Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  The family spent three weeks of August in Ramsgate. When they came back, Lenchen and Jenny worked very hard overseeing the renovations and interior decorating of Engels’s new house for his move from Manchester. Möhme felt self-conscious that their home, subsidised by the General, was grand compared with the modesty of his: ‘After all, we live in a veritable palace and, to my mind, far too large and expensive a house.’65 On 20 September Engels, Lizzy and Pumps moved into 122 Regent’s Park Road. The General loved this property and decided he never wanted to move again.

  Across the Channel things were not good for the Lafargues. Their new baby daughter lived less than two months. Möhme despaired at her middle daughter’s suffering. Laura was now pregnant again. The Lafargues were renting a small house in Levallois-Perret, close to the fortifications of Paris and scheduled for imminent demolition. They were in the direct firing line of the city’s fortifications and Marx was anxious that they get out of the capital immediately. They arrived in Bordeaux early in September, where Paul launched a new magazine, La Défense Nationale, aiming ‘to stir up the drowsy inhabitants of Bordeaux’.66

  They got out just in time: Wilhelm I headquartered himself at the Rothschilds’ chateau on the outskirts of Paris and in early October his troops started shelling the city. The capital was closed down from 7 November. No one was permitted to enter or leave and after a 135-day siege the city capitulated. Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire, ‘the reign of mediocrity, hypocrisy and profit’, was now defeated.67

  It was the beginning of one of the most contested periods of French history and Tussy was about to plunge headlong into the thick of it.

  7

  The Communards

  The brief, heroic and doomed Paris Commune of March to May 1871 was the first and only attempt to make a proletarian revolution in nineteenth-century Europe. It was the first political event in which Tussy was personally involved. Governments, international press and the respectable classes scared out of their wits by the Commune claimed it was a workers’ insurrection deliberately plotted by Karl Marx’s First International (1864–72).1 The Paris Commune was a Marx family matter.

  On 16 January 1871 Tussy turned sixteen in London. In Paris, a week before, the Republican Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements issued the ‘Red Poster’, calling for the replacement of the French provisional government by a Commune de Paris. Two days after her birthday, the Proclamation of the German Empire was made at Versailles. Ten days later, the conservative French provisional government signed an armistice with the newly proclaimed Bismarckian German Empire. The armistice was the tipping point for the forces of French radical democracy. In Lyons, Toulouse and Marseilles communes were proclaimed and in Narbonne and Saint-Etienne they were attempted.

  The citizens of Paris organised themselves against both the provisional government and the Prussian occupiers. The National Guard swung its support behind the masses of Paris on 18 March, and the political tide turned in favour of the common people. The majority of Parisians voted in the elections on 26 March and two days later the Paris Commune was declared. All sectors of the poor supported the Commune, but its leading activists were mainly skilled workers, craftsmen – and women. Adult men were the majority, but there were more women involved in the Paris Commune than in any revolution preceding it.

  The Commune lasted for two months. In mid-May the Versailles army, in alliance with German forces, seized the moment to attack and, in la Semaine Sanglante – the Bloody Week – executed some 20,000 Communards and suspected sympathisers, more people than were slaughtered in Robespierre’s ‘Terror’ during the first French Revolution of 1793–4. Some 8,000 people were jailed or deported to places like New Caledonia. Thousands of others fled to Belgium, England, Italy, Spain and the United States.

  In the following year, 1872, stringent laws were passed that ruled out all possibilities of organising on the left. Not until 1880 was there a general amnesty for exiled and imprisoned Communards. Meanwhile, the Third Republic renewed Louis Napoleon’s imperialist expansion – in Indochina, Africa and Oceania. Many French intellectuals and artists participated in the Commune or supported it, including Courbet, Rimbaud and Pissarro. The repression of 1871 and after alienated all who were persecuted by it from the Third Republic.

  Alarming news came from Laura in Bordeaux in March 1871. Her baby Marc Laurent, born in February, was gravely ill and Paul Lafargue had gone missing. Paul had gone to Paris to request authority to organise ‘the revolutionary army in Bordeaux’,2 but had not been heard from since he set out to return to Bordeaux. In the meantime, Schnappy, their elder son, had also become ill. Jennychen announced she was going to go and help, with or without Möhme and Mohr’s permission. Inspired by her elder sister’s determination, Tussy said that she was going too.

  April 1871 was the highpoint of the Paris Commune. On 22 April the Foreign Office issued a passport to ‘Miss Eleanor Marx (British Subject) accompanied by her sister, going to Bordeaux’. The following week the women of Paris established the Union des Femmes; abandoned factories and workshops were transferred to worker-owned co-operatives. In the same month empty housing stock was requisitioned for the people, employers were forbidden from deducting fines from workers’ wages, bakery workers excused from working nights and municipal elections held all over the rest of France. This was the world into which Tussy enthusiastically thrust herself.

  The railways were all either blocked or under secondment to the German or French armies, so the sisters travelled by steamer from Liverpool. On their arrival in Bordeaux on 1 May they went by the name of Williams, in what turned out to be a laughable attempt to conceal their true identities. They found Paul safely returned, but the children very ill. News from Paris was ominous. Reports of the atrocities of Bloody Week reached them shortly after 21 May. Street-fighting and horrific massacres continued. By the end of May the Versailles army had overpowered the Commune. It was all over – and Paul was a wanted man. It hadn’t yet occurred to the Marx sisters that they might be not just under suspicion, but in danger.

  Mohr sent an urgent coded letter telling them to get Paul and the children immediately to the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, where there was a ‘better climate’.3 They quickly started packing up in preparation for a discreet pre-dawn flight to the small resort town of Bagnères-de-Luchon in the Haute-Garonne. But the baby became sicker during the night and Paul and Laura refused to make the journey over the mountain footpath to Spain until he improved. The family laid low, Jennychen and Tussy maintaining their disguise as the Williams sisters.

  Marc Laurent died on 26 July. News came that government spies were closing in on Paul; the sisters persuaded him to leave straight away for Spain whilst they buried the baby. A week later, on 6 August, the three sisters and Schnappy made the tricky journey over the border so that the Lafargue family could be safe together with Paul in Bosost in the Spanish Pyrenees. To cover their tracks as soon as possible, Jennychen and Tussy made the journey on foot back into France the same day. The arrangement was for the ‘Williams’ sisters to leave Bordeaux by ship as soon as possible. Everything was going according to plan until they crossed the border back into France.

  The instant they put their feet back on French territory armed police seized them and, as Tussy described, they were ‘conducted by 24 gendarmes right across the Pyrenees from Fos to Luchon’,4 within French territory. Tussy protested throughout the journey that the police had no jurisdiction to apprehend a British citizen, but the armed guards ignored her.

  The furious Marx sisters were delivered directly to the front door of the residence of the police chief Emile de Kératry, Prefect of the Department of the Haute-Garonne. Kératry had been Police President of Paris the previous year and knew the Marxes and the First International all too well. He wanted to interrogate the sisters personally, and made them wait under armed guard in a carriage outside his residence until he returned from a summer concert in the park.5

  His concert over, Kératry fi
nally arrived, accompanied by a judge, Monsieur Delpech.6 The sisters were separated and Jenny interrogated first, from 10 p. m. At midnight, it was Tussy’s turn. She’d been up since 5 a.m., travelled nine hours in difficult mountain terrain on a crushingly hot August day, and last eaten a quick snack hours before when they left Bosost. Kératry told Tussy that Jenny had confessed all, and tried to get her to contradict her sister’s version of events. ‘It was a dirty trick, wasn’t it,’ she remarked in a letter to Library.7

  Their ordeal continued for a further two days. They were placed under house arrest in the Lafargues’ abandoned lodgings. As soon as they got back there the sisters discovered the apartment they had left neat and swept was in chaos, having been searched and turned upside down. The rooms were, Tussy said, ‘already full of gendarmes, mouchards and agents of every description’.8 The police had interrogated both the landlady and the Lafargues’ servant, and Eleanor felt guilty that the servant was badly shaken.

  Poking through their mattresses and bed linen, the police asked the sisters where the bomb-making equipment and munitions were hidden. They saw the lamps ‘in which we had warmed the milk for the poor little baby who died’, Tussy wrote, and thought they were filled with ‘petrole’.9 It’s easy to have some sympathy with the mouchards on this point. Meeting the Marx sisters in person tended to confirm, not allay, their reputation amongst conservatives of being dangerous petroleuses: the legendary women street-fighters of the Paris Commune, led by the formidable Union des Femmes. It is likely that spies had already told the French authorities that Elisabeth Demetrioff, founder and leader of the women’s union, was a personal family friend of the Marxes in general and Eleanor in particular.

  Tussy had met the brilliant nineteen-year-old Russian Elisabeth Demetrioff the previous year, when she came to London on a fact-finding mission and turned up at Modena Villas with a letter of introduction to Marx. Born Elizabeta Luknichna Tomanovskya, the daughter of a tsarist civil servant, feminist and actress, she was the co-founder of the Russian section of the First International. Tussy and Elisabeth struck up an instant friendship and spent a great deal of time in each other’s company until Elisabeth was dispatched to Paris in March as a Russian envoy to the Paris Commune.

  Just before Tussy left for her adventures in Bordeaux in April, she heard that Elisabeth had set up the Union des Femmes in Paris with Nathalie Lemel at a memorable public meeting at the Grand Café de Nation. The Union des Femmes chose representatives from each of the arrondissements and Elisabeth organised the women’s committees in each district. She fought on the barricades during Bloody Week and managed to elude her impending death sentence and escape to Geneva.

  Demetrioff’s story is a reminder that, above all else, the Paris Commune was a great gender event. The dominance of political and activist women in the Commune was seen as one of the key reasons for its awfulness, bloodthirstiness and failure. Spectacular misogyny is never very far from anti-Communard accounts. ‘The weaker sex’, fulminated one commentator, ‘behaved scandalously during these deplorable days’:

  Those females who dedicated themselves to the Commune – and there were many – had but a single ambition: to raise themselves above the level of man by exaggerating his vices . . . They were all there, agitating and squawking . . . the gentleman’s seamstresses; the gentleman’s shirtmakers; the teachers of grown-up schoolboys; the maids-of-all-work . . . What was profoundly comic was that these absconders from the workhouse unfailingly invoked Joan of Arc, and were not above comparing themselves to her. During the final days, all of these bellicose viragos held out longer than the men did behind the barricades.10

  The correspondent of The Times of London concurred: ‘If the French nation were composed only of French women, what a terrible nation it would be.’11 These and several similar expressions of anti-feminist antagonism were collated and in some cases translated by Eleanor herself for the most famous book ever written about the Paris Commune, a project with which she was shortly to become intimately involved.

  Back in Bordeaux, twenty-four hours of further searches and interrogation revealed nothing from the bellicose virago daughters of Karl Marx. Tussy and Jennychen expected to have their passports returned and to be escorted to the docks and put on the next steamer back to England. Instead, they were taken to the gendarmerie, locked up overnight and refused permission to let anyone know where they were. They were released the following morning and placed under house arrest without the return of their passports. After a week confined to the Lafargues’ former apartment under the watchful eye of agents who accompanied them to the shops to buy bread, coffee and tobacco, they were suddenly ordered to pack up immediately, shoved in a carriage and shooed over the Spanish border as their passports were slapped back into their hands.

  The Marx sisters had won the game. Since their arrest, Jennychen had successfully concealed an incriminating letter to Marx and Lafargue from Gustave Flourens, a famed leader of the Paris Commune. Flourens, who had been captured by gendarmes and butchered during Bloody Week, was one of Karl Marx’s oldest friends.

  Undetected by all except Tussy, Jennychen slipped the letter from her sleeve into a ledger on the booking officer’s desk when they were brought into the gendarmerie. Whilst the mouchards continued to search their apartment, the letter was safely hidden in plain view, interleaved in the police station detention register. As Engels observed, if discovered, this incendiary letter would have provided ‘a sure passport for the two girls to go to New Caledonia’.12

  Shortly after Eleanor and Jennychen’s return to London Tussy’s father wrote to Charles Dana, editor of the New York Sun, reporting on the daily increase of Communard refugees arriving in London: ‘Our means of supporting them is daily on the decrease, so that men find themselves in a very deplorable state . . . We shall,’ he added, ‘make an appeal for assistance to the Americans.’13 To illustrate the poor state of things in France under Adolphe Thiers’ repression of the Commune, Marx says, ‘I will tell you what has happened to my own daughters.’ Hilariously, the right-wing press incorrectly assumed the troublesome ‘insurgents’ hotly pursued through France, over the border into Spain and back again were three brothers of Karl Marx, ‘well known and dangerous agents of the International Propaganda, though I have no brothers’.14 Or sons.

  The Paris Commune was a brave failed attempt at a proletarian revolution. The ripples lasted far, far longer than the event itself and influenced and coloured the view of many people for years to come, not least Tussy. It also strongly affected Tussy’s choice of her first lover.

  Tussy helped with the organisation of the International Working Men’s Association London Congress, held during the third week of September. She joined the open sessions of the conference and subcommittee sessions held in her father’s study at Modena Villas to deal with the problem of Bakuninist opposition. Tussy was, Library observed, growing into ‘the International Working Men’s Association personified’.15

  As indicated by its name, the role of women within the International was contested. At the founding of the First International in 1864 the General Council, led by Marx, voted to admit women as members. The French delegation opposed this on the grounds that women ‘belonged by the hearth, not at the Forum’.16 Following Pierre Proudhon’s misogynist policy, the French chapter proclaimed that, ‘To men belong labour and the study of human problems; to women child care and adornment of the worker’s home.’17 This view was disproved by the leading role of women in organising and leading the Paris Commune. The problem was resolved by allowing each national delegation to determine the constitution of its own membership.

  The Marxes put up as many international visitors as they could fit in their house for the IWMA London Congress in September, and Tussy was ever helpful. When Spanish delegate Anselmo Lorenzo needed to send a telegram to Valencia, Tussy volunteered to show him the way:

  I was most surprised and touched by the alacrity with which the young lady helped a foreigner whom she did not k
now, this being contrary to the customs of the Spanish bourgeoisie. This young lady, or rather girl, as beautiful, merry and smiling as the very personification of youth and happiness, did not know Spanish. She could speak English and German well but was not very proficient in French, in which language I could make myself understood. Every time one of us made a blunder we both laughed as heartily as if we had been friends all our life.18

  Lorenzo described to Tussy his journey from Spain across France. He’d passed through Paris ‘when the persecution of the Communards was at its highest and courts-martial were sitting without interruption, passing death and deportation sentences wholesale . . . I saw the Hotel de Ville in ruins . . . part of the Louvre burnt out, the pedestal from which the column had been knocked down in Place de Vendôme and various buildings and houses showed traces of the week of bloodshed.’19

  The IWMA London Congress buzzed with reports and gossip about missing Communards, shot, deported, exiled, on the run or disappeared. Eleanor heard that Elisabeth Demetrioff had made it back to St Petersburg and chosen a new fiancé, leaving her forlorn lover Leo Frankel, Hungarian Communard, stranded, heartbroken and glumly contemplating his broken dreams. Frankel, also under a death sentence in France, joined the leadership of the First International in London and comforted himself by turning his rebounded attentions on Tussy.

  By December, in addition to conducting Mohr’s correspondence, Eleanor had the official role of assisting refugees by coordinating the Relief Committee for Communards, giving Frankel ample opportunity to put himself in her way. The refugees, Tussy wrote to Library, ‘suffer frightfully and they have none of them any money and you can’t think how difficult it is for them to get work’.20 In the same letter to Library about her work on the relief committee she remarks archly that she wishes the Communards had ‘taken some of the millions they’re accused of having stolen’.21