Karl Marx (18 page)

Marx presented much of this defence calmly and forensically, without his customary rhetorical tricks or embellishments, but in his peroration he at last appealed to the jurors’ political conscience:

I prefer to follow the great events of the world, to analyse the course of history, than to occupy myself with local bosses, with the police and prosecuting magistrates. However great these gentlemen may imagine themselves in their own fancy, they are
nothing
, absolutely
nothing
, in the gigantic battles of the present time. I consider we are making a real sacrifice when we decide to break a lance with these opponents. But, firstly, it is the duty of the press to come forward on behalf of the oppressed in its immediate neighbourhood … The first duty of the press now is
to undermine all the foundations of the existing political state of affairs
.

He sat down to loud applause from the crowded courtroom: Marx and Engels had won their acquittal. But there was little time for celebration. The very next day, 8 February, Marx was back in the dock with two of his colleagues from the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats, this time accused of ‘incitement to revolt’.

The prosecution arose from the turmoil of November 1848 when members of the Prussian National Assembly – then being forced out of their debating chamber at gunpoint by government troops – had ruled that taxes should be withheld in protest. In a proclamation dated 18 November 1848, Marx’s committee declared that the forcible collection of taxes ‘must be resisted everywhere and in every way’, and that a people’s militia should be formed ‘to repulse the enemy’. Since this was undoubtedly an incitement to revolt, as Marx admitted in court, the only question was ‘whether the accused were authorised by the decision of the National Assembly on the refusal to pay taxes to call in this way for resistance to the state power [and] to organise an armed force against that of the state’. After a very brief discussion the jury decided unanimously that he had behaved with perfect constitutional propriety. In the words of the
Deutsche Londoner Zeitung
, a liberal weekly for German refugees in England: ‘
In political trials the government nowadays has no luck
at all with the juries.’ But the government had other shots in its locker. The unfortunately named Colonel Friedrich Engels, deputy commandant of the Cologne garrison, informed the Rhineland
Oberpräsident
that Marx was ‘
becoming increasingly more audacious now that he has been acquitted
by the jury, and it seems to me high time that this man was deported, as one certainly does not have to put up with an alien who is no more than tolerated in our midst, befouling everything with his poisonous tongue, especially as our home-grown vermin are doing that quite adequately’.

While Colonel Engels waited for an answer, two of his NCOs from the 8th Infantry Company took it upon themselves to engage in a spot of freelance bullying by turning up at Marx’s house on
the afternoon of 2 March and demanding to know who had written a recent article in the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
about military corruption, which had apparently caused grave offence to ‘the whole of the 8th Company’. The editor pointed out that the article in question was in fact an advertisement, for which he had no responsibility. His uniformed visitors, literally rattling their sabres, warned that ‘evil would result’ if he refused to name the author. By way of reply, Marx drew their attention to the butt of a pistol protruding from his dressing-gown pocket. The two men quickly took their leave.

‘
Relaxation of discipline must have gone very far
,’ Marx wrote to Colonel Engels, ‘and all sense of law and order must have ceased if, like a robber band, a Company can send delegates to an individual citizen and attempt with threats to extort this or that confession from him … I must beg you, Sir, to institute an inquiry into this incident and to give me an explanation for this singular presumption. I would be sorry to be obliged to have recourse to publicity.’ Marx’s pen was a more effective threat than the sabres of the NCOs. The wretched commandant assured him that the men had been reprimanded, and thanked the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
for its discretion in not reporting the incident. Magnanimous in victory, Marx told the Colonel that the newspaper’s silence demonstrated ‘how great is its consideration for the prevailing mood of unrest’.

A likely story. Though Marx was indeed being castigated by leftists such as Dr Gottschalk (now released from jail) for lack of militancy, what he did publish was quite provocative enough – including savage mockery of the ‘bureaucratic – feudal – military despotism’ presided over by the King and his aristocratic new Interior Minister, Baron von Manteuffel. ‘The governments are openly preparing for
coups d’état
which are intended to complete the counter-revolution,’ he predicted on 12 March. ‘Consequently, the people would be fully justified in preparing for an insurrection.’ He did add that the people shouldn’t be decoyed into this ‘clumsily laid trap’ – but only because he thought there would soon be a far
better opportunity. On 8 May, after an eruption of riots and guerrilla warfare in Dresden and the Palatinate, the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
brought the glad tidings that ‘the revolution is drawing nearer and nearer’.

‘
Wonder was expressed
,’ Engels wrote many years later, ‘that we carried on our activities so unconcernedly within a Prussian fortress of the first rank, in the face of a garrison of 8,000 troops and confronting the guardhouse; but, on account of the eight rifles with bayonets and 250 live cartridges in the editorial room, and the red Jacobin caps of the compositors, our house was reckoned by the officers likewise as a fortress which was not to be taken by a mere
coup de main
.’ In fact, the fortress surrendered without a shot being fired. On 16 May the Prussian authorities prosecuted half of the editorial staff and recommended the other half – the non-Prussians, including Marx – for deportation. Nothing more could be done. In the final issue, printed defiantly in bright red ink, the editors announced that ‘their last word everywhere and always will be:
emancipation of the working class
!’ Marx and his journalists then left the building, clutching their weapons and baggage, with a band playing and the red flag flying proudly from the rooftop.

After liquidating everything – including the newspaper’s printing machinery, which he owned personally, and the furniture from his house – Marx managed to settle all outstanding debts. But he was left penniless. Jenny’s family silver was despatched to a pawnshop, this time in Frankfurt, while she and the children set off once again to stay with her mother in Trier. Marx and Engels headed for Frankfurt in the hope of persuading left-wing deputies in the National Assembly to support the insurgent troops from south-western Germany, who were still fighting the good fight on behalf of the ‘provisional government’ in Baden and the Palatinate. No one would listen, so the next day they travelled to Baden and urged the revolutionary forces to march on Frankfurt uninvited. Again their appeals were ignored, though they had a friendly encounter with their old colleague Willich, who was now
in charge of a partisan corps. Engels, a lifelong student of military strategy, couldn’t resist the chance to put on a uniform and join a real war. Enlisting as a volunteer, he soon became Willich’s chief adjutant, jointly directing operations and campaigns, and during the next few weeks he fought in four skirmishes – all of which were lost. His most important discovery, he told Jenny Marx, was ‘
that the much-vaunted bravery under fire is quite the most ordinary quality
one can possess. The whistle of bullets is really quite a trivial matter.’ He saw little evidence of cowardice, but plenty of ‘brave stupidity’.

Marx, who had neither the inclination nor the physique for soldiering, realised that there was nothing more he could do in Germany. At the beginning of June he departed for Paris, travelling on a false passport, and introduced himself to the French as the official envoy of the Palatinate revolutionary government. By the time he arrived, however, Paris was in the grip of a royalist reaction and a cholera epidemic. ‘
For all that,
’ he wrote cheerfully to Engels on 7 June, ‘never has a colossal eruption of the revolutionary volcano been more imminent than it is in Paris today … I consort with the whole of the revolutionary party and in a few days’ time I shall have
all
the revolutionary journals at my disposal.’

Within a few days there were no revolutionary journals to be had. When the Montagnard faction in the French National Assembly called for a mass demonstration on 13 June, government troops simply dragooned the protesters from the streets and arrested the ringleaders. Thus ended the revolutions begun in 1848: the Gallic cock, having crowed and strutted, had its neck wrung.

Jenny, pregnant with their fourth child, joined her husband in Paris at the beginning of July. ‘
If my wife were not in an
état par trop intéressant
, I would gladly leave Paris as soon as it was financially possible to do so,’ he wrote to Engels. But the decision was no longer up to him. The triumphant reactionaries were busily seeking out and evicting foreign revolutionists from the newly
placid capital, and on the sunny morning of 19 March a police sergeant turned up on the Marxes’ doorstep at 45 Rue de Lille to deliver an official order banishing him to the
département
of Morbihan, in Brittany. The only surprise is that he wasn’t expelled sooner: it seems that the police had been unable to find him for several weeks, perhaps because he had taken the precaution of renting his lodging under the pseudonym ‘Monsieur Ramboz’.

He managed to delay the inevitable by appealing to the Ministry of the Interior. On 16 August the Parisian commissioner informed him that the order had been confirmed, though Jenny was given permission to stay for another month. Marx described Morbihan as ‘the Pontine marshes of Brittany’, a malaria-infested swamp which would undoubtedly kill him and his family, all of whom were in wretched health. ‘
I need hardly say,
’ he told Engels, ‘that I shall not consent to this veiled attempt on my life. So I am leaving France.’ Neither Germany nor Belgium would let him in, and the Swiss refused his application for a passport – not that he particularly wanted to live in their ‘mousetrap’ of a country anyway. And so he turned to the last refuge of the rootless revolutionary. When the SS
City of Boulogne
sailed into Dover on 27 August 1849 its captain notified the Home Office of ‘
all Aliens who are now on board my said ship
’, as required by law: they included a Greek actor, a French gentleman, a Polish professor and one Charles Marx, who gave his profession as ‘Dr’.

‘
You must leave for London at once
,’ Marx wrote to Engels, who was recuperating from his military exertions by wining and womanising in Lausanne. ‘I count on this
absolutely
. You
cannot
stay in Switzerland. In London we shall get down to business.’

Karl Marx’s final refuge was the largest and wealthiest metropolis in the world. London had been the first city to reach a population of 1,000,000, a great wen that continued to swell without ever quite bursting. When the journalist Henry Mayhew went up in a hot-air balloon in the hope of comprehending its entirety, he could not tell ‘where the monster city began or ended, for the buildings stretched not only to the horizon on either side, but far away into the distance … where the town seemed to blend into the sky’. Census figures show that 300,000 newcomers settled in the capital between 1841 and 1851 – including hundreds of refugees who, like Marx, were lured by its reputation as a sanctuary for political outcasts.

But this ‘super-city de luxe’ was also the dark, dank monster that looms up from the opening paragraphs of
Bleak House
, written three years after Marx’s arrival:

Implacable November weather.
As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Beyond the plush salons of Mayfair and Piccadilly lay a sprawling, uncharted shanty town of slums and sweatshops, brothels and blacking factories. ‘It is like the heart of the universe and the flood of human effort rolls out of it and into it with a violence that almost appals one’s very sense,’ Thomas Carlyle wrote to his brother. ‘O that our father saw Holborn in a fog! with the black vapour brooding over it, absolutely like fluid ink; and coaches and wains and sheep and oxen and wild people rushing on with bellowings and shrieks and thundering din, as if the earth in general were gone distracted.’ Disease was commonplace – unsurprisingly, since sewers ran into the Thames, which provided much of the water supply. Only a month before Marx came to London, when the city was enduring one of its periodic cholera epidemics,
The Times
published the following cry for help on its letters page:

Sur, May we beg and beseech
you proteckshion and power. We are, Sur, as it may be, living in a Wilderniss, so far as the rest of London knows anything of us, or as rich and great people care about. We live in muck and filthe. We aint got no privez, no dust bins, no drains, no water splies, and no drain or suer in the whole place. The Suer Corporation, in Greek Street, Soho Square, all great, rich and powerfool men, take no notice whatsomedever of our complaints. The Stenche of a Gully-hole is disgustin. We al of us suffer, and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us.

In some districts, one child in every three died before its first birthday.

The marvels and monstrosities of Victorian London which so astonished many foreign visitors were invisible to Marx. For all his talents as a reporter and social analyst, he was often curiously oblivious to his own immediate surroundings: unlike Dickens, who plunged into the grime to bring back vivid firsthand observations, he preferred to rely on newspapers or Royal
Commissions for information. Nor did he show the slightest interest in the tastes and habits of his new compatriots – their dress, their games, their popular songs. True, in July 1850 he became ‘all flushed and excited’ after noticing a working model of an electric railway engine in the window of a Regent Street shop, but even then it was the economic implications rather than the thrill of novelty that excited him. ‘The problem is solved – the consequences are indefinable,’ he told his fellow gawpers, explaining that just as King Steam had transformed the world in the last century so now the electric spark would set off a new revolution. ‘In the wake of the economic revolution the political must necessarily follow, for the latter is only the expression of the former.’ It seems unlikely that anyone else in the Regent Street crowd had paused to consider the political consequences of this Trojan iron horse; to Marx, however, it was all that mattered. Had he encountered Dickens’s megalosaurus in the mud of Holborn Hill he would scarcely have given it a second glance.

Work was the only reliable distraction from the wretchedness of his plight. Without pausing to acclimatise himself, he set about establishing a new HQ for the Communist League at the London offices of the German Workers’ Education Society, one of the many political groups of the revolutionary diaspora. By mid-September he had also been elected to a Committee to Aid German Refugees. ‘
I am now in a really difficult situation
,’ he wrote to Ferdinand Freiligrath on 5 September 1849, little more than a week after arriving in England. ‘My wife is in an advanced state of pregnancy, she is obliged to leave Paris on the 15th and I don’t know how I am to raise the money for her journey and for settling her in here. On the other hand there are excellent prospects of my being able to start a monthly review here …’

Few refugees required aid more urgently than the Marxes. Jenny reached London on 17 September, sick and exhausted, with ‘my three poor persecuted small children’. Jennychen had been born in France, Laura and Edgar in Belgium, and this record of peripatetic parturition was maintained by their second son, who
entered the world on 5 November 1849 to the sound of exploding fireworks as Londoners held their annual celebration of the failure of Guido (Guy) Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. In homage to the great conspirator, the boy was christened Heinrich Guido and instantly nicknamed ‘Fawkesy’ (later Germanicised into ‘Foxchen’).

Marx had a most endearing passion for sobriquets and pseudonyms. Sometimes, of course, these were a political necessity: hence the comical alias ‘Monsieur Ramboz’, adopted while he was lying low in Paris. Even in liberal London, where there was little need for subterfuge, he sometimes signed his letters ‘A. Williams’ to evade any police finks in the postal sorting office. But most of the monikers he bestowed so liberally on friends and family were purely whimsical. Engels, the armchair soldier, was addressed by his imaginary rank, ‘General’. The housekeeper Helene Demuth was ‘Lenchen’ or, occasionally, ‘Nym’. Jennychen enjoyed the title if not the trappings of ‘Qui Qui, Emperor of China’, while Laura became ‘Kakadou’ and ‘the Hottentot’. Marx, known to intimates as ‘Moor’, encouraged his children to call him ‘Old Nick’ and ‘Charley’. Confusingly, the surest sign of his contempt for someone was the regular use of their Christian name: the poet Kinkel, anti-hero of Marx’s pamphlet
Great Men of the Exile
, was always referred to as ‘Gottfried’.

‘You know that my wife has made the world richer by one citizen?’ Marx wrote to Joseph Weydemeyer in Frankfurt, soon after Fawkesy’s début. The chirpy tone concealed a fearful apprehension: how on earth was he to provide for four young children and an ailing wife? Like Mr Micawber, he persuaded himself that something was bound to turn up. In October he had moved into a house in Anderson Street, Chelsea (then as now one of the more fashionable and expensive districts) at a rent of £6 a month, far more than he could afford.

A penniless, deracinated exile in a strange land might seem to need all the friends he can muster; but not Marx. The only ally he required was Engels – who, faithful as ever, moved to London on
12 November, loins girded for battle with the backsliders and traitors. At a meeting of the German Workers’ Education Society six days later, Marx changed the name of the refugees’ aid committee to distinguish it from a rival group founded by such namy-pamby ‘liberals’ as Gustav von Struve, Karl Heinzen and the Marxes’ newly acquired family doctor, Louis Bauer. With severe formality, he informed Dr Bauer that ‘
in view of the inimical relations
now obtaining between the two societies to which we belong – in view of your direct attacks upon the refugee committee here, at any rate upon my friends and colleagues in the same – we must break off social relations … Yesterday evening I thought it unseemly, in the presence of my wife, to express my views on this collision. While expressing my utmost obligation to you for your medical assistance, I would beg you to send me your account.’ As soon as the bill was presented, however, Marx accused the doctor of trying to fleece him and refused to pay.

By Christmas, Engels was able to report to another German comrade that ‘
all in all, things are going quite well here
. Struve and Heinzen are intriguing with all and sundry against the Workers’ Society and ourselves, but without success. They, together with some wailers of moderate persuasion who have been thrown out of our society, form a select club at which Heinzen airs his grievances about the noxious doctrines of the communists.’ When
The Times
described Heinzen as a ‘shining light of the German Social Democratic Party’, Engels sent a stern rebuttal to the
Northern Star
, a Chartist paper: ‘
Herr Heinzen, so far from serving as a shining light
to the party in question, has, on the contrary, ever since 1842, strenuously, though unsuccessfully, opposed everything like Socialism and Communism’. It was just like the old times in Paris or Brussels – a whirligig of intriguing, score-settling and striving for mastery. At the Society’s clubroom in Great Windmill Street, Soho, Marx soon took charge of vetting newcomers and laying down the law.

Wilhelm Liebknecht, who fled to London in 1850, left a vivid account of the intimidating methods by which Marx established
his dominance. At a Society picnic shortly after his arrival he was taken aside by ‘Père Marx’, who began a minute inspection of the shape of his skull. Unable to find any obvious abnormalities, Marx invited him to the ‘private parlour’ at Great Windmill Street the following day for a more thorough scrutiny:

I did not know what a private parlour was
, and I had a presentiment that now the ‘main’ examination was impending, but I followed confidingly. Marx, who had made the same sympathetic impression on me as the day previous, had the quality of inspiring confidence. He took my arm and led me into the private parlour; that is to say, the private room of the host – or was it a hostess? – where Engels, who had already provided himself with a pewter-pot full of dark-brown stout, at once received me with merry jokes … The massive mahogany table, the shining pewter-pots, the foaming stout, the prospect of a genuine English beefsteak with accessories, the long clay pipes inviting to a smoke – it was really comfortable and vividly recalled a certain picture in the English illustrations of ‘Boz’. But an examination it was for all that.

The examiners had done their homework. Citing an article written by Liebknecht for a German newspaper in 1848, Marx accused him of philistinism and ‘South German sentimental haziness’. After a long plea in mitigation, the candidate was pardoned. But his ordeal had not finished: the Communists’ resident phrenologist, Karl Pfaender, was then summoned to carry out a further investigation of Liebknecht’s cranial contours. ‘Well, my skull was officially inspected by Karl Pfaender and nothing was found that would have prevented my admission into the Holiest of Holies of the Communist League. But the examinations did not cease …’ Marx, who was only five or six years older than the ‘young fellows’ such as Wilhelm Liebknecht, quizzed them as if he were a professor testing a rather dim class of undergraduates, wielding his colossal knowledge and fabulous memory as instruments
of torture. ‘How he rejoiced when he had tempted a “little student” to go on the ice and demonstrated in the person of the unfortunate the inadequateness of our universities and of academic culture.’

Marx was undoubtedly a tremendous show-off and a sadistic intellectual thug. But he was also an inspiring teacher, who educated the young refugees in Spanish, Greek, Latin, philosophy and political economy. ‘And how patient he was in teaching, he who otherwise was so stormily impatient!’ From November 1849 he delivered a long course of lectures under the title ‘What is Bourgeois Property?’, which drew capacity crowds to the upstairs room at Great Windmill Street. ‘He stated a proposition – the shorter the better – and then demonstrated it in a lengthier explanation, endeavouring with the utmost care to avoid all expressions incomprehensible to the workers,’ Liebknecht recalled. ‘Then he requested his audience to put questions to him. If this was not done he commenced to examine the workers, and he did this with such pedagogic skill that no flaw, no misunderstanding escaped him … He also made use of a blackboard, on which he wrote the formulas – among them those familiar to all of us from the beginning of
Capital
.’

The denizens of Great Windmill Street maintained a busy timetable. On Sundays, there were lectures on history, geography and astronomy, followed by ‘questions of the present position of the workers and their attitude to the bourgeoisie’. Discussions about communism occupied most of Monday and Tuesday, but later in the week the curriculum included singing practice, language teaching, drawing lessons and even dancing classes. Saturday evening was devoted to ‘music, recitations and reading interesting newspaper articles’. In spare moments, Marx would stroll up to Rathbone Place, just off Oxford Street, where a group of French émigrés had opened a salon in which fencing with sabres, swords and foils could be practised. According to Liebknecht, Marx’s cut-and-thrust technique was crude but effective. ‘What he lacked in science, he tried to make up in
aggressiveness. And unless you were cool, he could really startle you.’

As with the sword, so with the mightier pen: when not brandishing an épée he was preparing to unsheathe yet another newspaper with which he could stab and gore the philistines. At the beginning of 1850, the following announcement appeared in the German press: ‘
The
Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue
edited by Karl Marx will appear in January 1850 … The review will be published in monthly issues of at least five printers’ sheets at a subscription price of 24 silver groschen per quarter.’ The business manager was to be Conrad Schramm, another footloose German revolutionary who had come to London a few months earlier.