Leftists in general, and German radicals in particular, from the French Revolution through the Crimean War, had understood great power warfare in ideological terms, pitting the forces of change against those of the status quo. This new conflict posed a question: which was the revolutionary and which the counterrevolutionary side? One argument perceived the war as a step in the direction of Italian national unity and the liberation of Italian territory from foreign rule—a precursor to and signal for similar movements on the part of the Hungarians, the Poles, and of course the Germans. The war was a blow against a reactionary Austria and its supporters among the German states, who represented, according to the radical émigré Ludwig Bamberger, “disunity and partition into petty states, darkness, Jesuitism, reaction and the whorish way of doing things of the patriarchal rule of the police.” But it was equally possible to understand the war as an act of imperialist aggression by the French emperor, and just the beginning of his conquests. Imitating his uncle, he would follow his march into Italy with one into Germany, so that an intervention in the war on Austria’s side would be a revolutionary step against foreign invasion and toward German national unity. As Jacob Venedey, another radical émigré, put it: “Fight, bleed and prevail for a united Germany and you will bring the united German parliament home from the battlefield.”1 The debate over how to interpret the war raged furiously during the first half of 1859, among both the radical exiles and their counterparts at home, finally able to articulate their views openly as the era of reaction waned. German nationalists took both sides in the debate, but their common nationalism carried them in opposite political directions.
Marx and especially Engels had a very clear position in this controversy: they were ferociously anti-Napoleonic and called, in nationalist fashion, for a military intervention of the other German states on Austria’s side. Engels articulated these ideas in a pamphlet, entitled Po and Rhine, written with Marx’s endorsement, and published anonymously in Berlin. The pamphlet argued that the western regions of Germany, along the Rhine River, were the future object of Napoleonic aggression. Their best defense would be to defeat the emperor in northern Italy, on the Po River, before he even marched on the Rhine. Taking the Austrian side in the Northern Italian War meant opposing the national unification of Italy and endorsing the Habsburgs’ oppressive rule over the northern end of the Italian peninsula, a painful position for Marx and Engels, who had vigorously supported the cause of Italian national unity during the 1848 Revolution. Engels, like other pro-Austrian and anti-French leftists, argued that support for Habsburg rule was just temporary; a future German revolutionary regime would liberate Italian national territory. Most of his pamphlet was taken up with the assertion that possession of territory in northern Italy was not necessary for German military security.2
This convoluted argument awkwardly aligned the revolutionary communists with the generally pro-Austrian conservatives and moderate liberals they despised. Marx’s political spin on the situation was to assert that Napoleon III was acting as a tool of the czar. Revolutionaries demanding the dissolution of the Austrian Empire were just doing the Muscovites’ bidding, since the latter would pick up the pieces of the former Habsburg realm and incorporate it into a Pan-Slavic empire.3 As a result of the 1859 war, Marx intensified his own long-term hostility to Russia. He increased his collaboration with David Urquhart, appearing on the platform of anti-Russian meetings in London that Urquhart’s followers organized. Marx even declared that he was part of “a war that we, together with the Urquhartites are fighting against Russia, Palmerston and Bonaparte, in which people of all parties and all walks of life are participating, in all the capitals of Europe, as far off as Constantinople. . . .”4 Marx’s hostility against Russia was a significant feature of all the forms of political action in which he was engaged, from 1859 until 1871, and in every single political position he took on the issues of the day.
STRONG OPINIONS HAD LITTLE value if they could not be heard, and the rapidly changing political situation in Europe made it urgent to be heard. “Germany’s fate is hanging in the balance,” Marx wrote to Engels in May 1859. “A moment may come, and very soon, when it will be of decisive importance that not only our enemies, but we ourselves, can express our opinions . . . in print.”5 In the three ensuing years, Marx made three separate attempts to bring his opinions before a wider German-language public. Each of these attempts was, ultimately, a failure, but in each case Marx recruited new allies and explored new options, which would come to fruition in the second half of the 1860s.
Just as Marx was sharing with Engels his opinions about the importance of getting their views in print, he was pursuing an opportunity to do so among the Germans living in London. In contrast to London’s German businessmen, as well as Marx’s old enemy Gottfried Kinkel, who took a pro-Prussian and anti-Austrian stance in 1859, the communist artisans of the Workers’ Educational Association supported a newly founded left-wing weekly, Das Volk, in English, The People. Associated with this newspaper were a motley crew of exile intellectuals, including the anti-Prussian South German democrat Karl Blind, a onetime member of the Communist League; Bruno Bauer’s younger brother Edgar, who doubled as a Danish police spy; and the leading member of Marx’s circle of younger adherents, Wilhelm Liebknecht.
Liebknecht brought Marx the news in May 1859 that the newspaper was in financial difficulties, so that Marx could bring it under his control. Between May and August 1859, Marx threw himself into that effort. He and Engels published a series of articles in the paper. They all dealt with the war of 1859: the heroism of the Austrian forces, betrayed by their incompetent generals, the dangers to Germany posed by Napoleon III and the czar, and the inadequately nationalist policies of the Prussian government. Using his considerable journalistic and publishing experience, Marx set out to make The People a viable and successful enterprise, increasing its subscriptions, expanding its advertising, and straightening out its chaotic bookkeeping and general administration. There were new subscribers from more affluent circles, attracted by the articles on diplomacy and able to understand Marx’s difficult literary style. The costs of improving the paper well outweighed additional subscription revenues, and unlike Marx’s past journalistic ventures, no affluent stockholders or private assets (just some small sums Engels could contribute) made up for the initial losses, so that by the end of August 1859, The People had run out of money and had to cease publication.6
As much as the paper had been an abortive publishing venture, it did bring Marx back in touch with the German artisans in London and their Workers’ Educational Association, for the first time since the controversies of the Communist League in the early 1850s. By the fall of 1859, Marx was giving lectures on economics and other topics in the association, a practice he continued through the 1860s.7 These renewed contacts with the London German artisans would prove quite useful, especially after the founding of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864.
THE MOST PROMINENT AND the harshest voice against Austria in the debate among German radical exiles belonged to Karl Vogt. A leading intellectual and scientific figure, professor of zoology at the University of Geneva, and soon to be one of the pioneering Darwinians of central Europe, Vogt had been a leader of the left in the German National Assembly during the 1848 Revolution. At the climax of the revolutionary confrontations in the spring of 1849, the radical rump of the Assembly, shortly before its dissolution, had appointed Vogt one of the “Regents of the Realm,” making him member of a kind of revolutionary German national government-in-exile. In 1859, Vogt tacitly endorsed Napoleon III’s aggressive war, and called on Prussia to act in Germany as Piedmont had in Italy. This drastic proposal, from a prominent revolutionary veteran, was enormously controversial, motivating both passionate supporters and angry opponents.8
Vogt’s views were anathema to Marx, an extreme example of what he opposed and what he was trying to counter in The People. It was one of the authors connected with The People, Karl Blind, who
informed Marx that Vogt was in the pay of the French emperor. These assertions then appeared in The People, and in an anonymous pamphlet, presumably written by Blind. Marx also informed Wilhelm Liebknecht about them, who repeated them in an article he wrote for the Augsburg General News.9
Marx was not prepared for Vogt’s response. Besides disagreeing with Marx politically, Vogt disliked the man personally—a legacy of the 1848 Revolution, when Marx had repeatedly attacked him and his politics in the New Rhineland News, and Marx’s associate, Wilhelm Wolff, had insulted Vogt and challenged him to a duel. Vogt sued the Augsburg newspaper for libel and defamation of character, and followed up his legal action with a pamphlet in which he set out to turn the tables on his accusers, focusing his fire on Marx. Rehashing controversies among the radical London exiles at the beginning of the 1850s, he accused Marx of being in the pay of the Austrian government, and of having betrayed radicals to the German political police. Going further, he claimed that Marx was the head of two secret societies, the Bürstenheimer, the Brush House Crowd, and the Schwefelbande, or Brimstone Gang, that engaged in counterfeiting and extorted money from democratic exiles by threatening to turn them over to the police.
While the court dismissed Vogt’s legal actions on a technicality, the first edition of his pamphlet sold out almost immediately. His charges were reprinted, among many other places, in Berlin’s National News, and in London’s leading mass-circulation newspaper, the Daily Telegraph. A parody of the Brimstone Gang even made an appearance as a float in the 1860 Breslau Mardi Gras parade. The radical German exiles in London promptly disavowed Marx. Blind denied having ever told Marx his suspicions about Vogt or having written the pamphlet against him. Much more painfully, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, by far the best known member of Marx’s circle, refused to support Marx either publicly or privately. In a personal meeting, Marx lost his temper and shouted at his onetime colleague. Although a modicum of politeness was restored in their relations, their friendship and political collaboration was at an end.10
In this increasingly difficult situation, Marx resolved to take the offensive by imitating his enemy’s tactics, writing a pamphlet denouncing Vogt as an agent of the French emperor and suing the National News in Berlin for libel and defamation of character. Most of Marx’s time in 1860 was taken up gathering evidence and preparing for legal action. Spinning out an enormous web of correspondence, he devoted hours of writing to produce his counterblast, the pamphlet entitled Herr Vogt, which appeared in print in November 1860.11
Marx biographers, impatient with their hero to finish Capital, tend to regard the whole concentration on Vogt as at best a bizarre, largely pointless obsession, and at worst an example of a tendency to blow up minor personal slights into major points of political principle.12 Marx was touchy about his personal honor—although that was the rule rather than the exception among the middle and upper classes of nineteenth-century Europe—but such an interpretation ignores his own personal history and the political surroundings that influenced his decisions.
Vogt’s accusations seemed to return Marx to the abyss of the early 1850s, when the vast majority of German political refugees in London despised him and circulated hateful stories about him. Marx tried to keep the whole matter hidden from Jenny, fearing the effect of recalling that time of extreme poverty, political and social isolation, and the death of their children. She proved, however, to be more resilient than her husband thought. When she found out about the charges brought against Karl, she responded with outrage rather than dismay, denouncing the “baseness, common crudity and cowardliness” of her husband’s enemies, and of his friends who would not stand up for him.13
Besides past traumas, current political controversies were also motivating Marx. The attack on Vogt was an intervention in the political debate raging among German leftists over the appropriate relationship of a revived nationalist movement to the military and diplomatic initiatives of Napoleon III. Karl Blind had informed Marx of his suspicions about Vogt, while both Blind and Marx were sitting on the platform at a meeting of David Urquhart’s followers devoted to denouncing the Northern Italian War of 1859 as a result of Russian machinations. In attacking Vogt, Marx was aiming at the German radicals who proposed to join in or get a free ride off a Franco-Russian alliance against Austria.14
Marx was also envisaging a future of political upheaval in continental Europe, in which he hoped to play an important role, all impossible if he was personally compromised by Vogt’s attacks. His decision to elevate his differences with Vogt into a public feud was only taken after consultations with Engels and Wilhelm Wolff. At first, they told Marx to ignore Vogt and concentrate on political economy, but then both men agreed with Marx that the strife with Vogt had become a “party matter” rather than a personal one. Leaving the charges unanswered would make future socialist political initiatives impossible.15
Marx’s campaign against Vogt was less than successful. His legal actions were doomed from the start. As his Berlin political contact informed him, Prussian judges were not concerned with the personal honor of a radical subversive: the courts refused to allow Marx to open proceedings against Vogt, a decision confirmed after repeated appeals.16 The anti-Vogt pamphlet did appear, and it is one of the distinctly non-canonical works of Marx. Rather like The Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, it is passed over in silence, or gets at best a brief embarrassed mention.
Herr Vogt is certainly not a great theoretical work. It suffers from two of Marx’s chronic literary problems: his distinctly academic tendency to go on at length, gathering material and not writing it up (both Engels and Jenny were painfully aware of this), and his inability to restrain himself when engaging in political polemics.17 The fury of the personal attacks in the pamphlet is reminiscent of the unpublished “Great Men of Exile” from the early 1850s. Yet Herr Vogt is quite revealing of Marx’s position at a critical period of nineteenth-century European history.
Based on a mass of evidence he had collected from his correspondence, Marx vigorously refuted Vogt’s charges. The Brush House Crowd, he pointed out, was the name of a group of left-wing German artisans living in Switzerland, who had taken Willich and Schapper’s side in their fight with Marx and Engels for control of the Communist League. The Brimstone Gang was a group of mostly student radical refugees from the 1848 Revolution, also based in Switzerland. Their name was an ironic reference to their future in hell as a result of the atheistic views they expressed in the taverns they frequented. Their actual connections to Marx were tenuous: Wilhelm Liebknecht had been a member, but before he met Marx. Engels, living in 1849 as a refugee in Switzerland, occasionally joined the group’s gatherings. He was a welcome guest, since he paid for the drinks.18
After clearing up these and related charges, Marx turned to more recent politics, lighting into Vogt’s plans for a European revolutionary alliance that would join German nationalists, Prussia, France, and Russia against the Austrian Empire. After denouncing the idea of revolutionaries cooperating with Russia, Marx emphasized Vogt’s perception of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as an ally of German nationalists. He pointed out that Napoleon III would insist on annexing German territory on the left bank of the Rhine River as compensation for supporting ostensibly nationalist pro-Prussian and anti-Austrian initiatives. Vogt’s unwillingness to accept the obvious consequence of his ideas was, according to Marx, evidence that Vogt was a paid agent of Napoleon III.
This argument, that a united German nation-state under Prussian leadership was only possible through the cession of territories to France and Russia, was a typical polemical point of pro-Austrian authors in the debate on the Northern Italian War. Where Marx differed was by placing his polemic in a broader global context, which is most apparent in the key chapter of the book, obscurely titled “Dâ-Dâ Vogt.” The original Dâ-Dâ was an Algerian author, a supporter of French colonial rule, because Napoleon III would sponsor the creation of a united Arab nation-state. Vogt’s proposals, Marx argued, were b
asically the same, with the Germans in the place of the Arabs. In this comparison, Marx, unlike his later followers, did not perceive imperialism as an economically driven relationship between capitalist European countries and pre-capitalist Asian or African ones. Instead, he described both the African Dâ-Dâ and the German Vogt as tools of a French imperialism that preyed alike on pre-capitalist North Africa and the capitalist and industrialized Rhineland.19
Herr Vogt might well be compared to Marx’s other anti-Napoleonic polemic, The Eighteenth Brumaire. The latter’s long-term influence was much greater; it has become a canonical text of Marxism, while the former has languished in obscurity. Yet at the time of their publication, it was Herr Vogt that was the more influential and better read work. To be sure, in the battle for public opinion between the living Herr Vogt and the pamphlet Herr Vogt, the former was the clear winner. But Marx’s polemics were something of a secret tip, known to readers who shared the suspicion—which circulated fairly widely in left-wing circles—that Vogt was in Louis Napoleon’s pay. And Vogt indeed was. After the overthrow of the emperor in 1870, the new republican government in France published his secret correspondence and accounts, which included a hefty payment of 50,000 francs to Vogt in 1859. Marx took a good deal of pleasure in seeing his suspicions confirmed.20
Marx’s efforts against Vogt—not so much the pamphlet itself as the extensive correspondence he conducted in preparation for it—brought him new political allies. A major supporter was the veteran German revolutionary Johann Philipp Becker, who had been attempting to overthrow the established central European order since 1830. Another adherent was Viktor Schily, a democratic émigré in Paris, and, like Marx, a native Rhinelander. Marx also recruited Sigismund Borkheim, a London merchant, and former member of the Brimstone Gang. All three shared Marx’s suspicions of Vogt as well as Marx’s hostility against Napoleon and Russia, and his disdain for the Prussian kingdom.21 The ties forged in Marx’s campaign against Vogt would remain after 1864 and the founding of the International Working Men’s Association, when these men became important supporters of Marx’s efforts to increase the group’s influence on the labor movement in Europe.
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