Epilogue to Revelations Concerning the communist Trial in Cologne

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 8 January 1875


First published in Der Volksstaat, No. 10 January 27, 1875 and in the book: Karl Marx, Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten prozess zu Köln, Leipzig, 1875
Printed according to the newspaper, checked with the book
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 24
Collection(s): Der Volksstaat

Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne is a forceful work in which Marx exposed the unseemly methods used by the Prussian police state against the communist movement. The pamphlet was published in Basle in January 1853, but in March almost the whole edition (2,000 copies) was confiscated by the police in the Baden frontier village of Weill on the way to Germany. In the USA the work was first published in instalments (on March 6 and April 2 and 28, 1853) in the Boston democratic newspaper Neue-England-Zeitung and at the end of April 1853 it was printed as a separate pamphlet by the same publishing house.

In 1874 this work was reprinted in 13 instalments in Der Volksstaat (Leipzig), with Marx named as its author for the first time. Preparing a separate edition of the Revelations, Wilhelm Liebknecht, the editor of the newspaper, on October 29, 1874 requested Marx to write a preface for it. On January 27, 1875, Der Volksstaat published Marx's epilogue to the Revelations dated January 8, 1875. The Revelations appeared as a book in Leipzig in 1875, reproducing the text from Der Volksstaat with this epilogue.

The Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne, which the Volksstaat now considers it timely to reprint, originally appeared in Boston (Massachusetts) and in Basle. Most of the latter edition was confiscated at the German border. The pamphlet saw the light of day a few weeks after the trial closed. At that point, it was of prime importance to waste no time, hence a good many errors of detail were inevitable. An example of this is the list of names of the Cologne jury. Thus, a certain Levy and not M. Hess is said to have been the author of the Red Catechism.[1] And W. Hirsch assures us in his "Rechtfertigungsschrift"[2] that Cherval's escape from gaol in Paris was pre-arranged by Greif, the French police and Cherval himself, in order that the latter might act as an informer in London during the court proceedings. This is likely, as the forgery of a bill of exchange committed in Prussia and the resultant risk of extradition were bound to bring Cramer[3] (ChervaFs real name) to heel. My account of the incident is based on Cherval's "confessions" to a friend of mine. Hirsch's statement casts an even harsher light on Stieber's perjury, the intrigues of the Prussian embassies in London and Paris, and the shameless intervention by Hinckeldey.

When the Volksstaat started to reprint the pamphlet in its columns, I was for a moment undecided whether or not it might be appropriate to omit Section VI (The Willich-Schapper Group).[4] On further consideration, however, any mutilation of the text appeared to me to be a falsification of an historical document.

The violent suppression of a revolution leaves behind a shock in the minds of its protagonists, particularly those forced into exile far from the domestic scene—a shock that, for a time, renders even the most able people, as it were, not responsible for their actions. They are unable to accept the course of history; they are loth to realise that the form of the movement has changed. Hence the conspiratorial and revolutionary games they play, equally compromising for themselves and for the cause they serve; hence, too, the errors of Schapper and Willich. In the North American Civil War, Willich showed that he was more than a visionary, and Schapper, a life-long champion of the labour movement, confessed and acknowledged his momentary aberration soon after the Cologne trial. Many years later, on his death-bed, the day before he died, he spoke to me with scathing irony about that time of "refugee foolishness".—Nevertheless, the circumstances in which the Revelations were written explain the bitterness of the attack on the involuntary accomplices of the common enemy. In times of crisis, thoughtlessness is a crime against the party calling for public expiation.

"The whole existence of the political police depends on the outcome of this trial!" With these words, written during the Cologne court proceedings to the embassy in London (see my pamphlet Herr Vogt, p. 27[5] ), Hinckeldey betrayed the secret of the Communist trial. "The whole existence of the political police" is not merely the existence and activities of the staff immediately concerned with this area. It is the subordination of the entire governmental machinery, including the courts (see the Prussian disciplinary law for judicial officials of May 7, 1851[6] ) and the press (see reptile funds[7] ), to that institution, just as the entire state system of Venice was once subordinated to the State Inquisition.[8] The political police, paralysed during the revolutionary storm in Prussia, needed re-organising along the lines of the second French Empire.

After the demise of the 1848 revolution, the German labour movement continued to exist only in the form of theoretical propaganda, confined to narrow circles; the Prussian Government was not for a moment deceived about its harmlessness in practice. The government's Communist witch-hunt served simply as a prelude to its reactionary crusade against the liberal bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie itself steeled the main weapon of this reaction, the political police, by sentencing the workers' representatives and acquitting Hinckeldey-Stieber. Stieber thus earned his spurs at the assizes in Cologne. At that time Stieber was a humble low-ranking policeman ruthlessly pursuing a higher salary and promotion; now Stieber stands for the unrestricted rule of the political police in the new holy Prussian-German empire. Thus he has, to a certain extent, become a moral person, moral in the metaphorical sense, as, for example, the Reichstag is a moral creation. This time the political police is not striking at the workers in order to hit the bourgeoisie. Quite the reverse. Precisely in his position as dictator of the German liberal bourgeoisie, Bismarck considers himself strong enough to drive[9] the workers' party out of existence. The German proletariat can, therefore, measure the progress of the movement it has achieved since the Cologne Communist trial by Stieber's growth in stature.

The Pope's infallibility is small beer compared with that of the political police. After for decades sticking young hotheads in gaol in Prussia for advocating German unity, [10] the German Empire and the German monarchy, it is today even incarcerating bald-headed old men for refusing to advocate these divine gifts. Today it is just as vainly attempting to eradicate the enemies of the Empire as it once tried to eradicate the friends of the Empire. What glaring proof that it is not called on to make history, even if it were only the history of the quarrel over the Emperor's beard!

The Communist trial in Cologne itself brands the state power's impotence in its struggle against social development. The royal Prussian state prosecutor ultimately based the guilt of the accused on the fact that they secretly disseminated the subversive principles of the Communist Manifesto.[11] Are not the same principles being proclaimed openly in the streets in Germany twenty years later? Do they not resound even from the tribune of the Reichstag? Have they not journeyed round the world, in the shape of the Programme of the International Working Men's Association,[12] despite all the government arrest-warrants? Society simply does not find its equilibrium until it revolves around the sun of labour.

At the end of the Revelations it says: "Jenal ... that is the final outcome of a government[13] that requires such methods in order to survive and of a society that needs such a government for its protection. The word that should stand at the end of the Communist trial is—Jenal"[14]

An accurate prediction indeed, giggles the first Treitschke to happen along, with a proud reference to Prussia's latest feat of arms and the Mauser rifle. Suffice it for me to point out that there is not only an inner Düppel,[15] but also an inner Jena.

London, January 8, 1875

Karl Marx

  1. ↑ Documents of which Marx was not aware, specifically the letter of Moses Hess to Joseph Weydemeyer of July 21, 1850, confirm that Hess was the author of the Red Catechism (Rother Kathechismus für das deutsche Volk, New York and Boston [1849 or 1850]). The place of publication is fictitious; the pamphlet was published in Germany in 1850.
  2. ↑ W. Hirsch, "Die Opfer der Moucharderie. Rechtfertigungsschrift", Belletristisches Journal und New-Yorker Criminal-Zeitung, Nos. 3-6, April 1, 8, 15 and 22, 1853. See also Marx's Herr Vogt (present edition, Vol. 17, p. 64) and Hirsch's Confessions (ibid., Vol. 12, pp. 40-43).— Ed.
  3. ↑ A pun: Cramer—Cherval's real name, Krämer (in German) means huckster.— Ed.
  4. ↑ See present edition, Vol. 11, pp. 445-52.—.Ed.
  5. ↑ A reference to the 1860 edition published in London (see present edition, Vol. 17, p. 67).— Ed
  6. ↑ Gesetz, betreffend die Dienstvergehen der Richter und die unfreiwillige Versetzung derselben auf eine andere Stelle oder in den Ruhestand. Vom 7. Mai 1851. In: Gesetz-Sammlung für die Königlichen Preußischen Staaten, No. 13, 1851.— Ed.
  7. ↑ The reptile funds—special money funds at the disposal of Bismarck which he used to buy venal journalists, nicknamed reptiles. The nickname was current in Germany in the 1870s. Bismarck was the first to use it, although in a different sense, speaking in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies on January 30, 1869 (by reptiles, he referred to the circles hostile to the government). However, the Left-wing press began to apply the word to the semi-official press bribed by the government. Speaking in the Reichstag on February 9, 1876, Bismarck was forced to admit that the new meaning of the word "reptiles" had gained wide currency in Germany.
  8. ↑ By the State Inquisition Marx means the Council of Ten set up in the Republic of Venice in the 14th century, and the Collegium of State Inquisitors formed by it in the 15th century.
  9. ↑ Marx uses here the verb stiebern coined from the name of Stieber.— Ed.
  10. ↑ A conference of Austrian, Prussian, Bavarian, Saxonian and other ministers held in Karlsbad in 1819 adopted decrees to fight opposition movements spearheaded against the reactionary customs and laws in the German states and advocating the unification of Germany. The Karlsbad Decrees in particular made it possible to prosecute participants in the political demonstration in Gambach (May 1832) and in the actions of revolutionary democrats, including members of the Burschenschaften (see Note 151) in Frankfurt am Main in April 1833. They were repealed by the Federal Diet (see Note 150) on April 2, 1848.
  11. ↑ by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.— Ed.
  12. ↑ The Programme of the International Working Men's Association was set forth by Marx in the "Inaugural Address of the Working Men's International Association" and in the preamble to the "Provisional Rules of the Association". These documents were published for the first time by the General Council of the International in the pamphlet Address and Provisional Rules of the Working Men's International Association, Established September 28, 1864, at a Public Meeting Held at St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, London (see present edition, Vol. 20). p
  13. ↑ An allusion to the defeat of Prussia by Napoleonic France at Jena on October 14, 1806. The defeat led to Prussia's capitulation and revealed the instability of the social and political system of the Hohenzollern feudal monarchy
  14. ↑ See present edition, Vol. 11, p. 457.— Ed.
  15. ↑ Marx has "inneres Düppel", an expression first used in the meaning of "enemy within" ("Düppel im Innern") in a political survey published in the Bismarckian Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on September 30, 1864. It became widely current later. Düppel (DybbÖl)—Danish fortification in Schleswig which the Prussians captured by storm on April 18, 1864, during the war of Prussia and Austria against Denmark.