CRUCIBLE OF REVOLUTION 19
such as Weitling. The "independent dignity" of the working
classes of Paris impressed Albert Brisbane on his first visit to
France. At that time, France, like Russia for the present-day
Marxist, was the spiritual and intellectual center of communism.
Ruge and Karl Gutzkow estimated the number of Germans in
Paris in 1842 at 80,000 or 85,000. Others put the figure even
higher. Gutzkow wrote to his wife that German was spoken on
every street.^10 The German colony in Paris consisted of refugees,
workers, and intellectuals. At the outset there was little co-opera
tion between German intellectuals and artisans. The latter had
migrated to the French capital largely for economic reasons and
in the early years were regarded as a threat to native craftsmen,
whose resentment was so great that occasionally bloody battles
were fought in the streets of the working-class districts. Gradu
ally, however, these national antagonisms were forgotten in the
coffeehouse society of the workers.
The French Revolution of 1830 was precipitated largely by
secret societies of republicans and workers of the industrial and
urban centers, but its results were far from satisfying to the groups
primarily responsible. The regime of Louis Philippe turned out
to be a government dominated by wealthy bourgeois, factory
owners, and bankers, from which the old aristocracy and the
workers were excluded. Widespread disgust with Louis Philippe
made it possible in the France of the 1830's and 1840's to get a hear
ing for more revolutionary proposals. In 1834 a law was enacted
which forbade secret associations and this was followed by re
strictions on the press and trial by jury. The result was that the
opposition was driven under cover, and Paris became the nodal
point for a succession of secret revolutionary societies which
fanned out over France. Bearing such names as Société des Families
and Société des Saisons, they led to the kind of rioting and street
fighting described in George Sand's Horace and Victor Hugo's
Les Misérables. The German secret societies paralleled the French
(^10) Karl Gutzkow, Pariser Briefe (Leipzig, 1842), 276.