Routledge Library Editions karl marx

However, minor disturbances did occur when on the 25th of September Becker, Moll, Schapper and Wilhelm Wolff were to be arrested. The news that troops were advancing to break up a public meeting even caused the erection of barricades, but in fact the military made no move and only after complete calm had descended again did the military commandant summon up sufficient courage to proclaim martial law in Cologne. Under martial law the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed and on the 27th of September it ceased to appear. This was probably the only aim of the senseless military coup and a few days afterwards the Pfuel Ministry raised the state of siege. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was, in fact, very heavily hit, and it was the 12th of October before it appeared again.

The editorial board was broken up owing to the fact that most of its members were compelled to go over the frontier to avoid arrest : Dronke and Engels went to Belgium, and Wilhelm Wolff to the Palatinate, and it was some time before they returned. At the beginning of January 1849 Engels was still in Berne, where he had gone through France, mostly on foot. Above all, the finances of the paper were in a sad state. Aster the shareholders had turned their backs on it the paper managed to exist for a while on its increased circulation, but after the latest blow it was saved from final disappearance only by the fact that Marx took it over as his “ personal property ”, that is to say, by the fact that he sacrificed that little he had inherited from his father, or that little he was able to obtain in advance




on his future inheritance. Marx himself never said a word about the affair, but from the letters of his wife and the utterances of his friends n would appear that he sacrificed about 7,000 thaler to further the agitation and keep the paper alive, though naturally the exact sum is unimportant, the main thing being that he sacrificed all he had in order to keep the flag

flying.

Marx’s position was very insecure in another respect also. After the outbreak of the revolution the Federal Council had decided on the 30th of March that the German fugitives should be given both the active and passive franchise in the elections for the German National Assembly provided they returned to Germany and gave notice of their desire to renew their former civil rights. This decision was expressly recognized by the Prussian government and Marx, who fulfilled all the conditions guaranteeing him national civil rights, was therefore all the more entitled to demand that he should be given back his Prussian civil rights. In fact, when he applied in April 1848 the Cologne Town Council immediately granted his application and when he pointed out to the Police President of Cologne, Muller, that he could not very well bring his family from Trier to Cologne so long as the affair was uncertain, Muller replied that the district authorities, who according to an old Prussian law had to confirm the decision of the Town Council, would certainly give their permission for his re-naturalization. However, in the meantime the Neue Rheinische Zeitung began to appear, and on the 3rd of August Marx received an official intimation from the commissarial Police President Geiger to the effect that under the circumstances the Royal Government had decided to make no use “for the moment ” in his case of it^ right to grant Prussian civil rights to a foreigner, and that therefore he must continue to regard himself as an alien. On the 22nd of August he appealed indignantly to the Minister of the Interior, but his appeal was rejected.

Devoted husband and father as he was, Marx had in the meantime brought his family to Cologne despite the uncertainty. In the meantime its numbers had increased : the first daughter, who was called Jenny after her mother and was born in May 1844, was followed by a second daughter Laura, who was born in September 1845 and was followed, presumably not long afterwards, by a son, Edgar. Edgar is the only one of Marx’s children whose exact birth date is not known. Since its Paris days the family had been accompanied by Helene Demuth, a loyal and devoted servant and friend.

Marx was not one of those men who greet every new acquaint




ance as a friend and a brother immediately, but his loyalty to his friends was beyond reproach and his friendship firm. At the same congress at which his intolerable arrogance is alleged to have repulsed men who would gladly have approached him, he won lifelong friends in the lawyer Schily of Trier and the teacher Imandt of Krefeld, and although the stern oneness of purpose which guided him throughout his life made him appear sinister to semi-revolutionaries like Schurz and Techov, at the same time it irresistibly drew real revolutionaries like Freiligrath and Lassalle into his intellectual and personal orbit.

2. 
   Freiligrath and Lassalle
   

Ferdinand Freiligrath was eight years older than Marx and in his youth he had been liberally suckled with the pure milk of orthodoxy. On one occasion he had felt the lash of the old Rheinische Zeitung for having published a mocking poem on the Wlsuccessful tour of Herwegh after the latter’s expulsion from Prussia. However, it had not been long before the pre-March reaction had turned Saul into Paul, and during the period of exile in Brussels he had made the acquaintance of Marx. Their acquaintance in the beginning was slight but friendly. “A nice fellow, interesting and modest in his attitude,” he declared of Marx, and he was no bad judge of character. Freiligrath himself was utterly free of all personal vanity and perhaps just for this reason he had a fine feeling for anything which suggested arrogance in others.

The acquaintance of the two men ripened into a firm friendship in the summer and autumn of 1848, and the thing which drew them together was the respect which each felt for the courageous and uncompromising fashion in 1 which the other represented their joint revolutionary principles in the Rhenish movement. Referring to Freiligrath Marx declared in a letter to Weydemeyer: “ He is a real revolutionary and a thoroughly honest man, and that is praise I would give to very few.” At the same time Marx advised Weydemeyer to flatter the poet a little, declaring that all poets needed a little flattering encouragement if they were to give of their best. Marx was not a man who wore his heart on his sleeve, but in a moment of tension he wrote to Freiligrath : “ I tell you frankly that I am not prepared to lose one of the few men I regard as my friends in the best sense of the word merely on account of unimportant misunderstand




ings.” Apart from Engels, Marx had no better friend than Freiligrath in the times of his worst troubles.

Because this friendship was so simple and so real it has always been a source of annoyance to the Philistines. Sometimes they declared that the passionate fantasy of the poet had played him a scurvy trick by leading him into bad company, and at other times they declared that a demoniacal demagogue had breathed poisonously on a harmless poet and shrivelled up his song. It would not be worth while to waste a word on this nonsense, but for the fact that a wrong antidote has been offered against it. An attempt has been made to turn Freiligrath into a modern social democrat and this puts him in a wrong light. Freiligrath was a revolutionary from passionate instinct and poetic feelings, and not out of any scientific considerations. He regarded Marx as a pioneer of the revolution and the Communist League as the revolutionary advance-guard, but the historical arguments of The Communist Manifesto always remained more or less foreign to him, and above all, his glowing fantasy could make nothing of the often miserable and sober petty details of the everyday agitational work.

Ferdinand Lassalle, who joined Marx’s circle at about the same time, was a totally different type. He was seven years younger than Marx, and up to that time his reputation was based exclusively on his zealous struggle on behalf of the Countess Hatzfeldt, who had been ill-treated by her husband and betrayed by her caste. In February 1848 he had been arrested on a charge of instigating the theft of a deed-box,¹ but on the 1 Ith of August he was acquitted by a Cologne jury, after putting up a brilliant defence, and he was then able to devote himself to the revolutionary struggles. With his “unfailing sympathy for all real strength ” he naturally could not fail to be deeply impressed with the leader of the revolutionary struggle, Marx.

Lassalle had also gone through the Hegelian school and had thoroughly mastered its methods without up to that time harbouring any doubts as to their infallibility and without being affected by the decadence of Hegel’s successors. During a visit to Paris he had made the acquaintance of French socialism and received the accolade of a great future from Heine’s prophetic vision. However, the great expectations which the young man had aroused were hampered in their development to a certain extent by an ambiguity of character which he had been unable to master completely in his struggle against the impeding heritage of an oppressed race. The stale atmosphere of Polish Judaism had

¹ A deed-box containing or alleged to contain documents of value as evidence in the Hatzfddt proces.—Tr.


prevailed absolutely in the home of his parents. In his-champion-

ship of Countess Hatzfeldt even unprejudiced spirits were not always able to appreciate the truth of his contention, justifiable from his own point of view, that in this individual case he was fighting against the social misery of a whole period now labouring its way towards the grave. Even Freiligrath, who was never particularly fond‘ of him, spoke contemptuously of the “wretched domestic trivialities” around which world-history seemed to revolve for him.

Seven years later Marx expressed himself in much the same fashion : Lassalle considered himself a world-conqueror because he had been ruthless in a private intrigue, as though a man of any real character would be prepared to sacrifice ten years of his life on such a bagatelle. And several decades later Engels declared that Marx had harboured an antipathy towards Lassalle from the very beginning and that the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had deliberately published as little as possible about the Hatzfeldt case in order to avoid any impression that it had anything in common with Lassalle in the matter. However, in this respect Engels’ memory was deceiving him, for in fact, up to the day of its suppression on the 27th of September, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung published very detailed reports of the trial of Lassalle in connection with his alleged instigation of the theft of the deed-box, although of course its reports did not conceal the fact that the whole affair had less agreeable sides. And further, Marx himself, as he informed Freiligrath in a letter, assisted Countess Hatzfeldt financially in her dire straits from his own modest means, and when after his Cologne period he got into serious difficulties himself he chose Lassalle, together with Frciligrath, as his confidant in a town in which he had many old friends.

But Engels was certainly right when he said that Marx harboured an antipathy to Lassalle, and he and Freiligrath did also. It was an antipathy which had little to do with reason, and there is sufficient evidence available to show that Marx did not let it blind him to the deeper significance of the Hatzfeldt affair, not to speak of the fiery enthusiasm which Lassalle showed for the cause of the revolution, his outstanding talents and finally the devoted friendship which the younger comrade-in-arms showed towards him.

It is necessary to examine carefully the development of the relations between the two men from the beginning, not on Lassalle’s account, for his historical claims have long ago been vindicated, but in order to shield Marx himself from misunderstandings, for his attitude to Lassalle represents the most difficult psychological problem of his life.

2. 
   October and November Days
   

On the 12 th of October the Neue Rheinische Zeitung began to appear again and announced that Freiligrpth had joined its staff. It was fortunate enough to be able to welcome a new revolution immediately, for on the 6th of October the proletariat of Vienna had brought down its fist resoundingly and upset the treacherous plans of the Habsburg counter-revolution, which after Radetzky’s victories in Italy intended, with the help of the Slav peoples, to crush first the rebellious Hungarians and then the rebellious Germans.

Marx himself had been in Vienna from the 28th of August to the 7th of September in order to enlighten the masses there, but to judge from occasional newspaper references he had not been particularly successful, and that is not surprising, for the workers of Viennawere still at a comparatively low level of development. The revolutionary instinct with which they had opposed the departure of the regiments ordered to Hungary to suppress the revolution there was therefore all the more praiseworthy. Their action drew the first fire of the counter-revolution upon themselves, a noble sacrifice of which the Hungarian aristocracy proved unworthy. It was anxious to wage its struggle for Hungarian independence on the basis of its historical rights, and the Hungarian army made only one half-hearted drive which increased rather than diminished the difficulties of the Vienna insurrectionaries.

The attitude of the German democracy was no better. It certainly recognized how much depended for itself on the success of the Vienna insurrection, for if the counter-revolution gained the upper hand in the Austrian capital then it would inevitably deal the decisive blow in the Prussian capital also, where it had been awaiting its opportunity long enough. However, the German democracy contented itself with sentimental dirges, fruitless expressions of sympathy and vain appeals for aid to the impotent Reich’s Regent. At the end of October the democratic congress met in Berlin for the second time and it issued an appeal on behalf of besieged Vienna drawn up by Ruge, but the Neue Rheinische Zeitung pointed out aptly that it tried to make up for its lack of revolutionary energy by a sermonizing and tearful pathos, and that the whole appeal contained not a vestige of revolutionary passion or ideas. However, the passionate appeals of Marx in powerful prose and of Freiligrath in magnificent verse to afford the besieged Viennese the only effective assistance possible by overthrowing the counter-revolution at home re-echoed like voices in the desert.




Thus the fate of the Vienna revolution was sealed. Betrayed by the bourgeoisie and by the peasants and supported only by the students and a section of the petty-bourgeoisie, the workers of Vienna fought heroically, but on the evening of the 31st of October the besieging troops succeeded in effecting an entry into the town and on the 1st of November the great black and yellow flag of the counter-revolution waved from the steeple of St. Stephen’s Cathedral.

The moving tragedy in Vienna was quickly followed by a grotesque tragi-comedy in Berlih. The Pfuel Ministry resigned to make way for the Brandenburg Ministry, which immediately ordered the Assembly to retire to the provincial town of Brandenburg and caused General Wrangel to march into Berlin with the Guards Regiments to support this order by force of arms. Brandenburg, an illegitimate Hohenzoller, compared himself somewhat too flatteringly with an elephant which would trample the revolution under foot, but the Neue Rheinische Zeitung declared more truthfully that Brandenburg and his accomplice Wrangel were “two men without heads, without hearts and without principles, nothing more than imposing whiskers”, but as such just the right opponents for the pusillanimous Assembly.

And in fact Wrangel’s martial whiskers proved sufficient to intimidate the Assembly. It is true that it refused to vacate its constitutional seat, Berlin, but when one blow followed the other and one act of violence the other: the dissolution of the citizens guard, the proclamation of martial law, etc., it declared the Ministers traitors and denounced them—to the Public Prosecutor. It ignored the demand of the Berlin workers that the rights of the people should be defended by force of arms and proclaimed “passive resistance” instead, or in other words, the noble decision to suffer the blows of the enemy without answering back. It was then driven out of one hall after the other by Wrangel’s troops, and in a sudden burst of temperament caused by a new appearance of Wrangel’s bayonets it solemnly declared that the Brandenburg Ministry had no right to dispose of State moneys or collect taxes so long as the Assembly was not permitted to hold its sessions in Berlin without let or hindrance. However, hardly had the Assembly been broken up than its President, von Unruh, fearing for the safety of his precious skin, called together the bureau of the Assembly in order to place on record in the Minutes that the decision against the Ministry was invalid on account of a technical formality, although he let the decision be made public without hindrance.

It was left to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung to oppose the brutal coup of the government in a worthy fashion. It declared that




the moment had arrived to oppose the counter-revolution with a second revolution, and it called on the masses to oppose the violence of the authorities with every possible form of counterviolence. Passive resistance must have active resistance as its basis, it declared, otherwise it was nothing but the ineffective struggles of the sheep against the slaughterman. At the same time it ruthlessly demolished the legal quibbling about the theory of agreement with the Crown, behind which the cowardice of the bourgeoisie sought to hide itself: “The Prussian Crown is absolutely within its rights when it acts as an absolutist power towards the Assembly, and the Assembly is in the wrong because it does not act towards the Crown as a sovereign Assembly. . . . The old bureaucracy is unwilling to become the servant of the bourgeoisie, whose despotic schoolmaster it has been up to the present. The feudal party is not willing to sacrifice its privileges and its interests on the altar of the bourgeoisie. And finally, the Crown sees its real and native social basis in the elements of the old feudal society, whose highest expression is found in the Crown, whilst it regards the bourgeoisie as a foreign and artificial basis which will bear it only on condition that it withers away. The rousing ‘ By the Grace of God’ becomes a sober legal title for the bourgeoisie, the right of blood becomes the right of paper, and the Royal Sun a bourgeois farthing dip. The Crown therefore refused to let itself be persuaded by the phrases of the bourgeoisie, but answered the half-revolution of the latter with a whole counter-revolution. It flung back the bourgeoisie into the arms of the revolution, into the arms of the people, when it shouted, ‘Brandenburg in the Assembly and the Assembly in Brandenburg!’ ”

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung aptly parodied this slogan as, “The guard-room in the Assembly, and the Assembly in the guard-room!” expressing the hope that the people would be victorious under this slogan and turn it into the epitaph on the grave of the House of Brandenburg.

After the decision of the Berlin Assembly to deprive the government of the right to collect taxes, the democratic district committee in Cologne issued an appeal on the 18th of November signed by Marx, Schapper and Schneider demanding that the democratic associations in the Rhineland should immediately take steps to put the following measures into effect : any attempt made by the authorities to collect taxes by force should be resisted by every possible means ; citizens guards to be organized everywhere immediately to offer resistance to the enemy; arms and munitions to be supplied to the poor at municipal cost and by voluntary contributions; should the government refuse to




recognize and respect the decisions of the Assembly then committees of public safety should be elected everywhere, if possible in agreement with the municipalities, those municipalities resisting the Assembly to be re-elected by popular vote. Thus the Democratic Association did what the Berlin Assembly should have done and must have done had it taken its decision to refuse the payment of taxes seriously. However, the heroes of the Berlin Assembly trembled at their own courage and hurried off to their constituencies in order to prevent the carrying out of their decision, and after that they slunk off to Brandenburg to continue their sessions. With this the last vestige of dignity and influence had been abandoned so that on the 5th of December it was an easy matter for the government to dismiss the Assembly altogether and to impose a new constitution and a new franchise.