Karl Marx
Revolution and Counter-Revolution 

NOTE BY THE EDITOR



THE following articles are now, after forty-five years, for the first time 
collected and printed in book form. They are an invaluable pendant to Marx's 
work on the coup d'etat of Napoleon III. ("Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis 
Bonaparte.") Both works belong to the same period, and both are what Engels 
calls "excellent specimens of that marvellous gift...of Marx... of apprehending 
clearly the character, the significance, and the necessary consequences of great 
historical events at a time when these events are actually in course of taking 
place, or are only just completed."
These articles were written in 1851-1852, when Marx had been about eighteen 
months in England. He was living with his wife, three young children, and their 
life-long friend, Helene Demuth, in two rooms in Dean Street, Soho, almost 
opposite the Royalty Theatre. For nearly ten years they had been driven from 
pillar to post. When, in 1843, the Prussian Government suppressed the Rhenish 
Gazette which Marx had edited, he went with his newly-married wife, Jenny von 
Westphalen, to Paris. Not long after, his expulsion was demanded by the Prussian 
Government--it is said that Alexander von Humboldt acted as the agent of Prussia 
on this occasion--and M. Guizot was, of course, too polite to refuse the 
request. Marx was expelled, and betook himself to Brussels. Again the Prussian 
Government requested his expulsion, and where the French Government had complied 
it was not likely the Belgian would refuse. Marx received marching orders.
But at this same time the French Government that had expelled Marx had gone the 
way of French Governments, and the new Provisional Government through Ferdinand 
Flocon invited the "brave et loyal Marx" to return to the country whence 
"tyranny had banished him, and where he, like all fighting in the sacred cause, 
the cause of the fraternity of all peoples," would be welcome. The invitation 
was accepted, and for some months he lived in Paris. Then he returned to Germany 
in order to start the New Rhenish Gazette in Cologne. And the Rhenish Gazette 
writers had very lively times. Marx was twice prosecuted, but as the juries 
would not convict, the Prussian Government took the nearer way and suppressed 
the paper.
Again Marx and his family returned to the country whose "doors" had only a few 
short months before been "thrown open" to him. The sky had changed--and the 
Government. "We remained in Paris," my mother says in some biographical notes I 
have found, "a month. Here also there was to be no resting-place for us. One 
fine morning the familiar figure of the sergeant of police appeared with the 
announcement that Karl 'et sa dame' must leave Paris within twenty-four hours. 
We were graciously told we might be interned at Vannes in the Morbihan. Of 
course we could not accept such an exile as that, and I again gathered together 
my small belongings to seek a safe haven in London. Karl had hastened thither 
before us." The "us" were my mother, Helene Demuth, and the three little 
children, Jenny (Madame Longuet), Laura (Madame Lafargue), and Edgar, who died 
at the age of eight.
The haven was safe indeed. But it was storm-tossed. Hundreds of refugees--all 
more or less destitute--were now in London. There followed years of horrible 
poverty, of bitter suffering--such suffering as can only be known to the 
penniless stranger in a strange land. The misery would have been unendurable but 
for the faith that was in these men and women, and hut for their invincible 
"Humor." I use the German word because I know no English one that quite 
expresses the same thing--such a combination of humor and good-humor, of 
light-hearted courage, and high spirits.
That readers of these articles may have some idea of the conditions under which 
Marx was working, under which he wrote them and the "Achtzehnte Brumaire," and 
was preparing his first great economical work, "Zur Kritik der Politischen 
Oeconomie" (published in 1859), I again quote from my mother's notes. Soon after 
the arrival of the family a second son was born. He died when about two years 
old. Then a fifth child, a little girl, was born. When about a year old, she too 
fell sick and died. "Three days,"writes my mother, "the poor child wrestled with 
death. She suffered so...Her little dead body lay in the small back room; we all 
of us" (i. e., my parents, Helene Demuth, and the three elder children) "went 
into the front room, and when night came we made us beds on the floor, the three 
living children lying by us. And we wept for the little angel resting near us, 
cold and dead. The death of the dear child came in the time of our bitterest 
poverty. Our German friends could not help us; Engels, after vainly trying to 
get literary work in London, had been obliged to go, under very disadvantageous 
conditions, into his father's firm, as a clerk, in Manchester; Ernest Jones, who 
often came to see us at this time, and had promised help, could do nothing... In 
the anguish of my heart I went to a French refugee who lived near, and who had 
sometimes visited us. I told him our sore need. At once with the friendliest 
kindness he gave me 2 [pounds]. With that we paid for the little coffin in which 
the poor child now sleeps peacefully. I had no cradle for her when she was born, 
and even the last small resting place was being denied her"..."It was a terrible 
time", Liebknecht writes to me (the Editor), "but it was grand nevertheless."
In that "front room" in Dean Street, the children playing about him, Marx 
worked. I have heard tell how the children would pile up chairs behind him to 
represent a coach, to which he was harnessed as horse, and would "whip him up" 
even as he sat at his desk writing.
Marx had been recommended to Mr. C. A. Dana, the managing director of the New 
York Tribune, by Ferdinand Freiligrath, and the first contributions sent by him 
to America are the series of letters on Germany here reprinted. They seem to 
have created such a sensation that before the series had been completed Marx was 
engaged as regular London correspondent. On the 12th Of March, 1852, Mr. Dana 
wrote: "It may perhaps give you pleasure to know that they" (i. e., the 
"Germany" letters) "are read with satisfaction by a considerable number of 
persons, and are widely reproduced." From this time on, with short intervals, 
Marx not only sent letters regularly to the New York paper; he wrote a large 
number of leading articles for it. "Mr. Marx," says an editorial note in 1853, 
"has indeed opinions of his own, with some of which we are far from agreeing; 
but those who do not read his letters neglect one of the most instructive 
sources of information on the great questions of European politics."
Not the least remarkable among these contributions were those dealing with Lord 
Palmerston and the Russian Government. "Urquhart's writings on Russia," says 
Marx, "had interested but not convinced me. In order to arrive at a definite 
opinion, I made a minute analysis of Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, and of the 
Diplomatic Blue Books from 1807 to 1850. The first fruits of these studies was a 
series of articles in the New York Tribune, in which I proved Palmerston's 
relations with the Russian Government. ...Shortly after, these studies were 
reprinted in the Chartist organ edited by Ernest Jones, The People's Paper... 
Meantime the Glasgow Sentinel had reproduced one of these articles, and part of 
it was issued in pamphlet form by Mr. Tucker, London." And the Sheffield Foreign 
Affairs Committee thanked Marx for the "great public service rendered by the 
admirable expose in his "Kars papers," published both in the New York Tribune 
and the People's Paper. A large number of articles on the subject were also 
printed in the Free Press by Marx's old friend, C. D. Collett. I hope to 
republish these and other articles.
As to the New York Tribune, it was at this time an admirably edited paper, with 
an immense staff of distinguished contributors, both American and European. It 
was a passionate anti-slavery organ, and also recognized that there "was need 
for a true organization of society," and that "our evils" were "social, not 
political." The paper, and especially Marx's articles, were frequently referred 
to in the House of Commons, notably by John Bright.
It may also interest readers to know what Marx was paid for his articles--many 
of them considerably longer even than those here collected. He received 1 
[pound] for each contribution--not exactly brilliant remuneration.
It will be noted that the twentieth chapter, promised in the nineteenth, does 
not appear. It may have been written, but was certainly not printed. It was 
probably crowded out. "I do not know," wrote Mr. Dana, "how long you intend to 
make the series, and under ordinary circumstances I should desire to have it 
prolonged as much as possible. But we have a presidential election at hand, 
which will occupy our columns to a great extent....Let me suggest to you if 
possible to condense your survey...into say half a dozen more articles" (eleven 
had then been received by Mr. Dana). "Do not, however, close it without an 
exposition of the forces now remaining at work there (Germany) and active in the 
preparation of the future." This "exposition" will be found in the article which 
I have added to the "Germany" series, on the "Cologne Communist Trial." That 
trial really gives a complete picture of the conditions of Germany under the 
triumphant Counter-Revolution.
Marx himself nowhere says the series of letters is incomplete, although he 
occasionally refers to them. Thus in the letter on the Cologne trial he speaks 
of the articles, and in 1853 writes: "Those of your readers who, having read my 
letters on the German Revolution and Counter-Revolution written for the Tribune 
some two years ago, desire to have an immediate intuition of it, will do well to 
inspect the picture by Mr. Hasenclever now being exhibited in...New 
York...representing the presentation of a workingmen's petition to the 
magistrates of Dusseldorf in 1848. What the writer could only analyze, the 
eminent painter has reproduced in its dramatic vitality." 
Finally, I would remind English readers that these articles were written when 
Marx had only been some eighteen months in England, and that he never had any 
opportunity of reading the proofs. Nevertheless, it has not seemed to me that 
anything needed correction. I have therefore only removed a few obvious 
printer's errors.
The date at the head of each chapter refers to the issue of the Tribune in which 
the article appeared, that at the end to the time of writing. I am alone 
responsible for the headings of the letters as published in this volume.
ELEANOR MARX AVELING.
Sydenham, April, 1896.









I. 
GERMANY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTION.



OCTOBER 25, 1851.
THE first act of the revolutionary drama on the continent of Europe has closed. 
The "powers that were" before the hurricane of 1848 are again the "powers that 
be," and the more or less popular rulers of a day, provisional governors, 
triumvirs, dictators with their tail of representatives, civil commissioners, 
military commissioners, prefects, judges, generals, officers, and soldiers, are 
thrown upon foreign shores, and "transported beyond the seas" to England or 
America, there to form new governments in partibus infidelium, European 
committees, central committees, national committees, and to announce their 
advent with proclamations quite as solemn as those of any less imaginary 
potentates.
A more signal defeat than that undergone by the continental revolutionary 
party--or rather parties--upon all points of the line of battle, cannot be 
imagined. But what of that? Has not the struggle of the British middle classes 
for their social and political supremacy embraced forty-eight, that of the 
French middle classes forty years of unexampled struggles? And was their triumph 
ever nearer than at the very moment when restored monarchy thought itself more 
firmly settled than ever? The times of that superstition which attributed 
revolutions to the ill-will of a few agitators have long passed away. Everyone 
knows nowadays that wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be 
some social want in the background, which is prevented, by outworn institutions, 
from satisfying itself. The want may not vet be felt as strongly, as generally, 
as might ensure immediate success; but every attempt at forcible repression will 
only bring it forth stronger and stronger, until it bursts its fetters. If, 
then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from 
the beginning. And, fortunately, the probably very short interval of rest which 
is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning of the second act 
of the movement, gives us time for a very necessary piece of work: the study of 
the causes that necessitated both the late outbreak and its defeat; causes that 
are not to be sought for in the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors, or 
treacheries of some of the leaders, but in the general social state and 
conditions of existence of each of the convulsed nations. That the sudden 
movements of February and March, 1848, were not the work of single individuals, 
but spontaneous, irresistible manifestations of national wants and necessities, 
more or less clearly understood, but very distinctly felt by numerous classes in 
every country, is a fact recognized everywhere; but when you inquire into the 
causes of the counter-revolutionary successes, there you are met on every hand 
with the ready reply that it was Mr. This or Citizen That who "betrayed" the 
people. Which reply may be very true or not, according to circumstances, but 
under no circumstances does it explain anything--not even show how it came to 
pass that the "people" allowed themselves to be thus betrayed. And what a poor 
chance stands a political party whose entire stock-in-trade consists in a 
knowledge of the solitary fact that Citizen So-and-so is not to be trusted.
The inquiry into, and the exposition of, the causes, both of the revolutionary 
convulsion and its suppression, are, besides, of paramount importance from a 
historical point of view. All these petty, personal quarrels and 
recriminations--all these contradictory assertions that it was Marrast, or Ledru 
Rollin, or Louis Blanc, or any other member of the Provisional Government, or 
the whole of them, that steered the Revolution amidst the rocks upon which it 
foundered--of what interest can they be, what light can they afford, to the 
American or Englishman who observed all these various movements from a distance 
too great to allow of his distinguishing any of the details of operations? No 
man in his senses will ever believe that eleven men, mostly of very indifferent 
capacity either for good or evil, were able in three months to ruin a nation of 
thirty-six millions, unless those thirty-six millions saw as little of their way 
before them as the eleven did. But how it came to pass that thirty-six millions 
were at once called upon to decide for themselves which way to go, although 
partly groping in dim twilight, and how then they got lost and their old leaders 
were for a moment allowed to return to their leadership, that is just the 
question.
If, then, we try to lay before the readers of The Tribune the causes which, 
while they necessitated the German Revolution of 1848, led quite as inevitably 
to its momentary repression in 1849 and 1850, we shall not be expected to give a 
complete history of events as they passed in that country. Later events, and the 
judgment of coming generations, will decide what portion of that confused mass 
of seemingly accidental, incoherent, and incongruous facts is to form a part of 
the world's history. The time for such a task has not yet arrived; we must 
confine ourselves to the limits of the possible, and be satisfied, if we can 
find rational causes, based upon undeniable facts, to explain the chief events, 
the principal vicissitudes of that movement, and to give us a clue as to the 
direction which the next, and perhaps not very distant, outbreak will impart to 
the German people.
And firstly, what was the state of Germany at the outbreak of the Revolution?
The composition of the different classes of the people which form the groundwork 
of every political organization was, in Germany, more complicated than in any 
other country. While in England and France feudalism was entirely destroyed, or, 
at least, reduced, as in the former country, to a few insignificant forms, by a 
powerful and wealthy middle class, concentrated in large towns, and particularly 
in the capital, the feudal nobility in Germany had retained a great portion of 
their ancient privileges. The feudal system of tenure was prevalent almost 
everywhere. The lords of the land had even retained the jurisdiction over their 
tenants. Deprived of their political privileges, of the right to control the 
princes, they had preserved almost all their Medieval supremacy over the 
peasantry of their demesnes, as well as their exemption from taxes. Feudalism 
was more flourishing in some localities than in others, but nowhere except on 
the left bank of the Rhine was it entirely destroyed. This feudal nobility, then 
extremely numerous and partly very wealthy was considered, officially, the first 
"Order" in the country. It furnished the higher Government officials, it almost 
exclusively officered the army.
The bourgeoisie of Germany was by far not as wealthy and concentrated as that of 
France or England. The ancient manufactures of Germany had been destroyed by the 
introduction of steam, and the rapidly extending supremacy of English 
manufactures; the more modern manufactures, started under the Napoleonic 
continental system, established in other parts of the country, did not 
compensate for the loss of the old ones, nor suffice to create a manufacturing 
interest strong enough to force its wants upon the notice of Governments jealous 
of every extension of non-noble wealth and power. If France carried her silk 
manufactures victorious through fifty years of revolutions and wars Germany, 
during the same time, all but lost her ancient linen trade. The manufacturing 
districts, besides, were few and far between; situated far inland, and using, 
mostly, foreign, Dutch, or Belgian ports for their imPorts and exports, they had 
little or no interest in common with the large seaport towns on the North Sea 
and the Baltic; they were, above all, unable to create large manufacturing and 
trading centres, such as Paris and Lyons, London and Manchester. The causes of 
this backwardness of German manufactures were manifold, but two will suffice to 
account for it: the unfavorable geographical situation of the country, at a 
distance from the Atlantic, which had become the great highway for the world's 
trade, and the continuous wars in which Germany was involved, and which mere 
fought on her soil, from the sixteenth century to the present day. It was this 
want of numbers, and particularly of anything like concentrated numbers, which 
prevented the German middle classes from attaining that political supremacy 
which the English bourgeoisie has enjoyed ever since 1688, and which the French 
conquered in 1789. And yet, ever since 1815, the wealth, and with the wealth the 
political importance of the middle class in Germany, was continually growing. 
Governments were, although reluctantly, compelled to bow, at least to its more 
immediate material interests. It may even be truly said that from 1815 to 1830, 
and from 1832 to 1840 every particle of political influence, which, having been 
allowed to the middle class in the constitutions of the smaller States, was 
again wrested from them during the above two periods of political reaction, that 
every such particle was compensated for by some more practical advantage allowed 
to them. Every political defeat of the middle class drew after it a victory on 
the field of commercial legislation. And certainly, the Prussian Protective 
Tariff of 1818, and the formation of the Zollverein, were worth a good deal more 
to the traders and manufacturers of Germany than the equivocal right of 
expressing in the chambers of some diminutive dukedom their want of confidence 
in ministers who laughed at their votes. Thus, with growing wealth and extending 
trade, the bourgeoisie soon arrived at a stage where it found the development of 
its most important interests checked by the political constitution of the 
country; by its random division among thirty-six princes with conflicting 
tendencies and caprices; by the feudal fetters upon agriculture and the trade 
connected with it; by the prying superintendence to which an ignorant and 
presumptuous bureaucracy subjected all its transactions. At the same time the 
extension and consolidation of the Zollverein, the general introduction of steam 
communication, the growing competition in the home trade, brought the commercial 
classes of the different States and Provinces closer together, equalized their 
interests and centralized their strength. The natural consequence was the 
passing of the whole mass of them into the camp of the Liberal Opposition, and 
the gaining of the first serious struggle of the German middle class for 
political power. This change may be dated from 1840, from the moment when the 
bourgeoisie of Prussia assumed the lead of the middle class movement of Germany. 
We shall hereafter revert to this Liberal Opposition movement of 1840-1847.
The great mass of the nation, which neither belonged to the nobility nor to the 
bourgeoisie, consisted in the towns of the small trading and shopkeeping class 
and the working people, and in the country of the peasantry.
The small trading and shopkeeping class is exceedingly numerous in Germany, in 
consequence of the stinted development which the large capitalists and 
manufacturers as a class have had in that country. In the larger towns it forms 
almost the majority of the inhabitants; in the smaller ones it entirely 
predominates, from the absence of wealthier competitors or influence. This 
class, a most important one in every modern body politic, and in all modern 
revolutions, is still more important in Germany, where, during the recent 
struggles, it generally played the decisive part. Its intermediate position 
between the class of larger capitalists, traders, and manufacturers, the 
bourgeoisie properly so-called, and the proletarian or industrial class, 
determines its character. Aspiring to the position of the first, the least 
adverse turn of fortune hurls the individuals of this class down into the ranks 
of the second. In monarchical and feudal countries the custom of the court and 
aristocracy becomes necessary to its existence; the loss of this custom might 
ruin a great part of it. In the smaller towns a military garrison, a county 
government, a court of law with its followers, form very often the base of its 
prosperity; withdraw these, and down go the shopkeepers, the tailors, the 
shoemakers, the joiners. Thus eternally tossed about between the hope of 
entering the ranks of the wealthier class, and the fear of being reduced to the 
state of proletarians or even paupers; between the hope of promoting their 
interests by conquering a share in the direction of public affairs, and the 
dread of rousing, by ill-timed opposition, the ire of a Government which 
disposes of their very existence, because it has the power of removing their 
best customers; possessed of small means, the insecurity of the possession of 
which is in the inverse ratio of the amount,--this class is extremely 
vacillating in its views. Humble and crouchingly submissive under a powerful 
feudal or monarchical Government, it turns to the side of Liberalism when the 
middle class is in the ascendant; it becomes seized with violent democratic fits 
as soon as the middle class has secured its own supremacy, but falls back into 
the abject despondency of fear as soon as the class below itself, the 
proletarians, attempts an independent movement. We shall by and by see this 
class, in Germany, pass alternately from one of these stages to the other.
The working class in Germany is, in its social and political development, as far 
behind that of England and France as the German bourgeoisie is behind the 
bourgeoisie of those countries. Like master, like man. The evolution of the 
conditions of existence for a numerous, strong, concentrated, and intelligent 
proletarian class goes hand in hand with the development of the conditions of 
existence for a numerous, wealthy, concentrated, and powerful middle class. The 
working class movement itself never is independent, never is of an exclusively 
proletarian character until all the different factions of the middle class, and 
particularly its most progressive faction, the large manufacturers, have 
conquered political power, and remodelled the State according to their wants. It 
is then that the inevitable conflict between the employer and the employed 
becomes imminent, and cannot be adjourned any longer; that the working class can 
no longer be put off with delusive hopes and promises never to be realized;that 
the great problem of the nineteenth century, the abolition of the proletariat, 
is at last brought forward fairly and in its proper light. Now, in Germany the 
mass of the working class were employed, not by those modern manufacturing lords 
of which Great Britain furnishes such splendid specimens, but by small 
tradesmen, whose entire manufacturing system is a mere relic of the Middle Ages. 
And as there is an enormous difference between the great cotton lord and the 
petty cobbler or master tailor, so there is a corresponding distance from the 
wide-awake factory operative of modern manufacturing Babylons to the bashful 
journeyman tailor or cabinetmaker of a small country town, who lives in 
circumstances and works after a plan very little different from those of the 
like sort of men some five hundred years ago. This general absence of modern 
conditions of life, of modern modes of industrial production, of course was 
accompanied by a pretty equally general absence of modern ideas, and it is, 
therefore, not to be wondered at if, at the outbreak of the Revolution, a large 
part of the working classes should cry out for the immediate re-establishment of 
guilds and Mediaeval privileged trades' corporations. Yet from the manufacturing 
districts, where the modern system of production predominated, and in 
consequence of the facilities of inter-communication and mental development 
afforded by the migratory life of a large number of the working men, a strong 
nucleus formed itself, whose ideas about the emancipation of their class were 
far clearer and more in accordance with existing facts and historical 
necessities; but they were a mere minority. If the active movement of the middle 
class may be dated from 1840, that of the working class commences its advent by 
the insurrections of the Silesian and Bohemian factory operatives in 1844, and 
we shall soon have occasion to pass in review the different stages through which 
this movement passed.
Lastly, there was the great class of the small farmers, the peasantry, which 
with its appendix of farm laborers, constitutes a considerable majority of the 
entire nation. Rut this class again sub-divided itself into different fractions. 
There were, firstly, the more wealthy farmers, what is called in Germany Gross 
and Mittel-Bauern, proprietors of more or less extensive farms, and each of them 
commanding the services of several agricultural laborers. This class, placed 
between the large untaxed feudal landowners, and the smaller peasantry and farm 
laborers, for obvious reasons found in an alliance with the antifeudal middle 
class of the towns its most natural political course. Then there were, secondly, 
the small freeholders, predominating in the Rhine country, where feudalism had 
succumbed before the mighty strokes of the great French Revolution. Similar 
independent small freeholders also existed here and there in other provinces, 
where they had succeeded in buying off the feudal charges formerly due upon 
their lands. This class, however, was a class of freeholders by name only, their 
property being generally mortgaged to such an extent, and under such onerous 
conditions, that not the peasant, but the usurer who had advanced the money, was 
the real landowner. Thirdly, the feudal tenants, who could not be easily turned 
out of their holdings, but who had to pay a perpetual rent, or to perform in 
perpetuity a certain amount of labor in favor of the lord of the manor. Lastly, 
the agricultural laborers, whose condition, in many large farming concerns was 
exactly that of the same class in England, and who in all cases lived and died 
poor, ill-fed, and the slaves of their employers. These three latter classes of 
the agricultural population, the small freeholders, the feudal tenants, and the 
agricultural laborers, never troubled their heads much about politics before the 
Revolution, but it is evident that this event must have opened to them a new 
career, full of brilliant prospects. To every one of them the Revolution offered 
advantages, and the movement once fairly engaged in, it was to be expected that 
each, in their turn, would join it. But at the same time it is quite as evident, 
and equally borne out by the history of all modern countries, that the 
agricultural population, in consequence of its dispersion over a great space, 
and of the difficulty of bringing about an agreement among any considerable 
portion of it, never can attempt a successful independent movement; they require 
the initiatory impulse of the more concentrated, more enlightened, more easily 
moved people of the towns.
The preceeding short sketch of the most important of the classes, which in their 
aggregate formed the German nation at the outbreak of the recent movements, will 
already be sufficient to explain a great part of the incoherence, incongruence, 
and apparent contradiction which prevailed in that movement. When interests so 
varied, so conflicting, so strangely crossing each other, are brought into 
violent collision; when these contending interests in every district, every 
province, are mixed in different proportions; when, above all, there is no great 
centre in the country, no London, no Paris, the decisions of which. by their 
weight, may supersede the necessity of fighting out the same quarrel over and 
over again in every single locality; what else is to be expected but that the 
contest will dissolve itself into a mass of unconnected struggles, in which an 
enormous quantity of blood, energy, and capital is spent, but which for all that 
remain without any decisive results?
The political dismemberment of Germany into three dozen of more or less 
important principalities is equally explained by this confusion and multiplicity 
of the elements which compose the nation. and which again vary in every 
locality. Where there are no common interests there call he no unity of purpose, 
much less of action. The German confederation, it is true, was declared 
everlastingly indissoluble; yet the Confederation, and its organ, the Diet, 
never represented German unity. The very highest pitch to which centralization 
was ever carried in Germany was the establishment of the Zollverein; by this the 
States on the North Sea were also forced into a Customs Union of their own, 
Austria remaining wrapped up in her separate prohibitive tariff. Germany had the 
satisfaction to be, for all practical purposes divided between three independent 
powers only, instead of between thirty-six. Of course the paramount supremacy of 
the Russian Czar, as established in 1814, underwent no change on this account.
Having drawn these preliminary conclusions from our premises, we shall see, in 
our next, how the aforesaid various classes of the German people were set into 
movement one after the other, and what character the movement assumed on the 
outbreak of the French Revolution of 1848.
LONDON, September, 1851.









II. 
THE PRUSSIAN STATE.



OCTOBER 28th, 1851.
THE political movement of the middle class or bourgeoisie, in Germany, may be 
dated from 1840. It had been preceded by symptoms showing that the moneyed and 
industrial class of that country was ripening into a state which would no longer 
allow it to continue apathetic and passive under the pressure of a half-feudal, 
half-bureaucratic Monarchism. The smaller princes of Germany, partly to insure 
to themselves a greater independence against the supremacy of Austria and 
Prussia, or against the influence of the nobility of their own States, partly in 
order to consolidate into a whole the disconnected provinces united under their 
rule by the Congress of Vienna, one after the other granted constitutions of a 
more or less liberal character. They could do so without any danger to 
themselves; for if the Diet of the Confederation, this mere puppet of Austria 
and Prussia, was to encroach upon their independence as sovereigns, they knew 
that in resisting its dictates they would be backed by public opinion and the 
Chambers; and if, on the contrary, these Chambers grew too strong, they could 
readily command the power of the Diet to break down all opposition. The 
Bavarian, Wurtemberg, Baden or Hanoverian Constitutional institutions could not, 
under such circumstances, give rise to any serious struggle for political power, 
and, therefore, the great bulk of the German middle class kept very generally 
aloof from the petty squabbles raised in the Legislatures of the small States, 
well knowing that without a fundamental change in the policy and constitution of 
the two great powers of Germany, no secondary efforts and victories would be of 
any avail. But, at the same time, a race of Liberal lawyers, professional 
oppositionists, sprung up in these small assemblies: the Rottecks, the Welckers, 
the Roemers, the Jordans, the Stuves, the Eisenmanns, those great "popular men" 
(Volksmanner) who, after a more or less noisy, but always unsuccessful, 
opposition of twenty years, were carried to the summit of power by the 
revolutionary springtide of 1848, and who, after having there shown their utter 
impotency and insignificance, were hurled down again in a moment. These first 
specimen upon German soil of the trader in politics and opposition, by their 
speeches and writings made familiar to the German ear the language of 
Constitutionalism, and by their very existence foreboded the approach of a time 
when the middle class would seize upon and restore to their proper meaning 
political phrases which these talkative attorneys and professors were in the 
habit of using without knowing much about the sense originally attached to them.
German literature, too, labored under the influence of the political excitement 
into which all Europe had been thrown by the events of 1830. A crude 
Constitutionalism or a still cruder Republicanism, were preached by almost all 
writers of the time. It became more and more the habit, particularly of the 
inferior sorts of literati, to make up for the want of cleverness in their 
productions, by political allusions which were sure to attract attention. 
Poetry, novels, reviews, the drama, every literary production teemed with what 
was called "tendency," that is with more or less timid exhibitions of an 
anti-govermental spirit. In order to complete the confusion of ideas reigning 
after 1830 in Germany, with these elements of political opposition there were 
mixed up ill-digested university-recollections of German philosophy, and 
misunderstood gleanings from French Socialism, particularly Saint-Simonism; and 
the clique of writers who expatiated upon this heterogeneous conglomerate of 
ideas, presumptuously called themselves "Young Germany," or "the Modern School." 
They have since repended their youthful sins, but not improved their style of 
writing.
Lastly, German philosophy, that most complicated, but at the same time most sure 
thermometer of the development of the German mind, had declared for the middle 
class, when Hegel in his "Philosophy of Law" pronounced Constitutional Monarchy 
to be the final and most perfect form of government. In other words, he 
proclaimed the approaching advent of the middle classes of the country to 
political power. His school, after his death, did not stop here. While the more 
advanced section of his followers, on one hand, subjected every religious belief 
to the ordeal of a rigorous criticism, and shook to its foundation the ancient 
fabric of Christianity, they at the same time brought forward bolder political 
principles than hitherto it had been the fate of German ears to hear expounded, 
and attempted to restore to glory the memory of the heroes of the first French 
Revolution. The abstruse philosophical language in which these ideas were 
clothed, if it obscured the mind of both the writer and the reader, equally 
blinded the eyes of the censor, and thus it was that the "young Hegelian" 
writers enjoyed a liberty of the Press unknown in every other branch of 
literature.
Thus it was evident that public opinion was undergoing a great change in 
Germany. By degrees the vast majority of those classes whose education or 
position in life enabled them, under an Absolute Monarchy, to gain some 
political information, and to form anything like an independent political 
opinion, united into one mighty phalanx of opposition against the existing 
system. And in passing judgment upon the slowness of political development in 
Germany no one ought to omit taking into account the difficulty of obtaining 
correct information upon any subject in a country where all sources of 
information were under the control of the Government, where from the Ragged 
School and the Sunday School to the Newspaper and University nothing was said, 
taught, printed, or published but what had previously obtained its approbation. 
Look at Vienna, for instance. The people of Vienna, in industry and 
manufactures, second to none perhaps in Germany; in spirit, courage, and 
revolutionary energy, proving themselves far superior to all, were yet more 
ignorant as to their real interests, and committed more blunders during the 
Revolution than any others, and this was due in a very great measure to the 
almost absolute ignorance with regard to the very commonest political subjects 
in which Metternich's Government had succeeded in keeping them.
It needs no further explanation why, under such a system, political information 
was an almost exclusive monopoly of such classes of society as could afford to 
pay for its being smuggled into the country, and more particularly of those 
whose interests were most seriously attacked by the existing state of things, 
namely, the manufacturing and commercial classes. They, therefore, were the 
first to unite in a mass against the continuance of a more or less disguised 
Absolutism, and from their passing into the ranks of the opposition must be 
dated the beginning of the real revolutionary movement in Germany.
The oppositional pronunciamento of the German bourgeoisie may be dated from 
1840, from the death of the late King of Prussia, the last surviving founder of 
the Holy Alliance of 1815. The new King was known to be no supporter of the 
predominantly bureaucratic and military monarchy of his father. What the French 
middle class had expected from the advent of Louis XVI., the German bourgeoisie 
hoped, in some measure, from Frederick William IV. of Prussia. It was agreed 
upon all hands that the old system was exploded, worn-out, and must be given up; 
and what had been borne in silence under the old King now was loudly proclaimed 
to be intolerable.
But if Louis XVI., "Louis le Desire," had been a plain, unpretending simpleton, 
half conscious of his own nullity, without any fixed opinions, ruled principally 
by the habits contracted during his education, "Frederick William le Desire" was 
something quite different. While he certainly surpassed his French original in 
weakness of character, he was neither without pretensions nor without opinions. 
He had made himself acquainted, in an amateur sort of way, with the rudiments of 
most sciences, and thought himself, therefore, learned enough to consider final 
his judgment upon every subject. He made sure he was a first-rate orator, and 
there was certainly no commercial traveller in Berlin who could beat him either 
in prolixity of pretended wit, or in fluency of elocution. And, above all, he 
had his opinions. He hated and despised the bureaucratic element of the Prussian 
Monarchy, but only because all his sympathies were with the feudal element. 
Himself one of the founders of, and chief contributors to, the Berlin Political 
Weekly Paper, the so-called Historical School (a school living upon the ideas of 
Bonald, De Maistre, and other writers of the first generation of French 
Legitimists), he aimed at a restoration, as complete as possible, of the 
predominant social position of the nobility. The King, first nobleman of his 
realm, surrounded in the first instance by a splendid court of mighty vassals, 
princes, dukes, and counts; in the second instance, by a numerous and wealthy 
lower nobility; ruling according to his discretion over his loyal burgesses and 
peasants, and thus being himself the chief of a complete hierarchy of social 
ranks or castes, each of which was to enjoy its particular privileges, and to be 
separated from the others by the almost insurmountable barrier of birth, or of a 
fixed, inalterable social position; the whole of these castes, or "estates of 
the realm" balancing each other at the same time so nicely in power and 
influence that a complete independence of action should remain to the 
King---such was the beau ideal which Frederick William IV. undertook to realize, 
and which he is again trying to realize at the present moment.
It took some time before the Prussian bourgeoisie, not very well versed in 
theoretical questions, found out the real purport of their King's tendency. But 
what they very soon found out was the fact that he was bent upon things quite 
the reverse of what they wanted. Hardly did the new King find his "gift of the 
gab" unfettered by his father's death than he set about proclaiming his 
intentions in speeches without number; and every speech, every act of his, went 
far to estrange from him the sympathies of the middle class. He would not have 
cared much for that, if it had not been for some stern and startling realities 
which interrupted his poetic dreams. Alas, that romanticism is not very quick at 
accounts, and that feudalism ever since Don Quixote, reckons without its host! 
Frederick William IV. partook too much of that contempt of ready cash which ever 
has been the noblest inheritance of the sons of the Crusaders. He found at his 
accession a costly, although parsimoniously arranged system of government, and a 
moderately filled State Treasury. In two years every trace of a surplus was 
spent in court festivals, royal progresses, largesses, subventions to needy, 
seedy, and greedy noblemen, etc., and the regular taxes were no longer 
sufficient for the exigencies of either Court or Government. And thus His 
Majesty found himself very soon placed between a glaring deficit on one side, 
and a law of 1820 on the other, by which any new loan, or any increase of the 
then existing taxation was made illegal without the assent of "the future 
Representation of the People." This representation did not exist; the new King 
was less inclined than even his father to create it; and if he had been, he knew 
that public opinion had wonderfully changed since his accession.
Indeed, the middle classes, who had partly expected that the new King would at 
once grant a Constitution, proclaim the Liberty of the Press, Trial by Jury, 
etc., etc.--in short, himself take the lead of that peaceful revolution which 
they wanted in order to obtain political supremacy-the middle classes had found 
out their error, and had turned ferociously against the King. In the Rhine 
Provinces, and more or less generally all over Prussia, they were so exasperated 
that they, being short themselves of men able to represent them in the Press, 
went to the length of an alliance with the extreme philosophical party, of which 
we have spoken above. The fruit of this alliance was the Rhenish Gazette of 
Cologne, [1] a paper which was suppressed after fifteen months' existence, but 
from which may be dated the existence of the Newspaper Press in Germany. This 
was in 1842.
The poor King, whose commercial difficulties were the keenest satire upon his 
Mediaeval propensities, very soon found out that he could not continue to reign 
without making some slight concession to the popular outcry for that 
"Representation of the People," which, as the last remnant of the long-forgotten 
promises of 1813 and 1815 had been embodied in the law of 1820. He found the 
least objectionable mode of satisfying this untoward law in calling together the 
Standing Committees of the Provincial Diets. The Provincial Diets had been 
instituted in 1823. They consisted for every one of the eight provinces of the 
kingdom:--(I) Of the higher nobility, the formerly sovereign families of the 
German Empire, the heads of which were members of the Diet by birthright. (2) Of 
the representatives of the knights, or lower nobility. (3) Of representatives of 
towns. (4) Of deputies of the peasantry, or small farming class. The whole was 
arranged in such a manner that in every province the two sections of the 
nobility always had a majority of the Diet. Every one of these eight Provincial 
Diets elected a Committee, and these eight Committees were now called to Berlin 
in order to form a Representative Assembly for the purpose of voting the 
much-desired loan. It was stated that the Treasury was full, and that the loan 
was required, not for current wants, but for the construction of a State 
railway. But the united Committees gave the King a flat refusal, declaring 
themselves incompetent to act as the representatives of the people, and called 
upon His Majesty to fulfil the promise of a Representative Constitution which 
his father had given, when he wanted the aid of the people against Napoleon.
The sitting of the united Committees proved that the spirit of opposition was no 
longer confined to the bourgeoisie. A part of the peasantry had joined them, and 
many nobles, being themselves large farmers on their own properties, and dealers 
in corn, wool, spirits, and flax, requiring the same guarantees against 
absolutism, bureaucracy, and feudal restoration, had equally pronounced against 
the Government, and for a Representative Constitution. The King's plan had 
signally failed; he had got no money, and had increased the power of the 
opposition. The subsequent sitting of the Provincial Diets themselves was still 
more unfortunate for the King. All of them asked for reforms, for the fulfilment 
of the promises of 1813 and 1815, for a Constitution and a Free Press; the 
resolutions to this effect of some of them were rather disrespectfully worded, 
and the ill-humored replies of the exasperated King made the evil still greater.
In the meantime, the financial difficulties of the Government went on 
increasing. For a time, abatements made upon the moneys appropriated for the 
different public services, fraudulent transactions with the "Seehandlung," a 
commercial establishment speculating and trading for account and risk of the 
State, and long since acting as its money-broker, had sufficed to keep up 
appearances; increased issues of State paper-money had furnished some resources; 
and the secret, upon the whole, had been pretty well kept. But all these 
contrivances were soon exhausted. There was another plan tried: the 
establishment of a bank, the capital of which was to be furnished partly by the 
State and partly by private shareholders;the chief direction to belong to the 
State, in such a manner as to enable the Government to draw upon the funds of 
this bank to a large amount, and thus to repeat the same fraudulent transactions 
that would no longer do with the "Seehandlung." But, as a matter of course, 
there were no capitalists to be found who would hand over their money upon such 
conditions; the statutes of the bank had to be altered, and the property of the 
shareholders guaranteed from the encroachments of the Treasury, before any 
shares were subscribed for. Thus, this plan having failed, there remained 
nothing but to try a loan, if capitalists could be found who would lend their 
cash without requiring the permission and guarantee of that mysterious "future 
Representation of the People." Rothchild was applied to, and he declared that if 
the loan was to be guaranteed by this "Representation of the People," he would 
undertake the thing at a moment's notice--if not, he could not have anything to 
do with the transaction.
Thus every hope of obtaining money had vanished, and there was no possibility of 
escaping the fatal "Representation of the People." Rothschild's refusal was 
known in autumn, 1846, and in February of the next year the King called together 
all the eight Provincial Diets to Berlin, forming them into one "United Diet." 
This Diet was to do the work required, in case of need, by the law of 1820; it 
was to vote loans and increased taxes, but beyond that it was to have no rights. 
Its voice upon general legislation was to be merely consultative; it was to 
assemble, not at fixed periods, but whenever it pleased the King; it was to 
discuss nothing but what the Government pleased to lay before it. Of course, the 
members were very little satisfied with the part they were expected to perform. 
They repeated the wishes they had enounced when they met in the provincial 
assembles; the relations between them and the Government soon became 
acrimonious, and when the loan, which was again stated to be required for 
railway constructions, was demanded from them, they again refused to grant it.
This vote very soon brought their sitting to a close. The King, more and more 
exasperated, dismissed them with a reprimand, but still remained without money. 
And, indeed, he had every reason to be alarmed at his position, seeing that the 
Liberal League, headed by the middle classes, comprising a large part of the 
lower nobility, and all the different sections of the lower orders--that this 
Liberal League was determined to have what it wanted. In vain the King had 
declared, in the openings speech, that he would never, never grant a 
Constitution in the modern sense of the word; the Liberal League insisted upon 
such a modern, anti-feudal, Representative Constitution, with all its sequels, 
Liberty of the Press, Trial by Jury, etc-.; and before they got it, not a 
farthing of money would they grant. There was one thing evident: that things 
could not go on long in this manner, and that either one of the parties must 
give way, or that a rupture--a bloody struggle--must ensue. And the middle 
classes knew that they were on the eve of a revolution, and they prepared 
themselves for it. They sought to obtain by every possible means the support of 
the working class of the towns, and of the peasantry in the agricultural 
districts, and it is well known that there was, in the latter end of 1847, 
hardly a single prominent political character among the bourgeoisie who did not 
proclaim himself a "Socialist," in order to insure to himself the sympathy of 
the proletarian class. We shall see these "Socialists" at work by and by.
This eagerness of the leading bourgeoisie to adopt, at least the outward show of 
Socialism, was caused by a great change that had come over the working classes 
of Germany. There had been ever since 1840 a fraction of German workmen, who, 
travelling in France and Switzerland, had more or less imbibed the crude 
Socialist or Communist notions then current among the French workmen. The 
increasing attention paid to similar ideas in France ever since 1840 made 
Socialism and Communism fashionable in Germany also, and as far back as 1843, 
all newspapers teemed with discussions of social questions. A school of 
Socialists very soon formed itself in Germany, distinguished more for the 
obscurity than for the novelty of its ideas; its principal efforts consisted in 
the translation of French Fourierist, Saint-Simonian, and other doctrines into 
the abstruse language of German philosophy. The German Communist school, 
entirely different from this sect, was formed about the same time.
In 1844, there occurred the Silesian weavers' riots, followed by the 
insurrection of the calico printers of Prague. These riots, cruelly suppressed, 
riots of working men not against the Government, but against their employers, 
created a deep sensation, and gave a new stimulus to Socialist and Communist 
propaganda amongst the working people. So did the bread riots during the year of 
famine, 1847. In short, in the same manner as Constitutional Opposition rallied 
around its banner the great bulk of the propertied classes (with the exception 
of the large feudal land-holders), so the working classes of the larger towns 
looked for their emancipation to the Socialist and Communist doctrines, 
although, under the then existing Press laws, they could be made to know only 
very little about them. They could not be expected to have any very definite 
ideas as to what they wanted; they only knew that the programme of the 
Constitutional bourgeoisie did not contain all they wanted, and that their wants 
were no wise contained in the Constitutional circle of ideas.
There was then no separate Republican party in Germany. People were either 
Constitutional Monarchists, or more or less clearly defined Socialists or 
Communists.
With such elements the slightest collision must have brought about a great 
revolution. While the higher nobility and the older civil and military officers 
were the only safe supports of the existing system; while the lower nobility, 
the trading middle classes, the universities, the school-masters of every 
degree, and even part of the lower ranks of the bureaucracy and military 
officers were all leagued against the Government; while behind these there stood 
the dissatisfied masses of the peasantry, and of the proletarians of the large 
towns, supporting, for the time being, the Liberal Opposition, but already 
muttering strange words about taking things into their own hands; while the 
bourgeoisie was ready to hurl down the Government, and the proletarians were 
preparing to hurl down the bourgeoisie in its turn; this Government went on 
obstinately in a course which must bring about a collision. Germany was, in the 
beginning of 1848, on the eve of a revolution, and this revolution was sure to 
come, even had the French Revolution of February not hastened it.
What the effects of this Parisian Revolution were upon Germany we shall see in 
our next.
LONDON, September, 1851.



Footnotes
[1] "The Rhenish Gazette." This paper was published at Cologne, as the organ of 
the Liberal leaders, Hansemann and Camphausen. Marx contributed certain articles 
on the Landtag, which created so great a sensation that he was offered in 
1842--although only 21 years of age--the editorship of the paper. He accepted 
the offer, and then began his long fight with the Prussian Government. Of course 
the paper was published under the supervision of a censor, but he, good, easy 
man, was hopelessly outwitted by the young firebrand. So the Government sent a 
second "special" censor from Berlin, but the double censorship proved unequal to 
the task, and in 1843 the paper was suppressed.








III. 
THE OTHER GERMAN STATES.



NOVEMBER 6th, 1851.
IN our last we confined ourselves almost exclusively to that State which, during 
the years 1840 to 1848, was by far the most important in the German movement, 
namely, to Prussia. It is, however, time to pass a rapid glance over the other 
States of Germany during the same period.
As to the petty States, they had, ever since the revolutionary movements of 
1830, completely passed under the dictatorship of the Diet, that is of Austria 
and Prussia. The several Constitutions, established as much as a means of 
defence against the dictates of the larger States, as to insure popularity to 
their princely authors, and unity to heterogeneous Assemblies of Provinces, 
formed by the Congress of Vienna, without ally leading principle whatever--these 
Constitutions, illusory as they were, had yet proved dangerous to the authority 
of the petty princes themselves during the exciting times of 1830 and 1831. They 
were all but destroyed; whatever of them was allowed to remain was less than a 
shadow, and it required the loquacious self-complacency of a Welcker, a Rotteck, 
a Dahlmann, to imagine that any results could possibly flow from the humble 
opposition, mingled with degrading flattery, which they were allowed to show off 
in the impotent Chambers of these petty States.
The more energetic portion of the middle class in these smaller States, very 
soon after 1840, abandoned all the hopes they had formerly based upon the 
development of Parliamentary government in these dependencies of Austria and 
Prussia. No sooner had the Prussian bourgeoisie and the classes allied to it 
shown a serious resolution to struggle for Parliamentary government in Prussia, 
than they were allowed to take the lead of the Constitutional movement over all 
non-Austrian Germany. It is a fact which now will not any longer be contested, 
that the nucleus of those Constitutionalists of Central Germany, who afterwards 
seceded from the Frankfort National Assembly, and who, from the place of their 
separate meetings, were called the Gotha party, long before 1848 contemplated a 
plan which, with little modification, they in 1849 proposed to the 
representatives of all Germany. They intended a complete exclusion of Austria 
from the German Confederation, the establishment of a new Confederation, with a 
new fundamental law, and with a Federal Parliament, of the more insignificant 
States into the larger ones. All this was to be carried out the moment Prussia 
entered into the ranks of Constitutional Monarchy, established the Liberty of 
the Press, assumed a policy independent from that of Russia and Austria, and 
thus enabled the Constitutionalists of the lesser States to obtain a real 
control over their respective Governments. The inventor of this scheme was 
Professor Gervinus, of Heidelberg (Baden). Thus the emancipation of the Prussian 
bourgeoisie was to be the signal for that of the middle classes of Germany 
generally, and for an alliance, offensive and defensive of both against Russia 
and Austria, for Austria was, as we shall see presently, considered as an 
entirely barbarian country, of which very little was known, and that little not 
to the credit of its population; Austria, therefore, was not considered as an 
essential part of Germany.
As to the other classes of society, in the smaller States they followed, more or 
less rapidly, in the wake of their equals in Prussia. The shopkeeping class got 
more and more dissatisfied with their respective Governments, with the increase 
of taxation, with the curtailments of those political sham-privileges of which 
they used to boast when comparing themselves to the "slaves of despotism" in 
Austria and Prussia; but as yet they had nothing definite in their opposition 
which might stamp them as an independent party, distinct from the 
Constitutionalism of the higher bourgeoisie. The dissatisfaction among the 
peasantry was equally growing, but it is well known that this section of the 
people, in quiet and peaceful times, will never assert its interests and assume 
its position as an independent class, except in countries where universal 
suffrage is established. The working classes in the trades and manufactures of 
the towns commenced to be infected with the "poison" of Socialism and Communism, 
but there being few towns of any importance out of Prussia, and still fewer 
manufacturing districts, the movement of this class, owing to the want of 
centres of action and propaganda, was extremely slow in the smaller States.
Both in Prussia and in the smaller States the difficulty of giving vent to 
political opposition created a sort of religious opposition in the parallel 
movements of German Catholicism and Free Congregationalism. History affords us 
numerous examples where, in countries which enjoy the blessings of a State 
Church, and where political discussion is fettered, the profane and dangerous 
opposition against the worldly power is hid under the more sanctified and 
apparently more disinterested struggle against spiritual despotism. Many a 
Government that will not allow of any of its acts being discussed, will hesitate 
before it creates martyrs and excites the religious fanaticism of the masses. 
Thus in Germany, in 1845, in every State, either the Roman Catholic or the 
Protestant religion, or both, were considered part and parcel of the law of the 
land. In every State, too, the clergy of either of those denominations, or of 
both, formed an essential part of the bureaucratic establishment of the 
Government. To attack Protestant or Catholic orthodoxy, to attack priestcraft, 
was then to make an underhand attack upon the Government itself. As to the 
German Catholics, their very existence was an attack upon the Catholic 
Governments of Germany, particularly Austria and Bavaria; and as such it was 
taken by those Governments. The Free Congregationalists, Protestant Dissenters, 
somewhat resembling the English and American Unitarians, openly professed their 
opposition to the clerical and rigidly orthodox tendency of the King of Prussia 
and his favourite Minister for the Educational and Clerical Department, Mr. 
Eickhorn. The two new sects, rapidly extending for a moment, the first in 
Catholic, the second in Protestant countries, had no other distinction but their 
different origin; as to their tenets, they perfectly agreed upon this most 
important point that all definite dogmas were nugatory. This want of any 
definition was their very essence; they pretended to build that great temple 
under the roof of which all Germans might unite; they thus represented, in a 
religious form, another political idea of the day--that of German unity, and yet 
they could never agree among themselves.
The idea of German unity, which the above-mentioned sects sought to realize, at 
least, upon religious ground, by inventing a common religion for all Germans, 
manufactured expressly for their use, habits, and taste--this idea was, indeed, 
very widely spread, particularly in the smaller States. Ever since the 
dissolution of the German Empire by Napoleon, the cry for a union of all the 
disjecta membra of the German body had been the most general expression of 
discontent with the established order of things, and most so in the smaller 
States, where costliness of a court, an administration, an army, in short, the 
dead weight of taxation, increased in a direct ratio with the smallness and 
impotency of the State. But what this German unity was to be when carried out 
was a question upon which parties disagreed. The bourgeoisie, which wanted no 
serious revolutionary convulsion, were satisfied with what we have seen they 
considered "practicable," namely a union of all Germany, exclusive of Austria, 
under the supremacy of a Constitutional Government of Prussia; and surely, 
without conjuring dangerous storms, nothing more could, at that time, be done. 
The shopkeeping class and the peasantry, as far as these latter troubled 
themselves about such things, never arrived at any definition of that German 
unity they so loudly clamoured after; a few dreamers, mostly feudalist 
reactionists, hoped for the reestablishment of the German Empire; some few 
ignorant, soi-disant Radicals, admiring Swiss institutions, of which they had 
not yet made that practical experience which afterwards most ludicrously 
undeceived them, pronounced for a Federated Republic; and it was only the most 
extreme party which, at that time, dared pronounce for a German Republic, one 
and indivisible. Thus, German unity was in itself a question big with disunion, 
discord, and, in the case of certain eventualities, even civil war.
To resume, then; this was the state of Prussia, and the smaller States of 
Germany, at the end of 1847. The middle class, feeling their power, and resolved 
not to endure much longer the fetters with which a feudal and bureaucratic 
despotism enchained their commercial transactions, their industrial 
productivity, their common action as a class; a portion of the landed nobility 
so far changed into producers of mere marketable commodities, as to have the 
same interests and to make common cause with the middle class; the smaller 
trading class, dissatisfied, grumbling at the takes, at the impediments thrown 
in the way of their business, but without any definite plan for such reforms as 
should secure their position in the social and political body; the peasantry, 
oppressed here by feudal exactions, there by money-lenders, usurers, and 
lawyers; the working people of the towns infected with the general discontent, 
equally hating the Government and the large industrial capitalists, and catching 
the contagion of Socialist and Communist ideas; in short, a heterogeneous mass 
of opposition, springing from various interests, but more or less led on by the 
bourgeoisie, in the first ranks of which again marched the bourgeoisie of 
Prussia, and particularly of the Rhine Province. On the other hand, Governments 
disagreeing upon many points, distrustful of each other, and particularly of 
that of Prussia, upon which yet they had to rely for protection; in Prussia a 
Government forsaken by public opinion, forsaken by even a portion of the 
nobility, leaning upon an army and a bureaucracy which every day got more 
infected by the ideas, and subjected to the influence, of the oppositional 
bourgeoisie--a Government, besides all this, penniless in the most literal 
meaning of the word, and which could not procure a single cent to cover its 
increasing deficit, but by surrendering at discretion to the opposition of the 
bourgeoisie. Was there ever a more splendid position for the middle class of any 
country, while it struggled for power against the established Government?
LONDON, September, 1851.







IV. 
AUSTRIA.



NOVEMBER 7th, 1851.
WE have now to consider Austria; that country which, up to March, 1848, was 
sealed up to the eyes of foreign nations almost as much as China before the late 
war with England.
As a matter of course, we can here take into consideration nothing but German 
Austria. The affairs of the Polish, Hungarian, or Italian Austrians do not 
belong to our subject, and as far as they, since 1848, have influenced the fate 
of the German Austrians, they will have to be taken into account hereafter.
The Government of Prince Metternich turned upon two hinges; firstly, to keep 
every one of the different nations subjected to the Austrian rule, in check, by 
all other nations similarly conditioned; secondly, and this always has been the 
fundamental principle of absolute monarchies, to rely for support upon two 
classes, the feudal landlords and the large stockjobbing capitalists; and to 
balance, at the same time, the influence and power of either of these classes by 
that of the other, so as to leave full independence of action to the Government. 
The landed nobility, whose entire income consisted in feudal revenues of all 
sorts, could not but support a Government which proved their only protection 
against that down-trodden class of serfs upon whose spoils they lived; and 
whenever the less wealthy portion of them, as in Galicia, in 1846, rose in 
opposition against the Government, Metternich in an instant let loose upon them 
these very serfs, who at any rate profited by the occasion to wreak a terrible 
vengeance upon their more immediate oppressors. On the other hand, the large 
capitalists of the Exchange were chained to Metternich's Government by the vast 
share they had in the public funds of the country. Austria, restored to her full 
power in 1815 restoring and maintaining in Italy Absolute Monarchy ever since 
1820, freed from part of her liabilities by the bankruptcy of 1810, had, after 
the peace, very soon re-established her credit in the great European money 
markets; and in proportion as her credit grew, she had drawn against it. Thus 
all the large European moneydealers had engaged considerable portions of their 
capital in the Austrian funds; they all of them were interested in upholding the 
credit of that country, and as Austrian public credit, in order to be upheld, 
ever required new loans, they were obliged from time to time to advance new 
capital in order to keep up the credit of the securities for that which they 
already had advanced. The long peace after 1815, and the apparent impossibility 
of a thousand years old empire, like Austria, being upset,increased the credit 
of Metternich's Government in a wonderful ratio, and made it even independent of 
the good will of the Vienna bankers and stock-jobbers; for as long as Metternich 
could obtain plenty of money at Frankfort and Amsterdam, he had, of course, the 
satisfaction of seeing the Austrian capitalists at his feet. They were, besides, 
in every other respect at his mercy; the large profits which bankers, 
stock-jobbers, and Government contractors always contrive to draw out of an 
absolute monarchy, were compensated for by the almost unlimited power which the 
Government possessed over their persons and fortunes; and not the smallest 
shadow of an opposition was, therefore, to be expected from this quarter. Thus 
Metternich was sure of the support of the two most powerful and influential 
classes of the empire, and he possessed besides an army and a bureaucracy, which 
for all purposes of absolutism could not be better constituted. The civil and 
military officers in the Austrian service form a race of their own; their 
fathers have been in the service of the Kaiser, and so will their sons be; they 
belong to none of the multifarious nationalities congregated under the wing of 
the double-headed eagle; they are, and ever have been, removed from one end of 
the empire to the other, from Poland to Italy, from Germany to Transylvania; 
Hungarian, Pole, German, Roumanian, Italian, Croat, every individual not stamped 
with "imperial and royal authority," etc., bearing a separate national 
character, is equally despised by them; they have no nationality, or rather, 
they alone make up the really Austrian nation. It is evident what a pliable, and 
at the same time powerful instrument, in the hands of an intelligent and 
energetic chief, such a civil and military hierarchy must be.
As to the other classes of the population, Metternich, in the true spirit of a 
statesman of the ancien regime, cared little for their support. He had, with 
regard to them, but one policy: to draw as much as possible out of them in the 
shape of taxation, and at the same time, to keep them quiet. The trading and 
manufacturing middle class was but of slow growth in Austria. The trade of the 
Danube was comparatively unimportant; the country possessed but one port, 
Trieste, and the trade of the port was very limited. As to the manufacturers, 
they enjoyed considerable protection, amounting even in most cases to the 
complete exclusion of all foreign competition; but this advantage had been 
granted to them principally with a view to increase their tax-paying 
capabilities, and was in a high degree counterpoised by internal restrictions on 
manucfactures, privileges on guilds, and other feudal corporations, which were 
scrupulously upheld as long as they did not impede the purposes and views of the 
Government. The petty tradesmen were encased in the narrow bounds of these 
Mediaeval guilds, which kept the different trades in a perpetual war of 
privilege against each other, and at the same time, by all but excluding 
individuals of the working class from the possibility of raising themselves in 
the social scale, gave a sort of hereditary stability to the members of those 
involuntary associations. Lastly, the peasant and the working man were treated 
as mere: taxable matter, and the only care that was taken of them was to keep 
them as much as possible in the same conditions of life in which they then 
existed, and in which their fathers had existed before them. For this purpose 
every old, established, hereditary authority was upheld in the same manner as 
that of the State; the authority of the landlord over the petty tenant farmer, 
that of the manufacturer over the operative, of the small master over the 
journeyman and apprentice, of the father over the son, was everywhere rigidly 
maintained by the Government, and every branch of disobedience punished the same 
as a transgression of the law, by that universal instrument of Austrian 
justice--the stick.
Finally, to wind up into one comprehensive system all these attempts at creating 
an artificial stability, the intellectual food allowed to the nation was 
selected with the minutest caution, and dealt out as sparingly as possible. 
Education was everywhere in the hands of the Catholic priesthood, whose chiefs, 
in the same manner as the large feudal landowners, were deeply interested in the 
conservation of the existing system. The universities were organized in a manner 
which allowed them to produce nothing but special men, that might or might not 
obtain great proficiency in sundry particular branches of knowledge, but which, 
at all events, excluded that universal liberal education which other 
universities are expected to impart. There was absolutely no newspaper press, 
except in Hungary, and the Hungarian papers were prohibited in all other parts 
of the monarchy. As to general literature, its range had not widened for a 
century; it had narrowed again after the death of Joseph II. And all around the 
frontier, where ever the Austrian States touched upon a civilized country, a 
cordon of literary censors was established in connection with the cordon of 
customhouse officials, preventing any foreign book or newspaper from passing 
into Austria before its contents had been twice or three times thoroughly 
sifted, and found pure of even the slightest contamination of the malignant 
spirit of the age.
For about thirty years after 1815 this system worked with wonderful success. 
Austria remained almost unknown to Europe, and Europe was quite as little known 
in Austria. The social state of every class of the population, and of the 
population as a whole, appeared not to have undergone the slightest change. 
Whatever rancour there might exist from class to class--and the existence of 
this rancour was for Metternich a principal condition of government, which he 
even fostered by making the higher classes the instruments of all Government 
exactions, and thus throwing the odium upon them--whatever hatred the people 
might bear to the inferior officials of the State, there existed, upon the 
whole, little or no dissatisfaction with the Central Government. The Emperor was 
adored, and old Francis I. seemed to be borne out by facts when, doubting of the 
durability of this system, he complacently added: "And yet it will hold while I 
live, and Metternich."
But there was a slow underground movement going on which baffled all 
Metternich's efforts. The wealth and influence of the manufacturing and trading 
middle class increased. The introduction of machinery and steam-power in 
manufactures upset in Austria, as it had done everywhere else, the old relations 
and vital conditions of whole classes of society; it changed serfs into free 
men, small farmers into manufacturing operatives; it undermined the old feudal 
trades corporations, and destroyed the means of existence of many of them. The 
new commercial and manufacturing population came everywhere into collision with 
the old feudal institutions. The middle classes, more and more induced by their 
business to travel abroad, introduced some mythical knowledge of the civilized 
countries situated beyond the Imperial line of customs; the introduction of 
railways finally accelerated both the industrial and intellectual movement. 
There was, too, a dangerous part in the Austrian State establishment, viz., the 
Hungarian feudal Constitution, with its parliamentary proceedings, and its 
struggles of the impoverished and oppositional mass of the nobility against the 
Government and its allies, the magnates. Presburg, the seat of the Diet, was at 
the very gates of Vienna. All the elements contributed to create among the 
middle classes of the towns a spirit, not exactly of opposition, for opposition 
was as yet impossible, but of discontent; a general wish for reforms, more of an 
administrative than of a constitutional nature. And in the same manner as in 
Prussia, a portion of the bureaucracy joined the bourgeoisie. Among this 
hereditary caste of officials the traditions of Joseph II. were not forgotten; 
the more educated functionaries of the Government, who themselves sometimes 
meddled with imaginary possible reforms, by far preferred the progressive and 
intellectual despotism of that Emperor to the "paternal" despotism of 
Metternich. A portion of the poorer nobility equally sided with the middle 
class, and as to the lower classes of the population, who always had found 
plenty of grounds to complain of their superiors, if not of the Government, they 
in most cases could not but adhere to the reformatory wishes of the bourgeoisie.
It was about this time, say 1843 or 1844, that a particular branch of 
literature, agreeable to this change, was established in Germany. A few Austrian 
writers, novelists, literary critics, bad poets, the whole of them of very 
indifferent ability, but gifted with that peculiar industrialism proper to the 
Jewish race, established themselves in Leipsic and other German towns out of 
Austria, and there, out of the reach of Metternich, published a number of books 
and pamphlets on Austrian affairs. They and their publishers made "a roaring 
trade" of it. All Germany was eager to become initiated into the secrets of the 
policy of European China; and the Austrians themselves, who obtained these 
publications by the wholesale smuggling carried on upon the Bohemian frontier, 
were still more curious. Of course, the secrets let out in these publications 
were of no great importance, and the reform plans schemed out by their 
well-wishing authors bore the stamp of an innocuousness almost amounting to 
political virginity. A Constitution and a free press for Austria were things 
considered unattainable; administrative reforms, extension of the rights of the 
Provincial Diets, admission of foreign books and newspapers, and a less severe 
censorship--the loyal and humble desires of these good Austrians did hardly go 
any farther.
At all events the growing impossibility of preventing the literary intercourse 
of Austria with the rest of Germany, and through Germany with the rest of the 
world, contributed much toward the formation of an anti-Governmental public 
opinion, and brought at least some little political information within the reach 
of part of the Austrian population. Thus, by the end of 1847, Austria was 
seized, although in an inferior degree, by that political and politico-religious 
agitation which then prevailed in all Germany; and if its progress in Austria 
was more silent, it did, nevertheless, find revolutionary elements enough to 
work upon. There was the peasant, serf, or feudal tenant, ground down into the 
dust by lordly or Government exactions; then the factory operative, forced by 
the stick of the policeman to work upon any terms the manufacturer chose to 
grant; then the journeyman, debarred by the corporative laws from any chance of 
gaining an independence in his trade; then the merchant, stumbling at every step 
in business over absurd regulations; then the manufacturer, in uninterrupted 
conflict with trade-guilds, jealous of their privileges, or with greedy and 
meddling officials; then the school-master, the savant, the better educated 
functionary, vainly struggling against an ignorant and presumptuous clergy, or a 
stupid and dictating superior. In short, there was not a single class satisfied, 
for the small concessions Government was obliged now and then to make were not 
made at its own expense, for the treasury could not afford that, but at the 
expense of the high aristocracy and clergy; and as to the great bankers, and 
fundholders, the late events in Italy, the increasing opposition of the 
Hungarian Diet, and the unwonted spirit of discontent and cry for reform, 
manifesting themselves all over the Empire, were not of a nature to strengthen 
their faith in the solidity and solvency of the Austrian Empire.
Thus Austria, too, was marching slowly but surely toward a mighty change, when, 
of a sudden, an event broke out in France, which at once brought down the 
impending storm, and gave the lie to old Francis's assertion, that the building 
would hold out both during his and Metternich's lifetime.
LONDON, September, 1851.







V. 
THE VIENNA INSURRECTION.



NOVEMBER 12, 1851.
ON the 24th of February, 1848, Louis Philippe was driven out of Paris, and the 
French Republic was proclaimed. On the 13th of March following, the people of 
Vienna broke the power of Prince Metternich, and made him flee shamefully out of 
the country. On the 18th of March the people of Berlin rose in arms, and, after 
an obstinate struggle of eighteen hours, had the satisfaction of seeing the King 
surrender himself into their hands. Simultaneous outbreaks of a more or less 
violent nature, but all with the same success, occurred in the capitals of the 
smaller States of Germany. The German people, if they had not accomplished their 
first revolution, were at least fairly launched into the revolutionary career.
As to the incidents of these various insurrections, we cannot enter here into 
the details of them: what we have to explain is their character, and the 
position which the different classes of the population took up with regard to 
them.
The Revolution of Vienna may be said to have been made by an almost unanimous 
population. The bourgeoisie (with the exception of the bankers and 
stock-jobbers), the petty trading class, the working people, one and all arose 
at once against a Government detested by all, a Government so universally hated, 
that the small minority of nobles and money lords which had supported it made 
itself invisible on the very first attack. The middle classes had been kept in 
such a degree of political ignorance by Metternich that to them the news from 
Paris about the reign of Anarchy, Socialism, and terror, and about impending 
struggles between the class of capitalists and the class of laborers, proved 
quite unintelligible. They, in their political innocence, either could attach no 
meaning to these news, or they believed them to be fiendish inventions of 
Metternich, to frighten them into obedience. They, besides, had never seen 
working men acting as a class, or stand up for their own distinct class 
interests. They had, from their past experience, no idea of the possibility of 
any differences springing up between classes that now were so heartily united in 
upsetting a Government hated by all. They saw the working people agree with 
themselves upon all points: a Constitution, Trial by Jury, Liberty of the Press, 
etc. Thus they were, in March, 1848, at least, heart and soul with the movement, 
and the movement, on the other hand, at once constituted them the (at least in 
theory) predominant class of the State.
But it is the fate of all revolutions that this union of different classes, 
which in some degree is always the necessary condition of any revolution, cannot 
subsist long. No sooner is the victory gained against the common enemy than the 
victors become divided among themselves into different camps, and turn their 
weapons against each other. It is this rapid and passionate development of class 
antagonism which, in old and complicated social organisms, makes a revolution 
such a powerful agent of social and political progress; it is this incessantly 
quick upshooting of new parties succeeding each other in power, which, during 
those violent commotions, makes a nation pass in five years over more ground 
than it would have done in a century under ordinary circumstances.
The Revolution in Vienna made the middle class the theoretically predominant 
class; that is to say, the concessions wrung from the Government were such as, 
once carried out practically and adhered to for a time, would inevitably have 
secured the supremacy of the middle class. But practically the supremacy of that 
class was far from being established. It is true that by the establishment of a 
national guard, which gave arms to the bourgeoisie and petty tradesmen, that 
class obtained both force and importance; it is true that by the installation of 
a "Committee of Safety," a sort of revolutionary, irresponsible Government in 
which the bourgeoisie predominated, it was placed at the head of power. But, at 
the same time, the workings classes were partially armed too; they and the 
students had borne the brunt of the fight, as far as fight there had been; and 
the students, about 4,000 strong, well-armed, and far better disciplined than 
the national guard, formed the nucleus, the real strength of the revolutionary 
force, and were no ways willing to act as a mere instrument in the hands of the 
Committee of Safety. Though they recognized it, and were even its most 
enthusiastic supporters, they yet formed a sort of independent and rather 
turbulent body, deliberating for themselves in the "Aula," keeping an 
intermediate position between the bourgeoisie and the working-classes, 
preventing by constant agitation things from settling down to the old everyday 
tranquillity, and very often forcing their resolutions upon the Committee of 
Safety. The working men, on the other hand, almost entirely thrown out of 
employment, had to be employed in public works at the expense of the State, and 
the money for this purpose had, of course, to be taken out of the purse of the 
taxpayers or out of the chest of the city of Vienna. All this could not but 
become very unpleasant to the tradesmen of Vienna. The manufactures of the city, 
calculated for the consumption of the rich and aristocratic courts of a, large 
country, were as a matter of course entirely stopped by the Revolution, by the 
flight of the aristocracy and Court; trade was at a standstill, and the 
continuous agitation and excitement kept up by the students and working people 
was certainly not the means to "restore confidence," as the phrase went. Thus a 
certain coolness very soon sprung up between the middle classes on the one side 
and the turbulent students and working people on the other; and if for a long 
time this coolness was not ripened into open hostility, it was because the 
Ministry, and particularly the Court, in their impatience to restore the old 
order of things, constantly justified the suspicions and the turbulent activity 
of the more revolutionary parties, and constantly made arise, even before the 
eyes of the middle classes, the spectre of old Metternichian despotism. Thus on 
the 15th of May, and again on the 16th, there were fresh risings of all classes 
in Vienna, on account of the Government having tried to attack, or to undermine 
some of the newly-conquered liberties, and on each occasion the alliance between 
the national guard or armed middle class, the students, and the workingmen, was 
again cemented for a time.
As to the other classes of the population, the aristocracy and the money lords 
had disappeared, and the peasantry were busily engaged everywhere in removing, 
down to the very last vestiges of feudalism. Thanks to the war in Italy, and the 
occupation which Vienna and Hungary gave to the Court, they were left at full 
liberty, and succeeded in their work of liberation, in Austria, better than in 
any other part of Germany. The Austrian Diet had very shortly after only to 
confirm the steps already practically taken by the peasantry, and whatever else 
the Government of Prince Schwartzenberg may be enabled to restore, it will never 
have the power of re-establishing the feudal servitude of the peasantry. And if 
Austria at the present moment is again comparatively tranquil, and even strong, 
it is principally because the great majority of the people, the peasants, have 
been real gainers by the Revolution, and because whatever else has been attacked 
by the restored Government, those palpable, substantial advantages, conquered by 
the peasantry, are as yet untouched.
LONDON, October, 1851.






VI. 
THE BERLIN INSURRECTION.



NOVEMBER 28, 1851.
THE second center of revolutionary action was Berlin, and from what has been 
stated in the foregoing papers, it may be guessed that there this action was far 
from having that unanimous support of almost all classes by which it was 
accompanied in Vienna. In Prussia, the bourgeoisie had been already involved in 
actual struggles with the Government; a rupture had been the result of the 
"United Diet"; a bourgeois revolution was impending, and that revolution might 
have been, in its first outbreak, quite as unanimous as that of Vienna, had it 
not been for the Paris Revolution of February. That event precipitated 
everything, while at the same time it was carried out under a banner totally 
different from that under which the Prussian bourgeoisie was preparing to defy 
its Government. The Revolution of February upset, in France, the very same sort 
of Government which the Prussian bourgeoisie were going to set up in their own 
country. The Revolution of February announced itself as a revolution of the 
working classes against the middle classes; it proclaimed the downfall of 
middle-class government and the emancipation of the workingman. Now the Prussian 
bourgeoisie had, of late, had quite enough of working-class agitation in their 
own country. After the first terror of the Silesian riots had passed away, they 
had even tried to give this agitation a turn in their own favor; but they always 
had retained a salutary horror of revolutionary Socialism and Communism; and, 
therefore, when they saw men at the head of the Government in Paris whom they 
considered as the most dangerous enemies of property, order, religion, family, 
and of the other Penates of the modern bourgeois, they at once experienced a 
considerable cooling down of their own revolutionary ardor. They knew that the 
moment must be seized, and that, without the aid of the working masses, they 
would be defeated; and yet their courage failed them. Thus they sided with the 
Government in the first partial and provincial outbreaks, tried to keep the 
people quiet in Berlin, who, during five days, met in crowds before the royal 
palace to discuss the news and ask for changes in the Government; and when at 
last, after the news of the downfall of Metternich, the King made some slight 
concessions, the bourgeoisie considered the Revolution as completed, and went to 
thank His Majesty for having fulfilled all the wishes of his people. But then 
followed the attack of the military on the crowd, the barricades, the struggle, 
and the defeat of royalty. Then everything was changed;the very working classes, 
which it had been the tendency of the bourgeoisie to keep in the background, had 
been pushed forward, had fought and conquered, and all at once were conscious of 
their strength. Restrictions of suffrage, of the liberty of the press, of the 
right to sit on juries, of the right of meeting-restrictions that would have 
been very agreeable to the bourgeoisie because they would have touched upon such 
classes only as were beneath them--now were no longer possible. The danger of a 
repetition of the Parisian scenes of "anarchy" was imminent. Before this danger 
all former differences disappeared. Against the victorious workingman, although 
he had not yet uttered any specific demands for himself, the friends and the 
foes of many years united, and the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the 
supporters of the over-turned system was concluded upon the very barricades of 
Berlin. The necessary concessions, but no more than was unavoidable, were to be 
made, a ministry of the opposition leaders of the United Diet was to be formed, 
and in return for its services in saving the Crown, it was to have the support 
of all the props of the old Government, the feudal aristocracy, the bureaucracy, 
the army. These were the conditions upon which Messrs. Camphausen and Hansemann 
undertook the formation of a cabinet.
Such was the dread evinced by the new ministers of the aroused masses, that in 
their eyes every means was good if it only tended to strengthen the shaken 
foundations of authority. They, poor deluded wretches, thought every danger of a 
restoration of the old system had passed away; and thus they made use of the 
whole of the old State machinery for the purpose of restoring "order." Not a 
single bureaucrat or military officer was dismissed; not the slightest change 
was made in the old bureaucratic system of administration. These precious 
constitutional and responsible ministers even restored to their posts those 
functionaries whom the people, in the first heat of revolutionary ardor, had 
driven away on account of their former acts of bureaucratic overbearing. There 
was nothing altered in Prussia hut the persons of the ministers; even the 
ministerial staffs in the different departments were not touched upon, and all 
the constitutional place-hunters, who had formed the chorus of the 
newly-elevated rulers, and who had expected their share of power and office, 
were told to wait until restored stability allowed changes to be operated in the 
bureaucratic personnel which now were not without danger.
The King, chap-fallen in the highest degree after the insurrection of the 18th 
of March, very soon found out that he was quite as necessary to these "liberal" 
ministers as they were to him. The throne had been spared by the insurrection; 
the throne was the last existing obstacle to "anarchy"; the liberal middle class 
and its leaders, now in the ministry, had therefore every interest to keep on 
excellent terms with the crown. The King, and the reactionary camerilla that 
surrounded him, were not slow in discovering this, and profited by the 
circumstance in order to fetter the march of the ministry even in those petty 
reforms that were from time to time intended.
The first care of the ministry was to give a sort of legal appearance to the 
recent violent changes. The United Diet was convoked in spite of all popular 
opposition, in order to vote as the legal and constitutional organ of the people 
a new electoral law for the election of an Assembly, which was to agree with the 
crown upon a new constitution. The elections were to be indirect, the mass of 
voters electing a number of electors, who then were to choose the 
representative. In spite of all opposition this system of double elections 
passed. The United Diet was then asked for a loan of twenty-five millions of 
dollars, opposed by the popular party, but equally agreed to.
These acts of the ministry gave a most rapid development to the popular, or as 
it now called itself, the Democratic party. This party, headed by the petty 
trading and shopkeeping class, and uniting under its banner, in the beginning of 
the revolution, the large majority of the working people, demanded direct and 
universal suffrage, the same as established in France, a single legislative 
assembly, and full and open recognition of the revolution of the 18th of March, 
as the base of the new governmental system. The more moderate faction would be 
satisfied with a thus "democratized" monarchy, the more advanced demanded the 
ultimate establishment of the republic. Both factions agreed in recognizing the 
German National Assembly at Frankfort as the supreme authority of the country, 
while the Constitutionalists and Reactionists affected a great horror of the 
sovereignty of this body, which they professed to consider as utterly 
revolutionary.
The independent movement of the working classes had, by the revolution, been 
broken up for a time. The immediate wants and circumstances of the movement were 
such as not to allow any of the specific demands of the Proletarian party to be 
put in the foreground. In fact, as long as the ground was not cleared for the 
independent action of the working men, as long as direct and universal suffrage 
was not yet established, as long as the thirty-six larger and smaller states 
continued to cut up Germany into numberless morsels, what else could the 
Proletarian party do but watch the--for them all-important--movement of Paris, 
and struggle in common with the petty shopkeepers for the attainment of those 
rights, which would allow them to fight afterwards their own battle?
There were only three points, then, by which the Proletarian party in its 
political action essentially distinguished itself from the petty trading class, 
or properly so-called Democratic party; firstly, in judging differently the 
French movement, with regard to which the democrats attacked, and the 
Proletarian revolutionists defended, the extreme party in Paris; secondly, in 
proclaiming the necessity of establishing a German Republic, one and 
indivisible, while the very extremest ultras among the democrats only dared to 
sigh for a Federative Republic; and thirdly, in showing upon every occasion, 
that revolutionary boldness and readiness for action, in which any party headed 
by, and composed principally of petty tradesmen, will always be deficient.
The Proletarian, or really Revolutionary party, succeeded only very gradually in 
withdrawing the mass of the working people from the influence of the Democrats, 
whose tail they formed in the beginning of the Revolution. But in due time the 
indecision, weakness, and cowardice of the Democratic leaders did the rest, and 
it may now be said to be one of the principal results of the last years' 
convulsions, that wherever the working-class is concentrated in anything like 
considerable masses, they are entirely freed from that Democratic influence 
which led them into an endless series of blunders and misfortunes during 1848 
and 1849. But we had better not anticipate; the events of these two years will 
give us plenty of opportunities to show the Democratic gentlemen at work.
The peasantry in Prussia, the same as in Austria, but with less energy, 
feudalism pressing, upon the whole, not quite so hardly upon them here, had 
profited by the revolution to free themselves at once from all feudal shackles. 
But here, from the reasons stated before, the middle classes at once turned 
against them, their oldest, their most indispensable allies; the democrats, 
equally frightened with the bourgeoisie, by what was called attacks upon private 
property, failed equally to support them; and thus, after three months' 
emancipation, after bloody struggles and military executions, particularly in 
Silesia, feudalism was restored by the hands of the, until yesterday, 
anti-feudal bourgeoisie. There is not a more damning fact to be brought against 
them than this. Similar treason against its best allies, against itself, never 
was committed by any party in history, and whatever humiliation and chastisement 
may be in store for this middle class party, it has deserved by this one act 
every morsel of it.
OCTOBER, 1851.








VII. 
THE FRANKFORT NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.



FEBRUARY 27, 1852.
IT will perhaps be in the recollection of our readers that in the six preceding 
papers we followed up the revolutionary movement of Germany to the two great 
popular victories of March 13th in Vienna, and March 18th in Berlin. We saw, 
both in Austria and Prussia, the establishment of constitutional governments and 
the proclamation, as leading rules for all future policy, of Liberal, or middle 
class principles; and the only difference observable between the two great 
centers of action was this, that in Prussia the liberal bourgeoisie, in the 
persons of two wealthy merchants, Messrs. Camphausen and Hansemann, directly 
seized upon the reins of power; while in Austria, where the bourgeoisie was, 
politically, far less educated, the Liberal bureaucracy walked into office, and 
professed to hold power in trust for them. We have further seen, how the parties 
and classes of society, that were heretofore all united in opposition to the old 
government, got divided among themselves after the victory, or even during the 
struggle; and how that same Liberal bourgeoisie that alone profited from the 
victory turned round immediately upon its allies of yesterday, assumed a hostile 
attitude against every class or party of a more advanced character, and 
concluded an alliance with the conquered feudal and bureaucratic interests. It 
was in fact, evident, even from the beginning of the revolutionary drama, that 
the Liberal bourgeoisie could not hold its ground against the vanquished, but 
not destroyed, feudal and bureaucratic parties except by relying upon the 
assistance of the popular and more advanced parties; and that it equally 
required, against the torrent of these more advanced masses, the assistance of 
the feudal nobility and of the bureaucracy. Thus, it was clear enough that the 
bourgeoisie in Austria and Prussia did not possess sufficient strength to 
maintain their power, and to adapt the institutions of the country to their own 
wants and ideas. The Liberal bourgeois ministry was only a halting-place from 
which, according to the turn circumstances might take, the country would either 
have to go on to the more advanced stage of Unitarian republicanism, or to 
relapse into the old clerico-feudal and bureaucratic regime. At all events, the 
real, decisive struggle was yet to come; the events of March had only engaged 
the combat.
Austria and Prussia being the two ruling states of Germany, every decisive 
revolutionary victory in Vienna or Berlin would have been decisive for all 
Germany. And as far as they went, the events of March, 1848, in these two 
cities, decided the turn of German affairs. It would, then, be superfluous to 
recur to the movements that occurred in the minor States; and we might, indeed, 
confine ourselves to the consideration of Austrian and Prussian affairs 
exclusively, if the existence of these minor states had not given rise to a body 
which was, by its very existence, a most striking proof of the abnormal 
situation of Germany and of the incompleteness of the late revolution; a body so 
abnormal, so ludicrous by its very position, and yet so full of its own 
importance, that history will, most likely, never afford a pendant to it. This 
body was the so-called German National Assembly at Frankfort-on-Main.
After the popular victories of Vienna and Berlin, it was a matter of course that 
there should be a Representative Assembly for all Germany. This body was 
consequently elected, and met at Frankfort, by the side of the old Federative 
Diet. The German National Assembly was expected, by the people, to settle every 
matter in dispute, and to act as the highest legislative authority for the whole 
of the German Confederation. But, at the same time, the Diet which had convoked 
it had in no way fixed its attributions. No one knew whether its decrees were to 
have force of law, or whether they were to be subject to the sanction of the 
Diet, or of the individual Governments. In this perplexity, if the Assembly had 
been possessed of the least energy, it would have immediately dissolved and sent 
home the Diet-- than which no corporate body was more unpopular in Germany--and 
replaced it by a Federal Government, chosen from among its own members. It would 
have declared itself the only legal expression of the sovereign will of the 
German people, and thus have attached legal validity to every one of its 
decrees. It would, above all, have secured to itself an organized and armed 
force in the country sufficient to put down any opposition on the parts of the 
Governments. And all this was easy, very easy, at that early period of the 
Revolution. But that would have been expecting a great deal too much from an 
Assembly composed in its majority of Liberal attorneys and doctrinaire 
professors an Assembly which, while it pretended to embody the very essence of 
German intellect and science, was in reality nothing but a stage where old and 
worn-out political characters exhibited their involuntary ludicrousness and 
their impotence of thought, as well as action, before the eyes of all Germany. 
THIS Assembly of old women was, from the first day of its existence, more 
frightened of the least popular movement than of all the reactionary plots of 
all the German Governments put together. It deliberated under the eyes of the 
Diet, nay, it almost craved the Diet's sanction to its decrees, for its first 
resolutions had to be promulgated by that odious body. Instead of asserting its 
own sovereignty, it studiously avoided the discussion of any such dangerous 
question. Instead of surrounding itself by a popular force, it passed to the 
order of the day over all the violent encroachments of the Governments; Mayence, 
under its very eyes, was placed in a state of siege, and the people there 
disarmed, and the National Assembly did not stir. Later on it elected Archduke 
John of Austria Regent of Germany, and declared that all its resolutions were to 
have the force of law; but then Archduke John was only instituted in his new 
dignity after the consent of all the Governments had been obtained, and he was 
instituted not by the Assembly, but by the Diet; and as to the legal force of 
the decrees of the Assembly, that point was never recognized by the larger 
Governments, nor enforced by the Assembly itself; it therefore remained in 
suspense. Thus we had the strange spectacle of an Assembly pretending to be the 
only legal representative of a great and sovereign nation, and yet never 
possessing either the will or the force to make its claims recognized. The 
debates of this body, without any practical result, were not even of ally 
theoretical value, reproducing, as they did, nothing but the most hackneyed 
commonplace themes of superannuated philosophical and juridical schools; every 
sentence that was said, or rather stammered forth, in that Assembly having been 
printed a thousand times over, and a thousand times better, long before.
Thus the pretended new central authority of Germany left everything as it had 
found it. So far from realizing the long-demanded unity of Germany, it did not 
dispossess the most insignificant of the princes who ruled her; it did not draw 
closer the bonds of union between her separated provinces; it never moved a 
single step to break down the customhouse barriers that separated Hanover from 
Prussia, and Prussia from Austria; it did not even make the slightest attempt to 
remove the obnoxious dues that everywhere obstruct river navigation in Prussia. 
But the less this Assembly did the more it blustered. It created a German 
fleet--upon paper; it annexed Poland and Schleswig; it allowed German-Austria to 
carry on war against Italy, and yet prohibited the Italians from following up 
the Austrians into their safe retreat in Germany; it gave three cheers and one 
cheer more for the French republic, and it received Hungarian embassies, which 
certainly went home with far more confused ideas about Germany than they had 
come with.
This Assembly had been, in the beginning of the Revolution, the bugbear of all 
German Governments. They had counted upon a very dictatorial and revolutionary 
action on its part---on account of the very want of definiteness in which it had 
been found necessary to leave its competency. These Governments, therefore, got 
up a most comprehensive system of intrigues in order to weaken the influence of 
this dreaded body; but they proved to have more luck than wits, for this 
Assembly did the work of the Governments better than they themselves could have 
done. The chief feature among these intrigues was the convocation of local 
Legislative Assemblies, and in consequence, not only the lesser States convoked 
their legislatures, but Prussia and Austria also called constituent assemblies. 
In these, as in the Frankfort House of Representatives, the Liberal middle 
class, or its allies, liberal lawyers, and bureaucrats had the majority, and the 
turn affairs took in each of them was nearly the same. The only difference is 
this, that the German National Assembly was the parliament of an imaginary 
country, as it had declined the task of forming what nevertheless was its own 
first condition of existence, viz. a United Germany; that it discussed the 
imaginary and never-to-be-carried-out measures of an imaginary government of its 
own creation, and that it passed imaginary resolutions for which nobody cared; 
while in Austria and Prussia the constituent bodies were at least real 
parliaments, upsetting and creating real ministries, and forcing, for a time at 
least, their resolutions upon the princes with whom they had to contend. They, 
too, were cowardly, and lacked enlarged views of revolutionary resolutions; 
they, too, betrayed the people, and restored power to the hands of feudal, 
bureaucratic, and military despotism. But then they were at least obliged to 
discuss practical questions of immediate interest, and to live upon earth with 
other people, while the Frankfort humbugs were never happier than when they 
could roam in "the airy realms of dream," im Luftreich des Traums. Thus the 
proceedings of the Berlin and Vienna Constituents form an important part of 
German revolutionary history, while the lucubrations of the Frankfort collective 
tomfoolery merely interest the collector of literary and antiquarian 
curiosities.
The people of Germany, deeply feeling the necessity of doing away with the 
obnoxious territorial division that scattered and annihilated the collective 
force of the nation, for some time expected to find, in the Frankfort National 
Assembly at least, the beginning of a new era. But the childish conduct of that 
set of wiseacres soon disenchanted the national enthusiasm. The disgraceful 
proceedings occasioned by the armistice of Malmoe (September, 1848,) made the 
popular indignation burst out against a body which, it had been hoped, would 
give the nation a fair field for action, and which, instead, carried away by 
unequalled cowardice, only restored to their former solidity the foundations 
upon which the present counter-revolutionary system is built.
LONDON, January, 1852.









VIII. 
POLES, TSCHECHS, AND GERMANS.



MARCH 5th, 1852.
FROM what has been stated in the foregoing articles, it is already evident that 
unless a fresh revolution was to follow that of March, 1848, things would 
inevitably return, in Germany, to what they were before this event. But such is 
the complicated nature of the historical theme upon which we are trying to throw 
some light, that subsequent events cannot be clearly understood without taking 
into account what may be called the foreign relations of the German Revolution. 
And these foreign relations were of the same intricate nature as the home 
affairs.
The whole of the eastern half of Germany, as far as the Elbe, Saale, and 
Bohemian Forest, has, it is well known, been reconquered during the last 
thousand years, from invaders of Slavonic origin. The greater part of these 
territories have been Germanized, to the perfect extinction of all Slavonic 
nationality and language, for several centuries past; and if we except a few 
totally isolated remnants, amounting in the aggregate to less than a hundred 
thousand souls (Kassubians in Pomerania, Wends or Sorbians in Lusatia)[1] , 
their inhabitants are, to all intents and purposes, Germans. But the case is 
different along the whole of the frontier of ancient Poland, and in the 
countries of the Tschechian tongue, in Bohemia and Moravia. Here the two 
nationalities are mixed up in every district, the towns being generally more or 
less German, while the Slavonic element prevails in the rural villages, where, 
however, it is also gradually disintegrated and forced back by the steady 
advance of German influence.
The reason of this state of things is this: ever since the time of Charlemagne, 
the Germans have directed their most constant and persevering efforts to the 
conquest, colonization, or, at least, civilization of the east of Europe. The 
conquest of the feudal nobility between the Elbe and the Oder, and the feudal 
colonies of the military orders of knights in Prussia and Livonia, only laid the 
ground for a far more extensive and effective system of Germanization by the 
trading and manufacturing middle classes, which in Germany, as in the rest of 
Western Europe, rose into social and political importance since the fifteenth 
century. The Slavonians, and particularly the Western Slavonians (Poles and 
Tschechs), are essentially an agricultural race; trade and manufactures never 
were in great favor with them. The consequence was that, with the increase of 
population and the origin of cities in these regions, the production of all 
articles of manufacture fell into the hands of German immigrants, and the 
exchange of these commodities against agricultural produce became the exclusive 
monopoly of the Jews, who, if they belong to any nationality, are in these 
countries certainly rather Germans than Slavonians. This has been, though in a 
less degree, the case in all the east of Europe. The handicraftsman, the small 
shopkeeper, the petty manufacturer, is a German up to this day in Petersburg, 
Pesth, Jassy, and even Constantinople; while the money-lender, the publican, the 
hawker--a very important man in these thinly populated countries--is very 
generally a Jew, whose native tongue is a horribly corrupted German. The 
importance of the German element in the Slavonic frontier localities, thus 
rising with the growth of towns, trade and manufactures, was still increased 
when it was found necessary to import almost every element of mental culture 
from Germany; after the German merchant and handicraftsman, the German 
clergyman, the German schoolmaster, the German savant came to establish himself 
upon Slavonic soil. And lastly, the iron thread of conquering armies, or the 
cautious, well-premeditated grasp of diplomacy, not only followed, but many 
times went ahead of the slow but sure advance of denationalization by social 
development. Thus, great parts of Western Prussia and Posen have been Germanized 
since the first partition of Poland, by sales and grants of public domains to 
German colonists, by encouragements given to German capitalists for the 
establishment of manufactories, etc., in those neighborhoods, and very often, 
too, by excessively despotic measures against the Polish inhabitants of the 
country.
In this manner the last seventy years had entirely changed the line of 
demarcation between the German and Polish nationalities. The Revolution of 1848 
calling forth at once the claim of all oppressed nations to an independent 
existence, and to the right of settling their own affairs for themselves, it was 
quite natural that the Poles should at once demand the restoration of their 
country within the frontiers of the old Polish Republic before 1772. It is true, 
this frontier, even at that time, had become obsolete, if taken as the 
delimitation of German and Polish nationality; it had become more so every year 
since by the progress of Germanization; but then, the Germans had proclaimed 
such an enthusiasm for the restoration of Poland, that they must expect to be 
asked, as a first proof of the reality of their sympathies to give up their 
share of the plunder. On the other hand, should whole tracts of land, inhabited 
chiefly by Germans, should large towns, entirely German, be given up to a people 
that as yet had never given any proofs of its capability of progressing beyond a 
state of feudalism based upon agricultural serfdom? The question was intricate 
enough. The only possible solution was in a war with Russia. The question of 
delimitation between the different revolutionized nations would have been made a 
secondary one to that of first establishing a safe frontier against the common 
enemy. The Poles, by receiving extended territories in the east, would have 
become more tractable and reasonable in the west; and Riga and Milan would have 
been deemed, after all, quite as important to them as Danzig and Elbing. Thus 
the advanced party in Germany, deeming a war with Russia necessary to keep up 
the Continental movement, and considering that the national re-establishment 
even of a part of Poland would inevitably lead to such a war, supported the 
Poles; while the reigning middle class partly clearly foresaw its downfall from 
any national war against Russia, which would have called more active and 
energetic men to the helm, and, therefore, with a feigned enthusiasm for the 
extension of German nationality, they declared Prussian Poland, the chief seat 
of Polish revolutionary agitation, to be part and parcel of the German Empire 
that was to be. The promises given to the Poles in the first days of excitement 
were shamefully broken. Polish armaments got up with the sanction of the 
Government were dispersed and massacred by Prussian artillery; and as soon as 
the month of April, 1848, within six weeks of the Berlin Revolution, the Polish 
movement was crushed, and the old national hostility revived between Poles and 
Germans. This immense and incalculable service to the Russian autocrat was 
performed by the Liberal merchant-ministers, Camphausen and Hansemann. It must 
be added that this Polish campaign was the first means of reorganizing and 
reassuring that same Prussian army, which afterward turned out the Liberal 
party, and crushed the movement which Messrs. Camphausen and Hansemann had taken 
such pains to bring about. "Whereby they sinned, thereby are they punished." 
Such has been the fate of all the upstarts of 1848 and 1849, from Ledru Rolin to 
Changarnier, and from Camphausen down to Haynau.
The question of nationality gave rise to another struggle in Bohemia. This 
country, inhabited by two millions of Germans, and three millions of Slavonians 
of the Tschechian tongue, had great historical recollections, almost all 
connected with the former supremacy of the Tschechs. But then the force of this 
branch of the Slavonic family had been broken ever since the wars of the 
Hussites in the fifteenth century. The province speaking the Tschechian tongue 
was divided, one part forming the kingdom of Bohemia, another the principality 
of Moravia, a third the Carpathian hill-country of the Slovaks, being part of 
Hungary. The Moravians and Slovaks had long since lost every vestige of national 
feeling and vitality, although mostly preserving their language. Bohemia was 
surrounded by thoroughly German countries on three sides out of four. The German 
element had made great progress on her own territory; even in the capital, in 
Prague, the two nationalities were pretty equally matched; and everywhere 
capital, trade, industry, and mental culture were in the hands of the Germans. 
The chief champion of the Tschechian nationality, Professor Palacky, is himself 
nothing but a learned German run mad, who even now cannot speak the Tschechian 
language correctly and without foreign accent. But as it often happens, dying 
Tschechian nationality, dying according to every fact known in history for the 
last four hundred years, made in 1848 a last effort to regain its former 
vitality--an effort whose failure, independently of all revolutionary 
considerations, was to prove that Bohemia could only exist, henceforth, as a 
portion of Germany, although part of her inhabitants might yet, for some 
centuries, continue to speak a non-German language.
LONDON, February, 1852.



Footnotes
[1] Lusiana, an ancient territory of Germany, north of Bohemia, to which the 
whole of it originally belonged. Later it belonged to Saxony, and still later, 
in 1815, was divided between Saxony (the northern part) and Prussia (the 
southern). 








IX. 
PANSLAVISM--THE SCHLESWIGHOLSTEIN WAR.



MARCH 15th, 1852.
BOHEMIA and Croatia (another disjected member of the Slavonic family, acted upon 
by the Hungarian, as Bohemia by the German) were the homes of what is called on 
the European continent "Panslavism." Neither Bohemia nor Croatia was strong 
enough to exist as a nation by herself. Their respective nationalities, 
gradually undermined by the action of historical causes that inevitably absorbs 
into a more energetic stock, could only hope to be restored to anything like 
independence by an alliance with other Slavonic nations. There were twenty-two 
millions of Poles, forty-five millions of Russians, eight millions of Serbians 
and Bulgarians; why not form a mighty confederation of the whole eighty millions 
of Slavonians, and drive back or exterminate the intruder upon the holy Slavonic 
soil, the Turk, the Hungarian, and above all the hated, but indispensable 
Niemetz, the German? Thus in the studies of a few Slavonian dilettanti of 
historical science was this ludicrous, this anti-historical movement got up, a 
movement which intended nothing less than to subjugate the civilized West under 
the barbarian East, the town under the country, trade, manufactures, 
intelligence, under the primitive agriculture of Slavonian serfs. But behind 
this ludicrous theory stood the terrible reality of the Russian Empire; that 
empire which by every movement proclaims the pretension of considering all 
Europe as the domain of the Slavonic race, and especially of the only energetic 
part of this race, of the Russians; that empire which, with two capitals such as 
St. Peterburg and Moscow, has not yet found its centre of gravity, as long as 
the "City of the Czar" (Constantinople, called in Russian Tzarigrad, the Czar's 
city), considered by every Russian peasant as the true metropolis of his 
religion and his nation, is not actually the residence of its Emperor; that 
empire which, for the last one hundred and fifty years, has never lost, but 
always gained territory by every war it has commenced. And well known in Central 
Europe are the intrigues by which Russian policy supported the new-fangled 
system of Panslavism, a system than which none better could be invented to suit 
its purposes. Thus, the Bohemian and Croatian Panslavists, some intentionally, 
some without knowing it, worked in the direct interest of Russia; they betrayed 
the revolutionary cause for the shadow of a nationality which, in the best of 
cases, would have shared the fate of the Polish nationality under Russian sway. 
It must, however, be said for the honor of the Poles, that they never got to be 
seriously entangled in these Panslavist traps, and if a few of the aristocracy 
turned furious Panslavists, they knew that by Russian subjugation they had less 
to lose than by a revolt of their own peasant serfs.
The Bohemians and Croatians called, then, a general Slavonic Congress at Prague, 
for the preparation of the universal Slavonian Alliance. This Congress would 
have proved a decided failure even without the interference of the Austrian 
military. The several Slavonic languages differ quite as much as the English, 
the German, and the Swedish, and when the proceedings opened, there was no 
common Slavonic tongue by which the speakers could make themselves understood. 
French was tried, but was equally unintelligible to the majority, and the poor 
Slavonic enthusiasts, whose only common feeling was a common hatred against the 
Germans, were at last obliged to express themselves in the hated German 
language, as the only one that was generally understood! But just then another 
Slavonic Congress was assembling in Prague, in the shape of Galician lancers, 
Croatian and Slovak grenadiers, and Bohemian gunners and cuirassiers; and this 
real, armed Slavonic Congress, under the command of Windischgratz, in less than 
twenty-four hours drove the founders of an imaginary Slavonian supremacy out of 
the town, and dispersed them to the winds.
The Bohemian, Moravian, Dalmatian, and part of the Polish deputies (the 
aristocracy) to the Austrian Constituent Diet, made in that Assembly a 
systematic war upon the German element. The Germans, and part of the Poles (the 
impoverished nobility), were in this Assembly the chief supporters of 
revolutionary progress; the mass of the Slavonic deputies, in opposing them, 
were not satisfied with thus showing clearly the reactionary tendencies of their 
entire movement, but they were degraded enough to tamper and conspire with the 
very same Austrian Government which had dispersed their meeting at Prague. They, 
too, were paid for this infamous conduct; after supporting the Government during 
the insurrection of October, 1848, an event which finally secured to them a 
majority in the Diet, this now almost exclusively Slavonic Diet was dispersed by 
Austrian soldiers, the same as the Prague Congress, and the Panslavists 
threatened with imprisonment if they should stir again. And they have only 
obtained this, that Slavonic nationality is now being everywhere undermined by 
Austrian centralization, a result for which they may thank their own fanaticism 
and blindness.
If the frontiers of Hungary and Germany had admitted of any doubt, there would 
certainly have been another quarrel there. But, fortunately, there was no 
pretext, and the interests of both nations being intimately related, they 
struggled against the same enemies, viz., the Austrian Government and the 
Panslavistic fanaticism. The good understanding was not for a moment disturbed. 
But the Italian Revolution entangled at least a part of Germany in an 
internecine war, and it must be stated here, as a proof how far the 
Metternichian system had succeeded in keeping back the development of the public 
mind, that during the first six months of 1848, the same men that had in Vienna 
mounted the barricades, went, full of enthusiasm, to join the army that fought 
against the Italian patriots. This deplorable confusion of ideas did not, 
however, last long.
Lastly, there was the war with Denmark about Schleswig and Holstein. These 
countries, unquestionably German by nationality, language and predilection, are 
also from military, naval and commercial grounds necessary to Germany. Their 
inhabitants have, for the last three years, struggled hard against Danish 
intrusion. The right of treaties, besides, was for them. The Revolution of March 
brought them into open collision with the Danes, and Germany supported them. But 
while in Poland, in Italy, in Bohemia, and later on, in Hungary, military 
operations were pushed with the utmost vigor, in this the only popular, the 
only, at least partially, revolutionary war, a system of resultless marches and 
counter-marches was adopted, and an interference of foreign diplomacy was 
submitted to, which led, after many an heroic engagement, to a most miserable 
end. The German Government betrayed, during the war, the Schleswig-Holstein 
revolutionary army on every occasion, and allowed it purposely to be cut up, 
when dispersed or divided, by the Danes. The German corps of volunteers were 
treated the same.
But while thus the German name earned nothing but hatred on every side, the 
German Constitutional and Liberal Governments rubbed their hands for joy. They 
had succeeded in crushing the Polish and the Bohemian movements. They had 
everywhere revived the old national animosities, which heretofore had prevented 
any common understanding and action between the German, the Pole, the Italian. 
They had accustomed the people to scenes of civil war and repression by the 
military. The Prussian army had regained its confidence in Poland, the Austrian 
army in Prague; and while the superabundant patriotism ("die Patriotische 
Ueberkraft," as Heine has it) of revolutionary but short-sighted youth was led 
in Schleswig and Lombardy, to be crushed by the grape-shot of the enemy, the 
regular army, the real instrument of action, both of Prussia and Austria, was 
placed in a position to regain public favor by victories over the foreigner. But 
we repeat: these armies, strengthened by the Liberals as a means of action 
against the more advanced party, no sooner had recovered their self-confidence 
and their discipline in some degree, than they turned themselves against the 
Liberals, and restored to power the men of the old system. When Radetzky, in his 
camp beyond the Adige, received the first orders from the "responsible 
ministers" at Vienna, he exclaimed: "Who are these ministers? They are not the 
Government of Austria! Austria is now nowhere but in my camp; I and my army, we 
are Austria; and when we shall have beaten the Italians we shall reconquer the 
Empire for the Emperor!" And old Radetzky was right--but the imbecile 
"responsible" ministers at Vienna heeded him not.
LONDON, February, 1852.








X. 
THE PARIS RISING--THE FRANKFORT ASSEMBLY.



MARCH 18th, 1852.
As early as the beginning of April, 1848, the revolutionary torrent had found 
itself stemmed all over the Continent of Europe by the league which those 
classes of society that had profited by the first victory immediately formed 
with the vanquished. In France, the petty trading class and the Republican 
faction of the bourgeoisie had combined with the Monarchist bourgeoisie against 
the proletarians; in Germany and Italy, the victorious bourgeoisie had eagerly 
courted the support of the feudal nobility, the official bureaucracy, and the 
army, against the mass of the people and the petty traders. Very soon the united 
Conservative and Counter-Revolutionary parties again regained the ascendant. In 
England, an untimely and ill-prepared popular demonstration (April 10th) turned 
out a complete and decisive defeat of the popular party. In France, two similar 
movements (16th April and 15th May) were equally defeated. In Italy, King Bomba 
regained his authority by a single stroke on the 15th May. In Germany, the 
different new bourgeois Governments and their respective constituent Assemblies 
consolidated themselves, and if the eventful 15th of May gave rise, in Vienna, 
to a popular victory, this was an event of merely secondary importance, and may 
be considered the last successful flash of popular energy. In Hungary the 
movement appeared to turn into the quiet channel of perfect legality, and the 
Polish movement, as we have seen in our last, was stifled in the bud by Prussian 
bayonets. But as yet nothing was decided as to the eventual turn which things 
would take, and every inch of ground lost by the Revolutionary parties in the 
different countries only tended to close their ranks more and more for the 
decisive action.
The decisive action drew near. It could be fought in France only; for France, as 
long as England took no part in the revolutionary strife, or as Germany remained 
divided, was, by its national independence, civilization, and centralization, 
the only country to impart the impulse of a mighty convulsion to the surrounding 
countries. Accordingly, when, on the 23rd of June, 1848, the bloody struggle 
began in Paris, when every succeeding telegraph or mail more clearly exposed the 
fact to the eyes of Europe, that this struggle was carried on between the mass 
of the working people on the one hand, and all the other classes of the Parisian 
population, supported by the army, on the other; when the fighting went on for 
several days with an exasperation unequalled in the history of modern civil 
warfare, but without any apparent advantage for either side--then it became 
evident to every one that this was the great decisive battle which would, if the 
insurrection were victorious, deluge the whole continent with renewed 
revolutions, or, if it was suppressed, bring about an at least momentary 
restoration of counter-revolutionary rule.
The proletarians of Paris were defeated, decimated, crushed with such an effect 
that even now they have not yet recovered from the blow. And immediately, all 
over Europe, the new and old Conservatives and Counter-Revolutionists raised 
their heads with an effrontery that showed how well they understood the 
importance of the event. The Press was everywhere attacked, the rights of 
meeting and association were interfered with, every little event in every small 
provincial town was taken profit of to disarm the people to declare a state of 
siege, to drill the troops in the new manoeuvres and artifices that Cavaignac 
had taught them. Besides, for the first time since February, the invincibility 
of a popular insurrection in a large town had been proved to be a delusion; the 
honor of the armies had been restored; the troops hitherto always defeated in 
street battles of importance regained confidence in their efficiency even in 
this kind of struggle. From this defeat of the ouvriers of Paris may be dated 
the first positive steps and definite plans of the old feudal bureaucratic party 
in Germany, to get rid even of their momentary allies, the middle classes, and 
to restore Germany to the state she was in before the events of March. The army 
again was the decisive power in the State, and the army belonged not to the 
middle classes but to themselves. Even in Prussia, where before 1848 a 
considerable leaning of part of the lower grades of officers towards a 
Constitutional Government had been observed, the disorder introduced into the 
army by the Revolution had brought back those reasoning young men to their 
allegiance; as soon as the private soldier took a few liberties with regard to 
the officers, the necessity of discipline and passive obedience became at once 
strikingly evident to them. The vanquished nobles and bureaucrats now began to 
see their way before them; the army, more united than ever, flushed with victory 
in minor insurrections and in foreign warfare, jealous of the great success the 
French soldiers had just attained--this army had only to be kept in constant 
petty conflicts with the people, and the decisive moment once at hand, it could 
with one great blow crush the Revolutionists, and set aside the presumptions of 
the middle class Parliamentarians. And the proper moment for such a decisive 
blow arrived soon enough.
We pass over the sometimes curious, but mostly tedious, parliamentary 
proceedings and local struggles that occupied, in Germany, the different parties 
during the summer. Suffice it to say that the supporters of the middle class 
interest in spite of numerous parliamentary triumphs, not one of which led to 
any practical result, very generally felt that their position between the 
extreme parties became daily more untenable, and that, therefore, they were 
obliged now to seek the alliance of the reactionists, and the next day to court 
the favor of the more popular factions. This constant vacillation gave the 
finishing stroke to their character in public opinion, and according to the turn 
events were taking, the contempt into which they had sunk, profited for the 
movement principally to the bureaucrats and feudalists.
By the beginning of autumn the relative position of the different parties had 
become exasperated and critical enough to make a decisive battle inevitable. The 
first engagements in this war between the democratic and revolutionary masses 
and the army took place at Frankfort. Though a mere secondary engagement, it was 
the first advantage of any note the troops acquired over the insurrection, and 
had a great moral effect. The fancy Government established by the Frankfort 
National Assembly had been allowed by Prussia, for very obvious reasons, to 
conclude an armistice with Denmark, which not only surrendered to Danish 
vengeance the Germans of Schleswig, but which also entirely disclaimed the more 
or less revolutionary principles which were generally supposed in the Danish 
war. This armistice was, by a majority of two or three, rejected in the 
Frankfort Assembly. A sham ministerial crisis followed this vote, but three days 
later the Assembly reconsidered their vote, and were actually induced to cancel 
it and acknowledge the armistice. This disgraceful proceeding roused the 
indignation of the people. Barricades were erected, but already sufficient 
troops had been drawn to Frankfort, and after six hours' fighting, the 
insurrection was suppressed. Similar, but less important, movements connected 
with this event took place in other parts of Germany (Baden, Cologne), but were 
equally defeated.
This preliminary engagement gave to the Counter-Revolutionary party the one 
great advantage, that now the only Government which had entirely--at least in 
semblance--originated with popular election, the Imperial Government of 
Frankfort, as well as the National Assembly, was ruined in the eyes of the 
people. This Government and this Assembly had been obliged to appeal to the 
bayonets of the troops against the manifestation of the popular will. They were 
compromised, and what little regard they might have been hitherto enabled to 
claim, this repudiation of their origin, the dependency upon the anti-popular 
Governments and their troops, made both the Lieutenant of the Empire, his 
ministers and his deputies, henceforth to be complete nullities. We shall soon 
see how first Austria, then Prussia, and later on the smaller States too, 
treated with contempt every order, every request, every deputation they received 
from this body of impotent dreamers.
We now come to the great counter-stroke in Germany, of the French battle of 
June, to that event which was as decisive for Germany as the proletarian 
struggle of Paris had been for France; we mean the revolution and subsequent 
storming of Vienna, October, 1848. But the importance of this battle is such, 
and the explanation of the different circumstances that more immediately 
contributed to its issue will take up such a portion of The Tribune's columns, 
as to necessitate its being treated in a separate letter.
LONDON, February, 1852.







XI. 
THE VIENNA INSURRECTION.



MARCH 19th, 1852.
WE now come to the decisive event which formed the counter-revolutionary part in 
Germany to the Parisian insurrection of June, and which, by a single blow, 
turned the scale in favor of the Counter-Revolutionary party,--the insurrection 
of October, 1848, in Vienna.
We have seen what the position of the different classes was, in Vienna, after 
the victory of 12th March. We have also seen how the movement of German-Austria 
was entangled with and impeded by the events in the non-German provinces of 
Austria. It only remains for us, then, briefly to survey the causes which led to 
this last and most formidable rising of German-Austria.
The high aristocracy and the stock-jobbing bourgeoisie, which had formed the 
principal nonofficial supports of the Metternichian Government, were enabled, 
even after the events of March,to maintain a predominating influence with the 
Government, not only by the Court, the army and the bureaucracy, but still more 
by the horror of "anarchy," which rapidly spread among the middle classes. They 
very soon ventured a few feelers in the shape of a Press Law, a nondescript 
Aristocratic Constitution, and an Electoral Law based upon the old division of 
"estates." The so-called Constitutional ministry, consisting of half Liberal, 
timid, incapable bureaucrats, on the 14th of May, even ventured a direct attack 
upon the revolutionary organizations of the masses by dissolving the Central 
Committee of Delegates of the National Guard and Academic Legion, a body formed 
for the express purpose of controlling the Government, and calling out against 
it, in case of need, the popular forces. But this act only provoked the 
insurrection of the 15th of May, by which the Government was forced to 
acknowledge the Committee, to repeal the Constitution and the Electoral Law and 
to grant the power of framing a new Fundamental Law to a Constitutional Diet, 
elected by universal suffrage. All this was confirmed on the following day by an 
Imperial proclamation. But the reactionary party, which also had its 
representatives in the ministry, soon got their "Liberal" colleagues to 
undertake a new attack upon the popular conquests. The Academic Legion, the 
stronghold of the movement party, the centre of continuous agitation, had, on 
this very account, become obnoxious to the more moderate burghers of Vienna; on 
the 26th a ministerial decree dissolved it. Perhaps this blow might have 
succeeded, if it had been carried out by a part of the National Guard only, but 
the Government, not trusting them either, brought the military forward, and at 
once the National Guard turned round, united with the Academic Legion, and thus 
frustrated the ministerial project.
In the meantime, however, the Emperor and his Court had, on the 16th of May, 
left Vienna, and fled to Innspruck. Here surrounded by the bigoted Tyroleans, 
whose loyalty was roused again by the danger of an invasion of their country by 
the Sardo-Lombardian army, supported by the vicinity of Radetzky's troops, 
within shell-range of whom Innspruck lay, here the Counter-Revolutionary party 
found an asylum, from whence, uncontrolled, unobserved and safe, it might rally 
its scattered forces, repair and spread again all over the country the network 
of its plots. Communications were reopened with Radetzky, with Jellachich, and 
with Windischgratz, as well as with the reliable men in the administrative 
hierarchy of the different provinces; intrigues were set on foot with the 
Slavonic chiefs, and thus a real force at the disposal of the 
Counter-Revolutionary camarilla was formed, while the impotent ministers in 
Vienna were allowed to wear their short and feeble popularity out in continual 
bickerings with the revolutionary masses, and in the debates of the forthcoming 
Constituent Assembly. Thus the policy of leaving the movement of the capital to 
itself for a time; a policy which must have led to the omnipotence of the 
movement party in a centralized and homogeneous country like France, here in 
Austria, in a heterogeneous political conglomerate, was one of the safest means 
of reorganizing the strength of the reactionists.
In Vienna the middle class, persuaded that after three successive defeats, and 
in the face of a Constituent Assembly based upon universal suffrage, the Court 
was no longer an opponent to be dreaded, fell more and more into that weariness 
and apathy, and that eternal outcry for order and tranquillity, which has 
everywhere seized this class after violent commotions and consequent derangement 
of trade. The manufactures of the Austrian capital are almost exclusively 
limited to articles of luxury, for which, since the Revolution and the flight of 
the Court, there had necessarily been little demand. The shout for a return to a 
regular system of government, and for a return of the Court, both of which were 
expected to bring about a revival of commercial prosperity--this shout became 
now general among the middle classes. The meeting of the Constituent Assembly in 
July was hailed with delight as the end of the revolutionary era; so was the 
return of the Court, which, after the victories of Radetzky in Italy, and after 
the advent of the reactionary ministry of Doblhoff, considered itself strong 
enough to brave the popular torrent, and which, at the same time, was wanted in 
Vienna in order to complete its intrigues with the Slavonic majority of the 
Diet. While the Constituent Diet discussed the laws on the emancipation of the 
peasantry from feudal bondage and forced labor for the nobility, the Court 
completed a master stroke. On the 19th of August the Emperor was made to review 
the National Guard; the Imperial family, the courtiers, the general officers, 
outbade each other in flatteries to the armed burghers, who were already 
intoxicated with pride at thus seeing themselves publicly acknowledged as one of 
the important bodies of the State; and immediately afterwards a decree, signed 
by Herr Schwarzer, the only popular minister in the Cabinet, was published, 
withdrawing the Government aid, given hitherto to the workmen out of employ. The 
trick succeeded; the working classes got up a demonstration; the middle class 
National Guards declared for the decree of their minister; they were launched 
upon the "Anarchists," fell like tigers on the unarmed and unresisting 
workpeople, and massacred a great number of them on the 23rd of August. Thus the 
unity and strength of the revolutionary force was broken; the class-struggle 
between bourgeois and proletarian had come in Vienna, too, to a bloody outbreak, 
and the counter-revolutionary camarilla saw the day approaching on which it 
might strike its grand blow.
The Hungarian affairs very opportunity to proclaim openly the principles upon 
which it intended to act. On the 5th of October an Imperial decree in the Vienna 
Gazette--a decree countersigned by none of the responsible ministers for 
Hungary--declared the Hungarian Diet dissolved, and named the Ban Jellachich, of 
Croatia, civil and military governor of that country--Jellachich, the leader of 
South Slavonian reaction, a man who was actually at war with the lawful 
authorities of Hungary. At the same time orders were given to the troops in 
Vienna to march out and form part of the army which was to enforce Jellachich's 
authority. This, however, was showing the cloven foot too openly; every man in 
Vienna felt that war upon Hungary was war upon the principle of constitutional 
government, which principle was in the very decree trampled upon by the attempt 
of the emperor to make decrees with legal force, without the countersign of a 
responsible minister. The people, the Academic Legion, the National Guard of 
Vienna, on the 6th of October rose in mass, and resisted the departure of the 
troops; some grenadiers passed over to the people; a short struggle took place 
between the popular forces and the troops; the minister of war, Latour, was 
massacred by the people, and in the evening the latter were victors. In the 
meantime, Ban Jellachich, beaten at Stuhlweissenburg by Perczel, had taken 
refuge near Vienna on German-Austrian territory; the Viennese troops that were 
to march to his support now took up an ostensibly hostile and defensive position 
against him; and the emperor and court had again fled to Olmutz, on 
semi-Slavonic territory.
But at Olmutz the Court found itself in very different circumstances from what 
it had been at Innspruck. It was now in a position to open immediately the 
campaign against the Revolution. It was surrounded by the Slavonian deputies of 
the Constituent, who flocked in masses to Olmutz, and by the Slavonian 
enthusiasts from all parts of the monarchy. The campaign, in their eyes, was to 
be a war of Slavonian restoration and of extermination, against the two 
intruders, upon what was considered Slavonian soil, against the German and the 
Magyar. Windischgratz, the conqueror of Prague, now commander of the army that 
was concentrated around Vienna, became at once the hero of Slavonian 
nationality. And his army concentrated rapidly from all sides. From Bohemia, 
Moravia, Styria, Upper Austria, and Italy, marched regiment after regiment on 
routes that converged at Vienna, to join the troops of Jellachich and the 
ex-garrison of the capital. Above sixty thousand men were thus united towards 
the end of October, and soon they commenced hemming in the imperial city on all 
sides, until, on the 30th of October, they were far enough advanced to venture 
upon the decisive attack.
In Vienna, in the meantime, confusion and helplessness was prevalent. The middle 
class, as soon as the victory was gained, became again possessed of their old 
distrust against the "anarchic" working classes; the working men, mindful of the 
treatment they had received, six weeks before, at the hands of the armed 
tradesmen, and of the unsteady, wavering policy of the middle class at large, 
would not trust to them the defence of the city, and demanded arms and military 
organization for themselves. The Academic Legion, full of zeal for the struggle 
against imperial despotism, were entirely incapable of understanding the nature 
of the estrangement of the two classes, or of otherwise comprehending the 
necessities of the situation. There was confusion in the public mind, confusion 
in the ruling councils. The remnant of the German Diet deputies, and a few 
Slavonians, acting the part of spies for their friends at Olmutz, besides a few 
of the more revolutionary Polish deputies, sat in permanency; but instead of 
taking part resolutely, they lost all their time in idle debates upon the 
possibility of resisting the imperial army without overstepping the bounds of 
constitutional conventionalities. The committee of safety, composed of deputies 
from almost all the popular bodies of Vienna, although resolved to resist, was 
pet dominated by a majority of burghers and petty tradesmen, who never allowed 
it to follow up any determined, energetic line of action. The council of the 
Academic Legion passed heroic resolutions, but was in no way able to take the 
lead. The working classes, distrusted, disarmed, disorganized, hardly emerging 
from the intellectual bondage of the old regime, hardly awaking, not to a 
knowledge, but to a mere instinct of their social position and proper political 
line of action, could only make themselves heard by loud demonstrations, and 
could not be expected to be up to the difficulties of the moment. But they were 
ready--as they ever were in Germany during the revolution--to fight to the last, 
as soon as they obtained arms.
That was the state of things in Vienna. Outside, the reorganized Austrian army 
flushed with the victories of Radetzky in Italy; sixty or seventy thousand men 
well armed, well organized, and if not well commanded at least possessing 
commanders. Inside, confusion, class division, disorganization; a national guard 
part of which was resolved not to fight at all, part irresolute, and only the 
smallest part ready to act; a proletarian mass, powerful by numbers but without 
leaders, without any political education, subject to panic as well as to fits of 
fury almost without cause, a prey to every false rumor spread about, quite ready 
to fight, but unarmed, at least in the beginning, and incompletely armed, and 
barely organized when at last they were led to battle; a helpless Diet, 
discussing theoretical quibbles while the roof over their heads was almost 
burning; a leading committee without impulse or energy. Everything was changed 
from the days of March and May, when, in the counter-revolutionary camp, all was 
confusion, and when the only organized force was that created by the revolution. 
There could hardly be a doubt about the issue of such a struggle, and whatever 
doubt there might be, was settled by the events of the 3Oth and 31st of October, 
and 1st November.
LONDON, March, 1852.








XII. 
THE STORMING OF VIENNA--THE BETRAYAL OF VIENNA.



APRIL 9th, 1852.
WHEN at last the concentrated army of Windisgratz commenced the attack upon 
Vienna, the forces that could be brought forward in defence were exceedingly 
insufficient for the purpose. Of the National Guard only a portion was to be 
brought to the entrenchments. A Proletarian Guard, it is true, had at last been 
hastily formed, but owing to the lateness of the attempt to thus make available 
the most numerous, most daring. and most energetic part of the population, it 
was too little inured to the use of arms and to the very first rudiments of 
discipline to offer a successful resistance. Thus the Academic Legion, three to 
four thousand strong, well exercised and disciplined to a certain degree, brave 
and enthusiastic, was, militarily speaking, the only force which was in a state 
to do its work successfully. But what were they, together with the few reliable 
National Guards, and with the confused mass of the armed proletarians, in 
opposition to the far more numerous regulars of Windischgratz, not counting even 
the brigand hordes of Jellachich, hordes that were, by the very nature of their 
habits, very useful in a war from house to house, from lane to lane? And what 
but a few old, outworn, ill-mounted, and ill-served pieces of ordnance had the 
insurgents to oppose to that numerous and well-appointed artillery, of which 
Windischgratz made such an unscrupulous use?
The nearer the danger drew, the more grew the confusion in Vienna. The Diet, up 
to the last moment, could not collect sufficient energy to call in for aid the 
Hungarian army of Perczel, encamped a few leagues below the capital. The 
committee passed contradictory resolutions, they themselves being, like the 
popular armed masses, floated up and down with the alternately rising and 
receding tide of rumors and counter-rumors. There was only one thing upon which 
all agreed--to respect property; and this was done in a degree almost ludicrous 
for such times. As to the final arrangement of a plan of defence, very little 
was done. Bem, the only man present who could have saved Vienna, if any could 
then in Vienna, an almost unknown foreigner, a Slavonlan by birth, gave up the 
task, overwhelmed as he was by universal distrust. Had he persevered, he might 
have been lynched as a traitor. Messenhauser, the commander of the insurgent 
forces, more of a novel-writer than even of a subaltern officer, was totally 
inadequate to the task; and yet, after eight months of revolutionary struggles, 
the popular party had not produced or acquired a military man of more ability 
than he. Thus the contest began. The Viennese considering their utterly 
inadequate means of defence, considering their utter absence of military skill 
and organization in the ranks, offered a most heroic resistance. In many places 
the order given Bem, when he was in command, "to defend that post to the last 
man," was carried out to the letter. But force prevailed. Barricade after 
barricade was swept away by the imperial artillery in the long and wide avenues 
which form the main streets of the suburbs; and on the evening of the second 
day's fighting the Croats occupied the range of houses facing the glacis of the 
Old Town. A feeble and disorderly attack of the Hungarian army had been utterly 
defeated; and during an armistice, while some parties in the Old Town 
capitulated, while others hesitated and spread confusion, while the remnants of 
the Academic Legion prepared fresh intrenchments, an entrance was made by the 
imperialists, and in the midst of the general disorder the Old Town was carried.
The immediate consequences of this victory, the brutalities and executions by 
martial law, the unheard-of cruelties and infamies committed by the Slavonian 
hordes let loose upon Vienna, are too well known to be detailed here. The 
ulterior consequences, the entirely new turn given to German affairs by the 
defeat of the revolution in Vienna, we shall have reason to notice hereafter. 
There remain two points to be considered in connection with the storming of 
Vienna. The people of that capital had two allies--the Hungarians and the German 
people. Where were they in the hour of trial?
We have seen that the Viennese, with all the generosity of a newly freed people, 
had risen for a cause which, though ultimately their own, was in the first 
instance, and above all, that of the Hungarians. Rather than suffer the Austrian 
troops to march upon Hungary, they would draw their first and most terrific 
onslaught upon themselves. And while they thus nobly came forward for the 
support of their allies, the Hungarians, successful against Jellachich, drove 
him upon Vienna, and by their victory strengthened the force that was to attack 
that town. Under these circumstances it was the clear duty of Hungary to 
support, without delay, and with all disposable forces, not the Diet of Vienna, 
not the Committee of Safety or any other official body at Vienna, but the 
Viennese revolution. And if Hungary should even have forgotten that Vienna had 
fought the first battle of Hungary, she owed it to her own safety not to forget 
that Vienna was the only outpost of Hungarian independence, and that after the 
fall of Vienna nothing could meet the advance of the imperial troops against 
herself. Now, we know very well all the Hungarians can say and have said in 
defence of their inactivity during the blockade and storming of Vienna: the 
insufficient state of their own force, the refusal of the Diet or any other 
official body in Vienna to call them in, the necessity to keep on constitutional 
ground, and to avoid complications with the German central power. But the fact 
is, as to the insufficient state of the Hungarian army, that in the first days 
after the Viennese revolution and the arrival of Jellachich, nothing was wanted 
in the shape of regular troops, as the Austrian regulars were very far from 
being concentrated; and that a courageous, unrelenting following up of the first 
advantage over Jellachich, even with nothing but the Land Sturm that had fought 
at Stuhlweissenburg, would have sufficed to effect a junction with the Viennese, 
and to adjourn to that day six months every concentration of an Austrian army. 
In war, and particularly in revolutionary warfare, rapidity of action until some 
decided advantage is gained is the first rule, and we have no hesitation in 
saying that upon merely military grounds. Perczel ought not to have stopped 
until his junction with the Viennese was affected. There was certainly some 
risk, but who ever won a battle without risking something? And did the people of 
Vienna risk nothing when they drew upon themselves--they, a population of four 
hundred thousand--the forces that were to march to the conquest of twelve 
millions of Hungarians? The military fault committed by waiting until the 
Austrians had united, and by making the feeble demonstration at Schwechat which 
ended, as it deserved to do, in an inglorious defeat--this military fault 
certainly incurred more risks than a resolute march upon Vienna against the 
disbanded brigands of Jellachich would have done.
But, it is said, such an advance of the Hungarians, unless authorized by some 
official body, would have been a violation of the German territory, would have 
brought on complications with the central power at Frankfort, and would have 
been, above all, an abandonment of the legal and constitutional policy which 
formed the strength of the Hungarian cause. Why, the official bodies in Vienna 
were nonentities! Was it the Diet, was it the popular committees, who had risen 
for Hungary, or was it the people of Vienna, and they alone, who had taken to 
the musket to stand the brunt of the first battle for Hungary's independence? It 
was not this nor that official body in Vienna which it was important to uphold; 
all these bodies might, and would have been, upset very soon in the progress of 
the revolutionary development; but it was the ascendancy of the revolutionary 
movement, the unbroken progress of popular action itself, which alone was in 
question, and which alone could save Hungary from invasion. What forms this 
revolutionary movement afterwards might take, was the business of the Viennese, 
not of the Hungarians, so long as Vienna and German Austria at large continued 
their allies against the common enemy. But the question is, whether in this 
stickling of the Hungarian government for some quasi-legal authorization, we are 
not to see the first clear symptom of that pretence to a rather doubtful 
legality of proceeding, which, if it did not save Hungary, at least told very 
well, at a later period, before the English middle class audiences.
As to the pretext of possible conflicts with the central power of Germany at 
Frankfort, it is quite futile. The Frankfort authorities were de facto upset by 
the victory of the counter-revolution at Vienna; they would have been equally 
upset had the revolution there found the support necessary to defeat its 
enemies. And lastly,the great argument that Hungary could not leave legal and 
constitutional ground, may do very well for British free-traders, but it will 
never be deemed sufficient in the eyes of history. Suppose the people of Vienna 
had stuck to "legal and constitutional means" on the 13th of March, and on the 
6th of October, what then of the "legal and constitutional" movement, and of all 
the glorious battles which, for the first time, brought Hungary to the notice of 
the civilized world? The very legal and constitutional ground upon which it is 
asserted the Hungarians moved in 1848 and 1849 was conquered for them by the 
exceedingly illegal and unconstitutional rising of the people of Vienna on the 
13th March. It is not to our purpose here to discuss the revolutionary history 
of Hungary, but it may be deemed proper if we observe that it is utterly useless 
to professedly use merely legal means of resistance against an enemy who scorns 
such scruples; and if we add, that had it not been for this eternal pretence of 
legality which Gorgey seized upon and turned against the Government, the 
devotion of Gorgey's army to its general, and the disgraceful catastrophe of 
Villagos, would have been impossible. And when, at last, to save their honor, 
the Hungarians came across the Leitha, in the latter end of October, 1848, was 
not this quite as illegal as any immediate and resolute attack would have been?
We are known to harbor no unfriendly feeling toward Hungary. We stood by her 
during the struggles; we may be allowed to say that our paper, the Neue 
Rheinische Zeitung, [1] has done more than any other to render the Hungarian 
cause popular in Germany, by explaining the nature of the struggle between the 
Magyar and Slavonian races, and by following up the Hungarian war in a series of 
articles which have had paid them the compliment of being plagiarized in almost 
every subsequent book upon the subject, the works of native Hungarians and 
"eyewitnesses" not excepted. We even now, in any future continental convulsion, 
consider Hungary as the necessary and natural ally of Germany. But we have been 
severe enough upon our own countrymen, to have a right to speak out upon our 
neighbors; and then we have here to record facts with historical impartiality, 
and we must say that in this particular instance, the generous bravery of the 
people of Vienna was not only fat more noble, but also more far-sighted than the 
cautious circumspection of the Hungarian Government. And, as a German, we may 
further be allowed to say, that not for all the showy victories and glorious 
battles of the Hungarian campaign, would we exchange that spontaneous, 
single-handed rising, and heroic resistance of the people of Vienna, our 
countrymen, which gave Hungary the time to organize the army that could do such 
great things.
The second ally of Vienna was the German people. But they were everywhere 
engaged in the same struggle as the Viennese. Frankfort, Baden, Cologne, had 
just been defeated and disarmed. In Berlin and Breslau the people were at 
daggers-drawn with the army, and daily expected to come to blows. Thus it was in 
every local center of action. Everywhere questions were pending that could only 
be settled by the force of arms; and now it was that for the first time were 
severely felt the disastrous consequences of the continuation of the old 
dismemberment and decentralization of Germany. The different questions in every 
State, every province, every town, were fundamentally the same; but they were 
brought forward everywhere under different shapes and pretexts, and had 
everywhere attained different degrees of maturity. Thus it happened that while 
in every locality the decisive gravity of the events at Vienna was felt, yet 
nowhere could an important blow be struck with any hope of bringing the Viennese 
succor, or making a diversion in their favor; and there remained nothing to aid 
them but the Parliament and Central Power of Frankfort; they were appealed to on 
all hands; but what did they do?
The Frankfort Parliament and the bastard child it had brought to light by 
incestuous intercourse with the old German Diet, the so-called Central Power, 
profited by the Viennese movement to show forth their utter nullity. This 
contemptible Assembly, as we have seen, had long since sacrificed its virginity, 
and young as it was, it was already turning grey-headed and experienced in all 
the artifices of painting and pseudo-diplomatic prostitution. Of the dreams and 
illusions of power, of German regeneration and unity, that in the beginning had 
pervaded it, nothing remained but a set of Teutonic clap-trap phraseology, that 
was repeated on every occasion, and a firm belief of each individual member in 
his own importance, as well as in the credulity of the public. The original 
naivety was discarded; the representatives of the German people had turned 
practical men, that is to say, they had made it out that the less they did, and 
the more they prated, the safer would be their position as the umpires of the 
fate of Germany. Not that they considered their proceedings superfluous; quite 
the contrary. But they had found out that all really great questions, being to 
them forbidden ground, had better be let alone, and there, like a set of 
Byzantine doctors of the Lower Empire, they discussed with an importance and 
assiduity worthy of the fate that at last overtook them, theoretical dogmas long 
ago settled in every part of the civilized world, or microscopical practical 
questions which never led to any practical result. Thus, the Assembly being a 
sort of Lancastrian School for the mutual instruction of members, and being, 
therefore, very important to themselves, they were persuaded it was doing ever 
more than the German people had a right to expect, and looked upon everyone as a 
traitor to the country who had impudence to ask them to come to any result.
When the Viennese insurrection broke out, there was a host of interpellations, 
debates, motions, and amendments upon it, which, of course, led to nothing. The 
Central Power was to interfere. It sent two commissioners, Welcker, the 
ex-Liberal, and Mosle, to Vienna. The travels of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza 
form matter for an Odyssey in comparison with the heroic feats and wonderful 
adventures of those two knight-errants of German Unity. Not daring to go to 
Vienna, they were bullied by Windischgratz, wondered at by the idiot Emperor, 
and impudently hoaxed by the Minister Stadion. Their despatches and reports are 
perhaps the only portion of the Frankfort transactions that will retain a place 
in German literature; they are a perfect satirical romance, ready cut and dried, 
and an eternal monument of disgrace for the Frankfort Assembly and its 
Government.
The left side of the Assembly had also sent two commissioners to Vienna, in 
order to uphold its authority there--Froebel and Robert Blum. Blum, when danger 
drew near, judged rightly that here the great battle of the German Revolution 
was to be fought, and unhesitatingly resolved to stake his head on the issue. 
Froebel, on the contrary, was of opinion that it was his duty to preserve 
himself for the important duties of his post at Frankfort. Blum was considered 
one of the most eloquent men of the Frankfort Assembly; he certainly was the 
most popular. His eloquence would not have stood the test of any experienced 
Parliamentary Assembly; he was too fond of the shallow declamations of a German 
dissenting preacher, and his arguments wanted both philosophical acumen and 
acquaintance with practical matters of fact. In politics he belonged to 
"Moderate Democracy," a rather indefinite sort of thing, cherished on account of 
this very want of definiteness in its principles. But with all this Robert Blum 
was by nature a thorough, though somewhat polished, plebeian, and in decisive 
moments his plebeian instinct and plebeian energy got the better of his 
indefiniteness, and, therefore, indecisive political persuasion and knowledge. 
In such moments he raised himself far above the usual standard of his 
capacities.
Thus, in Vienna, he saw at a glance that here, not in the midst of the would-be 
elegant debates of Frankfort, the fate of his country would have to be decided. 
He at once made up his mind, gave up all idea of retreat, took a command in the 
revolutionary force, and behaved with extraordinary coolness and decision. It 
was he who retarded for a considerable time the taking of the town, and covered 
one of its sides from attack by burning the Tabor Bridge over the Danube. 
Everybody knows how, after the storming, he was arrested, tried by 
court-martial, and shot. He died like a hero. And the Frankfort Assembly, 
horrorstruck as it was, yet took the bloody insult with a seeming good grace. A 
resolution was carried, which, by the softness and diplomatic decency of its 
language, was more an insult to the grave of the murdered martyr than a damning 
stain upon Austria. But it was not to be expected that this contemptible 
Assembly should resent the assassination of one of its members, particularly of 
the leader of the Left.
LONDON, March, 1852.



Footnotes
[1] "Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung" (The New Rhenish Gazette). After the March 
revolution, 1848, Marx returned from Paris to Germany, and settling down--for 
the time being--at Cologne, founded this paper. Although the "Neue Rheinische 
Zeitung" never went in for propounding "Communist schemes," as Mr. Dawson, e. 
g., says it did, it became a very nightmare to the Government. Reactionaries and 
Liberals alike denounced the "Gazette," especially after Marx's brilliant 
defence of the Paris Insurrection of June. The state of siege being declared in 
Cologne, the "Gazette" was suspended for six weeks--only to appear with a bigger 
reputation and bigger circulation than before. After the Prussian "coup d'etat" 
in November, the "Gazette" published at the head of every issue an appeal to the 
people to refuse to pay taxes, and to meet force by force. For this and certain 
other articles the paper was twice prosecuted. On the first occasion the accused 
were Marx, Engels, and Korff; on the second and more important trial, they were 
Marx, Schapper, and Schneider. The accused were charged with "inciting the 
people to armed resistance against the Government and its officials." Marx 
mainly conducted the defence, and delivered a brilliant speech. "Marx refrains" 
(in this speech) "from all oratorical flourish; he goes straight to the point, 
and without any peroration ends with a summary of the political situation. 
Anyone would think that Marx's own personality was to deliver a political 
lecture to the jury. And, in fact, at the end of the trial, one of the jurors 
went to Marx to thank him, in the name of his colleagues, for the instructive 
lecture he had given them." (See Bernstein's work, "Ferdinand Lassalle.")The 
accused were unanimously acquitted by the jury. Among the better known of the 
contributors of the "New Rhenish Gazette," edited by Marx, were Engels, W. 
Wolff, Werth, Lassalle; while Freiligrath wrote for it his splendid 
revolutionary poems. Perhaps one of the grandest of these is the celebrated 
"Farewell of the "Rhenish Gazette"." when on the 19th May, l849, the final 
number of the paper--suppressed by the Government--appeared, printed in red 
type.
"When the last of crowns like glass shall break,
On the scene our sorrows have haunted.
And the people the last dread 'Guilty' shall speak, 
By your side ye shall find me undaunted.
On Rhine or on Danube, in word and deed,
You shall witness, true to his vow,
On the wrecks of thrones, in the midst of the freed 
The rebel who greets you now."
(Translated by Ernest Jones.)








XIII. 
THE PRUSSIAN ASSEMBLY--THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.



APRIL 17th,1852.
ON the 1st of November Vienna fell, and on the 9th of the same month the 
dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in Berlin showed how much this event had 
at once raised the spirit and the strength of the Counter-Revolutionary party 
all over Germany.
The events of the summer of 1845 in Prussia are soon told. The Constituent 
Assembly, or rather "the Assembly elected for the purpose of agreeing upon a 
Constitution with the Crown," and its majority of representatives of the middle 
class interest, had long since forfeited all public esteem by lending itself to 
all the intrigues of the Court, from fear of the more energetic elements of the 
population. They had confirmed, or rather restored, the obnoxious privileges of 
feudalism, and thus betrayed the liberty and the interests of, the peasantry. 
They had neither been able to draw up a Constitution, nor to amend in any way 
the general legislation. They had occupied themselves almost exclusively with 
nice theoretical distinctions, mere formalities, and questions of constitutional 
etiquette. The Assembly, in fact, was more a school of Parliamentary savoir 
vivre for its members, than a body in which the people could take any interest. 
The majorities were, besides, very nicely balanced, and almost always decided by 
the wavering centers whose oscillations from right to left, and vice versa, 
upset, first the ministry of Camphausen, then that of Auerswald and Hansemann. 
But while thus the Liberals, here as everywhere else, let the occasion slip out 
of their hands, the Court reorganized its elements of strength among the 
nobility, and the most uncultivated portion of the rural population, as well as 
in the army and the bureaucracy. After Hansemann's downfall, a ministry of 
bureaucrats and military officers, all staunch reactionists, was formed, which, 
however, seemingly gave way to the demands of the Parliament; and the Assembly 
acting upon the commodious principle of "measures, not men," were actually duped 
into applauding this ministry, while they, of course, had no eyes for the 
concentration and organization of Counter-Revolutionary forces, which that same 
ministry carried on pretty openly. At last, the signal being given by the fall 
of Vienna, the King dismissed its ministers, and replaced them by "men of 
action," under the leadership of the present premier, Manteufel. Then the 
dreaming Assembly at once awoke to the danger; it passed a vote of no confidence 
in the Cabinet, which was at once replied to by a decree removing the Assembly 
from Berlin, where it might, in case of a conflict, count upon the support of 
the masses, to Brandenburg, petty provincial town dependent entirely upon the 
Government. The Assembly, however, declared that it could not be adjourned, 
removed or dissolved, except with its own consent. In the meantime, General 
Wrangle entered Berlin at the head of some forty thousand troops. In a meeting 
of the municipal magistrates and the officers of the National Guard, it was 
resolved not to offer any resistance. And now, after the Assembly and its 
Constituents, the Liberal bourgeoisie, had allowed the combined reactionary 
party to occupy every important position, and to wrest from their hands almost 
every means of defence, began that grand comedy of "passive and legal 
resistance" which they intended to be a glorious imitation of the example of 
Hampden, and of the first efforts of the Americans in the War of Independence. 
Berlin was declared in a state of siege, and Berlin remained tranquil; the 
National Guard was dissolved by the Government, and its arms were delivered up 
with the greatest punctuality. The Assembly was hunted down during a fortnight, 
from one place of meeting to another, and everywhere dispersed by the military, 
and the members of the Assembly begged of the citizens to remain tranquil. At 
last the Government having declared the Assembly dissolved, it passed a 
resolution to declare the levying of taxes illegal, and then its members 
dispersed themselves over the country to organize the refusal of taxes. But they 
found that they had been woefully mistaken in the choice of their means. After a 
few agitated weeks, followed by severe measures of the Government against the 
Opposition, everyone gave up the idea of refusing the taxes in order to please a 
defunct Assembly that had not even had the courage to defend itself.
Whether it was in the beginning of November, 1848, already too late to try armed 
resistance, or whether a part of the army, on finding serious opposition, would 
have turned over to the side of the Assembly, and thus decided the matter in its 
favor, is a question which may never be solved. But in revolution as in war, it 
is always necessary to show a strong front, and he who attacks is in the 
advantage; and in revolution as in war, it is of the highest necessity to stake 
everything on the decisive moment, whatever the odds may be. There is not a 
single successful revolution in history that does not prove the truth of these 
axioms. Now, for the Prussian Revolution, the decisive moment had come in 
November, 1848; the Assembly, at the head, officially, of the whole 
revolutionary interest, did neither show a strong front, for it receded at every 
advance of the enemy; much less did it attack, for it chose even not to defend 
itself; and when the decisive moment came, when Wrangle, at the head of forty 
thousand men, knocked at the gates of Berlin, instead of finding, as he and all 
his officers fully expected, every street studded with barricades, every window 
turned into a loophole, he found the Gates open, and the streets obstructed only 
by peaceful Berliner burghers, enjoying the joke they had played upon him, by 
delivering themselves up, hands and feet tied, unto the astonished soldiers. It 
is true, the Assembly and the people, if they had resisted, might have been 
beaten; Berlin might have been bombarded, and many hundreds might have been 
killed, without preventing the ultimate victory of the Royalist party. But that 
was no reason why they should surrender their arms at once. A well-contested 
defeat is a fact of as much revolutionary importance as an easily-won victory. 
The defeats of Paris in June, 1848, and of Vienna in October, certainly did far 
more in revolutionizing the minds of the people of these two cities than the 
victories of February and March. The Assembly and the people of Berlin would, 
probably have shared the fate of the two towns above-named; but they would have 
fallen gloriously, and would have left behind themselves, in the minds of the 
survivors, a wish of revenge which in revolutionary times is one of the highest 
incentives to energetic and passionate action. It is a matter of course that, in 
every struggle, he who takes up the gauntlet risks being beaten; but is that a 
reason why he should confess himself beaten, and submit to the yoke without 
drawing the sword?
In a revolution he who commands a decisive position and surrenders it, instead 
of forcing the enemy to try his hands at an assault, invariably deserves to be 
treated as a traitor.
The same decree of the King of Prussia which dissolved the Constituent Assembly 
also proclaimed a new Constitution, founded upon the draft which had been made 
by a Committee of that Assembly, but enlarging in some points the powers of the 
Crown, and rendering doubtful in others those of the Parliament. This 
Constitution established two Chambers, which were to meet soon for the purpose 
of confirming and revising it.
We need hardly ask where the German National Assembly was during the "legal and 
peaceful" struggle of the Prussian Constitutionalists. It was, as usual, at 
Frankfort, occupied with passing very tame resolutions against the proceedings 
of the Prussian Government, and admiring the "imposing spectacle of the passive, 
legal, and unanimous resistance of a whole people against brutal force." The 
Central Government sent commissioners to Berlin to intercede between the 
Ministry and the Assembly; but they met the same fate as their predecessors at 
Olmutz, and were politely shown out. The Left of the National Assembly, i. e., 
the so-called Radical party, sent also their commissioners; but after having 
duly convinced themselves of the utter helplessness of the Berlin Assembly, and 
confessed their own equal helplessness, they returned to Frankfort to report 
progress, and to testify to the admirably peaceful conduct of the population of 
Berlin. Nay, more; when Herr Bassermann, one of the Central Government's 
commissioners, reported that the late stringent measures of the Prussian 
ministers were not without foundation, inasmuch as there had of late been seen 
loitering about the streets of Berlin sundry, savage-looking characters, such as 
always appear previous to anarchical movements (and which ever since have been 
named "Bassermannic characters"), these worthy deputies of the Left and 
energetic representatives of the revolutionary interest actually arose to make 
oath, and testify that such was not the case! Thus within two months the total 
impotency of the Frankfort Assembly was signally proved. There could be no more 
glaring proofs that this body was totally inadequate to its task; nay, that it 
had not even the remotest idea of what its task really was. The fact that both 
in Vienna and in Berlin the fate of the Revolution was settled, that in both 
these capitals the most important and vital questions were disposed of, without 
the existence of the Frankfort Assembly ever being taken the slightest notice 
of--this fact alone is sufficient to establish that the body in question was a 
mere debating-club, composed of a set of dupes, who allowed the Governments to 
use them as Parliamentary puppet, shown to amuse the shopkeepers and petty 
tradesmen of petty States and petty towns, as long as it was considered 
convenient to divert the attention of these parties. How long this was 
considered convenient we shall soon see. But it is a fact worthy of attention 
that among all the "eminent" men of this Assembly there was not one who had the 
slightest apprehension of the part they were made to perform, and that even up 
to the present day ex-members of the Frankfort Club have invariably organs of 
historical perception quite peculiar to themselves.
LONDON, March, 1852.








XIV. 
THE RESTORATION OF ORDER--DIET AND CHAMBER



APRIL 24th, 1852
THE first months of the year 1849 were employed by the Austrian and Prussian 
Governments in following up the advantages obtained in October and November, 
1848. The Austrian Diet, ever since the takings of Vienna, had carried on a 
merely nominal existence in a small Moravian country-town, named Kremsir. Here 
the Slavonian deputies, who, with their constituents. had been mainly 
instrumental in raising the Austrian Government from its prostration, were 
singularly punished for their teachery against the European Revolution. As soon 
as the Government had recovered its strength, it treated the Diet and its 
Slavonian majority with the utmost contempt, and when the first successes of the 
Imperial arms foreboded a speedy termination of the Hungarian War, the Diet, on 
the 4th of March, was dissolved, and the deputies dispersed by military force. 
Then at last the Slavonians saw that they were duped, and then they shouted: 
"Let us go to Frankfort and carry on there the opposition which we cannot pursue 
here!" But it was then too late, and the very fact that they had no other 
alternative than either to remain quiet or to join the impotent Frankfort 
Assembly, this fact alone was sufficient to show their utter helplessness.
Thus ended for the present, and most likely for ever, the attempts of the 
Slavonians of Germany to recover an independent national existence. Scattered 
remnants of numerous nations, whose nationality and political vitality had long 
been extinguished, and who in consequence had been obliged, for almost a 
thousand years, to follow in the wake of a mightier nation, their conqueror, the 
same as the Welsh in England, the Basques in Spain, the Bas-Bretons in France, 
and at a more recent period the Spanish and French Creoles in those portions of 
North America occupied of late by the Anglo-American race --these dying 
nationalities, the Bohemians, Carinthians, Dalmatians, etc., had tried to profit 
by the universal confusion of 1848, in order to restore their political status 
quo of A. D. 800. The history of a thousand years ought to have shown them that 
such a retrogression was impossible; that if all the territory east of the Elbe 
and Saale had at one time been occupied by kindred Slavonians, this fact merely 
proved the historical tendency, and at the same time physical and intellectual 
power of the German nation to subdue, absorb, and assimilate its ancient eastern 
neighbors; that this tendency of absorption on the part of the Germans had 
always been, and still was one of the mightiest means by which the civilization 
of Western Europe had been spread in the east of that continent; that it could 
only cease whenever the process of Germanization had reached the frontier of 
large, compact, unbroken nations, capable of an independent national life, such 
as the Hungarians, and in some degree the roles: and that, therefore, the 
natural and inevitable fate of these dying nations was to allow this process of 
dissolution and absorption by their stronger neighbors to complete itself. 
Certainly this is no very flattering prospect for the national ambition of the 
Panslavistic dreamers who succeeded in agitating a portion of the Bohemian and 
South Slavonian people; but can they expect that history would retrograde a 
thousand years in order to please a few phthisical bodies of men, who in every 
part of the territory they occupy are interspersed with and surrounded by 
Germans, who from time almost immemorial have had for all purposes of 
civilization no other language but the German, and who lack the very first 
conditions of national existence, numbers and compactness of territory? Thus, 
the Panslavistic rising, which everywhere in the German and Hungarian Slavonic 
territories was the cloak for the restoration to independence of all these 
numberless petty nations, everywhere clashed with the European revolutionary 
movements, and the Slavonians, although pretending to fight for liberty, were 
invariably (the Democratic portion of the Poles excepted) found on the side of 
despotism and reaction. Thus it was in Germany, thus in Hungary, thus even here 
and there in Turkey. Traitors to the popular cause, supporters and chief props 
to the Austrian Government's cabal, they placed themselves in the position of 
outlaws in the eyes of all revolutionary nations. And although nowhere the mass 
of the people had a part in the petty squabbles about nationality raised by the 
Panslavistic leaders, for the very reason that they were too ignorant, yet it 
will never be forgotten that in Prague, in a half-German town, crowds of 
Slavonian fanatics cheered and repeated the cry: "Rather the Prussian knout than 
German Liberty!" After their first evaporated effort in 1848, and after the 
lesson the Austrian Government gave them, it is not likely that another attempt 
at a later opportunity will be made. But if they should try again under similar 
pretexts to ally themselves to the counter-revolutionary force, the duty of 
Germany is clear. No country in a state of revolution and involved in external 
war can tolerate a Vendee in its very heart.
As to the Constitution proclaimed by the Emperor at the same time with the 
dissolution of the Diet, there is no need to revert to it, as it never had a 
practical existence, and is now done away with altogether. Absolutism has been 
restored in Austria to all intents and purposes ever since the 4th March, 1849.
In Prussia, the Chambers met in February for the ratification and revision of 
the new Charter proclaimed by the King. They sat for about six weeks, humble and 
meek enough in their behavior toward the Government, yet not quite prepared to 
go the lengths the King and his ministers wished them to go. Therefore, as soon 
as a suitable occasion presented itself,they were dissolved.
Thus both Austria and Prussia had for the moment, got rid of the shackles of 
parliamentary control. The Governments now concentrated all power in themselves, 
and could bring that power to bear wherever is was wanted: Austria upon Hungary 
and Italy, Prussia upon Germany. For Prussia, too, was preparing for a campaign 
by which "order" was to be restored in the smaller States.
Counter-revolution being now paramount in the two great centres of action in 
Germany,--in Vienna and Berlin,--there remained only the lesser States in which 
the struggle was still undecided, although the balance there, too, was leaning 
more and more against the revolutionary interest. These smaller States, we have 
said, found a common centre in the National Assembly at Frankfort. Now, this 
so-called National Assembly, although its reactionist spirit had long been 
evident, so much so that the very people of Frankfort had risen in arms against 
it, yet its origin was of more or less revolutionary nature; it occupied an 
abnormal, revolutionary position in January; its competence had never been 
defined, and it had at last come to the decision--which, however, was never 
recognized by the larger States--that its resolutions had the force of law. 
Under these circumstances, and when the Constitutionalist-Monarchial party saw 
their positions turned by the recovering Absolutists, it is not to be wondered 
that the Liberal, monarchical bourgeoisie of almost the whole of Germany should 
place their last hopes upon the majority of this Assembly, just as the petty 
shopkeepers in the rest, the nucleus of the Democratic party, gathered in their 
growing distress around the minority of that same body, which indeed formed the 
last compact Parliamentary phalanx of Democracy. On the other hand, the larger 
Governments, and particularly the Prussian Ministry, saw more and more the 
incompatibility of such an irregular elective body with the restored monarchical 
system of Germany, and if they did not at once force its dissolution, it was 
only because the time had not yet come, and because Prussia hoped first to use 
it for the furthering of its own ambitious purposes.
In the meantime, that poor Assembly itself fell into a greater and greater 
confusion. Its deputations and commissaries had been treated with the utmost 
contempt, both in Vienna and Berlin; one of its members, in spite of his 
parliamentary inviolability, had been executed in Vienna as a common rebel. Its 
decrees were nowhere heeded; if they were noticed at all by the larger powers, 
it was merely by protesting notes which disputed the authority of the Assembly 
to pass laws and resolutions binding upon their Governments. The Representative 
of the Assembly, the Central Executive power, was involved in diplomatic 
squabbles with almost all the Cabinets of Germany, and, in spite of all their 
efforts, neither Assembly nor Central Government could bring Austria and Prussia 
to state their ultimate views, plans and demands. The Assembly, at last, 
commenced to see clearly, at least so far, that it had allowed all power to slip 
out of its hands, that it was at the mercy of Austria and Prussia, and that if 
it intended making a Federal Constitution for Germany at all, it must set about 
the thing at once and in good earnest. And many of the vacillating members also 
saw clearly that they had been egregiously duped by the Governments. But what 
were they, in their impotent position, able to do now? The only thing that could 
have saved them would have been promptly and decidedly to pass over into the 
popular camp; but the success, even of that step, was more than doubtful; and 
then, where in this helpless crowd of undecided, shortsighted, self-conceited 
beings, who, when the eternal noise of contradictory rumors and diplomatic notes 
completely stunned them, sought their only consolation and support in the 
everlastingly repeated assurance that they were the best, the greatest, the 
wisest men of the country, and that they alone could save Germany--where, we 
say, among these poor creatures, whom a single year of Parliamentary life had 
turned into complete idiots, where were the men for a prompt and decisive 
resolution, much less for energetic and consistent action?
At last the Austrian Government threw off the mask. In its Constitution of the 
4th of March, it proclaimed Austria an indivisible monarchy, with common 
finances, system of customs-duties, of military establishments, thereby effacing 
every barrier and distinction between the German and non-German provinces. This 
declaration was made in the face of resolutions and articles of the intended 
Federal Constitution which had been already passed by the Frankfort Assembly. It 
was the gauntlet of war thrown clown to it by Austria, and the poor Assembly had 
no other choice but to take it up. This it did with a deal of blustering, which 
Austria, in the consciousness of her power, and of the utter nothingness of the 
Assembly, could well afford to allow to pass. And this precious representation, 
as it styled itself, of the German people, in order to revenge itself for this 
insult on the part of Austria, saw nothing better before it than to throw 
itself, hands and feet tied, at the feet of the Prussian Government. Incredible 
as it would seem, it bent its knees before the very ministers whom it had 
condemned as unconstitutional and antipopular, and whose dismissal it had in 
vain insisted upon. The details of this disgraceful transaction, and the 
tragicomical events that followed, will form the subject of our next.
LONDON, April, 1852.








XV. 
THE TRIUMPH OF PRUSSIA.


JULY 27th, 1852. 
WE now come to the last chapter in the history of the German Revolution; the 
conflict of the National Assembly with the Governments of the different States, 
especially of Prussia; the insurrection of Southern and Western Germany, and its 
final overthrow by Prussia.
We have already seen the Frankfort National Assembly at work: We have seen it 
kicked by Austria, insulted by Prussia, disobeyed by the lesser States, duped by 
its own impotent Central "Government," which again was the dupe of all and every 
prince in the country. But at last things began to look threatening for this 
weak, vacillating, insipid legislative body. It was forced to come to the 
conclusion that "the sublime idea of Germany unity was threatened in its 
realization," which meant neither more nor less than that the Frankfort 
Assembly, and all it had done, and was about to do, were very likely to end in 
smoke. Thus it set to work in good earnest in order to bring forth, as soon as 
possible, its grand production, the "Imperial Constitution." There was, however, 
one difficulty. What Executive Government was there to be? An Executive Council? 
No; that would have been, they thought in their wisdom, making Germany a 
Republic. A "president"? That would come to the same. Thus they must revive the 
old Imperial dignity. But--as, of course, a prince was to be emperor--who should 
it be? Certainly none of the Diiminorum gentium, from 
Reuss-Schleitz-Greitz-Lobenstein-Ebersdorf up to Bavaria; neither Austria nor 
Prussia would have borne that. It could only be Austria or Prussia. But which of 
the two? There is no doubt that, under otherwise favorable circumstances, this 
august Assembly would be sitting up to the present day, discussing this 
important dilemma without being able to come to a conclusion, if the Austrian 
Government had not cut the Gordian knot, and saved them the trouble.
Austria knew very well that from the moment in which she could again appear 
before Europe with all her provinces subdued, as a strong and great European 
power, the very law of political gravitation would draw the remainder of Germany 
into her orbit, without the help of any authority which an Imperial crown, 
conferred by the Frankfort Assembly, could give her. Austria had been far 
stronger, far freer in her movements, since she shook off the powerless crown of 
the German Empire--a crown which clogged her own independent policy, while it 
added not one iota to her strength, either within or without Germany. And 
supposing the case that Austria could not maintain her footing in Italy and 
Hungary, why, then she was dissolved, annihilated in Germany too, and could 
never pretend to reseize a crown which had slipped from her hands while she was 
in the full possession of her strength. Thus Austria at once declared against 
all imperialist resurrections, and plainly demanded the restoration of the 
German Diet, the only Central Government of Germany known and recognized by the 
treaties of 1815; and on the 4th of March, 1849, issued that Constitution which 
had no other meaning than to declare Austria an indivisible, centralized, and 
independent monarchy, distinct even from that Germany which the Frankfort 
Assembly was to reorganize.
This open declaration of war left, indeed, the Frankfort wiseacres no other 
choice but to exclude Austria from Germany, and to create out of the remainder 
of that country a sort of lower empire, a "little Germany," the rather shabby 
Imperial mantle of which was to fall on the shoulders of His Majesty of Prussia. 
This, it will be recollected, was the renewal of an old project fostered already 
some six or eight years ago by a party of South and Middle German Liberal 
doctrinaires, who considered as a godsend the degrading circumstances by which 
their old crotchet was now again brought forward as the latest "new move" for 
the salvation of the country.
They accordingly finished, in February and March 1849, the debate on the 
Imperial Constitution, together with the Declaration of Rights and the Imperial 
Electoral Law; not, however, without being obliged to make, in a great many 
points, the most contradictory concessions--now to the Conservative or rather 
Reactionary party --now to the more advanced factions of the Assembly. In fact, 
it was evident that the leadership of the Assembly, which had formerly belonged 
to the Right and Right Centre (the Conservatives and Reactionists), was 
gradually, although slowly, passing toward the Left or Democratic side of that 
body. The rather dubious position of the Austrian deputies in an Assembly which 
had excluded their country from Germany, and in which they yet were called upon 
to sit and vote, favored the derangement of its equipoise; and thus, as early as 
the end of February, the Left Centre and Left found themselves, by the help of 
the Austrian votes, very generally in a majority, while on other days the 
Conservative faction of the Austrians, all of a sudden, and for the fun of the 
thing, voting with the Right, threw the balance again on the other side. They 
intended, by these sudden soubresauts, to bring the assembly into contempt, 
which, however, was quite unnecessary, the mass of the people being long since 
convinced of the utter hollowness and futility of anything coming from 
Frankfort. What a specimen of a Constitution, in the meantime, was framed under 
such jumping and counter-jumping, may easily be imagined.
The Left of the Assembly--this elite and pride of revolutionary Germany, as it 
believed itself to be--was entirely intoxicated with the few paltry successes it 
obtained by the good-will, or rather the ill-will, of a set of Austrian 
politicians, acting under the instigation and for the interest of Austrian 
despotism. Whenever the slightest approximation to their own not very 
well-defined principles had, in a homoeopathically diluted shape, obtained a 
sort of sanction by the Frankfort Assembly, these Democrats proclaimed that they 
had saved the country and the people. These poor, weak-minded men, during the 
course of their generally very obscure lives, had been so little accustomed to 
anything like success, that they actually believed their paltry amendments, 
passed with two or three votes majority, would change the face of Europe. They 
had, from the beginning of their legislative career, been more imbued than any 
other faction of the Assembly with that incurable malady Parliamentary 
cretinism, a disorder which penetrates its unfortunate victims with the solemn 
conviction that the whole world, its history and future, are governed and 
determined by a majority of votes in that particular representative body which 
has the honor to count them among its members, and that all and everything going 
on outside the walls of their house--wars, revolutions, railway-constructing, 
colonizing of whole new continents, California gold discoveries, Central 
American canals, Russian armies, and whatever else may have some little claim to 
influence upon the destinies of mankind--is nothing compared with the 
incommensurable events hinging upon the important question, whatever it may be, 
just at that moment occupying the attention of their honorable house. Thus it 
was the Democratic party of the Assembly, by effectually smuggling a few of 
their nostrums into the "Imperial Constitution," first became bound to support 
it, although in every essential point it flatly contradicted their own 
oft-proclaimed principles, and at last, when this mongrel work was abandoned, 
and bequeathed to them by its main authors, accepted the inheritance, and held 
out for this Monarchical Constitution, even in opposition to everybody who then 
proclaimed their own Republican principles.
But it must be confessed that in this the contradiction was merely apparent. The 
indeterminate, self-contradictory, immature character of the Imperial 
Constitution was the very image of the immature, confused, conflicting political 
ideas of these Democratic gentlemen. And if their own sayings and writings--as 
far as they could write--were not sufficient proof of this, their actions would 
furnish such proof; for among sensible people it is a matter of course to judge 
of a man, not by his professions, but his actions; not by what he pretends to 
be, hut by what he does, and what he really is; and the deeds of these heroes of 
German Democracy speak loud enough for themselves, as we shall learn by and by. 
However, the Imperial Constitution, with all its appendages and paraphernalia, 
was definitely passed, and on the 28th of March, the King of Prussia was, by 290 
votes against 248 who abstained, and 200 who were absent, elected Emperor of 
Germany minus Austria. The historical irons was complete; the Imperial farce 
executed in the streets of astonished Berlin, three days after the Revolution of 
March 18th, 1848, by Frederick William IV., while in a state which elsewhere 
would come under the Maine Liquor Law--this disgusting farce, just one year 
afterwards, had been sanctioned by the pretended Representative Assembly of all 
Germany. That, then, was the result of the German Revolution!
LONDON, July, 1852.






XVI. 
THE ASSEMBLY AND THE GOVERNMENTS.



AUGUST 19th, 1852.
THE National Assembly of Frankfort, after having elected the King of Prussia 
Emperor of Germany (minus Austria), sent a deputation to Berlin to offer him the 
crown, and then adjourned. On the 3rd of April, Frederick William received the 
deputies. He told them that, although he accepted the right of precedence over 
all the other princes of Germany, which this vote of the people's 
representatives had given him, yet he could not accept the Imperial crown as 
long as he was not sure that the remaining princes acknowledged his supremacy, 
and the Imperial Constitution conferring those rights upon him. It would be, he 
added, for the Governments of Germany to see whether this Constitution was such 
as could be ratified by them. At all events, Emperor or not, he always would be 
found ready, he concluded, to draw the sword against either the external or the 
internal foe. We shall see how he kept his promise in a manner rather startling 
for the National Assembly.
The Frankfort wiseacres, after profound diplomatic inquiry, at last came to the 
conclusion that this answer amounted to a refusal of the crown. They then (April 
12th) resolved: That the Imperial Constitution was the law of the land, and must 
he maintained; and not seeing their way at all before them, elected a Committee 
of thirty, to make proposals as to the means how this Constitution could be 
carried out.
This resolution was the signal for the conflict between the Frankfort Assembly 
and the German Governments which now broke out. The middle classes, and 
especially the smaller trading class, had all at once declared for the new 
Frankfort Constitution. They could not wait any longer the moment which was "to 
close the Revolution." In Austria and Prussia the Revolution had, for the 
moment, been closed by the interference of the armed power. The classes in 
question would have preferred a less forcible mode of performing that operation, 
but they had not had a chance; the things was done, and they had to make the 
best of it, a resolution which they at once took and carried out most 
heroically. In the smaller States, where things had been going on comparatively 
smoothly, the middle classes had long since been thrown back into that showy, 
but resultless, because powerless, parliamentary agitation, which was most 
congenial to themselves. The different States of Germany, as regarded each of 
them separately, appeared thus to have attained that new and definite form which 
was supposed to enable them to enter henceforth the path of peaceful 
constitutional development. There only remained one open question, that of the 
new political organization of the German Confederacy. And this question, the 
only one which still appeared fraught with danger, it was considered a necessity 
to resolve at once. Hence the pressure exerted upon the Frankfort Assembly by 
the middle classes, in order to induce it to get the Constitution ready as soon 
as possible; hence the resolution among the higher and lower bourgeoisie to 
accept and support this Constitution, whatever it might be, in order to create a 
settled state of things without delay. Thus from the very beginning the 
agitation for the Imperial Constitution arose out of a reactionary feeling, and 
sprang up among these classes which were long since tired of the Revolution.
But there was another feature in it. The first and fundamental principles of the 
future German Constitution had been voted during the first months of spring and 
summer, 1848, a time when popular agitation was still rife. The resolutions then 
passed, though completely reactionary then, now, after the arbitrary acts of the 
Austrian and Prussian Governments, appeared exceedingly Liberal, and even 
Democratic. The standard of comparison had changed. The Frankfort Assembly could 
not, without moral suicide, strike out these once-voted provisions, and model 
the Imperial Constitution upon those which the Austrian and Prussian Governments 
had dictated, sword in hand. Besides, as we have seen, the majority in that 
Assembly had changed sides, and the Liberal and Democratic party were rising in 
influence. Thus the Imperial Constitution not only was distinguished by its 
apparently exclusive popular origin, but at the same time, full of contradiction 
as it was, it yet was the most Liberal Constitution in all Germany. Its greatest 
fault was, that it was a mere sheet of paper, with no power to back its 
provisions.
Under these circumstances it was natural that the so-called Democratic party, 
that is, the mass of the petty trading class, should cling to the Imperial 
Constitution. This class had always been more forward in its demands than the 
Liberal-Monarchico-Constitutional bourgeoisie; it had shown a bolder front, it 
had very often threatened armed resistance, it was lavish in its promises to 
sacrifice its blood and its existence in the struggle for freedom; but it had 
already given plenty of proofs that on the day of danger it was nowhere, and 
that it never felt more comfortable than the day after a decisive defeat, when 
everything being lost, it had at least the consolation to know that somehow or 
other the matter was settled. While, therefore, the adhesion of the large 
bankers, manufacturers, and merchants was of a more reserved character, more 
like a simple demonstration in favor of the Frankfort Constitution, the class 
just beneath them, our valiant Democratic shopkeepers, came forward in grand 
style, and, as usual, proclaimed they would rather spill their last drop of 
blood than let the Imperial Constitution fall to the ground.
Supported by these two parties, the bourgeois adherents of the Constitutional 
Royalty, and the more or less Democratic shopkeepers, the agitation for the 
immediate establishment of the Imperial Constitution gained ground rapidly, and 
found its most powerful expression in the Parliaments of the several States. The 
Chambers of Prussia, of Hanover, of Saxony, of Baden, of Wurtemberg, declared in 
its favor. The struggle between the Governments and the Frankfort Assembly 
assumed a threatening aspect.
The Governments, however, acted rapidly. The Prussian Chambers were dissolved, 
anti-constitutionally, as they had to revise and confirm the Constitution; riots 
broke out at Berlin, provoked intentionally by the Government, and the next day, 
the 28th of April, the Prussian Ministry issued a circular note, in which the 
Imperial Constitution was held up as a most anarchical and revolutionary 
document, which it was for the Governments of Germany to remodel and purify. 
Thus Prussia denied, point-blank; that sovereign constituent power which the 
wise men at Frankfort had always boasted of, but never established. Thus a 
Congress of Princes, a renewal of the old Federal Diet, was called upon to sit 
in judgment on that Constitution which had already been promulgated as law. And 
at the same time Prussia concentrated troops at Kreuznach, three days' march 
from Frankfort, and called upon the smaller States to follow its example, by 
also dissolving their Chambers as soon as they should give their adhesion to the 
Frankfort Assembly. This example was speedily followed by Hanover and Saxony.
It was evident that a decision of the struggle by force of arms could not be 
avoided. The hostility of the Governments, the agitation among the people, were 
daily showing themselves in stronger colors. The military were everywhere worked 
upon by the Democratic citizens, and in the south of Germany with great success. 
Large mass meetings were everywhere held, passing resolutions to support the 
Imperial Constitution and the National Assembly, if need should be, with force 
of arms. At Cologne, a meeting of deputies of all the municipal councils of 
Rhenish Prussia took place for the same purpose. In the Palatinate, at Bergen, 
Fulda, Nuremberg, in the Odennald, the peasantry met by myriads and worked 
themselves up into enthusiasm. At the same time the Constituent Assembly of 
France dissolved, and the new elections were prepared amid violent agitation, 
while on the eastern frontier of Germany, the Hungarians had within a month, by 
a succession of brilliant victories, rolled back the tide of Austrian invasion 
from the Theiss to the Leitha, and were every day expected to take Vienna by 
storm. Thus, popular imagination being on all hands worked up to the highest 
pitch, and the aggressive policy of the Governments defining itself more clearly 
every day, a violent collision could not be avoided, and cowardly imbecility 
only could persuade itself that the struggle was to come off peaceably. But this 
cowardly imbecility was most extensively represented in the Frankfort Assembly.
LONDON, July, 1852.








XVII. 
INSURRECTION.



SEPTEMBER 18, 1852.
THE inevitable conflict between the National Assembly of Frankfort and the 
States Governments of Germany at last broke out in open hostilities during the 
first days of May, 1849. The Austrian deputies, recalled by their Government, 
had already left the Assembly and returned home, with the exception of a few 
members of the Left or Democratic party. The great body of the Conservative 
members, aware of the turn things were about to take, withdrew even before they 
were called upon to do so by their respective Governments. Thus, even 
independently of the causes which in the foregoing letters have been shown to 
strengthen the influence of the Left, the mere desertion of their posts by the 
members of the Right, sufficed to turn the old minority into a majority of the 
Assembly. The new majority, which, at no former time, had dreamed of ever 
obtaining that good fortune, had profited by their places on the opposition 
benches to spout against the weakness, the indecision, the indolence of the old 
majority, and of its Imperial Lieutenancy. Now all at once, they were called on 
to replace that old majority. They were now to show what they could perform. Of 
course, their career was to be one of energy, determination, activity. They, the 
elite of Germany, would soon be able to drive onwards the senile Lieutenant of 
the Empire, and his vacillating ministers, and in case that was impossible they 
would--there could be no doubt about it--by force of the sovereign right of the 
people, depose that impotent Government, and replace it by an energetic, 
indefatigable Executive, who would assure the salvation of Germany. Poor 
fellows! Their rule--if rule it can be named, where no one obeyed--was a still 
more ridiculous affair than even the rule of their predecessors.
The new majority declared that, in spite of all obstacles, the Imperial 
Constitution must be carried out, and at once; that on the 15th of July ensuing, 
the people were to elect the deputies of the new House of Representatives, and 
that this House was to meet at Frankfort on the 15th of August following. Now, 
this was an open declaration of war against those Governments that had not 
recognized the Imperial Constitution, the foremost among which were Prussia, 
Austria, Bavaria, comprising more than three-fourths of the German population; a 
declaration of war which was speedily accepted by them. Prussia and Bavaria, 
too, recalled the deputies sent from their territories to Frankfort, and 
hastened their military preparations against the National Assembly, while, on 
the other hand, the demonstrations of the Democratic party (out of Parliament) 
in favor of the Imperial Constitution and of the National Assembly, acquired a 
more turbulent and violent character, and the mass of the working people, led by 
the men of the most extreme party, were ready to take up arms in a cause which, 
if it was not their own, at least gave them a chance of somewhat approaching 
their aims by clearing Germany of its old monarchical encumbrances. Thus 
everywhere the people and the Governments were at daggers drawn upon this 
subject; the outbreak was inevitable; the mine was charged, and it only wanted a 
spark to make it explode. The dissolution of the Chambers in Saxony, the calling 
in of the Landwehr (military reserve) in Prussia, the open resistance of the 
Government to the Imperial Constitution, were such sparks; they fell, and all at 
once the country was in a blaze. In Dresden, on the 4th of May, the people 
victoriously took possession of the town, and drove out the King, while all the 
surrounding districts sent re-inforcements to the insurgents. In Rhenish Prussia 
and Westphalia the Landwehr refused to march, took possession of the arsenals, 
and armed itself in defence of the Imperial Constitution. In the Palatinate the 
people seized the Bavarian Government officials, and the public moneys, and 
instituted a Committee of Defence, which placed the province under the 
protection of the National Assembly. In Wurtemberg the people forced the King to 
acknowledge the Imperial Constitution, and in Baden the army, united with the 
people, forced the Grand Duke to flight, and erected a Provincial Government. In 
other parts of Germany the people only awaited a decisive signal from the 
National Assembly to rise in arms and place themselves at its disposal.
The position of the National Assembly was far more favorable than could have 
been expected after its ignoble career. The western half of Germany had taken up 
arms in its behalf; the military everywhere were vacillating; in the lesser 
States they were undoubtedly favorable to the movement. Austria was prostrated 
by the victorious advance of the Hungarians, and Russia, that reserve force of 
the German Governments, was straining all its powers in order to support Austria 
against the Magyar armies. There was only Prussia to subdue, and with the 
revolutionary sympathies existing in that country, a chance certainly existed of 
attaining that end. Everything then depended upon the conduct of the Assembly.
Now, insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to 
certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the 
party neglecting them. Those rules, logical deductions from the nature of the 
parties and the circumstances one has to deal with in such a case, are so plain 
and simple that the short experience of 1848 had made the Germans pretty well 
acquainted with them. Firstly, never play with insurrection unless you are fully 
prepared to face the consequences of your play. Insurrection is a calculus with 
very indefinite magnitudes, the value of which may change every day; the forces 
opposed to you have all the advantage of organization, discipline, and habitual 
authority: unless you bring strong odds against them you are defeated and 
ruined. Secondly, the insurrectionary career once entered upon, act with the 
greatest determination, and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of 
every armed rising; it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies. 
Surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare new 
successes, however small, but daily; keep up the moral ascendancy which the 
first successful rising has given to you; rally those vacillating elements to 
your side which always follow the strongest impulse, and which always look out 
for the safer side; force your enemies to a retreat before they can collect 
their strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest master of 
revolutionary policy yet known, de l'audace, de l'audace, encore de l'audace!
What, then, was the National Assembly of Frankfort to do if it would escape the 
certain ruin which it was threatened with? First of all, to see clearly through 
the situation, and to convince itself that there was now no other choice than 
either to submit to the Governments unconditionally, or take up the cause of the 
armed insurrection without reserve or hesitation. Secondly, to publicly 
recognize all the insurrections that had already broken out, and to call the 
people to take up arms everywhere in defence of the national representation, 
outlawing all princes, ministers and others who should dare to oppose the 
sovereign people represented by its mandatories. Thirdly, to at once depose the 
German Imperial Lieutenant, to create a strong, active, unscrupulous Executive, 
to call insurgent troops to Frankfort for its immediate protection, thus 
offering at the same time a legal pretext for the spread of the insurrection, to 
organize into a compact body all the forces at its disposal, and, in short, to 
profit quickly and unhesitatingly by every available means for strengthening its 
position and impairing that of its opponents.
Of all this the virtuous Democrats in the Frankfort Assembly did just the 
contrary. Not content with letting things take the course they liked, these 
worthies went so far as to suppress by their opposition all insurrectionary 
movements which were preparing. Thus, for instance, did Herr Karl Vogt at 
Nuremberg. They allowed the insurrections of Saxony, of Rhenish Prussia, of 
Westphalia to be suppressed without any other help than a posthumous, 
sentimental protest against the unfeeling violence of the Prussian Government. 
They kept up an underhand diplomatic intercourse with the South German 
insurrections but never gave them the support of their open acknowledgment. They 
knew that the Lieutenant of the Empire sided with the Governments, and yet they 
called upon him, who never stirred, to oppose the intrigues of these 
Governments. The ministers of the Empire, old Conservatives, ridiculed this 
impotent Assembly in every sitting, and they suffered it. And when William 
Wolff, [1] a Silesian deputy and one of the editors of the New Rhenish Gazette, 
called upon them to outlaw the Lieutenant of the Empire--who was, he justly 
said, nothing but the first and greatest traitor to the Empire, he was hooted 
down by the unanimous and virtuous indignation of those Democratic 
Revolutionists! In short, they went on talking, protesting, proclaiming, 
pronouncing, but never had the courage or the sense to act; while the hostile 
troops of the Governments drew nearer and nearer, and their own Executive, the 
Lieutenant of the Empire, was busily plotting with the German princes their 
speedy destruction. Thus even the last vestige of consideration was lost to this 
contemptible Assembly; the insurgents who had risen to defend it ceased to care 
any more for it, and when at last it came to a shameful end, as we shall see, it 
died without anybody taking any notice of its unhonored exit.
LONDON, August, 1852.



Footnotes
[1] The "Wolff" here alluded to is Wilhelm Wolff, the beloved friend of Marx and 
Engels, who--to distinguish him from the many other "Wolffs" in the movement at 
this period--was known to his intimates as "Lupus." It is to this Silesion 
peasant that Marx dedicated the first volume of "Capital."
"Dedicated
To My Never-To-Be-Forgotten Friend 
The Brave, True, Noble Fighter In The Van-Guard
Of The Proletariat, 
WILHELM WOLFF.
Born at Tornau, June 21st, 1809. Died in exile at Manchester, 9th May, 1864."








XIX. 
THE CLOSE OF THE INSURRECTION.



OCTOBER 23, 1852.
WHILE the south and west of Germany was in open insurrection, and while it took 
the Governments from the first opening of hostilities at Dresden to the 
capitulation of Rastatt, rather more than ten weeks, to stifle this final 
blazing up of the first German Revolution, the National Assembly disappeared 
from the political theater without any notice being taken of its exit.
We left this august body at Frankfort, perplexed by the insolent attacks of the 
Governments upon its dignity, by the impotency and treacherous listlessness of 
the Central Power it had itself created, by the risings of the petty trading 
class for its defence, and of the working class for a more revolutionary 
ultimate end. Desolation and despair reigned supreme among its members; events 
had at once assumed such a definite and decisive shape that in a few days the 
illusions of these learned legislators as to their real power and influence were 
entirely broken down. The Conservatives, at the signal given by the Governments, 
had already retired from a body which, henceforth, could not exist any longer, 
except in defiance of the constituted authorities. The Liberals gave the matter 
up in utter discomfiture; they, too, threw up their commissions as 
representatives. Honorable gentlemen decamped by hundreds. From eight or nine 
hundred members the number had dwindled down so rapidly that now one hundred and 
fifty, and a few days after one hundred, were declared a quorum. And even these 
were difficult to muster, although the whole of the Democratic party remained.
The course to be followed by the remnants of a parliament was plain enough. They 
had only to take their stand openly and decidedly with the insurrection, to give 
it, thereby, whatever strength legality could confer upon it, while they 
themselves at once acquired an army for their own defence. They had to summon 
the Central Power to stop all hostilities at once; and if, as could be foreseen, 
this power neither could nor would do so, to depose it at once and put another 
more energetic Government in its place. If insurgent troops could not be brought 
to Frankfort (which, in the beginning, when the State Governments were little 
prepared and still hesitating, might have been easily done), then the Assembly 
could have adjourned at once to the very center of the insurgent district. All 
this done at once, and resolutely, not later than the middle or end of May, 
might have opened chances both for the insurrection and for the National 
Assembly.
But such a determined course was not to be expected from the representatives of 
German shopocracy. These aspiring statesmen were not at all freed from their 
illusions. Those members who had lost their fatal belief in the strength and 
inviolability of the Parliament had already taken to their heels; the Democrats 
who remained, were not so easily induced to give up dreams of power and 
greatness which they had cherished for a twelvemonth. True to the course they 
had hitherto pursued, they shrank back from decisive action until every chance 
of success, nay, every chance to succumb, with at least the honors of war, had 
passed away. In order, then, to develop a fictitious, busy-body sort of 
activity, the sheer impotency of which, coupled with its high pretension, could 
not but excite pity and ridicule, they continued insinuating resolutions, 
addresses, and requests to an Imperial Lieutenant, who not even noticed them; to 
ministers who were in open league with the enemy. And when at last William 
Wolff, member for Striegan, one of the editors of the New Rhenish Gazette, the 
only really revolutionary man in the whole Assembly, told them that if they 
meant what they said, they had better give over talking, and declare the 
Imperial Lieutenant, the chief traitor to the country, an outlaw at once; then 
the entire compressed virtuous indignation of these parliamentary gentlemen 
burst out with an energy which they never found when the Government heaped 
insult after insult upon them.
Of course, for Wolff's proposition was the best sensible word spoken within the 
walls of St. Paul's Church; of course, for it was the very things that was to be 
done, and such plain language going so direct to the purpose, could not but 
insult a set of sentimentalists, who were resolute in nothing but irresolution, 
and who, too cowardly to act, had once for all made up their minds that in doing 
nothing, they were doing exactly what was to be done. Every word which cleared 
up, like lightning, the infatuated, but intentional nebulosity of their minds, 
every hint that was adapted to lead them out of the labyrinth where they 
obstinated themselves to take up as lasting an abode as possible, every clear 
conception of matters as they actually stood, was, of course, a crime against 
the majesty of this Sovereign Assembly.
Shortly after the position of the honorable gentlemen in Frankfort became 
untenable, in spite of resolutions, appeals, interpellations, and proclamations, 
they retreated, but not into the insurgent districts; that would have been too 
resolute a step. They went to Stuttgart, where the Wurtemberg Government kept up 
a sort of expectative neutrality. There, at last, they declared the Lieutenant 
of the Empire to have forfeited his power, and elected from their own body a 
Regency of five. This Regency at once proceeded to pass a Militia law, which was 
actually in all due force sent to all the Governments of Germany.
They the very enemies of the Assembly, were ordered to levy forces in its 
defence! Then there was created--on paper, of course--an army for the defence of 
the National Assembly. Divisions, brigades, regiments, batteries, everything was 
regulated and ordained. Nothing was wanted but reality, for that army, of 
course, was never called into existence.
One last scheme offered itself to the General Assembly. The Democratic 
population from all parts of the country sent deputations to place itself at the 
disposal of the Parliament, and to urge it on to a decisive action. The people, 
knowing what the intentions of the Wurtemberg Government were, implored the 
National Assembly to force that Government into an open and active participation 
with their insurgent neighbors. But no. The National Assembly, in goings to 
Stuttgart, had delivered itself up to the tender mercies of the Wurtemberg 
Government. The members knew it, and repressed the agitation among the people. 
They thus lost the last remnant of influence which they might yet have retained. 
They earned the contempt they deserved, and the Imperial Lieutenant put a stop 
to the Democratic farce by shutting up, on the 18th of June, 1849, the room 
where the Parliament met, and by ordering the members of the Regency to leave 
the country.
Next they went to Baden, into the camp of the insurrection; but there they were 
now useless. Nobody noticed them. The Regency, however, in the name of the 
Sovereign German people, continued to save the country by its exertions. It made 
an attempt to get recognized by foreign powers, by delivering passports to 
anybody who would accept of them. It issued proclamations, and sent 
commissioners to insurge those very districts of Wurtemberg whose active 
assistance it had refused when it was yet time; of course, without effect. We 
have now under our eye an original report, sent to the Regency by one of these 
commissioners, Herr Roesler (member for Oels), the contents of which are rather 
characteristic. It is dated, Stuttgart, June 30, 1849. After describing the 
adventures of half a dozen of these commissioners in a resultless search for 
cash, he gives a series of excuses for not having yet gone to his post, and then 
delivers himself of a most weighty argument respecting possible differences 
between Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, and Wurtemberg, with their possible 
consequences. After having fully considered this, he comes, however, to the 
conclusion that there is no more chance. Next, he proposes to establish relays 
of trustworthy men for the conveyance of intelligence, and a system of espionage 
as to the intentions of the Wurtemberg Ministry and the movements of the troops. 
This letter never reached its address, for when it was written the "Regency" had 
already passed entirely into the "foreign department," viz., Switzerland; and 
while poor Herr Roesler troubled his head about the intentions of the formidable 
ministry of a sixth-rate kingdom, a hundred thousand Prussian, Bavarian, and 
Hessian soldiers had already settled the whole affair in the last battle under 
the walls of Rastatt.
Thus vanished the German Parliament, and with it the first and last creation of 
the Revolution. Its convocation had been the first evidence that there actually 
had been a revolution in January; and it existed as long as this, the first 
modern German Revolution, was not yet brought to a close. Chosen under the 
influence of the capitalist class by a dismembered, scattered, rural population, 
for the most part only awaking from the dumbness of feudalism, this Parliament 
served to bring in one body upon the political arena all the great popular names 
of 1820-1848, and then to utterly ruin them. All the celebrities of middle class 
Liberalism were here collected. The bourgeoisie expected wonders; it earned 
shame for itself and its representatives. The industrial and commercial 
capitalist class were more severely defeated in Germany than in any other 
country; they were first worsted, broken, expelled from office in every 
individual State of Germany, and then put to rout, disgraced and hooted in the 
Central German Parliament. Political Liberalism, the rule of the bourgeoisie, be 
it under a Monarchical or Republican form of government, is forever impossible 
in Germany.
In the latter period of its existence, the German Parliament served to disgrace 
forever that section which had ever since March, 1848 headed the official 
opposition, the Democrats representing the interests of the small trading, and 
partially of the farming class. That class was, in May and June, 1849, given a 
chance to show its means of forming a stable Government in Germany. We have seen 
how it failed; not so much by adverse circumstances as by the actual and 
continued cowardice in all trying movements that had occurred since the outbreak 
of the revolution; by showing in politics the same shortsighted, pusillanimous, 
wavering spirit, which is characteristic of its commercial operations. In May, 
1849, it had, by this course, lost the confidence of the real fighting mass of 
all European insurrections, the working class. But yet, it had a fair chance. 
The German Parliament belonged to it, exclusively, after the Reactionists and 
Liberals had withdrawn. The rural population was in its favor. Two-thirds of the 
armies of the smaller States, one-third of the Prussian army, the majority of 
the Prussian Landwehr (reserve or militia), were ready to join it, if it only 
acted resolutely, and with that courage which is the result of a clear insight 
into the state of things. But the politicians who led on this class were not 
more clear-sighted than the host of petty tradesmen which followed them. They 
proved even to be more infatuated, more ardently attached to delusions 
voluntarily kept up, more credulous, more incapable of resolutely dealing with 
facts than the Liberals. Their political importance, too, is reduced below the 
freezing-point, But not having actually carried their common-place principles 
into execution, they were, under very favorable circumstances, capable of a 
momentary resurrection, when this last hope was taken from them, just as it was 
taken from their colleagues of the "pure Democracy" in France by the coup d'etat 
of Louis Bonaparte.
The defeat of the south-west German insurrection, and the dispersion of the 
German Parliament, bring the history of the first German insurrection to a 
close. We have now to cast a parting glance upon the victorious members of the 
counter-revolutionary alliance; we shall do this in our next letter. [1]
LONDON, September 24, 1852.



Footnotes
[1] After repeated search I have been unable to find the "next letter" referred 
to in the above paragraph; and, if it was ever written, there seems no doubt it 
was never published.--E. M. A. 








XX. 
THE LATE TRIAL AT COLOGNE.



DECEMBER 22, 1852.
You will have ere this received by the European papers numerous reports of the 
Communist Monster Trial at Cologne, Prussia, and of its result. But as none of 
the reports is anything like a faithful statement of the facts, and as these 
facts throw a glaring light upon the political means by which the continent of 
Europe is kept in bondage, I consider it necessary to revert to this trial.
The Communist or Proletarian party, as well as other parties, had lost, by 
suppression of the rights of association and meeting, the means of giving to 
itself a legal organization on the Continent. Its leaders, besides, had been 
exiled from their countries. But no political party can exist without an 
organization; and that organization which both the liberal bourgeois and the 
Democratic shopkeeping class were enabled more or less to supply by the social 
station, advantages, and long-established, every-day intercourse of their 
members, the proletarian class, without such social station and pecuniary means, 
was necessarily compelled to seek in secret association. Hence, both in France 
and Germany, sprung up those numerous secret Societies which have, ever since 
1819, one after another, been discovered by the police, and prosecuted as 
conspiracies; but if many of them were really conspiracies, formed with the 
actual intention of upsetting the Government for the time being,-- and he is a 
coward that under certain circumstances would not conspire, just as he is a fool 
who, under other circumstances, would do so;--there were some other Societies 
which were formed with a wider and more elevated purpose, which knew that the 
upsetting of an existing Government was but a passing stage in the great 
impending struggle, and which intended to keep together and to prepare the 
party, whose nucleus they formed, for the last decisive combat which must, one 
day or another, crush forever in Europe the domination, not of mere "tyrants," 
"despots" and "usurpers," but of a power far superior, and far more formidable 
than theirs; that of capital over labor.
The organization of the advanced Communist party in Germany was of this kind. In 
accordance with the principles of the "Manifesto" [1] (published in 1848), and 
with those explained in the series of articles on "Revolution and 
Counter-Revolution in Germany," published in the New York Daily Tribune, this 
party never imagined itself capable of producing, at any time and at its 
pleasure, that revolution which was to carry its ideas into practice. It studied 
the causes that hall produced the revolutionary movement in 1848, and the causes 
that made them fail. Recognizing the social antagonism of classes at the bottom 
of all political struggles, it applied itself to the study of the conditions 
under which one class of society can and must be called on to represent the 
whole of the interests of a nation, and thus politically to rule over it. 
History showed to the Communist party how, after the landed aristocracy of the 
Middle Ages, the monied power of the first capitalists arose and seized the 
reins of government; how the social influence and political rule of this 
financial section of capitalists was superseded by the rising strength since the 
introduction of steam, of the manufacturing capitalists, and how at the present 
moment two more classes claim their turn of domination, the petty trading class 
and the industrial working class. The practical revolutionary experience of 
1848-1849 confirmed the reasonings of theory, which led to the conclusion that 
the Democracy of the petty traders must first have its turn, before the 
Communist working class could hope to permanently establish itself in power and 
destroy that system of wage-slavery which keeps it under the yoke of the 
bourgeoisie. Thus the secret organization of the Communists could not have the 
direct purpose of upsetting the present Governments of Germany. Being formed to 
upset not these, but the insurrectionary Government, which is sooner or later to 
follow them, its members might, and certainly would, individually, lend an 
active hand to a revolutionary movement against the present status quo in its 
turn; but the preparation of such a movement, otherwise than by spreading of 
Communist opinions by the masses, could not be an object of the Association. So 
well was this foundation of the Society understood by the majority of its 
members, that when the place-hunting ambition of some tried to turn it into a 
conspiracy for making an extempore revolution, they were speedily turned out.
Now, according to no law upon the face of the earth, could such an Association 
be called a plot, a conspiracy for purposes of high treason. If it was a 
conspiracy, it was one against, not the existing Government, but its probable 
successor. And the Prussian Government was aware of it. That was the cause why 
the eleven defendants were kept in solitary confinement during eighteen months, 
spent, on the part of the authorities, in the strangest judicial feats. Imagine, 
that after eight months' detention, the prisoners were remanded for some months 
more, "there being no evidence of any crime against them!" And when at last they 
were brought before a jury, there was not a single overt act of a treasonable 
nature proved against them. And yet they were convicted, and you will speedily 
see how.
One of the emissaries of the society was arrested in May, 1851, and from 
documents found upon him, other arrests followed. A Prussian police officer, a 
certain Stieber, was immediately ordered to trace the ramifications, in London, 
of the pretended plot. He succeeded in obtaining some papers connected with the 
above-mentioned seceders from the society, who had, after being turned out, 
formed an actual conspiracy in Paris and London. These papers were obtained by a 
double crime. A man named Reuter was bribed to break open the writing-desk of 
the secretary of the Society, and steal the papers therefrom. But that was 
nothing yet. This theft led to the discovery and conviction of the so-called 
Franco-German plot, in Paris, but it gave no clue as to the great Communist 
Association. The Paris plot, we may as well here observe, was under the 
direction of a few ambitious imbeciles and political chevaliers d'industrie in 
London, and of a formerly convicted forger, then acting as a police spy in 
Paris; their dupes made up, by rabid declamations and blood-thirsty rantings, 
for the utter insignificance of their political existence.
The Prussian police, then, had to look out for fresh discoveries. They 
established a regular office of secret police at the Prussian Embassy in London. 
A police agent, Greif by name, held his odious vocation under the title of an 
attache to the Embassy -- a step which should suffice to put all Prussian 
embassies out of the pale of international law, and which even the Austrians 
have not yet dared to take. Under him worked a certain Fleury, a merchant in the 
city of London, a man of some fortune and rather respectably connected, one of 
those low creatures who do the basest actions from an innate inclination to 
infamy. Another agent was a commercial clerk named Hirsch, who, however, had 
already been denounced as a spy on his arrival. He introduced himself into the 
society of some German Communist refugees in London, and they, in order to 
obtain proofs of his real character, admitted him for a short time. The proofs 
of his connection with the police were very soon obtained, and Herr Hirsch, from 
that time, absented himself. Although, however, he thus resigned all 
opportunities of gaining the information he was paid to procure, he was not 
inactive. From his retreat in Kensington, where he never met one of the 
Communists in question, he manufactured every week pretended reports of 
pretended sittings of a pretended Central Committee of that very conspiracy 
which the Prussian police could not get hold of. The contents of these reports 
were of the most absurd nature; not a Christian name was correct, not a name 
correctly spelt, not a single individual made to speak as he would be likely to 
speak. His master, Fleury, assisted him in this forgery, and it is not yet 
proved that "Attache" Greif can wash his hands of these infamous proceedings. 
The Prussian Government, incredible to say, took these silly fabrications for 
gospel truth, and you may imagine what a confusion such depositions created in 
the evidence brought before the jury. When the trial came on, Herr Stieber, the 
already mentioned police officer, got into the witness-box, swore to all these 
absurdities, and, with no little self-complacency, maintained that he had a 
secret agent in the very closest intimacy with those parties in London who were 
considered the prime movers in this awful conspiracy. This secret agent was very 
secret indeed, for he had hid his face for eight months in Kensington, for fear 
he might actually see one of the parties whose most secret thoughts, words and 
doings, he pretended to report week after week.
Messrs. Hirsch and Fleury, however, had another invention in store. They worked 
up the whole of the reports they had made into an "original minute book" of the 
sittings of the Secret Supreme Committee, whose existence was maintained by the 
Prussian police; and Herr Stieber, finding that this book wondrously agreed with 
the reports already received from the same parties, at once laid it before the 
jury, declaring upon his oath that after serious examination, and according to 
his fullest conviction, that book was genuine. It was then that most of the 
absurdities reported by Hirsch were made public. You may imagine the surprise of 
the pretended members of that Secret Committee when they found things stated of 
them which they never knew before. Some who were baptized William were here 
christened Louis or Charles; others, at the time they were at the other end of 
England, were made to have pronounced speeches in London; others were reported 
to have read letters they never had received; they were made to have met 
regularly on a Thursday, when they used to have a convivial reunion, once a 
week, on Wednesdays; a working man, who could hardly write, figured as one of 
the takers of minutes, and signed as such; and they all of them were made to 
speak in a language which, if it may be that of Prussian police stations, was 
certainly not that of a reunion in which literary men, favorably known in their 
country, formed the majority. And, to crown the whole, a receipt was forged for 
a sum of money, pretended to have been paid by the fabricators to the pretended 
secretary of the fictitious Central Committee for this book; but the existence 
of this pretended secretary rested merely upon a hoax that some malicious 
Communist had played upon the unfortunate Hirsch.
This clumsy fabrication was too scandalous an affair not to produce the contrary 
of its intended effect. Although the London friends of the defendants were 
deprived of all means to bring the facts of the case before the jury -- although 
the letters they sent to the counsel for the defence were suppressed by the post 
-- although the documents and affidavits they succeeded in getting into the 
hands of these legal gentlemen were not admitted in evidence, yet the general 
indignation was such that even the public accusers, nay, even Herr Stieber -- 
whose oath had been given as a guarantee for the authenticity of that book--were 
compelled to recognize it as a forgery.
This forgery, however, was not the only thing of the kind of which the police 
was guilty. Two or three more cases of the sort came out during the trial. The 
documents stolen by Reuter were interpolated by the police so as to disfigure 
their meaning. A paper, containing some rabid nonsense, was written in a 
handwriting imitating that of Dr. Marx, and for a time it was pretended that it 
had been written by him, until at last the prosecution was obliged to 
acknowledge the forgery. But for every police infamy that was proved as such, 
there were five or six fresh ones brought forward, which could not, at the 
moment, be unveiled, the defence being taken by surprise, the proofs having to 
be got from London, and every correspondence of the counsel for the defence with 
the London Communist refugees being in open court treated as complicity in the 
alleged plot!
That Greif and Fleury are what they are here represented to be has been stated 
by Herr Stieber himself, in his evidence; as to Hirsch, he has before a London 
magistrate confessed that he forged the "minute book," by order and with the 
assistance of Fluery, and then made his escape from this country in order to 
evade a criminal prosecution.
The Government could stand few such branding disclosures as came to light during 
the trial. It had a jury -- six nobles, two Government officials. These were not 
the men to look closely into the confused mass of evidence heaped before them 
during six weeks, when they heard it continually dinned into their ears that the 
defendants were the chiefs of a dreadful Communist conspiracy, got up in order 
to subvert everything sacred--property, family, religion, order, government and 
law! And yet, had not the Government, at the same time, brought it to the 
knowledge of the privileged classes, that an acquittal in this trial would be 
the signal for the suppression of the jury: and that it would be taken as a 
direct political demonstration -- as a proof of the middle-class Liberal 
Opposition being ready to unite even with the most extreme revolutionists --the 
verdict would have been an acquittal. As it was, the retroactive application of 
the new Prussian code enabled the Government to have seven prisoners convicted, 
while four merely were acquitted, and those convicted were sentenced to 
imprisonment varying from three to six years, as you have, doubtless, already 
stated at the time the news reached you.
LONDON, December 1, 1852.



Footnotes
[1] "The Manifesto." This is the celebrated "Communist Manifesto," which the 
Communist Congress, held in London, November, 1847, delegated Marx and Engels to 
draw up. It was published in 1848 (in London). The fundamental proposition of 
the Manifesto, Engels writes in his introduction to the "Communist Manifesto," 
translated by S. Moore, and published by W. Reeves, "is that in every historical 
epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social 
organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built 
up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual 
history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind has been a 
history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling 
and oppressed classes; that nowadays a stage has been reached where the 
exploited and oppressed class--the proletariat--cannot attain its emancipation 
without at the same time, and once and for all emancipating society at large 
from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions, and class struggles." As 
to this fundamental propostion of the Manifesto, it "belongs," says Engels, 
"wholly and solely to Marx." The "Communist Manifesto" has been translated into 
well-nigh every language, and is, again to quote Engels, "the most international 
production of all Socialist literature." 





