suffering on the
other side.

Consequently, one fine day Germany will find herself at the level of
European decay, before she has ever stood at the level of European
emancipation. The phenomenon may be likened to a fetish-worshipper,
who succumbs to the diseases of Christianity.

Looking upon German governments, we find that, owing to contemporary
conditions, the situation of Germany, the standpoint of German culture
and finally their own lucky instincts, they are driven to combine the
civilized shortcomings of the modern State world, whose advantages we
do not possess, with the barbarous shortcomings of the _ancien
regime_, which we enjoy in full measure, so that Germany is constantly
obliged to participate, if not intelligently, at any rate
unintelligently, in the State formations which lie beyond her _status
quo_.

Is there for example a country in the world which shares so naively in
all the illusions of the constitutional community, without sharing in
its realities, as does so-called constitutional Germany? Was it
necessary to combine German governmental interference, the tortures of
the censorship, with the tortures of the French September laws which
presupposed freedom of the press? Just as one found the gods of all
nations in the Roman pantheon, so will one find the flaws of all State
forms in the Holy Roman German Empire. That this eclecticism will
reach a point hitherto unsuspected is guaranteed in particular by the
politico-aesthetic _gourmanderie_ of a German king, who thinks he can
play all the parts of monarchy, both of the feudal and the
bureaucratic, both of the absolute and the constitutional, of the
autocratic as of the democratic, if not in the person of his people,
then in his own person, if not for the people, then for himself.
Germany as the embodiment of the defect of the political present,
constituted in her own world, will not be able to overthrow the
specifically German obstacles without overthrowing the general
obstacles of the political present.

It is not the radical revolution which is a utopian dream for Germany,
not the general human emancipation, but rather the partial, the merely
political revolution, the revolution which leaves the pillars of the
house standing. Upon what can a partial, a merely political revolution
base itself? Upon the fact that a part of bourgeois society could
emancipate itself and attain to general rulership, upon the fact that,
by virtue of its special situ