The Treachery of the Bourgeoisie

On the Berlin barricades the German revolution had won firm ground beneath its feet. It travelled stormily through the land and destroyed the roots of feudal society. The peasant class arose to revenge innumerable wrongs. In Southern Germany, in the Odenwald, in the Black Forest, new flames broke out on the old soil of the peasant war. The rent-collectors of the nobility and of the lords of the Estates were hunted down, the land and tithe registers were destroyed, as were the castles of the great landlords. In the Kingdom of Saxony the fire consumed individual feudal castles. The peasant movement was strongest in Prussia east of the Elbe, and here it was particularly strong in Silesia. The peasants went to their landlords’ estates and forced documents from their tormentors renouncing all the fees and services of serfdom. The Feudal Party, the only organized party in Prussia, was wiped out in the countless peasant revolts, and with it fell the last pillar of the Vormärz state.

Meanwhile in Berlin itself the contradiction between the bourgeois and the proletarian class came clearly to the fore. Scarcely had the intoxication of that exciting March night begun to die down, than the middle class began to call for an ‘end to the revolution’, for peace at any price. The bourgeois class held the municipal offices, and used them to seize for themselves the 25,000 rifles delivered from the army’s arsenals for the Bürgerwehr (citizen’s defence force). They made entry into the Bürgerwehr conditional upon citizenship of a particular locality, personal guarantee of the safe return of the weapon issued and self-employed status – conditions which were widely used to exclude the working class from the arming of the people. On the morning after the victory, the victors were cheated of the prize.

The new Bürgerwehr immediately began to behave as a police force, in a way which even aroused a certain nostalgia for the Vormärz gendarmerie. It moved against ‘agitators’ with animal fury. And this despite the fact that the alleged ‘excesses’ of the March fighting amounted to no more than the demolition of a retired officer’s house and a glove-maker’s shop because they had betrayed fighters on the barricades to the troops. (The Prince of Prussia’s palace was threatened with a similar fate, but it was averted because one of the leaders of the masses had the presence of mind to declare that it had become the property of the nation.) Moreover, the revolution exercised its usual ennobling power in that March week: common crimes, and particularly crimes against property, became fewer. Characteristically, in the days leading up to March 18, the Minister of the Police, von Bodelschwingh, while still ‘denying the political danger from the great masses, saw a threatening sign in the fall in crimes against property.’ Exactly a month after March 18, the Berlin Police President declared: ‘In general the behaviour so far of journeymen and workers rightly deserves public recognition’. Three weeks after the freedom of the press had been achieved, the Public Prosecutor in the Berlin Criminal Court had to tell the good citizens, as a result of their countless denunciations of ‘press infringements’: ‘If you want freedom of the press you have to put up with its abuse; in any case, the novelty of the thing probably leads to an overestimation of the danger.’ Nevertheless the Bürgerwehr continued to make a great uproar over the threat to property; ‘all’s quiet in the town except the Bürgerwehr’, a patrol leader reported one night, fed up with his comrades’ antics. Nothing characterizes the spirit of these brave troops better than the roll of their self-elected commanders: the first was the President of Police, von Minutoli, then the Town Commandant, von Aschoff, then the ultra-reactionary Major Blesson and finally, when these bourgeois heroes were overwhelmed by their own divinity, the philistine Rimpler, flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood, the heart of a frightened rabbit when facing the armed reaction, and a roaring lion towards the defenceless proletariat.

The scandal grew so great that Berlin’s only political newspaper, the Zeitungshalle, founded a year previously, printed an article against the preachers of peace. It said, very rightly, that if the middle class had pulled backwards with all its strength on the first day after the revolution, it was fear of the workers that drove them to this suicidal conduct; that there was, it is true, a breach between the bourgeoisie and the working class, but that in order to bridge it the bourgeoisie should move not backwards but forwards. The editor of the Zeitungshalle was nearly lynched by indignant members of the Bürgerwehr for this article, which was as calm as it was sensible. His democratic friends stormed his house to break off their friendship, and the Stock Exchange solemnly swore that anybody who did not join in a boycott of the Zeitungshalle was a ‘rogue’.

The municipal authorities were naturally worthy of the Bürgerwehr. In their pronouncements they persisted, despite all knowledge to the contrary, in the claim that the political movement of the masses was directed against the property of the bourgeois class, and as early as March 21 they had, through secret intrigues, agreed with the Crown that the Guards Regiments which had only recently been driven out of the town should march back in. In order to throw the necessary dust into the people’s eyes, the City Council’s printed proclamation ran: ‘His Majesty has ordered that, before they enter the city, the soldiers must swear loyalty to the German constitution’, in other words, to a constitution that did not exist. In the last moment, however, they lost their nerve, and the proclamation went into the waste paper basket. On the other hand an Address to the Crown was now put together, with 14,000 signatures, asking for the entry – not indeed of the troops who had been driven out – but of ‘regiments friendly to the citizens’. A very dubious demagogue, the veterinary surgeon Urban, was of great assistance in this, and the majority of the Bürgerwehr also declared itself to be in favour. For all their toying with coloured piping and epaulettes, in which they even outdid the moustachioed Guards officers, it was better to be safe than sorry; it was better to have their holy property guarded by real soldiers than by their volunteer heroism. Thus on March 30 a regiment of infantry and one of cavalry, with two further battalions and a squadron, marched back into the capital.

There could be no more favourable augury for the bourgeoisie, which promptly joined the government. Now that it was called upon to rule, the Rhenish bourgeoisie was once more the most developed and mature element within it. Camphausen and Hansemann, the Presidents of the Chambers of Commerce of Cologne and Aachen, were immediately invited by Count Arnim to enter the ministry, but prudently declined to serve as figure-heads under a great landlord who could put on a liberal mask from time to time but who, in essence, retained his feudal caste outlook. Count Arnim fell as a result of this resistance. On March 29, Camphausen was appointed Minister-President and Hansemann Finance Minister. Count Schwerin and Auerswald, two leading opposition figures in the United Landtag, stayed on from the outgoing cabinet as Ministers of Culture and the Interior respectively, and Arnim-Heinrichsdorff, the former Ambassador to Paris, became Foreign Minister.

These people deserved a place in the first bourgeois ministry, which they had worked hard to prepare even under Count Arnim. On March 21 they had organized the King’s theatrical procession through the main streets of Berlin. Preceeded by an advance guard of Generals and Ministers wearing Black-Red-Gold armbands, in front of him a Bürgerwehr man with the tricolour flag, beside him the policeman Stieber and behind him the veterinary, Urban, with a painted Imperial Crown, the King had announced at the Town Hall and the University, like a fairground huckster, that Prussia was to be dissolved into Germany, and that he wished to head a constitutional Germany. For all the innocent pleasure it afforded the inhabitants of the Berlin streets, this tomfoolery loaded new contempt on the head of a King, who, only recently humiliated into the very dust, once more indulged in pompous processions. From all over Germany a contemptuous echo greeted his solemn promises.

But those who staged this theatrical jaunt knew very well what they were doing. What the King got out of it was the invitation, in a letter to the Duke of Augustenburg, to involve himself in the struggle of the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein against Denmark. Publicly, this took place under the aegis of the German Confederation for the salvation of people of German descent from foreign rule by the Danes. The secret aims were, on the one hand, to give the humiliated Guards – who had been driven out of Berlin – some military satisfaction, and on the other hand to stamp out a focus of revolution in Schleswig-Holstein, whose cause was very popular in Germany. Before the Prussian troops crossed the frontier, the Prussian Ambassador von Wildenbruch wrote a secret note to the Danish cabinet telling them not to take the war too seriously. What the Prussian government wanted above all, he said, was to preserve the Duchies for the King of Denmark, and the only reason they had undertaken the campaign was to prevent a dangerous intervention by radical and republican elements in Germany.

While the Arnim ministry had thus already begun to weave the web of counter-revolution, his cabinet proved much too weak to resist the harsh blows of the revolution without the help of the bourgeoisie. Like the deputation from Cologne on March 18, a deputation from Breslau intervened decisively in the Crown’s policies on March 22, and with the same means. They threatened that Silesia would secede unless popular representation based on direct suffrage replaced the United Landtag and unless there were guarantees of complete security of the person, trial by jury, especially for political offences, general arming of the people with free election of officers, immunity from dismissal for judges, abolition of all feudal privileges in the legal system and law-enforcement and an oath of loyalty to the constitution on the part of the army. Count Arnim resisted tooth and nail, but the deputation, which was led by a former Police President and consisted mainly of municipal officials, was so pressing, and the news from Silesia so disturbing, that the King had to give way willy-nilly.

In an Order in Council immediately addressed to the Silesian delegation the King promised ‘a constitutional system on the broadest foundation’ and a popular electoral law intended to create representation embracing all the interests of the people and based on direct suffrage. This assembly was to decide on the other points raised by the Silesian deputation, which the Order in Council repeated. Moreover, the King promised to have the standing army swear an oath of loyalty to the future constitution, and his only reservation was that the new electoral law should be laid before the United Landtag for consideration. Such a programme was impossible under Count Arnim. He hung on for a few more days, but his own colleagues, particularly his namesake, forced him out. These bourgeoisified aristocrats did not hesitate to place themselves under bourgeois command.

Of the two new ministers, Camphausen was the more cultured and Hansemann the more determined. Hansemann wanted to impose the material interests of the bourgeoisie without fear or shame, while Camphausen still had the school-prefect’s outlook of the bourgeois ideologist. But they were both united in believing that the victory of the proletariat would have to be conjured away in favour of the bourgeoisie. They therefore refused to convene the new popular assembly on the basis of the historic fact of the revolution, but would only do so on the ‘basis of law’. They wanted to maintain the ‘continuity of a state of legality’ and all the other high-sounding slogans. Therefore they insisted that the United Landtag would have to discuss an electoral law and draft the principles of the new constitution. The famous ‘legal basis’ consisted in the artful calculation that, if it was imposed on the proletariat by a feudal ghost, the conjuring out of existence of the revolution by the bourgeoisie would retain an appearance of respectability.

As was to be expected, the United Landtag proved to be nothing but a ghost. The feudal party was beaten all the way down the line. Even that feudal firebrand, Bismarck, admitted with frank grief that no human power could resurrect the past that had been buried and added, with a bitter-sweet air, that he would support the Camphausen ministry, since there was no other hope of ‘legal and ordered conditions’. The United Landtag was like a galvanized corpse, just about able to write down the orders the bourgeoisie dictated to it. In the law of April 6 the foundations of the new constitution were established: absolute freedom of the press without bond; trial by jury even for political offences; independence of the judiciary and the removal of the disciplinary law imposed on it; freedom of association and assembly and the free enjoyment of all civil rights regardless of religious creed. And finally, all this was crowned with the assurance that the establishment of the budget and the raising of taxes were to be dependent on approval by the future representatives of the people. In addition the law of April 8 granted universal, equal, secret but indirect suffrage for an assembly which was to establish the new constitution in agreement with the Crown.

Fear of the victorious proletariat can be traced very clearly in these laws. They are the practical outcome of the promises the King had made to the Silesian delegation. Especially the law concerning new popular rights, which was to be put into effect straight away, was born of fear. It is characteristic of the situation that Rodbertus , presumably the only member of the United Landtag who fundamentally supported universal suffrage, was certainly the only one who spoke against it, since he did not think that the masses were yet ripe to use it. The ministry had already smashed a huge hole in universal suffrage by making elections indirect. They translated the whole legislation of April 6 and 8 into completely cloudy regions anyway by making the future constitution dependent on mutual agreement between the Crown and the people’s representatives.

This mutual ‘agreement’ was a bourgeois trap on a par with the concept of ‘legality’. As a spokesman of the Left later said in the Berlin Assembly, it was a blemish idly tacked on to the great movement, a word neither old nor new and not even German, a real abortion of a word, tied like an umbilical cord to the new in order to suck out the substance of the old. With this ‘agreement’ the state of things was fundamentally thrown back to that noon of March 18, the victory of the people was rendered void, the Crown restored in all its might. It was again Rodbertus who put the question fair and square in the United Landtag: what would happen if the Crown and the Assembly did not agree? Hansemann answered with cold-blooded scorn: that point of view would prevail that had the greatest strength, whereupon Rodbertus concluded with a sigh that this could only happen through a second revolution. Nevertheless he still based himself on the principle of the agreement. A utopian in political as well as social matters, he wanted to save ‘Prussia’s legal virginity’ – that very same Prussia whose official history since the sixteenth century has been an uninterrupted series of illegalities. In order to be able to deny the ‘first revolution’, the revolution of the people, he prepared the way for the ‘second revolution’, the counter-revolution of the Crown.

The bourgeoisie would not have been the bourgeoisie if it had not, after this betrayal of the working class, strengthened its own hold on the sinews of things. The ministry demanded of the United Landtag a credit of forty million talers, fifteen million to equip the army and twenty five million to control internal anarchy by directing liquid capital to trade and industry in order to drown the unemployed and rebellious proletariat in its floods. Since not only the good-humour of the monarchy but also the legality of the bourgeoisie find their limits where money matters are concerned, Camphausen and Hansemann demanded this credit from precisely the same Landtag that had declared itself a year earlier incompetent to approve such credits, and they received the sizeable sum of pocket money without much oratory.

They were not quite so fortunate in the third intrigue in which they tried to misuse the United Landtag. Simultaneously with that body, the assembly of notables that had been called for in Heidelberg met in Frankfurt-am-Main, the so-called pre-parliament, which was based on revolution but by no means breathed the outlook of revolution. Undeveloped as political education still was in Germany, it was nevertheless impossible to shake off the conviction that if a free and unified Germany was to be created out of two great powers, half a dozen medium-sized states and a few dozen small states – in other words, a confused conglomeration of almost exclusively monarchist states and statelets – then it could only be done in the form of a republic. If therefore the pre-parliament wanted to finish the job, it would have not to ‘close’ the revolution but declare it in permanence. The German bourgeoisie lacked the stamina for that. A minority, particularly recruited from the South German petty bourgeoisie, did indeed demand a German Republic, but in a historically long outmoded form – as a federation of republican cantons on the Swiss pattern. The great mass of the bourgeoisie and the majority particularly of the North German petty bourgeoisie preferred to give up unity rather than give up the monarchy. Their ideal was a rump of Germany. Renouncing German Austria, which Metternich’s infamous policy had sealed off from the rest of Germany with its intellectual censorship and its material customs barriers , they wanted a hereditary Prussian Empire, which would remove the all-too-oppressive feudal and particularist chains from the bourgeois class, but otherwise keep as much of the old intact as possible. Never at a loss for high-flown phrases, they bowed in respect before a revolution ‘which had stopped respectfully at the steps to the throne’. They only veiled their ideal somewhat because the Prussian King had, for the moment, sunk too far beneath general contempt.

These contradictions clashed bitterly in the pre-parliament, but the victory of the monarchist faction was determined in advance. With approximately 370 votes they were much stronger than the 150 republican votes. And even then, the constituencies of these dwarf republicans were disproportionately strongly represented; for 52 Württemburgers, 72 from Baden and 84 from Hesse, there were only 2 from Austria and 141 from Prussia. The pre-parliament declined to declare either itself or the revolution in permanence. Instead it appointed a Commission of Fifty to call a German popular assembly together with the purged Federal Diet on the basis of universal suffrage, but leaving to the individual states the question of whether the suffrage was to be direct. The National Assembly was, it is true, to decide ‘solely and alone’ the future German constitution, but its sovereignty was also to extend to deciding whether it wanted to seek agreement with the governments or not. The Federal Diet added another ambiguity to this ambiguity of the pre-parliament by calling a ‘constitutional’ National Assembly but describing its purpose as being to bring about the constitution ‘between the German people and the governments’. A mutual evasion took place over this theory of agreement. The pre-parliament did not reject it unconditionally and the Federal Diet did not state it baldly. It all depended on who would finally turn out the strongest. For the moment the pre-parliament was the stronger, and its rejection of the proposal to back up its decisions by armed force was all the more senseless. It thus relegated the sovereignty of the future National Assembly to some cloud cuckoo land.

The same role that the Prussian March ministers Camphausen and Hansemann played in the United Landtag was played in the pre-parliament by the Hessian March minister, von Gagern, a ’Jupiter’, as the admiring bourgeoisie called him by reason of his thunderous voice and his bushy eyebrows, a ’really stupid fellow’ and a ’wind-bag’ as the practical Junker, Bismarck, correctly assessed him after five minutes of conversation. The North German petty bourgeoisie was especially represented in the pre-parliament by Robert Blum. He held the ponderous assembly together to a certain extent with his energy and skill, and he particularly saved it from the shame of dispersing upon the mere rumour of the approach of an armed body of the people, but after same resistance he finally accepted the decisions of the majority. The South German petty bourgeois, Hecker and Struve, were at the same time more confused and more rabid and, when they were excluded from the Commission of Fifty as a punishment for their recalcitrance, they let themselves be diverted into a republican putsch in Baden which turned out a tragic-comic failure.

Watery as the wine of the pre-parliament was, it was still too fiery for tastes in Berlin. The King of Prussia had already placed himself at the head of a constitutional Germany, and the Rhenish bourgeoisie certainly did not intend to abdicate in favour of local celebrities from Baden or Hesse. The Camphausen ministry therefore, basing itself on a decision of the Federal Diet that the latter had passed immediately before the assembly of the pre-parliament, asked the United Landtag to elect the Prussian delegates to the German National Assembly. But the revolutionary current was still too strong to accept such a challenge patiently, and Camphausen thought it advisable to give in to a protest from the Commission of Fifty. The United Landtag had to declare the election they had just carried out invalid, a further cross it had to bear until it finally sank out of sight.