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

Chapter 05: Philosophy under Censorship

The whole of the politics of an absolute state are embodied in the person of the reigning monarch. The more flagrantly his policy contradicts the interests of the classes excluded from government, the more conscious they are of their impotence to break their ruler's power, the more longingly they direct their gaze towards the heir to the throne. Upon him they rely for the fulfilment of all their hopes. With him, or so they whisper to themselves, the great new era will begin. The greater their expectations, the more bitter their disappointment when the new régime turns out to be nothing but a bare sequel of the old.

As Crown Prince Frederick Wilhelm IV had been the hope of many. They had taken seriously the high-sounding phrases concerning liberty and national unity that had flowed so easily from his lips, however vague and indefinite the phrases had been. They had expected that when once he was king the era of long-demanded reforms would open. When he ascended the throne new political life awakened on every side, and everyone sent him petitions and demands, expecting them to be fulfilled overnight. 'An Augustan age was to begin for Prussia. Everywhere new, fresh forces seemed to be arising; there was germinating and sprouting, and everywhere long-closed buds seemed to be opening in the warm light of the newly arisen sun. A breath of spring went out from Berlin and seemed to spread throughout the Fatherland.'

The romantic, pious, waywardly intellectual king fulfilled none of the many expectations that were centred upon him. He had proclaimed that there must be freedom of speech, but the new instructions issued to the censor's office provided for no alleviation of his severity. Things remained as they had been before. It was a time when freeing the individual from his traditional ties was the vogue. People's minds were much occupied with the problem of divorce, but the Government settled the matter in its own inimitable way and decided for the status quo.

The Left Hegelians had had but little faith in the Crown Prince, but even they had not been entirely without hope, as Köppen's writings show. When he became king they were quickly disillusioned. The first blow struck by the new régime fell upon their shoulders. Frederick William IV was a personal friend of Savigny, and Savigny strengthened him in his resolve once and for all to exterminate the godless forces of Hegelianism. He summoned the philosopher Schelling from Munich to Berlin to enable him at last to bring out into the light of day his long-prepared philosophical system, which was but a metaphysical justification of the police state. When the Hegelians tried to combat him the censor suppressed their literary opposition just as ruthlessly as he had done in the past; and thus the men who still to an extent believed that the battle could be fought out on the peaceful plain of theory were driven a stage farther into 'practice,' and 'direct participation in life.'

To the Hegelians the dismissal of Bruno Bauer was a still severer blow. To Marx the blow was a personal one. All the plans he had made in his last years at Berlin had been closely bound up with Bruno Bauer. They had wanted to teach together at Bonn, they had wanted to be joint editors of The Archives of Atheism, they had intended to do battle together against the enemies of Hegelianism. It was for this reason that Bauer had urged his friend to join him at Bonn at the earliest possible moment. The end of Marx's studies made the proposition a practical one for the first time, but circumstances intervened to make it impossible.

The University of Bonn had two theological schools, Protestant and Catholic, and they had always been bitterly opposed. Each was always ready to go to the assistance of the enemy of the other. The Catholics always supported the not completely orthodox Protestants and the Protestants always rallied behind the Liberal Catholics. Bruno Bauer counted on this. Between the pair of hostile brothers he hoped to find space for his critical annihilation of Christianity. He was disappointed. Catholics and Protestants forgot their ancient feud and united against their common foe. Pious students, incited by their teachers, declined as future ministers of religion to go on listening to the heresies of the 'atheist' lecturer. A Catholic-Protestant United Front, created specially for the purpose, started making hostile demonstrations against him, free fights broke out at lectures, and the university authorities strove to get rid of the disturber of their peace, whom the Ministry of Public Worship and Education had foisted upon them because it wanted him out of Berlin.

In the meantime Bauer's standing with the Ministry had also been seriously impaired. The department had been purged of its last pro-Hegelians. In April, 1841, when Bauer's Criticism of the Synoptic Gospels appeared, Eichhorn, the Minister, had inquired in Bonn whether it would not be possible to withdraw his right to lecture. But as long as Bauer refrained from political allusions in the lecture-room it was difficult to take any active steps against him without tearing the last shreds from the pretence of academic freedom.

The Government found their long-awaited opportunity in the autumn of 1841. Bauer tied the rope round his own neck by taking part in the demonstrations that took place in Berlin in honour of Welcker, who was a professor at Karlsruhe and leader of the opposition in the Parliament of Baden. Welcker's journey through Prussia was the signal for an extraordinary outburst of enthusiasm. The Government well knew that the banquets and 'serenades' of which he was the occasion were not in honour of him personally, but in honour of the cause he represented; i.e. constitutional government and the struggle against autocracy. The Berlin celebrations were organised by Bauer's friends, and Bauer was in Berlin at the time. In his speech at a banquet held on September 28 he drew a contrast between the Hegelian conception of the reasonable state, consciously understanding its tasks, and the vague spirit of South-German Liberalism.

The sensation caused by the demonstrations in Welcker's honour, and more particularly by Bauer's speech, was extraordinary. It was talked about for days. The police busied themselves with the 'scandalous' affair and the king ordered a detailed report to be made to him. On October 14, after reading the report, he wrote a letter to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, insisting that the organisers of the affair be sought out and removed from Berlin, or at least placed under rigorous police supervision. On no account must Bauer be allowed to continue lecturing at Bonn.

The king's letter did its work. Throughout the winter one report was written after another, the affair was exhaustively discussed in the Press, all the universities in Prussia were consulted, and eventually, on March 22, the verdict the king wanted was delivered. Bruno Bauer left the University of Bonn in May, 1842.

Marx followed Bauer's struggle in Bonn with extreme attention, for his own destiny was at stake beside his friend's. If Bauer had to leave the university, an academic career was closed to him as long as Prussia remained the bigoted, reactionary State that it was.

After leaving Berlin University Marx lived partly at Trier, partly at Cologne, partly at Bonn. Only one of his literary plans was realised. The ever-increasing severity of the censorship made it impossible even to think of founding an atheistic periodical. But Bauer's Posaune des Jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen did appear and Marx collaborated in it. It appeared anonymously. The writer gave himself out to be a right-thinking Christian and proceeded to demonstrate that the most dangerous enemy of the Christian State was Hegel, because he demolished it from within; and by Hegel he meant Hegel, and not Hegel as interpreted by his misguided pupils; Hegel who had so long passed as a column of the existing order. The deception was so well carried out that at first even men like Arnold Ruge took it for the real thing. The cat was only let out of the bag by that section of the Press which was friendly to the Hegelians. Every peasant,1 one paper wrote plainly enough, would understand that the book had not been written by a religious man at all but by an artful rebel. Marx prepared a sequel intended to demonstrate the revolutionary element in Hegel's art teaching. But the censor made it impossible to continue the series of pamphlets which was planned.

The philosophers, whether they wanted it or not, found themselves assailed on every side by the demands of practical, everyday life. Marx went on working at his essay. He wanted to publish it but it never appeared. He stopped, was forced to stop work on it because everything else had become overshadowed by the importance of the plain, practical, political task of coming to grips with the enemy. Marx's essay, 'Remarks on the New Prussian Censorship,' written in January and February, 1842, the deadliest attack ever made, the sharpest blow ever struck at the brazen profanity of arbitrary despotism, was intended for Ruge's Deutsche Jahrbücher but only appeared a year later in the Anekdota zur Neuesten Deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik, which was published in Switzerland.

In April, 1842, Marx went to Bonn, where Bauer's fate had already been decided. 'Irritating the devout,' shocking the philistine, bursting into peals of laughter in the deadly religious silence, gave them a pleasure which there was now less reason than ever to restrain. Bauer wrote mockingly about it to his brother. He described how he and Marx one day infuriated the excellent citizens of Bonn by appearing in a donkey-cart while everybody was going for a walk. 'The citizens of Bonn looked at us in amazement. We were delighted, and the donkeys brayed.'

In Bonn Marx wrote his first article for the Rheinische Zeitung, which had been appearing in Cologne since January 1, 1842.

The Rhine Province was economically and politically the most advanced part of Prussia, and its centre was Cologne. In no other part of Germany had industry developed so rapidly or was modern commerce so disseminated. Consciousness of the anachronism of the feudal state developed sooner and more powerfully here than elsewhere among the confident young bourgeoisie. Their economic demands struck everywhere on political impediments, and they recognised comparatively early that these impediments must be removed. If there were no other way, an end must be put to them by force. They required the unity of Germany, which was carved up into six-and-thirty 'Fatherlands'--big, medium, small and pigmy states, each with its own coinage, its own weights and measures, its own Customs. Political freedom, the overthrow of the many petty potentates, the unification of Germany into a single big economic unit was their necessary aim.

The centre of the Rhine Province was Cologne, where most of the modern industrial undertakings had their headquarters. The most energetic and progressive representatives of the new world which repudiated Old Prussia and was hated by it in turn lived there. Cologne was the headquarters of the young intelligentsia arising with and in the midst of the new economic order.

In the course of 1841 a number of young writers, philosophers, merchants and industrialists had gathered into a small, loosely knit group in Cologne. Camphausen, Mevissen and other future captains of industry belonged to it, besides representatives of the new intelligentsia such as Georg Jung, a member of a rich Dutch family, whose wife was the daughter of a Cologne banker, and Dagobert Oppenheim, brother of the proprietor of the big banking house of Oppenheim and Co.; and writers such as Moses Hess, who was a gifted and versatile man, if too volatile and unstable to make real contributions to the many branches of knowledge he wished to make his own.

Marx made a tremendous impression on the members of this group when he met them for the first time. This was apparently in July, 1841, when he was on his way from Trier to Bonn. Jung spoke of Marx as being 'a quite desperate revolutionary' and having 'one of the acutest minds' he knew. In September, 1841, Moses Hess wrote a letter to Berthold Auerbach which was a positive panegyric of Marx. 'You will be delighted to meet a man who is one of our friends here now, though he lives in Bonn, where he will soon be a lecturer,' he wrote. 'He is a phenomenon who has made a tremendous impression on me, though my interests lie in an entirely different field. In short, you can definitely look forward to meeting the greatest, perhaps the only real philosopher now living. Soon, when he makes his début (as a writer as well as in an academic chair) he will draw the eyes of all Germany upon himself. Dr. Marx, as my idol is called--he is still a young man (he is at most twenty-four years old)--will give mediaeval religion and philosophy their last push. He combines the most profound philosophical earnestness with the most biting wit. Think of Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one--I say fused, not just lumped together--and you have Dr. Marx.'

About this time the Cologne group conceived the project of having a daily paper of their own. Conditions were favourable. Antagonism between Protestant Prussia and the Catholic Rhineland had scarcely diminished during the bare three decades of their amalgamation. In the course of the thirties Church and State had come into a whole series of conflicts, which were liable to flare up again at any moment. Since the revolutionary upheaval by which the Catholics of Belgium had secured their independence from Protestant Holland, an example that militant sections of the clerical circles in the Rhineland occasionally felt tempted to imitate, the danger inherent in these conflicts was all the greater. The old and widely circulated Kölnische Zeitung propagated the Catholic cause with great skill. The Government tried to counter it with a paper of its own, the Rheinische Allgemeine Zeitung, which was started in 1841. It met with little success. It was too feeble in every way to compete with the ably conducted Kölnische Zeitung.

The Cologne group decided to take the paper over. The response to the appeal to take up shares in the new undertaking far surpassed expectations. Thirty thousand thalers were subscribed in a short time. In those days that was a very respectable sum of money. Every section of the public having Left sympathies of any kind was represented among the subscribers. As a token of the interest the Government took in an anti-ultramontane organ, even Gerlach, the president of the local administration, was among the shareholders.

The paper did not immediately find its political line. The first editor was intended to have been Friedrich List, whose National System of Political Economy had just appeared. In the field of economic theory, List was the first spokesman on behalf of the young bourgeoisie's aspirations for the protection and advancement of industry in an economically independent Germany. But List was ill and recommended Dr. Gustav Höfken, one of his disciples, to fill his place. The first number appeared on January 1, 1842. Höfken's policy was for the expansion of the German Zollverein, the development of German trade and trade policy, and the liberation of the German consciousness from everything that hampered unity. This did not satisfy the paper's new proprietors. They all belonged to the prosperous and educated bourgeoisie. On the board of directors Rudolf Schramm, the manufacturer's son, sat side by side with wealthy lawyers and doctors. The chief shareholders were leading Cologne industrialists, the most important being Ludolf Camphausen, later Prime Minister of Prussia, one of the pioneers of the railway in Germany. It had long been clear to them that their economic programme could not be realised without a fundamental reorganisation of the state. Jung and Oppenheim, the two managers, were Young Hegelians and helped Hess, who was closely associated with the editorial control from the beginning, in finding Young Hegelians to work for the paper. Variances arose with Höfken and on January 18 he resigned.

Marx already had considerable influence upon the management, especially upon Jung, and it was on his recommendation that his old friend Rutenberg was appointed editor, a position for which he soon proved utterly unsuitable. He could write Young Hegelian articles, but he was simply not equipped for the task of controlling a great political newspaper, which was what the Rheinische Zeitung was increasingly becoming every day. From the middle of February onwards the real editor was Moses Hess.

Changes of editorship did not impede the paper's expansion. Its circulation doubled in the first month and went on increasing steadily.

Close as Marx's connection with the paper was from its first day of publication, for the first three months he did not work for it. He wrote nothing for it until after Bauer's dismissal, when all prospect of an academic career had vanished. The first articles he wrote were a series about the debates in the sixth Rhenish Diet on the freedom of the Press, and the first of the series appeared on May 5, 1842. This was the first work of Marx's to be printed, if one excepts the two poems his friends published, possibly against his will, in the Athenäum. Georg Jung thought the article 'exceptionally good.' Arnold Ruge called it 'in short, the best that has ever been written about the freedom of the Press.' Ludolf Camphausen inquired of his brother who the writer of the 'admirable' article might be. (Marx did not sign it, but called it 'by a Rhinelander.') Extracts were quoted everywhere, and earned the Rheinische Zeitung such credit that Marx was promptly asked to send in as many more articles as he could as quickly as he could write them. Marx wrote three more articles in the course of the summer, one of which was suppressed by the censor and the other heavily blue-pencilled. In the middle of October Marx was sent for to Cologne. On October 15 he took over the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung.

In spite of all the determination with which Marx fought against feudal absolutism and rejected half-solutions and illusory ones--in a letter to Ruge he described constitutional monarchy as 'a mongrel riddled with contradiction and paradox'--he was soon forced to part from his Berlin friends. They went on with their 'absolute criticism,' completely untroubled as to whether it were possible or justified in the concrete circumstances in which they found themselves. A dispute that arose between him and Edgar Bauer is illuminating. In some essays he sent to Marx Edgar Bauer criticised the principle of compromise in political matters. Not satisfied with that, he made a most violent attack on all who were unwilling in practice to make his uncompromising critical attitude their own. Marx, in a letter to Oppenheim, emphatically repudiated this species of pseudo-radicalism. He described Bauer's articles as 'quite general theoretical discussions concerning the constitution of the state, suitable rather for a scientific journal than for a newspaper,' and drew a picture of 'liberal-minded, practical men, who have undertaken the troublesome rôle of struggling step-by-step for freedom within constitutional limits.'

Marx's constant regard for the concrete facts led him to taking an interest in social problems. At the time the German Press was paying particular attention to the Chartist movement in England and the Communist aspirations in France and Switzerland. The Rheinische Zeitung took up these questions and printed articles by Hess about the Communists and by Von Mevissen, who had just returned to Cologne from England, about the Chartists. In August, 1842, the management of the Rheinische Zeitung and those associated with them formed a study-circle for the discussion of social problems.

Marx took part in it himself. At the beginning of October he defended his paper against a charge of Communism. The article he wrote demonstrates how slight Marx's knowledge of social problems still was in 1842. He was still under the influence of ideas recently elaborated by Hess. Hess was the first of the Young Hegelian camp to turn his attention to Communism, and Engels says that he was the first of the three of them to come over to Communism. What Marx intended to write was a 'fundamental critique of Communism' based on 'a long-continued and thorough study.' He read the works of the French Socialists and Communists who were the chief authorities on the subject at the time--Proudhon's Qu'est ce que la Propriété?, Dezamy's Calomnie et Politique de M. Cabet, Leroux, Considérant, and others.

However important social questions may have been, there were immediate political problems to solve. In all these Marx shared the views of the other Left Hegelians, and his method was theirs. His position was at the extreme Left wing of bourgeois democracy. He was, to repeat the phrase, a 'desperate revolutionary.' A clean sweep must be made of things as they were--but for the time being in the domain of theory only. Victory in the intellectual sphere must precede victory in the world of reality--how, was uncertain, the path to it was not yet visible. Marx, in spite of some vacillation and changes of mind, clung as long as possible to the hope of being able to convince the rulers of the necessity of fundamental changes. Should their efforts prove in vain there was but one alternative and that was revolution, the threat of which appears in his writings at this period from time to time. When the ruling powers called on divine inspiration for their defence, Marx replied that English history had sufficiently demonstrated that the conception of divine inspiration from above called forth the counter-conception of divine inspiration from below. 'Charles I mounted the scaffold because of divine inspiration from below.' The threat was there plainly enough; but it was held in abeyance, only to apply if all efforts to gain the victory in the intellectual sphere should fail. It was their task to persevere tirelessly with these efforts.

The new newspaper was at first not unwelcome to the Government. Upholding the idea of national unity in opposition to the narrow frontiers of provincialism, it stood by implication for Prussian hegemony in Germany, set its face against ultramontanism and state interference in Church matters, all by virtue of its programme of freeing the national consciousness of everything that hampered the sense of unity.

But even before Marx took over control of the paper it had come into ever-growing conflict with the Government. As early as July Marx wrote to Ruge that the 'greatest obduracy' was required to see a paper like the Rheinische Zeitung through. It was censored with 'the most stern and unjust rigour.' The more it criticised the autocracy, the bureaucracy, the censorship, the whole system of the Christian-German Reaction, the harder did the Government bear down upon it. If at first it had been a welcome ally against the Kölnische Zeitung, its tone very soon became 'even more doubtful' than that of the Kölnische Zeitung. In the last resort it was possible, if not easy, to come to terms with the Catholic Reaction. With the spirit of Liberalism, whose banner was flown more flagrantly in the Rheinische Zeitung every day, it was out of the question.

Marx directed its policy far more clearly, more purposefully, more single-mindedly, launched it against the innermost chamber of the Old Prussian State. Under his direction the paper made extraordinarily rapid strides. When he took it over it had about one thousand subscribers. On January 1, 1843, the number had increased to three thousand. Very few German papers could boast as many. It was more widely quoted than all the others, and to write for it was considered a high honour. Letters, articles, poems were sent to it from all parts of Germany. Marx edited it as he had wanted it to be edited when he contributed to it from Bonn. It was essential, he had written to Oppenheim from Bonn, that the Rheinische Zeitung should not be directed by its contributors but that the contributors should be directed by it. He was, as friend and foe soon saw, 'the source from which the doctrine flowed.' He concerned himself with every detail. The paper was, as it were, fused all of a piece. Marx himself selected the articles and edited them. Traces of his powerful hand are perceptible in the paper's tone, its style, even in its punctuation.

But this meant that Marx was brought up against the hard facts of reality more sharply than ever. The Prussian State as it actually was could still be measured against the idea of what the true state ought to be. But there was no answer in Hegel to economic questions such as that raised by the debates in the Diet about the wood-theft law or the distress among the wine-growing peasants of the Moselle. Engels wrote later that 'Marx always said that it was his going into the question of the wood-theft law and the position of the Moselle peasants that turned his attention from pure politics to economic conditions and thus to Socialism.'

The more deeply Marx plunged into reality, the more his Berlin friends lost themselves in abstraction. Their criticism became ever more 'absolute,' and was destined to end up in empty negation. It became 'nihilistic.'

The word 'nihilism,' which dates from those times, was coined for them. The Russian writer, Turgeniev, who is generally supposed to have invented it, learned it during this period in Berlin, when he met members of Bruno Bauer's circle. He transferred it to the Russian revolutionaries twenty years later.

Berlin 'nihilism' took delight in an occasionally absurd ridiculing of philistinism, and the so-called 'Freien,' or 'Free,' demonstrated their emancipation by an anti-philistinism which in practice tied them to that very world which they so radically repudiated, and rendered them incapable of genuinely combating it. Their emancipation ended up in sheer buffoonery.

Marx's unwillingness to place the Rheinische Zeitung at the disposal of their antics brought their violent wrath down upon his head. The final breach came on account of Herwegh.

Georgh Herwegh's poems, Gedichte eines Lebendigen, had made him the most popular poet in Germany. They expressed incomparably all the vague, sentimental, often naïve longing for liberty that was rife in German society at the time. Herwegh had been forced to seek refuge abroad. He was able to return to Germany in 1842, and his return developed into a triumphal progress. Herwegh, who was a quite unpolitical poet at heart, was so fêted and honoured that he ended by completely losing all sense of proportion. At Berlin he was invited to see the king. Frederick William IV liked assuming a popular rôle and courting popularity, and on his side Herwegh felt flattered by the rôle of Marquis Posa which he hoped to play before the king. The interview, however, gave satisfaction to neither party. Each felt the falseness of his position, and when the Press started discussing this curious audience each party behaved as if the other had come off worse. The extreme Left took Herwegh's audience especially amiss, and his meeting with Bruno Bauer's group ended in an abrupt breach. Herwegh wrote a letter to the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung about the 'Freien.' He skated quickly over the occasion of his own quarrel with them and attacked them on quite general grounds. 'They compromise our cause and our Party with their revolutionary romanticism, their longing to be geniuses and their big talk,' he said.

Marx was anything but pleased at receiving Herwegh's letter, but his opinion of the 'Freien' coincided with Herwegh's. He was forced to defend Herwegh against the attacks made upon him from Berlin. They demanded that the Rheinische Zeitung print their anti-Herwegh articles, but Marx refused. They sent him an ultimatum, which Marx declined. The Berliners broke off relations with Marx and the Rheinische Zeitung. This was Marx's first rupture with the ultra-Lefts.

The paper lost little because of the 'Freien.' Its reputation was growing steadily, its circulation was increasing, and it was on the way to becoming the leading paper in Germany, when the censorship suddenly gave it its death-blow.

As early as the days of Rutenberg's editorship the Government had regretted the good-will they had shown the Rheinische Zeitung. In February, 1842, inquiries were made in official circles in the Rhineland as to whether it might not be advisable to withdraw its licence. This danger was at first averted because, though the local officials took exception to a great deal in the paper, they were unwilling to lose an ally against their hereditary clerical foes. But the censorship became more rigorous. It was in the hands of the 'shameless' Dolleschall, the dull-witted official who had forbidden 'making a comedy of divine things.' What he understood he blue-pencilled without rhyme or reason, and he was even more rigorous with what he did not understand, because that he regarded as particularly suspicious. But it was impossible to blue-pencil everything. So much that was subversive remained that the Berlin authorities recognised the insufficiency of their previous instructions. New and even more rigorous instructions were sent the censor. Marx was for a long time fond of quoting one saying of Dolleschall's: 'Now my living's at stake. I'll cross everything out!' It made no difference. Dolleschall was recalled and a new and more severe censor came and ruled in his stead. It was not long before the newcomer was reprimanded for excessive leniency. This hurt his feelings greatly, and he defended himself. He had suppressed no fewer than a hundred and forty articles, but he received no mercy because of that. The censor was given a super-censor to sit by his side, so that one should blue-pencil what the other left. Even this did not suffice. In December the Berlin authorities sent a special envoy to the Rhineland to inquire how the population would take it if the paper were suppressed or whether suppression would cause too much dissatisfaction. The paper's reputation had grown to such an extent that the Government shrank from taking the final step. But it was only a question of time.

Though the order came from Berlin, it was the Tsar, Nicholas I, who really suppressed the Rheinische Zeitung. On January 4 the Rheinische Zeitung published a violent anti-Russian article. Russia was the prop of Prussian foreign policy. It was an alliance in which Russia gave the orders and Prussia listened and obeyed. The Tsar saw to it that Prussia did not deviate from the straight and narrow path. When Frederick William IV ascended the throne and there were murmurs here and there in the Prussian Press to the effect that perhaps this Russian hegemony over a German State was not entirely in order, Nicholas I was filled with righteous indignation. He read the submissive young king a lecture and did not shrink from giving his very plain opinion as to how Prussia ought to be ruled.

The Prussian ambassador at the court of St. Petersburg had repeatedly to listen to hard words. On January 10 he reported to Berlin another and if possible a more violent outburst of imperial rage. Nicholas I had engaged Herr von Liebermann in conversation at the ball at the Winter Palace on January 8 and said that he found the Liberal German Press infamous beyond all measure, and he could not sufficiently express his astonishment at the reception the king had given the notorious Herwegh. His Imperial Majesty spoke so violently and with such a flood of words that the ambassador was unable to say anything at all. Moreover, the Tsar had already written Frederick William IV a personal letter. His rebukes became so trenchant and so threatening that Berlin became alarmed.

The anti-Russian article had been read with indignation in Berlin two weeks before the ambassador's report arrived from St. Petersburg. This time there was no more hesitation. On January 21, 1843, the three Prussian ministers concerned with the censorship decided to suspend the Rheinische Zeitung. The Government were in such a hurry that they sent a special mounted messenger to Cologne. According to the edict which he carried the newspaper had been guilty of malicious slander of the State authorities, especially the censorship department; it had held up the administration of the Press police in Prussia to contempt and offended friendly foreign Powers. In order not excessively to damage the shareholders and subscribers, the paper was to be allowed to continue until March 31, but would be subject to special censorship to prevent it from erring during the course of the reprieve.

A clever, cultured cynic, named Wilhelm Saint-Paul, came to Cologne as the last censor. In his reports on Marx he called him the living source and fountain-head of the paper's views. He had made Marx's acquaintance, and he was a man 'who would die for his ideas.' Another time he wrote that certain as it was that the views of Dr. Marx rested upon a profound speculative error, as he had tried to prove to him, Dr. Marx was equally certain of the rightness of his views. 'The contributors to the Rheinische Zeitung could be accused of anything rather than lack of principle in that sense. This can only be one more reason,' Saint-Paul concluded with shameless logic, 'for removing him, in the event of the paper being allowed to continue, from a position of direct and controlling influence.'

The fear that the ban would rouse ill-feeling turned out to be well founded. In every town of the province, in Cologne, Aachen, Elberfeld, Düsseldorf, Coblenz and Trier, hundreds of respectable citizens signed petitions to the Government, appealing for the lifting of the ban. The whole of the German Press took up the question of the suspension of the Rheinische Zeitung. The authorities in Berlin actually hesitated as to whether it might not be advisable to allow the paper to reappear under definite restrictions.

But in the last resort the Berlin Government regarded the good-will of the Tsar as more important than the temper of the Rhinelanders. On February 7 the ambassador in St. Petersburg wrote another report:

'Since submitting my last humble report I have had the opportunity of meeting Count de Nesselrode at his wife's salon and of conversing with him. Instead of giving me information which might have been useful or interesting to me in connection with the general political situation, the Vice-Chancellor used the occasion to ask me whether I had read the really infamous attack which the Rheinische Zeitung, published at Cologne, had recently made on the Russian Cabinet, basing its furious denunciations on the false pretext of a note said to have been addressed to me by him relative to the tendencies of the German Press. I replied that I was not acquainted with the text of the particular article but I recollected well that the State Gazette had recently published a refutation of some similar articles, declaring, briefly but quite categorically, that the assumptions on which those articles were based were entirely without foundation or reasonable cause. This refutation was certainly not unknown to the Vice-Chancellor; but he confessed to me that he was unable to understand how a Censor employed by Your Majesty's Government could have passed an article of such a nature. In his opinion it far surpassed in perfidy and violence all previous attacks made on the Imperial Government in the Prussian Press. He added that in order that I might judge for myself and be fully acquainted with the facts he would send me a copy of the Rheinische Zeitung containing the article in question, which he did the same evening. Consequently I am very gratified to-night, on returning from the Patriotic Ball, to find in the State Gazette for January 31, which has just arrived by post, that Your Majesty's three ministers in charge of the censorship have recently issued an order by virtue of which the Rheinische Zeitung will cease to appear as from April 1. I shall make it my most immediate duty to draw Count de Nesselrode's attention to this energetic measure to-day on the occasion of a dinner to which he has invited me. I believe it to be my duty very humbly to add that during my conversation with the Vice-Chancellor the day before yesterday he assured me definitely that in all probability the Emperor has not yet seen the article in question, because he on his part had hesitated to lay it before His Imperial Majesty's eyes.'2

The Prussian Government trembled at the thought that the infamous article might yet come to the eyes of the Tsar. It was decided definitely that the ban should remain. A deputation of shareholders was not even received. Marx, in ignorance of the true ground for the suspension of the paper (which as a matter of fact, has remained unknown to historians to this day) made a last desperate move. An article, inspired by him, appeared in the Mannheimer Abendzeitung attributing the whole of the blame to him. It was he who had given the paper its distinguishing tone, he was its evil spirit, its controversialist par excellence, and it was his audacious insolence and youthful indiscretion that were to blame. But that made no difference either. The issue of March 18 contained the following: 'The undersigned announces that he has retired from the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung because of the present censorship conditions. Dr. Marx.' But still there was no act of clemency.

The last number of the Rheinische Zeitung appeared on March 31. It was so sought after that as much as from eight to ten silver groschen were paid for a copy. The Rheinische Zeitung took its departure with a poem:

We boldly flew the flag of freedom, and every member of the crew did his
duty. In spite of the watch having been kept in vain, the voyage was good and
we do not regret it. Though the gods were angry, though our mast fell, we were
not intimidated. Columbus himself was despised at first, but he looked upon the
New World at last. Friends who applauded us, foes who fought us, we shall
meet again on the new shore. If all collapses, courage remains unbroken.3

Chapter 05 notes

1: The German for peasant is Bauer.

2: 'Depuis l'expédition de mon dernier très-humble rapport, j'ai eu aussi occasion do rencontrer Mr. le Comte de Nesselrode, dans le salon de son épouse, et de lui parler; mais au lieu de me fournir des renseignements qui auraient pu m'être utiles, ou intéressants, sous le rapport de la politique Mr. le Vice-Chancelier a saisi cette occasion pour me demander: si j'avais lu déjà l'article véritablement infame, que la gazette Rhénane, publiée à Cologne avait lancé dernièrement contre le Cabinet Russe,--en basant ses déclamations furibondes sur le faux prétexte d'une note qui m'aurait été adressée par lui, relativement à la tendance de la presse Allomande. J'ai répondu à Mr. le Comte de Nesselrode, que je ne connaissais pas textuellement cet article, mais que je me rappelais fort bien, que la gazette d'Etat avait publié, il n'y a pas longtems, une réfutation de quelques articles semblables, on déclarant brièvement, mais assez positivement, que les suppositions sur lesquelles le raisonnemont de ces articles avait été basé, manquaient de fondement et de tout motif raisonnable. Cette réfutation n'était point inconnue á Mr. le Vice-Chancelier; mais il m'a avvué, qu'elle ne suffisait pas, pour lui faire comprendre, comment un censeur employé par le gouvornement de Votre Majesté avait pu laisser passer un article d'une nature semblable, qui, selon lui, surpassait encore do beaucoup, en perfidie et en violence, tout ce qui avait été publié jusqu'ici dans los feuilles Prussiennes contre le gouvernement Imperial. Il y a ajouté encore qu'afin que je puisse en juger pour moi-même, en toute connaissance de cause, il m'enverait la feuille de la gazette Rhénane, qui renfermait l'article en question, et il l'a fait, en effet, encore le même soir.--Je suis donc véritablement heureux d'avoir trouvé, cette nuit, en revenant du bal patriotique, dans le numéro de la gazette d'Etat du 31. janvier, qui venait d'arriver par la poste, l'ordre émané tout récemment des trois Ministères de Votre Majesté qui président aux afi'aires de censure, et en vertu duquel la gazette Rhénane doit cesser de paraître à dater du 1. avril prochain! Aussi me ferai-je un devoir des plus empressés de faire valoir cette mesure énergique auprès de Mr. le Comte de Nesselrode aujourd'hui même à l'occasion d'un dîner auquel il m'a engagé. je crois, du reste, devoir faire observer encore très-humblement à ce sujet, que lors de la conversation que j'ai eu, avant-hier, avec Mr. le Vice-Chancelier, il m'avait très expressément assuré, que l'Empereur ne connaissait probablement pas encore l'article en question parce que, pour sa part, il avait hésité jusqu'ici à le placer sous les yeux de Sa Majesté Imperiale.'

3: Wir liessen kühn der Freiheit Fahne wehen
Und ernst tat jeder Schiffman seine Pflicht,
War d 'rum vergebens auch der Mannschaft Spähen:
Die Fahrt war schön and sie gereut uns nicht

.

Dass uns der Götter Zorn hat nachgetrachtet

Es schreckt uns nicht, dass unser Mast gefällt.
Denn auch Kolumbus ward zuerst verachtet
Und endlich sah er doch die neue Welt

.

Ihr Freunde, deren Beifall uns geworden,

Ihr Gegner, die ihr uns mit Kampf geehrt
Wir seh'n uns wieder einst an neuen Borden,
Wenn Alles bricht, der Mut bleibt unversehrt

.