Lassalle, Ferdinand

la-sal', Ferdinand (1825-1864), a German socialist. He was born at Breslau and died at Geneva. Like Carl Marx, he was of Jewish ancestry. His father was a merchant and aimed to bring his son up in the same calling. Ferdinand studied at Breslau and at Berlin. His first liking was the study of philosophy. His first publication was an examination of Heraclitus from the Hegelian point of view. In Berlin, Lassalle moved in so-called good society. Humboldt called him a prodigy--a Wunderkind. The poet Heine regarded him as a young man of remarkable endowments. In Berlin he formed an attachment for a Countess Hatzfeldt and undertook a bit of knight errantry in her behalf, nothing less than the theft from a room in a hotel at Cologne of a casket of jewels and a bond given by the husband of the countess to another woman. Lassalle himself did not engage in the act, but he instigated it and narrowly escaped imprisonment.

Like other young men of a Byronic turn of mind, he was engaged in fomenting the disturbance of 1848. The authorities of Dusseldorf put him behind the bars for a year. In consequence he was forbidden to return to Berlin. In 1859 he entered the capital city in the disguise of a carter, and sent his old friend Humboldt to the king to obtain permission to remain. In this same year he published a noteworthy pamphlet on the Italian war and the mission of France. He pointed out the service France was doing north Germany by weakening Austria in Italy, and outlined the program which was later carried out by Bismarck and Von Moltke.

In 1861 Lassalle published a work in two volumes, the System of Acquired Rights, in which he pointed out the gradual and systematic manner in which privilege and an extra chance in life have been acquired by a small part of the population. From this time on he flung himself into the work that has given him place in the memory of man--the organization of workingmen into a political party. He founded the German Labor Union. He taught that labor passes through three successive stages--serfdom, wage earning, and association. He published some twenty pamphlets in support of his theories. In all this Lassalle was merely a brilliant disciple of Carl Marx with a knack of getting his ideas before the people. He is regarded by many as the founder of the German Social Democratic Party--a party which in 1871 cast 12,400 votes and elected two members of the Reichstag and in 1903 cast 3,025,000 votes and elected eighty-one members.

The end of Lassalle was not heroic. He was an exquisite in personal habits, not averse to wine suppers and a fashionable life. In the round of social pleasures he met a young lady of social standing for whom he conceived a passion which was reciprocated. The young people met again at a hotel on the Rigi, Switzerland. They decided on a romantic marriage. Her father, a prosaic Bavarian diplomatist then resident in Geneva, shut the young lady up in her room and arranged a marriage for her with a Wallachian count. Lassalle, having exhausted every resource to see the young woman, sent a challenge to her father and another to her betrothed. The later accepted and Lassalle fell mortally wounded. In spite of this inglorious end Lassalle was given the funeral of a martyr, and is held almost in reverence by a large body of adherents.

Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me; Amen! Even if it lead to my mortal death. . . . I cannot act otherwise. An agitation of laborers exists; they must have theoretical knowledge, they must have a watchword given them. They shall have it, even if it cost the head. . . .

The alliance of science and the laborers, these two opposite poles of society, when once they shall have met and embraced each other, will crush all the impediments of culture within their brazen arms. This is the object for which I am determined to spend my life so long as there is any breath in me. . . .

Let others be happy! In natures like mine it is enough to go on struggling . . . to waste away one's own heart, and yet to appear smiling while death is gnawing away at one's inmost soul.--Quotations from Lassalle.