Now in Brussels, unable to earn an income from journalism, Marx accepted his first loan from Engels, who raised it from his father. Engels also raised a collection amongst communists in the Rhineland to support the family and generously promised Marx the proceeds from the royalties of his newly published book on the condition of the working classes in England. They had been unable to find a publisher for The German Ideology, and it was put aside – not to be published for another ninety years.
Shortly after his arrival Friedrich invited his lover Mary Burns to join him in Belgium. He paid her passage from England and the two set up home together in Brussels. Mary was a nineteen-year-old Irish textile-worker and political activist, daughter of factory workers Michael and Mary Burns. Friedrich met her when he was in Manchester working for his father’s firm. It was Mary who had awakened his real awareness of working-class industrial life and prompted him to the research and journalism that so impressed Karl subsequent to their first meeting. As with Lenchen and the Marxes, Mary was a catalytic force in the life of Engels.
In Brussels, the young allies founded the Communist Correspondence Committee, better known as ‘the Marx Party’, the cultivar from which all subsequent communist parties grew. Of the eighteen founding signatories, Jenny Marx was the only woman. In 1845 Karl and Friedrich visited England together and met with leaders of English trade unions, Chartists and German communists. Unbeknown to both, this trip presaged the future orientation of the rest of their lives by taking them to the place of their final exile – England.
Back in Brussels, a modest legacy from an uncle of Karl’s made life easier. The Marxes moved for the first time into a small house – delightful for being all their own, for all that it was overcrowded for four adults and three children. Their first son, Edgar, was born in December 1846, shortly before the uncle for whom he was named left for America to try his luck in Texas, taking some of his sister’s much-needed cash, but freeing up space in the little house. Edgar had been a drain on their resources and Karl and Jenny were quite relieved to see him go, unlike his devastated fiancée Lina Schöler, who he abandoned.
During their peripatetic political adventures around Europe between 1843 and 1848, Karl, Friedrich and Jenny famously explored their thinking on communism. They dispensed with the immaturity of conspiratorial secret societies. Anarchosyndicalism, though an attractive and occasionally useful strategic tool, was idealistic and unprogrammatic. Christian charity was well intended, but sentimental rather than transformative. All these principles had merits in their interpretation of inequality and injustice in the world but none reached the active point of how to change it.
In the course of these five years the Marxes and Engels thought about the nature of power and how to seize it. They argued about the roles of both the bourgeoisie – the middle classes – and the proletariat in real structural transformation. They examined the ways in which it was possible to interpret and understand economic laws. These were early days. Their thinking was often naive and exploratory, but it was an active and formative period, culminating in the profound lessons they learned from the nationalist European revolutions of 1848. The impact of 1848 spread throughout all forms of culture and thought – as could be heard in the new works of composers such as Wagner and Liszt.
Marx and Engels jointly worked out the ideas for what Engels jokingly referred to as the ‘Confession of Faith’, a statement of principles commissioned by the German Communist League. They missed successive deadlines and, in the end, the single most influential text of the nineteenth century3 was a rushed job written up by Marx, who holed up for a fortnight with his cigars in January 1848 at 42 Rue d’Orléans in Brussels, whilst his family lodged nearby at the Manchester Hotel.
The German Workers’ Educational Society in London published the first edition of The Communist Manifesto anonymously in German in the last week of February, to resounding silence. The ink was barely dry on their presses in Liverpool Street when mainland Europe detonated into revolution.
All over the continent, the labouring poor rose up in social revolutions against monarchies and undemocratic states. The immediate prompt for this uprising lay in a trans-European grain famine that took hold in 1846. More generally, 1848 saw the expression of a long-gathering radical movement in Europe of people who wanted more democratic governments, human rights and German unification. Due to the food crisis, prices rose, wages didn’t. Profits nosedived, causing a European-wide recession. Mass unemployment and starvation stimulated resentment against undemocratic, unresponsive regimes. Hungry and resentful at the inaction of their rulers, Europe’s poor – the majority – were receptive to the idea of revolt.
The 1848 revolutions began in France. In support of the labouring poor who made the revolution, middle-class, liberal lawyers, doctors, traders, retailers and academics – in a word, the bourgeoisie – mobilised for the expansion of suffrage. To raise money for the movement, they launched a ‘banquet campaign’ to fundraise from subscribed dinners in French cities. On 22 February 1848 Paris bureaucrats ordered the shutting down of a planned banquet on the grounds that it would spark civil unrest. Parisian citizens of all classes, from factory workers to teachers and lawyers, angry at this repression, took to the streets to demonstrate. The National Guard deserted King Louis Philippe and joined the protest, followed by the army garrison stationed in Paris. The king took flight and the people’s protest proclaimed the Second Republic on 24 February.
As the age of democracy appeared to be breaking out all around Europe, Belgium became uncomfortable about harbouring the revolution’s most loudly crowing cock. Under pressure from the Prussian government, Marx was given his marching orders from Belgium by royal decree in March. King Leopold I was, however, too late. The Marxes were already packing their boxes to head to Paris at the warm invitation of the new provisional French government, who welcomed the return of the ‘brave et loyal Marx’ to the country whence ‘tyranny had banished him, and where he, like all fighting in the sacred cause, the cause of the fraternity of all peoples’, would be welcome.4
The overthrow of the French monarchy sparked uprising throughout eastern and central Europe. Radical liberals and workers demanded constitutional reform or complete government change. Kaiser Wilhelm IV of Prussia conceded to revolts in Berlin and agreed to create a Prussian assembly. The end of Prussian autocracy encouraged liberals in the divided German provinces to convene at the Frankfurt Assembly to draw up a constitution to unite the German nation. They drew the boundaries for a German state and offered the crown to the Kaiser, who refused it. Minor reforms emerged in the German provinces and in Prussia, but it was the end of hope for a united, liberal Germany.
In Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Italy movements of national autonomy revolted to set up self-government, democratic assemblies and new constitutions. But from August 1848 the Austrian army crushed every uprising in its empire. In Vienna, Budapest and Prague the Austrian military machine flattened the liberal-democratic impetus and restored the empire to the traditional conservative regime that ruled at the beginning of 1848. Tens of thousands of protesters, hunted down for execution and imprisonment, had to flee the lands of their birth. Karl Marx, his family and most of his friends were amongst them. Known as the Forty-Eighters, these refugees migrated to Britain, America and Australia.
The revolutions of 1848 weakened the image of autocracy, but failed utterly to achieve any substantive change. The December 1848 presidential election in France brought the dictatorial Louis Napoleon, nephew of the former emperor, into office. In Austria the new emperor, Franz Josef I, consolidated Austrian repression over all the minorities of Eastern Europe. In Prussia, the new assembly had no power and was stuffed with the aristocratic elite.
The bourgeois revolutions of 1848 failed because they were badly organised and dominated by an essentially middle-class leadership dedicated to liberal reform, but ultimately fearful of the radicalism of mass, grass-roots, working-class movements. When radicals tried
to take control of the revolutions in France and eastern Europe, middle-class liberals ran scared, back into the arms of reaction; they were more comfortable with the familiarity of absolute rule and law and order than the uncertainty of radical revolution.
As Marx and Engels recognised, the uprisings were premature; it was going to take more time and democratic political organisation to achieve the formation of the proletariat into a transnational class that could overthrow bourgeois supremacy and take responsibility for political power. To their disappointment, and contrary to the predictions of their so recently published Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie in whom Marx and Engels had placed their hope had failed as a revolutionary class.
These were the chief lessons learned from 1848. The happy accident of timing that made this early work of two optimistic radicals coincident with the great, failed European revolutions pushed them to grow up very quickly. The events of 1848 demonstrated, for all time, that textbook bourgeois-democratic revolution was doomed to failure without the development of an independent, democratically organised proletarian movement. The 1848 failure of the bourgeois republican revolutions in Europe turned these young radical hopefuls into pragmatic revolutionaries. The age of utopian socialism was over. Exile and enforced isolation from politics after the upheavals of 1848 enabled Marx and Engels to mature their theories.
The year 1848 was one of hectic transmigration for the Marxes, in the flux of the European revolutions. They lived briefly in Paris, then moved to Cologne to start the New Rhenish Gazette, then back to Paris when the Prussian government banned and closed the paper. France was soon no longer safe. After a month the now-familiar figure of the sergeant of police appeared with the instruction that Karl et sa dame must leave Paris within twenty-four hours, otherwise they would be interned at Vannes in marshy Brittany.5
The Marxes gathered their possessions and joined the other refugees seeking a safe haven in England, the only country left in Europe that would have them. They arrived in London the year that the Corn Laws were repealed, Disraeli became the first leader of Jewish birth of the Conservative Party, Britain annexed the Punjab, the grand hall of Euston station was opened, and patent was granted for a machine to make envelopes. In literature, it was the period of publication of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Dickens’s David Copperfield and Macaulay’s History of England. Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, and Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh were challenging British censorship of sex education. In theatre, the legendary Fanny Kemble, abolitionist and Shakespearean actress, finally divorced Pierce Butler, her wealthy slave-owning husband.
Marx and his family arrived in Britain unnoticed. They would change it for ever.
The British population was about twenty million, over 10 per cent of whom lived in London and its suburbs. During the 1840s more than a quarter of a million people from Britain emigrated to America and three-quarters of a million left Ireland. In the wake of the 1848 revolutions thousands of Forty-Eighters emigrated to Britain. For those who made it to exile rather than jail6 – many of them radical thinkers, middle-class, or both – London was a key focal point of this diaspora.
By autumn 1849 the family was renting temporary lodgings at 4 Anderson Street, Chelsea. Möhme was pregnant again. Hans Röckle was setting up his toyshop in Europe’s biggest metropolis. The ‘small belongings’ that they brought with them included more books, papers and pamphlets than tables, chairs or cradles, but they had some boxes containing silver and linen from Jenny’s mother. When Marx took some of these to a London pawnshop sometime later to raise cash the pawnbroker called police constables. He claims they belong to his wife, explained the pawnbroker, but he’s an immigrant beggar tramp and I think he stole them.7 It’s a sharp insight into how some Londoners regarded the newly displaced European immigrants.
London was a safe haven for her family, but it was storm-tossed, to borrow one of the Shakespearean metaphors hovering behind Tussy’s pen when she wrote up this part of her family history. ‘Hundreds of refugees – all more or less destitute – were now in London. There followed years of horrible poverty, of bitter suffering – such suffering as can only be known to the penniless stranger in a strange land.’8 They were German Jews and revolutionary exiles in a tough city that with studied British indifference neither welcomed nor repelled them.
Möhme’s next baby was born on 5 November 1849 in Chelsea. She laboured whilst outside all was in uproar and small masked boys shouted, ‘Guy Fawkes for ever!’ In honour of the great conspirator they called the new baby boy Heinrich Guido: ‘Little Fawkes’, or ‘Fawksey’. He seemed weak and sickly from the start.
In the spring of 1850 the family was evicted from Chelsea by bailiffs who impounded their furniture and the children’s toys. Hans Röckle was losing his possessions to the devil. Respite in a German hotel in Leicester Square lasted only a week. The family were ejected on to the street when the hotelier discovered they couldn’t pay their bill. ‘One morning,’ wrote Jenny, ‘our worthy host refused to serve us our breakfast and we were forced to look for other lodgings.’9
Aided by yet another small emergency handout from Möhme’s mother, the Marxes found rooms in the house of a Jewish lace dealer in nearby Soho and spent a miserable summer there with the four children. Caroline, Möhme’s mother, sent money for her daughter to come home to Trier with the baby so she could take care of her, and told her to leave Lenchen in London to look after the other children and Marx.
Fawksey proved as doomed as the gunpowder plot. He died from meningitis in November 1850, a year after his birth. Jenny feared that she’d transmitted her anxieties to Little Fawkes through her breast milk; he ‘drank in so much sorrow and secret worries with the milk . . . that he was continually fretting, and in violent pain day and night’.10 She was already about six months pregnant again.
Shortly after, they moved up the road to the two-roomed lodgings at 28 Dean Street where Franziska, named for her mother’s youngest sister, was born in March 1851. Twelve weeks later there was another arrival in the household – Lenchen gave birth to her first and only child. There was no space for either of these newborns and Möhme was exhausted and unable to breastfeed, so both Jenny and Lenchen’s babies were put out to a wet nurse.
All efforts to save Franziska failed; a year later in April 1852 she died of pneumonia. The family laid out her little body in the back room. ‘Our three living children lay down by us,’ Möhme recalled, ‘and we all wept to the little angel whose livid, lifeless body was in the next room.’11 Jenny had to borrow two pounds from a friend to pay for the coffin and Franziska’s funeral.
These were events as lamentable, as terrible as any of Hoffmann’s tales. In September Marx wrote to Engels in despair: ‘My wife is sick, Jennychen is sick, Lenchen has a sort of nervous fever. I cannot and could not call the doctor, because I have no money for medicine. For the last eight or ten days I have fed my family on bread and potatoes, and it is still doubtful whether I can procure these to-day.’12
Engels had recently left London. He’d given up trying to get literary and journalistic work and moved to Manchester ‘to go, under very disadvantageous conditions, into his father’s firm, as a clerk’.13 Someone, Engels realised, had to earn money to subsidise Marx’s unique but unprofitable genius. His new job as clerk and general assistant at Ermen & Engels earned him an annual salary of £100 plus 10 per cent of the firm’s profits, all of which he shared with the Marxes.
From the moment he arrived in London in 1849 Marx had a mountain of political work to address, all of it unpaid. Setting up a new headquarters for the Communist League at the London offices of the German Workers’ Educational Society and running a committee for the aid of German refugees were amongst his most time-consuming tasks. He also attended regular meetings at the German Workers’ Educational Society clubroom above the Red Lion pub on the corner of Great Windmill Street and Archer Street, where he gave lectures and classes to young refugees in subjects ranging from languages to
philosophy and political economy. In November 1849 he began a long multi-part lecture series entitled, ‘What is Bourgeois Property?’ Well might he ask, since he had none.
In 1850 Marx turned 28 Dean Street into the temporary head office of the Communist League and filled it with volunteers campaigning for the support of the Cologne trialists, adding yet more pressure to the household. By the end of the year the Communist League was defunct, and Marx decided to refocus on his scholarly research on capital. However, he was instantly distracted by the relaunch in London of the New Rhenish Gazette. It was good journalism but, unable to pay for itself through subscription, it folded after five issues.
By the autumn of 1851 Marx was working as a regular correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. As well as his wages from the Tribune, Marx pulled in some £50 from journalism for other publications. Yet despite an average income of £200 a year, of which just over 10 per cent (£22 p.a.) went on the rent for Dean Street, there was never enough to pay off his creditors or the new bills for essential provisions.
Whilst Marx, like Hans Röckle, could never meet his obligations either to the devil or to the butcher, he laboured under these stressful conditions to investigate the workings of capitalism. This work was constantly interrupted by the temptations of timely, ‘essential’ pamphleteering. In December 1851 he began writing The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, commissioned by an American publication written in German, Die Revolution. He wasted several months of 1852 writing a satire of the ‘noteworthy jackasses’ and ‘democratic scallywags’ on the dispersed socialist fraternity, gleefully entitled The Great Men of Exile. Fortunately, the manuscript was sold fraudulently to the Prussian secret services by the scamp who was supposed to deliver it to the publisher, and consequently wasn’t published until a century later. More germane, he wrote a sound reflection on the Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne. But he and Engels knew he was merely producing ‘miniature dunghills’, and should get on with writing his analysis of political economy, a fact that further aggravated his now constant, uncomfortable carbuncles.
Eleanor Marx Page 6