Karl marx an Intellectual Biography Rolf Hosfeld

The Trauma of Exile

The Revolution was a feverish dream; the subsequent renewed exile, a trauma. “A more signal defeat,” noted Engels in retrospect, “than that undergone by the continental revolutionary party—or rather parties—upon all points of the line of battle, cannot be imagined.”⁹⁴ Engels had participated in the fighting almost to the very end in the South German uprising. The remains of the revolutionary army from Baden and the Palatinate fled over the border into Switzerland on 12 July 1849. Engels remained in Switzerland until September, met Stefan Born in Bern, and in Geneva got to know the former revolutionary fighter Wilhelm Liebknecht, who would later play a leading role in the history of social democracy in Germany. At the end of August, Marx informed Engels that he intended to go to Lon- don and found a new journal—a political-economic review in the spirit of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He had already secured part of the funding. “So you must leave for London at once,” Marx wrote. “In any case your safety demands it. The Prussians would shoot you twice over.”⁹⁵

Marx had left Cologne on 19 May, expelled from the country as a non-Prussian. In Frankfurt, he and Engels unsuccessfully urged the

left-wing representatives of the National Assembly to put them- selves at the fore of the South German uprising, which did not stand a chance from the outset; in Baden, likewise unsuccessfully, they tried to convince the South German rebels to march against Frank- furt. Engels, who as a young man in Berlin had completed military training, joined the revolutionary army of Baden; and on 2 June Marx moved on to Paris. The stay was brief: only six weeks later a deportation order he received from the French government offered him the seclusion of a lonely spot in Brittany. He would not consent to such a veiled attempt on his life, he wrote Engels, “So I am leav- ing France.”⁹⁶ He headed for the docks of Dover aboard the City of Boulogne, and subsequently the railway brought him to London. On 17 September, Jenny arrived there as well with what were now three small children. On 5 October, Engels reported to his old Chartist friend George Julian Harney from Genoa that, wind and weather permitting, he would board the schooner Cornish Diamond and ar- rive in London in mid November.⁹⁷

Marx had come to know Harney during a trip to England with Engels in summer 1845. Harney edited the Northern Star, at the time a mass-circulation socialist newspaper with a press run of fifty thou- sand, to which Engels regularly contributed. The years of continental revolution had radicalized Harney as had the experience of the large Chartist rally in April 1848. Ten thousand people had marched on Westminster to present more than five million signatures to Parlia- ment in support of universal suffrage. But the strong hand of the el- derly Wellington arranged for hundreds of mounted police, cavalry, and artillery to take up positions on the Thames Bridge and in the side streets. The Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor called off the un- dertaking for fear of a bloodbath. The disappointment was great, but the decision left Chartism with its spine intact, and it became more radical. Throughout the spring of 1848 in the industrial regions of north England, assemblies and demonstrations trumpeted revolu- tionary slogans. In 1850 Harney’s new journal, the Red Republican, announced that the working classes had taken leave of the hope for political reform and now advocated the idea of social revolution. It also published an English translation of the Communist Manifesto.⁹⁸ At this time Marx was residing with his family on Dean Street in Soho. A Prussian spy reported to Berlin that they occupied two rooms in what was virtually the worst, tawdriest quarter of London.

At first Marx believed that his exile would be brief and it was only a matter of time before another revolutionary wave would break out in Europe, especially in France. To the degree that the reaction had advanced, he noted at the beginning of the year, the power of the revolutionary party was naturally also growing as well.⁹⁹ And in March he prophesized an imminent commercial crisis with consequences far more significant than those of all earlier crises. Above all, it would inevitably expand from England to the conti- nent, where it would unleash revolutionary crises of an incomparably more pronounced socialist character—especially in Germany.¹⁰⁰

Therefore in April, with Harney and a few Blanquists, Marx founded the previously mentioned Universal Society of Revolution- ary Communists, which expressly committed itself to the overthrow of all privileged classes, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the permanent revolution.¹⁰¹ As Marx informed the members of the now reorganized Communist League in June 1850, the actual proletarian party of France, whose leader Louis-Auguste Blanqui was imprisoned on Belle-Île, had joined them to prepare for the next French revolu- tion, as had revolutionary leaders of the Chartist party,¹⁰² including Julian Harney. The Chartists, Marx maintained, had resumed their own party activity against the bourgeoisie with increased vigour and therefore could be an important ally of the revolutionary Continent during a future revolution.¹⁰³ During his first months of exile, Marx simply did not want to recognize the realities of the era of the Eu- ropean Reaction, which was accompanied by a phase of economic growth. His opinions were rarely as radical and fanciful as during this short period of his stubborn denial of defeat.

For the impending revolution, a “secret and indissoluble” cadre organization was to arise from the Communist League until the pro- letarian revolution had attained its final objective. All members had to “abide unconditionally” by the resolutions and subordinate them- selves to the Central Committee as the executive organ. Anyone expelled for violating the rules was to be brought under surveillance “just like any suspect individual.”¹⁰⁴ As the leading organization, the reorganized league was supposed to guarantee the political “inde- pendence of the workers” that Marx and Engels had valued so little in the years 1848/49. Now they expected that the democratic petty bourgeoisie would have to be drawn against its will into the on- going dynamic process of permanent revolution, as had happened

two years earlier with respect to the liberal bourgeoisie. “Above all things” decreed the Central Committee (i.e., Marx and Engels),
the workers must counteract, as much as is at all possible, during the conflict and immediately after the struggle, the bourgeois endeav- ours to allay the storm, and must compel the democrats to carry out their present terrorist phrases. They must work to prevent the direct revolutionary excitement from being suppressed again immediately after the victory. On the contrary, they must keep it alive as long as possible. Far from opposing so-called excesses, instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings that are associ- ated only with hateful recollections, such instances must not only be tolerated but the lead in them must be taken.¹⁰⁵
It was an almost desperate revival of revolutionary fire—perhaps also a result of the trauma of exile—lacking traction and flaunting a final unhesitating recollection of the purifying apocalyptic terror mod- eled by the French Revolution and the unleashed “puer robustus, sed malitiosus.” The Universal Society of Revolutionary Commu- nists would not have a very long life. In part because of the con- tinuing phase of prosperity in England, Julian Harney increasingly lost his faith in revolutionary solutions,¹⁰⁶ and the alliance with the Blanquists eventually became a casualty of the division of the Com- munist League.

In June 1850, Marx resumed his intensive study of economics and to that end was known to frequent the reading room of the British Museum. In that same summer of 1850, when he was clos- est to Blanquism, his prognoses of an imminent revolution became increasingly cautious. Marx was not a political romantic but rather chose to focus on the causes of the 1848/49 revolution. His studies showed that the world economic crisis of 1847 had been the real mother of the February and March revolution, and the subsequent prosperity—which entirely failed to lead to the crisis-laden panic Marx and Engels had predicted for July or August—was the real vitalizing force of the European Restoration.¹⁰⁷ The revolutionary party, Marx and Engels declared in the fall of 1850, had everywhere been forced from the stage. “With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution.” A new revolution was only possible as the re-

sult of a new crisis. But the former would come just as surely as the latter.¹⁰⁸

One of the reasons for the shift in opinion and mood was the Cal- ifornia gold rush. It signaled not only a tremendous influx of money into international capital markets but also the prospect of an inten- sified globalization that the Communist Manifesto had only dreamed about in broad strokes. As the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue noted:

In a few years we shall have a regular steam-packet service from England to Chagres and from Chagres and San Francisco to Sydney, Canton and Singapore. Thanks to Californian gold and the tireless energy of the Yankees, both coasts of the Pacific Ocean will soon be as populous, as open to trade and as industrialised as the coast from Boston to New Orleans is now. And then the Pacific Ocean will have the same role as the Atlantic has now and the Mediterranean had in antiquity and in the Middle Ages—that of the great water highway of world commerce; and the Atlantic will decline to the status of an inland sea, like the Mediterranean.¹⁰⁹
Thus the bourgeoisie’s titanic predestination was still very much slated for a great future in the screenplay of history. Marx and Engels sometimes spoke about this class, which they simultaneously deeply admired and despised, with a surprising degree of pathos. Contrary to the prophecies of the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie was evidently far from being finished.

According to a certain logic, however, the analysis above led Marx and Engels to adopt a wait-and-see attitude for the time being to avoid falling back into the futuristic tinkering and voluntarism of the movements they had energetically criticized prior to 1848 as incomplete or misguided stages of history’s self-consciousness. On 15 September 1850, this issue resulted in a split in the Communist League. A number of members, Willich and Schapper among them, accused Marx and Engels of being well on their way to betraying the revolution. Thereupon the Central Committee they controlled, responding in the same tone used in the earlier disagreement with Weitling, stated that it could no longer work with people who held the view that one need have “only the right intentions” to obtain “power immediately during the next revolution.” Such people also revealed a tendency to return to the “universal asceticism and social leveling in its crudest form” that had long been overcome.¹¹⁰ The

accusation also pertained to the Blanquists, who had joined them in founding a revolutionary Universal Society that April but now were taking sides with Willich and Schapper. Instead of babbling about coups in the manner of those “London hotspurs,”¹¹¹ in the coming period of economic prosperity Marx and Engels would focus primar- ily on the education of the workers closest to them and the scientific development of their theory.

Marx’s correspondence with Engels during this period was full of questions about the economic problems that occupied him during his studies in the British Museum. The lengthy article in the Revue Neue Rheinische Zeitung’s 1 November 1850 “Revue” presented itself as an analysis replete with comprehensive statistical material of the most recent economic developments; much of it could just as eas- ily have appeared in The Economist. The article maintained that a crisis generally erupts first in the area of speculation, leading then to a collapse of the banking system and a breakdown of the credits system before taking hold of production itself. The Economist was in fact quoted approvingly with words to the effect that the current prosperity distinguished itself in a very crucial way from all earlier periods: the cause of growth was no longer speculation; rather, it was based far more solidly on the production of immediately useful things that were directly entering the consumer market.¹¹²

On the basis of such insights, Marx and Engels carried out a full- fledged castling maneuver. In mid February 1851, Engels wrote to his friend:
A revolution is a purely natural phenomenon which is subject to physical laws rather than to the rules that determine the develop- ment of society in ordinary times. Or rather, in revolution these rules assume a much more physical character, the material force of neces- sity makes itself more strongly felt. And as soon as one steps forward as the representative of a party, one is dragged into this whirlpool of irresistible natural necessity. By the mere fact of keeping oneself independent, being in the nature of things more revolutionary than the others, one is able at least for a time to maintain one’s indepen- dence from this whirlpool, although one does, of course, end up by being dragged into it. This is the position we can and must adopt on the next occasion. Not only no official government appointments but also, and for as long as possible, no official party appointments, no seat on committees, etc., no responsibility for jackasses, merciless

criticism of everyone, and, besides, that serenity of which all the con- spiracies of blockheads cannot deprive us. And this much we are able to do. We can always, in the nature of things, be more revolutionary than the phrase-mongers because we have learnt our lesson and they have not, because we know what we want and they do not, and be- cause, after what we have seen for at least three years, we shall take it a great deal more coolly than anyone who has an interest in the business.¹¹³

Upon a motion by Marx at the Rose and Crown Tavern in Soho¹¹⁴ on 12 November 1852, the Communist League was dissolved for the reason that, even on the continent, its perpetuation was no longer expedient.¹¹⁵

For the next twelve years Marx no longer belonged to any po- litical organization. The period after the defeat of the revolution witnessed the advent of realism in the arts, Realpolitik, positivism, and—for Marx—so-called scientific socialism. Even the mythos of the French Revolution lost some of its sheen for a while. Self-criti- cally retrospective shortly before his death in 1895, Engels noted that back then they had been completely blinded by the “memories of the prototypes of 1789 and 1830,” convincing themselves that the “great decisive battle” had commenced, that it had to be waged in a single and eventful revolutionary period, and that it could only end with the final victory of the proletariat. History had not only revealed their point of view to be an illusion but also completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat had to fight. The mode of struggle was today obsolete in every respect. He now also subjected the 1848/49 fantasies of world war to harsh criticism. Especially given the modern industrial transformation of weapons technology, a future world war, if it occurred, would be of “unprec- edented cruelty and absolutely incalculable outcome.”¹¹⁶ Now, in 1895, Engels was promoting a new style of politics, namely, social democracy, which—as demonstrated by the SPD’s victories in the Reichstag elections—indeed evidently promised more success.

He now saw that the Jacobins’ legacy of terror had sided more with the man who had fought against the revolution in 1848, sub- sequently achieving German imperial unity by force—with blood and iron, through the deliberate, armed implementation of Jacobin methods. “If there is to be a revolution, we would rather make it than suffer it,” Bismarck telegraphed to General Manteuffel in mid August 1866.¹¹⁷ During the war with Austria, Bismarck even toyed

with the idea of “releasing all the dogs that can bark” and inciting guerillas under Lajos Kossuth in Hungary and Giuseppe Garibaldi in Dalmatia against the Habsburg monarchy.¹¹⁸ He went so far as to make advances to Marx, hoping to exploit his great talents in the in- terests of the German people.¹¹⁹ “Have we perchance evoked the civil war of 1866?” Engels asked his readers. Or was it Bismarck—“Have we driven the King of Hanover, the Elector of Hessia, and the Duke of Nassau from their hereditary lawful domains and annexed these hereditary domains? And these overthrowers of the German Con- federation and three crowns by the grace of God complain of over- throw! Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes?”¹²⁰—who would allow the Gracchi to complain about an insurrection?

But there was a long way to go before reaching that point. During Marx’s first years in London, the trauma of the unsuccessful revolu- tion and exile prevailed. Lajos Kossuth was one of the most promi- nent continental revolutionary refugees there at the time. He was celebrated as a romantic hero, yet Marx and Engels’s attitude to Kos- suth had noticeably cooled. “Like the Apostle Paul,” Engels wrote to Marx, “Mr. Kossuth is all things to all men,” shouting Vive la République in Marseilles and God save the Queen in Southampton.¹²¹ A few weeks later, Marx found himself amused by Kossuth’s hanky- panky with the Bavarian courtesan Lola Montez in London.¹²² Even Mr. Mazzini fared little better in their judgment, as was also the case for the more noteworthy German jackasses who populated the com- munity of exiles on the Thames—the democrats Kinkel, Hecker, Struve, Vogt, and Mr. Ruge, or the communist warhorse August von Willich,¹²³ who later, as a Union general, would participate in Wil- liam Tecumseh Sherman’s march on Atlanta, living long enough to see this redeem him in Marx’s eyes. Together with Engels, Marx wrote a pamphlet—one just as misshapen as The Holy Family had been—that dealt exclusively with the shattered existences of the Great Men of the Exile.

Was this, considered psychologically, a defense? “The great men of the Germany of 1848,” it said, “had been on the point of coming to a sticky end when the victory of ‘tyrants’ rescued them, swept them out of the country and made saints and martyrs of them. They were saved by the counter-revolution. The course of continental politics brought most of them to London which thus became their Euro- pean centre.”¹²⁴ But Marx and Engels wanted nothing to do with their spurious activity, their imagined parties and imagined struggles.

Then came the great industrial exhibition in London in 1851, with Joseph Paxton’s architectonic miracle of the Crystal Palace of iron and glass. It attracted many tourists, even from Germany, who gladly met with the great men of exile on the exhibition grounds, hosted either by the publicans Schärttner at the Hanau or Göhringer at the Star. Having talked shop about German and Prussian politics over their beer, all parties wound up heading home unsteadily but strengthened in the knowledge that they had made their contribution to the salvation of the fatherland. The emigration, Marx and Engels noted caustically, was staging a self-satisfying comedy, a history of its own, lying outside world history.¹²⁵

Engels had for some time been living in Manchester as an em- ployee of his father’s branch office and in any event had very little to do with the activity in London. But Marx deliberately distanced himself from the circle of exiles, insofar as it did not affect his clos- est friends. He valued his authentic isolation and was glad that the system of reciprocal concessions, half-measures tolerated for the sake of decorum, and the obligation to make oneself look ridiculous in public in the party along with all these jackasses had come to an end.¹²⁶ The research he was conducting was his own, far more im- portant, contribution to world history. On occasion he was visited by scholars like John Stuart Mill, author of the Principles of Political Economy, which had appeared in 1848; and he preferred to receive Mill, as an acquaintance reported, not with compliments but rather with economic categories. After all, they shared common interests in this field.

In the year of London’s Great Exhibition, Louis Bonaparte staged a coup in Paris, making himself a de facto dictator. In doing so, he deliberately chose the symbolic date of 2 December, the day on which his uncle had been crowned emperor in 1804 and, one year later, won the Battle of Austerlitz. “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, as it were, twice,” commented Marx with respect to the event. “He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” This pert for- mulation masks how hard put Marx and most of his contemporaries were to explain what appeared to be a completely irrational event. The constitution of 1848, he wrote, collapsed when it was touched by a hat—a three-cornered Napoleon hat, as Marx said. It was a seizure of power. But who was it that seized power, and in whose name?

On 10 December 1848, Bonaparte had been elected president of the Republic by an overwhelming majority consisting above all of the rural population but including, as Marx knew, many proletar- ians and petty bourgeoisie who by electing him sought to punish the bloodstained opposing candidate, Cavaignac. As far the bourgeoisie was concerned, Marx maintained, the revolution had shown that its own interests were best served by making sure that its bourgeois parlia- ment was laid to rest. That was one of the foundations for Bonaparte’s success; the other was his bohemian and corrupt populism. He had always dreamed of a state coup, yet when he finally carried it out one of his first measures was the reinstitution of universal voting rights, which the bourgeoisie-dominated National Assembly had abolished in the summer of 1850. “This is the complete and final triumph of socialism!” Guizot declared after 2 December. In actuality it was the definitive victory of Bonaparte’s populist despotism, which remained in power by means of new plebiscitary instruments.

According to Marx, Bonaparte’s rule was based on three idées napoléoniennes: the interests of the conservative smallholding peas- ants, the clergy, and the army. Basically, it was executive authority which has made itself independent; by no means was it pure class rule by the bourgeoisie but rather a dictatorship with populist traits that nonetheless understood its task as that of securing bourgeois order.¹²⁷ Engels, meanwhile, held that the entire secret of modern Bonapartism lay in the fact that the traditions associated with his name put Louis Napoléon in a position to safeguard the “the bal- ance of the contending classes of French society.”¹²⁸ Later he would make the claim that the bourgeoisie “is not cut out to rule directly” and that therefore the “Bonapartist semi-dictatorship is the normal form” of its class rule.¹²⁹ These were not very convincing theories. In any case, the peculiar entity at the Seine—which, following a plebiscite approving a new empire, crowned Louis Napoléon in No- vember 1852—was evidently not a class state in the strictest sense of the theory of historical materialism. Almost eight million French citizens voted for the new emperor; only two hundred fifty thousand voted against. On 2 December 1852—again, a symbolic date for his- torical Bonapartism—he moved as the emperor to Paris and into the Tuileries.

Marx’s treatment of the eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte nonetheless constitutes an impressive piece of contemporary his- torical writing that reveals the talent of a great historiographer. Pre-

cisely crafted linguistically and dramaturgically, his narrative of the revolution’s course to the point of this coup d’état is replete with ac- curately researched details and offers decidedly nuanced descriptions of the acting parties and factions. Among the frustrating results of his investigation was the finding that, in contrast to the 1789 revo- lution, the revolution of 1848 had found itself on a declining slope right from the outset.¹³⁰ Thus more than ever, the time was ripe to investigate the causes that necessitated both the late outbreak and its defeat, causes that were not to be sought in the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors, or treacheries of certain leaders, but in the gen- eral social state and conditions of existence of each of the convulsed nations.¹³¹ Thus it was all the more necessary to turn to researching the anatomy of bourgeois society, from which all political activity ultimately proceeded.

Marx sat in the reading room of the British Museum almost every day from nine o’clock in the morning to seven o’clock at night. He delved deeply into the writings of John Locke and David Hume, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Henry Charles Carey, Thomas Robert Malthus, and other authors of the classical economic and political sciences. He acquired mountains of literature about pre- cious metals, money, credit, banking, ground rent, factory systems, agriculture, colonial history, and technology. He worked through entire years of publications of The Economist, the blue books of the British factory inspectors (which he was the first to subject to schol- arly analysis), the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly, the Westminster Review, and a plethora of other sources, recording everything that appeared to be important in growing masses of notebooks. Yet his critique of the political economy, which at the time he thought he could quickly finish, did not progress. “The material I am working on is so damnably involved,” he wrote to his friend Weydemeyer in mid 1851, and in addition there were always the interruptions of a practical kind that were “inevitable in the wretched circumstances in which we are vegetating here.”¹³²

Interruptions of a practical kind. That June, in the restricted confines of Dean Street, “Lenchen” Demuth gave birth to a son whose father most certainly was the paterfamilias Marx. For the sake of familial peace, Engels chivalrously assumed official respon- sibility for the paternity. Yet when Frederick Demuth’s birth was registered in the civil registry at Somerset House, the name of the father was left blank. Admittedly, Jenny sensed a few things, but

she was certain of nothing. The child was immediately given to fos- ter parents. During these days, Marx’s situation looked, in his rather euphemistic formulation, quite dismal.¹³³ Constant financial worries plagued him as well. The Politisch-Ökonomische Revue was such a complete financial failure that he often had to bring the silverware of Jenny’s noble Scottish forebears to a pawnbroker to bridge his household’s regular financial crises. But there were still other reasons why his political economics did not make any progress. For one, he could not find a publisher. Moreover, he often delved so deeply into details that he came away having found nothing but excuses for not finishing.

As Wilhelm Liebknecht described him, Marx “always worked intensely, thoroughly.”¹³⁴ And scrupulously, one might add, which meant that writings he actually wanted to use to belligerently chal- lenge the bourgeois world and deal a fatal blow to its futuristic op- timism could, for personal reasons, drag on almost incessantly. His Contribution to the Critique of Politica1 Economy did not appear until 1859; the first volume of Capital was published in 1867. Apologiz- ing for the delay, he wrote: “The enormous amount of material re- lating to the history of political economy assembled in the British Museum, the fact that London is a convenient vantage point for the observation of bourgeois society, and finally the new stage of development which this society seemed to have entered with the discovery of gold in California and Australia, induced me to start again from the very beginning and to work carefully through the new material.” His time had also been considerably curtailed by the imperative necessity of earning a living.¹³⁵

Marx was referring to his work as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. He had come to know its editor in chief, Charles Anderson Dana, during the revolution in 1849 through Freiligrath in Cologne. At the time, the Tribune was the most influential news- paper in the United States, presumably with the widest circulation of any newspaper in the world, and Dana was a successful Ameri- can businessman touched by socialist ideas. In 1841 he had become a member of the Brook Farm communal settlement near Boston, whose sympathizers included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, noteworthy intellectuals whose influence on American culture and mentality can hardly be overestimated. Brook Farm practiced alternative educational mod- els and turned increasingly to experimentation inspired by Fourier.

After an effort to build a large phalanstery ended in a conflagra- tion, the settlement was dissolved in 1847.¹³⁶ Since then Dana had worked for the Tribune. Fourier’s ideas haunted its pages, but the newspaper campaigned above all against slavery, the death penalty, and the autocratic regimes in Europe.

In August 1851 Dana asked Marx to become one of the news- paper’s eighteen foreign correspondents.¹³⁷ He was to receive one pound sterling for each weekly report. In 1853, the editor in chief raised this honorarium to two pounds sterling after learning that his London correspondent’s contributions were very popular among his readers. In April 1857, Dana also asked Marx to compose articles for the planned New American Cyclopedia. The arrangement resulted in almost five hundred articles, some of which, however, stemmed from the pen of the ghostwriter Engels, who was always prepared to help. But then Marx raised his fees,¹³⁸ the orders from overseas subsided because of the Civil War, and the Tribune gradually lost its monopoly to the New York Times.¹³⁹ Still, during these years Marx kept American readers decidedly well informed, not only about con- ditions in Europe but also about social problems—for example, the enclosure movement in England and Scotland, the suffering in Ire- land, the Chartist movement, and the movement for the ten hours bill. And they could feel that they were understood when he assured them that those damned in Europe had, to the extent possible, al- ways found sanctuary in the United States of America.¹⁴⁰

Many of the articles in 1853 dealt with issues in the East—more precisely, with the crisis that would ultimately lead to the Crimean War, giving Marx the opportunity to once again take aim at his arch- enemy, Russia. When the czar announced his claims to the Ottoman Danube principalities—and thus also to the Dardanelles—Marx warned in a severe tone about the timidity of Western statesmen¹⁴¹ faced with the Russian threat. “To sum up the Eastern question in a few words,” he wrote, explaining his view of the problem to the American readers,

The Czar, vexed and dissatisfied at seeing his immense Empire con- fined to one sole port of export, and that even situated in a sea in- navigable through one half of the year, and assailable by Englishmen through the other half, is pushing the design of his ancestors, to get access to the Mediterranean; he is separating, one after another, the remotest members of the Ottoman Empire from its main body, till at last Constantinople, the heart, must cease to beat.¹⁴²

But Constantinople was the golden bridge between East and West, and Western civilization could not keep this bridge open without a struggle with Russia.¹⁴³

Russian troops had occupied the Danube principalities in July 1853, and in October Sultan Abdülmecid I declared war against St. Petersburg. In early January 1854, after the Russian Black Sea fleet annihilated the Turkish navy at Sinop, England and France inter- vened in the war on the side of the Turks, bombarding the Russian coast, conducting landing operations, and laying siege to the Sevas- topol fortress in the Crimea for almost a year. The war resulted in half a million dead. In the end, Russia had to fall in line and refrain from its ambition. Under the Peace of Paris, concluded on 30 March 1856, the czar lost his hegemonic position on the European conti- nent forever. The Holy Alliance had shot itself in the head, which was actually good news for Marx: now Prussia and Austria might finally “be relieved from the control of Russia.”¹⁴⁴

The second piece of good news was the outbreak of the economic crisis of 1857. The revolution is marching forward, Marx reported to Engels in Manchester in mid July, as shown by the march of the Crédit mobilier.¹⁴⁵ And the onset of the American crisis in late Octo- ber—its outbreak in New York was forecast by us in the November 1850 Revue—was downright beautiful.¹⁴⁶ As difficult as the frustrations of his finances were, never, since 1849, have I felt so cosy as during this outbreak.¹⁴⁷ Engels responded with almost identical euphoria, saying that since the swindle in New York had collapsed, he could hardly find any peace. He felt “tremendously cheerful” and noted that “in 1848 we were saying now our time is coming, and so in a certain sense it was, but this time it is coming properly; now it’s a case of do or die.”¹⁴⁸ In fact, the crisis of 1857 was the first to affect the entire world. In line with Marx’s early diagnosis, it had dimensions such as have never been seen before,¹⁴⁹ and even King Friedrich Wilhelm IV feared that now “the revolution is stalking the world once more. May God have mercy!”¹⁵⁰ The worldwide crisis, caused by a stock market crash on New York’s Wall Street after the collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance & Trust Company, suddenly led to panicked sell-offs. Worldwide, it gripped the financial system, industry, trade, and finally the agricultural sector, one after another. Marx was once again working enormously¹⁵¹ on the elaboration of his economic principles. In light of the latest developments, he and Engels would

need to report to the German public no later than the following spring to show that we are still there as always, and always the same.¹⁵² The enormous work was that of bringing the Outlines of the Cri- tique of Political Economy to the page, and the reason for the feverish haste was that Marx definitely wanted to have it written prior to the déluge, the great flood of the expected worldwide crisis. He worked like mad all night¹⁵³ so that the details of the related aspects of what the world now faced would be clear, at least to him. The result was a preliminary rough draft of what he had taken on as his great life work—and what in the end he was able to realize only in part. Ulti- mately, the entire work was supposed to consist of six books: “1. On Capital. 2. Landed Property. 3. Wage Labour. 4. State. 5. Interna- tional Trade. 6. World Market.”¹⁵⁴ The Outlines, first published from his estate in 1939 and 1941 by the Moscow publisher for foreign- language literature, was essentially limited, however, to book one of the planned series—the analysis of capital in general. The subjects of landed property and wage labor were later included in the three volumes of Capital and the subsequent Theories of Surplus Value. The books on the state, international trade, and the world market would never exist, despite the fact that Marx never for a moment relin- quished the intention of returning to these subjects. How the results would have looked remains a matter of speculation, but in terms of its basic assumptions the book about the state would presumably not have looked much different from the general theses on the subject

that Marx had already formulated in the 1840s.

The books about the world market and international trade, how- ever, would have given his theory about industrial cycles the unity that later would also be missing from the more comprehensive rep- resentations in the three volumes of Capital.¹⁵⁵ During the sleepless and smoke-filled nights when he put the Outlines on paper, he ad- dressed this subject only sketchily, at various points in the manu- script. Marx saw the fundamental cause of modern cyclical crises in the development of the credit system. On the one hand, the credit system followed with a certain necessity from businesses’ need to remain liquid even though investments had not yet been amortized through the sale of produced goods in the market. Capital, Marx maintained in the Outlines, thus developed the unavoidable need to achieve circulation without circulation time. Credit met this need. But on the other hand, out of intrinsic necessity the credit system itself

developed a dangerous tendency toward over-trading and over-specu- lation because the real market conditions could first be determined only in retrospect. Briefly put, credit suspended the barriers to the valorisation of capital only by giving them their most general form and thus produced, in oscillation, the period of overproduction and under- production as two periods.¹⁵⁶ It was a pure possibility theory.

Marx evidently intended to examine in detail the law of cyclical change between prosperity and crisis in his book about the world market.¹⁵⁷ It is impossible to know how his theory would have devel- oped and whether it could even have existed, in a strict sense, as a scientific explanation of a complex phenomenon. In any case, this phenomenon became globally apparent for the first time in sum- mer 1857, but—in defiance of Marx’s and Engel’s impatient expec- tations, and of what they had long wanted to believe—by the end of December 1857, the markets had noticeably calmed again. Even the second wave they had predicted failed to materialize. Evidently it was not a do or die situation.

Marx had originally planned to quickly establish the form of the Outlines as well as the plan for the entire six-book series, and to have the whole project appear in successive installments. But the work proceeded very slowly, above all because during his course of study continually revealed new aspects that needed to be thought out further.¹⁵⁸ When, after intense labor pains, it was actually published in 1859 by Franz Duncker in Berlin as a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the half-finished text was not much more than a fragment. “Don’t be bowled over by this,” wrote Marx to Engels shortly before sending the manuscript to Duncker: “although en- titled Capital in General, these instalments contain nothing as yet on the subject of capital, but only the two chapters: 1. The Commod- ity, 2. Money or Simple Circulation.” If things went well, he thought, he could quickly follow up with the chapter on capital.¹⁵⁹ But things did not go well at all.

Wilhelm Liebknecht declared that no book had disappointed him more than this one. The decisive chapter about capital was in fact missing, so the book remained only an academic treatment of goods and money; it said nothing about Marx’s central thesis about the basis of class antagonisms in modern relations of production. Despite a long and complicated foreword about historical material- ism, it remained a scholarly and ultimately apolitical book, even if Engels maintained that it clearly revealed that “economics is not

concerned with things but with relations between persons, and in the final analysis between classes.”¹⁶⁰ Johannes Miquel, an old mem- ber of the Communist League, reported that he found “very little actually new” in the text.¹⁶¹ As a future Berlin Oberbürgermeister, Prussian finance minister, and the architect of the principles of the German tax system that is still in force today, Miquel was someone who clearly understood something about the subject. By that time he had already become a liberal and a cofounder of the German National Association, but he was very familiar with the Commu- nist Manifesto from their time together during the struggles. Miquel presumably expected more from his old friend Marx, especially with respect to information about the political core of his economic the- ory. The book went practically unnoticed by the public. There were other issues in Germany that Marx could hardly understand from the loneliness of his exile in London. The economy was flourishing again, and the so-called “New Era” in Prussia brought a phase of liberalization in public life that began overnight upon the incurably mentally ill Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s departure from the throne at the end of 1858.

Marx was extremely frustrated. After all, the text contained the result of fifteen years of research, that is, the best years of my life.¹⁶² In Germany, he told Liebknecht, he had expected everything, attacks or criticism, but not complete ignoring.¹⁶³ Engels’s review—dictated in large parts by Marx himself—in the short-lived emigrant journal Das Volk did not change the book’s reception at all. Marx, Engels disclosed to his readers, was the first since Hegel to attempt “to de- velop any branch of science in its specific inner coherence,” but his “logical method” fundamentally distinguished him from the ideal- istic assumptions of speculative philosophy. To wit, Marx’s science was based on a materialistic conception of history, and thus for him the logical method was nothing but “the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and of interfering contingencies.” En- gels concluded his review by stating that he would address the actual economic content of the book in a subsequent article¹⁶⁴—which, however, never saw the light of day. Neither was there a continua- tion of the work itself.

Yet Marx had a faithful and reliable friend in Germany at this time: Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle’s far-reaching connections and tireless string-pulling were also to thank for Marx’s contact with Duncker and the fact that he ultimately received a book contract

in which the publisher quoted a much higher honorarium than usual. In the early 1850s, next to Miquel, Lassalle was one of the few political thinkers in Germany who considered themselves Marx’s party comrades. Miquel fell still farther under the influence of the zeitgeist’s new liberal “Realpolitik,” the principles of which were first formulated in 1853 by Ludwig August von Rochau, a former radical and participant in the charge on the Frankfurt guardhouse. The Revolution of 1848, according to Rochau, had failed because of insufficient insight into real power relations; therefore in the future one needed to learn to deal with realities rather than political fic- tions. In particular, the idea of a social revolution was nothing but a “figment of the imagination,” at best a “violent act of politics” that unwittingly only played into the hands of incorrigible conserva- tives.¹⁶⁵ This was increasingly also the opinion of Miquel, who in his last letter to Marx observed that his hope of a revolution occurring soon in Germany had noticeably diminished in recent years.¹⁶⁶

But ever since their first meeting in the fall of 1848, Lassalle had remained loyal to Marx. He had become a socialist very early and quite independently through his own interpretation of Hegel, Lorenz von Stein’s writings on the history of the social movement in France, and a personal encounter with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in Paris. On 17 September 1848, at the time of the Malmö cease-fire, he appeared together with Marx as a speaker at a mass rally under red flags on the Rhine meadow near Worringen.¹⁶⁷ He was rhetori- cally an extremely gifted speaker, and the influence he was able to exercise over the masses and the public would with time become one of the perhaps most difficult psychological problems that Marx faced during his life. Writing to Marx in June 1852, Lassalle noted that after the failed revolution he, like Marx, felt that in the future “no struggle would be successful in Europe anymore” if it was not “from the outset a pronounced purely socialist” struggle. He continued: “thus precisely during this apparently deathly quiet the real German workers’ party is being born.”¹⁶⁸ Marx was less certain. But in the correspondence of the early 1850s, Lassalle, who was years younger, was always someone who sought advice and forthrightly recognized Marx’s authority in theoretical questions, even if he never devel- oped into a real Marxist. For a time the correspondence ceased.

Lassalle resumed it again in 1857, when a book he published on the philosophy of Heraclitus the Obscure from Ephesus took the educated world of Berlin by storm. Suddenly celebrated as a

wunderkind, he was honored at a banquet, in the presence of the Prussian minister president, by being granted membership in the Philosophical Society of Berlin. Varnhagen von Ense, Alexander von Humboldt, Richard Lepsius, and August Boeckh praised the work enthusiastically.¹⁶⁹ A copy was sent to Marx in London. He found the reconstruction of Heraclitus’s system brilliant, he flattered Lassalle.¹⁷⁰ But in reality he felt that the worthy Lassalle was only poaching on the domain of others—all the more so since Marx him- self had made a much more significant contribution with his own dissertation. For the rest, Marx felt that Lassalle was a sensationalist for whom being the talk of the town in Berlin was all that mattered: This is the man who has written Heraclit. Perhaps, noted Marx to En- gels, the laddie might be of some service to us in finding a publisher.¹⁷¹ Indeed, Lassalle arranged for his own publisher, namely Duncker, to take on Marx’s Critique of Politica1 Economy and shortly thereafter Engels’s anonymously published Po and Rhine. Engels thanked him politely for his “bons offices”—his good services.¹⁷²

This was not completely fair, nor did it mark the nadir of the rela- tionship between the two exiled Church Fathers and their German admirer, whom they alternately mocked in their correspondence as Baron Itzig, Ephraim Gescheit, Jüdel Braun, Polish Schmuhl, and with other anti-Semitic invective. Jealousy played a significant role here. Lassalle’s Heraclitus was the talk of the day; nobody wanted to hear anything about Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Lassalle moved in the best circles of Berlin society and simultaneously called out to his audience in the tradesman association of the Oranienburg suburbs that soon, when the workers too claimed their civil rights, the bourgeoisie would be crying “murder and death.”¹⁷³ Meanwhile, Marx was researching and thinking on his own in London, in great isolation,¹⁷⁴ as he wrote to Lassalle.

A controversy regarding the Italian War of 1859 grew into a seri- ous dispute. It concerned the question of how the German states were to behave in light of the pact for the liberation of northern Italy concluded by Louis Bonaparte and the prime minister of Pied- mont-Sardinia Cavour. In his text Po and Rhine, Engels presented the view that Bonaparte’s Italian ambitions could only be the pre- lude to developments in which he would ultimately also demand the Rhine border, since otherwise his coup d’état on the eighteenth Bru- maire would not really be complete. If the Po was the “pretext” for Louis Napoléon, then under all circumstances, Engels maintained,

the Rhine had to be his “ultimate goal.” Nobody in Germany could therefore seriously think about giving up the Po without a fight, for ultimately that was the place to defend the Rhine.¹⁷⁵

Thus it was long believed amongst high-ranking military in Ber- lin that the anonymously published Po and Rhine had been written by a politicized Prussian general.¹⁷⁶ Additionally, Engels’s ideas came awfully close to the majority opinion in Germany, which had been gripped by the most intense wave of anti-French nationalism since the Rhine crisis of 1840. Talk was of the “Empire’s outside wall” along the Po, and the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung paraded before its readers the “lordly rights of the Germanic race” that ostensibly needed to be defended in northern Italy.¹⁷⁷ As little as Engels shared such positions, he was conversely just as convinced that nothing was a greater impediment to the revival of socialism in Europe than the new Bonapartism in Paris. Admittedly, he was no friend of the Habsburg “prison of nations,” but nor was it any solution to have Austria vacate a position of power only for it to be occupied by a usurper. Once greater Germany was unified, it could safely abstain from all plundering in Italy.

Lassalle saw things somewhat differently. Again with Duncker, he published the polemic The Italian War and the Task of Prussia: A Voice of Democracy. As he saw it, Bonaparte was working indirectly for German unity, if he aimed to wrest northern Italy from Austria and force this reactionary state of many nations to step back toward its German heartlands. At such a time, he maintained, a man like Frederick the Great would have marched into Vienna and left it to the Habsburg monarchy to decide whether it could even assert its claims in its non-German territories anymore. Today, though, a comparable solution would not be in the interests of the demo- crats. Lassalle therefore suggested that the German states maintain neutrality in the Italian War and, parallel to Bonaparte’s Italian in- tervention, liberate Schleswig-Holstein from Danish rule. Besides, Austria was the absolute embodiment of the reactionary principle in Europe, and thus a war against France would only strengthen the German people’s identification with the divinely ordained crown. Moreover, he concluded, Bonaparte was in no position to think about conquests, not even in Italy.¹⁷⁸

The result was precisely the last one. At the end of April 1859, the Austrians initiated hostilities, and on 20 June they suffered their final disaster at Solferino. Having conquered Lombardy, Louis Na-

poléon turned it over to Cavour in exchange for Nice and Savoy. Lassalle had perceived matters far more realistically than Engels, who was blinded by the caricature of Louis Bonaparte as the anti- revolutionary archenemy.

Marx, however, considered Lassalle’s pamphlet to be an enormous blunder. In the northern Italian crisis, and also given the threat of a French-Russian alliance against Austria, Germany could by no means remain neutral but was duty-bound to demonstrate that it was decidedly patriotic. With his headstrong views, Lassalle would in the future have to resign himself to being publicly disavowed by Marx and Engels. Especially now, it was necessary to maintain party discipline, otherwise everything will be in the soup.¹⁷⁹ What party? Marx, Engels—and Lassalle? Or that of the arrogated self-consciousness of history? Lassalle, however, did not regard the dispute as a party mat- ter at all but simply a normal conflict of opinions.

In 1861 he proposed to Marx that they found a newspaper in Ber- lin. It was to be entirely in the tradition of the old Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Wilhelm I (“beautiful Wilhelm”)—officially elevated to the throne from his position as regent after his brother’s death—had announced a general amnesty. But this amnesty had limits with respect to refugees; moreover, as a stateless person Marx did not pos- sess a passport. Nonetheless, he risked the trip. At the time he had just turned forty. In Zalt-Bommel near Nijmegen he stayed for two weeks with his uncle Lion Philips, one of the founding fathers of the Dutch Philips corporation, courting his cousin Antoinette, who would later be number one in the Dutch section of the First Interna- tional.¹⁸⁰ When it suited him—and especially vis-à-vis this cruel little witch¹⁸¹—Marx could be quite charming.

On 17 March, he arrived in Berlin by train at approximately 7:00

A.M. and drove along the Bellevuestraße to meet with Lassalle, who lived in a very beautiful house in one of the best parts of the city. Everything was fully prepared for his reception; subsequently they visited Countess Hatzfeldt, Lassalle’s eccentric life companion, for whom he had, as a lawyer, successfully conducted a multi-year inher- itance dispute. The countess, Marx informed Antoinette, appeared to him to be a very distinguished Lady, no blue-stocking, strongly in- terested in the matters of the revolution, and above all displaying a pleasant aristocratic laissez-aller, something that he, who deeply hated all bourgeois trivialities, found especially pleasing. She also allowed herself to become easily enthused about a campaign against

the brutal treatment of the French professional revolutionary Au- guste Blanqui in his lonely fortress imprisonment. Lassalle’s petition to the police president for the reinstatement of Marx’s Prussian state citizenship, however, went nowhere.¹⁸²

On occasion there was fellowship, theater, and ballet at the Royal Opera Unter den Linden, and above all a gala dinner arranged by Lassalle in honor of Marx’s return to Germany. It was an illustrious company. The elderly General von Pfuel, who once openly admitted his homoerotic tendencies to Heinrich von Kleist, sat across from Marx. As governor of Berlin during the March revolution, he had courageously prevented a bloodbath. In the fall of 1849 he became the Prussian minister president, but he was soon dismissed because of his unmistakable constitutional leanings. Now the old warhorse was supposedly full of hope for the liberality of the new era. Marx sat between Countess Hatzfeldt and Ludmilla Assing, the niece of Varnhagen von Ense, who inundated him with her goodwill. Court Councilor Förster, who had known Hegel personally and was among the publishers of his writings, proposed a toast for the Fatherland’s returning son.¹⁸³ For a while, Marx toyed with the idea of settling in Berlin.

The current situation in Prussia, he noted, was ill-boding for the powers that be, and all of the old parties were in a process of dissolu- tion. This might actually be the appropriate moment to launch a newspaper in the Prussian capital.¹⁸⁴ So he remained for a while. He visited his friend Köppen from the days of the Berlin Doctor Club and found that he had hardly changed. As for Rutenberg, he learned that the former chief of the Rheinische Zeitung had had to leave the liberal National-Zeitung because he had become too reac- tionary. Bruno Bauer was collaborating on a Staatslexikon (political encyclopedia) and otherwise indulging in country life in Rixdorf.¹⁸⁵ For the most part, however, Marx was bored stiff.¹⁸⁶ There was no haute politique—high politics—here.¹⁸⁷ But he did not want to leave Berlin until the Prussian government had approved the reinstate- ment of his citizenship.¹⁸⁸

The mood with Lassalle soured when they began speaking in binding terms about the composition of the future editorial office. Lassalle wanted himself and Marx to be equally responsible for di- recting the newspaper; if Engels were likewise to become a chief editor then by no means were both of them together to have more votes than he did. But Marx wrote confidentially to Engels that

even if Lassalle provided the money, in the best case scenario, if subjected to rigid discipline, Lassalle might be of service as one of the editors. Otherwise they would make fools of themselves.¹⁸⁹ In the end, the project did not amount to anything. Neither did the effort to acquire citizenship. Germany, Marx wrote to Antoinette at a station along his return route, was such a beautiful country that it was best to live outside its borders.¹⁹⁰ Basically, he—the herald of the real movement—needed the ivory tower, where one did not have to besmirch oneself with the temptations, compromises, trivialities, and necessities of everyday political life. Perhaps he also feared— consciously or unconsciously—that in Prussia he might one day be caught in the maelstrom of Realpolitik, to which Miquel had al- ready succumbed.

During the 1862 World Exhibition in South Kensington, which drew six million visitors, Lassalle stayed with Marx in London. Since 1856 the family had lived at Grafton Terrace near Hampstead Heath in a seven-room house with a small garden. An inheritance of Jenny’s had enabled the move from the restricted confines on Dean Street, yet 1862 was once again a year of unmitigated financial straits. Lassalle, by contrast, was living it up. Marx could hardly bear it. Allowing his anger full rein in a letter to Engels, Marx wrote that the baronized Jew had actually lost five thousand Taler in a specu- lation; he would presumably rather throw the money into the dirt than lend it to a friend.¹⁹¹ This was not quite the case: Lassalle had lent Marx fifteen pounds sterling and offered to extend him credit in any desired amount as long as Engels would secure the loan. Yet for Marx the matter remained an irritant. When Lassalle left London again, their correspondence ceased for the next two years.

A long-term political collaboration between Marx and Lassalle would hardly have been possible in any event. Lassalle was always more concerned with social issues than with socialism. In October 1862, three months after his return from London, he announced to Countess Hatzfeldt that he would establish a “collective labor asso- ciation for all of Germany” headquartered in Berlin and put himself “at its head.” As a response to the liberal Progress Party’s tepid pro- grams for solving social problems, he wanted the “fourth Estate” to develop as an independent political force with the prospects of civic recognition. His model consisted of state-funded productive orga- nizations by which members of the working class, instead of being exploited, could become independent entrepreneurs.¹⁹²

Lassalle never understood Marx. He always remained a Hegelian, especially with regard to the mediating role of the state. As opposed to Marx, he also had much more than unconditional intellectual leadership in mind; he wanted to become a real leader—in Marx’s words, a workers’ dictator.¹⁹³ On 23 May 1863, at the constituent meeting of the General German Workers’ Association in Leipzig, Lassalle was elected to a five-year term as president with plenary powers. According to Isaiah Berlin, Lassalle in fact advocated the doctrine of personal dictatorship and—quite contrary to Marx, who once said that leadership is never a pleasant thing¹⁹⁴—the ro- mantic idea of a Führer principle. But according to Berlin, this was precisely what made Bismarck consider him capable of providing satisfaction.

In May 1863 the head of the Prussian regime summoned Lassalle to an initial secret meeting, to be followed by others over the next ten months. Bismarck felt that Lassalle was one of the “most clever and charming men” he had ever dealt with. After all, they had the same enemy in the liberal bourgeoisie.¹⁹⁵ Lassalle explained to Bis- marck that the workers, despite their republican ethos, were fully prepared to see “the crown as a natural instrument of a social dic- tatorship” “rather than the egotism of the bourgeois class”—that is, if the crown changed from “a monarchy of the privileged classes” to a “social and revolutionary people’s monarchy.”¹⁹⁶ It was no coinci- dence that the idea of arranging these secret negotiations came from Bismarck’s assistant Hermann Wagener, an admirer of the socially conservative Hegelian Lorenz von Stein.

After Lassalle’s death in a duel in Geneva in August 1864, Marx noted that he had probably gone astray because in reality he was, like Mr Miquel, a ‘realistic politician’, only on a larger scale and with grander aims, a Marquis Posa of the proletariat.¹⁹⁷ His judgments were not always so severe. Lassalle’s misfortune, Marx wrote to Engels in early September 1864, had damnably preoccupied him in recent days. It was hard to believe that such a loud and noisy person was now dead as a doornail, and he felt truly sorry that their relationship had become so clouded in recent years. After all, in Marx’s eyes Lassalle still remained one of the vieille souche and the foe of our foes.¹⁹⁸ These words sound surprisingly noble, yet Isaiah Berlin is almost certainly correct to claim that, had he lived, Lassalle would certainly have developed into a first-rate obstacle for Marx.¹⁹⁹ Tellingly, when the leadership of the General German Workers’ Association was offered

to him, Marx refused it—and not only because Prussia, as before, refused to reinstate his citizenship, but above all because he wanted nothing to do with royal Prussian governmental socialism,²⁰⁰ or with the Tory-Chartist character²⁰¹ of the Lassalle association, and because even Wilhelm Liebknecht, sent specially to Berlin, had been unable to purge the party of the stench left behind by Lassalle.²⁰²