87
KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
shows that Marx's account of the role of the proletariat was drawn from
his study of the French Revolution, however much his language may be
that of Young Hegelian journalism.
To this historical base was added a distillation of contemporary French
socialist ideas. For three months already Marx had lived and worked with
prominent socialists in Paris. The view of the proletariat contained in his
article was not unique even in Young Hegelian circles, but it was of
course commonplace in Paris.^92
Marx's sudden espousal of the proletarian cause can be directly
attributed (as can that of other early German communists such as Weitling
and Hess) to his first-hand contacts with socialist intellectuals in France.
Instead of editing a paper for the Rhineland bourgeoisie or sitting in his
study in Kreuznach, he was now at the heart of socialist thought and
action. He was living in the same house as Germain Maurer, one of the
leaders of the League of the Just whose meetings he frequented. From
October 1843 Marx was breathing a socialist atmosphere. It is not surpris-
ing that his surroundings made a swift impact on him.^93
Marx admitted that the proletariat he described was only just beginning
to exist in Germany - indeed, factory workers constituted no more than
4 per cent of the total male population over the age of fourteen.^94 What
characterised it was not natural poverty (though this had a part to play)
but poverty that was artificially produced and resulted particularly in
the disintegration of the middle class. The proletariat would achieve the
dissolution of the old order of society by the negation of private property,
a negation of which it was itself the embodiment. This was the class in
which philosophy could finally give itself practical expression: 'As philo-
sophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds
its intellectual weapons in philosophy, and as soon as the lightning of
thought has struck deep into the virgin soil of the people, the emanci-
pation of the Germans into men will be completed.'^95 The signal for this
revolution would come from France: 'When all internal conditions are
fulfilled, the day of German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing
of the Gallic cock.'^96
The first double-number of the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher was
also the last. Having clamped down on the Press inside Prussia, the
Government there was particularly anxious to avoid the importation of
seditious literature. The propagation of communist ideas was explicitly
forbidden in Prussia and several of the articles in the Jahrbiicher had a
distinctly socialist flavour. The German authorities acted swiftly: the jour-
nal was banned in Prussia, several hundred copies being seized on entry.
Warrants were issued for the arrest of Marx, Heine and Ruge; and for
the first time in his life Marx had become a political refugee. The Jahr-