Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Chapter 14: Defeat with Honour

The reactionary Press poured scorn on the workers for their 'cowardice' in retreating when things grew difficult. Marx denied that it was cowardice. It merely meant that they were not reckless. The moment for a general rising would only come when great questions and mighty events urged the united population into battle.

The October rising should have been such a moment. The revolutionaries of Vienna rose once more, in alliance with Kossuth's Hungary, to fight the decisive battle with the rehabilitated forces of Habsburg absolutism. On its outcome depended not the victory or defeat of the Revolution in Austria alone. The fate of the whole German Revolution would be decided in Vienna. If the Habsburgs conquered, so would the Hohenzollerns, and March would have been in vain. For Germany's sake they must not win.

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung issued impassioned appeals to the Democrats of Germany, employed its most powerful arguments, used the glowing verses of Freiligrath, urging them to make Vienna's cause their own:

If we could only kneel we should down on our needs

If we could only pray, we should pray for Vienna.1

The Left produced their usual resounding rhetorical phrases in praise of the Viennese. But they failed to understand, would not listen, no longer had the strength to carry out the task of the moment: that of defending Vienna in Berlin, Dresden and Frankfurt. Germany's calamitous division into minor states meant that every general question assumed a variety of local forms--a Prussian form, a Saxon form, a Badenese form, a Bavarian form and so on. As local questions they were incapable of solution. There could be only one German Revolution. The alternative was the German counter-revolution.

The second Democratic Congress met in Berlin at the end of October. There were debates and more debates, and the time was frittered away with eloquent but empty speeches. In its appeal for the Viennese 'pulpit pathos' was substituted for 'revolutionary energy,' in the words of Marx; Germany did not rise, and Vienna was left to its fate. The imperial troops entered the Austrian capital on November 1.

Prussia's turn, quite logically, came next. On November 2 Pfuel's cabinet resigned in Berlin. It was not reactionary enough for the king, who felt himself strong enough now. The new Prime Minister he appointed was Count Brandenburg, an illegitimate son of Frederick William II. Brandenburg ordered the Berlin Parliament out of Berlin. It was unwilling to go, so a regiment of guards quite easily dispersed it. In March the king had said that soldiers were the only thing of any use against Democrats.

The Assembly opposed force not with force but with phrases. It had spent its whole time retreating step by step. Now, when its members should have organised armed resistance, acted like revolutionaries, ready to face every peril, even a sanguinary defeat, which would have been a thousand times better guarantee of a resurrection than a timid capitulation, the Chamber ceremoniously 'took its stand on the law.' The soldiers, of course, took their stand on the more solid ground of Berlin. The Chamber offered passive resistance, which meant in effect no resistance at all. The utmost to which they roused themselves was to issue an appeal to the country not to pay taxes to an unconstitutional government.

That was only the first and most obvious answer to the reactionary onslaught. Marx had proclaimed a tax-boycott in the Rhineland before the Chamber made its decision. Now blow after blow must inevitably follow. Cologne waited for the sign of battle from the capital. News was spread that the Berlin City Militia had refused to hand over their arms. This was the moment that Marx had been waiting for. Now the hour had struck. He appealed to the West of Germany to go to the assistance of Berlin, 'with men and arms.'

But the news was false. The people of Berlin remained quiet. The City Militia handed over their arms. Junker officers promenaded up and down Unter den Linden as of yore, full of contempt for the civilian rabble. Even the forcible dispersal of the Prussian National Assembly failed to enliven the feeble glow of the German Revolution.

Cologne was swarming with soldiers. The military were thirsting for an opportunity to shoot and stab to right and left to their heart's content. It would have been madness to have stood up to be butchered by them. Marx issued warnings against false heroism. At the same time he did everything possible to extend the movement. To open an attack in Cologne alone would merely have resulted in the riot he had condemned as hopeless in September. Berlin did not stir. But at all costs something must be done. The German Revolution must not be allowed to go down to defeat so ignominiously.

On November 18 Marx, jointly with Schapper and the lawyer, Schneider, issued an appeal for a tax-boycott in the name of the Rhineland district Democratic committee. Passive resistance presupposed active resistance, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung proclaimed, otherwise it would be equivalent to the struggles of a calf in the slaughter-house. Marx therefore appealed for a general levy of the people, of all men of military age, for the distribution of weapons, for the forming of committees of public safety and for the removal of officials who remained faithful to the Government.

The Prussian National Assembly might still, perhaps, have been able to carry the people with it, although the most favourable moment had passed. But it grew afraid of its own courage. It had been banished by the king to the reactionary little country town of Brandenburg.

It spent two weeks raging and fuming and then, with plaintive whines and ineffectual murmurs, went to Brandenburg. Once there it was promptly dissolved.

On December 5, 1848, Prussia was granted a new constitution.

A rising for such a Chamber, a popular revolution for the benefit of a bourgeoisie such as this would have been senseless. Marx explained to a Cologne jury a few weeks later what the struggle was about. 'What confronted us,' he told them, 'was the struggle between ancient feudal bureaucracy and modern bourgeois society, the fight between the society of landed property and industrial society, between the society of faith and the society of knowledge.' Between these two forms of societies there could only be a struggle to the death. But the bourgeoisie, who should have fought for their own interests, their class interests, cried off, shirked, evaded their task. They wanted the revolution, they could not help wanting it, but they shrank from the cost. They cast fearful glances at the masses whom they had set in motion because they themselves were too weak to face feudalism alone, the masses whom they also feared. For behind their own revolution they could already perceive the second revolution lurking, the revolution that would be against them. Lacking initiative, lacking faith in the people and faith in themselves, they failed to exert the strength to seize the power as they might have seized it. They did not even go half-way. They allowed the whole of the old state apparatus to remain intact, in the ingenuous hope of establishing their supremacy and preserving it with its help. The nobility, the army, the bureaucracy allowed them to hold sway as long as the elementary popular movement threatened to sweep everything away. The bourgeoisie were good enough as a screen to shelter behind, while danger threatened. As soon as they were no longer necessary for this purpose the feudal classes dispensed with their services.

The experiences of the past nine months had made one thing plain beyond all doubt. Vienna and Berlin, the Prussian Chamber and the National Assembly at Frankfurt, the speech-making and still more the behaviour of the parties, all pointed to one thing. The revolution could only be accomplished against the bourgeoisie. In a series of articles in which he summed up the progress of events Marx concluded that the alternative before Germany now was the counter-revolution of feudal absolutism or the 'social-republican revolution.'

'Social-republican,' was the term he used, not 'Socialist' or 'proletarian.' The seventeen points of the programme of the Communist League had demanded a republic with socialistic institutions, a Republic with equal suffagae [sic] for all, which should free the peasants of all feudal burdens, assure the workers a livelihood by national workshops, the breaking of the power of the aristocracy of finance for the benefit of industry and the petty-bourgeoisie, a state bank to replace the private banks and control credit. Social-republicanism involved neither the abolition of private ownership of the means of production nor the abolition of class-conflicts. It meant capitalism still, but capitalism in a State in which workers, petty-bourgeoisie and peasants had maximum concessions. The social-republican revolution did not emancipate the proletariat; it merely prepared the ground for the struggle for its emancipation. If the bourgeoisie failed, if they did not manage to attain what was expected of them, i.e. a constitutional monarchy in theory but their own supremacy in fact, the other anti-feudal classes must part from them and workers, petty-bourgeoisie and peasants must advance for the social republic.

From the autumn of 1848 onwards the Neue Rheinische Zeitung started changing its tone. If previously it had only paid slight attention to specifically working-class questions, wishing to avoid anything tending to disturb harmonious co-operation between bourgeoisie and proletariat against the forces of absolutism, it now set itself to demonstrating the full extent of the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie. It gave publicity to the work-book that the municipal authorities of Cologne imposed on its workers, a shameless document demonstrating the workers' lack of rights. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung declared that this was evidence of what kind of constitution the German bourgeoisie would give the people if it came into power.

The weakness of the German Revolution was now manifest. Its most deep-seated cause lay in Germany's defective economic development. All the negative factors which had come to light, the splitting up of the revolutionary movement in the separate states, the weakness of the bourgeoisie, the inertia of the petty-bourgeoisie, the uncertainty of the workers, all had their deepest roots in it. After the collapse of Vienna and Berlin, in the face of the growing apathy and paralysis which seemed to be extending its grip from day to day, all hope that the German revolution might once more find sufficient strength within itself seemed to disappear. Towards the end of 1848 Marx rested all his hopes upon a blow from without. The Gallic cock must crow again. The revolution in its course through Europe had started out from Paris, in Paris the counter-revolution had gained its first victories, in Paris likewise it would suffer its next defeat. Not a country in Europe now lived its own life alone; the same battle-front ran through" them all. The Revolution could not conquer in any country unless the counter-revolution were overthrown in France. The article with which the Neue Rheinische Zeitung greeted the New Year ended with the words: 'Revolutionary rising of the French working class, world war, that is the programme for 1849.'

In the Revolution's period of decline the respective social forces stood out far more plainly than during its period of advance. The strength and weakness of the various classes were now apparent. The ultra-Lefts chose just this moment to lose all sense of proportion. They clung the more fanatically to their wish-picture the farther reality departed from it. At the beginning of 1849 a fresh attack on Marx was hatched in the Workers' Union.

In spite of the unrelenting efforts of the public prosecutor, supported by the partisan president of the court, to secure a conviction of Gottschalk, 'who appealed to the crude masses, the lowest section of society, the most incapable of all of forming an opinion,' the jury had acquitted him. Marx's acceptance of the presidency of the Workers' Union had only been provisional. Now that Gottschalk was free once more, he was able to resume it. But in the meantime a great deal had changed in the Union, and Gottschalk's long imprisonment had not been without its effect on him. The school through which the Union had passed in those stormy days under the leadership of Marx and his friends had not been in vain. It had evolved, its understanding of the course of development had become infinitely clearer, it no longer only differentiated between black and white, between heaven and hell as it had done in the past; it had learned to differentiate both in the camp of the counter-revolution and in its own, it no longer stood for all or nothing.

Gottschalk was bitterly disappointed. 'His' Union, which he regarded so tenderly as his own creation and believed he could sway this way and that as if it were his own property, had been stolen from him. He decided that it needed reorganisation, and proposed that full powers be vested in the president--that, of course, meant Gottschalk himself--to appoint his own officers, for he alone possessed the necessary knowledge, understanding and authority. The Union declined to submit to a dictatorship of this sort, and Gottschalk was enraged at its 'ingratitude.' His vanity was so wounded that at the beginning of January, 1849, he left Cologne without saying anything to anybody and went to Brussels. But before leaving he gained control of the Union newspaper, and the new editor whom he put in charge was his unconditional adherent, as he was destined soon to show by what he wrote about the forthcoming elections.

Gottschalk may have asked the members of the Workers' Union to put him up as candidate for the Prussian National Assembly and they may have refused. This was later believed to have been the chief reason for his departure from Cologne. Gottschalk denied it, however, and recalled his attitude to the elections of 1848, to participation in which he had been so strongly opposed. But that had been in 1848. In 1849 Gottschalk became a candidate, though not in Cologne. He stood in Bonn and also in a peasant constituency near Bonn, on both occasions without success.

The elections, under the new Constitution granted by the king, were due to take place on February 22, 1849. The Workers' Union spent weeks discussing whether to participate in them or not. Anneke, who was a friend of Gottschalk, though he did not remain a partisan of his to the end, was in favour of the Workers' Union putting up their own candidate. Marx opposed this, in the first place for the practical reason that the time till the election was too short to make the necessary preparations. In principle, of course, he was in favour of putting up workers' candidates, but for the moment it was not a question of 'doing something on grounds of principle but of creating opposition to the Government, to absolutism and to feudal domination.' He was far from agreeing on matters of principle with Raveaux, whom he had relentlessly criticised, and with Schneider, both of whom were standing as candidates. But it was not a question of a struggle between 'red' and 'pink' Democrats now. 'In view of the impossibility of putting one's own principles into effect it was necessary to unite with the other opposition party in order not to leave the victory to absolute monarchism.'

This was another attempt to go part of the way with the radical bourgeoisie. It was an attempt undertaken without much hope of rallying the ranks in a battle that was almost lost. Yet it was the only course open in Germany as long as a blow did not come to clear the stifling atmosphere from without. In this situation, with the forces distributed as they were, anything else would have amounted to so much empty verbiage.

The second Prussian National Assembly was also elected by indirect voting. The primary voters elected the electors who elected the actual deputies. The Left bloc were successful in Cologne. Of the 344 electors two hundred were Democrats and opponents of the Constitution the king had granted. They sent two deputies to Berlin, Kyll and Schneider, the lawyer, with whom Marx had worked for months in the Democratic Union.

The majority of the members of the Workers' Union were followers of Marx. Gottschalk's closest followers, utterly opposed to compromise as of old, clinging to their principles all the more obstinately because they were utterly incapable of practical political thinking, wrong even when an error in their calculations accidentally produced the right result, now threw all discretion to the winds and used their paper to attack Marx more and more violently. Gottschalk still retained his control of the Union paper, and the Union failed to regain it. Consequently it was forced to start a new paper of its own. From February onwards there were two workers' newspapers in Cologne, fighting each other hammer and tongs. Gottschalk's paper declared relentless warfare on 'all parties, from that of the Neue Preussische Zeitung (the mouthpiece of the extreme Right) to that of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.' In the issue of February 25, 1849, there appeared an open letter 'to Herr Karl Marx,' which laid plain the substance of the dispute between Gottschalk and him. It was not signed but was written by Gottschalk, who remained behind the scenes but took a very lively part in the sectional squabble as before. Wounded pride was not the smallest of his motives. At the Frankfurt Democrats' Day Schapper had said that Marx was destined to play a great rôle, and this had hurt him. He consoled himself with the thought that this Goliath must meet his David too.

The 'open letter' seized on an article of Marx's in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of January 21. Gottschalk chose well. Never before and never again in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung did Marx express with such clarity his interpretation of the tasks of the revolution and the rôle played in it by the various classes.

The elections for the second Prussian National Assembly were at hand. The bourgeoisie were prepared to put up with the new constitution. Marx laid bare once more, in words that were crystal-clear and were this time entirely lacking in that scorn which he usually never spared, how inseparably their interests were interwoven with this constitution. It was not a question now of a Republic or even of a red Republic, but simply of the old absolutism with its hierarchy on the one hand and the representative system of the bourgeoisie on the other. Prussia must either attain the political organisation corresponding to the social conditions of the century or retain a political constitution corresponding to the social conditions of the past. The struggle against the bourgeois system of private property could not yet be. It confronted England and was on the order of the day in France. In Germany the struggle was rather against a political system which threatened bourgeois private property because it left the helm of the ship of state to the representatives of feudal private property, to the king by the grace of God, the army, the bureaucracy, the provincial Junkers, and a number of finance barons who were their allies.

Marx then proceeded to demonstrate in detail how Prussian feudalism had injured and was continuing to injure the bourgeoisie, how it was restricting the development of modern big industry, hampering foreign trade, delivering German industry helpless into the hands of English competition. He demonstrated how Prussian fiscal policy and the Prussian bureaucratic machine had out everything, great and small, to the measure of the feudal classes. The class-interest of the bourgeoisie was to destroy the feudal state themselves. That was their historical task, and this revolution was their revolution.

What of the workers and the petty-bourgeoisie. 'We say to the workers and the petty-bourgeoisie: rather suffer in modern bourgeois society, which by the development of industry creates the material means for the foundation of a new society which will free you all, than step backwards into an obsolete form of society, which, under the pretext of saving your class, will plunge the whole nation back into mediaeval barbarism.'

In these words Marx expressed, brutally and without the slightest regard for fondly nourished illusions, the fact that the revolution, on whomsoever's shoulders it might be borne, must be the bourgeois revolution first and could be no other, because it was necessary to free bourgeois conditions of property, i.e. in later language, capitalist economy, from all the fetters that hampered its development. The proletarian revolution would only be possible after capitalist economy had created the conditions that presupposed it.

Gottschalk's reply to Marx was: 'What is the purpose of such a revolution? Why should we, men of the proletariat, spill our blood for this? Must we really plunge voluntarily into the purgatory of a decrepit capitalist domination to avoid a mediaeval hell, as you, sir preacher, proclaim to us, in order to attain from there the nebulous heaven of your Communist creed?'

It was the question that Weitling put, it was the question that Willich and his supporters were to put a year later, it was the question that Bakunin's followers put in the seventies. Every time the bourgeois revolution was on the order of the day this question was put to scientific Socialism, expressing the same impatience as that to which the London Communists gave its classic formula in 1850--'We must come into power at once or lay ourselves down to sleep.'

Gottschalk's open letter also contained the reproach that such ideas could only come from an intellectual. 'They are not in earnest about the salvation of the oppressed. The distress of the workers, the hunger of the poor have only a scientific, doctrinaire interest for them. They are not touched by that which stirs the heart of men.' Thus did Gottschalk, himself an intellectual in the guise of a proletarian, make play with the mistrust of intellectuals felt by many workers; as if the threatened relapse into barbarism held terrors for Marx, i.e. for aesthetes and cultivated minds, but not for the workers. No, said Gottschalk, the party of the revolutionary proletariat knew no fear. He derided Marx for making the outbreak of revolution in Germany dependent on an outbreak in France and an outbreak in France dependent on an outbreak in England. He maintained that the proletariat must carry out its revolution here and now, without hesitations or misgivings. The revolution must be permanent and must continue until the victory of 'the proletariat. It was obvious that, holding these views as he did, Gottschalk was bound to reject co-operation with the bourgeois Democrats even if they were not (and this was another dig at Marx) such 'weaklings and nobodies' as the Cologne deputies whom Marx had recommended for election.

If Gottschalk expected Marx to continue the controversy he was sadly disappointed. Marx ignored the attack. He had succeeded in keeping his controversy with Weitling behind the scenes and he did not engage in polemics 'towards the Left' this time either. Instead of indulging in a theoretical battle with Gottschalk in a situation which demanded the concentration of all forces against the Right, instead of engaging in a controversy that might easily be misconstrued and was in any case inopportune, he preferred setting forth his own positive point of view. Later, in a situation that was in many respects similar, on the occasion of Lassalle's agitation against the Prussian Progressive Party, Marx adopted the same attitude. But it was impossible for his comrades in the Workers' Union to keep silence. The breach between them and Gottschalk's followers was so great that the Union ended by splitting into two. Gottschalk's adherents resigned and formed their own organisation. It only survived for a few months. A year later the old Union also expired, shattered by the blows of the Reaction.

After Gottschalk's return to Cologne in the summer of 1849, he took practically no more part in political activity. He resumed his medical practice as a faithful and selfless helper of the poor. Cholera broke out in the autumn, and Gottschalk, actuated by the sympathy for the poor which was the whole reason of his being, was the first and for a long time the only doctor to work in the infected slum districts. He caught the disease himself and died, after a day's illness, on September 8, 1849. Many hundreds of workers followed their dead friend to his grave.

In the struggle against the majority of the Workers' Union, a substantial proportion of Gottschalk's adherents had been actuated by personal motives and emotional attachment to their leader. Gottschalk had expressed, in however distorted and mutilated a fashion, an under-current of feeling in the revolutionary movement that grew stronger and stronger as time went on and affected even those who had hitherto followed Marx in his policy of coalition with bourgeois democracy. The same aspiration, to liberate the workers' movement from all burdensome and oppressive ties, called the Communist League into being once more.

Its old leaders, with Schapper and Moll at their head, had never been entirely reconciled to the dissolution of the League, although they had not been able to resist Marx's arguments for its dissolution. The branches of the League abroad had never acknowledged its dissolution. At the second Democratic Congress in Berlin, Ewerbeck, leader of the Paris branch, had conversations with former League members, with whom be arranged to summon a general League Congress in Berlin for December, 1848. The Congress was to appoint new executive officers in place of those previously appointed by Marx. The victory of Reaction in Berlin prevented the Congress from taking place, but the will to revive the League was there. Moll, who settled in London after fleeing from Cologne, was particularly active in the matter. Members of the London branch co-operated with him in drafting new League statutes. Moll, Heinrich Bauer and Georg Eccarius were to be the leaders of the resuscitated League.

At the beginning of 1849 Schapper was informed by Moll of the London decision and invited to found a branch in Cologne. Schapper summoned the old members of the League and a few of the most active members of the Workers' Union and established a branch. Marx, Engels and the rest of the editorial staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung seem to have been invited to join it in vain. A short time afterwards Moll appeared surreptitiously in Cologne as the representative of the new central office. He travelled all over Germany establishing contacts on behalf of the organisation. His chief aim was to persuade Marx and Engels to rejoin the League.

A meeting took place at the editorial offices of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx, Engels and Wilhelm Wolff were present, besides Moll and members of the Cologne branch. 'The discussion centred on whether the League ought to be re-established or not,' one of those present at the meeting later wrote. 'Those who took part in the debate were chiefly Marx, Engels and Wolff on the one side and Schapper and Moll on the other. Marx declared once again that under existing conditions, with freedom of speech and freedom of the Press, the League was superfluous. Schapper and Moll, on the other hand, insisted that the League was absolutely essential. Marx and his colleagues also objected to the statutes that Moll proposed.' Marx's objections were based on the League's proposed programme--its aims, as set forth in the statutes, were not those of the Communists--as well as on its proposed organisation, which 'tended towards the conspiratorial.' Marx was supported by Engels and Wolff, besides a few members of the Cologne branch, and Moll left Cologne without attaining his object.

The freedom of speech and of the Press, which in Marx's Opinion made the re-establishment of the League superfluous, still existed, certainly, but they were increasingly menaced every day. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung had to defend itself against more and more violent attacks. The officials whom it so pitilessly criticised had harassed it with complaints ever since the first day of its existence. They felt themselves 'slandered' every other minute. Among those who complained were Drigalski, a high official named Zweiffel, a policeman, and Hecker, the attorney-general. Some of their objections were so absurd that they had obviously been inspired from above. For instance, after Marx printed a repuplicam [sic] appeal by the notorious Gustav Hecker, Hecker, the attorney-general, protested at his not having pointed out that Gustav Hecker was not the same man. He claimed that this omission might possibly have led the reader to suppose that he, an official of royal Prussia, was making a Republican appeal. Far more serious was an accusation against Marx and his comrades based on his appeal to the people to refuse to pay taxes.

At first the officials persecuted Marx with accusations which they knew to be baseless obviously for the sole purpose of temporarily silencing him by a longer or shorter period in prison on remand. The Democrats of Cologne became alarmed at the persecutory zeal of the courts. The workers had already lost two presidents of their Union, and they were not minded to permit a third to be incarcerated. In the middle of November, when Marx was asked to appear before 'the examining magistrate on account of some trivial libel allegation, a large crowd of workers gathered outside the court and refused to disperse until Marx reappeared. They received him with jubilation and he was forced to make a short speech, the only one he ever made in the streets of Cologne. But there was even greater indignation, to say nothing of very justified anxiety, a week later when Marx and the other members of the committee of the Democratic Union were ordered before the court once more, this time for an alleged 'treasonable' appeal against a Government which was guilty of violating the Constitution. Before the accused appeared before the examining magistrate, a special delegation insisted on a high administrative official assuring them that they would not be arrested.

The civil officials preserved at least the outward appearance of legal forms. The military took more solid measures. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung had by no means soft-pedalled its exposures of the excesses committed by the soldiery at the instigation of their officers, particularly during the period of martial law. The officers, naturally enough, loathed the paper and plied the War Ministry with appeals for the suppression of the 'pernicious rag.' Threatening letters poured in by every post. One day two non-commissioned officers presented themselves at Marx's private address and announced that the newspaper had insulted the rank of non-commissioned officer and made threats of violence against the editorial staff. 'Marx received them in his dressing-gown, with the butt of an unloaded revolver protruding from one of the pockets,' Engels relates. 'This sight was sufficient to cause the gentlemen to refrain from further parleying, and they withdrew meekly, in spite of the fact that they were carrying their side-arms.'

These crude attempts at intimidation had no effect whatever. The civil authorities had no better success. In February, 1849, Marx twice appeared before a jury to answer their accusations. On the first occasion he was accused of insulting officials; on the second occasion the charge arose out of his November tax-boycott appeals. The first charge was easy to rebut, and the jury acquitted him after very short deliberation. Marx took advantage of his second trial to make a brilliant speech showing up the whole hypocrisy of the Reaction, who themselves tore the law to shreds and then, when men denounced them and called for violence against them, they, the law-breakers, accused them of violating the law. 'When the Crown makes a counter-revolution the people rightly reply with a revolution.' They could rid themselves of him as a conquered enemy but they could not condemn him as a criminal. The jury acquitted Marx once more, and, the foreman thanked him, on behalf of his colleagues, for his 'extremely informative speech.'

The courts having failed them, the now completely infuriated officials were compelled to resort to other measures. A favourable opportunity appeared to present itself in March. Though Joseph Moll had failed by a long way in attaining the objective of his journey in Germany, he had succeeded in establishing some connections and he had managed to found a branch in Berlin. The police were very soon on its track, for there appear to have been spies among its members. They did not know a great deal, but they did know some things; the rest they guessed or invented. At the end of March, 1849, the police conducted a number of house-searches, in the course of which some papers fell into their hands, including the statutes drafted by Moll. They also secured a clue which led them to suppose that the headquarters of the secret organisation were in Cologne. The police decided that the leaders must necessarily be Engels, Gottschalk, Moll and Marx, who in turn took their orders from a Paris committee of three, consisting of Herwegh, Heinzen and Ewerbeck. Thus truth and falsehood were inextricably mingled, partly in sheer defiance of common sense, partly as a consequence of sheer ignorance. But a sinister conspiracy had been discovered, the Fatherland was in danger, and it was possible to act at last. A special commissioner travelled from Berlin to Cologne, entrusted with the task of searching the houses of those implicated, confiscating their papers and issuing warrants for their arrest in accordance with the result of his investigations. In addition the correspondence of the conspirators was to be watched. The police visualised their hated enemies as already in prison. They were bitterly disappointed. The Cologne authorities were anxious 'in all friendliness and willingness' to oblige the police, but, in view of the mood of the city and the, complete unreliability of the assize courts, they were unwilling to risk another fiasco. They would not even agree to a house--search being undertaken without specific instructions from the higher authorities in Berlin. So this step misfired as well.

The Rhineland was not Berlin, and the sympathies of the overwhelming majority of the population on the Rhine were to the Left. Steps the Reaction were able to take with impunity elsewhere in Prussia had to be pondered well here. The political situation became more strained every day. The new Prussian National Assembly was far more radical than its predecessor and its Left wing was stronger and more active. The Democratic Party, under the leadership of D'Ester, of Cologne, prepared an armed rising. During the Easter holidays deputies from various parts of Germany discussed common action should that eventuality occur.

A 'live' section of the bourgeoisie, especially the petty-bourgeoisie, had roused themselves once more at the eleventh hour. But it was a section only. The vast majority of the bourgeois Democrats befuddled themselves with talk and nothing but talk. The experiences of the past year had taught Marx that when things grew serious they would cower by their firesides just as timidly as they had done in September and November. The republican question was discussed by the Cologne Democratic Union. There were two long meetings at which the question whether it should continue to call itself 'Democratic' or 'Democratic-Republican' was debated. It remained faithful to the democratic title. But what had been good and right in April, 1848, no longer sufficed in April, 1849. According to the Neue Kölnische Zeitung, which was edited by Anneke, the Union was thus determined 'to plunge deeper into the wide waters of Democracy, which nowadays has quite taken the place of Liberalism.' On April 14, Marx, Schapper, Wilhelm Wolff and Anneke resigned from the Rhineland sectional committee of the Democratic Union. Their reasons were that the 'present organisation of the Democratic Union included too many heterogeneous elements to permit of activity beneficial to the cause.' Three days later the Workers' Union decided to summon a Congress of all the Workers' Unions of the Rhine province and Westphalia and all other organisations which acknowledged Social Democracy at Cologne on May 6.

Thus was the separation between bourgeois and proletarian democracy finally achieved. In August, 1848, Marx had been in favour of a coalition of the 'most heterogeneous' elements. In April, 1849, he parted from the Democrats because they embraced too many heterogeneous elements. In 1848 he had been in favour of a united front of all the anti-feudal classes; now he directed that the alliance be dissolved. A cleavage had become inevitable. The differences in equipment, tempo, élan, fighting spirit, between the various columns of the great army which should have marched as a united front and with a single objective against the forces of absolutism and compelled the victory had become too great. A close connection with bourgeois Democracy had been maintained as long as possible, but it no longer worked, and it was necessary to abandon it. That did not exclude the possibility of future coalitions between the workers' unions and Democracy if circumstances should demand it. In February Marx supported the candidature of the Democrats, in April he parted from them, in June he went to Paris as a representative of a Democratic committee.

Marx may have had an additional reason for deciding on a public separation from the Democrats at that particular moment. In the spring of 1849 the resurrected Communist League was to all appearances still very weak. But it existed nevertheless, and it was to be anticipated that it would soon be of greater importance. The closer the counter-revolution approached the greater would be the justification for its existence. The workers had been only reluctant adherents of the necessary but disagreeable alliance with the Democrats, and the pick of them were obviously disposed to join the League and thus sever all connection with the Democratic unions. Marx may well have foreseen the danger that, if he postponed parting from the Democrats too long, it might result in isolating himself and his colleagues from the impatient workers. When Marx rejoined the Communist League is not known. It may have been at the time when he resigned from the Democratic committee. The journey he started in the middle of April may possibly have been a tour of organisation. The immediate reason for it was, of course, the increasing financial difficulties of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Its circulation increased from month to month, and it was read all over Germany. But its difficulties were increased by its very success. Printers, compositors, paper-makers, dispatch clerks had to be paid in cash, and subscriptions flowed in irregularly and belatedly. After the desertion of practically all the shareholders no capital was left. The newspaper swallowed up the remnants of Marx's legacy and all his wife's capital. This staved off things for a short time, but in the spring of 1849 the paper was once more on the brink of ruin. Marx tried to raise money in Westphalia and the north-west of Germany, but with little success. When he returned to Cologne on May 9 he brought only three hundred thalers with him.

Cologne was quiet, but in other Rhineland towns fighting had begun. In May, 1849, the German Revolution flared up for the last time. Dresden rose and fierce fighting raged in the streets for four days. The revolutionaries--among whom was the director of the Royal Saxon Orchestra, Richard Wagner--were defeated, for the Prussian forces were overwhelming. The Bavarian Palatinate was in wild insurrection. Baden was in the hands of a revolutionary Democratic government. In Rhenish Prussia the workers rose at Elberfeld, Iserlohn and elsewhere. The Government's military supremacy was so great and the few fighters were so pitifully left in the lurch by the petty-bourgeoisie that the isolated outbreaks in the Rhineland collapsed in a few days. This was also the fate of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Even now the Government did not dare to ban the paper outright. They still feared an open rising, though Cologne teemed with soldiers. True to their nature, they adopted crafty bureaucratic measures. They took no steps against the paper, they 'only' banished Marx. Marx having become an 'alien' by reason of his loss of Prussian nationality, they had the formal right to do so. He was a disturber of peace and order, so he was desired to leave Prussia at short notice. Marx received the expulsion order on May 16. On May 18 the last number of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared, printed in red. A prominent position was given to Freiligrath's powerful valedictory poem:

Defiance and scorn quivering on my lips, the gleaming dagger in my hand, still exclaiming: rebellion! in death, thus am I honourably defeated. Now farewell, farewell, you world of battle, farewell, you struggling hosts; farewell, you powder-blackened fields, farewell, you swords and spears. Farewell, but not for ever; for they cannot kill the spirit. Soon I shall once more be on high; soon I shall return on a steed!2

The last issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung warned the workers against any sort of rising. In view of the military situation in Cologne they would have been irretrievably lost. 'The Prussians will be infuriated by your quiet. In taking their farewell the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung thank you for the sympathy shown them. Their last word will always and everywhere be: "The emancipation of the working class!"'

The Reaction were highly gratified at the disappearance of the paper 'with which the Moniteur of 1793 paled in comparison.' 'Its surviving friends will be incapable of rivalling their Rhenish master in scurrility and desecration of the holiest in mankind.' The attitude of the people of Cologne to its disappearance is demonstrated by the words of a correspondent who was anything but sympathetic: 'No number of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung caused a greater sensation than the last. It was printed in red from beginning to end. The rush at the editorial offices and the demand for this number were really extraordinary. About twenty thousand copies must have been printed, and some of them are already fetching a thaler a piece. Real idolatry was roused by the issue of May 18. One hears again and again of instances of the paper being expensively framed.'

Marx liquidated the affairs of the newspaper with all speed. He devoted the cash in hand, the proceeds of the sale of the printing press (which belonged to him), etc., to pay the paper's debts. His own and his wife's fortune had been swallowed up to the last penny. Frau Marx had to pawn her silver to pay for immediate necessities. The staff distributed themselves among those parts of Germany where risings had, or had not yet, taken place. Marx and Engels went south, to the area of insurrection in the Palatinate of Baden.

Not that they expected a great deal from it. They had got to know the nature of the petty-bourgeoisie, even the best and most upright revolutionaries among them, and of the German lower middle class in particular, too well to be able to have great expectations. But even their most moderate expectations were disappointed. Marx travelled by way of Frankfurt and tried to persuade the Left representatives at the German National Assembly to summon the revolutionary troops from Baden and the Palatinate to Frankfurt by Parliamentary decree. But that might perhaps have been falsely construed, they held. No, no, even the Lefts intended to keep themselves 'within the framework of the law.' It was no better in areas where risings had taken place. Marx represented to the leaders that if anything at all could save them it could only be the most resolute offensive. They must promptly occupy Frankfurt, place the National Assembly under their protection, even if the Assembly did not explicitly ask for it, and so turn the struggle into an all-German one, i.e. one of the National Assembly against the reactionary governments. But the men of Baden and the Palatinate did not look beyond Baden and the Palatinate. They stayed where they were and there they were crushed. The last rising of the German revolution, like all the others, foundered on its local limitations.

In Germany there was no more work that Marx could do. He was no soldier, and his place was not in the army. He went to Paris as the representative of the Palatinate Democratic committee to get as much help for the insurrection as he could from the French Democrats. Engels was unwilling to miss an opportunity of gaining a little practical experience of war. 'As after all it was necessary honoris causa that the Neue Rheinische Zeitung be represented in the army of Baden and the Palatinate, I girded on a sword to my side and went to Willich.'

Gottschalk's followers warned the workers against taking up arms. Their ultra-radicalism ended in a passivity which was in fact counter-revolutionary. Their paper claimed that the workers should quietly wait until the absolutists and the constitutionalists had exhausted each other. The Communists, faithful to the words of the Manifesto which urged them to support every revolutionary movement aimed at existing social and political conditions, stepped without a moment's hesitation into the ranks of the insurrectionary army.

Chapter 14 notes

1: Wenn wir noch knien könnten, wir lägen auf den Knien

Wenn wir noch beten könnten, wir beteten für Wien
.

2: ...Auf der Lippe den Trotz und den zuckenden Hohn,

In der Hand den blitzenden Degen,
Noch im Sterben rufend: Die Rebellion!
So bin ich in Ehren erlegen...
Nun Ade, nun Ade, du kämpfende Welt,
Nun Ade, ihr ringenden Heere!
Nun Ade, du pulvergeschwärztes Feld,
Nun Ade, ihr Schwerter und Speere!
Nun Ade, doch nicht für immer Ade!
Denn sie toten den Geist nicht, ihr Brüder!
Bald richt'ich mich rasselnd in die Höh.
Bald kehr ich reisiger wieder

!