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The French Revolution and the Education of the Young Marx

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Maximilien Rubel
Maximilien Rubel*
Affiliation:
Institut de Sciences mathématiques et économiques appliquées

Extract

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The confession quoted above by way of introduction reveals with tragic sincerity the fatal passion of an overly avid reader, unlimited in curiosity certainly but fully conscious of the demanding finality of the work he had to accomplish: the scientific critique of an international system of social organization, “in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and scornful being” (1844). Cultivating poetry and philosophy in a world felt to be unlivable meant becoming an accomplice of those individuals and institutions principally responsible for the barbarity called modern civilization. But to combat this, it was necessary to scour the murky historical horizon issued from a distant past where only great social revolutions marked the stages of a progression seen as ambiguous because realized by means of unspeakable phenomena of regression. Only one revolution took place under the contradictory sign of an emancipation with universal ambitions and of a decline with indelible consequences: the French Revolution. Conclusion as well as beginning, it was studied by Marx as a unique event, both in relation to its antecedents as well as its liberating promises. Although it is true that Marx “never wrote a history of the ancien régime”, a hardly significant remark, it is no less true that he studied and compiled, with the eagerness of a schoolboy enthralled by history, an enormous mass of documentation that can “help understand how (the ancien regime) gave birth to the Revolution”, despite what François Furet might think (Marx et la Révolution française, Paris, 1986, p. 79). Moreover, the author of Das Kapital drew from the revolutionary history of France the inspiration for a “poetry of the future” in which the following vision was designed:

“The old bourgeois society, with its classes and its class antagonism, gave way to an association in which the free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of the whole” (1848).

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 37 , Issue 148 , December 1989 , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

* The present article is a shortened version of a work intended for Études de marxologie (Cahiers de I'I.S.M.E.A., series S, no. 26, 1989) entitled “Marx penseur de la Révolution française“. See in the same volume the essay by Louis Janover, “Liberté, Égalité, Proprieté et Bentham”. I refer as well to my work Marx devant le bonapartisme, Paris-The Hague, 1960; the topic proposed in the introduction deals with “Marx, historian of France“.

1 Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, 25 January 1843, Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, MEGA, III/1, 1975, p. 43.

2 Moses Hess to Berthold Auerbach, 2 September 1841, Moses Hess, Briefwechsel, The Hague, 1959, p. 79.

3 Bruno Bauer, Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts. Ober Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen. Ein Ultimatum, Leipzig, 1842.

4 Georg Jung to Arnold Ruge, 18 October 1841. See M. Rubel, Introduction to Oeuvres of Karl Marx (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), t. III, 1982, p. LXXVI sq.

5 Bruno Bauer to Arnold Ruge, 6 December 1841.

6 Ernest Barnikol, Bruno Bauer, Studien und Materialen…, Assen, 1972, p. 59.

7 Moses Hess, "Gegenwärtige Krisis der deutschen Philosophie", Athenäum, Ber lin, 9 October 1841.

8 K. Marx, "Bemerkungen über die neueste preussische Zensurinstruktion", Athenäum, I, 1843; article included in the collection K. Marx, Gesammelte Auf sätze, Cologne, 1851.

9 Marx to Ruge, 5 March 1842.

10 Karl Marx, "Die Verhandlungen des 6. rheinischen Landtags", Rheinische Zeitung, Cologne, May 1842. Cfr. Oeuvres, III, 1982, pp. 138-198.

11 Moses Hess, "Die Kommunisten in Frankreich", Rheinische Zeitung, 21 April 1842, and "Die politischen Parteien in Deutschland", Rh. Z., 11 September 1842.

12 Rheinische Zeitung, 18 March 1842.

13 Cf. L'Idéologie allemande, in Oeuvres, III, p. 1200.

14 K. Marx, "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie", unfinished manuscript. Cf. Oeuvres, III, p. 900.

15 Ibid. p. 902.

16 Ibid.

17 "I confess that in America I saw more than America; I looked there for an image of democracy itself (…). I wanted to know it, if only to learn at least what we should hope for or fear from it." Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, I, 1835, Garnier-Flammarion, 1981, p. 69.

18 K. Marx, Oeuvres, III, p. 930 sq.

19 Ibid., p. 934.

20 Ibid., p. 953.

21 The contract signed on 1 February 1845 in Paris with the publisher C.W. Leske of Darmstadt concerned a two volume work. This double "critique" was at that time only in outline stage. Cf. M. Rubel, Oeuvres, I, Introduction, p. LXIII sq.

22 K. Marx, Zur Kritik…, 1843, in Oeuvres, III, p. 959 sq.

23 K. Marx, On the Jewish Question and Toward a critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction, Oeuvres, III, p. 347-397.

24 Ibid., p. 373.

25 H. Heine, Einleitung zu: Kahldorf über den Adel (1831). The poet refers to the "philosophical Jacobins" of his country and sees in Kant "the Robespierre", in Fichte "the Napoleon" and in Hegel "the Orléans" of German philosophy.

26 Cf. MEGA IV/2, 1981, p. 84 sq. The Kreuznach and Paris notebooks are reprinted in their entirety in MEGA IV/2, Berlin, 1981, pp. 9-298.

27 Ibid., p. 116 sq. Other topics: Metternich's politics, the family as first form of the State, the rights of individuals and of society, equality, and property, exer cise of the general will, oligarchy and right, taxes, constitutional monarchy, etc.

28 Marx to Ruge, Cologne, May 1843, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Paris, 1844. Oeuvres, III, 337. In the same letter, in reference to Napoleon on the Bérézi na watching "the squirming of drowning men" and exclaiming "look at those toads! ", Marx notes, "The only thought of despotism is to scorn men; it is man devoid of his humanity. (…) The despot sees men ever deprived of dignity. Before his eyes, and for him, they drown themselves in the muck of vulgar living, just like frogs". Ibid., p. 338.

29 MEGA IV/2, p. 181. By changing the moments of the idea of State into sub ject and the ancient political realities into predicate, Hegel expresses "the general character of time, his political theology".

30 Ibid., p. 221. Among the passages quoted, which cover 40 pages, two readings were of particular interest to Marx: the five volumes of Geschichte des Teutschen by J. Christian Pfister (Hamburg, 1829-1835) and the travel description by the Scots-man Thomas Hamilton, Man and Manners in America (1832), that Marx read in a German translation (1834), and for which a French translation appeared in the same year in Brussels. See M. Rubel, Introduction to this text (Les hommes et les moeurs aux Etats-Unis) edited by Slatkine Reprints, Geneva, 1979.

31 The Jewish Question, cf. Oeuvres, III, p. 368.

32 A. Ruge to Ludwig Feuerbach, 15 May 1844.

33 René Levasseur (de la Sarthe), ex-member of the Convention, Mémoires, t. 1-4, Paris, 1829-1831. MEGA IV/2, p. 283-293.

34 Ibid., p. 283.

35 K. Marx, Oeuvres, III, p. 1027 sq.