Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  Marx and Engels had returned to Prussia to deliver a bourgeois democracy as part of the transition towards communism and they were in no mood for any indulgent nonsense about worker cooperatives. Backward, feudal Germany – in contrast, say, to advanced, industrial England with its developed working class – was not yet ready for a proletarian revolution. Their hostility to such futile scheming became quickly evident in the pages of Marx's Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which gave ostentatiously little space to covering strikes, radical congresses and any signs of proletarian insurrection. Indeed, so hostile was the newspaper to the city's radical working class that Oscar J. Hammen has even suggested it was produced using casual printing labour with wages far lower than its reactionary rival the Kölnische Zeitung.10 Marx and Engels's political strategy was clear: to turn the Neue Rheinische Zeitung into ‘the organ of the democratic movement’ – but, according to Engels, ‘of a democracy which everywhere emphasized in every point the specific proletarian character which it could not yet inscribe for all on its banner’.11 And such democratic initiatives would, in the long run, help bring the proletariat to greater consciousness and arm them with the political tools to take on the bourgeoisie when the time was ripe. Week in, week out, the paper hurled insults at Prussian bureaucrats and Junker aristocrats and made the case for moderate reforms based around universal suffrage, the dismantling of feudalism and assistance for the unemployed. For all of Marx's fiery journalese, the paper was in fact advocating a very moderate, bourgeois-friendly programme as a first stage to revolution. And it proved a great success, surging to daily sales of almost 5,000 copies.

  Given their newly consensual liberal stance, neither Marx nor Engels thought it would be too hard to drum up some investment for the paper from the region's middle classes. So, while Marx settled into the editor's chair in Cologne, Engels was despatched to Barmen to butter up the Wupper valley bourgeoisie. It was another difficult homecoming. ‘C. and A. Ermen were quaking visibly when I walked into their office today. I, of course, am not meddling in anything but waiting to see what happens,’ he reported mischievously to Emil Blank. Unsurprisingly, the fund-raising was not a success since the Barmen bourgeoisie were well aware of the communist programme. ‘The fact is, au fond, that even these radical bourgeois here see us as their future main enemies and have no intention of putting into our hands weapons which we would very shortly turn against themselves.’ Engels even had the chutzpah to ask his family for Neue Rheinische Zeitung funding despite his uncle, August Engels, being a notable reactionary on Barmen Town Council and his brother Hermann commanding a troop of the counter-revolutionary Home Guard. As for his father: ‘Nothing whatever is to be got out of my old man. To him even the Kölner Zeitung is a hotbed of agitation and sooner than present us with 1,000 talers, he would pepper us with a thousand balls of grape.’12

  The precious few investors whom Marx and Engels did entice into supporting the paper deserted in droves after Engels used the first issue to deliver a sarcastic diatribe against the newly elected National Assembly sitting in Frankfurt – ‘and by the end of the month we no longer had any [investors] at all’.13 But the paper somehow struggled on, with Engels concerning himself mainly with foreign and military matters and Marx providing the bulk of the German political coverage. For, despite the fears of shareholders, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was in principle extremely supportive of the Frankfurt assembly. They just wanted its representatives to go further and faster in transforming Germany into a unitary, bourgeois state as a preliminary step towards revolution. The problem was the assembly's ‘parliamentary cretinism’ with its endless introspective debates and dizzying array of verbose lawyers, officials and academics. After one futile session, Engels dismissed it as ‘nothing but a stage where old and worn-out political characters exhibited their involuntary ludicrousness and their impotence of thought as well as action’.14 Such waffling was not without cost: the precious moment of revolution had to be grabbed if Germany's scatterboard of feudal, princely statelets was to be moulded into a single bourgeois republic. And, as the Frankfurt delegates speechified about procedures and protocol, the forces of reaction were regrouping. In Paris, they had already struck.

  *

  The French provisional government's political honeymoon did not last long. The April 1848 elections to France's Constituent Assembly saw a resurgence of provincial, conservative opinion loyal to the deposed monarchy in response to the republican administration's decision to raise taxes to bolster the deteriorating public finances. At the polls, the socialists and republican candidates lost heavily with barely 100 of the 876 deputies elected. And, once in power, the conservatives swiftly and vengefully acted to dismantle the cornerstone policy of the provisional government: Louis Blanc's national workshops (ateliers nationaux). The scheme had been conceived as ‘true socialism’ in action with unemployed male residents of Paris offered either decently paid, public works-style jobs or generous unemployment benefit. But the result was that tens of thousands of workers, idlers and chancers moved to Paris hoping to profit from this gigantic system of out relief, while furious private employers had to hike wages to compete. Facing ruinous costs and a residuum of well-paid loafers, the newly conservative assembly announced its intention to close the workshop system, force unemployed workers to enlist for the army or return to their jobs in the provinces. Fearing a popular backlash, it also enacted a series of measures against radical political clubs and open-air banquets. On 22 June 1848 the government issued an ultimatum to Paris's 120,000-odd workers to sign up or go home. In the poverty-stricken eastern faubourgs of Paris, the workers responded with street riots under the banners of ‘Work or Death!’ and ‘Bread or Death!’ By the following morning, the 15-foot-high barricades were back up.15

  Infuriatingly, as the revolution rekindled itself, Engels was stuck in Cologne. However, such geographical difficulties were not going to interfere with his breathless reports on events in Paris for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, as if the bullets were whizzing past him. For Engels, what was so invigorating about June 1848, in contrast to February, was that ‘the insurrection is purely a workers' uprising’ as France moved from a bourgeois to a proletarian revolution with delicious alacrity. ‘The people are not standing on the barricades as in February singing “Mourir pour la patrie.” The workers of June 23 are fighting for their existence and the fatherland has lost all meaning for them.’ Comparing the uprising to the great slave revolts of ancient Rome, Engels the Jacobin manqué celebrated a ‘Paris bathed in blood’ and admired how the 50,000-strong insurrection was ‘growing into the greatest revolution that has ever taken place, into a revolution of proletariat versus the bourgeoisie’.16 In his Class Struggles in France, Marx would later claim the June days amounted to ‘civil war in its most terrible form, the war between labour and capital’. Yet whilst modern scholarship is generally sceptical about the level of proletarian involvement in the uprising (positing it more as a traditional artisan-led revolt), what remains in no doubt is the naked class antagonism of the government's response.

  The counter-attack was overseen by the bloodthirsty Algiers veteran and newly appointed minister of war, Louis-Eugeène Cavaignac, who carefully marshalled his forces before crushing the faubourg insurgency. It was a gruesome, butcherous affair as Cavaignac's troops cleared the boulevards with cavalry charges, peppered barricades with grapeshot, and concluded the day with a barrage of shells and incendiary Congreve rockets. Engels recounted it all, from second-hand sources, with a journalism dripping in socialist martyrology and nationalist sentiment. ‘A strong detachment of the national guard made a flanking attack upon the barricade of the rue de Clery,’ he reported in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 28 June 1848.

  Most of the barricades’ defenders withdrew. Only seven men and two women, two beautiful young grisettes, remained at their post. One of the seven mounts the barricades carrying a flag. The others open fire. The national guard replies and the standard-bearer falls. Then a grisette, a tall, beautif
ul, neatly-dressed girl with bare arms, grasps the flag, climbs over the barricade and advances upon the national guard. The firing continues and the bourgeois members of the national guard shoot down the girl just as she has come close to their bayonets. The other grisette immediately jumps forward, grasps the flag, raises the head of her companion and when she finds her dead, furiously throws stones at the national guard. She, too, falls under the bullets of the bourgeoisie.17

  Anarchy on the streets of Paris played perfectly into the hands of embattled authorities across Europe. By late summer 1848 Prussia's reactionaries were becoming much bolder in countering the liberal ambitions of the National Assembly, marching troops through radical neighbourhoods and clamping down on republican and socialist clubs. The staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung faced extra persecution with Marx and Engels brought before the magistrates on an almost weekly basis to be charged either with ‘insulting or libelling the Chief Public Prosecutor’, ‘incitement to revolt’ or various other acts of subversion. The Cologne Workers responded to the looming, counter-revolutionary putsch by establishing a Committee of Public Safety and then organizing a mass meeting on Fühlinger Heide near Worringen, a heath to the north of Cologne, in September 1848. Travelling in barges, with red flags fluttering at the prow, some 8,000 workers and socialists journeyed up the Rhine to hear a rousing address from Engels in which he vowed that in the coming struggle with the Prussian authorities the people of Cologne stood ‘ready to sacrifice their lives and property on the side of Germany’.18 Ten days later the city was placed under martial law, with public gatherings banned, the civic militia disbanded and all newspapers suspended.

  Luckily for him, Marx had not taken part in the Worringen meetings, but warrants for high treason were issued for the rest of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung editorial board. Wilhelm Wolff fled for the Bavarian Palatinate; George Weerth made for Bingen in Hesse-Darmstadt; unlucky Karl Schapper went straight to jail. Cologne's chief public prosecutor, Herr Hecker, was especially keen to get his hands on the ‘merchant’ Friedrich Engels with – as the highly descriptive arrest warrant put it – his ‘ordinary’ forehead, ‘well proportioned’ mouth, ‘good’ teeth, ‘oval’ face, ‘healthy’ complexion and ‘slender’ figure. Unfortunately, Engels's mother caught sight of this ‘wanted’ poster. ‘Now you have really gone too far,’ the mortified Elise upbraided her son after suffering the indignity of reading his warrant in the Kölnis Zeitung over her morning coffee. ‘So often have I begged you to proceed no further but you have paid more heed to other people, to strangers, and have taken no account of your mother's pleas. God alone knows what I have felt and suffered of late.’ The public humiliation was enough to break a mother's heart. ‘I can think of nothing else but you and then I often see you as a little boy still, playing near me. How happy I used to be then and what hopes did I not pin upon you.’ The only solution was for him to get away from the dangerous influence of his friends and start a new life in commerce across the Atlantic. ‘Dear Friedrich, if the words of a poor, sorrowing mother still mean anything to you, then follow your father's advice, go to America and abandon the course you have pursued hitherto. With your knowledge you will surely succeed in finding a position in a good firm…’19 She could hardly have known him less.

  Like Wolff and Weerth, Engels was now on the run. After scampering back to Barmen (where, thankfully, his parents were absent) he left for Brussels. But the Belgian authorities were all too familiar with his type and after news of his and fellow communist Ernst Dronke's arrival reached the police, ‘the inspector took them to the Town Hall and from there to the prison of the Petit-Carmes, whence after an hour or two they were transported in a sealed carriage to the Southern Railway Station’.20 On 5 October 1848 the two freedom fighters were put on a train to Paris after the authorities used their powers to disperse ‘vagabonds’ – a favoured tactic for dealing with communists. As they travelled through the night, Europe was alight: a titanic struggle between the forces of revolution and counterrevolution was intensifying across the continent's capitals. In France, the dictatorial Louis Napoleon was beginning his march to power; in Vienna, imperial troops were moving in the heavy artillery to shell the revolutionaries out; in Prague, the Czech rising had been crushed by Habsburg forces, who were soon to turn their attentions to reinvading northern Italy; in Berlin, the Prussian army was on the verge of retaking the city; and in Cologne, Marx's Neue Rheinische Zeitung was demanding ‘revolutionary terrorism’ as the only way to avenge ‘the useless butcheries of the June and October days’.21 And what did Friedrich Engels do to help see in the promised proletariat dawn? Did he return to the struggle? Propagandize in Paris? Support a workers’ defence fund? No, he got away from it all on a walking holiday.

  His journey began in Paris – and his heart instantly sank at the effects of Cavaignac's fusillade. ‘Paris was dead, it was no longer Paris. On the boulevards, no one but the bourgeoisie and police spies; the dance-halls and theatres deserted… it was the Paris of 1847 again, but without the spirit, without the life, without the fire and the ferment which the workers brought to everything in those days.’22 He had to leave. Turning his back on this ‘beautiful corpse’ of a city, Engels headed into la France profonde. The 28-year-old fugitive had had enough, it seemed, of the demands of revolution; the sensuous, almost Fourierist side to his character reasserted itself as he abandoned the tedious demands of insurgent life for an escapade through the sexual and gastronomic riches of rural France. What was more, he chronicled this meandering, cross-country journey from Paris to Geneva in a marvellously self-conscious feuilleton reminiscent of his most purple prose for the Telegraph für Deutschland. Within this unpublished travelogue there are flashes of political commentary, such as when he encounters some former denizens of the Parisian national workshops – now forcibly returned to the provinces – and is horrified by their fallen ideological state. ‘Not a trace of concern with the interests of their class and with current political issues which touch the workers so closely. They appeared not to read any papers any more… They were already on the point of turning into rustics, and they had only been there for two months.’ It only confirmed Engels's distaste for the contented conservatism of the peasant – ‘a barbarian in the midst of civilization’.23

  However, the body of the journal was less exercised about politics and far more concerned with wine, women and the natural beauty of the Loire valley. ‘The avenue is lined with elms, ashes, acacias or chestnuts; the valley floor comprises luxuriant pastures and fertile fields, amongst stubble a second harvest of the richest clover was sprouting…’ At times his entries read little better than an upmarket wine society tour brochure. ‘And what wine! What a diversity, from Bordeaux to Burgundy… from Petit Macon or Chablis to Chamber-tin… and from that to sparkling champagne!… With a few bottles one can experience every intermediate state from a Musard quadrille to the Marseillaise, from the exultation of the cancan to the tempestuous fever heat of revolution, and then finally with a bottle of champagne one can again drift into the merriest carnival mood in the world!’ As revolutionaries were offering up their lives on barricades across Europe, Engels allowed himself a small joke on entering the town of Auxerre ‘robed in red’

  It was not just one hall here but the whole town which was decorated in red… dark-red streams filled even the gutters and bespattered the paving stones, and a sinister-looking blackish, foaming-red liquid was being carried about the streets in great tubs by sinister bearded men. The red republic with all its horrors appeared to be working continuously… But the red republic of Auxerre was most innocent, it was the red republic of the Burgundian wine-harvest…

  Would his fellow revolutionaries have appreciated the joke? Never mind: ‘the 1848 harvest was so infinitely rich… better than '46, perhaps even better than '34!’ Ever the taxonomist, the women he encounters in France's vineyards and villages are as variable as the wines, with Engels recording his personal preference for ‘the cleanly-washed, smoothly-comb
ed, slimly-built Burgundian women from Saint-Bris and Vermenton’ in contrast to ‘those earthily dirty, tousled, young Molossian buffaloes between the Seine and the Loire’. Engels, however, does not cast himself as overly selective in his favours. ‘It will therefore readily be 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…’24

  By the time the well-satiated Engels crossed the French border into Switzerland in early November the counter-revolution in Germany was well on its way to overturning the advances of March 1848. Frederick William IV had abandoned his liberal reforms for the reactionary strategy of General Brandenburg, who marched the army straight back into Berlin, prorogued the Prussian parliament, banned radical newspapers and declared martial law. Although the crackdown had yet to reach Rhenish west Prussia, Engels was not keen on returning to Cologne to face charges of high treason. Instead, he bunkered down in Berne (assisted by secret funds from his mother, worried about him catching a cold in the Swiss winter), half-heartedly involved himself in the local Workers’ Association, and spent most of his time catching up on the revolutionary events he had missed whilst rolling around with those slim-built Burgundian women.