This work is a political pamphlet by Ferdinand Lassalle, written as an intervention in the German debate over the Italian war of 1859. At issue was whether Prussia should come to Austria’s aid against France and Piedmont, or whether German interests lay elsewhere. Lassalle’s pamphlet is not a general treatise on diplomacy or a history of the war; it is a focused polemic on Prussia’s “task” in the crisis. Its argument is directed at German public opinion and at Prussian statesmen, and its purpose is to challenge the assumption that Austria’s cause was Germany’s cause.
The pamphlet’s central claim is that Prussia should not defend Austria. Lassalle urges that Prussia side with France and Italy against Austria, on the ground that “the complete destruction of Austria was the preliminary condition of German unity.” He treats Austria as the obstacle to German national consolidation, not as a shield against France. In his account, the Italian war does not represent a serious threat to Germany. Germany, he argues, has a real interest in the success of the Italian struggle for national unity, and a good cause does not become a bad one merely because a bad man—Napoleon III—takes it up. Lassalle is concerned to separate the Italian national question from Bonaparte’s dynastic ambitions, insisting that hostility to Napoleon should not blind Germans to the legitimacy of Italian aspirations or to the advantages that Austrian defeat might bring to Germany.
A major part of the pamphlet is a critique of German nationalist war fever. Lassalle describes the national movement that arose under the threat of war as little more than hatred of France, a sheer anti-Gallicism for which Napoleon was the pretext but hatred of French revolutionary development the real reason. He warns that a Franco-German war, in which the two greatest continental peoples would tear at each other for nationalist delusions, would be a tremendous danger to European culture and to all genuinely national and revolutionary interests. Such a war, fought not for any vital national interest but out of pathologically irritated nationalism, high-flown patriotism and childish anti-Gallicism, would represent the most monstrous and incalculable victory of the reactionary principle since 1848. For Lassalle, therefore, it is the vital task of democracy to oppose such a war with all possible means.
The pamphlet also engages the strategic argument that Germany’s defenses required holding the line of the Po. Lassalle rejects the view—associated with Engels’s contemporaneous pamphlet Po und Rhein—that Austria’s Italian position was a German military necessity. He argues that this confuses Austrian interests with German interests. Germany need not abandon the Rhine because it declines to fight for the Po; the real question is whether Prussia will pursue a genuinely German national policy or exhaust itself in the service of the Habsburg monarchy. The Italian war, in his reading, is a matter between Austria and the Italian national movement, not a German war of defense. Prussia’s task is to recognize where German national interest truly lies and to refuse to be drawn into a war that would strengthen reaction and weaken the cause of German unity.
The pamphlet is thus an argument about nationality and realpolitik. Lassalle applies a principle of nationality to Italy and asks why Germany should oppose it when it works against Austria. He does not deny that Napoleon may hope to win popularity from the Italian cause, but he insists that this does not invalidate the cause itself. The rhetorical strategy of the work is to present a national and popular policy for Prussia—one that the Prussian government, in Lassalle’s private calculation, was unlikely to adopt—and thereby to expose the official pro-Austrian policy as unpopular and un-German. The pamphlet is short, urgent and combative, designed to shift public argument rather than to provide a systematic theory. It remains within the horizon of the crisis it addresses: the question of Prussia’s stance toward the Italian war and the meaning of German national interest in that immediate conjuncture.
More specifically, Lassalle makes the nationality principle a test of German politics. If Germans claim a national state for themselves, they cannot consistently treat the Italian claim to a national state as a crime; to do so is to adopt the legitimist standpoint of the German Confederation and the Habsburg monarchy. The pamphlet therefore attacks the official identification of “German interests” with the preservation of Austrian rule in Italy. Such an identification, Lassalle argues, subordinates German nationality to a dynastic-imperial interest and would commit Prussia to a cause that is not German at all. The Italian war thus exposes the political emptiness of the existing German order: it can defend legitimacy, but it cannot articulate a national idea.
Lassalle also treats Bonapartism as a rival and a warning rather than as the real issue. Napoleon’s sponsorship of Italian nationality is a usurpation of a revolutionary principle for dynastic ends; but the answer to that usurpation cannot be to defend Austrian legitimism. A German policy that merely opposes Napoleon in the name of the existing order would leave the national idea in Bonapartist hands and confirm the reactionary character of German politics. The pamphlet’s polemic is thus aimed at both pro-Austrian official policy and at a nationalist anti-French war fever that mistakes hatred of Napoleon for a German policy. Its significance lies in this reframing of the crisis: the question is not whether Prussia will help Austria hold the Po, but which principle Prussia will represent in Germany—dynastic legitimacy or national self-determination.
