84 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYand already development in social circumstances and political theory
make this point of view itself antiquated or at least problematical.^84
Marx then summarised the contrast he had been elaborating between
France and Germany:
In France it is enough that one should be something in order to wish
to be all. In Germany one must be nothing, if one is to avoid giving
up everything. In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal
emancipation, in Germany universal emancipation is a sine qua non of
every partial emancipation. In France it is the reality, in Germany the
impossibility, of a gradual liberation that must give birth to total free-
dom. In France every class of the people is politically idealistic and is
not primarily conscious of itself as a particular class but as a representa-
tive of general social needs. The role of emancipator thus passes in a
dramatic movement to different classes of the French people until it
comes to the class which no longer brings about social freedom by
presupposing certain conditions that lie outside mankind and are yet
created by human society, but which organizes the conditions of human
existence by presupposing social freedom. In Germany, on the contrary,
where practical life is as unintellectual as intellectual life is unpractical,
no class of civil society has the need for, or capability of, achieving
universal emancipation until it is compelled by its immediate situation,
by material necessity and its own chains.^85This passage shows the importance of Marx's study of the French
Revolution in the formation of his views. The Rhineland - where he was
born and spent his early life - had been French until 1814 , and had
enjoyed the benefits of the French Revolution where civil emancipation
was a genuine experience and not a possession of foreigners only, to be
envied from afar. To all German intellectuals the French Revolution
was the revolution, and Marx and his Young Hegelian friends constantly
compared themselves to the heroes of 1789. It was his reading of the
history of the French Revolution in the summer of 1843 that showed
him the role of class struggle in social development.^86
Approaching the conclusion of his article, Marx introduced the denoue-
ment with the question: 'So where is the real possibility of German
emancipation?' His answer was:
... in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society
that is not a class of civil society, the formation of a social group that
is the dissolution of all social groups, the formation of a sphere that has
a universal character because of its universal sufferings and lays claim
to no particular right, because it is the object of no particular injustice
but of injustice in general. This class can no longer lay claim to a
historical status, but only to a human one. It is not in a one-sided