16. Beer Riots in Bavaria
The Bavarian Beer is the most celebrated of all kinds of this drink brewed in Germany, and, of course, the Bavarians are much addicted to its consumption in rather large quantities. The government laid a new duty of about 100s. ad valorem on beer, and in consequence of this an outbreak occurred, which lasted more than four days. The working men assembled in large masses, paraded through the streets, assailed the public houses, smashing the windows, breaking the furniture, and destroying everything in their reach, in order to take revenge for the enhanced price of their favourite drink. The military was called in, but a regiment of horse-guards, when commanded to mount on horseback, refused to do so. The police, being, as everywhere, obnoxious to the people, were severely beaten and ill-treated by the rioters, and every station formerly occupied by police-officers had to be occupied by soldiers, who, being upon good terms with the people, were considered less hostile and showed an evident reluctance to interfere. They only did interfere when the palace of the King was attacked, and then they merely took up such a position as was sufficient to keep the rioters back. On the second evening (the 2nd of May) the King, in whose family a marriage had just been celebrated, and who for this reason had many illustrious visitors at his court, visited the theatre; but when, after the first act, a crowd assembled before the theatre and threatened to attack it, every one left the house to see what the matter was, and His Majesty, with his illustrious visitors, was obliged to follow them, or else he would have been left alone in his place. The French papers assert that the King on this occasion ordered the military stationed before the theatre to fire upon the people, and that the soldiers refused. The
18—482 German papers do not mention this, as may be expected from their being published under censorship; but as the French papers are sometimes rather ill-informed about foreign matters, we cannot vouch for the truth of their assertion. From all this, however, it appears, that the Poet King (Ludwig, King of Bavaria, is the author of three volumes of unreadable Poems, of a Traveller's Guide to one of his public buildings,[228] &c. &c.) has been in a very awkward position during these outbreaks. In Munich, a town full of soldiers and police, the seat of a royal court, a riot lasts four days, notwithstanding all the array of the military,— and at last the rioters force their object. The King restored tranquillity by an ordinance, reducing the price of the quart of beer from ten kreutzers (S[1]/^) to nine kreutzers (3d). If the people once know that they can frighten the government out of their taxing system, they will soon learn that it will be as easy to frighten them as far as regards more serious affairs.
No. 341, May 25, 1844, with an editorial note: "From our own Correspondent"
Endnotes
[1] Marx mentions his intention of critically analysing Hegel's views on the state and law as far back as in the spring of 1842. In a letter to Arnold Ruge of March 5 he writes that he is preparing an article on Hegel's legal and political views in which he intends first of all to criticise Hegel's apology on behalf of the constitutional monarchy (see this edition, Vol. 1). The above-mentioned article is not extant and it is unknown whether he actually wrote it, but the subject-matter continued to attract his attention. As Marx's theoretical views developed and he gradually adopted a materialist standpoint, largely due to Feuerbach's influence, his plans of writing a critique of Hegel's philosophy became more extensive and profound and finally he conceived the idea of counterposing the materialist conception of social phenomena to their idealist interpretation. For Marx the basic problem was the interdependence of material social relations, property relations and so on — which Hegel called "civil society"—and the political system of society, the state. Marx began to work on his plan during his stay from May to October 1843 in Kreuznach (where his bride Jenny von Westphalen, whom he married in June 1843, lived with her mother). Here, apparently, he wrote the original version of the work. In the process of writing it he felt the need for greater concrete historical material, and with this aim in view he began to study problems related not only to the theory and history of the state as a whole but to the history of individual countries (England, France, Germany, the United States, Italy, Sweden) and major world-historical events, in particular the Great French Revolution, as can be seen from his five notebooks containing excerpts (the Kreuznach Notebooks). Later on, he wrote an introduction to that work which was published in February 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. But Marx did not manage to prepare the main sections of his work for publication because he turned to other studies and conceived other literary plans (economic studies, preparation of a book against the Young Hegelians, work on the history of the Convention and so on). However, his work on the manuscript dealing with the criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of law played a major role in his spiritual development and was an important stage in the formation of his materialist views. Marx himself pointed to this in 1859 in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Engels, for his part, in his article "Karl Marx" (1869) described the conclusions arrived at by his friend as a result of the critical analysis of 20* Hegel's views in the following way: "Proceeding from the Hegelian philosophy of law, Marx came to the conclusion that it was not the state which Hegel had described as the 'top of the edifice' but 'the civil society' which Hegel had regarded with disdain that was the sphere in which a key to the understanding of the process of historical development of mankind should be looked for." The extant manuscript consists of 39 big sheets numbered in Roman figures by the author (II-XL), apparently after the work had been finished. The first sheet is missing. Each sheet is folded in two to form four pages, which are numbered in Arabic figures from sheet I-XXII. The manuscript contains a critical analysis of paragraphs 261-313 of G. W. F. Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. These paragraphs comprise the subsection "Internal State Law" in the third part of Hegel's work. The missing first sheet apparently dealt with §§257-260 as can be seen from the extant text. The manuscript bears the imprint of an unfinished work. Some problems which the author promises to deal with below have not been treated by him in the extant part. The title of the work given by the author, which is missing in the manuscript, is reproduced from the above-mentioned introduction published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. In one of the notebooks written by Marx in Bonn in 1842 there are some notes connected with this manuscript. The date of writing the notes is not established. The notes contain some subheadings, the first of which refers to the non-extant part of the manuscript and contains references to the sheets and pages of the manuscript of the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. The content of the notes is as follows: "Duplication of the Development System. I. 3,4. Logical Mysticism. II, 8. Ill, 9 [see this volume, pp. 7, 8]. "Mystical way of presentation. "Ibid. Example, §267. IV, pp. 13, 14 [see this volume, pp. 10, 11]. "Idea as Subject. IV, pp. 15, 16 [see this volume, pp. 11-13]. (Real subjects become mere names.) P. 17, p. 18, pp. 20, 21, pp. 24, 26, 27, p. 28, p. 40, p. 57, pp. 75, 78 [see this volume, pp. 13, 14-15, 16-18, 20-21, 22-24, 33-34, 48-49, 60, 62-63]. XXVI, 2. XXVIII. XXX, 3. XXXI, 3. XXXII, 2. XXXIV, 2, 3, 4. P. XXXVII, 2 [see this volume p. 82-83, 89-90, 98-99, 101-02, 109-10, 114-15]. Opposites. XXXIX [see this volume, p. 121-24]." Marx's manuscript was first published in Moscow by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. This work was first published in English in part in the book Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, and in full as a separate edition entitled Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right' by Karl Marx. Translated from the German by Annette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley, Cambridge, 1970. In translating the term "Hegeische Rechtsphilosophie", the translators and editors, being aware of the difficulty of its rendering into English, proceeded from the interpretation of this and similar concepts in the works of Marx and Engels written in English. Thus, in the English authorised edition of Engels' work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Hegel's expression "Begriff des Rechts" is translated in one of the notes as "concept of law" (see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1970, p. 115). In this manuscript as in the other works published in this volume Marx frequently uses two similar German terms, "Entäusserung" and "Entfremdung", to express the notion of "alienation". In the present edition the former is generally translated as "alienation", the latter as "estrangement", because in the later economic works (Theories of Surplus-Value) Marx himself used the word "alienation" as the English equivalent of the term "Entäusserung".