The Suppression of the Clubs in Stuttgart and Heidelberg

Cologne, July 19.  
No. 50, July 20, 1848  
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

My Germany drank itself a pigtail,  
And you, you believed in the toasts;  
You believed every pipe-bowl  
And its black-red-golden tassels!  

And this, honest German, is in fact once again your fate. You think you have made a revolution? Deception! — You think you have finished with the police state? Deception! — You believe you possess the right of free association, freedom of the press, arming of the people and other fine words which were called out to you across the March barricades? Deception, nothing but deception!  

Yet when the sweet intoxication fled,  
My precious friend, you stood aghast!  

Aghast at your indirectly-elected so-called National Assemblies, aghast at the renewed expulsions of German citizens from German towns, aghast at the sabre tyranny in Mainz, Trier, Aachen, Mannheim, Ulm, Prague, aghast at the arrests and political trials in Berlin, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Breslau, etc.  

But one thing remained to you, honest German, the clubs! You could go to the clubs and complain to the public about the political swindles of the last months; you could pour out your burdened heart before like-minded people, and find consolation in the words of like-minded, equally oppressed patriots!  

But now even that has come to an end. The clubs are incompatible with the existence of “order”. So that “confidence may return” it is urgently necessary that the subversive doings of the clubs be put a stop to.  

We related yesterday how the Württemberg government by royal ordinance has outrightly banned the democratic district association in Stuttgart. They no longer take the trouble to bring the club leaders before a court, they resort to the old police measures. Indeed, Messrs Harpprecht, Duvernoy and Maucler, who countersigned this ordinance, go even further — they prescribe extra-legal penalties against violators of the ban, penalties extending up to one year’s imprisonment; they make penal laws, and to boot exceptional penal laws without the Chambers, simply “by virtue of § 89 of the Constitution”!  

No better in Baden. We report today the banning of the democratic students’ association in Heidelberg. Here the right of association is not, in general, so openly contested; it is denied only to the students, by virtue of the old, long-abolished exceptional laws of the Bundestag, and they are threatened with the penalties prescribed in these invalid laws.  

We must now expect that the clubs will shortly be suppressed among us as well.  

So that the governments, however, can undertake such measures with complete safety, without becoming odious to public opinion, we have a National Assembly in Frankfurt. This Assembly will naturally pass over such police measures just as easily to the order of the day as it did the Mainz revolution.  

Therefore, not in order to achieve anything in the Assembly, but solely to force the majority of the Assembly once more to proclaim their alliance with reaction before all Germany — for this reason we demand that the deputies of the extreme Left in Frankfurt move:  

That the authors of these measures, and in particular Messrs Harpprecht, Duvernoy, Maucler and Mathy, be impeached for violation of the fundamental rights of the German people.