Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  With the Constituent Assembly finally acting in revolutionary fashion, Marx threw himself wholeheartedly into the fight. Every day, the masthead of the New Rhineland News proclaimed: “No more taxes!” In contrast to the events in September, which were largely limited to Cologne and its vicinity, Marx used his position on the directory of the provincial federation of democratic clubs in November to organize both a tax boycott and then armed resistance to the Prussian government across the length and breadth of the Rhine Province, with wide support from the region’s democrats and broad public approval.53 The struggle was a bitter one. It took the authorities much longer than in September to restore order; but in the end, by December 1848, this resistance too had been beaten down. Marx fully expected to be executed for his insurgent deeds; he was merely indicted for incitement to rebellion and for resistance against the government authorities.54

  ALMOST HALF A YEAR lay between the revolutionary crises of November 1848 and May 1849, and in that time Marx had had to confront a number of difficult situations. In some ways, the indictment was the least of his problems. His trial, in February 1849, turned into an enormous triumph. In his speech defending himself to the jurors, he held up a copy of the Napoleonic Code and praised it as the legal system of a “modern bourgeois society,” contrasting it to the society of orders, with its absolutist monarchy, and its supporters among noble landlords and government bureaucrats. The Prussian Constituent Assembly, Marx went on, in its decision to call for a tax boycott represented precisely this modern legal order, against the monarch’s arbitrary decree of dissolution, so in defending the Assembly he was acting legally.

  In this speech, Marx took ideas from the Communist Manifesto concerning the relationship between socioeconomic systems and the law and applied them to contemporary politics. Oddly, this one major example of Marx publicly using ideas from the Manifesto during the 1848 Revolution came before a very bourgeois audience, since jurors were selected from the ranks of the highest taxpayers. The praise of the Napoleonic Code was doubtless designed to appeal to them, as it was very popular in the Rhineland, but this praise also reflected Marx’s memories of his father, a very Napoleonic jurist, and his own legal studies in Bonn and Berlin. It certainly appealed to the jurors, who voted unanimously to acquit Marx—which, admittedly, was what happened at most political trials in the Rhineland during and after the midcentury revolution.55

  Two Prussian non-commissioned officers claimed that after the trial Marx boasted to them, “the courts can’t touch me now.”56 Marx denied their assertions, but in the winter and spring of 1849 financial problems rather than government persecution posed a greater threat to the New Rhineland News. The newspaper, whose press run had reached the quite respectable level of 6,000 copies, was very short of funds. The original investors were reluctant to put any more money into the enterprise. Marx’s previous fund-raising trip, in August and September, had brought in 2,000 talers from Polish nationalists, who appreciated his anti-Russian and anti-Prussian stance. But that money was soon spent, and the period of martial law, when the newspaper could not appear, was yet another severe financial blow. Short-term notes were issued to close the gap in finances, although the purchasers of these notes were making a political statement rather than a lucrative investment. By early 1849, as Marx wrote, “all the correspondents and creditors of the newspaper were letting loose against me.” He fell into arrears on the typesetters’ wages. The proletarians could not subsist on revolutionary rhetoric. They threatened to strike and hung up in the composition room a large banner reading: “When it’s a question of money, good-natured feelings are at an end,” a well-known remark that the liberal opposition leader David Hansemann had used to denounce the king of Prussia. Marx was on the road, once again seeking funds for the newspaper, in the second half of April and the first ten days of May 1849, this time in northern Germany, but with very little success. As a result, he was absent from his political headquarters in Cologne when the final revolutionary crisis broke out.57

  In the January 1849 elections to the Prussian parliament, Marx had continued his anti-Prussian strategy one last time, working closely with the Cologne democrats. He strongly opposed the proposal of Andreas Gottschalk, who had been freed from jail and was back in action after his trial and acquittal the previous month, for separate workers’ candidates. Gottschalk’s followers (Gottschalk himself was in Paris, with his mentor Moses Hess) fought bitterly with Marx in the Workers’ Association on that point, and lost. Their leader got in a parting shot, denouncing Marx for wanting to have the workers “escape the hell of the Middle Ages, by voluntarily plunging into the purgatory of a decrepit rule of capital”—in other words, through a revolution against Prussia, leading to a liberal-democratic, capitalist regime, that the workers would then have to oppose.58

  Following the elections, which proved to be a victory for the democrats and Marx’s strategy, Marx reversed course. Endorsing his rival’s strategy, he announced in April 1849 that he and his followers were leaving the provincial democratic committee and calling for the creation of a new federation of revolutionary workers’ associations. His newspaper, for the first time, began to deal with social issues, including printing a lecture on “Wage Labor and Capital” in which Marx related the results of his economic studies. Marx seemed to be on the verge of abandoning his strategy of a broad-based democratic revolution against the Prussian monarchy, and putting his efforts exclusively into the organization of the working class.59

  This realignment occurred precisely as the final crisis of the 1848 Revolution in Germany was breaking out. It began with a most unrevolutionary action, the creation of a constitution by the German National Assembly in Frankfurt that named the king of Prussia the emperor of Germany. This collaboration with the pre-revolutionary authorities—and a particularly reactionary pre-revolutionary authority at that—was exactly why Marx had condemned the National Assembly in the first place. He, like other radical democrats in Cologne and across Germany, treated the decision with the greatest contempt.

  Rather the opposite of Marx’s expectations, it was Friedrich Wilhelm IV who rejected the Assembly’s decision and the German public who supported it. Mass meetings throughout central Europe, attended by armed members of the militia and great crowds of citizens, endorsed the constitution, and took oaths vowing to fight and die for it. This was the insurrectionary moment Marx had been expecting ever since he began publishing the New Rhineland News. Only the radical-democratic revolution he had been seeking happened just as he had broken with the democrats and called for a separate, socialist and working-class political organization.

  In the climactic days of May 1849, tensions mounted rapidly in western Germany. The Prussian army kept a tight rein on Cologne. The soldiers of the garrison turned the artillery mounted on the walls inward toward the city. So there was no insurrection in the Rhenish metropolis, but there was a groundswell of political protest. Four different meetings of representatives of political clubs from across the province took place there, as did an even larger gathering of mayors and city councilmen. The tone of most of the meetings was harsh: support for the National Assembly and its constitution, attacks on their Prussian overlords, even calls for secession from the Prussian monarchy. Close to Cologne itself, insurrections broke out to the south in the university town of Bonn, and to the north in Düsseldorf, as well as farther north, in the lower Rhine weaving districts and to the east of the province among the metalworkers of Solingen and Remscheid and the textile workers in the Wupper Valley. Largely working-class insurgents erected barricades; militiamen battled with Prussian troops. These struggles were part of a wider insurrection that reached in a broad arc through central, western, and southwestern Germany.

  In this atmosphere of revolutionary upheaval, the New Rhineland News, far from promoting an uprising, preached caution and skepticism of the “bourgeois” political movement. The new provincial federation of workers’ associations—most of whose groups came from agricultural villag
es along the Rhine River—refused to be drawn into insurrectionary plans. Engels, who had returned from his exile to Cologne in January 1849 to stand trial and be acquitted, could not resist joining the insurgency, especially as it had broken out in his native Wupper Valley. His presence was not a success—often attributed to political differences between him and the insurgents there, but mostly a result of his less than tactful personality. Engels loudly boasted that the insurgents had taken hostage a reactionary and especially religious banker; should the Prussians attack, he would have the man shot. Appointed “inspector of the barricades,” he replaced all the black-red-gold German national flags with red ones, after which the insurgent leadership insisted that he leave town.60

  It is hard to know which was worse for the revolutionary movement, Marx’s reluctance to take action or Engels’s excessive willingness to do so. Neither of these problems hampered the Prussian authorities. Frustrated by the refusal of the jurors to convict Marx of press offenses, they looked in the spring of 1849 for other measures to silence his radical newspaper. Spies and agents provocateurs could prove nothing. But in the crisis of May 1849, the Ministry of the Interior received a report that Marx was deeply involved in a planned insurrection—although Marx was carefully keeping his distance from the uprisings spreading throughout much of Germany. It was the excuse the government needed. Marx, who had renounced his Prussian citizenship and had never regained it, was expelled from the country as an undesirable alien.61

  With the expulsion of its editor-in-chief, the New Rhineland News came to an abrupt end. The swan song issue, dated May 19, 1849, was printed in revolutionary red. Enormously popular, it had to be reprinted repeatedly, eventually selling 20,000 copies. Calling for the emancipation of the working class, while predicting a future of revolutionary terrorism and war with the czar, it was a final act of insurgent defiance. On the same day that the last issue appeared, Marx, accompanied by his family, Engels, and other political associates, left Cologne, traveling south up the Rhine River, probably by steamboat, on his way out of Prussian territory.62 Although he certainly was not expecting his departure to be permanent or even long-lasting, exile would be Marx’s fate for the rest of his life.

  7

  The Exile

  MARX LEFT COLOGNE JUST a couple of days after Prussian troops had suppressed the insurrections in the kingdom’s western provinces. In retrospect, their actions showed that the mid-nineteenth-century revolutions were reaching their end; but to contemporaries, the revolutionary struggles were still very much underway, reaching a high point of military confrontation whose outcome was profoundly uncertain. In Baden and the Palatinate, the far southwest of Germany along the Rhine River, radicals had seized power, and were striving to form a revolutionary army to fight for their cause. Hungarian soldiers, now the forces of an independent republic severing all its ties with the Austrian Empire, had reconquered Budapest from Habsburg troops, and were marching along the Danube on Vienna. Radicals controlled much of central Italy, including the Papal States. Seizing power in Rome, they had proclaimed a republic there and forced the Pope to flee. After Pius IX departed, the revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini arrived, along with his military expert, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was organizing yet another revolutionary army.

  As all the insurgents understood, the ultimate fate of the revolution across the entire Continent would depend on the outcome of political struggles in France. Democrats and socialists there were negotiating an alliance, seeking new supporters, and striving to win back the ground they had lost in the second half of 1848. Were they to regain power, then the political and military weight of continental Europe’s most powerful nation could be thrown onto the scales in behalf of the insurgents. The struggles of the spring of 1849 would then become the initial phases of a new revolutionary upheaval.

  Most immediately in the second half of May 1849, but over the following three and a half years, Marx would try to ride this revolutionary wave, seeking to bring the communist strategy he had initiated in April 1849 into an existing or renewed insurrectionary outbreak. In a painful and difficult process, beginning with his expulsion from Cologne in May 1849 and ending with the conclusion of the Cologne Communist Trial in November 1852, Marx would watch his hopes for a new revolution expire. His intransigent political strategy would expand the ranks of his enemies and deplete those of his friends. Losing his last base of support in Germany, he would be driven from one provisional refuge to another, all the while becoming steadily more impoverished and experiencing ever greater difficulties in his personal and family life. Out of these series of defeats would emerge a new theory of the preconditions for revolution, and a literary masterpiece, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In that work, Marx would offer a veiled self-criticism of his own actions during the 1848 Revolution, but also find a way to extend the hopes of that year into a dismal future.

  MARX’S WHEREABOUTS IN THE second half of May 1849 remain a bit of a mystery. Contemporary evidence is very scanty, and biographical accounts usually take at face value Friedrich Engels’s self-justifying memoir.1 Retracing Marx’s and Engels’s steps in light of their previous positions, especially their break with the democrats in April 1849, nonetheless illuminates an obscure sequence of events.

  Although expelled from Prussia, Marx could still legally stay in other German states, and he spent the two following weeks doing so. According to Engels’s account, he and Marx journeyed to Frankfurt, where they hoped to convince the National Assembly to take decisive revolutionary action in supporting the insurrections in southwestern Germany. Foiled by the cowardice of the petit-bourgeois democrats, the two men traveled on to the insurrectionary regimes themselves, but found the same petit-bourgeois lack of revolutionary decisiveness.

  How much of this actually happened, or at least happened as Engels claimed it did? One has to wonder just how well the democrats received Marx’s proposals for insurrection, given that he had just been denouncing their insurrectionary efforts. A decade later, Karl Emmermann, who had commanded a sharpshooters’ battalion in the army of the revolutionary southwest German regimes, recalled the attitudes and actions of Marx and Marx’s left-wing rival Karl Vogt in the spring of 1849: “To be sure, they will always drive forward, whip and sting—that is a necessity to them—however, always just up to the moment of the deed; then they will again wind things down, because it is either still too early, or already too late, or not political. . . .” A contemporary newspaper report had Marx telling the revolutionary government of the Palatinate just that. Engels, who eventually did join the revolutionary army, maintained that his participation was a good thing, for otherwise “the whole band of democratic bums” would have claimed that Marx and his followers were “too cowardly to fight”—an accusation that dogged Marx during his London exile in the early 1850s.2

  Following their tour of the insurgent centers, Marx and Engels, along with Marx’s family and other confidants, made their way to Bingen, in the Grand Duchy of Hessen. There, they were arrested by Hessian troops and brought to Frankfurt, but then released. They returned to Bingen and remained in the city for a few days, until the beginning of June. What exactly was the Marx team doing in this obscure Rhine River town? Bingen was on the border of the Grand Duchy of Hessen with Prussia; it was also home to Julius Hentze, a radical former Prussian army officer from whom Marx was trying to raise money. Combining these two facts leads to the suggestion that Marx was hoping to restart the New Rhineland News just outside Prussian territory. One of the few documents preserved from this period is a press release issued in Bingen on May 31, 1849, and signed by the entire editorial board of the New Rhineland News. It asserted that the West German News, a newspaper begun by the very energetic Cologne democrat Hermann Becker after Marx’s departure, was not, as Becker claimed, the successor to the New Rhineland News. “When and where the New Rhineland News will reappear, the undersigned editorial board reserves for a more detailed statement.” Such a declaration rather suggests that Marx
and his friends were hoping to resume publishing their newspaper.3

  These plans never came to fruition, probably because Marx could not find the necessary funds, and at the beginning of June, the group that had held together for the previous two weeks suddenly dissolved. Jenny took the children and went to her mother in Trier. Engels returned to the Palatinate, where he mocked the insurgents as petit-bourgeois dilettantes and made fun of their preparations to fight the approaching Prussian army to such an extent that a group of them arrested him as a Prussian spy. Several years later, after the Prussians had restored order for them, the Bavarian authorities held a show trial of the revolutionaries and issued a propaganda piece, proving that the latter had unleashed a reign of terror in the Palatinate—arresting, for instance, an innocent Prussian newspaper editor. The Bavarian officials were unaware that their innocent victim of revolutionary terror was none other than the notorious communist Friedrich Engels!

  Bavarian misapprehensions aside, the incident was the third time in six months that Engels’s tactless remarks and excessive behavior had alienated fellow leftists. Recognized by one of the officials of the revolutionary government, the Cologne communist physician Karl d’Ester, Engels was released and joined the armed volunteer corps commanded by August Willich, another radical ex-Prussian army officer. While most of the soldiers in the revolutionary armies were reluctant, very badly armed draftees, who ran away rather than confront the invading Prussians, Willich’s corps fought bravely. After battles in the Palatinate and in Baden, Engels ended up with Willich and most of his men as a refugee in Switzerland. From early June until late July 1849, he and Marx, as well as the other members of the editorial board of the New Rhineland News, were out of touch, had little idea of the others’ whereabouts, and frequently feared the worst.4