Delhi university library

marx, Eighteenth Brurmire of Louis Bonaparte.

Marx was expelled from Paris in the beginning of 1845 by the Guizot government, as a result of representations from Prussia, which had demanded the suppression of the socialist Vorwdrts in which offensive comments had appeared concerning the character of the reigning Prussian king. The order of expulsion was originally intended to apply to the entire group, including Heine, Bakunin, Ruge and several other lesser foreign exiles. Ruge, being a Saxon citizen, was left unmolested; the French government itself did not venture to press the order against Heine, a figure of, European fame, then at the height of his powers and influence. Bakunin and Marx were duly expelled in spite of vigorous protests in the radical press. Bakunin went to Switzerland; Marx, with his wife and one- year-old daughter Jenny, to Brussels where shortly afterwards he was joined by Engels who had returned from England for this purpose. In Brussels he lost no time in establishing contact with the various German communist workers’ organizations which contained members of the dissolved League of the Just, an international society of proletarian revolutionaries with a vague, but violent, programme, influenced by Weitling;


146 KARL MARX

it had branches in various European cities. He entered into relations with Belgian socialists and radicals, carried on an active correspondence with members of similar bodies in other countries, and established regular machinery for the exchange of political information, but the chief sphere of his activity lay among the German workmen in Brussels itself. To these he attempted by means of lectures, and of articles in their organ, the Briisseler fitting, to explain their proper part in the coming revolution, which he, like the majority of European radicals, believed to be imminent.

As soon as he concluded that the establishment of communism could only be achieved by an armed rising of the proletariat, his entire existence turned into an attempt to organize and discipline it for its task. His personal history which up to this point can be regarded as a series of episodes in the life of an individual, now becomes inseparable from the general history of socialism in Europe. An account of one is necessarily to some degree an account of the other. Attempts to distinguish the part which Marx played in directing the movement from the movement itself obscure the history of both. The task of preparing the workers for the revolution was for him a scientific task, a routine occupation, something to be performed as solidly and efficiently as possible, and not a direct means of personal self-expression. The external circumstances of his life are therefore as monotonous as those of any other devoted expert, as those of Darwin or Pasteur, and offer the sharpest possible contrast to the restless, emotionally involved, lives of the other revolutionaries of his time.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century form a period in which an enormous premium was placed


1848

147

on sensibility. What had begun by being the isolated experience of exceptional individuals, of Byron and Shelley, Rousseau and Chateaubriand, Schiller and Jean Paul, by insensible degrees became part of the general attitude of European society. For the first time a whole generation became fascinated by the personal experience of men and women, as opposed to the external world composed of interplay of the lives of whole groups or societies. This tendency obtained public expression in the lives and doctrines of the great democratic revolutionaries, and in the passionate adoration with which they were regarded by their followers: Mazzini, Kossuth, Garibaldi, Bakunin, Lassalle, were admired not only as heroic fighters for freedom, but for their romantic, poetiral properties as individuals. Their achievements were looked upon as the expression of profound inner experience, the intensity of which gave their words and gestures a moving personal quality wholly different from the austerely impersonal heroism of the men of 1789, a quality which constitutes the distinguishing characteristic, the peculiar Hegelian ; essence of the age. Karl Marx belonged in spirit to an earlier or a later generation; but certainly not to his own time. He lacked psychological insight, and poverty and hard work did not increase his emotional receptiveness; this extreme blindness to the experience and character of persons outside his immediate range made his intercourse with the outside world seem singularly boorish; he had had a brief sentimental period as a student in Berlin: this was now over and done with. He looked upon moral or emotional suffering, and spiritual crises, as so much bourgeois self-indulgence unpardonable in time of war: like Lenin after him, he


148 KARL MARX

had nothing but contempt for those who, during the heat of the battle, while the enemy gained one position after another, were preoccupied with the state of their own souls.

He set to work to create an international revolutionary organization. He received the warmest response from London, from a society called the German Workers’ Educational Association, headed by a small group of exiled artisans, whose revolutionary temper was beyond suspicion: the type-setter Schapper, the watch-maker Moll and the cobbler Bauer were his first reliable political allies. They had affiliated their society to a federation called the Communist League which succeeded the dissolved League of the Just. He met them in the course of a journey to England with Engels, and found them men after his own heart, determined, capable and energetic. They looked on him with considerable suspicion as a journalist and an intellectual: and their relations for some years preserved a severely impersonal and business-like character. It was an association for immediate practical ends, but this he approved. Under his guidance, the Communist League grew fast and began to embrace groups of radical workers, scattered for the most part in the industrial areas in Germany, with a sprinkling of army officers and professional men. Engels wrote glowing reports of the increase in their numbers and their revolutionary zeal in his own native province. For the first time Marx found himself in the position which he had long desired, the organizer and leader of an active and expanding revolutionary party. Bakunin, who had in his turn arrived in Brussels, and was on equally good terms with the foreign radicals and members of the local aristocracy,

1848 149

complained that Marx preferred the society of artisans and workmen to that of intelligent people, and was spoiling good and simple men by filling their heads with abstract theories and obscure economic doctrines, which they did not begin to understand, and which only made them intolerably conceited. He saw no point in lecturing to, and organizing small groups of ill-educated and hopelessly limited German artisans, who understood little of what was so elaborately expounded to them, drab, underfed creatures who could not conceivably turn the scale in any decisive conflict. Marx’s attack on Proudhon still further estranged them; Proudhon was an intimate friend and, in Hegelian matters, a disciple of Bakunin; and the attack was aimed no less at Bakunin’s own habit of indulging in vague and exuberant eloquence in place of detailed political analysis.

The events of 1848 altered the view of both on the technique of the coming revolution, but in precisely opposed directions. Bakunin in later years turned to secret terrorist groups, Marx to the foundation of an open official revolutionary party proceeding by recognized political methods. Pic set himself to destroy the tendency to rhetoric and vagueness among the Germans, nor was he wholly unsuccessful, as may be seen in the efficient and disciplined behaviour of the members of his organization in Germany during the two revolutionary years and after.

In 1847 the London centre of the Communist League showed its confidence in him by commissioning him to compose a document containing a definitive statement of its beliefs and aims. He eagerly embraced this opportunity for an explicit summary of the new doctrine which had lately resumed ils final shape in his head.


I50 KARL MARX

He delivered it into their hands early in 1848. It was published a few weeks before the outbreak of the Paris revolution under the title of The Manifesto of the Communist Party.

Engels wrote the first draft in the form of questions and answers, but since this was not thought sufficiently forcible, Mapc completely re-wrote it. According to Engels the result was an original work which owed hardly anything to his own hand: but he was excessively modest wherever their collaboration was concerned, so that it is virtually impossible to say how great a share he had in its composition. The result is very nearly a work of genius. No other modern political movement or cause can claim to have produced anything comparable with it in eloquence or power. It is a document of prodigious dramatic force; in form it is an edifice of bold and arresting historical generalizations, mounting to a denunciation of the existing order in the name of the avenging forces of the future, much of it written in prose which has the lyrical quality of a great revolutionary hymn, whose effect overwhelming even now, was probably greater at the time. It opens with a menacing phrase which reveals its tone and its intention: ‘A spectre is wandering over Europe to-day—the spectre of communism^ AD the forces of Europe have united to exorcise it: the Pope and the Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German policemen.. . . it is recognized as a real force by all the European powers.’ It proceeds as a succession of interconnected theses which are developed and brilliantly embroidered, and ends with a famous and magnificent invocation addressed to the workers of the world.

The first of these theses is contained in the opening


1848 151

sentence of the first section: ‘The history of all previous society is the history of class struggles.' At all periods within recorded memory mankind has been divided into exploiter and exploited, master and slave, patrician and plebeian, and in our day proletarian and capitalist. The immense development of discovery and invention has transformed the economic system of modern human society: guilds have given way to local manufacture, and this in its turn to great industrial enterprises. Each stage in this expansion is accompanied by political and cultural forms peculiar to itself. The structure of the modern State reflects the domination of the bourgeoisie —it is in effect a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeois class as a whole. The bourgeoisie fulfilled a highly revolutionary role in its day; it overthrew the feudal order and in so doing destroyed the old, picturesque, patriarchal, relations which connected a man to his ‘natural masters’ and left only one real relation between them—the cash nexus, naked self-interest. It has turned personal dignity into a negotiable commodity, to be bought and sold; in place of ancient • liberties, secured by writs and charters, is has created freedom of trade; for exploitation disguised by religious and political masks, it has substituted exploitation, direct, cynical and unashamed. It has turned professions formerly thought honourable, as being forms of service to the community, into mere hired labour: acquisitive in its aims, it has degraded every form of life. This was achieved by calling immense new natural resources into existence: the feudal framework could not contain the new development, and was split asunder. Now the process has repeated itself. The frequent economic crises due to over-production are a symptom


152 KARL MARX

of the fact that capitalism can in its turn no longer control its own resources. When a social order is forced to destroy its own products, to prevent its own faculties from expanding too rapidly and too far, that is a certain sign of its approaching bankruptcy and doom. The bourgeois order has created the proletariat which is at once its heir and its executioner. It has succeeded in destroying the power of all other rival forms of organization, the aristocracy, the small artisans and leaders, but the proletariat it cannot destroy, for it is necessary to its own existence, is an organic part of its system, and constitutes the great army of the dispossessed, whom in the very act of exploiting it inevitably disciplines and organizes. The more international capitalism becomes —and as it expands, it inevitably grows more so—the wider and more international the scale on which it automatically organizes the workers, whose union and solidarity will eventually overthrow it. The international of capitalism breeds inevitably, as its own necessary complement, the international of the working class. This dialectical process is inexorable, and no power can arrest it or control it. Hence it is futile to attempt to restore the old medieval idyll, to build utopian schemes on a nostalgic desire to return to the past, for which the ideologists of peasants, artisans, small traders so ardently long. The past is gone, the classes which belonged to it have long been decisively defeated by the force of history; their hostility toward the bourgeoisie, often falsely called socialism, is a reactionary attitude, a futile attempt to reverse the advance of human evolution. Their only hope of triumph over the enemy lies in abandonment of their independent existence and fusion with the proletariat, whose growth corrodes the


1848 153

bout geoisie from within; for the increases of crises and of unemployment forces the bourgeoisie to exhaust itself in feeding its servants instead of feeding on them, which is its natural function.

from attack the Manifesto passes to defence. The. enemies of socialism declare that the abolition of private property will destroy liberty and subvert the foundations of religion, morality and culture. This is admitted. But the values which it will thus destroy will be only those which are bound up with the old order—bourgeois liberty and bourgeois culture, whose appearance of absolute validity for all times and places is an illusion due solely to their function as a wcapon in class struggle. True personal freedom is possession of the power of independent action, of which the artisan, the small trader, the peasant, has long been deprived by capitalism. As for culture, ‘the culture the loss_of which .is

lamented is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine’. With the total abolition o£ the class struggle these illusory ideals will necessarily vanish and be succeeded by the new and wider form of life founded upon a classless society. To mourn their loss is to lament the disappearance of an old familiar ailment.

The revolution must differ in differing circumstances, but its first measuies everywhere must be the nationalization of land, credit, transport, the abolition of rights of inheritance, the increase of taxation, the intensification of production, the destruction of the barriers between town and country, the introduction of compulsory woik and of free education for all. Only then can serious social reconstruction begin. The rest of the Manifesto exposes and refutes vaiious forms of pseudosocialism—the attempts of vaiious enemies of the

L


154 KARL MARX

bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, or the Church, to gain the proletariat to its cause by specious pretence of common interest. Into this category enters the ruined petite bourgeoisie, whose writers, adept as they are at exposing the chaos of capitalist production, the pauperization and degradation caused by the introduction of machinery, the monstrous inequalities of wealth, offer remedies which, being conceived in obsolete terms, are utopian. Even this cannot be said of the German ‘True Socialists’, who by translating French platitudes into the language of Hegelianism, produce a meaningless collection of nonsense phrases which cannot long deceive the world. As for Proudhon, Fourier or Owen, their followers draw' up schemes to save the bourgeoisie, as if the proletariat did not exist, or else could be drawn upwards into capitalist ranks, leaving only exploiters and no exploited. This endless variety of views represents the desperate plight of the bourgeoisie unable or unwilling to face its own impending death, concentrating upon vain efforts to survive under the guise of a vague and opportunist socialism. As for the communists, they are not a party or a sect, but the self-conscious vanguard of the proletariat itself, obsessed by no mere theoretical ends, but seeking to fulfil their historical destiny. They do not conceal their aims. They openly declare that these can be gained only when the entire social order is overthrown by force of arms, and they themselves seize all political and economic power. The Manifesto ends with the celebrated words: ‘The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all lands, unite!’

No summary can convey the quality of its opening or its closing pages. As an instrument of destructive

1848 155

propaganda it has no equal anywhere; its effect upon succeeding generations is unparalleled outside religious history; had its author written nothing else, it would have ensured his lasting fame. Its most immediate effect, however, was upon his own fortunes. The Belgian Government, which behaved with considerable tolerance to political exiles, could not overlook this formidable publication, and brusquely expelled him and his family from its territory. On the next day the long expected revolution broke out in Paris. Flocon, a radical member of the new French Government, in a flattering letter, invited Marx to return to the revolutionary city. He set off immediately and arrived a day later.

He found the city in a state of universal and uncritical enthusiasm. The barriers had fallen once more, this time it seemed for ever. The king had fled, declaring that he had been driven out by moral forces, a new Government had been appointed containing representatives of all the friends of humanity and progress: the great physicist Arago and the poet Lamartine received portfolios, the workers were represented by Louis Blanc and Albert. Lamartine composed an eloquent manifesto which was read, quoted, declaimed everywhere. The streets were filled with an immense singing, cheering throng of democrats of all hues and nationalities. The opposition showed no sign of life. The Church published a manifesto in which it asserted that Christianity was not inimical to individual liberty, that on the contrary it was its natural ally and defender; its kingdom was not of this world, and consequently such support as it had been accused of giving to the reaction, sprang neither from its principles nor from its historical

156 KARL MARX

position in European society, and could be radically modified without doing violence to the essence of its teaching. These announcements were received with enthusiasm and credulity. The German exiles vied with the Poles and the Italians in their predictions of the imminent and universal collapse of the reaction, and of the immediate appearance on its ruins of a new moral world. News presently arrived that Naples had revolted; and after it Milan, Rome, Venice and other Italian cities. Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest had risen in arms. Europe was ablaze at last. Excitement among the Germans in Paris rose to fever pitch. To support the insurgent republicans a German Legion was formed, which the poet Georg Herwegh and a Prussian communist ex-soldier named Willich were to lead. It was to start at once. The French Government, not unwilling, perhaps, to see so many foreign agitators leave its soil, encouraged the project. Engels was greatly attracted by the scheme and would almost certainly have enlisted, but was dissuaded by Marx, who viewed the proceeding with the greatest mistrust and hostility. He saw no sign of any large-scale revolt of the German masses: here and there autocratic governments were overthrown, and the princes were forced to promise constitutions and appoint mildly liberal governments, but the Prussian army was still largely loyal to the king, while the democrats were scattered, badly led, and unable to reach agreement among themselves on vital points. The elected popular congress which met in Frankfurt to decide the future government of Germany was a failure from the first, and the sudden appearance of a legion of untrained emigre intellectuals on German soil appeared to Marx a needless waste of revolutionary energy, likely


1848 i₅7

to have a ludicrous or a pitiful end, and to be followed by a paralysing mood of shame and disillusionment. Consequently, Marx opposed the formation of the legion, took no interest in it after it had left Paris for its inevitable defeat by the royal army, and went to Cologne to see what could be done by propaganda in his native Rhineland. He was there largely instrumental in persuading a group of liberal industrialists and communist sympathizers to found a new Rheinische £eitmg, in succession to the journal of that name which had been suppressed five years before, and to appoint him its editor. Cologne was then the scene of an uneasy balance of power between the local democrats, who controlled the local militia, and a garrison under orders from Berlin. Acting in the name of the Communist League, Marx sent his agents to agitate among the German industrial masses, and used their reports as the material for his leading articles. There was at this time no formal censorship in the Rhineland, and his inflammatory words reached an ever-widening public. The Neue Rheinische grilling was well informed, and alone in the left-wing press possessed a clear policy of its own. Its circulation increased rapidly and it began to be widely read in other German provinces.

Marx had come armed with a complete political and economic plan of action founded on the solid theoretical basis which he had built carefully during the preceding years. He advocated a conditional alliance between the workers and the radical bourgeoisie for the immediate purpose of overthrowing a reactionary government, declaring that whereas the French had freed themselves from the yoke of feudalism in 1789, and were by this enabled to take the next step forward in 1848, the

158 KARL MARX

Germans had so far achieved their revolutions in the region of pure thought alone; as thinkers they had far outstripped the French in the radicalism of their sentiments: politically they still inhabited the eighteenth century. The most backward of western nations, they thus had two stages to achieve before they could hope to attain to that of developed industrialism, thenceforth to march in step with the neighbouring democracies. The dialectical movement of history permits no leaps, and the representatives of the proletariat did ill to overlook the claims of the bourgeoisie which, in working for its own emancipation, was furthering the general cause, and was economically and politically far better organized and capable of ruling than the ignorant, scattered, badly organized masses of the working class. Hence the proper step for the workers was to conclude an alliance with their fellow victims among the middle and lower middle class and then, after the victory, to seek to control, and if necessary, obstruct the work of their new allies (who by this time would doubtless be anxious to end their compromising association) by the sheer weight of their numbers and economic power. He opposed the Cologne democrats, Anneke and Gottschalk, who advocated absolute abstention from such naked opportunism and indeed from all political action as likely to compromise and weaken the pure proletarian cause. This seemed to him a typically German blindness to the true balance of forces. He demanded direct intervention and the sending of delegates to Frankfurt, as the only effective practical course. Political aloofness seemed to him the height of tactical folly, since it was likely to leave the workers isolated, and at the mercy of the victorious class. In foreign policy he was a


1848 159

pronounced pan-German and a rabid Russophobe. Russia had for many years occupied the same position in relation to the forces of democracy and progress and evoked the same emotional reaction as the fascist powers in the present day. It was hated and feared by democrats of all persuasions as the great champion of reaction, able and willing to crush all attempts at liberty within and without its borders.

As in 1842, Marx demanded an immediate war with Russia, because no attempt at democratic revolution could succeed in Germany in view of the certainty of Russian intervention, and as a means of welding the German principalities into a united democratic whole in opposition to a power whose entire influence was ranged on the side of the dynastic element in European politics; perhaps also in order to aid those scattered revolutionary forces within Russia itself to the existence of which Bakunin used to make constant mysterious references. Marx was prepared to sacrifice many other considerations to the ends of German unity—since in its disunion he, no less than Hegel and Bismarck, saw the cause at once of its weakness, its inefficiency and its political backwardness. He was neither a romantic, nor a nationalist, and regarded small nations as so many obsolete survivals impeding social and economic progress. He therefore acted quite consistently in publicly approving the unwarranted German invasion of the Danish province of Schleswig-Holstein; an act, the open support of which by most of the leading German democrats, caused considerable embarrassment to their allies among the liberals and constitutionalists of other lands.

He denounced the succession of short-lived liberal


KARL MARX

Prussian governments which, easily and, it seemed to him, almost with relief, allowed power to slip from their grasp back into that of the king and his party. There were furious outbursts against ‘empty chatter’ and of ‘parliamentary cretinism’ in Frankfurt, which ended in a storm of indignation hardly paralleled in Das Kapital itself. He did not either then or later despair of the ultimate outcome of the conflict, but his conception of the revolutionary tactics, and his view of the intelligence and reliability of the masses and their leaders, changed violently: he declared their own incurable stupidity to be a greater obstacle to their progress than capitalism itself. His own policy, as it turned out, proved as impracticable as that of the intransigent radicals whom he denounced. In his subsequent analysis he attributed the disastrous result of the revolution to the weakness of the bourgeoisie, the ineffectiveness of the parliamentary liberals, but principally to the political blindness of the infinitely gullible masses, obstinately loyal to the agents of their own worst enemy, who deceived and flattered them and led them only too easily to their destruction. If the rest of his life was spent as much over purely tactical problems, as much in consideration of what method it was best for revolutionary leaders to adopt in the interests of their uncomprehending flock, as in the analysis of its actual condition, this was largely due to the lesson of the German revolution. In 1849, after the failure of the risings in Vienna and in Dresden, he wrote violent diatribes against liberals of all persuasions as being cowards and saboteurs, still hypnotized by the king and his drill sergeants, frightened by the thought of too definite a victory, prepared to betray the revolution for fear of the dangerous forces which it


1848 i6i

might release, and so virtually defeated before they began. He declared that, even if the bourgeoisie succeeded in making its corrupt deal with the enemy at the expense of its allies among the petite bourgeoisie and the workers, at best it would not gain more than had been won by French liberals under the July monarchy in France, while at worst the bargain would be repudiated by the king and become the prelude to a new monarchist terror. No other journal in Germany dared to go as far in denouncing the government. The uncompromising directness of these analyses, and the audacity of the conclusions which Marx drew from them, fascinated his readers against their will, although unmistakable signs of panic began to show themselves among the shareholders.

By June 1848 the heroic phase of the Paris revolution had spent itself, and the conservative forces began to rally their strength. The socialist and radical members of the Government, Louis Blanc, Albert, Flocon, were forced to resign. The workers rebelled against the right- wing republicans who remained in power, threw up barricades, and after three days’ hand-to-hand fighting in the streets, were dispersed and routed by the National Guard and troops which remained loyal to the Government. The June emeute may be considered as the first purely socialist rising in Europe, consciously directed against liberals no less than against legitimists. The followers of Blanqui (who was in prison) called upon the people to seize power and establish an armed dictatorship : the spectre of the Communist Manifesto acquired substance at last; for the first time revolutionary socialism revealed itself in that savage and menacing aspect in which it has appeared ever since to its opponents in every land.

KARL MARX

Marx reacted at once. Against the frantic protests of the owners of his newspaper, who looked upon all forms of bloodshed and violence with profound horror, he published a long and fiery leading article, taking as his subject the funeral accorded by the State to the soldiers killed during the riots in Paris:

‘The fraternity of the two opposing classes (one of which exploits the other) which in February was inscribed in huge letters upon all the facades of Paris, upon all the prisons and all the barracks . . . this fraternity lasted just so long as the interests of the bourgeoisie could fraternize with the interests of the proletariat. Pedants of the old revolutionary tradition of 1793, socialist systematizers who begged the bourgeoisie to grant favours to the people, and were allowed to preach long sermons . . . needed to lull the proletarian lion to sleep, republicans who wanted the whole of the old bourgeois system, minus the crowned figurehead, legitimists who did not wish to doff their livery but merely to change its cut—these had been the people’s allies in the February revolution! Yet what the people hated was not Louis Philippe, but the crowned dominion of a class, capital enthroned. Nevertheless, magnanimous as ever, it fancied it had destroyed its own enemies when it had merely overthrown the enemy of its enemies, the common enemy of them all.

‘The clashes that spontaneously arise out of the conditions of bourgeois society must be fought to the bitter end; they cannot be conjured out of existence. The best form of State is the one in which opposed social tendencies are not slurred over~. . . but secure free expression, and are thus resolved. But we shall be asked: “Have you then no tears, no sighs, no


1848 163

Words of sympathy for the victims of popular frenzy?” ‘The State will take due care of the widows and orphans of these men. They will be honoured in decrees: they will be given a splendid public funeral: the official press will proclaim their memories immortal . . . but the plebeians, tormented by hunger, reviled in the newspapers, abandoned by even the surgeons, stigmatized by all “decent” people as thieves, incendiaries, convicts, their wives and their children plunged in greater misery than ever, the best among the survivors transported—surely the democratic press may claim the right to crown with laurel their grim and sombre brow?’ This article not unnaturally caused a panic among the subscribers and the paper began to lose money. Presently the Prussian Government, by this time convinced it had nothing to fear from popular sentiment, ordered the dissolution of the democratic assembly. The latter replied by declaring all taxes imposed by the government illegal. Marx vehemently supported this decision and called upon the people to resist attempts to collect the tax. This time the government acted promptly and ordered the immediate suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The last issue was printed in a red type, contained an inflammatory article by Marx and a magnificent poem by Freiligrath, and was bought up as a collector’s curiosity. Marx was arrested foif incitement to sedition and tried before a Cologne jury] He turned the occasion into the opportunity of deliveringl a speech of great length and erudition in which he( analysed in detail the social and political situation in' Germany and abroad. The result was unexpected: the foreman of the jury in announcing the acquittal of the accused said that he wished to thank him in his own ‘


164 KARL MARX

name and that of the jury for an unusually instructive and interesting lecture by which they had all greatly profited. The Prussian Government, which had annulled his Prussian citizenship four years previously, unable to reverse the verdict itself, in July 1849 expelled him from the Rhineland. He went to Paris, where the Bonapartist agitation in favour of the first Napoleon’s nephew had made the political situation even more confused than before, and it looked as if something of importance might occur at any moment. His collaborators scattered in various directions: Engels, who disliked inactivity, and declared he had nothing to lose, joined the Paris legion commanded by Willich, a single-minded communist and capable commander, whom Marx detested as a romantic adventurer, and Engels admired for his sincerity, coolness and personal courage. The legion was defeated in Baden by the royal forces without difficulty, and retired in good order to the frontier of the Swiss Confederation, where it dispersed. The majority of the survivors crossed into Switzerland, among them Engels, who preserved the pleasantest memories of his experiences on this occasion, and in later life used to enjoy telling the history of the campaign, which he represented as a gay and agreeable episode of no particular importance. Marx, whose capacity for enjoyment was more limited, found Paris a melancholy place. The revolution had patently failed. Legitimist, Orleanist and Bonapartist intrigue were undermining whatever remained of the democratic structure: such socialists and radicals as had not fled were either in prison or liable to find themselves there at any moment. The appearance of Marx, who was by this time a figure of European notoriety, was highly unwelcome to the

1848 165

government. Soon after his arrival he was presented with the alternative of leaving France or retiring to the distant marshes of the Morbihan in Brittany. Of free countries Belgium was closed to him; Switzerland, which had expelled Weitling and showed little friendliness to Bakunin, was unlikely to permit him to stay: only one European country placed no obstacle in his path. Marx arrived in Paris from the Rhineland in July; a month later a subscription among his friends, among whom Lassalle’s name occurs for the first time, enabled him to pay his fare to England. He arrived in London on 24 August 184Q; his family followed a month later, and Engels, after dallying in Switzerland, and making a long and agreeable sea voyage from Genoa, came in the beginning of November. He found Marx convinced that the revolution might at any moment break out once more, and engaged on a pamphlet against the conservative French republic.


CHAPTER VIII

EXILE IN LONDON: THE FIRST PHASE

There is only one antidote to mental suffering, and that is physical pain.

karl