Published unsigned under the headline “The Divine Right of the Hohenzollerns” in the New-York Daily Tribune, No. 4906, January 9, 1857, p. 3; first published in The People’s Paper, No. 241, December 13, 1856, which is the text followed by MEW (vol. 12, compared with the Tribune); the text of the Tribune has variants. Attributed to Karl Marx by MEW; MEGA² I/15 not yet published. Text from the original newspaper (Library of Congress, Chronicling America). Traducción al español.
At the present moment there is only one great question afloat in Europe—that of Neufchâtel. Such, at least, is the tenor of the Prussian newspapers. The Principality of Neufchâtel, it is true, together with the County of Valengin, may be mathematically circumscribed by the somewhat diminutive figure of seventeen miles square. But, say the royalist philosophers of Berlin, it is not quantity, but quality, that generally invests things with grandeur or pettiness, and stamps them as sublime or ridiculous. To them the Neufchâtel question is the eternal question between revolution and right divine—an antagonism as little affected by geographical dimensions as the law of gravitation by the difference between the sun and a tennis-ball.
Let us try to get at an understanding of what the Hohenzollern dynasty call their divine right. In the case now before us they appeal to a protocol dated London, May 24, 1852, by which the Plenipotentiaries of France, Great Britain and Russia “recognized the rights which belong to the King of Prussia over the Principality of Neufchâtel and the County of Valengin, according to the tenor of Arts. 22 and 76 of the Treaty of Vienna, and which have coexisted from 1815 to 1848 with those which Art. 73 of the same treaty conferred on Switzerland.” By this “diplomatic intervention” the right divine of the King of Prussia over Neufchâtel is acknowledged only so far as established by the Treaty of Vienna. The Treaty of Vienna, in its turn, refers us to the title which Prussia acquired in the year 1707. But how did the case stand in 1707?
The principality of Neufchâtel and County Valengin, appertaining in medieval times to the kingdom of Burgundy, became, after the defeat of Charles the Bold, an ally of the Swiss Confederation, and such it remained, under the immediate protection of Berne, during all the subsequent changes of its suzerains, till the Treaty of Vienna transformed the ally into a member of that Confederation. The suzeraineté over Neufchâtel was transferred first to the house of Châlons-Orange, next by the intervention of Switzerland to the house of Longueville, and finally, after the extirpation of the agnates of that family, to the sister of the last prince, the Dowager-duchess of Nemours. When the latter acceded to these dominions, William III., King of England and Duke of Nassau-Orange, issued a protest and made over his claims on Neufchâtel and Valengin to his cousin Frederick I. of Prussia—a settlement which, however, produced no effect during the lifetime of William III. On the death of Mary, Duchess of Nemours, Frederick I. stepped forward with his pretensions, but fourteen other candidates appearing in the field, he wisely abandoned the decision over the rival claims to the supreme judgment of the Estates of Neufchâtel and Valengin, having made sure before their sentence by bribing the judges. By dint of bribery, then, the King of Prussia became Prince of Neufchâtel and Count of Valengin. As such he was unmade by the French Revolution, remade by the Treaty of Vienna, and unmade again by the Revolution of 1848. Against the revolutionary right of the people he appeals to the right divine of the Hohenzollerns, which would seem in the last analysis to lose itself in the divine right of bribery.
Littleness is a characteristic feature of all feudal conflicts; yet there is a large line of distinction to be drawn. The numberless small fights, intrigues and treasons by which the Kings of France succeeded in supplanting their vassals are sure to remain a favorite theme with the historian, because they trace the origin of a great nation. On the other hand, the story how a vassal contrived to carve out of the German Empire a more or less extensive slice of sovereignty for his private use is a theme altogether barren and dull, unless enlivened by a concurrence of extraordinary circumstances such as distinguish the history of Austria. There we observe one and the same prince, as the elective head of an empire and as the hereditary vassal of a province of that empire, conspiring against the empire in the interest of his province; proving successful in that conspiracy because his encroachments on the south appear to resume the traditionary conflicts between the German Empire and Italy, and his encroachments on the east to continue the deadly struggle between the German and Slavonic races and the resistance of Christian Europe against the Mahometan Orient; lastly, exalting by dint of artful family combinations his domestic power to such a pitch that at one moment it threatened not only to absorb the empire while shedding a fictitious luster upon it, but to bury the world in the tomb of a universal monarchy. Than such colossal outlines nothing can be stranger to the annals of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. Where the history of its rival reads like a diabolical epic, its own reads like an immoral family romance. There exists a striking difference, even where one might expect to find likeness, if not identity, of interest. The two Marches of Brandenburg and Austria both derived their original importance from forming advanced posts for the defense as well as the attack of Germany against the neighboring Slavonian race. But even from this point of view the history of Brandenburg lacks color, life and dramatic movement, lost as it is in petty strifes with obscure Slavonic tribes scattered over a relatively small tract of land between the Elbe and the Oder, none of which tribes ever ripened into anything like an historical existence. No Slavonic tribe of historical mark was ever conquered or Germanized by the Margraviate of Brandenburg, nor did it ever succeed in stretching out its arms to the neighboring Wendish Sea. Pomerania, coveted by the Margraves of Brandenburg since the twelfth century, was not yet entirely incorporated into the kingdom of Prussia in the year 1815, and when the Brandenburg Electors began to appropriate it piecemeal, it had long ago ceased to be a Slavonic State. The transformation of the southern and south-eastern shores of the Baltic, partly by the commercial enterprise of German burghers, partly by the sword of German knights, belong to the history of Germany and of Poland, not to that of Brandenburg, which only came in to gather the fruit it had not sown.
Without much risk we may go so far as to assert that of the innumerable readers who have contrived to get some clue as to the classical names of Achilles, Cicero, Nestor and Hector, there exists only a very indifferent percentage who ever suspected the sandy soil of Brandenburg of not only producing potatoes and sheep in our own time, but of having exuberated some centuries ago no less than four Electors, respectively going under the names of Albrecht Achilles, Johann Cicero, Joachim I. Nestor, and Joachim II. Hector. The same golden mediocrity that favored the slow growth of the Electorate of Brandenburg into what is, by courtesy, called a European power, has safely screened its home-spun history from too indiscreet an intimacy with the public eye. Relying on this fact, Prussian statesmen and writers have exerted themselves to the utmost to impregnate the world with the notion that Prussia is the military monarchy, par excellence—whence it might be inferred that the divine right of the Hohenzollerns must mean the right of the sword, the right of conquest. Nothing could be further from the mark. It may be affirmed, on the contrary, that, properly speaking, of all the provinces the Hohenzollerns now possess, they have conquered only one—Silesia: a feat so unparalleled in the annals of their house, that it earned for Frederick II. the title of the Unique. Now, the Prussian monarchy stretches over 109,314 square miles, of which the province of Brandenburg, even in its present extent, does not number more than 15,792, and Silisia no more than 15,820. How, then, did they get at Prussia, with 25,126, at Posen, with 12,248, at Pomerania, with 12,304, at Saxony, with 9,818, at Westphalia, with 9,848, and at Rhenish Prussia, with 10,348 square miles? By the divine right of bribery, open purchase, petty larceny, legacy-hunting, and treacherous partition treaties.
In the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Margraviate of Brandenburg belonged to the house of Luxemburg, whose chief, Sigismund, simultaneously swayed the imperial scepter of Germany. Being very short of cash and hard pressed by his creditors, he found a facile and accommodating friend in Frederick, Burgrave of Nüremberg, a prince tracing his origin to the house of Hohenzollern. In 1411, Frederick was installed as General Administrator of Brandenburg, made over to him as a sort of mortgage for the divers sums he had advanced to the Emperor. Like a prudent money-lender who finds himself once put in preliminary possession of the premises of a spendthrift, Frederick continued to involve Sigismund in new debts by new advances, till 1415, when the debtor and creditor accounts were at last settled by the investiture of Frederick with the hereditary electorate of Brandenburg. To leave no doubt as to the nature of this act, it was encumbered with two clauses, the one reserving to the house of Luxemburg the right of redeeming the electorate on payment of 400,000 florins in gold; and the other binding Frederick and his heirs, on every new election for the Empire, to give their vote to that house—one clause stamping the contract as a barter and the other as bribery. To become full proprietor of the electorate, there remained for the grasping friend of Sigismund but one further operation—the dropping of the redemption clause. Accordingly, he watched the opportune moment when Sigismund, at the Council of Constance, was again out of money; he hurried from the March to the confines of Switzerland, emptied his purse, and the fatal clause was struck off. Such were the ways and means of the right divine, on which the still reigning dynasty of Hohenzollern founds its possession of the Electorate of Brandenburg. Such was the origin of the Prussian monarchy.
Frederick’s next successor, a very weak man, called the “Iron,” because of his fancy for always appearing in public in an iron harness, bought for 100,000 gold florins the New March from the order of the Teutonic Knights, as his father had bought the Old March and his dignity from the German Emperor. Thence the method of buying up encumbered parcels of sovereignty grew into as settled a thing with the Hohenzollern Electors as intervention had once been with the Roman Senate. Leaving the tedious details of this sordid traffic, we pass on to the times of the Reformation.
It must not be imagined that because the Reformation turned out to be the main prop of the Hohenzollern dynasty, the Hohenzollern dynasty proved themselves the main prop of the Reformation. Quite the reverse. The founder of the dynasty, Frederick I., inaugurated his reign by leading the armies of Sigismund against the Hussites, who thrashed him soundly for his pains. Joachim I. Nestor, from 1493 to 1535, treated the German Reformation as though it were a Taborite. He persecuted it to his death. Joachim II., Hector, although a convert to Lutheranism, refused to draw the sword in defense of the new faith at the very moment when it appeared to succumb before the overwhelming forces of Charles V. Not only declining to share in the armed resistance of the Schmalkalden Bund, he tendered his secret support to the Emperor. On the part of the Hohenzollerns the German Reformation, then, met with open hostility at its rise; at the time of its earlier struggles with a false neutrality, and during its terrible concluding scene of the Thirty Years’ War with fainthearted vacillation, cowardly inaction, and base faithlessness. It is known that the Elector, George Wilhelm, tried to bar a passage to the liberating arms of Gustavus Adolphus, who was forced to drive him by kicks and blows into the Protestant camp, out of which he afterward tried to skulk, by concluding a separate peace with Austria. But if the Hohenzollerns were not the knights, they certainly were the cashiers of the German Reformation. Their reluctance to fight in its cause was only equaled by their eagerness to plunder in its name. Reformation, with them, was but the religious title for secularization, so that the best part of their acquisitions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be traced to one large source—church robbery. A rather queer way this for the divine right to manifest itself.
Three events stand foremost in the history of the formation of the Hohenzollern monarchy—the acquisition of the Brandenburg electorate; the adjunction to the electorate of the duchy of Prussia; and lastly, the elevation of the duchy into a kingdom. We have seen how the electorate was acquired. The duchy of Prussia was got by three steps: first, by secularization; next, by marriage transactions of rather an equivocal character—the Elector Joachim Frederick espousing the younger, and his son Johann Sigismund the elder daughter of the mad and soulless Duke Albrecht of Prussia; and lastly, by bribing with the right hand the Court of the Polish King, and with the left hand the Diet of the Polish Republic. So complicated were these bribing transactions as to extend over a whole series of years. A similar method was adopted for the transformation of the duchy of Prussia into a kingdom. To get the royal title, the Elector Frederick III., afterward King Frederick I., wanted the consent of the German Emperor. To get this consent, against which the Catholic conscience of the Emperor revolted, he bribed the Jesuit Wolf, confessor of Leopold I., and threw into the bargain 30,000 Brandenburgers to be slaughtered in the Austro-Spanish succession-war. The Hohenzollern Elector returned to the old German institution of life-money, only that the ancient Germans paid with cattle and that he paid with men. Such was the formation of the Hohenzollern royalty by the grace of God.
With their improving fortunes, since the commencement of the eighteenth century, the Hohenzollerns improved their method of aggrandizement by adding to bribery and barter partition treaties with Russia against States which they had not felled themselves, but surprised when fallen. Thus we find them concurring with Peter the Great in the partition of the Swedish possessions, with Catherine II. in the partition of Poland, and with Alexander I. in the partition of Germany.
Those, then, who object to the Prussian claims to Neufchâtel that the Hohenzollerns got it by bribery, have committed a woful mistake in forgetting that it was by bribery that they acquired Brandenburg, that they acquired Prussia, that they acquired the royal dignity. There can exist no doubt that they possess Neufchâtel by the same right divine as their other States, and that they cannot resign the one without exposing the others.