Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Chapter 06: The Germans Learn French

Though the final impulse that led to the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung came from the Tsar, even if it had refrained from commenting on foreign politics it would inevitably have been suppressed a few weeks later just the same. The Prussian Government was determined to make an end of the radical Press once and for all. At the end of 1842 it forbade the circulation in Prussia of the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, which had been a mouthpiece of the Left Hegelians for the past two years under the editorship of Gustav Julius. At the beginning of January, 1843, Frederick Wilhelm IV obtained from the Government of Saxony the suspension in Dresden of Ruge's Deutsche Jahrbücher. Soon afterwards Buhl's Patriot was banned in Berlin. The police and the censor forced the Königsberger Zeitung to sever its connection with the radicals. At the end of January a decree withdrew all the concessions that had been granted two years before.

The Left Hegelians had now lost all the literary positions they had occupied at the beginning of the forties. They had been worsted in the struggle for the transformation of the State, for the remodelling into rational form of a world the irrationality of which they had demonstrated. They had fought with intellectual weapons only and had been defeated. Old Prussia had not been able to answer their arguments. Incapable of victory in the theoretical field, it had nevertheless conquered in fact. Its weapons were the police, the censorship and force. Against force, theory--theory, pure, unaided and alone--had failed.

Journalism had been the only method of political activity available, and now it had been taken away. No prospect of the situation changing was in sight. Certainly there were protests here and there, and in the Rhineland they were stronger than elsewhere, but the overwhelming majority of the population, the masses, looked upon the executioner of liberty with indifference. Nothing was to be hoped for from the inert multitude. Bruno Bauer and his followers turned into themselves and away from a reality that was so unreasonable. They isolated themselves, spun a new theory out of their very impotence, made a fetish of individual consciousness, which they regarded as the only battlefield on which victories could be fought and won, and ended up in an individual anarchism which reached its zenith in Max Stirner's ultra-radical and ultra-harmless Einzigen.

Marx, Ruge, Hess, all who had not grown weary of the fray, drew a different conclusion from defeat. The physical force of the State had emerged victorious only because philosophy had remained alone, had not been able to answer force with force. One duty above all others was now incumbent upon the philosophers--to find their way to the masses. In the spring of 1843 Marx wrote that politics were the only ally with the aid of which contemporary philosophy could become a reality. At the end of that year he expressed the idea with which he, far more than any of his colleagues, was impressed with in the celebrated words: 'The weapon of criticism can certainly never be a substitute for the criticism of the weapon; physical force must be overthrown with physical force; and theory will be a physical force as soon as the masses understand it.'

To speak to the people and make them understand one must talk to them freely. Immediately after the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung Marx decided to go abroad and continue the struggle from there. 'It is unpleasant,' he wrote to Ruge when the suppression was made public, 'to perform menial service even in the cause of freedom and to fight with needles instead of with clubs. I have grown weary of hypocrisy, stupidity, the exercise of brute force and bowing and cringing and back-bending and verbal hair-splitting. The Government has released me. ... In Germany there is now nothing I can do. In Germany one can only be false to oneself.'

Marx's first intention was to settle in Switzerland and work with Herwegh on the Deutsche Boten, which Herwegh edited there. But Ruge invited his collaboration in bringing out the suppressed Deutsche Jahrbücher in another form abroad. He held out to Marx the prospect of a fixed income of from five hundred and fifty to six hundred thalers and about two hundred and fifty thalers extra which could be earned by other writing. Thus, if all went well, he would have an income of eight hundred and fifty thalers. This was more than Marx could have hoped for, and he gladly accepted Ruge's proposal. 'Even if it had been possible to continue the Jahrbücher' he wrote to Ruge in answer--Ruge had for a time been hesitating as to whether it might not perhaps be better to stay on in Dresden after all if the minister made concessions--it would at best be a feeble imitation of the "dear departed," and that would no longer be good enough. In comparison the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher [sic] would be an enterprise of high principle, a thing of consequence, an undertaking to which one could devote oneself with enthusiasm.' Ruge had considered whether it might not be a good idea to make the proposed review one of more than three hundred and twenty pages. Books of more than three hundred and twenty pages were not subject to censorship in Germany at the time. Marx rejected the idea. Such books were not for the people. The most one dared offer them was a monthly.

A monthly would be suitable for the problem which now had to be solved; i.e. that of making contact with the masses. The name that Marx chose, The German-French Year-Books, was an indication of the intended contents. Ludwig Feuerbach had urged that the philosopher who should identify himself with life and mankind should be of Franco-German blood; his heart French and his head German. The head reformed, the heart revolutionised. For the German radicals the head meant German philosophy. 'We Germans are contemporary with the times in philosophy without being contemporary with the times in history.' The French were contemporary with the times in history. Paris was the 'new capital of the new world.' The review was intended to bring Germans and French, the most advanced in theory and the most advanced in practice, together into an 'intellectual alliance.'

Negotiations with Julius Fröbel, the prospective publisher, progressed favourably. Marx went to Dresden to make final arrangements. It was impossible for the paper to appear in Switzerland, which was becoming increasingly subservient to orders from Berlin and had started expelling radicals and banning newspapers and books. Brussels, or better still, Paris, held out brighter prospects for the new venture. By the end of May all arrangements were complete, and Marx was able to realise his 'private plans' and marry.

'As soon as we have signed the contract I shall go to Kreuznach and get married,' he wrote to Ruge in March. 'I can assure you, without being at all romantic, that I am head-over-heels in love. I have been engaged now for more than seven years, and my fiancée has had to fight the hardest battles for my sake, almost shattering her health in the process, partly with her bigoted, aristocratic relations, whose twin objects of worship are the "Lord in Heaven" and the "Lord in Berlin," and partly with my own family, into the bosom of which some priests and other enemies of mine have insinuated themselves. For years my fiancée and I have had to engage in more unnecessary and exhausting conflicts than many who are three times as old as we and prate continually of their "experience of life" (which is one of the favourite expressions in our home circle).'

Since the death of Karl's father there had been an element of strain in Jenny's relations with his family. The few letters that survive from the years 1839 to 1843 do not cast a very clear light on the reason. Karl's mother complained in the middle of 1840 that her son had become quite a stranger to his family and wrote in her Dutch-German that he had 'renounced everything which had formerly been valuable and dear to him.' The Westphalen family took no notice of her, humiliated her, annoyed her, behaved haughtily and distantly, were eccentric, and 'had no family feeling at all.' There was much talk of a Herr Schlink, who somehow seems to have encouraged these dissensions. What they were more particularly about cannot now be discovered.

Marx had 'fallen out with his family' since 1842. He told Ruge that he had no claim to his father's estate until after his mother's death. After his 'failure' in his career as the editor of a paper--according to all the well-disposed people whose opinion his mother prized so highly the Rheinische Zeitung was a 'fiasco'--his family put obstacles in his way and, although they were comfortably off, he was left in most pressing financial straits. His mother never became reconciled to him. She refused to help him even during his years of acute distress in London. When she died in 1863 Jenny wrote to Frau Liebknecht that it would be hypocrisy for her to say she had been sentimental at the news of her mother-in-law's death.

As long as old Westphalen lived he held a protecting hand over his daughter's engagement to Karl. Hostilities only broke out again after his death. True, no one raised objections to Marx's origin. Many years later, when Charles Longuet, in an obituary on Frau Marx, mentioned racial prejudice as having had to be overcome, Marx described it as 'pure moonshine.' To Jenny's relatives Marx seemed strange and hostile not because of his racial antecedents but because he was a pupil of Hegel, a follower of Feuerbach, a friend of the notorious Bruno Bauer, the atheist. Jenny's half-brother, Ferdinand, was the leader of the religious opposition. Jenny despised him. In her letters she never referred to him as her brother but as the 'Minister of State,' the 'Minister of the Interior' and so on. When her daughter Laura became engaged to Lafargue Jenny Marx observed that their 'agreement about fundamentals, particularly in the religious respect,' was 'a singular piece of good fortune.' She added, thinking of her own youth, 'And so Laura will be protected from all the struggles and the suffering inevitable for a girl with her opinions in the environment in which she is to live.' Jenny Marx preserved a bitter hatred of the 'bigots' for the whole of her life.

Though Jenny needed all her determination to overcome the opposition, an open rupture with her family did not take place. On June 13, 1843, there took place the marriage of 'Herr Carl Marx, doctor of philosophy, resident in Cologne, and of Fräulein Bertha Julia Jenny von Westphalen, no occupation, resident in Kreuznach.'

The young couple spent the next few months at Frau von Westphalen's house at Kreuznach, where they had two visitors. The first was Esser, a Revisionsrat and a friend of Karl's father, who had the naïve effrontery to offer him work for the Government which had just suppressed the Rheinische Zeitung. The attempt to buy him met with a point-blank rebuff.

At the end of July Ruge passed through Kreuznach, on his way to Brussels to find out what prospects it offered for the publication of his periodical. They did not turn out to be very hopeful. The German colony in Brussels was small, and was only moderately interested in philosophy and politics. Though the Press enjoyed greater freedom in Belgium than in France, intellectual life in Belgium, in so far as it could be called such, was only a feeble echo of the French. Ruge went on to Paris.

In the words of the young Engels, Paris was the place where 'European civilisation had reached its fullest bloom.' It was the 'nerve-centre of European history, sending out electric shocks at regular intervals which galvanised the whole world.' The Bourgeois Kingdom was tottering. Ruge, accustomed from Germany to detecting the slightest signs of opposition, found the tension in the city very great. Guizot's majority in the Chamber had sunk to three. 'The Bourgeois King's loss of prestige among the people is demonstrated by the many attempts to assassinate that dynastic and autocratic prince. He will not allow himself to be 'hampered' in any way with the promised 'republican institutions.' One day when he dashed by me in the Champs Elysées, well hidden in his coach, with hussars in front and behind and on both sides, I observed to my astonishment that the outriders had their guns cocked ready to fire in earnest and not just in the usual burlesque style. Thus did he ride by with his bad conscience!' France was the home of revolution, and in France the inevitable new revolution must start again. Everywhere that revolutionaries lived, waiting impatiently for their hour to strike, they lived in expectation of the 'crowing of the Gallic cock.'

At the end of October, 1843, Marx and his wife went to Paris. Ruge and the publisher, Fröbel, had already approached the leading radicals and members of the Opposition with a view to enlisting their support. The journal was intended to be bilingual, the Germans writing in German and the Frenchmen in French. Ruge's opinion was that everybody could read French, a view which accorded ill with the paper's proposed popular appeal. However, they were unsuccessful in securing the collaboration of a single Frenchman. Lamennais turned them down. Lamartine considered that his contributing to the journal would constitute an unwarrantable interference in German affairs. Louis Blanc had misgivings on account of the Young Hegelians' defiantly acknowledged atheism. He was anti-clerical, of course, but as an admirer of Robespierre and an heir of the Jacobins he was a deist. Leroux was for the time being entirely occupied with the invention of a printing machine. Cabet and Considérant also refused to associate themselves with the new journal, and Proudhon was only occasionally in Paris. The new enterprise became The German-French Year-Books all the same. It taught the Germans 'to talk French,' i.e. to be revolutionaries.

All the German contributors were émigrés. Not a single contributor wrote from Germany. Feuerbach's reason for declining Marx's invitation to contribute was not very plausible. Even Bakunin in Zurich, with whom Ruge and Marx had already corresponded--the letters were published in the _Jahrbücher_--withdrew. The poets Herwegh and Heine were the only contributors, apart from Marx, whose names were known.

The money for the journal was supplied by Fröbel, who put up three thousand francs, and Ruge, who put up six thousand thalers. Ruge and Marx shared the editorship, but Ruge did little. At first he was away from Paris and soon after he came back he was taken ill. All the work devolved upon Marx. The first and only double number appeared at the end of February.

Two essays by Marx appeared in it. One was 'On the Jewish Question,' and was in reply to two essays of Bruno Bauer. Marx had written it at Kreuznach. The other, 'Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law' he had started at Kreuznach and finished at the end of the year in Paris. After the suspension of the Rheinische Zeitung Marx 'withdrew from the public stage into the study to solve the doubts that assailed him.' He had to come to terms in his own mind with the Hegelian philosophy of law under the guidance of which he had fought his journalistic battle. In that battle it had been smashed to pieces. According to Hegel the state was the creator and guardian of a rational social and political order. The social organization proceeded from the state. But in dealing with the distress among the wine-growing peasants of the Moselle Marx had been forced to acknowledge that 'there are circumstances which are decided as much by the actions of private individuals as by individual officials, and are as independent of them as the method of drawing one's breath.' The more Marx examined the 'circumstances' which the actions of 'individual officials' determined the wider the scope they seemed to include. The 'circumstances' turned out to be the special interests of quite definite social groups, and the 'individual officials' ended by becoming identified with the state itself. Marx found it necessary to inquire whether the relations of state and society were not just the reverse of what Hegel had conceived them to be.

Ludwig Feuerbach's Introductory Theses to the Reform of Philosophy appeared in March, 1843. In this work the doubts which assailed Marx in his own special domain of Hegelian philosophy were exposed in their most general form and solved by a complete reversal of the Hegelian system. 'The true relation of thought to being is only this,' wrote Feuerbach. 'Being is subject, thought predicate. Thought arises from being, not being from thought. All speculations about law, about will, freedom, personality, without man, beside him or above him, are speculations without unity, necessity, substance, basis or reality. Man is the existence of personality, the existence of liberty, the existence of law.' Ideas have their origin in reality, they never realise themselves in reality. Applied to the philosophy of law, it follows from this reversal that it is not the idea of the state, the idea realising itself in the state, which creates and directs society, but society which conditions the state. In 1859, Marx summarised the result of his inquiries at this time in the classical sentences: 'Legal conditions, like state forms, are neither to be explained as things in themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human spirit. They have their roots rather in the material conditions of life, the whole of which Hegel, following the example of eighteenth-century Englishmen and Frenchmen, included under the name of "civil society."'

Feuerbach recognised man to be the creator of ideas which Hegel externalised into independent entities. But even in Hegel man is still an abstraction, a generic being, still 'languishing quite outside the world, having no history.' Marx went farther than Feuerbach; he went into the world of concrete reality. 'Man is the world of men, the state, society.'

Criticism of the state became at the same time criticism of the social order. It reached farther and penetrated to the foundations of society. Those foundations were private property. Logically Marx took the final step. Only one social class could fulfil the task of shaking off barbarism. That class was the proletariat. 'The revolution requires a material foundation. Theory is only realised in a people in so far as it realisation is a practical necessity. It is not enough that thought presses for realisation, reality itself must press for thought.' The answer to the question as to where the possibility of emancipation in practice lay was as follows: 'It lay in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in bourgeois society, which is yet not of bourgeois society, a social rank which is the abolition of all social ranks ... a sphere of society which cannot' emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thus emancipating all other spheres of society at the same time, which in a word, is the complete loss of man, and which can only attain itself again by the complete winning of man. This social catalyst is the proletariat.'

Philosophy had emerged into economics. At the end of the road taken by political radicalism in its criticism of the irrational Prussian State lay Communism, the abolition of private property, the proletarian revolution.

The Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher was the last product of the Young Hegelians. It was the last not only in the sense that after it the Young Hegelians were spoken of no more, but also in another sense. There was nothing left for them to say. Young Hegelianism had become Communism. Or rather Young Hegelianism as such shrank back from its consequences, revised its premises and disintegrated; whether into narrow petty bourgeois philistinism or 'absolute' criticism or individual philosophy or any other petty-bourgeois manifestation is in the last resort immaterial.

Ruge was not entirely satisfied with the contents of Marx's first number. He considered some of Marx's 'epigrams' too artificial, others too crude. 'Some unpolished things were also served up which otherwise (that is to say, if I had not been ill) I should have corrected, but as it is they got by in the rush.' Nevertheless he considered that the issue also contained a number of remarkable things which would attract a great deal of attention in Germany.

They did indeed attract a great deal of attention. The few copies that entered Germany were secretly passed from hand to hand. They caused astonishment, admiration, execration and disgust among Marx's former comrades. Those who were frightened stopped their ears, shut their eyes, dazzled by the new light. All were greatly affected.

The other side of this political and literary success was material failure. The police grasped the fact that the Jahrbücher were incomparably more dangerous than anything they had had to concern themselves with before. In April the Prussian Government informed the provincial authorities that the Jahrbücher came within the definition of attempted high treason and lèse-majesté. The police were directed to place Ruge, Marx, Heine, Bernays and their collaborators under arrest immediately they should set foot on Prussian soil. The head of the Austrian police and censorship department described the Jahrbücher as a publication 'whose loathsome and disgusting contents surpass everything previously published by the revolutionary Press.' Metternich was afraid it might be 'smuggled into the Austrian realm.' The whole official apparatus was set in motion, right down to the administrators of the town wards. Booksellers were warned against buying this monster of a book and 'notified of the severe penalties involved.' An exhaustive search was ordered to be made for it at all second-hand book-shops.

A hundred copies fell into the hands of the police on a Rhine steamer and two hundred and thirty were confiscated by the Bavarians at the frontier of France and the Palatinate. Ruge described later how Bernays, who accompanied the parcel on its ill-fated journey, came back very gaily with the information that he had disposed of the whole lot at once. The Customs officials had almost doubled up with laughter over Heine's verses about King Ludwig; a pleasure, Ruge added, that Heine and they could have had much more cheaply.

Fröbel refused to continue with the undertaking. Ruge, who was prosperous--he had only recently increased his fortune by successful speculations--though it was his encouragement that had brought Marx to Paris and though he had guaranteed him a definite income for his work as editor, withdrew likewise. Publication ceased after the first number, and Marx was left in a very difficult situation. He urged Ruge to keep his promise, but Ruge declined. The most he consented to was paying Marx in kind. He left him the unsold copies of the Jahrbücher to dispose of as best he could.

A violent quarrel between Marx and Ruge resulted. It would not, however, have ended in a definite rupture had not other personal differences, especially on fundamental matters of principle, been developing between them for some time.

Emma Herwegh relates that Ruge proposed to Marx and Herwegh that they should go and live with him and found a kind of Fourierist phalanstère, a communal household which the women should take it in turn to manage, doing the cooking and sewing and all the other domestic work required. 'Frau Herwegh rejected the idea at once. How could a nice little Saxon woman like Frau Ruge possibly get on with the highly intelligent and even more ambitious Madame Marx, who knew so much more than she? And how could the so recently married Frau Herwegh, who was the youngest of them all, possibly feel attracted to this communal life? Surely enough, Herwegh and his wife declined Ruge's invitation. Ruge and Marx and their wives went to live together in the Rue Vanneau. A fortnight later they parted.'

Marx and Ruge differed far too much in character, temperament and outlook on life for their collaboration to have endured, even if these external conflicts had not arisen. Ruge was a radical petty-bourgeois, a narrow-minded moralist, a tedious censor of morals, a careful, calculating business man, even if he was not altogether averse to sacrificing some fraction of his money for a cause--provided certain definite limits were not overstepped. Marx was a revolutionary. Ruge, as Marx was forced to recognise in Paris, rejoiced in 'a fundamental and universal ignorance.' He could not understand that Marx 'reads so much, works with such extraordinary intensity, sometimes actually does not go to bed for four nights running, and keeps on plunging anew into an ocean of books.'

The final and open rupture came because of Ruge's opinion of Georg Herwegh. There is no record of Marx's side of the case, but what Ruge stated in his own justification is sufficient. Herwegh was married to a rich Berlin banker's daughter and was very fond of luxury. It is not necessarily true that he was absurdly extravagant in clothes, flowers, food, furniture, carriages and horses, although he certainly overdid some things. Herwegh was very friendly with the Countess d'Agoult, a friendship which gossip turned into a highly immoral and dissolute love-affair. 'One evening,' Ruge wrote to his mother, 'the conversation turned to this topic. ... I was incensed by Herwegh's way of living and his laziness. Several times I referred to him warmly as a scoundrel, and declared that when a man gets married he ought to know what he is doing. Marx said nothing and took his departure in a perfectly friendly manner. Next morning he wrote to me that Herwegh was a genius with a great future. My calling him a scoundrel filled him with indignation, and my ideas on marriage were philistine and inhuman. Since then we have not seen each other again.'

Marx defended Herwegh on another occasion; this time against Heine. The Jahrbücher group had hailed Heine with joy. He was a new man, with new ideas. His arrival was like a blast of fresh air, a burst of stormy movement. He made friends with the Jahrbücher group, having quarreled with practically all the other German émigrés and being lonely and in bad health. He soon took a dislike to Ruge, of whom he said that though he had freedom in his mind, he would not let it sink into his limbs; however enthusiastic he might be for Hellenic nudity, he was quite incapable of bringing himself to cast off his barbaric modern trousers, or even the Christian-German pants of convention. Eleanor Marx remembered hearing from her parents that there was a time when Heine came to Marx's house day in and day out, to read his verses to the young couple and obtain their opinion of them. Heine and Marx would go through a little poem of eight lines a countless number of times, continually discussing one word or another and working away at it until everything was perfectly smooth and no trace of the workshop and the file was left. An infinite amount of patience was required for all this, because Heine was morbidly sensitive to criticism. Sometimes he would come to Marx, literally weeping because of an attack by some obscure reviewer. Marx's only way of dealing with the situation was to send him to his wife, whose wit and charm soon brought the desperate poet round to reason. Heine did not always come seeking for help. Sometimes he brought it. One example of this the Marx family had particular cause to remember.

When little Jenny Marx--she was born on May 1, 1844--was a baby of only a few months, she was seized with violent cramps which seemed to be threatening her life. Marx and his wife stood by the child in despair, not knowing what to do. Heine arrived, looked at the child and said: 'The baby must be given a bath.' He prepared the bath himself, put the child in it, and as Marx said, saved Jenny's life.

It was certainly more than a coincidence that Heine wrote Germany: A Winter's Tale during the year in which he and Marx were friends. He sent parts of it to Marx from Hamburg for serialisation in the Paris Vorwärts before publication of the whole. He ended the accompanying letter with the words: 'Farewell, dear friend, and excuse my terrible scrawl. I cannot read over what I have written--but we need but few tokens to understand each other.'

Heine's Weaver's Song also appeared for the first time in Vorwärts, and Marx wrote about the rising of the Silesian weavers in the same paper. If in 1843, when he recognised as latent in the proletariat the power which should carry his philosophy into practice, he regarded the proletarian revolution as necessary and inevitable though for the time lying in the indefinite future, he now believed he saw Communism actually coming into being before his eyes. However he over-estimated the desperate revolt of the Silesian weavers. They were not, as he then believed, ahead of the English and French workers' movements in class-consciousness and clarity of purpose. On the contrary, they were a long way behind them. This was no rising of organised industrial workers against the capitalists but wild rioting by desperate, impoverished homeworkers, who smashed machines as they had done in England half a century before. The philosophic foundation of Communism was manifestly insufficient to grapple with the facts. So Marx threw all his energy into the study of political economy. He read and made excerpts from the French economists, B. Say, Frédéric Skarbek, Destutt de Tracy, P. le Pesant de Boisguilbert, besides the great English economists, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J. R. M'Culloch and James Mill, whom he read in French translations. He studied history, especially that of the French Revolution. For a time he planned to write a history of the Convention. And he sought and found contact with the German artisans, the real proletariat, whom so far he had scarcely seen face to face, and with the French secret societies, who were the real revolutionaries. For the time being he was free from material worries. Former shareholders of the Rheinische Zeitung sent him a thousand thalers in March and in July Georg Jung sent him eight hundred francs as compensation for the hundred confiscated copies of the Jahrbücher.