There were further notable concessions. The Communist Manifesto had advocated ‘abolition of all right of inheritance’ (though this hadn’t inhibited Marx from accepting a paternal legacy of 6,000 francs); the ‘Demands’ suggested merely that inheritance should be ‘curtailed’. Where the Manifesto had proposed the nationalisation of all land, in the ‘Demands’ he limited this to ‘princely and other feudal estates’. He even tried to woo the peasants and small tenant farmers – whom he privately despised – by offering them state mortgages, free legal advice and an end to all feudal tithes and obligations. To show how moderate these ‘Demands of the Communist Party’ were, one need only point out that many of them – including universal adult suffrage, the payment of salaries to parliamentary representatives and the transformation of Germany into a ‘single indivisible republic’ – have since been accepted by governments whose capitalist credentials are beyond question.
Pandering to the peasants and petty bourgeois was all very well, but Marx’s most urgent task now was to raise the consciousness of the Teutonic masses. In late March and early April the Communist League’s supporters in Paris departed for Germany, mostly to their home towns, to start the process of education and organisation. Karl Schapper went to Nassau, Wilhelm Wolff to Breslau. ‘The League has dissolved; it is everywhere and nowhere,’ wrote Stephan Born, a revolutionary typesetter who installed himself in Berlin. (Born, whose real name was the delicious Simon Buttermilch, later abandoned communism and became a schoolmaster in Switzerland.)
Marx’s preferred weapon, as so often, was journalism. ‘A new daily newspaper will be published in Cologne,’ he announced. ‘It will be called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and will be edited by Herr Karl Marx.’ There were good reasons for the choice of location. Cologne, the capital of the Rhineland, was a city he knew well from his spell as editor of the previous Rheinische Zeitung. He was still friendly with some of the old shareholders and expected them to back his new venture. Perhaps more importantly, the Code Napoleon – a bequest from the years of French occupation – was still in force there, allowing some measure of press freedom.
The Marxes left Paris in the first week of April 1848 accompanied by Engels and Ernst Dronke, a twenty-six-year-old German radical who already had a novel, a prison sentence and a daring jailbreak to his credit. After a brief stopover in Mainz, they went their separate ways: Engels to Wuppertal, in the hope of persuading his father and friends to invest in the new paper; Dronke to an uncle in Koblenz; Jenny and the children to Trier, where they intended to stay with her mother for a few weeks until Karl had obtained a residence permit.
As soon as he arrived in Cologne, Marx duly asked the police authorities to restore his Prussian citizenship, which had been relinquished in 1845. He claimed that he wished to settle there with his family to write ‘a book about economics’, discreetly omitting his plan for a popular daily newspaper. The authorities turned him down anyway, thus leaving open the possibility of expulsion if he became too much of a nuisance.
Engels, too, was being thwarted at every turn. ‘There’s damned little prospect for the shares here,’ he wrote from Barmen on 25 April. ‘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 shortly turn against themselves.’ As well they might, since that was precisely Marx’s intention. ‘Nothing whatever is to be got out of my old man,’ Engels continued. ‘Sooner than present us with 1,000 thalers, he would pepper us with a thousand balls of grapeshot.’ In the end, Marx had to raid what remained of his own inheritance to ensure that the paper began publication on 1 June 1848. The starting date should have been 1 July, but ‘the renewed insolence of the reactionaries’ persuaded him that there was no time to be lost. (‘Our readers will therefore have to bear with us,’ he wrote in the inaugural issue, ‘if during the first days we cannot offer the abundant variety of news and reports that our widespread connections should enable us to do. In a few days we shall be able to satisfy all requirements.’)
The editorial board was controlled by former members of the Communist League, including the revolutionary poet Georg Weerth, Ernst Dronke, and the journalists Ferdinand Wolff and Wilhelm Wolff. (To avoid confusion, these unrelated Wolffs were nicknamed ‘Red Wolf’ and ‘Lupus’.) But as Engels admitted, the newspaper was essentially ‘a simple dictatorship by Marx’. According to Stephan Born, who visited the office some months later, even the tyrant’s most loyal subjects sometimes found it hard to cope with his chaotic autocracy. ‘The most bitter complaints about Marx came from Engels. “He is no journalist,” he said, “and will never become one. He pores for a whole day over a leading article that would take someone else a couple of hours as though it concerned the handling of a deep philosophical problem. He changes and polishes and changes the change and owing to his unremitting thoroughness can never be ready on time.” It was a real release for Engels to be able once in a while to sound off about what annoyed him.’ Though Marx was undoubtedly a deadline-hugger, Born may be exaggerating. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was published daily, often with a hefty supplement to accommodate all the news and features that wouldn’t fit into the main section; on special occasions it had an afternoon edition as well. If the editor had been quite as dilatory as Born alleged, the paper would never have gone to press at all.
What distinguished the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from the rest of the ‘democratic’ press in Germany was its preference for information over long-winded theory. By carefully shepherding the facts to suit his purposes, Marx believed he could achieve far more than any number of scholarly liberals brooding on the meaning of republicanism. He also paid close attention to the activities of Chartists in Britain and latter-day Jacobins in France, hoping that these would alert his readers to the necessary antagonism between the bourgeoisie and proletariat – an antagonism he dared not spell out any more explicitly. (The first thing he did on arriving in Cologne was to take out subscriptions to three English newspapers, The Times, the Telegraph and the Economist.)
The twelve months that Marx spent in Germany during 1848 and 1849 are often referred to as ‘the mad year’, and he certainly seems to have been in a frothing rage for much of the period – not least with himself, as he tried to marry two wholly irreconcilable impulses. The dilemma was obvious to anyone who studied the Communist Manifesto, where he had argued that communists should encourage the proletariat to support the bourgeoisie ‘whenever it acts in a revolutionary way’ while simultaneously instilling into the workers ‘the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat’. The middle classes – can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.
The bourgeois liberals, including several of his shareholders, were putting their faith in two democratic institutions that had been established after the riots of March, the German National Assembly in Frankfurt and the Prussian Assembly in Berlin. An editor who wanted to reassure anxious middle-class readers of his intentions might have been well advised to give these infant parliaments the benefit of the doubt, at least for a month or two. But impatience got the better of him: in the very first issue there was a mordant and merciless account of the Frankfurt assembly, written by Engels.
‘For a fortnight Germany has had a Constituent National Assembly elected by the German people as a whole,’ he reported. ‘The first act of the National Assembly should have been to proclaim loudly and publicly this sovereignty of the German people. Its second act should have been the drafting of a German constitution based on the sovereignty of the people.’ Instead, the ‘elected philistines’ – most of whom were lawyers and schoolmasters – had wasted their time with ‘new amendments and new digressions … long-winded speeches and endless confusion’. Whenever it looked as if a decision might be taken, the representatives would defer the question and adjourn for dinner. Several businessmen who had put money into the newspaper withdrew their support immediately. ‘It cost us half
our shareholders,’ Engels confessed. Having thus antagonised the moderates, Marx then picked a fight with the most popular socialist in town, Andreas Gottschalk, who was not only president of the newly formed Cologne Workers’ Association but also the leading figure in the local branch of the Communist League.
The violent animosity between the two men is hard to explain or justify – though jealousy may have had something to do with it. As he had already shown elsewhere, Marx disliked organisations or institutions which he couldn’t dominate; and Gottschalk, a doctor who was much loved for his medical work among the poor, had rather more disciples than the irascible editor. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was selling 5,000 copies, a huge circulation by the standards of the day; but Gottschalk’s Cologne Workers’ Association had a membership of 8,000 within weeks of its inception.
Marx condemned Gottschalk as a left-wing sectarian who had jeopardised the ‘united front’ of bourgeoisie and proletariat by founding an exclusively working-class pressure group – and, worse still, by demanding a boycott of elections for the parliaments in Berlin and Frankfurt. Given Marx’s own readiness to lampoon the National Assembly as a nest of pettifogging time-wasters, some might think this criticism reeked of humbug. Even more perversely, he complained that Gottschalk was willing to accept a limited constitutional monarchy instead of outright republicanism. Yet Marx himself declared, in an editorial on 7 June, ‘We do not make the utopian demand that at the outset a united indivisible German republic should be proclaimed.’
Poor old Gottschalk thus found himself damned for timidity and over-zealousness at the same time; no wonder he resigned from the Communist League weeks after Marx’s noisy arrival in Cologne. Even when Gottschalk and his friend Friedrich Anneke were arrested and charged with incitement to violence, at the beginning of July, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung seemed curiously dispassionate. ‘We are reserving our judgement since we are still lacking definite information about their arrest and the manner in which it was carried out,’ Marx commented in a brief editorial on 4 July. ‘The workers will be sensible enough not to let themselves be provoked into creating a disturbance.’ The next day’s paper had a fuller report, which concentrated on the treatment of Anneke by his arresting officers: it accused the public prosecutor, Herr Hecker, of arriving at the house half an hour after the police to give them time to beat up the suspect and terrorise his pregnant wife. ‘Herr Hecker replied that he had given no orders to commit brutalities,’ Marx noted sarcastically. ‘As if Herr Hecker could order brutalities!’ Of the hapless Gottschalk, however, there was scarcely a mention.
Gottschalk stayed in jail for the next five months awaiting trial. A cynic might suspect that Marx wasn’t entirely unhappy at his rival’s absence from the scene, since it gave him a chance to impose his own political authority and unite the quarrelling factions. But Marx was never a natural conciliator. Carl Schurz, a student from Bonn, watched his performance at a gathering of Cologne democrats held in August 1848:
He could not have been much more than thirty years old at that time, but he was already the recognised head of the advanced socialistic school … I have never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and intolerable. To no opinion which differed from his own did he accord the honour of even condescending consideration. Everyone who contradicted him he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it. I remember most distinctly the cutting disdain with which he pronounced the word ‘bourgeois’; and as a ‘bourgeois’ – that is, as a detestable example of the deepest mental and moral degeneracy – he denounced everyone who dared to oppose his opinion … It was very evident that not only had he not won any adherents, but had repelled many who otherwise might have become his followers.
It should be pointed out that this was written more than fifty years later, long after Schurz had emigrated to America and become a thoroughly respectable statesman, serving as a US senator and Secretary for the Interior. Nevertheless, it rings horribly true. Since Marx was seldom capable of remaining on civil terms with even his closest comrades, it was absurd to imagine that he could bring harmony to an already fractious coalition of liberals and leftists, peasants and proletarians. In his speeches and editorials he insisted that Germany must have a democratic government ‘of the most heterogeneous elements’ rather than a dictatorship of brilliant communists such as himself; but the vehemence with which he delivered these views – flinging insults and derision at anyone who dared disagree – suggested that this was a man who wouldn’t recognise pluralism if it was presented to him on a silver salver with watercress garnish.
The Prussian authorities weren’t fooled for a moment by his posturings as a benign reformist. Inspector Hünermund of the Cologne police had warned his superiors of ‘the politically unreliable Dr Marx’ as early as April, and when the Neue Rheinische Zeitung printed its caustic account of Anneke’s arrest they seized their chance. On 7 July Marx was hauled up before the examining magistrate for ‘insulting or libelling the Chief Public Prosecutor’, while policemen ransacked his office for any scrap of paper which might identify the anonymous author of the offending article. Two weeks later he was taken in for further interrogation, and in August his colleagues Dronke and Engels were called as witnesses. On 6 September the Zeitung reported a worrying new development: ‘Yesterday one of our editors, Friedrich Engels, was again summoned to appear before the examining magistrate in the investigation against Marx and consorts, but this time not as a witness but as co-accused.’
The harassment of ‘Marx and consorts’ did not cow or silence them; if anything, they became more reckless. ‘A characteristic feature of the Rhineland,’ Engels told a meeting of Cologne democrats in mid-August, ‘is hatred of Prussian officialdom and dyed-in-the-wool Prussianism; it is to be hoped that this attitude will endure.’ As he must have known, Prussian officialdom did not care to have its tail tweaked. The army, in particular, seemed to be entirely out of control, merrily sabotaging the so-called ‘Government of Action’ that had been formed only a couple of months earlier. In August the Prussian assembly in Berlin demanded the sacking of any military officers who were unwilling to accept the new constitutional system. The Minister of War took no notice, and on 8 September the government was toppled by a vote of no confidence from the assembly, proposed by representatives of the Left and Centre.
Marx himself happened to be in Berlin at the time, returning from a fund-raising trip to Vienna. ‘Indescribable rejoicing broke out when news of the government’s defeat became known to the assembled crowd,’ he reported back to Engels, who was running the newspaper in his absence. ‘Thousands of people joined this procession and to the accompaniment of endless hurrahs the masses rolled across the Opera House Square. Never before has such an expression of joy been seen here.’
It was a pyrrhic victory. Caught up in the euphoria of the crowd, Marx had blithely assumed that there would now be a government of the Centre Left. A moment’s reflection might have shown him that the King of Prussia would never tolerate such an affront. Sure enough, by the time Marx returned to Cologne the counter-revolution had begun. Defying the wishes of the people’s representatives in Berlin, the King began composing a new cabinet of reactionary bureaucrats and army officers. ‘The Crown and the Assembly confront each other,’ Marx wrote on 14 September. ‘It is possible that arms will decide the issue. The side that has the greater courage and consistency will win.’
A heroic delusion, of course: bravery would count for little against the full might of state intimidation. Soon after dawn on 25 September the Cologne police arrested several leaders of the newly formed Committee of Public Safety, including Karl Schapper and Hermann Becker; they came for Engels, too, but he had made himself scarce. At lunchtime Marx addressed a mass meeting in the old marketplace, warning workers not to react to these ‘police provocations’ by taking to the
barricades. The time was not yet ripe for street fighting.
But time, like quinces and avocado pears, has a trick of going rotten before it is ripe. A state of martial law was declared in Cologne on 25 September, and the military commander immediately suspended publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx issued a leaflet to subscribers explaining that ‘the pen has to submit to the sabre’, but promised that the paper would appear again before long ‘in an enlarged format’.
With several of the journalists already jailed and shareholders refusing to subsidise a newspaper in limbo, this seemed rather optimistic – especially since Marx’s most valuable colleague, Engels, had scarpered as soon as he heard that the police were after him, pausing briefly in Barmen to break the news to his horrified parents before fleeing to the sanctuary of Belgium. The rival Kölnische Zeitung, patriotic and law-abiding as ever, published the warrant for his arrest:
Name: Friedrich Engels; occupation: merchant; place of birth and residence: Barmen; religion: Evangelical; age: 27 years; height: 5 feet 8 inches; hair and eyebrows: dark blond; forehead: ordinary; eyes: grey; nose and mouth: well-proportioned; teeth: good; beard: brown; chin and face: oval; complexion: healthy; figure: slender.
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