The Public Prosecutor’s Office and the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”

Friedrich Engels
The German Reich Constitution Campaign

Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Politisch-ökonomische Revue.
No. 1, January 1850

The German Reich Constitution Campaign.

“Hecker, Struve, Blenker, Zitz and Blum,
Kill the German princes!”

In this refrain, which the South German “Volkswehr” set echoing along all highways and in all taverns from the Palatinate to the Swiss frontier, to the well-known sea-encircling melody, half chorale, half hurdy-gurdy drone – in this refrain is summed up the whole character of the “grand uprising for the Reich Constitution”. Here you have in two lines their great men, their final aims, their staunch steadfastness of conviction, their noble hatred of the “tyrants”, and at the same time their entire insight into social and political conditions.

Among all the movements and convulsions that were called forth in Germany by the February Revolution and its further development, the Reich Constitution Campaign stands out by reason of its classically German character. Its occasion, its appearance, its bearing, its whole course were German through and through. As the June days of 1848 denote the stage of social and political development of France, so the Reich Constitution Campaign denotes the stage of social and political development of Germany, and particularly of South Germany.

The soul of the whole movement was the class of the petty bourgeoisie, especially the so-called burgher estate, and this class is predominant precisely in Germany, particularly in the South. It was the petty bourgeoisie that, in “March associations”, democratic-constitutional associations, patriotic associations, in a great many so-called democratic associations and in almost the entire democratic press, swore to the Reich Constitution oaths on the Grütli as massive as they were harmless, and waged a struggle against the “recalcitrant” princes whose sole result to be sure initially was only the own elevating consciousness of fulfilled civic duty. It was the petty bourgeoisie that, represented by the decided and so-called extreme Left of the Frankfurt Assembly, thus specifically by the Stuttgart Parliament and the “Imperial Regency”, provided the official spearhead for the whole movement; it was the petty bourgeoisie, finally, that dominated in the local provincial committees, committees of public safety, provisional governments and constituent assemblies that earned greater or lesser merit for the Reich Constitution in Saxony, on the Rhine and in South Germany.

The petty bourgeoisie, had it depended on them, would scarcely have forsaken the legal ground of the legal, peaceful and virtuous struggle and have seized muskets and paving-stones instead of the so-called weapons of the mind. The history of all political movements since 1830 in Germany as in France and England shows us this class always braggart, loudly protesting and occasionally even extreme in phrase, so long as it sees no danger; timid, reticent and calculating as soon as the least danger approaches; astonished, anxious, vacillating as soon as the movement it has stirred up is taken up by other classes and treated seriously; betraying the whole movement for the sake of its petty-bourgeois existence as soon as it comes to struggle with weapons in hand – and finally, as a consequence of its irresolution, always especially duped and maltreated as soon as the reactionary party has won.

Behind the petty bourgeoisie, however, there stand everywhere other classes that take up the movement provoked by it and in its interest, give it a more definite, more energetic character and wherever possible seek to seize control of it: the proletariat and a large part of the peasants, to whom, besides, the more advanced fraction of the petty bourgeoisie is accustomed to attach itself for a time.

These classes, the proletariat of the larger cities at their head, took the loudly protesting assurances in the interest of the Reich Constitution more seriously than the petty-bourgeois agitators liked. If the petty bourgeois, as they swore at every moment, were ready to “pledge life and property” for the Reich Constitution, the workers and in many regions also the peasants were ready to do the same – under the condition, tacit but perfectly well known to all parties, that after the victory the petty bourgeoisie would have to defend this same Reich Constitution against these very proletarians and peasants. These classes drove the petty bourgeoisie to the point of open breach with the existing state power. If they could not prevent being betrayed by their shopkeeper allies even during the struggle, they at least had the satisfaction that this betrayal was punished after the victory of the counter-revolution by the counter-revolutionaries themselves.

On the other hand, at the beginning of the movement the more resolute fraction of the big and middle bourgeoisie likewise attached itself to the petty bourgeoisie, exactly as we find this in all earlier petty-bourgeois movements in England and France. The bourgeoisie never rules as a whole; leaving aside the remnants of feudalism that may still have preserved for themselves a part of political power, the big bourgeoisie itself, once it has defeated feudalism, splits into a governing and an opposition party, which are usually represented by the bank on the one hand and the manufacturers on the other. The oppositional, progressive fraction of the big and middle bourgeoisie then has common interests with the petty bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the ruling fraction, and unites with it for the common struggle. In Germany, where the armed counter-revolution has restored the almost exclusive rule of the army, the bureaucracy and the feudal nobility, where the bourgeoisie, despite the still existing constitutional forms, plays only a very subordinate and modest role, there exist far more motives for this alliance. For that, however, the German bourgeoisie is also infinitely more timorous than the English and French, and as soon as the slightest chance of returning anarchy, i.e., of the really decisive struggle, shows itself, it retires shuddering from the scene. So also this time.

The moment was, by the way, by no means unfavourable for struggle. In France, the elections were impending; whether they gave the majority to the monarchists or to the Reds, they were bound to drive out the centres of the Constituent Assembly, strengthen the extreme parties, and bring about a rapid decision of the parliamentary struggle, now grown more acute, through a popular movement – in a word, they were bound to bring about a “journée”. In Italy people were fighting under the walls of Rome, and the Roman Republic held out against the French army of invasion. In Hungary, the Magyars pressed forward irresistibly; the imperial forces had been driven across the Waag and the Leitha; in Vienna, where people believed they heard cannon thunder every day, the Hungarian revolutionary army was expected at any moment; in Galicia, the arrival of Dembinski with a Polish-Magyar army was imminent, and the Russian intervention, far from becoming dangerous to the Magyars, seemed rather to transform the Hungarian struggle into a European one. Germany, finally, was in the highest state of excitement; the advances of the counter-revolution, the growing insolence of the soldiery, the bureaucracy and the nobility, the constantly recurring treacheries of the old liberals in the ministries, the swiftly succeeding breaches of faith on the part of the princes threw whole classes of hitherto men of order into the arms of the movement party.

Under these circumstances the struggle broke out which we shall depict in the following fragments.

The incompleteness and confusion still prevailing in the materials, the total unreliability of almost all reports to be collected orally, the purely personal purpose underlying all writings published up to now about this struggle, make a critical presentation of the whole course impossible. Under these circumstances, nothing remains for us but to limit ourselves purely to the narration of what we ourselves have seen and heard. Fortunately this is fully sufficient to let the character of the whole campaign stand out; and if, besides our own observation of the Saxon movement, the observation of Mieroslawski’s campaign on the Neckar is missing, the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* will perhaps soon have the opportunity to give the necessary information at least on the latter.

Of the participants in the Reich Constitution Campaign, many are still in prison. Others have found the opportunity to return home; others, still abroad, expect it daily – and among them are not the worst. The consideration that we owe to these fellow-fighters will be understood; it will be found natural if we pass over many things in silence; and many a one who is now quietly back in his native land will not hold it against us if we do not wish to compromise him even by relating those incidents in which he really displayed brilliant courage.

I.
Rhenish Prussia.

One remembers how the armed uprising for the Reich Constitution broke out first in Dresden at the beginning of May. It is known how the Dresden barricade fighters, supported by the country folk, betrayed by the Leipzig philistines, after a six-days’ struggle succumbed to superior forces. They never had more than 2,500 combatants with very mixed weapons and as their entire artillery two or three small mortars. The royal troops consisted, besides the Saxon battalions, of two Prussian regiments. They had at their disposal cavalry, artillery, riflemen and a battalion with needle-guns. The royal troops seem to have behaved themselves even more cowardly in Dresden than elsewhere; but at the same time it is certain that the Dresden fighters fought more bravely against this superior force than was otherwise the case in the Reich Constitution Campaign. But, of course, a street fight is something quite different from an engagement in the open field.

Berlin remained quiet under the state of siege and disarmament. Not even the railway was torn up in order to hold up the Prussian reinforcements already near Berlin. Breslau attempted a weak barricade fight, for which the government had long been prepared, and thereby only fell all the more securely under the sabre dictatorship. The rest of North Germany, without revolutionary centres, was paralysed. On Rhenish Prussia and South Germany alone was there still to be counted, and in South Germany the Palatinate had just set itself in motion.

Rhenish Prussia has since 1815 been regarded as one of the most advanced provinces of Germany, and rightly so. It unites two advantages which are found united in no other part of Germany.

Rhenish Prussia shares with Luxemburg, Rhenish Hesse and the Palatinate the advantage of having undergone the French Revolution and the social, administrative and legislative consolidation of its results under Napoleon, from 1795 onwards. When the revolutionary party succumbed in Paris, the armies carried the revolution across the frontiers. Before these barely freed peasant sons, not only the armies of the Holy Roman Empire crumbled, but also the feudal rule of the nobility and the clergy. For two generations the left bank of the Rhine has known no feudalism any more; the nobleman is deprived of his privileges, landed property has passed from his hands and those of the Church into the hands of the peasant; the soil is parcelled out, the peasant is a free landowner as in France. In the towns the guilds and the patriarchal patrician regime disappeared ten years earlier than anywhere in Germany before free competition, and the Code Napoléon finally sanctioned the whole changed situation by summing up the entire revolutionary institutions.

Rhenish Prussia possesses, however, secondly — and herein lies its chief advantage over the other countries of the left bank of the Rhine — the most developed and most manifold industry in the whole of Germany. In the three governmental districts of Aachen, Cologne and Düsseldorf, almost all branches of industry are represented: cotton, woollen and silk industry of every kind, together with the dependent branches of bleaching, printing and dyeing, iron foundries and machine manufacture, furthermore mining, gunsmithing and other metal industries are concentrated here within the space of a few square miles and employ a population of a density unheard of in Germany. Immediately adjoining the Rhine Province, supplying it with part of its raw materials and belonging to it industrially, is the Mark iron and coal district. The best waterway in Germany, the proximity of the sea, the mineral wealth of the region favour the industry, which has moreover generated numerous railways and is still daily completing its railway network. In interaction with the industry stands a very extensive export and import trade to all parts of the world, for Germany, a significant direct intercourse with all the great entrepôts of the world market, and a proportionate speculation in raw products and railway shares. In short, the industrial and commercial stage of development of the Rhine Province, although fairly insignificant on the world market, is yet unique for Germany.

The consequence of this industry — which likewise flourished under revolutionary French rule — and of the trade connected with it in Rhenish Prussia is the creation of a powerful industrial and commercial big bourgeoisie and, in opposition to it, a numerous industrial proletariat, two classes which in the rest of Germany exist only very locally and in embryonic form, but which almost exclusively dominate the specific political development of the Rhine Province.

Over and above the other German countries revolutionised by the French, Rhenish Prussia has industry; over and above the other German industrial districts (Saxony and Silesia), it has the French Revolution. It is the only part of Germany whose social development has reached almost entirely the level of modern bourgeois society: developed industry, extensive trade, accumulation of capitals, freedom of landed property; a strong bourgeoisie and a massive proletariat in the towns, numerous and indebted small peasants predominating in the countryside; rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat through the wage relation, over the peasant through the mortgage, over the petty bourgeois through competition, and finally the sanction of bourgeois rule by the commercial courts, the factory courts, the bourgeois jury and the whole material legislation.

Does one now understand the hatred of the Rhinelander for everything that calls itself Prussian? Prussia had incorporated the French Revolution into its states with the Rhine Province, and treated the Rhinelanders not only like subjugated people and foreigners, but even like defeated rebels. Far from developing Rhenish legislation in the sense of the ever further developing modern bourgeois society, it wanted even to saddle the Rhinelanders with the pedantic-feudal-philistine mishmash of the Prussian Common Law, which itself hardly suits Farther Pomerania any more.

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Friedrich Engels

The upheaval after February 1848 clearly showed the exceptional position of the Rhine Province. It provided not only the Prussian bourgeoisie, but the German bourgeoisie in general with their classical representatives: Camphausen and Hansemann; it provided the German proletariat with the only organ in which it was represented not merely in phrase or good will, but according to its real interests: the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

How does it come, however, that Rhenish Prussia, despite all this, participated so little in the revolutionary movements of Germany?

Let it not be forgotten that the movement of the 1830s, in the interest of the constitutionalism of phrase and lawyers, could have no interest for the Rhenish bourgeoisie of Germany, which was occupied with much more real, industrial undertakings; that while in the small German states people still dreamt of a German empire, in Rhenish Prussia the proletariat was already beginning to appear openly against the bourgeoisie; that from 1840 to 1847, at the time of the bourgeois, really constitutional movement, the Rhenish bourgeoisie stood at the head, and that in March 1848 it threw a decisive weight into the scales in Berlin. But why Rhenish Prussia was never able to achieve anything by open insurrection, why it could not even bring about a general insurrection of the whole province, will best be shown by the simple account of the Rhenish campaign for the imperial constitution. —

The struggle in Dresden had just broken out; in the Palatinate it could break loose at any moment. In Baden, in Württemberg, in Franconia, monster meetings were being arranged and people hardly concealed any longer that they were resolved to let it come to a decision by arms. Throughout South Germany the troops were wavering. Prussia was no less agitated. The proletariat was only waiting for an opportunity to take revenge for the conjuring away of the advantages it believed it had conquered in March 1848. The petty bourgeoisie was everywhere active, condensing all the discontented elements into a great Imperial Constitution Party, the leadership of which it hoped to retain. The oaths to stand and fall with the Frankfurt Assembly, to stake life and blood for the imperial constitution, filled all the newspapers, resounded in all club halls and beer parlours.

Then the Prussian government opened hostilities, by calling up a large part of the Landwehr, notably in Westphalia and on the Rhine. The call-up order was illegal in the midst of peace, and not only the small, but also the big bourgeoisie rose up against it.

The Cologne Municipal Council summoned a congress of delegates of the Rhenish municipal councils. The government prohibited it; the form was dropped and the congress was held despite the prohibition. The municipal councils,

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representatives of the big and middle bourgeoisie, declared their recognition

of the imperial constitution, demanded its acceptance by the Prussian

government and the dismissal of the ministry, as well as the revocation of the

call-up of the Landwehr, and threatened, in the event of refusal, fairly

clearly with the secession of the Rhine provinces from Prussia.

“Whereas the Prussian government has dissolved the Second Chamber, after the latter had

pronounced in favour of the unconditional acceptance of the German Constitution of 28 March of this year,

and has thereby deprived the people of their representation and voice in the present decisive moment,

the undersigned deputies of the cities and municipalities of the Rhine Province

have assembled to deliberate on what the fatherland requires.

The assembly, under the chairmanship of the municipal deputies Zell of

Trier and Werner of Koblenz, and assisted by the minute-takers, the municipal

deputies Boecker of Cologne and Bloem II of Düsseldorf,

has resolved as follows:

1) it declares that it recognises the constitution of the German Reich, as

promulgated by the Imperial Assembly on 28 March of this year, as

final law, and stands on the side of the German Imperial Assembly in

the conflict raised by the Prussian government.

 2) The assembly calls upon the entire people of the Rhineland, and

especially all men capable of bearing arms, to express, by collective

declarations in smaller and larger circles, their obligation and their

inviolable will to hold fast to the German imperial constitution

and to obey the decrees of the imperial constitution.

3) The assembly calls upon the German Imperial Assembly now

speedily to make more vigorous efforts to give to the resistance

of the people in the individual German states, and particularly

in the Rhine Province, that unity and strength which alone is

capable of foiling the well-organised counter-revolution.

4

wm

It calls upon the Imperial authority to swear in the imperial troops

on the constitution as soon as possible and to order their concentration.

5) The undersigned pledge themselves to give validity to the imperial

constitution by all means at their disposal within the sphere of

their municipalities.

6) The assembly considers the dismissal of the Brandenburg-Manteuffel

ministry, and the convening of the Chambers without alteration

of the existing electoral mode, to be unconditionally necessary.

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15

20

25

30

35

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The Campaign for the Imperial Constitution in Germany · I. Rhenish Prussia

7) It sees in particular in the recently effected partial call-up

of the Landwehr an unnecessary measure, highly endangering the

internal peace, and expects its immediate revocation.

8) The undersigned finally express their conviction

that, if the content of this declaration is not heeded, the greatest

dangers threaten the fatherland, by which even the continued existence

of Prussia in its present composition may be endangered.

Resolved on 8 May 1849 at Cologne.”

(Here follow the signatures.)

We only add that the very same Herr Zell, who presided over this assembly,
went a few weeks later as imperial commissioner of the Frankfurt
Imperial Ministry to Baden, in order not only to conciliate there, but
also to arrange with the reactionaries there those counter-revolutionary
coups which later broke out in Mannheim and Karlsruhe.

That he also rendered services to the imperial general Peucker at the same
time as a military spy, is at least probable.

We attach importance to stating this fact well. The big bourgeoisie,
the flower of pre-March Rhenish liberalism, sought from the very beginning
in Rhenish Prussia to place itself at the head of the movement for the imperial
constitution. Their speeches, their resolutions, their whole bearing

made

They acted in solidarity for the later events. There were people enough who took the phrases of the municipal councillors seriously, especially the threat of the secession of the Rhine Province. If the big bourgeoisie joined in, the thing was as good as won from the start, one would then have all classes of the population with one, one could already risk something. So calculated the petty bourgeois, and hastened to adopt a heroic posture. It goes without saying that his alleged associate, the big bourgeois, allowed himself to be by no means prevented thereby from betraying him at the first opportunity and afterwards, when the whole affair had ended most miserably, from mocking him retrospectively for his stupidity.

The excitement meanwhile continued to grow; the news from all parts of Germany was very warlike. At last it became necessary to proceed to the fitting-out of the Landwehr. The battalions assembled and categorically declared that they would not allow themselves to be fitted out. The majors, without adequate military support, could accomplish nothing and were glad to get away without threats and physical attacks. They dismissed the men and appointed a fresh date for the fitting-out.

The government, which could easily have provided the Landwehr officers with the necessary support, deliberately allowed things to go so far. It now resorted immediately to force.

Friedrich Engels

The refractory Landwehr units belonged in particular to the industrial district of Berg and Mark. Elberfeld and Iserlohn, Solingen and the Ennepe road were the centres of resistance. Troops were immediately ordered to the first two of these towns.

A battalion of the Sixteenth Infantry, a squadron of Uhlans and two guns marched to Elberfeld. The town was in the greatest confusion. On mature reflection the Landwehr had in fact found that they were playing a risky game. Many peasants and workers were politically indifferent and simply had no desire to absent themselves from home for an indefinite period to oblige some government whim. The consequences of their refractoriness weighed heavily on their hearts: species facti, martial law, the chain-gang and perhaps even powder and lead! In short, the number of Landwehr men under arms—they had their weapons—melted away more and more, until at last about forty remained. They had set up their headquarters in a public house outside the town and there awaited the Prussians. Round the town hall stood the civic guard and two citizens’ sharpshooters’ corps, wavering, negotiating with the Landwehr, at any rate resolved to protect their property. The streets surged with the population, petty bourgeois who had sworn loyalty to the Imperial Constitution in the political club, proletarians of all gradations, from the determined revolutionary worker to the schnapps-sodden cart-binder. No one knew what was to be done, no one what was to come.

The municipal council wanted to negotiate with the troops. The commanding officer rejected everything and marched into the town. The troops parade through the streets and form up at the town hall, opposite the civic guard. Negotiations proceed. Stones are thrown from the crowd at the soldiers. The Landwehr, as said, some forty strong, advances from the other side of the town, after lengthy deliberation, likewise moving against the military.

Suddenly the people raise the cry for the liberation of the prisoners. For in the lock-up immediately adjacent to the town hall, had been sitting for a year sixty-nine workers from Solingen, arrested for demolishing the steel foundry near the Burg. Their trial was to be heard in a few days. The people rush to the prison to free them. The doors give way, the people force their way in, the prisoners are free. But at the same moment the military advances, a volley is fired and the last prisoner hurrying out of the door falls with his skull shattered.

The people fall back, but with the cry: To the barricades! In a flash the approaches to the inner town are barricaded. Unarmed workers are present in plenty, armed men behind the barricades number at most fifty.

The artillery advances. As before the infantry, it too fires too high, probably deliberately. Both arms consisted of Rhinelanders or Westphalians and were good. At last Captain von Uttenhoven advances at the head of the 8th Company of the 16th Regiment.

Three armed men were behind the first barricade. “Don’t shoot at us,” they cry, “we only shoot at the officers!” — The captain commands halt. “If you command ‘Ready’, you’re a dead man,” a rifleman behind the barricade calls to him. — “Ready — Aim — Fire!” — The volley crashes, but at that very instant the captain collapses. The bullet had struck him right through the heart.

The platoon hastily retreats; the captain’s body is not even taken with them. A few more shots fall, some soldiers are wounded, and the commanding officer, not wishing to spend the night in the rebellious town, withdraws again to bivouac with his troops an hour’s distance from the town. Behind the soldiers barricades immediately rise on all sides.

That same evening came the news of the Prussians’ withdrawal to Düsseldorf. Numerous groups formed in the streets; the petty bourgeoisie and the workers were in the highest state of excitement. Then the rumour that fresh troops were to be dispatched to Elberfeld gave the signal for the outbreak. Without pausing to reflect on the lack of arms—the civic guard had been disarmed since November 1848—without considering the relatively strong garrison and the unfavourable broad, straight streets of the little ex-residence, a number of workers raised the call to the barricades. In Neustrasse, Bolkerstrasse several barricades were thrown up; the remaining parts of the town were kept free partly by the troops who had been assigned to them in advance and partly by the fear of the big and petty burghers.

Towards evening the fight began. The barricade fighters were, here as everywhere, few in number. Where, indeed, were they to get arms and munitions? In short, they offered a long and brave resistance to the superior force, and only towards morning, after extensive use of artillery, did the half-dozen barricades which could be defended fall into the hands of the Prussians. It is known that on the following day these cautious heroes took bloody revenge on servant-girls, old men and peaceful people in general.

On the very day that the Prussians were beaten back from Elberfeld, a battalion of the 13th Regiment, if we are not mistaken, was to march into Iserlohn and bring the Landwehr there to reason. But this plan, too, was frustrated here; as soon as the news of the approach of the military became known, Landwehr and people barricaded all the approaches to the town and awaited the enemy with loaded muskets. The battalion did not venture an attack and withdrew again.

The fight in Elberfeld and Düsseldorf and the barricading of Iserlohn gave the signal for the uprising of the greater part of the Berg and Mark industrial district. The people of Solingen stormed the Gräfrath armoury and armed themselves with the rifles and cartridges taken from it; the people of Hagen joined the movement en masse, armed themselves, occupied the approaches to the Ruhr and sent out reconnaissance patrols; Solingen, Ronsdorf, Remscheid, Barmen, etc., sent their contingents to Elberfeld. In the other localities of the district the Landwehr declared for the movement and placed itself at the disposal of the Frankfurt Assembly. Elberfeld, Solingen, Hagen, Iserlohn set up committees of public safety in place of the expelled district and local authorities.

The news of these events was naturally exaggerated still further enormously. The whole Wupper and Ruhr region was depicted as a great, organised camp of insurrection; there was talk of fifteen thousand armed men in Elberfeld, of as many in Iserlohn and Hagen. The sudden terror of the government, which paralysed all its activity in face of this uprising of the most loyal districts at one blow, contributed not a little to gaining credence for these exaggerations.

Making all due deductions for probable exaggerations, the one fact remained undeniable that the principal towns of the Berg and Mark industrial district were in open and, up to then, victorious insurrection. This fact was present. To this came the news that Dresden was still holding out, that Silesia was stirring, that the Palatinate movement was consolidating, that a victorious military revolt had broken out in Baden and the Grand Duke had fled, that the Magyars stood on the Jablunka and the Leitha. In short, of all the revolutionary chances that had offered themselves to the democratic and workers’ party since March 1848, this was by far the most favourable, and it naturally had to be seized. The left bank of the Rhine could not leave the right bank in the lurch.

What was now to be done?

All the larger towns of the Rhenish Province are fortresses dominated by strong citadels and forts, like Cologne and Koblenz, or have numerous garrisons like Aachen, Düsseldorf and Trier. Besides, the province is kept in check by the fortresses of Wesel, Jülich, Luxemburg, Saarlouis and even by Mainz and Minden. In these fortresses and garrisons there lay together at least thirty thousand men. Cologne, Düsseldorf, Aachen, Trier had, moreover, been disarmed for some time. The revolutionary centres of the province were therefore paralysed. Any attempt at an uprising here, as had already been shown in Düsseldorf, would have to end with the victory of the military; one more such victory, e.g. in Cologne, and the Berg-Mark uprising would be morally annihilated despite the otherwise favourable news. On the left bank of the Rhine a movement was possible on the Mosel, in the Eifel and in the Crefeld industrial district; but this region was hemmed in by six fortresses and three garrison towns. The right bank of the Rhine, on the contrary, offered in the already insurgent districts a densely populated, extensive terrain, as if created by forest and mountain for an insurrectionary war.

Thus if one wished to support the insurgent districts, only one course remained possible:

Above all to avoid every useless riot in the fortresses and garrison towns;

To make a diversion on the left bank of the Rhine in the smaller towns, the factory villages and the countryside, in order to keep the Rhenish garrisons in check;

Finally to throw all disposable forces into the insurgent district of the right bank of the Rhine, to spread the insurrection further and attempt, by means of the Landwehr, to organise here the nucleus of a revolutionary army.

The new Prussian heroes of exposure should not be too quick to rejoice at the highly treasonable plot exposed here. Unfortunately, no plot existed. The three measures set out above are not a plan of conspiracy, but a simple proposal which originated with the writer of these lines, at the very moment, indeed, when he himself set out for Elberfeld to press for the implementation of the third point. Thanks to the disintegrated organisation of the democratic and workers’ party, thanks to the indecision and prudent reserve of most of the local leaders sprung from the petty bourgeoisie, thanks, finally, to the lack of time, it never came to conspiring. If, therefore, a diversion did indeed get under way on the left bank of the Rhine, if disturbances broke out in Kempen, Neuss and the surrounding area and the arsenal in Prüm was stormed, these facts were in no way the consequence of a common plan; they were merely called forth by the revolutionary instinct of the population.

In the insurgent districts, meanwhile, things looked quite different from what the rest of the province supposed. With its barricades—incidentally most planless and hurriedly thrown up—with the numerous guardposts, patrols and other armed men, with the whole population in the streets, where only the big bourgeoisie appeared to be absent, with the red and tricolour flags, Elberfeld indeed looked quite well; for the rest, however, the greatest confusion reigned in the city. The petty bourgeoisie had taken the direction of affairs into its hands through the Committee of Public Safety formed at the very first moment. Scarcely had it got so far when it took fright at its own power, slight as it was. Its first act was to get itself legitimised by the town council, i.e. by the big bourgeoisie, and to admit five of its members into the Committee of Public Safety as a thank-you for the council’s obligingness. This committee thus reinforced forthwith rid itself of all dangerous activity by transferring responsibility for external security to a military commission, while reserving for itself a moderating and restraining supervision over this commission. Thus secured from all contact with the insurrection, transplanted to the legal ground by the city fathers themselves, the trembling petty bourgeois of the Committee of Public Safety could confine themselves to soothing tempers, attending to current business, “clearing up misunderstandings”, pacifying, protracting matters, and paralysing all energetic activity under the pretext that first the answer to the deputations sent to Berlin and Frankfurt had to be awaited. The rest of the petty bourgeoisie naturally went hand in hand with the Committee of Public Safety, pacified everywhere, prevented as far as possible all further pursuit of defensive measures and arming, and vacillated continually over the limits of its participation in the insurrection. Only a small part of this class was resolved to defend itself arms in hand if the town were attacked. The great majority sought to persuade themselves that their mere threats and the fear of the almost inevitable bombardment of Elberfeld would move the government to concessions; for the rest, however, they kept a free hand for all eventualities.

The big bourgeoisie was as if thunderstruck at the first moment after the engagement. It saw arson, murder, plunder and who knows what atrocities sprout from the ground before its terrified imagination. The constitution of the Committee of Public Safety, whose majority—town councillors, lawyers, public prosecutors, steady men—suddenly offered it a guarantee for life and property, therefore filled it with a more than fanatical delight. The same big merchants, Turkey red dyers, manufacturers who had previously decried Messrs Karl Hecker, Riotte, Höchster, etc. as bloodthirsty terrorists, now rushed en masse to the town hall, embraced these very alleged bloodsuckers with the most feverish warmth, and deposited thousands of thalers on the table of the Committee of Public Safety. It goes without saying that after the end of the movement, these same enthusiastic admirers and supporters of the Committee of Public Safety disseminated the most tasteless and vulgar lies not only about the movement itself but also about the Committee of Public Safety and its members, and thanked the Prussians with the same warmth for liberation from a terrorism that had never existed. Innocent constitutional citizens like Messrs Hecker, Höchster and Public Prosecutor Heintzmann were again depicted as men of terror and cannibals, on whose faces the kinship with Robespierre and Danton was written. We regard it as our duty on our part to fully acquit the said honest men of this charge. For the rest, the greater part of the big bourgeoisie betook themselves as quickly as possible, with wife and child, to the protection of the Düsseldorf state of siege, and only the smaller, more courageous part remained behind to protect their property in all circumstances. The chief burgomaster sat hidden throughout the insurrection in an overturned cab covered with dung. The proletariat, united at the moment of the struggle, split as soon as the vacillation of the Committee of Public Safety and the petty bourgeoisie became apparent. The handicraftsmen, the factory workers proper, a section of the silk weavers were decidedly for the movement; but they, who formed the core of the proletariat, had almost no weapons. The red dyers, a robust, well-paid class of workers, coarse and therefore reactionary like all factions of workers whose work depends more on physical strength than on skill, had already become completely indifferent in the first days. They alone among all the industrial workers continued to work throughout the barricade period without allowing themselves to be disturbed. The lumpenproletariat, finally, was, as everywhere, venal from the second day of the movement; in the morning it demanded weapons and pay from the Committee of Public Safety, and in the afternoon it let itself be bought by the big bourgeoisie to protect their buildings or to tear down the barricades in the evening. On the whole, it sided with the bourgeoisie, which paid it best and with whose money it enjoyed high living throughout the movement.

The negligence and cowardice of the Committee of Public Safety, the disunity of the military commission, in which the party of inaction at first had the majority, prevented any resolute action from the very outset. From the second day onwards, reaction set in. From the beginning it was evident that in Elberfeld success could only be counted upon under the banner of the Imperial Constitution, only in agreement with the petty bourgeoisie. On the one hand, the proletariat had, precisely here, been torn away too short a time from the stagnation of schnapps and pietism for the slightest notion of the conditions of its emancipation to be able to penetrate into the masses; on the other hand, it had too instinctive a hatred of the bourgeoisie, was far too indifferent toward the bourgeois question of the Imperial Constitution, for it to have been able to enthuse over such tricolour interests. The resolute party, the only one that was in earnest about the defence, thereby got into a false position. It declared for the Imperial Constitution. But the petty bourgeoisie did not trust it, slandered it in every way among the people, hindered all its measures for arming and fortification. Every order that could serve to really put the town in a state of defence was at once countermanded by the first member of the Committee of Public Safety that came along. Every philistine who had a barricade erected in front of his door immediately ran to the town hall and procured a counter-order. The funds to pay the barricade workers—and they demanded only the bare minimum so as not to starve—could only be squeezed out of the Committee of Public Safety with difficulty and in the scantiest measure. Pay and provisioning of the armed men were attended to irregularly and were often inadequate. For five to six days, neither a review nor a roll-call of the armed men could be brought about, so that no one knew how many fighters could be counted on in case of need. Not until the fifth day was an attempt made to divide up the armed men, which, however, never came to execution and was based on a total ignorance of the forces available. Each member of the Committee of Public Safety acted on his own account. The most contradictory orders crossed one another, and the only respect in which most of these orders agreed was that they increased the cosy confusion and prevented every energetic step. The proletariat was thus thoroughly sickened of the movement, and within a few days the big bourgeois and the petty bourgeois achieved their aim of making the workers as indifferent as possible.

When I came to Elberfeld on 11 May, there were at least 2,500–3,000 armed men. Of these armed men, however, only the outsiders who had come in and the few armed Elberfeld workers were reliable. The Landwehr vacillated; the majority had a powerful dread of penal servitude. They were at first few in number, but were reinforced by the accession of all the undecided and timorous from the other detachments. The civic militia, finally, reactionary from the start here and set up directly to suppress the workers, declared itself neutral and only wanted to protect its property. All this, however, only came to light in the course of the next few days; in the meantime, some of the outside accessions and workers drifted away, the number of real fighting forces dwindled as a consequence of the movement’s stagnation, while the civic militia drew ever more closely together and expressed its reactionary desires more openly each day. In the last nights it had already torn down a number of barricades. The armed accessions, which at the beginning certainly amounted to over 1,000 men, had already been reduced by half on the 12th or 13th, and when a general muster finally took place, it turned out that the whole armed force that could be counted on amounted to at most 7–800 men. The Landwehr and civic militia refused to appear at this muster.

Not enough. The insurgent Elberfeld was surrounded by nothing but allegedly “neutral” places. Barmen, Kronenberg, Lennep, Lüttringhausen, etc. had not joined the movement. The revolutionary workers of these places, in so far as they had weapons, had marched to Elberfeld. The civic militia, in all these places a pure instrument in the hands of the manufacturers for keeping down the workers, composed of the manufacturers, their factory overseers and the small shopkeepers entirely dependent on the manufacturers, dominated these places in the interests of “order” and the manufacturers. The workers themselves, kept fairly alien to the political movement by their more rural dispersal, were, through the application of the well-known coercive means and through defamation about the character of the Elberfeld movement, partly won over to the side of

...brought down the manufacturers; upon the peasants the slander had an absolutely infallible effect. Added to this was the fact that the movement fell at a time when, after a fifteen-month commercial crisis, the manufacturers at last again had a wealth of orders, and that, as is well known, no revolution can be made with fully employed workers—a circumstance which also had a very significant effect in Elberfeld. That under all these circumstances the “neutral” neighbours were just so many hidden enemies is obvious.

What is more. Connection with the other insurgent districts was by no means established. From time to time a few individuals came over from Hagen; of Iserlohn next to nothing was known. A few people offered themselves as emissaries, but none could be trusted. Several messengers between Elberfeld and Hagen are said to have been arrested by the civic guard in Barmen and the surrounding area. The only place with which there was contact was Solingen, and there things looked exactly as they did in Elberfeld. That things did not look worse there was solely thanks to the good organisation and the determination of the Solingen workers, who, having sent 400 to 500 armed men to Elberfeld, were still strong enough to keep their own bourgeoisie and their civic guard at home in check. Had the Elberfeld workers been as developed and as organised as those of Solingen, the chances would have been entirely different.

Under these circumstances only one thing was possible: the adoption of a few rapid, energetic measures which would breathe new life into the movement, supply it with fresh fighting forces, paralyse its internal opponents, and organise it as vigorously as possible throughout the entire Berg-Mark industrial district.

The first step was the disarming of the Elberfeld civic guard, the distribution of its weapons among the workers, and the levying of a compulsory tax for the maintenance of the workers thus armed. This step broke decisively with all the previous slackness of the Security Committee, gave the proletariat fresh life, and paralysed the capacity for resistance of the “neutral” districts. What was then to be done in order to obtain arms from these districts as well, to extend the insurrection further, and to organise the defence of the entire district on a regular basis depended upon the success of this first step. With a resolution of the Security Committee in hand and with the four hundred men from Solingen alone, the Elberfeld civic guard could, by the by, have been disarmed in a trice. Their heroism was not worth mentioning.

For the security of the Elberfeld May defendants still held in prison, I owe the declaration that all these proposals originated solely and entirely from me. I advocated the disarming of the civic guard from the first moment that the financial means of the Security Committee began to dwindle.

But the estimable Security Committee found itself by no means constrained to agree to such “terrorist measures”. The only thing that I carried through, or rather had carried out on my own authority with a few corps leaders—who all happily escaped and are partly already in America—was the collection of some eighty rifles of the Kronenberg civic guard which were stored in the town hall there. And these rifles, distributed with the utmost thoughtlessness, came mostly into the hands of schnapps-loving lumpenproletarians, who sold them that same evening to the bourgeois. These gentlemen bourgeois, you see, sent agents among the people to buy up as many rifles as possible and paid a fairly high price for them. The Elberfeld lumpenproletariat thus delivered several hundred rifles to the bourgeois, rifles which had fallen into their hands through the negligence and disorder of the improvised authorities. With these rifles the factory overseers, the most reliable dyers, etc., etc., were armed, and the ranks of the “well-disposed” civic guard grew stronger from day to day.

The gentlemen of the Security Committee replied to every proposal for a better defence of the town that it was all useless, the Prussians would take good care not to come, they would not venture into the hills, etc., etc. They themselves knew very well that they were thereby spreading the most clumsy fairy tales, that the town could be fired upon from all the heights even with field artillery, that absolutely nothing was prepared for a defence that was even in any way serious, and that, given the standstill of the insurrection and the colossal Prussian superiority, only quite extraordinary events could still save the Elberfeld uprising.

In the meantime, the Prussian generals also seemed to have no great desire to venture into terrain that was to them almost completely unknown, before they had assembled a force that was in any event truly crushing. The four open towns of Elberfeld, Hagen, Iserlohn and Solingen so impressed these cautious war heroes that they had an entire army of twenty thousand men, together with numerous cavalry and artillery, brought in from Wesel, Westphalia and the eastern provinces, partly by railway, and, without venturing an attack, had them take up a regular strategic position behind the Ruhr. Supreme Command and General Staff, right wing, centre—everything was in the finest order, just as though one were facing a colossal enemy army, as though it were a matter of a battle against a Bem or a Dembiński, and not an unequal struggle against a few hundred unorganised workers, badly armed, almost without leaders, and betrayed in the rear by those who had put the weapons into their hands!

It is known how the insurrection ended. It is known how the workers, weary of the eternal procrastination, the hesitant cowardice and the treacherous lulling to sleep of the petty bourgeoisie, finally marched out of Elberfeld to fight their way through to the first land that offered them any protection under the Imperial Constitution. It is known what a hunt was made upon them by Prussian Uhlans and incited peasants. It is known how immediately after their departure the big bourgeoisie crept forth once more, had the barricades taken down and built arches of honour for the approaching Prussian heroes. It is known how Hagen and Solingen were delivered into the hands of the Prussians through direct betrayal by the bourgeoisie, and only Iserlohn put up a two-hour unequal struggle against the victors of Dresden, the 24th Regiment, already laden with booty.

A part of the Elberfeld, Solingen and Mülheim workers got through successfully to the Palatinate. Here they found their compatriots, the refugees from the Prüm arsenal storm. Together with these they formed a company in Willich’s Free Corps consisting almost exclusively of Rhinelanders. All their comrades must bear witness that wherever they came under fire, and particularly in the last decisive engagement on the Murg, they fought very bravely.—

The Elberfeld insurrection deserved a more detailed description for the very reason that it was precisely here that the position of the various classes in the movement for the Imperial Constitution was most sharply expressed, most highly developed. In the other Berg-Mark towns the movement was entirely similar to that of Elberfeld, except that there the participation or non-participation of the various classes in the movement was more of a jumble, because the classes themselves are not so sharply separated as in the industrial centre of the district. In the Palatinate and in Baden, where concentrated large-scale industry, and with it the developed big bourgeoisie, is almost completely non-existent, where class relations drift about in a much more cosy and patriarchal confusion, the mixture of classes that were the bearers of the movement was still far more tangled. We shall see this later, but we shall also see at the same time how all these admixtures of the uprising finally group themselves around the petty bourgeoisie, likewise as the crystallisation nucleus of the whole Imperial Constitution glory.

The attempted uprisings in Rhenish Prussia in May of last year clearly show what position this part of Germany can assume in a revolutionary movement. Surrounded by seven fortresses, three of them first-rank for Germany, constantly occupied by almost a third of the entire Prussian army, intersected in all directions by railways, with an entire steam transport fleet at the disposal of the military power, a Rhenish uprising has a chance of success only under quite extraordinary conditions. Only if the citadels are in the hands of the people can the Rhinelanders achieve anything with weapons in hand. And this case can only occur either when the military authorities are terrorised and made to lose their heads by tremendous external events, or when the troops declare themselves wholly or in part for the movement. In every other case an uprising in the Rhine Province is lost from the outset. A rapid march of the Badeners on Frankfurt and of the Palatines on Trier would probably have had the effect that the uprising on the Moselle and in the Eifel, in Nassau and in both Hesses would have broken out at once, and that the troops of the Middle Rhine states, at that time still well-disposed, would have joined the movement. There is no doubt that all the Rhenish troops, and particularly the entire 7th and 8th Artillery Brigades, would have followed their example, that they would at least have made known their sentiments loudly enough to make the Prussian generals lose their heads. Several fortresses would probably have fallen into the hands of the people, and even if not Elberfeld, then at any rate the greater part of the left bank of the Rhine would have been saved. All this, and perhaps far more, has been lost through the shabby, philistine-cowardly policy of the highly wise Baden State Committee.

With the defeat of the Rhenish workers, that newspaper also perished in which alone they saw their interests openly and resolutely represented—the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The editor-in-chief, although a native of Rhenish Prussia, was expelled from Prussia; the other editors faced, some direct arrest, others immediate expulsion. The Cologne police declared this with the greatest naivety and proved in full detail that they knew enough facts against each one to be able to proceed in one way or another. Thus the paper, at the very moment when its circulation, grown with unheard-of rapidity, more than secured its existence, had to cease publication. The editors scattered to the various German territories that were in insurrection or were yet to rise; several went to Paris, where yet another turning-point was imminent. There is not one among them who was not arrested or expelled during or as a result of the movements of this summer, and who thus met the fate which the Cologne police was so kind as to prepare for him. A part of the compositors went to the Palatinate and joined the army.

The Rhenish insurrection, too, had to end tragically. After three-quarters of the Rhine Province had been placed under a state of siege, after hundreds had been thrown into prison, it concludes with the shooting of three Prüm arsenal stormers on the eve of the birthday of Frederick William IV of Hohenzollern. Vae victis!

II.
Karlsruhe.

The insurrection in Baden occurred under the most favourable circumstances in which an insurrection can possibly find itself. The entire people was united in hatred against a government that was perfidious, time-serving, and cruel in its political persecutions. The reactionary classes — the nobility, the bureaucracy and the big bourgeoisie — were very small in number. Indeed, a big bourgeoisie exists in Baden only in embryonic form. With the exception of these few nobles, officials and bourgeois, with the exception of the Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden shopkeepers living off the court and rich foreigners, with the exception of a few Heidelberg professors and half a dozen peasant villages around Karlsruhe, the whole country was undividedly for the movement. The army, which in other uprisings first had to be defeated, the army, bullied by its aristocratic officers more than anywhere else, worked upon by the democratic party for a year past, and recently still further saturated with rebellious elements through the introduction of a kind of universal military service — here the army put itself at the head of the movement and even drove it further than the bourgeois leaders of the Offenburg assembly wanted. It was precisely the army that, in Rastatt and Karlsruhe, transformed the “movement” into an insurrection.

The insurrectionary government thus found, upon taking office, a ready-made army, amply stocked arsenals, a completely organised state machine, a full state treasury, and a population that was as good as unanimous. It further found, on the left bank of the Rhine, in the Palatinate, an already accomplished insurrection that covered its left flank; in Rhenish Prussia, an insurrection that, though severely threatened, was not yet defeated; in Württemberg, in Franconia, in both Hesses and Nassau, a general state of ferment, even within the army, which needed only a spark to repeat the Baden uprising throughout the whole of South and Central Germany and to place at least 50,000 to 60,000 men of regular troops at the disposal of the revolt.

What had to be done under these circumstances is so simple and palpable that now, after the suppression of the uprising, everyone knows it, everyone claims to have been saying so from the very beginning. What was at stake was to carry the uprising forward, immediately and without a moment’s hesitation, to Hesse, Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Nassau and Württemberg. What was at stake was to scrape together at once, from the available regular troops, 8,000 to 10,000 men — by rail this could have been done in two days — and to throw them on Frankfurt “for the protection of the National Assembly”. The terrified Hessian government was as if transfixed by the rapid, successive advances of the uprising; its troops were notoriously well-disposed towards the Badeners; neither it, nor the Frankfurt Senate, could offer the slightest resistance. The troops of Electoral Hesse, Württemberg and Darmstadt stationed in Frankfurt were for the movement; the Prussians there — mostly Rhinelanders | — were wavering; the Austrians were few in number. The arrival of the Badeners, whether one attempted to prevent it or not, was bound to carry the insurrection into the heart of both Hesses and Nassau, to force the Prussians and Austrians to retreat to Mainz, and to place the trembling German so-called National Assembly under the terrorising influence of an insurgent population and an insurgent army. If the uprising did not then immediately break out along the Moselle, in the Eifel, in Württemberg and Franconia, there were ample means at hand to carry it into these provinces as well.

Moreover, the power of the insurrection had to be centralised, the necessary financial resources placed at its disposal, and, by the immediate abolition of all feudal burdens, the great agrarian majority of the population had to be given a stake in the insurrection. The establishment of a common central authority for war and finance, with full powers to issue paper money,* first of all for Baden and the Palatinate, the abolition of all feudal burdens in Baden and in every district occupied by the insurrectionary army — this would have sufficed for the moment to give the uprising a far more energetic character.

All this, however, had to be done in the very first moment, in order to be carried through with the speed which alone could guarantee success. Eight days after the installation of the National Committee it was already too late. The Rhenish insurrection was suppressed; Württemberg and Hesse did not stir; the initially well-disposed sections of the troops became uncertain, and finally followed their reactionary officers once more entirely. The uprising had lost its all-German character; it had become a purely Baden, or Baden-Palatinate, local rising.

As I learnt after the end of the struggle, the former Baden second-lieutenant F. Sigel, who during the uprising won himself a more or less equivocal dwarfish laurel as “colonel” and later as “commander-in-chief”, | had, right at the beginning, presented the National Committee with a plan according to which the offensive was to be taken. This plan has the merit of containing the correct idea that attack was necessary under all circumstances; for the rest, it is the most adventurous that could possibly have been proposed. Sigel wanted first to march into Hohenzollern with a Baden corps and proclaim the Hohenzollern Republic, then to take Stuttgart and, from there, after lighting the insurrection in Württemberg, to march on Nuremberg and pitch a great camp in the heart of Franconia, likewise in revolt. One sees that this plan left completely out of account the moral importance of Frankfurt, whose possession alone would give the insurrection an all-German character, and the strategic importance of the Main line. One sees that it presupposed entirely different forces than were actually available, and that it finally fizzled out, after a completely quixotic or Schill-like raid into the blue, in such a way as — to set the strongest, the sole decidedly hostile army among all the South German armies, the Bavarian, instantly upon the heels of the uprising, even before it could strengthen itself by the crossing over of the Hessian and Nassau troops.

The new government undertook no offensive whatsoever, on the pretext that the soldiers had almost all dispersed and gone home. Quite apart from the fact that this was the case only with a few isolated detachments, in particular the body regiment, even these dispersed soldiers were almost all back with their colours within three days.

Besides, the government had quite different reasons for resisting every offensive.

At the head of the whole Baden Imperial Constitution agitation stood Herr Brentano, a lawyer, who, with the somewhat pettily ambitious air of a German petty-state “man of the people”, and with the ostentatious integrity of conviction that in South Germany is in general the first condition of all popularity, combined a certain diplomatic cunning, sufficient | to dominate his whole environment entirely, with perhaps one single exception. Herr Brentano — it has now become trivial to say so, but it is correct — Herr Brentano and his party, the strongest in the land, demanded at the Offenburg assembly nothing more than changes in the grand-ducal policy which were only possible with a Brentano ministry. The Grand Duke’s reply, and the general agitation, provoked the Rastatt military revolt — against the will and intentions of Brentano. At the moment when Herr Brentano was placed at the head of the National Committee, he was already overtaken by the movement, already compelled to try to check it. Then came the tumult in Karlsruhe in addition; the Grand Duke fled, and the very circumstance which called Herr Brentano to the head of the administration, which gave him, so to speak, dictatorial power, frustrated all his plans, brought him to the point of using this power against the same movement which had procured him the power. While the people were jubilant over the removal of the Grand Duke, Herr Brentano and his loyal National Committee sat as if on hot coals.

This National Committee, consisting almost exclusively of Baden philistines of the soundest convictions and the muddliest heads, of “pure republicans” who trembled at the proclamation of a republic and crossed themselves at the slightest energetic measure — this genuine petty-bourgeois committee was, of course, entirely dependent upon Brentano. The role that the lawyer Höchster had taken on in Elberfeld was taken on here, on a somewhat larger terrain, by the lawyer Brentano. Of the three heterogeneous elements who came from prison into the National Committee — Blind, Fickler and Struve — Blind was so enmeshed by Brentano’s intrigues that he, standing quite alone, had no choice but to go into exile in Paris in the capacity of a representative of Baden; Fickler had to undertake a dangerous mission to Stuttgart; Struve appeared to Herr Brentano so little dangerous that he calmly tolerated him in the National Committee, kept him under surveillance, and sought to make him unpopular — in which he fully succeeded. It is known how Struve, with several others, founded a “Club of Decided (or rather Deliberate) Progress”, which was dissolved after a failed demonstration. A few days later Struve was in the Palatinate, more or less a “refugee”, and there made another attempt to publish his “Deutscher Zuschauer”. The specimen number had hardly appeared when the Prussians marched in.

The National Committee, from the very outset a mere tool of Brentano, | elected an executive committee, at the head of which once again stood Brentano. This executive committee very soon replaced the National Committee almost entirely, at most got its credits and measures confirmed by it, and removed the more or less unreliable members of the larger committee by all sorts of subordinate missions to the districts or to the army. Finally it did away with the National Committee altogether through the “Constituent Assembly”, elected wholly under Brentano’s influence, and transformed itself into a “provisional government”, whose head, naturally, was once again Herr Brentano. It was he who appointed the ministers. And what ministers — Florian Mördes and Mayerhofer!

Herr Brentano was the most perfect representative of the Baden petty bourgeoisie. He differed from the mass of the petty bourgeoisie and their other representatives only in that he was too clearsighted to share all their illusions. Herr Brentano betrayed the Baden insurrection from the very first moment, and precisely because he perceived the situation more correctly from the very first moment than any other official person in Baden, because he took the only measures that could preserve the rule of the petty bourgeoisie, but precisely for that reason also had to ruin the whole insurrection. This is the secret of Brentano’s then boundless popularity, and at the same time the secret of the abuse that has been heaped upon him since July by his former adorers. The Baden petty bourgeoisie in the mass were | every bit as much traitors as Brentano; they were at the same time duped, which he was not. They betrayed out of cowardice; they let themselves be duped out of stupidity.

* The Baden Chambers had earlier authorised an emission of two million in paper money, of which not a single kreuzer had yet been issued.

The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution
II. Karlsruhe

In Baden, as generally in Southern Germany, there is almost no large bourgeoisie. The industry and commerce of the country are insignificant. There exists therefore only a very small, very fragmented, very undeveloped proletariat. The mass of the population is divided into peasants (the majority), petty bourgeois and journeymen. The latter, the urban workers, scattered in small towns, without any large centre in which an independent workers’ party could develop, are, or at least were until now, under the predominant social and political influence of the petty bourgeoisie. The peasants, scattered still more over the surface of the land, lacking means of education, in any case have interests which partly coincide, partly run, so to speak, parallel with those of the petty bourgeoisie and were therefore likewise under their political tutelage. The petty bourgeoisie, represented by lawyers, doctors, schoolmasters, a few merchants and booksellers, thus dominated, partly directly, partly through their representatives, the whole political movement in Baden since March 1848.

To this absence of the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and to the resulting political preponderance of the petty bourgeoisie, it is to be ascribed that a socialist agitation in Baden has never really existed. The socialist elements that came in from outside, whether through workers who had been in more developed countries, or through the influence of French or German socialist and communist literature, could never make headway. The red ribbon and the red flag in Baden meant nothing other than the bourgeois republic, at most mixed with a little terrorism, and Herr Struve’s “six scourges of mankind,” however innocently bourgeois they are, were the furthest that could still find an echo among the masses. The highest ideal of the Baden petty bourgeois and peasant always remained the small bourgeois-peasant republic, such as has existed in Switzerland since 1830. A small field of activity for small, modest people, the state a slightly enlarged commune, a “canton”; a small, stable industry based on manual labour, which conditions an equally stable and sluggish social condition; little wealth, little poverty, nothing but middle estate and mediocrity; no prince, no civil list, no standing army, almost no taxes; no active participation in history, no foreign policy, nothing but domestic petty local gossip and petty squabbles en famille; no large industry, no railways, no world trade, no social collisions between millionaires and proletarians, but a quiet, cosy life in all godliness and respectability, in the petty historyless modesty of contented souls—this is the gentle Arcadia that exists in the greater part of Switzerland and for the introduction of which the Baden petty bourgeois and peasant has raved for years. And when, in moments of bolder enthusiasm, the thought of the Baden, and, let us say, of the South German petty bourgeois in general expands to the conception of the whole of Germany, the ideal of Germany’s future hovers before him in the shape of an enlarged Switzerland, in the shape of the federative republic. Thus Herr Struve, too, in a brochure, has already divided Germany into 24 cantons, with as many Landammänner and great and small councils, and even appended the map with the ready-made division to the brochure. If Germany could ever be transformed into such an Arcadia, it would thereby have arrived at a stage of degradation of which it has had no inkling even in its most shameful times until now.

The South German petty bourgeoisie, however, had already more than once experienced that a revolution, and even if it carried their own bourgeois-republican flag, could very easily wash away their beloved, quiet Arcadia in the whirlpool of far more colossal conflicts, of real class struggles. Hence the petty bourgeoisie’s fear not only of every revolutionary shock, but also of their own ideal of the federated tobacco-and-beer republic. Hence their enthusiasm for the Imperial Constitution, which at least satisfied their immediate interests and gave them hope, under the merely suspensive veto of the emperor, of introducing the republic at a convenient time by legal means. Hence their surprise when the Baden military, unasked, presented them an insurrection ready-made on a platter, hence their fear of spreading the insurrection beyond the borders of the future canton of Baden. The conflagration might after all one day seize regions where large bourgeois and a mass proletariat existed, regions in which it would put power into the hands of the proletariat, and then woe to property!

What did Herr Brentano do under these circumstances?

What the petty bourgeoisie in Rhenish Prussia had done consciously, he did in Baden for the petty bourgeoisie: he betrayed the insurrection, but he saved the petty bourgeoisie.

By no means through his last actions, through his flight after the defeat on the Murg, as the finally disillusioned Baden petty bourgeois imagined, but from the very first moment Brentano betrayed the insurrection. It was precisely the measures which the Baden philistines, and with them a part of the peasants and even the handicraftsmen, most applauded, precisely these measures betrayed the movement to Prussia. Precisely because Brentano betrayed, he became so popular, he chained the fanatical enthusiasm of the philistine to his heels. The petty bourgeois overlooked the betrayal of the movement for the sake of the rapid restoration of order and security, for the sake of the momentary stemming of the movement itself; and when it was too late, when, compromised in the movement, he saw the movement and himself lost with it, he cried out about betrayal, he fell with the whole indignation of the bilked honest man upon his most faithful servant.

To be sure, Herr Brentano was bilked as well. He hoped, as the great man of the “moderate” party, i.e. precisely of the petty bourgeoisie, to emerge from the movement, and he had to flee ignominiously by night and fog from his own party, from his best friends, upon whom a terrifying light suddenly dawned. He even hoped to keep open the possibility of a grand-ducal ministerial post, and has received, in return for his cleverness, the kicks of all parties, the impossibility of ever again playing even any role at all. But indeed, one can be cleverer than all the petty bourgeois of some German robber state put together, and yet see one’s fairest hopes dashed, one’s noblest intentions besmirched with dirt!

From the very first day of his government, Herr Brentano did everything to confine the movement within the philistine bed which it had hardly attempted to overstep. Under the protection of the Karlsruhe civic guard, which was devoted to the Grand Duke, the same civic guard that had fought against the movement only the day before, he entered the Diet building in order to curb the movement from there. The recalling of the deserting soldiers was carried out with the utmost sluggishness; the reorganisation of the battalions was no more quickly pursued. On the other hand, the disarmed philistines of Mannheim were immediately armed, though everyone knew they would not fight and who, after the engagement at Waghäusel, even joined in large part in the betrayal of Mannheim by a dragoon regiment. There was no talk whatsoever of a march on Frankfurt or Stuttgart, of a spread of the insurrection to Nassau or Hesse. If such a proposal was made, it was at once dismissed, like Sigel’s. To speak of issuing paper money would have been considered a crime against the state, communist. The Palatinate sent envoy after envoy: it had no arms, no rifles, not to speak of artillery, no munitions, it needed everything necessary for carrying through an insurrection, and especially for taking the fortresses of Landau and Germersheim; but nothing was to be obtained from Herr Brentano. It proposed the immediate appointment of a joint military command, indeed the union of both lands under a single common government. Everything was dragged out and delayed. A small subsidy of money is, I believe, the only thing the Palatinate was able to get; later, when it was too late, eight guns arrived with some ammunition, without gun-crews and teams, and finally, on Mierosławski’s direct order, a Baden battalion and two mortars, of which, if I remember correctly, one fired a shot.

With this dragging out and removal of the most necessary measures, which could have carried the insurrection further, the whole movement was already betrayed. Internally, proceedings were conducted with the same nonchalance. There was no talk of abolishing feudal burdens; Herr Brentano knew very well that more revolutionary elements resided in the peasants, especially in the Oberland, than he liked, and that he must therefore hold them back rather than hurl them still deeper into the movement. The new officials were mostly creatures of Brentano or totally incapable; the old officials, with the exception of those who were too directly compromised in the reaction of the last twelve months and therefore had deserted of their own accord, all retained their posts, to the great delight of all quiet citizens. Even Herr Struve, during the last days of May, still found cause to praise the “revolution” for the fact that everything had passed off so nicely quietly and almost all officials had been able to remain in their posts. — For the rest, Herr Brentano and his agents worked to bring about as far as possible a return to the old rut, to ensure that as little unrest and excitement as possible prevailed, and that the revolutionary exterior of the country should disappear as soon as possible.

In the military organisation the same slovenliness reigned. Nothing more was done than what could not possibly be left undone. The troops were left without leaders, without occupation, without order; the incapable “Minister of War” Eichfeld and his successor, the traitor Mayerhofer, could not even manage to dispose them tolerably. The troop convoys criss-crossed on the railway, without purpose, without result. The battalions were led here today, back again tomorrow, no one could see why. In the garrisons they moved from one alehouse to another, because they had nothing else to do. It seemed as if they were to be deliberately demoralised, as if the government wanted straightway to drive out of them their last remnant of discipline. The organisation of the first levy of the so-called

The Volkswehr, i.e., all able-bodied men up to the age of 30, was placed under the command of the well-known Joh. Ph. Becker, a naturalised Swiss and officer in the federal army. To what extent Becker was hampered by Brentano in the execution of his mission, I do not know. But I do know that after the retreat of the Palatinate army onto Baden territory, when the imperious demands of the poorly clothed and poorly armed Palatinate troops could no longer be refused — that Brentano then washed his hands in innocence with the following words: “For all I care, give them whatever you like; but when the Grand Duke returns, let him at least know who squandered his supplies for him in this way!” If, therefore, the Baden Volkswehr was in part poorly organised, in part not organised at all, there can be no doubt that the main blame here too falls on Brentano and on the ill will or ineptitude of his commissaries in the individual districts.

When Marx and I first set foot on Baden territory, after the suppression of the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* — it must have been the 20th or 21st of May, hence more than eight days after the Grand Duke’s flight — we were astonished at the enormous carelessness with which the frontier was guarded, or rather not guarded. The whole railway from Frankfurt to Heppenheim was occupied by Württemberg and Hessian Imperial troops; Frankfurt and Darmstadt themselves were full of soldiers; all the railway stations, all the localities, had strong detachments posted in them; regular outposts had been pushed forward right up to the frontier. From the frontier to Weinheim, on the other hand, not a single man was to be seen; the same in Weinheim. The one and only precautionary measure was the demolition of a short stretch of the railway between Heppenheim and Weinheim. It was not until we were actually present that a weak detachment of the *Leibregiment*, at most 25 men, arrived in Weinheim. From Weinheim to Mannheim the profoundest peace again prevailed; at most, here and there a single, over-exuberant member of the Volkswehr, who seemed to have been scattered or to have deserted rather than to be on duty. Frontier control was naturally entirely out of the question. One went in and out as one wished.

In Mannheim, to be sure, things already looked rather more warlike. Crowds of soldiers stood about in the street or sat in the taverns. The Volkswehr and the *Bürgerwehr* were drilling in the park, most of them still very clumsy, with poor instructors. In the town hall there sat a host of committees, old and new officers, uniforms and blouses. The people mingled with the soldiers and free-corps men; there was a great deal of drinking, laughing, and making love. But one could see at once that the first upsurge was already over, that many were unpleasantly disappointed. The soldiers were malcontent; we made the insurrection, they said, and now, when it is the turn of the *bourgeois*, and they are supposed to take over the leadership, now they let everything grind to a halt and go to ruin! The soldiers were also not quite satisfied with their new officers; the new officers were at odds with the former Grand Ducal officers, of whom many were still there, although a few deserted every day; the old officers found themselves, against their will, placed in a fatal position from which they did not know how to extricate themselves. In short, complaints about the lack of energetic and capable leadership were heard everywhere.

On the other side of the Rhine, in Ludwigshafen, the movement confronted us in a far more cheerful form. Whereas in Mannheim a mass of young men, who obviously belonged to the first levy, still went quietly about their business as if nothing whatever had happened, here everyone was under arms. It was not, of course, like that everywhere in the Palatinate, as later became evident. The greatest unanimity prevailed in Ludwigshafen between the free-corps [66] men and the military. In the taverns, which were naturally also overcrowded here, the *Marseillaise* and other such songs resounded. There was no complaining, no grumbling; people laughed, were heart and soul in the movement, and at that time, particularly among the fusiliers and free-corps men, still cherished very pardonable and innocent illusions about their own invincibility.

In Karlsruhe the business already assumed a greater solemnity. In the *Pariser Hof* the *table d’hôte* was announced for one o’clock, but it was not begun until “the gentlemen of the *Landesausschuss*” had arrived. Such small attentions already gave the movement an agreeable bureaucratic tinge.

We expressed to various gentlemen of the *Landesausschuss* the view developed above, that at the very beginning the march should have been on Frankfurt and the insurrection thereby further extended, that it was now in all probability already too late, and that without decisive blows in Hungary or a new revolution in Paris the whole movement was already irretrievably lost. The indignation that broke loose among these citizens of the *Landesausschuss* at such heretical assertions is unimaginable. Blind and Gögg alone were on our side. Now, after events have proved us right, the same gentlemen have, of course, always been pressing for the offensive.

In Karlsruhe one encountered at that time already the first beginnings of that grand job-hunting which, under the equally grand title of a “concentration of all the democratic forces of Germany”, boasted of saving the fatherland. Whoever had ever declaimed, more or less confusedly, in some club, whoever had once called for hatred of tyrants in the most obscure little democratic local rag, hastened to Karlsruhe or Kaiserslautern, there straightway to become a great man. That the performance corresponded fully to the forces concentrated there hardly needs to be expressly asserted. — Thus there was in Karlsruhe a well-known, allegedly philosophical Atta-Troll, former deputy to the Frankfurt Assembly, and former editor of an allegedly democratic little sheet suppressed by Manteuffel despite the offer of our Atta-Troll’s services. Atta-Troll angled with great assiduity for the post of Baden envoy in Paris, for which he considered himself particularly called because he had at one time lived in Paris for two years and had not learnt French there. He was indeed fortunate enough to coax the credentials out of Herr Brentano, and was just packing his trunks when Brentano suddenly had him summoned and took the letter of accreditation back out of his pocket. It goes without saying that Atta-Troll now, in defiance of Herr Brentano, travelled to Paris all the more. — Another citizen sound in disposition, Herr Heinzen, who had already been threatening Germany with revolutionising and republicanising for some years, was likewise to be found in Karlsruhe. This worthy was known to have called, everywhere and at all times, before the February revolution, for “hitting out”, but after that revolution had considered it more advisable to watch the various German insurrections from the neutral high mountains of Switzerland. Now, at last, he seemed to feel the inclination to hit out at the “oppressors” himself. After his earlier pronouncement: “Kossuth is a great man, but Kossuth has forgotten the fulminate of silver,” it was to be expected that he would immediately organise the most colossal, hitherto undreamt-of forces of destruction against the Prussians. By no means. Since loftier plans appeared to be inapplicable, our hater of tyrants contented himself, as it is said, with [67] the formation of a republican elite corps, wrote articles in the meanwhile in support of Brentano in the *Karlsruher Zeitung*, and attended the Club of Resolute Progress. The club was dissolved, the republican elite did not materialise, and Herr Heinzen at last perceived that even he could no longer defend the Brentano policy. Unrecognised, used up, sullen, he went first into the Upper Baden region and from there into Switzerland, without having slain a single “oppressor”. Now he takes revenge on them by guillotining them in effigy in the millions from London.

We left Karlsruhe the next morning, in order to visit the Palatinate.

Of the further course of the Baden insurrection, in regard to the direction of general policy and civil administration, I need say but little more. As soon as Brentano felt himself strong enough, he annihilated the tame opposition that the Club of Resolute Progress offered him with a single blow. The “constituent assembly”, elected under the influence of Brentano’s immense popularity and the all-ruling petty bourgeoisie, gave its Yea and Amen to all his steps. The “provisional government with dictatorial power” (a dictatorship under an alleged Convention!) was entirely under his leadership. Thus he continued to rule, obstructed the revolutionary and military development of the insurrection, had the current business carried out *tant bien que mal*, and jealously guarded the supplies and the private property of the Grand Duke, whom he continually treated as his legitimate sovereign by the grace of God. In the *Karlsruher Zeitung* he declared that the Grand Duke could return at any moment, and indeed the palace remained locked for the entire period, as if its occupant were merely away on a journey. He put off the Palatinate envoys from day to day with indeterminate answers; the utmost that could be achieved was the joint military command under Mierosławski, and — a treaty for the abolition of the Mannheim-Ludwigshafen bridge toll, which, however, did not prevent Herr Brentano from having this toll continue to be collected on the Mannheim side.

When at last, after the engagement near Waghäusel and Ubstadt, Mierosławski had to withdraw the remnants of his army through the mountains to behind the Murg, when Karlsruhe with a mass of supplies had to be abandoned, when the defeat on the Murg decided the fate of the movement, then the illusions of the Baden *bourgeois*, peasants and soldiers vanished, then a general cry arose that Brentano had betrayed them. At a single blow, the whole edifice of Brentano’s popularity, upheld by the cowardice [68] of the petty bourgeoisie, by the lack of independence of the peasants, by the absence of a concentration of the workers, was destroyed.

Brentano fled by night and fog to Switzerland, pursued by the reproach of betraying the people, with which his own “Constituent Assembly” branded him, and went into hiding in Feuerthalen in the Canton of Zurich.

One might rest content with the fact that Herr Brentano is sufficiently chastised by the utter ruin of his political position and by the universal contempt of all parties for his treachery. The decline of the Baden movement is of no great consequence. The 13th of June in Paris and Görgey’s refusal to march on Vienna destroyed all the chances that Baden and the Palatinate still had, even had it been possible to transplant the movement into Hesse, Württemberg and Franconia. They would have fallen more honourably, but fallen they would have. However, what the revolutionary party will never forgive Herr Brentano, what it will never forgive the cowardly petty bourgeoisie of Baden who upheld him, is that they are directly responsible for the death of those shot in Karlsruhe, Freiburg and Rastatt, and of the countless and nameless victims whom the Prussians, by means of typhus, quietly executed in the casemates of Rastatt.

In the second issue of this *Revue* I shall depict the conditions in the Palatinate and, in conclusion, the Baden-Palatinate campaign.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Politisch-ökonomische Revue.
H.2, Februar 1850

III. The Palatinate.

From Karlsruhe we went to the Palatinate, and first of all to Speyer, where D'Ester and the provisional government were supposed to be. They had, however, already departed for Kaiserslautern, where the government, as the “strategically most favourably situated point in the Palatinate”, had finally set up its seat. Instead of them we found Willich in Speyer with his free corps. With a corps of a few hundred men he kept the garrisons of Landau and Germersheim, together more than 4,000 men, in check, cut off their supplies and molested them in every possible way. On that same day he had attacked two companies of the Germersheim garrison with about 80 riflemen and, without firing a shot, chased them back into the fortress. The next morning we drove with Willich to Kaiserslautern, where we found D'Ester, the provisional government and the flower of German democracy in general. There could, of course, be no talk here either of any official participation in the movement, which was entirely alien to our party. After a couple of days we therefore returned to Bingen, were arrested on the way, in the company of several friends, by Hessian troops suspected of participation in the rising, transported to Darmstadt and from there to Frankfurt, and here finally released again.

Shortly thereafter we left Bingen and Marx went to Paris with a mandate from the democratic central committee, where a decisive event was close at hand, in order to represent the German revolutionary party among the French Social-Democrats. I returned to Kaiserslautern to live there for the time being as a simple political refugee, and later perhaps, should a suitable opportunity offer itself at the outbreak of hostilities, to take up the only position that the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” could take in this movement: that of the soldier.

Anyone who has seen the Palatinate but once will understand that a movement in this country, so rich in wine and so given to wine, was bound to assume a most cheerful character. At long last one had got rid of the ponderous, pedantic, old-Bavarian beer‑souls, and in their place jolly Palatinate tipplers had been appointed as officials. At last one was rid of that deep‑meaning Bavarian police chicanery, which was amusingly enough caricatured in the otherwise so very dull “Fliegende Blätter”, and which weighed more heavily on the heart of the sprightly Palatine than anything else. The restoration of the freedom of the tavern was the first revolutionary act of the Palatinate people; the whole Palatinate turned into one great tavern, and the quantities of spirituous liquors consumed “in the name of the Palatinate people” during these six weeks surpass all computation. Although active participation in the movement was far from being as great in the Palatinate as in Baden, although there were many reactionary districts here, the whole population was nevertheless unanimous in this general tippling, and even the most reactionary philistine and peasant was swept along into the universal jollity.

One did not need great perspicacity to recognise what unpleasant disillusionment the Prussian army would bring upon these merry Palatines in a few weeks. And yet the people in the Palatinate who did not revel in the greatest confidence were few and far between. Very few believed that the Prussians would come, but that, if they did come, they would be thrown out again with the greatest ease – that was generally accepted as certain. That high-minded grimness, whose motto is: “Man must be in earnest”, which was written on the brow of all officers of the Baden popular levy and which nevertheless by no means prevented all those wonderful things I shall have to recount later – that upright solemnity which the philistine character of the movement had impressed upon the majority of its participants in Baden, did not exist here. In the Palatinate, the man was only “in earnest” as a sideline. “Enthusiasm” and “earnestness” served here only to gloss over the general jollity. But people were always “in earnest” and “enthusiastic” enough to believe themselves invincible against all the powers of the world, and notably against the Prussian army; and when in quiet hours of reflection a slight doubt ever arose, it was dismissed with the irrefutable argument: even if that were so, one must not say so. The longer the movement dragged on, the more undeniable and massive the concentration of Prussian battalions from Saarbrücken to Kreuznach became, the more frequent, to be sure, these doubts became, but the more violent also, precisely among the doubters and the anxious, became the swagger about the invincibility of a “people that is enthusiastic for its freedom”, as the Palatines were called. This swagger soon developed into a complete system of lulling to sleep, which, only too much favoured by the government, slackened all activity in defensive measures and exposed everyone who opposed it to the danger of arrest as a reactionary.

This confidence, this swagger about “enthusiasm” and its omnipotence, combined with the tiny material means at their disposal and the small corner of terrain on which it asserted itself, provided the comic side of the Palatinate “insurrection” and offered the few people whose advanced views and independent position allowed a free judgement ample matter for amusement.

The whole outward appearance of the Palatinate movement bore a cheerful, carefree and unconstrained character. Whereas in Baden every newly appointed second lieutenant, of the line and of the popular levy, laced himself into a heavy uniform and paraded with silver epaulettes which later, on the day of the engagement, promptly migrated into his pockets, people in the Palatinate were much more sensible. As soon as the great heat of the first days of June made itself felt, all cloth coats, waistcoats and cravats disappeared to make room for a light blouse. With the old bureaucracy, people seemed to have got rid of the entire old unsociable constraint as well. People dressed quite unconstrainedly, solely according to comfort and the time of year; and with the difference in clothing, all other differences in social intercourse momentarily vanished. All classes of society came together in the same public places, and a socialist enthusiast could have seen in this unconstrained intercourse the dawn of universal fraternity.

As with the Palatinate, so with its provisional government. It consisted almost entirely of genial tipplers, who were astonished at nothing more than that they were suddenly supposed to represent the provisional government of their Bacchus‑loving fatherland. And yet it cannot be denied that these laughing regents behaved better and achieved relatively more than their Baden neighbours, under the leadership of the “high-minded” Brentano. They at least had good will, and despite the tippling, more sober understanding than the philistine‑solemn gentlemen in Karlsruhe, and very few of them became indignant when people made fun of their comfortable manner of making revolution and of their impotent little measures.

The provisional government of the Palatinate could accomplish nothing as long as it was left in the lurch by the Baden government. And with regard to Baden, it fully did its duty. It sent envoy after envoy, made one concession after another, merely to reach an understanding: in vain, Herr Brentano would not, once and for all.

Whereas the Baden government found everything to hand, the Palatinate government found nothing. It had no money, no weapons, a large number of reactionary districts and two enemy fortresses in the country. France immediately prohibited the export of arms to Baden and the Palatinate, Prussia and Hesse seized all weapons dispatched thither. The Palatinate government at once sent agents to France and Belgium to buy up arms and get them in; the arms were bought, but did not arrive. One can reproach the government for not proceeding energetically enough in this, particularly for not organising any smuggling of rifles with the great number of smugglers on the border; the greater blame, however, falls on its agents, who acted very negligently and in part allowed themselves to be put off with empty promises, instead of at least conveying the French arms to Saargemünd and Lauterburg.

As for financial resources, little could be done with paper money in the small Palatinate. When the government found itself in pecuniary embarrassment, it at least had the courage to resort to a compulsory loan with progressive, albeit mildly graduated, rates.

The reproaches that can be levelled against the Palatinate government are confined to this: that, conscious of its impotence, it allowed itself to be too much infected by the general carelessness and the illusions about its own security connected therewith; that therefore, instead of energetically setting in motion the admittedly limited means for the defence of the country, it preferred to rely on the victory of the Montagne in Paris, on the capture of Vienna by the Hungarians, or even on actual miracles that were to occur somewhere for the rescue of the Palatinate — risings in the Prussian army, etc. Hence the negligence in the procuring of arms in a country where even 1,000 serviceable muskets more or less made an infinite difference, and where finally, on the day the Prussians marched in, the first and last forty rifles arrived from abroad, namely from Switzerland. Hence the frivolous selection of civil and military commissars, who mostly consisted of the most incapable, most muddled enthusiasts, and the retention of so many old officials and all the judges. Hence, finally, the neglect of all, even the most obvious, means to harass and perhaps to take Landau, to which I shall return later.

Behind the provisional government stood D'Ester as a kind of secret general secretary, or, as Herr Brentano called it, the “red camarilla that surrounded the moderate government of Kaiserslautern”. For the rest, this “red camarilla” also included other German democrats, notably refugees from Dresden. In D'Ester the Palatinate regents found that administrative overview which they lacked, and at the same time a revolutionary intelligence which impressed them by restricting itself at all times only to what lay nearest, what was undeniably possible, and therefore was never at a loss for detailed measures. Through this D'Ester acquired a significant influence and the unconditional trust of the government. Even if he sometimes took the movement too seriously and believed, for example, that he could accomplish something important by introducing his communal ordinance, which for the moment was totally unsuitable, it is nevertheless certain that D'Ester drove the provisional government on to all steps that had any degree of energy, and especially in conflicts over detail always had suitable solutions at hand.

If in Rhenish Prussia reactionary and revolutionary classes confronted each other from the outset, if in Baden a class that was at first enthusiastic for the movement, the petty bourgeoisie, allowed itself to be gradually led, as danger approached, first to indifference, later to hostility towards the movement it had itself provoked, then in the Palatinate it was less individual classes of the population than individual districts which, guided by local interests, declared themselves against the movement, partly from the beginning, partly gradually.

To be sure, in Speyer the citizenry was reactionary from the outset, in Kaiserslautern, Neustadt, Zweibrücken, etc., it became so over time; but the main strength of the reactionary party lay in the agricultural districts distributed over the entire Palatinate. This confused configuration of parties could only have been eliminated by one measure: by a direct attack on the private property invested in mortgages and mortgage usury in favour of the indebted peasants, sucked dry by usurers. This one measure, which would at once have interested the entire rural population in the insurrection, presupposes, however, a far larger terrain and far more developed social conditions in the towns than the Palatinate possesses. It was possible only at the beginning of the insurrection, together with an extension of the uprising to the Moselle and Eifel, where the same conditions exist in the countryside and find their complement in the industrial development of the Rhenish towns. And just as little as from Baden was the movement driven outwards from the Palatinate.

Under these circumstances the government had only limited means of fighting the reactionary districts: individual military expeditions into the refractory localities, arrests, especially of the Catholic priests who placed themselves at the head of the resistance, etc.; appointment of active civil and military commissioners, and finally propaganda. The expeditions, for the most part of a very comical nature, had only a momentary effect; propaganda had none at all, and the commissioners, in their self-important clumsiness, perpetrated one blunder after another, or confined themselves to a grand consumption of Palatinate wine, together with the inevitable swaggering in the pubs.

Among the propagandists, the commissioners and the officials of the central administration, the democrats assembled in the Palatinate, even more than in Baden, occupied a very significant place. Not only had the refugees from Dresden and Rhenish Prussia come here, but also a crowd of more or less enthusiastic ‘men of the people’, to devote themselves here to the service of the fatherland. The Palatinate government, which unlike Karlsruhe’s had the correct instinct that the capacities of the Palatinate alone were not equal to the burden even of this movement, received them with pleasure. One could not spend two hours in the Palatinate without being offered a dozen of the most diverse and, on the whole, very honourable posts. The democratic gentlemen, who saw in the Palatinate-Baden movement not a local insurrection that was becoming daily more local and insignificant, but the glorious dawn of the glorious rising of the whole of German democracy, who furthermore saw their, more or less petty-bourgeois tendency, prevailing in the movement, hurried to accept these offers. At the same time, however, everyone believed he might only take up a position in which he would not prejudice his, naturally mostly very high, claims in a general German movement. At the start that worked. Whoever came forward became at once bureau chief, government commissioner, major, or lieutenant-colonel. Gradually, however, the number of competitors grew, the posts became rarer, and a petty, philistine scramble for places developed, which presented a most amusing spectacle for the uninvolved onlooker.

That, given the rare mishmash of industrialism and confusion, pushiness and incapacity, which the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* had had so often the opportunity to admire in the German democracy, the officials and propagandists of the Palatinate were a faithful copy of this unpleasant mixture, I need hardly expressly assure you.

It goes without saying that I too was offered a multitude of civil and military posts, posts I would not have hesitated for a moment to accept in a proletarian movement. Under these circumstances I declined them all. The only thing I agreed to was to write a few rousing articles for a little sheet that the provisional government had distributed in masses in the Palatinate. I knew that even this would not work, but finally accepted the offer at the urgent request of D’Ester and several members of the government, in order at least to prove my good will. Since I naturally put little restraint on myself, the second article already gave offence as too ‘rousing’; I wasted no more words, withdrew the article, tore it up in D’Ester’s presence, and with that the matter ended.

Among the democrats from outside in the Palatinate, the best, incidentally, were those who had just come from the struggle in their home regions: the Saxons and the Rhenish Prussians. The few Saxons were mostly employed in the central bureaux, worked diligently and distinguished themselves by administrative knowledge, calm clear understanding, and absence of all pretensions and illusions. The Rhinelanders, mostly workers, went en masse into the army; the few who initially worked in the bureaux later also took up the musket.

In the bureaux of the central administration, in the Fruchthalle at Kaiserslautern, things went on in a most cosy fashion. Given the general laisser-aller, the complete absence of any active intervention in the movement, the enormous number of officials, there was on the whole little to do. It was almost exclusively a matter of current administrative business, and these were taken care of tant bien que mal. Unless some courier arrived, a patriotic citizen had a profound proposal for saving the fatherland, a peasant complained or a community sent a deputation, most of the bureaux had nothing to do. One yawned, chatted, told anecdotes, made bad jokes or strategic plans, went from one bureau to another and tried to kill time as best one could. The main topic of conversation was naturally the political events of the day, about which the most contradictory rumours were in circulation. The procurement of news was neglected in the highest degree. The old post office officials had almost without exception remained in their posts and were naturally very unreliable. Alongside them a ‘field post’ had been set up, which was handled by the Palatinate chevaux-légers who had come over. The commanders and commissioners of the border districts were not in the slightest concerned with what was going on beyond the frontier. At the government office one only had the *Frankfurter Journal* and the *Karlsruher Zeitung*, and I still recall with pleasure the astonishment that arose when I, at the casino, in an issue of the *Kölnische Zeitung* that had arrived several days earlier, discovered the news of the concentration of 27 Prussian battalions, nine batteries and nine regiments of cavalry, together with their exact dislocation between Saarbrücken and Kreuznach.

I come at last to the main point, to the military organisation. Approximately three thousand Palatines from the Bavarian army had come over bag and baggage. A number of volunteers, Palatines and non-Palatines, had at the same time placed themselves under arms. In addition the provisional government decreed the levy of the first contingent, initially all unmarried men from eighteen to thirty years of age. This levy, however, proceeded only on paper, partly because of the incapacity and negligence of the military commissioners, partly from lack of arms, partly through the indolence of the government itself. Where, as in the Palatinate, the lack of arms was the main obstacle to any defence, all means had to be employed to procure arms. If none could be procured from abroad, then every musket, every rifle, every shotgun that could be tracked down in the Palatinate had to be brought out and placed in the hands of the active fighters. But not only were there very many privately owned weapons, there were also at least 1,500–2,000 muskets, not counting the carbines, in the hands of the various civic guards. One could at least demand that the private weapons and the muskets of those members of the civic guard who were not required to join the first contingent or who did not wish to join it as volunteers be handed over. But nothing of the sort happened. After much pressing, such a resolution regarding the civic guards’ weapons was finally adopted, but never executed; the Kaiserslautern civic guard, numbering over 300 philistines, paraded daily in uniform and under arms as guard at the Fruchthalle, and when the Prussians marched in, they still had the pleasure of being able to disarm these gentlemen. And so it was everywhere.

A call was published in the official gazette to the forestry officials and forest guards to report in Kaiserslautern to form a rifle corps; those who did not come were the forestry officials.

Throughout the whole country scythes were forged, or at least orders were given for them; a few scythes were actually manufactured. At the Rhenish-Hessian corps in Kirchheimbolanden I saw several barrels of scythe blades being loaded and dispatched to Kaiserslautern. — The distance is about 7–8 hours; four days later the government had to abandon Kaiserslautern to the Prussians and the scythes had still not arrived. If these scythes had been given to the non-mobile civic guard, the so-called second contingent, as compensation for the guns they were to hand over, the matter would have been well enough; instead the idle philistines kept their percussion muskets and the young recruits were supposed to march with scythes against the Prussian cannon and needle-guns.

While there was a general lack of muskets, there prevailed, on the other hand, an equally remarkable superabundance of trailing sabres. Those who could not get a musket hung a clanking broadsword around themselves all the more eagerly, as they believed this alone already stamped them as an officer. In Kaiserslautern especially, these self-stamped officers were beyond counting, and the streets resounded day and night with the clatter of their terrible weapons. It was especially the students who, by this new manner of striking terror into the enemy, and by their pretension of forming an academic legion made up entirely of cavalrymen on foot, earned rare merits in the salvation of the fatherland.

In addition, there was a half-squadron of chevau-légers who had come over, but, being split up among the field postal service etc., they never managed to form a separate fighting corps. The artillery, under the command of “Lieutenant-Colonel” Anneke, consisted of a few three-pounders, whose teams I do not remember ever having seen, and a number of mortars. In front of the Fruchthalle in Kaiserslautern lay the finest collection of old iron mortar barrels one could wish for. Most of them naturally remained unused. The two largest were mounted on colossal carriages specially made and taken along; the Baden government finally sold the Palatinate a worn-out six-pounder battery together with some ammunition; but teams, crew, and sufficient ammunition were lacking. The ammunition was manufactured as far as possible; the teams were provided tant bien que mal by requisitioned peasants and horses; for the crews, some old Bavarian artillerymen were scraped together and the men were drilled in the clumsy and complicated Bavarian exercises.

The supreme direction of military affairs was in the worst hands. Herr Reichardt, who had taken over the military department in the provisional government, was active, but without energy and expertise. The first supreme commander of the Palatinate forces, the industrialist Fenner von Fenneberg, was soon dismissed for equivocal conduct; his place was taken for the moment by a Polish officer, Raquüliet. At last it was learned that Mieroslawski would assume supreme command for Baden and the Palatinate, and the command of the Palatinate troops was entrusted to “General” Sznayde, also a Pole.

General Sznayde arrived. He was a short, fat man, who looked more like an elderly bon vivant than a “caller in the strife of Menelaus”. General Sznayde assumed command with much dignity, had a report on the state of affairs rendered to him, and immediately issued a series of orders of the day. Most of these orders concerned the uniform — the blouse — and the insignia for officers — tricolour armbands or sashes — and appeals to veteran cavalrymen and riflemen to report voluntarily — appeals which had already been made ten times without success, and so on. He himself set a good example by immediately procuring an Attila with tricolour cords to instil respect in the army. What was really practical and important in his orders of the day was limited to repeating orders already issued long before, and to proposals that had already been made by the few good officers present but had never been carried out, and which were now to be enforced for the first time by virtue of the authority of a commanding general. For the rest, “General” Sznayde relied on God and Mieroslawski, and lived for the joys of the table, the only sensible thing such a totally incapable individual could do.

Among the remaining officers in Kaiserslautern, the only capable one was Techow, the same man who, as Prussian first lieutenant, had handed over the armoury to the people during the Berlin armoury storm together with Natzmer, and was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment, but had escaped from Magdeburg. Techow, chief of the Palatinate general staff, proved himself knowledgeable, circumspect, and calm everywhere, perhaps a little too calm for one to credit him with that rapidity of decision which often decides everything on the battlefield. “Lieutenant-Colonel” Anneke proved incapable and indolent in the organization of the artillery, although he did good service in the laboratory. At Ubstadt he reaped no laurels as a field commander, and from Rastatt, where Mieroslawski entrusted him with command of the material for the siege, he escaped across the Rhine in a strange manner, leaving his horses behind, even before the circumvallation.

Nor was there much to the officers in the individual districts. A number of Poles had arrived partly before Sznayde, partly with him. Since the best men of the Polish emigration were already in Hungary, it can be imagined that these Polish officers were of a rather mixed sort. Most of them hastened to procure a proper number of riding horses and to issue a few orders, and did not trouble themselves much about the execution. They behaved rather imperiously, wanted to treat the Palatinate peasants like servile Polish serfs, knew neither the country, nor the language, nor the word of command, and therefore, as military commissaries, i.e. organisers of battalions, accomplished little or nothing. In the course of the campaign they soon lost themselves in Sznayde’s staff, and disappeared entirely shortly afterwards, when Sznayde was attacked and mistreated by his soldiers. The better among them arrived too late to be able to organise anything.

Among the German officers, too, there were not many useful heads. The Rhenish-Hessian corps, which otherwise contained many elements also capable of military training, was under the leadership of a certain Häusner, a completely useless fellow, and under the still much more wretched moral and political influence of the two heroes Zitz and Bamberger, who later so gloriously extricated themselves from the affair in Karlsruhe. In the rear Palatinate, a former Prussian officer, Schimmelpfennig, organised a corps.

The only two officers who distinguished themselves in active service before the Prussian invasion were Willich and Blenker.

Willich, with a small volunteer corps, took over the observation and later the circumvallation of Landau and Germersheim. A company of students, a company of workers who had lived with him in Besançon, three weak companies of Turners — from Landau, Neustadt, and Kaiserslautern, two companies formed from volunteers of the surrounding localities, and finally a company of Rhenish Prussians armed with scythes, most of them fugitives from the Prüm and Elberfeld uprisings, gradually assembled under his command. In the end there were between 700 and 800 men, certainly the most reliable soldiers in the whole Palatinate, the non-commissioned officers mostly veterans, partly accustomed to small war in Algeria. With these few forces, Willich placed himself directly between Landau and Germersheim, organised the civic guards in the villages, used them for guarding roads and for outpost duty, repelled all sorties from both fortresses despite the superiority, especially of the Germersheim garrison, circumvallated Landau in such a way that virtually all supplies were cut off, cut off its water conduits, dammed up the Queich creek, so that all the cellars of the fortress were flooded and yet a shortage of drinking water ensued, and harassed the garrison every night with patrols which not only cleared the abandoned outer works and auctioned off the guardroom stoves found there for five guilders apiece, but also advanced right into the fortress ditch and frequently caused the garrison to open an as mighty as harmless fire with twenty-four-pounders on a lance-corporal and two men. This epoch was by far the most brilliant during the existence of Willich’s volunteer corps. Had he then had at his disposal only a few howitzers, and had they been only field pieces, then, according to the reports of spies going in and out of Landau daily, the fortress, with its demoralised, weak garrison and rebellious population, could have been taken in a few days. Even without artillery, a continuation of the circumvallation would have forced capitulation in eight days. In Kaiserslautern there were two seven-pounder howitzers, good enough to fire some houses in Landau at night. Had they been on the spot, the unheard-of thing would have been likely: that a fortress like Landau could be taken with a couple of field pieces. I preached daily to the general staff in Kaiserslautern the necessity of at least making the attempt. In vain. One howitzer remained in Kaiserslautern, the other wandered to Homburg, where it almost fell into the hands of the Prussians. Both crossed the Rhine without having fired a single shot.

But even more than Willich, “Colonel” Blenker distinguished himself. “Colonel” Blenker, a former wine salesman who had been in Greece as a Philhellene, and later established himself as a wine merchant in Worms, certainly belongs among the most eminent military personalities of this whole glorious campaign. Always mounted on a high horse, surrounded by a numerous staff, tall, strong, with a defiant countenance, an imposing Hecker beard, an almighty voice and all the other qualities which make up the South German “people’s man” and to which, as is well known, intelligence does not exactly belong, “Colonel” Blenker made the impression of a man before whose mere sight Napoleon would have to slink away, and who was worthy to figure in that refrain with which we opened these depictions. “Colonel” Blenker felt the stuff in himself, even without “Hecker, Struve, Zitz and Blum”, to overthrow the German princes and immediately set to work. His idea was to conduct the war not as a soldier, but as a wine salesman, and to this end he proposed to conquer Landau. Willich was not yet there at that time. He scraped together everything available in the Palatinate, regulars and people’s militia, organised the troops that were loafing about higgledy-piggledy, cavalry and artillery, and advanced upon Landau. In front of the fortress a council of war was held, the assault columns were formed, the position of the artillery was designated. But the artillery consisted of a few mortars, whose calibre varied from half-a-pounder to 1½-pounder, and was transported on a hay waggon, which also served as the ammunition waggon. For the ammunition of these different mortars consisted of one, I say one, twenty-four-pounder ball: there was no question of powder. After everything was arranged, they advanced full of contempt for death. They reached the glacis without encountering resistance; they marched on until they came to the gate. In front were the soldiers who had come over from Landau. On the ramparts some soldiers appeared as parliamentaries. They were called upon to open the gate. A quite cosy dialogue ensued, and everything seemed to be going according to wish. Suddenly a cannon shot rings out from the rampart, grapeshot whistles over the heads of the attackers, and in a trice the whole heroic army, together with its Palatinate Prince Eugene, dissolves into wild flight. Everyone runs, runs, runs with such irresistible vehemence that the few cannon balls fired soon afterwards by Willich’s corps no longer passed over the heads of the fugitives, but only over their thrown-away muskets, cartridge-boxes, and knapsacks. Some hours from Landau, a halt is finally called, the army is reassembled and led back home by Herr “Colonel” Blenker, without the keys of Landau, but nonetheless with undiminished pride. That was the unprecedented conquest of Landau with three mortars and one twenty-four-pounder ball.

The case-shot had been fired in haste by a few Bavarian officers, when they saw that their soldiers were disposed to open the gate. The cannon was knocked out of its aim by the soldiers themselves, and hence it came about that no one was hit. But when the garrison of Landau saw the effect produced by this shot fired at random, there was of course no further talk of surrender.

But hero Blenker was not the man to take no revenge for such a misadventure. He now resolved to conquer Worms. From Frankenthal, where he commanded a battalion, he advanced. The few Hessian soldiers lying in Worms took to their heels, and hero Blenker marched into his native town with drums beating and colours flying. After the liberation of Worms had been celebrated with a solemn breakfast, they proceeded to the main ceremony, namely the swearing-in on the Imperial Constitution of twenty Hessian soldiers who had remained behind sick. But on the night following these mighty results, Peucker’s imperial troops drew up cannon on the right bank of the Rhine, and awakened the victorious conquerors most unpleasantly with early-morning cannon thunder. It was no misunderstanding: the imperial troops were firing solid shot and shells across. Without saying a word, hero Blenker assembled his brave men and quietly withdrew from Worms back to Frankenthal. Of his later heroic deeds the Muse will report further in the proper place.

While in the districts the most diverse characters thus gave vent to their feelings each in his own way, while the soldiers and men of the people’s militia sat in the taverns singing instead of drilling, the officers in Kaiserslautern were busy inventing the most profound strategic plans. It was a matter of nothing less than the possibility of holding a small province like the Palatinate, accessible from several sides, with an almost entirely imaginary armed force against a very real army of over 30,000 men and 60 cannons. Precisely because every project here was equally useless, equally absurd, precisely because here all the conditions of any strategic plan were lacking, precisely for that reason the profound warriors, the thinking heads of the Palatinate army, resolved in all earnestness to devise a strategic miracle that would bar the Prussians’ way into the Palatinate. Every newly-baked lieutenant, every sabre-rattler from the academic legion which came into being under the auspices of Herr Sznayde, with the rank of lieutenant for each member, every office clerk stared profoundly at the map of the Palatinate in the hope of finding the strategic philosopher’s stone. One can easily imagine what delightful things resulted. In particular, the Hungarian method of warfare was very popular. From “General” Sznayde down to the as yet most unrecognised Napoleon of the army, one could hear hourly the phrase: “We must make it like Kossuth, we must give up a part of our terrain and withdraw — here or there, into the mountains or into the plain, as the case may be.” “We must make it like Kossuth,” was the cry in all the taverns. “We must make it like Kossuth,” repeated every corporal, every soldier, every street urchin. “We must make it like Kossuth,” repeated the provisional government good-naturedly, they who knew best that they were not to meddle in these matters, and who in the end were indifferent to how it was done. “We must make it like Kossuth, or we are lost.” — The Palatinate and Kossuth!

Before I proceed to the description of the campaign itself, I must briefly mention an affair that has been touched upon in various newspapers: my momentary arrest in Kirchheim. A few days before the entry of the Prussians, I accompanied my friend Moll on a mission he had undertaken as far as the frontier, to Kirchheimbolanden. Here was a part of the Rhenish-Hessian corps, where we had acquaintances. We sat in the evening with these and several other free-corps men of the corps in the inn. Among the free-corps men were some of those serious, enthusiastic “men of action”, of whom there has already been talk more than once, and who saw no difficulty whatever in beating any army in the world with little weapons and much enthusiasm. They are people who have seen of the military at most the guard parade, who never concern themselves at all about the material means to achieve any purpose, and who therefore mostly, as I later repeatedly had occasion to observe, experience in the first engagement such a devastating disappointment that they hurriedly take to their heels. I asked one of these heroes whether he really intended to beat the Prussians with the thirty thousand trailing sabres and three and a half muskets available in the Palatinate, among them several rusty carbines, and was just in the best vein of amusing myself over the holy indignation of the man of action wounded in his noblest enthusiasm, when the guard entered and declared me arrested. At the same moment I saw behind me two people springing at me, snorting with rage. — One identified himself as Civil Commissioner Müller, the other was Herr Greiner, the only member of the government with whom I had not come into closer contact on account of his frequent absence from Kaiserslautern — the fellow was quietly mobilising his fortune — and on account of his suspicious, canting and gloomy appearance. At the same time an old acquaintance of mine, a captain in the Rhenish-Hessian corps, rose and declared that if I were arrested, he and a considerable number of the best men would immediately leave the corps. Moll and others wanted to protect me by force on the spot. Those present split into two parties, the scene threatened to become interesting, and I declared that I would of course let myself be arrested with pleasure: people would at last see what colour the Palatinate movement had. I went with the guard.

The next morning, after a comical examination which Herr Zitz subjected me to, I was handed over to the civil commissioner and by him to a gendarme. The gendarme, who had been strictly enjoined to treat me as a spy, fettered my hands together and led me on foot to Kaiserslautern, accused of disparaging the uprising of the Palatinate people and of inciting against the government, about which, incidentally, I had not said a word. On the way I succeeded in getting a carriage. In Kaiserslautern, where Moll had hurried ahead of me, I found the government naturally highly dismayed at the exploit of the worthy Greiner, and even more dismayed at the treatment I had suffered. It will be understood that I made a lively scene for the gentlemen in the presence of the gendarme. Since no report from Herr Greiner had yet arrived, I was offered my release on parole. I refused the parole and went to the cantonal prison — unaccompanied, which was adopted on D’Ester’s motion. D’Ester declared that after a party comrade had been subjected to such treatment he could not remain any longer. Tzschirner, who had just arrived, also spoke out very firmly. The affair became the talk of the town that same evening, and all those belonging to the resolute tendency immediately took my side. In addition came the news that unrest had broken out in the Rhenish-Hessian corps on account of this matter, and that a large part of the corps wanted to disband. Less than that would have sufficed to show the provisional regents, with whom I had been together daily, the necessity of giving me satisfaction. After I had thoroughly amused myself for 24 hours in the prison, D’Ester and Schmitt came to me; Schmitt declared to me that I was free unconditionally and the government hoped I would not let myself be prevented from further participating in the movement. Moreover, orders had been given that from now on no political prisoner be brought in in fetters, and the investigation against the author of the infamous treatment, as well as into the arrest and its cause, would continue. After the government had thus given me all the satisfaction momentarily possible to them, since Herr Greiner had still sent no report, the solemn faces were dropped on both sides and we drank a few pints together in the Donnersberg. Tzschirner departed the next morning for the Rhenish-Hessian corps to pacify it, and I gave him a few lines for them. When Herr Greiner returned, he carried on in such appallingly canting fashion that he got a double dressing-down from his colleagues. Simultaneously, the Prussians marched in from Homburg, and since with this the affair took an interesting turn, since I did not want to miss the opportunity of going through a bit of war school, and since finally the Neue Rheinische Zeitung honoris causa also had to be represented in the Palatine-Baden army, I too buckled on a battle-sword and went to Willich.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Politisch-ökonomische Revue.
H.3, March 1850

IV.
To die for the republic!

“Only by the overthrow of thirty-six thrones
Can the German republic thrive;
Therefore, brothers, overthrow them without quarter,
Stake your goods and blood and life.
To die for the republic,
Is a lot great and sublime, is the goal of our courage!”

Thus sang the free-corps men on the railway, as I travelled to Neustadt to enquire there for Willich’s temporary headquarters.
To die for the republic was henceforth, then, the goal of my courage, or at least it was supposed to be. I felt strange with this new goal. I looked at the free-corps men, young, handsome, dashing fellows. They looked not at all as though death for the republic was, for the time being, the goal of their courage.

From Neustadt I travelled with a requisitioned peasant cart to Offenbach, between Landau and Germersheim, where Willich still was. Close behind Edenkoben I encountered the first sentry posts, set out by the peasants on his orders, which from now on were repeated at the entrance and exit of every village and at all crossroads, and let no one through without written authorisation from the insurrection authorities. One saw that one was drawing somewhat nearer to the state of war. Late at night I arrived in Offenbach, and immediately took over adjutant’s duties with Willich.

During this day — it was the 13th of June — a small part of the

The Willich corps fought a brilliant engagement. A few days earlier, Willich had received as reinforcement a Baden people’s militia battalion, the Dreher-Obermüller Battalion, and from this battalion about 50 men were pushed forward towards Germersheim, to Bellheim. Behind them, in Knittelsheim, there was still a company of the Free Corps together with some scythe-men. A Bavarian battalion with two guns and a squadron of chevauxlegers made a sortie. The Baden men fled without offering resistance; only one of them, overtaken by three mounted gendarmes, defended himself furiously until at last he fell, hacked all over by sabre cuts, and was finished off by his assailants. When the fugitives reached Knittelsheim, the captain who was stationed there set out against the Bavarians with barely 50 men, some of whom still had scythes. He skilfully divided his men into several detachments and advanced in skirmishing line with such resolution that after a two-hour fight the Bavarians, more than ten times superior in number, were forced back into the village abandoned by the Baden men, and finally, when some reinforcements from Willich’s corps arrived, they were thrown out of the village again. With a loss of about twenty dead and wounded they withdrew to Germersheim. I regret that I may not name this brave and talented young officer, as he is probably not yet in safety. His men had only five wounded, none of them seriously. One of these five, a French volunteer, received a shot in the upper arm before he himself came to fire. Despite this, he fired off all his sixteen cartridges, and when his wound prevented him from loading, he had his rifle loaded by a scythe-man so that he could continue to fire. The next day we went to Bellheim to view the field of combat and to make new dispositions. The

Friedrich Engels

Bavarians had fired solid shot and canister at our skirmishers, but hit nothing except the branches of the trees, with which the whole road was strewn, and the tree behind which the captain stood.

Today the Dreher-Obermüller Battalion was present in full strength to establish itself completely in Bellheim and the surrounding area. It was a fine, well-armed battalion, and the officers especially, with their twisted moustaches and brown faces full of seriousness and enthusiasm, looked like veritable thinking man-eaters. Fortunately, they were not as dangerous as we shall see more and more.

To my astonishment I learned that there was almost no ammunition at all, that most of the men had only five or six cartridges, a few twenty, and that the supply was not even sufficient to fill the quite empty cartridge pouches of the men who had been under fire the day before. I immediately offered to go to Kaiserslautern to fetch ammunition and set off the same evening.

The peasants’ carts travel badly; the necessity of requisitioning fresh wagons at each stage, the ignorance of the roads, etc., also cause delays. It was daybreak when I reached Maikammer, about halfway to Neustadt. Here I came upon a detachment of the Pirmasens people’s militia together with the four cannon sent to Homburg, which had already been given up for lost in Kaiserslautern. Via Zweibrücken and Pirmasens, and from there along the most wretched mountain roads, they had succeeded in getting as far as this, where they finally debouched into the plain. The Prussian gentlemen were not in such a hurry with the pursuit, although our Pirmasens men, excited by hardships, night marches and wine, already believed them to be at their heels.

A few hours later — it was 15 June — I reached Neustadt. The entire population was in the streets, among them soldiers and free-shooters, as all people’s militias in blouses were indiscriminately called in the Palatinate. Wagons, cannon and horses blocked the approaches. In short, I had landed right in the middle of the retreat of the entire Palatinate army. The provisional government, General Sznayde, the general staff, the offices, all were there. Kaiserslautern had been abandoned, the Fruchthalle, the “Donnersberg”, the beer-houses, the “most strategically situated point in the Palatinate”, and for the moment Neustadt was the centre of Palatinate confusion, which only now, when it came to fighting, reached its climax. Enough, I informed myself about everything, took along as many barrels of powder, lead and made-up cartridges as possible — what further use could ammunition be to this army, which had dissolved into ruins without a battle? — and after countless vain attempts finally procured a ladder wagon in a neighbouring village and drove off again in the evening with my booty and a few men as escort.

Before this I went to Herr Sznayde and asked whether he had anything to convey to Willich. The old gourmand gave me a few non-committal replies and added with an important air: “You see, we are now doing exactly as Kossuth.”

But how the Palatinate people came to do exactly as Kossuth did was connected as follows. In the most flourishing period of the “uprising”, i.e. on the day before the entry of the Prussians, the Palatinate possessed about 5,600 men armed with rifles of all kinds, and some 1,000–1,500 scythe-men. These 5,000–6,000 possible combatants consisted first of Willich’s Free Corps and the Rhenish-Hessian Free Corps, and secondly of the so-called people’s militia. In each district commissariat area a military commissioner was appointed with the task of organising a battalion. The soldiers who had come over and belonged to the district served as the cadre and instructors. This system of mixing troops of the line with the newly raised recruits, which during an active campaign with strict discipline and constant weapon drill would have led to the best results, ruined everything here. The battalions failed to materialise because of lack of weapons; the soldiers, having nothing to do, shed all discipline and military bearing and largely dispersed. At last in some districts a kind of battalion came together, in others there existed only a few armed bands. With the scythe-men nothing could be done at all; always in the way, yet never really usable, they were partly left as a temporary appendage to their respective battalions until they could be supplied with rifles, and partly combined into a special corps under the half-crazy Captain Zinn. Citizen Zinn, the most complete Shakespearian Pistol that one can see, who, while running away from Landau under hero Blenker, stumbled over his scabbard so that it broke, but afterwards swore with great pathos that a “twenty-four-pound fiery bomb-shell” had torn it in two, this same invincible Pistol had hitherto been used for executions against reactionary villages. He devoted himself to this office with great zeal, so that the peasants, though they had a very great respect for him and his corps, nevertheless gave him a proper thrashing whenever they got hold of him alone. On the return from such expeditions the scythe-men had to notch and splinter their scythes, and when he came to Kaiserslautern he told hair-raising Falstaffian stories of his battles with the peasants. —Since little could naturally be achieved with such forces, Mieroslawski, who only arrived at the Baden headquarters on the 10th, ordered that the Palatinate troops should fall back fighting to the Rhine, if possible win the Rhine crossing at Mannheim, or else cross to the right bank of the Rhine at Speyer or Knielingen, and then defend the Rhine crossings from Baden. Simultaneously with this order came the news that the Prussians had invaded the Palatinate from Saarbrücken and had thrown back our few men posted on the frontier towards Kaiserslautern after a few rifle shots. At the same time almost all of the more or less organised troop units concentrated in the direction of Kaiserslautern and Neustadt; boundless confusion arose, and a large part of the recruits dispersed. A young officer of the Schleswig-Holstein free corps of 1848, Rakow, went out with 30 men to collect the deserters again, and within forty-eight hours he brought together 1,400 of them, whom he formed into a “Kaiserslautern Battalion” and led until the end of the campaign.

Strategically, the Palatinate is such a simple terrain that even the Prussians could not make any blunders here. Along the Rhine lies a plain four to five hours’ march wide, without any terrain obstacles: In three easy days’ marches the Prussians could get from Kreuznach and Worms to Landau and Germersheim. Across the mountainous rear Palatinate leads the “Kaiserstrasse” from Saargemünd to Mainz, mostly along the ridge or through a wide brook valley. Here too there are almost no terrain obstacles behind which a numerically weak and tactically untrained army could hold its own in any way. Finally, right on the Prussian frontier, at Homburg, a fine road branches off from the Kaiserstrasse, leading partly through river valleys, partly over the ridge of the Vosges via Zweibrücken and Pirmasens, directly to Landau. This road admittedly presents greater difficulties, but even with few troops and without artillery it cannot be blocked, especially if an enemy corps manoeuvres in the plain and can cut off the retreat via Landau and Bergzabern.

Accordingly, the Prussian attack was very simple. The first incursion was made from Saarbrücken against Homburg; from here one column marched directly on Kaiserslautern, the other via Pirmasens on Landau. Immediately afterwards a second corps attacked in the Rhine valley. This corps encountered the first fierce resistance at Kirchheim-Bolanden from the Rhenish Hessians stationed there. The Mainz riflemen defended the castle garden with great tenacity and despite considerable losses. They were finally outflanked and withdrew. Seventeen of them fell into Prussian hands. They were immediately placed against the trees and shot without further ado by the schnapps-intoxicated heroes of the “magnificent army”. With this infamy the Prussians began their “brief but glorious campaign” in the Palatinate.

With this the whole northern half of the Palatinate was won and the link between the two main columns established. They now only had to advance in the plain and relieve Landau and Germersheim, to secure the entire remainder of the Palatinate for themselves and to capture all corps that might still be holding out in the mountains.

There were about 30,000 Prussians in the Palatinate, provided with numerous cavalry and artillery. In the plain, where the Prince of Prussia and Hirschfeld advanced with the strongest corps, there was nothing between them and Neustadt but a couple of sections of the people’s militia, already half dissolved and incapable of resistance, and part of the Rhenish Hessians. A rapid march on Speyer and Germersheim, and the whole 4–5,000 Palatines concentrated near Neustadt and Landau — or rather straggling confusedly about — would have been lost, scattered, dissolved and captured. But the Prussian gentlemen, so active when it came to shooting defenceless prisoners, were most reserved in battle, most sluggish in pursuit.

If, in the entire course of the campaign, I must repeatedly return to this highly strange luke-warmness of the Prussians and the other Reich troops, both in attack and in pursuit, in the face of an army that was mostly six times, and at all events at least three times, smaller, badly organised and wretchedly commanded in places — if I must revert to this circumstance, it is clear that I do not put it down to any special cowardice of the Prussian soldiers, the less so as one will already have seen that I harbour no illusions whatever about the particular bravery of our own troops. Nor do I trace it, as the reactionaries do, to a kind of magnanimity or to the wish not to be burdened with too many prisoners. The Prussian bourgeois and military bureaucracy has always sought its fame in carrying off triumphs over weak enemies with great éclat and in taking revenge on the defenceless with the full voluptuousness of bloodthirstiness. It did so in Baden and the Palatinate as well — witness the fusillades of Kirchheim, the nocturnal shootings in the pheasantry of Karlsruhe, the countless butcherings of the wounded and of those who surrendered on all the battlefields, the ill-treatment of those few who were taken prisoner, the summary executions in Freiburg and Rastatt, and finally the slow, secret, and, precisely for that reason, all the more cruel killing of the Rastatt prisoners by maltreatment, hunger, piling them up in damp, suffocating holes, and the typhus produced by all this. The lukewarm warfare of the Prussians had its cause, to be sure, in cowardice, namely in the cowardice of those in command. Apart from the slow, timorous precision of our Prussian heroes of the parade-ground and the manoeuvre, which by itself makes any bold stroke, any rapid decision, impossible,

apart from the cumbersome service regulations by which they seek to prevent indirectly the recurrence of so many ignominious defeats — where would the Prussians ever have employed this kind of warfare, so intolerably tedious for us and so deeply disgracing for them, if they had been sure of their own men? But therein lay the cause. The gentlemen generals knew that one-third of their army consisted of recalcitrant Landwehr regiments which, after the first victory of the insurrectionary army, would go over to it and very soon bring about the defection of half the regulars as well, and especially of all the artillery. And it is fairly clear what would then have become of the House of Hohenzollern and the unweakened crown.

In Maikammer, where I had to wait for fresh transport and escort until the morning of the 16th, the army, which had set out from Neustadt at the earliest hour, caught up with me again. The day before, there had still been talk of a march on Speyer; this plan had therefore been abandoned, and they were moving directly towards the Knielingen bridge. With fifteen men from Pirmasens, half-wild peasant lads from the primeval forests of the Hinterpfalz, I marched off. Only near Offenbach did I learn that Willich with all his troops had marched away to Frankweiler, a place lying north-west of Landau. I therefore turned back and arrived at Frankweiler around noon. Here I found not only Willich but once again the entire advance-guard of the Palatinate forces, which, in order not to march through the gap between Landau and Germersheim, had taken the road to the west of Landau. In the inn sat the provisional government with its officials, the general staff, and the numerous democratic idlers who had attached themselves to both. General Sznayde was breakfasting. Everything was in confusion — in the inn the regents, commanders and idlers, in the street the soldiers. The main body of the army gradually marched in; Herr Blenker, Herr Trocinski, Herr Strasser and all the rest of them, high on horseback, at the head of their valiant men. The confusion grew greater and greater. Little by little they succeeded in dispatching individual corps further on, in the direction of Impflingen and Kandel.

There was no sign that this army was in retreat. Disorder had been at home in it from the very beginning, and if the young warriors were already beginning 46) to complain about the unaccustomed marching, this did not stop them from carousing in the inns to their heart’s content, making a row and threatening the Prussians with the speediest annihilation. Despite this certainty of victory, a regiment of cavalry with a few mounted cannon would have sufficed to scatter the whole merry company to the four winds and to dissolve the “Rhine-Palatinate Army of Liberty” completely. Nothing would have been needed but a rapid decision and a bit of audacity; but in the Prussian camp there was no talk of either.

The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution  
IV. To Die for the Republic!

The next morning we set out. While the bulk of the fugitives marched off towards the Knielingen bridge, Willich with his corps and Dreher’s battalion marched into the mountains against the Prussians. One of our companies, about fifty gymnasts from Landau, had advanced into the highest mountains, to Johanniskreuz. Schimmelpfennig, with his corps, was also still on the road from Pirmasens to Landau. The object was to hold up the Prussians and to block the roads to Bergzabern and into the Lauter valley at Hinterweidenthal.

Schimmelpfennig, however, had already given up Hinterweidenthal and was at Rinnthal and Annweiler. The road makes a bend here, and precisely in this bend the mountains enclosing the Queich valley form a kind of defile, behind which the village of Rinnthal lies. This defile was held by a sort of outpost. During the night his patrols had reported being fired upon; early in the morning the former civil commissioner Weiß from Zweibrücken and a young Rhinelander, M. J. Becker, brought the news that the Prussians were advancing and called for reconnaissance patrols. But neither were reconnaissances carried out nor were the heights on both sides of the defile occupied, so that Weiß and Becker decided to go reconnoitring on their own. When reports of the enemy’s approach multiplied, Schimmelpfennig’s men began to barricade the defile; Willich arrived, reconnoitred the position, gave some orders to occupy the heights and had the completely useless barricade cleared away again. He then rode quickly back to Annweiler to fetch his troops.

As we marched through Rinnthal, we heard the first shots fall. We hurried through the village and saw Schimmelpfennig’s men drawn up on the chaussée, many scythe-men, few muskets, some already up ahead in the engagement. The Prussians advanced skirmishing on the heights; Schimmelpfennig had calmly let them come into the position which he was supposed to occupy himself. Not a bullet had yet fallen into our columns; they all flew high over us. Whenever a bullet whistled over the scythe-men, the whole line swayed, everyone shouted in confusion.

With difficulty we got past these troops, who blocked almost the entire road, threw everything into disorder, and, with their scythes, were entirely useless. The company leaders and lieutenants were as helpless and confused as the soldiers themselves. Our skirmishers were ordered forward, some to the right, some to the left onto the heights, with an additional two companies to the left to reinforce the skirmishers and to outflank the Prussians. The main column remained in the valley. A few skirmishers posted themselves behind the remnants of the barricade in the bend of the road and fired on the Prussian column, which stood some hundreds of paces further back. I went up the mountain to the left with a few men.

We had barely scrambled up the bushy slope when we came upon an open field, from the wooded edge on the far side of which Prussian skirmishers sent their conical bullets over to us. I fetched up a few more of the Free Corps men, who were clambering about on the slope helplessly and somewhat timidly, posted them as far under cover as possible, and looked at the terrain more closely. With the few men I had, I could not advance across a completely open field of 200–250 paces in breadth, so long as the flanking detachment dispatched further to the left had not reached the Prussians’ flank; at most we could hold out, as we were only poorly covered anyway. The Prussians, by the way, shot abominably badly despite their conical-bullet rifles; we stood for a good half-hour with almost no cover in the heaviest skirmishing fire, and the enemy sharpshooters hit only one musket barrel and the tip of a blouse.

At last I had to find where Willich was. My men promised to hold out; I scrambled down the slope again. Below, everything was standing firm. The main Prussian column, fired upon by our skirmishers on the road and to the right of the road, had to withdraw a little further. Suddenly, on the left, where I had been standing, our Free Corps men came leaping hurriedly down the slope and abandoned their position. The companies which had advanced on the extreme left wing, weakened by leaving behind numerous skirmishers, found the way through a more distant wood too long; with the captain who had won the engagement at Bellheim at their head, they advanced diagonally across the fields. A heavy fire received them; the captain and several others fell, and the rest, without a leader, gave way before superior force. The Prussians now moved forward, took our skirmishers in the flank, fired down on them from above, and thus forced them to retreat. The whole mountain was soon in the hands of the Prussians. They fired down into our columns; there was nothing more to be done, and we began the retreat. The road was blocked by Schimmelpfennig’s troops and by the Dreher-Obermüller battalion, which, according to laudable Baden custom, marched not in sections of 4–6, but in half-platoons of 12–15 men front, occupying the whole breadth of the chaussée. Our men had to march through swampy meadows into the village. I remained with the skirmishers who covered the retreat.

The engagement was lost, partly because Schimmelpfennig, contrary to Willich’s orders, had not had the heights occupied — heights which, with the few usable troops at our disposal, we could not retake from the Prussians — partly through the complete uselessness of Schimmelpfennig’s men and Dreher’s battalion, partly, finally, through the impatience of the captain ordered to outflank the Prussians, which nearly cost him his life and exposed our left wing. It was, by the way, fortunate for us that we were beaten; a Prussian column was already on the road to Bergzabern, Landau had been relieved, and we would thus have been surrounded on all sides in Hinterweidenthal.

On the retreat we lost more men than in the battle. From time to time the Prussian rifle bullets struck into the dense column, which for the most part moved on in edifying disorder, shouting and clattering. We had about fifteen wounded, among them Schimmelpfennig, who had been shot in the knee fairly early in the engagement. The Prussians again pursued us very half-heartedly and soon ceased firing. Only a few skirmishers on the mountain slopes followed us. In Annweiler, half an hour from the battlefield, we very calmly took some refreshments and then marched on to Albersweiler. The main thing we had secured: 3,000 gulden in payments for the forced loan, which had been lying ready in Annweiler. The Prussians afterwards called this a raid on the cash-box. In their intoxication of victory they also claimed to have killed Captain Manteuffel of our corps, cousin of Ehren-Manteuffel in Berlin and a former Prussian non-commissioned officer who had come over to us, at Rinnthal. Herr Manteuffel is so little dead that he has since won a gymnastics prize in Zurich.

At Albersweiler two Baden guns joined us, part of the reinforcements sent by Mierosławski. We wanted to use them to make a stand once more in the vicinity; but then news was brought to us that the Prussians were already in Landau, upon which nothing remained for us but to march off directly to Langenkandel.

At Albersweiler we were fortunate to get rid of the useless troops that were marching with us. After the loss of its leader, Schimmelpfennig’s corps had already partly disbanded and was marching off on its own hook in the direction of Kandel. Every moment it still left stragglers and other laggards behind in the inns. Dreher’s battalion began to turn mutinous at Albersweiler. Willich and I went over and asked them what they wanted. General silence. At last a Free Corps man, already fairly advanced in years, cried: “They want to lead us to the slaughter-bench!” This exclamation was highly comical in a corps that had not even been in the fight at all and had had two, at most three slightly wounded on the retreat. Willich made the man step forward and hand over his gun. The somewhat tipsy greybeard did so, made a tragicomic scene, and howled a long speech whose short meaning was that this had never happened to him before. At that, a general indignation arose amongst these very good-humoured but badly disciplined fighters, so that Willich ordered the whole company to march off at once; he was sick of the chattering and grumbling and did not want to lead such soldiers an instant longer. The company did not need to be told twice, wheeled off to the right and set itself in motion. Five minutes later the rest of the battalion followed, Willich having assigned 2 guns to it. The idea that they were to be “led to the slaughter-bench” and keep discipline was too much for them! We let them go with pleasure.

The Baden government, to spare the worthy petty bourgeois of Karlsruhe, who had conducted themselves so bravely against the republicans on 6 June, quartered the whole Palatinate company in the surrounding area. We had just been pressing to come to Karlsruhe with our corps; we needed a great many repairs and articles of clothing and also considered the presence of a reliable, revolutionary corps in Karlsruhe most desirable. But Herr Brentano had taken care of us. He directed us to Daxlanden, a village an hour and a half from Karlsruhe, which was depicted to us as a veritable Eldorado. We march there, and find the most reactionary hole in the whole region. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, hardly any straw; half the corps had to sleep on the hard floor. On top of that, sour faces at every door and window. We made short work. Herr Brentano was warned: if we were not assigned other, better quarters beforehand, we would be in Karlsruhe the next morning, 19 June. No sooner said than done. At nine o’clock in the morning we march off. Not yet a rifle-shot from the village, Herr Brentano comes towards us with a staff officer and expends all flatteries, all the arts of eloquence, to keep us away from Karlsruhe. The town was already housing 5,000 men, the richer class had travelled away, the middle class was overburdened with billeting; he would not tolerate the brave Willich corps, praised on all tongues, being badly accommodated, etc. All of no avail. Willich demanded a number of empty palaces of aristocrats who had departed, and when Brentano would not give them, we went into quarters in Karlsruhe.

In Karlsruhe we received rifles for our scythe company, and some cloth for greatcoats. We had shoes and clothes repaired as quickly as possible. New people also came to us, several workers whom I knew from the Elberfeld insurrection, furthermore Kinkel, who joined the Besançon workers’ company as a musketeer, and Zychlinski, adjutant of the high command in the Dresden insurrection and leader of the rearguard on the retreat of the insurgents. He joined the students’ company as a rifleman.

Alongside the completion of equipment, tactical training was not forgotten. There was zealous drilling, and on the second day of our presence a simulated storming of Karlsruhe was undertaken from the Schlossplatz. The petty bourgeois demonstrated by their general and deeply-felt indignation at this manoeuvre that they had fully understood the threat.

At last the bold decision was taken to requisition the weapons collection of the Grand Duke, which up to then had remained untouched like a sanctuary. We were just about to have twenty rifles from it fitted with pistons when the news came that the Prussians had crossed the Rhine near Germersheim and were in Graben and Bruchsal.

We marched off at once — on the evening of 20 June — together with two Palatinate guns. When we came to Blankenloch, an hour and a half from Karlsruhe in the direction of Bruchsal, we found Herr Clement there with his battalion and learnt that the Prussian outposts had been pushed forward to about an hour from Blankenloch. While our men ate supper under arms, we held a council of war. Willich proposed attacking the Prussians immediately. Herr Clement declared that with his untrained troops he could not carry out a night attack. It was therefore resolved that we should at once advance on Karlsdorf, attack a little before daybreak and seek to break through the Prussian line. If we succeeded, we should march on Bruchsal and throw ourselves into it if possible. Herr Clement was then to attack via Friedrichsthal at daybreak and support our left flank.

It was about midnight when we set out. Our undertaking was tolerably daring. We were not quite seven hundred men with two guns; our troops were better drilled and more reliable than the rest of the Palatinate troops, also fairly accustomed to fire. We wanted with them to attack an enemy corps that was in any case far more practised and provided with practised subaltern officers than we were, among whom individual captains had barely been in the civic militia; a corps whose strength we did not exactly know, but which numbered not fewer than 4,000 men. Our corps, however, had already sustained more unequal combats, and on less unfavourable numerical odds was, in any case, not to be counted upon in this campaign.

We sent ten students forward a hundred paces as an advance guard; then followed the first column, at its head half a dozen Baden dragoons who had been assigned to us for courier service, behind them three companies. The guns together with the three remaining companies stayed a little further back, the riflemen formed the rear. Orders were given under no condition to fire, to march in the greatest silence, and as soon as the enemy showed himself, to go at him with the bayonet.

Before long we saw in the distance the glow of the Prussian watch-fires. We reach Spöck without being molested. The main body halts; only the advance guard marches forward. Suddenly shots fall; on the road, at the entrance to the village, a bright straw fire flares up, the bell sounds the alarm. Right and left our skirmishers go around the village, and the column marches in. Inside, large fires are also burning; at every corner we expect a salvo. But all is quiet, and only a kind of guard post of peasants is camped before the town hall. The Prussian post had already made off.

The Prussian gentlemen — as we saw here — held themselves, despite their colossal—

The Prussians never felt secure of their superior numbers unless they had carried out their pedantic outpost duty regulations down to the most tedious detail. This extreme outpost was a whole hour’s distance from their camp. Had we wanted to wear out our men, unaccustomed to the hardships of war, in the same way by outpost duty, we would have had countless stragglers. We relied upon Prussian nervousness, and were of the opinion that they would have more respect for us than we for them. And rightly so. Our outposts were never attacked up to the Swiss border, our quarters never surprised.

In any event, the Prussians were now alerted. Should we turn back? We were not of that opinion, we marched on through.

At Neuthard the alarm bell again; this time, however, neither signal fires nor shots. We march in somewhat more closed order through the village here too and up the height towards Karlsdorf. Our advance guard, now only thirty paces ahead, has barely reached the height when it sees the Prussian picket close before it and is challenged by it. I hear the “Who goes there?” and jump forward. One of my comrades said: he is lost, we shall not see him again. But it was precisely my stepping forward that saved me.

For at that very moment the enemy picket fires a volley, and our advance guard, instead of throwing themselves upon it with the bayonet, fires back. The dragoons, beside whom I had been marching, with their usual cowardice immediately wheel about, gallop into the column, ride down a number of men, completely scatter the first four to six sections, and gallop off. At the same time, the enemy vedettes posted in the fields to right and left open fire on us, and to complete the confusion, a few blockheads in the middle of our column begin firing at their own vanguard, and other blockheads follow suit. In an instant the first half of the column is scattered, partly dispersed in the fields, partly in flight, partly huddled together on the road in a confused knot. Wounded men, knapsacks, hats, muskets lie pell-mell in the young corn. Amidst this, wild, confused shouting, shots and the whistling of bullets in every possible direction. And as the noise somewhat subsides, I hear our cannon far behind roll away in hasty flight. They had rendered the same service to the second half of the column as the dragoons to the first.

However furious I was at that moment at the childish terror that had seized our soldiers, the Prussians seemed all the more pitiful to me, who, alerted as they were to our arrival, ceased fire after a few shots and likewise beat a hasty retreat. Our advance guard still stood on its old spot, entirely unassailed. A squadron of cavalry, or a tolerably sustained skirmishing fire, would have dissolved us into the wildest flight.

Willich came hurrying up from the advance guard. The Besançon company was the first to be formed up again; the others, more or less ashamed, joined in. It was just daybreak. Our loss amounted to six wounded, among them one of our staff officers, who had been trampled to the ground at the very spot I had left a moment before to hurry to the advance guard. Several others had evidently been hit by the bullets of our own people. We carefully collected all discarded pieces of equipment, so that not the slightest trophy would fall to the Prussians, and then slowly withdrew to Neuthard. The riflemen posted themselves as a covering force behind the first houses. But no Prussian came; and when Zychlinski went to reconnoitre once more, he found them still behind the height, whence they sent a few bullets his way without hitting anything.

The Palatinate peasants who drove our guns had driven right through the village with one cannon; the other had overturned, and the drivers had ridden off with five horses, after cutting their traces. We had to right the gun and get it forward with the single pole horse alone.

On arriving near Spöck, we heard to the right, in the direction of Friedrichsthal, a fusillade that gradually became livelier. Herr Clement had finally attacked, an hour later than agreed. I proposed supporting him by a flank attack to make good the disgrace. Willich was of the same opinion and ordered the first road on the right to be taken. Part of our corps had already turned into it, when a dispatch officer from Clement reported that he was withdrawing. We accordingly went to Blankenloch. Soon we met Herr Beust, of the General Staff, who was highly astonished to see us alive and the corps in the best of order. The wretched dragoons, on their flight, which extended as far as Karlsruhe, had spread the story everywhere that Willich was dead, all the officers were dead, and the corps scattered to the four winds and annihilated. They had fired case-shot and “fiery bomb balls” at us.

Before Blankenloch, Palatinate and Baden troops came towards us, and finally Herr Sznayde with his staff. The old curmudgeon, who had probably spent the night very quietly in his bed, was impudent enough to call out to us: “Gentlemen, where are you going? The enemy is over there!” We answered him naturally as was proper, marched past and saw to some rest and refreshment in Blankenloch. After two hours, Herr Sznayde came back with his troop, naturally without having seen the enemy, and breakfasted.

The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution. IV. To Die for the Republic!

Herr Sznayde now had, with the reinforcements received from Karlsruhe and the surrounding area, about 8,000 to 9,000 men under his command, including three Baden line battalions and two Baden batteries. In all, there may have been 25 guns. As a result of the somewhat vague orders of Mieroslawski, and even more the total incapacity of Herr Sznayde, the entire Palatinate army remained in the vicinity of Karlsruhe until the Prussians had crossed the Rhine under the protection of the Germersheim bridgehead. Mieroslawski (see his reports on the campaign in Baden) had issued the general order to defend the Rhine crossings from Speyer to Knielingen after the withdrawal from the Palatinate, and the specific order to cover Karlsruhe and to make the Knielingen bridge the assembly point for the entire army corps. Herr Sznayde interpreted this to mean that he was to remain near Karlsruhe and Knielingen until further notice. Had he, as Mieroslawski’s general orders implied, sent a strong corps with artillery against the Germersheim bridgehead, the nonsense would not have occurred of ordering Major Mniewski with 450 recruits and no guns to take the bridgehead; 30,000 Prussians would not have crossed the Rhine unmolested; the link with Mieroslawski would not have been severed; the Palatinate army could have appeared in time on the battlefield of Waghäusel. Instead, on the day of the Waghäusel engagement, 21 June, it roamed about helplessly between Friedrichsthal, Weingarten and Bruchsal, lost sight of the enemy and squandered the time in marches to and fro.

We received orders to set out for the right wing and advance via Weingarten along the edge of the hills. We accordingly broke camp at noon that same day – 21 June – from Blankenloch, and towards five in the evening from Weingarten. The Palatinate troops at last began to grow uneasy; they noticed the superior numbers confronting them, and lost the braggart confidence they had previously possessed, at least before the fight. From now on there began, among the Palatinate and Baden popular militia, and gradually also among the regulars and artillery, that Prussian-sniffing, that daily repetition of blind alarms, which threw everything into confusion and gave rise to the most diverting scenes. Right on the first height beyond Weingarten, patrols and peasants rushed towards us with the cry: the Prussians are coming! Our corps formed in battle order and advanced. I went back into the little town to have the alarm sounded, and thereby lost the corps. The whole alarm was of course without foundation. The Prussians had withdrawn towards Waghäusel, and Willich entered Bruchsal that same evening.

I spent the night with Herr Oßwald and his Palatinate battalion in Obergrombach and marched with it the next morning to Bruchsal. Before the town, wagons with stragglers come towards us: The Prussians are here! Immediately the whole battalion fell into wavering, and it could only with difficulty be brought forward. Naturally, again a blind alarm; Willich and the rest of the Palatinate advance guard lay in Bruchsal; the others marched in in turn and there was no trace of the Prussians. Apart from the army and its leaders, d’Ester, the former Palatinate government and Goegg were there, the latter having, since Brentano’s dictatorship had become uncontestable, kept almost exclusively to the army and helped to attend to the current civil business. The provisioning was bad, the confusion great. Only at headquarters, as always, they lived well.

We again received a considerable number of cartridges from the Karlsruhe stores, and marched off in the evening, the whole advance guard with us. While it took up quarters in Ubstadt, we turned off to the right towards Unteröwisheim, to cover the flank in the hills.

By appearances, we were now quite a respectable force. Our corps had been reinforced by two new detachments. Firstly, by the Langenkandel battalion, which had dispersed on the way from its home territory to the Knielingen bridge and whose beaux restes had joined us; they consisted of a captain, a lieutenant, an ensign, a sergeant-major, a corporal and two men. Secondly, the “Robert Blum Column”, with a red flag, a corps of about sixty men who looked like cannibals and had performed notable feats of requisitioning. In addition, four Baden guns and a battalion of Baden popular militia had been assigned to us, the Kniery, Knüry or Knierim battalion (the correct reading of the name was impossible to discover). The Knierim battalion was worthy of its leader, and Herr Knierim was worthy of his battalion. Both were stout in their convictions, frightful braggarts and noise-makers, and perpetually drunk. The well-known “enthusiasm” was about to strike through their hearts, as we shall see, for the most prodigious heroic deeds.

On the morning of the 23rd, Willich received a note from Anneke, who commanded the Palatinate advance guard in Ubstadt, to the effect that the enemy was advancing, a council of war had been held and it had been decided to withdraw. Utterly astonished at this strange news, Willich immediately rode over, persuaded Anneke and his officers to accept battle at Ubstadt, reconnoitred the position himself and indicated the placement of the guns. He then returned and had his men fall in. While our troops were forming up, we received the following order from headquarters in Bruchsal, signed by Techow: The main body of the army would advance on the road to Heidelberg and hoped to reach Mingolzheim the same day, and we were simultaneously to march via Udenheim to Waldangelloch and spend the night there. Further news of the main corps’ successes and orders for our further conduct would be sent after us there.

The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution
IV. To Die for the Republic!

Herr Struve, in his absurd “History of the Three Popular Uprisings in Baden”, pp. 311–17, has published a report on the operations of the Palatinate army from 20 to 26 June, which is nothing but an apologia for the incompetent Sznayde and teems with inaccuracies and distortions. Even from what has been related, it is clear: 1) that Sznayde by no means “received reliable news of the engagement at Waghäusel and its outcome a few hours after his entry into Bruchsal (on the 22nd)”; 2) that therefore, by no means “did his plan change as a result, and that, instead of marching towards Mingolzheim as originally intended”, he by no means already on the 22nd “decided to stay with the bulk of his division in Bruchsal” (the aforementioned note from Techow was written in the night of the 22nd to the 23rd); 3) that by no means “was a major reconnaissance to be undertaken on the morning of the 23rd”, but rather the march to Mingolzheim was. That 4) “all detachments received orders, as soon as they heard firing, to march in the direction of the firing”, and 5) “the detachment of the right flank (Willich) excused its non-appearance at the engagement at Ubstadt by claiming that it had not heard the firing”, are, as will be shown, gross lies.

We marched off at once. We were to breakfast in Odenheim. A few Bavarian Chevauxlegers, who were assigned to us for courier service, rode around the left of the village to reconnoitre any enemy corps. Prussian hussars had been in the village and had requisitioned forage, which they were to collect later. While we were confiscating this forage and our men, under arms, were being issued wine and victuals, one of the Chevauxlegers came galloping in and shouted: The Prussians are here! In a flash, Knieriem’s battalion, which was standing nearest, had broken ranks and was rolling about in a wild tangle, shouting, cursing and lumbering in all directions, while the Herr Major, on his shying horse, had to abandon his men. Willich came riding up, restored order, and we marched off. The Prussians were naturally not there.

On the heights behind Odenheim we heard the cannon thunder from Ubstadt. The cannonade soon became livelier. More practised ears could already distinguish the solid shot from the grapeshot. We held a council about whether to continue our march or to follow the direction of the firing. Since our orders were positive, and since the firing seemed to be moving in the direction of Mingolzheim, which indicated an advance on the part of our forces, we decided on the more dangerous march, that to Waldangelloch. If the Palatines were beaten at Ubstadt, we up there in the mountains would be as good as cut off, and in a rather critical position.

Herr Struve claims that the engagement at Ubstadt “could have led to brilliant results if the flank detachments had intervened at the appropriate moment” (p. 314). The cannonade lasted less than an hour, and we would have needed 2 to 2½ hours to appear on the field between Stettfeld and Ubstadt, i.e. an hour and a half after it had been abandoned. That is how Herr Struve writes “history”.

Near Tiefenbach a halt was made. While our troops were refreshing themselves, Willich dispatched a few despatches. Knierim’s battalion discovered a kind of communal cellar in Tiefenbach, confiscated it, brought out the wine barrels, and within an hour everyone was drunk. The annoyance at the Prussian scare of the morning, the cannon thunder from Ubstadt, the scant confidence these heroes had in each other and in their officers, all this, heightened by the wine, suddenly burst into open rebellion. They demanded that we should immediately retrace our march; the eternal marching in the mountains in front of the enemy did not please them. When of course there was no question of that, they turned about and marched off on their own. The man-eating “Robert Blum Column” joined them. We let them go and marched to Waldangelloch.

Here, in a deep basin-like valley, it was impossible to spend the night with any degree of safety. Hence a halt was made and information was gathered about the terrain conditions of the surrounding area and the enemy’s position. In the meantime vague rumours of the retreat of the Neckar Army had been spread by peasants. It was said that significant Baden corps had marched on Bretten via Sinsheim and Eppingen, that Mieroslawski himself had come through incognito and that an attempt had been made to arrest him in Sinsheim. The artillery became uneasy, and even our students began to grumble. The artillery was therefore sent back and we marched towards Hilsbach. Here we learned more about the retreat of the Neckar Army, which had been carried out over the past 48 hours, and about the Bavarians who were in Sinsheim, an hour and a half away from us. Their number was given as 7,000, but, as we later learned, it was close to 10,000. We were only 700 men at most. Our men could not march any further. We therefore quartered them in barns, as always when we had to keep them together as far as possible, posted strong pickets and lay down to sleep. When we marched out the next morning, the 24th, we heard quite distinctly the beat of Bavarian marching step. A good quarter of an hour after our departure the Bavarians were in Hilsbach.

Mieroslawski had spent the night two days before, on the 22nd, in Sinsheim, and was already in Bretten with his troops when we entered Hilsbach. Becker, who led the rearguard, had also already passed through. He cannot, therefore, as Herr Struve claims on p. 308, have spent the night of the 23rd to the 24th in Sinsheim, for there, at 8 o’clock in the evening, and probably earlier, the Bavarians were already stationed, who had already fought a small engagement with Mieroslawski the previous evening. Mieroslawski’s retreat from Waghäusel via Heidelberg to Bretten is portrayed by those involved as an extremely dangerous manoeuvre. Mieroslawski’s operations from 20 June to the 24th, the rapid concentration of a corps near Heidelberg, with which he threw himself on the Prussians, and his swift retreat after losing the engagement at Waghäusel, certainly form the most brilliant part of his entire activity in Baden; but that in the face of such a sluggish enemy this manoeuvre was by no means so dangerous is proved by our retreat, carried out entirely unmolested 24 hours later with a small corps from Hilsbach. Even through the defile of Flehingen, where Mieroslawski had already expected an attack on the 23rd, we passed without being attacked and marched on to Büchig. Here we intended to stay in order to cover the camp pitched by Mieroslawski near Bretten against an initial attack.

Everywhere on our march, which went via Eppingen, Zaisenhausen and Flehingen, we caused astonishment, since all the corps of the Neckar Army, including the rearguard, had already marched through. When we marched into Büchig and our bugler sounded, we caused a Prussian scare there. A detachment of the Brettener militia, which was requisitioning provisions for Mieroslawski’s camp, took us for Prussians and provided the most splendid example of confusion, until we rounded the corner and the sight of our blouses calmed them. We immediately confiscated the provisions, and had hardly consumed them when the news that Mieroslawski had broken camp with all troops and left Bretten prompted our departure for Bretten.

We remained in Bretten overnight, while the militia posted pickets. For the next morning wagons had been requisitioned to carry the entire corps to Ettlingen. Since Bruchsal had already been taken by the Prussians on the 24th, and we could not risk an engagement in case the road via Diedelsheim to Durlach was occupied by the enemy (as we later learned it really was), no other route to the main army was left to us.

In Bretten a deputation of the students came to us with a declaration that the eternal marching in front of the enemy did not please them, and they requested their discharge. They received, as a matter of course, the reply that no one would be discharged in the face of the enemy; but if they wished to desert, they were free to do so. About half the company thereupon marched off; the rest soon melted away through individual desertions until only the riflemen remained. Altogether, throughout the entire campaign, the students showed themselves to be malcontent, timorous young gentlemen, who always wanted to be initiated into all operational plans, complained about sore feet and grumbled when the campaign did not offer all the amenities of a holiday trip. Among these “representatives of the intelligentsia”, there were only a few who, through truly revolutionary character and splendid courage, formed an exception.

Half an hour after our departure, we were later informed, the enemy entered Bretten. We reached Ettlingen, where Herr Corvin-Wiersbitzki called upon us to march to Durlach, where Becker was to hold the enemy until Karlsruhe was evacuated. Willich sent a Chevauxleger with a note to Becker to ascertain whether he still intended to hold out for some time; the man returned within a quarter of an hour with the news that Becker’s troops had already come towards him in full retreat. We therefore marched off towards Rastatt, where everything was concentrating.

The road to Rastatt presented a picture of the finest disorder. A host of the most diverse corps marched or encamped in a colourful jumble, and only with difficulty did we hold our men together in the blazing sun and the general confusion. On the glacis of Rastatt the Palatine troops and a few Baden battalions were encamped. The Palatines had greatly dwindled. The best corps, the one from Rhenish Hesse, had been summoned together in Karlsruhe before the engagement at Ubstadt by Messrs Zitz and Bamberger. These valiant freedom fighters disclosed to the corps: all was lost, the superiority of the enemy was too great, they could all still return home safely; they, the parliamentary blusterer Zitz and the courageous Bamberger, wished to keep their consciences clear of guiltless shed blood and other mischief, and thereupon declared the corps disbanded. The men from Rhenish Hesse were naturally so indignant at this infamous impertinence that they wanted to arrest and shoot the two traitors; D’Ester and the Palatine government also pursued them in order to arrest them. But the honourable citizens had already fled, and the brave Zitz, from the safety of Basel, was already observing the further course of the imperial constitution campaign. As in September 1848 with his “Frakturschrift”, so in May 1849 Herr Zitz had been one of those parliamentary braggarts who had most incited the people to insurrection,

and on both occasions he took a distinguished place among those who were the first to abandon the uprising. At Kirchheim-Bollanden, too,
Herr Zitz was among the first to flee, while his riflemen fought
and were executed by firing squad. — The Rhenish Hessian Corps, already greatly weakened like all corps by desertion, disheartened
by the retreat into Baden, momentarily lost all cohesion. One part
dissolved and went home; the remainder re-formed and fought on
until the end of the campaign. The rest of the Palatinate troops
were demoralised near Rastatt by the news that all who returned
home by 5 July would receive an amnesty. More than half scattered,
battalions shrank to companies, most of the subaltern officers were
gone, and the roughly 1,200 men who still held together were next
to worthless. Our corps, too, though by no means disheartened, had
nevertheless been reduced by losses, sickness and the desertion of
the students to little more than 500 men.

We arrived in Kuppenheim, where other troops were already stationed, and went into quarters. The next morning I went with Willich
to Rastatt and met Moll again there.

The more or less educated victims of the Baden uprising have
had memorials set to them on all sides, in the press, in the democratic
clubs, in verse and in prose. Of the hundreds and thousands of
workers who fought the battles, who fell on the battlefields, who
rotted alive in the Rastatt casemates or who now, in exile, alone
among all the refugees, must drain the cup of misery to its very
dregs — of them nobody speaks. The exploitation of the workers is
such an ancient, such an accustomed affair, that our official
“Democrats” see the workers as nothing but agitable, exploitable
and explosible raw material, as pure cannon-fodder. Our “Democrats”
are far too ignorant and bourgeoise to grasp the revolutionary
position of the proletariat, to grasp the future of the working
class. That is why those authentically proletarian characters are
also hateful to them, men who are too proud to flatter them, too
knowing to let themselves be used by them, and yet every time
stand there with weapons in their hands when the overthrow of
an existing power is at stake, and who directly represent the
party of the proletariat in every revolutionary movement. |
But if it is not in the interests of the so-called Democrats to
acknowledge such workers, it is the duty of the party of the
proletariat to honour them as they deserve. And among the
finest of these workers was Joseph Moll of Cologne.

Moll was a watchmaker. He had left Germany years before and taken
part in all the revolutionary, public and

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secret societies in France, Belgium and England. He had helped
to found the German Workers’ Society in London in 1840. After the
February Revolution he returned to Germany and soon, together with
his friend Schapper, took over the leadership of the Cologne Workers’
Society. A fugitive in London since the Cologne September disturbances of 1848, he soon returned to Germany under a false name,
agitated in the most diverse districts and undertook missions whose
danger would have deterred anyone else. In Kaiserslautern I met
him again. Here, too, he undertook missions to Prussia which, had
he been discovered, would have earned him immediate pardon in
the form of powder and lead. Returning from his second mission,
he passed successfully through all the enemy armies as far as
Rastatt, where he immediately joined the Besançon workers’
company of our corps. Three days later he had fallen. In him I
lost an old friend, and the party lost one of its most tireless,
most fearless and most reliable front-line fighters.

The party of the proletariat was fairly strongly represented
in the Baden-Palatinate army, especially in the volunteer corps,
as in our own, in the refugee legion, etc., and it can calmly
challenge all the other parties to cast the slightest blame upon
a single one of its members. The most resolute Communists were
the most courageous soldiers.

The next day, the 27th, we were moved a little further into the
mountains, to Rothenfels. The disposition of the army and the
dislocation of the various corps was gradually settled. We
belonged to the division of the right wing, which was commanded
by Colonel Thome — the same whom Mieroslawski had wanted to
arrest at Meckesheim, and who had been childishly left his
command — and, from the 27th onward, by Mersy. Willich, who
had declined the command of the Palatinate troops offered him
by Sigel, acted | as chief of the divisional staff. The division
was stationed from Gernsbach and the Württemberg border to beyond
Rothenfels, and leaned on its left upon Oborski's division,
which was concentrated around Kuppenheim. The advance guard was
pushed forward to the border, as well as to Sulzbach, Michelbach
and Winkel. The provisioning, at first irregular and poor, improved
from the 27th. Our division consisted of several Baden line
battalions, the remainder of the Palatinate troops under Held
Blenker, our corps, and one or one and a half batteries of
artillery. The Palatinate troops lay in Gernsbach and environs,
the line and we in and around Rothenfels. The headquarters were
in the Hotel zur Elisabethenquelle opposite Rothenfels.

We were sitting — the divisional staff and that of our corps,
together with Moll, Kinkel and other free corps men — in this
hotel on the 28th after lunch, just having

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coffee, when the news arrived that our outpost at Michelbach
had been attacked by the Prussians. We set out immediately,
although we had every reason to suppose that the enemy intended
only a reconnaissance. And indeed, it was nothing more. The village
of Michelbach, lying down in the valley and momentarily captured
by the Prussians, had already been retaken from them by the
time we arrived. Both mountain slopes fired across the valley
at each other and wasted a great deal of ammunition to no purpose.
I saw only one dead man and one wounded. While the line was
uselessly firing off its cartridges at ranges of 600–800 paces,
Willich had our men very calmly pile their rifles and rest
close beside the alleged combatants and in the alleged fire.
Only the riflemen went down the wooded slope and, supported by
some line troops, drove the Prussians from the opposite height.
One of our riflemen, with his colossal wall-piece, a veritable
portable cannon, shot a Prussian officer from his horse at
about 900 paces; his whole company immediately right-turned
and marched back into the wood. A number of Prussian dead and
wounded, as well as two prisoners, fell into our hands.
The next day the general attack took place along the whole line.
This time the Prussian gentlemen disturbed us at our midday meal.
The first attack that was reported to us was upon Bischweier, that
is, upon the link between | Oborski's division and our own. Willich
insisted that our troops at Rothenfels should be kept as far as
possible in hand, since the main attack was in any case to be expected
in the opposite direction, at Gernsbach. But Mersy answered: one
knew very well how things went; if one of our battalions were attacked
and the others did not immediately come to its aid in mass, there
would be cries of treason and all would run away. So we marched
off towards Bischweier.
Willich and I went forward with the rifle company on the road to
Bischweier, on the right bank of the Murg. Half an hour from
Rothenfels we came upon the enemy. The riflemen deployed as a
skirmish line and Willich rode back to bring the corps, which was
somewhat behind, into the line. For a while our riflemen, covered
behind fruit trees and vineyards, sustained quite a lively fire and
returned it just as lively. But when a strong enemy column advanced
on the road to support their skirmishers, the left wing of our
riflemen gave way and, despite all admonitions, could no longer
be brought to a stand. The right wing had advanced further up
towards the heights and was later taken up by our corps.
When I saw that nothing was to be done with the riflemen, I left
them to their fate and went towards the heights, where I saw the
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corps. One company had remained behind; its captain, a
tailor, otherwise a brave fellow, did not know what to do. I
took them with me to the rest and met Willich just as he was
sending the Besançon company forward as a skirmish line and
drawing up the rest behind them in two lines, together with one
company sent forward to cover the right flank against the mountains.

Our skirmishers were received by a heavy fire. It was Prussian
riflemen who faced them, and our workers had only muskets to
oppose to the pointed-bullet rifles. But, supported by the right
wing of our riflemen, who joined them, they advanced so resolutely
that at short range, especially on the right wing, the inferior
quality of the | weapon was very soon compensated for, and the
Prussians were thrown back. The two lines remained fairly close
behind the skirmish line. Meanwhile, two Baden guns had also come
up on our left, in the Murg valley, and opened fire on Prussian
infantry and artillery standing on the road.

The fight here, with the liveliest musket and rifle fire, and
with the Prussians falling back continuously, may have lasted
about an hour — some of our riflemen had already reached
Bischweier — when the Prussians received reinforcements and
sent their battalions forward. Our skirmishers withdrew; the
first line delivered platoon fire, the second moved a stretch
to the left into a sunken lane and also opened fire. But the
Prussians pressed on in dense masses all along the line; the
two Baden guns that covered our left flank had already retired,
and on the right flank the Prussians came down from the mountains,
so we had to fall back.

As soon as we were out of the enemy's crossfire, we took up a new
position on the edge of the mountains. Hitherto our front had faced
towards the Rhine plain, towards Bischweier and Niederweier; now
we faced towards the mountains, which the Prussians had occupied
from Oberweier. At last the line battalions also arrived in the
battle line and took up the fight, together with two companies of
our corps, which were once again sent forward as skirmishers.

We had suffered heavy losses. About thirty were missing, among them
Kinkel and Moll — not counting the scattered riflemen. The two
named, together with the right wing of their company and some
riflemen, had advanced too far. The rifle captain, Head Forester
Emmermann from Thronecken in Rhenish Prussia, who marched against
the Prussians as if he were going hare-shooting, had led them to a
spot where they fired into a detachment of Prussian artillery and
put it to a hasty retreat. But immediately a company of Prussians
debouched from

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|| a sunken road and fired at them. Kinkel fell, struck in the head, and
was dragged along until he could walk alone again; | soon, however, they
got into a cross-fire and had to see how they got away.
Kinkel could not keep up and went into a farmhouse, where he was taken
prisoner by the Prussians and maltreated; Moll received a shot
through the abdomen, was likewise taken prisoner and later died of his
wound. Zychlinski, too, had received a glancing shot in the neck, which
did not, however, prevent him from remaining with the corps.

While the main body halted and Willich rode to another part of the
battlefield, I hastened to the Murg bridge below Rothenfels, which
formed a kind of rallying point. I wanted news of Gernsbach.
But even before I arrived, I saw the smoke of burning Gernsbach
rising, and at the bridge itself I learned that cannon fire
had been heard from there. I went to this bridge several more times;
each time worse news from Gernsbach, each time more Baden
line troops assembled behind the bridge, who, having barely been under fire,
were already demoralised. The enemy was already in Gaggenau, I learned
last of all. Now it was high time to confront him there. Willich marched
with the corps across the Murg to take up position
opposite Rothenfels, and took along four guns that had just come
his way. I went to fetch our two skirmishing companies, which had in the meantime
advanced far. Near Überau, line troops, largely without
officers, came towards me. A detachment was led by a doctor, who
used the opportunity to introduce himself to me with the following words:
“You will know me; I am Neuhaus, the chief of the Thuringian
movement!” The good people had beaten the Prussians everywhere and
now came back because they saw no more enemy. I found our
companies nowhere—they had fallen back through Rothenfels for the same
reason—and returned to the bridge. Here I met
Mersy with his staff and his troops. I asked him to give me at least a
couple of companies to support Willich. “Take the
whole division, if you can still do anything with the men,” was
the answer. The very soldiers who had driven the enemy back at all points,
who had been on their feet for only five hours, now lay
scattered, demoralised, good for nothing, in the meadows. The news |
that they were being outflanked at Gernsbach had destroyed them. I went
my way. A company coming back from Michelbach that I
met was likewise not to be moved to anything. When I found the corps again at our old
headquarters, the fugitive
Palatines—Pistol Zinn with his band, who now, by the way, had muskets—
pressed in from Gaggenau. While Willich had sought and

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found a position for the guns, a position that commanded the Murg valley and offered considerable
advantages for a simultaneous skirmisher engagement, the artillerymen
had run off with the cannon, without the captain being able to hold them.
They were already with Mersy again at the bridge. At the same time
Willich showed me a note from Mersy, in which the latter informed him that all was lost, he would fall back to Oos. Nothing remained for us but
to do the same, and we immediately marched into the mountains. It was about seven
o’clock.

At Gernsbach things had happened as follows. The Peucker
imperial troops, whom our patrols had seen the day before near Herrenalb on
Württemberg territory, took along the Württembergers posted at the border and attacked Gernsbach on the afternoon of the 29th,
after they had made our outposts give way through treachery;
they approached them shouting not to shoot, they were brothers, and
then fired a volley at eighty paces. Then they set Gernsbach on fire with shells,
and when the flames could no longer be checked,
Herr Sigel, whom Mieroslawski had sent to hold the post at
all costs, Herr Sigel himself gave the order that Herr Blenker should
withdraw with his troops, fighting. Herr Sigel will not
deny this, any more than he did in Bern, when an adjutant of Herr
Blenker, in his, Herr Sigel’s, and Willich’s presence, recounted this curiosity.
With this order, to give up the key to the whole Murg position “fighting” (!), the engagement on the entire line, the
last position of the Baden army, was naturally lost.

The Prussians, by the way, earned no special glory from the battle of
Rastatt they won. We had 13,000 largely
demoralised troops, and with few exceptions, wretchedly led;
their army, together | with the imperial troops that advanced on Gernsbach,
numbered at least 60,000 men. Despite this colossal numerical superiority they risked
no serious frontal attack, but defeated us by cowardly treachery, by
violating neutral Württemberg territory, which was closed to us.
And even this treachery would not have profited them much, at least not at first,
and would ultimately have spared them no decisive frontal attack,
if Gernsbach had not been so incomprehensibly badly garrisoned
and if Herr Sigel had not given the above edifying order.
The position, which was not at all so formidable, would have been wrested from us the next
day, that cannot be doubted; but the victory would have cost
the Prussians entirely different sacrifices, would have infinitely damaged
their military reputation. And therefore they preferred to violate the neutrality of Württemberg,
and Württemberg quietly allowed it.

We fell back, barely 450 strong, through the mountains to Oos.

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Here the road was covered with troops in the wildest dissolution,
with wagons, guns, etc. in the greatest confusion. We marched
through and rested in Sinzheim. The next morning we gathered behind
Bühl a number of the fugitives, and spent the night in Oberachern. On
this day the last engagement took place; the German-Polish Legion,
along with some other troops of Becker’s division, beat back near Oos
the imperial troops and took from them a (Mecklenburg) howitzer,
which was indeed brought safely into Switzerland.

The army was completely dissolved. Mieroslawski and the other Poles
laid down their commands; Colonel Oborski had already
left his post on the battlefield, on the evening of the 29th. Yet this
momentary dissolution did not mean much. The Palatines had already been dissolved three
or four times and had each time re-formed themselves tant bien que mal.
A retreat as slow as possible, incorporating all levies
from the districts to be given up, rapid concentration of the
levies of the Oberland near Freiburg and Donaueschingen—these were
two means that still had to be tried. They would soon have brought
order and discipline back to a tolerable point, and made possible a
last, hopeless but honourable struggle, at the Kaiserstuhl before Freiburg
or near Donau|eschingen. But the chiefs, both of the
civil and the military administration, were more demoralised than the soldiers.
They abandoned the army and the whole movement to their fate and
went on falling back, dejected, helpless, destroyed.

Since the attack on Gernsbach, the fear of being outflanked through
Württemberg territory had become general and contributed greatly to the general
demoralisation. Willich’s corps now went, in order to cover the Württemberg
border, with two mountain howitzers—several other
guns assigned to us did not want to go further from Kappel—through the
Kappel valley into the mountains. Our march through the Black Forest, on which
we saw no enemy, was a veritable pleasure tour. We
went via Allerheiligen on 1 July to Oppenau, via the Hundskopf on the
2nd to Wolfach. Here we learned on 3 July that the government was in Freiburg,
and that thought was being given to giving up this city as well. This caused
us to set out for there immediately. We wanted to force the regent gentlemen and
the high command, now led by the hero Sigel, not to give up Freiburg
without a fight. It was already late when we marched off from Wolfach,
and so we reached Waldkirch only late in the evening. Here we learned
that Freiburg had already been given up and that government and headquarters
had been transferred to Donaueschingen. At the same time we received the positive
order to occupy and entrench the Simonswald valley, and to set up
our headquarters in Furtwangen. Thus we had to go back to
Bleibach.

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Herr Sigel had now posted his troops behind the ridge of the Black
Forest. The line of defence was to run from Lörrach via Todtnau
and Furtwangen to the Württemberg border, in the direction of
Schramberg. The left wing was formed by Mersy and Blenker, who were moving
through the Rhine valley towards Lörrach; then followed Herr Doli, formerly a
commercial traveller, who in his capacity as a Hecker general had been appointed
division commander and stood in the region of the Höllenthal;
then our corps in Furtwangen and the Simonswald valley, and finally,
on the right wing, Becker near Sankt Georgen and Tryberg. Behind the
mountains, Herr Sigel stood with the ||73] reserve at Donaueschingen. The
forces, considerably weakened by desertion, not reinforced by any brought-
up levies, still amounted to some 9,000 men with
40 cannon.

The orders that reached us from headquarters, from Freiburg, Neustadt on the
Wutach and Donaueschingen one after another, breathed the most
determined contempt for death. It was true that the enemy was expected
once more to fall upon our rear through Württemberg, via Rottweil and
Villingen; but it was resolved to beat him and to hold the crest of the
Black Forest under all circumstances, and indeed, as it
says in one of these orders, “almost without any regard for the movements
of the enemy”, i.e., Herr Sigel had secured for himself from Donaueschingen a
glorious retreat to Swiss territory, to be effected in four hours;
what would become of us, those surrounded in the mountains, he could then await
in Schaffhausen with all tranquility. What a
cheerful end this contempt for death took will soon be shown.

On the 4th we arrived in Furtwangen with 2 companies (160 men); the
rest was used to occupy the Simonswald valley and the passes of Gütenbach
and St. Märgen. Via the latter place we were in contact with the
Doll corps, via Schönwald with Becker. All passes
were barricaded. — We remained in Furtwangen on the 5th. On the 6th
came news from Becker that the Prussians were advancing on Villingen, together with
the call to attack them via Vöhrenbach in order to support Sigel’s operation.
At the same time he informed us that his main corps stood properly
entrenched in Tryberg, where he would go himself as soon as Villingen was
occupied by Sigel.

An attack on our part was not to be thought of. With
fewer than 450 men we had three square miles to hold and
could therefore spare no man. We had to remain where we were and informed
Becker of this. Soon afterwards a dispatch arrived from headquarters: Willich was immediately to come to Donaueschingen and take
command of the entire artillery. We were just preparing,

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The German Imperial Constitution Campaign + IV. To Die for the Republic!

...quickly to drive across, when a column of the Volunteer Guard, followed by artillery and several other battalions of the Volunteer Guard, came marching into Furtwangen. It was Becker with his corps. The men were said to have become rebellious. I enquired of a staff officer who was a friend of mine, “Major” Neriinger, and learned the following: He, Neriinger, had the position near Tryberg under his command and was just having the entrenchments thrown up, when the corps of officers handed him a written declaration signed by all of them: the men were rebellious, and if the order to march off were not given at once, they would march off with all the troops. I examined the signatures: it was once again the brave Dreher—Obermüller battalion! Neriinger could do nothing but inform Becker of this and march to Furtwangen. Becker set out immediately to catch them up, and thus he came with his whole force to Furtwangen, where the fainthearted officers and soldiers were received by our free corps with immense guffawing. They felt ashamed, and in the evening Becker was able to lead them back to their position.

Meanwhile we drove on, followed by the Besançon company, towards Donaueschingen. The Prussians were already swarming right up to the highroad; Villingen was occupied by them. Yet we got through unmolested, and towards ten o’clock at night the Besançon men also arrived. In Donaueschingen I found d’Ester and learned from him that Mr Struve had demanded in the Constituent Assembly in Freiburg that they should go at once to Switzerland, that all was lost, and that the hero Blenker had followed this advice and had already crossed over on to Swiss territory near Basel that very morning. Both things were perfectly correct. The hero Blenker had gone to Basel on 6 July, although he was precisely the one stationed furthest from the enemy. He had merely taken the time, in conclusion, to carry out a number of requisitions of a kind of his own, which provoked some unpleasant odour between him and Mr Sigel and, later, the Swiss authorities. And the hero Struve, the same man who on 29 June had still declared Mr Brentano and anyone who wanted to negotiate with the enemy to be a traitor to the people, was, three days later, on 2 July, so shattered that he was not ashamed, in a confidential sitting of the Baden Constituent Assembly, to move: so that the Oberland should not, like the Unterland, feel the horrors of war and that much precious blood might not be shed, and | since one must save what can still be saved, (!) the members of the Landesversammlung, and everyone involved in the revolution, should be paid their salary or soldiery up to 10 July, together with corresponding travelling money, and that everyone should withdraw with cash, supplies, arms, etc., on to Swiss territory! This neat proposal was made by the brave Struve on 2 July, when we stood up in Wolfach in the Black Forest, ten

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hours from Freiburg and twenty hours from the Swiss frontier! Mr Struve is naïve enough, in his “Geschichte” p. 237ff., to recount this incident himself and even to boast of it. The sole consequence that the adoption of such a proposal could have was that the Prussians would press us as hard as possible in order “to save what could still be saved”, namely to wrest from us our cash, pieces of ordnance and supplies, since the harmlessness of a vigorous pursuit was established after this resolution; and then that our troops would immediately disperse en masse and whole corps would break away on their own account for Switzerland, as indeed actually happened. Our corps would have come off the worst in this; it remained on Baden territory up to the 12th and its pay was disbursed up to the 17th.

Mr Sigel, instead of retaking Villingen, decided at first to take up position behind Donaueschingen near Hüfingen and await the enemy. But that same evening it was decided to march to Stühlingen, hard on the Swiss frontier. We sent fast-riding messengers to Furtwangen to inform our corps and Becker’s. Both were to proceed via Neustadt and Bonndorf likewise to Stühlingen. Willich went to Neustadt to meet the corps, I remained with the Besançon company. We spent the night in Riedböhringen and arrived the following afternoon, 7 July, in Stühlingen. On the 8th Mr Sigel held a review of his half-dispersed army, recommended to it that in future it should not drive but march (on the frontier!) and departed. He left us a half battery and an order for Willich.

In the meantime the news of the general retreat had been sent from Furtwangen first to Becker and then to our companies stationed forward. Our corps was the first to assemble in Furtwangen and met Willich in Neustadt. Becker, who was nearer to Furtwangen |[76] than our advanced corps, nevertheless arrived there only later and followed along the same road. He ran up against entrenchments that held up his march, and of which it was later reported in Swiss papers that they had been thrown up by our corps. This is erroneous; our corps only barricaded the roads on the other side of the Black Forest ridge, and not on the road from Tryberg to Furtwangen, which it did not hold at all. Moreover our free corps did not march off from Furtwangen until Becker’s vanguard had arrived there.

In Donaueschingen it had been agreed that the remnants of the whole army should assemble behind the Wutach, from Eggingen to Thiengen, and there await the approach of the enemy. Here, with our flanks resting on Swiss territory, we could still attempt a final engagement with our considerable artillery. One might even wait and see whether the Prussians would violate Swiss territory and thereby draw Switzerland into the

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war. But how astonished we were, when Willich arrived, to read in the order of the valiant Sigel: “The main body goes to Thiengen and Waldshut and takes up a firm position (!!) there. Seek to hold the position (near Stühlingen and Eggingen) as long as possible.” — “Firm position” at Thiengen and Waldshut, with the Rhine in the rear, and heights accessible to the enemy in front! That meant nothing other than: we want to cross the Säckingen bridge into Switzerland. And yet the hero Sigel had said, on the occasion of Struve’s proposal: if this were to be accepted, he, Sigel, would be the first to rebel.

We now took up the position behind the Wutach itself, and distributed our troops from Eggingen to Wutöschingen, where our headquarters lay. Here we received the following, even more edifying document from Mr Sigel: “Order. Headquarters Thiengen, 8 July 1849. — To Colonel Willich in Eggingen. Since the Canton of Schaffhausen is already acting in a hostile manner towards me, it is impossible for me to take up the position we discussed. You will direct your movements accordingly, and move towards Griessen, Lauchringen and Thiengen. I shall march from here tomorrow in order to go either to Waldshut or behind the Alb (i.e. towards Säckingen) — The Ober-General, Sigel.” This surpassed everything. In the evening Willich and I drove to Thiengen, where the “Quartermaster-General” Schlinke confessed to us that the move was indeed towards Säckingen and across the Rhine there. Sigel at first wanted to put on something of the “Ober-General”, but Willich would have none of this, and finally brought him to the point of giving the order to turn back and march on Griessen. The pretext for the march to Säckingen was the union with Doli, who was said to have marched there, and an allegedly strong position. The position, plainly the same one from which Moreau fought an engagement there in 1800, had only the drawback that it presented a front in a totally different direction from the one whence the enemy was coming; and as regards the noble Doli, he did not hesitate to prove that he could go to Switzerland even without Mr Sigel.

Between the cantons of Zurich and Schaffhausen lies a small strip of Baden territory with the localities of Jestetten and Lottstetten, which, save for a narrow approach at Baltersweil, is completely surrounded by Switzerland. Here the last position was to be taken up. The heights behind Baltersweil on both sides of the road offered excellent positions for our guns, and our infantry was still numerous enough to cover them until, in case of need, they reached Swiss territory. Here, so it was agreed, we were to wait and see whether the Prussians would attack us or starve us out. The main body, which Becker had joined, encamped there. Willich had selected the position for the guns (later we found

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their parks where their battle position was to be). We ourselves formed the rearguard and slowly followed the main body. On the evening of the 9th we went to Erzingen, on the 10th to Riedern. On that day a general council of war was held in the camp. Willich alone spoke for further defence. Sigel, Becker and others spoke for the retreat on to Swiss territory. A Swiss commissioner, I believe Colonel Kurz, had been there and had declared that if another battle were accepted, Switzerland would give no asylum. On the vote Willich remained alone with two or three officers. No one from our corps except him was present.|

While Willich was still in the camp, the half battery that was with us received orders to march off, and left without the slightest notification being given to us. All the other troops except ourselves also received orders to come into the camp. During the night I drove again with Willich to headquarters in Lottstetten; when we drove back at daybreak, we met on the road the whole crowd, which had broken camp and was surging towards the frontier in the wildest confusion. That same day, on the 11th, early in the morning, Mr Sigel went with his men on to Swiss territory near Rafz, Mr Becker with his near Rheinau. We concentrated our corps, followed into the camp and from there to Jestetten. Here around noon we received, through an orderly officer, a letter from Sigel from Eglisau, to the effect that he was already happily in Switzerland, that the officers kept their sabres and that we were to follow as soon as possible. They only thought of us once they were on neutral soil!

We marched through Lottstetten as far as the frontier, bivouacked that night still on German soil, fired off our rifles on the morning of the 12th and then set foot, the last of the Baden-Palatinate army, on Swiss territory. That same day, simultaneously with us, Konstanz was also abandoned by the corps stationed there. A week later Rastatt fell through treachery, and the counter-revolution had for the moment once more conquered Germany down to its remotest corner.

The Campaign for the Imperial Constitution perished of its own half-heartedness and inner wretchedness. Since the June defeat of 1848 the question has stood thus for the civilised part of the European continent: either rule of the revolutionary proletariat, or rule of the classes that ruled before February. A middle thing is no longer possible. In Germany especially the bourgeoisie has shown itself incapable of ruling; it could only maintain its rule as against the people by handing it over to the

The nobility and the bureaucracy again stepped aside. In the Reich constitution the petty bourgeoisie, allied with German ideology, attempted an impossible reconciliation, which was intended to postpone the decisive struggle. The attempt had to fail: those who were serious about the movement were not serious about the Reich constitution, and those who were serious about the Reich constitution were not serious about the movement.

The Reich Constitution campaign has nonetheless had no less significant results. It has above all simplified the situation. It has cut short an endless series of attempts at mediation: now that it is lost, only the somewhat constitutionalised feudal-bureaucratic monarchy can win, or the real revolution. And in Germany the revolution can no longer be completed otherwise than with the complete rule of the proletariat.

The Reich Constitution campaign has further, in those German states where class antagonisms were not yet sharply developed, contributed significantly to their development. Especially in Baden. In Baden, as we see, before the insurrection there were almost no class antagonisms at all. Hence the acknowledged rule of the petty bourgeoisie over all opposition classes, hence the apparent unanimity of the population, hence the rapidity with which the Badenese, like the Viennese, pass from opposition into insurrection, attempt an uprising at every opportunity, and do not even shrink from battle in the open field with a regular army. But as soon as the insurrection had broken out, the classes emerged distinctly, the petty bourgeoisie separated from the workers and peasants. In their representative Brentano they disgraced themselves for all time. They themselves have been driven to despair by the Prussian sabre rule to the point that they now prefer any regime, even that of the workers, to the present oppression; they will take a much more active part in the next movement than in any previous one; but fortunately they will never again be able to play the independent, ruling role, as under the dictatorship of Brentano. The workers and peasants, who suffer just as much under the present sabre rule as the petty bourgeoisie, have not undergone the experience of the last uprising in vain; they, who moreover have their fallen and murdered brothers to avenge, will see to it that in the next insurrection it is they and not the petty bourgeoisie who get the helm into their hands. And even if no insurrectionary experiences can replace the development of classes, which is achieved only through long years of operation of large-scale industry, Baden has nevertheless, through its last uprising and its consequences, entered the ranks of the German provinces that will occupy one of the most important places in the impending revolution.

Friedrich Engels

Considered politically, the Reich Constitution campaign was from the outset a mistake. Considered militarily, it was equally so. The sole chance of its success lay outside Germany, in the victory of the republicans in Paris on 13 June—and 13 June failed. After this event the campaign could be nothing more than a more or less bloody farce. It was nothing more. Stupidity and treason ruined it completely. With the exception of a few, the military chiefs were traitors, or unqualified, ignorant, and cowardly place-hunters, and the few exceptions were everywhere abandoned by the rest, as by the Brentano government. Anyone who, at the impending upheaval, has no other titles to present than having been a Hecker general or a Reich constitution officer, deserves to be shown the door at once. As the chiefs, so the soldiers. The Baden people have in them the best martial elements; in the insurrection these elements were from the outset so corrupted and neglected that the misery arose which we have described at greater length. The whole “revolution” dissolved into a veritable comedy, and the only consolation was that the six times stronger opponent himself had six times less courage.

But this comedy has had a tragic end, thanks to the bloodthirstiness of the counter-revolution. The same warriors who, on the march or on the battlefield, were more than once seized by panic terror, died in the trenches of Rastatt like heroes. Not one begged, not one trembled. The German people will not forget the fusillades and the casemates of Rastatt; it will not forget the great lords who ordered these infamies, but nor will it forget the traitors who caused them through their cowardice: the Brentanos of Karlsruhe and of Frankfurt.

Friedrich Engels