Brunswick Manifesto of 1870

At the outbreak of the war the committee in Brunswick supported the war against France on the ground that whoever is attacked must be allowed to defend himself. This position of Samuel Spier and Wilhelm Bracke clashed head-on with that of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, who held that the hostilities were desired by Germany and, rejecting a war "against brothers", abstained in the Reichstag vote of July; the fierce quarrel between the two camps threatened to break the year-old party apart. In a letter to the committee of about 1 September, Marx and Engels wrote that annexing Alsace-Lorraine was "the best means of turning this war into a European institution", would perpetuate military despotism in the new Germany as the price of holding "a western Poland", and would turn the peace into "a mere armistice until France has recovered sufficiently to demand back her lost territories". After the victory at Sedan and the capture of Napoleon III the committee too came out against continuing the war and in its manifesto of 5 September demanded an immediate "honourable peace" with France. "We protest against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. And we are conscious of speaking in the name of the German working class. In the common interest of France and Germany, in the interest of western civilization against eastern barbarism, the German workmen will not patiently tolerate the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine", it declared, and it demanded the extradition of Louis Bonaparte to the French republic as a common felon. The party was thus saved from a split, but its leadership was arrested at once.

Marx reported in the Pall Mall Gazette on 15 September that the committee of the German section of the International Working Men's Association, seated in Brunswick, had issued a manifesto to the German working class on the 5th calling on it to prevent the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine and to contribute to an honourable peace with the French republic, and that on the orders of the commanding general Vogel von Falckenstein not only had the manifesto been confiscated but all the members of the committee, even the unfortunate printer of the document, had been arrested and taken "in chains like common criminals" to Lötzen in East Prussia, about a thousand kilometres from Brunswick. In the Daily News in January 1871 he wrote that the members had been treated "like galley slaves" since the beginning of September and were still undergoing a judicial comedy on a charge of high treason, a fate shared by many workers who had spread the manifesto. The treason charge shrank to an offence against the law on assemblies, and of the years of imprisonment demanded for Spier the verdict left two months. The General Council's second address of 9 September quoted the manifesto and wrote that the German working class claimed "as the first of these guarantees, an honorable peace for France, and the recognition of the French republic", adding that "history will prove that the German working class are not made of the same malleable stuff as the German middle class". On 26 November Bebel and Liebknecht put a peace without annexation to the Reichstag.