Karl Marx (17 page)

The harassment of ‘Marx and consorts’ did not cow or silence them; if anything, they became more reckless. ‘
A characteristic feature of the Rhineland
,’ Engels told a meeting of Cologne democrats in mid-August, ‘is hatred of Prussian officialdom and dyed-in-the-wool Prussianism; it is to be hoped that this attitude will endure.’ As he must have known, Prussian officialdom did not care to have its tail tweaked. The army, in particular, seemed to be entirely out of control, merrily sabotaging the so-called ‘Government of Action’ that had been formed only a couple of months earlier. In August the Prussian assembly in Berlin demanded the sacking of any military officers who were unwilling to accept the new constitutional system. The Minister of War took no notice, and on 8 September the government was toppled
by a vote of no confidence from the assembly, proposed by representatives of the Left and Centre.

Marx himself happened to be in Berlin at the time, returning from a fund-raising trip to Vienna. ‘
Indescribable rejoicing broke out
when news of the government’s defeat became known to the assembled crowd,’ he reported back to Engels, who was running the newspaper in his absence. ‘Thousands of people joined this procession and to the accompaniment of endless hurrahs the masses rolled across the Opera House Square. Never before has such an expression of joy been seen here.’

It was a pyrrhic victory. Caught up in the euphoria of the crowd, Marx had blithely assumed that there would now be a government of the Centre Left. A moment’s reflection might have shown him that the King of Prussia would never tolerate such an affront. Sure enough, by the time Marx returned to Cologne the counter-revolution had begun. Defying the wishes of the people’s representatives in Berlin, the King began composing a new cabinet of reactionary bureaucrats and army officers. ‘The Crown and the Assembly confront each other,’ Marx wrote on 14 September. ‘It is possible that arms will decide the issue. The side that has the greater courage and consistency will win.’

A heroic delusion, of course: bravery would count for little against the full might of state intimidation. Soon after dawn on 25 September the Cologne police arrested several leaders of the newly formed Committee of Public Safety, including Karl Schapper and Hermann Becker; they came for Engels, too, but he had made himself scarce. At lunchtime Marx addressed a mass meeting in the old marketplace, warning workers not to react to these ‘police provocations’ by taking to the barricades. The time was not yet ripe for street fighting.

But time, like quinces and avocado pears, has a trick of going rotten before it is ripe. A state of martial law was declared in Cologne on 25 September, and the military commander immediately suspended publication of the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
. Marx issued a leaflet to subscribers explaining that ‘the pen has to
submit to the sabre’, but promised that the paper would appear again before long ‘in an enlarged format’.

With several of the journalists already jailed and shareholders refusing to subsidise a newspaper in limbo, this seemed rather optimistic – especially since Marx’s most valuable colleague, Engels, had scarpered as soon as he heard that the police were after him, pausing briefly in Barmen to break the news to his horrified parents before fleeing to the sanctuary of Belgium. The rival
Kölnische Zeitung
, patriotic and law-abiding as ever, published the warrant for his arrest:

Name:
Friedrich Engels;
occupation: merchant
; place of birth and residence: Barmen; religion: Evangelical; age: 27 years; height: 5 feet 8 inches; hair and eyebrows: dark blond; forehead: ordinary; eyes: grey; nose and mouth: well-proportioned; teeth: good; beard: brown; chin and face: oval; complexion: healthy; figure: slender.

A splendid advertisement for the revolutionary lifestyle. The owner of this healthy complexion and well-proportioned nose arrived in Brussels on 5 October, accompanied by Ernst Dronke, but the two fugitives had only just sat down to dinner in their hotel when a police posse dragged them off to the Petits-Carmes prison, taking full advantage of the law against ‘vagabonds’ which had proved so effective with Jenny Marx. Two hours later Engels and Dronke were driven to the railway station in a sealed carriage and escorted on to the next train for Paris.

As soon as the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
resumed publication after the lifting of martial law, on 12 October, Marx wrote a furious editorial about the ‘brutal treatment’ of his friends. ‘
It is clear from this that the Belgian government
is increasingly learning to recognise its position,’ he commented:

The Belgians gradually become policemen for all their neighbours, and are overjoyed when they are complimented on their
quiet and submissive behaviour. Nevertheless, there is something ridiculous about the good Belgian policeman. Even the earnest
Times
only jestingly acknowleged the Belgian desire to please. Recently it advised the Belgian nation, after it had got rid of all the [workers’] clubs, to turn itself into one big club with the motto: ‘
Ne risquez rien
!’ It goes without saying that the official Belgian press, in its cretinism, also reprinted this piece of flattery and welcomed it jubilantly.

The struggle to save Germany’s infant democracy was reaching its climax, with a revolutionary uprising in Vienna and street battles in Berlin. No sooner had Marx been elected president of the Cologne Workers’ Association, on 22 October, than the editor of the Association’s newspaper was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment for defaming Herr Hecker. Encouraged by this small victory over his tormentors, the vengeful public prosecutor brought several new lawsuits against Marx, claiming that his speeches were tantamount to ‘high treason’. Absurdly, he also started libel proceedings over an item published by the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
under the byline ‘Hecker’, even though the article was plainly a valedictory message to the German people from the republican Friedrich Hecker, who was leaving to start a new life in America. Nevertheless, Cologne’s tinpot Torquemada alleged that readers would assume it reflected his own views. As Marx asked incredulously, did the plaintiff really think that ‘
this newspaper, with its inventive maliciousness,
has signed its own proclamation “Hecker” in order to make the German people believe that Hecker, the public prosecutor, is emigrating to New York, that Hecker, the public prosecutor, proclaims the German republic, that Hecker, the public prosecutor, officially sanctions pious revolutionary wishes?’ Probably not: but it was yet another opportunity to hound and harass the enemies of the Prussian state.

Instead of hastening back to his fatherland for the denouement of these various dramas – half-tragedy, half-farce – Engels forgot
about them altogether. After a few days’ rest in Paris, he set off alone on a strange, meandering ramble through the French countryside in the vague direction of Switzerland – though with many a pleasant detour along the way. As he admitted, ‘one does not readily part from France’. Comrades in Cologne might be fighting for their lives and liberties, but he was in no particular hurry to join them. Could it be that he had lost his nerve?

Engels’s unpublished journal of this month-long odyssey, which scarcely mentions the crisis engulfing Germany, is written with all the saucer-eyed wonder of a novice tourist. ‘
What country in Europe can compare with France
in wealth, in the variety of its gifts of nature and products, in its universality?’ he gushes. ‘And what wine! What a diversity, from Bordeaux to Burgundy, from Burgundy to the heavy St Georges, Lünel and Frontignan of the south, and from that to sparkling champagne!’ He seems to have been more or less squiffy all the time – especially in Auxerre, which he reached in time to celebrate the new Burgundian vintage. ‘The 1848 harvest was so infinitely rich that not enough barrels could be found to take all the wine. And what is more, of such quality – better than ’46, perhaps even better than ’34!’

It wasn’t only the wine that intoxicated: ‘At every step I found the gayest company, the sweetest grapes and the prettiest girls.’ After expert and exhaustive research, he concluded that the ‘cleanly washed, smoothly combed, slimly built’ women of Burgundy were preferable to their ‘earthy’ and ‘tousled’ counterparts between the Seine and the Loire. ‘It will therefore be readily believed that I spent more time lying in the grass with the vintners and their girls, eating grapes, drinking wine, chatting and laughing, than marching up the hill.’

One can see why the journey took so long – and why he was flat broke when he finally arrived in Switzerland. Appealing to both his father and Marx for donations, and hearing nothing from either, he wrote again to Cologne wondering nervously if the editor had disowned him for going AWOL. ‘Dear Engels,’ Marx replied. ‘
I am truly amazed that you should still not have
received any money from me.
I
(not the dispatch department) sent you 61 thalers ages ago … To suppose that I could leave you in the lurch for even a moment is sheer fantasy. You will always remain my friend and confidant as I hope to remain yours, K. Marx.’ He added a cheerfully combative PS: ‘Your old man’s a swine and we shall write him a damned rude letter.’ But it soon dawned on him that this might not be an effective fund-raising technique. ‘
I have devised an infallible plan
for extracting money from your old man, as we now have none,’ he wrote on 29 November, after further consideration. ‘Write me a begging letter (as crude as possible) in which you retail your past vicissitudes, but in such a way that I can pass it on to your mother. The old man’s beginning to get the wind up.’ Billy Bunter, it may be recalled, used a similar appeal to maternal sympathy when trying to extract postal orders from his father, and it was no more successful for him than for Marx and Engels.

By Christmas, Engels was bored of ‘sinful living’ and ‘lazing about in foreign parts’. In a letter from Berne he offered a preposterous new excuse for his truancy: ‘If there are sufficient grounds for believing that I shall not be detained for questioning, I shall come at once. After that they may, so far as I’m concerned, place me before 10,000 juries, but when you’re arrested for questioning you’re not allowed to smoke, and I won’t let myself in for that.’

After being reassured that he needn’t sacrifice his cigars for the cause, Engels returned to Germany in January – only to find that the revolution was all but over. A new government had been formed under the reactionary Count Brandenburg, bastard son of Frederick William II, and the King had dissolved the Prussian assembly. ‘The bourgeoisie did not raise a finger; they simply allowed the people to fight for them,’ Marx grumbled in the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
, admitting that his vision of a grand alliance between the workers and the middle classes had been no more than a pipedream. The Prussian débâcle proved that a bourgeois revolution was impossible in Germany; nothing short of a
republican insurrection would now suffice. But the German working class was unable to gird up its loins for action without encouragement from abroad – specifically, from France. After brooding on the lessons of the previous year, he published a revised revolutionary menu on 1 January 1849:

The overthrow of the bourgeoisie in France
, the triumph of the French working class, the emancipation of the working class in general, is therefore the rallying cry of European liberation.

But
England
, the country that turns whole nations into its proletarians, that takes the whole world within its immense embrace …
England
seems to be the rock against which the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled in the womb.

Every social upheaval in France was bound to be thwarted by the industrial and commercial power of the English middle class, ‘and only a world war can overthrow the Old England, as only this can provide the Chartists, the party of the organised English workers, with the conditions for a successful rising against their gigantic oppressors’. This seasonal game of consequences – which, more than a century later, would come to be known as the domino theory – led to an inescapable and apocalyptic conclusion. ‘The table of contents for 1849 reads:
Revolutionary uprising of the French working class, world war
.’

And for afters? During 1848 the working class had been thoroughly worsted whenever and wherever it raised its head above the barricades – in France, Prussia, Austria and not least England itself, where a mass demonstration in Kennington, South London, marked the end of the Chartist threat. But with his talent for paradox and perversity, Marx could discern potential triumph in every disaster, silver linings behind every cloud, a new dawn lurking in even the most Stygian night. So what if the counter-revolutions had succeeded? This would spur the workers
into a proper cavalry charge next time. He put his faith in the old tactic of
réculer pour mieux sauter
.

As it turned out, 1849 was merely a gloomy postscript to 1848. One month after publishing the New Year message, Marx and Engels stood trial on the by now familiar charge of insulting the public prosecutor. In an hour-long speech from the dock, Marx showed what a brilliant mind the legal profession had lost when he declined to follow his father’s career, deconstructing Articles 222 and 367 of the Napoleonic penal code until there was nothing left but a handful of dust. He lectured the jury on the important if pedantic distinction between insulting remarks and calumny; he argued that the prosecutor must prove not only the insult but the
intention
to insult, since Article 367 allowed a journalist to publish ‘facts’ even if they caused offence. In his exegesis of Article 222 (which forbade insults against public officials) he pointed out that the penal code, unlike Prussian law, did not include the crime of
lèse-majesté
; and since the King of Prussia wasn’t an official he could not avail himself of Article 222 either. ‘Why am I permitted to insult the King, whereas I am not permitted to insult the chief public prosecutor?’