Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/77

34 war. In his speech from the throne to the North German Diet, he had solemnly declared to make war upon the Emperor of the French, and not upon the French people. On the 11th of August he had issued a manifesto to the French nation, where he said: "The Emperor Napoleon having made, by land and sea, an attack on the German nation, which desired and still desires to live in peace with the French people, I have assumed the command of the German armies to repel his aggression, and I have been led by military events to cross the frontiers of France." Not content to assert the defensive character of the war by the statement that he only assumed the command of the German armies to repel aggression," he added that he was only "led by military events" to cross the frontiers of France. A defensive war does, of course, not exclude offensive operations, dictated by "military events."

Thus this pious king stood pledged before France and the world to a strictly defensive war. How to release him from his solemn pledge? The stage managers had to exhibit him as reluctantly yielding to the irresistible behest of the German nation. They at once gave the cue to the liberal German middle class, with its professors, its capitalists, its aldermen, and its penmen. That middle class, which, in its struggles for civil liberty, had, from 1846 to 1870, been exhibiting an unexampled spectacle of irresolution, incapacity, and cowardice, felt, of course, highly delighted to bestride the European scene as the roaring lion of German patriotism. It revindicated its civic independence by affecting to force upon the Prussian Government the secret designs of that same Government. It does penance for its long-continued and almost religious faith in Louis Bonaparte's infallibility, by shouting for the dismemberment of the French