The Turin Concordia

The Turin “Concordia”

(“Neue Rheinische Zeitung” No. 55, July 25, 1848]

* Cologne, July 23. We recently mentioned the paper “L’Alba”* published in Florence, which extended its fraternal hand to us across the Alps. It was to be expected that another journal, “La Concordia”? in Turin, a paper of the opposite colour, would declare itself in an opposite, though by no means hostile, fashion. In an earlier issue “La Concordia” opined that the Neue Rheinische Zeitung took up the cause of any party provided only that it was “oppressed”. It was led to this hardly ingenious invention by our assessment of the Prague events, our sympathy for the democratic party against the reactionary Windischgrätz et Comp.? Perhaps the Turin journal has in the meantime become clearer about the so-called Czech movement.

Recently, however, “La Concordia” feels prompted to devote a more or less doctrinaire article to the “Nuova Gazzetta Renana”. It had read in our paper the programme for the workers’ congress to be convened in Berlin, and the eight points to be discussed by the workers are causing it considerable uneasiness.

After faithfully translating the whole, it begins a kind of critique with the following words:

“In these proposals there is much that is true and just, but the ‘Concordia’ would commit a betrayal of its mission if it did not raise its voice against the errors of the socialists.”

We, for our part, rise up against the “error” of the “Concordia”, which consists in treating the programme drawn up by the relevant commission for the workers’ congress and merely communicated by us as our own. Nevertheless, we are prepared to enter into a discussion of political economy with the “Concordia” as soon as its programme offers something more than a few well-known philanthropic phrases and seized free-trade dogmas.