Karl Marx: A Biography

TWO

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. MARRIAGE AND HEGEL

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 differ-
ences 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