Lassalle was born in 1825 at Breslau, where his father was a wholesale dealer. He was educated at the Universities of Breslau and Berlin, and at the latter city saw, through the Mendelssohns, a good deal of the best literary society there, and made the acquaintance, among others, of Alexander von Humboldt, who used to call him a Wunderkind. On finishing his curriculum, he went for a time to Paris, and formed there a close friendship with H. Heine, who was an old acquaintance of his family. He meant to qualify himself as privat Docent when he returned, but was diverted from his purpose by the task of redressing a woman's wrongs, into which he flew with the romantic enterprise of a knight-errant, and which he carried, through years of patient and zealous labour, to a successful issue. The Countess Hatzfeldt had been married when a girl of sixteen to a cousin of her own, one of the great nobles of Germany; but the marriage turned out most unhappily after a few years, and she was obliged, on account of the maltreatment she suffered, to live apart from her husband. His persecution followed her into her separation. He took child after child from her, and was now seeking to take the last she had left, her youngest son. He allowed her very scanty and irregular support, while he lavished his money on mistresses, and was, at this very moment, settling on one of them an annuity of £1,000. This state of things had continued for twenty years, and the Countess's own relations had, for family reasons, always declined to take up her case. Lassalle, who had made her acquaintance in Berlin, was profoundly touched by her story, and felt that she was suffering an intolerable wrong, which society permitted only because she was a woman, and her husband a lord. Though not a lawyer, he resolved to undertake her case, and after carrying the suit before thirty-six different courts, during a period of eight years, he at length procured for her a divorce in 1851, and a princely fortune in 1854, from which she rewarded him with a considerable annuity for his exertions. Lassalle's connection with this case not unnaturally gave rise to sinister construction. It was supposed he must have been in love with the Countess, and wanted to marry her, but this was disproved by the event. Darker insinuations were made, but had there been truth in them, it could not have escaped the spies the Count sent to watch him, and the servants the Count bribed to inform on him. Chivalry, vanity, and temerity at the season of life when all three qualities are at their height, account sufficiently for his whole conduct, and I see no reason to doubt the explanation he himself gives of it. "Her family," he states, "were silent, but it is said when men keep silence the stones will speak. When every human right is violated, when even the voice of blood is mute, and helpless man is forsaken by his born protectors, there then rises with right man's first and last relation—man. You have all read with emotion the monstrous history of the unhappy Duchess of Praslin. Who is there among you that would not have gone to the death to defend her? Well, gentlemen, I said to myself, here is Praslin ten times over. What is the sharp death-agony of an hour compared with the pangs of death protracted over twenty years? What are the wounds a knife inflicts compared with the slow murder dispensed with refined cruelty throughout a being's whole existence? What are they compared with the immense woe of this woman, every right of whose life has been trampled under foot, day after day, for twenty years, and whom they have first tried to cover with contempt, that they might then the more securely overwhelm her with punishment?... The difficulties, the sacrifices, the dangers did not deter me. I determined to meet false appearances with the truth, to meet rank with right, to meet the power of money with the power of mind. But if I had known what infamous calumnies I should have to encounter, how people turned the purest motives into their contraries, and what ready credence they gave to the most wretched lies—well, I hope my purpose would not have been changed, but it would have cost me a severe and bitter struggle." There seems almost something unmodern in the whole circumstances of this case, both in the oppression the victim endured, and in the manner of her rescue.
In the course of this suit occurred the robbery of Baroness von Meyerdorff's cassette, on which so much has been said. The Baroness was the person already mentioned on whom Count Hatzfeldt bestowed the annuity of £1,000. The Countess, on hearing of this settlement, went straight to her husband, accompanied by a clergyman, and insisted upon him cancelling it, in justice to his youngest son, whom it would have impoverished. The Count at first promised to do so, but after her departure, refused, and the Baroness set out for Aix to get her bond effectually secured. Lassalle suspected the object of her journey, and said to the Countess, in the presence of two young friends, Could we not obtain possession of this bond? No sooner said than done. The two young men started for Cologne, and one of them stole the Baroness's cassette, containing the veritable deed, in her hotel, and gave it to the other. They and Lassalle were all three successively tried for their part in this crime. Oppenheim, who actually stole the cassette, was acquitted; Mendelssohn, who only received it, was sent to prison; and Lassalle, who certainly suggested the deed, was found guilty by the jury, but acquitted by the judges. Moral complicity of some sort was clear, but it did not amount to a legal crime. Our interest with the transaction is merely to discover the light it reflects on the character of the man. It was a rash, foolish, and lawless freak, but of course the ordinary motives of the robber were absent. The theft of the cassette, however, was a transaction which his enemies never suffered to be forgotten.
The theft of the cassette occurred in 1846; Lassalle was tried for it in 1848, and was no sooner released than he fell into the hands of justice on a much more serious charge. The dissolution of the first Prussian National Assembly in 1848, and the gift of a Constitution by direct royal decree, had excited bitter disappointment and opposition over the whole country. There was a general agitation for combining to stop supplies by refusing to pay taxes, in order thus "to meet force with force," and this agitation was particularly active in the Rhine provinces, where democratic views had found much favour. Lassalle even planned an insurrection, and urged the citizens of Dusseldorf to armed resistance; but the Prussian Government promptly intervened, placed the town under a state of siege, and threw Lassalle into jail. He was tried in 1849 for treason, and acquitted by the jury, but was immediately afterwards brought before a correctional tribunal on the minor charge of resisting officers of the police, and sent to prison for six months. It was in his speech at the former of these trials that he declared himself a partisan of the Socialist Democratic Republic, and claimed for every citizen the right and duty of active resistance to the State when necessary. He had nothing but scorn to pour on the passive resistance policy of the Parliament. "Passive resistance is a contradiction in itself. It is like Lichtenberg's knife, without blade, and without handle, or like the fleece which one must wash without wetting. It is mere inward ill-will without the outward deed. The Crown confiscates the people's freedom; and the Prussian National Assembly, for the people's protection, declares ill-will; it would be unintelligible how the commonest logic should have allowed a legislative assembly to cover itself with such incomparable ridicule if it were not too intelligible." These are bold words. He felt himself standing on a principle and representing a cause; and so he went into prison, he tells us, with as light a heart as he would have gone to a ball; and when he heard that his sister had petitioned for his pardon, he wrote instantly and publicly disclaimed her letter.
All these trials had brought Lassalle into considerable notoriety, not unmingled with a due recognition of his undoubted verve, eloquence, and brilliancy. One effect of them was that he was forbidden to come to Berlin. This prohibition was founded, of course, on his seditious work at Dusseldorf, but is believed to have been instigated and kept up by the influence of the Hatzfeldt family. Lassalle felt it a sore privation, for his ambitions and hopes all centred in Berlin. After various ineffectual attempts to obtain permission, he arrived in the capital one day in 1857 disguised as a waggoner, and through the personal intercession of Alexander von Humboldt with the king, was at length suffered to remain. His "Heraclitus" had just appeared, and at once secured him a position in literary circles. One of his first productions after his return to Berlin was a pamphlet on "The Italian War and the Mission of Prussia; a Voice from the Democracy," which shows that his political prosecutions had not soured him against Prussia. His argument is that freedom and democracy must in Germany, as in Italy, be first preceded by unity, and that the only power capable of giving unity to Germany was Prussia, as to Italy, Piedmont. He had more of the political mind than most revolutionaries and doctrinaires, and knew that the better might be made the enemy of the good, and that ideals could only be carried out gradually, and by temporary compromises. He was monarchical for the present, therefore, no doubt because he thought the monarchy to be for the time the best and shortest road to the democratic republic. His friend Rodbertus said there was an esoteric and an exoteric Lassalle. That may be said of all politicians. Compromise is of the essence of their work.
During the next few years Lassalle's literary activity was considerable. Besides a tragedy of no merit ("Franz von Sickingen," 1859) and various pamphlets or lectures on Fichte, on Lessing, on the Constitution, on Might and Right, he published in 1861 the most important work he has left us, his "System of Acquired Rights," and in 1862 a satirical commentary on Julian Schmidt's "History of German Literature," which excited much attention and amusement at the time. His "System of Acquired Rights" already contains the germs of his socialist views, and his pamphlet on the Constitution, which appeared when the "new era" ended and the era of Bismarck began, is written to disparage the Constitutionalism of modern Liberals. A paper constitution was a thing of no consequence; it was merely declarative, not creative; the thing of real account was the distribution of power as it existed in actual fact. The king and army were powers, the court and nobility were powers, the populace was a power. Society was governed by the relative strength of these powers, as it existed in reality and not by the paper constitution that merely chronicled it. Right is regarded as merely declarative of might. It is thus easy to see why he should have more sympathy with the policy of Bismarck than with the Liberals; and later in the same year he expounded his own political position very completely in a lecture he delivered to a Working Men's Society in Berlin, on "The Connection between the Present Epoch of History and the Idea of the Working Class." This lecture, to which I shall again revert, was an epoch in his own career. It led to a second Government prosecution, and a second imprisonment for political reasons; and it and the prosecution together led to his receiving an invitation to address a General Working Men's Congress at Leipzig, in February, 1863, to which he responded by a letter, sketching the political programme of the working class, which was certainly the first step in the socialist movement.
Attention was already being engaged on the work of industrial amelioration. The Progressist party, then including the present National Liberals, had, under the lead of Schultze-Delitzsch, been promoting trades unions and co-operation in an experimental way, and the working classes themselves were beginning to think of taking more concerted action for their own improvement. The Leipzig Congress was projected by a circle of working men, who considered the Schultze-Delitzsch schemes inadequate to meet the case. This was exactly Lassalle's view. He begins his letter by telling the working men that if all they wanted was to mitigate some of the positive evils of their lot, then the Schultze-Delitzsch unions, savings banks, and sick funds were quite sufficient, and there was no need of thinking of anything more. But if their aim was to elevate the normal condition of their class, then more drastic remedies were requisite; and, in the first instance, a political agitation was indispensable. The Leipzig working men had discussed the question of their relation to politics at a previous congress a few months before, and had been divided between abstaining from politics altogether, and supporting the Progressist party. Lassalle disapproved of both these courses. They could never achieve the elevation they desired till they got universal suffrage, and they would never get universal suffrage by backing the Progressists who were opposed to it. He then explains to them how their normal condition is permanently depressed at present by the essential laws of the existing economic régime, especially by "the iron and cruel law of necessary wages." The only real cure was co-operative production, the substitution of associated labour for wage labour; for it was only so the operation of this tyrannical law of wages could be escaped. Now co-operative production, to be of any effective extent, must be introduced by State help and on State credit. The State gave advances to start railways, to develop agriculture, to promote manufactures, and nobody called it socialism to do so. Why, then, should people cry socialism if the State did a similar service to the great working class, who were, in fact, not a class, but the State itself. 96½ per cent. of the population were ground down by "the iron law," and could not possibly lift themselves above it by their own power. They must ask the State to help them, for they were themselves the State, and the help of the State was no more a superseding of their own self-help than reaching a man a ladder superseded his own climbing. State help was but self-help's means. Now these State advances could not be expected till the working class acquired political power by universal suffrage. Their first duty was therefore to organize themselves and agitate for universal suffrage; for universal suffrage was a question of the stomach.
The reception his letter met with at first was most discouraging. The newspapers with one consent condemned it, except a Feudalist organ here and there who saw in it an instrument for damaging the Liberals. What seemed more ominous was the opposition of the working men themselves. The Leipzig Committee to whom it was addressed did indeed approve of it, and individual voices were raised in its favour elsewhere, but in Berlin the working men's clubs rejected it with decided warmth, and all over the country one working men's club after another declared against it. Leipzig was the only place in which his words seemed to find any echo, and he went there two months later and addressed a meeting at which only 7 out of 1,300 voted against him. With this encouragement he resolved to go forward, and founded, on the 23rd of May, 1863, the General Working Men's Association for the promotion of universal suffrage by peaceful agitation, after the model of the English Anti-Corn Law League. He immediately threw himself with unsparing energy into the development of this organization. He passed from place to place, delivering speeches, establishing branches; he started newspapers, wrote pamphlets, and even larger works, published tracts by Rodbertus, songs by Herwegh, romances by Von Schweitzer. But it was uphill work. South Germany was evidently dead to his ideas, and even among those who followed him in the North there were but few who really understood his doctrines or concurred in his methods. Some were for more "heroic" procedure, for raising fighting corps to free Poland, to free Schleswig-Holstein, to free oppressed nationalities anywhere. Many were perfectly impracticable persons who knew neither why exactly they had come together, nor where exactly they would like to go. There were constant quarrels and rivalries and jealousies among them, and he is said to have shown remarkable tact and patience, and a genuine governing faculty in dealing with them. Lassalle's hope was to obtain a membership of 100,000: with a smaller number nothing could be done, but with 100,000 the movement would be a power. In August, 1863, he had only enrolled 1,000 after three months' energetic labour, which, he said, "would have produced colossal results among a people like the French." He was intensely disappointed, and asked, "When will this foolish people cast aside their lethargy?" but meanwhile repelled the suggestion of the secretary of the organization that it should be at once dissolved. In August, 1864, another year's strenuous work had raised their numbers only to 4,610, and Lassalle was completely disenchanted, and wrote Countess Hatzfeldt from Switzerland, shortly before his death, that he was continuing President of the Association much against his will, for he was now tired of politics, which was mere child's play if one had not power. He seems to have been convinced that the movement was a failure, and would never become a force in the State. Yet he was wrong; his words had really taken fire among the working classes, and kindled a movement which, in its curious history, has shown the remarkable power of spreading faster with the checks it encounters. It seems to have profited, not merely from political measures of repression, but even from the internal dissensions and divisions of its own adherents, and some persons tell us that it was first stimulated into decided vigour by the fatal event which might have been expected to crush it—the sudden and tragical death of its chief.
In the end of July, 1864, Lassalle went to Switzerland ostensibly for the Righi whey cure, but really to make the acquaintance of Herr von Dönnigsen, Bavarian Envoy at Berne, whose daughter he had known in Berlin, and wished to obtain in marriage. It is one of the fatalities that entangled this man's life in strange contradictions, that exactly he, a persona ingratissima to Court circles, their very arch-enemy, as they believed, should have become bound by deep mutual attachment with the daughter of exactly a German diplomatist, the courtliest of the courtly, a Conservative seven times refined. They certainly cherished for one another a sincere, and latterly a passionate affection, and they seem to have been well fitted for each other. Helena von Dönnigsen was a bright, keen-witted, eccentric, adventurous young woman of twenty-five, and so like Lassalle, even in appearance, that when she was acting a man's part, years afterwards (in 1874), in some amateur performance in the theatre of Breslau, Lassalle's native town, many of the audience said, here was Lassalle again as he was when a boy. Learning from a common friend in Berlin that Lassalle was at the Righi, she made a visit to some friends in Berne, and soon after accompanied them on an excursion to that "popular" mountain. She inquired for Lassalle at the hotel, and he joined the party to the summit. She knew her parents would be opposed to the match, but felt certain that her lover, with his gifts and charms, would be able to win them over, and it was accordingly agreed that when she returned to Geneva, Lassalle should go there too, and press his suit in person. The parents, however, were inexorable, and refused to see him; and the young lady in despair fled from her father's house to her lover's lodging, and urged him to elope with her. Lassalle calmly led her back to her father's roof, with a control which some writers think quite inexplicable in him, but which was probably due to his still believing that he would be able to talk the parents round if he got the chance, and to his desire to try constitutional means before resorting to revolutionary. Helena was locked in her room for days alone with her excited brain and panting heart. For days, father, mother, sister, brother, all came and laid before her what ruin she was bringing on the family for a mere selfish whim of her own. If she married a man so objectionable to people in power, her father would be obliged to resign his post, her brother could never look for one, and her sister, who had just been engaged to a Count, would, of course, have to give up her engagement. She was in despair, but ultimately submitted passively to write to Lassalle, desiring him to consider the matter ended, and submitted equally passively (for she informs us herself) to accept the hand of Herr von Racowitza, a young Wallachian Boyar, whom she had indeed been previously engaged to, and sincerely liked and respected, without in the eminent sense loving him. Lassalle had meanwhile wrought himself into a fury of excitement. Enraged by her parents' opposition, enraged still more by their refusal even to treat with him, enraged above all by his belief that their daughter was being illegitimately constrained, he wrote here, wrote there, tried to get the foreign minister at Munich to interfere, to get Bishop Ketteler to use his influence, promised even to turn Catholic to please the Dönnigsens, forgetting that they were Protestants. All in vain. At last two of his friends waited by appointment on Herr von Dönnigsen, and heard from Helena's own lips that she was to be married to the Boyar, and wished the subject no more mentioned. She now tells us that she did this in sheer weariness of mind, and with a confused hope that somehow or other the present storm would blow past, and she might have her Lassalle after all. Lassalle, however, was overcome with chagrin; and though he always held that a democrat should not fight duels, and had got Robespierre's stick, which he usually carried, as a present for having declined one, he now sent a challenge both to the father and the bridegroom. The latter accepted. The duel was fought. Lassalle was fatally wounded, and died two days after, on the 31st August, 1864, at the age of 39. Helena married Herr von Racowitza shortly afterwards, but he was already seized with consumption, and she says she found great comfort, after the tumult and excitement of the Lassalle episode, in nursing him during the few months he lived after their marriage.
The body was sent back to Germany, after funeral orations from revolutionists of all countries and colours, and the Countess Hatzfeldt had made arrangements for similar funeral celebrations at every halting place along the route to Berlin, where she meant it to be buried, but at Cologne it was intercepted by the police on behalf of the Lassalle family, and carried quietly to Breslau, where, after life's fitful fever, he was laid silently with his fathers in the Jewish burying-ground of his native place. Fate, however, had not even yet done with him. It followed him beyond the tomb to throw one more element of the bizarre into his strangely compounded history. Lest the death of the leader should prove fatal to the cause, the Committee of the General Working Men's Association determined to turn it, if possible, into a source of strength, as B. Becker, his successor in the president's chair, informs us, "by carrying it into the domain of faith." Lassalle was not dead, but only translated to a higher and surer leadership. A Lassalle cultus was instituted, and Becker says that many a German working man believed that he died for them, and that he was yet to come again to save them. This singular apotheosis, which is neither creditable to the honesty of the leaders of the socialist movement, nor to the intelligence of its rank and file, was kept up by periodical celebrations among those of the German socialists who are generally known as the orthodox Lassalleans, down, at least, to the time of the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878.