Routledge Library Editions karl marx

French Civilization

Judging by the way in which Marx usually worked it is very probable that he had already drafted the two contributions to the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrhucher, at least in their fundamentals,




which he was still in Germany, very likely during the first few months of his happy marriage. As the ideas contained in them turned on the Great French Revolution, nothing was more natural than that he should plunge into the study of the history of this revolution as soon as his presence in Paris gave him an opportunity of exploring its sources, and also the sources of its predecessor, French materialism, andofits successor, French socialism.

Paris at that time could justly claim that it was in the van of bourgeois civilization. After a series of illusions and catastrophes, the French bourgeoisie had finally secured in the July revolution of 1830 what it had begun in the Great Revolution of 1789. Its forces were now relaxing comfortably, although the resistance of the old powers had by no means been completely broken, and new powers were beginning to make themselves felt. The result was that a ceaseless battle of intellects raged— rolling now here, now there—such as could be found nowhere else in Europe and certainly not in Germany, which lay motionless in the silence of intellectual death.

Marx now plunged into this rejuvenating flood. In 1844 Ruge wrote to Feuerbach informing him that Marx was reading a tremendous amount and working with unusual intensity. However, he finished nothing, broke off his work constantly and plunged again and again into an endless sea of books. He was irritable and violent, particularly when he had worked himself sick and had not been to bed for three or four nights in succession. He had put his criticism of Hegelian philosophy on the shelf in order to utilize his stay in Paris to write a history of the Convention, having already collected the necessary material and adopted a number of very fruitful viewpoints. The evidence of this letter is all the more valuable because it was written in no commendatory sense.

Marx did not write a history of the Convention, but this fact does not disprove the information of Ruge. On the contrary, it makes it, if anything, rather more credible. The deeper Marx penetrated into the historical significance of the revolution of 1789 the easier it became for him to dispense with a criticism of the Hegelian philosophy as a means of arriving at a clear view of the struggles and demands of the age. However, the history of the Convention alone could not satisfy him because although it represented a maximum of political energy, political power and political understanding, it had proved itself impotent in the face of social anarchy.

Apart from the meagre indications of Ruge there is unfortunately no evidence to assist us to follow in any detail the course of study Marx pursued in the spring and summer of 1844. How




ever, the general way in which his studies developed can be seen. The study of the French Revolution led him on to the historical literature of the “ Third Estate ”, a literature which originated under the Bourbon restoration and was developed by men of great historical talent who followed the historical existence of their class back into the eleventh century and presented French history as an uninterrupted series of class struggles. Marx owed his knowledge of the historical nature of classes and their struggles to these historians—he mentions in particular Guizot and Thierry —and he then proceeded to study the economic anatomy of the classes from the bourgeois economists, mentioning Ricardo in particular. Marx always denied having originated the theory ofthe class struggle. What he claimed as his contribution was having supplied proof that the existence of classes was linked up with definite historical struggles in the development of production, that the class struggle necessarily led to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that this dictatorship was only a transitional period leading to the complete abolition of classes and the establishment of a classless society. This series of ideas developed during his stay in Paris.

The most brilliant and most trenchant weapon used by the ” Third Estate ” in its struggle against the ruling classes in the eighteenth century was the philosophy of materialism. During his exile in Paris Marx zealously studied this philosophy, paying less attention to the branch represented by Descartes, which developed into natural science, than to the branch which originated with Locke and developed into social science. Other stars which illuminated the Paris studies of the young Marx were Helvetius and Holbach, who carried materialism into social life and made the natural equality of human intellects, the essential unity between the progress of reason and the progress of industry, the natural goodness of humanity, and the omnipotent power of education the chief points in their system. He called their teachings ” real humanism ” as he had called Feuerbach’s philosophy, the difference being that the materialism ofHelvetius and Holbach had become “ the social basis of communism ”.

Paris now offered him all the opportunities he needed for studying communism and socialism as he had promised in the Rheinische Zeitung. The intellectual world which he had entered in Paris was dazzling, almost confusing, in its richness of ideas and forms. The intellectual atmosphere of Paris was pregnant with the germs of socialism, and even the Journal des Debats, the traditional organ of the ruling finance oligarchy, which was in receipt of a considerable government subsidy annually, was unable to hold itself completely aloof from the spirit of the day, though




it did no more than publish Eugene Sue’s socialist thrillers in its feuilleton columns. The opposing camp contained such brilliant thinkers as Leroux, men who were now being produced by the proletariat. Between the hostile camps were the remnants of the Saint-Simonists and the active Fourierist sect led by Con- siderant, whose organ was the Dbnocratie Pacifique, Christian socialists like the Catholic priest Lamennais and the former Carbonari Buchez, petty-bourgeois socialists like Sismondi, Buret, Pecquer and Vidal, whilst in literature the magnificent songs of Beranger and the novels of George Sand brilliantly reflected socialist ideas and problems.

The common characteristic of all these socialist systems was that they all reckoned on the good-will and the reasonableness of the possessing classes, whom they hoped to convince by peaceful propaganda of the necessity of social reforms or revolution. They were all born out of the disappointments of the Great Revolution, and they disdained the political path which had resulted in these disappointments. They desired to assist the suffering masses because the latter were unable to assist themselves. The insurrections of the workers in the ’thirties had failed, and even their most determined leaders, men like Barbes and Blanqui, knew nothing of any socialist theory or of any definite practical means for achieving a social revolution.

But the working-class movement grew all the more rapidly on account of this, and with the prophetic eye of the poet Heinrich Heine sketched the problem which arose in the following words : “ The communists represent the only party in France deserving of respect. I should feel the same way about the remnants of the Saint-Simonists perhaps, who still exist under strange banners, or about the Fourierists, who are still alive and active, but these good fellows are moved by the word only, by the social problem as a question of traditional conceptions and not by any demoniacal necessity. They are not the slaves predestined by the supreme world spirit to fulfil its tremendous decisions. Sooner or later the scattered army of Saint-Simon and the whole general staff of the Fourierists will go over to the growing army of communism, there to play the role of the Fathers of the Church, lending brutal necessity the creative word.” Thus Heine on the 15th of June 1843, and within the year the man arrived in Paris who was to play the role Heine thought the Saint-Simonists and the Fourierists might play: he lent brutal necessity the creative word.

In all probability whilst he was still in Germany, and in any case whilst his standpoint was still predominantly philosophical, Marx had declared himself against cut-and-dried systems for the future, against any attempt to settle all problems for all time,


acain.it the unfurling of any dogmatic standard, and against the idea of the “ crass socialists ” that political questions were beneath their dignity. And when he declaried it not enough that the idea shoUld press forward to reality, but that reality must become the idea, this condition fulfilled itself before his eyes. Since the last insurrection of the workers in 1839 the working-class movement and socialism had begun to approach each other in three ways.

First of all there was the Democratic Socialist Party. Its socialism was not of any very great import because it was composed of lower middle-class and proletarian elements together, and the slogans which it inscribed on its banners, the organization of labour and the right to work, were nothing but lower middle- class utopias impossible of fulfilment in capitalist society. The latter organizes labour as it must be organized, namely, as wage-labour, and this presupposes the existence of capital and can be abolished only with capital, whilst the situation with regard to the right to work is no different. Such a right can be fulfilled only in the joint ownership of the means of production, that is to say, by the abolition of bourgeois society, but the leaders of this party, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin and Ferdinand Flocon, solemnly refused to lay the axe to the roots of bourgeois society, declaring that they were neither communists nor socialists.

However, although the social aims of this party were completely utopian, it nevertheless represented a great step forward because it chose the political path for their realization. It declared that no social reform was possible without political reform, and that the conquest of political power was the only means by which the suffering masses could save themselves, and therefore it demanded the universal franchise. This demand met with a lively echo in the ranks of the proletariat, which was tired of putsches and conspiracies, and sought more effective weapons for the prosecution of the class struggle.

Still greater masses of the workers ra1lied to the banner of proletarian communism unfurled by Cabet, who had originally been a Jacobin and was later converted to communism by his reading and in particular by the Utopia of Sir Thomas More. Cabet professed communism as openly as the Democratic Socialist Party rejected it, but he agreed with the latter that political democracy was a necessary transitional stage. Thus The Journey to Icaria, in which Cabet attempted to describe the society of the future, became an incomparably more popular work than the brilliant fantasies of Fourier, although the narrow 1imits ofCabet’s work made it immeasurably inferior to the genius of the former.

And finally, voices began to sound loud and clear within the




ranks of the proletariat itself, indicating beyond a doubt that it was preparing to cast off its leading strings. Marx was acquainted from the days of the Rheinische Zeitung, with Leroux and Proudhon, both of whom were printers and members of the working class, and he had already promised to study their works thoroughly. Their works appealed to him because both men sought to harness the results of German philosophy to their own aims, although both of them fell victims to serious misunderstandings. Marx himself has informed us that he spent many hours, often throughout the night, trying to explain Hegelian philosophy to Proudhon. The two men came together for a while only to part soon afterwards, but writing after Proudhon’s death Marx readily bore witness to the great impetus which Proudhon’s first appearance gave to the working-class movement, an impetus, in fact, which undoubtedly affected him also. Marx regarded Proudhon’s first work (in which the latter abandoned all utopianism and subjected private property to a thorough and ruthless criticism as the cause of all social evil), as the first scientific manifesto of the modern proletariat.

All these tendencies helped to prepare the way for a unification between the working-class movement and socialism, but they were all in contradiction with each other, and after the first few steps they involved themselves in new contradictions. Marx had studied socialism and he now began to study the proletariat. In July 18^. Ruge wrote to a friend in Germany : ” Marx has plunged into German communism here—socially, I mean, fo- he can hardly consider the dismal affair of any political importance. Germany can stand the minor damage the artisan; (particularly the baker’s dozen converts here) are likely to do without much doctoring.” Ruge was soon to discover why Marx took ” the baker’s dozen ” artisans and their doings seriously.

2. 
   The Vorwarts and the Expulsion of Marx
   

We have no very detailed record of Marx’s personal life during his exile in Paris. His wife presented him with their first child, a daughter, and then returned proudly to Germany to show it to their relatives. Marx remained on the best of terms with his friends in Cologne and a gift of a thousand thaler helped considerably towards making the year in Paris such a fruitful one.

He was in close touch with Heinrich Heine and he did much to make the year 18^. a memorable one in the life of the poet,


assisting at the birth of the Winter Fables, the Song of the Weavers and the immortal satires on the German despots. They were not long together, but Marx remained loyal to Heine even when the howling of the Philistines against him became still more furious than it had been against Herwegh, and he generously remained silent when the bedridden Heine cited him untruthfully as a witness that the annual grant the poet received from the Guizot Ministry was irreproachable. As we know, in his youth Marx himself had vainly yearned for poetic laurels and all his life he retained a lively sympathy for poets, invariably showing great toleration towards their little weaknesses. Hefelt that poets were peculiar people who should be permitted to go their own way and must not be measured by the standards of ordinary or even extraordinary mortals. If they were to sing they must be flattered ; it was no use belabouring them with severe criticism.

But he regarded Heine as something more than a poet, as a fighter also, and in the dispute between Borne and Heine, which served at the time as a sort cf dividing line between the sheep and the goats, he steadfastly supported Heine, declaring that the doltish treatment accorded to Heine’s work on Borne by the Christian- Germanic donkeys was unique in any period of German literature, which had never at any time lacked its full complement of dolts. He was never misled by the shout about Heine’s alleged treachery, which even affected Engels and Lassalle, though both had the excuse of extreme youth. ” We need very few signs to understand each other,” wrote Heine on one occasion to excuse his ” confused scribble ”, and the sentence had a deeper significance than the immediate one which prompted it.

Marx was still a student when in 1834 Heine declared : ” The spirit of freedom breathed by our classical literature is less active amongst our scholars, poets and literary men than amongst the great mass of our artisans and workers.” And ten years later, when Marx was living in Paris, Heine declared : ” In their struggle against the existing state of affairs the proletarians can claim the progressive spirits, the great philosophers, as their leaders ”. The freedom and accuracy of this judgment become still clearer when one realizes that at the same time Heine was pouring scorn on the pot-house politics of the little conventicles of exiles in which Borne played the role of giant-killer. Heine realized that there was a great difference between Marx occupying himself with ” a baker’s dozen artisans ” and Borne doing so.

Heine and Marx were bound together by the spirit of German philosophy and French socialism, and by a common and deep- rooted dislike for that Christian-Germanic sloth, that false Teutonism, which sought to modernize the ancient garb of




German folly with radical phrases. The Massmanns and Venedys who live in Heine’s satires trudged along in Borne’s footsteps, though Borne may have been far above them in intellect and wit. Borne had no feeling either for art or philosophy, as was revealed in his declaration that Goethe was a rhymed and Hegel an unrhymed slave, and when he broke with the great traditions of German history he established no new intellectual relation to the new powers of Western European culture. Heine, on the other hand, could not abandon Goethe and Hegel without abandoning himself, and he therefore plunged with fierce avidity into French socialism as a new source of intellectual life. His works live on and arouse the anger of the grandchildren as they aroused the anger of their grandfathers, whilst the writings of Borne are forgotten, less on account of their “jog-trot ” style than on account of their content.

Referring to the back-biting gossip which Borne had set going against Heine even whilst the two were standing shoulder to shoulder, and which Borne’s literary executors were unwise enough to publish later on, Marx declared that he had never imagined the man to be so absurd, superficial and petty. However, he would never have called the personal honesty of the gossiper into question on that account had he actually carried out his intention of writing about the dispute. It is always difficult to find worse Jesuits in public life than those narrow-minded and orthodox radicals who wrap themselves up in the threadbare cloak of their own virtue and stop at nothing in their insinuations against the finer and freer spirits to whom it is given to recognize the deeper relations of history. Marx was always on the side of the latter and never of the former, particularly as he had made the acquaintance of the virtuous ones himself.

In later years Marx referred to “ Russian aristocrats ” who had carried him shoulder high during his exile in Paris, adding that this was of little importance: the Russian aristocracy was educated at German universities and spent its youth in Paris. Its members invariably snatched at the extremest things the West had to offer, but this did not prevent them becoming thorough blackguards immediately they entered the service of the State. Marx appears to have been referring to a certain Count Tolstoi, a secret agent of the Russian government, or to others of a like kidney. He was certainly not referring to that Russian aristocrat on whose intellectual development he exercised a great influence in those days, namely, Michael Bakunin. Even after the paths of the two men had widely separated Bakunin bore witness to this influence, and in the dispute between Marx and Ruge he took Marx’s side, although up to then Ruge had been his protector.




This dispute flared up again in the summer of 1844 and this time publicly. A paper entitled the Vorwiirts had been appearing twice a week in Paris since the New Year of 1844. Its origin was by no means irreproachable. It was founded by a certain Heinrich Bornstein who ran a theatrical and general advertisement business and sought to further his interests thereby. The necessary funds had been provided by Meyerbeer, who preferred living in Paris. We know from Heine that this Royal Prussian conductor was very keen on obtaining the greatest possible amount of advertisement, and he probably needed it. As a cunning business man Bornstein gave his paper a patriotic cloak and appointed, as its editor, Adalbert von Bornstedt, a former Prussian officer and a thoroughly venal character who was the “ confidant” of Metternich and at the same time in the pay of the Berlin government. When the Deutsch-Franziisische Jahrbucher appeared it was greeted with a salvo of abuse by the Vorwarts, and it would be difficult to say whether the abuse was characterized more by its foolishness or its vulgarity.

However, the affairs of the paper did not prosper. Bornstein had organized a regular translation factory in order to sell the latest pieces played in Paris with the greatest possible speed to German stage managers, and he sought to cut out the young German dramatists and win the German Philistines, who were becoming restive, by mouthing a few phrases about “ moderate progress” and condemning “ultra-ism” both on the left and on the right. His editor Bornstedt was in the same boat because he had to lull the suspicions of the emigrants if he was to associate with them freely, a proceeding which was absolutely necessary if he was to earn his blood-money. However, the Prussian government was blind even to its own interest of self-preservation, and it prohibited the sale of the Vorwarts on its territory, an example which was followed by theother German governments.

Bornstedt threw in his hand at the beginning of May, regarding the game as hopeless, but not so BOrnstein, who wanted to do business and was not at all particular about the way in which he did it. With the cold-blooded calculation of a cunning speculator he said to himself that if the Vorwarts was to be prohibited in Prussia in any case, it might just as well don the crown of martyrdom and take advantage of the interest aroused by a prohibited paper, for the German Philistines would consider it worth while to obtain such a paper secretly. It suited his book extremely well therefore when the youthful firebrand Bernays offered him a fiery article for the Vorwiirts, and after a certain amount of preliminary skirmishing Bernays was made editor in place of Bornstedt. Owing to the lack of any other medium, the German


exiles in Paris now began to contribute to the Vorwarts, each on his own responsibility and without being attached to the editorial board.

One of the first to do so was Ruge, who came forward under his own name and even defended Marx’s contributions to the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbficher as though he were in agreement with them. A few months later, however, he published two anonymous articles in the Vorwarts: a few short observations concerning Prussian policy and a long article containing nothing but gossip about the Prussian dynasty, interlarded with remarks about “ the drinking King” and “ the limping Queen” and their “ purely spiritual marriage ”, etc. The articles were signed “A Prussian ”, and under the circumstances it appeared as though Marx was the author, for Ruge was a member of the Dresden Town Council and registered at the Saxon Embassy in Paris, Bernays was a Bavarian from Rhineland-Westphalia, whilst Bornstein was a Hamburger, and although he had lived for a long time in Austria he had never lived for any length of time in Prussia.

It is impossible to discover now what Ruge had in mind when he adopted such a misleading pen-name, but, as his letters to his friends and relatives show, he had worked himself up into a furious rage against Marx, to whom he referred as “ a thoroughly vile fellow” and “ an insolent Jew”, and it is undeniable that two years later in a penitent petition to the Prussian Minister of the Interior he betrayed the comrades of his exile in Paris, and against his better knowledge loaded on the shoulders of these “ nameless young men” the sins he had himself committed in the Vorwarts. It is of course quite possible that he signed his articles “ A Prussian” in order to give them greater weight as they dealt with Prussian affairs, but if this were the case he acted with irresponsible thoughtlessness, and it is quite understandable that Marx hastened to parry the trick of the alleged “ Prussian ”,

Marx’s answer was couched in a dignified tone: he dealt solely with the one or two, so to speak, objective observations which Ruge had made on Prussian policy and dismissed the whole gossip about the Prussian dynasty in a short footnote : “ Special reasons cause me to point out that the above contribution is the first I have made to the Vorwiirts.” As a matter of fact, it was also the last.

The point at issue was the revolt of the Silesian weavers in 1844, which Ruge treated as an unimportant affair, declaring that it had no political soul and that without a political soul no social revolution was possible. The essence of Marx’s reply had already been dealt with in his treatise “On the Jewish Question”. Political force can heal no social evils because the


State cannot abolish the conditions whose product it is. He sharply attacked utopianism, declaring that socialism was not possible without a revolution, but he attacked Blanqui and his followers just as sharply, declaring that political understanding was deceiving the social instinct when it sought to make progress by means of small, useless putsches. He defined the character of the revolution with epigrammatic trenchancy : “ Every revolution dissolves the old society and in so far as it does this it is social. Every revolution overthrows the old power and in so far as it does this it is political.” A social revolution with a political soul, as demanded by Ruge, was senseless, but a political revolution with a social soul was reasonable. The revolution in general—the overthrow of the existing power and the dissolution of the old relations—was a political act. In so far as socialism first needed destruction and dissolution it needed this political act) but when its organizational activity began, when its innate aim, its soul, appeared, socialism flung off the political cloak.

These ideas were developed from Marx’s own treatise “ On the Jewish Question”, and the revolt of the Silesian weavers quickly confirmed what he had written about the feebleness of the class struggle in Germany. His friend Jung wrote from Cologne that there was now more communism to be found in the columns of the KOlnische Zeitung than formerly in the columns of the Rheinische Zeitung, and that the former had opened up a subscription list for the families of the fallen and imprisoned weavers. At a farewell dinner-party for the retiring district governor a hundred thaler had been collected for the list amongst the highest officials and richest merchants of Cologne, and sympathy was being shown everywhere to the dangerous rebels. “ What a few months ago would have been a daring and completely new attitude for them, has now become a matter of course.”

Marx made use of the general sympathy shown towards the weavers against Ruge’s underestimation of their revolt, but he was not deceived for one moment by the “ lack of resistance shown by the bourgeoisie towards new social tendencies and ideas”. He realized that immediately the working-class movement gained any real power the effect would be to stifle the political antipathies and antagonisms within the camp of the ruling classes and to cause the latter to direct their whole hostility against the workers. He showed the deep difference between bourgeois and proletarian emancipation when he pointed out that the one sprang from social well-being and the other from social misery. The bourgeois revolution was caused by isolation from the political commonwealth and the State, whilst the




proletarian revolution was caused by isolation from humanity and the real commonwealth of humanity. The isolation from the latter was incomparably more thorough, more intolerable, more terrible and more innately contradictory than isolation from the political commonwealth, and therefore the liquidation of this isolation, even as a partial phenomenon represented by the revolt of the Silesian weavers, was a much more tremendous affair, just as the human being was more than the citizen, and human life more than poli tical life.

Marx’s views on the revolt of the Silesian weavers were thus fundamentally different from those of Ruge : ” Consider only the song of the weavers; the striking, trenchant, ruthless and powerful way in which the proletariat hurls the slogan of its antagonism against the society of private property. The Silesian revolt began where the French and English insurrections ended, with the consciousness of the proletariat as a class. The whole action was of this character. Not only did it destroy machinery, the rival of the workers, but also the merchants’ records, their property titles. In the beginning at least, all other movements were directed exclusively against the industrialists, against the visible enemy, but this movement was also directed against the banker, the invisible enemy. And finally, no English insurrection was carried out with the same courage, deliberation and persistence.”

In this connection Marx also refers to the brilliant writings of Weitling, who often excelled Proudhon in his theories, although he remained behind him in practice : “ Can the me-, a -

its philosophers and scribes included—show us a work on its own emancipation, political emancipation, comparable to Weitling’s Guarantees of Harmony and Liberty? When one compares the sober and subdued mediocrity of German political !.• ■ :>>■.: ■ with this incomparably brilliant debut of the German worker, and when one compares the undersized and down-at- heel political shoes of the German bourgeoisie with the giant boots of the youthful proletariat, one is entitled to prophesy the frame of an athlete for this neglected son of Germany.” Marx declared that the German proletariat was the theoretician amongst the European proletariats, as the English proletariat was the economist and the French proletariat the politician.

Marx’s verdict on Weitling’s writings has been confirmed by the judgment of posterity. For their time they were brilliant achievements, and their brilliance was enhanced by the fact that the German journeyman tailor prepared the way for an understanding between the working-class movement and socialism before Louis Blanc, Cabet and Proudhon, and more effectively.




However, Marx’s historical estimation of the revolt of the Silesian weavers seems extraordinary to us to-day. He read tendencies into it which were certainly not present, and Ruge seems to have estimated the revolt more correctly when he declared it to be no more than a hunger revolt without any deeper significance. However, as was the case with regard to their earlier dispute about Herwegh, so here we see also that to be formally in the right against genius is the whole error of the Philistine, and that in the last resort a great heart always triumphs over a narrow understanding.

The “ baker’s dozen artisans ” referred to so contemptuously by Ruge, but zealously studied by Marx, were organized in the “ League of the Just ” which had developed in the ’thirties from the French secret societies and out of their final defeat in 1839. This defeat had been a good thing for the organization because its dispersed elements reassembled not only in their old centre Paris, but also in England and Switzerland, where the freedom of meeting and association offered them more room for development, so that these branches from the old trunk began to develop more powerfully than the mother-tree. The Paris organization was led by Hermann Ewerbeck of Danzig, who was entangled in Cabet’s moralizing utopianism and had translated Cabet’s utopia into German. Weitling, who led the agitation in Switzerland, proved himself the intellectual superior of Ewerbeck, whilst the London leaders of the League, the watchmaker Joseph Moll, the shoemaker Heinrich Bauer, and Karl Schapper, a a formei student of forestry who earned his living sometimes as a compositor and sometimes as a teacher of languages, also proved themselves superior to Ewerbeck at least in revolutionary determination.

Marx probably first heard about these ” three real men ” from Engels, who, when he visited Marx in September i8as whilst passing through Paris, spoke of the “ deep impression” they had made on him. During the ten days Engels stayed in Paris much ofhis time was spent in the company of Marx, and they had an opportunity of confirming the far-reaching agreement in their ideas which had already revealed itselfin their contributions to the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher. In the meantime their old friend Bruno Bauer had turned against these ideas and published a criticism in a literary publication he had founded. The two learned of this attack whilst they were together and immediately decided to answer it. Engels sat down at once and put all he had to say about the matter on paper, but in accordance with his character Marx went much more deeply into the matter than they had originally planned and in several months of hard




work he produced a book of over 300 pages. With the conclusion of this work in January 1845 his stay in Paris also came to an end.

After taking over the editorship of the Vorwarts Bernays had energetically continued his attacks on “ the Christian-Germanic simpletons in Berlin,” and there was no lack of Use-majeste in the paper, whilst Heine shot one barbed arrow after the other against “ the new Alexander ” in the Palace of Berlin. It was not long before the legitimate monarchy in Germany petitioned the illegitimate bourgeois monarchy in France for the use of the police cudgel against the Vorwarts, but Guizot proved hard of hearing. Despite his reactionary opinions he was a man of some culture, and in addition he had no desire to play the myrmidon to Prussian despotism and thus court the scorn and contempt of the opposition at home, but he became more complaisant when the Vorwarts published “ a nefarious article ” on the attempt made by Mayor Tschech on the life of Frederick William IV.¹ After a discussion in the Cabinet Guizot agreed to take action against the Vorwarts on two counts : the prosecution of the responsible editor for not having deposited a sufficient sum with the authorities and his indictment on a charge ofi ncitement to regicide.

The Berlin government agreed to the first proposal, but when it was carried into execution it proved ineffective. Bernays was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment and fined 200 francs for his failure to comply with the deposit provisions, but the Vorwarts immediately announced that in the future it would appear as a monthly, and in this way it completely circumvented the deposit law. The Berlin government would not hear of the second proposal, in all probability in the well-founded fear that the jurymen ofParis would show little inclination to strain their consciences on behalf of the King of Prussia, but it continued to lodge complaints, and finally it demanded the expulsion of the editors and contributors of the paper from France. After long negotiations Guizot agreed.

I t was assumed at the time, and Engels repeated the charge in his speech at the grave of Frau Marx, that Guizot was won over by the inglorious mediation of Alexander von Humboldt, who was related to the Prussian Minister for Foreign Affairs by marriage. Lately attempts have been made to clear Humboldt’s memory of this charge on the ground that the Prussian archives contain no reference to any such mediation, but that is hardly

1 Heinrich Ludwig Tschech, Mayor of Storckow in Prussia, democrat and philanthropist, made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Frederick William IV in July 1844 and was executed the same year.—Tr.




enough to clear him because, first of all, the archives are known to be incomplete and, secondly, it is not usual for such matters to be committed to writing. All that the archives prove is that one of the decisive acts in the affair took place behind the scenes.

The Berlin government had been irritated chiefly by Heine, who had published eleven of his sharpest satires on the situation in Prussia and in particular on the King in the Vorwarts, but for Guizot Heine represented the most ticklish point in the whole disagreeable business. He was a poet with a European reputation, and the French people regarded him almost as a national poet. Naturally, Guizot could not explain these difficulties direct to Berlin, and therefore a little bird seems to have made some mention of the matter to the Prussian Ambassador in Paris, for on the 4th of October the latter suddenly reported to Berlin that it was very doubtful whether Heine, who had published only two of his poems in the Vorwarts, was a member of the editorial staff of the paper, and at last the authorities in Berlin understood.

Heine himself was therefore not molested, but on the 1 Ith of January 1845 a number of other German fugitives who had contributed to the Vorwarts or who were suspected of having done so, received orders of expulsions, including Marx, Ruge, Bakunin, Bornstein and Bernays. Some of them saved themselves: Bornstein by giving an undertaking to cease publishing the Vorwarts, and Ruge by running from the Saxon Ambassador to various French deputies and back again in order to assure everyone what a loyal citizen he really was. Naturally, Marx was not to be had for anything of that sort and he therefore prepared to move to Brussels.

His exile in Paris had lasted a little over a year, but it was perhaps the most important one in all his years of wandering and apprenticeship. It was rich in experience and stimulation, and it was made still richer by the winning of a comrade-in-arms who served him magnificently and to the very end.