Karl Marx (40 page)

Neither Marx’s wife nor his best friend needed any such convoluted justifications for taking sides. Jenny thought that France deserved a damn good walloping for having the impudence to try and export its ‘civilis-a-a-ation’ into the sacred soil of Germany. ‘
All the French, even the tiny number of better ones,
have an element of chauvinism in some remote corner of their hearts,’ she wrote to Engels. ‘This will have to be knocked out of them.’ Engels, who spent the war profitably knocking out military analyses for the
Pall Mall Gazette
, also felt the tug of atavistic allegiance. ‘
My confidence in the military achievements of the Germans grows daily
,’ he enthused. ‘We really do seem to have won the first serious encounter.’ Once Bonaparte had been smashed, his long-suffering citizens would at last have the chance to take power for themselves.

But did the Parisians have either the means or the leaders to effect a revolution while resisting the Prussian army? This question, more than any other, tormented Marx during those sleepless nights. ‘
One cannot conceal from oneself
that the twenty-year-long Bonapartist farce has caused enormous demoralisation,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘One is hardly justified in counting on revolutionary heroism. What do you think about it?’ Engels barely had time to reply before Bonaparte surrendered at Sedan and a
new regime – the Third Republic – was proclaimed in Paris.

If you wait by the river for long enough, you will see the corpses of your enemies float by. The installation of the pipsqueak Napoleon had provoked Marx’s
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
almost twenty years earlier; now he had the pleasure of writing the obituary. On 9 September the International issued a Second Address on the war, which began with the rather smug confirmation that ‘
we were not mistaken as to the vitality
of the Second Empire’. Alas, Marx continued, ‘we were not wrong in our apprehension lest the German war should “lose its strictly defensive character and degenerate into a war against the French people”.’ Anyone referring back to the First Address might notice that he had in fact denied this possibility, insisting that the heroic German working class would forestall it. But the purely ‘defensive’ campaign had ended with the capitulation at Sedan, and now that the Germans were demanding the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine he quickly rewrote history to spare his own blushes.

Not that we should be too hard on old Marx. His earlier tribute to Teutonic restraint had been a triumph of hope over experience, but with that notable exception his entrail-reading was amazingly accurate. If the fortune of arms and the arrogance of success led Prussia to dismember France, what then? In the Second Address he warned that Germany would either ‘become the avowed tool of Russian aggrandisement, or, after some short respite, make again ready for another “defensive” war, not one of those newfangled “localised” wars, but a
war of races
– a war of the combined Slavonian and Roman races’. A letter to the International’s American organiser, Friedrich Adolph Sorge, was even more prescient. ‘
What the Prussian jackasses do not see
is that the present war is leading … inevitably to a war between Germany and Russia. And such a war No. 2 will act as the midwife of the inevitable social revolution in Russia.’ Marx did not live to see the drama of 1917, but it would not have surprised him in the least. Sometimes he seemed to be looking even further ahead:

If limits are to be fixed by military interests, there will be no end to claims, because every military line is necessarily faulty, and may be improved by annexing some more outlying territory; and, moreover, they can never be fixed finally and fairly, because they must always be imposed by the conqueror upon the conquered, and consequently carry within them the seed of fresh wars.

Those who cite Marx’s occasional misjudgements as proof of his historical myopia might care to tell us if any other mid-Victorian had such an acute premonition of the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Marx’s Second Address welcomed the new French Republic (‘
Vive la République
!’), but with profound misgivings. ‘That Republic has not subverted the throne, but only taken its place become vacant,’ he noted. ‘It has been proclaimed, not as a social conquest, but as a national measure of defence.’ The provisional government was an unstable coalition of Orleanists and Republicans, Bonapartists and Jacobins, which might turn out to be a mere bridge or stopgap for a royal restoration. Nevertheless, the French workers must do their duty as citizens and banish all thoughts of revolution. ‘Any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly.’

Desperate folly was, of course, the favourite pastime of Michael Bakunin, who had been following the news from France at his Swiss villa. Hearing of an insurrection in Lyons after the Sedan defeat, he hastened there at once, strutted into the Hotel de Ville and appointed himself leader of the ‘Committee of French Salvation’. In a proclamation from the balcony of the town hall he then decreed the Abolition of the State – adding that anyone who disagreed with him would be executed. (
Very
libertarian.) The state, in the form of a platoon of National Guards, promptly entered the town hall through a door which had been inadvertently left unguarded and forced the Messiah of Lyons to scuttle back to the safe shores of Lake Geneva.

Marx’s admonishment against upsetting the apple-cart had no more influence than Bakunin’s vainglorious buffoonery. Adolphe Thiers, a veteran liberal lawyer, was installed as president of the Third Republic, and soon set about suing for peace with Prussia on behalf of his ill-named ‘Government of National Defence’. The rage of Parisians at this capitulation was redoubled when he announced that reparations would be financed by the immediate repayment of all outstanding bills and rents, which had been suspended during the siege. On 18 March 1871 an indignant crowd took to the streets – backed by the city’s National Guard, which had refused to obey an order to hand over its weapons to the government. Thiers and his followers decamped to Versailles, leaving the nation’s capital in the hands of its citizens.

Once again, the Gallic cock had crowed. The rulers of Europe affected deafness at first, perhaps hoping that the squawks would fade if they took no notice. When this failed, their panic was delightful to behold.
The Times
of London thundered against ‘this dangerous sentiment of the Democracy, this conspiracy against civilisation in its so-called capital’. Even Karl Marx, it reported, was so horrified by the uprising that he had sent a stern message of rebuke to French members of the International. The paper then had to publish a denial from Marx, who revealed that the alleged letter was ‘
an impudent forgery
’. (‘
You must not believe a word of all the stuff you get to see
in the bourgeois papers about the internal events in Paris,’ he advised Liebknecht in Germany. ‘It is all lies and deception. Never has the vileness of the reptile bourgeois newspaper hacks displayed itself more splendidly.’)

Marx’s excitement at ‘the internal events in Paris’ was tempered only by a fear that the revolutionaries might be too decent for their own good. Instead of marching on Versailles at once to finish off Thiers and his wretched crew, they ‘lost precious moments’ organising a city-wide election for the Commune. He also disapproved of their willingness to allow the National Bank to continue with business as usual: if Marx had been in charge he’d have ransacked the vaults at once. Even so, bliss was it in that
dawn to be alive. ‘
What resilience, what historical initiative
, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians!’ he exclaimed. ‘After six months of hunger and ruin, caused rather by internal treachery than by the external enemy, they rise, beneath Prussian bayonets, as if there had never been a war between France and Germany and the enemy were still not at the gates of Paris! History has no like example of such greatness.’

Of the ninety-two Communards elected by popular suffrage on 28 March, seventeen were members of the International. At a meeting in London that same day, the General Council unanimously agreed that Marx should draft a new ‘Address to the People of Paris’. But then nothing happened. Throughout the two months of the Commune’s existence, the International made no public statement whatever. By the time Marx delivered his fifty-page Address, on 30 May, it was an epitaph: Thiers’s troops had retaken the city three days earlier, and the cobblestones of Paris were red with the blood of at least 20,000 murdered Communards.

Why the delay? His biographers usually attribute it to ‘
Marx’s personal ambivalence to the Commune
’. He was certainly haunted by fears that the Commune would fall, but apprehension is not the same as ambivalence. The main reason, more banal and familiar, is that for much of April and May he had bronchitis and liver trouble which prevented him from attending the General Council – let alone gathering the necessary evidence for a magisterial fifty-page tribute that would do justice to the Parisians’ historic
levée en masse
. ‘
The present state of things causes our dear Moor intense suffering
,’ his daughter Jenny wrote in mid-April, ‘and no doubt is one of the chief causes of his illness. A great number of our friends are in the Commune.’ One was Charles Longuet, editor of the daily
Journal Officiel
, who moved to London after the fall of the Commune and married Jennychen in 1872. Another Communard, Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, later became the secret fiancé of Eleanor Marx – though the engagement was eventually broken off. Paul and Laura Lafargue had escaped from
Paris shortly before the Prussians laid siege to the city, but were busily agitating on behalf of the Commune from their bolt-hole in Bordeaux.

Weighed down by illness and foreboding, Marx also had to struggle against his own obsessive perfectionism: whether in
Capital
or a brief pamphlet, he was reluctant to issue a definitive pronouncement on any subject until he had gleaned and winnowed all the available evidence. During the weeks of the Commune he dashed off dozens of letters to comrades on the Continent, badgering them for yet more documents and press cuttings. To judge by the more scurrilous passages in his long-awaited Address – which was published as
The Civil War in France
– the research also included close study of the gossip columns. Within the first couple of pages we are treated to this charming portrait of Thiers’s foreign minister: ‘Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunkard resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succession, which made him a rich man.’ The finance minister Ernest Picard is dubbed ‘the Joe Miller of the government of National Defence’, a reference to one of London’s music-hall comedians. Since Marx’s knowledge of English popular culture was almost zero, one guesses that his stage-struck daughters suggested the line. But the rest of the indictment against Picard is pure Marx, as each new item on the charge-sheet is produced with a legalistic flourish. Picard, we learn, ‘is the brother of one Arthur Picard, an individual expelled from the Paris
Bourse
as a blackleg (see report of the Prefecture of Police, dated the 31st July, 1867), and convicted, on his own confession, of a theft of 300,000 francs, while manager of one of the branches of the
Société Générale
, rue Palestro, No. 5 (see report of the Prefecture of Police, 11th December 1868). This Arthur Picard was made by Ernest Picard the editor of his paper,
l’Électeur Libre
…’ The Communards may have left the bank vaults unmolested, but they had certainly enjoyed rummaging in the police archives.

Having introduced the bit players, Marx ushers in Thiers himself – the ‘monstrous gnome’:

A master in small state roguery
, a virtuoso in perjury and treason, a craftsman in all the petty stratagems, cunning devices, and base perfidies of parliamentary party-warfare; never scrupling, when out of office, to fan a revolution, and to stifle it in blood when at the helm of the state; with class prejudices standing him in the place of ideas, and vanity in the place; his private life is as infamous as his public life is odious – even now, when playing the part of a French Sulla, he cannot help setting off the abomination of his deeds by the ridicule of his ostentation.

Marx then sketches the background to the Commune. Far from being some sort of mutiny against a legitimate government, it was a valiant attempt to save the Third Republic from Thiers’s unconstitutional demand that the National Guard surrender its arms and leave Paris undefended. He adds proudly that the popular uprising of 18 March was more or less untainted by ‘the acts of violence in which the revolutions, and still more the counter-revolutions, of the “better classes” abound’.

For an example of these better classes he turns again to the president himself, sparing his readers nothing:

Thiers opened his second campaign against Paris in the beginning of April. The first batch of Parisian prisoners brought into Versailles was subjected to the most revolting atrocities while Ernest Picard, with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, strolled about jeering them, and while Mesdames Thiers and Favre, in the midst of their ladies of honour (?), applauded, from the balcony, the outrages of the Versailles mob. The captured soldiers of the line were massacred in cold blood; our brave friend, General Duval, the iron-founder, was shot without any form of trial. Gallifet, the kept man of his wife, so notorious for her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of
the Second Empire, boasted in a proclamation of having commanded the murder of a small troop of National Guards … With the elated vanity of a parliamentary Tom Thumb, permitted to play the part of a Tamerlane, he [Thiers] denied the rebels against his littleness every right of civilised warfare, up to the right of neutrality for ambulances. Nothing more horrid than that monkey, allowed for a time to give full fling to his tigerish instincts, as foreseen by Voltaire.