F O U R
Cologne
No German newspaper, before or since, has ever had the same power and influence or been able to electrify the proletarian masses as effectively as the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. And that it owed above all to Marx.
F. Engels, 'Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung', MESW 11 305.
I . F R O M B R U S S E L S T O P A R I S
T h e revolutionary movement that swept over Europe in 1848-49 began in Switzerland in November 1847 when the unwillingness of Austria to intervene in support of reactionary cantons against the radicals severely diminished her prestige in Italy: shortly afterwards, the Bourbon King Ferdinand of Naples was overthrown and republics proclaimed in Naples, Turin and Florence. In France, Louis Philippe continued complacently to believe that the Parisians never revolted in winter, but when his troops fired on unarmed demonstrators a rash of barricades sprang up; the King was exiled and a provisional republican government formed.
N e w s of the revolution in Paris reached Brussels on 26 February. At first the Belgian Government acted very cautiously and the King even offered to abdicate. But once its forces had been concentrated, the Government's policy became tougher. A mild demonstration on 28 February was broken up, Wilhelm Wolff was arrested and a list of foreigners to be deported was drawn up, with Marx's name at the top. The Democratic Association had already demanded that the Government arm the workers, and sent a congratulatory Address to the provisional French Government.
'Iwo weeks earlier Marx had inherited 6000 francs from his mother (probably as much as his total income for the three previous years) and the police suspected (there was no evidence) that he was using it to finance the revolutionary movement. They even went as far as asking the authorities in Trier to question Marx's mother, who protested that the only reason she had for sending the money at that time was that 'her son had long been asking her for money for his family and this was an advance on his inheritance'.1 On 3 March Marx received an order, signed by the King, to leave Belgium within twenty-four hours. The same day he received from Paris a reply to his request for the cancellation of the previous expulsion order:
Brave and loyal Marx,
The soil of the French Republic is a place of refuge for all friends of freedom. Tyranny has banished you, free France opens her doors to you and all those who fight for the holy cause, the fraternal cause of all peoples. Every officer of the French Government must interpret his mission in this sense. Salut et Fratemite.
Ferdinand Flocon
Member of the Provisional Government.
Yet Marx was not left to depart in peace. The same evening the Central Committee of the Communist League met in the Bois Sauvage guest house where Marx had moved a week earlier on receipt of his inheritance, and decided to transfer the seat of the Central Committee to Paris and to give Marx discretionary powers over all the League's affairs. At one o'clock in the morning the over-zealous local police commissioner broke into the guest house and arrested Marx. A week later in a letter of protest to the Paris paper La Reforme, he described the situation: I was occupied in preparing my departure when a police commissioner, accompanied by ten civil guards, penetrated into my home, searched the whole house and finally arrested me on the pretext of my having no papers. Leaving aside the very correct papers that Monsieur Duch-atel gave me on my expulsion from France, I had in my hands the deportation pass that Belgium had issued to me only several hours before....
Immediately after my arrest, my wife had herself gone to M. Jottrand, President of the Belgian Democratic Association, to get him to take the necessary steps. On returning home, she found a policeman in front of the door who told her, with exquisite politeness, that if she wanted to talk to Monsieur Marx, she had only to follow him. My wife eagerly accepted the offer. She was taken to the police station and the commissioner told her at first that Monsieur Marx was not there; he brusquely asked her who she was, what she was doing at Monsieur Jottrand's house and whether she had any papers with her... . On the pretext of vagabondage my wife was taken to the prison of the Town Hall and locked in a dark room with lost women.4 At eleven o'clock in the morning she was taken, in full daylight and with a whole escort of policemen, to the magistrate's office. For two hours she was put in a cell in spite of the most forceful protests that came from all quarters.
She stayed there exposed to the rigours of the weather and the shameful propositions of the warders. At length she appeared before the magistrate who was astonished that the police had not carried their attentions to the extent of arresting the small children too. The interrogation could only be a farce since the only crime of my wife consisted in the fact that, although she belonged to the Prussian aristocracy, she shared the democratic opinions of her husband. I will not enter into all the details of this revolting affair. I will only say that, on our release, the 24 hours had just expired and we had to leave without even being able to take away our most indispensable belongings.
This whole affair caused widespread protests in Brussels which resulted in questions being asked in the Chamber of Deputies and the dismissal of the police commissioner concerned. On her release Jenny Marx sold what she could, left her silver plate and best linen in the charge of a friend, and the whole family was conducted, under police escort, to the frontier. Travelling was difficult since in Belgium there were large-scale troop movements while in France portions of the track had been torn up by those who had been put out of business by the railway. The Marx family eventually reached Paris the following day after a miserably cold journey.
In the city, charred ruins and the debris of recent barricades were still evident. The tricolour was everywhere, accompanied by the red flag. Marx settled his family in the Boulevard Beaumarchais, near the Place de la Bastille, and urged Engels (who had remained behind in Brussels) to collect his old debts and use them to bring his silver and other possessions over the frontier as far as Valenciennes. Revolutionary enthusiasm was still strong in Paris, and Marx took an active part in the meetings of the Society of the Rights of Man, one of the largest of the political clubs in existence in Paris in early 1848. The club had been sponsored by Ledru-Rollin and Flocon, and Marx joined it the same day he arrived in the city. Later he is known to have spoken in favour of deferring the elections to the National Assembly and for the easier recruitment of working men into the National Guard.6 Marx's main activities, however, were naturally among the expatriate Germans, many of whom were quite carried away by revolutionary enthusiasm. Before Marx's arrival the German Democratic Association had decided - as had the other main emigre groups - to form a German Legion. Recruits soon numbered several thousand and exercises were held on the Champ de Mars throughout March. The Provisional Government, by no means unwilling to see the departure of so many possible trouble-makers, placed barracks at the disposal of the Legion and granted them fifty centimes a day per man for the march to the frontier. Following the tradition of 1789, the leaders of the Legion - Bornstedt, who was a member of the Communist League, and Herwegh, the poet - believed that a revolutionary war was inevitable after a successful revolution and this time proposed themselves to contribute the vanguard of liberating forces. Marx was utterly opposed to these adventures. Sebastian Seiler, a member of the Communist League, later wrote:
The socialists and Communists declared themselves decidedly against any armed imposition of a German Republic from without. They held public sessions in the Rue St Denis attended by some of those who later became volunteers. In one of these sessions Marx developed in a long speech the theme that the February revolution should be viewed only as the superficial beginning of the European movement. In a short time here in Paris the open struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie would break out, as did happen, in fact, in June. The victory or defeat of revolutionary Europe would depend on this struggle.7
In order to give their opposition strength, Marx and his friends organised a meeting based on the four Parisian sections of the Communist League8
and founded a German Workers' Club (under the presidency first of Heinrich Bauer and then of Moses Hess) which by the end of March had 400 members - mainly drawn from tailors and bootmakers. It was also possible to reconstitute the Central Committee of the Communist League: the Fraternal Democrats in London had sent to Paris a deputation, including Harney and Jones, with an Address to the Provisional Government. Schapper and Moll were sent by the London German Workers' Association. At a meeting on 10 March Marx was elected President, Schapper Secretary, and Moll, Bauer, Engels, Wolff and Wallau committee members. Marx also enjoyed good relations with Ledru-Rollin and Flocon, both members of the Provisional Government. Flocon offered money to start a German-language newspaper, but Marx refused - as he wished to preserve his independence.
On 19 March news reached Paris which changed the situation radically: a week earlier Metternich had been driven out of Vienna and the Emperor was forced to grant the demands of the insurgents; and on the twentieth news came of revolution in Berlin. The Legion made immediate preparations for departure and marched out of Paris - appropriately on 1 April: at its first encounter with government troops after crossing the Rhine it was virtually annihilated. Marx and his followers also decided to return to Germany, but in a less spectacular manner. They, too, benefited from the Provisional Government's subsidy, and most of the members of the Communist League left for various towns in Germany (either singly or in small groups) with the intention of establishing a national network.
They carried with them two propaganda documents: one was the Communist Manifesto of which the first 1000 copies had just arrived from London; the other was a flysheet listing seventeen points elaborated by Marx and Engels in the last half of March and entitled The Demands of the Communist Party in Germany. Marx himself paid for the printing of the Demands which were an attempt to adapt the proposals of the Communist Manifesto to Germany. Only four of the ten points of the Manifesto were included: a state bank, nationalisation of transport, progressive income tax and free education. The right of inheritance was to be limited rather than abolished, and there was no proposal for nationalising land - but only the estates of the feudal princes.9 The Demands were a plan of action for a bourgeois (and not socialist) revolution; they were designed to appeal to the petty bourgeoisie and peasants as well as to the workers, and were very similar to programmes proposed by radical republicans.
II. P O L I T I C S I N C O L O G N E
Marx himself, armed with a passport valid for one year only, left Paris at the beginning of April and travelled to Mainz. He was accompanied by his family, Engels and Ernst Dronke (a young radical writer who had recently been brought into the Communist League). They stopped two days in Mainz where the Workers' Educational Association had shortly before issued an appeal for the organisation and unification of workers'
unions throughout Germany. Marx arrived in Cologne on 10 April, and settled in the north of the city. About three months later he was followed by Jenny and the children who had been waiting in Trier until he obtained a residence permit. They all moved into lodgings situated in the narrow streets of the Old City," almost next door to the future offices of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Cologne was an obvious base: it was the third biggest town in Prussia with nearly 100,000 inhabitants and was situated in the most industrialised region of Germany; Marx had many old contacts there and the Rhineland laws were known to be more liberal than those of any other German state. There was also a group of the Communist League there which in mid-1847 met twice weekly for singing, discussion and propaganda though by the time of Marx's arrival in Cologne, Wolff reported it to be 'vegetating and disorganised'. Its leading members had been Andreas Gottschalk, gifted son of a Jewish butcher who practised as a doctor among the poor of Cologne, and August Willich and Friedrich Anneke, both ex-Prussian officers. Cologne had also been the first city to witness mass action by the workers. On 3 March, two weeks before the outbreak of the revolution in Berlin, a crowd of several thousand assembled on the main square and invaded the session of the Town Council where Gottschalk and Willich presented their demands: universal suffrage, freedom of the Press and association, a people's militia, and state responsibility for work and education. The army was called in and, after some casualties, Gottschalk, Willich and Anneke were all arrested - to be released three weeks later after the successful revolution in Berlin. Four days before Marx's arrival, Gottschalk had founded a Workers' Association (which he viewed as an extension of the Communist League), recruiting 8000 members in a few months. The current business was transacted in a Committee of fifty elected members. Gottschalk was immensely popular with the Cologne workers, more than a quarter of whom were unemployed. The Association, organised in sections according to the different professions, persuaded the municipality to initiate a public works programme and negotiated with employers on wages and hours. It is, of course, important to remember that factory workers were still only a small proportion of Cologne's working population: the number of artisans and traders was much greater. Thus Marx entered a situation in Cologne in which the working-class movement was already well under way, and there were suggestions that he would do better to go on to Berlin or even run as a parliamentary candidate from Trier.
Differences between Marx and Gottschalk were inevitable. Gottschalk was a close friend of Moses Hess and a thoroughly 'true' socialist in his outlook, taking a conciliatory attitude to religion and rejecting notions of class struggle; he also supported a federalist solution to the problem of German unification. Soon after his arrival Marx attacked Gottschalk's organisation of the Workers' Association, no doubt because he considered its activities too limited to purely economic demands. But the immediate quarrel between Marx and Gottschalk was over tactics: whether or not to participate in the elections (at the beginning of May) to the Prussian Assembly and the National Parliament at Frankfurt. Although Gottschalk's immediate demands were moderate (he thought that the workers should agitate on the basis of 'monarchy with a Chartist base') he could not approve of participation in elections based on an indirect voting system, which in some states came near to disenfranchising the workers completely; he also thought that elections could only be successful when the working-class movement had developed considerably further, and wished to dissuade the workers from taking part in a struggle for a bourgeois republic in which the fruits of victory would not go to them.
Marx strongly criticised this isolation of the workers from the political process, and himself helped to found and preside over a Democratic Society in Cologne which successfully sponsored Franz Raveau as candidate for the Frankfurt Parliament. There was a further open clash between
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the Democratic Society and Gottschalk's Workers' Association when Willich appealed to the Society for financial aid on behalf of the refugee remnants of Herwegh's Legion. The Society refused to help - fearing to be associated with the Legion; but Gottschalk's Association (although Gottschalk himself disagreed with the aims of the Legion) agreed to arrange payments.
On one thing Marx and Gottschalk did agree, and that was the increasing irrelevance of the Communist League. At a meeting of the Cologne branch in the middle of May, Gottschalk confirmed his decision to resign from the League, declaring that its constitution needed reframing though he promised his future co-operation if required. However, by this time the League had virtually ceased to exist. From Berlin Born wrote to Marx: 'The League has dissolved; it is everywhere and nowhere.' It seems probable that Marx exercised the power granted him in Brussels in February to declare a formal dissolution in spite of the opposition of the former leaders of the League of the Just. According to Peter Roser, a member of the Cologne group who later turned King's evidence: 'because it was impossible to agree and Schapper and Moll insisted on the maintenance of the League, Marx used his discretionary power and dissolved the League. Marx considered the continuance of the League to be superfluous, since the aim of the League was not conspiracy but propaganda, and under present circumstances propaganda could be conducted openly and secrecy was not necessary since a free Press and the right of association were guaranteed.' Marx himself said later that the League's activities 'faded out of their own accord in that more effective means of carrying out its aims were available'. And two years later in London Marx found the Communist League 'reconstituted'. The reasons Marx gave for the dissolution seem implausible: they only argue for the continuance of an open Communist League. More likely, Marx considered the radical policies of the Communist League and the Seventeen Demands harmful to the more moderate line being pursued by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
III. T H E ' N E U E R H E I N I S C H E Z E I T U N G '
Marx's main energies throughout this period were concentrated on giving effect to an idea he had had since the outbreak of the German revolution: the founding of an influential radical newspaper. The Cologne communists had already planned a paper of which Hess was to be the editor.
But Marx and Engels had laid their plans too. They had started collecting subscriptions while in Paris; and on arrival in Cologne, in Engels' words, 'in twenty-four hours, through Marx, we had conquered the terrain and the paper was ours, though we had agreed to take Heinrich Burgers on to the editorial committee'. Money was their chief difficulty: Engels left to collect subscriptions in the Wuppertal but met with no success.
Of his father, he wrote that 'he would sooner send us iooo bullets than 1000 thaler'. In the end they raised only 13,000 thaler out of the 30,000 which had been their aim, and Marx had to contribute substantially from his own pocket. The provenance of the share money was severely criticised in the paper of the Workers' Association, edited by Gottschalk: Marx's paper, it was said, had put itself in the hands of the 'money aristocracy' and its printer, Clouth, had lowered wages and tried to impose no-strike agreements on his workers. Clouth replied that he had merely refused to raise wages; and that the editorial board had no control over the printing workers. The editorial board was composed entirely of members of the Communist League with the exception of Burgers, who was soon forced out. According to Engels, Marx exercised 'a dictatorship pure and simple'
which was 'completely natural, uncontested and freely accepted. By the clarity of his vision and the resoluteness of his principles he made the paper into the most famous of the revolutionary period.' T h e only criticism voiced was that Marx worked too slowly 'Marx is no journalist and never will be,' wrote Born. 'He spends a whole day on a leading article that another would write in two hours, as though it was concerned with the solution of a deep philosophical problem. He changes and polishes and changes the changed and can never be ready in time.'
From the start the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was conceived as a national paper containing little local news. Engels contributed most of the leading articles in the early period and followed developments in France and England, while Marx concentrated on internal politics. Its general character was factual and ironically descriptive rather than theoretical, and there was an attractive Feuilleton edited by Georg Weerth.
Marx had arrived in Germany with the hope of reproducing there the sort of revolutionary situation that he had experienced in Paris, but he soon realised that this was beyond the bounds of possibility. The German 'revolution' had been a very partial one: only in Berlin and Vienna had there been any serious violence, and in the whole of Germany only one prince lost his throne - let alone his head. In 1848 it was only possible to modify autocratic structures: these did not entirely disappear until after the First World War. For the autocratic Government managed to retain control both of the army and of the administration that was more powerful than that in either France or England (since it controlled the development of the economy which at that time needed protection). T h e r e were two main reasons for this necessarily limited character of the 1848 revolution.
Firstly, Prussia, the key to Germany, still had a social structure much more akin to that of Eastern Europe and Russia than to the states of Western Europe. The land-owning aristocracy - the Junkers - still held the decisive power based on largely unemancipated serfs. T h e second reason lay in the nature of the opposition to the Government: once an all-German Assembly had been promised (it did not meet until mid-May), the opposition spent its time preparing for the elections, sending in petitions and indulging its hopes. This opposition was itself extremely diverse, and the various liberals, radicals and socialists of which it was composed could have very little common programme. Nor could working-class organisations make much impact: although now legalised and spreading very fast, they were mainly interested in improving wages and working conditions.
Faced with this situation the programme of Neue Rheinische Zeitung contained, as Engels said later, two main points: 'a single, indivisible, democratic German Republic, and war with Russia which would bring the restoration of Poland'. In Prussia the events of March had forced Frederick William to form a ministry headed by Rudolf Camphausen, a prominent liberal businessman from the Rhineland. A new Prussian Assembly was elected to work out a constitution. This Assembly was far from radical: it summoned the King's brother-in-law, the Prince of Prussia, back from England where he had fled in March; and agreed that its task was to elaborate a constitution - the panacea of those times - 'in agreement with the King'. There was an abortive rising in Berlin in mid-June and Camphausen was replaced by the slightly less liberal Hansemann who stayed in office until September. It was to sarcastic attacks on the vacillations and essential impotence of the Camphausen ministry that Marx devoted most of the few articles that he wrote on German politics in the first few months of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung's existence.
According to Marx, 'the provisional political circumstances that follow a revolution always require a dictatorship and an energetic one at that.
From the beginning we reproached Camphausen with not acting dicta-torially, with not immediately breaking and abolishing the remains of the old institutions."0 One particular field in which Marx felt compelled to attack the Prussian Assembly was their decision that peasants could buy their freedom, but at a prohibitively high price. This was a serious mistake:
The French bourgeoisie of 1789 did not for a moment forsake its allies, the peasants. It knew that the basis of its rule was the destruction of rural feudalism, and the creation of a free, landowning peasant class.
The German bourgeoisie of 1848 without any hesitation betrays its peasants who are its most natural allies, flesh of its flesh, without whom it is powerless against the nobility.
In an article on the Frankfurt Assembly published in the first issue of the paper Engels attacked the Assembly for not defending the sovereignty of the people and a corresponding constitution. This immediately cost the paper half its shareholders. And a week later Marx gave the L e f t in Frankfurt the following advice:
We do not make the Utopian demand that a single indivisible German Republic be proclaimed a priori, but we do demand of the so-called Radical Democratic party that it should not confuse the beginning of the struggle and revolutionary movement with its final aim. German unity and a German constitution can only be the end results of a movement in which both internal conflicts and war with the East can be pushed to a decisive point.
But the paper in general paid very little attention to the Frankfurt Parliament which it rightly considered increasingly irrelevant to the evolution of German affairs. Although it contained many highly gifted men, the method of election yielded a narrowly middle-class parliament and, bereft of any executive authority, it found itself discussing in a void. As the months went by, it also became aware of irreconcilable divisions between the 'big Germans' who wanted a united Germany to include Austria and the 'little Germans' who looked exclusively to Prussia for hegemony.
And with the decline of the workers' movements from June onwards, the middle class found itself increasingly isolated and vulnerable in face of the Government.
With the Berlin and Frankfurt Assemblies so weak, where could the Neue Rheinische Zeitung look for support? Engels was quite clear: When we founded a wide-circulation paper in Germany, our slogan presented itself automatically. It could only be the slogan of democracy but one that emphasised everywhere and in detail its specifically proletarian character which it could not yet inscribe on its banner once and for all. If one refused this, if we were unwilling to join the movement on its most progressive and proletarian wing, there was nothing left for us but to preach Communism in a small corner magazine and found a small sect instead of a large party of action. But we were no good at crying in the wilderness; we had studied the Utopians too well for that.
The subtitle of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was 'An Organ of Democracy' and it supported a 'united front' of all democratic forces. A mark of this was Marx's support for the Democratic Society in Cologne in spite of the fact that its newspaper condemned the June uprising of the Paris proletariat. Following the principles of the Communist Manifesto Marx considered it the workers' main task to aid the bourgeois revolution to achieve its aims by supporting the radical wing of the bourgeoisie. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung did not preach a socialist republic nor exclusively a workers' one. T h e programme was universal suffrage, direct elections, the abolition of all feudal dues and charges, the establishment of a state banking system, and the admission of state responsibility for unemployment. Capitalism (even state capitalism), private property and class antagonism would still exist and, indeed, expand. T h e essence of the programme was the emancipation of the bourgeoisie with some concessions to workers and peasants. T h i s position implied a certain standing apart from the efforts of workers' organisations for self-improvement, and lay behind Marx's criticism of Gottschalk's policies in Cologne and his lack of enthusiasm for Born's success in Berlin in founding an all-German workers' movement and various mutual-aid funds and co-operatives. Marx declared that, in this context, 'the proletariat has not the right to isolate itself; however hard it may seem, it must reject anything that could separate it from its allies'.34 This policy was so carefully carried out in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung that, with one exception and notwithstanding the declaration of Engels above, neither Marx nor Engels published anything during 1848 that dealt with the situation or interests of the working class as such.
The one exception was Marx's impassioned article on the 'June days' in Paris. Finding conditions worse than they had been before the February revolution, the workers in Paris rose spontaneously only to be killed in their thousands by the troops of General Cavaignac in six days of bitter street fighting; those who survived were transported. Marx finished the article by saying:
They will ask us whether we have no tears, no sighs and no words of regret for the victims in the ranks of the National Guard, the Mobile Guard, the Republican Guard and the Regiments of the Line who fell before the anger of the people. The State will look after their widows and orphans, pompous decrees will glorify them and solemn processions will bear their remains to the grave. The official press will declare them immortal and the European reaction from East to West will sing their praises. On the other hand, it is the privilege and right of the democratic press to place the laurel wreaths on the lowering brows of the plebeians tortured with the pangs of hunger, despised by the official press, abandoned by the doctors, abused as thieves, vandals and galley-slaves by all respectable citizens, their wives and children plunged into still greater misery and the best of their survivors deported overseas.
The second plank in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung's platform was a revolutionary war against Russia. On the model of the French offensive against feudal Germany after 1789, it seemed to Marx that only an attack on Russia could enable the revolution to survive. Russia was Germany's most dangerous enemy who, as the backbone of the Holy Alliance, would eventually crush any revolutionary movement unless crushed by it. Such a war would also achieve the otherwise impossible task of uniting Germany's democratic forces. A secondary consequence of a war against Russia would be the liberation of Poland which was at that time partitioned between Prussia, Russia and Austria. On the occasion of a debate in the Frankfurt Assembly on the situation in Poland, Engels published the longest series of articles ever to appear in the paper. Their message was: 'The division that the three powers have effected in Poland is the band that holds them together; their common plunder has created their common solidarity. .. the creation of a democratic Poland is the first condition for the creation of a democratic Germany.'
The remaining important issue of Prussian foreign policy was the notoriously complicated question of Schleswig-Holstein, two duchies whose loyalties were divided between Prussia and Denmark. The Danish King, largely supported by the bourgeoisie of Schleswig-Holstein, was making strenuous efforts to imbue them with a Scandinavian spirit, while the nobles felt more sympathetic to Germany. The Prussian military forces were, of course, vastly superior, but Denmark was supported diplomatically by Britain and Russia, and Prussia was forced to sign the armistice of Malmo at the end of August. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung, through the pen of Engels, was quite clear about the issue. Scandinavianism was merely 'enthusiasm for a brutal, dirty, piratical Old-Nordic nationality which is incapable of expressing its profound thoughts and feelings in words, but certainly can in deeds, namely, in brutality towards women, perpetual drunkenness and alternate tear-sodden sentimentality and ber-serk fury'.
In addition to editing the newspaper, Marx also found time to be active in local politics. In mid-June a large congress with delegates from almost a hundred democratic organisations met in Frankfurt; it urged a national organisation of democratic unions and created a central committee in Berlin, of which Kriege, Ruge and Weitling were members. The national organisation never got off the ground, but the congress bore fruit in the Rhineland where the three main Cologne organisations - the Workers'
Association, the Democratic Society and the Union of Employees and F.mployers - decided to co-operate. The delegate of the Workers' Association at the Frankfurt Congress had been Gottschalk who had created the impression of a man 'made to be dictator, with an energy of iron and an intelligence as sharp as any guillotine: a living portrait of Robes-pierre'. Gottschalk wanted a fusion of the three bodies which would have made his Workers' Association dominant; the Democratic Society suggested a steering committee. But before anything was decided the situation was drastically altered on 3 July by the arrest, on charges of incitement to violence, of Gottschalk and Anneke who were to remain in prison for the next six months. Moll became President of the Workers'
Association with Schapper as Vice-President. The Association immediately began to devote more time to the discussion of social and political questions and less to practical economic demands, thereby losing a lot of its momentum during July and August. Moll also became editor of the Association's newspaper.
The collaboration of the three democratic organisations was now no problem: a Committee of Cologne Democratic Unions was formed with Moll and Schapper representing the Workers' Association, Marx and Schneider (a lawyer) representing the Democratic Society, and the young barrister Hermann Becker from the Union of Employees and Employers.
This committee summoned a congress of Rhineland Democrats which met in Cologne in mid-August. At this congress, whose main conclusion was to increase agitation among factory workers and peasants, Marx emerged as one of the leading figures. Carl Schurz, a student at Bonn at the time who soon afterwards emigrated and made for himself a distinguished career as a United States Senator and Secretary of the Interior, wrote many years later in his memoirs of Marx's being 'already the recognised head of the advanced socialistic school' and 'attracting general attention', though what struck him most of all was Marx's sarcasm and extreme intolerance. Albert Brisbane, an editor of the New York Daily Tribune for which Marx was later to write extensively, has left a slightly different picture of the Marx he met in the autumn of 1848: There I found Karl Marx, the leader in the popular movement... He was just then rising into prominence: a man of some thirty years, short, solidly built, with a fine face and bushy black hair. His expression was that of great energy, and behind his self-contained reserve of manner were visible the fire and passion of a resolute soul.
Meanwhile Marx had also had to defend his orthodoxy against the renewed intervention of Weitling who had returned from America to establish himself in Berlin on the outbreak of the revolution. At the same meeting which elected Marx to the six-man committee of the Cologne Democrats, Weitling gave a speech in favour of the separation of the political and social movements: in his view a democracy at the present time could only lead to chaos and he proposed a 'dictatorship of those with most insight'.42 Marx replied in a plenary session two weeks later that only the interaction of social and political elements could achieve success for either, and that the solution to political problems was not to be found in a dictatorship but in a 'democratic government composed of the most heterogeneous elements' which by exchanging their ideas would have to evolve a suitable political programme.
Although the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had achieved a circulation of around 5000 - which made it one of the largest in Germany - share-capital was no longer available to it: it had therefore to rely on its subscriptions. During July difficulties increased. The printer refused any more credit and one issue was lost before another printer could be found.
Marx himself had to appear twice before a magistrate and the premises of the paper were searched following an article by Marx protesting at the brutality of the police when they arrested Anneke. More seriously, the Cologne authorities refused Marx's request for Prussian citizenship, a decision maintained despite energetic protests from the Democratic Society and a personal letter from Marx to the Prussian Minister of the Interior. This meant that his position in Cologne remained precarious as at any time he could be expelled as a 'foreigner'.
IV. T H E W A T E R S H E D
At the end of August 1848 Marx decided on a trip to Berlin and Vienna to meet the Democratic leaders there and try to raise funds for the paper.
He spent two days in Berlin where he saw his old friend Koppen, Bakunin and leaders of the Left - such as the energetic d'Ester who represented Cologne in the Prussian Assembly. In Vienna he spent almost two weeks.
A few days before his arrival, there had been a bloody repression of the workers and the whole city was to pass under democratic control for a short period at the end of October. Marx took part in a meeting of the Democratic Club which, though agreed on demanding the resignation of the Government, were debating whether the demand should be made of the Emperor or of Parliament. Marx is reported as intervening testily to say that Emperor and Parliament were largely irrelevant here: 'the greatest power of all has been forgotten: the people. We must turn to the people and influence them with all the means at our disposal, through the press, placards and public meetings.'44 Marx also gave two lectures in the Workers' Association, one on the development of the workers' movements in Europe and the other a repeat of his Brussels talks on 'Wage-Labour and Capital'. On his return to Berlin he attended a meeting of the Prussian Assembly and succeeded in negotiating a gift of 2000 thalers from the Polish community who were impressed by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung's defence of their cause. Another 2000 thalers he managed to collect from other sources.
The Hansemann ministry, proving too recalcitrant for the Prussian establishment, had fallen while Marx was in Berlin; the controversial armistice with Denmark also contributed to the general feeling of unrest throughout Germany. Marx hurried back to Cologne on 11 September to experience the most tempestuous month of that turbulent year.
Relations in Cologne between the citizens and the soldiers (most of whom came from East Prussia) were tense in any event; and on 13 September, after a particularly brutal provocation and looting by the soldiers, Wolff and Burgers summoned a public meeting on Cologne's main square.
Several thousands surrounded the tribune draped in a black, red and gold flag; the flysheet with the Seventeen Demands was distributed, and a Committee of Public Safety of thirty members was elected 'to represent those portions of the population not represented by the present authorities'. The Committee included Marx and most of the staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung; its five-man executive committee, of which Marx was not a member, was headed by Hermann Becker. The last act of the meeting was to send an Address, proposed by Engels, to the Prussian Assembly urging them to stand firm in the face of government pressure.
The Committee of Public Safety summoned a mass meeting at Wor-ringen just outside Cologne for the following Sunday, 17 September, in order to support the Frankfurt Assembly against the Prussian Government over Denmark. It was also hoped that the choice of venue would help to draw into the revolutionary movement peasants and factory workers who lived in the villages. About 10,000 people arrived to hear a series of speeches in favour of a Social-Democratic Republic from, among others, 1 lenry Brisbane (editor of the New York Daily Tribune) and Lassalle (whose championship of Countess von Hatzfeld in a cause celebre had already provided him with a national reputation), representing the Diisseldorf radicals. On Engels' proposal a motion was carried that, if a conflict broke out between Prussia and the other German states, the participants 'would give life and limb for Germany'.46 The news had not yet arrived that the Frankfurt Assembly (which had not even been previously consulted) had reluctantly agreed to the armistice of Malmo that Prussia had signed with Denmark. This aroused nationwide protests, particularly from Democrats who considered that Prussia had merely dishonoured Germany and had rejected all aspirations towards national unity. Barricades were erected in Frankfurt and two conservative deputies were lynched. The momentum of protest in Cologne was continued on 20 September with a mass meeting called in support of the Frankfurt insurgents by the Democratic Society and the Workers' Association as well as the Committee of Public Safety. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung opened a subscription for them and their families.
But the movement had already passed its zenith: the Frankfurt uprising was suppressed and the King nominated General Pfuel to form an administration that could no longer be called liberal.
The second Congress of the Rhineland Democrats had been called for 25 September. But early in the morning of the same day, the authorities struck: Becker and Schapper were arrested and only the gathering of a hostile crowd gave Moll time to escape. Warrants were also issued for the arrest of Engels, Dronke, Wolff and Burgers, the charge in every case being conspiracy to overthrow the regime. Marx himself could not be prosecuted as he had taken no active part in the recent public meetings.
A meeting of the Democratic Society that afternoon - which Marx attended - decided to do everything to avoid a confrontation with the soldiers. Marx wrote two weeks later:
The democrats told . .. the workers that under no circumstances did they want a putsch. At this moment, there was no burning question to bring the people as a whole into the struggle and every revolt must therefore fail; it was even more senseless since in a few days violent events could occur and we would have made ourselves incapable of fighting even before the day of decision.
A few barricades were raised and although these were dismantled without violence (the authorities being thereby deprived of the clash that they had hoped to provoke) martial law was declared that evening. The Civil Guard was disbanded, all political organisations were forbidden, and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (together with three smaller newspapers) was suppressed.
Martial law lasted for a week: it was lifted on 3 October on orders from Berlin following pressure from the Cologne City Council and the Prussian Assembly. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung had been hard hit: Marx had planned to bring out the newspaper in Diisseldorf had martial law continued, but even so it was impossible to put an issue together before 13 October. Engels and Dronke had gone to Belgium, Wolff to Pfalz, and Marx and Weerth were the only editors left. T h e one fresh recruit was the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath. Marx had to contribute yet more of his own and Jenny's money to get the paper restarted and it became legally his own property.
When it did reappear, the paper was full of reports on Vienna: the city had fallen under the control of the Democrats on 6 October, and the Emperor had been forced to flee for a second time; he was reinstated at the end of the month by loyalist troops under Prince Windischgratz who had struck the first blow for the counter-revolution as early as June when he suppressed the rising of the Czechs in Prague. Austria set the example for Prussia: on 2 November General Pfuel was replaced by Count Brandenburg, illegitimate son of Frederick William II and an energetic conservative, and on 9 November the Prussian Assembly was transferred to the small provincial town of Brandenburg. At first it refused to move and had to be hounded ignominiously from one hall to another; but finally it agreed, merely appealing to the people not to pay their taxes as a protest.
These events marked the definite end of any revolutionary prospect for Germany. In response to the new situation there was a sharp change in the content and editorial policies of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung: much less space was given to purely political questions and more to problems of direct concern to the working class; the notion of class struggle was much more to the fore and the whole tone became more radical. Owing to the depletion in the paper's staff Marx wrote more of the articles himself. He appears to have believed, for a moment at least, in the possible success of an armed uprising. On 1 November the paper carried an appeal, inserted independently of the editorial board, for arms and volunteers for Vienna. On 6 November Marx himself announced the fall of Vienna to a sombre meeting of the Workers' Association and laid the blame for Windischgratz's victory on 'the manifold treachery of the Viennese bourgeoisie'. He elaborated this accusation in the article,
'Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna', published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on 7 November. T h e article ended: Granted that the counter-revolution is alive throughout Europe thanks to weapons, it will die throughout Europe thanks to money. The destiny that will abolish victory is European bankruptcy, State bankruptcy.
Bayonet tips break on economic 'points' like dry tinder. . . . The useless butcheries of the June and October days, the wearisome feast of victims since February and March, the cannibalism of the counter-revolution will itself convince the people that there is only one means to shorten, simplify and concentrate the death agony of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new, one means only - revolutionary terrorism.
And when it seemed that the Civil Guard in Berlin might refuse to surrender their weapons and support the Assembly, Marx proclaimed: 'It is the duty of the Rhine Province to hasten to the aid of the Berlin National Assembly with men and arms.'
On 18 November the Committee of Rhineland Democrats proclaimed a three-point programme signed by Marx, Schapper and Schneider. It was published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and led to Marx's subsequent prosecution. The programme consisted in: resistance to tax collection; the organisation of a popular levy 'for defence against the enemy' (and for those without resources 'weapons and munitions are to be procured at the expense of the communes and through voluntary subscription'); and, thirdly, any refusal to obey the National Assembly was to be answered by the creation of Committees of Public Safety. A 'People's Committee' was set up in Cologne (Marx was not a member), but the feeble reactions of the Assembly precluded any recourse to arms and tax refusal was the only point in the programme that was implemented: from 19 November until mid-December the Neue Rheinische Zeitung carried the slogan 'No More Taxes' underneath its masthead and the paper devoted much space to reporting the progress of the campaign. Marx had already given the historical and economic background to this campaign a month earlier in a popular application of his materialist conceptions: After God had created the world and Kings by the grace of God, He left smaller-scale industry to men. Weapons and Lieutenants' uniforms are made in a profane manner and the profane way of production cannot, like heavenly industry, create out of nothing. It needs raw materials, tools and wages, weighty things that are categorised under the modest term of 'production costs'. These production costs are offset for the state through taxes and taxes are offset through the nation's work. From the economic point of view, therefore, it remains an enigma how any King can give any people anything. The people must first make weapons and give them to the King in order to be able to receive them from the King. The King can only give what has already been given to him. This from the economic point of view. However, constitutional Kings arise at precisely those moments when people are beginning to understand the economic mystery. Thus the first beginnings of the fall of Kings by the grace of God have always been questions of taxes.
So too in Prussia. In spite of its vigorous campaigning, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was getting more difficult to produce. At the end of October Marx wrote to Engels: 'I am up to my ears in work, and find it impossible to do anything detailed; moreover, the authorities do everything to steal my time.'
Engels had wandered through France during the month of October compiling a delightful travel-diary in which his admiration for the way of life of the French peasants was mingled with disgust at their political ignorance. Once he arrived in Switzerland Marx kept him supplied with money a strange reversal of their later roles. The 'stupid reactionary shareholders' had thought that economies would be possible now that the editorial board had shrunk. But Marx replied 'it is up to me to pay as high a fee as I wish and thus they will get no financial advantage'. He further admitted to his friend that: 'it was perhaps not wise to have advanced such a large sum for the paper, as I have 3 or 4 press prose cutions on my back and could be locked up any day - and then I could pant for money like the deer for cooling streams. But it was important to make progress under any conditions and not to give up our political position.' He added that it was 'pure fantasy' to suppose that he could have left Engels in a fix for a single moment. 'You always remain my intimate friend, as I hope I do yours.' Marx was much heartened by a demonstration of popular support on 14 November when he had to appear before the public prosecutor. According to a government report Marx was 'accompanied by several hundred people to the courtroom . . .
who on his return received him with a thundering cheer and made no secret of the fact that they would have freed him by force if he had been arrested'. In reply to this demonstration Marx made a short speech his only speech to a public meeting in Cologne - thanking the crowd for their sympathy and support. At the end of the month he wrote optimistically to Engels: 'Our paper is still conducting a policy of revolt and nevertheless steering clear of the code penal in spite of all the publication regulations. It is now very much en vogue. We also publish daily fly sheets.
The Revolution goes on.' An increasing amount of Marx's time was taken up by the Workers'
Association. On 12 October a delegation had asked him whether he would take over the presidency of the Association, both Moll and Schapper being unavailable. Marx pointed out that his situation in Cologne was precarious as he had not managed to obtain Prussian citizenship and was liable to prosecution for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, but he agreed to take on the job 'provisionally, until the release of Dr Gottschalk'.
Some modifications were introduced: half the time at meetings was regularly given to the study of social and political questions and from November a lengthy study of the Seventeen Demands was begun.
By December it was quite clear that the disturbances of the previous three months could have no revolutionary issue. On 5 December Frederick William took the decisive step of dismissing the Prussian Assembly and himself proclaiming a Constitution. Marx drew his conclusions in a series of articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung entitled 'The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution' which marked a substantia] revision of his earlier position. According to Marx, since the bourgeoisie had proved incapable of making its own revolution, the working class would have to rely exclusively on its own forces. 'The history of the Prussian bourgeoisie', he wrote, 'and that of the German bourgeoisie as a whole from March to December demonstrates that in Germany a purely bourgeois revolution and the establishment of bourgeois rule in the form of a constitutional monarchy is impossible and that the only possibility is either a feudal absolutist counter-revolution or a social-republican revolution.'60 But Marx now despaired of the impetus for such a social-republican revolution arising from inside Germany: it could only be produced by an external shock. This was the programme for 1849 that he sketched out on 1 January:
The liberation of Europe . . . is dependent on a successful uprising by the French working class. But every French social upheaval necessarily founders on the English bourgeoisie, on the industrial and commercial world-domination of Great Britain. Every partial social reform in France and on the European continent in general is and remains, in as far as it aims at being definitive, an empty pious hope. And old England will only be overthrown by a world war, which is the only thing that could provide the Chartists, the organised party of the English workers, with the conditions for a successful rising against their gigantic oppressors. The Chartists at the head of the English government only at that moment does the idea of a social revolution leave the realm of Utopia for that of reality. But every European war which involves England is a world war. And a European war will be the first result of a successful workers' revolution in France. As in Napoleon's time, England will be at the head of the counter-revolutionary armies, but will be precipitated to the front of the revolutionary movement by the war itself and thus redeem its guilt against the revolution of the 18th century. Revolutionary uprising of the French working class, world war that is the programme for the year 1849.61
But however much Marx might see world war as the solution to Germany's problems, there was still the more immediate question of the elections to be held under the new Constitution at the end of February.
The problems of the previous May arose again: to participate or not to participate. And Marx's answer, despite his drastically changed attitude to the bourgeoisie, was still the same. W h e n Anneke proposed in the committee meeting of 15 January that the Workers' Association put up its own candidates, the minutes record Marx as saying that the Workers' Association as such could not run any candidates at the present moment; nor was it a question for the present of maintaining certain principles, but of opposing the government, absolutism and feudal domination; and for this even simple democrats, so-called liberals, were sufficient as they were in any event far from satisfied with the present government. One had simply to take matters as they were.
The important thing was to create as strong an opposition as possible to the present absolutist regime; it was therefore common sense, since they could not secure the victory of their own principles in the elections, to unite with another opposition party to prevent the victory of their common enemy, absolute monarchy. And, in the event, the two deputies whom Cologne sent to Berlin were both Democrats.
V . T H E D E M I S E O F T H E ' N E U E R H E I N I S C H E
Z E I T U N G '
During January 1849 the staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was strengthened by the return of Engels, who had written from Berne to inquire of Marx whether it was safe to return: he did not mind standing trial but what he could not support was the no-smoking rule in preventive deten-tion. Engels devoted many of his articles to affairs in Eastern Europe, but his contributions were not entirely felicitous: he published two articles, one in January and the other in February, which branded (in a way reminiscent of Hegel) whole Slav peoples as 'reactionary' and 'without a history'. In the first of these articles, written particularly in response to Bakunin's romantically revolutionary appeals, Engels talked of the treason to the revolution of the Czechs and Southern Slavs and 'promised a bloody revenge on the Slavs'. He finished his second article with these words:
With the first successful revolt of the French proletariat.. . the Austrian Germans and Magyars will be free and exact a bloody revenge from the Slavic barbarians. The general war that will break out will break this Slavic union and annihilate all these small pigheaded nations right down to their very names. The next world war will cause to vanish from the face of the earth not only reactionary classes and dynasties but also whole reactionary peoples. And that, too, is progress.
This view was typical of other correspondents of the paper: the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was misled by the role that certain sections of the Slavs played in 1848-49 into describing whole nations as being once and for all revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, as having a right to a history or not having a right to any history at all.
During the electoral campaign the case against Marx for his incitement during the September troubles finally came up for trial. T h e previous day Marx had also had to appear in court, together with Engels and Korff (who was legally responsible for the paper), to answer a charge of libel against state officials arising out of the article of the previous July protesting at the arrest of Anneke. Marx was defended by Schneider, his colleague in the Democratic Association, and also spoke lengthily himself. He defended his article by explicit reference to the Code Napoleon and by describing the subject of his article as 'tangible manifestation of the systematically counter-revolutionary tendency of the Hansemann ministry and the German government in general'. He went on to say that it could not be judged in isolation from the general situation in Germany and the failure of the March revolution. He finished: Why did the March revolution fail? It reformed the political summit and left untouched all the foundations of this summit - the old bureaucracy, the old army, the old courts, the old judges born, educated and grown grey in the service of absolutism. The first duty of the press is now to undermine all the foundations of the present political situation.
His speech was greeted with applause and all three defendants were acquitted.
The trial on the following day was a more serious affair. Marx, Schapper and Schneider, as signatories of the anti-tax proclamation of the Rhineland Democratic Committee, were accused of plotting to overthrow the regime. Marx again defended himself in a speech lasting almost an hour. He professed amazement at being prosecuted under laws that the Government itself had abrogated by its dissolution of the Assembly on 5
December. Furthermore, these laws were those passed by the pre-March Diet which was an outdated institution. Marx then gave the jurors an object lesson on the materialist conception of history.
Society is not based on the law [he stated], that is a legal fiction, rather law must be based on society; it must be the expression of society's common interests and needs, as they arise from the various material methods of production, against the arbitrariness of the single individual.
The Code Napoleon, which I have in my hand, did not produce modern bourgeois society. Bourgeois society, as it arose in the eighteenth century and developed in the nineteenth, merely finds its legal expression in the Code. As soon as it no longer corresponds to social relationships, it is worth no more than the paper it is written on. You cannot make old laws the foundation of a new social development any more than these old laws created the old social conditions... . Any attempted assertion of the eternal validity of laws continually clashes with present needs, it prevents commerce and industry, and paves the way for social crises that break out with political revolutions.
Marx went on to explain that in this context the National Assembly represented modern bourgeois society against the feudal society of the United Diet and as such was incapable of coming to terms with the monarchy. Moreover, the Assembly merely derived its rights from the people and 'if the crown makes a counter-revolution then the people rightly answers with a revolution'. Marx concluded with a prophecy:
'Whatever way the new National Assembly may go, the necessary result can only be a complete victory of the counter-revolution or a fresh and successful revolution. Perhaps the victory of the revolution is only possible after a complete counter-revolution.'68
The three defendants were again acquitted and the foreman of the sympathetic jury thanked Marx for his instructive explanation. Marx's two speeches in his defence appeared shortly afterwards as a pamphlet.
One result of the February election was to provoke in the Workers'
Association the serious split that had been imminent for some time.
Gottschalk had eventually been acquitted and released from prison just before Christmas. He found the Workers' Association much changed since July and realising that it was impossible for him to be re-elected President on his own terms, he left Cologne of his own accord and went to Brussels. But he still continued to follow the affairs of the Association with interest and expressed his views through the Association's newspaper, whose editor, Prinz, was a close friend. Prinz launched a violent attack on the Democrats, and the committee meeting next day, 15 January, decided to appoint a commission to supervise Prinz in his editorial activities. But Prinz would not be supervised and the Association was obliged to found a rival journal. On the proposal of Schapper, the organisation of the Association was tightened up 'in order that disunity should not arise through lack of rules'. Schapper himself became President; Marx did not hold any official position, though he and Engels offered to give the members fortnightly lectures on social questions. At the end of February Gottschalk himself launched a violent attack on Marx in an unsigned article in Prinz's newspaper. Gottschalk took particular exception to an article by Marx in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in which he had defended his position on the forthcoming elections. Marx had written: We are certainly the last to desire the rule of the bourgeoisie... . But our cry to the workers and petty-bourgeoisie is: you should prefer to suffer in modern bourgeois society whose industry creates the material condition for a new society that will free you all, rather than return to an obsolete form of society which, under the pretence of saving your classes, precipitates the whole nation into medieval barbarism.
This did, in fact, seem to mark a change from the stark choice between social republican revolution and feudal reaction that Marx had proclaimed in December. Gottschalk was quick to attack this modified position in an unsigned open letter 'To Herr Karl Marx' which was typical of many attacks on Marx from the Left during (and after) the 1848 revolution: Why should we make a revolution? Why should we, men of the proletariat, spill our blood? Should we really, as you, Mr Preacher, proclaim to us, escape the hell of the Middle Ages by precipitating ourselves voluntarily into the purgatory of decrepit capitalist rule in order to arrive at the cloudy heaven of your Communist Credo? . . . You are not serious about the liberation of the oppressed. For you the misery of the worker, the hunger of the poor has only a scientific and doctrinaire interest. You are elevated above such miseries and merely shine down upon the parties as a learned sungod. You are not affected by what moves the heart of man. You have no belief in the cause that you pretend to represent. Yes, although every day you prune the revolution according to the pattern of accomplished facts, although you have a Communist Credo, you do not believe in the revolt of the working people whose rising flood is already beginning to prepare the downfall of capitalism; you do not believe in the permanence of the revolution, you do not even believe in the innate capacity for revolution. .. . And now that we, the revolutionary party, have realised that we can expect nothing from any class except our own, and thus our only task is to make the revolution permanent, now you recommend to us people who are known to be weaklings and nonentities.'
Such was the tenor of Gottschalk's onslaught, echoing the previous views of Weitling. Marx did not reply to this attack of which the majority of the Association disapproved. Gottschalk returned to Cologne in the summer but died of cholera in September while coping with an epidemic in the poor quarters of the city.
It was not only Gottschalk who considered that Marx's policies were not radical enough. Moll and Schapper had never really approved of Marx's unilateral dissolution of the Communist League, and the branches outside Germany had continued to lead a (rather shadowy) existence. On his flight from Cologne in September Moll had settled in London and reinvigorated the group there. It was decided to re-establish the League on a wider basis: a new Central Committee comprising Moll, Heinrich Bauer and Eccarius was elected, and Schapper was invited to found a group in Cologne 'even without Marx's agreement'. Schapper called a meeting of selected persons to whom he suggested that, after the events of December 1848, the existence of the Communist League was once again a necessity. This meeting proved inconclusive and shortly afterwards Moll appeared in Cologne with the specific object of winning over Marx and Engels. A meeting was held on the premises of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung at which Marx resolutely opposed the idea. Firstly, he maintained that the relative freedom of speech and Press that still obtained rendered the League superfluous. He was further opposed to its re-creation 'since a "single, indivisible republic" was proclaimed as the goal to be achieved
- and this made the proposed League statutes more socialist than communist - and also since the statutes had a conspiratorial tendency.' T h e meeting agreed to disagree and Moll continued his trip to other German towns but with little success.
Meanwhile pressure on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung mounted. Marx's paper - and Marx himself - came in for attention from the military as well as the civil authorities. On 2 March two N C O s called on Marx in his home to ask for the name of the author of an article reporting on the conviction of an officer for the illicit sale of army material. Marx described the encounter in a subsequent letter of complaint to the Cologne Commandant:
I answered the gendemen (1) that the article had nothing to do with me as it was an insertion in the non-editorial part of the paper; (2) that they could be provided with free space for a counterstatement; (3) that it was open to them to seek satisfaction in the courts. When the gentlemen pointed out that the whole of the Eighth Company felt itself slandered by the article, then I replied that only the signatures of the whole of the Eighth Company could convince me of the correctness of this statement which was, in any case, irrelevant. The N C O s then told me that if I did not name 'the man', if I did not 'hand him over', they could 'no longer hold their people back', and it would 'turn out badly'.
I answered that the gentlemen's threats and intimidation would achieve absolutely nothing with me. They then left, muttering under their breath.
Engels, in a much later letter, made it plain that it was not only Marx's bitter irony that made the soldiers leave so fast: 'Marx received them wearing a dressing gown in whose pocket he had placed an unloaded pistol with the handle showing. T h e sight of this was enough to make the N C O s stop asking for any further explanation. In spite of the sabre bayonets with which they were armed, they lost their self-possession and departed.'Engels also recounted later that many wondered how we were able to conduct our business so unhampered in a Prussian fortress of the first rank in face of a garrison of 8000 men and right opposite the main guard post; but the eight bayonets and the 250 sharp cartridges in the editorial room and the red Jacobin hats of the typesetters made our building also look like a fortress to the officers and one that could not be taken by any mere surprise attack.78
But the days of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung were evidently numbered.
One month before the end Marx took the most dramatic step of his year in Cologne: he broke the ties with the Democrats that he had, till then, been so eager to foster. On 15 April the Neue Rheinische Zeitung carried the brief announcement, signed by Marx, Schapper, Anneke, Becker and Wolff: We consider that the present organisation of Democratic Associations contains too many heterogeneous elements to allow of an activity profitable to the aims of the Cause. We are rather of the opinion that a closer connexion between workers' associations is preferable as their composition is homogeneous; therefore, as from today, we are resigning from the Rhineland Committee of Democratic Associations."
The reasons for Marx's decision were probably complex. The Democratic Association had debated at length the question whether it should change its title to Democratic and Republican Association, but it had rejected the proposals and had in consequence been bitterly attacked by Anneke's Neue Kolnische Zeitung. Probably also the refounding of the Communist League and criticism from within the Workers' Association of his temporising attitude led Marx to break with the Democrats. The content of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had been reaching towards this
'left turn' for some time: in March Wolff had started a series of articles on the misery of the Silesian peasantry and on 5 April Marx began to publish the lectures that he had given two years before to the German Workers' Association in Brussels on Wage Labour and Capital.80 T h e articles were prefaced with a reference to the reproach addressed to the paper 'from various quarters' o f ' n o t having presented the economic relations which constitute the material foundation of the present class struggle and national struggles'. Three days before Marx left the Democratic Association, the Cologne Workers' Association had invited all the Rhineland Workers' Associations to unite on a regional basis; on 16 April the General Assembly decided to cease co-operating with Democratic Associations in the Rhineland; and on 26 April the leaders of the Workers'
Association summoned a Congress of the Workers' Associations of the Rhineland and Westphalia to meet in Cologne on 6 May. One of the tasks of this Congress was to be to elect delegates to attend the all-German Workers' Congress in Leipzig the following month. This Congress was called by the Verbriiderung (Brotherhood), the only national workers'
organisation in Germany.82 This change of tactics further weakened the Cologne Workers' Association: a section of the members resigned and sent a letter to Gottschalk asking him to return, saying that recent policy changes only showed that 'the present leaders of the Association were not, and are not, clear as to what they want'.8'
All this, however, happened in Marx's absence. For the past two months the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had been perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy. Immediately on resigning from the Democratic Association Marx went on a three-week trip through North-West Germany and Westphalia to collect money for the newspaper and also, no doubt, in view of the policies just adopted, to make contacts with workers' groups: he spent a
fortnight in a first-class hotel in Hamburg laying plans for further communist activity with Karl von Bruhn and Konrad Schramm, both members of the Communist League. While Marx was in Hamburg, revolution broke out in Germany for the last time for many years. T h e Frankfurt Assembly had at length drafted a Constitution, but the King was in a strong enough position to reject it and coined at this time the famous phrase: against Democrats the only remedy is soldiers. In early M a y street fighting broke out in Dresden and lasted for a week with such colourful figures as Bakunin and the young Richard Wagner behind the barricades.
There were also shortlived revolts in the Ruhr, but it was only in Baden that there was any extensive insurgency.
T h e renewed confidence of the authorities led to the expulsion of Marx. T h e military authorities in Cologne had already in March applied to the police for his expulsion. T h e request had gone so far as Manteuffel, the Minister of the Interior, but was not immediately implemented as the civil authorities in Cologne thought it would be unduly provocative to expel Marx without any particular reason. By May, however, they felt strong enough to do just that: on his return to Cologne on 9 M a y Marx learnt that he was to be expelled; the authorities in Hamburg had already issued him with a passport valid for Paris only. On the sixteenth he received the order to leave Prussian soil within twenty-four hours 'because of his shameful violation of hospitality'.85 All the other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung were either expelled or threatened with arrest. T h e paper could not continue. T h e last number appeared on 18 May, printed in red. On the first page there appeared a poem by Freiligrath of which the first stanza ran:
No open blow in an open fight,
But with quips and with quirks they arraign me, By creeping treacherous secret blight
The Western Kalmucks have slain me.
The fatal shaft in the dark did fly;
I was struck by an ambushed knave;
And here in the pride of my strength I lie,
Like the corpse of a rebel brave!
Also on the first page was a message to the workers of Cologne from the editors which warned them against any attempt at a putsch in Cologne and finished: 'the last word of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung will always and everywhere be: emancipation of the working class'.
Marx himself contributed a defiant article claiming - rather implausibly that the paper had always been revolutionary and had made no attempt to conceal its views: Of what use are your hypocritical phrases that strain after impossible subterfuges? We also are ruthless and we ask for no consideration from you. When our turn comes we will not excuse our terrorism. But royal terrorists, terrorists by the grace of God and the law are brutal, contemptible and vulgar in their practice, cowardly, secretive and double-faced in their theory, and in both respects entirely without honour.
Twenty thousand copies of the 'Red Number' were sold and were soon changing hands at ten times the original price. It was even rumoured that some copies had been expensively framed, to serve as ikons.
Marx was left with the task of winding up the affairs of the paper. All the plant and machinery - which belonged to Marx personally - had to be sold to pay the various debts to shareholders, employees and contributors: Marx later claimed to have sunk 7000 thalers of his own money in the paper.89 The circulation of the paper at the time of its demise was almost 6000, but its growth had merely increased the expenses without a corresponding increase in revenue. Everything that remained, including incoming articles, Marx gave over to the Neue Kolnische Zeitung. This left them only Jenny's silver. This was packed in a suitcase lent by one of Marx's creditors and the whole family left Cologne on 19 May 1849 and went down the Rhine to Bingen where Jenny stayed with friends for a few days. Marx and Engels went on to Frankfurt where, assisted by Wilhelm Wolff, they met the leaders of the Left in the Frankfurt Assembly to persuade them to assume leadership of the revolutionary movement in South-West Germany by summoning the revolutionary forces to Frankfurt. Meanwhile Jenny arranged, with the help of Weydemeyer, to pawn her silver in Frankfurt. She then took the children to stay with her mother in Trier for a few days. She found her mother much changed: 'Straitened circumstances and old age have infiltrated into a soul that is otherwise so mild and loving the qualities of hardness and selfishness that deeply wound those near to her.' But she comforted herself with amusement at the provinciality of Trier and the confidence of Marx that 'all the pressures that we now feel are only the sign of an imminent and even more complete victory of our views'.
When Marx and Engels could get no agreement from the Left in Frankfurt, they went south to Baden where they spent a week vainly urging the revolutionary leaders (who had established a provisional government) to march on Frankfurt. In Speyer Marx encountered Willich, still enthusiastic for campaigning, and in Kaiserslautern he met d'Ester who gave him a mandate on behalf of the Democratic Central Committee (of which Marx had recently been so severely critical) to liaise on their behalf with the Paris socialists. There was plainly no further role for Marx in Germany. The two friends decided to split up: Marx would go to Paris while Engels put his talents as a bombardier at the service of the Baden revolutionaries. However, on their way back from Kaiserslautern to Bingen they were both arrested by Hessian troops who took them to Darmstadt and Frankfurt where they were eventually released. Marx returned to Bingen and left for Paris on 2 June accompanied by Ferdinand Wolff.
V I . PARIS A G A I N
Marx arrived in Paris, where he was to spend the next three months, confident of an imminent revolutionary outbreak. In reality, following the crushing victory of Louis Napoleon at the Presidential election the previous December, a military autocracy was imminent. Marx settled in the rue de Lille near Les Invalides under the pseudonym of M. Ramboz.
He found Paris 'dismal' - as indeed it must inevitably have seemed compared to the previous year. In addition a cholera epidemic was raging far and wide. Marx was nevertheless confident of an immediate uprising and set about fulfilling his mandate. On 7 June he wrote to Engels: 'A colossal eruption of the revolutionary crater was never more imminent than now in Paris.... I am in touch with the whole of the revolutionary party and in a few days will have all the revolutionary journals at my disposition.' In fact, however, the situation was grim: the sporadic armed revolts in Germany were petering out, the Hungarian rebellion was crushed by Russian troops, and in Italy the French army was in the process of re-establishing papal authority. On 11 June, following a censure motion on the Government proposed by Ledru-Rollin and the radical Montagne, the workers' associations proposed an armed coup d'e'tat by night, but the Montagne refused; and when the latter held a peaceful demonstration themselves two days later, it was easily dispersed by government troops. Thus the two parties 'mutually paralysed and deceived each other'. The 'revolution' was finished.
At the beginning of July Jenny and the children had joined Marx in Paris to find themselves in a state of poverty that was to become chronic.
Marx enlisted Weydemeyer's help to try and persuade a lady who had promised money for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung to give it to Marx personally so that he could purchase the copyright of the Poverty of Philosophy and make some money from a second edition. 'If help does not come from some quarter,' he wrote to Weydemeyer, 'I am l o s t . . . the last jewels of my wife have already gone to the pawnshop.' Marx also wrote to Lassalle, who responded promptly and generously, but he bitterly regretted his request when he learned from Freiligrath that Lassalle had made the affair the talk of the taverns. On 19 July, however, as Jenny wrote, 'the familiar police sergeant came again and informed us that "Karl Marx and his wife had to leave Paris within 24 hours" , Marx was given the alternative of moving to the Morbihan district of Brittany He described the area - rather ungenerously - as 'the pontine marshes of Brittany' and the whole proposition was 'a disguised attempt at murder'. He managed at least to obtain a delay by appealing to the Ministry of the Interior and writing to the Press that he had come to Paris with 'the general aim of adding to source-material for my work on the history of political economy that I began five years ago'. Marx still declared himself 'satisfied' with the political situation. 'Things progress well', he wrote, 'and the Waterloo that the official democratic party has experienced is to be treated as a victory.' He asked Weydemeyer to try to persuade Leske, despite the still outstanding debt, to publish his articles on 'Wage-Labour and Capital'; he had already put out feelers to Berlin in the hope of establishing a monthly on economics and politics. On 17
August Marx wrote to Engels that the increasingly reactionary nature of the French Government gave hope for an immediate revolutionary insurrection: 'We must start a literary and commercial enterprise: I await your propositions.' A week later, he sailed for England.