CHAPTER IIII. Paris, the Crucible of Revolution
REVOLUTION
I
N THE fall of 1835, Weitling had seen Paris for the first time.
But he had remained only until the following April, when he
returned to Germany and Vienna. Now, in the fall of 1837,
he was back in France and, save for short trips to Geneva and the
area around Strassburg, he remained until May, 1841, when he
departed for Switzerland to spread into the cantons of the Alpine
republic the communism which he had learned and developed in
the French metropolis.
Weitling reached Paris at a time when a new world order was
struggling to be born, not only in France but all over western
Europe and to a lesser degree in the Americas as well. The chal
lenge to the old order came primarily from the rise of the prole
tarian class and from the introduction of the factory system, which
was destined to break down large segments of the middle class and
start the movement of workers from the land into the cities.
In Germany during the 1830's, skilled craftsmen still were
highly respected and relatively independent and self-sustaining
members of the body politic. Yet the specter of "big business"
and the factory system hung ominously over the skilled-artisan
class. The population of Berlin was growing by 7,000 a year, be
cause of an influx from the provinces; half the population of
Cologne in the 1840's could be described as proletarians; and
50,000 of the inhabitants of Breslau belonged to the same class.
Hunger and suffering in the overcrowded areas, a shortage of