BRUSSELS H 5can only be a complete victory of the counter-revolution or a fresh and
successful revolution. Perhaps the victory of the revolution is only possible
after a complete counter-revolution.'^68
The three defendants were again acquitted and the foreman of the
sympathetic jury thanked Marx for his instructive explanation. Marx's two
speeches in his defence appeared shortly afterwards as a pamphlet.
One result of the February election was to provoke in the Workers'
Association the serious split that had been imminent for some time.
Gottschalk had eventually been acquitted and released from prison just
before Christmas. He found the Workers' Association much changed
since July and realising that it was impossible for him to be re-elected
President on his own terms, he left Cologne of his own accord and went
to Brussels. But he still continued to follow the affairs of the Association
with interest and expressed his views through the Association's newspaper,
whose editor, Prinz, was a close friend. Prinz launched a violent attack
on the Democrats, and the committee meeting next day, 15 January,
decided to appoint a commission to supervise Prinz in his editorial activi-
ties.^69 But Prinz would not be supervised and the Association was obliged
to found a rival journal. On the proposal of Schapper, the organisation
of the Association was tightened up 'in order that disunity should not
arise through lack of rules'.^70 Schapper himself became President; Marx
did not hold any official position, though he and Engels offered to give the
members fortnightly lectures on social questions. At the end of February
Gottschalk himself launched a violent attack on Marx in an unsigned
article in Prinz's newspaper. Gottschalk took particular exception to an
article by Marx in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in which he had defended
his position on the forthcoming elections. Marx had written:
We are certainly the last to desire the rule of the bourgeoisie.... But
our cry to the workers and petty-bourgeoisie is: you should prefer to
suffer in modern bourgeois society whose industry creates the material
condition for a new society that will free you all, rather than return to
an obsolete form of society which, under the pretence of saving your
classes, precipitates the whole nation into medieval barbarism.^71This did, in fact, seem to mark a change from the stark choice between
social republican revolution and feudal reaction that Marx had proclaimed
in December. Gottschalk was quick to attack this modified position in an
unsigned open letter 'To Herr Karl Marx' which was typical of many
attacks on Marx from the Left during (and after) the 1848 revolution:
Why should we make a revolution? Why should we, men of the prole-
tariat, spill our blood? Should we really, as you, Mr Preacher, proclaim
to us, escape the hell of the Middle Ages by precipitating ourselves