The March Association

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung" No. 243, March 11, 1849]

Cologne, March 10. The Frankfurt so-called “March Association” of the Frankfurt so-called “Imperial Assembly” has the impudence to send us the following lithographed letter:

“The March Association has resolved that a list of all the papers that have opened their columns to us shall be drawn up and communicated to all associations with which we are in touch, so that the said associations may act to ensure that the papers indicated are favoured preferably with any pertinent advertisements.

In enclosing the list herewith, we believe it unnecessary to draw your attention to the importance of the paid ‘advertisements’ of a paper as a source of sustenance for the whole enterprise.

Furthermore, the Central March Association has resolved to recommend to the associations, for their kind support, the ‘Teutsches Volksblatt’, a democratic-constitutional journal, edited by Dr. Eisenmann, appearing in Würzburg, since it threatens to succumb to the competition of anti-democratic papers, the editor having declared himself unable to make further sacrifices beyond those already made.

Frankfurt, end of February 1849

The Board of the Central March Association”

On the appended list of these papers which “have opened their columns to the March Association” and are to be favoured preferably with “pertinent advertisements” by the supporters of the “March Association”, there also appears, even with an honourable asterisk, the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”.

We hereby declare to the gauche and extreme gauche members[7] of this so-called “March Association” of the ci-devant[1] “Imperial Assembly”, that the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” has never lent itself as the organ of a parliamentary party, least of all of a party of the Frankfurt comic imperial club, that the so-called “March Association” of this club has never had the columns of our paper opened to it, just as the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” knows no “March Association” at all. If, therefore, the “March Association” designates our paper as one of its organs in its lithographed report, along with the papers that have really opened their columns, this is a simple slander of the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” and absurd boasting of the “March Association”. The patriotic good souls of the “March Association” will no doubt know how to square this with their “conscience”.

The “March Association’s” invocation of our paper is, however, rendered still more virtuous by the “resolution” of the association to recommend the “democratic-constitutional” journal (Teutonic journal: “Teutsches Volksblatt”) of “Dr. Eisenmann”. Who would not be moved by the sad fate of the great “Teutonic” arch-sufferer Eisenmann? What good soul does not feel the blow that “Dr.” Eisenmann, who sold his prison memoirs for 12,000 gulden to the “democratic-constitutional” King of Bavaria, can no longer make “new sacrifices”, but threatens to succumb to the bookselling “competition” of the ordinary, non-octroyed anti-March-Association newspapers? We leave it to the calculation of the patriots to investigate into what deep neglect the “Teutsches Volksblatt” must have fallen, if the 12,000-gulden sufferer and five-thaler representative Eisenmann has to appeal to public “support”. At any rate, things must have gone very, very far with the “democratic-constitutional” Eisenmanns when they fabricate a begging letter from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, the very paper that has, alone in Germany, pursued the “shameless shabby beggars” of patriotism and the imperial begging assemblies.

To the filthy remark of the profit-thirsty, competition-driven patriot on the “importance of paid advertisements of a newspaper as a source of sustenance for the whole enterprise” we naturally have no answer. The “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” has always, in this as in everything else, distinguished itself from the patriots by never having considered political movements as a branch of knight-of-industrydom or a source of sustenance.


[1] former