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Special pages :
Address of the Democratic Association of Brussels to the Swiss People
| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels Karl Marx |
|---|---|
| Written | 29 November 1847 |
Printed according to the newspaper
Translated from the French
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 6
THE DEMOCRATIC ASSOCIATION, ESTABLISHED IN BRUSSELS (BELGIUM),
WHOSE AIM IS THE UNION AND FRATERNITY OF ALL PEOPLES,
TO THE SWISS PEOPLE
Swiss Brothers,
An unhappy struggle has just ended for you.[1] All the nations have watched it with the anxiety, blended with sorrow, that generous hearts always feel at the sight of a civil war.
We shall not here discuss the causes of this quarrel. The two parties decided to resolve it alone, without calling for intervention from anyone.
Those who, not having been asked, claimed to set themselves up as the official judges of your domestic quarrels must incur the reproach of a culpable imprudence.
But this imprudence threatens to change in character.
All the friends of liberty have the right to be indignant, if not alarmed by it.
More or less ardent, more or less sincere good wishes, and even offers of service for one or other cause, could be explained without resort to any other motives than those of the diversity of human opinions on political or religious matters.
Today it is a question of something else.
The intervention of a congress of royalty[2] in your affairs can only be understood in the sense of an open or hidden attack on your institutions and above all on the development that you have given them in law during the last fifteen years.
Guardians, for nearly six centuries, of the repository of liberty which was exiled by usurping feudalism successively from nearly all other parts of Europe, you owe it to us, Swiss Brothers, you owe it to yourselves, to defend one last time more this precious heritage, at this supreme hour when all nations are preparing to claim it from you and divide it.
If you let it be seized from your guardianship, the six centuries of persistent vigilance for which we would soon have owed you full gratitude would be lost for you and for the rest of Europe.
Exiled beyond the sea, on the soil of a new world, democratic institutions would have ceased for a long time to be a model for our constant study and imitation.
Government of the State by universally elected leaders;—State administration without crippling financial debts, without the ruin of the worker for the profit of hosts of useless bureaucrats;—the defence of the State without standing armies;—the commercial and industrial prosperity of the State without tariffs;—freedom of belief without theocratic domination;—where shall we find these again, and be able to copy the model of this regime for which all Europe yearns today, if Switzerland allows a concert of kings, bankers, ministers, mercenaries, monopolists, sectarians, to intervene in its affairs?
Their interference can have no other aim but to wipe out once for all from the centre of Europe this example—so fatal for them—of a nation which governs itself without them.
We understand this so well, Swiss Brothers, that, assembled here from all parts of Europe by the political hazards of recent times, and mingling with a small free nation like yours, and rather in your manner, we felt it essential unanimously to express the wish to see you resist the diplomatic intrigues which are contemplated against you.
We urge you therefore not to listen to those treacherous offers of intervention made to you by five Courts (we will not say five peoples) combined to tempt you into a fatal trap.
Fear of their threats, if they carried them out, cannot exist in your hearts. It is only their cunning that you must guard against.
And if their threats were serious, your forces would without boasting be equal to those which the courts in fact control in the midst of the domestic embarrassments increasing for them every day.
Moreover, if they dreamed of constraining you by force, allies would not fail you. Once more, we recommend into your hands, Swiss Brothers, the sacred repository of European democratic liberty which you have guarded so well up to now, and which in recent times you have been able to make flourish to the benefit of the rights and interests of the greatest number.
We offer you, with the future tribute of our gratitude for the firmness which you will show the world,—
the expression of our most sincere sympathy.
On behalf of the above-named Democratic Association, and by virtue of its deliberations in the general assembly of November 29, 1847 after the Polish commemoration celebrated this day at the Hôtel de Ville of Brussels,
The Committee of the Association.
General Mellinet, Chief of the civic legions in 1830, Hon. President.
L. Jottrand, barrister, former member of the National Congress of Belgium in 1830, President.
Maynz, barrister at the Court of Appeal at Brussels.
Imbert, Vice-president, former editor of the Peuple Souverain of Marseilles.
Karl Marx, former editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, Vice-president.[3]
Lelewel, Joachim, member of the National Government.
George Weerth.
The Secretary of the society, A. Picard, barrister at the Court of Appeal at Brussels.
Spilthoorn, barrister at the court of Ghent. Leader of the provisional government of Flanders in 1830.
Pellering, shoe-maker.
A. von Bornstedt, editor of the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung.
The German workers assembled in the society at Brussels[4] have joined in the present address. This is attested by the undersigned members of the committee of this society.
Chairman— Wallau.
Vice-chairman—Hess.
Wolff, secretary.
Riedel, treasurer.
- ↑ About the civil war in Switzerland, see this volume, pp. 367-74 and Note 172.
- ↑ The reference is to the attempts to organise diplomatic and military interference by the five European powers (France, Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia) in the civil war in Switzerland in the interests of the Sonderbund. They were initiated by the Austrian Chancellor Metternich and supported by the Guizot's government. Metternich and Guizot planned to call a conference of the five great powers on the Swiss question to dictate peace terms to the belligerent parties in Switzerland. However, the speedy rout of the Sonderbund's troops and the negative attitude of the British government thwarted these plans.
- ↑ Marx's name was presumably put by proxy for he was in London at that time.—Ed.
- ↑ The reference is to the German Workers’ Society in Brussels (see Note 208).