Karl Marx

by Francis Wheen

  For an example of these better classes he turns again to the president himself, sparing his readers nothing:

  Thiers opened his second campaign against Paris in the beginning of April. The first batch of Parisian prisoners brought into Versailles was subjected to the most revolting atrocities while Ernest Picard, with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, strolled about jeering them, and while Mesdames Thiers and Favre, in the midst of their ladies of honour (?), applauded, from the balcony, the outrages of the Versailles mob. The captured soldiers of the line were massacred in cold blood; our brave friend, General Duval, the iron-founder, was shot without any form of trial. Gallifet, the kept man of his wife, so notorious for her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second Empire, boasted in a proclamation of having commanded the murder of a small troop of National Guards … With the elated vanity of a parliamentary Tom Thumb, permitted to play the part of a Tamerlane, he [Thiers] denied the rebels against his littleness every right of civilised warfare, up to the right of neutrality for ambulances. Nothing more horrid than that monkey, allowed for a time to give full fling to his tigerish instincts, as foreseen by Voltaire.

  Before we are surfeited with all this gore and fury Marx executes a skilful change of tone, pausing to consider the lessons of the Commune. He quotes a manifesto of 18 March which boasted that the proletarians of Paris had made themselves ‘masters of their own destiny by seizing upon the government power’. A naïve delusion, he argues. The working class cannot simply ‘lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes’: one might as well try playing a piano sonata on a tin whistle. Fortunately the Commune had quickly taken the point by getting rid of the political police, replacing the standing army with an armed populace, disestablishing the Church, liberating schools from the interference of bishops and politicians, and introducing elections for all public servants – including judges – so that they would be ‘responsible and revocable’. The Communal constitution restored to society all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state, and the transformation was visible at once: ‘Wonderful indeed was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! … No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees, American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serfowners, and Wallachian boyards. No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848 the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind.’

  Not for long, however. As Marx points out, Thiers cannot have it both ways: if the Commune was the work of a few ‘usurpers’ who had held the citizens of Paris hostage for two months, why did the bloodhounds of Versailles have to murder tens of thousands of people in order to kill the revolution? He concludes with another roar of saeva indignatio at the government’s brutality and a promise that the spirit of the Commune will not be suppressed, in France or anywhere else.

  The soil out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out, the governments would have to stamp out the despotism of capital over labour – the condition of their own parasitical existence.

  Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.

  The Civil War in France was one of Marx’s most intoxicating tracts – far too heady for the temperate English trade unionists Benjamin Lucraft and George Odger, who resigned from the General Council as soon as the text was approved, protesting that the International had no business meddling in politics. (Henceforth they would pursue their modest ambitions through the dear old non-political Liberal Party.) The first two printings of 3,000 copies were sold out within a fortnight; German and French editions followed soon afterwards. Perhaps Marx’s most impressive achievement was to make the rival factions of the Left quite forget their squabbles. ‘The French translation of the Civil War has had an excellent effect on the refugees,’ his daughter Jenny wrote, ‘for it has equally satisfied all parties – Blanquists, Proudhonists and Communists.’

  It also had an excellent effect on the notoriety of Karl Marx and his Association. Those who uphold the status quo can never believe that ordinary people might be able or willing to challenge it, and so any act of civil disobedience or defiance is invariably followed by a hunt for the hidden hand – whether a single Mr Big or a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’ – that has been pulling the strings. (One of the most delicious examples of this paranoid tendency can be found in Agatha Christie’s novel The Secret Adversary, published in 1922, in which the dauntless private detectives Tommy and Tuppence investigate a sudden spate of industrial strikes. ‘The Bolshevists are behind the labour unrest,’ they learn, ‘but this man is behind the Bolshevists.’ The villain, who masterminded and manipulated the entire Russian revolution without drawing attention to himself, turns out to be an Englishman named Mr Brown.) The Victorian versions of Tommy and Tuppence did not have far to look for the criminal force behind the Paris Commune. The evidence was all there on the last page of The Civil War in France. ‘The police-tinged bourgeois mind naturally figures to itself the International Working Men’s Association as acting in the manner of a secret conspiracy, its central body ordering, from time to time, explosions in different countries,’ Marx noted sarcastically. ‘Our Association is, in fact, nothing but the international bond between the most advanced working men in the various countries of the civilised world. Wherever, in whatever shape, and under whatever conditions the class struggle obtains any consistency, it is but natural that members of our Association should stand in the foreground.’

  Although a few of its individual members had been elected to the Commune, the International itself had said and done nothing throughout those two months apart from commissioning Marx to compose an Address, which appeared too late to have any influence on the outcome. But his exaggerated claim that the Association was ‘in the foreground’ set off a hue and cry across the continent. Jules Favre, now reinstated as foreign minister, asked all European governments to outlaw the International at once. A French newspaper identified Marx as the ‘supreme chief’ of the conspirators, alleging that he had ‘organised’ the uprising of 18 February from his lair in London. The International was said to have seven million members, all awaiting Marx’s orders to revolt. The great Mazzini, romantic hero of republican nationalism, seized the chance to settle an old score, informing the Italian and British press that Marx was ‘a man of domineering disposition; jealous of the influence of others; governed by no earnest, philosophical, or religious belief; having, I fear, more elements of anger than of love in his nature’.

  Other European governments fanned the panic. Spain agreed to extradite Communard refugees, and the German ambassador in London urged Lord Granville, the British Foreign Secretary, to treat Marx as a common criminal because of his outrageous ‘menaces to life and property’. After consulting the Prime Minister and the Queen, Granville replied that ‘extreme socialist opinions are not believed to have gained any hold upon the working men of this country’ and ‘no practical steps with regard to foreign countries are known to have been taken by the English branch of the Association’. Besides, one couldn’t arrest a man who had broken no law.

  Lord Aberdare, the Home Secretary, was continually badgered to do something about Marx and the International, particularly by a noisy backbench MP called Alexander Baillie-Cochrane. Before offering an opinion, Aberdare asked his private secretary to obtain copies of the International’s supposedly incendiary literature. Marx was happy to co-operate: on 12 July he sent the Home Office a parcel of papers that included the Inaugural Address, the Provisional Rules and a copy of The Civil War in France. When news of this reached Bakunin, he denounced Marx as a ‘sneaky and calumniatory
police spy’ – a libel that has been repeated periodically ever since. One of Marx’s most recent biographers, Robert Payne, concludes that ‘there is some truth in the charge’.

  But why shouldn’t Marx strive to dispel nonsense that might otherwise have been believed by the British government? Unlike Bakunin, he had no time for clandestine conspiracies. The International was an association of legally constituted trade unions, so why behave as if there were some guilty secret lurking in the wainscoting? His belief in openness was fully vindicated when Aberdare told Parliament, after studying the documents, that Marx and his supporters were harmless malcontents who needed only ‘education with some religious training’ to put themselves to rights. The Times was unconvinced, fearing that solid English trade unionists who wanted nothing more than ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ might be corrupted by ‘strange theories’ imported from abroad.

  Thanks to Marx’s pamphlet, British newspapers were now fully alert to the enemy within. ‘Little as we saw or heard openly of the influence of the “International”, it was in fact the real motive force whose hidden hand guided, with a mysterious and dreaded power, the whole machine of the Revolution,’ Fraser’s Magazine reported in June 1871. A Catholic magazine, the Tablet, warned its readers about the sinister significance of an unprepossessing bookseller’s shop in central London. ‘We would venture to set that undistinguished shop above more than one palace and monument. For there are the headquarters of a society whose behests are obeyed by countless thousands from Moscow to Madrid, and in the New World as in the Old, whose disciples have already waged desperate war against one government, and whose proclamations pledge it to wage war against every government – the ominous, the ubiquitous International Association of Workmen.’ A Spectator editorial, while praising Marx’s prose style (‘as vigorous as Cobbett’s’), thought the Address was ‘perhaps the most significant and ominous of the political signs of the times’. Even the Pall Mall Gazette, for which Engels had been a valued contributor during the Franco-Prussian war, joined the witch-hunt, describing Marx as ‘an Israelite by birth’ who had placed himself at the head of ‘a vast conspiracy having for its object to create political communism’.

  After years of obscurity, Karl Marx suddenly woke up to find himself infamous. ‘It is true, no doubt, that the secretary of that body, who assumes to direct it and to speak and write in its name, is a mischievous, hot-headed, and intemperate German, named Karl Marx,’ the Quarterly Review reported. ‘It is true, too, that many of his English colleagues are disgusted at his violence and resist his imperious behaviour, and altogether refuse to be dragged through the mire and blood which have no repugnant qualities for him.’ At first he was rather flattered by all the hullaballoo. ‘I have the honour to be at this moment the most calumniated and the most menaced man in London,’ he bragged to his German friend Ludwig Kugelmann. ‘That really does one good after a tedious twenty years’ idyll in the backwoods. The government paper – the Observer – threatens me with legal prosecution. Let them dare! I don’t care a damn about these scoundrels!’ But this insouciant defiance soon gave way to injured pride at the falsehoods and fantasies that were repeated in the press almost daily. When Jenny offered to help out by demanding an apology on his behalf from the weekly magazine Public Opinion, he instructed her to enclose her old calling card (‘Mme Jenny Marx, née Baronesse de Westphalen’) – which, he hoped, ‘will be bound to put fear into those Tories’. Mostly, however, he preferred less subtle forms of counter-attack. ‘If your paper continues to spread such lies, legal action will be taken against it,’ he warned the editor of a French newspaper in London, L’International, which had claimed that ‘infatuated’ European workers were bankrupting themselves to provide Marx with ‘every desirable comfort for leading a pleasant life in London’. Fresh libels in the Pall Mall Gazette provoked yet another riposte:

  Sir,

  From the Paris correspondence in your yesterday’s publication I see that while fancying to live in London, I was, in reality, arrested in Holland on the request of Bismarck-Favre. But, maybe, this is but one of the innumerable sensational stories about the International which for the last two months the Franco-Prussian police has never tired of fabricating, the Versailles press of publishing, and the rest of the European press of reproducing.

  I have the honour, Sir, to be

  Yours obediently,

  Karl Marx

  1, Modena Villas, Maitland Park.

  The Pall Mall Gazette retaliated by accusing Marx of libelling the French politician Jules Favre – and the obedient correspondent from Modena Villas once again took up his pen. ‘I declare you to be a libeller,’ he told the editor, Frederick Greenwood. ‘It is no fault of mine that you are as ignorant as arrogant. If we lived on the Continent, I should call you to account in another way. Obediently, Karl Marx.’ To English readers, of course, the publication of such a letter merely confirmed their worst fears about this dangerous German ruffian.

  In mid-July a correspondent from the New York World travelled to Modena Villas to inspect the ogre in his den. The first surprise was that Marx’s surroundings and appearance were those of a well-to-do man of the middle class – a thriving stockbroker, perhaps.

  It was comfort personified, the apartment of a man of taste and of easy means, but with nothing in it peculiarly characteristic of its owner. A fine album of Rhine views on the table, however, gave a clue to his nationality. I peered cautiously into the vase on the side-table for a bomb. I sniffed for petroleum, but the smell was the smell of roses. I crept back stealthily to my seat, and moodily awaited the worst.

  He has entered and greeted me cordially, and we are sitting face to face. Yes, I am tête à tête with the revolution incarnate, with the real founder and guiding spirit of the International Association, with the author of the address in which capital was told that if it warred on labour it must expect to have its house burned down about its ears – in a word, with the apologist for the Commune of Paris. Do you remember the bust of Socrates, the man who died rather than profess his belief in the gods of the time – the man with the fine sweep of profile for the forehead running meanly at the end into a little snub, curled-up feature like a bisected pothook that formed the nose? Take this bust in your mind’s eye, colour the beard black, dashing it here and there with puffs of grey; clap the head thus made on a portly body of the middle height, and the Doctor is before you. Throw a veil over the upper part of the face and you might be in the company of a born vestryman. Reveal the essential feature, the immense brow, and you know at once that you have to deal with that most formidable of all composite forces – a dreamer who thinks, a thinker who dreams.

  The interview itself scarcely lived up to the elaborate mise en scène. Was Marx the shadowy puppetmaster behind the International? ‘There is no mystery to clear up, dear sir,’ he chuckled, ‘except perhaps the mystery of human stupidity in those who perpetually ignore the fact that our Association is a public one and that the fullest reports of its proceedings are published for all who care to read them. You may buy our rules for a penny, and a shilling laid out in pamphlets will teach you almost as much about us as we know ourselves.’ The American newsman was unconvinced. The International might be a society of genuine working men, but were they not mere instruments in the hands of an evil genius masquerading as a respectable middle-class citizen of north-west London? ‘There is,’ Marx answered curtly, ‘nothing to prove it.’

  He grew weary of refuting the sensational rumours that were surfacing all over western Europe and beyond. A French newspaper, L’Avenir Libéral, reported that he had died; he then read his own obituary in the New York World, which eulogised ‘one of the most devoted, most fearless and most selfless defenders of all oppressed classes and peoples’. Quite gratifying, perhaps – but also an unwelcome reminder of mortality, since he was indeed in feeble health. By mid-August his doctor diagnosed ‘overstrain’ and recommended two weeks of rest and sea air. ‘I have not brought my li
ver medicine with me,’ Marx wrote to Engels from the Globe Hotel, Brighton, ‘but the air does me a world of good.’ He neglected to add that it was raining continuously and he had caught a beastly cold.

  Notoriety followed him everywhere. Shortly after arriving in Brighton he recognised a man lurking on the street corner as a rather inept spy who had often tailed him and Engels in London. A few days later, fed up with having his every footstep dogged, Marx stopped in mid-stride, turned round and fixed his pursuer with a menacing glare. The snoop humbly doffed his hat and scarpered, never to be seen again.

  Had they known the truth, these sleuth hounds could have saved themselves much wasted shoe leather. Marx’s vast, disciplined army of revolutionists existed only in the imagination of excitable politicians and editors. Once the Commune had been crushed, the International itself soon began to disintegrate. The French section was outlawed, its members either killed or transported to the distant colony of New Caledonia; the English trade-union leaders fell into the embrace of Gladstone’s Liberal Party; and many of the American branches were hijacked by middle-class disciples of the weird sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, who advocated spiritualism, necromancy, free love, teetotalism and a Universal Language. (Woodhull, who used her undoubted seductive charms to con large sums of money from the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, had begun her career as a snake-oil saleswoman in the travelling medicine-shows. She was a beneficiary of Marx’s open-door policy, which held that anyone who roughly subscribed to the Association’s statement of aims should be allowed in; but even his patience ran out when she announced her intention to stand for the American presidency as the candidate of the International Working Men’s Association and the National Society of Spiritualists.) During Marx’s absence at the seaside, several Parisian refugees in London were co-opted on to the General Council, but since most of them were Proudhonist windbags the old factional squabbles began all over again.