KARL MARX
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Revolution and counter-revo ut on
3 1924 028 552 457
31924028552457REVOLUTION
AND
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONBY THE SAME AUTHOR.
Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Pro-
duction. By Karl Marx. Translated from the
third German Edition by S. Moore and Edward
Aveling, and Edited by Frederick Engels.
Fifth Edition (1896). Demy 8vo, 10s. 6d.
“ So great a position has not been taken by any work on economic
science since the appearance of ‘ The Wealth of Nations.'"—
Athenaeum.
“Nowhere before has the irresistible march of Capitalism been so
dramatically pictured; never before have the innumerable injuries
it has inflicted on the weaker classes been discussed so vividly."—
Pall Mall Gazette.
Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd., London.REVOLUTION
AND
COUNTER-REVOLUTION
OR
GERMANY IN 1848
BY
KARL MARX
EDITED BY ELEANOR MARX AVELING
LONDON
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LTD.
NEW YORK : CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1896NOTE 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. (“ DerAcht-
zehnte 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 1851-52, 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 Govern-
ment—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
vVI
Note by the Editor.
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 Govern-
ment 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 desti-
tute—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 unendur-Note by the Editor.	vii
able but for the faith that was in these men and
women, and but for their invincible “ Humor.” I use
the German word because I know no English one
that quite expresses the same thing—such a combina-
tion of humour and good-humour, 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 economi-
cal work, “ Zur Kritik der Politischen CEconomie ”
fpublished 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 dis-
advantageous 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.
With that we paid for the little coffin in which the
poor child now sleeps peacefully. I had no cradlevi ii	Note by the Editor.
for her when she was born, and even the last small
resting-place was long 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,1
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 Ger-
many here reprinted. They seem to have created
such a sensation that before the series had been com-
pleted Marx was engaged as regular London cor-
respondent. On the 12th 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, 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 ques-
tions of European politics.”
Not the least remarkable among these contribu-
tions were those dealing with Lord Palmerston and
the Russian Government. “ Urquhart’s writings on
Russia,” says Marx, “ had interested but not con-
vinced me. In order to arrive at a definite opinion, I
1 Mr. C. A. Dana was at this time still in sympathy with
Socialism. The effects of Brook Farm had not yet worn off.Note by the Editor.
IX
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 re-
produced one of these articles, and part of it was
issued in pamphlet form by Mr. Tucker, London.”1
And the Sheffield Foreign Affairs Committee thanked
Marx for the “ great public service rendered by the
admirable exposi” 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,2 both American and Euro-
pean. It was a passionate anti-slavery organ, and
also recognised that there “ was need for a true
organisation 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 for each contribution—not exactly brilliant re-
muneration.
It will be noted that the twentieth chapter, pro-
mised in the nineteenth, does not appear. It may
1	“ Herr Vogt,” pp. 59 and 185. London, i860.
2	Including Bruno Bauer, Bayard Taylor, Ripley, and many
of the Brook Farmers. The editor was Horace Greeley.X
Note by the Editor.
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 im-
mediate 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 Diissel-
dorf in 1848. What the writer could only analyse, the
eminent painterhas 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 correc-
tion. I have therefore only removed a few obvious
printer’s errors.Note by the Editor.
xi
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 lettrs as pub-
lished in this volume.
Eleanor Marx Aveling.
Sydenham, April, 1896.
ERRATA.
Page 62, line 6 from end, for "’nomad," read run mad.
„ 88, line 16 from end, for “ Vilarges,” read Villagos.
„ 92, line 3, for “ Modern Democracy,’' read “ moderate
Democracy.”CONTENTS
CHAP.	PAGE
PREFACE -	...	.v
~*—l. GERMANY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLU-
TION -	-	-	-	-	I
II.	THE PRUSSIAN STATE..................13
III.	THE OTHER GERMAN STATES -	26
IV.	AUSTRIA -	32
V.	THE VIENNA INSURRECTION ....	40
VI.	THE BERLIN INSURRECTION ...	45
VII.	THE FRANKFORT NATIONAL ASSEMBLY	-	51
VIII.	POLES, TSCHECHS, AND GERMANS -	58
IX.	PANSLAVISM—THE SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN WAR	64
X.	THE PARIS RISING — THE FRANKFORT AS-
SEMBLY ..................................... 69
-XI. THE VIENNA INSURRECTION ....	75
XII.	THE STORMING OF VIENNA—THE BETRAYAL
OF VIENNA.........................83
XIII.	THE PRUSSIAN ASSEMBLY—THE NATIONAL AS-
SEMBLY ................................93
XIV.	THE RESTORATION OF ORDER — DIET AND
CHAMBER...........................99
XV.	THE TRIUMPH OF PRUSSIA -	-	-	-	106
XVI.	THE ASSEMBLY AND THE GOVERNMENTS	-	112
XVII.	INSURRECTION	-	-	-	-	117
JCVIII. PETTY TRADERS......................I23
XIX. THE CLOSE OF THE INSURRECTION	129
XX. THE LATE TRIAL AT COLOGNE -	-	-	136
NOTES	  145REVOLUTION AND
COUNTER-REVOLUTION.
i.
GERMANY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE
REVOLUTION.
October 25th, 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 unexampled2
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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
Cthat superstition which attributed revolutions to the
(\ ill-will of a few agitators have long passed away.
!l Everyone knows nowadays that wherever there is a
I revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social
want in the background, which is prevented, by out-
turn institutions, from satisfying itself. The want
J may not yet 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 mani-
festations oiliiatlanaLwants -and- necessities, -more or
less clearly- unders-toocL-but very,, distinctly- felt by
numerous classes in every country, is a fact recognised
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 cir-
cumstances, but under no circumstances does it explain
anything—not even show how it came to pass thatGermany at Outbreak of Revolution.	3
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 sup-
pression, 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,(l> 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 184.8. 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,4
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 fact0, to explain the
chief events, the principal vicissitudes of that move-
ment, 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 groundworkTof-everv political
organisation was, in Germany more rnmplira.tfA than
jn 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 rtprmany ViaH i-ptainprl a gef-at por-
tion 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 Mediaeval supremacy over the
peasantry of their demesnes, as well as their exemp-
tion from taxes. Feudalism was more flourishing in
some localities than in others, but novjhere except on
the left bank of the Rhine was it entirely destroyed.
This feudal nobility, then extremely numerous and
partijTverjT^ealthy, was_ considered, officially, the
first “.Order” ini thexountrv. It furnishcd-the-higher
GovermneritTq^TcIals, it almost exclusively officered
the army.
The bourgeoisie of Germaruz_was—bv—for-not as
wealthy ~and ~ con'-pntraWi	—that—©fUtrapce orGermany at Outbreak of Revolution.
s
England. The ancient manufactures of Germany;
had been destroyed by the introduction of steam, and
the rapidly extending supremacy of English manu-
factures ; 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 manu-
facturing 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 tiffie, 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 thi:
backwardness of German manufactures were manifold
but two will suffice to account for it: the unfavour-
able geographical situation of the country, at a distance
from the Atlantic, which had become the great high-
way for the world’s trade, and the continuous wars in
which Germany was involved, and which were 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 pre-
vented .the German middle classes from attaining that
political supremacy which the English bourgeoisie has
enjoyed ever since 1688, and which the French con-
quered 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'6
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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
victory on the field of commercial legislation. And,
irtainly, the Prussian Protective Tariff of 1818, and
the formation of the Zollverein/2) were worth a good
deal more to the traders and manufacturers of Ger-
many 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
ievelopment of its most important interests checked
py the political constitution of the country; by its
l/andom division among thirty-six princes-with con-
flicting tendencies and caprices ; by the feudal fetters
lupon agriculture and the trade connected with it; by
the prying superintendence to which an ignorant and
presumptuous bureaucracy subjected all its transac-
tions. At the same time the extension and consolida-
tion 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, equal-
| ised their interests, centralised their strength. The
I natural consequence was the passing of the whole
/ mass of them into the camp of the LibefaLQppesition,
and the gaining of the first serious struggle of the
I 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 middleGermany at Outbreak of Revolution.
7
class movement of Germany. We shall hereafter
revert to this Liberal Opposition movement of 1840-
47-
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 ex-
ceedingly 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 pre-
dominates, from the absence of wealthier competitors
or influence. This class, a most important one ini
every modern body politic, and in all modern revolu-l
tions, is still more important in Germany, where!
during the recent struggles, it generally played thel
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 their8
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 re-
moving 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.
Thp working rlasg in Gprmany is, in its Social and
political development, as Jar 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 develop-
ment of the conditions of existence for a numerous,
wealthy, concentrated, and powerful middle class.
The working class movement-itself never—is- in-
dependent, never is of an exclusively proletarian
character until all the different factions of the middle
class, and particularly its njost progressive faction, the
large manufacturefsHTave conquered political power,
and ■remodelled' th'e^Sfate according to their wants.
It is themthafThe inevitable conflict hptweao-thg em-
plover^and the employed—becomes -imminent, and
cannot be adjourned any longer; that the working
class can no longer be put off with delusive hopes andGermany at Outbreak of Revolution. Q
promises never to be realised ; that the great problem
of the nineteenth century, the abolition of the pro-
letariat, 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 differ-
ence 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-establish-
ment of guilds and Mediaeval privileged trades’ cor-
porations. Yet from the manufacturing districts,
where the modern system of production predominated,
and in consequence of the facilities of inter-communi-
cation 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 ne-
cessities ; but they-were a mere minority. If the
active movement of the middle classes may be dated
from 1840, that of the working class commences its
advent by the insurrections of the Silesian and Bo-
hemian factory operatives in 1844, and w,e shall soonlo
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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
labourers, constitutes a considerable majority of the
entire nation. But 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 labourers. This class, placed
between the large untaxed feudal landowners, and
the smaller peasantry and farm labourers, for obvious
reasons found in an alliance with the anti-feudal
middle class of the towns its most natural political
course. Then there were, secondly, the small free-
holders, 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 labour
in favour of the lord of the manor. Lastly, the agri-
cultural labourers, 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 tinge
freeholders, the feudal tenants, and the agriculturalGermany at Outbreak of Revolution.
H
labourers, never troubled thpir heads mnrh ahnnt
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 agricul-
tural 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 move-
ment ; they require the initiatory impulse of the more
concentrated, more enlightened, more easily moved
people of the towns.
The preceding short sketch of the most important
of the classes, which in their aggregate formed the
German nation at the outbreak oi the recenf move-
ments, will'"already-P£^U^koi_ia_exp]amJi_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, everjl
province, are mixed in different proportions ; wheni
above all, there is no great centre in the country, not
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 pqlitical dismemberment of Germany into thfeiT
dozep of more or less impoftaill pilllCipali'Lfes- is12	Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
equally explained hy-this CQnfusi&n-OTTFmTtritiplicitV
of the elements whichxnDy^se-tbe-rnrtiofk and_which
again vary in every locality. Where there are no
common-interests there ran he nn*TiTrMTv~of purpose,
much less of actiom The German Confederation, it
is true, was declared everlastingly indissoluble ; yet
the Confederation anH ilg—euM-nn-	Tbtel^-npver
represented German unity. The very highest pitch
to whictT'centraHsatlorTwas 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. Ger-
many 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 estab-
lished in 1814, underwent no change on this account.
Having drawn these preliminary conclusions from
our premisses, we shall see, in our next, how the afore-
said 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 i%lh, 1851.
The political movement of the middle class or bour-
geoisie, in Germany, may be dated from 1S40. It
had been preceded by symptoms showing that the
moneyed and industrial class of thaFTountry was
ripening into a state which would no longer allow it
to continue apathetic and passive under the pressure
of a half-feudal, half-bnreanr-ratir Mnnarrhigm £be
smallef~princes of Germany, partly to insure to thente^
selves a greater independence against the supremacy of
Austria and Prussia, or against the influence of the
nobilit'y’ot their own States, partly in nrrW tn con-
solidate into a whole the disconnected provinces\
united under their rule by the Congress 01 Vienna,*1
one after the other granted constitutions of a more or
less liberal character. They could Bo so without any
danger to themselves; for if the Diet of the Con-
federation, this mere puppet of Austria and Prussia,
was to encroach upon their independence as sove-
reigns, 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,
Wiirtemberg, 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
13H
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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
thes^ small assemblies : the "Rottecks, the Welckers,
the KSern'ErsTthe^jordans, the Stiives, the Eisenmanns,
those great “ popular men ” ( Volksmanner) who, after
a more or less noisy, but always unsuccessful, oppo-
sition 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^iirst. specimens upon German soil
of the trader in politics and opposition, by their
speeches and writings made-4amfiiati--te-Jie_German
ear the language nf Toiu-iiinHnii.-rlism, 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.
GermanJiterat-ure, too, laboured under the influence
of the political excitement into which all Eufope had
been thrownl5y'the events of 1830. A crude Con-
stitutfonulisnrrur'urst'irrcruder Republicanism, were
preached bv almost all writer.s_^£~JJa«--44mft. TT”Ee>
came more ancl 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-governmental spirit.
In order to complete the confusion of ideas reigningThe Prussian State.
15
after 1830 in Germany, with these elements of political
opposition there were mixed up ill-digested university-
recollections of German philosophy, ^nd misunder-
stood gleanings from French Socialism, particularly
Saint-Simonism ; and the clique of writers who ex-
patiated upon this heterogeneous conglomerate of
ideas, presumptuously called themselves “ Young
Germany,” or “ the Modern School.” They have since
repented 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 hither-
to it had heen the fata nf German ears to hear ex-
poundal—and attempted to restore, la—gdorv—the
memory of the heroes..of t he fi rst -French--Kevolutien.
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 under-j
going a great change in Germany. By degrees thd
position in life enabled them, under an Absolute Mon-1!16
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
archy, to
tioivand to form
anything like an independent political opinion,_um£ed
int^pQ-0 mighty phalanx of opposition agaihst the
exiSfmglsystem. 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 pub-
lished but what had previously obtained its appro-
bation. Look at Vienna, for instance. The^jpsople
of Vienna in industry and manufactures, second to
none perhaps in Germany; in cpirit, couragc;~and
revolutionary energy, proving themselves far superior
to all, wete-yetmore tgaaiaoEas	r^i 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
Metternir.h’s Governnocn-t-ltad—succeeded in keeping
them. ------	3t;nn	h
system, po 1 iticaLinforroatiefl w^s an almost exclusive
monopoly of snrh Hasqpq of society as could attord to
pay forTts being smuggled into the country, and more
particularly of those whose interests were most seri5
ously attacked by the existing state of things, namely,
the mamrfact 11 riTip;~rrm-f~ romin ercial classes. _TRgy.
therefore, were	mass against the
continuance of a more or less disguised Ajiaalvtism,
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 deathThe Prussian State.
17
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	William IV. of
Prussia,. . "It was- agreed upon all hands that tfae-old~
system was exploded, wnrn-nnt. 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 Ddsird,” had been a
plain, unpretending simpleton, half conscious of his
own nullity, without any fixed opinions, ruled princi-
pally by the habits contracted during his education,
“ Frederick William le Ddsird ” was something quite
different. While he certainly surpassed his French
original in weakness of character, he was neither with-
out 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 judg-
ment 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 symp-ithi'ac juprp
with the feudal element. Himself one of the founders
of, ami Llllef 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
Bi8
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 accord-
ing to his discretion over his loyal burgesses and
peasants, and thus being himself the chief of a com-
plete 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 insurmount-
able 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 inde-
pendence of action should remain to the King—such
was the beau ideal which-Frederick William IV. under-
took to realise, and which he is again trying to realise
at the present moment.
It took some time before the Prussian bourgeoisie,
not very well versed in theoretical questions, found
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-speer.h. otety o£Jua, yen*- 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 parsi-
moniously arranged system of government, and a
moderately filled State Treasury. In two years everyThe Prussian State.
*9
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.
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—tha_jfliddl£--cki&s©s--liad found
out thek_errorr-aftd*^ad’-tm*ned'-ferociotrsiy~^'gaTrratj the
King.. In the Ph:n~ Previn 1——mil nilT "iTT less
generally al,L Q3i£x~.Bju-ssia, 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/35 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-lie-could- nofr-ewntmne to
reign without making some slight concession .ta.-tl.ie
popiTl'aTPgtiayTbr4h-atx‘Repies,eii tation of the People,”
which, as the last remnant of the long - forgotten20
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
promises of 1813 and 1815, had been embodied in the
law of 1820. H^ found thgL. least objectionable mode
of Satisfying this^mfoward law in calling together the
Stailding~Committees of the Provincial JJtefs.~ The
Provincial Diets had EeerTmstituteT m T"823. They
consisted for every one of the eight provinces of the
kingdom :—(1) 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 Jcnights, or lower
jjobihty:—f-3) Of representatives of towns. (4) (5f
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 thgsg"fcight
Provincial_j~)iets elected a Committed and these eight
Committees were. now-called -to. Berlin in order to
form a Representative Assembly for the puirpase of
votingJdie-Bftueh-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-.-refus'al, 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
that
the spirit oi opposition was. no danger-confined to the
bourgeoisie. _^A—paxt„ of. the pea-santey-- 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
againsl aisolutism,-bureaucracy, and feudal restora-
tion, had equally pronounced againsttha. Government,
and for a Representative Constitution. The King’s
plan had signally failed ; he had got no mnnpy) andThe Prussian State.
21
hadJncreased the power of the opposition. The sub-
sequent sitting of the Provincial Diels 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-humoured
replies of the exasperated King made the evil still
greater.
Governrqent went on increasing. For a time, abate-
ments 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 mys*22
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
terious “ future Representation of the People.”
Rothschild 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 thgre was no possibility of escaping the fatal
“ Representation oi tne reopfe.T Rothschild’s refusal
was known 'in "afftlTffTfT‘1846, and in February of the
next year ^he King called together all the eight
Provincial PietA.to^BSt^wy^gcaii^Then^ into—one
“ United Diet.” This Diet was to do the work re-
quired, in case of need, by the law of 1820 ; ij: was to
vote loans and increased taxes, but bevond that it was
to have no rights. Its voice upon general legislation
was'to be'Tnerely 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 assemblies;
the relations between them and the Government soon
became acrimonious, and whgp thit-Hm, which was
again stated_tO-be—req-u-ked for railway constructions,
was" demanded from them, they agaia—refused to
grant it.
This vote very soon brought their sitting to a close.
The Kipg, more and more exasperated, dismissed
thejnjvith a reprimand, but still remained without
money. And, indeed, he had every reason tn 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 manifold
discontents that had been accumulated in the different
sqctioqs of the lower orders—that this Liberal LeagueThe Prussian State.
23
was determined to have what it wanted. In vain the
King'hatl“'ded'ared'~in the"” Opening" 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 Constitu-
tion, 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 ^jL^ftLa-revol utio-
selveSTorit. 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 sym-
pathy 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 outwartf*5hQW" 6f' Socialism, "was "caused
by a great change that had come. jQ.ver_ theTvorking
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 at-
tention paid to similar ideas in France ever since
1840 made "Socialism and Communism fashionable in
Germany also, and as far back as 1843, all news-
papers 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 con-24 Revolution and Counter-Revolutioti.
sisted in the translation of French Fourierist, Saint-
Simonian, and other doctrines into the abstruse lan-
guage of German philosophy. The German Com-
munist 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 work-
ing 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 emancipa-
tion to the Socialist and Communist doctrines, al-
though, 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,_th£tt.-n& -sepa-rate“Republican party in
Germany. People were either Constitutional Mon-
archists, or more or less clearly defined Socialists or
Communists.
With s_uch__elements the slightest collision must
have/bought 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 of32or# degree,
and even part of TEeTower .ranks of the bureaucracyThe Prussian State.
25
and military officers were all leagued against the
Government; while behind tHese^tTrcTC""Sfood the
dissatisfied masses of the_peasantry, and of the pro-
letarians of the large towns, suppcw-Uttg, 4< ir-iheJme
being, T iheral 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 pre-
paring 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
beginninsaof 184-87'on the eve-of-a-r«v€>IutiaiLand this
revolution was sure, let CQxne^.ev£a_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.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 move-
ment, 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-haeh evef-smeerthe re-
volutionary 'Tnovements pHjS3o, complataly^assed
under theldtgaQt&SR‘2fl.he-T3iet. that. Js..of Austria
and Pfussia. The several Constitutions, established
as mhtrlr'as a means of defence against the dictates of
the larger States, as to insure popularity to their
princely authors, and unity to heterogeneous Assem-
blies of Provinces, formed by the Congress of Vienna,
without any leading principle whatever—these Con- -
stitutioas. illusory as they were, had vet. proved
selves during the exciting times of 1830 and 1831.
They were*-a44—bu-t -destroyed ; whatever of them was
allowed to remain was less than a shadow, and it re-
quired 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 inThe Other German States.
27
these smaller States, very soon after 1840, abandoned
all the hopes they had formerly based upon the de-
velopment 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 Par-
liamentary government in Prussia, than they were
allowed to take the lead of the Constitutional move-
ment 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! ot their separate
meetings, were called the ^otha party, long before
1848 contemplated a plan vHnTlll, Wltll Tittle modifica-
tion, they in 1849 proposed to the representatives of
all Germany. They intpnHpH a rnmplete exclusion
of Austria from the German Confederatiorir the
establishment of a-.new. Confederation, with a new
fundamental law, and with a Federar'FarJi'ament,
und^rAc profcectiem-e-f.Prugsia, and the incorporation
of the more insignificant States into the larger ones.
All this was to be carried out the,moment Prussia
enteredTIata'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 Govern-
ments. The inventor of this scheme was Professor
Gervinus, of Heidelberg (Baden). Thus the eman-
cipation of the Prussian bourgeoisie was to be the
signal- fQr...th^LlafL[he~ mrddje^xl'a5ses~' 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 ttianiffle~rfot to the credit of its population ;28
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 opposi-
tion 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 wracking
classes, in the trades and manufactures of the towns
commenced to be .infected with the ..“poison ” of
Socialism and CommumsmTbut there being few towns
of any "importance out of Prussia, and still fewer
manufacturing districts, the movement_oLlhis-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 diffi-
culty 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 itsThe Other German States.
29
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 Govern-
ment. To attack Protestant or Catholic orthodoxy,
to attack priestcraft, was then to make an underhand
attack upon the Government itself. As to the Ger-
man Catholics, their very existence was an attack
upon the Catholic Governments of Germany, par-
ticularly Austria and Bavaria ; and as such it was
taken by those Governments. The Free Congrega-
tionalists, Protestant Dissenters, somewhat resembling*
the English and American Unitarians, openly pro-
fessed 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 dis-
tinction 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 repre-
sented, 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-men-
tioned sects sought to realise, 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 widely30
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
spread, particularly in the smaller States. Ever since
the dissolution of the German Empire by Napoleon,
the cry’~ToFa'union of all the disjecta membra of the
Germanpo3yTiacl been the most general expression
of discontent with the established order of things, and
most soap the smaller States, where the 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 bour-
geoisie, which wanted no serious revolutionary con-
vulsions, were satisfied with what we have seen they
considered “ practicable,” namely a union of all
Germany., exclusive of Austria, under the supremacy
of a C ons titutianal.Govemm e n t o f 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 re-
actionists, hoped for the re-establishment 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, pro-
nounced for a Federated Republic ; and it w^s-only
the most extexae party which, at that timer^ared
pronoun££_for a German Republic, one and-indlvisible.
Thus, Gerin&y unity was in itself aquestion big with
disunion, discord, and, inTKe”case of certain eventuali-
ties, "even qivil 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 feudalThe Other German States.
31
and bureaucratic despotism enchained their com-
mercial 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 taxes, 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, ^heterogeneous mass of-opposition,
springing from various interests, bqt more or Jess led
on by the bourgeoisie, in the first ranks of which again
marched the bourgeoisie of Prussia, and particularly
of the Rhine Province. Qn..lhe other hand1 Govern-
ments disagreeing upon many points, distrustluTof
each other. anrIl.^rticularIy~oT’'tfiat ~dr Prussia, upon
which ye'£ 'they had to rely for protection ; ia-JPxjjssia
a Government forsaken bv 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 op-
positional 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 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 con-
sideration 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 largfe stock-
jobbing 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 noi 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
32Austria.
33
very serfs, who at anyrate 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 cKamed to Metternich’s Go-
vern mentb2^theiy^t;;shEK£lthey_h’a3in'jK''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 money-dealers 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 capi-
talists 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 opposi-
tion was, therefore, to be expected from this quarter.
Thus Metternich was sure of tho support of the two
c34 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
| most powerfuLand—iaftuewtiat-classes of the empire,
ancHlS'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 multi-
farious 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 Tran-
sylvania ; 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 manu-
facturing-muddle class was but "or 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
protectioQ,_amounting even in most cases to the com-
plete 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 hipfo degree- counterpoised-..fey .internal
restrictions on manufactures, privileges on guilds, andAustria.
35
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, heredi-
tary 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 every-
where 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 organised 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,36 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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, wherever the Austrian
States touched upon a civilised country, a cordon of
literary censors was established in connection with
the cordon of custom-house 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 wonderfuF'succes£* 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 dis-
satisfaction 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_\vas_a slQW-undergpourid movement_going
on which baffled all Metternich’s efforts. Thg. wealth
and influence of the-manufacturing-and trading middleAustria.
37
class increased. The introduction of .machinery and '
steam-power in manufacturesupset in Austria, as it had
done everywhere else, the oTTrelations^mrl vital ronrii-
tionsxil.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_±he.-ald -feudal
institutions. The middle classes, more and more
induced by their business to travel abroad, introduced
some mythical knowledge of the civilised countries
situated beyond the Imperial line of customs; theiatro-
duction of.railwavsfinally.a.ccelfiratedb£tditheind.ustrial
andlatdlectual movement There was, too, a danger-
ous 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 Govern-
ment 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 jeforms. more of an administrative
than of a constitutional nature. And in the same
manner as in Prussia, a portkm-xrf-the- bureaucracy
joined the bourgeoisie. Among this hereditary caste
of officiaIs"tHe traditions of Joseph II. were not for-
gotten ; 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 Em-
peror to the “ paternal ” despotism of Metternich. A
port.ion nf the pooror. nohUifry-^gtrally-sided with the
middle class, and-.aa.tollmlowercl asses of the.popula-
tion, who always had found plenty of grounds to com-38	Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
plain 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 wholesal£.....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
iof these good Austrians did hardly go any farther.
At all events the growing impossibility of prevent-
ing 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 1847, Austria was seized, although in- anAustria.
39
inferior degree, by that political and politiro-rpliymiig
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 busi-
ness 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 satis-
fied, 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^tQQv Was matching rshq.wly but surely
towardj,, njighty .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 12th, 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 Metter-
nich, ancL.	shamefuTTy~out of ’ the
country. On the 18th of March the people of Berlin
rose in^ arms, and, afteVah 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. ViennajnayJae said.to have been
made by an almost unanimous population. The
bourgeoisie"exception of the bankers and
stock-jobbers), the petty trading class, the working
people,.one .ajod-aU arbgcTat oncfe~a"gStnsf ’a Govern-
ment detested by a,\\, a Government so universally
hated, that the small minority of nobles and money
40The Vienna Insurrection.
4i
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 labourers, 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 move-
ment, 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 ground42 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
than it would have done in a century under ordinary
circumstances.
The Re@iution in.Vienna .made the middle.class
the theoreticalTv 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 su-
premacy of the middle class. But practically the
supremacy of that class was far from being estab-
lished. 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,
irresponsihle Government in which the bourgeoisie
predominated, it was placed at the head of power.
But, at the same time, the working 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 4000 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 recognised it, and were even its most
enthusiastic supporters, they yet formed a sort of
independent and rather turbulent body, deliberating
for themselves in the “ Anla,” keeping an intermediate
position between the bourgeoisie and the working-
classes, preventing by constant agitation things from
settling down to the old every-day tranquillity, and
very often forcing their resolutions upon the Com-
mittee of Safety. Th ^working men,
hand, almost entirely thrown out oLem-pLoyment. had
to be efnpIayecLin public works at the expense of the
State, and thgjjioneyJiar_±hia. purpose had, of course,
to betaken out of the purse of -the.taxqaayers or outThe Vienna Insurrection.
43
of the chest of the city of Vienna. AH-this.could not
but become very iinplsa,ca>wfc--ta. .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 aristo-
cracy 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.
Thug_aucertai«~6eel®©ss-»eqiu^QCUQ.,sprung up -between
the middle-classes on the one -side, and„tllS_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 26th, 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 working-men, was again cemenfprl
^AstoTEF^meFTIassesofthe population, the aristo-
cracy and the money lords had disappeared, and the
peasantry were busily engaged everywhere in re-
moving, 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,44 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 major-
ity 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 2&th, 1851.
The second centre of revolutionary action was Beajjg,
and from what has been stated in the foregoing
papers, it may be guessed that fehare this action was
far from having that unanimous support ofiTGjwlt’"all
classes" 'b^wiricH it"was accompanied in Vienna. In
Prussia, the bourgeoisie had been already involved in
artnai striiaaips wbh th&Uxwernment ; a rupture had
been the result of the “United Diet”; a-bourgeois
revolution was impending, and that revolution might
have been, inTts first outbreak, quite as unanimous as
that of Vienna, had it not been for the Paris Revolu-
tion 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 Govern-
ment. The Revoliition 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 working
man. 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 favour; but they always
had retained a salutary horror of revolutionary
4546
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 ex-
perienced a considerable cooling down of their own
revolutionary ardour. They knew that the moment
i must be seized, and that, without the aid of the
' working masses, they would be defeated; and yet
their courage failed them. Thus they sideH with the
Government in the first partial and provincial out-
breaks, tried to keep the people quiet in Berlin, who,
during five days, met in crowds before the roval
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. RuLlhen
followed the attack nf rhe military nn thp crowd, the
barricades, "tEestruggle, and the defeat of royalty.
Then everything was changed the„wery-watking
Qlasses> which it had been the tendency of the bour-
geoisie to keep in the background, had1,-b£en...pushed
forward, had-faught and conquered, and all at once
were_j£janscious -at,. their strppgth. 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 be-"
cause 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. Apainst the vir.tori-
ous'working" man, although he had not yet uttered
1 any specific demands for himself, the friends and the
foes of many years united, and tha-alliance betweenThe Berlin Insurrection.
47
the bourgeoisie, and the-sTOPorters ofthe 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,piinistry of the
opposition leaders of the United . Diet,, was, to be
formed, and Tn*7e£unf f6r 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
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 ardour, had driven away on account
of their former acts of bureaucratic overbearing.
There was nothing altered in Prussia but 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 ex-
pected 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 Kip-g^diap-fallen in the highest degree after
the insurrection of the 18th March, ver^spon found48	Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
J
out that he was quite as ngcessary .ta_toese.lLl.iheral ”
ministersrss-tbej*- were to him. Xhe throne had been
spared by the insurrection ; the .throne, was _the last
existing obstacle to “ anarchy ” ; the Libera^ middle
class and its leaders, now in the ministry, had there-
fore 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 op-
po'sitTonfin order to vote as the legal and constitu-
tional organ dTthe people a new electoral, law for the
election of jin Assembly, which was to agree with the
Crown upon a new Constitution. The elections were
to £>e, indirect, the mass of voters electing a number
of electors, who then were to choose the representa-
tive. 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.
Thegg^acts of toe ministry gave a most rapid de-
velopment- to the popular, or as it now 'catted Itself,
the Democratic party. This-patty, headed by the
petty trading and shopkeeping class, and uniting
under its banner, in the beginning-of-toe 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 March,
as the base of the new governmental system. The
more moderate faction would be satisfied with a thus
“ democratised ” monarchy; the more advanced de-
manded the ultimate establishment of the Republic.The Berlin Insurrection.
49
Both factions agreed, in ^xemgajsing, the German
NatiSnaFT^ssembly 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 con-
sider 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 move-
ment 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 judg-
ing 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 j
boldness and readiness for action, in which any party/
headed by, and composed principally of petty trades-
men, will always be deficient.
DRevolution and Counter-Revolution.
50
The Proletarian, or really Revolutionary party, suc-
ceeded 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 any-
thing 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 pro-
fited 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; Lite 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, feudal-
ism 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 27tk, 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 proclamation, as leading rules for all future policy,
of Liberal, or middle class principles; and the only
difference observable between the two great centres 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
see®, how the parties and classes of society, that"were
heretofore all united in "opposition to the old' Govern -
ment, got dmdfid, among themselves* after the victory,
or even during the struggle; and how that'“same
LiberaLJgourgeoisie that alone profited from the
virt-nry riTi-ner^roiind rn-)mprHafply upnn.it-; allfpg of
yesterday, assumed a hostile attitude against every
class or party of a more advanced character, and con-
cluded an -alliance with t-he—eanquered-feud,al--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
5i52
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 enoughMt|mt-The-.bcuj,rgeoisia.. in Austria..and
Prussia'clid 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 lyould. then, be superfluous to
recur to the movements that occurredJnJhe minor
States; and we might, indeed, coniine ourselves to
the consideration of Austrian and Prussian affairs
exclusively, if the.c.xistejnce oj[ these ,min or States had
not given rise to a body which was, by its very exist-
ence, a most striking proof of the abnormal situation
of Germany- an d of-lhe.. j n r.n m pi e t on dss of _t he—latp
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^bPH4v»~wa.a. the SQ=Callfid Curmnn NnitnunJ
Assembly-sX Frank fert-on-Main.
After the popular victories of Vienna and Berlin, it'The Frankfort National Assembly.
S3
was a matter of course that there should be a Repre-
sentative 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
settTTevery matter in dispute, ancjJ&.jict asTheJugJi-
est, legislative autho^ity-fca^ihe-wiiQlg. of the.Xierm^n
Confederation. But, at the same time, The' Diet
whirt-whaH rrvmrnVprl if had in nn way fixed, its attrihlL-
tion&~ No one knew whether its decrees were to have
forGe- of law, or whether they were to be subject to
the sanction of the Diet, or of the individual Govern*-
ments. In this perplexity, if the Assembly had been
possessed of the least energy, it would have immedi-
ately 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 organised 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 tooy
much from an Assembly composed in its majority di
Liberal attorneys and doctrinaire professors, an As-
sembly 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 ludi-
crousness 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 move-
ment than of all the reactionary plots of all the54 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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. In-
stead 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 recog-
nised 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^ *r» he tlTP'-rrrTtjriegal xeprpgpnfatiup of a
r great and sovereign nation, and yet never possessing
either the(wHl? -or -theToree to—rrrake its claims-.recog-
nised. Tne debatesoT~this body, without^ any
practical result, were not even of any 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.- ceQtral au t hori_ty_of
Gcrmanyleft everythjjog_as it_ had found it. So far
from realising the long-demanded unity of Germany,
it did not dispossess the most insignificant of theThe Frankfort National Assembly. 55
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 custom-
house barriers that separated Hanover'from Prussia,
ahd'^Pnlssia-'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 AssemBIy>rfM~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 andT^volu-
tionary^action on impart—on account of the very
want of definiteness in which it had been found
necessary to leave its competency. Thesa^jjQvern-
ments, therefore..got up a most comprehensive system
of intrigues in order to weaken,the infl.usn.ce 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 lacalliglilaHve Assemblies, and in
consequence, not only the lesser States.^ convoked
their Legislatures, but Prussia and Austria. „ also
calledf Gohstftuent Assemblies. In theseras-in the
Frankfort House of Representatives, Jthe_JLiberal
middle class, or its allies, Liberal lawyers, and bureau-
crats had the majority, and the turn affairs took in
each of them was nearly the same. The bfily~3Iffer-56
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
ence is this, that the German National ftfisemhly was
the Par 1 iaraan.t> -of-an• -lmapmaTV	it had
declined the task of forming what nevertheless was
its own first condition of existence, viz. a United
Germany; that it discussedj^ Jmagin^uaad never-
to-be-carried-ent ‘itljasures of jin imaginary Govern-
ment of its own creation, and that it passed imaginary
resolutions for which nobody cared ; whileJn Austria
and Prussia the constituent bodies were at least real
parliaments, upsetting apd^creatungreal .mtoistfies,
the princes with whom they had to contend, r Tlrey,
too, were cowardly, and lacked enlarged views of
revolutionary resolutions; they, ton, betrayed the
people, aruL-csstorecL 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 o fth e Bcr lfii .and V-ie»na-G«nsU.tucn t s
form an important part of German revolutionary
history, while the lucubrations of the Frankfort collec-
tive 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 armis-
tice 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 forThe Frankfort National Assembly.	57
action, and which, instead, carried away by unequalled
cowardice, only restored to their former solidity the
foundations upon which the present counter-revolu-
tionary system is built.
LONDON, January, 185 2.VIII.
POLES, TSCHECHS, AND GERMANS.
March 5th, 1852.
Fr^M what has been stated in the foregoing articles,
it is already evident"that'tmless aixesh revolution was
to follow that of March, 1848, things would inevitably"
retUrn^Arr-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 re1ah‘nns_o.f the GermafT'ReSaGjA.inn.
And these "foreign relations were of the same intricate
nature as the home affairs.
The whole of the eastern halLef Germany, asiar as
'■*" the ElbeJTSa’alSf and“BoKemian Forest, has,..it is ..well
knoWTT^ been reconquered during the last thousand
yearsT-from-invaders of Slavonic’origin. ~ The”g£gater
part of these territories have been Germanised, 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)/'*) their inhabitants are, to all intents and
purposes, Germans. Bnt-tEe case is different- along
the whole of the frontier df^incient Poland, and in_
the countrfcg "'of The Tsrherh w-w--tftn^me7Tn~’Bohern la
and MorajaaZTTTere^the. two-nationalities are-mixed
up
or
in every district, the~tP.wns~being-eenerallv- more
58Poles, Tschechs, and Germans.	59
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, colonisation, or, at least, civilisation of
the east of Europe. The conquests 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 Germanisation
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 manu-
factures never were in great favour 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 com-
modities against agricultural produce became the ex-
clusive 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 Peters-
burg, 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, and6o
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 Ger-
man schoolmaster, the German savant came to
establish himself upon Slavonic soil. And lastly, the
iron tread 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 denationalisation by social developments.
Thus, great parts of Western Prussia and Posen have
been Germanised since the first partition of Poland,
by sales and grants of public domains to German
colonists, by encouragements given to German capi-
talists for the establishment of manufactories, etc., in
those neighbourhoods, and very often, too, by ex-
cessively despotic measures against the Polish in-
habitants of the country.
In this manner the last seventy years had entirely
changed the line of demarcation between the German
and Polish nationalities. The-ftevoWtion 'Of-!848
calling JjDrth at once the claiflft-oTaU oppressed-nations
to an independent. .existence, and .to the right of
settling their own affairs for themselvqsT4t-was-'quite
naturaL-that -the-Poles -should at orTce~demand~the
restoration of their country within the frontiersof 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 Germanisation; 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 sym-
pathies 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 Ger-Poles, Tschecks, and Germans.	61
man, be given up to a people that as yet had never
given any proofs of its capability of progressing be-
yond a state of feudalism based upon agricultural
serfdom ? The question was intricate enough. Ths-.
only possible-solution was tn-a-wa^The
question of delimitation between the different revolu-
tionised 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 tract-
able 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 neces-
sary to keep up the Continental movement, and con-
sidering that the national re-establishment even of a
part of Poland'would inevitably lead to such a war,
supported the Poles ; while thg reigning middle rlRgg
party clearly foresaw its dnwnfa]l from any national
war-against—Russiar1 whieh-jypuld have called Thdre
active and enercrpti^ mpn to rhf* KpTnT~"anr1thprpfnr^
with a~felgned enthusiasm foFthe extension of German
nationality, they Heelpred—Er-Hssi-a-w- Boland, the chief
seat of Polish revolutionary agitation, to be part and
parcel of the.. German-Empire "that- was 4©-bei—-The
promises gfivaorto-the.£oles in the first days of ,excite-
ment were ^ha.m^fijJfy-hrokeh.‘"' PQTiqh armaments-gnt
up with the sanction of the Government were dis- ^
persed and massacred by Prussian _artilkry~i~amTIis
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 Hanse-
mann. It must be added that this Polish campaign
was the first means of reorganising and reassuring62
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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, there-
by are they punished.” Such has been the fate of
all the upstarts of 1848 and 1849, from Ledru Rollin
to Changarnier, and from Camphausen down to
Haynau.
The question, of nationality gave rise to another
struggle in Bohemia*- This country. inhabited by' two
millidns of Germans, and three millions of Slavonians
of the T’scLechian'tdngETSi'had great hTstbiTcaT recol-
lections, almost all connected with the former su-
premacy 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 .prav.mc^.spcak-ing^th-e- Tsc-hech'i'an- tongue was
divided, one part forming the kingdom of Bohemia, an-
other the principality of Moravia,a third the Carpathian
hill-country of the Slovaks, being part of Hungary.
The Moravians and Slovaks-had-lorrg~stnce le&t^every
vestige of national -feeWng-and- vitality, although
mostly preserving their language. Bohemialwas'Sur-
rounded by thoroughly German countries on three
sides out of. four. The~German~~elKinent 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, in-
dustry, and mental culture were in the hands of the
Germans. The chief champion of the Tsehechian
nationalitv^Profcssqr Pala^ky. is himself nothing but
a learned Germarl^ofrrac^ wfto even now cannot speak
the Tschechian language correctly and without foreign
accent. But ^as it often happens, dyjngriFseheekian
nationality, dying according to every'fact known in
history for the last four hundred years, marie in 1848
a last effort to-regain its former vitality—SneffhrtPoles, Tscheehs, and Germans.
63
whose failure, independently of all revolutionary con-
siderations, 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.IX.
PANSLAVISM—THE SCHLESWIG-
HOLSTEIN WAR.
March l$th, 1852.
Bohemia ancLCroatia (another disjected member of
the Slavonic family, acted upon by the Hungarian, as
Bohemia by the German) wprp fhp hnmpc nf mfrat is
called on the European continent “Panslavism.”
Neither Bohemia nor Croatia was strong enough to
exist as a nation by herself. Their respective nation-
alities, 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 wjtlj^^atJis^.Slev^ic
nations. There were twenfy-two millions q£ Balas,
forty-five millions of Russians, eight millions of
Serbians and Bulgarians • why not form a mighty
ans, 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 civilised
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
ment proclaims the pretension of considering all
Europe as the domain of the Slavonic race, and es-
that empire which by every move-Panslavism—The Schleswig Holstein War. 65
pecially of the only energetic part of this race, of the
Russians ; that empire which, with two capitals such
as St. Petersburg 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 pur-
poses. Thus, the Bohemian and Croatian Panslav-
ists, som^mtefttkrrnrlty, some without knowing it,
worked intRp dTrprh -mt-dresT of'RYissia; 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 honour 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 proceed-
ings opened, there was no common Slavonic tongue
by which the speakers could make themselves under-
stood. French was tried, but was equally unintellig-
ible to the majority, and the poor Slavonic enthusi-
E66
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
asts, 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 oppos-
ing them, were not satisfied with thus showing clearly
the reactionary tendencies of their entire movement,
but they were degraded enough to tamper and con-
spire 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, an"3~tKe PansTavists
threatened with imprisonment if they should stir
again. And they have only obtained this, that
Slavonic nationality is now being everywhere under-
mined by Austrian centralisation, 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 havePanslavism—The Schleswig-Holstein War. 67
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 Pan-
slavistic fanaticism. The good understanding was
not for a moment disturbed. But the Italian Revolu-
tion 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,unquestion-
ably 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 vigour, 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 sub-
mitted 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.68	Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
But while thus the German name earned nothing
but hatred on every side, the Gerrnan-Gemsti-tutional
and Liberal Governments rubBecftheir hands for joy.
They drad"Tiacceed£d-xn~- crushing the P.olLh jinrl
Bohemian movements. They had everywhere revived
the'^WTTatlonal 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-confidenoe-in-Eoland. the Austrian, army
in Prague; and while the superabundant patriotism
(“ die Patriotische Ueberkraftas 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 favour by
victories over the foreigner. But we repeat: these
armigs* strengthened by the Liberals as a means of
action against the more advanced party, tua_aao»er
had recovered_ their.self^aiifi4enee-and~theirTiTScipiine
in somfLdegree^thaa.. they turn-ed-them-sel-v-es -against
the Liberals, and restored to powat-Phe-rH-ea-of the
old sysWTfiT^When Rade~tzkv..in—his camp bevond
the Adige, received the first orders from the “re-
sponsible ministers ” at Viehna, 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 \%th, 1852.
As early as the beginning of April, 1848, the revolu-
tionary torrent had found itseli stemmed all over the
Continent of Europe by the league which those classes
of society thaFTia3~prphte^byJthe first victory im-
mediatefy"fdmTd'^ith\"thewanquishcd. InHjiaqce,
the petty trading class and the Republican faction of
the hohmeois^bad. .combined -with-tha. Monarchist.
bourgedigie__against the-^^iroleterians; in Germaayl
and Italy, the victorious bourgeoisie hadeagerlyh
courted the suppoTTofThe feudal nobility, the official!
bureaucracy, and the army, against the mass of the j
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 them-
selves, 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 Hun-
6970 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
gary 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 re-
mained divided, was, by its national independence,
civilisation, and centralisation, the only country to
impart the impulse of a mighty convulsion to the sur-
rounding countries. Accordingly, whrn ap	agrA
of Tune. i8a8. the bloody “struggle began in Paris,
when every succeeding telegraph of tftalfTnore'cIearly
exposed the fact to the eyes of Europe, that this
struggle was _rar.ripri on between the mass of the work-
ing people on t1' tS&'otlTer^classes
of the Parisian population, supported by the army, on
the othe?7 when the-fighting went on for several days
with an exasperation unequalled in the history of
modern civil warfare, but without any apparent ad-
vantage for either side—then it became evident to
every onejfliai-th-i-s-was -tke.great.dgcisive battle whiclv
would, if Hip irroirrprtiAn ufprp virtnrimig, deluge the
whole contingnt-with renewed revolution^brA'.Pfrjga <;
suppressed?"bliTTg abm+fc an--at .least momentary re-
storation.of counter-revolutionary rule.
The proletarians of Paris were defeated, decimated,
crushed with such an effect that even trow they have
not yet recovered from the blow. Andjmmadiately,
all over Europe, tEe^e>v anA-«ld--ConsB-r-vatlyes and
CotftTter-Revolutionists raised-their heads vvith~ an
ef&enterjTthat showed bow well they understood the
importance of the event. The Press was everywhereThe Paris Rising—The Prankjort Assembly. 71
attacked, the rights of meeting and association were
interfered with, every little event in every small pro-
vincial 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 honour 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 nuvriers- nf_ Park may he
datedthc fiul uusTtlve steps ancLdefinlta plans.o£„the
old feudahirofbaucrat.i r. party, in Germany,' to get'rid
even of Theirmomentary. allies,.the jaiddle~elasses,
and to rcstpTTrGefmany to the state she was in before
the events~~0f Mail'll.—The' armv-agaimjcgas^tfae de-
cisive power in ghe-State-,--and -the' army* bdtffiged not
to thrr-mrTcTdTe classes ...bat- to themsel-ves. Even in
Prussia, where before 1848 a considerable leaning of
part of the lower grades of officers towards a Con-
stitutional Government had been observed, the dis-
order 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 the72
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
presumptions of the middle class Parliamentarians.
And the proper moment for such a decisive blow ar-
rived 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 parlia-
mentary triumphs, not one of which led to any prac-
tical result, very generally felt that their position
between the extreme parties became daily more un-
tenable, and that, therefore, they were obliged now
to seek the alliance of the reactionists, and the next
day to court the favour 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,
of the different parties had become exasperated and
critical enough to make a decisive battle inevitable.
The first eng£gnments in this-war..Jaetween.the-demo-
crati£.ahd„xevolutionary masses and the army took
place at Frankfort. Though a naere'lecomlaiy’en-
gagement, it was thejh'st advantage of anv note the
moral effect. The fancy Government established by
the Frankfort National Assembly had been allowed
by Prussia, for very obvious reasons, to conclude an
with Denmark, which not only surrendered
to Danish-vengeance.the Germans.nf Schleswig, but
which also entirely disclaimed the more dr less re-
volutionary principles which were generally supposed
in the Danish war. This^rmistice was, bv a majority
of two or three, rejected in the Frankfort Assembly.
A sham ministerial crisis followed this vote, but threeThe Pans Rising—The Frankfort Assembly. 73
, days later the Assembly reconsidered their vote, and
were actually induced to cancel it and acknowledge
the armistice. This._disgraceful proceeding mused
the indignation	the—people.	Barricades--were
ererferj hut already..sufficient troops ..had heen drawn
to Frankfort,_and.. after six'-hours-High'tmg, the insur-
rection was_sikppressed. 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
beenjobUged-to • appeal to The bayonets of-the-.troops
against4he»-manifestation of -ths—popular will. They
were compromised, and what little regard they
might have been hitherto enabled to claim^jus rp-
pudiation of their origin, the dfppn^pn^y upon the
anil-popular Governments . and.their troops, made
both The Lieutenant of the Empire, his ministers
and his deputies, henceforth to be complete null-
ities. . We shall soon see how firsT~~Austria( then
Prussia, and latiafoS'.'fK? smaller' States too, treated
with~ mntpmpt pvpyy order, every request, every
deputation they received^from-.tJxLs-_bridy of impn-
tent 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 sub^pqi10"*- summing
OctoES2£^4s; Bui the importance of this battle is
such, and the explanation of the different circum-74
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
stances 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 separ-
ate letter.
London, February, 1852.XI.
THE VIENNA INSURRECTION.
March igth, 1852.
We now come to decisive’- ev-e«ts- -wbieh- -fewned
the counter,r^u.Qli4.ticin.'Lry. .paj±_i.n Germany to the
Parisian insurrection of June, and \jhkL by a single
blow, turned the scale in favour of the Counter-Revolu-
tionary p^TTyJ^EHe injuasGlion 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 higtuaristucTacy and dte-stoek-Jobbrng' bour-
geoisie^which had formed the principal non-official
supports of the Metternichian Government, were en-
abled, °,TQn nftrr ihe-weats oL March, to maintain a
predominating infLueJire with the Government, not
only by the Court, the army-and the bureaucracy, but
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.”., Tke
so-called Constitutional joittiefrry;' consisting -of half
Liberal, ttrrrtdpirrcapaSTubureaucrats, on the 14th of76 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
Mav. even ventured a direct attack upon -the- revolu-
tionary orgaojaatinas-oL the masses, by disaelising the
CentraT .Committee, of . Delegate*- 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 qjrovoked-the. insurrection
of the- 15th May, by which the Government was
forced to acknowledge_thfi. Committee, to re^eaLthe
Constitution and the Electoral Law. and "to grant the
power ~p.iL framing a new Fundamental ...Law "to a
Constitutional Diet, elected by universal suffrage.
All this was con fir meet 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 minis-
terial decree dissolved it. Perhaps this hlaauraight
have succeeded. iL.it had be@iCcarried.out by a, .part
of the National Guard only, but the Government, not
trusting- them eitherj" brought the military .forward,
and at once, the National Guard turned round, united
with the Academic Xegion, and thus_ frustrated the
ministerial project.	.....
In the meantime, however., Jhfejmpaixa^nd his
Court had' on the 16th of May, left Vienna,.and fled
to Innspruck. Here,' 'surrourmeiI_~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-Revolution ary-party
found aq .asylum, from whence, uncontrolled, unob-The Vienna Insurrection.
77
served and safe, it might rally its scattered forces,
repair and spread again all over the country the net-
work of its plots. Conamunications were reopened
with Radetzky, with Jellachir.h, apH~wlltr~Wiwdisch-
grat£, as well as with the reliable men in the admin-
istrative 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 re-
volutionary masses, and in the debates of the forth-
coming Constituent Assembly. JChus the policy of
leaving the movement of the capital to itself for a
time; a policy which must have led to the omnipo-
tence of the movement party in a centralised and
homogeneous country like France, here in Austria, in
a heterogeneous political conglomerate, was one of
the safest means of reorganising the strengthoFtKe
reactionists?	""	--------
In Vienna the middle class, persuaded that after
three successive-defeats, and'Tn the face of a Consti-
tuent Assembly based upon universal suffrage, the
jU3.-Jnnprp|- an nppnnpnl to be dreSdecT,
fell	into tEat* weannpgg and apathy,
and that eternal outcryVf5T",rTrtter'•amh tranquillity,
which has everywhere seized" this class after violent
commotions and consequent derangement of trade.
The mannfartnrpg of thp Austrian capital are almost
exclusively limited to articles of luxury, for which,
since the Revolution and thsJb'ght of the Cnnrt, fVrp
had necessarily been little demands. The-sboutr-for a
return to a regular system of government, and £ot- a
return of the Court, both of which were expected to
bring about a" revivaPof commercial prosperity—this
shout became now general among the middle classes.
The meetiaff-nrfr tftg^fk^tituenl^Assetpblv in July78
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
was hailed with delight as the end of the revolutionary
era; so was the .returja^f-the-Gourt,- 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
peasantfylrom feudal bondage and forced labour for
the nobility, the Court completed a master stroke.
On the^ icjilr of August the Emperor was made to
review dhe .NationaljG.uarff,; Jhe-ImperiaFfarmTy, the
courtiers, the general officers, outbade each’’ other in
flatteries to the armed burghers, who were already in-
toxicatetf-wrth 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 pnly-popalar. -imnisTer'in the
Cabinet, was publishe<Jr-witkdiimag- the Govern ment
aid, given hitherto to the workmen out of employ.
Tire trick succeeded ; the working classes got up a
dem.St)stration; the middle classTTaliui'lcLl Gawds de-
clared for the decree of their minister ; they were
launched upon the “Anarchists,” fgjjL-LLke—fcigers on
the unarmed, and-, unresisting workspeople^and mas-
sacreflagreat number of them on the 23rd of August.
force _wasJat£&gILj the class-struggle between .bpur-
geois and .proletarian had come 'hr -Vienna, too, to a
bloody outbreak, and the counter-revolutionary cama-
rilla saw the day approaching on which it might strike
its grand blow.
The Hungarian affairs very soon offered an oppor-
tunity to proclaim openly the principles upon which
it intended to act. On the 3JJ1—©f—Oetober an
Imperial decree in the Vienna Gazette — a decreeThe Vienna Insurrection.
79
countersigned by none of the responsible ministers
for Hungary—declared the Hungarian Diet dissolved,
and named., the-Baa...JelJachich, of Croatia, Civil and
Military Governor _of that country—Jellachich, the
leader ofSouth Slavonian reaction, a man wholwas
actually at war with the lawful authorities,.of Hunp'arv.
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-Jcllgrehieh’o authority. This, however,
was shewing the cloven foot too openly; every man
in Viennafelt that war upon Hungary was—war upon
the prin^Tpfp nV Constitutional -Government, which
principle wag in ftie very derrpp trornpTprt- upan 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 Guardlaf Vienna^.-QiiJ:EeI2tHJQfl!)'ctober rose
in mass, and resisted the departure of the troops ;
some grenadiers passed over to the people ; a short
strnpgle-taok-plar.e hetween fhe popular far_ces~~and
the troops; the Minister of War, Latour, was mas-
sacred by the people, aiyl	the latter
were victors. In the meantime, Ban Jellachich,
beatSn at Stuhlweissenburg by Perczel, had taken
refuge near Vienna on German-Austrian territory ;
the Viennese troops that were to march to his sup-
port now took up an ostensibly hostile and defensive
position against him ; and Emp^1'^1' aod—Court
had amin flpd in Qlmiita,......&»~9etfH-&iyygflTg~terri-
tory.——,
But at Olmiltz the Cauxt-feund itself in very
different circumstances from what it had been at
Innspruck. It was now in a position to open im-
mediatelv the campaign .against the. Revolution. It
was surrounded by the Sla.vonian flepnt-i^ of ffte
Constituent, who flocked in masses to Olmiitz. and .
by the Slavonian enthusiasts from all parts ofjhe8o
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
monarchy. The campaign, in their eyes, was to be a
waf oF”Slavonian restoration and of extermination,
against the two intruders, upon what was considered
Slavonian soil, against the German and the Magyar.
Windischgtita, the conqueror of Prague, now com-
mander" of the army that was concentrated around
Vienna, became at once the hero of Slavonian
nationality. And his army£oxu;ea±cated—rapidly
from all sides. From Bohemia. Moravia. Stvria.
Upper A usj riband Italy, marched -regiment after
regiment on" routes that converged.-aLALLeaiia,.tQ join
the troops of Jellachich and the ex-garrison of the
capitaTT“Above sixty thousand men were thus united
towards the end of October, and soon they com-
menced 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 -t-he-mean-tim-e^confusion aruhhsj^less-
ness was prevalent. The middle class, as saomas-the
victory was gained. became. Again—pos<iPtitiad of their
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
organisation 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 Olmiitz, besides a few of the
more revolutionary Polish deputies, sat in perman-
ancy; but instead of taking part resolutely, they lostThe Vienna Insurrection.
81
all their time in idle debates upon the possibility of
resisting the Imperial army without overstepping the
bounds of constitutional conventionalities. The Com-
mittee of Safety, composed of deputies from almost all
the popular bodies of Vienna, although resolved to
resist, was yet dominated by a majority of burghers
and petty tradesmen, who never allowed it to follow
up any determined, energetic line of action. Tlje
Council of the Academic Legion passed heroic resolu-
tions, but was no ways able to take the lead. The
working classes, distrusted, disarmed, disorganised,
hardly emerging from the intellectual bondage of the
old rigime, 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 ex-
pected 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 reorganised Austrian army flushed witn tm:
vicWrfe's"~of Rad£t2kV 1'n Italy; sixty 'or seventy
thofisand men well armed, well organised, and if not
well commanded at least possessing commanders.
Inside, confusion, class division, disorganisation ; a
NartWfl^r'Guard'p^f^oC^bich. was~"resdlve3TTTBt to
fight- at all, partjxsesoJUite, and only the smallest part
read^—to “act; a proletarian mass, powerful by
numbers but without leaders, without' any political
educatfenj'suBjecFTd "panic as well as to fits of fury
almost without cause, a prey to every false rumour
spread about, quite ready to fight, but unarmed, at
least in the beginning, and incompletely armed, and
barely organised when at last they were led to battle;
a helpless Diet, discussing theoretical quibbles while
the roof over their heads was almost burning; a lead-
F82
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
ing Committee without impulse or energy. Every-
thing was changed from the days of March ancTMay,
wfienTm the Counter-Revolutionary camp, all was con-
fusion, and when the only organised force was*tfiat
createaby the Revolution. There could hardly be a
doubt about the issue of such a struggle, and what-
ever doubt there might be, was settled by the events
of the 30th and 31st October, and 1st November.
London, March, 1852.XII.
THE STORMING OF VIENNA—THE
BETRAYAL OF VIENNA.
April gi/i, 1852.
WH'ErN"af~Iast me concentrated army of Windisch-
gratz commenced Iheua^taZLupoEArienna. flKrTorces
that coblcf be brought forward in defence were ex-
ceedjiigly fnsumcient'ior the "purpose." Of the National
Guard only a portion was to be brought to the en-
trenchments. 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 numer-
ous, 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, out-
worn, ill-mounted, and ill-served pieces of ordnance
had the insurgents to oppose to that numerous and
8384	Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 mo-
ment, 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 rumours and
counter-rumours. 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. Bern, the only man present who
could have saved Vienna, if any could then in Vienna,
an almost unknown foreigner, a Slavonian 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 ac-
quired 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 organisation in the
ranks, offered a most heroic resistance. In many
places the order given by Bern, when he was in com-
mand, “ to defend that post to the last man,” was
carried out to the letter. But force prevailed. Barri-
cade 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. AStorming of Vienna—The Betrayal of Vienna. 85
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 Im-
perialists, 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 un-
heard-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 tcfnolicc 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 gen-
erosity 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 for-
gotten that Vienna had fought thq first battle of86
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
Hungary, she owed it to her own safety not to forget
that Vienna was the only outpost of Hungarian in-
dependence, 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 con-
centrated ; and that a courageous, unrelenting follow-
ing 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 war-
fare, 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 lihve stopped until his junction with the
Viennese was effected. There was certainly some
risk, but who ever won a battle without risking some-
thing ? 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 Hun-
garians? 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 militaryStorming of Vienna—The Betrayal of Vienna. 87
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 authorised 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 indepen-
dence ? 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 revolution-
ary 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 Govern-
ment for some quasi-legal authorisation, 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 ;88
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
they would have been equally upset had the Revolu-
tion 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 his-
tory. 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 civilised 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 un-
constitutional 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 armyytftjte.
general, and the disgraceful catastrophe of VTargaeT
would have been impossible. And when, at'last, to
save their honour, 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 harbour no unfriendly feeling
toward Hungary. We stood by her during the
struggles; we may be allowed to say that our paper,
the Neue Rkeinische Zeitung,(B> 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 byStorming of Vienna—The Betrayal of Vienna. 89
following up the Hungarian war in a series of articles
which have had paid them the compliment of being
plagiarised in almost every subsequent book upon the
subject, the works of native Hungarians and “eye-
witnesses ” not excepted. We even now, in any future
continental convulsion, consider Hungary as the neces-
sary and natural ally of Germany. But we have been
severe enough upon our own countrymen, to have a
right to speak out upon our neighbours ; and then
we have here to record facts with historical impartial-
ity, and we must say that in this particular instance,
the generous bravery of the people of Vienna was not
only far more noble, but also more far-sighted than
the cautious circumspection of the Hungarian Govern-
ment. And, as a German, we may further be allowed
to say, that not for all the showy victories and glori-
ous battles of the Hungarian campaign, would we
exchange that spontaneous, single-handed rising, and
heroic resistance of the people of Vienna, our country-
men, which gave Hungary the time to organise the
army that could do such grfeat things.
The second ally of Vienna u'-ar German people.
But theyMvcre everywhere engaged in the same
struggle,aWie Viennese.—1FnmirforfjBaden, Cologne,
Rad jus£ bcerr-defeUed 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 centre 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
decentralisation of Germany. The different questions
in every State, every province, every town, were funda-
mentally the same; but they were brought forward
everywhere under different shapes and pretexts, and
had everywhere attained different degrees of maturity.90 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 succour, or making a
diversion in their favour ; 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 FninTdort Parliament and the bastard child it
had BroTTglTirto light by incestuous intercourse with
the old German Diet, the so-called Central Power,
profited by the Viennese movement to show forth
their utter^nulTItv. This contemptfbleVtssembly, 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 prating
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
naivete was discarded ; the representatives of the
German people had turned practical men, that is to
say, they had-jn^Ldt? it out thaf- the less they did, and
the more they orated, the safer wnnlrl he their
position as-the umpires of the fate-®£-G,ermany. 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 Byzan-
tine 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 civilised world, or micro-
scopical practical questions which never led to anyStorming of Vienna—The Betrayal of Vienna. 91
practical result. Thus, the Assembly being a sort of
Lancastrian School for the mutual instruction of
members, and being, therefore, very important to them-
selves, they were persuaded it was doing even more
than the German people had a right to expect, and
looked upon everyone as a traitor to the country who
had the impudence to ask them to come to any result.
When the Vj£iwes«-tnsmTegtioirl3Tnke-Tmtr4here
was a host of1 interpellations, debates, mottopspand
amendmeHte-Hf)o-n-it^-wli.khr©f course,'TedTcTnothing.
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 monu-
ment 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. Frcebel, on the contrary, was of opinion
that it was his duty to preserve himself for the im-
portant 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 pot have stood thq92
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 Pr4£tical
matters of fact. In politics he belonged to “ Moaeria
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 storm-
ing, 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.XIII.
THE PRUSSIAN ASSEMBLY—THE
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.
April 17th, 1852.
On the 1st of November Vienna fell, and on the 9th
of the-wtrrrgTrionth the dissoluHoTrT7f^e..lCettstiTuehl
Assembly in BerlLIldiowUlTrow~much thts:'event:.had
at once raised the spirit atT^tbe strength of the
Counfer-ReTOTufibnary par&jajLayer .Germany.
Th> erCTTtTTTf'The~~summer of 1848 in Prussia are
soon told. The Constituent Assembly, or rather
“the AwpimMy >4ec±er! W the,purpole 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 con-
firmed, or rather restegedytha obamsiaas privileges of
feudalism, and thus betrayed the liberly..ancl the in-
terests-rtTthe peasantry. I'hev Imd-nelfegrbgen able
to draw up a Constitution, nor'to amend in any way
the geuml legislation. They had occupied them-
selves almost exclusively^ with nice theoretical dis-
tinctionSyrnere formalitres,'an3^ues£ibns" of constitu-
tioiiaT CTRjtfffffeT 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
centres whose oscillations from right to left, and vice
versa, upset, first the ministry of Carnphausen, then
9394 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
that of Auerswald and Hansemann. But while thug
the Liberals, here as every where else, -let the occasion
slip out of their hands, the Court reorgafilsSEMts
elements of strength among the nobility, and the
most uncultivated portion of the rural populatiojvas-
well as jn_ the,...ar-my-and the -bureaucracy; After
Hansemann’s downfall, a ministry-of hmaaUCtata anrl
military-o££cers-^ll-staunr.h 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 concentra-
tion and organisation of Counter-Revolutionary forces,
which that same ministry carried on pretty openly.
At last, the signal being given by the fall of Vienn.i
the King dismissed ..its , ministers, and replacedthem
by “ men of action,” .under the. leadership _pf the pre-
sent premier,__Manteufel. Then the dreamlng-Ap-
semblvat onceawobe-to tire ttenger ;4t-passed a vote
' of no confidence in the Cabi'nH*r-whidj--Wss at nnre
replied-to by a decree -removing- tho-AssenabJ^frorn
Berliarwhere it might, in case of a conflict, count upon
the support of the masses, to Brandenburg, a petty
provincial town dependent entirely upon the Govern-
ment. 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-aaaeeting of the municipal magistrates
and the officers ofthe National GuardJtwas resolved
not to offer any resistance. And now-, after the—As-
senfbTy and ltS^Constituents. fche~d4beral" bourgeoisie,
had allowed the combined______reactionary—party to
occupy every important position, and to wrest from
their
that grand comedy of “-5The Prussian Assembly—The National Assembly. 95
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 tran-
quil ; 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 coun-
try to organise the refusal of taxes. But they found
that they had been wofully mistaken in the choice of
their means. After a few agitated weeks, followed by
severe measures of the Government against the Oppo-
sition, 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 armearesistance, or
whether k pail of Lilt: army, on finding serious opposi-
tion, wbuld Rave turned~~over to the^sldq of^ the
Assembly, and thus decided the matterTn its 'favour,
is a question which may never be solved. TBut in re-
volutioff’^S'TfT’war, it1 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 neces-
sity 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, offici-
ally, of the whole revolutionary interest, did neither96	Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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, in-
stead of finding, as he and all his officers fully ex-
pected, every street studded with barricades, every
window turned into a loop-hole, 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 revolu-
tionising 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 wohld 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 posi-
tion and surrenders it, instead of forcing the enemy to
try his hands at an assault, invariably deserves to be
treated as a traitor.The Prussian Assembly—The National Assembly. 97
The ^amc deuce ~of Ihc-
which
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 resist-
ance 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
Olmiitz, 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 pro-
gress, and to testify to the admirably peaceful conduct
of the population of Berlin. Nay, more ; when Herr
Bassermann, one of the Central Government’s com-
missioners, 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 of98 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 a 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 nth, 1852.
The first months of the vear.uiLfa.were employed by
the Austrian and Prussian Governments in following
up the adva:i'rt'Vt^t!s~obtaixred in ©etoberSTTcTNovernber,
1848. The Austrian Diet, ever since the taking of
Vienna, had carried on a merely nominal existence in
a small Moravian country-town, named Kremsir.
Here the Slavonian deputies, who, with their con-
stituents, had been mainly instrumental in raising the
Austrian Government from its prostration, were
singularly punished for their treachery 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 fore-
boded 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
99100 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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, Dal-
matians, 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 retro-
gression 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 sub-
due, absorb, and assimilate its ancient eastern neigh-
bours ; 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 civilisation of
Western Europe had been spread in the east of that
continent; that it could only cease whenever the
process of Germanisation had reached the frontier of
large, compact, unbroken nations, capable of*an in-
dependent national life, such as the Hungarians, and
in some degree the Poles; and that, therefore, the
natural and inevitable fate of these dying nations was
to allow this process of dissolution and absorption by
their stronger neighbours 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 ofThe Restoration of Order—T)iet and Chamber. IOI
the territory they occupy are interspersed with and
surrounded by Germans, who from time almost im-
memorial have had for all purposes of civilisation 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 Hun-
garian 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, al-
though 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 Govern-
ment’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 Russian 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 a102
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
practical existence, and is now done away with al-
together. Absolutism has been restored in Austria
to all intents ariS~purpo5es~evei since~TEe~4th March,
18497^	37-— ------------—7
"Tn Prussi*rptlTe"Gh'aTnbers mclJ.n_-Eebtua4-y-f<=>iH;he
ratification and rcvisionxiLthe-ncw-Gba-rter-preela-im-ed
bv the'TCing. They sat for about six weeks, humble
and meek enough in their behaviour toward the
Government, yet not quite prepared to go the lengths
the King and his ministers wished them to go. There-
fore, as soon as a sin'tahle nqrasinn presented itself.
they were dissolved.
Thus both Austria and Prussia had for the moment
got rid of the shackles of pariiainen-tary-eefrferek—The
Governments now concentrated all power in them-
selves, and could bring that power to bear wherever
it was wanted: Austria upon Hungary and Italy,
Prussia upon Germany. For Prussia, too, was pre-
paring for a campaign by which “ order ” was to be
restored in the smaller States.
Countg£jevolutioa--beTng—new par amount—in the
two great centres of action in Germany,—in Vienna
and Bgrlin,—there remained only the lesser StatesTn
which~~the struggle was still undecided., although the
balanceThere, too, was leaning more and more against
the revolutiorrarfy^inferest These smaller Slates, we
have said, found -a-Gonimon 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 a more or less revolutionary nature; it oc-
cupied ?rn-abnoffnaJTrevn1ntu»HflTy-prTSttion trrjhtfrukiy*;
its competence had never been-defi-ned. and it had at
last come to the decision—which, however, was never
recognised by the larger States—that its resolutions
had the force of law. Under these circumstances, andThe Restoration of Order—Diet and Chamber. 103
when the Constitutionalist - Monarchical 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 Parlia-
mentary 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
with the utmost con-
tempt, both in Vienna and Berlin ; one of its mem-
bers, in spite of his parliamentary inviolability, had
been executed in Vienna as a common rebel. Jts rL“—
crees 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 diplo-
matic squabbles with almost all the Cabinets of
Germany, and, in spite of all their efforts, neither
Assembly nor Gentral Government could bring
Austria and Prussia to state their ultimate views,
plans and demands. The Assembly, at last, com-
menced to see clearly, at least so far, that it had allowed
all power to slip out of its hands, that it was at the
Its deputations and104
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 Govern-
ments. But what were they, in their impotent posi-
tion, 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, short-
sighted, self-conceited beings, who, when the eternal
noise of contradictory rumours and diplomatic notes
completely stunned them, sought their only consola-
tion 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 Pfaje^Austriatr Government t-bseuc_o£Lthe
mask____Hi hits Constitution, of the 4th of March, it pro-
claimed Austria an indivisible monarchy, witn common
fiijaficesTsystem of customs-duties, of military establish-
ments; thereby effacing every barrier and distinction
between the German and non-German provinces.
This declaration was made in the face of resolutions
and-articles!S£tteIlnt^ncIe3"Federal Constitution which
had bgea-akcaAy_passed^^tlTe'Ff:arilff-srb'Assehlbly.
It wag ..the gauntlet of war. thrown down to it by
Anstria.-and the poor Assembly had^no^EeFchoice
but to take it up. This it did with a 3eaToT~BThster-
ing, which Austria, in the consciousness of her power,
and of the utter nothingness of the Assembly, could
well afford to allow to pass. And jtljis—preciousThe Restoration of Order—Diet and Chamber. 105
representation, as it styled itself, of the German
peoplejn order to revenge itself for this insult on the
part of Austria, saw nothing better before it than to
throw itSeTfTTTahdTand ieet tied..at„the feet of~the
Prussian Government. Incredible as it would seemTit
bent its TTnees before the very ministers whom it had
condemned as unconstitutional and anti-popular, and
whose dismissal it had in vain insisted upon. The
details of this disgraceful transaction, and the tragi-
comical 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 over-
throw 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 “ Govern-
ment,” 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 con-
clusion that “ the sublime idea of German unity was
threatened in its realisation,” 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, mak-
ing 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
106The Triumph of Prussia.
107
the DU minorum 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 favourable circum-
stances, 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, con-
ferred by the Frankfort Assembly, could give her.
Austria had been far stronger, far freer in her move-
ments, 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 re-seize 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 recognised by
the treaties of 1815 ; andj}ja_ihe-4tb--e#- MarcfrprSqv-,
issued that Constitution whicb-bad no otheLJJu^jnng--
thnnjjl declare Austria an indivisible, centralised, anrl
independent—monarchy, distinct even from .-that—
organise.lo8 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
This open declaration of war left, indeed, the Frank-
fort 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 pro-
ject fostered already some six or eight years ago by a
party of South and Middle German Liberal doctrin-
aires, who considered as a god-send 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 ad-
vanced 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 Demo-
cratic 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, favoured
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 theThe Triumph of Prussia.
109
Assembly into contempt, which, however, was quite
unnecessary, the mass of the people being long since
convinced of the utter hollowness and futility of any-
thing 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 T.eft of the_Afisemb1v—this Hite and pride of
revokrfTonary 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 instiga-
tion and for the interest of Austrian despotism.
Whenever the slightest approximation to their own
not very well-defined principles had, in a homceopathi-
cally 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-min^^ meftr^rring-the^TOTrrse of
their generally very obscure lives, had been so little
accustomed to anything like success, that they actu-
ally 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 crdtinism, 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
honour to count them among its members, and that
all and everything going on outside the walls of their
house—wars, revolutions, railway-constructing, colon-
ising of whole new continents, California gold dis-
coveries, Central American canals, Russian armies,
and whatever else may have some little claim to in-IIO
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
fluence 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
honourable house. Thus it was-the--Bemocratic party
of the Assembly, byeffectually smuggling a few of
their nostrums into the*7' Imperial Constitution,’’ first
became bound,.to support it, although in everj? essen-
tial point it flatly contradicted th^ownpft-prfli^lairned
principles, and at last, when this mongrel work was
abandoned, and bequeathed- to -them by—its main
authors, accepted the^irah&r-k-a-nce^'and' helcT'oTTETor
this Monarchical Constitution, even in mppo’SfTTOrr to
everybody who then proclaimed their own Republican
principles. -
But it must be confessed that in this the contra-
diction was merely apparent. The indeterminate,
self-contradictory, immature characTe?~of the Imperial
Constitution was'TfuT’very image-ofTtEe immature,
confused, conflicting political ideas of these-Demeeratic
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 by his actions ;
not by what he pretends to be, but by what he does,
and what he really is ; and the deeds of these heroes
of German Democracy speak loud enough for them-
selves, as we shall learn by and by. However, the
Imperial^Gonstitution, with all its appendages and
paraphernalia, was definitely-passed, and "Oil the 28th
of March, the King of -Prussia y/as, hy—apo-votes
against 248 "who abstained, and 200 who were absent,
elected Emperor of Germany minus Austria. The
historical irony was complete ; the Imperial farce
executed in the streets of astonished Berlin,thxee
days after the Revolution of M-arcIi 18th, r84§7byThe Triumph of Prussia.
ill
Frederick William IV.. while in a state which else-
where wotrM 'come under the Maine Liquor Law—
this disgusting farce, just one year afterwards, had
been sanctioned by thfi pretended Representative
Assembly of alLGermanv. That, then, was the result
of thcTGerman Revolution !
London, July, 1852.XVI.
THE ASSEMBLY AND THE
GOVERNMENTS.
August iQtk, 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 Im-
perial Constitution conferring those rights upon him.
It would be, he added, for the Governments of Ger-
many 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, £f”last came to the conclusion that this
answer amounted to a refusal of the crown. They
then (April 12th) resolved : That the Imperial Con-
st i t u tiorL waaJhe_JaHlnClEE^aiid^253ISBSj2£- m a i n-
tajped-yand not seeing their way at all before them,
elected a Committee of thirty, to make proposals as
112The Assembly and the Governments. 113
to the means how this Constitution could be carried
out.
This resolution was the signal for the conflict be-
tween the Frankfort Assembly and the German Govern-
ments which now broke out. The middle classes, and
e s p e c i aJlyjJie-^malfeF- trading- cktss-y-hacHal l^aTo n cc
declaredJbr—the—new-Frankfaft''GonstifutIon. They
could not await 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 thing 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, ap-
peared thus to have attained that new and definite
form which was supposed to enable them to enter
henceforth the path of peaceful constitutional de-
velopment. There only remained one open question,
that of the new political organisation 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 the114 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
Imperial Constitution arose out of a reactionary feel-
ing, 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 Consti-
tution had been voted during the first months of
spring and summer, 1848, a time when popular agita-
tion was still rife. The resolutions then passed,
though completely reactionary then, now, after the
arbitrary acts of the Austrian and Prussian Govern-
ments, appeared exceedingly Liberal, and even Demo-
cratic. 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 Con-
stitution. This class had always been more forward
in its demands than the Liberal-Monarchico-Consti-
tutional 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, whenThe Assembly and the Governments. 115
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 favour 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 ad-
herents of the Constitutional Royalty, and the more
or less Democratic shopkeepers, the agitation for the
i m m e d i a t e__establ.i-sh-f»ent •of- the- 4 m p e ria-1- C o n s t i t u t i o n
gained-ground rapidly, and found its most powerful
expression'in the--Parliaments of the several States.
The ChaflnberiTbf Prussia, of Hanover, of Saxony, of
Baden, of Wtirtemberg, declared in its favour. The
struggle between the Governments and the Frankfort
Assembly assumed a threatening aspect.
The Governments.—however—acted, raoidlv. The
Prussian Chambers were dissolved, anti-constitution-
ally, as tfiHy-had~to-revise^nd confirm the Constitu-
tion ; 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 Frank-Ii6 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
fort, and^called upon the smaller States to follow its
example, Dy~atso~dissolvinef-th.e!EChamEeri.as-soon as
the'y^shouldjjive their adhesion to the Frankfort
Assembly! Thlscexasaftle-was- speed i Ly-fbl-l-nwerl by
Hanover and SaxonyV
It was evident that a decision of the struggle by
force of arms could not be avoided. The hostility of
the Governments, the agitation amCrig the "people,
were daily showing tlxemselves 'in" stronger colours.
The military were everywhere wordlbbTuporT by the
Democratic citizens, and in the south of Germany with
great success. Large mass-meetmgS'werCUV51 /ivliw.e
held, passing resolutions to support the- Imperial
Constitution--and- the National Assembly, if need
should be, with force of arms. At Cologne, a meet-
ing 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
Odenwald, 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, arid 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 imbe-
cility was most extensively represented in the Frank-
fort Assembly.
London,/^, 1852.XVII.
INSURRECTION.
September 18th, 1852.
THE inevitable conflict hetwccn the National Assembly
of Frankfort and the States Govern naentsof Germany
at last broke out in open hostilities during the first
days of	THe Austrian deputies, recalled
by their ^	’	’	’	’ left the Assembly
bers of	t	The great hndy
of the Conservative memhe«^-awas^ef-the-turn .things
were about to take, withdrew even before they were
called upon to dn 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 dreamt 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
and ret
ie exception of a few mem-118
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
sovereign right of the people, depose that impotent
Government, and replace it by an energetic, indefatig-
able 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 pre-
decessors.
The sew majority-declared-that, -in-spite-©f-afL-abt_.
stacles. the Imperial Constitution must be carried out,
and at once ; that on the 15th July ensuing, the people
were' ter elect the deputies of the new House of
Representatives, and that this House was to meet at
Frankfort on the 15th of August folio wing.-«-~NnwJ
this wag an . open declaration of war against those
Governments that had not' recognised the.Imperial
Constitution, the forem_ost_ a m-Q.ng~W-h.ir.h_were.. _Pr 11 ssia,
AusTnfa. lIavaria. comprising more than three fourths
of t hFGErmanp o p u 1 a t i oa-p-ardeefaratirri'njf war-which
was^speedily accepted bv them. Prussia and Bavaria,
too, reca.Tled’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 favour of the Imperial Constitu-
tion 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 -every-
where the people and the—Governments- were“*^t
daggers drawn upon this subjectf the outbreak wasTn-
evitafflS"; tire Wine was charged, and it only wanted a
spark to make it explode. The-dissolulicm-of the
Chambers-in Saxxmyr*e_calhngunuaLthe-T^mWERr
(military reserve) in JPrussia, the open resistance of theInsurrection.
119
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
reinforcements 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 protec-
tion of the National Assembly. In Wtirtemberg 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 them-
selves at its disposal.
The position of the National Assembly was far
more favouraBleTKan could' have been expected after
its ignoble-eareer. The western half'oT'Germany had
taken up_araiS-imits--beli»lf; the military everywhere
were vacillating; in the lesser States they were un-
doubtedly favourable to the movement. Austria was
prostrated by the victorious advance of the Hungarians,
and Russia, that reserve force of the German Govern-
ments, 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. ~£verythixig—then
depended upon the condnct-QPthft-Ajwiwably.
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 the120
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
party neglecting them. Those rules, logical deduc-
tions from the nature of the parties and the circum-
stances 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 inde-
finite magnitudes, the value of which may change
every day ; the forces opposed to you have all the
advantage of organisation, /discipline, and habitual
authority ; unless you bring strong odds against them
you are defeated and ruined. Secondly, the insur-
rectionary 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, pre-
pare new successes, however small, but daily; keep
up the moral ascendancy which the first successful
rising has given to you ; rally those vacillating ele-
ments 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 I'audace, de Vaudace, encore de 1‘audace !
What, then, was the National Assembly of Frank-
fort 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 recognise all the insurrections
that had already broken out, and to call the people to
take up arms everywhere in defence of the nationalInsurrection.
12 I
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 in-
surgent troops to Frankfort for its immediate protec-
tion, thus offering at the same time a legal pretext for
the spread of the insurrection, to organise into a com-
pact 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 inJLc-Fran-kfort
Assemhly did just the contrary. Not content with
letting things take the course they liked, these
worthies went so far as to suppress by their opposi-
tion all insurrectionary movements which were pre-
paring. Thus, for instance, did Herr Karl Vogt at
Nuremberg. They allowed the insurrections of
Saxony, of Rhenish Prussia, of Westphalia.tQ-.ba, sup-
pressed wfthout any oilier'help -than a -posthumous,
sentimental protest against the unfeeling violence of
the Prussian Government. They kept up an under-
hand diplomatic intercourse with the South Gentian
insurrections. but_never. ga.ve..them the support of their
open acknowledgment. They knew that the Lieu-
tenant 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/6) 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 indigna-122 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
tion of those Democratic Revolutionists ! In short,
nouncfngTbut never had the courage orJhe-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
unhonoured exit.
London, August, 1852.XVIII.
PETTY TRADERS.
October 2nd, 1852.
IN our last we showed that the struggle between the
German Governments on the one side, and the Trank-
fort'Farliament on the other, had ultimately acquired
such_a_-degree 'Of"violence .that--in the first days*(af
Mav a grpat- pnrtinr of Germany broke out in open
insuircgtion; first Dresden, then the Bavarian Pala-
tinate, parts of Rhenish Prussia, and at last Baden.
In all cases, the real fighting body of the insurgents,
that body~\vTItCli first"ToolTup arms and gave battle to
the troops, consisted_af—\ke--w&rking~da&$es~e.f--the
—A portion of the poorer country population,
labourers and petty farmers, generally joined them
after the outbreak of the conflict. The greater number
of the young men of all classes, below the capitalist
class, were to be found, for a time at least, in the ranks
of the insurgent armies, but this rather indiscriminate
aggregate of young men very soon thinned as the
aspect of affairs took a somewhat serious turn. The
students particularly, those “ representatives of in-
tellect,” as they liked to call themselves, were the
first, to quit their standards, unless they were retained
by the bestowal of officer’s rank, for which they, of
course, had very seldom any qualifications.
The working class entered upon this insurrection
as they would have done upon any other which pro-
mised either to remove some obstacles in their progress
towards political dominion and social revolution, or,
123124 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
at least, to tie the more influential but less courageous
classes of society to a more decided and revolutionary
course than they had followed hitherto. The working
class took up arms with a full knowledge that this
was, in the direct bearings of the case, no quarrel of
its own ; but it followed up its only true policy, to
allow no class that has risen on its shoulders (as the
bourgeoisie had done in 1848) to fortify its class-
government, without opening, at least, a fair field to
the working classes for the struggle for its own
interests, and, in any case, to bring matters to a crisis,
by which either the nation was fairly and irresistibly
launched in the revolutionary career, or else the
status quo before the Revolution restored as nearly as
possible, and, thereby, a new revolution rendered un-
avoidable. In both cases the working classes repre-
sented the real and well-understood interest of the
nation at large, in hastening as much as possible that
revolutionary course which for the old societies of
civilised Europe has now become a historical necessity,
before any of them can again aspire to a more quiet
and regular development of their resources.
As te^trrrtTypeSFple-thaijoined the insurrection,they
were principalLyihrpw.nintoRi^rms-ofthe'Revofntion-
arypartj^partly by the relatively enormous load75ftax-
ation, and partly of feudal burdens pressingTi^dn them:
Without any 'initiative of their owrrpthey"forriTed
the tail of the other classes engaged in the insurrec-
tion, wavering between the working men on the one
side, and the petty trading class on the other. Their
own private social position, in almost every case, de-
cided which way they turned; the agricultural
labourer generally supported the city artizan; the
small farmer was apt to go hand in hand with the
small shopkeeper.
Thi^ class of petty tradesmen, the great importance
and influence ofwKIch weTlave already several timesPetty Traders.
125
adverted to, may be r.onsidpi-pd ag the leading class of
the insurrection of May, 1 8aq. There being, this
time, none of-the large towns of Germany among the
centre of the movement, the petty trading class, which
in middling and lesser towns always predominates,
found the means of getting the direction of the move-
ment into its hands. We have, moreover, seen that,
in this Struggle.for the Imperial Constitution, and"for
the rights of the German Parliament, there were the
intergsts—ef-this peculiar class at starce. lEe"~Fro-
visional uovernmgnis'formed in.alTtheJSajjjgantldis-
tricjg	majority of-each a£them this
section of the people, and the length they went to
may therefore be fairly taken as the measure of what
the German petty bourgeoisie is capable of—capable,
as we shall see, of nothing but ruining any movement
that entrusts itself to its hands.
The petty bourgeoisie, great in boasting, is very
impotent for action, and very shy in risking anything.
The mesquin character of its commercial transactions
and its credit operations is eminently apt to stamp its
character with a want of energy and enterprise ; it is,
then, to be expected that similar qualities will mark
its political career. Accordingly the petty bourgeoisie
encouraged insurrection by big words, and great
boasting as to what it was going to do ; it was eager
to seize upon power as soon as the insurrection, much
against its will, had broken out; it used this power
to no other purpose but to destroy the effects of the
insurrection. Wherever an armed conflict had
brought matters to a serious crisis, there the shop-
keepers stood aghast at the dangerous situation
created for them ; aghast at the people who had taken
their boasting appeals to arms in earnest; aghast at
the power thus thrust into their own hands ; aghast,
above all, at the consequences for themselves, for
their social positions, for their fortunes, of the policy126 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
in which they were forced to engage themselves.
Were they not expected to risk “ life and property,”
as they used to say, for the cause of the insurrection ?
Were they not forced to take official positions in the
insurrection, whereby, in the case of defeat, they
risked the loss of their capital ? And in case of
victory, were they not sure to be immediately turned
out of office, and to see their entire policy subverted
by the victorious proletarians who formed the main
body of their fighting army ? Thus placed between
opposing dangers which surrounded them on every
side, the petty.-bourgcoisie,.kne.W-n£itto turn its power
to any other account than to let everything -taj^e its
charicepwhereby, of course, there was lost what little
cfiance of success there might have been, and thus to
ruin the insurrection altogether. Trg policy, <-,«■ ^a.-
ofc-pilif » evp.i'tfwhf'pi'. was the same, and, the*e-
fore, the insurreeticm^ef'Hay 1849, in parR~of
Germany, are all cut out to the samp pattern.
In Dresden, the struggle was kept on for four days
in the streets of the town. The shopkeepers of
Dresden, the “ communal guard,” not only did not
fight, but in many instances favoured the proceedings
of the troops against the insurgents. These again
consisted almost exclusively of working men from the
surrounding manufacturing districts. They found
an able and cool-headed commander in the Russian
refugee Michael Bakunin, who afterwards was taken
prisoner, and now is confined in the dungeons of
Munkacs, Hungary. The intervention of numerous
Prussian troops crushed this insurrection.
In Rhenish Prussia the actual fighting was of little
importance. All the large towns being fortresses
commanded by citadels, there could be only skirmish-
ing on the part of the insurgents. As soon as a
sufficient number of troops had been drawn together,
there was an end to armed opposition.Petty Traders.
127
In the Palatinate and Baden, on the contrary, a
rich, fruitful province and an entire state fell into the
hands of the insurrection. Money, arms, soldiers,
warlike stores, everything was ready for use. The
soldiers of the regular army themselves joined the
insurgents; nay, in Baden, they were amongst the
foremost of them. The insurrections in Saxony and
Rhenish Prussia sacrificed themselves in order to
gain time for the organisation of the South German
movement. Never was there such a favourable
position for a provincial and partial insurrection as
this. A revolution was expected in Paris; the Hun-
garians were at the gates of Vienna; in all the central
States of Germany, not only the people, but even the
troops, were strongly in favour of the insurrection,
and only wanted an opportunity to join it openly. •
And yet the movement, having once got into the
hands of the petty bourgeoisie, was ruined from its
very beginning. The~-pet-ty bourgeois-rulcfvparticu-
larlyof Baden—Herr Brentano at the head of them—
never forgot that by usurping the place and preroga-
tives ofTEe~'*"tawful ” sovereign, the Grand Duke, they
were committing high treason. They .sat,_4owh in
their tfnnistenal •arfflChaTrsTinlTTthp consciousness of
criminalitvJjuth&if--h-eart5:—^Wba±~ean-yau .expect of
such cowards ? They mot only abandoned^the in-
surrection to its own uncentralised, and therefore
ineffective, spontaneity, they actually did everything
in their power to take the sting out of the movement,
to unman, to destroy it. And they succeeded, thanks
to the zealous support of that deep class of politicians,
the “ Democratic ” heroes of the petty bourgeoisie,
who actually thought they were “saving the country,”
while they allowed themselves to be led by their
noses by a few men of a sharper cast, such as
Brentano.
As to the fighting-pai t of Lhd Ijusfness^never were .128
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
military_©peratraTTS_caxned »n in 3 mnw g1nvpn|y
more stolid way than under the Baden General-in-
Chief Sigel, an ex-lieutenant of the regular army.
Everything was got into confusion, every good oppor-
tunity was lost, every precious moment was loitered
away with planning colossal, but impracticable pro-
jects,until, when at last the talented Pole Mieroslawski,
took up the command, the army was disorganised,
beaten, dispirited, badly provided for, opposed to an
enemy four times more numerous, and withal, he
could do nothing more than fight, at Waghausel, a
glorious though unsuccessful battle, carry out a clever
retreat, offer a last hopeless fight under the walls of
Rastatt, and resign.. AsifreveTyfminxer.tinnarv war
where ar»4eyai'i~lliiAda-e-Rwell-drilled soldiers and
raw levies, there was plenty of heroism, and plenty
but, imperfect as it could not but
number were not considered sufficient to put it to the
rout, and that a hundred thousand regular troops, in
a campaign against twenty thousand insurgents,
treated them, militarily, with as much respect as if
they had had to fight the Old Guard of Napoleon.
In	had hfnkpn put-; by -the
middle of Jll-lyr'I-&2J:9-it was . entire!y ■sn.bd.ued7!a.nd-the
first German Revolution was closed.
London. [Undated.]
satisfaction that four times itsXIX.
THE CLOSE OF THE INSURRECTION.
October 23rd, 1852.
While the south and west of__Germany- was- Jn
open insurrection, and while it took the Governments
froffTtEe 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 pojitical theatre without an^ notice, being . taken
of its-adt.'^-'-'^" ‘ ”
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 ris-
ings of the petty trading class for its defence, and of
the working class for a more revolutionary ultimate
end. Desojation-aad- despair- reigned suprenreatnong
its membdri; 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 Govern-
ments, had already retired from a body which, hence-
forth, could not exist any longer, except in defiance
of the constituted authorities. The Liberals gave the
matter -up in ..utter discomfiture;ton, threw up
their commissions as representatives. Honourable
gentlemen decamped by hundreds. From eight or
nine hundred members the number had dwindled
129	I130 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 in-
surrection, 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 centre 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 ex-
pected from the representatives of German shopocracy.
These aspiring statesmen were not at all ffeed 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 de-
cisive aetion tmttb-evecy	a£ sjjQcesgpmy evdry
chance to succumb, with at least the honours of war,
-hadtsPassed away. In order, then, to develop a
fictitious, busy-body sort of activity, the sheer im-The Close of the Insurrection.	131
potency 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 indigna-
tion of these parliamentary gentlemen burst out with
an energy which they never found when the Govern-
ment heaped insult after insult upon them.
Of course, for Wolffs proposition was the first
sensible word spoken within the walls of St. Paul’s
Churchof course, for it was the very thing that was
to be done, and such plain language going so direct
to the purpose, could not but insult a set of senti-
mentalists, who were resolute in nothing but irresolu-
tion, 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 oLihe-hcmourable gentle-
men in Frankfort becaTfie“untenable, in spite""of reso-
lution!, appeals,-interpellations, and proclamations,
they retreated, but not into the insurgent districts ;
that wouicThave been too resolute a step. They went
to Stuttgart, where the Wurtemberg Government132 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
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 pro-
ceeded 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, bri-
gades, 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 de-
cisive action. The people, knowing what the inten-
tions of the Wurtemberg Government were, implored
the National Assembly to force that Government into
an open and active participation with their insurgent
neighbours. But no. The National Assembly, in
going 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 in-
fluence which they might yet have retained. They
earned the contempt they deserved, and the Wiir-
temberg Government, pressed by Prussia and the
Imperial Lieutenant, put a stop to the Democratic
farce by shutting up, on the 18th 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 in-
surrection; but there they were now useless. Nobody
noticed them. The Regency, however, in the name
of the Sovereign German people, continued to saveThe Close of the Insurrection.	133
the country by its exertions. It made an attempt to
get recognised by foreign powers, by delivering pass-
ports to anybody who would accept of them. It
issued proclamations, and sent commissioners to in-
surge those very districts of Wtirtemberg 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, 30th June, 1849. After describing
the adventures of half a dozen of these commissioners
in a resultless search for cash, he gives a series of ex-
cuses for not having yet gone to his post, and then
delivers himself of a most weighty argument respect-
ing possible differences between Prussia, Austria,
Bavaria, and Wtirtemberg, with their possible conse-
quences. 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
Wiirtemberg 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 minis-
try 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 dnd last creation 01 fhb RuvcrlTrtivj'ir: 1 Its con-
vocation had-been the first evidence that there
actually had been a revolution in January; and it
existed as long as this, the first modern German134
Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
Revolution, was not yet brought to a close, ^hosen
under .the. influence, of the..capitaUst class, bji-a-ffis-
ffiembered, 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 namgsof 1820-
48, and then to utterly ruin them. All the celebri-
ties 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 de-
feated 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,.ta.—disgrace forever that section
which had ever since March, 1848, headed the official
opposition^ the Democrats representing the interests
of the small...fi?dTn?7~~a7Tn^parhal1y oL.rhp fa_rrpTrier
class.- That glass was, in May and June, 1849, given
a chance to . show Tts. means of forming1* a stable
Government in Germany. WehaveseepTjow it failed,;
not so—-much' by adverse circumstances as by the
actual and c.ontinnecL.eaw:ardice in all trying move-
ments that had occurred since the outbreak of the
revolution; by showing in politics the same short-
sighted, pusillanimous, wavering spirit, which is char-
acteristic 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 work-
ing class. But yet, it had a fair chance. The German
Parliament belonged to it, exclusively, after the Re-The Close of the Insurrection.	135
actionists and Liberals had withdrawn. The rural
population was in its favour. 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 infatu-
ated, 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.
Bu.t not having actually carried their common-place
principles into execution, they were, under very
favourable 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 jirst 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.
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 22nd, 1852.
YOU will have ere this received fry 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 state-
ment 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 organisation on the Continent. Its leaders,
besides, had been exiled from their countries. But no
political party ,can exist without an organisation ; and
that organisation which both the Liberal bourgeois
and tha Democratic shopkeeping class were enabled
more or less to supply by the social station, advan-
tages, 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 1849, one after
another, been discovered by the police, and prosecuted
as conspiracies ; but if many of them were really con-
spiracies, formed with the actual intention of upsetting
136The Late Trial at Cologne.	137
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 Govern-
ment 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 labour.
The organisation of the advanced Communist party
in Germany was of this kind. In accordance with the
principles of the “Manifesto”^ (published in 1848),
and with those explained in the series of articles on
“ Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany,”
published in the Neiv 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 had produced the revolutionary movements
in 1848, and the causes that made them fail. Re-
cognising 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 manufacturing138 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
capitalists, and how at the present moment two more
classes claim their turn of domination, the petty trad-
ing class and the industrial working class. The
practical revolutionary experience of 1848-49 con-
firmed the reasonings of theory, which led to the
conclusion that the Democracy of the petty traders
must first have its turn, before the Communist work-
ing 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 organisation 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 secret spreading of
Communist opinions by the masses, could not be an
object of the Association. So well was this founda-
tion 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 successors. 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!”The Late Trial at Cologne.	139
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 con-
spiracy 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 dis-
covery and conviction of the so-called Franco-German
plot, in Paris, but it gave no clue as to the great Com-
munist 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 exist-
ence.
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 attach^ 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 respect-140 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
ably 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 con-
nection 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 ques-
tion, 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 “Attach^”
Grcif can wa«h his hands of these infamous proceed-
ings. 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 seeThe Late Trial at Cologne.	141
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 Com-
mittee, whose existence was maintained by the
Prussian police; and Herr Stieber, finding that this
book wondrously agreed with the reports already re-
ceived 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 chris-
tened Louis or Charles ; others, at the time they were
at the other end of England, were made to have pro-
nounced 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, favourably 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 Com-
mitee for this book ; but the existence of this pre-
tended secretary rested merely upon a hoax that142 Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
some malicious Communist had played upon the un-
fortunate Hirsch.
This clumsy fabrication was too scandalous an
affair not to produce the contrary of its intended
effect. Although the London friends of the defend-
ants 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 recognise 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 inter-
polated 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 in-
famy 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 de-
fence 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 re-
presented to be has been stated by Herr Stieber him-
self, 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 ofThe Late Trial at Cologne.
143	%
Fleury, and then made his escape from this, country 1
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 such as the Rhenish Provinces had not yet
seen—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 re-
troactive application of the new Prussian code en-
abled the Government to have seven prisoners con-
victed, 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 1st, 1852.NOTES.
(i.) Page 3. The “eleven men ” were : Dupont de
1’Eure, Lamartine, Cremieux, Arago, Ledru Rollin,
Garnier-Pages, Marrast, Flocon, Louis Blanc, and
Albert.
(2.) Page 6. The “ Zollverein " was the German
Customs Union. It was originally founded in 1827,
and largely extended after the war of 1866. Since
the unification of Germany as an “ Empire ” in 1871,
the States belonging to the Zollverein have been in-
cluded in the German Empire. The object of the
Zollverein was to obtain a uniform rate of customs
duties all over Germany.
(3.) Page 19. The Rhenish Gazette. This paper
was published at Cologne, as the organ of the Liberal
leaders, Hansemann and Camphausen. Marx contri-
buted certain articles on the Landtag, which created
so great a sensation that he was offered in 1842—
although only 24 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 Govern-
ment sent a second “ special ” censor from Berlin, but
the double censorship proved unequal to the task, and
in 1843 the paper was suppressed.
(4.) Page 58. Lusatia, an ancient territory of Ger-
145	K146
Notes.
many, 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).
(5.) Page 88. Die Neue Rheiniscke 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, eg., 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 sus-
pended 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 werfe Marx,
Schapper, and Schneider. The accused were charged
with “inciting the people to armed resistance against
the Government and its officials.” Marx mainly con-
ducted 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 in no wise concerned, and that his
only business was to deliver a political lecture to the
jury. And, in fact, at the end of the trial, one of theNotes.
147
jurors went to Marx to thank him, in the name of his
colleagues, for the instructive lecture he had given
them.”1 The accused were unanimously acquitted by
the jury. Among the better known of the contribu-
tors to the New Rhenish Gazette, edited by Marx,
were Engels, W. Wolff, Werth, Lassalle ; while Freili-
grath 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, 1849, 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 1 Guilty ’ shall speak,
By ypur side ye shall find me undaunted.
On Rhirffi 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.” 2
(6.) Page 121. 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
Silesian 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.”
*■“ Ferdinand Lassalle,” by Edward Bernstein. (Swan Son-
nenschein. Social Science Series.)
3 Translated by Ernest Jones.I4S
Notes.
(7.) Page 137. “The Manifesto.” This is the
celebrated “ Communist Manifesto,” which the Com-
munist 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 eco-
nomic production and exchange, and the social
organisation 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 . . . with-
out at the same time, and once and for all emancipat-
ing society at large from all exploitation, oppression,
class distinctions, and class struggles.” As to this
fundamental proposition of the Manifesto, it “be-
longs,” 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.”
Printed by Cowan fr9 Co., Limited, Perth,SOCIAL SCIENCE SERIES.
SCARLET CLOTH, EACH 2s. 6d.
1.	Work and Wages.	Pro! J. E. Thorold Rogers.
“ Nothing that Professor Rogers writes can fail to be of interest to thoughtful
people.”—Athenceum.
2.	Civilisation : its Cause and Care.	Edward Carpenter.
*' No passing piece of polemics, but a permanent possession.”—Scottish Review.
8. Quintessence of Socialism.	Dr. Schafflb,
" Precisely the manual needed. Brief, lucid, fair and wise.”—British Weekly.
4. Darwinism and Polities.	D. G. Ritchie, M.A. (Oxon.).
New Edition, with two additional Essays on Human Evolution.
** One of the most suggestive books we have met with.”—Literary World.
6. Religion of Socialism.	E. Belfort Bax.
6. Ethics of Socialism.	E. Belfort Bax.
“ Mr. Bax is by far the ablest of the English exponents of Socialism.”— Westminster
Review.
7.	The Drink Question.	Dr. Kate Mitchell.
“ Plenty of interesting matter for reflection. \ graphic.
8.	Promotion of General Happiness.	Prof. M. Macmillan,
*■ A reasoned account of the most advanced and most enlightened utilitarian doc-
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10.	Socialism in England.	Sidney Webb, LL.B.
“ The best general view of the subject from the modern Socialist side.”—Athenaeum,
11.	Prince Bismarck and State Socialism.	W. H. Dawson.
" A succinct, well-digested review of German social and economic legislation since
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12.	Godwin’s Political Justice (On Property).	Edited by H. S. Salt.
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18. The Story of the French Revolution.	E. Belfort Bax
** A trustworthy outline.”—Scotsman.
14. The Co-Operative Commonwealth.	Laurence Gronlund.
“ An independent exposition of the Socialism of the Marx school.”—Contemporary
Review.
16. Essays and Addresses.	Bernard Bosanquet, M.A. (Oxon.).
" Ought to be in the hands of every student of the Nineteenth Century spirit.”—
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means.”—Pall Mall Gazette.
16.	Charity Organisation. C. S. Loch, Secretary to Charity Organisation
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*' A perfect little manual.”—Athenaeum.
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17.	Thoreaa’s Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers.	Edited by H. S. Salt.
“ An interesting collection of essays.”—Literary World.
18.	Self-Help a Hundred Tears Ago.	G. J. Holyoake.
“ Will be studied with much oenefit by all who are interested in the amelioration
of the condition of the poor."— Morning Post.
19.	The New York State Reformatory at Elmira.	Alexander Winter.
With Preface by Havelock Ellis.
*' A valuable contribution to the literature of penology.”—Black and Whitt.SOCIAL SCIENCE SERIES—(Continued).
3$. Common Sense about Women.	T. W. Higginson.
“ An admirable collection of papers, advocating In the most liberal spirit the
emancipation of women.”— Woman's Herald.
SI. The Unearned Increment.	W. H. Dawson.
“A concise but comprehensive volume.”—Seho.
22. Our Destiny.	Laurence Gronlund.
“ A very vigorous little book, dealing with the influence of Socialism on morals
and religion.’—Daily Chronicle.
-28. The Working-Class Movement In America.
Dr. Edward and E. Mari Avelino.
“ Will give a good idea of the condition of the working classes in America, and of
the various organisations which they have formed.”—Scots Leader.
24. Luxury.	Prof. Emile de Lavelbyb.
" An eloquent plea on moral and economical grounds for simplicity of life.”—
Academy.
26. The Land and the Labourers.	Eev. 0. W. Stubbs, M.A.
“This admirable book should be circulated in every village in the countcy.”—
Manchetter Guardian.
26.	The Evolution of Property.	Paul Lafargub.
“Will prove interesting and profitable to all students of economic history."—
Scotsman.
27.	Crime and Its Causes.	W. Douglas Morrison.
“ Gan hardly fail to suggest to all readers several new and pregnant reflections os
the subject.”—Anti-Jacobin.
28.	Principles of State Interference.	D. G. Ritchie, M.A.
“ An interesting contribution to the controversy on the functions of the State.”—
Glasgow Herald.
29.	German Socialism and F. Lassalle.	W. H. Dawson.
“Asa biographical history of German Socialistic movements during this century
it may be accepted as complete.”— British Weekly.
30.	The Purse and the Conscience.	H. M. Thompson, £.A. (Cantab.).
•• Shows common sense and fairness in his arguments.”—Scokwan.
81. Origin of Property in Land. Fustel de Coulangbs. Edited, with an
Introductory Chapter on the English Manor, by Prof. W. J. Ashley, M.A.
" His views are clearly stated, and are worth reading."—Saturday Review.
'82. The English Republic.	W. J. Linton. Edited by Kinbton Paries.
“ Characterised by that vigorous intellectuality which has marked his long life of
literary and artistic activity."—Glasgow Herald.
'63. The Co-Operative Movement.	Beatrice Potter.
“ Withont doubt the ablest and most philosophical analysis of the Co-Operative
Movement which has yet been produced. "—Speaker.
24.	Neighbourhood Guilds.	Dr. Stanton Coit.
“ A most suggestive little book to anyone interested in the social question."—
Fall Mall Gazette.
25.	Modern Humanists.	J. M. Robertson.
“ Mr. Robertson’s style is excellent—nay, even brilliant—and his purely literary
criticisms bear the mark of much acumen.”— Times.
■36. Outlooks from the New Standpoint.	E. Belfort Bax.
“Mr. Bax is a very acute and accomplished student of history and economics."
—Daily Chronicle.
37. Distributing Co-Operative Societies. Dr. Luigi Pizzamiglio. Edited by
F. J. Snell.
" Dr. Pizzamiglio has gathered together and grouped a wide array of facte and
statistics, and they speak for themselves.”—Speaker.
$8. Collectivism and Socialism. By A. Nacquet. Edited by W. Heaford.
“ An admirable criticism by a well-known French politician of the New Socialism
of Marx and Lassalle.”— Daily Chronicle.SOCIAL SCIENCE SERIES—(Continued).
39.	The London Programme.	Sidney Webb, LL.Bb
“ Brimful of excellent ideas."—AnfiVacoWn.
40.	The Modern State.	Paul Leroy Beaulieu.
“A most interesting book; well worth a plaoe in the library of every social
inquirer.”—A. B. Economist.
41.	The Condition of Labour.	Henry George.
“ Written with striking ability, and sure to attract attention."—Newcastle Chronicle.
42.	The Revolutionary Spirit preceding the French Revolution.
Felix Rocquain. With a Preface by Professor Huxley.
' The student of the French Revolution will find in it an excellent introduction to
the study of that catastrophe."—Scotsman.
43.	The Student's Marx.	Edward Aveling, D.So.
“ One of the most practically useful of any in the Series.”—Glasgow Herald.
44.	A Short History of Parliament.	B. C. Skottowe, M.A. (Oxon.).
“ Deals very carefully and completely with this side of constitutional history."—
Spectator.
46. Poverty: Its Genesis and Exodus.	J. G. Godard.
“ He states the problems with great force and clearness ”—N. B. Economist.
46.	The Trade Policy of Imperial Federation.	Maurice H. Hervby.
“ An interesting contribution to the discussion. '—Publishers' Circular.
47.	The Dawn of Radicalism.	J. Bowles Daly, LL.D.
“ Forms an admirable picture of an epoch more pregnant, perhaps, with political
instruction than any other in the world’s history.”— Daily Telegraph.
48.	The Destitute Alien In Great Britain. Arnold White; Montague Crackan-
thorpe, Q.C.; W. A. M'Arthur, M.P.; W. H. Wilkins, &o.
“ Much valuable information concerning a burning question of the day.”—Tims*.
49.	Illegitimacy and the Influence of Seasons on Conduct.
Albert Leffingwell, M.D.
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Interesting.”— Westminster Review.
£0. Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century.	H. M. Hyndman.
“One of the best and most permanently useful volumes of the Series.”—Literary
Opinion.
£1. The State and Pensions In Old Age. J. A. Spender and Arthur Acland, M.P.
“A careful and cautious examination of the question."—Times.
£2. The Fallacy of Saving.	John M. Robertson.
“ A plea for the reorganisation of our social and industrial system.”—Speaker.
£3. The Irish Peasant.	Anon.
‘A real contribution to the Irish Problem by a close, patient and dispassionate
Investigator."— Daily Chronicle.
£4. The Effects of Machinery on Wages.	Prof. J. S. Nicholson, D.So.
“Ably reasoned, clearly stated, impartially written."— Literary World.
65. The Social Horizon.	Anon.
“A really admirable little book, bright, clear, and unconventional."—Daily
Chronicle.
£6. Socialism! Utopian and Scientific.	Frederick Engels.
“ The body of the book is still freBh and striking."—Daily Chronicle.
67.	Land Nationalisation.	A. R. Wallace.
“The most instructive and convincing of the popular works on the subject."—
National Reformer.
68.	The Ethic of Usury and Interest.	Rev. W. Blissard.
“The work is marked by genuine ability."—North British Agriculturalist.
69.	The Emancipation of Women.	Adelb Cbepaz.
“ By far the most comprehensive, luminous, and penetrating work on this question
that I have yet met with."— Extract from, Mr. Gladstone’s Preface.
£0. The Eight Hours’ Question.	John M. Robertson.
“A very cogent and sustained argument on what is at present the unpopular
side."—Times.
61.	Drunkenness.	George R. Wilson, M.B.
“ Well written, carefully reasoned, free from cant, and full of sound sense.”—
National Observer.
62.	The New Reformation.	Rambden Balm forth.
“ A striking presentation of the nascent religion, how beHt to realize the personal
and social ideal.”—Westminster Review.
63- The Agricultural Labourer.	T. E. Kbbbb«»
“ A short summary of his position, with appendices on wages, education, allot*
ments, etc., etc.”
64. Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer.	E. Bernstein.
“A worthy addition to the Social Science Series.”—North British Economist.SOCIAL SCIENCE SERIES—(Continued).
66.
66.
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England’s Foreign Trade In XIXth Century.	A. L. Bowles'.
“ Full of valuable information, carefully compiled.”—Timet.
Theory and Policy of Labour Protection.	Dr. Schaffle.
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History of Rochdale Pioneers.	G. J. Holyoake.
“ Brought down from 1844 to the Rochdale Congress of 1892.”—Co-Op. News.
Rights of Women.	M. Ostragorskj
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Dwellings of the People.	Locke WoRTHiNGTor
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Hours, Wages, and Production.	Dr. Brentano.
“Characterised by all Professor Brentano’s clearness of style."—Economic Review.
Rise of Modern Democracy.	Ch. Borgeaud,
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Land Systems of Australasia.	Wm. Epps.
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Scots. Mag.
The Tyranny of Socialism.	Y >es Guyot. Pref. by J. H. Levy-
“M. Guyot is smart, lively, trenchant, and interesting."—Daily Chronicle.
Population and the Social System.	Dr. Nitb,
“ A very valuable work of an Italian economist.”— West. Rev.
The Labour Question.	T. G. Spyerr.
“ Will be found extremely useful.”—Times.
British Freewomen.	C. C. Stope9.
“ The most complete study of the Women’s Suffrage question.”— English Worn. Rev.
8ulcide anb Insanity.	Dr. J. K. Strahan,
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A History of Tithes.	Rev. H. W. Clarke-
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Three Months in a Workshop.	P. Gohre, with Pref. by Prof. Ely.
“ A vivid picture of the state of mind of German workmen.”— Manch. Guard.
Darwinism and Race Progress.	Prof. J. B. Haycraft.
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Local Taxation and Finance.
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The Social Contract.
Labour upon the Land.
Moral Pathology.
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Anglo-American Trade.
A Plain Examination of Socialism.
Commercial Federation & Colonial Trade Policy.
Selections from Fourier.
Public-House Reform.
G. H. Blunden.
E. BuRdis.
J J. Rousseau. Edited by H. J. Tozer.
Edited by J. A. Hobson, M.A,
Arthur E. Giles, M.D., B.So.
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6. Social Peace.	G. von Schultze-Gaevernitz.
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