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28 wine-growers on the Mosel furnished Marx with actual material in this connection. These peasants had been alternately exploited and oppressed by the officials of the god-ordained government and unscrupulous usurers, and found in Marx a warm and fearless attorney. The struggle in behalf of these impoverished peasants was a thorn in the sides of the government, and only tended to swell the already lengthy list of treasonable offences and undesirable acts committed by this now formidable opponent. Shortly and upon explicit decree of Wilhelm IV. the suppression of the "Rheinische Zeitung" was ordered. Marx was practically now without any means of support and also, and that depressed him still more, without a field of public activity, and without the least possibility of creating such a field in Germany. In less than two years, it had forcefully dawned upon Marx that any work which aimed at the liberation of Germany from feudal domination was nigh impossible on German soil. He, consequently, decided to go to Paris—the center of political life and libertarian aspirations. Before his departure, he was wedded to Jenny von Westfalen after a courtship of seven years.

The material basis for the support of the family in Paris was to be created by the Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher ("German-French Annals"), which Marx contemplated publishing in collaboration with Arnold Ruge. The "Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher" were to be a forum for the free expression and cultivation of radical thought; the periodical was to be a literary gauntlet thrown down to the conservative and sterile elements in Europe; and finally aimed to become a factor in the marshalling, organizing and intellectually clarifying the republican or democratic forces in Germany. As such, the annals were bound to become a medium for the continuation, development and perfection of Marx's search and studies of the driving forces and laws in social life. In this connection it may be of interest to cite the following lines of a letter which Ruge addressed to Feuerbach on this subject. Amongst others Ruge writes: "We intend to publish the "German-French Annals" in a foreign country, and desire to