A splendid advertisement for the revolutionary lifestyle. The owner of this healthy complexion and well-proportioned nose arrived in Brussels on 5 October, accompanied by Ernst Dronke, but the two fugitives had only just sat down to dinner in their hotel when a police posse dragged them off to the Petits-Carmes prison, taking full advantage of the law against ‘vagabonds’ which had proved so effective with Jenny Marx. Two hours later Engels and Dronke were driven to the railway station in a sealed carriage and escorted on to the next train for Paris.
As soon as the Neue Rheinische Zeitung resumed publication after the lifting of martial law, on 12 October, Marx wrote a furious editorial about the ‘brutal treatment’ of his friends. ‘It is clear from this that the Belgian government is increasingly learning to recognise its position,’ he commented:
The Belgians gradually become policemen for all their neighbours, and are overjoyed when they are complimented on their quiet and submissive behaviour. Nevertheless, there is something ridiculous about the good Belgian policeman. Even the earnest Times only jestingly acknowleged the Belgian desire to please. Recently it advised the Belgian nation, after it had got rid of all the [workers’] clubs, to turn itself into one big club with the motto: ‘Ne risquez rien!’ It goes without saying that the official Belgian press, in its cretinism, also reprinted this piece of flattery and welcomed it jubilantly.
The struggle to save Germany’s infant democracy was reaching its climax, with a revolutionary uprising in Vienna and street battles in Berlin. No sooner had Marx been elected president of the Cologne Workers’ Association, on 22 October, than the editor of the Association’s newspaper was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment for defaming Herr Hecker. Encouraged by this small victory over his tormentors, the vengeful public prosecutor brought several new lawsuits against Marx, claiming that his speeches were tantamount to ‘high treason’. Absurdly, he also started libel proceedings over an item published by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung under the byline ‘Hecker’, even though the article was plainly a valedictory message to the German people from the republican Friedrich Hecker, who was leaving to start a new life in America. Nevertheless, Cologne’s tinpot Torquemada alleged that readers would assume it reflected his own views. As Marx asked incredulously, did the plaintiff really think that ‘this newspaper, with its inventive maliciousness, has signed its own proclamation “Hecker” in order to make the German people believe that Hecker, the public prosecutor, is emigrating to New York, that Hecker, the public prosecutor, proclaims the German republic, that Hecker, the public prosecutor, officially sanctions pious revolutionary wishes?’ Probably not: but it was yet another opportunity to hound and harass the enemies of the Prussian state.
Instead of hastening back to his fatherland for the denouement of these various dramas – half-tragedy, half-farce – Engels forgot about them altogether. After a few days’ rest in Paris, he set off alone on a strange, meandering ramble through the French countryside in the vague direction of Switzerland – though with many a pleasant detour along the way. As he admitted, ‘one does not readily part from France’. Comrades in Cologne might be fighting for their lives and liberties, but he was in no particular hurry to join them. Could it be that he had lost his nerve?
Engels’s unpublished journal of this month-long odyssey, which scarcely mentions the crisis engulfing Germany, is written with all the saucer-eyed wonder of a novice tourist. ‘What country in Europe can compare with France in wealth, in the variety of its gifts of nature and products, in its universality?’ he gushes. ‘And what wine! What a diversity, from Bordeaux to Burgundy, from Burgundy to the heavy St Georges, Lünel and Frontignan of the south, and from that to sparkling champagne!’ He seems to have been more or less squiffy all the time – especially in Auxerre, which he reached in time to celebrate the new Burgundian vintage. ‘The 1848 harvest was so infinitely rich that not enough barrels could be found to take all the wine. And what is more, of such quality – better than ’46, perhaps even better than ’34!’
It wasn’t only the wine that intoxicated: ‘At every step I found the gayest company, the sweetest grapes and the prettiest girls.’ After expert and exhaustive research, he concluded that the ‘cleanly washed, smoothly combed, slimly built’ women of Burgundy were preferable to their ‘earthy’ and ‘tousled’ counterparts between the Seine and the Loire. ‘It will therefore be readily believed that I spent more time lying in the grass with the vintners and their girls, eating grapes, drinking wine, chatting and laughing, than marching up the hill.’
One can see why the journey took so long – and why he was flat broke when he finally arrived in Switzerland. Appealing to both his father and Marx for donations, and hearing nothing from either, he wrote again to Cologne wondering nervously if the editor had disowned him for going AWOL. ‘Dear Engels,’ Marx replied. ‘I am truly amazed that you should still not have received any money from me. I (not the dispatch department) sent you 61 thalers ages ago … To suppose that I could leave you in the lurch for even a moment is sheer fantasy. You will always remain my friend and confidant as I hope to remain yours, K. Marx.’ He added a cheerfully combative PS: ‘Your old man’s a swine and we shall write him a damned rude letter.’ But it soon dawned on him that this might not be an effective fund-raising technique. ‘I have devised an infallible plan for extracting money from your old man, as we now have none,’ he wrote on 29 November, after further consideration. ‘Write me a begging letter (as crude as possible) in which you retail your past vicissitudes, but in such a way that I can pass it on to your mother. The old man’s beginning to get the wind up.’ Billy Bunter, it may be recalled, used a similar appeal to maternal sympathy when trying to extract postal orders from his father, and it was no more successful for him than for Marx and Engels.
By Christmas, Engels was bored of ‘sinful living’ and ‘lazing about in foreign parts’. In a letter from Berne he offered a preposterous new excuse for his truancy: ‘If there are sufficient grounds for believing that I shall not be detained for questioning, I shall come at once. After that they may, so far as I’m concerned, place me before 10,000 juries, but when you’re arrested for questioning you’re not allowed to smoke, and I won’t let myself in for that.’
After being reassured that he needn’t sacrifice his cigars for the cause, Engels returned to Germany in January – only to find that the revolution was all but over. A new government had been formed under the reactionary Count Brandenburg, bastard son of Frederick William II, and the King had dissolved the Prussian assembly. ‘The bourgeoisie did not raise a finger; they simply allowed the people to fight for them,’ Marx grumbled in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, admitting that his vision of a grand alliance between the workers and the middle classes had been no more than a pipedream. The Prussian débâcle proved that a bourgeois revolution was impossible in Germany; nothing short of a republican insurrection would now suffice. But the German working class was unable to gird up its loins for action without encouragement from abroad – specifically, from France. After brooding on the lessons of the previous year, he published a revised revolutionary menu on 1 January 1849:
The overthrow of the bourgeoisie in France, the triumph of the French working class, the emancipation of the working class in general, is therefore the rallying cry of European liberation.
But England, the country that turns whole nations into its proletarians, that takes the whole world within its immense embrace … England seems to be the rock against which the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled in the womb.
Every social upheaval in France was bound to be thwarted by the industrial and commercial power of the English middle class, ‘and only a world war can overthrow the Old England, as only this can provide the Chartists, the party of the organised English workers, with the conditions for a successful rising against their gigantic oppressors’. This seasonal game of consequences – which, more than a century later, would come to be known as the domino theory – led to
an inescapable and apocalyptic conclusion. ‘The table of contents for 1849 reads: Revolutionary uprising of the French working class, world war.’
And for afters? During 1848 the working class had been thoroughly worsted whenever and wherever it raised its head above the barricades – in France, Prussia, Austria and not least England itself, where a mass demonstration in Kennington, South London, marked the end of the Chartist threat. But with his talent for paradox and perversity, Marx could discern potential triumph in every disaster, silver linings behind every cloud, a new dawn lurking in even the most Stygian night. So what if the counter-revolutions had succeeded? This would spur the workers into a proper cavalry charge next time. He put his faith in the old tactic of réculer pour mieux sauter.
As it turned out, 1849 was merely a gloomy postscript to 1848. One month after publishing the New Year message, Marx and Engels stood trial on the by now familiar charge of insulting the public prosecutor. In an hour-long speech from the dock, Marx showed what a brilliant mind the legal profession had lost when he declined to follow his father’s career, deconstructing Articles 222 and 367 of the Napoleonic penal code until there was nothing left but a handful of dust. He lectured the jury on the important if pedantic distinction between insulting remarks and calumny; he argued that the prosecutor must prove not only the insult but the intention to insult, since Article 367 allowed a journalist to publish ‘facts’ even if they caused offence. In his exegesis of Article 222 (which forbade insults against public officials) he pointed out that the penal code, unlike Prussian law, did not include the crime of lèse-majesté; and since the King of Prussia wasn’t an official he could not avail himself of Article 222 either. ‘Why am I permitted to insult the King, whereas I am not permitted to insult the chief public prosecutor?’
Marx presented much of this defence calmly and forensically, without his customary rhetorical tricks or embellishments, but in his peroration he at last appealed to the jurors’ political conscience:
I prefer to follow the great events of the world, to analyse the course of history, than to occupy myself with local bosses, with the police and prosecuting magistrates. However great these gentlemen may imagine themselves in their own fancy, they are nothing, absolutely nothing, in the gigantic battles of the present time. I consider we are making a real sacrifice when we decide to break a lance with these opponents. But, firstly, it is the duty of the press to come forward on behalf of the oppressed in its immediate neighbourhood … The first duty of the press now is to undermine all the foundations of the existing political state of affairs.
He sat down to loud applause from the crowded courtroom: Marx and Engels had won their acquittal. But there was little time for celebration. The very next day, 8 February, Marx was back in the dock with two of his colleagues from the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats, this time accused of ‘incitement to revolt’.
The prosecution arose from the turmoil of November 1848 when members of the Prussian National Assembly – then being forced out of their debating chamber at gunpoint by government troops – had ruled that taxes should be withheld in protest. In a proclamation dated 18 November 1848, Marx’s committee declared that the forcible collection of taxes ‘must be resisted everywhere and in every way’, and that a people’s militia should be formed ‘to repulse the enemy’. Since this was undoubtedly an incitement to revolt, as Marx admitted in court, the only question was ‘whether the accused were authorised by the decision of the National Assembly on the refusal to pay taxes to call in this way for resistance to the state power [and] to organise an armed force against that of the state’. After a very brief discussion the jury decided unanimously that he had behaved with perfect constitutional propriety. In the words of the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung, a liberal weekly for German refugees in England: ‘In political trials the government nowadays has no luck at all with the juries.’ But the government had other shots in its locker. The unfortunately named Colonel Friedrich Engels, deputy commandant of the Cologne garrison, informed the Rhineland Oberpräsident that Marx was ‘becoming increasingly more audacious now that he has been acquitted by the jury, and it seems to me high time that this man was deported, as one certainly does not have to put up with an alien who is no more than tolerated in our midst, befouling everything with his poisonous tongue, especially as our home-grown vermin are doing that quite adequately’.
While Colonel Engels waited for an answer, two of his NCOs from the 8th Infantry Company took it upon themselves to engage in a spot of freelance bullying by turning up at Marx’s house on the afternoon of 2 March and demanding to know who had written a recent article in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung about military corruption, which had apparently caused grave offence to ‘the whole of the 8th Company’. The editor pointed out that the article in question was in fact an advertisement, for which he had no responsibility. His uniformed visitors, literally rattling their sabres, warned that ‘evil would result’ if he refused to name the author. By way of reply, Marx drew their attention to the butt of a pistol protruding from his dressing-gown pocket. The two men quickly took their leave.
‘Relaxation of discipline must have gone very far,’ Marx wrote to Colonel Engels, ‘and all sense of law and order must have ceased if, like a robber band, a Company can send delegates to an individual citizen and attempt with threats to extort this or that confession from him … I must beg you, Sir, to institute an inquiry into this incident and to give me an explanation for this singular presumption. I would be sorry to be obliged to have recourse to publicity.’ Marx’s pen was a more effective threat than the sabres of the NCOs. The wretched commandant assured him that the men had been reprimanded, and thanked the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for its discretion in not reporting the incident. Magnanimous in victory, Marx told the Colonel that the newspaper’s silence demonstrated ‘how great is its consideration for the prevailing mood of unrest’.
A likely story. Though Marx was indeed being castigated by leftists such as Dr Gottschalk (now released from jail) for lack of militancy, what he did publish was quite provocative enough – including savage mockery of the ‘bureaucratic – feudal – military despotism’ presided over by the King and his aristocratic new Interior Minister, Baron von Manteuffel. ‘The governments are openly preparing for coups d’état which are intended to complete the counter-revolution,’ he predicted on 12 March. ‘Consequently, the people would be fully justified in preparing for an insurrection.’ He did add that the people shouldn’t be decoyed into this ‘clumsily laid trap’ – but only because he thought there would soon be a far better opportunity. On 8 May, after an eruption of riots and guerrilla warfare in Dresden and the Palatinate, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung brought the glad tidings that ‘the revolution is drawing nearer and nearer’.
‘Wonder was expressed,’ Engels wrote many years later, ‘that we carried on our activities so unconcernedly within a Prussian fortress of the first rank, in the face of a garrison of 8,000 troops and confronting the guardhouse; but, on account of the eight rifles with bayonets and 250 live cartridges in the editorial room, and the red Jacobin caps of the compositors, our house was reckoned by the officers likewise as a fortress which was not to be taken by a mere coup de main.’ In fact, the fortress surrendered without a shot being fired. On 16 May the Prussian authorities prosecuted half of the editorial staff and recommended the other half – the non-Prussians, including Marx – for deportation. Nothing more could be done. In the final issue, printed defiantly in bright red ink, the editors announced that ‘their last word everywhere and always will be: emancipation of the working class!’ Marx and his journalists then left the building, clutching their weapons and baggage, with a band playing and the red flag flying proudly from the rooftop.
After liquidating everything – including the newspaper’s printing machinery, which he owned personally, and the furniture from his house – Marx managed to settle all outstanding debts. But he was left penniless. Jenny’s family silver was despatched to a pawnshop, this
time in Frankfurt, while she and the children set off once again to stay with her mother in Trier. Marx and Engels headed for Frankfurt in the hope of persuading left-wing deputies in the National Assembly to support the insurgent troops from south-western Germany, who were still fighting the good fight on behalf of the ‘provisional government’ in Baden and the Palatinate. No one would listen, so the next day they travelled to Baden and urged the revolutionary forces to march on Frankfurt uninvited. Again their appeals were ignored, though they had a friendly encounter with their old colleague Willich, who was now in charge of a partisan corps. Engels, a lifelong student of military strategy, couldn’t resist the chance to put on a uniform and join a real war. Enlisting as a volunteer, he soon became Willich’s chief adjutant, jointly directing operations and campaigns, and during the next few weeks he fought in four skirmishes – all of which were lost. His most important discovery, he told Jenny Marx, was ‘that the much-vaunted bravery under fire is quite the most ordinary quality one can possess. The whistle of bullets is really quite a trivial matter.’ He saw little evidence of cowardice, but plenty of ‘brave stupidity’.
Marx, who had neither the inclination nor the physique for soldiering, realised that there was nothing more he could do in Germany. At the beginning of June he departed for Paris, travelling on a false passport, and introduced himself to the French as the official envoy of the Palatinate revolutionary government. By the time he arrived, however, Paris was in the grip of a royalist reaction and a cholera epidemic. ‘For all that,’ he wrote cheerfully to Engels on 7 June, ‘never has a colossal eruption of the revolutionary volcano been more imminent than it is in Paris today … I consort with the whole of the revolutionary party and in a few days’ time I shall have all the revolutionary journals at my disposal.’
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