Towards Democracy as Bourgeois

Abstract

Karl Marx was born in the ancient Rhineland city of Trier in May 1818. The area had come under Prussian jurisdiction just a few years earlier, following the defeat of Napoleon. Prior to that it had experienced twenty years of French rule. For the citizens of Trier Paris was only half as far away as Berlin and whether the citizens of the Rhineland had been equally prepared to be ruled from the west as from the distant capital to the east is a matter of much dispute among historians. Either way with French rule had come French ideas, and the influence of Saint-Simon was still evident in the years of Marx’s youth. One follower of the French reformer was Baron von Westphalen, Marx’s neighbour, ‘fatherly friend’ and eventual father-in-law. And, just as the Rhineland province achieved its distinctive characteristics through the alternation and integration of German and French influences, so too did the early intellectual development of Karl Marx. For the youth who went to Berlin in 1836 and acquired the sharp cutting edge of radical Hegelianism visited Paris in 1843 and became aware of the plight of the modern proletariat.