The “Government of Action” which succeeded the Camphausen Government was in power from June 25 to September 21, 1848, Auerswald being formally its head. Hansemann, Finance Minister as in the Camphausen Ministry, actually directed the Ministry’s activity.
154 Marx refers to the revolution in the Netherlands in 1566-1609 which was a combination of the national liberation war against absolutist Spain and the anti-feudal struggle of the progressive forces. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire The revolution ended with the victory of the north, where Europe’s first bourgeois republic — the United Provinces (the Dutch Republic) — was established, and with the defeat of the southern provinces, which remained under Spanish rule.
155 An allusion to Camphausen, who was formerly an oil and corn dealer, and to Hansemann, who started as a wool merchant.
156 Early in June 1848, the Prussian National Assembly, under pressure from the Government and the moderate constitutionalists, rejected a resolution giving due credit to the participants in the revolution of March 18-19, 1848, in Prussia. After long debates (described by Engels in his article “The Berlin Debate on the Revolution”, present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 73-86), the Assembly decided by a majority vote to proceed to the next items on the agenda. The Assembly’s renunciation of the March revolution aroused the indignation of the Berlin workers and artisans who, on June 14, took the arsenal by storm to arm themselves and defend their revolutionary gains. The uprising was put down by the army and the bourgeois civic militia.
157 Marx refers here to the numerous promises of the kings of Prussia to introduce a constitution and representative bodies in the country. On May 22, 1815, a decree as issued by the King in which he promised the setting up of provincial diets of estates, the convocation of an all-Prussia representative body, and a Constitution. Under the National Debt Law of January 17, 1820, state loans could only be issued with the consent of the provincial diets. But these promises made under pressure from the bourgeois opposition movement remained a dead letter. All that happened was that a law of June 5, 1823, established provincial diets with restricted advisory functions.
Financial difficulties compelled Frederick William IV on February 3, 1847, to. issue an edict convening the United Diet (Vereinigte Landtag), a body consisting of representatives of all the provincial diets of Prussia. The United Diet refused to grant a loan to the Government and was soon dissolved. The electoral law of April 8, 1848 (Marx quotes it above, on p. 154 of this volume), promulgated as a result the March revolution, provided for the convocation of an Assembly to draft a Constitution by “agreement with the Crown”. The two-stage system of voting established by this law secured the majority for the representatives of the bourgeoisie and the Prussian officials.
158 By Prussian Law is meant the Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preussischen Staaten approved and published in 1794. It included the criminal, constitutional, civil, administrative and ecclesiastical law and was strongly influenced by feudal ideas in the sphere of jurisdiction.
Code pénal — see Note 88.
Constables — see Note 45.
159 On August 21, 1848, Berlin was the scene of mass meetings and demonstrations in protest against attacks on members of the Democratic Club by reactionaries in Charlottenburg, a Berlin suburb. The demonstrators, who demanded the resignation of the Auerswald-Hansemann Ministry, threw stones at the building where Auerswald and other Ministers were staying. The Government replied to the August events with fresh repressive measures.
160 The Belgian Constitution of 1831 adopted after the victory of the bourgeois revolution of 1830 established a high property qualification, thus depriving a considerable part of the population of the suffrage.
161 The reference is to the Preussische Seehandlungsgesellschaft (the Prussian Maritime Trading Company) — a trade and credit society, founded in 1772 and enjoying a number of important state privileges. It granted large credits to the Government and actually played the part of its banker and broker. In 1904 it was made the official Prussian state bank.
162 A Bill abrogating exemption from graduated tax payments for the nobility, officers, teachers and the clergy was submitted by Hansemann to the Prussian National Assembly on July 12, 1848. A Bill abrogating exemption from the land tax was tabled on July 21, 1848.
163 At the sitting of the Prussian National Assembly on July 21, 1848, the Bill introduced on the basis of Deputy Hanow’s motion of June 3, 1848, was voted down and considered for the second time on September 30. Accepted this time, the Bill was approved by the King on October 9.
164 Nenstiel’s motion was introduced as early as June 2, 1848, and the decision mentioned by Marx, which in effect postponed indefinitely the abolition of peasant labour services, was adopted on September 1, 1848.
165 The reference is to the Congress of big landowners which met in Berlin on August 18, 1848. It was convoked by the leaders of the Association for the Protection of Property and the Advancement of the Well-Being of All Classes of the Prussian People. The Congress changed the name of the Association to: Association for the Protection of the Interests of Landowners; the Congress became known as the “Landowners’ Parliament”.
166 On July 31, 1848, the garrison of the Silesian fortress of Schweidnitz fired at a demonstration of the civic militia and local population protesting against the provocative actions of the military; 14 people were killed and 32 seriously wounded.
The Schweidnitz events served as a pretext for a discussion of the situation in the army by the Prussian National Assembly.
On August 9, 1848, the Assembly adopted the proposal of Deputy Stein, with amendments by Deputy Schultze, requesting the Minister of War to issue an army order to the effect that officers opposed to the constitutional system were bound in honour to resign from the army. Despite the Assembly’s decision Schreckenstein, the Minister of War, did not issue any such order. Stein therefore tabled his motion for the second time at the sitting of the National Assembly on September 7, 1848. As a result of the voting, the Auerswald-Hansemann Ministry had to resign. Under the Pfuel Ministry which followed, the order, though in a milder form, was at last issued on September 26, but this also remained a dead letter. Earlier, on September 17, General Wrangel issued an army order which made it clear that the military intended to launch an open offensive against the revolution. It urged the maintenance of “public order”, threatened those “who were trying to entice the people to commit unlawful acts”, and called upon the soldiers to rally round their officers and the King.
167 A reference to the speech from the throne made by Frederick William IV at the opening of the United Diet on April 11, 1847. The King said he would never agree to grant a Constitution which he described as a “written scrap of paper”.
168 Article 14 of the Constitutional Charter Louis XVIII granted in 1814 read: “The King is the head of the state.”
169 Magna Charta Libertatum — the charter which the insurgent barons forced King John of England to sign in 1215. It limited the powers of the King in the interests of the feudal lords, and also contained some concessions to the knights and burghers.
170 An allusion to the attempts made by the European counter-revolutionary forces in 1848-49 to restore the Holy Alliance, a league of European monarchs set up in 1815 on the initiative of Austrian Chancellor Metternich and Russian Tsar Alexander I, to put down the revolutionary movement.
171 See Note 84.
172 The reference is to the agreements concluded from the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century between Swiss cantons and European states for the supply of Swiss mercenaries. In many West-European countries the mercenaries were used by the counter-revolutionary monarchist forces.
173 The King’s guard consisting of Swiss mercenaries and lazzaroni (see Note 25) took an active part in suppressing the popular uprising in Naples on May 15, 1848 (see Note 1 18). Lazzaroni and soldiers broke into the houses of the people of Naples, including foreigners, looted them and committed violence.
174 Burghers’ communes (Bürgergemeinden) came into being at the end of the Middle Ages. They granted their members certain economic and political privileges including exemption from a number of duties and tax payments, the right to use the commune’s property and advantages in filling lucrative government offices. One became a member of the commune either by birth or by living in a given place for a definite period of time and possessing immovable property, or by paying an admission fee.
In the course of time it became more and more difficult to enter a commune, which led to the division of the Swiss population into citizens (Bürger) and residents (Einwohner), the latter being deprived of the above-named privileges. Within the burghers’ commune there appeared a still closer corporation of representatives of the old patrician families who in fact established a monopoly of practically all the major government posts. Abolition of the privileges of the burghers’ commune began during the Helvetian Republic in 1798-99, when all the Swiss were made equal in rights and political power was transferred to the residents’ commune (Einwohnergemeinde), which was declared to be the holder of sovereignty in the name of the entire nation. The Federal Constitution adopted in 1848 enlarged still more the rights of the residents’ commune while the burghers’ commune only retained philanthropic functions and power over its own property.
175 This address was written by Engels, as a member of the Central Commission, on the instructions of the First Congress of the German Workers’ Associations in Switzerland which took place in Berne between December 9 and 11, 1848. The Congress was attended by representatives from democratic and workers’ associations in a number of Swiss towns. It adopted the rules of the Union of German Associations of Switzerland. In accordance with these rules, a Central Association (the Berne Workers’ Association was elected as such) was to he at the head of the Union, and current leadership was to be exercised by a Central Commission consisting of five members. Engels was a member of the Commission elected on December 14.
Differences arose at the sitting on December 10 when the Congress discussed the question of the attitude towards the March Association. A delegate of the Berne Association spoke against establishing contacts with this non-republican organisation. Nevertheless, the majority of delegates were in favour of an address proposing to the March Association to keep up correspondence. The text of the address was approved by the Congress on December 11. When Engels compiled it he had to take into account the Congress decision. However, in the text of the address written in the name of the Central Commission he managed to reflect the views of the proletarian revolutionaries who regarded this Association only as a fellow traveller in the German revolution and thought that co-operation with it was possible only within strict limits.
The March Association, which had branches in various towns of Germany, was founded in Frankfurt am Main at the end of November 1848 by the Left-wing deputies of the Frankfurt National Assembly. Fröbel, Simon, Ruge, Vogt and other petty-bourgeois democratic leaders of the March associations, thus named after the March 1848 revolution in Germany, confined themselves to revolutionary phrase-mongering and showed indecision and inconsistency in the struggle against the counter-revolutionaries, for which Marx and Engels sharply criticised them.
176 By 1848, the Berne Association became one of the biggest and most influential German workers’ associations in Switzerland. Its members held democratic republican views and were considerably. influenced by Weitling and Stephan Born. It disintegrated in the spring of 1849.
177 According to Article 1 of the Rules of the Union of German Associations in Switzerland adopted at the Berne Congress, the aim of the new organisation was “to educate members of the Union in the socio-democratic and republican spirit and use all legal means at its disposal so that socio-democratic and republican principles and institutions would be acknowledged by the Germans and put into practice”.
178 The so-called Risquons-Tout trial, held in Antwerp from August 9 to 30, 1848, was a fabrication of the Government of Leopold, King of the Belgians, against the democrats. The pretext was a clash which took place on March 29, 1848, between the Belgian republican legion bound for home from France and a detachment of soldiers near the village of Risquons-Tout not far from the French border. The bill of indictment was published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 45, July 15, 1848, No. 47, July 17, 1848, No. 49 and in the supplement to this issue, July 19, 1848. Mellinet, Ballin, Tedesco and other main accused were sentenced to death, but this was commuted to 30 years imprisonment; later they were pardoned.
See Engels’ article “The Antwerp Death Sentences” in Vol. 7 of the present 180 edition, pp. 404-06.
179 The Cologne Workers’ Association (Kölner Arbeitesverein) — a workers’ organisation founded by Andreas Gottschalk on April 13, 1848. The initial membership of 300 had increased to 5,000 by early May, the majority being workers and artisans. The Association was headed by a President and a committee consisting of representatives of various trades. The Zeitung des Arbeiter-Vereines zu Köln was the Association’s newspaper, but on October 26 it was replaced by the Freiheit, Brüderlichkeit, Arbeit. There were a number of branches. After Gottschalk’s arrest Moll was elected President on July 6 and he held this post till the state of siege was proclaimed in Cologne in September 1848, when he had to emigrate under threat of arrest. On October 16, Marx agreed to assume temporary presidency at the request of the Association members. In November Röser began to fulfil the duties of President, and on February 28, 1849, Schapper was elected to the post and remained in it until the end of May 1849.
The majority of the leading members (Gottschalk, Anneke, Schapper, Moll, Lessner, Jansen, Röser, Nothjung, Bedorf) were members of the Communist League.
During the initial period of its existence, the Workers’ Association was influenced by Gottschalk, who shared many of the views of the “true socialists”, ignored the historical tasks of the proletariat in the democratic revolution, pursued sectarian tactics of boycotting indirect elections to the German and Prussian National Assemblies and came out against support of democratic candidates in elections. He combined ultra-Left phrases with very moderate methods of struggle (workers’ petitions to the Government and the City Council etc.), and supported the demands of the workers affected by artisan prejudices etc. From the very beginning, Gottschalk’s sectarian tactics were resisted by the supporters of Marx and Engels. At the end of June under their influence a change took place in the activities of the Workers’ Association, which became a centre of revolutionary agitation among the workers, and from the autumn of 1848, also among the peasants. Members of the Association organised democratic and workers’ associations in the vicinity of Cologne and disseminated revolutionary publications, including the “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany”. They carried on among themselves education in scientific communism through the study of Marx’s writings. The Association maintained close contact with other workers’ and democratic organisations.
With a view to strengthening the Association Marx, Schapper and other leaders reorganised it in January and February 1849. On February 25, new Rules were adopted according to which the main task of the Association was to raise the workers’ class and political consciousness.
When in the spring of 1849 Marx and Engels took steps to organise the advanced workers on a national scale and actually started preparing for the creation of a proletarian party, they relied to a considerable extent on the Cologne Workers’ Association.
The mounting counter-revolution and intensified police reprisals prevented further activities of the Cologne Workers’ Association to unite and organise the working masses. After the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ceased publication and Marx, Schapper and other leaders of the Association left Cologne, it gradually turned into an ordinary workers’ educational society.
180 The reference is to the trial of A. Brocker-Evererts, owner of the printshop which printed the Zeitung des Arbeiter-Vereines zu Köln (published from April to October 1848 and edited first by Andreas Gottschalk and from July to September by Joseph Moll). The trial took place on October 24, 1848. Brocker-Evererts was accused of printing in issues 12 and 13 of the newspaper (July 6 and 9, 1848) the articles “Arrest of Dr. Gottschalk and Anneke” and “Arrests in Cologne” insulting Chief Public Prosecutor Zweiffel and the police. The jury sentenced him to a month’s imprisonment and laid down that if the newspaper resumed publication he would have to pay a big fine. Beginning from October 26 the Cologne Workers’ Association published the newspaper Freiheit, Brüderlichkeit, Arbeit.
181 The laws promulgated by the French Government in September 1835 restricted the rights of juries and introduced severe measures against the press: increased money deposits for periodicals and large fines and imprisonment for the authors of publications directed against property and the existing political system.
182 The First Democratic Congress was held in Frankfurt am Main from June 14 to 17, 1848. It was attended by delegates of 89 democratic and workers’ associations from different towns in Germany. The Congress decided to unite all democratic associations and to set up district committees headed by a Central Committee of German Democrats with its headquarters in Berlin. Fröbel, Rau and Kriege were elected to the Central Committee and Bairhoffer, Schütte and Anneke their deputies. However, due to the weakness and vacillations of the petty-bourgeois leaders, even after the Congress the democratic movement in Germany still lacked unity and organisation.
183 At the close of its sitting on July 4, 1848, the Prussian National Assembly decided to grant unlimited powers to the committee investigating the Posen events (see Note 151). In violation of parliamentary rules, the Right attempted to have a motion voted to limit the committee’s powers. The Left walked out of the Assembly in protest and the Right took advantage of this and carried a motion prohibiting the committee from travelling to Posen and interrogating witnesses and experts on the spot, thereby unlawfully annulling the Assembly’s original decision. This incident is described in Engels’ article “The Agreement Session of July 4” (present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 200-07).
184 Concerning the union of the three democratic associations in Cologne — the Democratic Society, the Workers’ Association and the Association for Workers and Employers — see Note 40.
185 After keeping Gottschalk and Anneke in prison for almost six months, the authorities were compelled to release them when the assizes acquitted them on December 23, 1848.
186 An excerpt from this article was first published in English under the title “The Prussian Counter-Revolution and the judiciary” in the collection: Karl Marx, On Revolution ed. by S. K. Padover, New York, 1971.
187 The report on the decisions of the Courts of Appeal in Ratibor (Racibórz), Bromberg (Bydgoszcz) and Münster and the decision of the Berlin Supreme Court were printed in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 174, December 21, 1848.
188 French parliaments — judicial institutions which arose in the Middle Ages. The Paris Parliament was the supreme appeal body and at the same time performed important executive and political functions, such as the registration of royal decrees, without which they had no legal force, etc. The parliaments enjoyed the right to remonstrate government decrees. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their members were officials of high birth, representatives of the so-called silk gown nobility. The parliaments, which finally became the bulwark of Right opposition to absolutism and impeded the implementation of even moderate reforms, were abolished in 1790, during the French Revolution.
189 The reference is to the edict of the Berlin Supreme Court of December 16, 1848, signed by Mühler and published in the Preussischer Staats-Anzeiger No. 229 on December 19, 1848.
190 The reference is to the transfer of the sittings of the Prussian National Assembly from Berlin to Brandenburg. This was the beginning of a counter-revolutionary coup d’état in Prussia which ended with the dissolution of the National Assembly and imposition of a Constitution by the King.
191 An allusion to a German legend according to which the souls of the dead, led by the “wild hunter”, fly about shrieking fearfully at night. People who meet these ghosts are doomed to wander with them for ever.
192 See Note 89.
193 In December 1848, the counter-revolutionary Austrian Government was not supported by the Imperial Diet on the question of the compulsory loan and asked the bank for a loan. However, it succeeded in obtaining a loan only after threatening the bank with confiscation of all its ready cash.
194 The reference is to the attempt by Gustav Struve and other political refugees to organise an uprising in Baden in September 1848 (see Note 84).
The “Hilf Dir” military association was founded in the autumn of 1848 by Johann Philipp Becker, a leader of the democratic and working-class movement. With its Central Committee in Biel (canton of Berne), it united societies consisting mainly of artisans formed in various towns in Switzerland.
The “Hilf Dir” military association pursued a democratic policy and aimed at uniting all German volunteer units in Switzerland for the purpose of establishing a republic in Germany. It was organised as a secret conspiratorial society, on the lines of those in France and Italy. The Swiss authorities, under pressure from German counter-revolutionary circles and the Imperial Government in particular, instituted proceedings against Becker and other initiators of the military association. Becker was sentenced to expulsion from the Berne canton for twelve months.
195 The republican uprisings in Baden and April and September 1848 — see Notes 78 and 84.
The uprising in Val d’Intelvi (Lombardy) and the part played in it by refugees living in Switzerland — see Engels’ article “The National Council” (this volume, pp. 138-53) and Note 144.
The Lucerne campaigns were organised in response to the decision adopted by the reactionary Great Council of the Lucerne canton in October 1844, granting unlimited powers to the Order of Jesuits in matters of religion and public education. The liberal circles of the canton made an attempt to overthrow the Government, organising on December 8 a campaign of volunteer detachments against Lucerne. The insurgents were dispersed by government troops. The second campaign, organised for the same purpose from the territory of the neighbouring cantons on March 31, 1845, also proved a failure.
196 In its letter of December 7 to the forthcoming First Congress of the German Workers’ Associations in Berne (see Note 175), the Association in Vivis objected to a number of proposals advanced by the democratic German National Association in Zurich, suggesting in particular that the new Union should he headed by the “Hilf Dir” military association in Biel (see Note 194). The letter was discussed at the Congress sitting of December 10, 1848. The Congress directed the Central Commission, formed to exercise current leadership of the Union of Workers’ Associations in Switzerland (with Engels as its secretary), to answer the letter and persuade the Vivis Association to renounce its demands and join the Union.
197 The reference is to the German National Association in Zurich founded in April 1848, a democratic organisation of German intellectuals and workers living in Switzerland. It was influenced by petty-bourgeois democrats: Fröbel, Ruge and others. In the summer of 1848 the National Association joined the Union of Democratic German Associations founded by the First Democratic Congress in Frankfurt am Main (see Note 182). In August 1848 the National Association appealed to all the German associations in Switzerland to convene a congress and unite. Its representatives took an active part in the First Congress of German Associations in Switzerland held from December 9 to 11, 1848.
198 On December 8, 1848, the Lausanne Workers’ Association sent Engels a mandate, delegating him to the Congress (see this volume, pp. 505-06). The leaders of this Association, G. Schneeberger, Chr. Haaf and Bangert, wrote in this connection to the Berne Workers’ Association on December 8, 1848: “We cannot send a delegate because of the inactivity of the Vivis Association (which recognises only the Association in Biel as the central body). Therefore we have decided to authorise our friend Engels. If, however, he cannot attend, our friend Frost will act as our delegate.”
199 The Central Committee of German Democrats (d’Ester, Reichenbach, Hexamer) was elected at the Second Democratic Congress held in Berlin from October 26 to 30, 1848.
The Central Committee of German Workers in Leipzig, headed by Stephan Born, was Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire elected at the Workers’ Congress held in Berlin from August 23 to September 3, 1848. At this Congress the Workers’ Fraternity, a union of workers’ associations, was founded. Its programme was drawn up under the influence of Born and was concerned only with narrow craft-union demands, thereby diverting the workers from the revolutionary struggle. A number of its points bore the stamp of Louis Blanc’s and Proudhon’s utopian ideas. Marx and Engels did not approve of the general stand taken by Born, but they refrained from publicly criticising his views, bearing in mind his endeavour to unite the workers’ associations.
200 See Note 170.
But on Whit Monday it is really lively in these parts. Everybody goes out of town and it is dead quiet in Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Bremen, but at the town gates you see procession after procession of carriages, riders and walkers. And such a dust, it is terrible. For the roads are covered with sand to a depth of half a yard and of course it all goes up into the air. A broker called Jan Krusbecker has just arrived and I’ll draw him for you.
Namely with my fellow lodger by the name of George (pronounced as in English) Gorrissen, the greatest Hamburg fop that ever existed. Take the mean between the two drawings you see here, place it on a slim trunk and long legs, give the eyes a real boorish look, a speech exactly like Kirchner’s, only in the Hamburg dialect, and you have the most complete picture of this lout that you can get. I wish I could only draw him as well as last night when I drew him on a board, and it was so like him that everybody recognised him, even the maids. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Even a painter [G. W. Feistkorn] who lives in our house and otherwise doesn’t think much of anything found it very good. — This G. Gorrissen is the most boorish fellow on earth; he is busy with some new nonsense every day and is inexhaustible in commonplace and boring ideas. The fellow already has on his conscience at least twenty hours that he has bored me.
it is extraordinarily good and is written with a rare power. I read no less than seven pamphlets about the Cologne affair in one bookshop.
