Paris was not just a melting pot in the field of ideologies. Culture in its narrower meaning was in a vital phase. Its literature was rich and lively. Honoré de Balzac was constructing the substantial world of his novels, a singular panorama of contemporary France. Aurore Dudevant, alias George Sand, was also enjoying great success as an author. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve became the first literary critic in the modern sense.
Musical life was equally significant. Paris was the city of Hector Berlioz, and the great composers and musicians of the time stayed there for shorter or longer periods: Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, Richard Wagner, Felix Mendelssohn, Hector Berlioz, and many others. The scope among painters was no smaller: everything from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s paintings of beautiful, well-dressed society ladies to Honoré Daumier’s incomparably nasty caricatures of the men of power was to be found here.
On the other hand, France was politically stagnant after the July Revolution of 1830. The king, Louis Philippe, was satisfied with a system in which money reigned supreme. His understanding was shared by the leading politician, François Guizot, whose most famous utterance to the French has already been quoted: ‘Get rich! Get rich!’ But social rifts and dissatisfaction were increasing.
In Salons and Cafés
It was this remarkable environment which greeted Marx and his wife Jenny. Jenny was already pregnant, and on 1 May 1844, their daughter Jenny – who would come to be called Jennychen – was born.
Domestic happiness did not prevent the young husband and father from making himself at home in the simmering new environment. He was not the only German who had taken refuge in Paris. There was an entire German colony that included everyone from poets to craftsmen. In Paris, they could live a freer, richer life than they could in their German homelands.
One of them was the great author Heinrich Heine. Marx came to know him in December 1843, and he, Jenny, and Heine began a deep friendship. Through Heine, Marx began to frequent one of the real focal points of Parisian life: the salon of Marie d’Agoult, where many musicians, artists, and authors met. We must stop a moment with Marie d’Agoult and some of her visitors.
Marie d’Agoult was born into the aristocracy, and was married early to a French nobleman who gave her her surname. After a few years, the piano virtuoso and composer Franz Liszt came into her life. With him her existence changed utterly. He became her lover and father to three of her children – among them Cosima, the future wife of Richard Wagner. But Liszt abandoned her after a few years. This did not crush her in the least; she created her own career. Above all, she became a celebrated writer under the pseudonym of Daniel Stern. Her most enduring work is Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 (History of the 1848 Revolution), written between 1850 and 1853, which is still cited as a well-informed eyewitness depiction.
But Marie d’Agoult also held a salon that gathered many of the great personages of the era. At that time, Paris was the cultural capital of Europe, but it also constituted a centre for new, revolutionary political ideas. Culture and politics met at Madame d’Agoult’s.
Many of the more or less regular visitors to the salon were living in exile. Heine was one of them; Marx another.2 We know nothing in detail of Marx’s life at the salon. But he was an exceptionally receptive person who had the ability to fuse together impressions from the most disparate spheres of reality. At Madame d’Agoult’s he could, as Jacque Attali has pointed out, meet with several of the great personages we have already mentioned: Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin, George Sand, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It is likely that he also met the prose author whom he would rank highest of all throughout his life – Honoré de Balzac.3 When he left France in 1845, he received reports on Parisian life from Hermann August Ewerbeck, one of his German friends. Clearly, Marx had asked Ewerbeck to deliver something to Heine that concerned ‘Frau Gräftin Darg’, which must be a distortion of the name d’Agoult. But the efforts, according to the letter, did not lead to the desired result.4
Heine’s importance to Marx during this momentous time in Paris is often underestimated. It is said that they became good friends in Paris and got on well in each other’s company, and it is usually added that Marx deeply admired Heine’s poetry, as Heine just as highly appreciated the intelligence and acumen of his twenty-one-year-old friend. But Heine’s influence was certainly greater than that. He introduced his young friend to much that could not be found in Trier, Bonn, or Berlin.
Like many other Germans, Heine initially had a positive view of the 1830 revolution in France; in fact, it was the direct reason he settled in Paris in 1831. From there, he also wrote hopeful newspaper reports for a few years. In the art of painter Léopold Robert, he found signs that people were on the way to abandoning their dreams of finding happiness in the life to come and were now instead looking for it in this world. But the more that cold economic calculations prevailed in 1830s France, the darker Heine’s image of the times became. He sought escapes from the society of egoism in various socialist and communist ideas. The world of ideas that Marx first came into intense contact with in Paris was thus well known to his new friend, who was significantly older.
Like his new fellow traveller, Heine gladly talked about the need for a revolution. At the same time, his political radicalism was largely aesthetic, if not mostly so. It was in art, literature, and perhaps music in particular, that Heine could most clearly read the need for a new and better society. He was not alone in this. The socialist tendency he sympathized with above all – Saint-Simonism – contained a crucial aesthetic component. In it, the artist was a central figure in the new society of the future taking over the role of the priests.5
The interpretation made it easier for many of the artists to let themselves be influenced by Saint-Simon’s ideas.6 Heine was only one of many; Liszt was another and George Sand a third. In this context, George Sand is particularly interesting. It is clear that she and Marx had come into contact with each other in Paris. During the revolution of 1848, she turned to Marx for help with exonerating the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who had been accused of being a Russian spy. Marx, who was then editor-in-chief for Neue Rheinische Zeitung, published an open letter from her on the subject.7
In her enormous autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (History of My Life), Sand provides a lively picture of Paris in the 1840s. The name Marx does not turn up, but we get a look into the social life Marx was part of for a time. Great personages pass in review; among them are also politicians rather than artists, like Pierre Leroux, whom we have already met, and Félicité Robert de Lamennais, a Catholic priest who also was a socialist. Heine is there, of course, well integrated in this radical left circle – at least up until the great schism over the revolution of 1848. Sand herself was more consistent than most. A pathos for the hard-working, oppressed masses permeated most of her work. She was also convinced that the greatest minds of the future were among them, and encouraged workers with ambitions to become writers to try their luck. She hoped for a French proletarian literature, but her hopes did not come to pass.8
The new revolutionary ideas were readily discussed in d’Agoult’s salon, and conversations flowed spontaneously from politics to music and art. Moreover, of course, the gatherings were devoted to rarefied musicianship. An attachment to ‘the people’s music’ and a marked aesthetic elitism apparently got on well there without problem.
Marx did not only move among the salons of Paris. Above all, he sought out craftsmen and workers. In his letters from his time in Paris – which are few in number – he also preferred to talk about them and their progress. In the aforementioned second letter to Feuerbach written in October 1844, he dwelt in some detail on the mood among French proletarians and German craftsmen. Feuerbach’s religious criticisms were a success among the working class, and there were even lectures on the subject for hundreds of German craftsmen in Paris, Marx told him.
But above all, his letter was a song of praise to the French proletari
at that was not only free of pieties but also aware of its significance for the liberation of humanity. The English working class was also making substantial progress but lacked the culture that characterized their French counterparts. The German craftsmen had come far in the field of theory, but their obstacle was that they were just that – craftsmen, not wage earners.
Marx provided an example of the difference between French and German, but chose nothing from the world of the craftsmen or the workers. The former is from a book by a follower of Charles Fourier, alongside Saint-Simon the most influential of the early French socialists. The author was Édouard de Pompery; in his book, he expounds on Fourier’s image of humanity according to which passions not only drive humanity but also give each individual their distinctive character. Passions, not ideas, get people to turn to each other and to choose their lives.
Against this view of humanity, Marx put one of a German, Bruno Bauer. Marx reminded Feuerbach that for many years, Bauer had been his friend but that he had now become increasingly foreign to him. Bauer and the other so-called ‘critics’ in Berlin did not see themselves as people devoted to criticism, Marx said. In their eyes, they were critics who had the misfortune of also being people.9
In these lines to Feuerbach, a writing project about the Young Hegelians can be detected – one which in fact had already begun to take form.
Socialism and Communism
Marx did not make his most important contacts in the salons of Paris but in significantly darker locales. These both shared the idea that society had to be changed completely, but while this topic was the subject of smart conversation at Madame d’Agoult’s, it was a matter of life and livelihood in the poorer quarters.
The words ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ were on many lips, though two of the most important advocates of socialism were already dead when Marx arrived in Paris. Saint-Simon had disappeared from the scene in 1825; both his renown and his influence had come late, and largely posthumously. Charles Fourier died in 1837, at a time when his star was also on the rise.
Both are usually packed together as utopian socialists with a third revolutionary – Welshman Robert Owen, the most practically oriented of them, who tried to create a model industry – or rather, a complete little model society where equality and justice would prevail – in New Lanark outside Glasgow.
Marx labelled them ‘utopian socialists’ in the Communist Manifesto, and it has stuck. The fairness of the designation ‘utopian’ can be questioned. On a small scale, Owen had tried to create something entirely real; he wanted to influence the rest of the world by example of his model. Saint-Simon, as we have seen, spoke about actually existing social phenomena – industry, science, and art – and he was also alert for opportunities for women in the future. At the same time, there was an element of mysticism in him. His most important work was Le nouveau christianisme (The New Christianity); it was published in 1825, the year of his death. In it, he sketches out the contours of a worldly Christianity; his ideas could appeal to both the men of practical life and to more romantic souls who dreamed of the ‘feminine Messiah’ who would redeem the world.
Fourier was the one who best met the original designation of ‘utopian’, which Thomas More created with his 1516 story of the island of Utopia. Fourier dreamed of small ideal societies – which he called phalanstères – whose core consisted of 600 individuals, 300 men and 300 women. The idea was to construct an existence in common with a strict division of labour. The characteristics and interests of each and every person would be used to their advantage, but no one would be stuck in a specific occupation; everyone would be able to switch jobs on a regular basis.
Through the division of labour, each and every person would be dependent on all the others. For this mutuality, Fourier used the term solidarity, a word he borrowed from jurisprudence (solidarité), where it had to do (and still does) with joint and several liability, or collective responsibility to pay. During the 1840s, the word ‘solidarity’ became politically fashionable in France and also spread to other countries.10 But it was not a word that was given space in Marx’s vocabulary – not even in the 1860s, when it had become prevalent in the First International.
On the other hand, Marx read Fourier, and made several important personal acquaintances among societal thinkers in Paris. He had already expressed admiration of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as a newspaperman in Cologne, and now they could both meet face to face. Twenty years later in January 1865, just after Proudhon’s death, Marx talked about their meeting in an article. Proudhon had wanted to learn more about Hegel from Marx, and now after the fact Marx was declaring himself responsible for Proudhon’s later attempts at adopting Hegel’s style. ‘In the course of lengthy debates often lasting all night, I infected him very much to his detriment with Hegelianism, which, owing to his lack of German, he could not study properly.’ Marx adds, with his customary caustic irony, that Karl Grün – a German socialist – continued to speak about Hegel with Proudhon after Marx left Paris, and that he ‘had the advantage over me that he himself understood nothing of it’.11
The result of the lessons was Proudhon’s 1846 book Philosophie de la misère (The Philosophy of Poverty), in which the author attempted to use Hegel’s dialectic in his criticism of society. He sent the book to Marx with an accompanying letter declaring that he now awaited Marx’s ‘critical flog’ (férule critique). When Marx actually let his paddle fly in his 1847 response, Misère de la philosophie (The Poverty of Philosophy), Proudhon ended the friendship.12
Marx also wrote that Proudhon’s debut work, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (What is Property?) of 1840, remained his best (this was the one Marx had read when he was still a journalist). Proudhon’s attitude towards Fourier and Saint-Simon was roughly that of Feuerbach towards Hegel, he says: Feuerbach was less significant as a philosopher, but nonetheless created an epoch through his criticism of Hegel’s philosophy. In a similar way, Proudhon vanquished his superior predecessors. But his fundamental question was wrongly put, since property is a historically variable concept. The property he spoke about was bourgeois property. It is odd to call it theft, since it is protected by bourgeois right. Proudhon’s weakness, according to Marx, was that he had not sufficiently burrowed his way into modern economic theory.
Marx here does not take into consideration the fact that Proudhon did not share his theoretical background. Proudhon stood out to the world as a worker who wrote – he was a typographer – and it was as such that he had first roused Marx’s interest. But Proudhon himself was no propertyless proletarian; rather, he identified himself with small businessmen. Small businessmen and small farmers, who worked to acquire what they owned, were protected in his ideal society whereas the large owners – those who could live off the toil of others – would pass into history. It was their property that he famously called theft (though the phrase had been coined before the French Revolution) – theft from the little people, theft from the commons.
Proudhon was critical of all centralized power because it protected the propertied classes with its state apparatus and its laws. According to Mikhail Bakunin, who is extraordinarily competent in the subject, Proudhon was the first to call himself an anarchist, in 1840 in connection with What Is Property?
Bakunin was, incidentally, another important acquaintance Marx made in Paris. Bakunin, the Russian nobleman who loved revolutions and hated everything to do with the state, remained an admirer of Marx’s intellectual capacity long after they had parted ways. In a manuscript from 1871, he recalls that he and Marx became friends in Paris, and that Marx was by far superior to Bakunin himself in acumen and knowledge. ‘Although younger than I was, [he was] already an atheist, an erudite materialist, and a well-reasoned socialist,’ he wrote. It was no close relationship, he added. Moreover, they were both far too different. Bakunin remembered that Marx called him ‘a sentimental idealist and he was right; I called him faithless, conceited, and treacherous, and I also was right.’13
The young M
arx hardly drew any lessons from Bakunin, but the Russian’s passionate social engagement certainly made an impression on him.
Wilhelm Weitling
An important part of the company Marx kept in Paris consisted of revolutionary Germans living in the city. This took place in meetings arranged by an organization called Bund der Gerechten (League of the Just).
The Bund der Gerechten had been called Bund der Geächteten (League of the Outlaws) in the beginning, but the German tailor and writer Wilhelm Weitling had pushed through the name change in 1836. Weitling had a more radical agenda than earlier iterations of the league. A political revolution was not enough to create a good society, he declared. It would also require a social upheaval that completely transformed property relations.
In 1839, the League of the Just had taken part in a failed attempt at a coup against the prevailing order in France. The leader of the coup was Louis Blanqui, a French socialist who claimed that a group of closely-knit revolutionaries would be able to seize power and bring along the great majority of the people in its revolutionary enterprise. Their tactic was called putschism after the German word Putsch, which means ‘coup’. The 1839 attempt failed. After the defeat, Weitling left for London, which was intended to be the association’s new headquarters. But their activities there were rather lacklustre, while those in Paris at the time of Marx’s debut in society were flourishing.14
Police spies have given us the names of the meeting places that Marx and his newfound friends frequented: Café Scherger, Café Schiewer, Restaurant Schreiber, and so on. Picture the scene: shabby places run by German emigrants, overflowing with master craftsmen and more bookish types with soft hands. In the midst of the gathering, cleverly disguised as a member of the working class, there is a police spy dispatched by the Ministry of the Interior, tasked with reporting what he observed to the Prussian ambassador. The spy’s reports have been preserved, and give us a vivid picture of this side of Parisian life at the time.
A World to Win Page 14