TRIER, BONN AND BERLIN 39devote a series of articles to the debates of the Rhineland Parliament that
had held a long session in Dtlsseldorf in mid-1841. He originally proposed
a series of five articles on the debates, of which the first was to be the
one written in early April and entitled 'Debates on the Freedom of
the Press and on the Publication of the Parliamentary Proceedings': the
other four were to deal with the Cologne Affair, the laws on theft of
wood, on poaching and 'the really earthy question in all its vital extent,
the division of land'.^155 But the only articles to be published were those
on the freedom of the Press and the theft of wood. In the parliamentary
debates on the freedom of the Press, Marx found that the 'characteristic
outlook of each class' was 'nowhere more clearly expressed than in these
debates'. The speakers did not regard freedom as a natural gift to all
rational men; for them it was 'an individual characteristic of certain
persons and classes'.^156 Such an attitude was incapable of drawing up any
laws to govern the Press. Marx went on to criticise in particular the feudal
romanticism of the Prussian regime, and developed ideas on evasion and
projection that later turned into a full theory of ideology:
because the real situation of these gentlemen in the modern state bears
no relation at all to the conception that they have of their situation;
because they live in a world situated beyond the real world and because
in consequence their imagination holds the place of their head and
their heart, they necessarily turn towards theory, being unsatisfied with
practice, but it is towards the theory of the transcendent, i.e. religion.
However, in their hands religion acquires a polemical bitterness impreg-
nated with political tendencies and becomes, in a more or less conscious
manner, simply a sacred cloak to hide desires that are both very secular
and at the same time very imaginary.
Thus we shall find in our Speaker that he opposes a mystical/
religious theory of his imagination to practical demands ... and that to
what is reasonable from the human point of view he opposes super-
human sacred entities.^157Marx finished by outlining the part laws should play in the state: 'A
Press law is a true law because it is the positive existence of freedom. It
treats freedom as the normal condition of the Press.. .'^158 Marx went on
to draw conclusions about the nature of law in general: 'Laws are not
rules that repress freedom any more than the law of gravity is a law that
represses movement... laws are rather positive lights, general norms, in
which freedom has obtained an impersonal, theoretical existence that is
independent of any arbitrary individual. Its law book is a people's bible
of freedom.'^159 In this case it was nonsense to speak of preventive laws,
for true laws could not prevent the activities of man, but were 'the inner,
vital laws of human activity, the conscious mirror of human life'.^160 This