Epilogue to Revelations Concerning the communist Trial in Cologne

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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.And W. Hirsch assures us in his “Rechtfertigungsschrift” 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 (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). 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), 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) and the press (see reptile funds), to that institution, just as the entire state system of Venice was once subordinated to the State Inquisition. 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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”

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, but also an inner Jena.

London, January 8, 1875

Karl Marx