Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Frankel tried to advance his cause. Tussy enjoyed flirting with him; he was intelligent and entertaining, but that’s as far as her interest extended. Her mother had a much firmer grasp on Tussy’s development at this time, describing her as ‘eine Politikerin von top to bottom’.22 Möhme identified this as the point at which her youngest daughter emerged into adulthood: she was Eleanor, with a public political identity, no longer only Tussy the family tearaway. And it is her direct engagement with the Paris Commune and some of its key players – both men and women – that made her so.

  Exiled Communard refugees starved on the streets of London. Those discovered to have changed their names in order to get work were sacked immediately. English mainstream press opinion was hostile to the political exiles. Reflecting years later on the potency of anti-Communard feeling in her homeland at the time, Tussy recalled,

  . . . that it was proposed – quite seriously – that the Communards who had taken refuge in England should be handed over to the doctors and the hospitals for purposes of vivisection . . . this proposition . . . largely expressed the feelings of the whole of respectable society. Saddest of all is the fact that in England the workers also, with rare exceptions . . . were as bitterly hostile to the Commune as their exploiters.23

  Tussy experienced this first hand when she organised the first anniversary meeting to celebrate the memory of the Commune at St George’s Hall, Upper Regent Street in London. The Communards and their English supporters arrived at the venue to find it barricaded against them and the landlord demanding the return of his deposit. He preferred to pay the penalty for breach of contract rather than allow ‘such a set of “ruffians” in his highly respectable Hall’.24 Said ruffians instead adjourned to the Cercle d’Etudes on Tottenham Court Road, where ‘despite . . . so much suffering . . . we were a merry party . . . gay with the gaiety of perfect faith.’25 Brave words. In truth, the surviving Communards were, according to Engels, ‘hideously demoralised’. The General lamented the extent of their trauma and inability to regroup efficiently: ‘only sheer hard necessity can bring a disorganised Frenchman to his senses.’26

  Meanwhile, Leo Frankel persisted in trying to bring his senses to bear on Tussy. He had by now made some headway with her, appealing to her easily awakened sympathies for his plight as a Communard and engaging her attention with his new perspectives on art and politics. She seemed more responsive; Frankel hoped to catch her in party mood at the Commune anniversary celebration and propose to her. Worse luck for him, this was the very moment that Hippolyte Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray strode into Tussy’s life.

  As the party turned away from St George’s Hall and they all walked together from Upper Regent’s Street to Tottenham Court Road, Frankel tried to take Tussy’s arm. But he found her already talking easily with the legendary Communard Lissagaray. It was a conversation that Frankel was never able to interrupt.

  Whilst Tussy was in Bordeaux during Bloody Week at the end of May 1871, Lissagaray had been fighting on the barricades, defending Paris from the Versailles army, who aimed to recapture the city and shoot every man, woman and child who resisted. By 26 May the Versailles army was in control of the city centre and only the worker districts had not been overpowered. In these working-class arrondissements of Paris the army fired on the populace with heavy artillery, shot captured prisoners and piled up the bodies in public buildings.

  The defeated Communards fought on at ridiculous odds, refusing to surrender. Their military organisation and discipline were shambolic. They no longer had any strategic plan or central command. Two hundred Communards fought their last battle in Père Lachaise Cemetery, where 147 of them were lined up, shot and buried in a communal pit in front of one of the cemetery walls.

  Prosper Lissagaray fought singlehandedly for a quarter of an hour on the last manned barricade of the Commune on the Rue Ramponeau, until he ran out of ammunition. With a death sentence on his head, he escaped from Paris and made his way, circuitously, to London.

  Lissa, as Tussy called him, was quite literally a tall, dark and handsome stranger, a Basque from the Midi-Pyrenees in south-west France. A journalist and activist turned street-fighter, he was seventeen years older than seventeen-year-old Tussy. At thirty-four, he had the energy and alert, nervous anxiety of those Communards involved in hand-to-hand combat who had fought and survived the day. He took no prisoners in his politics, writing, journalism, or on the barricades. Dashing and flamboyant, experience of extremity and realpolitik had made him also gentle-mannered and good-humoured. Legendary for his physical bravery, political adventures and serious intellectual mindset, he was as yet unmarried. Marx admired his thinking and activism. But he didn’t like his attentions to Tussy.

  A more saturnine disposition lurked beneath Lissa’s élan, but for now this was obscured from Eleanor’s view by sexual naivety and the flush of first attraction – instant and mutual. Tussy, blooming at seventeen, already had some of her own adventures to recount, shone intellectually in any situation and – for a man who had just outwitted death – had the charm of bold, unfettered youth. She laughed a lot and she argued continuously. Physically striking, with her father’s flashing coal-black eyes, and unconventional in the stylish simplicity of her dress, Tussy at seventeen was elemental and mercurial, far from the gauze and velvet of vapid romantic love. She was boisterous, passionate and, to Lissa, unlike any other woman he had yet met.

  They made a striking couple, enchanted with each other’s company. Tussy’s close friend Clara Collet recorded that Tussy in love was ‘prettier than ever’ but she missed their former intimacy: ‘I wish he would commit forgery and suicide. It would be such a relief.’27

  At the end of 1871 Lissa had published a pamphlet about his experiences in the Commune. Entitled Les huit journées de mai derrière les barricades, this was the beginning of what would become – and remains to this day – the primary first-hand historical account and source of Communard history. He read early extracts to Tussy, and the two decided to both expand and translate the pamphlet together. Lissa’s project was a hook for Tussy that Frankel could not hope to match. The rest of her family were preoccupied with Jennychen’s wedding plans and busy preparing for the last congress of the First International at The Hague, scheduled for September.

  Jenny had become engaged to Charles Félix César Longuet in March 1872. Longuet was a university friend of Paul Lafargue; the two had been student radicals together in Paris and worked together for the Commune. Communards were in romantic favour with the Marx sisters, though not with their mother or the General.

  Initially Möhme thought Longuet a ‘good, fine, proper man’,28 but wished her eldest daughter’s choice had ‘fallen on an Englishman rather than a Frenchman, who, combined with the national qualities of charm, is naturally not without their weakness and irresponsibility’.29 Her regrets proved well-founded as Longuet’s constitutional laziness became evident. Möhme grumbled that she was fed up with his ‘pack of lies’, national chauvinism and ‘French fiddlededee’.30 Her Prussian prejudice was naturally mixed up with her maternal anxiety about the future security of daughters married to impecunious revolutionaries, a concern – entertainingly – shared by her husband.

  When Schnappy died in Spain in July, Jennychen’s marriage was postponed. Tussy’s parents and the General set off for Spain to comfort Laura and Paul, and then proceeded directly on to The Hague congress. Tussy stayed in London to attend to her work on the Refugee Relief Committee, allowing her – conveniently – to spend time with Lissa.

  In October Jennychen married Longuet at St Pancras Register Office. Marx and Engels were preoccupied with settling the fate of the First International. Tussy, meanwhile, had to calm Lissa when he became jealous of Frankel. Both men then discovered that another Communard refugee, with the initials JJ, was furious with Frankel for cutting in on his approaches to Tussy. Tussy tried to untangle these complications with the help of a friend, Maggie, about whom little is known except that she lived on Harley St
reet and liked romantic intrigue. Maggie urged Tussy to tackle Lissa head on, ‘try and pump my dear – all is fair in love and war – I hope you are no longer miserable’.31

  Tussy’s practical solution to reassuring Lissagaray was to give him her virginity. She was not the sort of girl to lose it, as if by accident. Likely as not, this agreeable sexual initiation happened whilst the rest of the family were abroad. Of course the instant the couple got themselves sorted out, Eleanor’s family objected to the relationship.

  Lissa was another Frenchman. Marx had just married off his eldest daughter to a disappointed, broke Communard. Now here was another one. To make matters more tricky, Lissagaray and Lafargue had fallen out over political differences concerning the future of the International. Laura sided with her husband and on a family visit to Modena Villas in 1872 the Lafargues cold-shouldered Lissa. Furious about this snub, Tussy complained to Jennychen about ‘this really unladylike behaviour on Laura’s part’.32 A rich criticism, coming from the champion of the unladylike.

  On the cusp of her eighteenth birthday, Tussy was headstrong, a force of nature for the first time truly in love with someone as well as her father but, uncomfortably, very much like him. Marx admired Lissa for his politics and his mind but had no intention of allowing his favourite to throw away her life as her sisters had now done without discovering the unrealised value in herself. That Lissa was twice her age was not, by contemporary standards, a matter of much concern to anyone.

  From the outset of their relationship, Tussy acted as the far too dutiful amanuensis, translating, transcribing and editing Lissa’s history of the Commune and bolstering his ego. Her relationship with him brought a huge improvement in her French. She entered a phase of long struggle, breaking away from her father’s dominance with a charming, talented older man who was in many points reminiscent of Marx. Tussy was resolute and determined to stand her ground. Her father was the most stubborn man in Europe. A titanic clash between father and daughter was brewing. Daddy’s little girl might now break both of their hearts.

  In an attempt to quell the tension, Marx took Eleanor to Brighton for a fortnight. However, less than a week later, on April Fools’ Day, Marx came home alone, without prior warning and with a face like thunder.

  The previous day Tussy had informed her father that she had decided to stay in Brighton and earn her own living. The ensuing twenty-four-hour row failed to alter her decision. Marx sulked in his study at Modena Villas and wrote complaining letters to Engels about the confounded Lissagaray. ‘I want nothing from him except that he would give proofs instead of phrases, that he would be better than his reputation, and that one could have certain right to rely on him. You will see from [Tussy’s] answer how the man continues to act. The damned thing is that I have to proceed with much consideration for the child’s sake.’33

  The child, meanwhile, set herself up in private lodgings at 2 Manchester Street, very near the seafront and Brighton Pavilion, signed up with an employment agency recommended to her by family friend Arnold Ruge and asked some French friends living in Brighton to help her find private pupils to teach whilst she sought a more permanent position.

  It was no small thing in early 1870s England for an eighteen-year-old without her own money or formal education to strike an act of independence like this from her family. Tussy did not want to continue living off the General’s bounty. She knew her parents depended on Engels for the mainstay of their annual income and that her married sisters relied on his financial support for their new households. It was the General who taught her the value of self-sufficiency; her bid for economic freedom was out of respect for him as much as it was for her parents – but primarily, it was for her own self-respect.

  Five months after Jennychen married and left home, the pitfalls of being the last remaining daughter in the Marx household were now clear to Tussy. She was as much running away from the spectre of becoming the stay-at-home daughter on whom her parents depended as she was running towards the lover of her choice.

  Counting on the General to mollify Marx, Möhme gave Tussy’s decision her practical and unqualified support. Eleanor had a firm ally in her mother. The Jenny Marx who was once a young female radical firebrand empathised with Tussy’s decision. Almost immediately after her husband’s furious return to London Jenny sent her youngest daughter ‘a little outfit’34 to tide her over for the first week or so until she found a job. In the accompanying note she also advised Tussy to buy a few extra pairs of stockings from the Brighton shops. ‘I alone understand how dearly you long for work and independence, the only two things that can help one over the sorrows and cares of present day society.’35 Sound feminist advice from a mother who had neither. Tussy received many reassuring letters from her mother: ‘Believe me, despite appearances to the contrary, nobody understands your position, your conflict, your embitterment better than I do. Let your young heart triumph . . . Forgive me if at times you have felt that I hurt you.’36 Jenny recognised her own youth in Tussy, in which her natural instinct for liberty from the absurdities of patriarchy and class-based social expectation were cast as rebellious provocation. The reference to ‘embitterment’ is to Eleanor and Laura’s feud over the discord between Lissa and Lafargue. Jenny tried to repair the rift, to no effect. Tussy and Laura remained at loggerheads.

  Tussy’s French friends quickly referred some pupils to her and in the month of April 1873 she earned ten shillings a week from private tuition. She needed every penny to cover her rent and subsistence. Brighton and independence were expensive.

  Möhme packed up and sent her clothes from London, along with detailed notes and practical advice about all manner of things including accessories, keeping warm and eating regularly. She apologised to Tussy that all this fuss over clothes and self-presentation would doubtless try her patience: ‘I know how little store you set by such things and how lacking in vanity and a love of finery you are.’37 Her mother was quite right to be more concerned about the state of Tussy’s stockings than her ability to find work.

  Early in May the agency found her a salaried part-time teaching post at a seminary for young ladies run by the Misses Hall in Sussex Square. She was to start in the new academic term. Eleanor upgraded her lodgings to 6 Vernon Terrace and prepared for her new job.

  On 3 May Tussy wrote a breezy birthday letter to her father, describing all that she had achieved in the past month and making no allusion to the argument between them. She told him that she’d read Pythagoras and asked him to send her some history books. Nothing could have further flattered or reassured Marx that he had done a good job with the apple of his eye: she was coping magnificently, and as well as securing herself two sources of income she was applying herself to continuing study. Mohr reacted to this eloquent olive branch by sulking: Tussy was not making the hour-long train journey from Brighton to London to come home and see him for his birthday.

  Quite aside from Mohr’s Lear-like fatherly solipsism, the manner in which Tussy organised these first weeks of her independence demonstrate her self-motivation and intellectual discipline. By a combination of nature and culture, she was a tireless autodidact. Had she been a boy, she could have aspired to university and socially sanctioned study like her father. Without that option, like many gifted women before her, she had to set about educating herself. As Mary Wollstonecraft observed, if woman ‘be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice.’38

  The history books she requested came in her mother’s parcels containing some clothes and accessories for her new job, complete with detailed instructions on how to assemble and wear them attractively. Möhme’s vicarious embrace of Tussy’s independence is palpable. In opposite, inverse proportion to her husband’s fit of pique, Jenny Marx, about to turn sixty, enjoyed the life her younger self might have led through Tussy.

  Resisting Mohr’s silence, Tussy
threw herself into her first professional teaching job. Of the limited options available for women to earn their own living in 1870s Britain, governessing and teaching were crucial means to hard-won independence. The narrative of Tussy’s life begins to take shape like that of a feminist anti-heroine of the great Victorian novels. Except that she is real, not the aspirational projection of a frustrated intellect that longs to express itself through the actualisation of contested freedom.

  Tussy was immediately interested in her pupils, particularly the individuals with active political inquisitiveness. A teenager with an ‘immense interest’39 in the Commune and the International quickly attached herself to her inspiring new history teacher, Miss Marx. ‘Is it not odd that I should always hit on such girls?’40 Tussy asked her mother with a charming lack of awareness that she might be a role model for younger women.

  For the first time mistress of her own routine, working hard at a double teaching load, carrying her own salary in her purse, Tussy was challenged and exhilarated. Lissa caught the train from London and visited her regularly at the weekends. They took long walks arm in arm along the Brighton and Hove seafront, munching fish and chips, eels, clams and whelks on the pier, chain-smoking, talking, debating what they were reading. They rambled over the Sussex Downs with picnics of bread, cheese and wine, discussing the fate of the International now that Marx had ensured the relocation of its head of operations to New York, bitching about the Lafargues, his writing, her teaching, ending the day in lamplit country pubs with pies and pints of ale. As far as Tussy’s landlady and friends in Brighton understood, Lissa was Tussy’s fiancé.

  She was, in her mother’s view, working too much and eating too little. But what tipped Möhme’s anxiety was her discovery that in Brighton Lissa seemed to be accepted by all as Tussy’s betrothed – allowing the couple free rein to wander around unchaperoned. Möhme learned from Tussy’s employers that Lissa had been visiting her at the school. The Misses Hall concluded these visits were appropriate as they understood that Tussy and Lissa were engaged.