Rheinische Zeitung

[4] At the eleventh hour a group of prominent Cologne citizens decided to raise fresh working capital and to attempt to reestablish the paper on a new basis.

[5][6] The paper originally expressed a pro-government stance, but its political line soon shifted to better accord with popular sentiment among Rhinelanders, many of whom regarded the Prussian government in Berlin as an oppressive alien entity.

[6][5] In the pages of the Rheinische Zeitung Marx had criticized the failings of the Rhineland Diet, seated at Düsseldorf, charging it with implementing class-based legislation which negatively impacted the rights and prosperity of common citizens in favor of a privileged stratum of landowners.

[9] Far from revolutionary at this juncture, Marx retained a faith that public debate in a free press would be sufficient to ameliorate the various evils facing society regardless of the Diet's weakness.

[10] However, on 15 October 1842, Marx was appointed to the editorial board and the Rheinische Zeitung began an apparent rise from the ashes gaining nearly 1,000 subscribers over the course of the next month.

[15] In desperation shareholders in the paper demanded that the Rheinische Zeitung tone down its aggressive political line, a move which prompted Marx to submit his resignation as editor on 17 March 1843.

[15] The local censor was enthusiastic about this change in the newspaper's staff, noting that a "really moderate though insignificant man" named Oppenheim had taken over the editorial chair and recommending that the decision to close the paper be reversed.

[17] In the view of historian David Fernbach, the suppression of the paper in March 1843 by the Prussian government shattered Marx's belief that the country could traverse the road from monarchy to constitutional democracy without revolutionary struggle.

Marx would return to Cologne during the first half of April 1848, amidst the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states and immediately began to make preparations to establish a new—and more radical—newspaper.