On the shutters the scoundrels wrote: “Mort aux Voleurs!” Death to the scoundrels!

They “murdered like cannibals!” The cannibals – they did not tamely allow the National Guards who, behind the line troops, broke into the barricades to smash in the skulls of their wounded, to shoot their overwhelmed, to dagger their women. The cannibals who, in a war of annihilation, as a French bourgeois paper says, annihilated! They burned? And yet the only incendiary torch which they flung against the legitimate Congreve rockets of Cavaignac in the 8th arrondissement is only a poetic, an invented torch, as the Moniteur attests. “Some”, says Wolfers, “held high the programme of Barbès, Blanqui and Sobrier, others cheered Napoleon or Henry V.”

And the chaste “Cologne woman”, who goes pregnant with neither Napoleonides nor Blanquis, she declared already on the second day of the insurrection that “the fight was being waged in the name of the red republic”. What, then, is she babbling about pretenders! But she is, as already indicated, an inveterate crypto-republican and a female Robespierre – she scents pretenders everywhere and her morality trembles before the pretenders!

“Almost all were provided with money, and several with considerable sums.”

There were 30 to 40,000 workers, and “almost all were provided with money” in this time of distress and business stagnation! The money was presumably so scarce because the workers had hidden it! The Paris Moniteur has published with the greatest conscientiousness all cases in which money was established among the insurgents. These cases were confined to twenty at the most. The various papers and correspondents repeat these cases and give the sums differently. The “Kölnische Zeitung”, with its proven critical tact, taking these various accounts of the twenty cases as so many different cases and adding those circulating as rumours, arrives, perhaps, at 200 in the best case. And that entitles it to say that almost all, 30-40,000, were provided with money! All that has been established so far is that legitimist, Bonapartist and perhaps Philippist emissaries, provided with money, had mingled and intended to mingle among the barricade fighters. M. Payer, the highly conservative member of the National Assembly, who spent 12 hours as a prisoner among the insurgents, declares: The majority were workers driven to despair by four months of misery and they had said: Better to die by a bullet than of hunger!

“Many, very many dead”, Wolfers assures us, “bore the fateful sign with which society brands crime.” This is one of the vile lies, the shameful calumnies, the infamies that Lamennais, the opponent of the insurgents, the man of the National, in his “Peuple constituant”, that the ever chivalrous legitimitist La Rochejaquelein in the National Assembly brands. The whole lie rests on the completely unauthenticated, unconfirmed by the Moniteur, assertion of one press agency that 11 corpses had been found branded with T. F. And in which revolution were these 11 corpses not found? And which revolution will not brand 11 times 100 with this sign?

Note well, the journals, the proclamations, the illuminations of the victors testify that they starved, goaded to despair, spitted, fusilladed, walled in alive, deported, and desecrated corpses. And against the vanquished only anecdotes, and only anecdotes related by the Constitutionnel, reprinted by the “Indépendance”, translated into German by the “Kölnische”! There is no greater insult to truth than to wish to prove it by an anecdote, says – Hegel.

In front of the houses of Paris the women sit and pluck lint for the wounded, even for the wounded insurgents. The editors of the Kölnische Zeitung pour sulphuric acid into their wounds.

They have denounced us to the bourgeois police. We, in return, recommend the workers, the “unfortunates”, to get themselves “enlightened about their true rights and duties, to let themselves be initiated into the science which leads to order, which forms the true citizen” – by the immortal triumvirate – by Dumont-Brüggemann-Wolfers.