The Parliaments

Elsewhere, too, the betrayal by the bourgeoisie had not taken place without violent resistance from the revolutionary elements. The recall of the United Landtag, the indirect elections and the famous question of agreement had called forth stormy protests, particularly in Berlin. Nevertheless the bourgeoisie succeeded in its surprise attack because it possessed the great advantage of already being conscious of its interests as a class, while in the petty bourgeois and proletarian masses there were still only quite vague tendencies all mixed up together.

It could not be otherwise. They had been thrust from an existence that was politically totally dead into a revolutionary movement. They possessed unlimited freedom of the press and of assembly, when for centuries they had lacked any lever for involvement in public affairs. It was quite impossible for them to do any other than proceed very helplessly with the new weapons.

The petty bourgeoisie was by far the strongest class of the urban population, but its strength was cancelled out by its disunity. It was still full of guild prejudices, and in the countless towns whose main occupations were administration, the army and the court, it was very dependent on its customers among the courtiers, Junkers, officials and soldiers. A great part of this class was reactionary or rather, as soon as it rebelled, it was easily caught out by the first reactionary slogans that came to hand. But even its more developed elements were difficult to unite together; in disunited Germany, which was still so backward, their interests and thus their demands changed from state to state, even from province to province, and sometimes from town to town. And what made even the boldest petty bourgeois timid and unreliable was the revolution itself, which was smoothing not a golden path for the handicrafts, but a battlefield of the modern class struggle.

The working class was immune from such fatal surprises; but it was only where large-scale industry had sharpened its gaze that it saw the one thing that was necessary: its organization as a class of modern bourgeois society. The other and major parts of the proletariat still stood on the most primitive level of a class consciousness that was only just awakening and was still half wrapped in sleep; they wanted, as the Communist Manifesto says, to win back the vanished position of the medieval worker. This was particularly true of the rural proletariat. In the towns, the inevitable lack of clarity among workers, their inability to find their way around all the bourgeoisie’s tricks and ruses, the terrible straits in which they found themselves, all left the way open for all kinds of dubious demagogues like the veterinary surgeon Urban, the former Lieutenant Held, the confectioner Karbe and similar phantoms. Berlin now had to pay heavily for that frivolous longing for ‘genius’ that Marx had already criticized in the Rheinische Zeitung ; the intelligentsia of the capital had shot off all their ammunition to no avail, and now that the real fight was at hand, there was no powder left to flash in the pan. Immediately after the March days, too, there began the attempts of the feudal absolutist reaction to whip up the lumpen-proletariat. How could they not use the glorious opportunity offered by the bourgeoisie’s outcry of fear for its property?

In addition, the elections for the German and Prussian Assemblies were monopolising attention. The Parliaments could, and would have to, make good what had been missed out in the first weeks following the revolution. Of course, the fact that two great assemblies were in session side by side showed how thoroughly the bourgeoisie had led the whole affair astray. The Commission of Fifty demanded that the governments should not convene their states’ Landtage until the Frankfurt Parliament had determined the German constitution, and this demand would have made some sense if representatives of the German people were going to play the role of a revolutionary convention. But if, on the other hand, it was going to follow in the airy tracks of the pre-parliament and the Commission of Fifty, then the German people’s last hope lay with the Prussian Assembly, which was at least struggling on the earth here below with the mightiest crown in Germany. In an appeal to the Prussian representatives, Johann Jacoby called on them to appoint men in whom they had confidence as their ministers as soon as they assembled, and to give them unconditional carte blanche, but then to adjourn until the work of preparing the German constitution had been completed. Pathetically, he declared that never again should the fate of Germane depend on one town, on the foolhardy arrogance of the masses of the people in that town; as if it had not been the ‘arrogance’ of the Berlin proletariat, rather than the pre-parliament and the Commission of Fifty, on which Jacoby sat, which had torn Germany out of the swamp of the Vormärz! Scarcely had the echoes of his thundering words died away, when the logic of facts forced this honourable man to take his seat in the Prussian Assembly.

In the elections for the two Parliaments that took place in early May, universal suffrage showed its naturally sound instincts by packing off all the romantics from the days of the Burschenschaft, including those old fossils of the wars of independence, Arndt and Jahn, all the celebrities of the Landtage and the Vormärz universities, to the apparently more important but in fact impotent Assembly at Frankfurt. To the Prussian Assembly new, and in part very practical, people were elected. This was the first but also the last time the rural proletariat was to be represented in parliament, by a delegation of some fifty members. By contrast, there were as good as no Junkers there; a mere one was elected in the Junker paradise of Silesia. Even the Vendée of Farther Pomerania had grown rebellious. From Lauenburg there came a village schoolmaster, from Schlawe a cottager, from Rügenwalde the clerk of the court, from Neustettin a half-peasant, from Belgard a master-butcher and in amongst them, from the Junker stronghold of Stolp, the Assessor Lothar Bucher, who, although the Junkers’ judge, had won the love and the confidence of their tenants.

It would be wrong to speak of a party political struggle during the elections, simply because there were no parties. Even in Berlin, two men were elected by the same voters in the same poll, one on the extreme Left and the other on the extreme Right of the new assembly. The Nationalzeitung, the new organ that the Berlin bourgeoisie had set up because the Zeitungshalle was too heretical and the old philistine sheets were too narrow-minded, was still so much feeling its way in the dark that it lamented Waldeck’s election in Berlin as a victory for reaction. Universal suffrage could only work with the materials that lay to hand, and there was no great choice. If the new organ of popular representation was to clear out the old state, it needed trained forces. It was really not as short-sighted as it looked when actual members of the ruling class, the administration, the church, the school system and the state found a special resonance among the voters, especially if they had been harassed by romantic reaction for real or alleged free-thinking. There were many parsons, teachers and judges among those elected. Moreover, the guild-like isolation of the legal profession had given rise to a kind of judicial proletariat, from which a whole swarm of dissatisfied Assessors arrived at the Assembly. The bourgeoisie of the cities, conscious of its great lack of education, also preferred to elect academically-trained members of the legal bureaucracy as its parliamentary representatives.

Explicable – and even to a certain extent inevitable – as the predominance of officials in the Berlin Assembly was, it brought severe disadvantages. Legalistic formalism led it astray more than once, the teachers and parsons proved in the main extremely unreliable customers, and above all Prussian bureaucrats always remain Prussian bureaucrats – people who, in the phrase of one of the best of their number, have had all their intellectual and moral backbone broken in a process of elaborate dressage. At a decisive hour, that was to prove fatal.

Only gradually did four factions emerge in the Prussian Assembly, with very vague boundaries and programmes that sounded more or less the same, but which nevertheless betrayed their social origins. The very numerous Right wing, which made up nearly half the Assembly, was purely ministerial, in principle rejected feudalism and all that went with it, but in practice was prepared for any possible compromise with the King and the Junkers. At its head stood the Rhenish lawyer, Reichensperger, the Silesian factory owner Milde, the Pomeranian Professor Baumstark and Grabow, the Lord Mayor of Prenzlau. Milde was the Assembly’s first President, Grabow its second.

Next to the Right stood the Right Centre, which differed from it about as much as the dynastic opposition in France differed from Guizot’s loyal majority. This faction wanted to eat out of the same dish as the King and the Junkers, but they wanted to dig their spoon in a bit further than the Right. Its leader was the Councillor for Building and Administration, von Unruh, born an East Prussian, the son of a General and originally a rigid bureaucrat, until railway construction involved him deeply in the interests of the bourgeoisie, whose table he found more richly and appetisingly laid than that of the bureaucracy. Ready at any moment to betray the masses, he still haggled obstinately over the price of his betrayal. Plagued by secret vanity, he played the loyal man of integrity, for whom the common cause was everything and his own person nothing. Next to and behind him stood the Berlin city councillor Duncker and the Stettin Town Clerk, Gierke, and then too the Assessor Pilet from Stendal, whose previous work had been regulating relations between the great landlords and the bourgeoisie, and had learnt in practice how to deal with the Junkers.

In the Left Centre sat the ideologists of the bourgeoisie. One could compare this faction with the republican opposition under Louis Philippe, except for the fact that they wanted nothing to do with a republic. What they represented were the interests of the whole bourgeois class, and they represented them from a higher standpoint of principle than was represented in the wheeling and dealing of the Right and the Right Centre. Bucher and Rodbertus may well have been the finest brains of the Assembly, but they came from Pomerania, politically the most backward province, and they lacked any revolutionary energy. They possessed a certain degree of understanding of political development, but in the mannor of the academic in his lonely study, not like the fighter in the rough-and-tumble of the market place. Rodbertus never spoke on the social and economic questions that came before the Assembly, and which he could have addressed better than by any other member. He preferred, instead, to get involved the German question, where his utopian bent could pile one castle in the air on top of another. Bucher’s logic had a sharper cutting edge, but on the other hand he lacked the social independence that Rodbertus enjoyed. Seldom has ‘German misery’ revenged itself on so great a talent as Bucher. From earliest childhood he had had to fight his way through painfully limited circumstances, until the native hue of resolution had faded in his cheeks. Not nearly so well informed and far-sighted as Bucher and Rodbertus, a petty bourgeois through and through, but a man of practical talent, was the manorial court judge, Schulze, from Delitzsch, in Saxony. In the last days of the Assembly, Ziegler, Lord Mayor of Brandenburg, also joined the Left Centre as a result of a bye-election. He was the true and gifted type of the Prussian democrat, who only dared to enter the promised land of bourgeois freedom under the crozier of ‘Old Fritz’. He was a man who was far Schulze’s superior in organizational talent, shared Rodbertus’ and Bucher’s deeper conception of social questions, and yet, like Rodbertus in particular, was hypnotized by the concept of the Prussian state.

The Left formed the fourth faction. It bore no comparison at all with the republican-socialist party under Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc. Its narrow-minded petty-bourgeois character was only emphasized all the more by the republican or even communist outlook of some of its members. In its mass, it represented the more radical elements of the North German petty bourgeoisie, and it was superior to the Centre Left in determination but not at all in political vision. This was also true of its leaders, Johann Jacoby and the Senior Judge Waldeck. Jacoby understood very little of the class struggles of the day. He was the strict man of principle, but it was a principle tied to the petty bourgeoisie, which bent like a slender sapling when it should have measured up to the revolutionary convulsions of the working class, sometimes making them out to be ‘justified demands of the working class’ and sometimes ‘the anarchistic activities of a work-shy mob’. If Jacoby clung too fast to abstract formulae, Waldeck on the other hand suffered from a concrete surfeit of history. His admirers compared this born Westphalian with the farmer in Immermann’s story, and not without reason. In his own way he was a very powerful figure, but he was full of caprices. A fanatical Prussian and a rigid monarchist, he brandished ‘the sword of Frederick the Great’ just as the farmer in the story did Charlemagne’s. As ‘King of the Westphalian peasants’ he could understand the peasant as the farmer in the story, but he could not understand the peasant as proletarian. He denied universal suffrage as a social weapon of the working class. He was an orthodox Catholic; he was, in particular, also a self-conscious bureaucrat, who thought himself too ‘refined’ to speak at popular meetings. He translated the parliamentary mandate into a priesthood that cut itself off from practical life.

These four factions only crystallized gradually out of the Assembly, first of all the Left and the Right, the dividing line between them being drawn by the struggle over governmental ‘agreement’. The two Centre groups wavered for a long time in their numbers and in their policies, with a strong inclination to the Right, until they were thrown to the Left by the growth of the counter-revolution. At first the Left numbered scarcely forty to fifty members, and the two centre groups were each about as strong.

The contempt with which the Camphausen ministry treated the representatives of the people contrasted very strangely with its tender solicitude for the dynasty. It did nothing to make their first steps easier, to guide the confusion that was bound to arise when an Assembly of four hundred people has to find its way in the unaccustomed territory of Parliament. The ministry did not even open the necessary negotiations with the Right, who for the time being were in control. It contented itself with presenting the draft constitution, a misconceived copy of the Belgian constitution, which in the end nobody agreed with.

Understandably, the mass of the Berlin population showed no great interest in the Assembly, from which they expected little. It became a source of great weakness for the Berlin Parliament and for that in Frankfurt that they met in towns that lacked vigorous popular life. They lacked the fiery soil that the English and the French revolutions had possessed in London and Paris. The Berlin masses did indeed try occasionally to get the Berlin Parliament moving by violent means, but they were not organized, and every outbreak only gave lurking reaction an opportunity to play false and provided pretexts for breaking up the Assembly.

The most violent of these outbreaks, the attack on the Arsenal, took place on June 19. After the Assembly had painfully brought itself to order, the Left introduced the motion that, in recognition of the revolution, it should be recorded in the minutes that the fighters of March 18-19 had rendered great service to the Fatherland. The motion was not defended with any particular energy or clarity. In good-humoured confusion, Schulze-Delitzsche even tried to gain recognition not only for those who had fought on the barricades but also subsequently, which more or less turned the motion in its head. The masses understood the motion much better, and during the two hours of debate they surged round the hall in the greatest excitement. The motion was lost by 196 votes to 177. The Assembly moved on to next business on the grounds that while the March events, which (in conjunction with the royal agreement) formed their current legal basis, were undeniably important, the Assembly was not competent to pass a verdict on them, but only to work out a constitution in collaboration with the Crown. Thus the need for governmental agreement was recognized, and the crowd became angry. Minister von Arnim who felt impelled, while leaving the session, to enrage them still further with a few scornful phrases, had to take to his heels, as did the preacher Sydow, who, as the parson at the funeral of the dead fighters on the barricades, had extolled them as much as he now had vilified them as a member of the Assembly.

This act of very tame popular justice was used by the Right at the Assembly session of June 14 to claim that popular representation was threatened and to demand measures for its protection. The Left succeeded in fighting off this attack, but the masses’ excitement found relief in the attack on the Arsenal. This betrayed a lack of confidence in the Left which was proved a few days later to be thoroughly justified. Without a word of protest, with little more than a slight hissing, the Left listened to a commissar of the War Minister drivelling on about a band of thieves who had plundered the Arsenal. It is possible that by then the counter-revolution had already succeeded in infiltrating agents provocateurs among the attackers, and these champions of the throne and the altar may also have had sticky fingers. Essentially, the attack on the Arsenal was an instinctive revolutionary counter-stroke to the treachery of the bourgeoisie, who had sealed their rejection of the fighters on the barricades with a majority vote in the Assembly. At first the attack was successful, and the military garrison of the Arsenal capitulated. But before the rebellious crowd could arm themselves fresh troops arrived and drove them out. As usual, the Bürgerwehr was less than impressive on this occasion, too.

Nevertheless, the attack on the Arsenal stiffened Parliament’s backbone to a certain extent. Most of the members of the Right, who even then were planning to adjourn the Assembly to a provincial town at a safe distance, stayed away from the session of June 15 out of fear. The Left, however, got a proposal adopted to renounce all security measures for the Assembly and place it under the protection of the people of Berlin, and also successfully moved that the government’s draft constitution was to be treated as ‘valuable material’ and that it should be referred to a commission for revision or re-drafting. The Left and the Left Centre could see that just any old piece of paper would not do. Waldeck called out: ‘We must start building from below; first we must create the local communities and smash up the sad remains of the feudal state. If we do not do that we have done nothing; like ploughing in the sand, we are merely building in the air.’ Similarly Bucher thought: ‘We should not let a single day go by without smashing some remnant of the defeated past’. Rodbertus had already proposed a motion that a Statute of Trades, a local government system and a taxation system, a law on education and a law on defence and so forth should be decided upon as organic parts of the constitution by the Assembly.

It was a powerful first assault which might have gone much further than the bourgeoisie wanted. They hastened to meet the danger with an even higher degree of treachery.