Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

194 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

systematically counter-revolutionary tendency of the Hansemann ministry

and the German government in general'.^65 He went on to say that it

could not be judged in isolation from the general situation in Germany

and the failure of the March revolution. He finished:

Why did the March revolution fail? It reformed the political summit

and left untouched all the foundations of this summit - the old bureauc-

racy, the old army, the old courts, the old judges born, educated and

grown grey in the service of absolutism. The first duty of the press is

now to undermine all the foundations of the present political situation.^66

His speech was greeted with applause and all three defendants were

acquitted.

The trial on the following day was a more serious affair. Marx, Schap-

per and Schneider, as signatories of the anti-tax proclamation of the

Rhineland Democratic Committee, were accused of plotting to overthrow

the regime. Marx again defended himself in a speech lasting almost an

hour. He professed amazement at being prosecuted under laws that the

Government itself had abrogated by its dissolution of the Assembly on 5

December. Furthermore, these laws were those passed by the pre-March

Diet which was an outdated institution. Marx then gave the jurors an

object lesson on the materialist conception of history.

Society is not based on the law [he stated], that is a legal fiction, rather

law must be based on society; it must be the expression of society's

common interests and needs, as they arise from the various material

methods of production, against the arbitrariness of the single individual.

The Code Napoleon, which I have in my hand, did not produce modern

bourgeois society. Bourgeois society, as it arose in the eighteenth

century and developed in the nineteenth, merely finds its legal

expression in the Code. As soon as it no longer corresponds to social

relationships, it is worth no more than the paper it is written on. You

cannot make old laws the foundation of a new social development any

more than these old laws created the old social conditions.... Any

attempted assertion of the eternal validity of laws continually clashes

with present needs, it prevents commerce and industry, and paves the

way for social crises that break out with political revolutions.^67

Marx went on to explain that in this context the National Assembly
represented modern bourgeois society against the feudal society of the
United Diet and as such was incapable of coming to terms with
the monarchy. Moreover, the Assembly merely derived its rights from the
people and 'if the crown makes a counter-revolution then the people
rightly answers with a revolution'. Marx concluded with a prophecy:
'Whatever way the new National Assembly may go, the necessary result