[New-York Daily Tribune, No. 3594, October 23, 1852] 

While the South and West of Germany was in open insurrection, 
and while it took the Governments from the first opening of 
hostilities at Dresden to the capitulation of Rastatt, rather more than 
ten weeks, to stifle this final blazing up of the first German 
Revolution, the National Assembly disappeared from the political 
theatre without any notice being taken of its exit. 

We left this august body at Frankfort, perplexed by the insolent 
attacks of the Governments upon its dignity, by the impotency and 
treacherous listlessness of the Central Power it had itself created, by 

the risings of the petty trading class for its defense, and of the 
working class for a more revolutionary ultimate end. Desolation and 
despair reigned supreme among its members; events had at once 
assumed such a definite and decisive shape, that in a few days the 
illusions of these learned legislators, as to their real power and 
influence, were entirely broken down. The Conservatives, at the 
signal given by the Governments, had already retired from a body 
which henceforth could not exist any longer, except in defiance of 
the constituted authorities. The Liberals gave the matter up in utter 
discomfiture; they, too, threw up their commissions as representa- 
tives. Honorable gentlemen decamped by hundreds. From eight or 
nine hundred members the number had dwindled down so rapidly, 
that now 150, and a few days after 100, were declared a quorum. 
And even these were difficult to muster, although the whole of the 
Democratic party remained. 

The course to be followed by the remnants of a Parliament was 
plain enough. They had only to take their stand openly and 
decidedly with the insurrection, to give it, thereby, whatever strength 
legality could confer upon it, while they themselves at once acquired 
an army for their own defense. They had to summon the Central 
Power to stop all hostilities at once; and if, as could be foreseen, this 
power neither could nor would do so, to depose it at once and put 
another more energetic Government in its place. If insurgent troops 
could not be brought to Frankfort (which, in the beginning, when 
the State Governments were little prepared and still hesitating, might 
have been easily done), then the Assembly could have adjourned at 
once to the very center of the insurgent district. All this, done at 
once, and resolutely, not later than the middle or end of May, might 
have opened chances both for the insurrection and for the National 
Assembly. 

But such a determined course was not to be expected from the 
representatives of German shopocracy. These aspiring statesmen 
were not at all freed from their illusions. Those members who had 
lost their fatal belief in the strength and inviolability of the 
Parliament, had already taken to their heels; the Democrats, who 
remained, were not so easily induced to give up dreams of power and 
greatness which they had cherished for a twelvemonth. True to the 
course they had hitherto pursued, they shrunk back from decisive 
action until every chance of success, nay, every chance to succumb 
with, at least, the honors of war, had passed away. In order, then, to 
develop a factitious, busy-body sort of activity, the sheer impotence 
of which,coupled with its high pretensions, could not but excite pity 
and ridicule, they continued insinuating resolutions, addresses, and 

requests to an Imperial Lieutenant, who not even noticed them, 
to Ministers, who were in open league with the enemy. And when at 
last William Wolff, member for Striegau,* one of the editors of the 
New Rhenish Gazette,” the only really revolutionary man in the whole 
Assembly, told them that if they meant what they said, they had 
_ better give over talking and declare the Imperial Lieutenant, the 
' chief traitor to the country, an outlaw at once; then the entire 
compressed virtuous indignation of these parliamentary gentlemen 
burst out with an energy which they never found when the 
Government heaped insult after insult upon them. Of course, for 
Wolff's proposition was the first sensible word spoken within the 
walls of St. Paul’s Church‘; of course, for it was the very thing that 
was to be done—and such plain language, going so direct to the 
purpose, could not but insult a set of sentimentalists, who were 
resolute in nothing but irresolution, and who, too cowardly to act, 
had once for all made up their minds that in doing nothing, they 
were doing exactly what was to be done. Every word which cleared 
up, like lightning, the infatuated but intentional nebulosity of their 
minds, every hint that was adapted to lead them out of the labyrinth 
where they obstinated themselves to take up as lasting an abode as 
possible, every clear conception of matters as they actually stood, 
was, of course, a crime against the majesty of this Sovereign 
Assembly. 

Shortly after the position of the honorable gentlemen in Frankfort 
became untenable, in spite of resolutions, appeals, interpellations, 
and proclamations, they retreated, but not into the insurged 
districts; that would have been too resolute a step. They went to 
Stuttgart, where the Wurttemberg Government kept up a sort of 
expectative neutrality. There, at last, they declared the Lieutenant of 
the Empire to have forfeited his power, and elected from their own 
body a Regency of five.°' This Regency at once proceeded to pass a 
Militia Law, which was actually in all due force sent to all the 
Governments of Germany. They, the very enemies of the Assembly, 
were ordered to levy forces in its defense! Then there was 
created—on paper, of course—an army for the defense of the 
National Assembly. Divisions, brigades, regiments, batteries, every- 
thing was regulated and ordained. Nothing was wanting but reality, 
for that army, of course, never was called into existence. 

from May 18, 1848 to May 30, 1849.— Ed. 

One last scheme offered itself to the National Assembly. The 
Democratic population from all parts of the country sent deputations 
to place itself at the disposal of the Parliament, and to urge it on toa 
decisive action. The people, knowing what the intentions of the 
Wurttemberg Government were, implored the National Assembly to 
force that Government into an open and active participation with 
their insurgent neighbors. But No. The National Assembly, in going 
to Stuttgart, had delivered itself up to the tender mercies of the 
Wiurttemberg Government. The members knew it, and repressed 
the agitation among the people. They thus lost the last remnant of 
influence which they might yet have retained. They earned the 
contempt they deserved, and the Wiurttemberg Government, 
pressed by Prussia and the Imperial Lieutenant, put a stop to the 
Democratic farce by shutting up, on the 18th of June, 1849, the 
room where the Parliament met, and by ordering the members of 
the Regency to leave the country. 

Next they went to Baden, into the camp of the insurrection, but 
there they were now useless. Nobody noticed them. The Regency, 
however, in the name of the Sovereign German People, continued to 
save the country by its exertions. It made an attempt to get 
recognized by foreign powers, by delivering passports to anybody who 
would accept of them. It issued proclamations and sent Commission- 
ers to insurge those very districts of Wurttemberg whose active 
assistance it had refused when it was yet time; of course without 
effect. We have now under our eye an original report sent to the 
Regency by one of these Commissioners, Mr. Roesler (member for 
Oels*), the contents of which are rather characteristic. It is dated 
Stuttgart, 30th June, 1849. After describing the adventures of 
half-a-dozen of these Commissioners in a resultless search for cash, 
he gives a series of excuses for not having yet gone to his post, and 
then delivers himself of a most weighty argument respecting possible 
differences between Prussia, Austria, Bavaria and Wirttemberg, 
with their possible consequences. After having fully considered this, 
he comes, however, to the conclusion that there is no more chance. 
Next he proposes to establish relays of trustworthy men for the 
conveyance of intelligence, and a system of espionage as to the 
intentions of the Wurttemberg Ministry, and movements of the 
troops. This letter never reached its address, for when it was written 
the “Regency” had already passed entirely into the “foreign 
department,” viz., Switzerland; and while poor Mr. Roesler troubled 
his head about the intentions of the formidable ministry of a 

sixth-rate kingdom, a hundred thousand Prussian, Bavarian, and 
Hessian soldiers had already settled the whole affair in the last battle 
under the walls of Rastatt. 

Thus vanished the German Parliament, and with it the first and 
the last creation of the revolution. Its convocation had been the first 
evidence that there actually had beena revolution in Germany; and it 
existed as long as this, the first modern German Revolution, was not 
yet brought to a close. Chosen under the influence of the capitalist 
class by a dismembered, scattered, rural population, for the most 
part only awaking from the dumbness of feudalism, this Parliament 
served to bring in one body upon the political arena all the great 
popular names of 1820-1848, and then to utterly ruin them. All the 
celebrities of the middle-class Liberalism were here collected; the 
bourgeoisie expected wonders; it earned shame for itself and for its 
representatives. The industrial and commercial capitalist class were 
more severely defeated in Germany than in any other country; they 
were first worsted, broken, expelled from office in every individual 
State of Germany, and then put to rout, disgraced, and hooted in the 
Central German Parliament. Political Liberalism, the rule of the 
bourgeoisie, be it under a monarchical or republican form of 
government, is forever impossible in Germany. 

In the latter period of its existence, the German Parliament served 
to disgrace forever that section which had ever since March, 1848, 
headed the official opposition, the Democrats representing the 
interests of the small trading, and partially of the farming class. That 
class was, in May and June, 1849, given a chance to show its means of 
forming a stable government in Germany. We have seen how it 
failed; not so much by adverse circumstances as by the actual and 
continual cowardice in all trying movements that had occurred since 
the outbreak of the revolution; by showing in politics the same 
short-sighted, pusillanimous, wavering spirit, which is characteristic 
of its commercial operations. In May, 1849, it had, by this course, 
lost the confidence of the real fighting mass of all European 
insurrections, the working class. But yet, it had a fair chance. The 
German Parliament belonged to it, exclusively, after the Reactionists 
and Liberals had withdrawn. The rural population was in its favor. 
Two-thirds of the armies of the smaller States, one-third of the 
Prussian army, the majority of the Prussian Landwehr (reserve or 
militia), were ready to join it, if it only acted resolutely, and with that 
courage which is the result of a clear insight in the state of things. But 
the politicians, who led on this class, were not more clear-sighted 
than the host of petty tradesmen which followed them. They proved 
even to be more infatuated, more ardently attached to delusions 

voluntarily kept up, more credulous, more incapable of resolutely 
dealing with facts than the Liberals. Their political importance, 
too, is reduced below the freezing point. But they not having actually 
carried their commonplace principles into execution, they were, 
under very favorable circumstances, capable of a momentary 
resurrection, when this last hope was taken from them, just as it was 
taken from their colleagues of the “pure Democracy” in France, by 
the coup d'état of Louis Bonaparte. 

The defeat of the South-West German insurrection, and the 
dispersion of the German Parliament, bring the history of the first 
German Revolution to a close. We have now to throw a parting 
glance upon the victorious members of the counter-revolutionary 
alliance; we shall do this in our next letter.” 

London, September 24, 1852 

Karl Marx