Monday, November 17, 2014
TIDBITS FROM GOOGLE AND WIKIPEDIA
I am not what you would call a scholar. Even when I write two books on someone, I am liable to be a bit dim about that person's actual life. So it was with considerable surprise that I learned only today that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels met for the first time, in 1843, in a Paris cafe, cafe de la Regence. The cafe, which I also learned is famous in chess circles as the site of many storied matches in the 19th century, lies on a little side street between rue de Rivoli and the Right Bank. If GoogleMaps is to be trusted, it is still there, though it is now a restaurant, not a cafe. When I return to Paris in March for a brief visit during Spring Break, I shall be sure to visit it. I shall also ask my chess grandmaster son, Patrick, whether he has ever come across the name.
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3 comments:
I'm sure Patrick knows about Paul Morphy's visit to Europe and playing in the Café.
Odd, I just happened upon Wilson's account of the Marx-Engles meeting in To the Finland Station, at the beginning of section II, part 7....
"In the fall of 1842, when Marx was editing the Rheinische Zeitung, a highly intelligent young man who had been contributing to the paper came to see him. The son of a Rhineland manufacturer, be had just been converted to communism. He was passing through Cologne on his way to England, whither he was going with the double object of learning his father's business in Manchester and of studying the Chartist movement. Karl Marx, who was only beginning to read the communists and who as yet knew little or nothing about Manchester, received him with the utmost coldness. He was then in the midst of one of those feuds with former associates which were to be a recurrent feature of his life. The result of the all-powerful reaction had been to cause the young Hegelians in Berlin to recoil into a theoretical intransigence; and since their position of pure atheism and pure communism, which made no contact with actual society, excluded all possibility of affecting the course of events by ordinary agitation, they had resorted to a policy of clowning not unlike that by which the Dadaists of our own post-war period attempted, in a similar fashion, to shock a world of which they totally despaired and which they could only desire to insult. Karl Marx hated the clowning and considered the intransigence futile: he was trying to make his paper a practical political force. He had been cutting and refusing to publish the contributions of his friends in Berlin; and
it was to be increasingly characteristic of Marx that he passed readily from a critical mistrust, based on sound intellectual grounds, to an unhealthy and hateful suspicion. In this case, he assumed that the young traveler was an emissary from his enemies in Berlin, and he sent Friedrich Engels away without ever finding out what there was in him or understanding what he was up to."
Wilson has an odd edge, no?
Wilson's book is marvelous, but it looks as though Wikipedia got it wrong! They met a year earlier in Cologne. Oh well. That is one reason why I will never be a scholar.
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