Throughout the 20th Century, Karl Marx's visage often appeared on communist banners in the guise of a mighty, bearded prophet, the first and greatest in an array of great thinkers that also included Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. So it may be slightly odd and amusing to think of him in his mid-20s living in Paris as the editor of a magazine. Digging into the letters and writings that Marx produced in those years, and the writings of those who knew him, always turns up something interesting—and occasionally something utterly fascinating.
The year was 1844. Hoping to unite German and French radicals, Marx and his colleague Arnold Ruge moved with their wives to Paris in order to found a new theoretical journal, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals). Paris was an exciting and cosmopolitan city, but the intellectual climate was unfamiliar to the two Germans. “Marx and Ruge were simply unfamiliar both with popular politics and with the world outside Germany,” says Gareth Stedman Jones in his new biography of Marx.
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