T W O
Paris
We are going to France, the threshold of a new world. May it live up to our dreams! At the end of our journey we will find the vast valley of Paris, the cradle of the new Europe, the great laboratory where world history is formed and has its ever fresh source. It is in Paris that we shall live our victories and our defeats. Even our philosophy, the field where we are in advance of our time, will only be able to triumph when proclaimed in Paris and impregnated with the French spirit.
A. Ruge, Zwei Jahre in Paris (Leipzig, 1846) 1 4 ff.
I . M A R R I A G E A N D H E G E L
With the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx found himself once again an unemployed intellectual. His immediate preoccupations were to lind a secure job and get married. As far as journalism was concerned, Marx's variety had become virtually impossible in Germany. The differences of opinion among the Young Hegelians, already manifest over their attitude to the Rheinische Zeitung, provoked a complete split following the decision of the Prussian Government to suppress the liberal Press. Those in Berlin, led by Bruno Bauer, tended more and more to dissociate themselves from political action. They had imagined their influence to be such that the suppression of their views would lead to a strong protest among the liberal bourgeoisie. When nothing of the sort happened, they confined themselves increasingly to purely theoretical criticism that deliberately renounced all hope of immediate political influence. The response of the group around Ruge was different: they wished to continue the political struggle - but in an even more effective manner. A review of their own still seemed to them the most promising means of political action, and their first ideas was to base themselves on Julius Froebel's publishing house in Zurich. Froebel was a Professor of Mineralogy at Zurich who had started his business at the end of 1841 in order to publish the radical poems of Georg Herwegh; he also published a review, edited by Herwegh, which looked for a moment like a successor to the Deutsche
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Jahrbiicher. With Herwegh's expulsion from Zurich in March 1843 an obvious gap was waiting to be filled, Ruge was all the more attracted to Zurich as it was (together with Paris) the main centre of German expatriates. Given that these exiles comprised both intellectuals and workers, it was sensible that any new review should combine the theory of the Deutsche Jahrbiicher with the more immediately political ideas of the Rheinische Zeitung. Ruge had a great admiration for Marx and wrote to his brother, Ludwig: 'Marx has great intelligence. He is very worried about his future and particularly his immediate future. So in continuing with the Jahrbiicher it is quite natural to ask for his assistance." So when Ruge proposed in January 1843 that he and Marx be co-editors, Marx accepted with enthusiasm.
Naturally Marx's conception of the review was conditioned by his estimate of Germany's political future which he regarded as revolutionary. In March 1843 he wrote: 'You could probably let a shipload of fools sail before the wind for a good while, but it would run into its fate just because the fools did not believe in it. This fate is the revolution which stands before us.'2 In a letter to Ruge, written two months later for publication in the forthcoming review, Marx took him to task for his pessimistic view of Germany's future. 'It is true', he wrote, 'that the old world is in the possession of the philistine; but we should not treat him as a scarecrow and turn back frightened. Let the dead bury and mourn their dead. In contrast, it is enviable to be the first to go alive into the new life; and this shall be our lot.'3 After a lengthy analysis of the 'Philistine' nature of contemporary Germany, Marx declared that 'it is only its own desperate situation that fills me with hope'. He was already beginning to envisage the possibility of revolution as consisting in an alliance of 'thinkers' and 'sufferers':
The system of profit and commerce, of property and human exploitation, leads much more quickly than an increase of population to a rift inside contemporary society that the old society is incapable of healing, because it never heals or creates, but only exists and enjoys. The existence of a suffering humanity which thinks and a thinking humanity which is oppressed must of necessity be disagreeable and unacceptable for the animal world of philistines who neither act nor think but merely enjoy.
On our side the old world must be brought right out into the light of day and the new one given a positive form. The longer that events allow thinking humanity time to recollect itself and suffering humanity time to assemble itself the more perfect will be the birth of the product that the present carries in its womb.4
In view of his revolutionary optimism Marx was definitely against
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simply continuing the Deutsche Jahrbiicher. 'Even if the Jahrbiicher were once again permitted, all we could achieve would be a pale imitation of the extinct review and that is no longer sufficient.'5 Ruge had at first thought in terms of a series of pamphlets but Marx was strongly in favour of a monthly as a more effective means of propaganda. So he and Ruge decided to give practical expression to the idea of Franco-German cooperation that had been suggested by most of the Young Hegelians at some time or other during the previous two years. The influence of French thought had made the radicals very internationally-minded - in contrast to the liberals whom the crises of the 1840s forced into a narrow nationalism. Hess and Weitling had both learned their socialism in France and Feuerbach had forcefully expressed the idea that the 'new' philosophy, if it wished to be at all effective, would have to combine a German head with a French heart. Marx was extremely enthusiastic at the prospect: 'Franco-German annals - that would be a principle, an event of importance, an undertaking that fills one with enthusiasm.'6 Froebel agreed to publish a review of this character and preparations began. In May, Marx and Froebel went to visit Ruge in Dresden; Ruge agreed to put up 6000 thalers, Froebel 3000, and the three of them decided on Strasbourg as the place of publication. Marx's immediate future was now guaranteed: as co-editor of the review he had a salary of 550 thalers, and earned a further 250 or so from royalties.
The way was now at last open for marriage. He had written to Ruge in March:
As soon as we have signed the contract I will go to Kreuznach and get married.... Without romanticising, I can tell you that I am head-over- heels in love and it is as serious as can be. I have been engaged for more than seven years and my fiancee has been involved on my behalf in the toughest of struggles that have ruined her health. These have been in part against her pietist and aristocratic relations, for whom the Lord in Heaven and the Lord in Berlin are the objects of an equal veneration, and in part against my own family where certain radicals and other sworn enemies have insinuated themselves. For years, my fiancee and I have been fighting more useless and exhausting battles than many other persons three times our age - who are for ever talking of their 'experience', a word particularly dear to our partisans of the juste-milieuJ
The difficulties with Jenny's family had been increased by the arrival of her step-brother Ferdinand, a career civil servant and later Prussian Minister of the Interior, who in 1838 had been appointed to an important post in Trier. It was possibly to avoid his influence that Jenny moved with her mother, probably as early as July 1842, to the spa of Kreuznach about
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fifty miles east of Trier. Marx paid a visit to her there in March to make plans for the marriage.
As soon as he left, Jenny wrote to him:
I think that you have never been as dear, as sweet, as charming. Every time we parted before I was certainly enraptured with you, and would have had you back to tell you once more how dear, how completely dear you are to me. But this last time you left triumphant; I did not know how dear you were to me in my deepest heart until I no longer saw you in the flesh; I have only the one faithful portrait of you standing so full of life before my soul in all its angelic mildness and goodness, heightened love and spiritual lustre. If you were back here again, my dear little Karl, what a capacity for happiness you would find in your brave little girl; and even if you showed a still worse tendency and even nastier intentions, I would still not take reactionary measures;8 I would patiently lay down my head, sacrificing it to my naughty boy. . . . Do you still remember our twilight conversation, our beckoning games, our hours of slumber. Dear heart, how good, how loving, how attentive, how joyful you were!0
The letter also contained careful instructions as to what to buy and what not to buy for the wedding which took place in the Protestant Church and registry office in Kreuznach on 19 June 1843. The official registration described the couple as 'Herr Karl Marx, Doctor of Philosophy, residing in Cologne, and Fraulein Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny von Westphalen, no occupation, residing in Kreuznach'. From the two families, only Jenny's mother and brother Edgar were present, the witnesses being acquaintances from Kreuznach.
Marx and Jenny left immediately for a honeymoon of several weeks. They first went to Switzerland to see the Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen
and then - travelling through the province |
of Baden |
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time on the journey back to Kreuznach. Jenny later |
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illustrated how extraordinarily irresponsible |
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tinued to be) in their attitude to money. Jenny's mother had given them some money for the honeymoon and they took it with them, in a chest. They had it with them in the coach during their journey and took it into the different hotels. When they had visits from needy friends they left it open on the table in their room and anyone could take as much as he pleased. Needless to say, it was soon empty.10
On returning to Kreuznach, Marx and Jenny lived for three months in her mother's house - which enabled Marx to 'withdraw from the public stage into my study'" and get down to writing for the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher. It was clear that the Jahrbiicher would be a specifically political review. Although Marx had dealt with political subjects in his articles for
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the Rheinische Zeitung, his approach - as was normal in polemical articles - had been very eclectic with lines of argument drawn from Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. Now he felt the need for a more systematic framework of criticism and decided to try to come to terms with Hegel's political philosophy, particularly as expressed in The Philosophy of Right. All Hegel's disciples had sooner or later to do this when it became clear that the Prussian Government showed no possibility of becoming Hegel's 'rational state'. Marx had had the idea for at least a year. In March 1842 he had written to Ruge: 'Another article that I also intend for the Deutsche Jahrbiicher is a critique of the part of Hegel's natural right where he talks of the constitution. The essential part of it is the critique of constitutional monarchy, a bastard, contradictory and unjustifiable institution.'12 He went on to say that the article was finished and only required rewriting. Six months later he was still talking about publishing it in the Rheinische
'Zeitung. The critique of Hegel's politics that Marx elaborated in the three months he spent at Kreuznach is much richer than the purely logicalpolitical approach of the previous year.
Two factors shaped Marx's view of Hegel's politics. The first was his recent experience as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. Many years later, in the preface to his Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote:
The first work which I undertook for the solution of the doubts which assailed me was a critical review of the Hegelian philosophy of law .. .
My investigation led to the conclusion, firstly, that legal relations as well as forms of state are to be understood neither in themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life (the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, combines under the name of 'civil society'); but secondly that the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy.'s
Although this account is too simplified, his experience with the Rheinische '/.citung and the rejection of liberal politics by Heine and the socialists
(including Hess) enabled his critique of Hegel to take socio-economic factors into account to a much greater extent.
The second factor was the impression made on Marx by his reading of Feuerbach's Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy. Marx had already read Feuerbach when composing his doctoral thesis, but Feuerbach's magnum opus. The Essence of Christianity, which claimed that religious beliefs were merely projections of alienated human desires and capacities, had not made as great an impression on him as it had on Ruge.14 But the Theses had an immediate and important influence on Marx: they had been