Karl Marx Read online

  No such luck. Apparently forgetting his insistence that revolution was possible only as the consequence of an economic débâcle, he scanned the horizon for some other dark cloud. On 24 June 1855 the Chartists held a rally in Hyde Park to protest against the new Sunday Trading Bill, which would ban the opening of pubs and the printing of newspapers on the sabbath. Ladies and gentlemen riding along Rotten Row had to run the gauntlet of demonstrators; some were forced to dismount and flee. ‘We were spectators from beginning to end,’ Marx wrote in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, ‘and do not think we are exaggerating in saying that the English revolution began yesterday in Hyde Park.’

  A similar gathering one week later drew an even bigger crowd – and another vivid dispatch from Marx to the Neue Oder-Zeitung. ‘At once the constabulary rushed from ambush, whipped their truncheons out of their pockets, began to beat up people’s heads until the blood ran profusely, yanked individuals here and there out of the vast multitude (a total of 104 were thus arrested) and dragged them to the improvised blockhouses.’ But the character of the scene was quite different from the improvised class war of the previous weekend:

  Last Sunday the masses were confronted by the ruling class as individuals. This time it appeared as the state power, the law, the truncheon. This time resistance meant insurrection, and the Englishman must be provoked for a long time before he breaks out in insurrection. Hence the counter-demonstration was confined, in the main, to hissing, jeering and whistling at the police-wagons, to isolated and feeble attempts at liberating the arrested, but above all to passive resistance in phlegmatically standing their ground.

  Thus did ‘the English revolution’ fizzle out, only seven days after Marx’s bold fanfare; and all because of the natives’ deferential timidity when confronted by the majesty of institutionalised power. It is all too like a scene from Gilbert and Sullivan in which the bloodthirsty pirates of Penzance, having captured a posse of police officers, are standing over their victims with drawn swords. ‘We charge you yield,’ a police sergeant commands from a prostrate position, ‘in Queen Victoria’s name!’ The pirate king cannot but obey: ‘We yield at once, with humbled mien,/Because, with all our faults, we love our Queen.’

  For the rest of his life, Marx’s view of the English proletariat oscillated between reverence and scorn. In January 1862 he cited British workers’ support for the North in the American Civil War as ‘a new, splendid proof of the indestructible thoroughness of the English popular masses, that thoroughness which is the secret of England’s greatness’. But when anti-government demonstrators tore down the Hyde Park railings in July 1866, he despaired of their moderation. ‘The Englishman first needs a revolutionary education, of course,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘If the railings – and it was touch and go – had been used offensively and defensively against the police and about twenty of the latter had been knocked out, the military would have had to “intervene” instead of only parading. And then there would have been some fun. One thing is certain, these thick-headed John Bulls, whose brainpans seem to have been specially manufactured for the constables’ bludgeons, will never get anywhere without a really bloody encounter with the ruling powers.’ As he conceded, however, there was no great likelihood of serious combat: the workers were ‘slavish’, ‘sheepish’ and incurably enfeebled by a ‘bourgeois infection’.

  This disease had many small but telling symptoms. The historian Keith Thomas has suggested that ‘the preoccupation with gardening, like that with pets, fishing and other hobbies … helps to explain the relative lack of radical and political impulses among the British proletariat’. Hence the popularity of allotments in the nineteenth century, and the surprising dearth of large-scale tenement blocks – which ‘would have deprived working men of the gardens which they regarded as a necessity’. For every worker who ripped up railings in Hyde Park, there were dozens more who wanted only to walk their dogs or inspect the flower-beds.

  Even Ernest Jones, the Chartist leader whom Marx most admired, soon revealed himself as a middle-class dilettante by advocating a coalition between the Chartists and the thoroughly bourgeois radicals. ‘The business with Jones is very disgusting,’ Engels wrote after hearing him address a meeting in Manchester. ‘One is really almost driven to believe that the English proletarian movement in its old traditional Chartist form must perish completely before it can develop in a new, viable form.’ But what form would this be? As Engels noted, with rueful prescience, ‘the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie’. So it has come to pass: in the England of today, toffs and workers alike buy their food from Tesco superstores and watch the National Lottery draw on Saturday nights. If the ghosts of Marx and Engels returned they would also notice the most bizarre oxymoron of all, a bourgeois monarchy, whose young princes wear baseball caps, eat Big Macs and take their holidays at Eurodisney. In Hyde Park, where once the Chartists taunted aristocrats and Karl Marx thought the English revolution had begun, the largest mass assembly in living memory occurred on 6 September 1997 – for the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.

  Marx’s final verdict on his adopted country can be found in a letter written shortly before his death in 1883. After mocking the ‘poor British bourgeois, who groan as they assume more and more “responsabilities” [sic] in the service of their historic mission, while vainly protesting against it’, he concluded with a cry of exasperation: ‘Drat the British!’

  Ernest Jones’s apostasy in joining forces with the middle-class liberals incurred the most severe punishment Marx and Engels could mete out: he was labelled an ‘opportunist’. A few years later they passed the same sentence on Ferdinand Lassalle for his proposal that Prussian workers and noblemen should gang up against the industrial bourgeoisie. While railing against these cynical marriages of convenience, however, Marx himself was forming opportunistic partnerships with some pretty rum coves.

  The rummiest of them all was David Urquhart, an eccentric Scottish aristocrat and sometime Tory MP who is now remembered, if at all, as the man who introduced Turkish baths to England. ‘To most of his adherents, to the end of his life, Urquhart was the Bey, the Chief, the Prophet, almost “the sent of God”,’ one disciple recorded. ‘To his little daughter dreaming of her father … it did not seem strange that that same father should change, after the strange fashion of dreams, into the Christ. “It is really the same thing, is it not, mother?” she said.’ To less worshipful observers, he was a cantankerous old walrus with a lopsided moustache, a lopsided bow-tie and exceedingly lopsided opinions. ‘There is no art I have practised so assiduously as the faculty of making men hate me,’ Urquhart boasted. ‘That removes apathy. You can get them into speech. Then you have their words to catch and hurl back at them to knock them down with.’ Many mid-Victorian eminences could testify to the success of this technique: he had enemies galore.

  Born in Scotland in 1805, educated in France, Switzerland and Spain, Urquhart discovered his long obsession with the East when at the age of twenty-one he sailed – at the suggestion of Jeremy Bentham, an admirer – to take part in the Greek war of independence, and was severely wounded at the siege of Scio. Having caught the attention of Sir Herbert Taylor, private secretary to William IV, he was then dispatched on secret diplomatic missions to Constantinople, where he abruptly changed his allegiance. ‘This chap went to Greece as a Philhellene and, after three years of fighting the Turks, proceeded to Turkey and went into raptures about those selfsame Turks,’ Marx wrote in March 1853 after chuckling over Urquhart’s book Turkey and Its Resources.

  He enthuses over Islam on the principle, ‘if I wasn’t a Calvinist, I could only be a Mohammedan’. Turks, particularly those of the Ottoman Empire in its heyday, are the most perfect nation on earth in every possible way. The Turkish language is the most perfect and melodious in the world … If a European is maltreat
ed in Turkey, he has only himself to blame; your Turk hates neither the religion of the Frank, nor his character, but only his narrow trousers. Imitation of Turkish architecture, etiquette, etc. is strongly recommended. The author himself was several times kicked in the bottom by Turks, but subsequently realised that he alone was to blame … In short, only the Turk is a gentleman and freedom exists only in Turkey.

  Urquhart’s hosts in Constantinople were dazzled by his extravagant Turkophilia. ‘The Turkish officials placed such reliance on Urquhart,’ according to the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘that they kept him immediately informed of all communications made to them by the Russian ambassador. Lord Palmerston, however, took alarm … and wrote to the ambassador, Lord Ponsonby, to remove him from Constantinople as a danger to the peace of Europe.’ As well he might. Urquhart’s passionate partisanship – pro-Turkey, anti-Russia – left him at odds with British policy, and persuaded him that his own country’s government had been hijacked by sinister forces. In short, he concluded that the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, must be a secret Russian agent. On his return to Britain he founded several newspapers and a national network of ‘foreign affairs committees’ to disseminate this bold conspiracy theory. After entering Parliament in 1847, he fired off a fusillade of speeches calling for an immediate inquiry into the conduct of the Foreign Office, ‘with a view to the impeachment of the Right Honourable Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston’.

  Essentially a romantic reactionary, Uruquhart nevertheless managed to convince some radicals that he was really on their side – speaking for the downtrodden workers against their devious and deceitful rulers. Though the more revolutionary Chartists dismissed him as a Tory spy whose populist crusade against Lord Palmerston was a ‘red herring’, others praised his exposure of ‘the injury done to the labour and capital of this country by the expansion of the Russian Empire, and the almost universal exercise of Russian influence, all directed to the destruction of British commerce.’

  This all chimed in most harmoniously with Karl Marx’s own hatred and mistrust of Tsarist Russia. ‘Excited but not convinced’ by Urquhart’s allegations, he set to work with characteristic diligence, poring over old copies of Hansard and the diplomatic Blue Books in search of evidence. His progress can be followed through the changing tone of his letters to Engels. In the spring of 1853 he mocked Urquhart as ‘the mad MP who denounces Palmerston as being in the pay of Russia’. By that summer, he was already showing rather more respect: ‘In the Advertiser four letters by D. Urquhart on the eastern question contained much that was interesting, despite quirks and quiddities.’ Before autumn was out, the conversion to Urquhartism – if not to Urquhart himself – was complete. ‘I have come to the same conclusion as that monomaniac Urquhart – namely that for several decades Palmerston has been in the pay of Russia,’ he wrote on 2 November. ‘I am glad that chance should have led me to take a closer look at the foreign policy – diplomatic – of the past twenty years. We had very much neglected this aspect, and one ought to know with whom one is dealing.’

  The first fruit of these researches was a series of articles for the New York Tribune at the end of 1853, describing Palmerston’s clandestine ‘connections’ with the Russian government. Urquhart, understandably delighted, arranged a meeting with the author early in 1854 at which he paid him the highest compliment in his lexicon by saying that ‘the articles read as though written by a Turk’. Marx, rather crossly, pointed out that he was in fact a German revolutionist.

  ‘He is an utter maniac,’ Marx reported soon after this strange encounter:

  is firmly convinced that he will one day be Premier of England. When everyone else is downtrodden, England will come to him and say, Save us, Urquhart! And then he will save her. While speaking, particularly if contradicted, he goes into fits … The fellow’s most comical idea is this: Russia rules the world through having a specific superfluity of brain. To cope with her, a man must have the brain of an Urquhart and, if one has the misfortune not to be Urquhart himself, one should at least be an Urquhartite, i.e. believe what Urquhart believes, his ‘metaphysics’, his ‘political economy’ etc etc. One should have been in the ‘East’, or at least have absorbed the Turkish ‘spirit’, etc.

  When some of Marx’s Palmerston articles from the Tribune were reprinted as a pamphlet, he was horrified to discover that polemics by Urquhart were appearing in the same series – and promptly forbade any further publication. ‘I do not wish to be numbered among the followers of that gentleman,’ he explained to Ferdinand Lassalle, ‘with whom I have only one thing in common, viz. my views on Palmerston, but to whom in all other matters I am diametrically opposed.’

  One might infer from this that any further offers or inducements from the maniac would be rejected with a brisk ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ But Marx could not afford to maintain his principled posture for long. Harried by impatient creditors, he found it hard to resist a commission to write a series for one of Urquhart’s journals, the Sheffield Free Press, in the summer of 1856. ‘The Urquhartites are being damned importunate,’ he grumbled. ‘A good thing financially. But I don’t know whether, politically, I ought to get too involved with the fellows.’ The articles were suitably sensational: he claimed to have discovered, among the diplomatic manuscripts at the British Museum, ‘a series of documents going back from the end of the eighteenth century to the time of Peter the Great, which revealed the secret and permanent collaboration of the Cabinets at London and St Petersburg’. More alarmingly still, the aim of Russia throughout this period had been nothing less than the conquest of the earth. ‘It is yet the policy of Peter the Great, and of modern Russia, whatever changes of name, seat and character the hostile power used may have undergone. Peter the Great is indeed the inventor of modern Russian policy, but he became so only by divesting the old Muscovite method of its merely local character and its accidental admixtures, by distilling it into an abstract formula, by generalising its purpose, and exalting its object from the overthrow of certain given limits of power to the aspiration of unlimited power.’

  There was a rather obvious flaw in the theory that Britain and Russia had been in cahoots for the previous 150 years: the Crimean War. Urquhart and Marx had a ready explanation. The war had been a cunning ploy to throw sleuths off the scent of Palmerston’s corrupt alliance with Russia; and Britain had deliberately prosecuted the war as incompetently as possible. To the dedicated conspiracy theorist, all is explicable, and any inconvenient facts are merely further confirmation of the diabolical deviousness of his prey.

  Marx may have convinced himself, but few others were persuaded. His philippics against Palmerston and Russia were reissued in 1899 by his daughter Eleanor as two pamphlets, The Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century and The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston – though with some of the more provocative passages quietly excised. For most of the twentieth century they remained out of print and largely forgotten. The Institute of Marxism – Leninism in Moscow omitted them from its otherwise exhaustive collected works, presumably because the Soviet editors could not bring themselves to admit that the presiding spirit of the Russian revolution had in fact been a fervent Russophobe. Marxist hagiographers in the West have also been reluctant to draw attention to this embarrassing partnership between the revolutionist and the reactionary. An all-too-typical example is The Life and Teaching of Karl Marx by John Lewis, published in 1965; the curious reader may search the text for any mention of David Urquhart, or of Marx’s contribution to his obsessive crusade – but will find nothing.

  Urquhart himself later turned his attention to other, equally quixotic causes. A devout if unorthodox Roman Catholic, he spent many years appealing to Pope Pius IX for the restoration of Canon Law while also proselytising tirelessly on behalf of the Turkish bath. (‘Did you overlook, in one of the Guardians you sent me, the item in which David Urquhart figures as an infanticide?’ Marx wrote to Engels in 1858. ‘The fool treated his thirteen-month-old baby
to a Turkish bath which, as chance would have it, contributed to congestion of the brain and hence its subsequent death. The coroner’s inquest on this case lasted for three days and it was only by the skin of his teeth that Urquhart escaped a verdict of manslaughter.’) Urquhart’s house in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, was described by one visitor as ‘an Eastern palace, with a Turkish bath … which in luxuriousness was inferior to none in Constantinople’. A session in this ornate sweat-chamber might have done Marx’s carbuncles a power of good, but as far as one can discover he never had the pleasure.

  8

  The Hero on Horseback

  Shortly before dawn on 16 January 1855 Jenny Marx gave birth to another daughter, Eleanor. The father was none too ecstatic. ‘Unfortunately of the “sex” par excellence,’ he told Engels. ‘If it had been a male child, well and good.’ His announcement of Franziska’s arrival, four years earlier, had been equally joyless. It would be easy to infer that Marx felt only lukewarm affection for his daughters; easy, but wrong. Their own letters and autobiographical scraps all testify that ‘Moor’ was an adoring father who inspired utter devotion in return. Unlike many men of his generation, he treated girls as intelligent adults-to-be. To Eleanor, as to her sisters before her, he read the whole of Homer, Shakespeare, the Niebelungen Lied, Gudrun, Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights and much else. For her sixth birthday she was given her first novel, Peter Simple, which was soon followed by the complete works of Marryat, Cooper and Walter Scott. Subjects that would have been taboo devant les enfants in other middle-class Victorian households – atheism, socialism – were not merely permitted but encouraged. After a family outing to hear the sung mass in a Roman Catholic church, when Eleanor was about five, she confessed to feeling ‘certain religious qualms’. Her father then ‘made everything straight’, patiently elucidating the story of the carpenter whom the rich men killed. ‘We can forgive Christianity much,’ he told her, ‘because it taught us the worship of the child.’