ontact with
German social conditions, this French literature lost all its
immediate practical significance, and assumed a purely literary
aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth
century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing
more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the
utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie
signified in their eyes the law of pure Will, of Will as it was
bound to be, of true human Will generally.

The world of the German literate consisted solely in bringing
the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical
conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without
deserting their own philosophic point of view.

This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign
language is appropriated, namely, by translation.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic
Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of
ancient heathendom had been written. The German literate
reversed this process with the profane French literature. They
wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original.
For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic
functions of money, they wrote "Alienation of Humanity," and
beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote
"dethronement of the Category of the General," and so forth.

The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of
the French historical criticisms they dubbed "Philosophy of
Action," "True Socialism," "German Science of Socialism,"
"Philosophical Foundation of Socialism," and so on.

The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely
emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express
the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having
overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing, not true
requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the
proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who
belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm
of philosophical fantasy.

This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously
and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such
mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic
innocence.

The fight of the German, and especially, of the Prussian bourgeoisie,
against feudal aristocracy and absolute mona