Background and occasion
The pamphlet grows out of the agitation Lassalle conducted in the first half of 1863. After the Leipzig founding of the ADAV, he toured and spoke to workers, presenting the case for universal and direct suffrage and for workers forming their own independent political party separate from the liberal bourgeoisie. His program centered on producer cooperatives supported by state credit, and on winning the vote for the working class. The Prussian political scene was dominated by a conflict in which the liberal Progressive majority refused to approve the military budget and the government acted without parliamentary sanction, an arrangement that left the constitutional order in dispute.
Lassalle’s broader strategic outlook held that the working class could not rely on the liberal middle class to secure its interests, and that a direct alliance between the working masses and the monarchy, against the liberal bourgeoisie, offered a path to political change. This is the core tension the pamphlet addresses: the relationship between the labor movement, the Crown, and the liberal opposition.
The argument
The title points to the central object of the text, the supposed promise made by the King of Prussia, Wilhelm I, to the workers. Lassalle’s reasoning is that the monarchy had, in effect, signaled a willingness to ally with the lower classes against the propertied liberal bourgeoisie, and that the labor movement should hold the Crown to such a promise rather than entangle itself in liberal parliamentary politics. He argues that the bourgeois liberals, having achieved economic and political power in their own interest, were no longer a revolutionary force and were in fact the main obstacle to the social and political emancipation of the workers.
In building this case, Lassalle takes the agitation of the ADAV as the foundation of a new political movement. The pamphlet defends the independence of that agitation from liberal leadership and insists that workers should organize on their own account. It frames the alliance with the monarchy not as a surrender to reaction but as a tactical use of the Crown’s own interests against the liberal parliamentary class, which he portrays as hypocritical in its professions of constitutional principle.
The text is polemical in form, written as a political intervention rather than a systematic treatise. It moves through a series of assertions about the nature of the Prussian state, the character of the bourgeoisie, and the historical role of the working class, each supported by appeals to the political situation of the moment and to the logic of the ADAV’s program.
Structure and method
As a pamphlet, the work is organized around a sequence of arguments rather than chapters with fixed titles, and I would not want to reconstruct its exact section divisions from memory. Its method is rhetorical and strategic: Lassalle addresses an audience of workers and sympathizers, anticipates the objections of liberal critics, and argues that the labor movement should claim the political initiative. The pamphlet’s force depends heavily on its sharp contrast between the “promise” of royal favor and the broken promises of the liberal bourgeoisie.
Significance and reception
This pamphlet belongs to the phase of Lassalle’s career when he was the most prominent organizer of independent working-class politics in Germany. It helped define the ADAV’s distinct identity, emphasizing state-assisted cooperatives and universal suffrage, and it sharpened the break with the liberal labor milieu. Its controversial alliance with the monarchy drew criticism from liberals and from later socialist currents, including Marx and Engels, whose relationship with Lassalle and the ADAV was often tense. The debate over Lassalle’s tactical turn toward the Crown has remained a central point of discussion in the history of German socialism, and this pamphlet is among the texts through which that debate is best understood.
Lassalle’s reputation rests on his role in founding the first mass working-class party in Germany, and this writing captures the political logic behind that project: the conviction that the labor movement must act as an independent force and that its path to power ran through a confrontation with the existing order, aided by whatever divisions existed within it.
