Karl Marx 
Preparations for Napoleon's Coming War on the Rhine 

New-York Daily Tribune. 
Nr.5950, 19. Mai 1860 

Preparations for Napoleon's 
Coming War on the Rhine. 

From Our Own Correspondent. 
Berlin, May 1, 1860. 

The notion that Louis Bonaparte is about to put the German question on the 
tapis prevails here among all classes of society. In to-day's National-Zeitung, 
a correspondent even affirms that he knows, from sources most authentic, 
that Badinguet (as Louis Bonaparte is familiarly styled at Paris) has definitely 
resolved upon a Rhenish campaign, and that Lord John Russell had just been 
informed of this scheme when, some weeks ago, he rose from his seat to 
frighten the House of Commons by fierce invectives against the Emperor 
of the French, and the sudden announcement that England was now going 
in search for new alliances. The tone and temper of French semi-official 
prints are far from allaying these apprehensions. Read, for instance, the 
following extract from Bullier's Correspondence, a Paris publication from 
which most of the provincial journalists in France derive their inspiration: 
"A friend of mine, who is addicted to prophetic pleasantries, said to me 
the other day: 'You'll see the Emperor go to the Rhine to offer his alliance 
to the King of Prussia, coupled with a slight rectification of frontiers.’ I 
replied by a quotation from the pamphlet Napoleon III et l'Italie: 'It is better 
to settle a territorial modification in a friendly way than to have to do it the 
day after a victory.'" 
Not long after the treaty of commerce with England was concluded, the 
French Government threw out a hint to the Prussian Embassador at Paris 
that an application for a similar treaty between France and the Zollverein 

Karl Marx 

would be favorably received, but the Prussian Government answering that 
the Zollverein was not at all desirous to make such a treaty, surprise and 
displeasure were expressed in terms far from courteous. Moreover, the 
Prussian Government was, at the time, fully informed of the negotiations 
which the agents of Louis Bonaparte had recently opened with the Bavarian 
Court, in order to induce the latter to cede to France the fortress of Landau, 
which, it was said, having been left to France by the treaty of 1814, had been 
unjustly taken from her by the treaty of 1815. The popular rumors of an 
impending rupture with France are, consequently, strengthened by official 
suspicion. 

Prussia's position at present bears, in some respects, a strong likeness to 
that of Austria after the conclusion of the Oriental war. Austria seemed then 
to have got off best of all the Powers. She flattered herself that she had 
humbled Russia, her dangerous neighbor, without incurring any trouble 
beyond the mobilization of her forces. Having played the armed mediator 
while the Western Powers had to bear the brunt of war, she might, after the 
proclamation of peace, fancy she had broken, by the arms of the Western 
Alliance, the ascendency Russia had won over her since the Hungarian 
events of 1849, and there were indeed at that time many compliments 
bestowed upon the clever diplomatic tactics of the Vienna Cabinet. In point 
of fact, however, the ambiguous attitude maintained by Austria during the 
Oriental war, left her without allies, and enabled Louis Bonaparte to localize 
the Italian war. Prussia, in her turn, maintained her resources intact during 
the Italian war. She shouldered her arms, but had not used them, and con- 
tented herself with spilling, instead of blood, the patient ink of her political 
wiseacres. After the peace of Villafranca, Prussia seemed to have weakened 
the rival House of Hapsburg through the instrumentality of French victories, 
and opened to herself the road to paramount power in Germany. Still, the 
very pretexts on which the treaty of Villafranca was proclaimed ought to 
have rent the delusions she labored under. While Louis Bonaparte declared 
that Prussia's armaments and threats of an eventual intervention had blunted 
the sword of France, Austria declared that her own power of resistance had 
split upon the equivocal neutrality of Prussia. During the whole war, Prussia 
had displayed pretensions ludicrously contradicted by her acts. Before 
Austria and the minor German States she appealed to her duties as a Eu- 
ropean power; before England and Russia she appealed to her obligations 
as the paramount German power; and, resting her claims on these double 
pretensions, she demanded from France to be acknowledged as the armed 
mediator of Europe. To her claims as the German power, par excellence, she 
acted up by allowing Russia to intimidate, in a circular of unprecedented 
insolence, the minor German courts, and by timidly listening, in the person 

Preparations for Napoleon's Coming War on the Rhine 

of Herr von Schleinitz, to Lord John Russell's flippant lectures on the 
"constitutional" law of nations. 

Her claims as a European Power she made good by hushing up the warlike 

impulses of the minor German princes, and by an attempt to turn the military 

defeats of Austria into as many titles for usurping the place formerly held 
by her rival in the councils of the German Confederation. When at last forced, 
by the progress of the French arms, to assume something like a warlike 
attitude, she met with the cold resistance of the minor German States, which 
hardly thought it worth while to dissimulate their distrust as to the ultimate 
intentions of the Prussian Court. The peace of Villafranca found Prussia 
completely insulated, not only in Europe, but in Germany, while the sub- 
sequent annexation of Savoy, by greatly contracting the exposed front of 
France, greatly improved her chances of a victorious campaign on the 
Rhine. 

Under these circumstances, the line of policy which Prussia now affected 
to follow, both in her internal and external relations, appears alike faulty. 
Despite all the vain-glorious declamations of the Prussian newspapers and 
Representative Chambers, nothing has been altered in her internal affairs, 
save the phraseology of her officials. The propositions on army reform, while 
not at all strengthening her military force for the impending emergency, aim 
at a permanent enlargement of the standing army, already too large; the 
overburdening of the financial resources, already overstrained, and the 
annihilation of the only democratic institution of the country—the Landwehr. 
All the reactionary laws on the press, the right of association, the municipal 
administration, the relations of landlords and peasants, the bureaucratic 
tutelage, the ubiquity of the police, have been carefully maintained. Even 
the infamous statutes relating to marriages contracted between nobles and 
the common stock of mankind, have not been rescinded. The very idea of 
restoring the Constitution, overthrown by a coup d’état,h hooted at as a wild 
dream. 

I will give you one single instance of the civil liberty now enjoyed by a 
Prussian subject. A native of Rhenish Prussia had, during the worst period 
of the reaction, been condemned by a packed Jury, because of what was then 
called a political crime, to seven years imprisonment in a Prussian fortress. 
The period of his punishment, not abridged by the liberal ministry, having 
come to an end, he repaired to Cologne, there to be driven out by order of 
the police. He then set out for his native town, but, strange to say, was 
informed by the authorities that, having absented himself for seven years 
from the place, he had lost his citizenship, and must look for another abode. 

He retorted that his absence had not been a voluntary one, but all in vain. 
From Berlin, where he then resorted, he was again ejected on the plea that 

Kal Marx 

he had no means of existence to show, excepthis personal resources of labor 
and knowledge; all his property having been consumed during his im- 
prisonment. He at last betook himself to Breslau, where an old acquaintance 
of his employed him as one of his agents, but being one morning summoned 
to the Police, he was told that his permission of residence could be prolonged 
only for a few weeks, if, in the mean while, he should not have procured 
citizenship in Breslau. On his appliance to the Breslau municipal authority, 
many petty difficulties were thrown in his way, which, being removed by 
the interference of zealous friends, his petition for citizenship was at last 
granted, but, together with the grant he received a big bui parading an array 
of fees, all to be paid by any happy mortal on his entrance into the ranks 
of Breslau citizens. If his friends had not possessed the means by clubbing, 
to raise the sum required, this Prussian subject would, like the Wandering 
Jew, have found no place in his glorious fatherland where to rest his head. 

Berlin, May 2, 1860. 

After the conclusion of the peace of Villafranca, the Prussian Government, 
which for months had flattered itself with the idle hope of being acknowl- 
edged as the armed mediator of Europe, and of rearing, upon the ruins of 

the Hapsburg Empire, the edifice of Hohenzollern greatness, seemed to have 20 

awakened to a sense of the immense dangers looming in the future. Then- 
policy, at once irresolute, vacillating, and perfidious, had left them without 
allies, and even Von Schleinitz, whose long-winded dispatches had become 
a standing joke with the diplomatic world, could hardly conceal from himself 
the truth that, so soon as the internal state of France should again drive the 
Man of December beyond the French frontiers, Prussia was to be the pre- 
destined object of another localized war. 

Had not Louis Napoleon, in a moment of apparent openheartedness, 
dropped some words to the effect that he knew what Germany stood in need 
of—unity, that he was the man to impart it; and that the Rhenish provinces 
would be not too high a price for the purchase of so precious acommodity? 
Quite true to the tradition of Prussia's past, the first idea of the Prince Regent 
and his satellites was to throw themselves upon the mercy of Russia. Had 
not Frederic William I. acquired Pomerania by atreaty of division concluded 
with Peter the Great against Charles XII. of Sweden? Had not Frederic II. 
carried the day in the seven years’ war, and annexed Silesia by the withdrawal 
of Russia from her Austrian ally? Had not the several divisions of Poland, 
planned between the Court of Berlin and the Court of Petersburg, swelled 

Preparations for Napoleon's Coming War on the Rhine 

out the diminutive dimensions of the Prussian monarchy? Had not, at the 
Congress of Vienna; the unbounded servility of Frederic William III., who 
stood by Alexander I, when, in 1814, England, Austria, and France showed 
some indication to opposition and resistance, been rewarded by the annexa- 
tion of Saxony and the Rhenish Provinces to Prussia? Prussia, in one word, 
had in its encroachments upon Germany, always enjoyed the patronage and 
the support of Russia, on the express condition, of course, of helping that 
latter Power to subject the countries bordering on the fatherland, and of 
playing the part of its humble vassal onthe European stage. In October, 1859, 
the Prince Regent and Alexander II, surrounded by diplomatists, generals 
and courtiers, met each other at Breslau, there to conclude a treaty, the 
articles of which have, till now, remained an unfathomable secret, not for 
Louis Bonaparte or Lord Palmerston, but for Prussian subjects, whose lib- 
eral representatives have proved themselves, of course, much too polite to 
interpellate Herr von Schleinitz, the Foreign Minister, on such a delicate 
question. This much, however, is sure, that the Bonapartist press took no 
fright at the Breslau conference; that ever since then the relations between 
Russia and France have grown more ostentatiously intimate; that that con- 
ference did not prevent Louis Bonaparte, either from seizing upon Savoy, 
or threatening Switzerland, and throwing out hints upon some unavoidable 
"rectification of the Rhenish frontiers," and, finally, that Prussia herself, 
despite the comfortable prospect of again being allowed to form Russia's 
vanguard, has, in these latter times, eagerly seized upon the bait of an English 
alliance, only thrown out at London to amuse the British House of Commons 
for a week or two. 

However, Lord John Russell's indiscreet betrayal in the shape of a Blue 
Book, of Herr von Schleinitz's coquetry with the Tuileries during the last 
Italian war, gave the death-blow to the Anglo-Prussia alliance, which the 
Prussian Government considered for a moment as a scheme really en- 
tertained, but which was known at London to be nothing beyond a phrase 
hiding a Parliamentary trick. After all, despite the conference with Alexan- 
der II, at Breslau, and Lord John Russell's "search for new alliances," 
Prussia now, as after the treaty of Villafranca, finds herself completely 
insulated and singly exposed to the French theory of the natural frontiers. 

Can it be believed that under such trying circumstances the only expedient 
which the Prussian Government has hit upon is to renew its scheme of a little 
Germany with a Hohenzollern at its head, and, by the most insolent provoca- 
tions, not only to drive Austria into the hostile camp, but to estrange the 
whole of Southern Germany? Yet, incredible as it may appear, and the more 

incredible since this line of policy is fervently recommended by the Bona- 
partist press, such is the case. The nearer the danger draws, the more anxious 

Karl Marx 

appears Prussia to display her hunger for a new division of Germany. By 
the way, it is hkely enough that, after the blow dealt to Austria, Germany 
stands in need of a similar blow being dealt to Prussia, in order to get rid 
of "both the houses," but at all events nobody will suspect the Prince Regent 
and Herr von Schleinitz of acting upon such pessimist principles. Ever since 
the treaty of Villafranca the leanings of the Regent's policy have been 
betrayed in little press skirmishes and small occasional debates on the Italian 
question, but, on the 20th of April, in the Prussian Lower House, on occasion 
of the debates on the Kurhessian question, the cat was let out of the bag. 

I have before explained this Kurhessian question to yourreaders, and shall 
therefore now limit myself to explaining in a few words the main points upon 
which the debates turned. The Kurhessian Constitution of 1831 having been 
destroyed by the Arch-Elector in 1849-50, under Austrian auspices, Prussia 
for a moment affected a desire to draw the sword on behalf of the protesting 
representative Chamber, but in November, 1850, on the meeting between 
Prince Schwarzenberg and Baron Manteuffel at Olmutz, when Prussia alto- 
gether surrendered to Austria, acknowledged the restoration of the old 
German Diet, betrayed Schleswig-Holstein, and recanted all her pretensions 
to supremacy; she also yielded her knight-errantry on behalf of the Kurhes- 
sian Constitution of 1831. 

In 1852, the Arch-Elector octroyed a new constitution which was guaran- 
teed by the German Diet, despite the protest of the Kurhessian people. After 
the Italian war, the question, on the secret instigation of Prussia, was again 
mooted. The Kurhessian Chambers again declared for the validity of the 
Constitution of 1831, and fresh petitions for its reéstablishment went up to 
the Diet at Frankfort. Prussia then asserted the Constitution of 1831 to be 
alone valid, but, as she cautiously added, it ought to be adapted to the 
monarchical principles of the Diet. Austria, on the other hand, insisted that 
the Constitution of 1852 was legal, but ought to be amended in a liberal sense. 
Thus the dispute was a verbal one, a mere quibble, the gist of which was a 
trial of the respective power wielded by the Hohenzollern and the Hapsburg 
over the German Confederation. A vast majority of the Diet decided at last 
for the validity of the Constitution of 1852; viz., on the Austrian side, and 
against Prussia. The motives which swayed the votes of the minor German 
States were transparent. Austria they knew to be too much involved in 
foreign difficulties, and too unpopular, to attempt anything beyond the 
conservation of the general status quo in Germany, while they suspected 
Prussia of ambitious schemes of innovation. By not acknowledging the 
competency of the vote of the Diet of 1851, they would have put in jeopardy 
the competency of all the other resolutions of the Diet since 1848. Last, not 
least, they did not like the Prussian strategy of dictating to the minor German 

Preparations for Napoleon's Coming War on the Rhine 

Princes and encroaching upon their sovereignty, by affecting to take up the 
grievances of the Kurhessian people against the Arch-Elector. Consequently 
the motion of Prussia was lost. 

Now, on the 20th of April, when this matter came to be debated at Berlin 
in the House of Deputies, Herr von Schleinitz, in the name of the Prussian 
Government, explicitly declared that Prussia would not think herself bound 
by the vote of the German Diet; that, in 1850, when the Prussian Constitution 
was fabricated, there existed no German Diet, that body having been swept 
away by the earthquake of 1848, whence it followed that all resolutions of 
the German Diet which should run counter to the plans of the Prussian 
Government were void of legal force; and, lastly, that, in fact, the German 
Diet belonged to the dead, although the German Confederation, of course, 
continued to exist. Now, is it possible to imagine any step more foolish on 
the part of the Prussian Government? The Austrian Government declared 

the old Constitution of the German Empire to be defunct, after Napoleon I. 
had really put the extinguisher upon it. The Hapsburg then proclaimed only 
a fact. The Hohenzollern, on the contrary, now proclaims the nullity of the 
Federal Constitution of Germany at a moment when Germany is threatened 
with a foreign war, as if to afford the Man of December legal pretexts for 
entering into separate alliances with the minor German States, which, till 
now, were precluded from such a course of action by the laws of the Diet. 
If Prussia had proclaimed the right of the Revolution of 1848, the nullity of 
all the counter revolutionary acts committed by herself and the Diet since 
that time, and the restoration of the institutions and laws of the Revolutionary 

epoch, she would have commanded the sympathies of all Germany, Austrian 
Germany included. As itis, she has only divided the German Princes without 
uniting the German people. She has, in fact, opened the door by which to 
let in the Zouaves.