Karl Marx Read online

  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.’

  * * *

  *See Postscript 3 for the only surviving record of an actual chess game played by Marx.

  6

  The Megalosaurus

  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.

  Marx’s ambitions for the review were heroically grand. ‘I have little doubt that by the time three, or maybe two, monthly issues have appeared, a world conflagration will intervene,’ he predicted. In the meantime, however, there was the small but tiresome problem of finance. Convinced that ‘money is to be had only in America’, Marx decided to send Conrad Schramm on a transatlantic fund-raising tour – until it belatedly dawned on him that such a lengthy journey would incur even more expense.

  The new journal, which limped through five issues before expiring, was jinxed from the start. The first issue was postponed when Marx fell ill for a fortnight; the typesetters’ inability to decipher his scrawl caused further delay; he argued continually with the publisher and distributor, suspecting them of being in league with the censors. The miracle is that it ever appeared at all.

  There were many good things in the Revue – notably a long series in which Marx employed all his dialectical ingenuity to challenge the received wisdom that the French revolution of 1848 had failed. ‘What succumbed in these defeats was not the revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary traditional appendages, results of social relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class antagonisms …’ Success would have been a disaster in disguise: it was only by a series of rebuffs that the revolutionary party could free itself of illusory notions and opportunistic leaders. ‘In a word: the revolution made progress, forged ahead, not by its immediate tragi-comic achievements, but on the contrary by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution.’ Having proved this contrarian thesis to his own satisfaction (‘The revolution is dead! – Long live the revolution!’), he moved on to discuss Louis Napoleon’s spectacular victory in the presidential elections of December 1848. Why had the French voted, in such overwhelming numbers, for this preposterous deadbeat – ‘clumsily cunning, knavishly naïve, doltishly sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, a cleverly stupid anachronism, a world-historic piece of buffoonery and an undecipherable hieroglyphic’? Simple: the very blankness of this junior Bonaparte allowed all classes and types to reinvent him in their own image. To the peasantry, he was the enemy of the rich; to the proletariat, he represented the overthrow of bourgeois republicanism; to the haute bourgeoisie, he offered the hope of royalist restoration; to the army, he promised war. Thus it happened that the most simple-minded man in France acquired the most complex significance: ‘Just because he was nothing, he could signify everything.’