Searching aimlessly for a career, Marx drifted into journalism and became editor of Rheinische
Zeitung, a liberal newspaper, reflecting Marx’s own political views at that time, as well
as that of the Rhineland middle class in general.
Under the Prussian repression of that era, liberalism was an embattled and endangered
creed, and Marx made the newspaper more controversial and more widely read than before.
His running of the paper was characterized by a contemporary as “a dictatorship of
Marx”—as so many groups with which he was affiliated would be throughout his lifetime.
Another contemporary described him as “domineering, impetuous, passionate, full of boundless self-confidence.
” Marx engaged in a running battle of wits with the government’s censors, and—ironically—tried
to restrain some of the more radical of the newspaper’s writers.
Among these was another young man from an affluent background named Moses Hess, a communist
who eventually converted still another such offspring of wealth to communism—Friedrich
Engels.
Marx, however, purged Hess from the newspaper for his “smuggling into the newspaper of
communist and socialist dogmas disguised as theatrical criticism.”
Only after Marx finally resigned as editor, to spare the paper from being banned, did
he begin the studies that would eventually lead him to communism.
During the same period in the early 1840s Marx had a decisive break with his family.
Now that his father was dead, and the estate had to suffice for eight people to live on,
Frau Marx was not inclined to continue indefinitely sending money to her eldest son, now fully
grown and holding a doctoral degree.
Marx had continued his already long-standing practice of running up bills that he could
not pay, and was outraged that his mother cut off his remaining small allowance.
As he put it in a letter to a friend: “Although they are quite rich, my family has placed
difficulties in my way which have temporarily placed me in an embarrassing situation.”
Such temporary embarrassments were to become a permanent feature of Marx’s life over
the next four decades.
Nevertheless, he eventually persuaded the aristocratic von Westphalens to let him marry
their daughter—now 29 years old—who had waited faithfully for him for seven years.
It was not a marriage whose prospects were viewed with favor by either family.
There was a church wedding in 1843, but most of her family and all of his family stayed
away.
However, the bride’s mother paid for the honeymoon and in addition turned over to the
couple a small legacy which she had received.
This legacy was held in the form of coins in a strong box—which Marx and his bride
then left open in their hotel rooms, inviting any visitors to take whatever they might need.
It was empty before they returned to her home, where they lived with her mother for several
months.
In October 1843, Marx and his wife—now pregnant—moved to Paris, where he was hired to contribute
to a publishing venture—a bilingual journal for German and French readers.
Only one issue ever appeared.
Marx and the editor quarreled and broke up, leaving Marx without funds in a foreign land.
A collection was hastily taken up by friends in Cologne, and the couple was rescued—as
they would be again and again throughout their lives.
Here in Paris Marx began the studies that led him to communism.
He also began to meet other radical figures of the time—including the radical poet Heinrich
Heine, Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and the French radical writer Pierre Joseph
Proudhon.
Heine, though at first a great friend of the Marxes, was eventually alienated by Karl Marx’s
arrogance and dogmatism.
In later years, Heine described the Paris radicals—including Marx—as a “crowd
of godless, self-appointed gods.”
Among these radicals was a young German whom Marx had met briefly before—Friedrich Engels.