V. Imperial Regent and Count Palatine

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Vidi un col capo sì dì merda lordo,

Che non parea, s'era laico, o cherco,

Quei mi sgridò: perchè se' tu sì 'ngordo

Di riguardar più me che gli altri brutti.

(Dante)[1]

Vogt, repulsed by the Bristlers, experiences a powerful need to show why the "Brimstone Gang" had singled him out as the bête noire. For this reason Cherval and the "frustrated conspiracy" at the Joint Festival in Lausanne are supplemented by the adventure of the "fugitive Imperial Regent", an adventure which had no less reality than they. Vogt, we must not forget, was at one time Governor of the parliamentary island of Barataria[2]. His story goes like this:

"Early in 1850 the Deutsche Monatsschrift of Kolatschek made its appearance. [...] Immediately after the publication of the first number, the Brimstone Gang, acting through one of its comrades who left for America without delay, issued a pamphlet with the title Der flüchtige Reichsregent Vogt mit seinem Anhange und die Deutsche Monatsschrift von Adolf Kolatschek, a work which was also mentioned by the Allgemeine Zeitung.... The Brimstone Gang's whole system is revealed yet again in this pamphlet" (loc. cit., pp. [162-1163).[3]

He goes on to explain at tedious length how, in the pamphlet referred to, an anonymous article on Gagern which had been written by Professor Hagen was "attributed" to the fugitive Imperial Regent, Vogt, because

"the Brimstone Gang knew" that Hagen "was living in. Germany at the time, that he had been harassed by the Baden police and that he could not be named without exposing him to molestation of the most unpleasant sort" (p. 163).

In his letter of February 6,[4] Schily wrote to me from Paris:

"That Greiner who, to the best of my knowledge, has never been to Geneva, has been linked with the Brimstone Gang, is the result of his obituary notice to the 'fugitive Imperial Regent' for which d'Ester was held responsible and outlawed in parliamentary circles until I set matters right in a letter to one of Vogt's friends and colleagues."[5]

Greiner was a member of the Provisional Government of the Palatinate. Greiner's rule was an "unrelieved horror" (see Vogt's Studien, p. 28), that is for my friend Engels, whom he had arrested on a trumped-up charge in Kirchheim. Engels has himself given a detailed account of the whole tragicomedy in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Revue (February 1850, pp. 53-55)[6]. And that is all I know about Herr Greiner. The fact that the fugitive Imperial Regent has managed to implicate me in his quarrel with "Count Palatine" reveals "yet again" the "whole system" by means of which our ingenious raconteur has composed the story of the life and deeds of "the Brimstone Gang". What endears him to me, however, is the true Falstaffian humour he displayed in causing the Count Palatine to depart for America "without delay". The Count Palatine, having let fly his pamphlet at the "fugitive Imperial Regent" like a Parthian shot, was suddenly overwhelmed with horror. Which caused Greiner to flee from Switzerland to France, from France to England. Even the Channel did not seem to offer sufficient protection and so he fled headlong to a Cunard steamer[7] in Liverpool where he breathlessly cried out to the Captain: "Away, across the Atlantic!" And the "stern mariner"[8] replied:

"I'll save you from the hands of the Vogt But from the might of the storm another must lend his aid."[9]

  1. ↑ I there made out a smearedHead—whether clerk or lay was hard to tell, It was so thickly plastered with the merd."Why stand there gloating?" he began to yell, "Why stare at me more than the other scum?" (Kannegiesser)[The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XVIII. Kannegiesser is the name of the German translator.]
  2. ↑ Marx ridicules Vogt's ephemeral power as Imperial Regent by comparing his status to Sancho Panza's imaginary governorship of the island of Barataria (barato means "cheap" in Spanish) in Cervantes' Don Quixote.
  3. ↑ Here and below Marx quotes from Vogt's Mein Prozess..., S. 162-63. The italics are Marx's.—Ed.
  4. ↑ Marx quotes from Schily's letter of February 8, 1860.—Ed.
  5. ↑ Ludwig Simon.—Ed.
  6. ↑ See The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution.—Ed.
  7. ↑ Marx uses the English word.—Ed.
  8. ↑ Marx uses the English word.—Ed.
  9. ↑ Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, Act I, Scene 1.—Ed.
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