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Updated: July 29, 2025
The State Department cabled me to find out whether there was any truth in these rumours, with particular reference to Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Liebknecht is a lawyer practicing in Berlin and so I telephoned him, asking him to come and see me. He did so, and of course, by his presence verified the fact that he had not been executed.
It was the chief thought and labor of Marx during the first years of that organization to win for the English workers the suffrage, while in Germany all his followers including Lassalle as well as Bebel and Liebknecht labored throughout the sixties to that end.
After the "dismissal of the pilot," Bismarck, he became Prussian Minister of Finance, holding that position for ten years. Liebknecht referred to him as "my former comrade in communismo and present Chancellor in re."
Franck, one of the Social Democracy's most shining lights and the man who was in line to be Bebel's successor, volunteered for military service. He was one of the first to fall fighting in September, somewhere in the West. The authorities might have known that Liebknecht was a hard man to keep quiet if he ever decided to speak out.
When the Chancellor said: "We could have gotten what we wanted by peaceful work. Our enemies chose war." Liebknecht interjected in his sharp, shrill voice, "You chose the war!" There was great excitement and hissing; the President called for order. Members shouted: "Throw him out!" But Liebknecht sat there more determined than ever.
The exposures of Liebknecht and Bebel proved not only ruinous to Von Schweitzer, but excessively annoying to Bismarck, and as early as 1871 he wanted to begin a war upon the Marxian socialists. In 1874 he actually began his attempts to crush what he could no longer corrupt or control. He became more and more enraged at the attitude of the socialists toward him personally.
The spirit of the international movement, on the whole, is more and more that of the great German Socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht, who advised the party to be "always on the offensive and never on the defensive," or of La Salle when he declared, "True political power will have to be fought for, and cannot be bought."
This was written in October, 1869, a month after the Basel congress. On the 1st of January, 1870, the General Council at London sent a private communication to all sections of the International, and on the 28th of March it was followed by another. These, together with various circulars dealing with questions of principle, but all consisting of attacks upon Bakounin personally or upon his doctrines, finally goaded him into open war upon Marx, the General Council, all their doctrines, and even upon the then forming socialist party of Germany, with Bebel and Liebknecht at its head. During the year 1870 Bakounin was preparing for the great controversy, but his friends of Lyons interrupted his work by calling him there to take part in the uprising of that year. He hastened to Lyons, but, as we know, he was soon forced to flee and conceal himself in Marseilles. It was there, in the midst of the blackest despair, that Bakounin wrote: "I have no longer any faith in the Revolution in France. This nation is no longer in the least revolutionary. The people themselves have become doctrinaire, as insolent and as bourgeois as the bourgeois.... The bourgeois are loathsome. They are as savage as they are stupid and as the police blood flows in their veins they should be called policemen and attorneys-general in embryo. I am going to reply to their infamous calumnies by a good little book in which I shall give everything and everybody its proper name. I leave this country with deep despair in my heart." He then set to work at last to state systematically his own views and to annihilate utterly those of the socialists. Many of these documents are only fragmentary. Some were started and abandoned; others ended in hopeless confusion. With the most extraordinary gift of inspirited statement, he passes in review every phase of history, leaping from one peak to another of the great periods, pointing his lessons, issuing his warnings, but all the time throwing at the reader such a Niagara of ideas and arguments that he is left utterly dazed and bewildered as by some startling military display or the rushing here and there of a military maneuver. In Lettres
But such is the natural end of sensibility, and of the woman who typifies it for succeeding generations. Some time ago I entered a fairly large library one of more than two hundred thousand volumes to seek the little brochure on Karl Marx written by his old friend and genial comrade Wilhelm Liebknecht. It was in the card catalogue.
Behind closed doors, without an opportunity to consult his friends, with only an attorney appointed by the Government to defend him, Liebknecht was sentenced to two years' hard labour. His only crime was that he had dared to speak in the Reichstag the opinions of some of the more radical socialists. Liebknecht's imprisonment was a lesson to other Socialist agitators.
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