Pots and jugs he’d laugh to scorn, 

He would guzzle tankards tall, 

The staunchest drinkers he would balk, 

He was the greatest of them all. 

“Neither bison nor the elk 

Could quaff their drink in such a gulp.” 

But to return to the “revolutionary congress” in Murten. 
“Revolutionary congress”! “Final organisation of the League”! 
“Moment for the armed uprising”! “Absolutely secret prepara- 
tions”! “Very secret meeting converging from all sides on foot, by 
boat and by carriage”! “Charles the Bold” evidently did not study 
my analysis of Stieber’s methods in the Revelations without 
profit. 

The facts of the matter are simply these: Liebknecht was—early 
in 1850—the President of the Geneva Workers’ Association. He 
proposed a union of all the hitherto unconnected German 
workers’ associations in Switzerland. The proposal was accepted. 
Whereupon it was decided to send a circular to twenty-four 
different workers’ associations, inviting them to Murten to discuss 
the problems of the intended organisation and of establishing a 
joint newspaper. The debates in the Geneva Workers’ Association, 
the circular, the discussions of the latter in the other twenty-four 
workers’ associations—all this was done in public and the congress 
at Murten was likewise arranged in full view of the public. Had the 
Swiss authorities desired to ban it they could have done so four 
weeks before it was due to be held.sBut the liberal Herr Druey, 
who was on the look-out for a victiny he could devour and thus 
placate the sabre-rattling Holy Alliance, preferred to have his 
police stage a coup de théatre. Liebknecht, who as President of the 
Workers’ Association had signed the document proclaiming the 
congress, was accorded the honour of being regarded as one of 
the chief ringleaders. He was separated from the other delegates, 
was granted free lodging in the uppermost turret of the tower in 
Fribourg, from where he enjoyed a fine view of the surrounding 
country, and he even had the privilege of walking for an hour 
each day upon the battlements. The only special feature of the 
way he was treated was the fact of solitary confinement. His 
repeated request to be allowed to join the other prisoners was 
repeatedly rejected. Vogt, however, knows full well that the police 
do not put their “moutons’* in solitary confinement, but place 
them as “agreeable companions” among the mass. 

Two months later Liebknecht, together with a certain Gebert, 
was transported by the Fribourg Chief of Police to Besancon, 
where both he and his companion received a compulsory French 
passport to London, with the warning that if they deviated from 
the prescribed route they would be deported to Algiers. As a 
result of this unexpected journey Liebknecht lost most of the 

personal effects he had in Geneva. Apart from this, however, 
Messrs. Castella, Schaller and the other members of the then 
Fribourg Government are to be commended for their humane 
treatment of Liebknecht and the other prisoners of Murten. These 
gentlemen were mindful of the fact that they themselves had been 
captive or on the run but a few vears before and they openly 
expressed the disgust they felt at being obliged to execute the 
orders of the Grand Cophta Druey.*” The captive refugees were 
not given the kind of treatment that the refugee “parliamen- 
tarians” had expected. A certain Herr H., an associate of the 
parliamentarians who is still in Switzerland, felt it incumbent on 
himself to publish a pamphlet in which he denounced the 
prisoners in general and Liebknecht in particular for upholding 
“revolutionary” ideas that exceeded the limits of parliamentary 
reason. And it seems that “Charles the Bold” is still inconsolable 
about the “quite exceptional consideration”? accorded to Lieb- 
knecht. 

Plagiarism is a general characteristic of all the concoctions of our 
“bold hero”, and this one is no exception. For the Swiss liberals 
invariably “liberalised” their acts of expulsion by accusing their 
vicums of spying. After Fazy had expelled Struve he denounced 
him publicly as a “Russian spy”. Likewise Druey, who accused 
Boichot of being a French mouchard. Tourte slandered Schily in a 
similar manner after he had suddenly had him arrested in the 
street in Geneva and sent to the tour des prisons in Berne. “Le 
commissaire maire fédéral Monsieur Kern exige votre expulsion’ 
was the reply of the high and mighty Tourte when Schily asked 
the reason for the brutal treatment meted out to him. Schily: 
“Alors mettez-moi en présence de Monsieur Kern.”” Tourte: 
“Non, nous ne voulons pas que M. le commissaire fédéral fasse la 
police a Genéve.”* The logic of this reply was altogether worthy of 
the letter this same Tourte, who was then Swiss Ambassador in 
Turin, wrote to the President of the Confederation informing 
him that Cavour was working with might and main to prevent the 
cession of Savoy and Nice at a time when this cession was already 
a fait accompli. But it is possible that certain diplomatic railway 

No. 34, p. 34, Hudson to Russell, received February 16, 1860.— Ed. 

connections were responsible for the failure of Tourte’s normal 
discernment at the time. Scarcely was Schily locked up in the 
severest solitary confinement in Berne when Tourte began to 
“liberalise” his police brutality by whispering in the ears of 
German refugees (Dr. Fink, for example) that “Schily had _ se- 
cretly been in contact with Kern and had sent him information 
about refugees in Geneva, etc.” The Geneva paper Indépendant 
itself included among the notorious sins of the Geneva Govern- 
ment of the day “the systematic calumniation of the refugees, 
which has been raised to the level of a principle of state”. (See 
Appendix 1.) 

At the very first representations of the German police, Swiss 
liberalism violated the right of asylum by driving out the so-called 
“leaders” —and this right of asylum had just been granted on 
condition that the remnant of the revolutionary army would 
refrain from fighting a last battle on Baden soil. But later, after 
the “leaders”, it was the turn of the ‘misguided led”. Thousands 
of Baden soldiers were given passports for home on_ false 
pretences and when they arrived there they were immediately 
welcomed by gendarmes, who knew in advance about “the whats, 
the whys and the hows”. Then came the threats of the Holy 
Alliance and with them the police farce in Murten. But even the 
“liberal” Federal Council did not venture to go as far as the 
“bold Charles”. Nothing at all about “revolutionary congress”, 
“final organisation of the League”, “exact moment for the armed 
uprising”. The investigation which for propriety’s sake had to be 
started, vanished into thin air. 

“Threats of war” from abroad and “political-propagandistic 
tendencies’, that was all the “embarrassed”’ Federal Council could 
stutter by way of excuse in its official report. (See Appendix 2.) 
The grand police actions of “Swiss liberalism” did not cease with 
the “revolutionary congress in Murten”’. On January 25, 1851 my 
friend Wilhelm Wolff (“Parliamentary Wolf” as he was known 
among the “Parliamentary Sheep”) wrote to me from Zurich: 

“The recent measures taken by the Federal Council have reduced the number 
of refugees from 11,000 to 500, and the Council will not rest until the remnant has 
been harried out of the country too, leaving only those who possess either a 
considerable fortune or powerful connections.” 

The réfugees who had fought for the revolution stood in the 
most natural opposition to the heroes of St. Paul’s Church who 
had talked it into the grave. The latter did not scruple to deliver 
their opponents into the hands of the Swiss police. 

Vogt’s loyal follower, the Ranickel monstrosity, himself wrote to 
Schily after the latter’s arrival in London: 

“Try to keep a few columns open in one of the Belgian newspapers for 
explanations, and do not fail to make the life of those rascally German dogs (the 
parliamentarians) in America miserable for having sold themselves to that goitrous 
diplomat (Druey).” 

It is now apparent what “Charles the Bold” meant when he 
said: 
“I was labouring with all my strength to set limits to all these revolutionary antics 

and to provide the refugees with shelter, either on the Continent or overseas.” # 

The following description was to be found, long ago, in No. 257 
of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung dated 

“Heidelberg, March 23, 1849: Our friend Vogt, ‘champion’ of the Left, imperiai 
jester of the moment, imperial Barrot of the future, the ‘faithful warner’ against 
revolution—he has joined forces with—some like-minded people? By no means! But 

with a few reactionaries of the deepest dye ... and for what purpose? In order to 
convey or to deport to America all those ‘characters’ living in Strasbourg. Besangon and 
elsewhere on the German trontier.... What Cavaignac’s iron rule imposes as a 

punishment these gentlemen would like to mete out in the name of Christian 
charity.... Amnesty is dead, long live deportation! And of course this was accompanied 
by the pia fraus> that the refugees had themselves expressed the desire to emigrate. 
etc. But now the Sveblatter receives word from Strasbourg that these intentions to 
deport them have unleashed an angry storm of protest among all the refugees, etc. 

[...] In fact they all hope to return to Germany soon, even at the risk (as Herr Vogt 
touchingly remarks) of having to join some ‘mad escapade:’’* 

But enough of “Charles the Bold’s” revolutionary congress in 
Murten. 

3. CHERVAL 

“The virtue of this jest will be the incomprehen- 
sible lies that this same fat rogue will tell us.”4 

In my Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne aii 
entire chapter is devoted to the Cherval plot.“ In it I show that 
Stieber with Chervai (a pseudonym for Cramer) as his instrument, 
and Carlier, Greif and Fleury as midwives, brought tite so-called 

Franco-German September plot in Paris into the world,* with the 
intention of providing the prosecution with just that “factual 
evidence of an indictable offence” against the Coiogne prisoners 
the lack of which the “Indictment Board of Cologne” had criti- 
cised. 

So decisive were the proofs I delivered to the defence during 
the Cologne trial,°° so convincing the demonstration of a total lack 
of connection between Cherval, on the one hand, and the accused 
at Cologne and myself, on the other, that Sueber, who had sworn 
by Cherval on October 18 (1852), forswore him again on October 
23, 1852 (Revelations, p. 297). Driven into a corner he abandoned 
the attempt to link Cherval and his plot with us. Stieber was Stieber, 
but even Stieber was a far cry from Vogt. 

I think it is quite unnecessary for me to repeat here the 
information I gave in the Revelations about the so-called Sep- 
tember plot. At the beginning of May 1852 Cherval returned to 
London, from where he had moved to Paris on business in the 
early summer of 1850. The Paris police let him escape from them 
a few months after he was sentenced in February 1852. In London 
he was greeted at first as a political martyr and welcomed into the 
German Workers’ Educational Society, from which my friends and 
I had resigned as early as mid-September 1850.°' But this delusion 
was short-lived. The truth about his deeds of heroism in Paris 
soon became known and during that same month, May 1852, he 
was publicly expelled from the Society for his infamous conduct. 
The accused in Cologne, who hati been imprisoned early in May 
1851, were still in detention awaiting trial. I realised trom a notice 
sent from Paris by the spy Beckmann to his paper, the Kolnische 
Zeitung, that the Prussian police were attempting retrospectively to 
forge a link between Cherval, his plot and the accused in Cologne. 
I accordingly kept on the look-out for reports about Cherval. It so 
happened that in July 1852 the latter offered his services as an 
Orleanist agent to M. de R.,” a former Minister during Louis 
Philippe’s reign and a_ well-known eclectic philosopher. The 
connections which M. de R. retained in the Paris Prefecture of 
Police enabled him to obtain extracts from their dossier on 

* IT did not learn until after the Revelations were in print that de la Hodde 
(under the name Duprez) as well as the Prussian police agents Beckmann (then 
correspondent of the “Kolnische Zeitung”) and Sommer were also involved. 

Cherval. In the French police report Cherval was referred to as 
Cherval nommé Frank, dont le véritable nom est Cramer? For a long 
time he had worked as an agent for Prince Hatzfeldt, the Prussian 
Ambassador in Paris; he was the betrayer of the complot 
franco-allemand and was now simultaneously a spy for the French, 
etc. In the course of the Cologne trial I gave these reports to one 
of the counsel for the defence, Herr Schneider II, and empowered 
him to name my source if need arose. When Stieber said under 
oath during the session of October 18 that the Irishman Cherval, 
who on Stieber’s own testimony had served a gaol sentence in 
Aachen in 1845 for forging bills of exchange, was at that moment 
still under arrest in Paris, I informed Schneider II by return of 
post that, under the pseudonym of Cherval, the Rhenish Prussian 
Cramer was “still” in London, was in daily communication with 
Greif, the Prussian lieutenant of police, and that, as he was a 
condemned Prussian criminal, the English would extradite him as 
soon as they received an application from the Prussian Government. 
To have brought him to Cologne as a witness would have overthrown 
the entire Stieber system. 

Under pressure from Schneider II Stieber finally remembered 
on October 23 having heard that Cherval had fled from Paris, but 
he swore high and low that he had no knowledge of the present 
whereabouts of the Irishman or of his alliance with the Prussian 
police. In fact at that time Cherval was attached to Greif in 
London by a fixed weekly salary. The debates about the “Cherval 
mystery” at the Cologne Assizes, that had been provoked by my 
reports, drove Cherval from London. I heard that he had gone on 
a police mission to Jersey. I had long lost sight of him when by 
chance I came across a report from the Geneva correspondent of 
the Republik der Arbeiter,” which appears in New York, stating that 
Cherval had turned up in Geneva in March 1853 under the name 
of Nugent, and that he had vanished from there once more in the 
summer of 1854. He visited Vogt in Geneva, then, a few weeks 
after my Revelations with the compromising statements about him 
had been published in Basle by Schabelitz. 

Let us now return to the Falstaffian travesty of history. 

According to Vogt, Cherval arrived in Geneva immediately after 
his fictitious escape from Paris and before that he was allegedly 

“sent” by the secret Communist League from London to Paris “a 

May 27, 1854.— Ed. 

few months” prior to the discovery of the September plot (loc. cit., 
p. 172). Hence while the interval between May 1852 and March 
1853 thus disappears altogether, the interval between June 1850 
and September 1851 shrinks to “a few months”. What wouldn't 
Stieber have given for a Vogt who could have testified on oath 
before the Assizes at Cologne that the “secret Communist League 
in London” had sent Cherval to Paris in June 1850, and what 
wouldn’t I have given to see Vogt sweating on the witness stand 
next to his Stieber! What a fine company they make: the swearing 
Stieber with his bird, the Greif [griffin], his Wermuth [vermouth], 
his Goldheimchen [golden cricket] and his Bettelvogt [beadle]. 
Vogt’s Cherval brought with him to Geneva “recommendations 
to all friends of Marx & Co., from whom Mr. Nugent soon became 
inseparable” (p. 173). He “took up his quarters with the family of a 
correspondent of the Allgemeine Zeitung” and gained access to 
Vogt probably as the result of my recommendations (in the 
Revelations). Vogt employed him as a lithographer (loc. cit., pp. 
173[-74]) and entered with him so to speak into a “scientific 
intercourse” as he had done earlier with Archduke John and 
was to do later with Plon-Plon. One day, while he was working in 
the “office” of the Imperial Regent,” “Nugent” was recognised by 
an “acquaintance” as Cherval and accused of being an “agent 
provocateur”. In fact Nugent was not only working for Vogt in 
Geneva but was also busily engaged in “founding a clandestine 
society”. 

“Cherval-Nugent presided, kept the minutes and corresponded with London” (loc. 
cit., p. 175). He had “taken a few not very discerning but otherwise worthy workers 
into his confidence” (ibid.), however “among the members there was also an associate 
of the Marx clique known to everyone as a suspect minion of the German police” 
(loc. cit.). 

“All the friends” of Marx, from whom Cherval-Nugent 
“became inseparable”, are now suddenly transformed into “one 
associate”, and this one associate promptly dissolves again into “the 
associates of Marx who had remained behind in Geneva” (p. 176), 
with whom Nugent later “continues to correspond from Paris” 
and whom he magnetically “attracts to himself” in Paris (loc. cit.). 

Yet another instance, then, of his favourite “transformation” of 
the buckram “cloth” of Kendal green! 

What Cherval-Nugent purposed with his society was the 

“mass production of forged banknotes and treasury bills which when put into 
circulation were expected to undermine the credit of the despots and ruin their 
finances” (loc. cit., p. 175). 

Cherval, it seems, was trying to emulate the celebrated Pitt who, 
as is well known, set up a factory not far from London during the 
war against the Jacobins to produce false French assignats. 

“Various stone and copper plates had already been engraved for this purpose by 
Nugent himself; the gullible members of the secret league had already been 
selected to go to France, Switzerland and Germany with packets of these’ —stone 
and copper plates?>—no—‘“‘these counterfeit banknotes” (the banknotes were, of 
course, put into packets before they were printed) (p. 175), 

but Cicero-Vogt was already standing behind Cherval-Catiline with 
his sword drawn. A peculiar characteristic of all Falstaffs is that as 
well as big bellies they also have big mouths. Just look at our 
Gurgelgrosslinger who has already set limits to “revolutionary 
antics” in Switzerland and arranged for whole shiploads of 
refugees to find a livelihood overseas, look how he postures, how 
melodramatically he acts, how he magnifies Stieber’s Paris skirmish 
with Cherval (see Revelations*)! Here he lay, and thus he bore his 
point! ? 

“The plan of the whole conspiracy” (loc. cit., p. 176) “had been monstrously 
concewed.” “All the workers’ associations were to have Cherval’s project laid at their 
door.” There had already been “some confidential inquiries from foreign 

embassies”, they were already on the point of “compromising Switzerland, 
especially the Canton of Geneva”. 

But the Land-Vogt was vigilant. He carried out his first rescue 
of Switzerland, an experiment he later repeated several times with 
steadily increasing success. 

“TI cannot deny,” the weighty man exclaims, “J cannot deny that I contributed 
a substantial part in frustrating these devilish plans; I cannot deny that I made use of 
the police of the Geneva Republic for this purpose; I regret to this day” (disconsolate 
Cicero) “that the zeal of some deluded enthusiasts served to warn the wily ringleader 
and enabled him to evade arrest” [p. 177]. 

But at all events, Cicero-Vogt had “frustrated” the Catiline 
conspiracy, rescued Switzerland, and “contributed” his substantial 
part (wherever he carries that). According to him Cherval 
reappeared in Paris a few weeks later and there “he made no 
attempt to hide himself, but showed himself in public like other 
citizens” (loc. cit., p. 176). And we all know how public is the life 
of the citizens of Paris in the counterfeit Empire.