THE MAN OF AFFAIRShon stood aloof from this tendency. Even he did not agree with
German ‘atheist humanism,’ but he regarded religion critically as
a passing phase in social evolution, and his mind was therefore
open to the arguments of the German anti-religious socialists.
Secondly, the French socialists still moved mostly in the
Jacobin tradition, which nurtured the assumption that France
was the world centre of revolution, and when the solemn German
doctors of philosophy came to Paris with their baggage o f wordy
dialectics and tried to teach the French how the revolution should
be carried out, the latter merely ignored them.
Only Proudhon, anti-clerical, anti-Jacobinical, and not at all
patriotic in the narrow way of his fellows, was ready to welcome
them. And even he had a peasant’s eye to the intellectual main
chance, for he w; s much more concerned with what he might
learn from the C ermans about philosophy than with how he
might help their schemes for international co-operation. For,
though the idea < f an association of the working classes was very
much in his mir d during the years when he knew Marx, it was
not an organisation for political propaganda, as conceived by the
German socialists, that he envisaged, but an association for
economic action, based on the workshop.
In the long conversations in that winter o f 1844-5, Marx
doubtless realised these Proudhonian reservations. But he seems
also to have decided that Proudhon was more likely than any of
the other French socialists to fall in with his own ideas of an
international network. How far this aim was discussed during
their direct acquaintanceship in Paris is unrecorded. It does not,
however, seem likely that anything definite was proposed, for
though Marx was expelled from France in February, 1845, it was
not until the 5 th May, 1846, that he actually wrote to Proudhon
suggesting co-operation. This letter and the reply are of great
importance in socialist history.
Marx proposed to establish a ‘sustained correspondence’
among socialists, concerned with the discussion of scientific
questions and with the problems of socialist propaganda. ‘But the
principal aim of our correspondence will be that of putting the
German socialists into touch with the French and English
socialists, so as to keep foreigners informed o f the socialist
movements which are operating in Germany, and to inform the
Germans within Germany of the progress of socialism in France