Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

in the form of a reply to the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, which had accused its rival of flirting with communism:

      The Rheinische Zeitung, which does not even admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical reality, and therefore can still less desire their practical realisation, or even consider it possible, will subject these ideas to thoroughgoing criticism … Such writings as those of Leroux, Considérant, and above all the sharp-witted work by Proudhon, cannot be criticised on the basis of superficial flashes of thought, but only after long and profound study.

      No doubt he had half an eye on the censor – and on the paper’s shareholders, bourgeois capitalists to a man. But he meant it all the same. Marx disliked the posturing of colleagues such as the tipsy Rutenberg (who was still working in the office, though his job consisted mainly of inserting punctuation marks) and Moses Hess. He was even more irritated by the antics of the Young Hegelian pranksters in Berlin, now calling themselves ‘The Free’, who lived up to the name by freely criticising everything – the state, the Church, the family – and advocating ostentatious libertinism as a political duty. He regarded them as tiresome, frivolous self-publicists. ‘Rowdiness and blackguardism must be loudly and resolutely repudiated in a period which demands serious, manly and sober-minded persons for the achievement of its lofty aims,’ he told his readers.

      There was, of course, an element of hypocrisy here: as his Cologne drinking companions testify, he was not always either serious or sober, and the solemn disapproval of attention-grabbing stunts came a little oddly from a man who, only a few months earlier, had been clattering through the streets of Bonn astride a donkey. But the assumption of editorial responsibility had concentrated his mind wonderfully: juvenile japes were no longer acceptable. The most persistent nuisance was Eduard Meyen, leader of the licentious Berlin clique, who submitted ‘heaps of scribblings, pregnant with revolutionising the world and empty of ideas’. During the weak, undiscriminating stewardship of Rutenberg, Meyen and his gang had come to regard the Rheinische Zeitung as their private playground. But the new editor made it clear that he would no longer permit them to drench the newspaper in a watery torrent of verbiage. ‘I regard it as inappropriate, indeed even immoral, to smuggle communist and socialist doctrines, hence a new world outlook, into incidental theatrical criticisms etc.,’ he wrote. ‘I demand a quite different and more thorough discussion of communism, if it should be discussed at all.’

      Marx’s own ability to discuss communism was hampered by the fact that he knew nothing about it. His years of academic study had taught him all the philosophy, theology and law that he was ever likely to need, but in politics and economics he was still a novice. ‘As editor of the Rheinische Zeitung,’ he admitted many years later, ‘I experienced for the first time the embarrassment of having to take part in discussions on so-called material interests.’

      His first venture into this unexplored territory was a long critique of the new law dealing with thefts of wood from private forests. By ancient custom, peasants had been allowed to gather fallen branches for fuel, but now anyone who picked up the merest twig could expect a prison sentence. More outrageously still, the offender would have to pay the forest-owner the value of the wood, such value to be assessed by the forester himself. This legalised larceny forced Marx to think, for the first time, about the questions of class, private property and the state. It also allowed him to exercise his talent for demolishing a thoughtless argument with its own logic. Reporting a comment by one of the knightly halfwits in the provincial assembly – ‘It is precisely because the pilfering of wood is not regarded as theft that it occurs so often – he let rip with a characteristic reductio ad absurdum: ‘By analogy with this, the legislator would have to draw the conclusion: It is because a box on the ear is not regarded as a murder that it has become so frequent. It should be decreed therefore that a box on the ear is murder.’

      This may not have been communism but it was quite naughty enough to worry Prussian officialdom – especially since the paper’s circulation and reputation were growing rapidly. ‘Do not imagine that we on the Rhine live in a political Eldorado,’ Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge, whose Deutsche Jahrbücher had taken a fearsome battering from the authorities in Dresden. ‘The most unswerving persistence is required to push through a newspaper like the Rheinische Zeitung.’ For most of 1842, the resident censor at the paper was Laurenz Dolleschall, a doltish police officer who had once banned an advertisement for Dante’s Divine Comedy on the grounds that ‘the divine is not a fit subject for comedy’. After receiving the proofs each evening he blue-pencilled any articles he didn’t understand (most of them), whereupon the editor would spend hours persuading him that it was all quite harmless – while the printers waited, long into the night. Marx liked to quote Dolleschall’s anguished wail whenever his superiors chided him for letting through some piece of devilry: ‘Now my living’s at stake!’ One can almost sympathise with the hapless jobsworth, since any censor unlucky enough to have to haggle with Karl Marx every working day might well conclude that a policeman’s lot is not a happy one. A story told by the left-wing journalist Wilhelm Blos shows what Dolleschall had to endure:

      One evening the censor had been invited, with his wife and nubile daughter, to a grand ball given by the President of the Province. Before leaving he had to finish work on the censorship. But precisely on this evening the proofs did not arrive at the accustomed time. The censor waited and waited, because he could not neglect his official duties, and yet he had to put in an appearance at the President’s ball – quite apart from the openings this would give to his nubile daughter. It was near ten o’clock, the censor was extremely agitated and sent his wife and daughter on in front to the President’s house and dispatched his servant to the press to get the proofs. The servant returned with the information that the press was closed. The bewildered censor went in his carriage to Marx’s lodgings, which was quite a distance. It was almost eleven o’clock.

      After much bell-ringing, Marx stuck his head out of a third-storey window.

      ‘The proofs!’ bellowed up the censor.

      ‘Aren’t any!’ Marx yelled down.

      ‘But—’

      ‘We’re not publishing tomorrow!’

      Thereupon Marx slammed the window shut. The anger of the censor, thus fooled, made his words stick in his throat. He was more courteous from then on.

      His employers, however, were not. The provincial governor who hosted the ball, Oberpräsident von Schaper, complained in November that the tone of the paper was ‘becoming more and more impudent’ and demanded the dismissal of Rutenberg (whom he wrongly assumed to be the culprit) from the editorial board. Since Rutenberg was a pie-eyed liability anyway, this was no great sacrifice. Marx composed a grovelling letter assuring His Excellency that the Rheinische Zeitung wished only to echo ‘the benedictions which at the present time the whole of Germany conveys to His Majesty the King in his ascendant career’. As Franz Mehring commented many years later, the letter displayed ‘a diplomatic caution of which the life of its author offers no other example’.

      It failed to mollify Herr Oberpräsident. In mid-December he recommended to the censorship ministers in Berlin that they should prosecute the newspaper – and the anonymous author of the article on wood-gathering – for ‘impudent and disrespectful criticism of the existing government institutions’. On 21 January 1843 a mounted messenger arrived from Berlin bearing a ministerial edict revoking the Rheinische Zeitung’s licence to publish, with effect from the end of March. Loyal readers throughout the Rhineland – from Cologne, Düsseldorf, Aachen and Marx’s home town of Trier – sent petitions to the king begging for a reprieve, but to no effect. A second censor was installed to prevent any monkey business in the final weeks. ‘Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at,’ Marx grumbled to a friend, ‘and if the police nose smells anything