Herr Müller – Radetzky’s Chicaneries against Tessin – The Federal Council – Lohbauer

Bern, 8 January. The Neapolitan government, increasingly worried at the non-arrival of its Swiss recruits, has now sent one of its Swiss staff officers, Herr Tobias Müller, here to confer with the Federal Council on a change in the recruits’ travel route, since the contractual port of embarkation, Genoa, is blockaded. This Herr Müller is excellently suited to such a mission. Not only has he fought against freedom in Italy for many years; as early as 1831 he took up arms against the revolution in his native region (Freiburg). Radetzky, who knows his men, received him with distinction, embraced him before his general staff, and praised him and the Swiss in Naples in general most glowingly for their “loyalty to their king” (!) and for their bravery in the service of their “king”. However, Herr Müller will probably encounter difficulties; even the liberalism reigning in the Federal Council is no friend of military capitulations, any more than the liberal governments of Bern and Lucerne are.

While Radetzky fraternises with the Swiss in Naples, his chicaneries against Tessin are constantly beginning anew. He has denounced to the government there that Mazzini is still hiding in the canton, and has even specified his hiding-place. Furthermore, he complains that arms are continually being smuggled into Lombardy. The government resolved to investigate the first point and, if Mazzini really was back in the canton, to expel him; on the second point it proceeded to the order of the day, since it was not its business to serve the Austrians as border guards. Radetzky, moreover, has threatened that, if the arms smuggling does not cease, he will have the blockade reimposed.

Herr Müller – Radetzky’s Chicaneries against Tessin

The Federal Council is occupying itself with the draft legislation to be laid before the next Federal Assembly. These include the customs law, the postal organisation, proposals for military organisation, etc. It must be admitted: while the highly laudable Frankfurt Assembly, in its exuberant impotence and impotent exuberance, brings to light nothing but its own misery, the Swiss federal authorities are quietly carrying through one piece of bourgeois centralisation after another. A mass of centralising laws will be presented to the councils in March, deliberated and adopted in May and June, and in force by June. For small, detailed reforms of this kind, the currently ruling liberal generation of Swiss politicians (statesmen one certainly cannot call them) have an undeniable dexterity. In a few years the centralisation of Switzerland will be complete, so far as the constitution permits, and then this constitution itself will become a fetter on the country’s further development and the one and indivisible republic will become a necessity. All this on the – impossible – assumption that the European storm which is now brewing leaves Switzerland as neutral as the year 1848 did.

But of course, what nation, in a time of revolutions such as the present, strives for nothing higher than the abolition of cantonal customs, cantonal posts and other cantonal institutions which have long, long since become an oppressive burden! What nation, in the midst of the birth-pangs of a new historical epoch, sets its highest goal in an improved edition of the historically inherited federal republic and in the first beginnings of bourgeois centralisation already rendered necessary by the Sonderbund war! What petty quidnuncery in the midst of the most grandiose European movement!

Incidentally, the Federal Council has taken a most peculiar step. It has recalled the well-known Herr Lohbauer from Berlin as a professor of military sciences. Herr Lohbauer, refugee of 1830, radical, later renegade, was, as is well known, called to Berlin by the Eichhorn coterie in the 1840s, where he collaborated on the Staatszeitung, the Janus and other ultra-reactionary and pietist organs. Herr Lohbauer is, if we are not greatly mistaken, the author of that lackey’s kick in the feuilleton of the Staatszeitung which, after his letter to His Majesty, was used to speed Herwegh out of the royal states. Herr Lohbauer was never a soldier, and yet he is to lecture on military sciences here. What that is supposed to mean, only Herr Ochsenbein, who summoned him, can understand.

In most cantons the grand councils are now assembled and are wrangling over the most purely local interests. That of Zurich has elected our friend Dr. Alcibiades Escher as mayor (id est head of the executive power). The grand council of Bern meets on the 15th.