Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Beyond just the absolute number of inhabitants, no central European city could compete with the richness and diversity of the cultural and intellectual life in the great French metropolis. Every kind of literature abounded, from the classics portrayed by the Comédie Française, to the Romantic writings of Victor Hugo or Jules Michelet, to the realism of Honoré de Balzac, whom Marx admired greatly, to the popular forms of literature in the boulevard theaters and the enormously successful works of the sentimental novelist Eugène Sue, whom Marx deeply despised. The art world was no less varied, from the old masters at the Louvre to the avant-garde realists, such as Courbet, to the intensely politicized satirical cartoons and lampoons of Daumier.

  Daumier’s work pointed to the major reason for Marx and Ruge’s relocation to Paris: the city’s role as the capital of what was, in spite of its defeats in the Napoleonic Wars, still the Continent’s wealthiest, most powerful, and most influential country. The so-called July Monarchy, installed in France after the revolutionary Parisian street fighting of July 1830, was a liberal constitutional regime, containing the sorts of guarantees of basic civil liberties that Marx, in the Rhineland News, had advocated in vain for Prussia. Although by the 1840s the French government was following a somewhat more conservative course and had placed some restrictions on the free expression of political ideas, even this more limited setting for political debate was a sharp change from the censorship and authoritarian bureaucracy in Prussia. The entire left-right political spectrum—not to mention groups claiming to be in another political dimension altogether—was vigorously present in Paris, from conservatives to pro- and anti-government liberals, to radical democrats and republicans, to pacifist Fourierist socialists, to revolutionary communists. Supporters of all these views articulated their opinions forthrightly in the periodical press, parliamentary debates, legal and clandestine associations, public and private gatherings. Not only were the vigor and forums of political debate in Paris greater than in Prussia, so were the social circles in which it was expressed. Marx had previously been involved with a small group of Young Hegelian intellectuals, and then, while editing the Rhineland News, with the more numerous but eminently bourgeois notables of Cologne. In Paris he met working-class political activists, and spent time in taverns both with artisans belonging to illegal, secret societies and with members of legal mutual benefit associations.

  Paris was the capital of the entire Continent. Political exiles from across Europe flocked to the city, where they could express their ideas freely and even hope to influence public policy in ways that would reverberate back home. Leftists and liberals from the Iberian Peninsula and Italy, Poland and Russia, even the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, core of the future Romania, were all a part of the Parisian political scene. Marx’s contacts with the Russians, in particular, are well documented.15

  Living in Paris brought Marx into close proximity with radicals from other countries, but becoming an émigré meant new and often quite different contacts with Germans. They were the largest group of foreigners in Paris, some 60,000 strong by the mid-1840s, or about one Parisian in seventeen. Many dissident German intellectuals were living in the French capital, including Young Hegelians and other radicals Marx had met in Berlin and Cologne, but also a host of new acquaintances. Two well-known examples were the celebrated poet and man of letters Heinrich Heine, whose political attitudes vacillated between liberal and more radical perspectives; and August Ludwig von Rochau, onetime student radical and later unconventional liberal, who would coin the famous term Realpolitik. Paris’s German intellectuals included some historically more obscure figures, veteran leftists who had been active for years in radical secret societies, such as Jacob Venedey, German Mäurer, and August Hermann Ewerbeck.16 Marx would move in their circles as well.

  These long-term leftists did socialize with their fellow intellectuals, even of other political persuasions, but they also shared a social scene with members of a quite different milieu: the substantial majority of Paris’s German inhabitants, who were journeymen artisans come to France because they were unable to find work in central Europe. About one third of the tailors, shoemakers, and cabinetmakers—the three most numerous but also worst paid crafts—in Paris at the time were Germans.17 These artisans made up the bulk of the membership in the secret societies led by intellectuals such as Ewerbeck or Venedey; like their fellow craftsmen all across the Continent, they joined mutual benefit societies to guard against the dangers of their proletarian existence, particularly unemployment-generating illness. And like their French counterparts, they were experimenting, in eclectic and unsystematic fashion, with socialist and communist ideas, mixing vaguely understood notions about collective workshops, often drawn from memories of the guild system, with biblically based, if theologically dubious, understandings of justice and equity.18

  The elements of Marx’s intellectual evolution between the fall of 1843 and the end of the following year—in particular, his redefinition of the future ideal regime as communist; his investigation of the works of the major economists of the day and incorporation of their findings into his new worldview; his identification of the working class as the vehicle for political transformation; and his restatement of Feuerbach’s version of Young Hegelianism, to put an emphasis on the labor process—were all conceptually distinct from his personal experiences in Europe’s leading metropolis. Marx by no means accepted everything or everyone he met in Paris. Older and more experienced, with more responsibilities than when he was a young and enthusiastic student in Berlin, Marx was far more discerning in assessing the new intellectual and political currents he encountered in Paris, and deciding which he preferred to reject, than he had been in 1837 when he embraced the doctrines of the Young Hegelians. Yet it is hard to avoid the impression that life in Paris played a major role in shaping Marx’s future.

  KARL AND JENNY ARRIVED on October 11 or 12, 1843. During their sixteen-month stay, they resided at several different addresses on the rue Vanneau, in the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain.19 At first, they lodged with Arnold Ruge, the radical poet Georg Herwegh, and their spouses. Some writers have, rather naively, seen this living arrangement as a socialist commune, misled by Ruge’s ironic description of it as “a bit of communism.” Ruge’s plans, which included a cook and housekeeper for the common apartment, and delivery of all foodstuffs, thus making shopping unnecessary, were designed primarily to enable the émigrés “to live more cheaply,” no small point in such an expensive city. Disagreements among the wives brought the common household to a quick end, and the Marxes moved out, but just to another apartment down the block.20

  Shortly after the Marxes’ arrival, Ruge fell ill, so Marx had to take over responsibility for editing the Franco-German Yearbooks. He threw himself into the task with the same energy he had shown in editing the Rhineland News, but with much less success. The French part of the Yearbooks fell away, because Ruge and Marx were unable to get any French contributors, in spite of making rounds of the many left-wing circles in Paris. Although they, like all educated Europeans of the time, could read French with some facility, their spoken French was poor and they had trouble making themselves understood.

  Language problems were not the only issue, since they had the help of Moses Hess, who spoke better French from a previous stay in Paris, as a translator. There were also political and intellectual differences that made cooperation difficult. Most of the French socialists the German editors met rejected political action as a means to bring about their new society, counting instead on the voluntary formation of communes, without the need for subversive activities or revolutionary struggles. These socialists also understood their social and economic plans in religious terms: communism was the authentic realization of the ideals of Christianity. The radical, atheist German intellectuals, subversives in trouble with the Prussian authorities, were not at all congenial to these French socialists. Realizing some of these difficulties, the editors shifted their attention to the l
eaders of the non-socialist radical opposition to the July Monarchy, men like the poet Alphonse Lamartine, or the attorney Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, both of whom would play leading roles during the Revolution of 1848. But they had no more success in eliciting their cooperation. There was a group on the French left that probably would have been sympathetic to the émigré radicals: the overt revolutionaries, who combined an appeal to the heritage of Jacobinism, including its anti-clericalism, with a growing interest in socialist doctrines. Only these men, such as Armand Barbès, or Louis-Auguste Blanqui, France’s leading revolutionary conspirator, were in jail for their attempts to foment uprisings, and so unavailable for collaboration.21

  If efforts to recruit French authors for the Yearbooks failed, Marx was able to pull together enough German contributors to bring out a double issue at the end of February 1844. It was the first and last issue. Ruge had hoped, following the example of the Rhineland News, to create a corporation to publish the magazine, but found no investors. The Franco-German Yearbooks, financially a partnership between Ruge and Fröbel (Marx was asked to join, but had no funds to put into the venture), was seriously undercapitalized.22 One setback would destroy the enterprise, and when the Prussian authorities confiscated copies as they came into Germany, Julius Fröbel gave up on the magazine, and Marx and Ruge were unable to find anyone to replace him. As the publishing venture failed, quarrels among its leading figures broke out. Ruge and Hess got into a vicious fight over a small sum the former had given the latter as an advance on an article never delivered. Ruge paid Marx, at least in part, not in cash but with copies of the Yearbooks—an object lesson in economics, which Marx did not fail to comprehend. Marx and Ruge then quarreled bitterly, and broke off relations with each other. Ostensibly, the issue between them was the extramarital affairs of Georg Herwegh, another member of the Yearbooks’ inner circle (he was consorting with Franz Liszt’s ex-mistress), Ruge denouncing Herwegh’s immorality, Marx contending that Herwegh’s questionable personal life should not impede political collaboration with him.23

  This turn of affairs was particularly painful to Marx, since it occurred as the number of his dependents was growing. Jenny gave birth to a daughter on May 1, 1844. Her parents named the child Jenny, and she quickly came to be known in the family as Jennychen, “little Jenny.” Jenny took the infant, at the age of six weeks, to visit her mother, who had moved back to Trier from Kreuznach. When mother and daughter arrived in Trier, the little girl was half-dead, probably because she was not nursing but receiving some dreadful gruel, a prime source of infant mortality at the time. The family physician decided the baby needed a wet-nurse, so the daughter of an old family retainer was hired. Jenny would bring the wet-nurse, who could do double duty as household help and even spoke a little French, back with her to Paris.

  Dressed in the latest Parisian fashions, “for once more elegant than everybody” in Trier, showing off her daughter, Jenny was a big success and was soon receiving regular visits from all her past acquaintances. She herself took the “difficult walk” and went to see her mother-in-law. But the meeting with Henriette Marx, to her surprise, went extremely well. Pleased at the news of her son’s position, Henriette was accepting and loving to her daughter-in-law, a noticeable change from past experiences. Jenny remarked in a letter to Karl on “What success does, or, for us, rather the semblance of success that I have been able to maintain with the finest tactics.”24

  Much to her and Karl’s delight, they were rescued by Karl’s supporters in Cologne, who raised the substantial sum of 1,000 talers and sent it to him, “personally to compensate you for the sacrifices you have made for our common cause.” Heinrich Claessen, the Cologne liberal who directed the efforts, compared Marx to Daniel O’Connell, the celebrated Irish nationalist leader, whose followers collected a “national subscription” for him so that he could devote himself full time to politics. So Marx’s studies, leading him toward communism, were financed by Cologne’s bourgeoisie, yet more evidence of the powerful impression Marx had made when editing the Rhineland News, and of the local celebrity that he had achieved.25

  IF THE FRANCO-GERMAN YEARBOOKS failed both as a business venture and a political intervention, the two articles Marx wrote for the double issue represented important steps in the development of his worldview. One of these articles, “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” argued that the Young Hegelians’ critique of religion should not be an end in itself, but lead toward a criticism of social and political conditions. In doing so, Marx, for the first time, began to develop a theory of how the political and social changes he envisaged would come to pass. The second article, “On the Jewish Question,” formulated as a review of Bruno Bauer’s book by the same name, was both a critique of the Young Hegelians and the first public formulation of Marx’s communist ideals.26 Marx’s connection of economic criticism to his discussion of the legal and social standing of the Jews in that piece has led to persistent charges that he was an anti-Semite—charges involving an anachronistic conception of both anti-Semitism and Jews.

  The “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” began by confirming the Young Hegelians’ idea of religion as an alienated expression of collective humanity. But humanity, Marx went on, was “the human world, state, society. This state, this society produces religion, an upside-down consciousness of the world, because the world itself is upside down.” Religion, as the expression of an alienated human existence, was simultaneously a protest against this existence and consolation for it, in Marx’s famous phrase—borrowed from Bruno Bauer—the “opium of the people.”27 Consequently, Marx asserted, the philosophical criticism of religion, or the attempts of the Free Men in Berlin to develop an atheist lifestyle, did not suffice; needed was a criticism of the social and political circumstances that were articulated in alienated form by religion. If philosophy had previously “exposed the holy form of human self-alienation,” it was now necessary “to expose self-alienation in its unholy form. The critique of heaven is thus transformed into a critique of the earth, the criticism of religion into a criticism of law, the criticism of theology into a criticism of politics.”

  Such criticism would perceive current conditions in Germany—the absolutist state, the society of orders, the Romantic intellectuals and enthusiasts for the ancient Germanic tribes or the Middle Ages, and the jurists of the Historical School of Law, who justified these conditions—as similar to those in France before the Revolution of 1789. Since then, France, England, and other countries of Western Europe had become constitutional monarchies, characterized by basic civil rights, equality under the law, and a strong elected parliament, so the further continuation of pre-1789 circumstances in the German states was an archaic and anachronistic parody of its predecessor. When editing the Rhineland News, Marx had envisaged peaceful and gradual ways to change these circumstances; now he concluded that their removal, as had been the case in France, would require a revolution, or as Marx put it, in one of the many pithy phrases he used in the essay, “the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons.”

  A rerun of 1789 in Germany, Marx continued, would only result in circumstances like those in the post-revolutionary France of the 1840s. Ever since his arrival in Paris, Marx had been intellectually and personally in contact with enemies of this post-revolutionary order, who had pointed out its many social, economic, and political defects. A German revolution, he suggested, would have to go further, not just to raise Germany “to the official level of the modern nations, but to the human heights, which are the near future of these nations.” This need to exceed past revolutions, in effect to have Germany take the lead in nineteenth-century revolutions, as France had done in the previous century, does sound like a moral imperative, intermingled with a bit of national pride. But the final turn in Marx’s argument, dealing with how this German revolution was to come about, eliminated the moral imperative and also underscored the vanguard position of Germany, paradoxically by emp
hasizing its retrograde character.

  Marx asserted that a “radical revolution,” leading to “universal human emancipation,” was not a “utopian dream” for Germany; rather, it was the more modest alternative of a “political revolution,” that is, one modeled on the French revolutions of 1789 and 1830. The reason for this assertion was the first public example of Marx’s theory of social classes. In Marx’s view, a political revolution required a class of civil society to identify its particular emancipation with the universal emancipation of civil society. For the French Revolution of 1789, he ascribed this revolutionary role to the bourgeoisie—an ascription derived from the French socialist authors he had been reading—but denied that its contemporary German counterpart could carry out the same role. The German bourgeoisie refused to represent the universal interests of civil society, but was just one of a large number of social and political groups, including the state bureaucracy, the nobility, and the monarchy, all of whom were competing with each other to advance their own particular interests. This was criticism strongly reminiscent of Marx’s article for the Rhineland News concerning the debates on freedom of the press, when he denounced the different groups in the Rhenish Diet for seeing press freedom as a particular interest, rather than one example of a universal articulation of civil liberties.

  In his articles on wood theft in the Rhineland News, Marx had not been able to identify any revolutionary class. Now he derived its chief criterion: a class whose burdens were so great, whose conditions were so difficult, whose possibilities for action within the existing socioeconomic and political system were so restricted, that it could only achieve its emancipation by a total reversal of all existing conditions. This would occur through