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Notes
<"1">1 Marx’s article “The Crisis in Berlin” and his series of articles “Counter-Revolution in Berlin” were written in response to the first moves in the counter-revolutionary coup d'état in Prussia. On November 1, 1848, Frederick William IV dismissed the moderate liberal Pfuel Ministry, and an openly counter-revolutionary Ministry headed by Brandenburg and Manteuffel was formed. On November 9 a royal decree transferred the Prussian National Assembly from Berlin to Brandenburg, a small provincial town. This was the beginning of the coup d'état which ended with the dissolution of the Assembly on December 5, 1848. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung, under Marx’s editorship, started a campaign to mobilise the people against the counter-revolution.
In English this article was first published in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was founded by Marx as a militant organ intended to reach and to influence the masses and, by their ideological and political education and consolidation, to prepare the ground for a mass party of the German proletariat. At the same time, it served to direct the activities of the Communist League which Marx and Engels founded in 1847 and regarded as the embryo of the future proletarian party. At the peak of the 1848 revolution, the League itself was too weak and numerically small to immediately rally the workers. There was no point in secret activity during the revolution, and Marx and Engels instructed League members throughout Germany to use the legal opportunities afforded by joining the workers’ associations and democratic societies which were being formed. In the situation that had arisen only a proletarian revolutionary newspaper could direct and co-ordinate the activities of Communist League members and mobilise the masses to carry through the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.
It was decided to publish the newspaper in Cologne, the capital of the Rhine Province, one of the most economically and politically advanced regions in Germany (here there were considerable cadres of the proletariat, and the Code Napoléon which was in force provided for greater freedom of the press than Prussian Law). The newspaper was given the name of Neue Rheinische Zeitung to emphasise that it was to continue the revolutionary-democratic traditions of the Rheinische Zeitung edited by Marx in 1842 and 1843. Taking account of the specific circumstances, with no independent mass workers’ party in Germany, Marx, Engels and their followers entered the political scene as the Left, actually proletarian, wing of the democratic movement. This determined the stand of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which began to appear under the subtitle Organ der Demokratie (Organ of Democracy).
The first issue of the newspaper appeared in the evening of May 31, 1848, and was dated June 1. The editorial board consisted of Karl Marx (editor-in-chief), Heinrich Bürgers. Ernst Dronke, Georg Weerth, Ferdinand and Wilhelm Wolff and Frederick Engels, joined in October 1848 by the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath. All the editors were members of the Communist League. The editorial board was known for its unanimity of views, smooth working and precise division of functions. Besides reading and answering letters and helping the editor-in-chief, each member had to deal with a definite range of questions. The editorial board had its correspondents in different parts of Germany and abroad. It established regular contacts with a number of democratic periodicals in other countries.
As a rule, Marx and Engels wrote the editorials formulating the newspaper’s stand on the most important questions of the revolution. These were marked “*Köln” or “**Köln”. Sometimes editorial articles marked with one asterisk were printed in other sections under the heading of News from Italy, France, Hungary, Switzerland and other countries. In addition to editorials, Engels wrote articles on other subjects, including the course of the revolutionary liberation movement in Italy, the revolutionary war in Hungary, the political life of Switzerland, and so on. Wilhelm Wolff contributed articles on the agrarian question, on the condition of the peasants and the peasant movement, particularly in Silesia. He was also responsible for the current events section. Georg Weerth wrote feuilletons and Ernst Dronke contributed various reports (including reports from Paris). The only article which Heinrich Bürgers wrote for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was practically rewritten by Marx. He was more successful as the newspaper’s representative at workers’ meetings. Freiligrath published his revolutionary poems in the newspaper.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was a daily (from September 1848 it appeared every day except Monday). On some days a second edition was put out in order to supply the readers with prompt information on all the most important revolutionary developments in Germany and Europe; supplements were printed when there was too much material for the four pages of the issue, and special supplements and special editions in the form of leaflets carried the latest and most important news.
Even in the first months of the newspaper’s existence the bourgeois shareholders started to complain of the consistent revolutionary line of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, its militant internationalism and political denunciations of the Government. Its editors were persecuted by the Government and attacked in the feudal monarchist and liberal bourgeois press. Shareholders were especially scared off by articles in defence of the June 1848 uprising of the Paris proletariat.
To make Marx’s stay in the Rhine Province more difficult, the Cologne authorities, on instructions from Berlin, refused to reinstate him in his rights as a Prussian citizen (which Marx had renounced in 1845), and on several occasions instituted legal proceedings against him and other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. On September 26, 1848, when a state of siege was declared in Cologne, several democratic newspapers, including the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, were suspended. To avoid arrest, Engels, Dronke and Ferdinand Wolff had to leave Germany for a time. Wilhelm Wolff stayed in Cologne but for several months lived in hiding. When the state of siege was lifted the paper resumed publication on October 12, thanks to the great efforts of Marx who contributed all his ready money to the paper. Until January 1849, the main burden of the work, including editorial articles, lay on Marx’s shoulders since Engels had to stay out of Germany (in France and Switzerland).
Persecution of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung editors by the legal authorities and the police was particularly intensified after the counter-revolutionary coup in Prussia in November-December 1848. On February 7, 1849, Marx, Engels and Hermann Korff, the responsible publisher, were summoned to appear before a jury in Cologne, and the next day Marx, together with Schapper and lawyer Schneider, was brought to trial as the leader of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats. But in both cases Marx and his associates were acquitted thanks to skilful defence.
The failure of these prosecutions compelled the authorities to resort to other means for the prohibition of the revolutionary periodical. In May 1849, when the counter-revolution went into the offensive all over Germany, the Prussian Government issued an order for Marx’s expulsion from Prussia on the grounds that he had not been granted Prussian citizenship. Marx’s expulsion and new repressions against other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung put an end to the publication of the newspaper. Its last issue (No. 301), printed in red ink, came out on May 19, 1849. In their farewell address to the workers, the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung said, “Their last word everywhere and always will be: emancipation of the working class!”
<"2">2 By the “theory of agreement” (Vereinbarungstheorie) the Prussian liberal bourgeoisie sought to justify its policy of compromise in the revolution. The “agreement theory” meant that the Prussian National Assembly convened in May 1848 was to draft a Constitution and introduce a constitutional system, not on the basis of its sovereign and constitutive rights, but “by agreement with the Crown”. By accepting this formula, which was advanced by the Camphausen-Hansemann Government, the Assembly’s liberal majority in fact abandoned the principle of popular sovereignty and gave freedom of action, to the counter-revolutionaries who wanted to restore the absolute power of the King. Beginning with the early issues of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Marx and Engels sharply criticised the “theory of agreement” calling its supporters “agreers” and the Berlin Assembly — the “Agreement Assembly”. They warned that this theory would only serve the King as a screen for preparing a counter-revolutionary coup d'état and the forcible dissolution of the Assembly.
<"3">3 This article, as well as a number of other reports below, was written by Engels during his forced stay in Switzerland. On September 26, 1848, a state of siege was declared in Cologne and an order was issued for the arrest of some of the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, including Engels. Engels emigrated from Prussia to Belgium, where he was arrested by the Brussels police and on October 4 deported to France. After a short stay in Paris Engels went on foot to Switzerland (see his travel notes “From Paris to Berne” in Vol. 7 of the present edition, pp. 507-29). About November 9 Engels arrived in Berne via Geneva and Lausanne and remained there until January 1849. While in emigration he regularly sent to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung articles and various items of information.
<"4">4 In 1707-1806 the principality of Neuenburg and Vallondis (the German names for Neuchâtel and Valangin) was a dwarf state under the rule of Prussia. In 1806, during the Napoleonic wars, Neuchâtel was ceded to France. In 1815, by decision of the Vienna Congress, it was incorporated into the Swiss Confederation as its 21st canton but at the same time retained its vassal dependence on Prussia. On February 29, 1848. a bourgeois revolution in Neuchâtel put an end to Prussian rule and a republic was proclaimed. However, up to 1857 Prussia constantly laid claim to Neuchâtel and was forced to renounce it officially only under pressure from France.
<"5">5 An allusion to General Pfuel’s participation in the suppression of the national liberation uprising in Posen, a duchy under Prussia’s rule, which took place in the spring of 1848. On his orders the insurgents who had been taken prisoner had their heads shaved and their hands and ears branded with lunar caustic (in German Höllenstein i.e. stone of hell); hence his nickname “von Höllenstein”. p. 7 6
<"6">6 The Holy Hermandad (Holy Brotherhood) — a league of Spanish towns set up at the end of the fifteenth century with the approbation of the King to fight against the powerful feudal lords. From the middle of the sixteenth century the armed detachments of the Holy Hermandad performed police duties. Thus. the police in general was often ironically labelled the “Holy Hermandad”.
<"7">7 In accordance with the Constitution of the Swiss Confederation adopted on September 12, 1848, the National Council (Nationalrat) consisted of deputies elected every three years by universal suffrage. The Constitution also provided for the existence of the Council of States (Ständerat) made up of two deputies from each canton. The two Councils constituted the Federal Assembly (Bundesversammlung), the supreme legislative body in Switzerland.
Great Councils (Gross Räte) — legislatures of urban cantons set up under the Swiss Constitution of 1803.
<"8">8 In English this article was first published in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
<"9">9 Demi-cantons — out of the 22 Swiss cantons three — Appenzell, Basle and Unterwalden — were for various reasons (geographical, religious etc.) divided into demi-cantons: Appenzell into Innerrhoden and Ausserrhoden, Basle into Basle and Baselland, and Unterwalden into Obwalden and Nidwalden.
Diet (Tagsatzung) — supreme organ of the Swiss Confederation which existed until the latter was reorganised and transformed from a union of states into a federal state in 1848. The Diet consisted of representatives of the separate cantons. In 1848 it adopted a new Constitution and yielded place to the Federal Assembly consisting of two Chambers (the National Council and the Council of States).
<"10">10 The Ur-cantons (Urkantönli) are the mountain cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries formed the nucleus of the Swiss Confederation. During the civil war of 1847 these cantons, as members of the Sonderbund, opposed the progressive forces of Switzerland.
Separatists — members of the Sonderbund, a separatist union formed by the seven economically backward Catholic cantons of Switzerland in 1843 to resist progressive bourgeois reforms and defend the privileges of the Church and the Jesuits. The decree of the Swiss Diet of July 1847 on the dissolution of the Sonderbund served as a pretext for the latter to start hostilities against the other cantons early in November. On November 23, 1847, the Sonderbund army was defeated by the federal forces.
<"11">11 During the bourgeois revolution of 1820-23 in Spain, the liberal party split into a Right wing, the Moderados, and a Left wing, the Exaltados.
<"12">12 On May 21, 1847, the canton of Geneva adopted a new bourgeois-democratic Constitution. Among other things, it legalised freedom of faith and the election of the State Council (the cantonal Government) directly by the people, granted suffrage to persons living on allowances, introduced free primary instruction etc. The canton’s previous Constitution was abolished by its Great Council as a result of a popular uprising in October 1846 in which a decisive role was played by the workers of Saint-Gervais.
<"13">13 For the proletarian uprising ‘ Paris on June 23-26, 1848, see present edition, in Vol. 7, pp. 124-28 and 130-64.
The popular uprising in Vienna on October 6-7, 1848, flared up in response to the Austrian Government’s order to dissolve the Hungarian Sejm and to dispatch Austrian troops to aid the Croatian Ban Jellachich who, supported by the Emperor’s court, had started a counter-revolutionary campaign against Hungary and been defeated by the Hungarian revolutionary forces on September 29. Headed by the petty-bourgeois democrats, the masses prevented the Vienna garrison from marching to Hungary and seized control of the city after a fierce struggle. However, the insurgents did not receive the necessary support from other revolutionary forces in Austria and Germany and revolutionary measures were sabotaged by the Vienna bourgeoisie. The Hungarian troops were not energetic enough in their march to the aid of the insurgents and were halted by Jellachich on October 29 while the counter-revolutionary army of Windischgrätz had already been fighting in the city itself from October 26. On November 1 the resistance of the insurgents was broken. The restoration of the Habsburgs to power was accompanied by savage counter-revolutionary terror.
<"14">14 In the spring of 1798, after the troops of the French Directory entered Switzerland, the one and indivisible Helvetian Republic was proclaimed there and a Constitution adopted on the pattern of the French Constitution of 1795. For the first time in the history of the country a central government was created, the equality of the cantons declared, the privileges of the estates and feudal dependence of the peasants abolished, the medieval guilds liquidated etc. Swiss participation in France’s wars against the forces of the anti-French coalition was accompanied by a struggle between the progressive and reactionary forces within the country for preserving or abolishing the Helvetian Republic. The latter was abolished in 1803 by Napoleon, who restored, with certain modifications, the previous decentralised state system of the Swiss Confederation. In 1815 the Vienna Congress acknowledged Switzerland’s permanent neutrality and approved the Federal Act adopted by the Swiss Diet in 1814, which limited the powers of the central Government still more. Though particularism was restored, on the whole the anti-feudal measures of the Helvetian Republic remained in force.
<"15">15 The riot which took place on October 24, 1848, in Freiburg (Fribourg) was f organised by the Catholic priests led by Bishop Marilley, and aimed at overthrowing the democratic Government of the canton. It was quickly suppressed.
<"16">16 In English this article was first published in full in the collection: Kart Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972. Prior to this, an excerpt from the article published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on November 12, 1848, appeared under the title “We Refuse to Pay Taxes” in the book: Karl Marx, On Revolution, ed. by S. K. Padover, New York, 1971 (“The Karl Marx Library” series).
<"17">17 Speaking of the Brandenburg Ministry, Frederick William IV said: “Either Brandenburg in the Assembly or the Assembly in Brandenburg.” In its issue Of November 9, 1848, the Neue Preussische Zeitung changed this to: “Brandenburg in the Assembly and the Assembly in Brandenburg.”
<"18">18 The Emperor Charles V is said to have ordered his own funeral to be performed and to have taken part in the burial service shortly before his death.
<"19">19 The criminal code of Charles V (Constitutio criminalis carolina), adopted by the Imperial Diet in Regensburg in 1532, was notorious for its extremely cruel penalties.
<"20">20 During the uprising of August 10, 1792, which overthrew the French monarchy, Louis XVI (of the Bourbon dynasty originating from the Capet dynasty) sought protection in the National Assembly. The next day he was arrested. The Convention which tried him found him guilty of conspiring against the freedom of the nation and the state security and sentenced him to death. On January 2 1, 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined. In its issues Nos. 19, 21, 22. 26 and 98 for June 19, 21, 22, 26 and September 9, 1848, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung published a series of articles under the title “Die Verhandlungen des National-Konvents über Louis Capet, Ex-König von Frankreich” describing the trial of Louis XVI.
<"21">21 Marx is speaking here about the Austrian Imperial Diet which was in session in Vienna from July 1848. The majority of its Slav deputies were associated with the bourgeoisie or the landowners and sought to set up a Slav federal constitutional-monarchic state under the supremacy of Austria and its Emperor. During the Vienna uprising of October 6-7, 1848, the deputies belonging to the Czech national-liberal party urgently left Vienna for Prague, where they continued to provide assistance to the fugitive Emperor in Olmütz (Olomouc) in his struggle against the Vienna insurgents.
<"22">22 When on November 9, 1848, the Prussian National Assembly was informed of the royal decree transferring it from Berlin to Brandenburg the majority of the Right-wing deputies obediently left the building.
<"23">23 On June 28, 1848, the Frankfurt National Assembly decided to set up a provisional Central Authority (Zentralgewalt) consisting of the Imperial Regent (Archduke John of Austria) and an Imperial Ministry. This provisional Central Authority had neither a budget nor an army of its own, possessed no real power, and was an instrument of the counter-revolutionary policy of the German princes.
<"24">24 In the preface to his book Kahldorf über den Adel in Briefen an den Grafen M. von Moltke, which Heine published in March 1831, he says with reference to the French revolution of 1830: “The Gallic cock has now crowed a second time, and in Germany, too, day is breaking.”
<"25">25 Lazzaroni — a contemptuous nickname for declassed proletarians, primarily in the Kingdom of Naples. They were repeatedly used by the Government in the struggle against liberal and democratic movements.
<"26">26 The Academic Legion — a student militarised organisation founded in Vienna in March 1848. Each faculty of the University formed a detachment divided into companies. The Legion consisted mostly of radical democrats. It also included University lecturers and professors as well as writers, poets, journalists and physicians. The Academic Legion played a significant role in the Austrian revolutionary movement in 1848. It was dissolved after the suppression of the October uprising in Vienna.
The civic militia (Bürgerwehr) — the Vienna national guard formed after the March events: it was in its social composition a motley organisation: besides artisans and small shopkeepers, it included representatives of the bourgeoisie. Its bourgeois units took part in firing on the workers’ demonstration already in August 1848. During the October uprising in Vienna the bourgeois elements of the national guard were pushed into the background and the artisans and small shopkeepers had the upper hand.
<"27">27 This refers to the speech made by Brandenburg in the Prussian National Assembly on November 9, 1848. In this and other articles that follow, when speaking of events and debates in the Prussian National Assembly, use has been made as a rule of the shorthand reports subsequently published as a separate book: Verhandlungen der constituirenden Versammlung für Preussen, Berlin, 1848.
<"28">28 In its issue of November 3, 1848, the Kölnische Zeitung carried an article about an imaginary African tribe, the Hyghlans, an intermediate form between man and ape. “Many of them,” it said, “learn Arabic.” On November 5, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ridiculed the report, adding: “This discovery is at any rate of the greatest importance for the party of the wailers for whom the Hyghlans will provide a fitting reinforcement.”
For the wailers see Note 127.
<"29">29 According to the French Constitution adopted on November 4, 1848, the presidential elections had to take place in December 1848. The President, as head of the executive, was given wide powers by the Constitution, which reflected the growing counter-revolutionary trend among the ruling bourgeoisie, which had been frightened by the June uprising of the workers in Paris. As a result of the December 10 elections Louis Bonaparte became President of the Republic. Three years later he carried out a coup d'état.
<"30">30 Marx draws an analogy between the events in Versailles on June 20, 1789 (when the delegates of the States General, which on June 17 declared themselves to be the National Assembly, took an oath in the tennis-court not to disperse until a Constitution had been drawn up), and the events in Berlin on November 11, 1848. On November 9, 1848, a royal decree was read to the delegates transferring the sittings of the Prussian National Assembly from Berlin to Brandenburg but the majority decided to continue their deliberations in Berlin. The next day they were expelled from the building (the playhouse) where their sittings had been held hitherto; from November 11 to 13 the delegates met in the Berlin shooting-gallery , which was occupied by soldiers in the evening of November 13.
<"31">31 This decision was adopted by the Prussian National Assembly on November 11, 1848, at a sitting in the Berlin shooting-gallery (see Verhandlungen der constituirenden Versammlung für Preussen. 1848, Bd. 9, Suppl. — Bd.).
<"32">32 The Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 142 (second edition) and No. 143, for November 14 and 15, 1848, carried an article by Georg Weerth under the heading “Die Steuerverweigerung in England bei Gelegenheit der Reform-Bill im Jahre 1832”
<"33">33 This article is a report from .Berlin worked up by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung editorial board. The most important information was as in this volume printed in larger type and worded by the editors accordingly. The entire conclusion was written by Marx. The rest of the text (published here in small type) contains emphasis by the editors.
This was the first time that the Neue Rheinische Zeitung called on the population to refuse to pay taxes in reply to the coup d'état begun by the Prussian counter-revolutionary forces.
<"34">34 The Kölnische Rathaus (Cologne Town Hall) was situated in the centre of Berlin which in the middle of the nineteenth century was still called Kölln or Altkölln (Old Cologne).
<"35">35 In the Freiburg (Fribourg) and other Swiss cantons the Government made recognition of the cantonal Constitution one of the conditions for voting at the elections to the Federal Assembly. In Freiburg this measure was directed against clergymen who tried to get their deputies elected to the National Council.
Many members of the National Council, however, regarded this as a violation of the universal suffrage introduced by the 1848 Constitution and managed to have the elections in the Freiburg canton annulled (for details see this volume, pp. 42-43). Subsequently this decision was reviewed and the annulment of the Freiburg elections reversed (see this volume, pp. 57-58).
<"36">36 Under pressure from Radetzky, commander-in-chief of the Austrian army in North Italy, the Vorort Berne sent its representatives and a military detachment to Tessin, a canton bordering on Italy, where Italian refugees who supported the insurgent movement against Austria had found asylum. The representatives demanded that all the Italian refugees should he deported from Tessin into the interior of the country. The Tessin Government refused to fulfil this demand and agreed to deport only those Italians who had taken a direct part in the insurgents’ movement. The conflict was discussed in the columns of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for several months. Engels gave details of the debate on it in the new Swiss Federal Assembly in his article “The National Council” (see this volume, pp. 138-53).
The Vorort (the main canton) — the name given to a Swiss canton in whose capital the Diet, and later the Federal Assembly, held its sittings before Berne was proclaimed the Swiss capital. In 1803-09, there were six main cantons — Freiburg, Berne, Solothurn, Basle, Zurich and Lucerne; in 18 1 5 their number was reduced to three: Zurich, Berne and Lucerne, and the seat of the Diet changed every two years.
Until the Constitution of 1848, the Vorort authorities to a certain extent fulfilled the functions of the country’s Government and its representative was President of the Diet.
<"37">37 Marx wrote “Cavaignac and the June Revolution” as an editorial introduction to a series of articles published under the tide “Herr Cavaignac” in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 142 (second edition), No. 145 (special supplement), No. 146, No. 147 (second edition), No. 157 (supplement) and No. 158, November 14, 17, 18 and 19, December 1 and 2, 1848. These articles were reprinted (with certain changes) from the newspaper La Presse where they were published from November 7 to 11, 1848, under the general title: “M. Cavaignac devant la Commission d'Enquête sur l'insurrection du 23 Juin”, their author being smile Girardin, editor of the newspaper, republican and later follower of Bonaparte.
<"38">38 “Little constable” (kleiner Konstabler) — an ironical paraphrase of “little corporal”, a nickname given to Napoleon 1 by the French soldiers in allusion to the fact that, while in emigration in England, Louis Bonaparte joined the detachments of special constables used to break up the Chartist demonstration of April 10, 1848.
<"39">39 An allusion to General Cavaignac’s part in the conquest of Algeria and his behaviour as Governor there in 1848 when he brutally suppressed the Arab national liberation movement. It was these “exploits” of Cavaignac that gave him the reputation of a reliable “limb of the law” in the eyes of the French bourgeoisie.
<"40">40 The Central Commission of representatives of the three democratic organisations of Cologne — the Democratic Society, the Workers’ Association and the Association for Workers and Employers — was set up at the end of June 1848 by decision of the First Democratic Congress in Frankfurt am Main; Marx was a member of the Corn mission. Until the convocation of the Rhenish Congress of Democrats, — this Commission functioned temporarily as the District Committee. The First Rhenish Congress of Democrats, which was held in Cologne on August 13 and 14, 1848, with the participation of Marx and Engels, confirmed the composition of the Central Commission of these three Cologne democratic associations as Rhenish District Committee of Democrats. Besides the President, lawyer Schneider If, it included Marx, Schapper and Moll. The activities of the Committee covered not only the Rhine Province but also Westphalia. The Congress adopted a decision on the necessity to carry on work among factory workers and peasants.
On November 14, 1848, at the beginning of the counter-revolutionary coup d'état in Prussia, the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats called on the population to refuse to pay taxes, even before the Prussian National Assembly had adopted a decision to this effect. Until the Assembly recognised this slogan and the campaign for the refusal to pay taxes developed in other provinces, Marx judged it necessary to temporarily restrain. the people from forcible resistance to the collection of taxes. However, he put the slogan of armed resistance on the agenda when, on November 15, the Assembly at last adopted a decision on the refusal to pay taxes as of November 17. From November 19 to December 17 the Neue Rheinische Zeitung carried the slogan “No More Taxes!!!” on its front page.
There was a wide response to the appeal in the Rhine Province (see this volume, pp. 39-40).
In English the text of the appeal was first published in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
<"41">41 At its sitting on November 13, 1848, held in the Berlin shooting-gallery, the Prussian National Assembly approved the report of a special commission describing the Brandenburg Ministry’s actions as acts of high treason. The Assembly decided to publish the report and convey it to the Public Prosecutor for him to take action (see Verhandlungen der constituirenden Versammlung für Preussen. 1849, Bd. 9, Suppl. — Bd.).
This article was published in English for the first time in the collection: Karl Marx, On Revolution, ed. by S. K. Padover, New York, 1971, and then in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
<"42">42 The reference is to the law safeguarding personal freedom passed by the Prussian National Assembly on August 28, 1848, and signed by the King on September 24.
It was called the Habeas Corpus Act by analogy with the English Writ of Habeas Corpus. The law was published in the Preussischer Staats-Anzeiger No. 148, September 29, 1848.
A Writ of Habeas Corpus is the name given in English judicial procedure to a document enjoining the relevant authorities to present an arrested person before a court on the demand of persons interested to check the legitimacy of the arrest. Having considered the reasons for the arrest, the court either frees the person arrested, sends him back to prison or releases him on bail or guarantee. The procedure, laid down by an Act of Parliament of 1679, does not apply to persons accused of high treason and can be suspended by decision of Parliament.
<"43">43 This refers to the editors’ introduction to the “Appeal of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats” published in the Kölnische Zeitung No. 308 on November 16, 1848.
<"44">44 An allusion to the similarity between the measures proposed by Hansemann, the Prussian Minister of Finance (i.e. a compulsory loan as a means to stimulate money circulation), and the views of Pinto, the eighteenth-century Dutch stockjobber, who regarded stockjobbing as a factor speeding up money circulation. Cf. the article “The Bill on the Compulsory Loan and Its Motivation” (present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 278-86).
<"45">45 The Auerswald-Hansemann Government (the so-called Government of Action) was in power from June 25 to September 21, ‘ 1848 (see Note 153).
Besides the ordinary police, a body of armed civilians was set up in Berlin in the summer of 1848 for use against street gatherings and mass demonstrations and for spying. These policemen were called constables by analogy with the special constables in England who played an important part in breaking up the Chartist demonstration of April 10, 1848.
<"46">46 Santa Casa (the Sacred House) — headquarters of the Inquisition in Madrid.
<"47">47 The Prussian Brumaire of 1848 — an ironical comparison of the counter-revolutionary coup d'état in Prussia with that in France on the 18th Brumaire (November 9), 1799, as a result of which the dictatorship of General Bonaparte was established in the country.
In the Middle Ages people used to believe that there was special wisdom in the works of the Roman poet Virgil. They regarded his poems as divinely inspired and treated him as an oracle.
<"48">48 Dissenters or dissidents — members of religious trends and sects not belonging to the established church; in this particular case adherents of various Protestant sects who did riot recognise orthodox Lutheranism.
<"49">49 Potsdam — a town near Berlin, the residence of the Prussian kings where military parades and reviews of the Prussian army were held.
<"50">50 In English this article was published in the collection: Karl Marx, On Revolution, ed. by S. K. Padover, New York, 1971, and in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
<"51">51 The Privy Councillors’ quarter (Geheimsratverteil) — a district in the south-west of Berlin inhabited mainly by Prussian officials.
<"52">52 On October 31, 1848, a mass demonstration was held in Berlin in protest against the cruelty with which the Austrian counter-revolution crushed the Vienna uprising. The demonstration ended when unarmed engineering workers were attacked by the 8th Battalion of the bourgeois civic militia. This incident provided the Prussian reaction with an excuse for replacing the Pfuel Government by the openly counter-revolutionary Brandenburg Government.
<"53">53 The majority of the National Assembly adhered to the tactics of passive resistance in their struggle against the counter-revolutionary actions of the Brandenhurg Government when it began the coup d'état. These tactics amounted to not obeying the Government’s orders, including the one on the transfer of the Assembly from Berlin to Brandenburg. The Assembly refrained from more effective forms of resistance to the counter-revolutionary forces, and only after much procrastination did it adopt the decision on the refusal to pay taxes, interpreting it, moreover, in the spirit of passive disobedience to the authorities. Even the Left-wing deputies did not dare call on the people to arm and deal an open blow against reaction, which the Neue Rheinische Zeitung saw as the real means of struggle against the coup d'état. As a result of the tactics of passive resistance the Government — which on November 10 brought the troops of General Wrangel into Berlin and declared a state of siege there — managed, by force, arrests and intimidation, to make the Assembly cease its work in Berlin. Then, on December 5, after the resumption of its sittings in Brandenburg in early December 1848, the Government issued orders dissolving it altogether and introducing a Constitution imposed by the King.
<"54">54 The Neue Rheinische Zeitung published the messages of support for the National Assembly in Berlin on November 21, 25 and 26 (Nos. 148, 152 and 153).
<"55">55 This appeal gave the Prussian authorities a pretext for instituting legal proceedings against Marx, Schapper and Schneider 11, who were members of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats. The trial took place on February 8, 1848, and ended with the jury returning a verdict of not guilty (see this volume, p. 520).
In English the appeal was first published in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
<"56">56 This report did not appear in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
In accordance with the new Constitution of the Swiss Confederation adopted on September 12, 1848, members of the Federal Court were elected at a joint sitting of the two Chambers of the Federal Assembly: the National Council and the Council of States. The eight members elected earlier were: Johann Kern (canton of Thurgau), Kasimir Pfyffer (Lucerne), Migy (Berne), Rüttimann (Zurich), Brosi (Graubünden), Zenrufinen (Wallis), Favre (Neuenburg) and Blumer (Glarus).
The Federal Court was responsible for the speedy settlement of conflicts which the Diet (see Note 9) had formerly taken years over, and for passing sentence on persons who were charged with high treason but still remained unpunished.
<"57">57 See Note 35.
<"58">58 For the rebellion of the Bishop of Freiburg see Note 15.
For the Sonderbund see Note 10.
<"59">59 On October 25, 1848, Bishop Marilley was arrested. On October 30, a diocesan conference of representatives of the Freiburg, Berne, Vaud, Neuchâtel and Geneva canton governments was held in Freiburg (Fribourg). It decided to set the bishop free but to prohibit his stay and activities on the territory of these five cantons. The opening of this conference was announced in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 136, November 7, 1848. Possibly Engels wrote about the conference decision in the above-mentioned report, which did not appear in the newspaper (see Note 56).
<"60">60 The reference is to the Second Rhenish Congress of Democrats, which was held in Cologne on November 23, 1848. It discussed questions connected with the tax-refusal campaign and also the question of drawing the peasants into the struggle against the counter-revolution. Marx took part in the deliberations of the Congress, which approved his slogans of action and the tactics of active struggle against the coup d'état in Prussia. For reasons of security the newspaper did not cover the sessions of the Congress and gave only extremely laconic reports on its decisions. Thus, the second edition of the N~ Rheinische Zeitung No. 153, November 26, 1848, carried the following item: “The Congress of Rhenish democrats, held on November 23, approved the decisions adopted by the District Committee. — Detailed instructions will he communicated by the delegates to their associations.
<"61">61 On July 5, 1848, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 35 published the article “Arrests” giving details of the arrest of Gottschalk and Anneke, then leaders of the Cologne Workers’ Association (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 177-79). This article served as a pretext for charging the editors with insulting Chief Public Prosecutor Zweiffel and the police officers who made the arrests. Public Prosecutor Hecker sent a letter to the newspaper refuting the article “Arrests” and threatening the editors. Marx published the letter in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and called the Cologne Public Prosecutor’s office a “new, promising contributor” to that newspaper (see the article “Legal Proceedings against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 186-88).
<"62">62 The German National Assembly which opened on May 18, 1848, in St. Paul’s Church, in the free city of Frankfurt am Main, was convened to effect the unification of the country and to draw up its Constitution. Among the deputies elected in various German states late in April and early in May there were 122 government officials, 95 judges, 81 lawyers, 103 professors, 17 manufacturers and wholesale dealers, 15 physicians and 40 landowners. The liberal deputies, who were in the majority, turned the Assembly into a mere debating club. At the decisive moments of the revolution — during the September crisis connected with the signing of Prussia’s armistice with Denmark to the detriment of Germany’s national interests, during the October uprising in Vienna and the coup d'état in Prussia — the liberal majority helped the counter-revolutionary forces. Thus, the German National Assembly disavowed the decision of the Prussian National Assembly on refusal to pay taxes by 275 votes to 150. The decision referred to in this article was adopted by the Frankfurt National Assembly on November 20, 1848.
In writing this and other articles on the debates in the Frankfurt National Assembly, Marx and Engels made use of the shorthand reports of its sittings which later appeared as a separate publication, Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen der deutschen constituirenden Nationalversammlung zu Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main, 1848-49.
<"63">63 The Federal Diet — the representative body of the German Confederation, that ephemeral union of German states founded by decision of the Vienna Congress in 1815. Consisting of representatives of the German states, the Federal Diet had no real power and served as a vehicle of feudal and monarchist reaction. After the March 1848 revolution in Germany the Right-wing circles tried in vain to revive the Federal Diet and use it to undermine the principle of popular sovereignty and prevent the democratic unification of Germany.
<"64">64 Marx refers to the rejection by Prime Minister Brandenburg of the petition presented by a delegation from the Cologne Municipal Council and other Rhenish delegations asking to be given an audience by the King. When the delegates said that in case of refusal they would suspend payment of taxes, the Prime Minister threatened to resort to bayonets.
<"65">65 This rumour was based on the conflict between the German Central Authority, or the so-called Imperial Government (see Note 23), which acted in the name of the Frankfurt National Assembly, and the Swiss authorities. Early in October the Imperial Government sent a Note to Berne demanding the cessation of the actions of the German republican refugees and their expulsion from the cantons bordering on Germany. This and the next Note, of October 23, contained both demands and threats, which, however, were rejected by the Swiss Government. The conflict accompanied by frontier incidents continued. Its essence was revealed by Engels in his article “The German Central Authority and Switzerland” (see this volume, pp. 66-74).
<"66">66 See Note 36.
<"67">67 A few days before the publication of this report, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 198 of November 21, 1848, carried the following report marked with two asterisks:
“Berne, November 16. I hasten to inform you of the results of the elections to the executive Federal Council held at today’s joint sitting of the National Council and the Council of States. The following were elected:
"President: Burgomaster Furrer, of Zurich;
"Vice-President: State Councillor Druey, of Waadt;
"Members: Colonel Ochsenbein, of Berne;
Colonel Franscini, of Tessin;
Herr Munzinger, of Solothurn;
Herr Näff, of St. GaHen;
Herr Steiger, of Lucerne.“The moderate. party which has an overwhelming majority in both Councils also had its candidates elected against the candidates of the radical party: Eytel, Stämpfli, Luvini etc.”
This information, probably supplied by Engels, contained certain inaccuracies which can be explained by the fact that the Federal Council had not finally constituted itself by that time. Instead of Ochsenbein, Steiger was elected President of the National Council; and the seventh member of the Federal Council was Frey-Hérosé of Aargau. For the details see Engels’ article “Personalities of the Federal Council” (this volume, pp. 83-87).
The Federal Council was the supreme executive body of the Swiss Republic. The President of the Republic, elected from among the Council members, was also President of the Federal Council.
<"68">68 See Note 35.
<"69">69 See Note 10.
<"70">70 See Note 36.
<"71">71 According to the Constitution of the Swiss Confederation of 1848, Swiss citizens had the right to vote after three months’ permanent residence.
<"72">72 The following report from Berne, dated November 23, 1848, appeared in the supplement to No. 154 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung but it elucidated other questions (“Raveaux’s Resignation — Violation of the Swiss Frontier”, see this volume, pp. 63-64). Engels gave detailed information about the debates in the National Council on the Tessin conflict in his article “The National Council”, published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on December 10, 1848 (see this volume, pp. 138-53).
<"73">73 The Barataria’s Reich — an ironical name which Engels gave to the future united German state for which the members of the Frankfurt parliament were drafting a Constitution; an allusion to the imaginary island of Barataria of which Sancho Panza was made Governor in Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote.
<"74">74 During the coup d'état in Prussia the Frankfurt National Assembly undertook to settle the conflict between the Prussian National Assembly and the Crown. For this purpose, first Bassermann (one of the liberal leaders) and then Simson and Hergenhahn went to Berlin as imperial commissioners. In mid-November the Frankfurt National Assembly adopted a decision calling on the Central Authority to help, through the imperial commissioners in Berlin, to form a Ministry which would enjoy the confidence of the country, that is a Ministry more acceptable to the Prussian bourgeoisie than the obviously counter-revolutionary Brandenburg-Manteuffel Ministry. However, this decision proved ineffective because the Frankfurt Assembly’s liberal majority openly disapproved of the campaign for refusal to pay taxes as a means of struggle against the coup d'état. The mediation of the imperial commissioners proved to be helpful to the counter-revolutionaries since it diverted the democratic forces in the German states from real support of the Prussian National Assembly in its struggle against the Brandenburg-Manteuffel Ministry.
<"75">75 The reference is to the armistice between Denmark and Prussia concluded in the Swedish city of Ma]m5 on August 26, 1848. Though the Prussian ruling circles waged the war against Denmark over Schleswig and Holstein in the name of the German Confederation, they sacrificed general German interests to dynastic and counter-revolutionary interests when they concluded the armistice. They were moved by the desire to release troops for the suppression of the revolution in Prussia, and also by pressure from Russia and Britain, which supported Denmark. Besides a cease-fire between Prussia and Denmark, the armistice provided for the replacement of the provisional authorities in Schleswig with a new government, to be formed by the two, contracting parties (representatives of the Danish monarchy were dominant in it), separation of the Schleswig and Holstein armed forces and other harsh terms for the national liberation movement in the duchies. The revolutionary-democratic reforms which had been introduced were now virtually eliminated.
The Malmö armistice and its ratification by the Frankfurt National Assembly caused popular dissatisfaction and protests in Germany.
<"76">76 The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was founded in 962 and lasted till 1806. At different times it included German, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian and Bohemian lands, Switzerland and the Netherlands, forming a motley conglomeration of feudal kingdoms and principalities, church lands and free cities with different political structures, legal standards and customs.
<"77">77 Maximilian Gagern’s journey to Berlin and Schleswig, made on instructions from the Government of the Imperial Regent John to take part in the armistice negotiations with Denmark in the summer of 1848, ended in a complete failure since both Prussia and Denmark ignored the representative of the impotent Central Authority.
Engels compares this fruitless journey of Gagern’s with that of the heroine in Johann Hermes’ novel Sophiens Reise von Memel nach Sachsen which was popular in Germany at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century: after spending more than ten years on her journey she failed to reach her destination.
<"78">78 In April 1848 Baden was the scene of a republican uprising led by the petty-bourgeois democrats Friedrich Hecker and Gustav Struve. It started with republican detachments invading Baden from the Swiss border. But this poorly prepared and poorly organised uprising was crushed by the end of April.
<"79">79 The first Note to the Vorort (main canton) Berne (see Note 36), dated October 4, 1848, and signed by Franz Raveaux, an imperial commissioner in Switzerland, was published in several German newspapers including the Preussischer Staats-Anzeiger No. 163 of October 14, 1848. The same day, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (in the supplement to issue No. 116) carried a report from Berne dated October 8 setting forth the content of the Note from the main canton Berne written in reply to the imperial Note. The full text of the Note, dated October 5, was reproduced in the Frankfurter Oberpostamts-Zeitung on October 10 (No. 275, second supplement) and October 11, 1848 (No. 276).
A new Note of the German Central Authority, dated October 23 and also signed by Raveaux, was published in the Frankfurt Oberpostamts-Zeitung No. 298 on November 6, 1848. An announcement about its delivery to the Berne authorities appeared in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 140, November 11. The main canton Berne’s reply of November 4 was published in the Frankfurter Oberpostamts-Zeitung No. 304 and in the first supplement to it on November 13, 1848. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung likewise published the text of this Note in its issue No. 143, November 15, 1848. p. 68
<"80">80 See Note 73.
<"81">81 An allusion to the special troops. supplied by the so-called Military Border Area — i.e., military settlements formed in the southern border regions of the Austrian Empire between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The inhabitants of these regions — Serbs, Croats, Rumanians, Szeklers, Saxons, and others — were allotted plots of land by the state, for which they had to serve in the army, pay taxes and fulfil certain public duties. While serving in the army they wore red coats and caps. In 1848 they formed part of the counter-revolutionary army of the Croatian Ban Jellachich deployed against revolutionary Vienna and Hungary.
The names of these border regiments and battalions derived either from the names of the regions where they were formed, the names of the central towns of the corresponding border areas, or the nationality making up the majority of the military unit.
<"82">82 See Note 9. p, 68
<"83">83 After the defeat of the Baden republican uprising in April 1848 (see Note 78), oil(, of its leaders, Friedrich Hecker, emigrated to Switzerland and lived in Muttenz (Basle canton) until September 1848, when he left for America.
<"84">84 The reference is to the invasion of Baden from Swiss territory by detachments of German republican refugees led by Gustav Struve on September 21, 1848, following the news of the ratification by the Frankfurt National Assembly of the armistice in Malmö and the popular uprising in Frankfurt in reply to it. Supported by the local republicans, Struve proclaimed a German Republic in the frontier town of Lörrach and formed a provisional government. However, the insurgent detachments were shortly afterwards scattered by the troops, and Struve, Blind and other leaders of the uprising were imprisoned by decision of a court martial (they were released during another republican uprising in Baden in May 1849).
<"85">85 The words “citizen and communist” were taken by Marx from the address of General Drigalski, commander of a division quartered in Düsseldorf, to the population. The address was published in the Düsseldorfer Zeitung No. 311, November 24, 1848. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung reprinted it immediately after this article. Drigalski said in the address:
“As a communist truly devoted to God and my King, I declare hereby that for the benefit of my poor brothers of the Düsseldorf commune I shall, as long as I live here, pay yearly the sum of thousand talers by monthly instalments to the city poor fund through the Government’s central treasury.... Fellow citizens, follow this example and be communists in the noble sense of this word and soon here, as everywhere else, there will he calm, peace and confidence.
"Düsseldorf, November 23, 1848Citizen von Drigalski”
<"86">86 The state of siege in Düsseldorf was declared on November 22, 1848, the order of Spiegel and Drigalski to that effect being published in the Kölnische Zeitung No. 314 (second edition), November 23, 1848.
<"87">87 Pfuel’s speech in the Prussian National Assembly on September 29, 1848, was connected with the declaration of a state of siege in Cologne on September 26. The Cologne authorities had been scared by the growing revolutionary-democratic movement and the campaign of protest against the Prussian-Danish armistice concluded in Malmö and ratified by the Frankfurt Assembly. Pfuel tried to justify this measure, but general indignation against the actions of the Cologne authorities and their condemnation by the Left deputies in the Assembly compelled the Government to issue an order lifting the state of siege in Cologne as of November 2, 1848.
<"88">88 The Penal Code (Code pénal), adopted in France in 1810 and introduced into the regions of West and South-West Germany conquered by the French, remained in effect in the Rhine Province even after its incorporation into Prussia in 1815. The Prussian Government attempted to reduce the sphere of its application and by a whole series of laws and orders to reintroduce in this province Prussian Law designed to guarantee feudal privileges. These measures, which met with great opposition in the Rhine Province, were annulled after the March revolution by the decree of April 15, 1848.
<"89">89 The law of April 6 — “Decision on Some Principles of the Future Prussian. Constitution” (“Verordnung über einige Grundlagen der künftigen Preussischen Verlassung”) — was adopted by the Second United Diet an assembly of representatives from the eight provincial diets of Prussia. Like the provincial diets, the United Diet was based on the estate principle. It sanctioned new taxes and loans, discussed new Bills and had the right to petition the King.
The First United Diet opened on April 11, 1847, but was dissolved in June because it refused to grant a new loan. The Second United Diet met on April 2, 1848, after the revolution of March 18-19 in Prussia. It adopted decrees, decisions and a law on the elections to the Prussian National Assembly, and sanctioned the loan, following which its session was closed.
<"90">90 The Civic Militia Law was adopted on the basis of the Bill introduced in mid-July of 1848 by the Auerswald-Hansemann Ministry. It reflected the desire of the Prussian liberals to prevent the masses from joining the civic militia formed after the March revolution in Prussia, and to convert it into a purely bourgeois military organisation. (For the criticism of it by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung see the article “The Civic Militia Bill”, present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 256-65.) The law in effect abolished the militia as an autonomous armed organisation and subordinated it to the King and the Minister of the Interior. This dependence of the civic militia on the Government was utilised by the counter-revolutionary forces during the coup d'état in Prussia.
<"91">91 The reference is to a statement made by the Düsseldorf Chief Postmaster (Oberpostdirector) Maurenbrecher on November 21, 1848, and published in the Kölnische Zeitung No. 314 (second edition) on November 23. This statement accused a group of officers of the Düsseldorf civic militia of “sacrilegiously” violating the secrecy of the postal service and correspondence because they tried to find out at the post-office whether postal orders for large sums of money had arrived from the Regierungspräsident
<"92">92 For the law safeguarding personal freedom see Note 42. Below Marx quotes Paragraph 9 of this law.
<"93">93 In addition to the proceedings instituted earlier against the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the Cologne Public Prosecutor Hecker gave instructions, in the autumn of 1848, to bring to court the editor-in-chief Karl Marx and the responsible publisher Hermann Korff, for publishing in their newspaper a number of items which were not to the liking of the authorities, including the proclamation “To the German People” by the republican Friedrich Hecker. Although the examining magistrate declared in October 1848 that there were no serious grounds for prosecution, the Public Prosecutor insisted on his former accusations and even advanced new ones.
In his article “Public Prosecutor ‘Hecker’ and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung” (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 485-89), Marx sharply criticised the Cologne Public Prosecutor’s office, using the coincidence of the names of the Public Prosecutor and the republican to call the former either “simple Hecker” (“tout bonnement”) (“C'est du Hecker tout pur” — “it’s genuine Hecker”, as he wrote in French) or “the dichotomous Hecker”. This was the “second crime” of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (see this volume, p. 82).
<"94">94 The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was accused by the Cologne authorities of insulting police officers and Public Prosecutor Zweiffel in the summer of 1848, by publishing the article “Arrests” exposing the repressive measures against Gottschalk and Anneke, leaders of the Cologne Workers’ Association (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 177-79). Later this accusation was made at the trial of Marx and Engels (see this volume, pp. 304-22, 511 and 517).
<"95">95 In partibus infidelium — literally: in parts inhabited by unbelievers. The words are added to the tide of Roman Catholic bishops appointed to purely nominal dioceses in non-Christian countries.
<"96">96 The Disch Hotel was in Cologne; the Mielentz Hotel — a hotel in Berlin where the Prussian National Assembly, driven out of its former premises, held its sitting on November 15, 1848.
<"97">97 At the end of September 1848, the Imperial Minister of Justice, Kisker, demanded that the Cologne Public Prosecutor should institute legal proceedings against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung editors for publishing a series of feature articles which ridiculed Prince Lichnowski, a reactionary deputy of the Frankfurt National Assembly, under the name of the knight Schnapphahnski. Written by Georg Weerth, the feature articles “Leben und Taten des berühmten Ritters Schnapphahnski” were published unsigned in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in August, September and December 1848 and in January 1849.
<"98">98 Concerning the Vorort see Note 36.
Concerning the Swiss Diet see Note 9.
<"99">99 On September 6, 1839, the canton of Zurich was the scene of a putsch organised by conservatives and clericals which led to the overthrow of the liberal Government formed on the basis of the 1831 Constitution and brought the conservatives to power. This conservative Government was in turn replaced when the liberals won the elections in 1845.
<"100">100 See Note 10.
<"101">101 The reference is to the party of moderate republicans headed by Armand Marrast which formed around the newspaper Le National in the 1840s; it was supported by the industrial bourgeoisie and a section of the liberal intellectuals connected with it.
<"102">102 The draft Constitution for Tessin was approved by the people of this canton on July 4, 1830, three weeks before the July revolution in France which led to the overthrow of the Bourbons and exerted a great influence on Switzerland.
December 1839 saw the revival of the liberal and radical movement in Tessin. As a result of the popular uprising on December 8 a provisional government was set up and the Great Council of Tessin was replaced by a new one with the radical Stefano Franscini at its head. The attempts of the conservative party to take the lead were finally defeated after the elections of November 15, 1840, which brought victory to the liberals.
<"103">103 Munzinger and Escher, the main canton Berne’s representatives in Tessin at the time of the so-called Tessin conflict (see Note 36), insisted that all Italian refugees in Tessin and their families should be removed into the interior of the country. Their demand was contrary to the principle of sovereignty of the cantons.
<"104">104 Commission du pouvoir exécutif (the Executive Commission) — the Government of the French Republic set up by the Constituent Assembly on May 10, 1848, to replace the Provisional Government which had resigned. It existed until June 24, 1848, when Cavaignac’s dictatorship was established during the June proletarian uprising. The majority in the Commission were moderate republicans, Ledru-Rollin being the only representative of the Left.
<"105">105 The reference is to an anonymous patriotic pamphlet, Deutschland in seiner tiefen Erniedrigung (Nuremberg, 1806), directed against Napoleon’s rule. For the publication of this pamphlet the bookseller Johann Philipp Palm was shot by the French authorities.
<"106">106 See Note 75.
<"107">107 The full title of this report in German is “Bericht des Ausschusses für die österreichischen Angelegenheiten über die Anträge der Abgeordneten Venedey, Heinrich Simon, Wiesner und Bauernschmied, sowie über mehrere die österreichischen Angelegenheiten betreffende Petitionen”. It was published in the book: Verhandlungen der deutschen verfassunggebenden Reichsversammlung zu Frankfurt am Main Bd. 2, Frankfurt am Main, 1848-49, S. 602- 19. The report was read out by Deputy H. Löwe, of Posen, at the 119th sitting of the Frankfurt National Assembly on November 20, 1848. Appended to it were letters of the two imperial commissioners Welcker and Mosle to the Imperial Minister Schmerling and the Austrian Prime Minister Wessenberg; these letters are repeatedly quoted in this article. Subsequently, touching on Welcker and Mosle’s mission when dealing with the October uprising in Vienna in his work Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, Engels wrote: “The travels of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza form matter for an Odyssey in comparison to the heroic feats and wonderful adventures of these two knights-errant of German Unity.... Their dispatches and reports are perhaps the only portion of the Frankfurt transactions that will retain a place in German literature; they are a perfect satirical romance, ready cut and dried, and an eternal monument of disgrace for the Frankfurt Assembly and its government” (see present edition, Vol. 11).
<"108">108 Eisele and Beisele, here nicknames for Welcker and Mosle, are comic characters from a pamphlet by Johann Wilhelm Christern published anonymously, Doctor Eisele’s und Baron van Beisele’s Landtagsreise im April 1847. Genrebilder aus der neuesten Zeitgeschichte, Leipzig, 1847. These names also appeared in the Munich Fliegenden Blättern in 1848.
<"109">109 Die Jobsiade. Ein komisches Heldengedicht — satirical poem by Karl Arnold Kortum published in 1784 and repeatedly reprinted in the nineteenth century. The comic travel map attached to it was a closed labyrinth.
<"110">110 An allusion to the uprising in Frankfurt am Main which broke out following the ratification of the Malmö armistice by the majority of the National Assembly on September 16, 1848. Next day, there was a mass meeting of protest in the suburbs of Frankfurt attended by the inhabitants of the city and the neighbouring towns and localities who demanded the dissolution of the Assembly and the formation of a new representative body. The Imperial Government called in Prussian and Austrian troops. When an uprising flared up on the following day, the poorly armed people were defeated after stubborn barricade fighting. There was popular unrest in many parts of Germany in response to the Frankfurt events.
<"111">111 See Note 81.
<"112">112 The Austrian troops of Windischgrätz and Jellachich which suppressed the Vienna uprising were mostly recruited from the South-Slav peoples.
Serezhans — special units in border regiments (200 men per regiment) recruited in the Serbian and Croatian regions of the Military Border Area (see Note 81). In peacetime they protected the frontier and in wartime fulfilled vanguard, outpost and patrol duties.
Raizes (Raizen, Razen, Rascier) — the name given to the Orthodox Serbs and often used for Serbs in general. It is apparendy derived from the name of one of the first settlements of Serbian tribes, the ancient town Rassa, centre of the Raschka region.
<"113">113 A reference to the documents relating to the activities of the German refugees in the border cantons of Switzerland published in the Frankfurter Oberpostamts-Zeitung No. 301 (special supplement), November 9, 1848.
<"114">114 See Note 74.
<"115">115 By decision of the Vienna Congress (1814-15) the lands on the left and the right banks of the Rhine were incorporated into Prussia, and among other tides bestowed on the King of Prussia was that of Archduke of the Lower Rhine. In his manifesto of April 5, 1815, issued on the occasion of the incorporation of this territory into Prussia, Frederick William III promised to introduce representative institutions in the Rhine Province and throughout the country.
<"116">116 An English translation of this article was first published in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
<"117">117 On April 10, 1848, a Chartist demonstration in London was broken up by troops and. special constables; the purpose of the demonstration was to present the third Chartist Petition to Parliament.
On May 15, 1848, the bourgeois national guard suppressed the revolutionary actions of the Paris workers.
On June 25, 1848, the rising of the workers of Paris was crushed.
On August 6, 1848, Milan was occupied by Austrian troops, who suppressed the national liberation movement in North Italy.
On November 1, 1848, the troops of Windischgrätz took Vienna.
<"118">118 As a result of the revolutionary actions of the masses in Vienna, primarily of the workers and students, on May 15 and 16, the Imperial Government was forced to give up the idea of creating an elective two-Chamber parliament and to introduce changes into the electoral law, adopted shortly before that, by extending the franchise. The armed people also secured the abrogation of the order of May 14 dissolving the Central Committee of the national guard and the Academic Legion (see Note 26).
On May 15, 1848, a popular uprising in Naples caused by King Ferdinand’s infringement of constitutional rights was brutally crushed, the lazzarani (see Note 25) taking an active part in its suppression.
<"119">119 This refers to the suppression of the popular uprising in Frankfurt am Main on September 18, 1848 (see Note 110).
<"120">120 On July 25, 1848, at Custozza (North Italy), the Austrian army under Radetzky defeated the Piedmont troops. This was followed by the capture of Milan on August 6 and the conclusion on August 9 of an armistice between Austria and the Kingdom of Sardinia under which the latter was to withdraw its troops from the towns and fortresses of Lombardy and Venice and to hand them over to the Austrians.
<"121">121 The uprising in Leghorn (Grand Duchy of Tuscany) began at the end of August 1848 and ended on September 2 with the rout of the government troops. Fearing that the uprising might spread all over Tuscany, the Grand Duke Leopold II dismissed the moderate liberal Government of Capponi. On October 27 a democratic government of Tuscany was formed headed by Montagnelli. It was he who put forward the slogan of convening an Italian Constituent Assembly (Guerazzi became a member of the Government).
The victory of the people in Tuscany called forth mass demonstrations in Rome (Papal states) demanding the convocation of an Italian Constituent Assembly, resumption of the war with Austria, formation of a provisional democratic government, and social reforms. On November 16, in response to the attempts of the Papal Swiss Guard to disperse the demonstration, the people erected barricades near the Vatican and attacked it. Pins IX yielded, and a new government was set up in Rome with the participation of Left liberals and democrats.
<"122">122 “Troppo tardi, santo padre, troop tardi!” (“Too late, Holy Father, too late!”) cried he revolutionary-minded people of Rome when Pius IX, after much procrastination, issued an edict on March 15, 1848, introducing a watered-down Constitution of the Papal states.
<"123">123 See Note 59.
<"124">124 Fearing the growth of the revolutionary movement in Rome (see Note 12 1), Pius IX fled from Rome on the night of November 24, 1848, and took up residence in the Neapolitan fortress of Gaeta. Meanwhile a struggle flared up in the Papal states between the revolutionary democrats who stood for the proclamation of a republic and the liberals who sought to bring back the Pope to Rome and get his sanction for certain constitutional concessions. In the course of this struggle the liberals were defeated and on February 9, 1849, a Roman Republic was founded.
<"125">125 The reference is to the treaty (drawn up by the Swiss Diet in 1814 and approved by the Vienna Congress in 1815) which acknowledged Switzerland’s permanent neutrality. Under this treaty the Swiss Confederation was defined as a federation of 22 cantons. When a Constitution was introduced in 1848, this treaty became invalid.
<"126">126 Concerning the position of Escher and Munzinger as the representatives of the Berne canton in Tessin during the so-called Tessin conflict, see Note 36.
<"127">127 In 1848-49 moderate bourgeois constitutionalists in Germany called the republican democrats “agitators” (Wühler) and these in turn called their opponents “wailers” (Heuler).
<"128">128 The articles “The French Working-Class and the Presidential Elections” and “Proudhon” were written by Engels in early December 1848 during his stay in Switzerland and were intended for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. However, they were not published and came down to us in manuscript form.
<"129">129 In view of the presidential elections in France scheduled for December 10, 1848, the party of the petty-bourgeois democrats, which had formed a bloc for a time with the petty-bourgeois socialists (Louis Blanc and others) and grouped round the newspaper La Réforme (its representatives in the Constituent and later in the Legislative Assembly called themselves Montagnards or the Mountain by analogy with the Montagnards in the Convention of 1792-94), nominated its leader, Ledru-Rollin, as a candidate for the presidency. The proletarian socialists, however, preferred their own candidate, Raspail, a well-known scientist and revolutionary with communist views. Proudhon’s followers, grouped round his newspaper Le Peuple, also supported Raspail.
The differences between the supporters of these two candidates revealed the internal contradictions among the revolutionary democrats. To characterise these differences Engels made use of the material published in the French democratic and socialist periodicals, in particular, the article “Encore et toujours la présidence” in La Réforme, November 14, 1848, and the leading article in La Révolution démocratique et sociale No. 10, November 10, 1848.
<"130">130 By the “pure” (or tricolour) republicans are meant members of the National party (see Note 101).
<"131">131 See Note 104.
<"132">132 For the revolutionary events in Paris on May 15, 1848, see Note 117.
The June insurrection — the proletarian uprising in Paris on June 23-26, 1848 (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 124-28 and 130-64).
<"133">133 Equitable Labour Exchange Bazaars or Offices (the name is given in English in the German original) were founded by the workers’ co-operative societies in various towns of England in 1832. This movement was headed by Robert Owen, who founded such a bazaar in London. The products of labour at these bazaars were exchanged for a kind of paper “money” issued as labour “tickets”, a working hour being the unit. These bazaars were an attempt by the utopians to organise exchange without money in the conditions of capitalist commodity production and soon proved to be a failure.
<"134">134 Concerning this speech of Proudhon’s in the French National (Constituent) Assembly on July 31, 1848, see the article “Proudhon’s Speech against Thiers” published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 321-24).
<"135">135 The royal order dissolving the Prussian National Assembly was issued on December 5, 1848. In the Ministry’s explanation accompanying the order the Assembly was accused of having disregarded the royal decree of November 8 ordering it to move from Berlin to Brandenburg, a measure allegedly designed “to protect the deputies’ freedom of deliberation from the anarchistic movements in the capital and their terroristic influences”.
The imposed Constitution came into force on December 5, 1848, simultaneously with the dissolution of the Assembly. This Constitution provided for a two-Chamber parliament. By means of age and property qualifications the First Chamber was made a privileged “Chamber of the Gentry”, while under the electoral law of December 6, 1848, a considerable part of the working people was excluded from the two-stage election to the Second Chamber. According to this Constitution, in case of war or “disorders” “guarantees” of personal freedom, inviolability of the home, freedom of the press, assembly and association etc. were suspended. Wide powers were assumed by the King: he had the right to convene or dissolve the Chambers, to appoint Ministers, to declare war or conclude peace; he had the executive power entirely in his hands, while sharing the legislative power with the Chambers. All this, together with the direct proviso that the King could review the Constitution on his own initiative, played into the hands of the counter-revolutionaries.
<"136">136 See Note 2.
<"137">137 An English translation of this article first appeared in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
<"138">138 See Note 135.
<"139">139 The Vorort — see Note 36.
Concerning the Struve campaign see Note 84.
<"140">140 See Note 9.
<"141">141 See Note 10.
<"142">142 See Note 1 0.
<"143">143 The reference is to the anti-constitutional coup d'état in the Wallis (Valais) canton in May 1844, when the Upper Wallis opponents of bourgeois reforms, instigated by the Jesuits and the clergy, overthrew the liberal Government and annulled the cantonal Constitution of 1840. In a battle at Pont-de-Trient on May 21, 1,500 men of Lower Wallis headed by Maurice Barman were defeated by the 8,000-strong army of General Kalbermatten. With the change of government the Wallis canton joined the Sonderbund (see Note 10) in June 1844.
<"144">144 In October 1848 there was an uprising in North Lombardy (Veltlin and other places) against the Austrian occupation troops of Radetzky. Giuseppe Mazzini, who had emigrated to Switzerland after Milan was occupied by the Austrians in September 1848, issued an appeal to the insurgents and tried to help them by organising an expedition of Italian refugees who had settled in the Swiss frontier canton of Tessin.
Crossing the frontier at Valle Intelvi the members of the expedition joined the insurgents, but the uprising was soon crushed and the surviving refugees returned to Switzerland. This provided Radetzky with a pretext for demanding from the Swiss Government the deportation of all Italian refugees, but the Tessin authorities refused to satisfy this demand. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung published. a number of reports on the course of the uprising in Lombardy (in the section “Italy”). p. 152
<"145">145 The second article in the series “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution” (of December 11, 1848) was first published in English in the book: Marx and Engels, Selected Works in two volumes, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Vol. I, Moscow, 1950. The series was first published in full in English in the collection: Karl Marx, On Revolution, ed. by S. K. Padover, New York, 197 1, and then in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972. p. 154
<"146">146 Below Marx quotes “Decision on Some Principles of the Future Prussian Constitution” (“Verordnung über einige Grundlagen der künftigen Preussischen Verfassung”) and the electoral law for the convocation of the National Assembly adopted by the Second United Diet (see Note 89) on April 6 and 8, 1848. Both documents were published in the book Verhandlungen des zum 2. April 1848 zusammenberufenen Vereinigten Landtages, zusammengestellt von E. Bleich, Berlin, 1848.
<"147">147 This refers to the Constitution imposed by the Prussian King on December 5, 1848, simultaneously with the publication of the order dissolving the Prussian National Assembly (see Note 135).
<"148">148 See Note 109.
<"149">149 Trop tard! (too late!) — apparently by analogy with Tropo tardi! Cf. Note 122.
<"150">150 During the March revolution of 1848 the Prince of Prussia fled to England, but on June 4, aided by the Camphausen Ministry, he returned to Berlin. At the sitting of the Prussian National Assembly on June 6 Camphausen sought to present this cowardly flight of the Prince as a journey undertaken for educational purposes.
<"151">151 After the March revolution of 1848 in Germany an insurrection of the Poles broke out in the Duchy of Posen for their liberation from the Prussian yoke. The mass of the Polish peasants and artisans took part in it together with members of the lesser nobility. The Prussian Government was forced to promise that a commission would be set up to carry out the reorganisation of Posen: creation of a Polish army, appointment of Poles to administrative and other posts, recognition of Polish as the official language etc. On April 14, 1848, however, the King ordered the division of the Duchy of Posen into an eastern Polish part and a western “German” part, which was not to be “reorganised”. During the months following the suppression of the Polish insurrection by the Prussian military, in violation of all agreements with the Poles, the demarcation line was pushed further and further east and the promised “reorganisation” was never carried out.
Under the impact of the March revolution, the national liberation movement of the German population in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which had been incorporated into the Kingdom of Denmark by decision of the Vienna Congress (1815), grew in strength and became radical and democratic, forming part of the struggle for the unification of Germany. Volunteers from all over the country rushed to the aid of the local population when it rose in arms against Danish rule. Prussia, Hanover and other states of the German Confederation sent to the duchies federal troops under the command of the Prussian General Wrangel. However, the Prussian Government which feared a popular outbreak and an intensification of the revolution sought an agreement with Denmark at the expense of the general German interests. The situation was complicated by the intervention of Britain, Sweden and Tsarist Russia in favour of the Kingdom of Denmark. The seven months armistice concluded between Prussia and Denmark at Malmö on August 26, 1848 (see Note 75), in fact preserved Danish rule in Schleswig and Holstein. The war, resumed at the end of March 1849, ended in 1850 with the victory of the Danes and the two duchies remained part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
<"152">152 On September 15, 1848, General Wrangel, who was associated with the reactionary Court clique, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Brandenburg military district, which included Berlin. The Markgrafschaft (Marches) of Brandenburg, the original core of Prussia, consisted in the Middle Ages of two parts, the Kurmark and the Neumark, hence the tide of the general: “Commander-in-Chief of the two Marches.”
<"153">153 Concerning Hansemann-Pinto — see Note 44.
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">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. 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">155 An allusion to Camphausen, who was formerly an oil and corn dealer, and to Hansemann, who started as a wool merchant.
<"156">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">168 Article 14 of the Constitutional Charter Louis XVIII granted in 1814 read: “The King is the head of the state.”
<"169">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">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">171 See Note 84.
<"172">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">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">192 See Note 89.
<"193">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">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">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">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">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">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">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 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">200 See Note 170.
<"201">201 An excerpt from this article was first published in English in the journal Labour Monthly, London, 1923, Vol. 5, No. 1. Another excerpt appeared in the collection: Karl Marx, On Revolution, ed. by S. K. Padover, New York, 1971. An English translation was first published in full in the book: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972. p. 213 202
The reference is to the manifesto published on February 10, 1848, by Pins IX, who had previously carried out a number of liberal reforms and sanctioned the formation of a secular government. In the manifesto the Pope gave the blessing of the Church to the Italian people. Although the manifesto hinted that Pius IX disapproved of the demand for a Constitution, it was interpreted as an approval of the movement for constitutional reforms which had developed after the popular uprising in Sicily in January 1848 against the rule of the Bourbons of Naples.
Under the impact of the French revolution in February 1848 Pius IX was compelled to issue a decree on March 15, 1848, introducing a moderate Constitution in the Papal states.
<"203">203 After the popular uprising in Rome on November 16, 1848 (see Note 12 1), Pius IX fled on November 24 to the fortress of Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples.
<"204">204 The Mountain — see Note 129.
The party of the “National” — see Note 101.
The dynastic opposition — an opposition group headed by Odilon Barrot in the French Chamber of Deputies during the July monarchy (1830-48). It expressed the views of the liberal industrial and commercial bourgeoisie and favoured a moderate electoral reform, regarding it as a means of preventing revolution and preserving the Orléans dynasty. The dynastic opposition was close to the monarchist pro-Orleanist bourgeois politicians headed by Thiers, whose mouthpiece was the newspaper Constitutionnel. Until February 1848 this group stood for a monarchy with republican institutions and subsequently for a republic with monarchical institutions.
The legitimists — supporters of the Bourbon dynasty, which was overthrown in 1830. They upheld the interests of the big hereditary landowners.
<"205">205 In the summer of 1848, the anti-feudal movement and the struggle for complete liberation from the rule of the Turkish Sultan gained strength in the Danube principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which formally remained autonomous possessions of Turkey. The movement in Wallachia grew into a bourgeois revolution. In June 1848, a Constitution was proclaimed, a liberal Provisional Government was formed and George Bibesco, the ruler of Wallachia, abdicated and fled from the country.
On June 28, 1848, a 12,000-strong Russian army corps entered Moldavia and in July Turkish troops also invaded the country. The Russian and Turkish intervention helped restore the feudal system and the subsequent entry of Turkish troops into Wallachia with the consent of the Tsarist Government brought a bout the defeat of the bourgeois revolution there. There were bloody reprisals against the population in Bucharest. A proclamation of the Turkish government commissioner Fuad-Effendi declared it necessary to establish “law and order” and “eliminate all traces of the revolution”.
<"206">206 Pandours — irregular infantry units of the Austrian army recruited mainly in the South-Slav provinces of the Austrian Empire.
Serezhans — see Note 112.
<"207">207 See Note 172.
<"208">208 The reference is to the Swiss citizens living in the Kingdom of Naples who suffered maltreatment and material losses as a result of the suppression of the popular uprising in Naples on May 15, 1848 (see Note 118), and the fierce four-day bombardment and plunder of Messina early in September 1848, after it had been captured by the royal troops sent by Ferdinand If to crush the revolutionary movement in Sicily.
<"209">209 An English translation of this article was first published in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
<"210">210 “To my dear Berliners” — an appeal of Frederick William IV published in the morning of March 19, 1848, during the people’s uprising in Berlin.
“To my people and the German nation” — an appeal of Frederick William IV published on March 21, 1848.
“To my army” — a New-Year message of Frederick William IV signed by him in Potsdam on January 1, 1849, and published in the Preussischer Staats-Anzeiger No. 3, January 3, 1849.
<"211">211 Friedrichshain — a park in Berlin where the insurgents killed on the barricades during the uprising on March 18, 1848, were buried.
<"212">212 On April 8, 1848, during his secret mission on behalf of the King of Prussia, Major Wildenbruch handed a Note to the Danish Government which stated that Prussia was not fighting in Schleswig-Holstein to rob Denmark of the duchy but merely to combat “radical and republican elements in Germany”. The Prussian Government tried every possible means to avoid official recognition of this compromising document.
<"213">213 See Note 75.
<"214">214 The reference is to the battle at Miloslaw on April 30, 1848, during the national liberation insurrection in the Duchy of Posen (see Note 1 5 1). As a result, the Polish insurgents commanded by Mieroslawski forced the Prussian troops under General Colomb to retreat.
<"215">215 The reference is apparently to the battle at Sokoluv, near Wreschen (Wrzesnia), where on May 2, 1848, a 3.000-strong Prussian detachment under General Hirschfeld attacked the insurgents commanded by Mieroslawski, who was leading thein north to Kujavia intending to continue the struggle there. The insurgents beat off the Prussian attacks and continued their march northwards. But owing to the enemy’s superiority in manpower and armaments and disagreements among the commanders, the insurgents were compelled to capitulate on May 9, 1848.
<"216">216 See Note 5.
<"217">217 The reference is to the popular uprising in Naples on May 15, 1848 (see Note 118).
<"218">218 The reference is to the suppression by Windischgrätz’s counter-revolutionary troops of the uprising in Prague on June 12-17, 1848, directed against the arbitrary rule of the Austrian authorities (see Engels’ articles “The Prague Uprising” and “The Democratic Character of the Uprising”, present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 91-93 and 119-20), and also of the uprising in Vienna in October 1848. In December 1848 Windischgrätz’s army, which included the troops of the Croatian Ban Jellachich, intervened in Hungary to suppress the national liberation movement and seized Pressburg (Bratislava) and other towns.
Serezhans — see Note 112.
Ottochans (Ottocans) — soldiers of the Austrian border regiment formed in 1746 and stationed in Ottocac (Western Croatia).
<"219">219 The Imperial Government formed by the Frankfurt National Assembly and headed by Archduke John of Austria took over from the former Federal Diet (see Note 63) its functions of suppressing the revolutionary movement, particularly in South Germany, with military support from a number of German states including Prussia.
<"220">220 On July 25, 1792, the Duke of Brunswick, who was Commander-in-Chief of the Austro-Prussian army fighting against revolutionary France, issued a manifesto threatening the French people to raze Paris to the ground.
<"221">221 This article was first published in English in the book: Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, Political Writings Vol. 1, London, Penguin Books, 1973.
<"222">222 The reference is to Austria’s participation — along with Prussia and Russia — in the first (1 772) and third (1 795) partitions of Poland. The third partition led to the liquidation of the Polish state. The Austrian Empire annexed a considerable part of Southern Poland and Western Ukraine (Galicia) hitherto belonging to Poland.
<"223">223 The reference is to the events in early 1846. In February an unsuccessful attempt at a national liberation uprising was made in the Polish lands. Only in the Republic of Cracow, which from the Vienna Congress of 1815 had been under the joint control of Austria, Russia and Prussia, did the insurgents seize power on February 22 and create a National Government, which issued a manifesto abrogating all feudal obligations. The uprising was suppressed in early March 1846 and Cracow was again incorporated into the Austrian Empire. During the uprising the Austrian authorities provoked clashes between Ukrainian (Ruthenian) peasants and detachments of Polish insurgents, taking advantage of the oppressed peasants’ hatred of the Polish nobility. But when the uprising was crushed, the participants in the peasant movement in Galicia were subjected to severe repressions.
The Ruthenians — the name given in nineteenth-century West-European ethnographical and historical works to the Ukrainian population of Galicia and Bukovina, which was separated at the time from the bulk of the Ukrainian people.
<"224">224 Engels expressed this point of view more precisely in his articles written in the spring of 1853 on the prospects of the national liberation struggle of the Slavs and other peoples of the Balkan Peninsula against the oppression of the Turkish Empire. He supported the right of the Southern Slavs in the Balkans to form their own independent state (see Frederick Engels, “What Will Become of European Turkey?”, present edition, Vol. 12).
<"225">225 The Hussite wars, named after the Czech patriot and reformer Jan Huss (1369-1415), began with a popular uprising in Prague on July 30, 1419. The revolutionary wars of the Czech people against feudal exploitation, the Catholic Church and national enslavement continued until 1437 and ended in the defeat of the Hussites.
<"226">226 In the battle at Poitiers (Central France) in 732, also known as the battle of Tours, the Franks led by Charles Martel, the actual ruler of the Frankish state of the Merovingians, defeated the Arabs who had invaded France from Spain.
In 1241 the German and Polish knights were defeated by the Mongolian invaders near Wahlstatt (Dobre Pole) in Silesia. But the Mongols, having sustained heavy losses in this battle and the previous campaigns, were forced to cease their advance westward from conquered Moravia, Hungary and Dalmatia and return to their East-European and Asian possessions.
<"227">227 See Note 10.
<"228">228 The reference is to the Slav Congress which met in Prague on June 2, 1848. It was attended by representatives of the Slav regions of the Austrian Empire. The Right, moderately liberal wing, to which Palacky and Shafarik, the leaders of the Congress, belonged, sought to solve the national question through autonomy of the Slav regions within the framework of the Habsburg monarchy. The Left, radical wing (Sabina, Fric, Libelt and others) wanted joint action with the democratic movement in Germany and Hungary. The radical delegates took an active part in the popular uprising in Prague (June 12-17, 1848) and were subjected to severe reprisals. On June 16, the moderately liberal delegates declared the Congress adjourned indefinitely.
The Sabor (Diet) of the Southern Slavs opened in Agram (Zagreb) on June 5,1848. It was attended by delegates from the Croats, Serbs of the Voivodina, Slovenes and Czechs. Representatives of the liberal landowners and the top sections of the commercial bourgeoisie in Croatia prevailing at the Sabor expressed their loyalty to the Habsburgs and restricted the national programme to the demand of autonomy for the united Slav territories within the Austrian Empire. Only a small group of democratic delegates connected the struggle for the national cause with the revolutionary struggle against feudal monarchist regimes.
<"229">229 See Note 172.
<"230">230 See Note 1 0.
<"231">231 On November 19, 1842, the democratic poet Georg Herwegh was received by Frederick William IV. Disappointed with the outcome of the audience, Herwegh wrote a letter to the King accusing him of violating his promise to introduce freedom of the press. The letter was published in the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung on December 24, 1842, and later in other German and foreign newspapers. To counteract the influence of this letter on public opinion Frederick William IV ordered the semi-official newspapers to publish articles discrediting Herwegh.
After the publication of this article of Engels’ in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Lohbauer sent a statement to its editorial board in which he rejected suggestions of his involvement in publication of the feuilletons against Herwegh on the grounds that before his arrival in Berlin he had served in the General Staff in Württemberg and had nothing to do with Herwegh’s expulsion. His statement was published in the supplement to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 1 99, January 19, 1849.
<"232">232 See Note 194.
<"233">233 The reference is to the bourgeois revolution in Neuchâtel (principality of Neuenburg) in February 1848, which put an end to its vassal dependence on the Prussian King and proclaimed Neuchâtel a republic (see Note 4).
<"234">234 See Note 88.
<"235">235 The Swiss Croats in Italy — an ironical allusion to the Swiss mercenaries in the service of counter-revolutionary governments in a number of Italian states.
Enlistment agreements — see Note 172.
<"236">236 The Ur-cantons — see Note 10.
<"237">237 See Note 14.
<"238">238 The continuation of this article was never written. Engels wrote two more small reports on the Swiss affairs, which were published in the same issue (No. 197) of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (see this volume, pp. 251-53). The publication of his reports from Switzerland ceased because in mid-January 1849 Engels returned to Cologne and worked as an editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
<"239">239 Ferdinand II of Naples earned the derisive nickname “King Bomba” after he had ordered the savage bombardment of Messina (Sicily) by a punitive force in September 1848 (see Note 208).
<"240">240 This article was first published in English in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
<"241">241 The supplement to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 197 of January 17, 1849, carried an item in the section “Neueste Nachrichten” to the effect that the leaflets addressed to the voters had been reprinted from the Neue Preussische Zeitung at the printing-press of the Kölnische Zeitung and distributed throughout the country by the citizens’ associations (see Note 245), which sponsored the Kölnische Zeitung.
<"242">242 The reference is to the Prussian Association for a Constitutional Monarchy founded in June 1848 and its local branches. They were composed of Prussian landowners who had adopted bourgeois methods and customs and members of the bourgeoisie. The Association and its branches supported the counter-revolutionary policy of the Government and were labelled in the democratic press “societies of denunciators”.
<"243">243 Marx refers to the addresses to the primary electors regularly published in the Kölnische Zeitung in January 1849 (Nos. 10-18) in connection with the primary elections to the Prussian Lower Chamber fixed for January 22 (the elections were in two stages: those elected at the primary elections were to elect deputies on February 5). Some of the addresses contained direct attacks on the communists (e. g. No. 14 of January 17, 1849) and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (first supplement to No. 15, January 18, 1849, and No. 17, January 20, 1849).
Quoted below is the address “To the Primary Electors”, published in the Kölnische Zeitung No. 11, January 13, 1849.
<"244">244 Morison pills — pills invented by the English quack James Morison and widely advertised as a cure for all illnesses in the mid-1820s. Their main ingredient was the juice of certain tropical plants.
<"245">245 Citizens’ associations (Bürgervereine), consisting of moderate liberal elements, appeared in Prussia after the March revolution. Their aim was to preserve “law and order” within the framework of a constitutional monarchy, and to combat “anarchy”, i.e. the revolutionary-democratic movement.
The last article of the Constitution imposed on December 5, 1848, and the decree on the convocation of the Chambers provided for a revision of the Constitution by the two Chambers before it was finally accepted and sworn to. The Prussian ruling circles subsequently availed themselves of this provision to revise the Constitution along the lines of extending royal prerogatives and the privileges of the aristocracy and the Junkers.
<"246">246 The reference is to one of the Prussian associations founded by the Right forces after the March 1848 revolution in Germany. These associations functioned as organs of the Junkers’ counter-revolution (see Note 242).
“With God for King and Fatherland” — a phrase from the decree on the organisation of the army reserve promulgated by Frederick William III on March 17, 1813.
<"247">247 An allusion to the suppression of the Silesian weavers’ uprising in June 1844.
<"248">248 An allusion to Wühler (agitators) and Heuler (wailers) (see Note 127).
<"249">249 In their works of the 1840s and 1850s, prior to Marx’s elaboration of his theory of surplus value, Marx and Engels used the terms “value of labour”, “price of labour”, “sale of labour” which, as Engels noted in 1891 in the introduction to Marx’s pamphlet Wage Labour and Capital, “from the point of view of the later works were inadequate and even wrong”. After Marx had shown that the worker sells to the capitalist not his labour but his labour power, Marx and Engels used more precise terms — “value of labour power”, “price of labour power” and “sale of labour power”.
<"250">250 Code civil (Code Napoléon) — French Civil Code published in 1804. It was introduced by Napoleon in the conquered regions of West and South-West Germany and remained in force in the Rhine Province after its incorporation into Prussia in 1815.
<"251">251 In Britain Charles Stuart (King Charles 1) was executed in 1649 and James Stuart (King James 11) fled in 1688.
In France the Bourbons were overthrown twice, in 1792 and in 1830.
In Belgium William of Orange, King of the Netherlands, was overthrown in 1830 and Belgium was proclaimed a kingdom independent of Holland.
<"252">252 An allusion to the words from Frederick William IV’s speech on March 6, 1848, at the last sitting of the United Commission of the Estates formed of representatives of the provincial diets: “Stand like a mighty wall, united by your confidence in your King, Your best friend.”
<"253">253 The trade agreement which Prussia (on behalf of the German Customs Union) concluded with the Netherlands on January 21, 1839, established low import duties on Dutch sugar, thus causing considerable harm to the Prussian sugar industry and the trade of German towns.
<"254">254 The reference is to the joint actions of Austria, Prussia and Russia against the Cracow Republic during the national liberation uprising in the free city of Cracow, and the agreement concluded by these powers on incorporating Cracow into the Austrian Empire (see Note 223).
<"255">255 The Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 203, January 24, 1849, carried an item “'My Army’ in Cologne” dealing with the outrages committed by the Prussian soldiery. At the end of it a question was put to Colonel Engels, the second commandant of Cologne, whether he had really replied to the demands of the owners of houses destroyed by the soldiers that “in one of those houses 11 talers were stolen from a soldier” and that therefore he believed that “not enough by a long chalk has been done to these houses by the soldiers”.
<"256">256 The German Confederation — an association of German states formed by the Vienna Congress on June 8, 1815. It initially included 34 states and 4 free cities with a feudal-absolutist system of government. The Confederation consolidated the political and economic fragmentation of Germany and retarded its development.
<"257">257 The reference is to the refugees who fled to Prussia from the free city of Cracow and from Galicia, which was under Austrian domination, after the suppression of the Cracow uprising and of the Ukrainian peasant movement in Galicia in 1846 (see Notes 223 and 254).
<"258">258 Engels refers to the Polish national liberation insurrection of 1830-31. The majority of its participants were revolutionary nobles and most of its leaders came from the aristocracy. The insurrection was suppressed by Russian troops, with the support of Prussia and Austria. After the troops sent by Nicholas 1 captured Warsaw in September 1831, the remnants of the insurgent army crossed the Prussian and Austrian borders early in October and were interned there.
<"259">259 The Hungarian plains between the Danube and the Theiss.
<"260">260 Schilda — the name of a town whose inhabitants, portrayed in the sixteenth-century popular German satirical book Schildbürger, typified philistine narrow-mindedness and dullness.
<"261">261 The electoral law of April 8, 1848, established a procedure of elections “to the Assembly for an agreement on a Prussian Constitution” on the basis of universal suffrage, which was, however, restricted by the system of indirect (two-stage) elections. The electoral law of December 6, 1848, promulgated immediately after the imposed Constitution, retained the two-stage elections to the Lower Chamber but gave the franchise only to “independent Prussians”, which allowed the Government arbitrarily to limit the electorate.
<"262">262 Nothing learnt and nothing forgotten. This phrase is commonly thought to have been coined by Talleyrand in reference to the Bourbons. Its origin, however, goes back to Admiral de Panat who, in 1796, said about the royalists: “Personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien prendre” (“Nobody has been able to forget anything or learn anything”).
For the wailers mentioned above see Note 127.
<"263">263 On January 26, 1849, Faucher, Minister of the Interior in the Government of the liberal monarchist Odilon Barrot, submitted to the Constituent Assembly a draft Bill on the right of association. Its first clause ran as follows: “Clubs are prohibited.” Faucher demanded that the Constituent Assembly should immediately discuss his Bill, but the deputies refused. On January 27 Ledru-Rollin, supported by 230 deputies, charged the Government with violating the Constitution and demanded its resignation. However, due to the votes of monarchists and moderate republicans, the draft Bill on the right of association (better known as the draft Bill on clubs) was passed by the National Assembly on March 21, 1849. This was a serious blow to freedom of assembly and association and above all to workers’ associations.
<"264">264 The mobile guard was set up by a decree of the Provisional Government on February 25, 1848, to fight against the revolutionary masses. Its units consisted mainly of lumpen-proletarians and were used to crush the June uprising of Paris workers. After Louis Bonaparte was elected President (December 10, 1848), the Government, fearing that the mobile guard might side with the republicans, decided to disband it. They curtailed its numbers and deprived it of many privileges: some of the guards were enrolled as soldiers in army units, And many officers were deprived of their rank. This gave rise to disturbances in the mobile guard, and soon afterwards it was disbanded.
<"265">265 See Note 104.
<"266">266 An allusion to the similarity between the schemes for restoring the monarchy in December 1848, when the Orleanist Changarnier assumed command of the national guard and the Paris garrison, and the part played by General Monk in the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660.
<"267">267 See Note 127.
<"268">268 The reports of January 29, 1849, from Paris printed with an introductory article by Marx, described the general excitement in Paris caused by rumours that the Government was going to forcibly dissolve the National Assembly. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung correspondent wrote that Paris was flooded with soldiers but that the mobile guard had sided with the workers. Louis Napoleon, he reported, had left the palace and joined his troops who received him with a gloomy silence or even exclamations such as “Long live the Red Republic!” Only the bourgeois Ist Legion greeted him with “Long live Bonaparte!”, “Long live the Ministers!” Everybody was waiting for news from the National Assembly which was to determine the subsequent course of events. The day before, the Moniteur had reported that at the session of the Cabinet of Ministers President Louis Bonaparte declared that he fully supported the Government.
<"269">269 In the primary elections to the Second Prussian Chamber on January 22, 1848, the democrats in Cologne won a considerable victory: they made up two-thirds of the electors. They also won in many other towns and rural localities in the Rhine Province. This victory, which proved the correctness of the tactics pursued by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung — that of uniting all democratic forces in the elections — aroused apprehensions not only on the part of the authorities but also of the moderate liberals, whose reaction to the elections was reflected in the Kölnische Zeitung.
<"270">270 The reference is to the article “Elections to the First Chamber” published in the Kölnische Zeitung No. 24, January 28, 1849. The article expressed an opinion that as opposed to “a somewhat revolutionary-democratic Second Chamber”, the First Chamber would be “the pillar of the Crown, law and order and genuine freedom”, and called upon the electors to see to it that the “highest culture” and “statesmanly wisdom” should he represented in it by people of really outstanding talent.
<"271">271 With this article Engels began his series of reports on the Hungarian revolutionary war against the Austrian monarchy. He used army bulletins of the Austrian command published in the official Wiener Zeitung and other Austrian newspapers as his main source. In spite of the tendentious and fragmentary character of the information given in them, which Engels himself later emphasised in his letter to Marx on April 3, 185 1, he managed to give a fairly exact general picture of the military developments. “At the time,” he wrote in this connection to Marx on July 6, 1852, “we presented the course of the Hungarian war in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung with amazing correctness on the basis of Austrian reports and made brilliant, though cautious, forecasts.” Engels also wrote about his reports on the Hungarian war in his letter to H. G. Lincoln, editor of the Daily News on March 30, 1854, offering his services as a war correspondent. In the early 1850s Engels took up a systematic study of military science and the art of war and began to collect additional material on the Hungarian war (Memoirs of Görgey, commander-in-chief of the Hungarian army, biographies of Hungarian generals, the Kossuth Government’s official periodicals etc.) with the intention of writing a special work on the history of the revolutionary wars in Hungary and Italy, but these plans did not materialise.
Engels began his reports on the Hungarian events when the situation in revolutionary Hungary was extremely grave. On December 16 Windischgrätz’s counter-revolutionary army marched to the south, in the direction of Buda and Pest (two neighbouring towns at the time), and captured them early in January 1849. The Hungarian revolutionary Government (National Defence Committee) headed by Kossuth and the parliament (State Assembly) moved to Debreczin. At the same time counter-revolutionary troops advanced from Galicia (General Schlick’s corps), Silesia, the Banat and in other regions. The reactionary German periodicals exaggerated the successes of the Austrian army and foretold a speedy and final defeat of Hungary. Engels, on the other hand, pointed out that Hungary had defence reserves and the possibility to bring about a radical turn in the fortunes of war, which indeed happened soon afterwards.
<"272">272 The reference is to the Slovak corps formed in 1848 by L. Stur and J. Hurbann under the control of Austrian officers. The corps consisted of Slovak and to some extent Czech students. In 1848-49 it took part in the war against revolutionary Hungary. The corps did not enjoy the sympathy of the people of Slovakia.
<"273">273 The reference is to the civil war in Spain in 1833-40 which was unleashed by the clerical and feudal circles headed by Don Carlos, the pretender to the throne. The Carlist forces commanded by Zumalacarregni and Cabrera-y-Griño operated in Catalonia and the Basque provinces using guerilla methods of warfare. After the 14-thousand-strong army of the Carlists failed to take Madrid in 1837, the Carlist movement declined and was defeated by 1840. In 1848 Cabrera tried to revive it by organising a revolt of the Carlists in Catalonia but was seriously wounded and fled to France.
<"274">274 The United Diet — see Notes 89 and 157.
<"275">275 See Note 261.
<"276">276 See Note 150.
<"277">277 The reference is to the suppression of the Polish national liberation uprising in Posen in April-May 1848 (see Note 151).
<"278">278 See Note 75.
<"279">279 The Government of Action — see Note 153.
Constables — see Note 45.
<"280">280 Johan Tilly, the army commander of the Catholic League during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), stormed Magdeburg on May 20, 1631, and allowed his soldiers to plunder it. The town was almost completely burnt down and ruined and about 30 thousand people were killed.
<"281">281 The Prussian Government’s Circular Note of January 23, 1849, addressed to all Prussian diplomats in the German states, formulated a plan for restoring the Federal Diet (see Note 63) — the central body of the German Confederation established by decision of the Vienna Congress in 1815.
<"282">282 On September 22, 1848, after the Croatian Ban Jellachich started intervention against revolutionary Hungary, the Hungarian Sejm formed the National Defence Committee headed by Kossuth to exercise control over Count Batthyány’s liberal Government. After Jellachich had been defeated and Batthyány’s Government had resigned the National Defence Committee took over the Government’s functions on October 8 and Kossuth was vested with extensive powers corresponding to a wartime situation.
<"283">283 See Note 223.
<"284">284 The trial of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was begun on February 7, 1849. Karl Marx, editor-in-chief, Frederick Engels, co-editor, and Hermann Korff, responsible publisher, were tried by the Cologne jury court. They were accused of insulting Chief Public Prosecutor Zweiffel and calumniating the police officers who arrested Gottschalk and Anneke, in the article “Arrests” published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 35, July 5, 1848 (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 177-79).
Though the legal proceedings were instituted on July 6, the trial was only fixed for December 20 and then postponed. Marx’s and Engels’ defence counsel was Karl Schneider If and Korff’s was Hagen. The jury acquitted the defendants.
Marx’s and Engels’ speeches were published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as part of a detailed account of the whole trial, which also included the speeches of the Public Prosecutor (not word-for-word but abridged, with references to the publications in the Kölnische Zeitung), of all the accused and defence counsels. The account was apparently edited by Marx and Engels, and the texts of their speeches can be considered as their own, as emerges in particular from a comparison of Marx’s speech with the preparatory material for it (see this volume, pp. 485-92). The emphasis in the quotations from the articles of the Code pénal is the author’s. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung accounts of this trial and of another, that of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats, which was held the next day, were published as a separate pamphlet in the spring of 1849.
Marx’s and Engels’ speeches were not reprinted in Marx’s lifetime. They were published in an abridged form shortly before Engels’ death in the German Social-Democratic Party papers — the Berlin Socialdemokrat No. 37, September 12, 1895, and the Sächsische Volksblatt No. 111, September 19, 1895 — under the title “Zwei verschollene Vertheidigungsreden von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels”.
<"285">285 See Note 88.
<"286">286 The reference is to the Prussian law on punishment for written insults which was promulgated on July 5, 1819, for the Rhine and other provinces where the Code pénal remained in force after 1815 (“Verordnung wegen Bestrafung schriftlicher Beleidigungen in den Provinzen, wo das französische Strafgesetzbuch vorläufig noch gesetzliche Kraft hat”).
<"287">287 See Note 158.
<"288">288 See Note 245.
<"289">289 The reference is to three articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung denouncing the actions of the prosecuting magistrates against the Cologne democrats, written in connection with the arrest of Julius Wulff (No. 40, July 10, 1848), Falkenheim (No. 43, July 13, 1848) and Joseph Wolff (No. 62, August 1, 1848). In response to the last article Public Prosecutor Hecker came out with a refutation (Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 64, August 3, 1848), in reply to which the newspaper published the article “Herr Hecker and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung” (No. 65, August 4,1848).
<"290">290 An allusion to the reactionary entourage of Frederick William IV (the Gerlach brothers, Radowitz and others). This Court camarina was frenziedly counter-revolutionary and played an active part in preparing and staging the coup d'état in Prussia in November-December 1848.
<"291">291 On November 9, 1848, after Prime Minister Brandenburg declared that the Prussian National Assembly had to move to Brandenburg, the Ministers and some of the Right deputies left the sitting. The remaining majority, on the insistence of the Left deputies, decided that the King had no right to adjourn or transfer the Assembly without the consent of the people’s representatives. However, despite the National Assembly’s decision to continue its session in Berlin, the Government, supported by General Wrangel’s troops, who arrived in Berlin the next day, carried out the coup d'état (see also Notes 53 and 135).
<"292">292 The trial of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats took place on February 8, 1849. Karl Marx, Karl Schapper and the lawyer Schneider II were summoned to the Cologne jury court, accused of incitement to revolt in connection with the Committee’s appeal of November 18, 1848, on the refusal to pay taxes (see this volume, p. 41). They were acquitted.
One of the responses to the trial in the revolutionary press was Marx’s article published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on February 10 (see this volume, pp. 340-41).
Marx’s speech was included in the general account of the trial published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Nos. 226 and 231-33 at the end of February 1848; the account also contained the incriminated appeal of November 18, the report of the speech of Public Prosecutor Bölling, and speeches of the other defendants.
In the spring of 1849 this account was published as a separate pamphlet, which also included the account of the trial of February 7 against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (see Note 284). It was not reprinted in Marx’s lifetime. In 1885 it was published as a pamphlet, Karl Marx von den Kölner Geschwornen Prozess gegen den Ausschuss der Rheinischen Demokraten wegen Aufrufs zum bewaffneten Widerstand, Hottingen, Zürich. with a preface by Engels, in the “Social-Democratic Library” series, and reprinted with the other pamphlets of the series in 1887. It was also put out in 1895 in Berlin.
Marx’s speech in abridged form or extracts from it were published in Social-Democratic periodicals of the time (Der Socialdemokrat Nos. 24 and 26, June 1 1 and 23, 1885; the Polish journal Walka klas No. 517, I-III, 1886) and as a supplement to the Russian edition of The Poverty of Philosophy issued in Geneva.
An English translation of Marx’s speech was first published in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
<"293">293 See Notes 89 and 146.
<"294">294 See Note 167.
<"295">295 See Note 191. ,
<"296">296 For Habeas Corpus see Note 42.
The Civic Militia Law adopted by the National Assembly on October 17, 1848, made the civic militia completely dependent on the Government (see Note 90). Despite this, the counter-revolutionary government circles considered the existence of the civic militia to he dangerous and on November 12, 1848, after Wrangel’s troops arrived in Berlin, it was disarmed.
<"297">297 See Note 166.
<"298">298 Marx refers to the reform movement in England. As a result of this movement the British Parliament passed the Reform Act of 1832, which extended the franchise and put an end to the old and corrupt constituencies (“rotten boroughs”). In protest against the opposition to the Reform Bill on the part of the Tories and the House of Lords, the participants in the movement organised mass meetings and advanced the slogan “No Bill, no taxes!” Political unions of the bourgeoisie also called for refusal to pay taxes and withdrawal of deposits from the banks. After the House of Lords rejected the Bill for the third time in March 1832, and Grey’s Whig Government, which had proposed the Bill, resigned, the Tories headed by Wellington (Prime Minister in 1828-30) failed to form a government. The King was compelled to turn to the Whigs, who by threatening to pack the House of Lords with new peers succeeded in carrying through the Bill.
<"299">299 Lassalle was arrested in Düsseldorf on November 22, 1848, on the charge of incitement to arming against the Government during the campaign for refusal to pay taxes. The judiciary of the Rhine Province used all means to drag out his case. On Lassalle’s request, expressed in his letters to Marx and Engels, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung came out in his defence and that of other persecuted Düsseldorf democrats. It carried a number of articles exposing the abuses and illegal actions of the judiciary and the prison authorities against Lassalle (see this volume, pp. 344-46, 474-76). An article on Lassalle, written later on, is published in Vol. 9 of the present edition. Marx and Engels also participated in the steps taken by the Cologne democratic organisations to induce the judiciary to speed up the investigation of the case. In particular they were among the deputation who visited Prosecutor-General of the Rhine Province Nicolovius on March 3, 1849, and protested against the protraction of, Lassalle’s case (see this volume, p. 344). The trial was held on May 3 and 4; Lassalle was acquitted.
<"300">300 Pennsylvanian prisons — solitary confinement prisons. The first such prison was built in Philadelphia (State of Pennsylvania) in 1791. In the nineteenth century this system of confinement was widely used in Europe; in Germany it was applied in 1844 in the Moabit Prison in Berlin and in several others.
<"301">301 The reference is apparently to the law of March 29, 1844, on judicial and administrative and criminal court procedure in bringing an action against officials.
<"302">302 The reference is to the Government of the Austrian Empire. During the popular uprising in Vienna in October 1848 the Emperor and his court left the capital on October 7 and moved to the provincial town of Olmijtz (Olomouc) in Moravia. Olmiltz became the centre of the counter-revolutionary forces. Soon after the fall of Vienna in November 1848 a new government was formed of representatives of the landowning aristocracy and the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie headed by Prince Schwarzenherg. Ferdinand 11 abdicated and his nephew Franz Joseph acceded to the throne on December 2, 1848.
<"303">303 Tchaikists (or tchaikashi) — Austro-Hungarian infantry who served on small sailing vessels and rowing boats (tchaikas) in the Military Border Area making pontoon bridges and transporting troops along the Danube, Theiss and Sava. They were recruited mainly from the Serbs inhabiting the Tchaikash Area in Slavonia.
From 1764 they formed a special battalion.
<"304">304 The war between the Serbs and the Magyars began in May 1848 over the conflict between the Hungarian Government and the Serbian national movement which demanded autonomy for the Voivodina. The movement was not homogeneous in its social composition and political tendencies. Liberal bourgeois (Stratimirovich and others) and more reactionary landowners prevailed in it, which made it possible for the Austrian ruling circles to use it against the Hungarian revolution.
On the other hand, the Hungarian revolutionaries, by refusing to meet the national demands of the Serbs an d other Slav nationalities incorporated in the Hungarian state, contributed to making them side with the Habsburgs. It was only on July 28, 1849, i.e. on the eve of its fall, that the Hungarian Republic officially proclaimed the equality of all nationalities inhabiting Hungary.
Having consolidated their domination to a considerable degree with the help of the Croats, Serbs of the Voivodina etc., the ruling classes of the Austrian Empire, far from fulfilling their promises and granting autonomy to the Slav and other peoples of the multinational state, pursued a still more rigid policy of centralisation, abolishing all remnants of self-government in the national regions.
<"305">305 The reference is apparently to the Limes Romanus, a system of fortifications built along the frontiers of the Roman Empire, mainly during the rule of Emperor Hadrian (117-138). Remnants of the Limes Romanus still survive. Part of it ran through Western Hungary and. the South-Slav border regions of the Austrian Empire.
<"306">306 In the battle at Grokhov (Grokhuv) on February 25, 1831, the Polish insurgent troops halted the offensive of the Tsarist army commanded by Diebitsch which had been sent to suppress the Polish insurrection of 1830-31 (see Note 258).
<"307">307 Szeklers — an ethnic group of Hungarians, mostly free peasants. In the thirteenth century their forefathers were settled by Hungarian kings in the mountain regions of Transylvania to protect the frontiers. The region inhabited by them was usually called Szekler land.
The majority of Szeklers sided with the Hungarian revolution.
<"308">308 The reference is probably to the appeals of Jozef Madarasz, a Left-winger in the State Assembly of the Hungarian Republic in Debreczin, published in the newspaper Debreczenski Lapok. He called on the people to struggle not only against the Austrians but also against the agreers in the Assembly, demanded that the Assembly should be dissolved and new elections declared, and pointed to the need to organise an insurrectionary movement and render all possible assistance to the Hungarian revolutionary army.
<"309">309 Komorn (Komárom), a fortified camp and fortress in North-Western Hungary, remained in the hands of the Hungarians in the rear of the Austrian army during its offensive in late 1848 and early 1849. Subsequently the fortress held out against several sieges by the Austrian forces and played an important part in the operations of the Hungarian revolutionary army.
<"310">310 See Note 282.
<"311">311 An allusion to the trials of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats which took place on February 7 and 8, 1849 (see this volume, pp. 304-39).
<"312">312 The reference is to the series “Politische Gespräche” by Levin Schücking published in the Kölnische Zeitung Nos. 29, 30, 34 and 35 on February 3, 4, 9 and 10, 1849. Wagner, a character in these “Conversations”, says to Professor Urian: “You have always played the part of Mephistopheles a bit.”
<"313">313 See Note 242.
<"314">314 An English translation of this article was first published in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, London, 1953.
<"315">315 See Note 228.
<"316">316 The reference is to the war of 1846-48 between the United States of America and Mexico, as a result of which the USA seized almost half of Mexico’s territory, including the whole of Texas, Upper California, New Mexico and other regions. In assessing these events in the article Engels proceeded from the general conception that it was progressive for patriarchal and feudal countries to be drawn into the orbit of bourgeois relations because, he thought, this accelerated the creation of preconditions for a proletarian revolution. In subsequent years, however, he and Marx fully understood the deplorable consequences of colonial conquests and the subjugation of backward countries by large states. In particular, having made a thorough study of the history of US aggression in Mexico and other countries of the American continent, Marx in his article “The Civil War in North America” (1861) described it as expansion in the interests of the then dominant slave-owning oligarchy in the Southern States and of the bourgeois elements in the North which supported it, as a policy aimed at seizing new territories to spread slavery.
<"317">317 The reference is to Marx’s and Engels’ criticism of bourgeois cosmopolitanism and their substantiation of the internationalist position of the working class in the national question set forth in the proletarian and democratic newspapers (the Chartist newspaper Northern Star, the Brüsseler-Deutsche-Zeitung, the French La Réforme), in particular their speeches “On Poland” (November 29, 1847) and “On the Polish Question” (February 22, 1848), Marx’s “Speech on the Question of Free Trade”, and Engels’ articles “The Anniversary of the Polish Revolution of 1830”, “Reform Movement in France. — Banquet of Dijon” and “Louis Blanc’s Speech at the Dijon Banquet” (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 388-90, 545-52, 450-65, 391-92, 397-401, 409-11).
<"318">318 See Note 206.
<"319">319 Shokazians — the name of Catholic Serbs.
<"320">320 Morlaks — one of the nationalities inhabiting Dalmatia, descendants of the Romanised Illyrian tribes which lived in Northern Dalmatia (Split and Zadar regions) and Southern Istria and subsequently merged with the neighbouring Serbs; they were mostly Catholics.
<"321">321 See Note 354.
<"322">322 These are the languages of the West-Slav tribes which in the Middle Ages lived between the Elbe, Saale and Oder.
Wends — originally a general name given in Germany to different Laba (Elbe) Slavs, one branch of which was the Sorbs or Luzice Serbs.
Obodrites (Bodryci) — the largest tribe of Laba Slavs living in the region of the Lower Elbe and Mecklenburg Bay. They made up the core of the Wendish Power, an early feudal national Slav grouping formed in the 1040s. In the middle of the twelfth century, as a result of the German feudalists’ expansion to the east accompanied by the extermination or enslavement of the local population, the Wendish Power broke up and the Laba Slavs were subjugated and Germanised. Only the Luzice Serbs have preserved their language and national features.
<"323">323 Avars — a union of tribes in which nomadic Turkic tribes dominated. Coming from Asia, the Avars established themselves in the sixth century in the eastern regions of Central Europe and in the Balkans and formed their state, the Avar Khaganate, constantly waging wars with the Slavs, Germanic tribes and Byzantines. However, as a result of the risings of the subjugated Slay tribes and the blows struck by the Byzantines and Franks, the Avarian state was weakened. In the 790s the Avars were utterly defeated by Charlemagne’s Frankish army and later on fully assimilated by the peoples of the Western Black-Sea regions and the Danube area.
<"324">324 Ogulians — reservists from the inhabitants of Ogulin (Western Croatia) registered with the Karlstadt (Karlovac) infantry regiment formed by the Austrian authorities in the mid-eighteenth century to guard the frontiers; the headquarters of the regiment was in Ogulin.
Serezhans — see Note 112.
<"325">325 See Engels’ articles “The State of Germany”, “German Socialism in Verse and Prose”, his speech “On Poland”, “Three New Constitutions” and “A Word to the Riforma” (present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 15-33, 235-73, 389-90, 540-44 and 553-55).
<"326">326 An allusion to the changed nature of the Czech national movement after the suppression of the popular uprising in Prague on June 12-17, 1848. In its first stage — from the beginning of the March events to the Prague uprising — the Czech revolutionary democrats played a prominent part in the movement, and the Czech peasants and the urban lower strata, including the working class, actively participated in the struggle against feudalism and absolutism. This struggle was fully in the interests of the European revolutionary movement and was vigorously supported by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung directed by Marx and Engels (see the articles “The Prague Uprising” and “The Democratic Character of the Uprising”, present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 91-93, 119-20). In the summer of 1848 the Czech liberals, representing the bourgeoisie and the landowners, took the lead of the national movement which they turned into an instrument against the revolutionary-democratic forces of Germany and Hungary, and a prop for the Habsburg monarchy and, indirectly, for Russian Tsarism. The orientation of the new leaders of other Slav peoples in Austria towards supporting the Habsburgs and the Tsar so as to secure the satisfaction of their national demands also ran counter to the interests of the revolution. For this reason the Neue Rheinische Zeitung denounced the Austrian Slavs’ movement in its new stage.
<"327">327 The Slovanská Lípa — a Czech national society founded at the end of April 1848. The leadership of the society in Prague was in the hands of moderate liberals (Safarik, Gauc), who joined the counter-revolutionary camp after the suppression of the Prague uprising in June 1848, whereas the provincial branches were mostly led by representatives of the radical Czech bourgeoisie.
<"328">328 Svornost — the Czech national militia formed after the revolutionary events of March 1848 in the Austrian Empire. It was recruited mainly from among students. Its main detachment guarded the Czech Museum in Prague, where the Slav Congress was in session in June 1848. During the popular uprising in Prague, this detachment was disarmed. The Austrian troops disarmed the national militia despite the fact that it was commanded by moderate representatives of the Czech movement who disapproved of the insurgents.
Burschenschaften — German students’ associations which sprang up under the influence of the liberation war against Napoleon. They advocated German unification. However, alongside progressive ideas extremely nationalistic ideas were widespread in the Burschenschaften.
The Wartburg Festival was organised by German students’ associations on October 8, 1817, to mark the 300th anniversary of the Reformation and developed into a demonstration for the unification of Germany and of protest against the reactionary policy of Metternich and the ruling circles of other states of the German Confederation. At the same time the festival revealed strong nationalistic and pan-German sentiments.
<"329">329 The commission of the estates of the provincial diets, whose competence was limited to local economic and administrative problems, were instituted in Prussia in 1842. They were elected from among the members of the provincial diets on the estate principle and formed a single advisory body known as the “united commissions”. With the help of this institution, which was but a make-believe representative body, Frederick William IV hoped to introduce new taxes and obtain a loan.
<"330">330 The minutes of the First United Diet (see Note 89) cite the “Uebersicht von den Resultaten der Finanzverwaltung in den Jahren 1840 bis einschliesslich 1846” presented by the Prussian Government (see Der Erste Vereinigte Landtag in Berlin 1847, 1. Teil, Berlin, 1847). Marx probably bases his calculations on data from this survey. Some inaccuracies in the tables cited in this article are corrected on the basis of the book Preussens Erster Reichstag, 7. Th,, Berlin, 1847.
<"331">331 In 1841 Frederick William IV donated 430,000 marks to establish an English-German Protestant Bishopric in Jerusalem.
Papers of Frederick II were published in Prussia from 1846.
<"332">332 See Note 245.
<"333">333 See Note 206.
<"334">334 On February 16 and 17, 1849, the Cologne court tried Gottfried Kinkel, the editor of the democratic Neue Bonner Zeitung. The indictment against him was that in describing in 1848 the outrages of the Prussian soldiery in Mainz in his newspaper (then called Bonner Zeitung), he had insulted the Prussian garrison of the town.
The court sentenced Kinkel to a month’s imprisonment.
<"335">335 See Note 258.
<"336">336 The reference is to the Hungarian State Assembly evacuated from Pest to Debreczin during the advance of the Austrian army in December 1848. Some Right-wing deputies went over to Windischgrätz.
<"337">337 The reference is to Austrian Prime Minister Prince Schwarzenberg’s Note of February 4, 1849, addressed to the Frankfurt National Assembly, in which, in the name of his Government, he opposed the formation of a united German state. The Note was published in the Wiener Zeitung No. 39, February 15, 1849.
<"338">338 Magyarisers — a group of influential aristocratic landowners in Croatia, Slavonia, the Serbian Voivodina and other ethnic regions who advocated Magyarisation of the population in these areas. The narrow selfish interests of this group had nothing in common with the Hungarian revolution. They proved to he a cause of the Hungarian Government’s nationalist mistakes.
<"339">339 The reference is to the chief committee governing the Serbian Voivodeship or Chief Obdor — an executive body formed by the Assembly (Skupstina) of representatives of the Serbian communities in the South-Slav border regions of the Austrian Empire in May 1848. The Assembly proclaimed the Voivodina an autonomous region within the Empire.
The chief committee was the scene of struggle between the liberal group headed by Stratimirovich, who was elected President, and the clerical-feudal group who professed loyalty to the Habsburgs and opposed liberal reforms. Early in 1849 the second group, headed by Patriarch Rajachich, prevailed. It directed the national movement of the Voivodina Serbs towards still closer collaboration with the Austrian counter-revolutionary Government. The latter, however, after using the Serbs to fight revolutionary Hungary, broke its promises and refused, in March 1849, to grant them autonomy..
<"340">340 The reference is to the decree sent to Croatia by Count Moritz Almásy, head of the Hungarian Provisional Finance Chamber formed under the auspices of Windischgrätz in Pest after the Hungarian revolutionary army left the town. The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung No. 45 of February 14, 1849, reprinted the following note to the text of this decree from the Agram newspaper Slavenski jug: “We publish this new act of Austrian politics without comment. The Croatians who have learned that loyalty to our Emperor and King and our Habsburg-Lotharingian Royal House is paid for with blood and money, must now also learn to understand such decrees in Magyar.”
<"341">341 The reference is to the cruel suppression by the Austrian reactionaries headed by Windischgrätz of the popular uprising in Prague in June 1848 (see Note 218).
<"342">342 As a result of the popular uprising Pins IX was compelled to give his consent to the establishment of a temporal Ministry and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal suffrage on November 16, 1848. The subsequent development of the bourgeois-democratic revolution led to the election of the Constituent Assembly on January 21, 1849, which on February 9 deprived Pins IX of his temporal power and proclaimed a republic. The Roman Republic existed until July 3, 1849, when it was crushed by foreign intervention. In English this article was first published in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
<"343">343 According to the convention in 1753 the 20-gulden or conventional system of money circulation was introduced in Austria and Bavaria: 20 guldens were to be coined out of one Cologne mark of pure silver (approximately 234 grams). Since then silver and gold money was called conventional money (C.M.). By the beginning of the nineteenth century metal money was practically replaced by paper money, called “Vienna currency”, and the coining of metal money almost ceased. But the conventional system was still preserved. As the amount of paper money in circulation increased, especially during the 1848-49 revolution, the rate of the conventional money constantly rose, which prompted the population to hoard gold and silver coins.
<"344">344 Urbar duties (Urbariallasten) — duties of the feudal-bound peasants registered in the Urbars, inventories of feudal land possessions. Beginning with the thirteenth century they also included taxes and other incomes as provided by law.
<"345">345 In June 1848, at the time of the conflict between the Croatian nationalists and the Austrian Government which refused to meet their demands, the Sabor (Diet) meeting in Agram (Zagreb) (see Note 228) vested the Croatian Ban Jellachich at first with dictatorial powers. However, Jellachich, who represented the Croatian nobility, quickly came to terms with the Austrian Court and used his dictatorship to suppress the peasant movement in Croatia. The Austrian Government, which had dismissed Jellachich from the post of Ban during the conflict, reinstated him at the beginning of September 1848 and appointed him commander of the imperial troops in Hungary. Placing Croatian formations at the service of the Austrian reaction, Jellachich took part in the counter-revolutionary campaign against Hungary and in suppressing the popular uprising in Vienna.
<"346">346 As to the source of the data on the finances of the Prussian monarchy between 1840 and 1846 and in 1847 used in this article, see Note 330.
<"347">347 As Issue No. 3 of the Revue rétrospective ou Archives secrètes du dernier Gouvernement, published by Jules Taschereau, carried a list of the secret funds of the July monarchy’s Foreign Ministry for 1840, 1842, 1844-47 in which the annual pension of the editor of the Frankfurter Oberpostamts-Zeitung Karl Berly, a secret agent of the Guizot’s Government, was mentioned.
<"348">348 Peterwardein border guards, like Serezhans, Ottochans and other South-Slav army formations, guarded the Austro-Turkish border (the so-called Military Border Area). They were named after their respective regimental or company districts and communities (see also Notes 81, 112 and 218).
<"349">349 See Note 307.
<"350">350 Cavalry units in the Austrian army included not only squadrons but larger tactical formations — divisions which usually consisted of two squadrons.
<"351">351 Cumans — descendants of Polovtsi (Kumans), a Turkic nationality. They appeared on the territory of Hungary in the ninth century together with the Magyars, but the bulk settled there in the thirteenth century, fleeing from the Mongolian yoke after the battle on the Kalka River.
Jazyges (Iazyges, Jaszok) — descendants of the Sarmatian tribes. They first appeared on the territory of Hungary about the eleventh century.
Cumans and Jazyges, who had been granted land by the Hungarian kings, formed two independent districts between the Theiss, Danube and Gran. For their special services to the Hungarian Crown a large part of the population were granted nobility. Palatin, the imperial governor in Hungary, was their supreme judge and ruler.
<"352">352 The Treaty of Pressburg (Bratislava) signed on December 26, 1805, between Austria and Napoleonic France put an end to the war of the Austrian monarchy against Napoleon within the third anti-French coalition (Britain, Austria, Russia and Sweden). The signing of the treaty was preceded by the capitulation of the Austrian army at Ulm (October 17-20) and the defeat of the Austrian and Russian forces at Austerlitz (December 2).
<"353">353 In this article Engels pays special attention to the condition in Transylvania at the turning-point of the revolutionary war in Hungary. In January and February 1849 the Hungarian revolutionary troops checked the Austrian offensive on almost all the fronts and, harassing the Austrians by repeated attacks and continuous fighting, prepared for the decisive battle in April 1849.
In Transylvania as in other national regions which were part of Hungary at the time, the struggle was waged in the conditions of sharp national contradictions. The majority of its motley population — Rumanians, Hungarians including Szeklers, and Germans, mostly from Saxony — were Rumanian peasants exploited by the Hungarian landowners and Austrian officials Though the advanced part of the Rumanian bourgeoisie and intelligentsia welcomed the Hungarian revolution of 1848, the Austrian agents using social and national antagonisms organised an uprising of the Rumanians against revolutionary Hungary in September 1848. The Rumanian legions under Colonel Urban fought against the Hungarians together with the Austrian troops of Baron Puchner. However, the Polish refugee Bem, appointed commander of the Hungarian army in Transylvania in December 1848, prevented Puchner from entering Hungary via Transylvania and during January-March 1849 managed to inflict several serious blows upon the counter-revolutionary forces in Transylvania proper.
A small contingent of Russian troops sent to Puchner’s aid by Lüders, the commander of the Tsarist expeditionary corps in Wallachia, failed to stop Bem’s advance and by the end of March the latter had practically driven the enemy out of Transylvania. Bem’s success was furthered by his desire to reconcile the national contradictions between Hungarians and Rumanians notwithstanding the resistance of the representatives of the Hungarian Government, who expressed the interests of the Hungarian nobility. (Later Engels specially emphasised this in his article “Bem” written for the New American Encyclopedia.) The Rumanian democrat Balcescu also called for joint action by the Rumanians and Hungarians against the Habsburgs. Janku, the leader of the insurrectionary movement of the Rumanian poor peasants, held similar views.
However, the Hungarian revolutionaries among the bourgeoisie and the nobility realised too late that co-operation with the downtrodden nationalities was necessary. This made it possible for the Austrian ruling circles to use the Rumanian national movement in Transylvania, headed by the clerical-aristocratic clique, as a weapon against revolutionary Hungary. After the suppression of the Hungarian revolution in Transylvania, the Austrians established a regime of ruthless national oppression there despite all their demagogic promises.
<"354">354 After agreeing on the possibility of joint action against republican France in July 1791, Austria and Prussia signed a treaty in February 1792. The Austro-Prussian alliance encouraged by Tsarist Russia became the core of the first anti-French coalition, which by March 1793 was joined by Britain, Russia, Sardinia, Naples, Spain, Holland and some of the German principalities. In 1795 the coalition broke up.
The suppression by the Tsarist army of the 1794 Polish uprising led by Kosciuszko is connected with the first anti-French coalition. The insurgents demanded that the Constitution which had been proclaimed by the Four Years’ Sejm (1788-92) should again come into force. The adoption of the Constitution had been used as a pretext for the occupation of Poland by Prussia and Russia in 1793 and led to the second partition of Poland (the first was carried out by Prussia, Russia and Austria in 1772). After the suppression of the Kosciuszko uprising a third partition of Poland between Austria, Prussia and Tsarist Russia took place in 1795 and the Polish state ceased to exist.
<"355">355 See Note 170.
<"356">356 See Note 303.
<"357">357 Arians — a trend in Christian religion which was widely spread among several German tribes in the fourth and fifth centuries. Arian heresy was condemned by the official church in 381.
<"358">358 See Note 319.
<"359">359 Honvéd — literally: defender of the homeland; the name given to the Hungarian revolutionary army of 1848-49, which was set up by decision of the Hungarian revolutionary Government on May 7, 1848, on the formation of ten battalions of the Honvéd.
<"360">360 The original text of the speech from the throne made by Frederick William IV at the inaugural sitting of the Prussian Diet was published in a special supplement to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 233. February 28, 1849, In the text of the speech published after this article in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 234, March 1, 1849, this passage was changed as follows: “To my greatest regret a state of siege had to be proclaimed in the capital and its immediate environs to restore the rule of law and public safety. Corresponding proposals will he presented to you, gentlemen, without delay.” Below in the article the speech from the throne is cited from the latter publication.
<"361">361 The reference is to the draft laws on clubs and meetings, posters and the press which were being prepared by the Government (on this see Marx’s article “Three New Draft Laws” published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on March 13, 1849, present edition, Vol. 9). These drafts are compared with the reactionary press laws passed in France in September 1835 (see Note 181).
<"362">362 The reference is to the speech from the throne by Frederick William IV at the inaugural sitting of the Second United Diet (see Note 89) on April 2, 1848; the text of the speech was prepared by the Camphausen Ministry.
<"363">363 The White Hall — a hall in the royal palace in Berlin where the first joint sitting of the two Chambers of the newly convened Prussian Diet was held on February 26, 1849.
<"364">364 On March 21, 1848, Frederick William IV, frightened by the barricade fighting in Berlin, issued an appeal “To my people and the German nation” (see Note 210) in which he promised to set up a representative institution based on the estates, grant a Constitution, make Ministers responsible, introduce jury courts etc.
<"365">365 The reference is to the two decrees on amending the old trade statute introducing chambers of commerce (Gewerberäte) and trade courts (Gewerbegerichte) — which were issued by the Prussian Government on February 9, 1849.
<"366">366 Gagging laws — the name given to the six exceptional laws passed in England in 1819 after the cutting down by hussars and yeomanry of participants in a mass meeting for electoral reform at St. Peter’s Field, Manchester (the so-called battle of Peterloo); the laws restricted freedom of assembly and the press.
<"367">367 See Note 348.
<"368">368 Taking advantage of the forthcoming expiration of the seven months’ armistice signed by Denmark and Prussia at Malmö (see Note 75) the Prussian ruling circles refused to prolong it with a view to raising the prestige of the Prussian monarchy by waging the war, which was very popular in Germany, and realising their aggressive plans. Military operations were resumed in March 1849 and proceeded with varying success. Eventually, under pressure from the Great Powers, Prussia signed a peace treaty with Denmark in Berlin on July 2, 1850, temporarily renouncing its claims to Schleswig and Holstein and treacherously leaving the population of these duchies to continue the war alone. The Schleswig-Holstein troops were defeated and compelled to cease resistance. As a result both duchies remained within the Kingdom of Denmark.
<"369">369 The moderate liberal Gioberti who headed the Piedmont Government strove to use the movement which had spread in Italian states for an all-Italy Constituent Assembly and unification of the country in a democratic way in order to carry out the plan of establishing a federation of Italian states which was in the interests of the Savoy dynasty. After the proclamation of a republic in Rome on February 9, 1849, and the beginning of a campaign for a republic in Tuscany, Gioberti made efforts to restore the power of Pius IX and Grand Duke Leopold 11 with military aid from Piedmont. Such a policy and his refusal to carry out progressive reforms in Piedmont made Gioberti extremely unpopular and led to his resignation on February 21, 1849. Under mass pressure and apprehensive over the future of the Savoy dynasty in the impending crisis in Italy, the Piedmont ruling circles were compelled to declare on March 12, 1849, the resumption of the war against Austria. However, the Piedmont army, which was poorly prepared for the war and led by monarchist generals who were afraid to impart a really popular character to the war, was soon routed by the Austrians. On March 26 the new King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel, was compelled to sign an armistice with Austria on more onerous terms than in August 1848.
<"370">370 The reference is to the failure of the counter-revolutionary General Laugier, supported by the Piedmont ruling circles and the Austrians, to interfere with the development of revolutionary events in Tuscany and prevent the abdication of Grand Duke Leopold If and the proclamation of a Tuscan republic. On January 30, 1849, the Grand Duke fled to Siena, and later to Gaeta, the residence of Pius IX. On February 18, a republic was proclaimed at a popular meeting (official introduction of the republican system was postponed till the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, which never took place due to sabotage by the moderate wing of the movement).
<"371">371 The information reproduced by Engels from a French newspaper was not entirely correct. However, the events which marked the beginning of the culminating stage of the struggle between the revolutionary movement in Sicily and the Government of King Ferdinand of Naples provided a basis for rumours about the proclamation of a Sicilian republic. On February 25, 1849, Ferdinand sent the Sicilians an ultimatum. Though promising to sanction the restoration of the 18 1 2 Constitution he demanded disarmament and consent to occupation of the major parts of the island by Neapolitan troops. The refusal of the Sicilians to accept the ultimatum led to fierce fighting; although the Neapolitan forces were superior in numbers and arms, the Sicilians offered resistance until the beginning of May 1849.
<"372">372 The thoughts expressed here show Engels’ keen insight into future military developments in Hungary. Indeed, the general counter-offensive of the Hungarian revolutionary army was launched in the mentioned region at the beginning of April 1849. On April 2, the revolutionary army won a major victory at Hatvan, followed by a series of strong blows at the enemy. Thus, Engels’ forecast did not come true so far as the time of the offensive was concerned, but was quite correct in respect of the place of concentration of the main Hungarian forces for a decisive blow and its direction.
<"373">373 A major part of the urban population in Transylvania was made up of Germans (Saxons) who constituted about 16 per cent of the region’s total population.
<"374">374 On November 22, 1848, Lassalle delivered a speech at a popular meeting in Neuss (near Düsseldorf) in which he called upon the people to offer if necessary armed support to the Prussian National Assembly. Lassalle was arrested on the same day. On the legal proceedings against Lassalle see Note 299.
<"375">375 Here and elsewhere, the reference is to the articles of the Code pénal (see Note 88).
<"376">376 Code d'instruction criminelle — the French Criminal Code in force in the Rhine Province of Prussia. Further Article 360 of this Code is cited.
<"377">377 The Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 186, January 4, 1849, carried information about the deputation of sixteen Düsseldorf citizens to Prosecutor-General Nicolovius among whom were members of the Cologne Workers’ Association and the Democratic Society. The deputation handed in a petition signed by 2,800 Düsseldorf citizens, the text of which the newspaper appended to the report.
<"378">378 Kameralgüter — landed estates which passed into the ownership of the Crown after the death of the last descendant of a feudal family. confiscated lands etc. The Kameralgüter also gave the owner the right to collect taxes and other privileges, and were managed by a special administration directly subordinated to the Hungarian Royal Chancellory in Ofen.
<"379">379 This note was probably written as a rough draft (many words and sentences are crossed out in the manuscript) of a report for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, but no item on this subject appeared in the newspaper.
The occasion for writing this note was a clash of the Workers’ Association (see Note 179) and the democratic organisations in Cologne with the police and military authorities who wanted to prevent the people’s procession on the occasion of the release from prison on December 23 of Gottschalk, Anneke and others acquitted by the jury after six months of imprisonment. The acquittal was seen by the masses as a victory of the democratic movement, which they wanted to celebrate by procession. The authorities prohibited this procession and it did not take place.
<"380">380 This fragment is apparently part of the draft of the fourth article in the series “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution” which dealt with Hansemann and the Government of Action (see Note 153) he in practice headed. Some of the ideas were reflected in the published version of the article (see this volume, pp. 168-70).
<"381">381 The extant part of the draft of a speech at the trial of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung held on February 7, 1849 (see Note 284), refers to that part of Marx’s speech in which, on the basis of a legal analysis of the relevant articles of the French Code pénal he refutes the accusation levelled :At the newspaper’s editors of insulting Chief Public Prosecutor Zweiffel and calumniating the police officers. To what extent Marx used this draft in the speech itself tan be seen by comparing it with the published text (see this volume, pp. 304-17). The manuscript of the draft has come down to us in an incomplete and rough form, indecipherable in some places.
<"382">382 Marx was summoned before the examining magistrate on November 14, 1848, after the Neue Rheinische Zeitung published the second article in the series “Counter-Revolution in Berlin” containing a call to refuse to pay taxes as a measure against the counter-revolutionary coup d'état in Prussia (see this volume, pp. 16-18). However, fearing the people’s reaction to the persecution of the editors of a popular newspaper, the authorities confined themselves to confirming one of the charges brought against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung earlier, after it had published the appeal “To the German People” by the republican Friedrich Hecker (see Note 93).
<"383">383 Engels wrote this petition when he arrived in Berne about November 9, 1848, as a political refugee. On the reasons for his departure to Berne see Note 3. The warrant for his arrest and trial, mentioned in the petition, was issued by the Cologne judiciary, who, on the demand of the Imperial Minister of Justice, instituted proceedings against him and. a number of other persons for their speeches. at the public meeting in Cologne on September 26, 1848. Later, the judicial authorities found it expedient to annul the case, and this was officially announced at the end of January 1849, when Engels, who had returned to Germany, was summoned before. the examining magistrate (see this volume, p. 516).
<"384">384 The People’s Committee was elected on November 13, 1848, at a public meeting in Cologne held in protest against the transfer of the Prussian National Assembly from Berlin to Brandenburg. It consisted of 25 representatives of Cologne democratic and proletarian circles, among them Marx, Beust, Nothiung, Weyll and Schneider II. The Committee became one of the organising centres of the people’s struggle in the Rhine Province against the coup d'état in Prussia. It sought to rearm the civic militia, which was disarmed in September 1848, when a state of siege was declared in Cologne, and reorganise the army reserve on a democratic basis; it carried out agitation among soldiers and attempted to create a workers’ volunteer detachment. Taking part in the tax-refusal campaign, the People’s Committee tried to draw into it peasants from the neighbouring localities.
<"385">385 Article 209 of the Code pénal (see Note 88) concerns resistance to the representatives of state power, and Article 217, incitement to rebellion.
<"386">386 Marx, Korff and others were accused by the Imperial Ministry of having libelled deputies of the Frankfurt National Assembly in: 1) Georg Weerth’s series of feuilletons Leben und Taten des berühmten Ritters Schnapphahnski directed against Lichnowski, a Right-wing deputy, and published anonymously in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in August, September and December 1848 and January 1849; 2) a report from Breslau in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 95 for September 6, 1848, about Prince Lichnowski’s machinations in the electoral campaign; 3) a report from Frankfurt am Main in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 102 for September 14, 1848, exposing false information in the report by Stedtmann, deputy to the Frankfurt National Assembly, concerning the vote on the armistice with Denmark; 4) a resolution of a public meeting in Cologne published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 1 10 for September 23, 1848, in which the deputies of the Frankfurt ‘ National Assembly who had voted for the armistice with Denmark were accused of having betrayed the nation (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 588-89).
<"387">387 The trial of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung fixed for December 20, 1848, was postponed and was heard on February 7, 1849 (see this volume, pp. 304-22 and Note 284).
<"388">388 The First Congress of German Workers’ Associations and Democratic Organisations of Switzerland was held in Berne on December 9-11, 1848. On the work of the Congress and Engels’ participation in it see Note 175.
<"389">389 The reference is to the Central Committee of German Workers in Leipzig (see Note 199).
<"390">390 Marx’s and Engels’ defence counsel, lawyer Schneider If, demanded that the proceedings be adjourned in view of the fact that the accused had not been informed of the trial in due time (ten days prior). The trial took place on February 7, 1849.
<"391">391 When the Zeitung des Arbeiter-Vereines zu Köln (see Note 180) ceased to appear, the newspaper Freiheit, Brüderlichkeit, Arbeit which began publication on October 26, 1848, became the organ of the Cologne Workers’ Association (see Note 179). The publisher was Röser, Vice-President of the Cologne Workers’ Association, and the responsible editor was W. Pünz. At the end of December 1848, as a result of Gottschalk’s interference in the paper’s affairs, its publication was interrupted. From January 14, 1849, the newspaper Freiheit, Arbeit began to appear, its publisher being the printer Brocker-Evererts. Prinz, its responsible editor and a supporter of Gottschalk, pursued the policy of splitting the Cologne Workers’ Association. He refused to submit to the editorial commission which had been appointed at the committee meeting of the Cologne Workers’ Association on January 15 and consisted of Schapper, Röser and Reiff; therefore the committee meeting of January 29 resolved that the Freiheit, Arbeit could not be regarded as the Association’s newspaper and that the Freiheit Brüderlichkeit, Arbeit should resume publication; Christian Joseph Esser was appointed its editor. The Freiheit Brüderlichkeit, Arbeit reappeared on February 8 and continued publication up to the middle of 1849. The Freiheit, Arbeit continued to appear until June 17, 1849. It sharply attacked Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung’s editorial board and published various malicious insinuations against them.
<"392">392 After December 23, when the members of the Cologne Workers’ Association, Anneke, Esser and Gottschalk, were acquitted, the last-named tried to keep aloof from the Association (at first he went to Bonn, and later to Paris and Brussels); at the same time, he endeavoured, through his associates, to cause a split in the ranks of the organisation and again impose a sectarian policy on it. in a statement written in Brussels on January 9, 1849, and published in the Freiheit, Arbeit on January 18, Gottschalk explained his “voluntary exile” by the fact that, despite the acquittal, many of his fellow citizens remained convinced of his guilt. He declared that he would come back only “at the call of the hitherto supreme arbiter in the country” (an allusion to Frederick William IV) or “at the call of his fellow citizens”. For an appraisal of this ambiguous statement see the decision of Branch No. 1 of the Cologne Workers’ Association (present edition, Vol. 9).
<"393">393 According to the decree of December 5, 1848, the elections of electors were fixed for January 22, and the election of deputies to the Second Chamber of the Prussian Diet for February 5, 1849.
<"394">394 The Democratic Society in Cologne was set up in April 1848; it included workers and artisans as well as small businessmen. Marx, Engels and other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung who directed the Society’s activity wanted to orientate it towards a resolute struggle against the counter-revolutionary policy of the Prussian ruling circles and exposure of the liberal bourgeoisie’s policy of agreement. In April 1849, Marx and his followers, who had practically begun to organise an independent mass proletarian party, considered it best to dissociate themselves from the petty-bourgeois democrats and withdrew from the Democratic Society. Meanwhile they continued to support the revolutionary actions of the German democratic forces.
<"395">395 The passport which Engels produced to obtain a residence permit for the canton of Berne was issued by the Government of the French Republic on March 30, 1848. At that time Marx and Engels were preparing to go to Germany, intending to take a direct part in the German revolution. On April 6 they left Paris for their native country.
<"396">396 Lieutenants Adamski and Niethake took part in the September events in Cologne and in November 1848 were elected to the People’s Committee (see Note 384). When the threat of arrest arose, they fled to Belgium, but were arrested, there and deported to France. On December 14, after their voluntary return to Germany, they were court-martialled. On May 29, 1849, the court martial deprived Adamski of his commission and sentenced him to nine months’ imprisonment in a fortress.
<"397">397 The banquet in Mülheim on the Rhine described here was one of the first democratic banquets arranged in the Rhine Province to mark the anniversaries of the February revolution in France and the March revolution in Germany. Considering these banquets as a form of revolutionary education of the masses, Marx and Engels took part in some of them.
<"398">398 The new Statute of the Cologne Workers’ Association was adopted on February 25, 1849. According to it, the Association’s main task was to raise the workers’ class and political consciousness and it was to be built not on the guild principle as before, but on a territorial basis; consistent democratisation was to apply in the internal life of the organisation, and simultaneously the authority of its elected leading body — the Committee — was to increase. Nine branches were set up as planned. All this contributed to extend popular support for the Association and to enhance its political influence.
<"399">399 See Note 127.
<"400">400 See Note 75.
<"401">401 After the flight of Grand Duke Leopold 11 on January 31, 1849, and the establishment on February 8 of the radical Government (triumvirate) consisting of Guerazzi, Montagnelli and Mazzini, the movement for a republic and unity with the Roman Republic intensified in Tuscany. The radicals regarded this as the beginning of a democratic achievement of Italian unity. On February 18, 1849, a public meeting in Florence proclaimed the foundation of a Tuscan republic. However, under pressure from the liberals and moderate democrats the Guerazzi Government postponed the formal proclamation of the republic until the convocation of the Tuscan Constituent Assembly. As moderate elements dominated the Assembly, the triumvirate again postponed the establishment of a republic on March 27, 1849. The republic had not yet been officially proclaimed when a counter-revolutionary revolt on April 11, 1849, brought Leopold II back to power. Guerazzi’s policy of yielding to pressure from the moderates also upset the plan for uniting Tuscany with the Roman Republic.
<"402">402 On his arrival in Cologne on April 11, 1848, Marx, who was compelled to renounce his Prussian citizenship in 1845, petitioned the Cologne City Council to grant him the right of citizenship and received a favourable reply. But this decision had to be confirmed by the royal provincial government, which early in August 1848, after four months of delay, informed Marx that his petition had been turned down. Marx lodged a complaint with the Minister of the Interior, Kühlwetter, but on September 12, 1848, the latter confirmed the decision of the provincial government (see present edition, Vol. 7, p. 581). Though the campaign of protest prevented the reactionaries from immediately carrying out all their intentions towards the editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the threat of expulsion from Prussia as a foreigner hovered over him. Later the Prussian Government expelled Marx from Prussia under the pretext that he “had abused hospitality”. Due to this act and repressions against other editors, the newspaper ceased publication in May 1849.
<"403">403 On February 27, 1849, the Kölnische Zeitung carried a report on the banquet of February 24. The item said in particular: “Deputy Gladbach especially distinguished himself among the orators by his thunderous speeches against the House of Hohenzollern, Count Brandenburg and others.”
<"404">404 The reference is to the group of participants in the Baden uprising of April 1848 who emigrated to Besançon (France); later, under the name of the Besançon company and headed by Willich, they took part in the Baden-Palatinate uprising of 1849.
<"405">405 See Note 178.