Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Chapter 16: The Sleepless Night of Exile

Bonaparte's coup d'état put the finishing external touch to the European counter-revolution, which now held the whole Continent in its grip. In Hungary, where the defence had been heroic, the hangman now held sway. Austria was ruled as it had been in the time of Metternich. In Prussia nothing was left of the triumphant achievements of March but a pitiful mock-constitutionalism which served as an admirable prop of military despotism. The inner enemy was everywhere defeated. The way was once more clear for an active foreign policy.

The revolution had not succeeded in solving a single one of the numerous European national problems. Germany remained carved into little pieces, Poland remained divided, Italy was still rent asunder and Hungary enslaved. In the last resort Austria and Prussia had been saved by Russia. Russian troops had kept down the Poles and suppressed the Hungarian revolution; and now the Tsar proceeded to claim his recompense for saving Central Europe from 'chaos.' The opportunity of coming a step nearer to the capture of Holy Byzantium, the principal aim of Russian foreign policy, was more favourable than it had ever been before. Austria, just saved by Russia from Kossuth and practically bankrupt in any case, was bound to remain inactive, and Prussia was a vassal state. No danger threatened from the West. France, or so they believed in St. Petersburg, was not yet strong enough to resist Russia alone, and the Tory Government in England could not well defend the Crescent against the Cross.

The calculation was erroneous. France and England, much as they wished to avoid war, were forced to come to the assistance of Turkey. It was impossible for them to tolerate Russia, even in the guise of a champion of Christianity, gaining a foothold on the Dardanelles. In the spring of 1854 Russia found herself at war with England, France and Turkey.

This was not the war Marx had longed for in 1848 and 1849. This was no war against the stronghold of counter-revolution, but a war of the three most important counter-revolutionary powers among themselves. Marx welcomed it, for he who fought Russia was working for the revolution, though he knew it not and willed it not. Recent experience had shown once more that the overthrow of Russia was an essential preliminary to the victory of the proletariat. In the nineties Engels summarised Marx's reasons in two sentences. 'In the first place the Russian Empire constitutes the great stronghold, reserve position and reserve army of European reaction. The mere fact of its existence is itself a danger and a threat to us. In the second place it constantly interferes in European affairs with the object of securing geographical points of vantage, all with the aim of obtaining an ascendancy over Europe, and in so doing interferes with our normal development and thus makes the liberation of the European proletariat impossible.'

Being anti-Russian meant anything but being pro-English or pro-French or even pro-Turkish. In France the most arbitrary despotism held sway, in spite of, or rather because of, the universal suffrage which under the Empire had become a gigantic instrument of popular betrayal. Freedom of assembly was as good as abolished, the workers' right to combine was taken away, the increase in the severity of the conditions of the work-books made them the slaves of every minor police official, and the whole country was given over a helpless prey to the rapacity of the December bands, who did not hesitate to take advantage of their opportunity. As for England, it pretended to be waging 'a war of civilisation against barbarism,' but in defending Turkey it was really defending the flanks of the route to India, where in Marx's words, 'the real hypocrisy and the barbarism native to bourgeois civilisation appears in all its nakedness.' England treated the Irish with even greater inhumanity, if such a thing were possible, than that with which the Russian proprietor treated his serfs; England was the country whose fate was determined by its aristocracy and heartless middle-class alone, who were roused to indignation at the maltreatment of Christians in Turkey to-day, and at the suppression by the Russians of the noble peoples of the Caucasus to-morrow, but had no objection to eleven-year-old children slaving for ten or eleven hours a day in the textile factories.

Europe was on the move again, but Marx was entirely cut off from any possibility of direct political activity. After the dissolution of the Communist League, which in any case would not have been a suitable instrument for political action, no other organisation existed. The German Press was closed to Marx. He started writing for an unimportant paper in Breslau, but that was not till the beginning of 1855, and in any case it was sheer hack-work and after a year the paper was discontinued. Marx's connections in France were even more tenuous; an occasional letter from a refugee in Paris, and that was all. In England things were slightly better.

The Chartist Movement never succeeded in recovering from its defeat in the spring of 1848. A few groups survived here and there, practically without contact with one another. Many leaders had deserted it, and with the end of the crisis the great English workers' movement seemed to be at an end too. Of the two men whom Marx knew from earlier days, G.J. Harney was undoubtedly as well-meaning and as devoted to the workers' cause as anyone could be, but he was quite obviously incapable of resurrecting the expiring movement. He was always full of enthusiasms, for Kossuth and Mazzini, for Marx and for Willich. They were all such excellent men, and he made heroes of them all. Marx and Engels had a private name for him--'Citizen Hip-Hip-Hurrah!' They soon parted from him.

The one Chartist leader with whom Marx remained in contact for long was Ernest Jones. Jones, energetic, pertinacious, clever, if sometimes over-clever, educated and an excellent speaker, well-tried in struggle--he spent two years in prison because of his part in the stormy demonstration of 1848--had all the qualities of a great agitator. His fiery spirit breathed new life into the movement. In March, 1854, he actually succeeded in causing an All English Workers' Parliament to meet in Manchester. Marx, who was invited as an honorary delegate, sent an address in which he defined the task of the parliament as 'organisation of its united forces, organisation of the working class on a national scale.' But the Chartists lacked the strength to overcome their defeat and the movement increasingly disintegrated. Some of its old adherents merged into petty-bourgeois reformist groups, others lost interest, and Jones himself ended by joining John Bright's Radicals.

Marx found it exceedingly difficult to reconcile himself to the idea of a powerful movement, which but a few years before had been the champion of the European proletariat, ending in this way. He went on hoping that it would flare up again, be rekindled by some spontaneous act. When two hundred thousand workers, artisans and small tradesmen demonstrated against the Sunday Trading Bill in Hyde Park in June, 1855, Marx believed the affair to be no less than 'the beginning of the English revolution.' He and other German exiles took an active part in it. Liebknecht writes in his memoirs that Marx, who was liable to become very excited on such occasions, was 'within a hair's breadth of being seized by the collar by a policeman and hauled before a magistrate, had not a warm appeal to the thirst of the brave guardian of the law eventually met with success.' After a second demonstration the Bill was withdrawn and the flickering flame extinguished.

The whole weakness of the Chartist Movement in the first half of the fifties was demonstrated, among other things, by its newspapers. Harney's paper, The Red Republican, which published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto, ceased to appear after a short time and its successor, The Friend of the People, had no better fate. From February, 1852, onwards Jones produced a weekly, The People's Paper, but had the greatest difficulty in keeping the 'poor sheet' (as Marx called it) alive. Marx helped to edit it for a time. From the autumn onwards he occasionally wrote articles for Jones and allowed him to reprint articles which had appeared elsewhere. But even the People's Paper had only a very limited circulation. It was several times on the verge of bankruptcy and ended by passing into the hands of a bourgeois radical group.

Apart from the Chartist Press, which was insignificant, the only papers in England at Marx's disposal were the Urquhartite papers. When the Oriental question cropped up once more in the spring of 1853 Marx at first paid very little attention to it. In March he was still convinced that 'in spite of all the dirty work and the ranting in the newspapers it would never be the cause of a European war.' Six months later Russia and Turkey were at war, and when France and England entered the fray a local dispute flared up into a European war. Marx flung himself into the détestable question orientale, and for a time even thought of learning Arabic and Turkish. He read all the books on the Near East he could lay his hands on, and found particular interest in the writings of David Urquhart, to which Engels had drawn his attention. 'I am now reading Urquhart, the crazy M.P., who declares that Palmerston is sold to Russia. The explanation is simple; the fellow is a Highland Scot of Lowland education, by nature a Romantic and by training a Free Trader. The fellow went to Greece a philhellene and, after being at daggers drawn with the Turks for three long years, he went to Turkey and became an enthusiast for the very Turks he had just been quarrelling with. He goes into raptures over Islam, and his motto is: if I were not a Calvinist I should be a Mohammedan. In his opinion Turks, particularly those of the Golden Age of the Osmanli Empire, are the most perfect nation on earth, without any exception whatever. The Turkish language is the most perfect and melodious in the world. The Turkish constitution in its 'purity' is as fine as any there could be, and is almost superior to the British. In short, only the Turk is a gentleman and freedom exists only in Turkey.'

Urquhart went into raptures over Turkey because it was barbaric. He went into raptures about the Middle Ages and the Catholic Church for the same reason. He hated modern industry, the bourgeoisie, universal suffrage, the Chartists and revolutionaries of every kind. He was profoundly convinced that all these were nothing but the tools of Russian diplomacy, which made use of them to cause unrest in the West and deliver it a helpless prey to Russian plans of world-conquest. Marx soon saw that Urquhart was a complete monomaniac, but his hatred of Russia might make him a useful ally.

Marx frequently praised the writings of Urquhart in the articles on the Oriental question he wrote for the New York Tribune from the summer of 1853 onwards. Whatever else the Scot might be, he certainly knew the Near East better than most of his contemporaries. The fact that there was no infamy of which he did not think Russia capable only served to make

Marx more favourably inclined towards him. Moreover, there seemed to be an element of truth in his exaggerations. In spite of Marx's original scepticism, the more closely he studied the recent history of Anglo-Russian relations the better-founded did Urquhart's imputations against British statesmen, and Palmerston in particular, appear. Marx made an exhaustive study of Hansard and subjected the diplomatic Blue Books from 1807 to 1850 to an assiduous analysis. In November, 1853, he communicated the result of his researches to Engels: 'Curious as it may seem to you, as a result of closely following the footprints of the noble Viscount for the past twenty years, I have come to the same conclusion as the monomaniac Urquhart, namely that Palmerston has been sold to Russia for several decades.'

The irresolute, vacillating manner in which England and France waged the war and their complaints of the Tsar's intransigeance, which made the compromise they desired so difficult to obtain, only served to intensify Marx's conviction that Palmerston did not mean the war seriously and that the war was a sham. Marx became a monomaniac like Urquhart. He examined hundreds of diplomatic documents in the British Museum, and in his opinion they revealed a secret connivance between the Cabinets of London and St. Petersburg dating from the time of Peter the Great. Marx now attacked Palmerston with great vehemence. He did not directly accuse him of being corrupted by Russia, but demonstrated 'Palmerston's connivance with the St. Petersburg Cabinet from his transactions with Poland, Turkey, Circassia, etc.'

Urquhart was delighted at Marx's articles on Lord Palmerston, which were published in the New York Tribune and the People's Paper. E. Tucker, a publisher and a friend of Urquhart's, printed fifteen thousand copies of one of these articles in the form of a fly-sheet, and not long afterwards he reproduced two more articles in the same form. In the summer of 1854, the Urquhartites, this time with the support of the Chartists, started a campaign against secret diplomacy. The campaign was chiefly directed against Palmerston. Their organs, the Free Press in London and the Sheffield Free Press reprinted many of Marx's articles. Marx maintained his contact with them until the middle of the sixties. Marx shrank at nothing when it came to striking a blow at Russian Tsarism. Later he actually wrote anti-Russian articles for Conservative papers.

Apart from the Chartist movement and the Urquhartite committees, some unimportant weeklies, and two or three pamphlets, Marx's voice in England was echoing in the void. For ten whole years Marx had only one big newspaper through which to speak, though his voice did not reach the English, French and German proletariat for whom his words were meant. From the summer of 1852 onwards Marx was a regular correspondent of the New York Tribune, which in the middle of the fifties had the largest circulation in the world.

The New York Tribune was founded in April, 1841, as an organ of the advanced bourgeois intelligentsia, by Horace Greeley, a former compositor who became a journalist. Greeley was a friend of Albert Brisbane and the Rev. George Ripley, two zealous disciples of the Socialist teaching of Fourier. In the spring of 1842 he put his paper at the disposal of Fourierist propaganda. Fourierism had many followers among the educated classes in America at the time. Its colony at Brook Farm, near Boston, was visited and encouraged by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson, Charming and Margaret Fuller. It was destroyed by fire in 1846 and financial difficulties prevented its reconstruction. Many of the colonists went to New York, where Charles A. Dana became city editor and Ripley critic of the New York Tribune. It had a roll of contributors unequalled by any other American paper, an uncommonly high literary and political standard, and excellent European correspondents, but was only moderately successful prior to 1848, when, as the best-informed paper in America, its circulation increased as a consequence of the outbreak of the revolution. Dana was sent to Europe as a special correspondent. He was in Paris during the June rising, went to Berlin in the autumn and in November went to Cologne. It may have been Brisbane, who was in Berlin at the time and had met Marx in Paris, who drew Dana's attention to him. Dana paid Marx a visit and spent a 'delightful' evening with him, as he was fond of recalling in later years, and took away with him an abiding impression that in Marx he had met the most acute and far-seeing of the revolutionaries. In July, 1850, he wrote to Marx from New York that he always kept himself informed of Marx's activities and whereabouts and asked him whether he would not like to come to America. Marx's answer is unknown. At the time Marx certainly had plans to emigrate to America, as will be mentioned later.

After the collapse of the German revolution a great stream of emigrants poured into the new, the free world. Half a million Germans landed in New York in the years 1852 to 1854 alone. They took with them a lively interest in the affairs of their native land. Even the native Americans, who did not generally pay much attention to Europe, took much more notice of it now than formerly. The New York Tribune, with its excellent connections among the Democrats of the emigration, advanced in circulation by leaps and bounds. At the beginning of August, 1851, Dana invited Marx to contribute.

Between August, 1851, and September, 1852, eighteen articles on the revolution and counter-revolution in Germany appeared in the New York Tribune. They appeared over Marx's signature, though not one of them was written by him. Marx was so fully occupied on the great economic work which he was anxious to complete as quickly as possible that he asked Engels to write them in his stead, and Engels wrote them, as he later wrote many more articles for Marx, either entirely or in part. In May, 1852, Dana asked Marx to send him articles on 'current events which throw light on the brewing revolutionary crisis.' Marx submitted the first article in August. As his English was not yet adequate, he wrote in German, which Engels translated. From February, 1853, onwards Marx wrote his English articles himself. From then onwards Marx worked very hard for the New York Tribune. During the first year he sent no fewer than sixty articles to New York.

The work Marx did for the New York Tribune was not that of an ordinary foreign correspondent. He contributed articles which were comprehensive evaluations of recent events. Sometimes he wrote regular essays. They were composed hurriedly, because the steamer sailed twice a week, and if Marx missed the mail an article was lost and he was £2 the poorer. But every line he wrote was based on careful study. Marx lacked both inclination and ability for the work of a newspaper correspondent proper. He had little contact with political circles, still less with bourgeois circles, he avoided journalists and could not dance attendance on the latest sensations. From ten in the morning till seven at night he sat in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Before writing an article on British rule in India he studied dozens of books on the subject, and before his series on the Spanish revolution he went through the whole of ancient and modern literature relevant to the subject. Engels co-operated valiantly in his own departments, i.e. military matters and geography. The New York Tribune was more than pleased with the work of its contributor. Sometimes Marx's contributions were printed as leading articles, and Dana did not shrink from inserting sentences here and there and altering the beginning and end to make it appear that the articles had been written in the office. Engels's military articles on the Turko-Russian War attracted so much attention that their author was taken to be the prominent General Winfield Scott, who was friendly with Greeley and stood as a candidate for the presidency.

The New York Tribune, which was not so anxious to let its readers see how much of the work was not its own, started omitting Marx's name more and more frequently. Marx eventually insisted that either all his articles be signed or none, and from the spring of 1855 they all appeared unsigned. At first other Germans had contributed to the New York Tribune, including Freiligrath, Ruge and even Bruno Bauer, but from the middle of the fifties Marx was its only diplomatic correspondent in Europe.

The fees paid Marx for his articles were hardly in accordance with the New York Tribune's appreciation of him as 'its most highly--valued contributor.' For the first article Marx was paid £1, and the fee was then raised to £2. Marx was not paid for all the articles he submitted but only for those that were printed. The greatest concession that Marx ever obtained was in the spring of 1857, when the Tribune agreed to pay him for one dispatch a week, whether it were used or not. The remainder were only to be paid for if they actually appeared. The number of articles paid for rose and fell in accordance with American interest in events in Europe, whether because they directly affected the United States or whether such things as wars, risings or crises were 'sensational' enough for them. 'It is really disgusting,' Marx wrote to Engels in January, 1857, 'to be condemned to take it as a favour that such a rag admits you to its company. To pound and grind dry bones and make soup of them, as paupers do in the workhouse, that is the sum total of the political work to which one is generously condemned in such society. Although I am only an ass, I am conscious of having given these rascals, I will not say recently, but in former years, too much for their money.'

Irregular and uncertain as Marx's income from the New York Tribune was for nearly ten years, it was all he earned. In spite of Engels's unlimited sacrifices he would have been lost without it.

When Marx arrived in London he was not in the least worried about his immediate monetary prospects. He was convinced that he would soon succeed in putting the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on its feet again in the form of a review. But negotiations with the publishers dragged on for month after month, and then Marx was taken ill. The contributions were not ready in time and the first number appeared at the beginning of March, 1850, instead of on January 1. The money Marx brought with him--his wife had sold the furniture in Cologne and she had pawned the silver in France--quickly vanished. Other exiles, poverty-stricken themselves, were unable to help. Marx had to provide for his wife, four young children (Guido, his second son, was born in October, 1849) and Lenchen Demuth, the faithful housekeeper. The household was reduced to an appalling state of destitution. At the end of March, 1850, they were evicted. About this time Frau Marx wrote to Weydemeyer: 'I shall describe one day of this life as it really was, and you will see that perhaps few other refugees have had to suffer so much. Since the cost of a wet-nurse is prohibitive here, I decided, in spite of continual and terrible pains in the breasts and the back, to nurse the child myself. But the poor little angel drank in so much sorrow with the milk that he was continually fretting, and in violent pain day and night. He has not slept a whole night through since he was born, but sleeps at most two or three hours. Recently he has been subject to violent cramps, so that he is continually hovering on the brink of life and death. When he was suffering in this way he sucked so violently that my nipple became sore and bled. Often the blood streamed into his little mouth. As I was sitting like this one day our landlady suddenly appeared. In the course of the winter we had paid her more than two hundred and fifty thalers, and we had arranged with her that in future we were not to pay her but the landlord, who had put in an execution. Now she denied this agreement and demanded the £5 we still owed her. As we could not pay this sum at once two brokers entered the house and took possession of all my belongings; bedding, linen, clothes, everything, even the poor baby's cradle and the better toys belonging to the girls, who stood by, weeping bitterly. They threatened to take everything away in two hours' time, when I should have had to lie on the bare floor with my freezing children and my aching breast. Our friend Schramm hurried into the town to seek help. He got into a cab, but the horses ran away. He jumped out and was brought back bleeding to the house, where I was in despair with my poor shivering children.

'We had to leave the house next day. It was cold and rainy and dreary. My husband tried to find a lodging for us, but no one was willing to have us when he mentioned the four children. At last a friend helped us and we paid what was owing. I quickly sold all my beds in order to settle with the chemist, the baker, the butcher and the milkman, who were all filled with alarm when they heard the broker's men were in and rushed to send in their bills. The beds I sold were taken to the street door and loaded on to a hand-cart--and what do you think happened? By this time it had grown late and it was long after sunset, after which moving furniture in this way is illegal by English law. The landlord appeared with a number of constables, and said that some of his property might be on the cart, we might be escaping to a foreign country. In less than five minutes a crowd of two or three hundred people had gathered outside our front door--the whole Chelsea mob. The beds were brought in again, and could not be sent to the purchaser until next morning. Now that the sale of our goods and chattels had enabled us to pay our debts to the last penny, I moved with my little darlings to two tiny rooms at our present address, the German Hotel, 1, Leicester Street, Leicester Square, where we found a human reception for £5 10_s_. a week.