Friedrich Engels 
The Late Trial at Cologne 

New-York Daily Tribune. 
Nr. 3645, 22. Dezember 1852 

The Late Trial at Cologne. 

Correspondence of The N.Y. Tribune. 

London, Wednesday, Dec. 1, 1852. 

You will have ere this received by the European papers numerous reports 
of the Communist Monster Trial at Cologne, Prussia, and of its result. But 
as none of the reports is anything like a faithful statement of the facts, and 
as these facts throw a glaring light upon the political means by which the 
Continent of Europe is kept in bondage, I consider it necessery to revert to 
this trial. 

The Communist or Proletarian party as well as other parties, had lost, by 
suppression of the rights of association and meeting, the means of giving to 
itself a legal organization on the Continent. Its leaders, besides, had been 
exiled from their countries. But no political party can exist without an organi- 
zation; and that organization which both the Liberal Bourgeois and the 
Democratic shop-keeping class, were enabled more or less to supply by the 
social station, advantages, and long-established, every-day intercourse of 
their members, the proletarian class, without such social station and pecuni- 
ary means, was necessarily compelled to seek in secret association. Hence, 
both in France and Germany, sprang up those numerous secret societies 
which have, ever since 1849, one after another been discovered by the police 
and prosecuted as conspiracies; butif many of them were really conspiracies, 
formed with the actual intention of upsetting the Government for the time 
being—and he is a coward that under certain circumstances would not con- 
spire, just as he is afool who, under other circumstances, would do so—there 
were some other societies which were formed with a wider and more elevated 
purpose, which knew, that the upsetting of an existing Government was but 
a passing stage in the great impending struggle, and which intended to keep 

The Late Trial at Cologne 

together and to prepare the party, whose nucleus they formed, for the last, 
decisive combat which must one day or another crush forever in Europe 
the domination, not of mere "tyrants," "despots" and "usurpers," but of a 
power far superior, and far more formidable than theirs; that of capital over 
labor. 

The organization of the advanced Communist party in Germany was of 
this kind. In accordance with the principles of its "Manifesto" (published 
in 1848) and with those explained in the series of articles on Revolution and 
Counter-Revolution in Germany, published in The New-York Daily Tribune, 
this party never imagined itself capable of producing, at any time and at its 
pleasure, that revolution which was to carry its ideas into practice. It studied 
the causes that had produced the revolutionary movements of 1848, and the 
causes that made them fail. Recognizing the social antagonism of classes at 
the bottom of all political struggles, it applied itself to the study of the 
conditions under which one class of society can and must be called on to 
represent the whole of the interests of a nation, and thus politically to rule 
over it. History showed to the Communist party, how, after the landed 
aristocracy of the middle ages, the monied power of the first capitalists arose 
and seized the reins of Government; how the social influence and political 
rule of this financial section of Capitalists was superseded by the rising 
strength, since the introduction of steam, of the manufacturing Capitalists, 
and how at the present moment two more classes claim their turn of domina- 
tion, the petty trading class, and the industrial working class. The practical 
revolutionary experience of 1848449 confirmed the reasonings of theory, 
which led to the conclusion that the democracy of the petty traders must first 
have its turn, before the Communist working class could hope to permanently 
establish itself in power and destroy that system of wages-slavery which 
keeps it under the yoke of the Bourgeoisie. Thus the secret organization of 
the Communists could not have the direct purpose of upsetting the present 
governments of Germany. Being formed to upset not these, but the in- 
surrectionary government which is sooner or later to follow them, its mem- 
bers might, and certainly would, individually lend an active hand to arevolu- 
tionary movement against the present status quo in its time ; but the prepara- 
tion of such a movement, otherwise than by secret spreading of Communist 
opinions by the masses, could not be an object of the Association. So well 
was this foundation of the society understood by the majority of its mem- 
bers, that when the place-hunting ambition of some tried to turn it into a 
conspiracy for making an ex tempore revolution, they were speedily turned 
out. 

Now, according to no law upon the face of the earth, could such an associ- 
ation be called a plot, a conspiracy for purposes of high treason. If it was 

Friedrich Engels 

a conspiracy, it was one against, not the existing Government, but its prob- 
able successors. And the Prussian Government was aware of it. That was 
the cause why the eleven defendants were kept in solitary confinement 
during eighteen months, spent, on the part of the authorities, in the strangest 
judicial feats. Imagine, that after eight months' detention, the prisoners were 
remanded for some months more, "there being no evidence of any crime 
against them!" And when at last they were brought before a jury, there was 
not a single overt act of a treasonable nature proved against them. And yet 
they were convicted, and you will speedily see how. 

One of the emissaries of the society was arrested in May, 1851, and from 
documents found upon him, other arrests followed. A Prussian police officer, 
a certain Stieber, was immediately ordered to trace the ramifications, in 
London, of the pretended plot. He succeeded in obtaining some papers 
connected with the above-mentioned seceders from the society, who had, 
after being turned out, formed an actual conspiracy in Paris and London. 
These papers were obtained by a double crime. A man named Reuter was 
bribed to break open the writing desk of the secretary of the society, and 
steal the papers therefrom. But that was nothing yet. This theft led to the 
discovery and conviction of the so-called Franco-German plot, in Paris, but 
it gave no clue as to the great Communist Association. The Paris plot we may 
as well here observe, was under the direction of a few ambitious imbeciles 
and political chevaliers d'industrie in London, and of a formerly convicted 
forger, then acting as a police spy in Paris; their dupes made up by rabid 
declamations and blood-thirsty rantings, for the utter insignificance of their 
political existence. 

The Prussian police, then, had to look out for fresh discoveries. They 
established a regular office of secret police at the Prussian Embassy in 
London. A police-agent, Greiff by name, held his odious vocation under the 
title of an attaché to the Embassy—a step which would suffice to put all 
Prussian Embassies out of the pale of international law, and which even the 
Austrians have not yet dared to take. Under him worked a certain Fleury, 
a merchant in the City of London, a man of some fortune and rather re- 
spectably connected, one of those low creatures who do the basest actions 
from an innate inclination to infamy. Another agent was a commercial clerk 
named Hirsch, who, however, had already been denounced as a spy on his 
arrival. He introduced himself into the society of some German Communist 
refugees in London, and they, in order to obtain proofs of his real character, 
admitted him for a short time. The proofs of his connection with the police 
were very soon obtained, and Mr. Hirsch, from that time, absented himself. 
Although, however, he thus resigned all opportunities of gaining the in- 
formation he was paid to procure, he was not inactive. From his retreat in 

The Late Trial at Cologne 

Kensington, where he never met one of the Communists in question, he 
manufactured every week pretended reports of pretended sittings of a pre- 
tended Central Committee of that very conspiracy which the Prussian Police 
could not get hold of. The contents of these reports were of the most absurd 
nature; not a Christian name was correct, not a name correctly spelt, not a 
single individual made to speak as he would be likely to speak. His master, 
Fleury, assisted him in this forgery, and it is not yet proved that "Attaché" 
Greiff can wash his hands of these infamous proceedings. The Prussian 
Government, incredible to say, took these silly fabrications for gospel truth, 
and you may imagine what a confusion such depositions created in the 
evidence to be brought before the Jury. When the trial came on, Mr. Stieber, 
the already mentioned police officer, got into the witness-box, swore to all 
these absurdities, and, with no little self-complacency, maintained that he 
had a secret agent in the very closest intimacy with these parties in London 
who were considered the prime movers in this awful conspiracy. This sec- 
ret agent was very secret indeed, for he had hid his face for eight months 
in Kensington, for fear he might actually see one of the parties whose 
most secret thoughts, words and doings he pretended to report week after 
week. 

Messrs. Hirsch and Fleury, however, had another invention in store. They 
worked up the whole of the reports they had made, into an "original minute 
book" of the sittings of the secret supreme committee, whose existence was 
maintained by the Prussian police; and Mr. Stieber, finding that this book 
wondrously agreed with the reports already received from the same parties, 

at once laid it before the jury, declaring upon his oath that after serious 
examination and according to his fullest conviction that book was genuine. 
It was then that most of the absurdities reported by Hirsch were made public. 
You may imagine the surprise of the pretended members of that secret 
committee when they found things stated of them which they never knew 
before. Some who were baptized William, were here christened Louis or 
Charles; others, at the time they were at the other end of England, were made 
to have pronounced speeches in London; others were reported to have read 
letters they never had received; they were made to have met regularly on 
a Thursday, when they used to have a convivial reunion, once a week, on 
Wednesdays; a working-man, who could hardly write, figured as one of the 
takers of minutes and signed as such; and they all of them were made to speak 
in a language which, if it may be that of Prussian police stations, was certainly 
not that of a reunion in which literary men, favorably known in their country, 
formed the majority. And, to crown the whole, a receipt was forged for a 
sum of money, pretended to have been paid by the fabricators to the pre- 
tended secretary of the fictitious central committee for this book; but the 

Friedrich Engels 

existence of this pretended secretary rested merely upon a hoax that some 
malicious Communist had played upon the unfortunate Hirsch. 

This clumsy fabrication was too scandalous an affair not to produce the 
contrary of its intended effect. Although the London friends of the de- 
fendants were deprived of all means to bring the facts of the case before the 
jury—although the letters they sent to the counsel for the defense were 
suppressed by the post—although the documents and affidavits they succeed- 
ed in getting into the hands of these legal gentlemen were not admitted in 
evidence, yet the general indignation was such that even the public accusers, 
nay, even Mr. Stieber—whose oath had been given as a guarantee for the 
authenticity of that book—were compelled to recognize it as a forgery. 

This forgery, however, was not the only thing of the kind of which the 
police was guilty. Two or three more cases of the sort came out during the 
trial. The documents stolen by Reuter were interpolated by the police so as 
to disfigure their meaning. A paper, containing some rabid nonsense, was 
written in a handwriting imitating that of Dr. Marx, and for a time it was 
pretended that it had been written by him, until at last the prosecution was 
obliged to acknowledge the forgery. But for every police infamy that was 
proved as such, there were five or six fresh ones brought forward, which 
could not, at the moment, be unveiled, the defense being taken by surprise, 
the proofs having to be got from London, and every correspondence of the 
counsel for the defense with the London Communist refugees being in open 
court treated as complicity in the alleged plot! 

That Greiff and Fleury are what they are here represented to be has been 
stated by Mr. Stieber himself, in his evidence; as to Hirsch, he has before 
a London magistrate confessed that he forged the "Minute-Book" by order 
and with the assistance of Fleury, and then made his escape from this country 
in order to evade a criminal prosecution. 

The Government could stand few such branding disclosures as came to 
light during the trial. It had a jury such as the Rhenish Provinces had not 
yet seen. Six nobles, of the purest reactionist water, four Lords of Finance, 
two Government officials. These were not the men to look closely into the 
confused mass of evidence heaped before them during six weeks, when they 
heard it continually dinned into their ears that the defendants were the chiefs 
of a dreadful Communist conspiracy, got up in order to subvert everything 
sacred—property, family, religion, order, government and law! And yet, had 
not the Government, at the same time, brought it to the knowledge of the 
privileged classes, that an acquittal in this trial would be the signal for the 
suppression of the jury; and that it would be taken as a direct political 
demonstration—as a proof of the middle-class liberal opposition being ready 
to unite even with the most extreme revolutionists—the verdict would have 

The Late Trial at Cologne 

been an acquittal. As it was, the retroactive application of the new Prussian 
code enabled the Government to have seven prisoners convicted while four 
merely were acquitted, and those convicted were sentenced to imprisonment 
varying from three to six years, as you have, doubtless, already stated at the 
time the news reached you. 

Karl Marx.