Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  With another arrest warrant out for Engels (‘special characteristics: speaks very rapidly and is short-sighted’) and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung firmly shut down after a melodramatic final edition printed in red ink, the communist influence over the German uprising looked finished. But as long as the chance for revolution remained, Marx and Engels refused to give up. They trudged from Cologne to Frankfurt and thence to Baden, Speyer, Kaiserslautern and Bingen in support of the spluttering armed struggle for the Imperial Constitution. It was in the south-west corner of Germany, in Baden-Palatinate, that Engels thought the last remaining chance of insurgency appeared most favourable. ‘The entire people were united in their hatred for a government that broke its word, engaged in duplicity and cruelly persecuted its political adversaries. The reactionary classes, the nobility, the bureaucracy and the big bourgeoisie were few in numbers.’51

  All too typically, the revolution was already being betrayed by a timid petit-bourgeois leadership – in this case a lawyer called Lorenz Peter Brentano – which could not shed its fear of committing high treason. Moreover, there appeared a distinct lack of revolutionary rigour within the higher echelons of the provisional government. ‘People yawned and chatted, told anecdotes and made bad jokes and strategic plans and went from one office to another trying as well as they could to kill time.’ As ever, Marx and Engels let their views about the competency of those in charge be known – at one point, Engels was so precise in his analysis of the leadership's weaknesses and so explicit in describing the coming Prussian onslaught that he was arrested as a spy on the grounds that only an enemy of the regime could be quite so damaging to morale. He spent a day in jail, before the intervention of various communist activists secured his release. Seeing no real hope for this revolution, at this point Marx abandoned the struggle and headed back to Paris. Engels was ready to do the same when the former Prussian officer and now rebel commander August von Willich and his 800-strong volunteer company of worker and student soldiers marched into Kaiserslautern. ‘Since I had no intention of letting slip the opportunity of gaining some military education… I too buckled on a broadsword and went off to join Willich.’52 For Engels, who was quickly commissioned as his aide-decamp, Willich was one of the few figures of any worth within the Baden-Palatinate revolutionary army. In battle, Engels thought him ‘brave, cool-headed and adroit, and able to appreciate a situation quickly and accurately’. Outside of the war zone, he was a terrible bore – ‘plus ou moins tedious ideologist and a true socialist’.53 Nevertheless, after the enforced exit from Elberfeld, here was a chance for real combat as the Prussian forces started to encircle this last redoubt of the 1848 revolution.

  ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea,’ was the judgement of Samuel Johnson. And Engels certainly thought a great deal more of himself having been in combat. In a long letter to Jenny Marx in the aftermath of the Baden campaign, Engels was full of it. ‘The whistle of bullets is really quite a trivial matter,’ he reported back insouciantly, ‘and though, throughout the campaign, a great deal of cowardice was in evidence, I did not see as many as a dozen men whose conduct was cowardly in battle.’54 Engels was involved in four engagements, ‘two of them fairly important’, but most of his time was spent in a futile cycle of skirmishing and retreat. ‘We had scarcely climbed the bushy slope when we came to an open field from the opposite wooded edge of which Prussian riflemen were loosing off their elongated bullets at us. I fetched up a few more of the volunteers, who were scrambling around the slope helpless and rather nervous, posted them with as much cover as possible and took a closer look at the terrain…’, reads a fairly typical account of Engels's war record from his Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution.55 And whilst he had a great deal of admiration for Willich, some of the officers and the worker corps within the company, he had the autodidact's total disdain for the student contingent. ‘During the course of the entire campaign the students generally showed themselves to be malcontent and timid young gentlemen; they always wanted to be let into all the plans of operation, complained about sore feet and grumbled when the campaign did not afford all the comforts of a holiday trip.’56

  It was at the Rastatt Fortress, along the River Murg, south of Karlsruhe and on the very western edges of Germany, that Engels took part in the largest battle of the campaign – and discovered, as he put it to Jenny, ‘that the much vaunted bravery under fire is quite the most ordinary quality one can possess’.57 Facing a Prussian contingent some four times the size of the 13,000-strong revolutionary force, Engels fought with mettle and distinction. He led the Besançon workers’ company of Willich's troops into battle with the 1st Prussian Army Corps and took part in a series of skirmishes along the Murg. Indeed, throughout the campaign Engels was widely praised by fellow soldiers for his easy willingness to muck in with the troops and ‘energy and courage’ in battle.58 But the cause was doomed as the Prussians systematically outgunned and outmanoeuvred Willich's men and Rastatt proved a bloody defeat, with the Communist League founder member Joseph Moll amongst the fallen.

  In the wake of the rout the last, straggling remnants of the revolutionary army sped south through the Black Forest towards the Swiss border. While Willich and Engels argued for making a last stand, they could no longer command the support of the wounded and exhausted troops. ‘We marched through Lottstetten to the frontier, bivouacked that night still on German soil, discharged our rifles on the morning of the 12th [July] and then set foot on Swiss territory, the last of the army of Baden and the Palatinate to do so…’59 From its hapless inception through to its divided leadership and woeful logistics, the Baden-Palatinate campaign was a doomed enterprise. But, for Engels, it served a vital purpose: he had tasted blood and could now look in the eye any fellow revolutionary. ‘Enfin, I came through the whole thing unscathed, and au bout du compte, it was as well that one member of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was present, since the entire pack of democratic blackguards were in Baden and the Palatinate, and are now bragging about the heroic deeds they never performed.’60 Marx, too, realized the campaign's significance in terms of their public image. ‘Had you not taken part in the actual fighting, we couldn't have put forward our views about that frolic,’ he wrote from Paris. And Marx now urged Engels to write up this authentic episode of revolutionary endeavour as swiftly as possible as he was positive ‘the thing will sell and bring you money’.61

  Back in safe but dull Switzerland, along with thousands of other political refugees seeking asylum, Engels followed Marx's advice and churned out The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution both to cement his reputation for heroic conduct under fire and to establish the contours of the post-1848 blame game. For the unredeemed villains of the piece – indeed, the object of opprobrium for allowing the entire ’48 harvest to go to waste – were the petit-bourgeois who led the workers down the garden path of insurgency and then abandoned them the moment the counter-revolution surfaced. In a blistering opening chapter, Engels branded them ‘fainthearted, cautious and calculating as soon as the slightest danger approaches; aghast, alarmed and wavering as soon as the movement it provoked is seized upon and taken up seriously by other classes’. There was no failure on the part of the radical democrats, the communists or the proletariat. Instead, it was the ‘stab in the back’ from the bourgeoisie which betrayed the promise of revolution. In the coming months, this contempt for bourgeois prevarication – ‘as soon as there is the slightest chance of a return to anarchy, i.e. of the real, decisive struggle, it retreats from the scene in fear and trembling’ – would harden into a political ideology.62 After Europe's failure to turn, Marx and Engels came to the realization that the two-step model of bourgeois-democratic and then proletarian revolution would have to be rethought in its entirety. And they now had the time to do so.

  Marx had been in Paris only a month when the forces of reaction caught up with him. Threatened by the Bonapartist authorities with banishment to ‘the Pont
ine marshes of Brittany’, he chose exile in London. ‘So you must leave for London at once,’ he wrote to Engels now festering in Lausanne. ‘In any case your safety demands it. The Prussians would shoot you twice over: 1) because of Baden; 2) because of Elberfeld. And why stay in a Switzerland where you can do nothing… In London we shall get down to business.’63 But it was not so easy for a wanted man in an era of counter-revolution to make his way across a still cindering Europe. France and Germany were out of bounds, so he headed for Genoa via Piedmont to catch a ride with Captain Stevens aboard the Cornish Diamond sailing for London. Engels, the bloodied veteran of the Baden campaign, hurried to Marx's side to join a diaspora of émigrés, exiles, revolutionaries and communists huddled together in the capital of the one country that so spectacularly failed to rise to the ’48 revolution. Far removed from the turmoil of the continent, conservative mid-Victorian England was to be his home for the next forty years.

  6

  Manchester in Shades of Grey

  On Saturday I went out fox-hunting – seven hours in the saddle. That sort of thing always keeps me in a state of devilish excitement for several days; it's the greatest physical pleasure I know. I saw only two out of the whole field who were better horsemen than myself, but then they were also better mounted. This will really put my health to rights. At least twenty of the chaps fell off or came down, two horses were done for, one fox killed (I was in AT THE DEATH)…1

  Barely a decade after raising the red flag over the Barmen barricades, Friedrich Engels seemed to have undergone a startling character change. The revolutionary of ’49 was now a stalwart of Manchester society: riding out with the Cheshire Hunt; member of the prestigious Albert Club and Brazenose Club; resident of a salubrious city suburb; and a respectable, hard-working employee of Ermen & Engels, with good prospects of making partnership. ‘I am very glad you have left and are well on the way to becoming a great COTTON LORD,’ Jenny Marx wrote admiringly to her husband's friend.2 Finally, it seemed Elise and Friedrich Engels might finally rest easy as their ‘black sheep’ son settled into his rightful place within the family firm. Had he, like so many young radicals, turned from firebrand to fogey? Or, like the youthful ‘Oswald’, was it just another front?

  In truth, the middle decades of Engels's life were a wretched time. He was exiled back to Manchester, humiliatingly forced to return to Ermen & Engels, and the twenty years he then spent in the cotton trade was an era of nervous, sapping sacrifice. Karl Marx called them Engels's time of ‘Sturm und Drang’ – and he was not a little to blame. Heroically, between 1850 and 1870 Engels sacrificed much of what gave him meaning in life – intellectual enquiry, political activism, his close friendship with Marx – to serve the cause of scientific socialism. ‘The two of us form a partnership together,’ Marx soothingly explained, ‘in which I spend my time on the theoretical and party side of the business,’ while Engels's job was to provide the financial support by busying himself at commerce.3 To support Marx, Marx's growing family and, most importantly of all, the writing of Das Kapital, Engels willingly offered up his own financial security, philosophical researches and even his good name. The Manchester years demanded a heavy price of the self-appointed second fiddle.

  In retreating north, Engels turned his back on his favoured habitat of émigré radicalism and political machinations for the respectable life of a mid-Victorian bourgeois. And this was where the eye of the storm and stress really lay: in squaring his two diametrically opposed public and private lives as exploitative cotton lord and revolutionary socialist, as frock-coated member of the upper-middle class and ardent disciple of the low life. To retain his office job, keep Marx out of penury and the communist cause afloat Engels was forced to maintain a façade of painful propriety. It nurtured a contradiction between public commitments and personal beliefs which proved impossible to maintain as he spiralled towards illness, depression and eventual breakdown.

  ‘If any one had conceived the idea of writing from the outside the inner history of the political émigrés and exiles from the year 1848 in London, what a melancholy page he would have added to the records of contemporary man,’ the Russian exile Alexander Herzen wrote in his memoirs. ‘What sufferings, what privations, what tears… and what triviality, what narrowness, what poverty of intellectual powers, of resources, of understanding, what obstinacy in wrangling, what pettiness of wounded vanity…’4

  When Engels stepped off the Cornish Diamond in 1849 and rented some rooms in Chelsea and then Soho, he reentered precisely this scene of exile fratricide, failing newspapers, futile politicking and ever-present Prussian spies. ‘We cannot make a single step without being followed by them wherever we go,’ Engels publicly protested in a letter written in his hand under Marx's name to the Spectator in June 1850. ‘We cannot get into an omnibus or enter a coffee-house without being favoured with the company of at least one of these unknown friends… the majority of them look anything but clean and respectable.’5 Meanwhile, the days passed with selection battles for the Communist League Central Committee, fights over membership of the London German Workers’ Educational Society and a tussle over dispersing charitable funds for impoverished émigrés. Marx and Engels had quickly reverted to type by undermining the existing German Refugee Relief Committee and establishing their own Social Democratic Relief Committee for German Refugees. After fleeing Prussian sharpshooters and enduring the ennui of Switzerland, this rats-in-a-sack politics was a welcome return to the Brussels and Paris good time. ‘All in all, things are going quite well here,’ Engels wrote to his publisher friend Jakob Schabelitz in Paris. ‘[Gustav] Struve and [Karl] Heinzen are intriguing with all and sundry against the Workers' Society and ourselves, but without success. They, together with some wailers of moderate persuasion who have been thrown out of our society, form a select club at which Heinzen airs his grievances about the noxious doctrines of the Communists.’6 Happy days.

  This beery, smoke-filled world centred on Great Windmill Street amused itself in a political time-warp. ‘After every unsuccessful revolution or counter-revolution, feverish activity develops among the émigrés who escaped abroad,’ Engels later wrote.

  Party groups of various shades are formed, which accuse each other of having driven the cart into the mud, of treason and of all other possible mortal sins. They also maintain close ties with the homeland, organize, conspire, print leaflets and newspapers, swear that it will start over again within the next 24 hours, that victory is certain and in the wake of this expectation, distribute government posts. Naturally, disappointment follows disappointment… recriminations accumulate and result in general bickering.7

  The full enormity of the 1848 failure – the collapse of a bourgeois-democratic revolution in the face of an ancien régime fight back – and the hegemony of counter-revolutionary sentiment on the continent had simply failed to sink in. The Great Windmill Street communists still believed the overthrow of monarchism was imminent. ‘The revolution is advancing so rapidly, that every one must see its approach,’ Engels confidently predicted of the French political scene in March 1850 (as Bonaparte's Second Empire lurked in the wings).8 Marx and Engels hoped to use this narrow, pre-revolutionary breathing space to reaffirm their demands for a more organized, autonomous working-class movement. The ‘stab in the back’ thesis they had been adumbrating since the failure of the continental revolutions – of a liberal bourgeoisie willing to sacrifice the workers' cause at the first hint of a settlement with the ruling classes – evolved into a broader political strategy to outmanoeuvre the petit-bourgeois democrats. In their 1850 ‘Address of the Central Authority to the League’, Marx and Engels explained how only a system of workers' associations could exploit the political gains of the coming bourgeois revolution without falling into the trap of a liberal alliance. ‘In a word, from the first moment of victory, mistrust must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party, but against the workers' previous allies,’ they enjoined.9 What this necessitated, in a phrase Leon Tr
otsky would later appropriate, was a ‘permanent revolution’ and a far more aggressive proletarian commitment to grabbing the levers of power. To avoid any prospect of bourgeois consolidation, there could be no moment of calm after the initial democratic revolution.

  Yet, at the same time, the revolution could not be rushed if the socio-economic fundamentals were not in place. And as the reactionary fallout from 1848 continued to gather pace, with ever-decreasing signs of an economic crisis precipitating political revolution, the chances for insurrection diminished. Marx and Engels began to fear that the materialist preconditions would not be ripe for some years to come; the moment of contradiction had been lost, as the economic crisis passed. Just as previously in Cologne, this political hesitancy placed them at odds with the broader membership of the Communist League led in London by Karl Schapper and Engels's old commander, August Willich, both of whom advocated immediate military action. To Marx and Engels, this was tinpot terrorism and a premature threat to the communist cause. In addition to which, Marx could not abide Willich's cocky bravado and war-veteran aura (nothing infuriated him more than authentic, revolutionary credentials). Naturally, he ended up challenging the decorated class warrior to a duel before transferring the Central Board of the Communist League back to Germany in a fit of pique.