[“Neue Rheinische Zeitung”
No. 1, 1 June 1848]

** Cologne, 31 May. Herr Hüser of Mainz, with the help of old fortress regulations and rotten federal laws, has invented a new method for turning Prussians and other Germans into even greater slaves than they were before 22 May 1815. We advise Herr Hüser to take out a patent on his new invention; it would in any case become very lucrative. According to this method, two or more drunken soldiers are sent out, who naturally pick a quarrel with citizens of their own accord. The public authorities intervene, arrest the soldiers; that suffices for the commandant of any fortress to declare the town in a state of siege, for all weapons to be confiscated, and the inhabitants to be delivered up to the mercy of the brutal soldateska. This plan is all the more lucrative in Germany, since there are more fortresses here against the interior than against the foreigner; it must become especially lucrative because some place-commandant paid by the people, a Hüser, a Roth von Schreckenstein and similar feudal names, may dare more than even the king or emperor, because he may suppress the freedom of the press, because he may, e.g., forbid the people of Mainz, who are not Prussians, to express their antipathies towards the King of Prussia and the Prussian state system.

Herr Hüser’s project is only a part of the great plan of the Berlin reaction, which strives, as quickly as possible, to disarm all civic guards, particularly on the Rhine, gradually to destroy the entire arming of the people, which is only just beginning, and to deliver us, defenceless, into the hands of the army, which mostly consists of foreigners and can easily be, or already has been, turned against us.

This has happened in Aachen, in Trier, in Mannheim, in Mainz, and it may happen elsewhere.

The Latest Heroic Deed of the House of Bourbon

[“Neue Rheinische Zeitung”
No. 1, 1 June 1848]

* The House of Bourbon has not yet reached the goal of its glorious career. Its white flag has, to be sure, been pretty well soiled of late, and the withering lilies have let their heads droop pitiably enough. Charles Louis of Bourbon bartered away one duchy and had to ignominiously abandon the second; Ferdinand of Bourbon lost Sicily and was forced to grant the revolution a constitution in Naples; Louis Philippe, although only a crypto-Bourbon, nevertheless went the way of all French-Bourbon flesh across the Channel to England. But the Neapolitan Bourbon has brilliantly avenged his family’s honour.

The chambers are summoned to Naples. The opening day is to be used for a decisive struggle against the revolution. Campobasso, one of the principal police chiefs of the notorious Del Carretto, is quietly recalled from Malta; the sbirri, their old leaders at their head, once again patrol the Toledo, armed and in broad daylight, for the first time in a long while; they disarm the citizens, tear their coats off them, force them to cut off their moustaches. The 14th of May, the opening day of the chambers, arrives. The king demands that the chambers swear a solemn oath to change nothing in the constitution granted by him. They refuse. The National Guard declares for the deputies. Negotiations take place; the king gives way; the ministers resign. The deputies demand that the king proclaim the concession made by means of an ordinance. The king promises this ordinance for the following day. But during the night all the troops stationed in the vicinity march into Naples. The National Guard perceives that it is betrayed; it throws up barricades, and five to six thousand men station themselves behind them. But facing them stand twenty thousand soldiers, partly Neapolitans, partly Swiss, with eighteen cannon; between the two, for the time being indifferent, stand the twenty thousand lazzaroni of Naples.

On the morning of the 15th, the Swiss still declare that they will not attack the people. But one of the police agents, mixed in among the people, fires on the soldiers in the Strada di Toledo; immediately Fort Sant’Elmo hoists the red flag – and at this signal the soldiers hurl themselves upon the barricades. A horrifying butchery begins; the National Guards defend themselves heroically against fourfold superior numbers, against the cannon-fire of the soldiers; from ten in the morning until midnight the fighting continues; despite the overwhelming might of the soldateska, the people would have been victorious had not the miserable conduct of the French Admiral Baudin induced the lazzaroni to join the royalist party.

Admiral Baudin lay before Naples with a fairly strong French fleet. A simple but timely threat to bombard the palace and the forts would have forced Ferdinand to give way. But Baudin, an old servant of Louis Philippe, accustomed to the previous, merely tolerated existence of the French fleet in the days of the entente cordiale, kept quiet and thereby caused the lazzaroni, already inclining towards the people, to go over to the troops.

Through this step of the Neapolitan lumpen proletariat the defeat of the revolution was decided. The Swiss Guard, the Neapolitan line regiments, and the lazzaroni hurled themselves together upon the barricade fighters. The palaces of the Toledo street, swept clean with canister, crashed down under the soldiers’ cannon balls; the furious horde of victors burst into the houses, stabbed the men, spitted the children, violated the women before murdering them, plundered everything and delivered the devastated dwellings to the flames. The lazzaroni showed themselves the greediest, the Swiss the most brutal. The infamies and barbarities that accompanied the victory of the fourfold stronger and well-armed Bourbon mercenaries and the ever-sanfedist lazzaroni over the almost annihilated National Guard of Naples are indescribable.

At length, even Admiral Baudin found it too much. Refugee after refugee came on board his ships and recounted what was going on in the city. The French blood of his sailors began to boil. Then at last, when the king’s victory was decided, he thought of bombardment. The bloodshed was gradually stopped; there was no longer murder in the streets, they confined themselves to plunder and rape; but the prisoners were led off to the forts and there summarily shot. By midnight all was over, the absolute rule of Ferdinand de facto re-established, the honour of the House of Bourbon washed clean in Italian blood.

Such is the latest heroic deed of the House of Bourbon. And as always, it is the Swiss who fight out the Bourbons’ cause against the people. On the 10th of August 1792, on the 29th of July 1830, in the Neapolitan struggles of 1820, everywhere we find the grandsons of Tell and Winkelried as mercenaries in the pay of the family whose name has for years become synonymous throughout Europe with absolute monarchy. Now this, of course, will soon be at an end. After long wrangling, the more civilised cantons have forced through the prohibition of military capitulations; the sturdy sons of the free Old Swiss Confederacy will have to renounce kicking Neapolitan women, reveling in the plunder of outraged towns, and, in case of defeat, being immortalised by Thorwaldsen lions, like the fallen of the 10th of August.

For the time being, however, the House of Bourbon may once again breathe freely. The reaction that has set in afresh since the 24th of February has nowhere won so decisive a victory as in Naples; and it was precisely from Naples and Sicily that the first of this year’s revolutions proceeded. Yet the revolutionary storm-flood that has burst upon old Europe cannot be dammed up by absolutist conspiracies and coups d’état. By the counter-revolution of the 15th of May, Ferdinand of Bourbon has laid the cornerstone of the Italian Republic. Calabria is already in flames, a provisional government set up in Palermo; the Abruzzi will likewise break loose, the inhabitants of all the sucked-out provinces will march on Naples and, together with the people of the city, take revenge on the royal traitor and his rude mercenaries. And if Ferdinand falls, at least he has the satisfaction of having lived and fallen as a true Bourbon.

Written by Friedrich Engels.

The Democratic Party

[“Neue Rheinische Zeitung”
No. 2, 2 June 1848]

** Cologne, 1 June. It is a common demand made upon every new organ of public opinion: enthusiasm for the party whose principles it professes, unconditional confidence in its strength, constant readiness either to shield the principle with the actual power, or to adorn the actual weakness with the splendour of the principle. We shall not meet this demand. We shall not seek to gloss over suffered defeats with illusions.

The party has suffered defeats; the principles which it proclaimed at the moment of its triumph have been called into question; the ground it has really gained is being disputed foot by foot; it has already lost much, and the question of what still remains to it will soon arise.

What matters to us is that the democratic party become aware of its position. It will be asked why we address ourselves to a party, why we do not rather fix our gaze upon the goal of the democratic strivings, the people’s welfare, the salvation of all without distinction.

This is the right and the custom of the struggle, and only from the struggle of parties, not from sham-clever compromises, from a pretended coming together of conflicting views, interests, and purposes, can the salvation of the new epoch spring.

We demand of the democratic party that it become aware of its position. This demand arises from the experiences of the last months. The democratic party has abandoned itself far too much to the frenzy of the first intoxication of victory. Drunk with joy that it was at last permitted to proclaim its principle aloud and openly, it imagined that the proclamation alone was enough to make its realisation immediately certain. It has not got beyond this proclamation after its first victory and the concessions directly tied to it. But while it was liberal with its ideas and embraced everyone as a brother who merely did not venture to raise objections, the others, those to whom power was left or given, acted. And their activity has not been contemptible. Reticent with their principle, allowing it to come to the fore only insofar as it was directed against the old state of things overthrown by the revolution, cautiously restricting the movement whenever the interest of the new legal order to be established, the restoration of external order, could serve as a pretext, making apparent concessions to the friends of the old order in order to be all the more certain of them for the execution of their plans, then gradually erecting their own political system in its main features, they have succeeded in gaining a middle position between the democratic party and the absolutists, advancing on one side, pressing back on the other, at once progressive – against absolutism, reactionary – against democracy.

This is the party of the prudent, moderate bourgeoisie, by which the people’s party, in its first drunkenness, allowed itself to be outwitted, until at last, when it was insolently thrust back, when it was denounced as a set of conspirators and every possible reprehensible tendency was imputed to it, its eyes were opened, until it perceived that it had essentially achieved nothing beyond what the gentlemen of the middle class consider compatible with their well-understood interest. Set at variance with itself by an undemocratic electoral law, beaten in the elections, it now sees facing it a double representation, of which it is hard to say which of the two resists its demands the more decisively. Therewith, of course, its enthusiasm has evaporated, and sober recognition has taken its place: that a powerful reaction has attained dominance, and, remarkably enough, before any action in the sense of the revolution has even taken place.

Unquestionable as all this is, it would be dangerous if the democratic party were now, under the bitter feeling of the first, partly self-inflicted, defeat, to allow itself to be induced to return to that fatal idealism, unfortunately so congenial to the German character, by virtue of which a principle that cannot be immediately put into practice is commended to the distant future, while for the present it is left to the harmless elaboration of the “thinkers”.

We must directly warn against those specious friends who declare themselves, indeed, in agreement with the principle, but doubt its feasibility because the world is not yet ripe for it; who have by no means any intention of making it ripe, but prefer rather, in this miserable earthly existence, to fall victim themselves to the universal fate of baseness. If these be the crypto-republicans of whom court councillor Gervinus is so afraid, we cordially concur with him: such people are dangerous.