136 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNISTa revolutionary party of the workers, dedicated to communism.
Weitling contrasted the financial failure of Kinkel's campaign
with the sacrifices which working men make regularly for their
fellow workers and added mournfully, "Kinkel has been received
with loud rejoicing.... Not a soul inquired about me."
The Republik der Arbeiter for 1851 contained many excited
comments about the European situation and continued to discuss
the possibilities of a new revolution. Weitling was ready to accept
Louis Napoleon as "the heir of Louis Blanc," and predicted that
this noncommunist would do more in five years to provide a solid
foundation for communism than Cabet could have accomplished
in fifty years. Even when Napoleon was crowned emperor, he
clung to the hope that the revived Napoleonic Empire would pre
pare the road for communism. Weitling persuaded himself that
the emperor had the workers' interests at heart, really wished to
abolish poverty, and had been forced by the aristocracy and the
moneyed powers to accept a throne to make sure that he would
not revert to his earlier sympathies for socialism. For months
Weitling and his Republik der Arbeiter vacillated between fear
of "the brainless adventurer," who was making France into a
"penitentiary," and joy over Napoleon's dismissal of the "900
talkers" in parliament, which ended "the humbug of democracy."
"It will be easier, by Revolution, to get rid of one tyrant than
nine hundred," he reasoned. The communist editor could hardly
claim Napoleon III as "one of us"; he was "not our Messiah"; yet
Weitling never entirely abandoned hope that eventually he would
woo the proletariat, conquer Europe, and issue the call to establish
a German social republic.
As late as March, 1855, the editor of the Republik der Arbeiter
still hoped for a new European revolution led by a dictator who
would abolish private property and then, as the people became
educated and converted to the new order, would gradually re
linquish his powers and transform his regime into a popular gov
ernment, along the lines indicated in the Garantieen.
The new revolution never came, because for one thing so many