Although he and Marx agreed to keep his affiliation with the communists secret, “not to spoil the things with the petit-bourgeois customers,” Becker joined the Communist League in the fall of 1850 and quickly came to play an important role. He led a League delegation to Braunschweig in May 1851 to confer with North German democrats, and prepared to hold a secret communist congress. Becker’s new ties to Marx were not just conspiratorial. At the beginning of 1851, Marx arranged with Becker to publish the New Rhineland News: Review of Political Economy, and the two made plans to bring out a multivolume edition of Marx’s collected essays. The Prussian government’s intimidation of printers terminated these efforts, although not before the initial installment of the first volume of essays appeared in print.86
Small scale when compared to the revolutionary events of 1848–49, these actions were impressive set against the backdrop of Marx’s isolation and impoverishment in London. They came to a sudden and abrupt end in May 1851, when Peter Nothjung, a League member and Cologne tailor, was arrested at the railroad station in Leipzig while carrying clandestine documents of the Communist League, enabling the authorities to arrest the last vestiges of stalwart Cologne communists over the next few weeks. They were held in jail for the next sixteen months, and finally brought to trial in October 1852 on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the government.87
The prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, in dark narrow cells, with few opportunities for exercise or fresh air. They were cut off from most visitors, including their attorneys. Particularly outrageous to contemporaries, even those unsympathetic to the communists, was that the wife of one of the prisoners, Roland Daniels, the Cologne physician, was only permitted to talk with her husband in the presence of a gendarme. By the standards of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes—and, one might add, of some twenty-first-century democratic ones—this treatment of ostensibly dangerous subversives seems rather mild. It is a tribute to the old-fashioned, gentlemanly attitudes of nineteenth-century observers that they did not see it that way.
The prisoners’ treatment and the decision to make their arrest into a major political affair came directly from none other than Friedrich Wilhelm IV. He wanted a show trial, in which the entire 1848 Revolution would be blamed on a secret subversive conspiracy. As part of his counterrevolutionary policy, Friedrich Wilhelm had reluctantly issued a constitution for his realm, but his preparations for the trial were designed to evade his role as a constitutional monarch. Rather than coordinate actions with his council of ministers, as was constitutionally required, the monarch worked with fellow Evangelicals lacking any official position, most prominently the principal of a deaf-and-dumb school in Berlin. The monarch had his own personal secret agent, Wilhelm Stieber, a former police detective, whose decades-long career was dogged by persistent accusations of illegal actions, blackmail, and a wide variety of abuses of power—a man who also had a personal grudge against Marx, dating from the 1848 Revolution.88 Stieber was ordered to provide evidence of a giant revolutionary conspiracy by whatever means necessary, but to do so without his royal master seeming to be involved. These efforts were underway even before Nothjung was arrested, and the subsequent exposure of the secret Communist League provided just the opportunity Prussia’s ruler wanted.
Unaware of these machinations at the highest levels of the Prussian kingdom, Marx saw the arrest of his followers and their trial primarily in terms of his differences with his fellow London exiles. He blamed the arrest on the ultra-revolutionary proclamations of Schapper and Willich, whose shrill statements, he felt, had alerted the police. It was hard for Marx to convey to his supporters his political strategy for the trial, since the Prussian police were lurking in wait for his letters, ready to arrest their recipients, as they ultimately did, on a tip from Jànos Bangya. Marx’s advice, parts of which did reach Cologne, was that the defendants should describe Schapper and Willich as revolutionary conspirators, planning a violent communist uprising. By contrast, Marx and his adherents were not opposing the Prussian government, but just waiting for a revolution against it to happen as the result of an economic crisis. Only then would they form a communist opposition to the radical government in power.89
The Cologne Communist Trial, which finally began on October 4, 1852, was front-page news throughout central Europe. In Cologne itself, large crowds gathered in the courthouse square, cheering the defendants and threatening the gendarmes and soldiers escorting them from jail. To make its case, the prosecution presented the defendants as dangerous subversives, who wanted to destroy religion—a sensitive issue in Catholic Cologne. The state’s prosecutor also emphasized that the communists wished to confiscate capitalists’ property, an effective move for a jury that included a leading sugar beet manufacturer, as well as prominent merchants and members of the chamber of commerce. Revisiting all the revolutionary events in Cologne during 1848–49, the prosecution, much as its royal master wished, attributed them to the secret schemes of communist conspirators. To underscore the dangers posed by the accused, the chief state’s attorney melodramatically placed a dagger before him on his desk during the first week of the trial.90
Undoubtedly the star of the crown’s case was the king’s secret agent, who often seemed more in charge of the prosecution than the state’s prosecutors. Stieber proudly flaunted a cache of secret communist documents he had acquired in London, stolen by one of his spies from the offices of the Willich-Schapper group. After relating hair-raising details of the planned insurrection, Stieber described how he had helped the French police in Paris arrest the conspirators and told a dramatic tale of how Cherval—in reality his agent provocateur—had attacked Stieber in his Paris apartment and wounded Stieber’s wife in the ensuing hand-to-hand combat.91
The eleven defendants responded with a number of strategies. One employed by Dr. Roland Daniels, as well as the other professionals and intellectuals among the accused (their ranks included a pediatrician and a chemist), was to deny any political connections. Daniels’s interest in communism, and his extensive correspondence with Marx, he insisted, was purely scientific and scholarly in nature. Three defendants—Nothjung, Heinrich Bürgers, and Peter Roeser, who had confessed to belonging to a secret organization—followed Marx’s lead, presenting their group, in contrast to Willich and Schapper’s followers, as opponents of a future revolutionary government rather than enemies of the existing Prussian monarchy. The prosecution’s retort was to point to revolutionary documents Marx wrote, such as the March Address (Marx admitted, privately, that it was quite compromising), and to assert that the differences between the two communist factions were purely personal. Stieber himself said that “the actual difference between the party Marx-Engels and Willich-Schapper consisted of the question of whether, after the next successful revolution, Herr Marx or Herr Willich would be the dictator. . . .”92
Of all the accused, it was “Red Becker” who put up the most overtly political defense. Never denying his association with Marx, he rejected the idea that he belonged to a secret group led by the latter. Instead, he insisted on his independent actions, and portrayed himself as a consistent defender of the people’s freedom against Prussian oppression. Becker’s strategy was similar to the one Marx used when he was in the dock in 1849. Both Marx and Engels, however, were unhappy with this strategy in view of Becker’s repudiation of the Communist League, although they had agreed that his affiliation with the League would be kept secret.93
Following the initial excitement, public interest in the trial waned, as the evidence showed that the defendants were a small group with little subversive effect, hardly Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s imagined ubiquitous conspirators with a continentwide influence. Speculation about an acquittal increased as both sides concluded their cases. Then, Stieber suddenly appeared in court asking to be heard, announcing that his agents had just acquired a secret minute book of the meetings of Marx’s followers in London, proving that they were indeed revolutionary conspirators. This assertion galvanized Marx i
nto action. He gathered up notarized affidavits denying the material in the minute book, providing evidence contradicting its assertions—for instance, the minutes had the wrong day of the week for the regular meetings of Marx’s London associates—and, above all, a copy of Wilhelm Liebknecht’s handwriting, showing that it differed considerably from the “Liebknecht” who had supposedly written up the minutes. Spending every last shilling he had, plus additional funds from Engels (Marx’s friend Peter Immandt tried to raise money from one of Stieber’s operatives), Marx worked “all day and deep into the night” to gather the material and send it, via secret intermediaries (one of them, unbeknownst to Marx, was the Austrian spy Hermann Ebner) to the defense attorneys in Cologne. Jenny wrote to Adolf Cluss: “A whole office has been established in our home. There are two or three scribes, others run errands, still others gather the pennies together so that the scribes can continue to exist and bring forth proofs of the most outrageous scandals of the old official world. In the middle of all this my three faithful children sing and whistle and are often almost knocked down by their papa as he dashes around. It is a whirlwind of action.”94
Becker’s defense attorney, Karl Schneider II, who had been president of the Cologne Democratic Society during the 1848 Revolution, already had a sample of Liebknecht’s handwriting, and was able submit it to the court as he cross-examined Stieber. The secret policeman, warned in advance, deftly evaded the evidence, claiming that it was not Wilhelm Liebknecht who had written the minutes but another man, one “H. Liebknecht.” The existence of this H. Liebknecht was every bit as real as the rest of the secret minutes: they had been forged by Stieber’s spies, Hirsch and Cherval, who were also Willich’s confidants. Marx’s rival, it turned out, had known all about the forgeries, but had not said anything about them, part of his strategy of deploying the Prussian spies as double agents. When he learned of their role in the Cologne Communist Trial, he rushed off with Hirsch to a London magistrate and they swore out an account of what had actually happened—frustrating Marx, who had hoped that he could get a warrant issued for Hirsch’s arrest. Although sent off to Cologne, Willich’s affidavit never reached the court. Supposedly, Hirsch himself traveled to Cologne, but Schneider II refused to see him, although it is unclear whether Hirsch’s journey (assuming this actually happened) was on Willich’s or Stieber’s behalf.95
Marx and Engels were jubilant, and confidently expected, as Engels wrote, that “the matter can end not with the conviction of the Cologne defendants, but with the arrest of Herr Stieber for perjury and other Prussian crimes against the godless French criminal code.”96 Ironically, the two communists, who asserted in their Manifesto that justice and law were merely an instrument of class interests, believed that the truth would win out in court and justice would triumph. It was the deeply devout, moralizing monarch and his agents who had cynically exploited the legal system, caring nothing for guilt or innocence according to the law, making use of theft, forgery, and perjury to further their political ends.
The verdict was announced on November 12, 1852, while soldiers guarded the courthouse from an angry, hostile crowd of spectators. The jury’s decision was a crushing blow to Marx and Engels’s expectations. Seven of the eleven defendants were found guilty, and sentenced to three to six years imprisonment in a fortress; they would have to serve every single day. The three working-class defendants, Roeser, Nothjung and Friedrich Lessner, a tailor, all would remain active in the labor movement after their release. Roland Daniels, although acquitted, died a few years later from tuberculosis contracted in jail. His fellow doctor, Abraham Jacobi, also acquitted, emigrated to the United States, and became a professor of medicine at Columbia University. Both Heinrich Bürgers and Hermann Becker, after serving out their sentences, joined the liberal and democratic opposition to the Prussian government. In 1878, two decades after his release from the fortress, Red Becker was elected mayor of Cologne—a belated act of revenge on the Prussians. He proved to be a very successful municipal administrator; during his term of office, the city threw down its medieval walls, replacing them with broad boulevards, which still shape its urban space today.
The ramifications of the Cologne trial were palpable among the London radical exiles. Willich’s popularity among the German artisans there, already in decline, collapsed when evidence of his long and close connection with Prussian spies was revealed. The Willich-Schapper Communist League was dissolved, and Willich thought it prudent to move to the United States, where German émigré radicals greeted him with great enthusiasm. Like many of these radicals, Willich threw himself into the fight against slavery. A brave and skillful military man, he served in the Union Army during the Civil War, eventually promoted to major general—the first and last communist to hold such high rank in the American armed forces. Marx and Engels amassed their evidence about Stieber’s forgery, which they explained in a pamphlet, Uncovering the Scandals of the Cologne Communist Trial. Some copies were printed in the United States and never reached Europe; thousands printed in Switzerland were confiscated, probably following a tip to the police from Bangya, as the publisher tried to smuggle them over the border into the German states. The pamphlet, which had many similarities to “The Great Men of Exile,” was once again a rearguard struggle in a difficult situation. On the Wednesday after the announcement of the verdict, Marx at his weekly pub meeting with his London followers proposed that they dissolve the Communist League. Their agreement brought the group to an end. Marx explained his decision in a letter to Engels: with the arrest and conviction of his followers in Cologne, all prospects of effective political action had vanished.97
THE COUP D’ÉTAT OF Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, on December 2, 1851, by which he turned himself from president of the French Republic into First Consul, and shortly thereafter into Emperor Napoleon III, was a severe blow to the radical exiles in London. Their hopes of a renewed revolutionary upheaval centered on France had suddenly been extinguished, and they were facing a future of unchallenged reaction and counterrevolution. Marx was somewhat less affected by the coup than his fellow exiles, in view of his new theory of economic crisis and revolution; even for him, however, France remained the center of revolutionary expectations, and within a few weeks of the coup he had begun writing an analysis of it. He had a lot of material at his disposal: his own insider’s knowledge of French politics, reports sent to him by friends on the scene, and the detailed coverage in the London press. Originally planned as a series of installments, the account was published in the United States by Marx’s supporters, Weydemeyer and Cluss, as a pamphlet entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.98
Marx took a defeat of the revolutionary cause and turned it into a literary masterpiece. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, his writing was at its best: keeping his sarcasm under control, and not losing himself in endless denunciations of his opponents, Marx cloaked his profound insights in a sharp sarcastic wit and clever turns of phrase. Profound Marxist apothegm emerged from the pamphlet, such as “first time as tragedy, second as farce” (based on a remark by Engels), “the tradition of past generations weighs like the Alps on the brains of the living,” “well grubbed old mole,” and many, many others.99
The basic analysis of the pamphlet followed The Class Struggles in France, composed two years earlier, by identifying political movements with social classes. Marx described the socialists and communists as the representative of the workers, the non-communist democrats as the exponents of the petit bourgeoisie, the moderate republicans and monarchists as representing different elements of the capitalist class, and the conservatives as being for the large landowners. In contrast to his previous work, which had treated Louis Napoleon with contempt (as did most contemporaries), Marx had to reckon with the future emperor. He described him as leader of his own distinct political grouping, which Marx associated with a particular social class, France’s smallholding peasants.
More than anything, the work became a profound postmortem on the 1848 Revolution, a diss
ection of its failure at the very center of European-wide revolutionary aspirations. Marx criticized French leftists for seeing 1848 as a rerun of 1789. This was the main theme of the celebrated opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire, in which Marx explained how previous revolutionary movements evoked past ideals, pointing out how Martin Luther had portrayed himself as the Apostle Paul and the French revolutionaries of 1789–93 had tried to recreate the ancient Roman Republic. The same action in 1848, evoking the Revolution of 1789, had just led to a pitiful and farcical outcome. What Marx did not mention, however, was that the French radical politicians he mocked were the same people he had been cultivating for years before the outbreak of the Revolution. Their support had enabled him and his associates to move from Brussels to Cologne in the spring of 1848. His hopes for the revival of a European-wide revolutionary movement, from December 1848 to June 1849, had rested on them. Marx’s own political strategy as editor of the New Rhineland News and in the German democratic movement had centered precisely on evoking the 1789 Revolution. He had called for a German republic one and indivisible, for a revolutionary war against Russia, and had glorified and endorsed the radical and terrorist actions of the Jacobins. In this respect, The Eighteenth Brumaire was a particularly drastic example of Marx’s practice of engaging in self-criticism through the criticism of others.
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