In coming to terms with this new electoral landscape thrown up by an expanding suffrage, Engels reached for an unexpected analogy. In the early 1880s his voracious reading had alighted on the history of the early Christian Church under the late Roman Empire. Drawing on his Young Hegelian heritage of biblical criticism, he had penned a small article on the Book of Revelation and, in the process, recounted ‘how Christianity got hold of the masses, exactly as modern socialism does’.65 We hear no more of this thought until, a decade on, Engels again was struck by the comparison between the inexorable march of socialism across Europe and the unstoppable spread of Christianity within the Empire. The aggressive atheist and teenage baiter of the good Christian Graeber brothers was, in his old age, altogether more willing to give greater credence to the social gospel of Jesus. ‘The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement,’ Engels wrote in a historical essay on the early Church. ‘Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people; it first appeared as the religion of slaves and freedmen, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome.’ And even if the one promised salvation in the afterlife and the other societal transformation here on earth, they both shared an unquenchable eagerness for struggle and a bloody heritage of martyrdom. ‘Both are persecuted and subjected to harassment… And in spite of all persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously, irresistibly ahead.’66
But in contrast to the Christians, he and Marx were never inclined, as Engels put it, ‘like good Quakers, to turn the other cheek’.67 For all Engels's talk of an end to the barricades and the futility of armed insurrection, he adamantly refused ‘to subscribe heart and soul to absolute legality’ and was always careful to defend the socialist's moral right to force. Legality was a political tactic relevant for the SPD in the current German political climate rather than any kind of ethical absolute. ‘But I preach those tactics only for the Germany of today and even then with many reservations,’ he explained in a letter to Paul Lafargue after some within the SPD hierarchy had misinterpreted Engels's views as a blanket commitment to peaceable means. ‘For France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, such tactics could not be followed as a whole and for Germany, they could become inapplicable tomorrow.’68 To Engels's frustration, these caveats were overlooked and, thanks to the ensuing revisionism of Eduard Bernstein, in future years he would also be blamed (in addition to the militant excesses of Marxism-Leninism) for the crimes of SPD reformism with its commitment to political gradualism. Engels was never a Fabian: if a mass workers’ party, elected into office, was the swiftest way to socialism, then so be it. Otherwise, the retired Cheshire huntsman was still raring to join the cavalry charge.
As Second International socialism surged across the European continent, Engels wanted to witness it first hand. His opportunity was an International Workers’ Congress set for Zurich in August 1893 to which he excitedly set off (with Louise) via Cologne, the Rhineland, Mainz and Strasbourg. Meeting the new generation of socialist leaders face to face – Filipo Turati from Italy, Pavel Axelrod from Russia, Stanislaw Mendelson from Poland, as well as old friends such as August Bebel and Victor Adler – Engels announced himself highly impressed with the commitment of the activists. But what really took his breath away was the beauty of the female delegates. ‘The women were splendidly represented,’ he reported back to Laura Lafargue. ‘Besides Louise, Austria sent little [Adelheid] Dworzak, a charming little girl in every respect; I fell quite in love with her… These Viennoises sont des Parisiennes nées, mais des Parisiennes d'il y a cinquante ans. Regular grisettes. Then the Russian women, there were 4 or 5 with wonderfully beautiful leuchtende Augen [shining eyes], and there were besides Vera Zasulich and Anna Kulischoff.’69 But he found the socialist nitty-gritty of the Zurich debates deeply tedious and, excusing himself from the composite motions, sped off to the Canton of Graubunden to visit his brother Hermann – the former commander of counter-revolutionary forces in 1848, but with whom Engels had entered into an increasingly affectionate brotherly correspondence over the previous decade, exchanging letters on illnesses, tax rates and ailing lustful thoughts.
On 12 August, Engels returned to Zurich to give the congress closing speech. ‘We wanted to close the meeting: the last votes were taken in feverish haste,’ recalled the young Belgian socialist party leader, Van-der-Velde, of the last day. ‘One name was on every lip. Friedrich Engels entered the hall: among storms of cheering he came to the platform.’70 This was surely Engels's moment, stepping out from the shadow of Marx and imprinting his own character on the socialist movement which he had done so much to found, nurture and fund. But, even then, he wouldn't claim the credit. ‘I could not but experience deep emotion at the unexpectedly splendid reception which you have given me, accepting it not for myself personally but as a collaborator of the great man whose portrait hangs up there,’ he explained to the 400 delegates, pointing upwards to a picture of Marx. Some fifty years since he and Marx first began publishing their tracts in the Deutsche-Franzósische Jahrbücher, ‘socialism has developed from small sects to a mighty party which makes the whole official world quail. Marx is dead, but were he still alive there would be not one man in Europe or America who could look back with such justified pride over his life's work.’ He then made a principled plea for freedom of debate within the movement, ‘in order not to become a sect’, before leaving the hall to huge acclamation and a highly vocal rendition of the ‘Marseillaise’.71
It was a message of humility and pride which Engels repeated time and again as his continental trip turned into something of a victory lap. In Vienna – where ‘the women especially are charming and enthusiastic’ – he addressed rapturous crowds of 6,000. ‘When you come from England with this distracted and disunited working class, when you have heard for years nothing but bickering and squabbles from France, from Italy, from America, and then go amongst these people… and see the unity of purpose, the splendid organization, the enthusiasm… you cannot help being carried away and saying: this is the centre of gravity of the working-class movement,’ he reflected to Laura.72 His journey culminated in Berlin, the city of his officer training and which Marx and Engels had reviled above all others, where he was welcomed back by the socialist newspaper Vorwärts. ‘When Friedrich Engels, with his 73 years, today looks out on the capital city of the Reich, it may give him a joyful and elevating feeling that out of the calcified and pedantic royal residence of the king of Prussia of the year 1842 has developed the powerful proletarian native city which today greets him as – Social Democratic Berlin.’73 Some 3,000 socialists packed into the Concordia Hall to hear Liebknecht recount Engels's history of service and sacrifice to the party. ‘You know that I am not an orator or a parliamentarian; I work in a different field, chiefly in the study and with the pen,’ Engels modestly replied before revealing his delight at the transformation of Berlin from Junker playpen to socialist powerhouse.74 He went on to pay tribute to the disciplined electoral success of the SPD which he felt sure, given steady industrialization and proletarianization, was set to enjoy further triumphs. For what the 1893 continental excursion – with its vast crowds, glowing newspaper coverage and motivated activists – had convinced Engels of was the rightness of the suffrage strategy: the workers' vote was growing with irreversible vigour allowing the socialists to make an ever greater series of political demands until the necessary confrontation with the bourgeois state occurred. All they had to do was hold their nerve, avoid provocation and stay the course.
There was only one pitfall he truly feared. ‘I would consider a European war to be a disaster; this time it would prove frightfully serious and inflame chauvinism everywhere for years to come, since all peoples would be fighting for their own existence,’ Engels had written to Bebel in 1882. ‘Such a war would, I believe, retard the revolution by ten years, at the end of which, however, the upheaval would doubtless be all the more drastic.’75 This fear
of the antirevolutionary effects of a European conflagration marked another reversal of thinking. Until the early 1870s both Marx and Engels were adamant that war on the continent would naturally advance the socialist cause since it would eliminate the great reactionary obstacle of Tsarist Russia. Just as the French wars of the 1790s intensified revolutionary sentiment, so the communists assumed another Great Powers conflict would unite and radicalize the European working class. But after Bismarck's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and the growing nationalist antagonism between France and Germany, Engels concluded that war might in fact derail those country's workers’ movements amidst an unedifying upsurge of chauvinism. ‘It is precisely because everything's going so marvelously,’ he wrote to Bebel, ‘that I wouldn't exactly wish for a world war.’76 Even if a workers’ revolution arose from the ashes of a world war, modern technological advances and the transformation of European armies into industrialized killing machines meant this route to communism would entail too high a body count. ‘Eight to ten million soldiers will strangle one another, and in the process will eat all Europe more bare than any swarm of locusts,’ he wrote presciently in 1887 of a coming conflagration. ‘The devastation of the Thirty Years War, comprised into three or four years and extended over the whole continent: famine, pestilence, general barbarization of armies and peoples alike through extreme want.’77
The way to avoid war and salvage the prospect of a less gory revolution was, Engels believed, to transfer the political strategy the party was pursuing in the electoral to the military sphere. In the wake of SPD success in the 1877 Reichstag elections, Engels mused how ‘at least half if not more of these men of 25 (the minimum age) who voted for us spent two to three years in uniform and they know perfectly well how to handle a needle gun and a rifled cannon’.78 As socialism attracted ever greater popular support, it was essential that its philosophy made its way into the barracks and battalions of the Prussian regiments – where, in turn, soldiers would soon begin to question the orders of their reactionary, bellicose commanders. ‘When every able-bodied man serves in the army, this army increasingly reflects popular feelings and ideas, and this army, the great means of repression, is becoming less secure day by day: already the heads of all the big states foresee with terror the day when soldiers under arms will refuse to butcher their fathers and brothers.’79 Engels, the once steadfast sceptic of the militia system, now urged mass conscription as an even more effective democratic tool than the franchise. The unstoppable mathematics of socialist advance would take the army in its wake, and once the armed forces turned socialist, the sort of jingoistic wars being adumbrated by the leaders of France, Russia and Germany would prove impossible just as the troops' traditional, counter-revolutionary function (so bloodily on display in the Paris Commune) would be neutered. ‘I have more than once heard him say,’ the SDF activist Ernest Belfort Bax recalled, ‘that as soon as one man in three, i.e., one-third, of the German army actually in service could be relied on by the Party leaders, revolutionary action ought to be taken.’80
This then was Engels aged seventy-three – advancing the Marxist cause, inspiring the faithful, delivering the latest volumes of Das Kapital, providing analyses on Sino-Russian relations, the German peasant question and Russian obschina (an urgent issue in light of the 1891–2 great famine), the ILP and SPD. He remained that same restless, inquisitive, productive and passionate architect of scientific socialism who first emerged in the 1840s. Avoiding both dogma and platitude, Engels's political interventions remained neither overly prescriptive nor unhelpfully vague. As always he was never afraid of telling his socialist colleagues, in the bluntest language, where they went wrong. His health remained good and he continued to celebrate his birthdays in characteristically robust style. ‘We kept it up till half past three in the morning,’ Engels boasted of his seventieth birthday to Laura Lafargue, ‘and drank, besides claret, 16 bottles of champagne – the morning we had had 12 dozen oysters. So you see I did my best to show that I was still alive and kicking.’81 One visitor to Regent's Park Road in 1891 described meeting ‘a tall bearded, vigorous, bright-eyed and genial septuagenarian’ who proved ‘a generous and delightful host’.82 Tussy called him, ‘the youngest man I know. As far as I can remember he has not grown any older in the last 20 years.’83 He continued to take his daily walks on Hampstead Heath (‘London's Chimborazo’), but his recurring groin trouble from a fox-hunting fall had now forced him to give up smoking and reduce his Pilsener intake, whilst he was beginning to suffer from ever more aggressive bouts of bronchitis, stomach aches and rheumatism of the legs. Yet what really seemed to worry him was the spectre of ‘encroaching baldness’
At home, with Pumps banished to the Isle of Wight, Louise Kautsky governed the domestic setting. ‘You know the General is always under the thumb of the “lady of the house”,’ Tussy wrote to Laura. ‘When Pumps was with him, lo, she was good in his sight; now Pumps is dethroned and Louise is the queen who can do no wrong.’ Tussy was less amused by Louise's introduction of a foreign body into Engels's household: her new live-in husband, the Austrian physician and member of the National Liberal Club, Ludwig Freyberger. Tussy thought him an anti-Semite and a creep with dubious political affiliations who had changed 122 Regent's Park Road from a laughter-filled socialist redoubt for the greater Marx clan into an uneasy Viennese ménage à trois. ‘I would not trust a fly to his tender mercies,’ she wrote angrily to Laura in March 1894 with a litany of complaints about Freyberger's various manipulations, ‘he is an adventurer pure and simple, and I am heartily sorry for Louise.’84 She was even more upset when, in autumn 1894, the Freybergers persuaded the 74-year-old Engels to move out of his own home.
A child had followed the marriage of Ludwig to Louise and it was decided that No. 122 was too cramped for their familial needs. So for another £25 p.a. rent, the quartet marched 500 paces down the road to No. 41. On the face of it, Engels didn't seem to mind this minor change of residence. ‘Downstairs we have our communal living-rooms, on the first floor my study and bedroom, on the second Louise, her husband, the baby daughter,’ as Engels described the layout for Sorge, ‘… on the third floor the two housemaids, lumber-room and visitor's room. My study is at the front, has three windows and is so big that I can accommodate nearly all my books in it and yet, despite its size, very nice and easy to heat. In short, we are a lot better off.’85 Engels, who doted on all of Pumps, Laura and Jenny's children like a grandfather, had no problem sharing the house with an infant, remained devoted to Louise and even appreciated Freyberger's ‘draconian medical supervision’ of his various physical ailments. But for the fragile, emotional Tussy, who was contending with her own multiple Aveling crises, it seemed ‘the General’ had been taken from her: increasingly she depicted him as an infantilized, bullied and frightened old man held against his will in the evil clutches of the Freybergers. ‘I don't think the poor old General even fully realizes what he is made to do, he has come to the condition where he is a mere child in the hands of the monstrous pair,’ she complained to Laura. ‘If you knew how they bully and frighten him by constantly reminding him he is too old for this and too old for that… and saw how utterly depressed, and lonely, and miserable he is…’86 Tussy was particularly concerned about the fate of her father's manuscripts, which were at risk of falling into the Freybergers' hands – this despite Engels's repeated affirmations (as evinced in his will) that all Marx's papers would be handed over, on his death, straight to Tussy.
The struggle between Tussy and Louise – with the former blaming the latter for spreading rumours about her and Aveling and generally interfering in the London Marxist circle – must have been an unwelcome source of angst to the ageing Engels. In Tussy's defence, it does seem that the acquisitive Freybergers were unnecessarily controlling about access to Engels by his Sunday afternoon crowd and had half an eye on their landlord's estate. But given that both the Lafargues and the Avelings had over the previous years ignored numerous heartfelt invitations from the lonely
Engels to join him either for Christmas or a summer holiday, Tussy's fury was about more than living conditions at No. 41. Her exaggerated accounts of Engels's confusion and her own paranoia about the Marx manuscripts – which led to a blazing row between Engels and the Avelings over Christmas 1894 – was a displacement vehicle for her much deeper fear of losing ‘Uncle Angel’ and, with him, that deep, abiding connection to her late, adored Mohr. Maybe Tussy had sensed what Dr Freyberger had so far missed, that Engels was dying.
Friedrich Engels had begun his remarkable life in the furnace of Germany's Industrial Revolution, amongst the yarn bleacheries and textile works of the Wupper valley; he concluded it amidst the Victorian elegance of the Duke of Devonshire's fastidiously English seaside retreat, Eastbourne. By the 1880s this gentlemanly resort had become his favoured holidaying spot, where he liked to take a well-positioned house along Cavendish Place hosting Nim, Schorlemmer, Pumps and her brood – as well as Laura or Tussy if he was lucky. There Engels sat, the lover of the good things and happy times in life, with Pumps's children crawling round his knees, an open bottle of Pilsener, a letter on the go and a stoical resolve in the face of the August mist and rain. In the summer of 1894 he appears to have suffered a small stroke while on holiday and began to fear he might not make that longed-for peek into the new century. ‘Between ourselves, my 75th year doesn't hold out quite so much promise as previous ones,’ he wrote mordantly to Sorge.87 By the following spring an unwelcome complication had arisen. ‘Sometime ago I got a swelling on the right side of the neck, which after some time resolved itself into a bunch of deep-seated glands infiltrated by some cause or other,’ he wrote to Laura in the matter-of-fact tone he liked to adopt on medical issues. ‘The pains arose from direct pressure of that lump on the nerve and will of course only give way when that pressure disappears.’88 To aid the healing process, Engels departed for Eastbourne earlier than usual in June 1895, where he planned to get to work on a new edition of his Peasant War in Germany and tidy up some of Kautsky's forthcoming History of Socialism.
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