be read in the Revelations. Then came the arrest of
Nothjung, followed by that of Haupt, in Hamburg. The
latter turned traitor by divulging the names of the
cologne Central Committee and being slated as the
chief witness in the trial; but his relatives had no desire
to be thus disgraced and bundled him off to Rio de
Janeiro, where he later established himself as a
businessman and in recognition of his services was
appointed first Prussian and then German Consul
General. He is now again in Europe.
For a better understanding of the Revelations, I
give the list of the Cologne accused: 1) P. G. Roser,
cigarmaker; 2) Heinrich Burgers, who later died , a
progressive deputy to the Landtag; 3) Peter Nothjung,
tailor, who died a few years ago a photographer in
Breslau; 4) W. J. Reiff ; 5) Dr. Hermann Becker, now
chief burgomaster of Cologne and member of the
Upper House; 6) Dr. Roland Daniels, physician, who
died a few years after the trial as a result of
tuberculosis contracted in prison; 7) Karl Otto,
chemist; 8) Dr. Abraham Jacoby, now physician in New
York; 9) Dr. I. J. Klein, now physician and town
councillor in Cologne; 10) Ferdinand Freiligrath, who,
however, was at that time already in London; 11) I. L.
Ehrhard, clerk; 12) Friedrich Lessner, tailor, now in
London. After a public trial before a jury lasting from
October 4 to November 12,1852, the following were
sentenced for attempted high treason: Roser, Burgers
and Nothjung to six, Reiff, Otto and Becker to five
and Lessner to three years’ confinement in a fortress;
Daniels, Klein, Jacoby and Ehrhard were acquitted.
With the Cologne trial the first period of the
German communist workers’ movement comes to an
end. Immediately after the sentence we dissolved our
League; a few months later the Willich-Schapper
separate league was also laid to eternal rest.
A whole generation lies between then and now.
At that time Germany was a country of handicraft and
of domestic industry based on hand labour; now it is
a big industrial country still undergoing continual
industrial transformation. At that time one had to seek
out one by one the workers who had an understanding
of their position as workers and of their historico-
economic antagonism to capital, because this
antagonism itself was only just beginning to develop.
Today the entire German proletariat has to be placed
under exceptional laws, merely in order to slow down
a little the process of its development to full
consciousness of its position as an oppressed class.
At that time the few persons whose minds had
penetrated to the point of realising the historical role
of the proletariat had to foregather in secret, to
assemble clandestinely in small communities of 3 to
20 persons. Today the German proletariat no longer
14
needs any official organisation, either public or secret.
The simple self-evident interconnection of like-minded
class comrades suffices, without any rules, boards,
resolutions or other tangible forms, to shake the whole
German Empire to its foundations. Bismarck is the
arbiter of Europe beyond the frontiers of Germany,
but within them there grows daily more threateningly
the athletic figure of the German proletariat that Marx
foresaw already in 1844, the giant for whom the
cramped imperial edifice designed to fit the Philistine
is even now becoming inadequate and whose mighty
stature and broad shoulders are growing until the
moment comes when by merely rising from his seat
he will shatter the whole structure of the imperial
constitution into fragments. And still more. The
international movement of the European and American
proletariat has become so much strengthened that
not merely its first narrow form — the secret League
—but even its second, infinitely wider form—the open
International Working Men’s Association—has become
a fetter for it, and that the simple feeling of solidarity
based on the understanding of the identity of class
position suffices to create and to hold together one
and the same great party of the proletariat among
the workers of all countries and tongues. The doctrine
which the League represented from 1847 to 1852,
and which at that time could be treated by the wise
Philistines with a shrug of the shoulders as the
hallucinations of utter madcaps, as the secret doctrine
of a few scattered sectarians, has now innumerable
adherents in all civilised countries of the world, among
those condemned to the Siberian mines as much as
among the gold diggers of California; and the founder
of this doctrine, the most hated, most slandered man
of his time, Karl Marx, was, when he died, the ever-
sought-for and ever—willing counsellor of the
proletariat of both the old and the new world.
Frederick Engels
London, October 8, 1885
123
Parliamentary cretinism—an incurable disease, a
disorder “which penetrates its unfortunate victims with
the solemn conviction that the whole world, its history
and future, are governed and determined by a majority of
votes in that particular representative body which has the
honour to count them among its members,” (Engels,
Revolution and counter Revolution in Germany in
1848, see present edition, Vol, 1, p. 370). —169
124
Bougeart’s book Marat, l‘Ami du peuple (Marat, Friend
of the people) appeared in Paris in 1865
L‘Ami du peuple-newspaper published by Marat from
September 12, 1789 to July 14, 1793; it appeared under
this name from September 16, 1789 to September 21, 1792,
and was signed: Marat, l‘Ami du peuple. —169
Class Struggle