talkative deputies were arrested, together with Hepner, the associate editor of the Volkstaat, the official organ of the Eisenachers, on the charge of "inciting to high treason". After three months and a half of close surveillance—the war by that time being practically concluded—the accused were given provisional liberty. Subsequently, in March, 1872, they were tried at Leipzig: Hepner was acquitted, but Liebknecht and Bebel were condemned to two years' confinement in a military fortress; and Bebel was released in 1874 only to be clapped into jail another nine months for lèse-majesté.[1] Beside these leaders of the Eisenachers, four members of the Leipzig committee and numerous other members of the party had been accused of organizing protests against the later developments of the Franco-Prussian War and had been condemned to various terms of imprisonment.
Nor were the government's prosecutions directed solely against the Eisenachers. The Lassalleans themselves, who up to Sedan had been under Bismarck's spell and had been magnanimously tolerated by him, now broke with him and paid the penalty by losing his protection. While they acclaimed the overthrow of Napoleon III. and the establishment of the German Empire, they denounced the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine; and the failure of Schweitzer to secure re-election to the Reichstag in 1871 lost him both his popularity with his followers and his usefulness to Bismarck. Moreover, the Lassalleans all along had based their admiration for the chancellor upon his strenuous opposition to the hated bourgeoisie, but now in the early 'seventies Bismarck was apparently surrendering himself completely to the programme and the policies of the National Liberals and the Free Conservatives, those very elements of the national life which the Lassalleans most distrusted. To cap the climax, in June, 1874, the Imperial Prosecutor Tessendorf obtained a court order for the provisional closing of the General Association of German Workingmen. Whereupon, Toelcke, one of the Lassallean chieftains, wrote to Liebknecht and to Geib, a member of the Eisenach executive, proposing a corporate union of the rival Socialist organizations. At Gotha, accordingly, a joint congress assembled in May, 1875, comprising seventy-three delegates representing 16,000 Lassalleans, and fifty-six delegates representing some 9000 Eisenachers. The outcome, as everyone knows, was the
- ↑ Interesting side-lights on these events are supplied by Der Hochverraths-Prozess wider Liebknecht, Bebel, Hepner, vor dem Schwurgericht zu Leipzig vom 11. bis 26. März 1872, mit einer Einleitung von W. Liebknecht (1894), and by Bebel, Aus meinem Leben (3 vols., 1910–1914).
