Charles II of Brunswick: Communism as the Beneficiary of Usurpation

In his protest of April 12, 1873, Duke Charles II of Brunswick identified the abandonment of lawful order—not socialism alone—as the deeper danger facing Germany. His warning centered on the replacement of treaty obligations, constitutional rights, lawful succession, and recognized property by the principle that political force could override law.

“Faced with a cancer that is eating away and will eat away at whole Germany, not socialist but usurpatist, based on this principle: ‘Force prevails over Law,’ We predict that communism will benefit from it.”

Charles II’s argument was that communism would prosper wherever governments first taught society that rights could be seized by superior power. If rulers, confederations, and political authorities could dispossess others while disregarding solemn guarantees, they would lose the moral and legal authority to condemn revolutionary confiscation when the same principle was later adopted by the masses.

He therefore asked how, in a struggle of the poor against the rich, authorities could effectively say:

“We will steal from each other, but you will not steal from us?”

The warning extended beyond his own dynastic cause. If the recognized rights of sovereign houses could be set aside by political convenience, then the property and liberties of ordinary citizens would be even less secure. If treaties restrained only the weak while the powerful acted through annexation and usurpation, law would cease to function as a common protection.

Charles II thus presented communism as the beneficiary of an earlier constitutional collapse. The initial disease was the official acceptance of force over law. Communism would later inherit that principle, apply it more broadly, and turn it against the very institutions that had normalized it.

Communism advances when governments first demonstrate that power, rather than lawful right, determines who may possess property and exercise authority.