General German Workers' Association (ADAV)

The Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV), Germany's first national workers' association, is founded in Leipzig on May 23 under the leadership of Ferdinand Lassalle.

Wilhelm Liebknecht espouses the political philosophy of Karl Marx and attacks the growing personality cult around Ferdinand Lassalle among workers on May 21 in Berlin at the first anniversary of the founding of the  General German Workers' Association (German: Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV).

The ADAV had been founded on May 23, 1863, in Leipzig, Kingdom of Saxony, by Lassalle and twelve delegates from some of the most important cities in Germany: Barmen, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Elberfeld, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Harburg, Cologne, Leipzig, Mainz and Solingen.

About six hundred workers were present, having traveled on the newly opened Dresden - Leipzig railway line.

The ADAV is the first German Labor Party.

Its members are known colloquially throughout Germany as Lassalleans.

Lassalle, who acts as president, had been expecting many thousands to become members of the association, but by 1864 there are only forty-six hundred.

The ADAV is in part financially supported by funds obtained by Lassalle through his personal relations.

Liebknecht, a German social democrat arrested for his initiatives to unite Switzerland's German workers' associations had been banished from the country, moving to his exile in London and becoming a friend and follower of Karl Marx.

After a royal amnesty for political exiles, he  had returned in 1861 to Germany and become a member of the ADAV.

Ferdinand Lassalle fights a duel on the morning of August 28, 1864, at the Carouge, a suburb of Geneva.

He had met a young woman, Helene von Dönniges, in Berlin, and during the summer of 1864 they decided to marry.

She, however, is the daughter of a Bavarian diplomat resident at Geneva, who will have nothing to do with Lassalle.

Imprisoned in her own room, Helen soon, apparently under duress, renounces Lassalle in favor of another suitor, a Wallachian count named Bajor von Racowitza.

Lassalle sends a challenge to duel both to the lady's father and to Count von Racowitza, which is accepted by the latter.

Lassalle is wounded mortally, and he dies on August 31.

He is buried in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), in the old Jewish cemetery there.

At the time of his death, Lassalle's political party has only 4,610 members, more than half of them in the Rhineland, and no detailed political program.

The Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein continues after his death, however, and will go on to help establish the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) during 1875.

The leadership of the ADAV is taken over by Bernhard Becker.

Jean Baptist von Schweitzer, attracted by the social democratic labor movement, had become president of the General Workingmen's Union of Germany after the death of Lassalle, and in this capacity edits Der Sozialdemokrat ("the Social Democrat"), which brings him into frequent trouble with the Prussian government.

Published three times weekly in Berlin by, it becomes the organ of the ADAV by January 4, 1865.

Marx contributes an article on the death, in this month, of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

Schweitzer is arrested and charged with the crime of homosexuality but key people within the Social Democrats still support him.

Born at Frankfurt am Main of an old aristocratic Catholic family, Schweitzer had studied law in Berlin and Heidelberg, and afterwards had practiced in his native city.

He is, however, generally more interested in politics and literature than law.

Wilhelm Liebknecht has also worked on Der Socialdemokrat from 1864 to 1865; however, he had soon found himself in disagreement with the paper's Prussia-friendly position, leaving the editorial staff and also being forced to leave the ADAV due to pressure from Schweitzer.

Expelled from Berlin, moves on July 2 to Leipzig, where he and August Bebel will become active in labor organizing.

Ferdinand August Bebel, known to all by his middle name, was born February 22, 1840, in Deutz, Germany, now a part of Cologne.

The son of a Prussian noncommissioned officer in the Prussian infantry, initially from Ostrowo in the Province of Posen, he was born in military barracks.

As a young man, Bebel had apprenticed as a carpenter and joiner in Leipzig.

Like most German workmen at that time, he had traveled extensively in search of work and he thereby obtained a firsthand knowledge of the difficulties facing the working people of the day.

At Salzburg, where he lived for some time, he joined a Roman Catholic workmen's club.

When in Tyrol in 1859, he had volunteered for service in the war against Italy, but was rejected; and in his own country he was rejected likewise as physically unfit for the army.

In 1860, he had settled in Leipzig as a master turner, making horn buttons, and joined various labor organizations.

Although initially an opponent of socialism, Bebel had gradually been won over to socialist ideas through reading the pamphlets of Ferdinand Lassalle, which had popularized the ideas of Karl Marx.

In 1865, he comes under the influence of Liebknecht and has becomes committed fully to the socialist cause.

Twenty delegates at the general congress of ADAV in Berlin on November 22, representing three thousand four hundred and eight members, have as their agenda the following items: (1) Prussia and the German question; (2) universal suffrage; (3) abolition of the usury laws; (4) woman labor; (5) food adulteration; (6) British factory laws; (7) an eight-hour workday.

Jean Baptista von Schweitzer is reelected president.

The police close the headquarters of the ADAV in Leipzig on September 16.

Jean Baptista von Schweitzer, with police approval, moves ADAV headquarters to Berlin on October 10.

Bavarian members break away from Schweitzer's ADAV and form their own German Social-Democratic Labor party at a meeting in Augsburg on January 23 and 24, 1870.

Napoleon III had declared war on Prussia to prevent German unification, and thereby made it a war of German national defense.

In the Diet on July 21, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht refuse to vote for a war loan, although the ADAV supports it.

During the first days of the Franco-Prussian War, the SDAP, at meetings in Berlin, ...