The Hohenzollern General Reform Plan

[“Neue Rheinische Zeitung”
No. 246, March 15, 1849]

* Cologne, March 14. “The exceptional states of siege will be lifted as soon as the general state of siege is imposed on the whole of the kingship by means of laws and introduced into our constitutional customs. The round dance of these ‘strong’ laws will be opened by September legislation on associations and the press.”

It was with these words that we accompanied the publication of the Speech from the Throne (No. 234 of the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”). And what is the first parliamentary act of the ministry? It comes before the chambers and says:

“We exempt you from the state of siege; in return you impose permanent martial law on meetings, associations, press.”

We must not conceal for a moment the fact that the parliamentary Left, by its modest behaviour, made it easier from the outset for the ministry to throw itself into the offensive.

We shall compare in detail the 3 notorious draft laws with the September laws, with the pre-March draft criminal code, with the Prussian common law. But first we shall communicate to our readers the overall plan of the old Prussian reformers, to which our extra issue of the day before yesterday already alluded.

On the same day that the non-official Berlin papers published the 3 notorious draft laws, the “Neue Preußische Zeitung,” this Moniteur of Brandenburg Providence, published a “Votum on the essential tasks of the now assembled so-called representation of the people.” The Hohenzollern house and its Brandenburg ministry are of too “noble” a lineage to dissemble in moments when the sun of “force” shines upon the unimpaired crown. In such moments the hearts of kings do not constrain themselves and humiliate the plebeian mass even by the brusque, unceremonious utterance of their innermost desires and thoughts. It cannot be concealed that heartless destiny has more than once taken pleasure in frustrating, through peculiar events, the prophecies, threats, and intentions of the will which Frederick William IV, “our good king,” “the brilliant,”—who placed the crown upon his head with exactly the same words as Napoleon did the iron crown of Lombardy—proclaimed in moments of triumphantly confident plenitude of power, of “divine intoxication,” as Goethe puts it. But the iron fatum, as is well known, rules even the gods. And in any case it remains an intoxicating delight for a royal heart, as for a female heart, as for any heart, to allow its innermost thoughts to break forth unbridled and to adapt the world, even if only through a speech, through writings, to its own heart.

The more or less royal outpouring of the heart in the “Neue Preußische Zeitung” therefore offers a high psychological interest; on the other hand it makes known to the people what is expected of it, what they intend to force from it if necessary, naturally in its own well-understood interest.

The “Neue Preußische Zeitung” (No. 59, supplement) has, to facilitate a survey, divided the Hohenzollern general reform plan into rubrics, which is in any case a condescension towards the public worthy of recognition. Was it not free to communicate the royal counsels in apocalyptic form, in the manner of the Revelation of St John? Let us keep to the rubrics!

The “essential tasks of the now assembled so-called representation of the people” are subdivided as follows:

1. “Purification of the chambers from political criminals.” A Jove principium. The first law for a chamber that is to act according to the heart of the king is to reshape itself according to the heart of the king. For the time being its composition is still a botch of the disrespectful universal suffrage, albeit indirect.

And what does the royal heart demand?

About the present representation of the people, the “Neue Preußische Zeitung” blabs out that it is afflicted with “a blemish” which renders it unworthy and incapable “to stand up in its entirety as a bearer of Prussian honour, Prussian loyalty and love of the fatherland”. It has a scandal about it, which it must cast off in order to be “righteous” in the eyes of the Most High.

“This blemish, this scandal, lies in the membership of such men who participated in the criminal outrages of the Unruh faction, especially in its resolution of tax refusal.”

“The government,” it continues, “has, out of its own lamentable weakness or out of mistrust against a judiciary infected in a high degree with revolutionary sentiments, not brought those men before a court. To make good this omission, this error, is the task of the chambers; to insist upon it is in particular the duty of all judges and jurists among their members, also in order to preserve the fading honour of their estate. The government must be petitioned—and let this be one of the first procedures after the constitution of the chamber—that the Minister of Justice even now bring about the judicial investigation and punishment of those malefactors. Such an excision is the first and most urgent requirement for a prosperous continuation of the deliberations.”

The king cherishes the innermost wish to see the tax-refusing miscreants and desecrators of the sanctuary chastised down to the third generation. The royal government was too weak to realise this wish. The royal Prussian people was so shameless, so wanton as to re-appoint the malefactors and sinners, in open rebellion against the paternal heart of the sovereign, as its representatives. It is now up to the chambers to compel the royal government to carry out the very own intentions of His Majesty. On its knees it must beseech the ministry to permit it to expel all mangy elements and those unworthy in the higher sense to appear at court. And above all the scribes and Pharisees, the “judges and jurists,” must save their “estate,” whose “honour” has faded since the moment when the, indeed unfounded, suspicion arose in Manteuffel that the Prussian Themis might remain blind to the clear hints of the crown. How is a judicial estate to save its honour before the people, an estate for which every whim of the incorporated grace of God would not be law, which would not unconditionally obey order to the king himself?

It is well known that in all religions contrition, sacrifice, if possible self-sacrifice, constitutes the real core of divine service, of the cultus. Therefore, in order to prove that it is a representation of the royal heart—and the royal heart is the living, individualised, incarnate, real people’s heart—the “so-called” representation of the people must above all sacrifice itself, itself as an emanation of popular sovereignty, upon the steps of the throne.

It must expel all members displeasing to His Majesty and deliver them up to prison and to the hangman, in expiation for the religion of absolute kingship. Thus it atones, first, for the crime of its popular-sovereign, originally sinful origin. At the same time it atones for a past that is pregnant with outrage against majesty, and hence with blasphemy against God. It purifies itself to become a true emanation of royal plenitude of power. It changes from a “so-called” representation of the people into a real representation of the people—in the higher, royal Prussian sense. The king is the real Prussian people. The real Prussian people—which is in no wise, in accordance with bad Latin fashion, to be confused with the superficial head-count of the state’s inhabitants—therefore elects only representatives so that the royal wishes may resound before the king as the wishes of the people and in this way the most secret demands of his own Most High heart obtain a reality that is as prosaic as it is universally valid, in the form of public legislative proposals and chamber resolutions.

We therefore expect the Berlin chambers to open their king-cultus with self-sacrifice, with the excision of the tax-refusing sinners.

The “Neue Preußische Zeitung” does not conceal it. Even so the chamber is not yet righteous before the Most High. The other part of the sacrifice, however, is not to be performed by it as a corporation. It is left to the active consciousness of sin and the self-crucifixion of the individual members concerned.

“To be sure,” sighs the “Neue Preußische Zeitung,” “such a purification would not expel all those members whom one could wish to remove, on account of their political, even statesmanlike antecedents, for so long as they do not recognise and repent their share in the misery of the fatherland and make the vow and publicly testify that they will strive, to the best of their ability, to stem the crimes which have broken out partly through their personal guilt. Yet it goes without saying that there can be no legal ground for turning out of the chambers in their entirety such men as have served the revolution, who in particular were used up in this service” (truly Prussian grammar!) “as high-ranking officials between the 18th of March and the 8th of November. One could only wish that their own consciousness had kept them away, in case the conversion desiderated above has not taken place. Moreover, at this” (Most High) “wish, distinctions justly make themselves felt, e.g., between Rhenish merchants, who are supposed to become pillars of the state overnight, and men from old Prussian” (feudal) “families, whose honourable names have been from time immemorial most closely bound up with the history of our royal house and of the original core-lands” (is Silesia also an original core-land?) “of the monarchy.”

We have long told the “Rhenish merchants” so. Only with dégoût did the feudal Hohenzollern house choose this bourgeois canaille as its base tool, and it is lying in wait for the moment to dismiss them with kicks, and radically at that. Hansemann! Camphausen! Kühlwetter! On your knees! In penitential garments before the royal palace, in the sight of the people, ashes on your guilt-laden heads, make the vow, testify publicly how you, in deepest contrition, repent having for a moment dared to prepare the counter-revolution, the accomplishment of which was due solely to “my glorious army,” with bourgeois-constitutional intrigues and—you penny-pinchers, huckstering bondsmen, pedantic oil dealers, cunning railway speculators—not only to have saved the throne, but even to have boasted of this salvation in high-flown, hackneyed funeral-orator phrases. On your knees! Into penitential garments! Or go into a monastery!

And as for the “men of old Prussian lineage”, these noble-born, grace-election-favoured scions of the chosen people, from them, an Arnim, Auerswald, Bonin, Pfuel, we expect soon to read the obituary in the *Staats-Anzeiger*!?*! Only if they voluntarily go to their deaths can we believe in their repentance. From a Rhenish merchant like Hansemann, this greatness of soul is not to be expected. Hansemann is a Voltairian of the most reprehensible sort, shallow, and, above all, heartless in money matters.

Therefore, disappear from the Chambers, from the stage, you living, walking monuments of 18 March, of royal visitations, humiliations, inconsistencies and weaknesses! Withdraw from the Chambers, or condemn yourselves as the scapegoats of 18 March!

The tax refusers, however, will present the Chambers themselves as a hecatomb of their purification and atonement to the royal throne, and thus render themselves worthy of fulfilling the further “tasks” dictated by the king to “the so-called popular representation”.

(To be continued.)


¹ Reluctance — ? see present volume, pp. 364–371