Karl Marx: the romantic idealist exhorting man to triumph over the things he manufactures…
…To many of that generation “revolution” was a holy word, and the spirit of freedom appeared, as in Delacroix’s famous painting, as a beautiful bare-breasted woman leading the workers at the barricades. The years of Marx’s youth and early manhood were they ears before the European revolution of 1846, when it seemed that with one final, titantic effort humanity might throw off all its oppressors at one blow and create from the ashes of the old social order a new world of justice and freedom. Paris was revered by young men as the holy city of revolution. As the Russian socialist Aleksandr Herzen once put it, ” I entered the city with reverence, as men used to enter Jerusalem or Rome.”
—Young Karl Marx & young Friedrich Engels as they were in 1847.—click image for source…
The fate of captive countries like Italy and Poland, ruled by oppressor nations whose domination had been reaffirmed at the Congress of Vienna, touched liberal consciences as Spain was to do in the 1930’s and Hungary in the 1950’s. Not only proletarians but artists and intellectuals of all kinds felt, during these years, the revolutionary itch; when revolution came to Europe’s capitals in 1848-49, they went with the workers to the barricades. ( to be continued)…
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