Marx-Engels Collected Works
1 In this article, the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung raised the important question of the relation between economic development and the course of the European revolution and of the influence of the economic factor on the revolutionary process. Subsequently, Marx and Engels dealt with this problem on several occasions, partirularly in the period when, in the pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-Okonomische Revue—the journal that continued the traditions of the periodical they had published during the revolution—they summed up the results of the revolutionary battles that had just ended. In the autumn of 1850, they elaborated the ideas expressed in this article when they wrote the following in the "Review [ May to October 1850]": "However, this much at least is certain, that the commercial crisis contributed infinitely more to the revolutions of 1848 than the revolution to commercial crisis" (present edition, Vol. 10).
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was founded by Marx as a militant periodical intended to exert an effective influence upon the masses, to educate and unite them politically and ideologically and pave the way for the creation of the mass party of the German proletariat. The newspaper provided Marx and Engels with an opportunity to guide the activities of the Communist League founded by them in 1847, which they regarded as the nucleus of the future proletarian party. However, since the League was too weak and numerically small, it could not be directly transformed into the rallying centre of the proletarian forces at the time when the 1848 revolution was at its peak. As the underground activities of the League lost all sense under the conditions of revolution, Marx and Engels instructed its members, who were scattered throughout Germany, to avail themselves of every legal opportunity to join the emerging workers' associations and democratic societies. In this context, a revolutionary proletarian newspaper became the main instrument for directing and co-ordinating the activities of the Communist League members, of mobilising the masses to resolve the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.
It was decided to publish the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, the capital of the Rhine Province, which was more advanced economically and politically than the other regions of Germany (here the working class was fairly strong and the Code Napoleon was in operation, which provided for somewhat greater freedom of the press than did the Prussian Law). The name, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, was chosen in order to stress the intention to continue the revolutionary-democratic traditions of the Rheinische Zeitung, which was edited by Marx in 1842 and 1843. In view of the specific conditions and the absence of the mass workers' party in Germany, Marx, Engels and their followers entered the political scene as the Left, in fact the proletarian, wing of the democratic movement. This predetermined the stand adopted by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which was put out under the subtitle Organ der Demokratie (Organ of Democracy). Only after mid-April 1849, when the German workers' class consciousness underwent certain changes, did the newspaper's editors take steps to set up an independent mass political party of the German proletariat, organisationally separate from petty-bourgeois democracy.
The first issue came out in the evening of May 31, but was dated June 1, 1848. The editorial board consisted of Karl Marx (editor-in-chief). Heinrich Bürgers, Ernst Dronke, Georg Weerth, Wilhelm Wolff, Ferdinand Wolff and Frederick Engels. In October 1848, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath became one of its editors. All the editors were members of the Communist League. Common views, a strict division of functions and good co-ordination were characteristic of the work of the editorial board. Besides reading and answering letters and assisting the editor-in-chief, every editor dealt with a specific range of problems. The editorial board had correspondents in various parts of Germany and abroad. It established contacts with a number of democratic periodicals in other countries.
As a rule, Marx and Engels wrote the editorials, formulating the paper's stand on the most important questions of the revolution. These articles were marked "*Köln" and "**Köln". Sometimes editorials marked with one asterisk were printed in other sections of the paper under the heading of News from Italy, France, Hungary, Switzerland and other countries. In addition to editorials, Engels wrote articles on other subjects, such as the progress of the revolutionary and liberation movement in Italy, the revolutionary war in Hungary, the political situation in Switzerland and so on. Wilhelm Wolff contributed articles on the agrarian question, on the condition of the peasants and their 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). Heinrich Bürgers' contribution to the paper was limited to a single article, which was practically rewritten by Marx; he had more success speaking at various meetings as the paper's representative. Freiligrath published his revolutionary verses in the paper.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was a daily (from September 1848 it appeared every day except Monday); it aimed to give its readers prompt information on all the most significant revolutionary developments in Germany and Europe. Often a second edition was put out on the same day; supplements were printed when there was too much material to be squeezed into the four pages of the issue, while special supplements and special editions in the form of leaflets carried the latest and most important news.
The consistent revolutionary tendency of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, its militant internationalism, and articles that appeared in its columns containing political accusations against the Government, aroused the displeasure of its bourgeois shareholders in the first months of the paper's existence and led to the persecution of its editors by the Government and attacks in the feudal monarchist and liberal bourgeois press. It was particularly the paper's articles in defence of the June 1848 uprising of the Paris proletariat that frightened away the shareholders.
To make Marx's stay in the Rhine Province more difficult, the Cologne authorities, on instructions from Berlin, refused to restore his Prussian citizenship (which Marx had renounced in 1845), and on several occasions instituted legal proceedings against him and other editors of the paper. On September 26, 1848, when a state of siege was declared in Cologne, several democratic newspapers, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung among them, 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 he 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 invested all his ready money in the paper. Until January 1849, the brunt of the work, including writing leading articles, fell to Marx, since Engels had to stay in France and later in Switzerland.
Persecution of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung editors by the judicial authorities and the police became particularly intense after the counter-revolutionary coup in Prussia in November-December 1848. On February 7, 1849, Marx, Engels and Hermann Korff, the responsible manager, had to appear before a jury in Cologne and, the next day, Marx was summoned to court as the leader of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats, together with Schapper and the lawyer Schneider. In both cases, Marx and his associates were acquitted thanks to skilful defence.
The paper's highly unstable financial position led to Marx continually taking steps to raise the necessary funds for its publication. Towards the end of March 1849, he insisted that Korff, who had considerably entangled the paper's financial affairs, be replaced by Stephan Adolf Naut who was closely associated with the Cologne Communists. In mid-April Marx had to undertake a trip to North-West Germany and Westphalia to raise funds among Communist League members and German democrats. In his absence (he returned to Cologne about May 8), the newspaper was managed by Engels. At the time, in the context of a new rise of revolutionary developments caused by the conflict between the Frankfurt National Assembly and the German governments, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung intensified its campaign for the consolidation of the revolutionary forces by publishing reports on the course of the uprising in Rhenish Prussia, Saxony and South-West Germany in defence of the imperial Constitution drafted by the Assembly. The authorities used this as a fresh pretext to persecute the paper. The number of legal proceedings against its editors rose to 23. However, the authorities' failure to win previous cases induced them to resort to another means of suppressing the revolutionary periodical. In May 1849, under the conditions of the general counter-revolutionary offensive, the Prussian Government issued an order to expel Marx 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 resulted in the paper ceasing publication. The last issue, No. 301, printed in red ink, appeared on May 19, 1849. In their farewell address "To the Workers of Cologne", the editors wrote that "their last word everywhere and always will be: emancipation of the working class" (see this volume, p. 467).
2 An allusion to the Nanking Treaty concluded by Britain as a result of the 1840-42 war with China (the so-called First Opium War). It was the first of a series of unequal treaties China was forced to conclude with European powers, reducing it to the state of a semi-colony. Under this treaty, Hong Kong was placed under British rule and five Chinese sea ports, including Canton and Shanghai, were declared open sea ports for British commerce. The Treaty was signed by Sir Henry Pottinger, Commander of the British Expeditionary Corps in China.
3 The Corn Laws—a series of laws in England (the first dating back to the 15th century) that imposed high duties on imported corn with the aim of maintaining high prices for corn on the home market in the interests of the landowners. The struggle between the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy over the Corn Laws ended in the adoption of a Bill repealing them in June 1846.
4 The struggle between Britain and the USA for the Oregon region on the Pacific coast of North America ended in 1846 with its partition between the two powers.
In 1845-49 Britain waged wars of conquest in Northern India against the State of Sikhs, which resulted in the entire Punjab being annexed by the East India Company.
5 In 1847, along with other European countries, Italy went through an economic crisis. In an attempt to overcome it, Pope Plus IX proposed a programme of economic and political reforms including a project to set up a customs union of the Italian states. However, the Pope's proposals and measures, supported by the liberals, failed to prevent a revolutionary upheaval in Italy. The revolution started with a popular uprising in Palermo on January 12, 1848 against the absolutist regime of the Neapolitan Bourbons. The movement for a Constitution and liberation from foreign rule spread all over the country. As a result of the popular uprising in Milan in March 1848, the Austrian troops were driven out of the capital of Lombardy which, however, was recaptured by Austrians after the defeat of the Piedmontese troops. From November 1848, the centre of the revolutionary movement shifted to Central Italy, particularly to the Papal states where developments forced Pope Plus IX to flee from Rome. The Roman Republic was proclaimed on February 9, 1849.
6 The present and following articles on the course of the revolutionary war in Hungary against the Austrian monarchy are the continuation of a series oi reports by Engels on the subject which he began in February 1848 (see present edition. Vol. 8). He drew his information mainly from Austrian Command communiquis. i.e. army bulletins published in the official Wiener Zeitung and other Austrian newspapers. At the time Hungarian sources were almost unavailable in Germany. In spite of the biased and incomplete data contained in the Austrian bulletins, Engels managed to present a fairly exact overall picture of the hostilities Subsequently, in his work Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Gennany, Engels pointed out that, by reporting the true development of the revolutionary war in Hungary, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had contributed more than any other paper to making the Hungarians' cause popular in Germany. The paper had explained the character of the struggle between the Magyars and the Slavs and printed a series of articles on the Hungarian war which had the honour of being plagiarised in nearly every subsequent book on the subject, not excluding those by Hungarians themselves and by "eyewitnesses" (see present edition, Vol. 11).
Engels also mentions his reports about Hungary in his letters to Marx dated April 3, 1851 and July 6, 1852 and also in his letter to H.J. Lincoln, editor of the Daily News, dated March 30, 1854. At that time he took up a systematic study of military science and the art of war and began to collect additional material on the Hungarian campaign (Memoirs by the Hungarian Commander-in-Chief Görgey, biographies of Hungarian generals, periodicals put out by the Kossuth Government). He also planned to write a book on the history of the revolutionar) war in Hungary and Italy--but these plans did not materialise.
Engels started his military reports at a grievous moment for revolutionary Hungary. On December 16, 1848, the Austrian imperial army, under the command of Windischgrätz, started an offensive and at the beginning of January captured Buda and Pest (two neighbouring cities at the time). The Hungarian revolutionary Government (the Defence Council) headed by Kossuth and Parliament (National Assembly) moved to Debreczin. Simultaneously, counter-revolutionary forces launched an offensive in Galicia (the corps under General Schlick), Silesia, the Banat and other districts. Right-wing circles in Austria and Germany predicted a speedy and final defeat of revolutionary Hungary. However, from the very beginning Engels pointed to her reserves for building up her defences and possibilities for securing a turn in the war. In fact the Defence Council did take a number of energetic steps to strengthen the revolutionary army. Guerilla warfare spread in the enemy's rear. Volunteer detachments arrived from Austria to defend the Hungarian revolution and units consisting of national minorities were formed for the purpose. The Hungarian army was joined by many Polish revolutionary commanders (among them Bem, Dembinski). In February 1849, the Hungarians not only succeeded in stabilising the situation in the central area of hostilities (on the Theiss) and even in forcing the enemy to retreat along some other sectors of the front, but also in starting to concentrate forces for a counter-blow that was delivered early in April 1849.
7 On February 26 and 27, 1849, a battle between the Hungarian revolutionary army and Austrian troops took place at Kapolna (in Central Hungary between Pest and Debreczin) which, despite the retreat of the Hungarian troops beyond the Theiss, was nor a victory for either side. Having received Windischgrätz's report on the victory at Kapolna, Francis Joseph abrogated Hungary's autonomy, which had up to that point been recognised by the Austrian ruling circles, and incorporated her into "the lands of the Austrian Empire" by the Olmiitz Manifesto of March 4, 1849 (Olmütz was the seat of the Austrian Court since the people's uprising in Vienna in October 1848).
8 The 1848-49 struggle between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces was accompanied by an exacerbation of national contradictions in Transylvania and in other districts belonging administratively to Hungary but inhabited by other nationalities. The predominant part of the motley population of the region (Romanians, Hungarians and Szeklers, who are their off-shoot, and Germans, mainly settlers from Saxony) consisted of Romanian peasants, who were exploited by Hungarian landowners and Austrian officials. Although the advanced sections of the Romanian bourgeoisie and intelligentsia welcomed the Hungarian 1848 revolution, the erroneous policy of the Hungarian Government in the national question allowed the feudal clerical circles to use social and national antagonisms and stir up Romanians to revolt against Hungary in September 1848. The Romanian legions under the command of Colonel Urban, aided by Austrian troops under Baron Puchner, fought against the Hungarians. However, the Polish emigrant Bem, who was appointed Commander of the Hungarian army in Transylvania in December 1848, succeeded in preventing Puchner from invading Hungary from Transylvania and dealt crushing blows to the counterrevolutionary forces in Transylvania proper during January-March 1849.
A small detachment of Russian troops sent to Puchner's aid by Lüders, commander of the Tsarist expeditionary corps in Wallachia, failed to stop Bem's advance and by the end of March the latter had cleared nearly all enemy troops out of Transylvania. Bem owed his success to his policy of reconciliation of national contradictions between the Hungarians and the Romanians, in spite of the resistance of Hungarian government representatives, who were spokesmen of the Hungarian nobility (later Marx and Engels stressed this in the article "Bem" written for the New American Cyclopaedia). Calls for joint actions of the Romanians and Hungarians against the Habsburgs were also issued by Balcescu, a Romanian democrat; Janku, the leader of the Romanian poor peasants' guerilla movement, supported this idea.
The Hungarian revolutionaries from among the bourgeoisie and nobility were, however, too late in realising the necessity of co-operation with the oppressed nationalities and this enabled the Austrian ruling circles in general to use the Romanian national movement in Transylvania, led by the clerical-aristocratic upper sections, as a tool in the struggle against revolutionary Hungary. After the defeat of the Hungarian revolution, the Austrians established a rule of brutal national oppression in Transylvania, despite their demagogic promises to the contrary.
9 Szeklers(from szek—settlements)—an ethnic group of Hungarians, mostly free pe~nts. In the 13th century their forefathers were settled by Hungarian kings in the mountain regions of Transylvania to protect the frontiers. The majority of Szeklers sided with the Hungarian revolution.
10 The reference is to the paper money issued in 1848-49 by the Hungarian revolutionary Government. The notes were first issued in May 1848. Despite the Austrian authorities' repeated ban on the "Kossuth notes", the Hungarian paper money was a serious competitor to Austrian money, not only within Hungary but also in Austria proper. The "Kossuth notes" were in circulation until almost the end of 1849.
11 The reference is to the Chief Administrative Committee of the Serbian Voivodeship or the Chief Odbor in Karlowitz—an executive body elected by the Assembly (Skupstina) of representatives of the Serbian communities in the South-Slav border regions of the Austrian Empire in May 1848. The Skupstina proclaimed the Voivodina an autonomous region within the Empire. In the autumn of 1848, a number of Serbian cities formed Local Odbors which were patterned on the Chief Odbor and concentrated all civil and military authority in their hands.
The Chief Odbor became the scene of struggle between the liberals headed by Stratimirovich (who was elected President) and clerical and feudal group, who professed loyalty to the Habsburgs and opposed liberal reforms. At the beginning of 1849, this group led by Patriarch Rajachich took the upper hand. They directed the Serbian national movement in the Voivodina towards still closer collaboration with the Austrian counter-revolutionary Government which,having made use of the Serbs in the struggle against revolutionary Hungary, broke its promise and, in March 1849, refused to grant them autonomy.
12 This refers to the southern part of the Austrian-Turkish border (the Military Border area—see notes 22 and 68).
13 An allusion to the new Constitution of the Austrian united monarchy (Gesamtmonarchie) introduced by Francis Joseph on March 4, 1849. According to the Constitution, the Emperor and his Ministers were vested with full executive authority and the bureaucratic centralisation principle was strictly implemented in the administration of the Empire. Lombardy, Venice, Hungary and Bohemia were proclaimed Austrian crown lands and the autonomous estate institutions that existed in some national regions even before the 1848 revolution were abolished Croatia, Serbian Voivodina and Transylvania likewise did not receive autonomy, repeated promises notwithstanding; they separated from Hungary administratively and a system of administration similar to that in other crown lands was established there. The Constitution of March 4, 1849, was a step towards the restoration of absolutism (it was finally restored by the imperial patent of December 31. 1851, which repealed constitutional rule) and was unpopular even among the Right-wing elements in the Slav national movement in Austria, who cherished the hope that the Habsburgs would satisfy their national demands.
14 The reference is to the Hungarian National Assembly which moved to Debreczin early in January 1849 because of the advance of the Austrian troops on Pest. Some of the Right-wing deputies refused to leave for Debreczin and went over to the side of Windischgräz who captured the capital of Hungary.
15 The fortified camp and fortress of Komorn 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. Later on the fortress, which withstood several sieges by Austrian troops, played an important role in the operations of the Hungarian revolutionary army.
16 The reference is to the final stage in the suppression of the 1830-31 Polish national liberation uprising by Tsarist troops supported by Prussia and Austria. After Warsaw was outflanked from the west and on September 6 its western suburb seized, the Tsarist command succeeded in forcing the city to capitulate on the night of September 7, 1851. Early in October, the remnants of the Polish insurgent army crossed the border for Prussia and Austria, where they were interned.
17 By the autumn of 1848, a democratic movement had spread among the Polish population of Galicia that aimed at preparing a national uprising and uniting with revolutionary Hungary. However, the Polish revolutionaries failed to rally adequate forces for an uprising.
In connection with the victories of the Hungarian troops under Bem in Transylvania in the first months of 1849, in particular with his march on January 5 to South Bukovina, rumours spread in Galicia of an impending advance over the Carpathians by the revolutionary Hungarian army and the Polish legion, and this intensified the revolutionary ferment among the Poles. Many young Polish democrats went secretly to Hungary to serve in the Polish legion.
18 Petty sessions—a court of the Justices of the Peace in England, tries minor offences according to a simplified legal procedure.
Quarter sessions—a court held quarterly by Justices of the Peace.
The expressions "petty sessions" and "quarter sessions" are given in English in the original.
19 An allusion to the New Year's message of greetings from King Frederick William IV "To My Army" ("An mein Heer") which he signed in Potsdam on January 1, 1849; it was published in the Preußischer Staats-Anzeiger on January 3, 1849. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung used this to expose the counter-revolutionary actions of the Prussian military (see Marx's article "A New Year Greeting", present edition, Vol. 8, pp. 222-26).
21 A considerable section of the population of Transylvania (over 200,000) were German colonists who had come from Saxony, Flanders and the Rhine lands (known as Teutons, Flemings, Saxons, later all German colonists came to be known as Saxons); they had been settled there by the Hungarian kings and Austrian emperors.
The majority of the Saxons, who were well-to-do townspeople, came out agaillst the Hungarian revolution and sided with the imperial troops in the armed struggle.
22 Peterwardein borderers as well as Serezhans and other South-Slav army formations mentioned below performed compulsory military service on the Austro-Turkish border (in the so-called Military Border area). They were named after their regimental or company districts or communities from which the soldiers came. In 1848-49 the Austrian authorities and the Right-wing bourgeois-landowning nationalist elements drew them into the war against revolutionary Hungary.
23 This refers to the Transylvanian Saxons (see Note 21).
24 The war between the Serbs and the Hungarians broke out as far back as May 1848, as a result of the conflict between the Hungarian Government and the Serbian national movement which demanded autonomy for the Voivodina. The movement was socially and politically heterogeneous. Liberal bourgeois elements (Stratimirovich and others) and Right-wing conservative landowning elements prevailed in the movement and thus allowed the Austrian ruling circles to make use of it in the struggle against the Hungarian revolution. On the other hand, the Hungarian revolutionaries, who refused to recognise the national demands of the Serbs and other Slav peoples incorporated in the Hungarian state prompted them to side with.the Habsburgs. It was only on July 28, 1849, i. e. on the eve of its downfall, that revolutionary Hungary officially declared equality for all nationalities in the country. Having consolidated their domination largely with the help of the Croats, the Serbs of the Voivodina and so on, the ruling circles of the Austrian Empire went back on their promises and not only refused to grant autonomy to the Slav and other peoples of the multinational state, but abolished even the remnants of self-government in the national regions.
26 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 Democrats mentioned below was elected at the First Democratic Congress held in Frankfurt am Main from June 14 to 17, 1848. Fröbel, Rau and Kriege were elected to the first Central Committee and Bairhoffer, Schütte and Anneke were their deputies. The Committee had its headquarters in Berlin. However, despite the decision of the Frankfurt am Main Congress to unite all democratic associations and set up the Central and district committees of German Democrats; the democratic movement in Germany still lacked unity and organisation owing to the weakness and vacillation of it's petty-bourgeois leaders.
27 This refers to the Prussian National Assembly convened in Berlin on May 22, 1848, to work out a Constitution and introduce a constitutional system on the basis of an "agreement with the Crown". It was dissolved on December 5 as a result of the coup d'etat in Prussia. The causes behind the coup d'etat were the formation of the Brandenburg-Manteuffel counter-revolutionary Government and the publication on November 9 of a decree transferring the Assembly to the provincial town of Brandenburg. Liberal and democratic (Left) deputies failed to offer any real resistance to the instigators of the coup d'etat and confined themselves to passive resistance. The introduction of a Constitution "granted" hy the King was announced simultaneously with the dissolution of the Assembly.
28 An allusion to the Wahl-Manifest der radicalen Reformpartei für Deutschland (Election Manifesto of the Radical Reform Party of Germany) written by Ruge not long before the elections to the Frankfurt National Assembly. It proclaimed "editing of the rationale of events" to be the chief task of the Assembly. The Election Manifesto was published by Ruge in Leipzig in his newspaper Die Reform on April 16, 1848.
29 The Central March Association which had branches in different cities of Germany was set up at the end of November 1848 in Frankfurt am Main by the Left-wing deputies to the Frankfurt National Assembly. The leaders of the March associations, which derived their name from the March 1848 revolution in Germany, were petty-bourgeois democrats including Fröbel, Simon and Vogt. These confined themselves to revolutionary phrase-mongering, were both indecisive and inconsistent in the struggle against the counter-revolution and were sharply criticised by Marx and Engels on this account.
30 The phrase "Imperial Assembly" refers to the German National Assembly which opened on May 18, 1848 in St. Paul's Church, in the free town of Frankfurt am Main. It 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 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, the liberal majority in fact condoned the counter-revolution.
When writing this and other articles on 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.
31 An allusion to the Left wing of the Frankfurt National Assembly which consisted of two factions: the Left (Fröbel, Vogt, Venedey and others) and the extreme Left known as the Radical-Democratic Party (Ruge, Schlöffel, Zitz, Trüzschler, Simon and others). Though the Neue Rheinische Zeitung supported the extreme Left rather than the more moderate groups of democrats, it criticised the former for their vacillations and halfway stand on the basic problems of the German revolution -- abolition of feudal survivals and unification of the country.
32 The toleration tax was levied on the Jewish population of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1749. The arrears grew from year to year, and the 1840s witnessed the intensified struggle for the abolition of this humiliating tax. In June 1846 it was repealed on condition that all the arrears, which amounted to 1,200,000 florins, were paid off during the next five years.
This measure was a certain step towards the emancipation of the country's Jews.
33 On September 7, 1848 the Emperor sanctioned the law drawn up by the Austrian Imperial Diet (Reichstag) repealing the personal bondage of the peasants and making labour and other services connected with land tenure subject to redemption. The redemption sum was fixed at twenty times the amount of the peasants' annual duties. Two-thirds of this was to be paid by the peasants and one-third by the state (from taxes). Despite the halfway nature of this agrarian reform, which did not satisfy the peasants who continued to fight for the abolition of feudal obligations without redemption, it nevertheless opened the way for the development of capitalist relations in agriculture.
34 This article is complementary to the series of articles and reports on Switzerland written by Engels during his forced stay there (because of the order for his arrest issued by the Cologne authorities) from November 1848 to January 1849. The series started with the article "The Ex-Principality" and ended with two reports on the foreign policy of the Swiss ruling circles (see preseni edition, Vol. 8, pp. 7-8, 251-53). Engels ceased his writings on Swiss affairs in mid-January 1849, when he returnehto Germany. Later on, however, he occasionally wrote on the subject, as this article shows. It is based on data from Swiss and German papers, but the editors of the volume are not in possession of the actual material used by Engels.
35 Sonderbund—a separatist union formed by the seven economically backward Catholic cantons of Switzerland in 1845 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 25, 1847, the Sonderbund army was defeated by federal forces.
36 The reference is to the Constitution of the Swiss Republic adapted on Sepember 12, 1848. The Constitution legalised the results of the victory won by the progressive forces over the Sonderbund and turned Switzerland from a union of individual cantons into a united federativestate. In place of the former Swiss Diet, the members of which functioned as representatives of cantons, an all-Swiss Federal Assembly was set up consisting of two chambers—the National Council and the Council of States. The executive power was vested in the Federal Council (the Government of Switzerland) and the chairman of the Federal Council acted as President of the Republic. The Constitution provided for the organisation of a single post and customs department, the introduction of a unified monetary system, and a system of weights and measures. At the same time, cantons retained broad autonomous rights.
37 In the period from the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries agreements were concluded between Swiss cantons and European states for the supply of Swiss mercenaries. In many countries they were used by counter-revolutionary monarchist forces.
In this case, the reference is to the agreements concluded in 1848 by the canton of Berne and some other cantons with the counter-revolutionary Government of Ferdinand II, King of Naples. The use of Swiss troops against the revolutionary movement in Italy aroused profound indignation among the Swiss progressive public, and this eventually led to the annulment of these agreements.
38 An allusion to the invitation to Berne extended by the Federal Council to Professor of Military Sciences Rudolf Lohbauer, formerly a radical journalist who contributed to Prussian government periodicals. See Engels' article "Herr Müller.— Radetzky's Chicanery towards Tessin.—The Federal Council-Lohbauer" (Vol. 8, pp. 259-41).
39 The reference is to the dissolution of the Austrian Constituent Imperial Diet (Reichstag) by Emperor Francis Joseph on March 7, 1849. He was prompted to do this by his mother Archduchess Sophia and the Court camarilla. The Imperial Diet opened in Vienna on July 22, 1848. Prior to this, on May 15, as a result of the mass revolutionary actions, the Government was forced to recognise the constituent rights of the Imperial Diet to be convened. The majority of its deputies, however, representing the liberal bourgeoisie and landowners (including deputies from the Slav national districts), opposed any extension of the revolution. During the Vienna popular uprising in October 1848, the Imperial Diet transferred its seat to the Moravian town of Kremsier. There, on March 4, 1849 the consultative commission it had set up completed a Draft of Fundamental Rights providing for people's sovereignty, freedom of assembly and the press, equality of estates and nationalities, while retaining the monarchy. The draft, however, was not approved because the coup d'etat took place the same day and the new, anti-democratic Constitution (see Note 13) was introduced by royal decree. Three days later the Diet itself was dissolved.
40 The reference is to the October-November 1848 counter-revolutionary coup d'etat in Prussia which resulted in the dissolution of the Prussian National Assembly and the introduction of the Constitution imposed by King Frederick William IV (see Note 27).
The Holy Alliance—an association of European monarchs founded on September 26, 1815, on the initiative of the Russian Tsar Alexander I and the Austrian Chancellor Metternich, to suppress revolutionary movements and preserve feudal monarchies in European countries. During the 1848-49 revolution and subsequent years, counter-revolutionary circles in Austria, Prussia and Tsarist Russia attempted to revive the Holy Alliance's activities in a modified form.
41 During the popular uprising in Vienna in October 1848, Welcker and Mosle, liberal deputies of the Frankfurt National Assembly (see Note 30), were sent to Vienna to negotiate with the insurgents and the Austrian Court and Government, which moved from the capital to Olmütz. Both of them acted as commissioners of the so-called Central Authority (Zentralgewalt) set up by the Frankfurt Assembly on June 28, 1848 and consisting of the Imperial Regent (Archduke Johann 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 in fact an instrument of the counter-revolutionary German princes. However, Welcker and Mosle never turned up in revolutionary Vienna and confined themselves to fruitless talks with the Austrian Ministers and audiences granted by Emperor Ferdinand and Commander-in-Chief of the counter-revolutionary army Windischgrätz. The mediatory mission of the imperial commissioners was in fact a cover for the treacherous refusal by the liberal majority of the Frankfurt Assembly to support the Viennese insurgents.
Robert Blum, who represented the Left wing of the Frankfurt Assembly, sided with the insurgents and, despite his parliamentary immunity, was shot on November 9 by an Austrian firing-squad after the uprising was suppressed.
The correspondence between Welcker and Mosle and the Austrian Ministers was published in the Appendices to the Report of the Committee of the Frankfurt Assembly for investigating Austrian affairs (see Verhandlungen der detschen verfassunggebenden Reichsversammlung zu Frankfurt am Main, Ed. 2, Frankfurt am Main, 1849, S. 602-19).
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung responded to the Welcker-Mosle mission with a critical article "Report of the Frankfurt Committee on Austrian Affairs" (see present edition, Vol. 8, pp. 88-93).
42 At the time when the coup d'etat was being hatched and implemented in Prussia, the Frankfurt National Assembly undertook to settle the conflict between the Prussian National Assembly and the Crown. To fulfil this mission, first Bassermann (a liberal leader) and later Simson and Hergenhahn arrived in Berlin as imperial commissioners. Gagern, Chairman of the Frankfurt Assembly, also went to the capital of Prussia to render assistance. The mediation of the imperial commissioners and Gagern proved to be helpful to the counter-revolutionaries, because it diverted the democratic forces in the German state from offering real support to the Prussian National Assembly in its struggle against the Brandenburg-Manteuffel Ministry.
43 Serezhans — see Note 22.
Huzuls — Ukrainians living in the Carpathian mountains which formed part of Austrian Hungary. In the first half of the 19th century, up to 1918, they were subjects of the Habsburg Empire.
44 The reference is to the Grundrechte des deutschen Volkes a document passed by the Frankfurt National Assembly in December 1848 in the course of drawing up an all-German imperial Constitution (“Verfassung des deutschen Reiches vom 28. März 1849”). It was regarded by the Assembly as a component part of the Constitution and was included in it as Chapter Vi.
45 An allusion to the Austrian special border troops who wore red-coats and caps and were recruited mainly from among the inhabitants of the Empire’s Slav provinces (Croats, Serbs of the Voivodina etc.). In 1848 and 1849, they were used by the counter-revolution against the revolutionary movement.
46 An allusion to Frederick William IV’s statement in his speech at the opening of the United Diet on April 11, 1847, that he was “heir to the unweakened crown and must hand it over to his successors in an unweakened state” (see Der Erste Vereinigte Landtag in Berlin 1847, erster Teil).
47 In the first half of the 19th century the word poster was used to denote any appeal, announcement or notice posted in the streets for the public to see.
The September Laws promulgated by the French Government in September 1835 restricted the rights of jury courts and introduced severe measures against the press. They provided for increased money deposits for periodical publications and introduced imprisonment and large fines for publishing attacks on private property and the existing political system.
48 The Prussian National Assembly dissolved by King Frederick William IV on December 5, 1848 (see Note 27), was ironically referred to by Marx and Engels as the “Agreement Assembly” (“Vereinbarungsversammlung”), because it was guided by the “theory of agreement”. According to this, the Assembly was to draw up a Constitution not on the basis of sovereign and constituent rights, but by “agreement with the Crown” (the principle formulated by the Camphausen-Hansemann Government and adopted by the majority of the Assembly). The Crown used this theory of agreement as a screen to cover up preparations for a counter-revolutionary coup d'état.
49 The so-called law on crieurs publics (street newspaper-sellers) adopted by the Louis Philippe Government in 1834 was intended to restrict the distribution of opposition periodicals.
50 Code Napoléon (Code civil) — French code of civil law promulgated in 1804. It was introduced by Napoleon in the conquered regions of West and South-West Germany and remained in operation in the Rhine Province even after its incorporation into Prussia in 1815.
The expression Prussian Law refers to the Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preussischen Staaten approved and published in 1794. It included the criminal, state, civil, administrative and ecclesiastical law and was strongly influenced by backward feudal juridical standards.
51 After the Rhineland’s union with Prussia in 1815, the Prussian Government strove to introduce Prussian Law standards into various spheres of jurisdiction, in place of the existing French civil code. This was being done through a series of laws, edicts and instructions aimed at restoring the feudal privileges of the nobility (the right of primogeniture), introduction of the Prussian penal code, marriage laws etc. These measures, which met with great opposition in the Rhineland, were repealed after the March revolution by the decree of April 15, 1848.
52 The Constitution imposed (“granted”) by King Frederick William IV on December 5, 1848, dissolved the Prussian National Assembly and introduced a two-chamber system; the First Chamber was transformed by age and property qualifications into a privileged chamber of the nobility. According to the electoral law of December 6, 1848, the right to vote in the two-stage elections to the Second Chamber was granted only to so-called independent Prussians. The Constitution provided for the suspension, in case of war or disorder, of freedom of the individual, inviolability of the dwelling, freedom of the press, assembly, association and so forth. The royal authority was vested with very wide powers — the King was authorised to convene or dissolve the Chambers, to appoint Ministers, declare war or conclude a peace treaty. He was vested with full executive power, while he exercised legislative power together with the Chambers. Later on, anti-democratic revisions of the Constitution were repeatedly made on the initiative of Prussian ruling circles.
53 See Note 19.
54 Raizen (Rascians, Rascier) is the name for Serbs of the Orthodox denomination, often used to denote Serbs in general; it probably derives from the ancient town of Rassa, the centre of the Raschka district where the first Serbian tribes settled.
55 Honved — literally: defender of the homeland; the name given to the Hungarian revolutionary army of 1848-49, which was set up by the decision of the Hungarian revolutionary Government on May 16, 1848, to form ten battalions of Honveds.
56 See Note 9.
57 The Slovanská Lipa — a Czech national society founded in Prague at the end of April 1848. The society was. under the leadership of moderate liberals (Shafarik, Gauch), who joined the counter-revolution after the Prague uprising was suppressed in June 1848, whereas the provincial branches were mostly led by representatives of the radical Czech bourgeoisie.
58 The reference is to the Bills on associations and assemblies, and on posters and the press prepared by the Prussian Government.
The September Laws — see Note 47.
The Prussian Law — see Note 50.
59 See Note 46.
60 After Napoleon was proclaimed “Emperor of the French” in 1804, he assumed the title of king of the vassal Italian state formed from the Cisalpine Republic (Northern Italy), a dependency of France. After being crowned in Milan Cathedral on May 26, 1805 with the traditional iron crown of the Lombard kings who conquered Northern Italy in the sixth century, he uttered the following phrase, “God has given it to me, woe to him who will touch it” (“Dio mi la diede, guai a chi la tocca”).
61 See Note 19.
62 An allusion to Camphausen who was formerly an oil and corn dealer.
63 In the Neue Rheinische Zeitung this ironical expression was used of the commander of a division billeted in Düsseldorf, the reactionary Prussian general Drigalski (see Marx’s article “Drigalski — Legislator, Citizen and Communist”, present edition, Vol. 8, pp. 75-80) who in November 1848 proclaimed a state of siege in the town and appealed to the citizens to be “communists in the noble sense of the word” and make donations to the poor. The appeal signed “Citizen Drigalski” was published in the Düsseldorfer Zeitung No. 311, November 24, 1848.
64 The reference is to the eastern provinces of the Kingdom of Prussia (with the exception of Posen) which historically formed its basis. They were known as the old provinces as distinct from the western (“new”) provinces — Rhineland and Westphalia, which were incorporated into Prussia in 1815 by decision of the Vienna Congress.
65 See Note 55.
66 See Note 45.
67 The reference is to the so-called party of Magyarisers, or the Croatian-Hungarian party, formed as far back as 1841 and consisting mainly of Croatian-Slavonian nobles and big landowners. The party aimed for a complete merger of Croatia and Slavonia (which administratively formed part of the Hungarian Kingdom within the Austrian Empire) with Hungary as a means to counteract bourgeois reforms and to retain political and social privileges. its members waged a bitter struggle against the representatives of “Illyrism”, a national trend dominated mainly by liberal landowners and commercial bourgeoisie. The Illyrians aimed at uniting the South-Slav peoples and at securing broad autonomous rights for them within the framework of the Austrian Empire, on a federative basis.
During the 1848 revolution and the increasingly acute national conflict, many Magyarisers fled to Hungary. On June 5, 1848, the sittings of the Sabor of the Southern Slavs opened in Agrarp (Zagreb). Representatives of the liberal landowners and the top sections of the commercial bourgeoisie in Croatia and Slavonia who predominated at the Sabor (the Sabor was also attended by delegates from the Serbs of the Voivodina and the Czechs), professed their loyalty to the Habsburgs and restricted the national programme to the demand for autonomy for the united Slav territories within the Austrian Empire. General Jellachich, who was close to the Right-wing Illyrians, was appointed Ban of Croatia in March 1848. After a brief conflict with the Austrian Government, which led to his dismissal, he was reinstated in September 1848. Placing Croatian and Slavonian military units at the service of Austrian reaction, Jellachich took part in the counter-revolutionary campaign against Hungary and in the suppression of the popular uprising in Vienna.
The Banal Council — an administrative body, headed by the Ban, exercised the functions of the Government of Croatia.
68 The reference is to the inhabitants of the so-called Military Border area, i.e. the southern border region of the Austrian Empire under a military administration. The area included part of Croatia and southern Hungary. its population was made up of Serbs and Croats who were allotted land in return for military service, the fulfilment of state obligations and payment of duties. Borderers often rose in revolt against this system of military-feudal oppression (see also notes 22 and 45).
69 In this item, Engels apparently made use of the material published in the Breslauer Zeitung and reprinted in the Kölnische Zeitung No. 63 (second edition), March 15, 1849.
70 The reference is to the Defence Council set up on September 22, 1848 under the conditions of the intervention launched against revolutionary Hungary by the army of the Croatian Ban Jellachich. The Council, headed by Kossuth, exercised control over the Count Batthyiny liberal Government. After the victory over Jellachich and the resignation of the Batthyány Cabinet the Defence Council was entrusted with governmental functions on October 8. Kossuth, its chairman, was vested with full powers in accordance with war-time conditions. In January 1849, when Austrian troops seized Pest, the Defence Council and the National Assembly transferred their seat to Debreczin.
71 The reference is to the French Provisional Government formed on February 24, 1848, as a result of the overthrow of the July monarchy. The posts in this Government were mainly held by moderate republicans (Lamartine, Dupont de l'Eure, Crémieux, Arago, Marie and two men from the National-the opposition republican party — Marrast and Carnier-Pagès). In addition, the Government included three representatives of the petty-bourgeois party of democrat-socialists who grouped round the Réforme — Ledru-Rollin, Flocon and Louis Blanc, and a mechanic Albert (real name Martin). The Provisional Government stayed in power till May 10, 1848 when it was superseded by the Executive Commission formed by the National (Constituent) Assembly.
72 The reference is to the uprising of the Paris proletariat against the bourgeois regime of the Second Republic (June 23-26, 1848). It was the climax of the 1848 revolution in France and had an impact on revolutionary events in other European countries. Marx and Engels appraised the uprising and its historic’ significance in a series of articles published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 130-49).
73 The additional 45-centime tax for every franc of all direct taxes that was introduced by the French Provisional Government on March 16, 1848, became a heavy burden, above all for the peasants who made up the majority of France’s population. This measure caused the peasant masses to turn away from the revolution and to vote for Louis Napoleon Bonaparte at the presidential elections on December 10, 1848.
74 The legitimists — advocates of the Bourbon dynasty overthrown in 1830, who upheld the interests of the big hereditary landowners, and the claim to the throne by the grandson of King Charles X, Comte de Chambord, who took the name of Henry V.
75 The reference is to the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in France, first in May 1814 and later in July 1815. After the defeat of Napoleonic France in the war against the sixth coalition, Napoleon had to abdicate in April 1814 and the Bourbons were restored to power. Louis XVIII became King of France. In March 1815, Napoleon regained power but his rule did not 1 last long (the Hundred Days). After his defeat at Waterloo by British and Prussian troops he again abdicated on June 22, 1815 and Louis XVIII was again restored to the throne (July 8) with the help of the foreign armies.
76 Orleanists — supporters of the Orléans dynasty which held power in France during the July monarchy (1830-48). The Orleanists upheld the interests of the financial aristocracy and the big industrial bourgeoisie.
77 On May 15, 1848, there was a revolutionary uprising of Paris workers led by Blanqui, Barbès and others against the anti-labour and anti-democratic Policy pursued by the Constituent Assembly which opened on May 4. The participants in the mass demonstration forced their way into the Assembly’s premises, demanded the formation of a Ministry of Labour and presented a number of other demands. An attempt was made to form a revolutionary government. However, with the help of national guards from the bourgeois quarters and regular troops, the power of the Constituent Assembly was restored. The leaders of the movement were arrested and put on trial.
78 The trial of the leaders of the Paris workers’ revolutionary uprising of May 15, 1848 was held in Bourges from March 7 to April 3, 1849. They were accused of conspiring against the Government. The court sentenced Barbès and Albert to exile and Blanqui to ten-year solitary confinement. The other defendants (among them Sobrier, Raspail) were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment or exile.
79 The reference is to the article “Ein Aktenstück des Märzvereins” published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 181 of December 29, 1848, which exposed the half-hearted and inconsistent policy of a number of the Frankfurt Left leaders whose actions only helped the counter-revolution. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung called these leaders the “Girondists of our revolution”.
80 This refers to the counter-revolutionary Catholic Union attached to the Frankfurt National Assembly and headed by von Radowitz, an extreme Right-wing leader.
81 “Thinking friends of history” is a phrase which Marx and Engels ironically used of Camphausen and other liberals, alluding to the subtitle of the then well-known book by the liberal historian Karl von Rotteck, Allgemeine Geschichte vom Anfang der historischen Kenntniss bis auf unsere Zeiten. Für denkende Geschichtsfreunde bearb. van Karl von Rotteck, Bd. 1-9, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1834.
82 The Feuillants — moderate liberal constitutionalists who, during the French Revolution, withdrew from the Jacobin Club on July 16, 1791, after it had adopted a petition to dethrone the King. They formed their own political club which held meetings in the premises of the monastic order of the same name which was dissolved in 1789. The Feuillants upheld the interests of the big bourgeoisie and liberal nobility and did their utmost to prevent the revolution from developing further.
83 An allusion to the stand adopted by Karl Vogt and other leaders of the March Association over the future state structure of Germany. At the concluding stage of the debates in the Frankfurt National Assembly on the imperial Constitution, Vogt and other moderate democrats began to be inclined to agree with the pro-Prussian liberals (Gagern and others) who strove to unite Germany as an empire, with Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, at the head.
84 The Second Chamber of the Prussian Diet (Landtag) was convened on February 26, 1849, on the basis of the Constitution “granted” by Frederick William IV on December 5, 1848. Despite the fact that elections to it were held under conditions of virtual martial law, introduced in many provinces of Prussia and under the anti-democratic electoral law of December 6, 1848, a strong opposition was formed in the Chamber. It was made up of the majority of Left-Centre and Right-Centre deputies of the dissolved National Assembly. Though the opposition speeches of the Left were rather moderate, the Second Chamber was dissolved by the Government on April 27, 1849.
The text of the draft Address, as well as the minutes of the debates in the Chamber, were published in Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen der durch das Allerhöchste Patent vom 5. Dezember 1848 einberufenen Kammem. Zweite Kammer. Beilage zum “Preussischen Staats-Anzeiger”, Bd. 1-2, Berlin, 1849.
Marx apparently used newspaper reports.
85 See Note 52.
86 The reference is to “Verordnung über einige Grundlagen der künftigen Preussischen Verfassung” and to “Wahlgesetz für die zur Vereinbarung der Preussischen Staats-Verfassung zu berufende Versammlung”, adopted by the Second United Diet (the first document on April 6, the second on April 8, 1848). The dissolution of the National Assembly by the Prussian Government on December 5, 1848, was in blatant violation of the laws passed by the United Diet.
87 Comité du salut public (Committee of Public Safety) — revolutionary government of France during the dictatorship of the Jacobins (1793-94).
88 The United Diet — an assembly of representatives from the eight Provincial Diets of Prussia and similarly based on the estate principle. The United Diet sanctioned new taxes and loans, took part in the discussion of new Bills and had the right to address petitions to the King.
The First United Diet, which opened on April 11, 1847, was dissolved in June, following its refusal to grant a new loan. The Second United Diet was convened on April 2, 1848, after the revolution of March 18-19 in Prussia. It passed a series of laws pertaining to the principles ‘of a future Constitution and on elections to the Prussian National Assembly, and also sanctioned the loan. The United Diet session was closed on April 10, 1848.
89 An allusion to the suppression of the Polish national liberation insurrection of 1830-31 by Tsarist troops.
90 The Danish campaign refers to the war between Prussia and Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein which broke out in April 1848. The national liberation movement against Danish rule arose in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein inhabited mainly by Germans under the influence of the March 1848 revolution in the German states. Fearful of a national uprising and an extension of the revolution, Prussian ruling circles strove to come to terms with the King of Denmark in the course of the war, at the expense of all-German interests, and this also affected the war manoeuvres of the Prussian army. Engels ironically compared them with the proceedings in the Imperial Court of Law which were marked by unprecedented red tape and confusion (the Imperial Court of Law was the supreme Judicial institution in Germany in the 15th-18th centuries). The Imperial Court of Law ceased to exist in 1806 when the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German nation was abolished.
91 During the suppression of the national liberation uprising in Posen at the end of April and the beginning of May 1848, Prussian troops suffered a defeat at Miloslavl and shot the Polish insurgents at Wreschen (Wrzegnia) (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 104-05).
When speaking of the “victories” of the Prussian army, Engels is ironically referring to its savage reprisals against the popular movements in Anhalt-Bernburg in March 1848, in Mainz in May 1848 and its participation in suppressing the revolt in Frankfurt am Main in September 1848.
“My glorious army” — see Note 19.
92 The reference is to the armistice concluded on August 26, 1848, in the Swedish town of Malm6 between Denmark and Prussia for a term of seven months. The armistice actually preserved the Danish rule in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, provided for the replacement of provisional authorities in Schleswig by a new government (in which the puppets of the Danish monarchy prevailed), the separation of the Schleswig and Holstein troops and other terms unfavourable to the national liberation movement in the duchies. The revolutionary-democratic changes that had been introduced there came virtually to nothing.
Later on, the ruling circles of Prussia, hoping to raise the prestige of the Prussian monarchy by taking part in this popular war and to realise their aggressive plans, resumed hostilities in March 1849 which went on with changing success. However, under pressure from Denmark’s allies (England and Russia), Prussia signed a peace treaty with Denmark on July 2, 1850, temporarily abandoned its claims to Schleswig and Holstein and withdrew its military support in the war waged by the duchies. The Schleswig-Holstein troops sustained a defeat and had to give up resistance. As a result, the two duchies remained within the Kingdom of Denmark.
93 See Note 9.
94 This apparently refers to the Chief Odbor (see Note 11).
95 See Note 54.
96 See Note 68.
97 The reference is to the Hungarian National Assembly (Diet) convened in Pressburg before the 1848 revolution in the Austrian Empire. The Assembly, in which the liberal nobility predominated, put forward a demand for a Constitution. After the revolutionary demonstrations in Pest on March 15, 1848, the Assembly introduced a parliamentary system. Executive power was vested in the Hungarian Government, but the two states — Hungary and Austria — continued as monarchies under one crown.
The imperial government at first had to recognise this status of Hungary, but subsequently, as a result of the deepening conflict, tried to demolish it through armed intervention. At the same time, in the Hungarian National Assembly which held its sessions in Debreczin there was the “Party of Pacification” which consisted mainly of aristocratic elements and was striving to find a compromise with the Habsburgs and to secure recognition of the new Emperor Francis Joseph as the King of Hungary. The “Party of Pacification” was opposed by the radicals headed by Kossuth who came out for more resolute action against the Austrian monarchy.
The Pragmatic Sanction was a royal decree having the force of fundamental law on succession to the throne. Adopted in the Austrian Empire in 1713, it established the principle of the indivisibility of the Habsburg crown lands and the possibility of distaff succession if the Emperor had no sons.
98 This article was written by Engels for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung but was not published. It is extant in the manuscript form with slight corrections and deletions in the text made by the author. The most important versions that were crossed out are given in footnotes.
99 The reference is to the suppression of the popular uprising in Vienna by the counter-revolutionary army of Windischgrätz at the end of October and the beginning of November 1848, and also to the capture of Pest on January 5, 1849 by Austrian troops under his command in an attack on revolutionary Hungary.
100 Apparently Engels is here referring to the Slav group in the Imperial Diet and, in general, to the representatives of the Slav peoples’ national movement who were demanding the unification of the Slav lands and autonomy within the framework of the Austrian Empire. After the publication of the imposed (“granted”) Constitution on March 4, 1849, which destroyed all hopes that the national demands might be satisfied, opposition sentiments grew stronger among the Slavs.
101 The reference is to the conflict of the Austrian Government with the Constituent Imperial Diet and to the Constitution imposed by Emperor Francis Joseph on March 4, 1849 (see Note 39).
102 See Note 35.
103 The sittings of the Frankfurt National Assembly were held in St. Paul’s Church. Austrian ruling circles were hostile to the elaboration of an all-German Constitution by the Assembly and strove to restore the old German Confederation of 1815, in which Austria played . the leading role. Schwarzenberg, head of the Austrian Government, issued a Note imbued with this idea on March 9, 1849, after the dissolution of the Austrian Diet. On April 15, 1849, the Austrian Government officially rejected the imperial Constitution adopted by the Assembly as incompatible with the unity and nature of the Austrian Empire and recalled the Austrian deputies from Frankfurt.
104 The revolution in Austria began with the uprising of March 13, 1848 in Vienna. I was followed by the March 18-19 revolutionary events in Berlin which started the revolution in Prussia.
105 On June 25, 1849, the anniversary of the June 1848 uprising of the Paris workers was to he celebrated.
106 Camphausen was one of the shareholders of the oppositional Rheinische Zeitung which was published in Cologne in 1842 and 1843 and edited by Marx from October 1842 to March 1843.
107 The reference is to the appeal by Frederick William IV published on March 21, 1848 under the title “To My People and the German Nation” (“An mein Volk und an die deutsche Nation”). Under the impact of the revolutionary events, the King had to give a pledge to be loyal to the tricolour banner of the revolution and to contribute to the unification of Germany.
108 Friedrichshain — a park in Berlin where those killed in the barricade fighting during the March 18, 1848 uprising were buried.
109 The reference is to the cities of Buda (Ofen) and Pest which at the time were virtually twin capital cities of Hungary. After a successful counter-attack by the Hungarian revolutionary army and the liberation of the two capital cities from the Austrian invaders on June 24, 1849 the Hungarian authorities announced the unification of Buda and Pest into one city. However, subsequent events prevented this decree from being implemented. The official unification of Pest and Buda and the formation of a single city of Budapest took place on January 1, 1873.
110 See Note 10.
111 See Note 21.
112 Cavalry units of the Austrian army included not only squadrons but also larger tactical formations — divisions, which usually consisted of two squadrons.
113 The reference is to the armistice concluded between Austria and the Kingdom of Sardiniá (Piedmont) on August 9, 1848 after the defeat of the Piedmontese troops at Custozza. The Kingdom of Sardinia was to withdraw its troops from Lombardy, Parma and Venice and cede them to the Austrians.
On March 20, 1849, under pressure from the masses, King Charles Albert had to declare the armistice cancelled and to resume hostilities against Austria.
114 C.M. (conventional money, or 20-guiden coins) had existed in Austria since the eighteenth century and, under the respective convention, was also introduced in Bavaria. Its standard was silver (20 guldens were to contain 234 grams of silver). In the eighteenth century, paper money was issued which, from the early nineteenth century, was called “Vienna currency”. Transactions were quoted in conventional monetary units.
115 See Note 39.
116 The German term used here and elsewhere is Feldzeugmeister which is a higher rank in the Austrian army directly subordinate to Field Marshal. In some other armies it retained its original meaning of artillery commander.
117 See Note 67.
118 See Note 54.
119 The reference is to provincial diets (Landtags) introduced in Prussia in 1823. They consisted of representatives of four estates (princes, nobility, representatives of towns and rural communities). Property and other electoral qualifications secured the majority in the provincial diets for the nobility. The provincial diets were convened by the King and they were competent only to deal with questions of local economy and administration. As consultative bodies they could make proposals on Bills submitted by the Government for discussion. In 1843, under the pretext of introducing unified legislation for Prussia, King Frederick William IV submitted for discussion in the Rhenish Diet a new draft of the penal code which was to replace the more liberal French Code Pénal. The seventh Rhenish Diet (1 843) rejected the Bill, stating that the existing laws fully conformed to the moral standards, traditions and legal practices of the Rhine Province.
120 See Note 46.
The Rhenish legislation refers to the Code civil (see Note 50) and Code pénal — the penal code adopted in France in 1810 and introduced in the conquered regions of West and South-West Germany. It remained in operation in the Rhine Province even after its incorporation into Prussia in 1815.
121 An allusion to the rescripts (patents) of Frederick William IV of February 3, 1847, on the convocation of the United Diet (on which see Note 88).
122 At the June 2, 1847 sitting of the United Diet, Thadden-Triglaff, a Right-wing deputy, stated: “My proposal reads as follows: freedom of the press — really public proceedings for the gentlemen of the press and along with them the gallows! I would ask Messrs the stenographers to underline thoroughly both the words ‘really’ and ‘gallows’.” (Der Erste Vereinigte Landtag in Berlin 1847, vierter Theil, S. 224 I.)
123 Uckermark — a northern part of the Brandenburg Province (Prussia), the mainstay of the reactionary Prussian Junkers.
124 Holy Hermandad — a league of Spanish towns set up at the end of the fifteenth century with the approbation of the King, who sought to make use of the wealthy townspeople in their fight. against the feudal magnates in an attempt to establish royal absolutism. From the middle of the sixteenth century, the armed detachments of the Holy Hermandad performed police duties. Thus the police in general has often been ironically labelled the “Holy Hermandad”.
125 See Note 4.
126 The reference is to the Vienna Congress of European monarchs and their Ministers (September 1814 to June 1815) which set up a system of all-European treaties after the wars of the European powers against Napoleonic France. The decisions of the Congress helped to restore the feudal system and a number of former dynasties in the states that had been conquered by Napoleon, sanctioned the political disunity of Germany and Italy, the incorporation of Belgium into Holland and the partition of Poland and mapped out measures to combat the revolutionary movement.
127 See Note 50.
128 The reference is to the so-called. United Commissions of the representatives of the Provincial Diets which met on January 17, 1848 to discuss the Bill concerning penal law (“Entwurf des Strafgesetzbuchs für die preussischen Staaten...”). Convening these commissions, the Prussian Government hoped that the apparent preparations for reform would lessen the growing public unrest. The work of the commissions was interrupted by the revolutionary outbursts that swept through Germany at the beginning of March.
129 The reference is to the edict issued by the King of Prussia on March 6, 1821 under the title “Allerhöchste Kabinetsorder vom 6ten März 1821, betreffend die Strafgesetze und das Verfahren in den Rheinprovinzen bei Verbrechen und Vergehungen gegen den Staat und dessen Oberhaupt..”. It introduced the Prussian penal code into the Rhine Province with respect to high treason. This was one of the first attempts made by the Prussian Government to limit the jurisdiction of the Code pénal operating in the Rhine Province and introduce the old-Prussian feudal-type penal code.
130 See Note 55.
131 The debates in the Second Chamber of the Prussian Provincial Diet (see Note 84) were published in Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen der durch das Allerhöcchste Patent vom 5. Dezember 1848 einberufenen Kammern. Zweite Kammer. Beilage zum “Preussischen Staats-Anzeiger”, Bd. 1-2, Berlin, 1849. The discussion of the draft Address in reply to the speech from the throne was held on March 13, 1849.
132 The minutes of the Prussian National Assembly (ironically referred to here as the “Agreement Assembly” — see Note 48) were published in the Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen der durch das Allerhöcchste Patent vom 5. Dezember 1848 einberufenen Kammern. Zweite Kammer. Beilage zum “Preussischen Staats-Anzeiger”, Bd. 1-3, Berlin, 1848. Later they were published as a separate edition under the title Verhandlungen der constituirenden Versammlung für Preussen. 1848, Bd. 1-8, Berlin, 1848; Bd. 9 (Suppl.-Bd.), Leipzig, 1849.
133 The reference is to the period between the dissolution of the Prussian National Assembly (December 5, 1848) and the convocation of the Chambers of the Prussian Provincial Diet (February 26, 1849).
134 See Note 52.
135 During the coup d'état in Prussia, after a series of delays, the National Assembly adopted on November 15, 1848 a decision to refuse to pay taxes from November 17 onwards in protest against government policy. However, the decision taken under the pressure of the Left deputies and democratic circles was interpreted by the majority of deputies in the spirit of passive resistance, which could hardly be effective measure in the struggle against the counter-revolutionary offensive.
136 Wailers (Heuler) — the name the republican democrats in Germany in 1848-49 applied to the moderate constitutionalists who, in turn, called their opponents “agitators” (Wühler). See also Note 245).
137 In January and February 1814, during the war against Napoleonic France, the Prussian and other coalition armies suffered a number of defeats in Champagne (including the battles at Bar-Sur-Aube, Saint Dizier, and Montmirail).
In the battle at Jena on October 14, 1806, the Prussian army was defeated by the French; the defeat was followed by the surrender of feudal Prussia to Napoleonic France.
On March 18 and 19, 1848, the imperial troops had to withdraw from Berlin as a result of the victorious uprising of the masses.
138 The question of electing the King of Prussia to the throne of the German Empire was discussed in the Frankfurt National Assembly on its completion of the draft for an imperial Constitution which, though it proclaimed some civil liberties and introduced all-German central institutions, nevertheless attributed to the united German state the form of a monarchy. The liberal deputies of the Assembly who held pro-Prussian views were particularly insistent on handing over the imperial crown to the Hohenzollerns. They were opposed by the democratic wing, but pro-Prussian tendencies took the upper hand as a result of a compromise between the moderate democrats and the liberals. On March 27, 1849, the imperial Constitution was passed on second reading. On March 28, the Frankfurt Assembly elected the Prussian King. Frederick William IV “Emperor of the Germans”. Frederick William IV, however, rejected the imperial crown. On the causes of his refusal to accept the crown from the Frankfurt Assembly see Engels’ article “The Comedy with the Imperial Crown” (this volume, pp. 193-94).
139 According to the electoral law of December 6, 1848 (see Note 52) only “independent Prussians” had the right to elect to the Second Chamber. This qualification in fact deprived the poor and the dispossessed sections of the population of all electoral rights.
140 The imposed Constitution of December 5, 1848, contained reservations which contravened the principle of the immunity of deputies. Article 83 in particular stated that members of both Chambers “may he called to account both for their voting in the Chamber and for the statement of their views there”.
141 St. Stephen’s Chapel — part of Westminster Palace, where the House of Commons sat since 1547.
Chambre introuvable, the name given by King Louis XVIII to the Chamber of Deputies in France which in 1815-16 consisted of extreme conservatives.
The Chamber of February 24, 1848 — the Chamber of Deputies in France which tried in vain to restrain the growing revolution and preserve the monarchy by replacing Louis Philippe by his grandson — the Count of Paris — in whose favour Louis Philippe abdicated on February 24, 1848.
142 See Note 88.
143 See Note 26.
144 An allusion to the Catholic Easter rites practised at the Viennese, Munich, Madrid and other courts. On the Thursday of Passion Week a religious ceremony of the ablution of the sovereign’s feet used to he held in the cathedrals before the liturgy.
145 On March 12, 1849, the King of Sardinia cancelled the armistice with Austria that had been concluded on August 9, 1848, and hostilities were resumed on March 20. However, the seven-month armistice had not been used by the ruling circles of Piedmont to reorganise and strengthen the army; the key posts were left in the hands of mediocre and counter-revolutionary-minded generals. Despite the national enthusiasm with which the resumption of hostilities was met in Piedmont, in Austrian-ridden Lombardy and all over Italy, the Piedmontese army was defeated by March 23. Charles Albert abdicated. Victor-Emmanuel II, the new king, concluded an armistice with the Austrians on March 26, and on August 6, 1849, a peace treaty was signed on very onerous terms for Piedmont. It sanctioned the restoration of Austrian rule in Northern Italy and the Austrian protectorate over a number of states of Central Italy (Tuscany, Parma).
146 The reference is to the main battle during the first stage of the Austro-Italian war (which broke out on March 25, 1848, as a result of the national liberation uprising in Lombardy and Venice against Austrian rule) — the battle at Custozza (on the River Mincio) on July 25 and 26,1848, in which the Austrian army under the command of Radetzky defeated the Piedmontese troops. Then, on August 6, the Austrians captured Milan and on August 9, 1848, an armistice was concluded between Austria and the Kingdom of Sardinia, under which the latter undertook to withdraw its troops from the cities and fortresses of Lombardy and Venice and cede them to the Austrians. At the beginning, some of the states of Southern and Central Italy (including the Kingdom of Naples, Rome and Tuscany) were forced by the patriots to take part in the war against Austria, but right from the start the counter-revolutionary ruling circles of these states sabotaged the dispatch of army detachments to the front and soon managed either to recall their troops or make them surrender to the Austrians.
147 See Note 13.
148 Apparently an allusion to the actions of General Bonaparte (the future Emperor Napoleon) during his Italian campaign of 1796-97. At the beginning of the war, as a result of his hold manoeuvring of large military contingents, Bonaparte succeeded in defeating first the Austrian troops and then their allies, the Piedmontese, in the area of the Gulf of Genoa and, by threatening to march against Turin, in forcing the Kingdom of Sardinia to dissociate itself from the anti-French coalition and sign an armistice on April 28 and a peace treaty with France on May 5, 1796.
149 In the summer of 1848, during the initial period of the Austro-Italian war, Garibaldi offered help to Charles Albert who, however, rejected it. The command of the Piedmontese army and the provisional government of Lombardy controlled by Charles Albert in no way assisted the volunteer corps formed by Garibaldi, who was left to fight the Austrian troops alone. Though Garibaldi and his corps continued to offer heroic resistance to the Austrians, even after the Austrian-Piedmontese armistice was signed on August 9, 1848, they were compelled by superior enemy forces to retreat to Switzerland.
150 See Note 9.
151 Pusztas — the Hungarian plains between the Danube and Theiss.
152 Engels refers to the liberation war of the Algerians under the command of Emir Abd-el-Kader against the French colonialists who had occupied Algeria in 1830.
The war continued from 1832 to 1847 with short intervals.
153 Several items written by Engels on the war in Northern Italy were published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung under the title “From the Theatre of War” which headed the majority of his reports on the revolutionary war in Hungary. However, the former were printed in the section entitled “Italy” and the latter in the “Hungary” section. To distinguish the Italian items from his Hungarian reports, the former are published in this edition with the subtitle “Italy” supplied by the editors.
154 During the national liberation insurrection of 1830-31 in Poland, Ramorino, who had emigrated from Italy, was appointed commander of one of the insurgents’ corps. After Warsaw was stormed by tsarist troops early in September 1831, Ramorino withdrew his corps to Austria, where it was interned.
In 1833, Italian revolutionary emigrants, members of the “Young Italy” association headed by Mazzini, proposed to Ramorino that he should lead the military expedition to Savoy intended to instigate a republican uprising in, Piedmont. However, Ramorino embezzled part of the money given him by Mazzini to enlist volunteers and in fact helped to frustrate the insurgents’ plan. Instead of a simultaneous entry into Savoy from Switzerland and France, only one group of patriots penetrated Savoy from Grenoble in February 1834, and was dispersed by the Piedmontese carabinieri.
At the second stage of the Austro-Italian war, Ramorino commanded one of the Piedmontese divisions made up of Lombards. On March 20, 1849, he ordered his troops to retreat from the.Ticino lowlands and thus enabled the Austrians not only to enter Piedmont, but even to cut off part of the army from the main forces. After the war, Ramorino was court-martialled and executed.
155 The reference is to the German section of the population of Transylvania (see Note 2 1).
156 On March 20, 1849, the Slovak deputation consisting mainly of Right-wing leaders of the Slovak national movement was received by Emperor Francis Joseph. The visit to Olmütz was prompted by the fact that Slovakia was still deprived of language equality and of other national rights, even after the imposed Constitution was proclaimed on March 4, 1849. The Slovak deputation again demanded the separation of Slovakia from Hungary and autonomy within the framework of the Austrian Empire. The Austrian Court deliberately adopted a delaying policy with the aim of using the Slovaks to fight the Hungarian revolution. However, all their national demands were subsequently rejected.
157 Venice, where the masses had proclaimed independence and restored the “Republic of St. Mark” as early as March 1848, took an active part in the national liberation struggle against Austrian rule. The Venetians continued to offer resistance to the Austrians even after the armistice was concluded on August 9, 1848, between Austria and Piedmont, and withstood for many months a severe blockade by sea and land. After scoring a new victory over the Piedmontese army in March 1849, the Austrians reinforced their troops besieging Venice, which was finally forced to surrender. On August 22, 1849, the Republic of Venice, the last bulwark of the revolution in Italy, collapsed.
158 See Note 55.
159 The battle at Novara between Piedmontese and Austrian troops lasted the whole day of March 22 and ended at dawn on March 23, 1849, in the defeat and retreat of the Piedmontese army.
160 On Ramorino’s part in the Polish national liberation movement and the Savoy campaign of the Italian republicans in 1834, see Note 154.
161 As Engels expected, the defeat at Novara and the conclusion of a new armistice between Austria and Piedmont cardinally changed the balance of forces in Italy. in favour of the home and foreign counter-revolution. In Florence, the revolutionary events in January and February 1849 led to the overthrow of Grand Duke Leopold If and the proclamation of a republic in Tuscany (the official inauguration of a republic did not take place owing to sabotage by moderate liberals). On April 11, a counter-revolutionary coup d'état took place, the democratic provisional government of Guerazzi was overthrown, and the Grand Duke returned to power. He entered the city on May 25, 1849, together with Austrian troops.
The Roman Republic, proclaimed on February 9, 1849, had to wage a grim struggle against counter-revolutionary insurgents instigated by the Catholic clergy, against Neapolitan troops, Austrians and the French expeditionary corps sent to Italy on April 6, 1849 to restore the power of Pope Pins I X over Rome. On July 3, 1849 the Republic fell under the blows of the foreign interventionists.
162 On January 26, 1849, Faucher, Minister of Public Works in the Government of the liberal monarchist Odilon Barrot, submitted a Bill on the right of association to the Constituent Assembly. Its first clause ran as follows: “Clubs are prohibited”. The Bill on the right of association (better known as the Bill on clubs) was adopted on March 21, 1849, by the votes of the monarchists and moderate republicans, despite opposition from Left deputies who accused the Government of a breach of the Constitution and demanded its resignation. This decision dealt a heavy blow to freedom of assembly and association, and primarily to the workers’ associations.
163 See Note 19.
164 The reference is to the liberation war waged by the Spanish people against Napoleonic rule; a prominent part in this war was played by guerilla fighters.
165 See Note 40.
166 During the 1815 campaign in Belgium, Napoleon, after defeating the Prussian army under Blücher at Ligny, ordered Marshal Grouchy to pursue the routed Prussians and prevent them from joining the Anglo-Dutch troops under Wellington. Grouchy, however, could not prevent Blücher’s army from appearing, on June 18, on the battlefield of Waterloo at the most crucial moment of the battle. Grouchy with his troops failed to provide support for the French Emperor in time, and this lost them the entire campaign.
167 The reference is to the march of the Austrian auxiliary army under General Nugent from Triest to help the troops under Field Marshal Radetzky who were in a difficult position as a result of a popular uprising in Lombardy and Venice against Austrian rule in March 1848. Nugent’s army left Triest in the second half of April 1848. Moving through the Venetian region, particularly the mountainous district of Friuli, and only meeting resistance from weak volunteer detachments, it plundered everything on its way. On April 21 Nugent barbarously shelled Udine, the main city of Friuli. At the end of May his army joined Radetzky’s troops in Verona.
Master of Ordnance — see Note 116.
168 Direct-fire batteries (Demontir-Batterien) were intended for demolishing gun emplacements and guns in besieged fortresses.
Palatine line (Palatine — Hungarian title for a representative of the Emperor) outer earthwork north-west of the Komorn fortress, between the Waag and the Danube; its construction was started in 1809 by order of the Hungarian Palatine, Archduke Joseph, and continued up to 1848.
169 The German term used here is Feuerwerker — a rank in the artillery corresponding to that of non-commissioned officer in other arms.
170 On the recognition of Francis Joseph as King of Hungary on the basis of the Pragmatic Sanction, see Note 97.
On the Debreczin National Assembly, see Note 14.
171 See Note 54.
172 Chaikists — Austro-Hungarian infantrymen who served on small sailing vessels and rowing boats (chaikas) in the Military Border area. They built pontoon bridges and transported troops along the Danube, Theiss and Sava. Recruited mainly from among the Serbs, inhabiting the Chaikist Area in Slavonia, from 1764 onwards they formed a special battalion.
173 See Note 11.
174 The reference is to Pest and Buda (see Note 109).
175 An allusion to the important part Saragossa played in the Spanish national liberation war against Napoleon’s rule, when the city was twice besieged by the French (in June-August 1808 and December 1808-February 1809) and won fame for its heroic defence.
176 The reference is to the decisions of the Vienna Congress of 1814-15 (see Note 126).
177 See Note 71
178 An allusion to the predominance of monarchists in the Government of Odilon Barrot, set up after the election of Louis Bonaparte as President of the Republic on December 10, 1848. Republican officials in the state apparatus were replaced by monarchists. Monarchist factions of legitimists (supporters of the Bourbon dynasty), Orleanists (followers of Louis Philippe) and Bonapartists formed a coalition in the Constituent Assembly, launched a struggle against the moderate republicans for political influence and strove to strengthen counter-revolutionary policy. In the Legislative Assembly convoked on May 28, 1849, this joint “party of order” was in the majority.
The Holy Alliance — see Note 40.
179 An allusion to the composition of the Frankfurt National Assembly which on March 28, 1849 resolved to elect the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV, “Emperor of the Germans”. The overwhelming majority of the Assembly’s deputies were government and state officials, professors and lawyers (see Note 30)
At first Frederick William IV agreed to accept the imperial crown proffered by the National Assembly on the condition that the other German states agreed, but on April 25, 1849, he finally rejected the proposal of the Frankfurt National Assembly and the imperial Constitution it had drawn up.
The phrase “By the grace of God do I have this crown” was pronounced by Frederick William IV on October 15, 1840 when he was crowned King of Prussia.
180 This article written by Engels for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was not published and has survived as an unfinished manuscript.
The article was occasioned by the Prussian Government’s measures to call tip the army reserve. Among the pretexts for this was the war with Denmark resumed in Schleswig-Holstein. The Prussian ruling circles were obviously preparing the armed suppression of the revolutionary-democratic movement in Prussia and the rest of Germany.
The army reserve (Landwehr) appeared in Prussia during the struggle against Napoleon. “Landwehr-Ordnung” defining the rules of enrolment, recruitment and service was adopted on November 21, 1815. In the 1840s, those to be enrolled in the army reserve had to he under 40 and go through three-years active service and be not less than two years in reserve. In contrast to the regular army, enlistment to the army reserve took place only in case of extreme necessity (war, or threat of war).
181 On the resumption of war between Prussia and Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein, after the expiry of the truce between them at the end of March 1849, see Note 92.
182 The reference is to the brutal suppression by Prussian soldiers of the national liberation insurrection in Posen in March-May 1848.
183 In the second half of December 1847, Marx delivered several lectures on political economy in the German Workers’ Society in Brussels and intended to prepare them for publication. A manuscript of the pamphlet prepared at the time and entitled Wages has survived. It is written in Joseph Weydemeyer’s hand and its text is almost identical to that published later in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. A draft outline of Marx’s concluding lectures, which he had no time to prepare for publication, is extant as a manuscript written in his own hand and also bearing the heading Wages (see present edition, Vol. 6). As regards its contents, it supplements the work Wage Labour and Capital Later, in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) (see present edition, Vol. 30), Marx pointed out that he did not manage to publish the work on “Wage Labour” based on his lectures because of the February revolution of 1848 in France and his expulsion from Belgium.
This work first appeared as a series of leading articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of April 5-8 and 11, 1849 under the tide of Wage Labour and Capital When undertaking this publication, Marx edited the former text once more and wrote an introduction giving the reasons why it was necessary to discuss economic problems in a newspaper, and primarily to reveal the economic relations on which bourgeois rule and the actual slavery of wage workers were founded.
By publishing this work, Marx wished to prepare the proletarian readers of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for the solution of the tasks that had become urgent by that time — the creation of the mass workers’ party, and also to define the social aims set by the revolutionary organ which he edited. Marx’s work helped to spread the ideas of scientific communism among the advanced section of the German proletariat. On April 11, 1849 the Committee of the Cologne Workers’ Association recommended that all its branches should start discussing social problems on the basis of the articles on wage labour and capital published in the newspaper, and called upon other workers’ associations in Germany to discuss these articles.
The work was not published in the newspaper in full. Issue No. 269 announced that there was to be a sequel, but this never appeared because Marx had to leave Cologne for a time on financial and other business connected with the newspaper. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 277 of April 20 carried the following note: “Cologne, April 19. Owing to the temporary absence of the author, the exposition of the relationship between wage labour and capital has had to be interrupted. It will, however, be resumed shortly and then continued to the end without interruption. “ This was never done, however, because the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ceased publication. Marx’s subsequent intention to put out the work as a separate pamphlet did not materialise either.
The first separate edition in the language of the original appeared in Breslau in 1880 without Marx’s knowledge. In 1881 the pamphlet was republished there. A Russian translation (the first translation into a foreign language) appeared in Geneva in 1883. It was made from the Breslau edition and repeatedly republished illegally.
After Marx’s death, Wage Labour and Capital was published in 1884 in Hottingen-Zurich as a pamphlet with a short introductory note by Engels, dated June of that year. From December 1884 to February 1885, the London newspaper Justice, the organ of the Social-Democratic Federation, published the first English translation made by J.L.Joynes. In March 1885 it appeared as a separate pamphlet and later was repeatedly republished. J. L. Joynes’ translation was used in the workers’ press of the USA, in particular by the Workmen’s Advocate, New Haven (Connecticut), in November 1886-January 1887.
In 1891 a new edition of the am hict a ared in Berlin: Lohnarbeit und Kapital Von Karl Marx, Separat-Abdruck aus der Neuen Rheinische Zeitung vom jahre 1849. Berlin, Verlag der Expedition des Vorwärts Berliner Volksblatt, 1891. It was edited by Engels who wrote the introduction and made certain changes and amendments in order to bring the presentation and terminology into harmony with the further development of Marx’s economic teaching after 1849. Engels wrote about this in his introduction:
“In the forties, Marx had not yet finished his critique of political economy. This took place only towards the end of the fifties. Consequently, his works that appeared before the first part of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) differ in some points from those written after 1859, and contain expressions and whole sentences which, from the point of view of the later works, appear unfortunate and even incorrect. Now, it is self-evident that in ordinary editions intended for the general public this earlier point of view also has its place, as a part of the intellectual development of the author, and that both author and public have an indisputable right to the unaltered reproduction of these older works. And 1 should not have dreamed of altering a word of them.
“It is another thing when the new edition is intended practically exclusively for propaganda among workers.
“In such a case Marx would certainly have brought the old presentation dating from 1849 into harmony with his new point of view....
“My alterations all turn on one point. According to the original, the worker sells his labour to the capitalist for wages; according to the present text he sells his labour power.”
The 1891 edition, intended by Engels for popular propaganda, was used as the basis for many publications of this work in different languages, in particular for the English translation of 1891 printed in Glasgow by the Socialist Labour Party publishers.
In this volume, the work is reproduced in a form which was in keeping with the level of Marx’s economic teaching in 1849 and in accordance with the text in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. At the same time, all the major amendments made by Engels in the 1891 edition are given in footnotes. The division of the work into sections follows the sequence in which it was published in separate issues of the newspaper. The sections are numbered by the editors of the present edition. The list of misprints given in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 270, April 12,1849, is also taken into account.
184 The reference is to the major events of 1848 and 1849: the insurrection of the Paris proletariat on June 23-26; the suppression of the Vienna October popular revolt by Austrian soldiers and the capture of the capital on November 1 by troops under Windischgrätz; the counter-revolutionary coup in Prussia in November, which brought about the dissolution of the Prussian National Assembly on December 5; and the rise of the revolutionary national liberation movement in Poland, Italy and Hungary. ..
In 1845-47, Ireland experienced a terrible famine, after continual failure of the potato crop. The real reason for this social calamity was the cruel exploitation of the Irish people under English rule, reduced to destitution by the ruling classes through the enslaving lease system imposed on the Irish peasants by the landlords. About a million died of hunger, and as many were compelled to emigrate. The effects of the famine were felt to the full in subsequent years.
185 Engels points out in the introduction to the 1891 edition that Marx failed to prepare his lectures on wage labour and capital for the press mainly because of the rapid pace of political events at the time: popular uprisings in response to the refusal by the ruling circles of Prussia and other states to recognise the imperial Constitution (Dresden, Iserlohn, Elberfeld, the Palatinate, Baden) and a new counter-revolutionary advance which led to the suppression of the New Rheinische Zeitung.
186 The reference is to the draft Constitution drawn up in Kremsier by the Austrian Constituent Imperial Diet. In early March 1849 it was dissolved by the Austrian Government which countered this draft with the Constitution imposed by the Emperor (see notes 13 and 39). The Kremsier draft, though it contained some concessions to the great-power and centralising tendencies of the German aristocratic ruling circles, envisaged a certain administrative independence for a number of national regions of the Empire and introduced provincial diets as representative institutions there.
187 See Note 55.
188 See Note 10.
189 See Note 9.
190 On March 15, 1848, a popular uprising broke out in Pest. In the middle of the day, the insurgents — craftsmen, workers, students, and peasants who had come to the fair — captured the town, crossed the Danube by the bridge and broke into Buda, where they set political prisoners free. The Austrian garrison was paralysed. The insurgents elected a Committee of Public Safety which provisionally concentrated power in its own hands. A popular meeting adopted the “12 points” drawn up by the radical opposition and demanding administration by parliament and civil liberties. The events of March 15 started the revolution in Hungary against the feudal serf-owning system and for national independence.
191 The Austrian Archduke Stephan was appointed Palatine of Hungary in 1847. From the very first days of the Hungarian revolution he strove to restore the Habsburgs’ rule, disguising his counter-revolutionary designs by concessions to the Hungarian national liberation movement, and aiming at collusion with Hungarian magnates. In September 1848, when the Ban Jellachich, inspired by Austrian court circles, entered Hungary causing a government crisis there, Stephan made an unsuccessful attempt to seize power. On the proposal of Hungarian right-wing leaders, the National Assembly appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Hungarian troops. However, Archduke Stephan delayed military action and tried to come to an agreement with the Croatian Ban. Shortly afterwards, feeling himself insecure, he fled from Hungary. on September 29, 1848, Hungarian revolutionary troops defeated Jallachich’s army.
192 The reference is to the “independent and responsible government” of Hungary formed as a result of the March uprising of 1848 and headed by Count Batthyány. The Government was dominated by representatives of the landed aristocracy and nobility, who were afraid that the revolution would he carried further and strove to compromise with the Austrian ruling circles. The radicals were represented in the Government by Lajos Kossuth (Finance Minister) and Bertalan Szemere (Minister of the Interior). The Batthyány Government (its composition was made public on March 25) held power up to October 1, 1848. Early in October, the National Assembly transferred governmental functions to the Defence Council (see Note 70) headed by Kossuth.
193 An allusion to the debate on a number of Bills in the National Assembly (Diet) then in session in Pressburg: on the abolition of labour services and tithe. On March 18, 1848, the Assembly promulgated an agrarian law annulling some of the peasants’ feudal services, and passed laws on representation of the people, national independence, the press etc. These Bills were proposed under the impact of the growing revolutionary movement in the country.
194 The march of Bem’s army to the Banat (a district in the Serbian Voivodina, then administratively included in Hungary) took place in April 1849 after his troops had routed the Austrian army and Russian auxiliary detachments and occupied almost the whole of Transylvania. In the Banat, the troops under Bem and the Hungarian General Perczel inflicted a number of defeats on the Austrians and the Serbs of the Voivodina, whom the Austrian Government and pro-Austrian circles of the Serbian nobility and clergy had involved in the war with revolutionary Hungary (see Note 24); but they were unable to achieve any decisive successes. At the end of June 1849, large army contingents from tsarist Russia entered Transylvania to assist the Austrian counter-revolution and this again made the presence of Bem’s troops necessary in the Transylvanian theatre of war. This time he was defeated by the superior Russian troops.
Later Marx and Engels drew attention to Bem’s expedition in the Banat in the article “Bem” written for the New American Cyclopaedia in September 1857.
195 Up to 1868, regiments and other independent military units in the Austrian imperial army were named after their “patrons” or chiefs (Inhaber). This custom dated back to the mercenary armies when commanders maintained regiments at their own expense and therefore had the right to appoint officers. Later the commanders retained the right, to give their names to the regiments, but the state assumed the responsibility of maintaining them.
196 The Palatine redoubts, direct-fire batteries — see Note 168.
Breach batteries were installed at the concluding stages of a siege to destroy the bastions and other fortifications of a besieged fortress.
197 The Debreczin National Assembly — see Note 14.
This session of the National Assembly was held in Debreczin because only on April 24, 1849 did the Hungarian troops liberate Pest.
198 See Note 68.
199 “World-historic Diet” — the reference is to the Sabor of the Southern Slavs in Agram (Zagreb) on June 5, 1848 (see Note 67). Though the Sabor came out in favour of uniting Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia and of certain reforms there, on the whole, it sought compromise with the Austrian monarchy and did little to modify the former military feudal order in these regions and the enslaved position of their population. Only a small group of democratic delegates connected the struggle for the national cause with the revolutionary struggle against feudal monarchist regimes.
200 Observation corps were assigned to watch the enemy on the flanks of the main theatre of military operations.
201 See Note 1 90.
202 The reference is evidently to the Odhor then in session in the town of Karlowitz (see Note 11).
203 In the suinmer of 1848, the anti-feudal movement and the struggle for complete liberation from the Turkish Sultan’s yoke gained strength in the Danube principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia), which were formally still 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 the country.
On June 28, 1848, a 12,000-strong Russian army corps entered Moldavia and, in July, Turkish troops also invaded the country. In September 1848 the Turkish army, supported by the Tsarist Government, occupied Wallachia and perpetrated a massacre in Bucharest. A proclamation of the Turkish government commissioner Fuad-Effendi declared the need to establish “law and order” and “eliminate all traces of the revolution”. Intervention by Russia and Turkey led to the restoration of the feudal system in the Danube principalities and the defeat of the bourgeois revolution in Wallachia. The desire to completely suppress the revolutionary movement made the two governments, despite acute Russo-Turkish contradictions, conclude a convention in Balta-Liman on May 1, 1849. This cancelled the system of the election of rulers and other progressive reforms introduced in the Danube principalities in 1848, and sanctioned the occupation of their territories by Turkish and Russian troops. The military occupation of the principalities lasted until 1851.
204 The bombardment of Hatvan on April 2, 1849 opened a new stage in the Hungarian offensive against the Austrian troops. It was prepared for by successful movements in the centre of military operations at the Theiss, Bem’s victories in Transylvania, guerilla warfare in areas occupied by the Austrians, and vigorous measures taken by the Kossuth Government (the Defence Council) to strengthen the army and mobilise all its resources for the struggle against the enemy. When Engels wrote this report he had not yet received the news of the battle at Hatvan. Meanwhile, the victory scored by the Hungarian army there and the subsequent blows inflicted by it on the Austrians at Tapio-Bicske (April 4), Isaczeg and Gödöllö (April 5-7), Waitzen (April 10), etc. brought about it radical change in the war in favour of revolutionary Hungary. On April 19, 1849 the Hungarians routed the Austrians in a decisive battle at Nagy-Sallo, advanced further, relieved Komorn on April 22, and liberated Pest on April 24. The defeated Austrian army retreated to the western border.
The Hungarian command faced the prospect of spreading the revolutionary war into Austrian and German territory. However, because of anti-revolutionary sentiments among a number of high commanders, Görgey in particular, and the fear of diplomatic complications, it was decided to cease the pursuit of the Austrians and to turn the main forces towards the fortress of Buda, which was still held by an Austrian garrison. The siege of Buda was time-consuming (it was captured only on May 21) and this gave the Austrians the respite they needed to bring up new reserves and complete their talks with tsarist Russia about help in suppressing revolutionary Hungary (the final agreement was reached at the meeting of Francis Joseph and Nicholas 1 in Warsaw on May 2 1). All this had fatal consequences for the Hungarian revolution.
205 See Note 10.
206 Potsdam — a town near Berlin, the residence of the Prussian kings, where military parades and reviews of the Prussian army were held.
Olmütz (Olomouc) — a town in Moravia, from October 7, 1848, temporary residence of the Austrian Court which fled from Vienna where the people rose in revolt; centre of counter-revolutionary forces.
207 An allusion to the shooting of Robert Blum, a German democrat and deputy to the Frankfurt National Assembly, by sentence of an Austrian court martial (see Note 41). This crudely arbitrary act on the part of the Austrian military clique was approved by reactionary circles in Prussia.
208 The reference is to the conventions concerning extradition of criminals, deserters, vagabonds etc. concluded by Prussia with a number of German states (Austria, Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony, Grand Duchy of Baden etc.) and also with Russia in 1816-20. In practice, these conventions applied to persons accused of political crimes in accordance with the policy of the Holy Alliance powers (see Note 40) which strove for an international union of counter-revolutionary forces in the struggle against the revolutionary movement.
209 In the initial period of the European revolution of 1848, various reactionary sovereigns and public figures, deprived of throne and power and seeking safety from the people’s wrath, found refuge in England. Among them were: ex-King of the French, Louis Philippe (February); ex-Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, Metternich; the Prince of Prussia, Wilhelm (March); and later Lola Montez, an influential favourite of Ludwig I, King of Bavaria who was compelled to abdicate, and others.
210 The war with Denmark over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein renewed by Prussia at the end of March 1849 (see notes 90 and 92) was waged in the name of all the states of the German Confederation. Owing to this, military and naval contingents from., Schleswig-Holstein were regarded as the nucleus of an all-German imperial army and navy, their formation being stipulated by the imperial Constitution drawn up by the Frankfurt National Assembly. pi 259
211 On April 5, 1849 a German coastal battery fired on the Danish squadron at the harbour of Eckernförde (Schleswig); two damaged Danish ships were captured. This event, which made no essential difference to the course of war with Denmark, was claimed by the official Prussian press as a major victory.
212 Black-red-and-gold — a symbolic combination of colours signifying the unity of Germany. The Belgian state flag, introduced during the revolution of 1830-31, after the separation of Belgium from Holland, included the same colours but arranged differently (vertical black, gold and red stripes).
213 An ironical allusion to the strivings of the liberal majority of the Frankfurt National Assembly to place the Prussian King (black-and-white — state colours of the Prussian monarchy) at the head of united Germany (black-red-and-gold — symbol of its unity) as the “Emperor of the Germans” (see Note 138).
214 See Note 151.
215 In the battle of Leipzig on October 16-19, 1813 troops from Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden won a victory over the army of Napoleon and the states dependent on him. This victory decided the outcome of the 1813 campaign in favour of the sixth anti-Napoleon coalition (England, Spain and some other states also participated in it). As a result, Napoleon’s troops were driven out of Germany and military operations moved over into France.
216 The reference is to the Constitution imposed by Francis Joseph on March 4, 1849 (see Note 13).
217 See Note 97.
218 On the battle at Novara between the Austrian and Piedmontese armies, see Note 159.
219 Here and in the two reports given below, “A Magyar Victory” and “An Austrian Defeat”, Engels writes about the military events in Hungary early in April: the victory won by the Hungarian troops at Hatvan on April 2 and the subsequent blows they inflicted on the Austrian army (see Note 204).
220 Banderial hussars (from the Latin banderium — banner) — the name given in medieval Hungary to cavalry detachments of nobles that under their own banners formed part of the royal army or of the armies of the big feudal lords. In this instance, the reference is to the regiment of Banderial hussars formed in July 1848 in Croatia. It took part in the marches of Jellachich’s army against revolutionary Hungary.
221 See Note 112.
222 The battles for Pest were fought from April 6 to 25, 1849. They also continued after the main Austrian forces, beaten by Hungarian revolutionary troops, had been compelled to retreat north-west to the borders of Austria. After Pest was liberated, the Austrian garrison still held out in the fortress of Buda which was besieged by the Hungarians from May 4 to 21, 1849.
223 In March 1849, the war between Piedmont and Austria was renewed and this served as a new impetus to the national liberation movement in Lombardy, in the rear of the Austrian army. A large popular uprising against Austrian rule took place on March 20 in Brescia. The Austrian garrison was trapped in the fortress. The Austrian troops sent against Brescia consisted partly of those which had taken part in the operations against the Republic of Venice. They were under the command of General Nugent, who was later replaced by a Master of Ordnance, Haynau. The insurgent city was severely bombarded, but continued to resist even after the truce was signed between the King of Piedmont and Austria. Brescia was taken only by a fierce assault on March 31 and April 1. Haynau inflicted brutal reprisals on the insurgents.
On the blockade of Venice, see Note 157.
224 The reference is to the response of the ruling circles in one of the small German states, the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg, to the proposal by the Frankfurt National Assembly that the crown of the “Emperor of the Germans” be given to the Prussian King, Frederick William IV (see Note 138).
225 The Rhenish District Committee of Democrats was set up at the First Rhenish Congress of Democrats held in Cologne on August 13 and 14, 1848, by a decision of the First All-German Democratic Congress in Frankfurt am Main, on the basis of the Central Commission of representatives from the three democratic organisations in Cologne — the Democratic Society, the Workers’ Association and the Association for Workers and Employers — formed late in June 1848. Marx, who was on the Central Commission, also became a member of the Rhenish District Committee, together with Schapper, Moll and other prominent figures of the Communist League.
The President of the Committee was a German democrat, lawyer Schneider 11. When he was elected to the Second Chamber of the Prussian Provincial Diet early in 1848, Marx acted as President. Thanks to Marx and his associates, the Committee exerted a considerable influence on the popular movement in the Rhine Province. It successfully organised resistance to the growing counter-revolutionary forces and, in particular, initiated the tax-refusal campaign during the coup d'état in Prussia (November-December 1848). It did not confine its activities to the Rhine Province, but extended them to Westphalia as well.
Marx and other members of the Communist League decided to withdraw from the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats because of the changes that had taken place in Germany and in the working-class movement there by the spring of 1849. The rising activity of workers’ associations and the markedly growing class consciousness of the German proletariat provided the opportunity to create a mass proletarian party. On the other hand, the wavering position of the petty-bourgeois democrats made necessary an ideological and organisational separation from them. Under these conditions, taking the first steps to found a proletarian party, Marx and Engels proposed the task of strengthening the independence of the workers’ associations, primarily the Cologne Workers’ Association, of freeing them from petty-bourgeois influence, of marshalling their activities in a single direction and achieving a unified revolutionary platform. Their withdrawal from the Committee in no way meant a break with the non-proletarian democratic trends. Marx and Engels continued to call for unity of action with democrats in the struggle against counter-revolution, believing, however, that at that stage it should not be carried out within a single organisation. At the same time, Marx established closer contacts with the representatives of the workers’ associations.
These tasks and the financial problems of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung were the main purpose of Marx’s trip to North-West Germany and Westphalia in the second half of April 1849, during which he visited Bremen, Hamburg, Bielefeld, Hamm and other towns.
226 The Rakos plain — a district on the left bank of the Danube where, until the sixteenth century, Hungarian assemblies of estates were held and Hungarian kings crowned. It is now within the city bounds of Budapest.
227 See Note 55.
228 See Note 16.
229 The reference is to the men of the Vienna mobile guard and the Academic Legion who survived after the capture of Vienna by counter-revolutionary troops (November 1, 1848) and, as part of Bem’s army, participated in the revolutionary war in Hungary.
The Vienna mobile guard was formed by Bem during the October uprising in Vienna. It consisted mainly of artisans and workers and proved itself to be the most disciplined, efficient and audacious section of the insurgents’ military forces.
The Academic Legion was a student militarised organisation set up in March 1848 in Vienna. It also included university lecturers and other intellectuals, mostly radical democrats. The Legion played a significant part in the Austrian revolutionary movement in 1848. When the October uprising in Vienna was suppressed, it was dissolved.
230 See Note 43.
231 Under the impact of the March revolution of 1848, the peasants’ anti-feudal struggle assumed wide proportions within the Austrian Empire and became combined with the national liberation movement in the national border regions. Disturbances among the Ukrainian peasants of the Bukovina started in the spring of 1848 and became especially intensive when, on April 17, 1848, a law was promulgated in neighbouring Galicia abolishing feudal services. This law did not apply to the Bukovina, though it was administratively part of Galicia. The Ukrainian peasant, Huzul Lucian Kobylica, was especially prominent among the peasants’ leaders. He belonged to the radical democratic wing of the Austrian Constituent Imperial Diet to which he was elected in 1848. He helped the peasants lodge their petitions and complaints and did his best to get the lands seized by the landowners returned to the peasants. For this, Kobylica was deprived of his rights as a deputy.
In the spring of 1849, the peasants’ movement in the Bukovina was rekindled. Peasants’ detachments were formed, landowners’ estates were seized and their woods felled more often. The peasant leaders, Lucian Kobylica (who may have been in direct contact with the Hungarian emissaries) and Birla Mironiuk, called upon the peasants to store up provisions and fodder for the Hungarian troops and to join them, if the latter entered the Bukovina. The peasants’ disturbances in the Bukovina were suppressed by imperial forces.
The imposed redemption law referred to by Engels was adopted by the Austrian Imperial Diet on September 7, 1848 (see Note 33).
232 Ruthenian — the name given in nineteenth-century West-European ethnographical and historical works to the Ukrainian population of Galicia and the Bukovina, which was separated at the time from the bulk of the Ukrainian people.
233 The Neue Rheinische Zeitung Nos. 265, 266, 267, 269 and 271 of April 6, 7, 8, 11 and 13, 1849, carried a series of feature articles by Georg Weerth ridiculing the servility of the liberal majority of the Frankfurt National Assembly who wished to unite Germany under the aegis of Prussia and resolved on March 28, 1849 to elect the Prussian King, Frederick William IV, “Emperor of the Germans” (see Note 138).
234 The battle at Novara — see Note 159.
The battle for Pest — see Note 222.
The battle at Eckmförde — see Note 211.
On April 13, 1849, the so-called German federal troops stormed the Danish fortifications near Düppel (a village in Schleswig).
235 “Gagging laws” — the name given to the six exceptional laws passed in England in 1819 after “Peterloo” — when participants in a mass meeting for electoral reforms in St. Peter’s Field near Manchester were shot by police and troops; the laws limited the freedom of assembly and the press.
236 See Note 180.
237 After the March revolution, an insurrection of the Poles broke out in the Duchy of Posen for liberation from the Prussian yoke. Polish peasants and artisans took an active part in this, along with members of the lesser nobility. The Prussian Government was forced to promise that a reorganising committee would be set up in Posen and that the “reorganisation” would include: formation of a Polish army, appointment of Poles to administrative and other posts, recognition of Polish as an official language, etc. Similar promises were given in the convention of April 11, 1848, signed by the Posen Committee and representatives of the Prussian Government in Jaroslawiec. On April 14, 1848, however, the King of Prussia ordered that the Duchy of Posen be divided into an eastern Polish part and a western “German” part, which was not to be “reorganised” and was to remain formally part of the German Confederation. During the months following the suppression of the uprising by Prussian troops, the demarcation line was pushed further east and the promised “reorganisation” was never carried out.
The German Confederation — the ephemeral union of German states founded in 1815 by decision of the Vienna Congress.
238 See Note 232.
239 See Note 19.
240 Potato war — the name given ironically to the so-called war for the Bavarian succession between Prussia and Saxony, on the one hand, and Austria, on the other, in 1778 and 1779. The military actions consisted mainly of troop movements and of soldiers’ quarrels over potatoes. The war ended with the Peace of Teschen, compelling the Austrian Habsburgs to abandon their claims to Bavarian possessions.
241 The reference is to the deputation of the Right-wing representatives of the Slovak national movement to the negotiations with Austrian ruling circles in Olmütz in March 1849 (see Note 156).
242 See Note 114.
243 See Note 68.
244 The foundation of a Croatian-Slavonian-Dalmatian triune kingdom was discussed in the Croatian Sabor (see Note 67) as early as the summer of 1848. The scheme under consideration reflected the desire of the top bourgeoisie and landowners in the South-Slav lands for autonomy within the Austrian’ monarchy and a moderate Constitution. The scheme was regarded as part of a broader programme for integrating all the South-Slav lands of the Austrian Empire. The centralising Constitution imposed in March 1849 dealt a heavy blow to the Right wing of the South-Slav national movement, which cherished hopes of obtaining autonomy in collaboration with the Austrian ruling circles. The latter, however, needed the Southern Slavs for the struggle against revolutionary Hungary and Italy, and therefore supported the illusion that this scheme for autonomy could he put into effect. ‘ The Croatian Sabor, in particular, was allowed to negotiate unity with the representatives of Dalmatia. When the uprisings in Hungary and Italy were suppressed, the Austrian authorities curbed all attempts on the part of the South-Slav adherents of autonomy to implement their plans. Engels calls the newly conceived state Raubstaat meaning either a robber state or a dwarfish, dependent state.
Pandours — irregular infantry units of the Austrian army recruited mainly in the South-Slav provinces of the Austrian Empire.
Serezhans — see Note 22.
Haiduks — South-Slav guerillas fighting against Turkish conquerors in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. In the Austrian Empire, this name was given to people inhabiting an autonomous district in Hungary who provided special military contingents for the army.
Red-coats — see Note 45.
245 An allusion to German moderate constitutionalists (contemptuously called wailers by democratic circles), including members of the Frankfurt parliament, advocates of uniting Germany in the form of the German Empire. Engels ironically compares the state they planned to form with the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (962-1806) which included, at different times, the German, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian and Bohemian lands, Switzerland and the Netherlands and which was a motley confederation of feudal kingdoms, church lands and free towns with different political structures, legal standards and customs.
246 An ironical comparison with the Swiss separatist union — Sonderbund (see Note 35).
247 The reference is to the Congress of representatives of the Slav regions forming part of the Austrian Empire. It met in Prague on June 2, 1848. The Right, moderately liberal wing to which Palacký and Shafarhik, the leaders of the Congress, belonged, tried to solve the national problem through autonomy of the Slav regions within the framework of the Habsburg monarchy. The Left, radical wing (Sabina, Frich, Libelt, Shtúr and others) wanted joint action with the revolutionary and democratic movement in Germany and Hungary. The radical delegates took an active part in the popular uprising in Prague (June 12-17, 1848) against the arbitrary rule of the Austrian authorities, and were subjected to cruel reprisals. On June 16, the moderate liberal delegates declared the Congress adjourned indefinitely.
248 Otochac gentlemen (Otochaner) — soldiers of the Austrian border regiment formed in 1746 and stationed in Otochac (Western Croatia). They were recruited mainly from the South-Slav subjects of the Austrian Emperor.
249 See Note 220.
250 See Note 70.
251 When the Austrians heavily bombarded Cracow during the national liberation uprising in April 1848, Castiglioni was military commandant of the Cracow fortress.
252 See Note 9.
253 See Note 47.
254 The Gustavus Adolphus Union — a religious organisation formed in 1832 to help Protestant communities in Catholic regions of Germany; Rupp, formerly pastor in Königsberg (he was removed from his post for criticism of church dogmas), was expelled from this Union in 1846.
255 “Friends of Light” — a religious trend which arose in 1841 and was directed against pietism; the latter, being supported by Junker circles, was predominant in the official Protestant church and was outstanding for its extreme reactionary nature and hypocrisy. The “Friends of Light” movement was an expression of bourgeois discontent with the reactionary order in Germany in the 1840s; in 1846-47 it led to the formation of the so-called free communities, which separated from the official Protestant church.
256 See Note 52.
257 See Note 235.
258 See Note 123.
259 See Note 136.
260 See Note 172.
261 See notes 13 and 39.
262 Here the Neue Rheinische Zeitung continues its exposure of the legal and police persecution of Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle was arrested in Düsseldorf on November 22, 1848 on a charge of incitement to arm against the government during the tax-refusal campaign. The proceedings against him were delayed by the legal authorities of the Rhine Province in every possible way. During the investigation, attempts were also made to bring a case against him for insulting government officiate, etc. On Lassalle’s request, expressed in his letters to Marx and Engels, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung came out in defence of him and of other Düsseldorf democrats under persecution. The newspaper carried a number of articles exposing the abuses of power and illegal actions by the judicial and prison authorities against Lassalle (see present edition, Vol. 8, pp. 463-65,474-76). Marx and Engels also took part in the efforts of the Cologne democratic organisations to induce the legal authorities to speed up the investigation of the case. Subsequently, the newspaper several times published material exposing this trial (see this volume, pp. 344-46, 372-76 and 383-88) which was held on May 3 and 4. The jury acquitted Lassalle.
Below, the reference is to the Articles of the Code pénal (see Note 120).
263 The reference is to the resolutions on abolition of serfdom, labour services and tithes and landowners’ courts by the Hungarian National Assembly on March 18 1848 in the atmosphere of general revolutionary upsurge. The agrarian reform carried out by the Assembly (it was elected before the March revolution according to the principle of estate representation and on the whole expressed the interests of the nobility) was half-hearted, however. The peasants had to pay redemption for the abolition of certain feudal obligations, and the terms of redemption were such that whole categories of landless and land-starved peasants were virtually unable to free themselves of labour services. During the revolution, the radical wing made repeated demands for further measures in favour of the peasants, but met with resistance from the moderate elements among the nobility. Incomplete agrarian reforms were one of the inner causes of the defeat of the Hungarian revolution of 1848-49.
264 This item, occasioned by the news reaching Cologne that the Hungarian revolutionary army had taken Pest and Buda (here as well as in other military reports, Engels uses its German name — Ofen), was printed in the special supplement to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 283 dated April 27; however, the supplement came out on the morning of April 28, 1849, as is pointed out in Engels’ next war review (see this volume, pp. 350-51).
Hungarian troops occupied the city of Buda; but its fortress still remained in the hands of the Austrian garrison and was captured only on May 21, 1849. after a prolonged siege.
265 Mentioned here are two big battles during the war waged by revolutionary France against the first anti-French coalition of European counter-revolutionary states — Austria, Prussia, England, Russia and others.
At Jemappes (Belgium) on November 6, 1792 the French army defeated the Austrian troops.
At Fleurus (Belgium) on June 26, 1794 the French troops defeated the Austrian army under the Duke of Coburg. This victory enabled the French revolutionary army to enter and occupy Belgium.
266 Evidently the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung did not have Kossuth’s exact biographical data at that time and so availed themselves of the current newspaper information. In fact, Kossuth was born on September 19, 1802.
267 When Engels expressed his hope for a new revolution in Vienna if the Hungarian army moved further, and called this probable revolt the “fifth revolution”, he obviously had in mind the four revolutionary events in the Austrian capital in 1848, namely: the popular uprising of March 13 that started the revolution in Austria armed risings of workers, artisans and students on May 15 and 26 that compelled the Government to make new concessions to the democratic movement (it extended the suffrage, consented to have a one-chamber Constituent Imperial Diet, annulled orders to dissolve the Central Committee of the National Guard and the Academic Legion, etc.); workers’ disturbances on August 23 that led to the collision between workers and bourgeois detachments of the national guards; and the popular revolt on October 6-31, the culminating point of the revolution in Austria and Germany.
268 See Note 172.
269 The reference is to the former soldiers of the Academic Legion (see Note 229).
270 On April 27, 1849 the Prussian Government dissolved the Second Chamber because, at its sitting on April 2 1, it had approved the imperial Constitution drawn up by the Frankfurt National Assembly. The Chamber took this resolution on the initiative of the opposition deputies, in spite of the head of the Government’s statement that the King had definitely decided to reject the imperial Constitution.
271 See Note 52.
272 The reference is to the Prussian National Assembly dissolved by the Government on December 5, 1848. For its principle of “agreement with the Crown see Note 48.
273 See Note 88.
274 The reference is to the suppression of the national liberation uprising in the Grand Duchy of Posen in 1848 by Prussian soldiers and to the gross violation of the promise originally given to the insurgents by the Government, namely to introduce national autonomy in the eastern part of the Duchy, i.e. behind the demarcation line (see Note 237). General Pfuel, in command of the Prussian troops in Posen, ordered that all the insurgents who had been taken prisoner he shaved and their hands and ears branded with caustic (in German Höllenstein). This was how he got his nickname Pfuel von Höllenstein in democratic circles.
275 See Note 19.
276 In 1793 the second partition of Poland (the first in 1772, the third in 1795) took place. As a result, the Polish feudal state ceased to exist. The Polish lands were incorporated into Prussia, Austria and Russia. The second partition was carried out by the Russian Empress Catherine and the Prussian ‘king Frederick William II. The Austrian Emperor Francis 1 did not participate in it directly, but his policy facilitated the partition and thus prepared for Austria’s participation in the third partition of Poland.
By the second partition, the Prussian kingdom obtained Torun (Thorn) and Gdansk (Danzig) with adjoining lands, the greater part of Great Poland (provinces of Posen, Gnesen, Kalisch, Plotsk, etc.) and other Polish territories. The annexed part of Great Poland was turned into a new province — South Prussia (mentioned by Engels below), to which Warsaw was joined in 1795 after the third partition. By the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, however, these lands were taken from Prussia by Napoleon who formed them into a vassal Duchy of Warsaw but, in 1815, by decision of the Vienna Congress, part of them — the Great Duchy of Posen — was returned to the Prussian monarchy.
277 The reference here is to Prussian participation in the suppression of the Polish national liberation uprising of 1794 led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko. The insurgents wanted to restore the independence of Poland, to return the lands taken from it in 1772 and 1793, and to continue the progressive reforms interrupted by the second partition. The uprising was suppressed by troops fromtsarist Russia, Prussia and Austria which, in 1795, partitioned Poland for the third time.
278 The article mentioned was not published in the next issues of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, evidently, the newspaper was suppressed before Engels managed to write it.
279 The Deutschmeister regiment of the Austrian imperial army was formed in 1695 and originated with the military religious “Hoch und Deutschmeister” Order. The master of the Order was the regiment’s chief.
280 See Note 195.
281 See Note 136.
282 See Note 68.
283 The reference is to the decisions taken by the National Assemblies (Diets) of Hungary and Transylvania after the March revolution of 1848 to establish union between the two countries and to introduce a single administrative system. In Transylvania, the decision on the union was adopted on May 30 by the Assembly in Cluj that was elected according to the principle of estate representation which secured the predominance in it of Hungarian landowners. This decision attached a one-sided character to the union, it retained the privilege of the Hungarian minority in local administration and school matters and proclaimed Hungarian as the only official language. The ideas of the Romanian and Hungarian democrats, who regarded this union as the formation of a Hungarian-Transylvanian state based on the equality of nations, were actually rejected. This fact was used by the Right wing of the Romanian national movement in Transylvania.who aimed at a union with the Habsburgs and helped the latter make use of the Transylvanian Romanians in the struggle against revolutionary Hungary.
284 The Hungarian Constitution of 1848 — a number of laws promulgated in the second half of March 1848 by the Hungarian National Assembly in the atmosphere of revolutionary upsurge (see Note 193) concerned political organisation in the country. These laws proclaimed Hungary independent of the Austrian Empire in financial and military matters; legislative power was concentrated in the elected National Assembly, and the executive body — the Cabinet Council — was proclaimed responsible to the latter. However, Hungary remained bound to the empire by the common emperor of the Habsburg dynasty and suffrage was limited by a property qualification. Though the new Constitution preserved many of the nobility’s privileges, it was an important step towards a bourgeois transformation of the political order in Hungary.
285 See Note 136.
286 On the Prussian electoral law and the imposed Constitution (called above the “martial-law Charter of December 5”), see Note 52.
287 The Konversationshalle at Dönhoff square — a hall in Berlin where, on April 27, 1849, Left-wing deputies assembled after the dissolution of the Second Chamber of the Prussian Provincial Diet. They were turned out by soldiers and constables and the people who gathered near the Konversationshalle came under fire from the troops.
Constables in Berlin — a special detachment of plain-clothes men formed in summer 1848 for use against street gatherings and popular disturbances and for spying purposes. The name was given by analogy with special constables in England, who were used to break up the Chartist demonstration on April 10, 1848.
288 See Note 120.
289 The trial of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats (see Note 225) was held on February 8, 1849. Marx, Karl Schapper and the lawyer Schneider II were brought before the jury and accused of instigation to revolt on the basis of that committee’s appeal issued on November 18, 1848 concerning the refusal to pay taxes as a measure of struggle against the counter-revolutionary coup in Prussia. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. For Marx’s speech at this trial see present edition, Vol. 8, pp. 323-39. p. 372,
290 Code d'instruction criminelle — French Criminal Code which was in force in the Rhine Province of Prussia. In this particular case, reference is to Article 300.
291 The first time Lassalle was imprisoned from February to August 1848. Legal proceedings were instituted against him on the charge that he had instigated the theft of a box containing documents to be used in the divorce case of Countess Hatzfeld. As a lawyer, he was employed on this case from 1846 to 1854. About Lassalle’s second arrest and trial see Note 262.
292 On November 22, 1848 Lassalle made a speech at the popular meeting in Neuss (near Düsseldorf) in which he called upon the people to give armed support when needed to the Prussian National Assembly in its conflict with the Prussian Government. On the same day he was arrested.
293 After the dissolution of the Second Chamber, the Prussian Government published a Note of April 281 1849 signed by Prime Minister Brandenburg and addressed to the Frankfurt National Assembly and the German governments. The Note contained Frederick William IV’s final refusal to accept the imperial crown proffered by the Assembly, motivated by the fact that the revolutionary origin and’ contents of the imperial Constitution made it unacceptable to the King. At the same time, the Note stressed that the Prussian King certainly did not refuse to fulfil the mission of uniting the German lands, in collaboration with other German monarchs. It was suggested that the Frankfurt Assembly should give up the imperial Constitution and promote these dynastic plans. Simultaneously with this Note, the Prussian Government stepped up military preparations in order to put down the growing popular movement in Germany for the introduction of the imperial Constitution.
294 In September, the Frankfurt National Assembly discussed the Law on the Protection of the Constituent imperial Assembly and the Officials of the Central Authority (“Gesetz, bettreffend den Schutz der constituirenden Nationalversammlung und der Beamten der Centralgewalt!') and adopted it on October 10, 1848. Article V read: “Public insult to the Imperial Assembly, including that made outside its sittings, is to be punished by imprisonment of up to two years. “This law was also published in Prussia in Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen der deutschen constituirenden Nationalversammlung zu Frankfurt am Main.
295 St. Paul’s Church — see Note 30.
Carbonari — members of secret political societies in Italy and France in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Italy they fought for national independence, unification of the country and liberal constitutional reforms. In France their movement was primarily directed’ against the rule of the restored Bourbon dynasty (1815-30).
296 In connection with the coup d'état that began in Prussia in November 1848, the Frankfurt National Assembly sent a delegation to Berlin to mediate in the conflict between the Prussian Assembly and the Government (see Note 42). On his return to Frankfurt, Bassermann, a moderate liberal member of the delegation, announced to the Assembly that the Prussian Government had a good reason for taking decisive measures, because savage-looking characters were loafing about in the streets of Berlin as they usually did on the eve of anarchist demonstrations. Hence the ironical expression “Bassermannic characters”.
297 Engels had in mind revolutionary disturbances among the broad masses in the Bavarian Palatinate caused by the declaration made by the Bavarian King Maximilian II and his Cabinet on April 23, 1849. In it they rejected the imperial Constitution and proclaimed loyalty to the former particularism of small states. The movement in the Palatinate soon led to a revolutionary upheaval there, the Palatinate’s separation from Bavaria and the formation of a local provisional government.
298 This refers to the central body of the German Confederation (see Note 237) which consisted of representatives from the German states. Though it had no real power, it was nevertheless a vehicle for feudal and monarchist reaction. After the March 1848 revolution in Germany, 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.
299 On September 18, 1848 a popular uprising broke out in Frankfurt am Main against the Frankfurt National Assembly’s ratification of the armistice with Denmark concluded in MalmiS (see Note 92). The wavering and indecision of the Assembly’s Left wing helped defeat the uprising.
300 The dissolution of the Second Chamber in Prussia on April 27, 1849 was followed by the dissolution of the corresponding chambers in Hanover and Saxony because, the ruling circles of these states refused to recognise the imperial Constitution approved by the majority of deputies. In Saxony the Provincial Diet was dissolved by order of King Frederick Augustus II as early as April 28, 1849. This act and the Government’s other counter-revolutionary measures sparked off the uprising in Dresden on May 3. It started the armed struggle for the imperial Constitution in a number of regions in Germany.
301 See Note 19.
302 See Note 50.
303 The address quoted here was composed by Lassalle in November 1848 on behalf of the Düsseldorf civic militia and sent to the Prussian National Assembly that same evening. The address was published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 149, November 22, 1848. About Lassalle’s speech at Neuss, see Note 292.
304 See Note 86.
305 An allusion to the paragraphs in Prussian Law concerning the prosecution and punishment of persons guilty of “stirring up discontent”.
306 On May 1, 1849 the Cologne municipal council, which consisted mainly of liberal bourgeois representatives, addressed all other municipal councils in the Rhine Province with a proposal to convene a meeting on May 5, 1849 in connection with the new situation that had arisen in Prussia after the dissolution of the Second Chamber. The Prussian Government banned this meeting (the ban was published in the Kölnische Zeitung No. 104, May 2, 1849). Even so, the Cologne municipal council convoked a congress of delegates from the Rhine cities on May 8, 1849 in Cologne. The Congress came out in favour of the imperial Constitution and demanded the convocation of the dissolved Provincial Diet. It was made clear that, if the Prussian Government ignored the Congress’s resolution, the question of the Rhine Province’s secession from Prussia would be raised. This threat, however, was not supported by decisive action and remained merely an empty declaration, because the liberal majority of the Congress rejected the proposal to arm the people and to resist the authorities by force.
307 On September 26, 1848 the authorities, frightened by the upsurge of the revolutionary-democratic movement in Cologne, declared a state of siege there “to safeguard the individual and property”. The military commandant’s office issued an order prohibiting all associations pursuing “political and social aims”, banned all meetings, disbanded and disarmed the civic militia, instituted courts martial and suspended publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and a number of other democratic newspapers. A protest campaign compelled the Cologne military authorities to lift the state of siege on October 2. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung resumed publication on October 12.
308 See Note 226.
309 See Note 306.
310 The organisations of the Rhine Province and Westphalia held three congresses in Cologne on Sunday, May 6, 1849: the congress of workers’ associations, the congress of democratic associations and the congress of constitutional-monarchist citizens’ associations (in Deutz, near Cologne).
311 On September 25, 1848 the Cologne authorities arrested several leaders of democratic and workers'associations and provoked premature action on the part of the workers, who began to erect barricades in the city. Marx and his associates did their utmost to prevent the Cologne workers from premature and isolated actions. On the next day, a state of siege was declared in Cologne on the pretext of “safeguarding the individual and property” (see Note 307).
312 Sans-Souci — a residence of the Prussian kings in Pot’sdam, built at the time of Frederick Il.
313 At the peak of the victorious offensive of the Hungarian revolutionary troops, the National Assembly at its grand meeting in Debreczin on April 14, 1849 adopted, on Kossuth’s initiative, a Declaration of Hungary’s Independence. The Habsburg dynasty was dethroned and Kossuth elected head of state. In fact, a republican order was established in Hungary though, for foreign policy considerations, the name “Hungarian republic” was not used in official documents.
The New Rheinische Zeitung No. 291 for May 6, 1849 published the minutes of the session of the Hungarian National Assembly on April 14, 1849 and the text of the Declaration of Independence adopted by it. It also reproduced the respective article from the Neue Oder-Zeitung, supplying it with the following introductory note by the editors (probably written by Engels): “Cologne, May 5. The Neue Oder-Zeitung contains minutes of the session of the Hungarian National Assembly held in Debreczin on April 14, which decreed separation from Austria and the overthrow of the Habsburg dynasty and nominated Kossuth president of the state. Despite the poor German translation, we reproduce below the whole article word for word.”
314 See Note 310.
315 See Note 19.
316 The author of the report cited by Engels is obviously referring to the and townspeople in Galicia, subordinate to revolutionary unrest among peasants a Austria. It was caused by rumours spreading in the spring of 1849 about the impending intrusion from behind the Carpathians of the Hungarian army and Polish legions fighting in its ranks. In April 1849, a large group of peasant recruits escaped from Chrzanov (near Cracow) and tried to make their way to Hungary.
Some were captured by the Austrian authorities; four were shot in Cracow.
317 See Note 151.
318 The reference is to the schemes for a Croatian-Slavonian-Dalmatian state under the auspices of the Habsburgs. These were put forward by the Right-wing leaders of the South-Slav national movement (see Note 244).
Rascians — see Note 54.
319 On May 3-9, 1849 an armed uprising took place in Dresden, the capital of Saxony. It broke out because the King of Saxony refused to recognise the imperial Constitution. With workers forming the most active contingent in the barricade fighting, the insurgents occupied the greater part of the city and formed the provisional government headed by a radical democrat Tzschirner. However, the moderate policy of other members of the provisional government, desertion by the bourgeois civic militia, sabotage on the part of the liberal municipal council, the treachery of the bourgeoisie in Leipzig where they suppressed the workers’ solidarity movement, weakened the insurgents’ resistance to counter-revolution. The uprising was put down by Saxon troops assisted by troops dispatched from Prussia. Active in the uprising were the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, a workers’ leader Stephan Born and the composer Richard Wagner.
320 The Palatinate Defence Council was formed at the beginning of May at people’s gatherings in Kaiserslautern. Relying on the people’s support, it demanded that the Bavarian Government recognise the imperial Constitution. However, the moderate elements on the Council strove to confine the movement to legal resistance. Only the threat of intervention by Prussia made the Palatinate petty-bourgeois democrats take more resolute action. On May 17, a provisional government of the Palatinate was formed and separation from Bavaria proclaimed.
321 See Note 40.
322 On the Dresden uprising, see Note 319.
323 See Note 320.
324 At that moment Bassermann was commissioner of the provisional Central Authority in Frankfurt (see Note 41) empowered to negotiate with the Prussian ruling circles. Despite the National Assembly’s decision, the Austrian Archduke Johann, head of the Central Authority, supported the activities of the Prussian and other governments against the imperial Constitution.
325 On March 19, 1848, during the revolutionary events in Berlin, the armed people compelled King Frederick William IV to come onto the balcony of his palace and bare his head before the insurgents who had fallen on the barricades.
326 This article was reprinted in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung No. 218, June 1, 1849 (see this volume, pp. 511-12). Later it was published in a slightly abridged form in the newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat (Zurich) No. 2, January 8, 1886 and entitled “Aus dem Ruhmeskranz der Hohenzollern”. The name of the author was mentioned in the editorial introduction.
The article was first published in English in the book: Karl Marx. On Revolution, ed. by S. K. Padover, New York, 1971 (“The Karl Marx Library” series, Vol. 1).
327 During the war between Sweden and Poland (1655-60) the Great Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick William, sided now with the one, now with the other, of the warring states. Taking advantage of Poland’s military difficulties, he broke off relations with Sweden in 1657 on condition that the Polish King renounced his sovereign rights to Eastern Prussia, which was joined to Brandenburg in 1628 but was dependent on the Polish crown. The Peace of Oliva concluded on May 3, 1660 by Sweden with Poland, Austria and Brandenburg confirmed Eastern Prussia’s independence from Poland.
328 This refers to the first partition of Poland between Prussia, Austria and Russia in 1772. It was initiated by the Prussian King Frederick II.
329 Early in 1792, supported by England and Tsarist Russia, Austria and Prussia concluded a military alliance against revolutionary France. During the war, this first anti-French coalition was joined by the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont), England, Holland, Spain, Naples and other states. However, the defeats inflicted by the French army on the allied troops and the growing Austro-Prussian contradictions compelled Prussia to withdraw from the coalition in 1795 and conclude in Basle a separate peace with the French Republic.
330 In 1788 royal edicts limiting the rights of the press and freedom of worship were issued in Prussia on the initiative of Bischoffswerder, adviser to Frederick William II.
331 See Note 137.
332 The wars waged in 1813-14 and 1815 against Napoleonic France after the defeat of Napoleon’s army in Russia in 1812 were contradictory in nature. Their character was affected by the counter-revolutionary and expansionist aims and policy of the ruling circles in the feudal monarchical states, and this is implied in this article. At the same time, especially in 1813, when the struggle was aimed at liberating German territory from French occupation, it assumed the character of a genuinely popular national liberation war against foreign oppression. Later in a series of articles entitled “Notes on the War” (1870), Engels stressed the progressive nature of the people’s resistance to the French rule and in his work The Role of Force in History (1888) he wrote: “The people’s war against Napoleon was the reaction of the national feeling of all the peoples, which Napoleon had trampled on.”
333 On May 22, 1815, Frederick William of Prussia who, during the war with Napoleonic France, had to respond to the demand for a Constitution, issued a decree promising to convoke an all-Prussia people’s representative body. the law of June 5, 1823, only provincial assemblies of the However, according to estates with limited consultative functions were formed.
The battle of Waterloo — see Note 166.
334 The reference is to the Federative Act (Bundesakte) which proclaimed an ephemeral German Confederation and virtually sanctioned the political dismemberment of Germany and the maintenance of the monarchist system in the German states. This Act was signed on June 8 at the Vienna Congress and confirmed on June 9 in the Vienna concluding document. It contained vague promises of constitutional reforms and freedom of the press, but these remained a dead letter.
335 These decisions were drawn up in August 1819 on the initiative of the Austrian Chancellor Metternich at the conference in Carisbad by delegates of the states forming the German Confederation. They envisaged the introduction of preliminary censorship in all the German states, strict surveillance over universities, prohibition of students’ societies and the establishment of a committee of inquiry to suppress so-called demagogues (participants in the opposition movement of that time).
The congress of the Holy Alliance (see Note 40), which began in Troppau in October 1820 and ended in Laibach in May 182 1, openly proclaimed the principle of interference in the internal affairs of other states. Accordingly, the congress in Laibach resolved to send Austrian troops to Italy, and the congress in Verona (1822) to effect French intervention in Spain, with the aim of crushing the revolutionary and national liberation movements in those countries.
336 According to the law of January 17, 1820 on state debt, state loans could only be made with the consent of the assemblies of estates, but this law was not observed in practice.
Seehandlung or Preussische SeehandlungsgeseUschaft (Prussian Overseas Trading Company) — a trade and credit society founded in 1772 which enjoyed 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 transformed into the official Prussian State Bank.
337 The reference is to the suppression of the Polish national liberation insurrection of 1830-31 by the Tsarist Government.
338 In a letter of January 15, 1838 addressed to the citizens of Elbing who expressed their dissatisfaction with the persecution of seven opposition professors in Hanover, the Prussian Minister of the Interior, Rochow, wrote: “Loyal subjects are expected to exhibit due obedience to their king and sovereign, but their limited understanding should keep them from interfering in the affairs of heads of state.”
339 Here the reference is to the so-called Lehnin Prophecy (Vaticinium Lehninense) — a poem in Latin which is ascribed to a certain Hermann, a monk of the Lehnin monastery (near Potsdam) who lived circa 1300. It described the crimes of the Hohenzollern dynasty which ruled in Brandenburg and prophesied their ruin in the eleventh generation.
340 In 1843 Frederick William IV, who wanted to revive the romantic aspect of feudalism, issued a decree on the rebirth of the Order of the Swan a medieval religious order of knights (founded in 1443 and dissolved during the Reformation). The King’s intention did not materialise, however.
The United Diet — see Note 88.
The “scrap of paper” — an expression taken from the royal speech of Frederick William IV at the opening of the United Diet on April 11, 1847. The King declared that he would never agree to a Constitution which he derisively called “a written piece of paper”.
341 Marx probably had in mind the idea repeatedly expressed by Hegel that, in the process of dialectical development, there is an inevitable transition from the stage of formation and efflorescence to that of disintegration and ruin. In particular, Hegel stated in Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts that the “history of a world-historic nation contains partly the development of its principle from its latent embryonic stage until it blossoms ... and the period of its decline and fall...” (Part 3, Section 3, p. 347). Marx developed this idea in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction (end of 1843-beginning of 1844): “History is thorough and goes through many phases when carrying an old form to the grave. The last phase of a world-historical form is its comedy” (see present edition, Vol. 3, p. 179).
342 The report which Engels cites from the liberal Düsseldorfer Zeitung and supplements with a call to the Cologne troops to join the popular movement, describes the initial stage of the Elberfeld uprising.
The Elberfeld uprising of workers and petty bourgeois broke out on May 8, 1849 and served as a signal for armed struggle in a number of cities in the Rhine Province (Düsseldorf, Iserlohn, Solingen and others) in defence of the imperial Constitution. The immediate occasion for the uprising was the attempts by the Prussian Government to use troops to suppress the revolutionary movement on the Rhine, to destroy democratic organisations and the press, and to disarm the army reserve troops it had itself called up which disobeyed its orders and supported the demand for the imperial Constitution. Engels played an active part in the uprising, having arrived in Elberfeld on May 11 together with a workers’ detachment from Solingen (later legal proceedings were instituted against him for this — see present edition, Vol. 10). Engels’ efforts to secure the disbandment of the bourgeois civic militia, the imposition of a war tax on the bourgeoisie, extensive armament of the workers in order to form the core of the Rhenish revolutionary army and to unite local uprisings, met with opposition from the Committee of Public Safety which was dominated by the representatives of the local bourgeoisie. Under pressure from bourgeois circles, Engels was deported from the city on the morning of May 15. As a result of secret negotiations between a deputation from the city bourgeoisie and the Government and of the capitulatory stand taken by the Committee of Public Safety, workers’ detachments including those which came to their support from other places (the Berg Country, etc.) were forced out of the city on the night of May 16 (some managed to break through to the south, to the insurgent Palatinate) and the previous order was restored in Elberfeld. The defeat of the Elberfeld uprising led to the triumph of reaction throughout Rhenish Prussia.
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung and Neue Kölnische Zeitung devoted several articles to the events in Elberfeld (see, for instance, this volume, pp. 447-49 and 508).
343 See Note 68.
344 In English this article was first published in the collection: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles from the “New Rheinische Zeitung”. 1848-49, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972.
345 The suppression of the uprising in Dresden — see Note 319.
In response to the dispatch of artillery to suppress the Dresden uprising, workers and democrats in Breslau erected barricades in the city on May 6 and 7, 1849. They were, however, considerably outnumbered by the counter-revolutionary troops and were defeated. Isolated attempts to start a revolt in Saxony (the Prussian province) also failed. In the eastern districts of Prussia, the authorities managed in a very short time to overwhelm the campaign in defence of the imperial Constitution.
346 Alongside the uprising in Dresden and other towns in the Rhine Province and Westphalia, the most powerful struggle for the imperial Constitution developed in the Bavarian Palatinate and Baden (South West Germany). Despite the limited nature of this Constitution the popular masses saw it as the only revolutionary achievement still surviving. In the Palatinate and Baden, workers, urban petty bourgeoisie and peasants rose in its defence. Soon they were joined by military units, particularly the lower ranks. In the middle of May provisional governments were set up there, the Grand Duke of Baden, Leopold, fled from the country, and. the separation of the Palatinate from Bavaria was proclaimed. However, the leadership of the movement fell into the hands of moderate petty-bourgeois democrats who were hesitant, refusing to proclaim a republic and carry through a radical agrarian reform in the interests of the peasants. They chose passive defensive tactics which confined the movement to local limits and prevented the uprising from spreading outside the Palatinate and Baden. Nevertheless, the combined Palatinate-Baden insurgent army, in which there were many workers’ units, put up a strong resistance to the Prussian-Bavarian-Württemberg mercenary troops who greatly exceeded the insurgents in numbers and strength. Engels took part in the campaigns and battles of this army. He was aide to August Willich, commander of one of the units which covered the retreat of its last detachments to Swiss territory on July 11 and 12. The insurgents’ last stronghold — Rastatt — fell on July 23.
The uprising in the Palatinate and Baden was the culmination of the German revolution of 1848-49. Its character and course were later described by Engels in the essay “The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution” (see present edition, Vol. 10). p. 426 341 In April 1849, President Louis Napoleon and the French Government decided to send an expeditionary corps under General Udino to Italy with the aim of intervening against the Roman Republic and restoring the secular power of the Pope. On April 30, 1849 the French troops were driven from Rome. The main blow was dealt them by Garibaldi’s volunteer legion. However, Udino violated the terms of the armistice signed by the French and, on June 3, started a new offensive against the Roman Republic which had just completed a military campaign in the south against Neapolitan troops and was compelled to deliver a rebuff to the Austrians in the north. On July 3, after a month of heroic defence, Rome was captured by the interventionists and the Roman Republic ceased to exist.
348 Engels’ article on the uprising in Elberfeld and Düsseldorf (see Note 342) was obviously written not later than May 10, before he left for insurgent Elberfeld via Solingen, where an armed struggle in defence of the imperial Constitution had also begun. It is possible that Engels sent the report to Cologne from Solingen, where he formed a detachment of armed workers on May 10. The next day he and this detachment arrived in Elberfeld where he stayed till the morning of May 15. The article was published in the special supplement to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 295, May 11, and probably the editors themselves supplied it with the same date.
349 Marx has in mind the close bond between the three monarchs — the Prussian King, the Russian Tsar and the Austrian Emperor.
350 The majority of the Prussian National Assembly which continued its sittings in Berlin despite the King’s order to transfer the Assembly to Brandenburg was dispersed by General Wrangel’s troops on November 15, 1848.
The Second Chamber was dissolved on April 27, 1849 (about this see Note 270) on the basis of the Brandenburg-Manteuffel Government’s memorandum, sanctioned by the King.
351 The Saxon King Friedrich Augustus 11 found refuge in the fortress of K5nigstein to which he fled from Dresden during the uprising in May 1849.
Imperial Max in Munich — King of Bavaria, Maximilian II, nominated by certain deputies of the Frankfurt National Assembly for German emperorship.
352 The reference is to the Constitution imposed by the Prussian King on December 5, 1848 (see Note 52).
353 See Note 63.
354 See Note 270.
355 See Note 136.
356 See Note 306.
357 Marx’s prediction of the Frankfurt National Assembly’s inglorious end, which was brought about by its own compromise with and connivance in the counter-revolution, came true. In compliance with the orders of the Austrian, Prussian and other governments which recalled their deputies from Frankfurt, the Assembly’s liberal majority, scared by the uprisings in defence of the imperial Constitution and the possibility of a civil war, disavowed this Constitution — their own creation — and resigned. The moderate democrats who thus proved to be in the majority lacked the courage to join the insurgents and continued to cherish hopes of introducing a Constitution by peaceful means. Early in June 1849, when the threat of dissolution arose, the “rump” of the Assembly transferred its sittings to Stuttgart (Württemberg). The imperial regent, who took an openly counter-revolutionary stand, was replaced by a five-man imperial administration (Karl Vogt, Ludwig Simons and others) which, because of its refusal to take revolutionary measures and its wavering and equivocal policy, was a complete failure. On June 18, 1849, the “rump” was dispersed by Württemberg troops.
358 Charlottenburg — a royal palace in the town of the same name west of Berlin (it became a suburb in the twentieth century); built in 1695 for Sophia Charlotte, wife of the Great Elector of Brandenburg, it later became one of the residences of the Prussian kings and also a place of their burial.
359 This refers to the joint action taken against revolutionary Hungary by the three monarchs — the Austrian Emperor, the Russian Tsar and the Prussian King. This counter-revolutionary plot is also exposed in Engels’ article “The Third Party in the Alliance” (see this volume, pp. 394-95).
360 In April 1795 Prussia concluded the separate Basle peace treaty with France and withdrew from the first anti-French coalition. and in October of that same year it signed the Petersburg convention with Russia and Austria on the third partition of Poland (see Note 276).
361 “Scrap of parchment” — paraphrased expression from the royal speech of Frederick William IV at the opening of the United Diet in 1847 (see Note 340).
362 See Note 46.
363 Ça ira! — a popular song during the French Revolution.
364 See Note 342.
365 On May 19, 1849 the Neue Rheinische Zeitung came out for the last time. The Government and the police had long awaited a suitable moment to suppress the newspaper. In April and early May 1849, the Minister of the Interior, Manteuffel, repeatedly demanded that the Cologne Public Prosecutor’s office and legal authorities bring an action against its editors. By that time, the number of charges against them had grown to 23 (some were later used as a pretext for instituting legal proceedings against Marx and Engels by default, see this volume, p. 516). However, Marx’s and Engels’ acquittal by the jury in February 1849 and fear of the people’s unrest compelled the Public Prosecutor’s office to refrain from making the legal proceedings against the paper public. Only after the main uprisings in the Rhine Province had, on the whole, been suppressed, was a long-prepared measure applied against Marx — expulsion from Prussia. He was refused Prussian citizenship in due time, despite the Cologne magistrate’s favourable reply to his application for this on his arrival in Cologne on April 11, 1848. After four months, delay, the Royal Government refused to confirm the magistrate’s decision, and Minister Kühlwetter, to whom Marx sent a complaint, turned it down (see present edition, Vol. 7, p. 581). Marx continued to remain “a foreigner” who could at any moment be accused of abusing hospitality and be subject to expulsion. The Royal Government’s note to this effect followed on May 1 1, 1849 (see below) and was handed to Marx on May 16. Other editors were also persecuted. Weerth and Dronke, who did not enjoy Prussian citizenship either, were likewise ordered to leave Cologne. Legal proceedings were instituted against Engels for his part in the Elberfeld uprising. The democratic press still surviving in Germany protested against the police measures towards the newspaper’s editors (see this volume, pp. 509-13). Forced to cease publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx and Engels cherished hopes of resuming it shortly in some other place (see this volume, p. 473), but the situation in the country did not allow them to carry out these intentions. The entire issue No. 301 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung which carried this and other articles by Marx and Engels, together with the editors’ address to the Cologne workers, was printed in red ink.
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.
366 This refers to the verdicts of the Cologne jury court pronounced on February 7 and 8, 1849. On February 7, Karl Marx, editor-in-chief of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Frederick Engels, co-editor, and Hermann Korff, responsible publisher, were brought before the court on a charge of having insulted the Chief Public Prosecutor Zweiffel and having libelled the policemen who arrested workers’ leaders, in the article “Arrests” published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 35, July 5, 1848 (see present edition, Vol. 7).
On February 8, 1849 the second trial — against the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats — was held. For details see Note 289.
At both trials, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. For the speeches made by Marx and Engels at the trial, see present edition, Vol. 8, pp. 304-22.
367 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.
368 The delegates of the opposition headed by Kossuth submitted a whole programme of progressive reforms to the National Assembly (Diet) of the Hungarian Kingdom convened in November 1847 in Pressburg. However, the demands of the opposition came up against stubborn resistance on the part of the Right aristocratic wing of the Assembly, especially its Upper Chamber, and were implemented only under pressure of the revolutionary masses after the popular uprising in Pest and Buda on March 15, 1848. Even at this stage, the reforms carried out were of a narrow nature (see notes 193 and 263) because the Assembly was dominated by moderate liberal aristocrats inclined to compromise with the Austrian Court and conservative circles. Equality and autonomy were not granted to the oppressed nationalities and this allowed the Habsburg reaction to use their national movements in the struggle against the Hungarian revolution.
369 See Note 232.
370 The reference is to the appointment of Kossuth as head of the Defence Council, the actual government of revolutionary Hungary (see Note 70).
371 Engels is evidently referring to the rescript issued by the Austrian Emperor Ferdinand on October 3, 1848 when he ordered that the Hungarian Assembly be dissolved and its resolutions not sanctioned by the Crown (including that on the formation of the Defence Council) be regarded as invalid. According to this rescript, the Croatian Ban Jellachich was appointed commander-in-chief of all troops and extraordinary government commissioner in Hungary, and martial law was introduced throughout the country. The rescript was published in the Wiener Zeitung No. 275, October 5, 1848.
372 The battle of Schwechat (near Vienna), in which the Hungarian army was defeated by Austrian troops under Windischgrätz, took place on October 30, 1848, on the eve of the fall of revolutionary Vienna.
373 See Note 55.
374 See Note 9.
375 The reference is to the Declaration of Hungary’s Independence adopted by the National Assembly on April 14, 1849 (see Note 313).
376 See Note 40. 462
377 The reference is to the Polish national liberation insurrection of 1830-31.
378 The reference is to the elections to the French Legislative Assembly held on May 13, 1849. The monarchist groups — legitimists, Orleanists and Bonapartists who formed a joint “party of order” — got the majority. Though the elections were held in an atmosphere of administrative pressure and accompanied by ballot-rigging on the part of the conservative authorities, a major success was scored by a bloc of democrats and petty-bourgeois socialists called the Mountain party. About two million electors voted for their candidates, who received 180 seats in the Assembly.
379 The expectation of a new upsurge of the European revolution, which is expressed in Engels’ article closing his series about the revolutionary war in Hungary, as well as in other items by Marx and Engels in the last issues of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, was fostered by the brilliant victories scored by the Hungarian army, the uprisings in South-West Germany and the maturing conflict between the democratic and counter-revolutionary forces in the French Republic. Hopes of a more extensive and wider revolution did not come true, however. The uprisings in Baden and the Palatinate did not extend beyond local limits and the activities of petty-bourgeois democrats in France in June 1849 failed (see this volume, pp. 477-79). In the Hungarian campaign, a change shortly took place unfavourable to the revolutionary movement. Internal differences intensified between radical circles and the supporters of a compromise with the Habsburgs among the liberal landowners who were afraid that the revolution would go further. The views of the latter were also shared by Görgey, Hungarian commander-in-chief (in May also appointed War Minister), who often acted contrary to the instructions of Kossuth and other radicals. Görgey’s strategic error was that he actually refused to undertake operations to capture Vienna and use the main forces for the siege of the fortress of Buda (Ofen), and this gave the Austrian command time to bring up reserves. In mid-June 1849 the Tsarist army under Paskevich entered Hungary to offer help to the Austrian counter-revolution. The Tsarist intervention was carried out according to the agreement concluded by Emperor Nicholas 1 and Francis Joseph in Warsaw on May 21, and was in fact approved by the ruling circles of France and England who were eager to destroy the revolution in Central Europe. The combined forces of the Habsburgs and the Tsar far outnumbered those of the Hungarians and inflicted several defeats on the latter. On August 13, Görgey, who was in command of the Hungarian main army, signed a capitulation at Világos. The Hungarian revolution was suppressed amid great terror of which many Hungarian military and political figures fell victims. Kossuth, Bem, Dembiniski and the head of the last Hungarian Government Szemere who had to flee the country, were sentenced to death by default.
380 See Note 19.
381 After the defeat of the Prussian troops by Napoleon’s army at Jena and Auerstedt (October 14, 1806), a number of Prussian fortresses capitulated to the French without a fight. The fortress of Kilstrin, for instance, surrendered to a small French detachment on October 31 and Magdeburg, with its many thousand-strong garrison and artillery, was surrendered by General Kleist on November 8, after the first salvo fired by the French from light field mortars.
In the Appeal To My People (An Mein Volk) of March 17, 1813 Frederick William III promised to introduce a Constitution in Prussia, but this remained a dead letter.
382 See Note 340.
383 See Note 274.
384 “I and My house wish to serve the lord” — words from the royal speech of Frederick William IV at the opening of the first United Diet on April 11, 1847. The words “unweakened crown” (see Note 46) are also from that speech.
385 This address 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.
386 This statement was written by Marx in Bingen (Hesse) during his last days in Germany. Immediately after the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx and Engels went to Frankfurt am Main and then to insurgent Baden and the Palatinate. However, they failed in their attempts to convince the Left deputies of the Frankfurt Assembly and members of the provisional governments of Baden and the Palatinate of the need to give the movement an all-German character, to mount a resolute offensive, to bring the Assembly openly to join the uprising, to compel it to call upon the people everywhere to take up arms, set up an energetic executive power and carry out radical agrarian and other reforms.
Their bold revolutionary plan was turned down by the representatives of petty-bourgeois democrats. From Bingen, Marx decided to go to France where new revolutionary events were expected, intending to establish closer ties between the German democrats and the revolutionary circles in Paris. For his part, Engels thought it expedient to return to the Palatinate and join personally the forthcoming struggle against the counter-revolutionary troops that were then concentrating.
This statement in the press was in reply to the claims of the democratic Westdeutsche Zeitung (which first came out in Cologne on May 25, 1849) to be the successor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Its editorial board announced that the subscribers to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung would receive the Westdeutsche Zeitung instead. The covering letter addressed to the editorial board of the liberal Frankfurter Journal has survived in manuscript form. There are no data about the statement being published in this newspaper, but it was printed in the democratic newspapers of Frankfurt and Cologne.
387 This article was written by Engels in early June 1849, immediately after his return to Kaiserslautern — the capital of the Palatinate which he and Marx visited in the last ten days of May after the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ceased to appear. In the Palatinate, Engels refused to accept the civil and military posts offered him by the provisional government, because he did not want to take responsibility for the policy of the petty-bourgeois democratic members of the government, a policy which he, a proletarian revolutionary, did not support. He agreed, however, to write a few articles for the government newspaper, Der Bote für Stadt und Land, in defence of the democratic movement against attacks from conservative and moderately liberal papers.
Engels’ second article was not published because of objections that it was too “inflammatory” (see Engels’ article “The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution”, present edition, Vol. 10). This induced Engels to cease contributing to the newspaper. On June 13, Engels left Kaiserslautern for Offenbach in order to join the ranks of the Baden-Palatinate army — Willich’s volunteer corps. As Willich’s aide, he took part in drafting the plan for military operations and supervised the implementation of the most important assignments. He fought in four big battles, in particular at Rastatt. On July 12, 1849, Engels was one of the last fighters to cross the Swiss border.
388 See Note 40.
389 An allusion to Marx who, in view of the decisive revolutionary events expected in France, went to Paris about June 2, 1849. He was issued with the mandate of the Central Committee of German Democrats signed by d'Ester, the most active member of the provisional government in the Palatinate, and this empowered him to represent the German revolutionary party before the French democrats and socialists in Paris.
390 See Note 244.
391 The reference is to the Prussian General Peucker who, from July 15, 1848 to May 10, 1849, held the post of Minister of War in the so-called Central Authority (see Note 41) and was then in command of the imperial troops sent to the Palatinate and Baden to suppress the movement for the imperial Constitution there.
392 See Note 335.
393 See Note 136.
394 On June 13, 1849, in Paris the petty-bourgeois Mountain party (see Note 378) came out against the Government, on account of the bombardment of Rome by French troops sent to Italy to suppress the Roman Republic. That was done in violation of Article 5 of the French Constitution, which forbade the use of armed forces against the freedom of other nations. The representatives of the Mountain in the Legislative Assembly declared that they would use all possible means to defend the Constitution. At the decisive moment, however, the leaders of the Mountain were frightened of a new armed uprising by the Paris proletariat and called upon Parisians to confine themselves to a peaceful protest demonstration against intervention in Italy. The demonstration took place on June 13 and was dispersed by troops and bourgeois detachments of the National Guard prepared in advance. A state of siege was declared in Paris, massive repressions began against democratic and proletarian organisations, some representatives of the Mountain emigrated, others were arrested and put on trial. The Legislative Assembly was overwhelmed by the conservative “party of order”, a union of monarchist factions, which started a campaign against the democratic freedoms and rights that still survived. The events of June 13 testified to the bankruptcy of the tactics used by petty-bourgeois democrats and inflicted a severe blow to the revolutionary movement in Europe.
395 The reference is to the revolutionary group within the Commission of the Twenty-Five, the agency of the Paris Democratic-Socialist Electoral Committee. The group included members of d workers’ clubs and secret societies. The Democratic-Socialist Committee headed the campaign carried on in Paris by the Mountain for the elections to the French Legislative Assembly held on May 13, 1849 (see Note 378).
396 Conservatoire des Arts — an educational establishment in Paris.
397 The reference is to the Democratic Association of the Friends of the Constitution an organisation of moderate bourgeois republicans set up by the members of the National party (see Note 7 1) during the campaign for the elections to the French Legislative Assembly held on May 13, 1849.
398 Ledru-Rollin stated in the Legislative Assembly on June 11, 1849, that the Mountain intended to defend the Constitution by force of arms if necessary.
399 During the proletarian uprising in Paris on May 15, 1848 (see Note 77), Ledru-Rollin persuaded demonstrators who had burst into the premises of the Constituent Assembly to cease from decisive action, clear the premises and allow the Assembly to discuss their demands calmly. During the uprising of the French proletariat on June 23-26, 1848, Ledru-Rollin supported the measures taken by the Government and the Constituent Assembly to suppress the insurgents and was one of the first to send a telegraph request for military reinforcements to be dispatched from the provinces to Paris.
400 The reference is to the brutal suppression of the workers’ uprising in Lyons which broke out on June 15, 1849 under the impact of t he June 13 events in Paris.
401 In view of the great financial and organisational difficulties which arose after the introduction of the state of siege in Cologne on September 26, 1848 and the suspension of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (see Note 307), Marx was compelled to take financial responsibility for the newspaper’s publication upon himself; he invested in it all the cash he had and thus, in fact, became its owner.
402 Marx began to study political economy at the end of 1843 and, in the spring of 1844, set himself the task of giving critical examination of bourgeois political economy from the standpoint of materialism and communism. The draft written in this connection — Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (see present edition, Vol. 3) — has reached us in an incomplete form. In February 1845, just before his first expulsion from France, Marx concluded a contract with the Leske publishers in Darmstadt for the publication of a two-volume Kritik der Politik und Nationalökonomie, which he continued to work on in Brussels (see present edition, Vol. 4, p. 675). In September 1846, however, Leske informed Marx that, in view of rigorous censorship and police persecution, he would not be able to publish the work. The contract was soon cancelled. Nevertheless Marx did not cease his economic studies and added new material to his notebooks containing extracts on political economy. He set out the results of his economic research in a book directed against Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy, in his Speech on the Question of Free Trade, in his Wage Labour and Capital and other works (see present edition, Vol. 6 and this volume, pp. 197-228). Marx did not give up his intention of writing a big treatise on political economy, but during the intensive revolutionary activities of 1848-49, he had to postpone it. Marx managed to resume his economic research on a regular basis only after he moved to London in August 1849.
403 On July 19, 1849 in an atmosphere of repression against democrats and socialists following the events of June 13 in Paris, the French authorities informed Marx that an order had been issued for his expulsion from Paris to Morbihan, a swampy and unhealthy place in Brittany. Marx protested and the expulsion was delayed, but on August 23 he again received a police order to leave Paris within 24 hours. At the end of August, Marx set off for London where he spent the rest of his life.
404 This is a rough version of the Repudiation drawn up by Engels on behalf of a group of men who had served in the volunteer corps under Willich (Engels was his aide) and had taken part in the military operations of the Baden-Palatinate army. Willich’s corps consisted of eight companies numbering 700-800 people, partly students but mostly workers — German emigrants in Besançon (France), members of workers’ associations and gymnastics societies, etc. Two companies were formed from the workers of Rhenish Prussia, participants in the May uprising in Elberfeld and other towns. Engels described them as the most steady and reliable in the insurgent army. At the closing stage of the military campaign, when the insurgents were defeated at the battle at Rastatt, Willich’s corps covered the retreat of other insurgent units and on July 12, 1849 was the last to leave German territory. During their stay in Switzerland, the men and officers of the corps were criticised and abused by petty-bourgeois emigrants, leaders of the uprising in the Palatinate and Baden. This compelled Engels, who happened to be in the town of Vevey, in the Swiss Canton of Waad (Vaud), to write this Repudiation.
On Marx’s advice (see his letter to Engels dated August 1, 1849), Engels soon began to write “The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution” directed against the petty-bourgeois democrats. He finished it in February 1850 in London, where he had moved from Switzerland (it took him October and November 1849 to travel to England). The facts given in the rough copy of the Repudiation and pertaining to the moment when the Baden-Palatinate army was retreating towards the Swiss border are found in the concluding part of that work (see present edition, Vol. 10). Engels’ manuscript was discovered in the Berne Federal Archives by Rolf Dlubek, an historian from the German Democratic Republic, who published it in 1967. There are many deletions. Judging from the first lines, the document was intended to be signed by several participants in the campaign. At the end of the rough copy, there is the pencilled signature of Captain Koebler.
405 The reference is to one of the units in the insurgent army, the Baden Landsturm under Becker. During the revolution of 1848-49, Becker played an important role in the republican uprisings in South Germany. At that time he took a revolutionary-democratic stand, but his views on programme and tactics were confined to petty-bourgeois socialism.
406 The commanders of the Baden-Palatinate army that was retreating before the enemy’s superior forces held a council of war in Jestetten on July 10, 1849, on the eve of the crossing on to Swiss territory. At the council, most of the commanders spoke for ending the struggle. Among them was the commander-in-chief Franz Siegel, who was reinstated in this post when on July 1, 1849, the Polish general, Mieroslawski, who had commanded the insurgent army for some time, resigned.
407 The reference is to the acquittals of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (the accused were Marx, Engels and Korff) and of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats (the accused were Marx, Schapper and the lawyer Schneider II) at the trials held on February 7 and 8, 1849 (see notes.289 and 366).
408 What is meant here is evidently the . order issued by the Prussian Minister of the Interior Kühlwetter to the effect that the decision of the Cologne royal government authorities not to grant Prussian citizenship to Marx remained in force (see Note 365, and also the article “The Conflict between Marx and Prussian Citizenship” and the letter from the Minister of the Interior Kühlwetter to Marx dated September 12, 1848, present edition, Vol. 7).
409 In February and March 1849, a number of democratic banquets were organised in the Rhine Province to mark the anniversaries of the revolutions in France and Germany. Marx and Engels regarded these banquets as a form of revolutionary education for the masses, and gave them their general support. They themselves, however, attended only those that were held under genuinely revolutionary slogans and did not approve the attempts of petty-bourgeois democrats to exaggerate the significance of those revolutionary events that were half-hearted and incomplete in character and thereby sowed constitutional illusions among the masses. Among these events, they believed, was the March revolution in Prussia (see this volume, p. 108). Therefore, having published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (No. 245, May 14, 1849) an announcement of the banquet in Solingen in compliance with its organisers’ request, they did not accept an invitation to attend in person. Their refusal to accept this and other invitations was tactfully explained in the editorial note published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 249, second edition, March 18, 1849 which read: “The editorial hoard of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung has received from many neighbouring towns, both on the left and the right bank of the Rhine, invitations to attend banquets to be held on March 18. We are very grateful to our democratic friends for these kind invitations, but unfortunately having plenty of work to do we could not accept a single one of them.” Nevertheless, Marx, Engels and other newspaper editors took an active part in the banquet organised in Cologne at the Gürzenich hall, on March 19, not to celebrate the March revolution but in honour of those who fought on the barricades in Berlin on March 18 and 19, 1848 (see next document, pp. 490-91).
410 On the trial of Barbès, Blanqui, Raspail and other revolutionary leaders held in Bourges between March 7 and April 3, 1849, see Note 78.
411 The reference is to the banquet organised by liberals and moderate democrats in Cologne to mark the anniversary of the revolution of March 18, 1848.
Wailers — see Note 136.
412 This refers to the attempt by the Minister of the Interior, Manteuffel, to implicate Marx, Engels and their associates in the case against cobbler Hatzel, a member of the Communist League, at whose house in Berlin the Rules of the League, weapons and hand grenades had been found. On March 30, 1848, Manteuffel sent a secret police agent to Cologne to carry out house searches, seize papers and, using the evidence thus obtained, arrest the Cologne leaders of the Communist League. However, this police action misfired owing to lack of evidence.
413 These decisions by the general meeting of the Cologne Workers’ Association were connected with the policy of strengthening the class independence of the workers’ organisations and with practical steps to form a mass political party in Germany. Marx, Engels and their associates in the Communist League and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung adopted this policy in view of the changes that had taken place in the country’s political situation by the spring of 1849 (see Note 225). Marx and Engels attached great importance to the Cologne Workers’ Association in their plans for founding the party. By that time, the Association had become the bulwark of their ideological influence on the workers’ movement and one of the initiators of the union of workers’ associations in the Rhine Province and throughout Germany.
The Cologne Workers’ Association — a workers’ organisiation founded on April 13, 1848 by Andreas Gottschalk. By the beginning of May it had up to 5,000 members, most of whom were workers and artisans. The Association was headed by a President and a committee, which included representatives of various trades, and had several branches.
Most of the leading figures in the Workers’ Association (Gottschalk, Anneke, Schapper, Moll, Lessner, Jansen, Röser, Nothjung, Bedorf) were members of the Communist League. After Gottschalk’s arrest on July 6, Moll was elected President of the Association, and on October 16, on request of the Association’s members, the presidency was temporarily assumed by Marx. From February to May 1849 the post was held by Schapper.
In the initial period of its existence, the Workers’ Association was influenced by Gottschalk who ignored the tasks of the proletariat in the democratic revolution, pursued a policy of boycotting elections to representative institutions and came out against a union with democracy. Gottschalk combined ultra-Left phrases with quite moderate methods of struggle (e.g. petitions) and support for the demands advanced by workers affected by craft prejudices. From the very outset, Gottschalk’s sectarian position was opposed by the supporters of Marx and Engels. Under their impact, a change took place at the end of June 1848 in the activities of the Workers’ Association, which became a centre of revolutionary agitation among the workers, and from the autumn of 1848 among the peasants as well. Propaganda of scientific communism and study of Marx’s works were carried on within the Association. It maintained contacts with other workers’ and democratic organisations.
With the aim of strengthening the Association, Marx, Schapper and its other leaders reorganised it in January and February 1849. On February 25, new Rules were adopted declaring a higher class consciousness on the part of the workers to be the main task of the Association.
The mounting counter-revolution and intensified police persecution frustrated the Association’s activities aimed at unity and organisation of the working masses. After the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed and Marx, Schapper and other leaders left Cologne, the Association gradually turned into an ordinary workers’ educational society.
414 The reference is to the Central Committee of German Workers that 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 many workers’ associations, was founded. The programme of the congress was drawn up under the influence of Stephan Born and set the workers the task of implementing narrow craft-union demands, thereby diverting them from the revolutionary struggle. The Central Committee, which included Stephan Born, Schwenniger and Kick, had its headquarters in Leipzig.
At the end of 1848, under the impact of the revolutionary events and experience drawn from them, the leaders of the Workers’ Fraternity began to display certain revolutionary tendencies. They recognised the need to arm the workers and for them to take an active part in the political struggle. There was a great desire to set up an all-German workers’ organisation. In the spring of 1849, the Workers’ Fraternity and a number of regional congresses of workers’ associations proposed that a national workers’ congress be convened in Leipzig to found a general workers’ union. These plans, however, were frustrated by the developing counter-revolution.
415 See Note 412.
416 This resolution criticises the sectarian stand taken by Gottschalk. From the very start of the revolution, it was evident that he did not agree with the tactics pursued by Marx and Engels (see Note 413) and, for that reason, he withdrew from the Communist League at the beginning of May 1848.
In July 1848, Gottschalk, together with Anneke and Esser, was arrested and put on trial on a charge of “inciting to an armed uprising against royal power”. The trial was held on December 21-23. Under public pressure, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. After his release, Gottschalk first went to Bonn and later to Paris and Brussels, but through his associates attempted to cause a split in the ranks of the Cologne Workers’ Association and impose sectarian organisational principles and tactics upon it.
417 The reference is to the participation of Gottschalk, prior to his arrest, in the First Democratic Congress. It was held in Frankfurt am Main from June 14 to 17, 1848 and 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 under the Central Committee of German Democrats. 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, and remained ideologically heterogeneous.
418 When the Zeitung des Arbeiter-Vereines zu Köln ceased to appear because of police reprisals against the owner of its printing-press, the newspaper Freiheit, Brüderlichkeit, Arbeit which began publication on October 26, 1848, became the organ of the Cologne Workers’ Association. At the end of December, 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 responsible editor was Prinz, who supported Gottschalk and pursued the latter’s policy of splitting the Cologne Workers’ Association, Prinz refused to submit to the editorial commission which had been appointed at the committee meeting of the Cologne Workers’ Association on January 15 and included Schapper, Röser and Reiff; the committee meeting of January 29 resolved, therefore, that the Freiheit, Arbeit could not he regarded as the Association’s newspaper and that the Freiheit, Brüderlichkeit, Arbeit should resume publication with Esser as 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, carrying a variety of insinuations against Marx and Engels.
419 In a declaration written in Brussels on January 9, 1849 and published in the Freiheit, Arbeit on January 18, Gottschalk explained his “voluntary banishment” by the fact that, despite his acquittal, many of his fellow-citizens remained convinced of his guilt. He declared that he would come back only if he was called by “the hitherto supreme arbiter in the country” (an allusion to the King, Frederick William IV), or by “his fellow-citizens”, by “the voice of the people”.
420 The reference is to the Workers’ Fraternity (see Note 414).
421 This receipt was made at the time of Marx’s trip to North-West Germany and Westphalia in mid-April 1849 with the aim of drawing local workers’ associations into the preparations for organising a proletarian party, of establishing closer contacts with the members of the Communist League and democrats and of collecting funds to continue the publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
422 Simultaneously with the Congress of Workers’ Associations of the Rhine Province and Westphalia (about the preparations for which see this volume, p. 392) on May 6, 1849 in Cologne a congress of the democratic organisations of these provinces, and then a joint sitting were held. Both congresses took place at a time when the authorities were preparing reprisals against those who engaged in revolutionary disturbances. It was expected that a state of siege would be declared in Cologne. The sittings of the congresses were therefore short and reports on their resolutions were not published in the newspapers. These resolutions evidently concerned urgent measures to combat the counter-revolution. The joint sitting of the congresses showed that, despite the organisational break with the petty-bourgeois democrats, the workers’ organisations led by Marx and Engels did not reject combined actions with them in the struggle against the counter-revolution.
Marx and Engels planned that the congress of the workers’ associations of Rhenish Prussia, which, as the newspaper report indicates, was attended by a considerable number of delegates, would be a new step towards the convocation of an all-German workers’ congress and a union of workers’ associations on a country-wide scale. The mounting reaction, however, upset this plan to create a mass political party of the German proletariat.
423 As the report of May 18 from Cologne published in the Trier’sche Zeitung indicates, the news of reprisals against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was circulating among journalists before May 19, when the last issue of the newspaper appeared. A Cologne correspondent of the constitutional monarchist Deutsche Zeitung put out in Frankfurt am Main wrote as follows about this in a report also dated May IS: “The editor-in-chief of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Herr Karl Marx, has received orders from our Regierungspräsident to leave Cologne within 24 hours, failing which the authorities will be obliged to resort to force. The reason given in the letter from the Regierungspräsident is that by the unbridled language predominating in recent numbers of his newspaper, by deriding and insulting the Royal Government and the authorities, as well as by openly working for the Social Republic, Herr Marx has shamelessly abused the hospitality extended to him.
Since orders for the arrest of his other colleagues as well are to be implemented and the latter therefore intend to escape, the last number of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung will appear tomorrow morning, and it will be printed in red. Furthermore, this number will contain a remarkable valedictory poem by Freiligrath. The editors and the workers are said to be intending to proceed to the Palatinate without delay” (Deutsche Zeitung No. 138, May 20, 1849).
424 The reference is to a number of Marx’s items and his speech for the defence at the trial against the Rhenish District ‘ Committee of Democrats on February 8, 1849. These were published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and proved that by effecting the coup d'état and dispersing the Prussian National Assembly on December 5, 1848, the Government of Frederick William IV had grossly violated the edicts sanctioned by the King after the March revolution introducing a constitutional system in the country. In his speech for the defence Marx pointed to the “Decision on Some Principles of the Future Prussian Constitution” adopted on April 6, 1848 and the electoral law for the convocation of the National Assembly adopted on April 8, 1848 (see Note 86).
425 This is an excerpt from the section “Continental Europe” in “The Political and Historical Survey” published in several issues of the Democratic Review: The author of the “Survey” was obviously George Julian Harney, editor of the journal.
426 On the stay of Marx and Engels in South-West Germany (Baden and the Palatinate) after being compelled to leave Cologne, see Note 386.
427 In September 1848 Marx, Korff and others were accused by the imperial Ministry of having libelled the 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 representative, 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 the public meeting in Cologne published in the Neue RheinischeZeitung No. 110, 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). For more details on the trial, see this volume, pp. 517-20.
428 See Note 92.
429 The reference is to the Democratic Society in Cologne which was set up in April 1848 and included small businessmen, as well as workers and artisans. Marx, Engels and other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung who formed the leadership of the Society strove to direct its activities towards a resolute struggle against the counter-revolutionary policy of the Prussian ruling circles and exposure of the liberal bourgeoisie’s “agreement” policy. In April 1849 Marx and his supporters, who had in fact begun to organise an independent mass proletarian party, found it necessary to separate from the petty-bourgeois democrats and so withdrew from the Democratic Society. At the same time, they continued to support the revolutionary actions of all the democratic forces in Germany.
430 This was the third time that the authorities instituted legal proceedings against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. At the first trial of Marx, Engels and Korff, held on February 7, 1849, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty (see present edition, Vol. 8, pp. 304-22). At the second trial on May 29, 1849 the Public Prosecutor’s office and the police authorities failed to sentence Marx and other newspaper editors in their absence and only Korff, the former responsible manager, was sentenced to a one-month term of imprisonment and to pay one-seventh of the costs (see this volume, pp. 519-20), so the third time it was decided to put only Korff on trial. It was thought that, by condemning him, other leading editors of the newspaper would likewise he morally discredited, above all Marx as editor-in-chief. But the reactionaries miscalculated: Korff was acquitted.
431 See Note 307.
432 The news of Marx’s arrival in Paris was evidently somewhat delayed in reaching Cologne. Judging from Marx’s letter to Engels of July 7, 1849 sent from Paris to Kaiserslautern (the Palatinate), he arrived in the French capital in the first days of June.
433 On Marx’s expulsion from Paris, see Note 403.