In 1848, the threat of revolution was everywhere. The French endured a weak, dissolute king before fomenting riots; the Belgians likewise found no strength in royal leadership. Uprisings in Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria imitated the unrest of the French. The songs of workers and the poems of romanticists echoed the volatile rumblings of internal discontent. Yet, despite all their zeal and furor, these stirrings failed because they were spontaneous, undisciplined, and disconnected.
From this fierce, bloody clamor, however, a new voice made itself heard — the voice of militant workers who comprised the Communist League. Their initial efforts proved insufficient against the reaction of European governments, but they presaged a turn of events in world economics which would make itself felt for years to come, for amid this turmoil appeared The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx, with the collaboration of Friedrich Engels.
Marx (1818–83), born in Germany, the second son of a liberal, middle-class Jewish family, pursued a college education, but to his father's dismay, he rejected the study of law. At universities in Bonn and Berlin, he dedicated himself to philosophy and came under the influence of Hegel's ideas. He found his ambition to teach blocked by authorities who rejected his liberal views, particularly his belief in constitutional government and atheism.
Marx turned to journalism and edited the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical newspaper which was suppressed because of his attacks on law and the Tsar of Russia. At this time, he began studying politics and economics. Married to the beautiful Jenny von Westphalen, daughter of a Prussian aristocrat and his former next-door neighbor, he continued his journalistic career in Paris, Brussels, again in Paris, then in Germany. However, the pattern of his life changed little — radical views always led to expulsion. Hunger was never far from the Marx household.
