In the second letter to U.S. audiences during the Franco-Prussian war, Liebknecht describes the internationalist reaction of the German Social-Democrats to the war in the face of a rising nationalism and ‘patriotism.’ Beginning in November, 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, German revolutionary and Social Democrat member of parliament Wilhelm Liebknecht began a column on European affairs for U.S. audiences in Chicago’s Workingmen’s Advocate. The Advocate was the paper of the National Labor Union, a constituent of the First International. Of obvious great value for the history of the Marxist and workers’ movements, these letters continued through December, 1871 and chronicle the fall of France, the rise of the Commune, and the bloody reaction that followed.

‘Letter from Leipzig, II’ by Wilhelm Liebknecht from The Workingman’s Advocate (Chicago). Vol. 7 No. 15. December 3, 1870.

LEIPZIG, Nov. 12, 1870.

To the Editor of the WORKINGMAN’S ADVOCATE.

When the present war broke out, the Socialist-Democrats were the only party in Germany that denounced it as a dynastic one and laid the whole fault at the door of the Prussian government and especially of Count Bismarck. The shopkeeper-democracy (“volkspartei–party of the people) who until then, in the German questions, had, to some extent, at least, been our allies, were at once seized by the patriotic furor, and gave up every opposition to the Prussian policy, so that we were left quite alone in the struggle. Prussian government did everything in its power to crush us. Our Executive Council was put in prison, and many other members of the party met the same fate. The Volkstaat, the organ of our party, was forbidden in all North German provinces where the state of siege is proclaimed–that is to say, in two-thirds of Prussia. In Saxony a ukase was published, forbidding our party to hold any meetings about the war. Besides, the Prussian military authorities outlawed everybody that dared to utter “unpatriotic” ideas and feelings, and they had the impudence to cause a number of our friends to be arrested in parts of Germany not belonging to Prussia–for instance, in Gotha. However, the German workingmen were not to be cowed. They used all means left to them to prove the nefariousness of this war and to protest against the proposed annexation of Alsace and Lorraine as being contrary to the principles of true democracy, which do not allow us to dispose of our fellow men as of a herd of sheep, and as creating a source of hatred between the Germans and Frenchmen and so, on the one hand, giving our Junkers a pretext for increasing still more the burden of standing armies, and on the other hand, putting it in the power of Russia to arrange wars in western Europe at the shortest notice and, while the two champion peoples of European democracy are throttling one another, to achieve herself the triumph of despotism and barbarity. And our protests were not in vain. They showed our brethren in France that we had not deserted the standard of international brotherhood, and, which is of still higher importance, they helped to change the current of public opinion in Germany.

How completely this latter has been done appears conclusively from the simple fact that the German Social-Democrats, although by brutal military force prevented from holding mass meetings and organizing other demonstrations against the intended annexation and the continuation of the war, have yet gained the great negative success of rendering it impossible for our middle classes to arrange their intended great “patriotic” movement in favor of annexation and war. As we are only forbidden to hold meetings of our own, but not to visit the meetings called together by other parties, we should have everywhere turned the tables against the “patriotic” fools, and passed resolutions in our own sense. This they knew, and not daring to face us in public, they had to recur to the modest makeshift of private nook-and-corner meetings, where they fabricated servile addresses and petitions. In all Germany not one mass meeting has taken place in favor of annexation and the war. The only place where the bourgeois tried it was in Munchen, and there our party had the majority. Since then no attempt has been made anywhere. And this negative victory is the more significant since the whole press of Germany is hostile to us. With the exception of Jacoby’s Zukuuft (Future), in Berlin, and the Frankfurt Gazette, in Frankfort-on-the-Maine, there is not one paper, political or unpolitical, throughout Germany that does not, with more or less zeal, ride the “national” hobby-horse. This contrast between real and artificial public opinion–between the mind of the people and the spirit of the newspaper press–is one of the characteristic features of our age and the necessary result of class government. We have the same phenomenon in England, where the working classes–I mean the industrial working classes–form the majority of the population, and have only one paper (Reynolds’ Newspaper) that promotes their political and social interests, and this paper, even, being only the private speculation of an enterprising bourgeois. And how is it in your United States? Since the German Workingmen’s Union (Arbeiter Union), in New York, had, unfortunately, to be given up, your paper, as far as I know, is the only one in the whole United States that can truly be called an organ of the working classes.

The press in Germany as everywhere else, is the monopoly of the ruling classes, their principal engine of power. And the classes are the Aristocracy (Junkers) and the Bourgeoise. That the former uphold a policy of conquest, that they are in favor of a war a’ l’outrance against the French Republic, is natural enough. Like the American slaveholders of old they cannot exist without annexation, and for the same reasons; thus they want a large standing army to oppress the people and to get the means of living for themselves, and since the army must have some occupation, they are for war on principle; and as for this particular war–it is to them a matter of life and death to destroy the French Republic, whose moral influence would in ten years’ time render impossible the Hohenzollern monarchy, together with the Junkers. So it is not to be wondered that all the papers directly or indirectly connected with the aristocracy, are writing now in a most warlike spirit.

But the mass of the newspapers are the property of the Bourgeoise, and the Bourgeoise is at the bottom of a peaceful disposition. Why is our Bourgeoise press unanimously in favor of the war. The reason is: our middle classes (I shall always use this word in the same meaning as the French word bourgeoise, which has also been adopted in the German language) our middle classes are afraid of the working classes, and like the French Bourgeoise, that in 1851 threw itself in Bonaparte’s arms, and would like to do so again–they have come to the conclusion that “order” can only be kept by the sword, and that “Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery” are the veritable Trinity of capitalistic religion. Prussia is stronger, has more soldiers than Austria, therefore our middle classes preferred the former to the latter, and their instinct telling them that if Prussia is defeated now, this great pillar of Bourgeoise rule will get shaky, they do their best to assist Prussia, whether they call themselves “national liberals” or “progressists.” Between these two “factions” of the middle class “party” there is in fact no real difference,–the “progressists” talk a little more of, “liberty” than the ethers, else they are one heart and one soul, two names for the same thing.

By the by–though our Bourgeoise exhibit “tremendous patriotism” in their newspapers, yet they are quite “international” when a profitable piece of business is to be transacted with the “hereditary enemy.” You know the French Republic lately contracted a loan of 250,000,000 francs in London; well, the flower of our ultra-patriotic capitalists in Berlin, Frankfurt, etc., have taken up a considerable amount of the obligations emitted by the Republican government; and those fellows who give the French men the money where with to buy the guns to be pointed at our soldiers, have the brazenness to reproach us with our “want of patriotism!” Not as it the reproach was unfounded. Only it is no reproach. What is patriotism? What is “fatherland?” Principles have no geographical boundaries. Right and truth are no nation’s privilege, they belong equally to all mankind.

If my countrymen are wrong, and foreigners are right, I cannot take the part of my countrymen. “Amicus Plato, magis amica veritas.“¹ The “nationality” is a great lie, “invented by rogues to misguide fools,” to use the famous expression applied by Robespierre to the “red spectre” of communism, which had to serve the Reactionists during the first French Revolution. “A man is a man for a’ that,” whether born on this side of a “frontier” stone, or on that; the sole fact that the two only real Republics existing (before the establishment of the new French Republic) that of Switzerland and the United States are living proofs against this danger fraught “principle,” should be sufficient to bring every sincere Democrat² to his senses. What do the French Swiss, the Italian Swiss, the German Swiss care for their respective nationalities? They are free, and want to remain free. And your United States–do they not owe their origin just to the want of “patriotism” or feeling of the nationality principle on the part of their founders? Does not the merit of the Pilgrim Fathers consist in their having sacrificed the love of their native country to the love of religious and political liberty? And the millions that emigrated to your land of the free since the last half century–was it not the sacred love of liberty that drove them to your shores? If they had followed the principle of nationality they would have stopped at home and remained slaves. The United States are the most glorious reductio ad absurdum of the nationality principle. Composed of free citizens belonging to every nationality and race, you are no nation, but the greatest people of the world.

Now in this horrible war Germany is wrong and France is right. Instead of Germany I will rather say Prussia; for the leading statesmen and soldiers of Prussia bear the whole responsibility of the war, which they carry on solely in the interest of the Hohenzollern family and the Junkers. Who are those lending statesmen and soldiers? Those Moltke, Bismarck, Stieber, with their hangers on? Why, the very same men that in 1848 and 1849 made war upon the German people, and stifled the revolutionary movement (at Dresden, in Baden) in torrents of blood. Those self-same men that now talk of German unity, and even liberty, then sentenced to death by court martial the champions of the Constitution, framed by the German Parliament, which would have given us “a free and united Germany;” and those self same men, who, twenty- one years ago tried the “Zunduadel” on the German Republicans, just as Bonaparte three years ago tried his “Chassepot” on the Italian Republicans, will, if they succeed in conquering the French, try the “Zunduadel” again on us at the first opportunity. The principal organ of the Junkers, the “Kreuzzeitung” (Gazette of the Cross) has already announced it: “The war against the Frenchmen in France would not be complete it it was not carried on against the Frenchmen in Germany as well.” And who are the Frenchmen in Germany? The Democrats–and before all, we Social Democrats.

Is that clear? And here one word more. Don’t allow yourselves to be humbugged by the silly phrase of the Prussian army being “the people in arms.” If the Prussian people were armed–that is to say, if every citizen was a soldier, and consequently every soldier a citizen, Prussia would be a democratic republic, instead of an absolutistic monarchy, with all the faults of the other absolutistic monarchies, and a greater amount of hypocrisy than any.

The Prussian army is in proportion to the number of inhabitants the largest army in the world, and the Landwehr, about which so much nonsense is talked and written abroad, is at present, after its having been systematically deprived of its originally half democratic character, nothing but the an integral part of the standing army (the “Line”) ready at the order of its commanders to cut to pieces and shoot down their own countrymen with the same docility they are now disposing of French soldiers and Franctireurs.

About the state of the war only a few remarks today. The position of Prussia is not favorable at all, and Count Bismark was much disappointed by the French refusal of his proposed armistice. The position is the following: Prussia has lost by bullets, the sword and diseases of all kind, upon the lowest estimation 300,000 men, the sick of course included; she has at least 500,000 men in France, locked up in deadly embrace with a furious enemy; the wear and tare of this war is so enormous that she has to strain every nerve only to maintain the invading army in its present strength–in short the military resources of Prussia are totally absorbed by the war with France. Add to this, that the soldiers are getting more and more tired of a war, in which no more laurels are to be gained, but those gained may be lost; that the people at home are grumbling louder and louder; the small South German States are not quite safe anymore; that Ba aria, for instance, has until now re- fused to enter the Prusso-German confederation; that Austria is making suspicious moves–and many other ugly symptoms, and you will understand Count Bismarck is rather in a fix. The annexation scheme is half given up already–instead of Alsace and Lorraine, Luxemberg is to be taken–and there are many people who think that the oriental row, which the cabinet of St. Petersburg is just causing, has been arranged principally with a view of covering Bismarck’s retreat from the French war. However, of that I am not too sure. It is very probable, the Russian bear intends a serious spring at the sick man’s throat and then we have the long foresaid, long dreaded universal war.

Be it!

Universal war is universal revolution.

W.L.

NOTES

1. The celebrated answer of one of Plato’s disciples, when approached with not believing blindly every word of the master: “I love Plato, but truth I love more

2. I need hardly say, that I use the word in the European, not in the American sense.

The Chicago Workingman’s Advocate in 1864 by the Chicago Typographical Union during a strike against the Chicago Times. An essential publication in the history of the U.S. workers’ movement, the Advocate though editor Andrew Cameron became the voice National Labor Union after the Civil War. It’s pages were often the first place the work of Marx, Engels, and the International were printed in English in the U.S. It lasted through 1874 with the demise of the N.L.U.

Access to PDF of issue: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89077510/1870-12-03/ed-1/seq-2/