t46 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYon ... provided the first occasion for occupying myself with the economic
questions.''^82 Engels, too, said later that he had 'always heard from Marx,
that it was precisely through concentrating on the law of thefts of wood
and the situation of the Mosel wine-growers, that he was led from pure
politics to economic relationships and so to socialism'.^183
The Rheinische Zeitung's growing success, together with its criticism of
the Rhineland Parliament, so annoyed the Government that the President
of the province wrote in November to the Minister of the Interior that
he intended to prosecute the author of the article on theft of wood.
Relations had already been strained by the publication in the Rheinische
Zeitung in October of a secret government project to reform the divorce
law, the first of Frederick William IVs measures to 'christianise' the law.
The paper followed up this exposure with three critical articles, the third
of which (in mid-December) was by Marx. He agreed that the present
law was too individualistic and did not take into account the 'ethical
substance' of marriage in family and children. The law still 'thinks only
of two individuals and forgets the family'.'^84 But he could not welcome
the new proposals - for it treated marriage not as an ethical, but as a
religious institution and thus did not recognise its secular nature.
By the end of November the break between Marx and his former
Berlin colleagues was complete. Matters came to a head with the visit of
Ruge and the poet Herwegh to Berlin, where they wished to invite the
Freien to co-operate in the founding of a new university. Ruge (who was
always a bit of a Puritan) and Herwegh were revolted by the licentiousness
and extravagant ideas of the Freien. According to Ruge, Bruno Bauer, for
example, 'pretended to make me swallow the most grotesque things - e.g.
that the state and religion must be suppressed in theory, and also property
and family, without bothering to know what would replace them, the
essential thing being to destroy everything'.^185 On 25 November Marx
made his position clear to everyone by publishing a report from Berlin
whose essential points were taken from a letter sent by Herwegh to the
Rheinische Zeitung. The break proved final and Marx justified his action
as follows in a letter sent a few days later to Ruge:
You know that every day the censorship mutilates our paper so much
that it has difficulty in appearing. This has obliged me to suppress
quantities of articles by the Freien. I allowed myself to annul as many
as the censor. Meyen and Co. sent us heaps of scrawls pregnant with
world revolutions and empty of thought, written in a slovenly style and
flavoured with some atheism and communism (which these gentlemen
have never studied)... I declared that I considered the smuggling of
communist and socialist ideas into casual theatre reviews was unsuitable,
indeed immoral, and a very different and more fundamental treatment