by Ian Buruma
Marx’s analysis of British politics was naturally couched in terms of class conflict and economics. The Tory aristocracy, protective of its landed wealth, was being challenged by the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie (the “Bankocracy” and “Millocracy”), which wanted to open the country to unfettered trade. As Marx put it: “Rent of land is conservative, profit is progressive; rent of land is national, profit is cosmopolitan; rent of land believes in the State Church, profit is a dissenter by birth.” The Whig aristocracy served as the advocate of bourgeois interests in Parliament, thereby ensuring its continuing monopoly on political power. But this was a hopeless quest in Marx’s opinion, for the laws of time would exact their proper toll, and with the ascendancy of the Bankocracy and Millocracy, the Whigs would go down with the Tories into the great dustbin of history. This then would pit the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, and revolution would follow, as surely as night follows day. After all, the English workingmen were “the first sons of modern industry,” and they would be the first to launch the world revolution. They would end the universal tyranny of “capital-rule and wages-slavery,” and the rest of the world would follow their example.
In his reports for the New-York Daily Tribune Marx was forever announcing that the revolution was shortly at hand. A typical case was the Sunday Trading Bill riot in 1855. It started with the Beer Bill, introduced by pietists in Parliament. The earl of Shaftesbury, in particular, was worried that the English working people were staying away from church. This would never do. Where would it all end? In sloth and impudence, of course. The Beer Bill ensured that all places of entertainment would henceforth be shut on Sundays, except between 6:00 and 10:00 P.M. The big brewery owners agreed to this after they were guaranteed a monopoly on the beer business through a license system. The next step in official piousness was the Sunday Trading Bill. Shops would be closed on Sundays too. The victims of such measures were not the upper classes, who hardly needed Sundays to do their shopping and didn’t frequent pubs. The victims were the working-class men and women, who had no other day to enjoy themselves. Sunday was their only day of liberty.
London society had the habit of showing off its finery on Sundays in Hyde Park, gliding along the Serpentine in high coaches and phaetons, doffing their hats and exchanging pleasantries as they passed one another. It was there that the Chartists decided to organize a protest meeting on the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-fourth of June. By midafternoon two hundred thousand men, women, and children had gathered round the Serpentine. There was nothing the police could do to chase them away. When the ladies and gentlemen arrived in their coaches-and-four, with liveried lackeys in front and behind, they were swiftly surrounded by the mob. For once Marx was inspired by the British people. The toffs were greeted by “a cacophony of grunting, hissing, whistling, squeaking, snarling, growling, croaking, shrieking, groaning, rattling, howling, gnashing sounds!”
The toffs didn’t know what had hit them. One fine old lady handed her prayer book to the crowd, as though it were a piece of cake. She was told to give it to her horse to read. A venerable gentleman was unwise enough to stick out his tongue. Ah, said someone in the crowd, he must be a parliamentary man, a windbag: “He fights with his own weapons!” So impressed was Marx by what he saw that he announced to his readers in New York the next day that “the English Revolution began yesterday in Hyde Park” (his italics). In fact, the laws were still in force when I first moved to London more than a century later.
Marx’s own background was bourgeois and Jewish. His father came from a line of rabbis but changed his name from Herschel to Heinrich, grew up on Voltaire and Lessing, converted to Christianity to cope with the anti-Jewish laws in 1816, and lived a secular life in Trier as a lawyer. His politics were those of the enlightened Prussian bourgeoisie: patriotic and monarchist. Heinrich Marx, then, tried to escape his ancestral world through discreet assimilation. His son Karl tried to escape from the same thing by declaring war on it. He hated the bourgeoisie and the Jews in equal measure. He associated Jews with greed, materialism, selfishness, lack of values, and parasitism, precisely the sort of things that Anglophobes associated with England, and anti-Americans with America. Judaism and economic liberalism, or what the French still like to call “Anglo-Saxon values,” are often confused. Marx, in any event, was an enemy of those “values.”
There were more or less genteel ways to express Marx’s brand of anti-Semitism. Marx often chose the less genteel. His friend Wilhelm Liebknecht quoted him as saying that “Judaism” had become universal and had turned “dispossessed Man and Nature into disposable, saleable objects, a prey to serfdom of egoistic wants, of barter.” He also said that “money is the zealous God of Israel, before whom no other god may be.” And that Hebrew was “the muse of stock exchange quotations.” He called his friend Ferdinand Lassalle, the German socialist, a “Jewish nigger” whose blood showed traces of African camp followers during the Exodus from Egypt. Marx imagined a world in which national, religious, ethnic, and class distinctions would cease to matter, or indeed would cease to exist at all. That is why the revolution had to come. Then he himself could no longer be classified as a bourgeois Jew, for there would be no more bourgeois Jews. As he put it to Liebknecht: “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from the Jew.”
MARX GENUINELY THOUGHT, in the 1850s and 1860s, that this universal solution would start in Britain. Very few Europeans shared that faith. The stable monotony of English life seemed to mock Continental revolutionary ideals. Paris, not London, was seen as the capital of radicalism. That is where the transformations of Europe would come from. Certainly all Frenchmen thought so. The most prominent in London was Alexandre Ledru-Rollin. Marx despised him, of course, as a “reformist liberal.” Ledru-Rollin had made himself particularly unpopular with the “reds” by opposing the extremists after the Paris revolution in 1848. He was in fact far from liberal. He was a seething French nationalist, for whom 1793, when French Jacobins were at war with the reactionary forces of Europe, was the pinnacle of glory. Like Marx, he loathed Anglo-Saxon values.
Ledru-Rollin was large but short. Herzen pictured his peculiar physique as that of “a swollen child, like a dwarf of huge dimensions, or seen through a magnifying glass.” If the typical Englishman, in Herzen’s view, was a solitary individual who respected the privacy of others as much as he wished others to respect his own, the typical Frenchman—again in Herzen’s view—was a meddler, always “educating everybody, giving instructions about everything.” Mazzini called Ledru-Rollin a fine man, but “French down to his nails.” Ledru-Rollin’s most famous document on Britain, La décadence de L’Angleterre, published in 1850, is a good example of republican French Anglophobia. The editor of the English edition warned readers that the author “must be set down amongst the bitterest enemies of this country; so much so, indeed, that no Englishman, whatever may be his party, but must unite in his condemnation.” The English translation of The Decline of England is a curious read, for the pages are speckled with editor’s footnotes, tut-tutting the Frenchman’s absurdities.
Ledru-Rollin’s views on Britain were in many ways similar to Marx’s. But Marx was ahead of him in one respect. Marx saw the bourgeoisie as the main enemy of the proletariat, while Ledru-Rollin, in true republican spirit, concentrated all his fire on the aristocracy: “aristocracy of the crown, of the land, and of the counting-house.” Britain, he said, was a nation of half-liberties whose common people were enslaved by patrician families and “citizen jewries,” a nation that pretended to have freedom of speech and assembly but was in fact oppressed by a few rich families, a nation that prided itself on its common law, its habeas corpus, and its jury justice, but whose legal system was actually irrational, mysterious, and obscure and thus completely unsuitable for a free and enlightened people. Britain had a few geniuses, such as Byron and Shakespeare, but no national culture or philosophy that could benefit mankind. It was a nation utterly lacking in grandeur or universal i
deals.
Other nations had supreme symbols and great destinies. France, for example, was crowned by a star “called justice, eternal right, equality.” France was blessed with homogeneity. France had one sovereign assembly, one centralized power, one government, and one united system of finance. France would never settle for “half-principles” of civil, commercial, and religious liberties. For “once an idea takes possession of her, and so long as she sees a clear horizon, she is forced to go on with it to the end.” In France, “logic is a religion.” But England, that nation of blood and gold, aristocrats, bloodsucking Shylocks, and citizen-jewries? England “has never raised its eyes or its heart above its masts and its cargoes.” In England, all people wish to know about a fellow man is “How much is he worth?”
The idea of universal French grandeur never died. The first thing the motorist sees on approaching General de Gaulle’s former home of Colombey-les-deux-Eglises is a gigantic cross of Lorraine, which towers above the roofs of the unassuming little Champenois village like the symbol of some richly endowed new religion. On the base of the ash-colored granite cross, in front of which French pilgrims line up by the busload to be photographed, you read the following phrase: “For two thousand years there has been a pact between the grandeur of France and the liberty of the world.” The most memorable thing about Churchill’s old home in Chartwell, nicely kept up by the National Trust, is the beauty of its garden.
Still, like Marx, Ledru-Rollin was convinced progress and justice would eventually sweep away the feudal cobwebs of Britain. Britain had simply been cut off for too long from the great forces of universal progress, and isolation had bred a selfish distrust of foreigners. But change would inevitably come, just as it did to Venice, because Europe’s modern Carthage could not be protected forever by its wide moat and white cliffs from “the contagion of ideas.” Ledru-Rollin thought revolutions were like earthquakes: they transmitted themselves underground. The source of the greatest earthquakes would of course be France, and its natural ally was Germany.
The picture drawn by Ledru-Rollin of a selfish, mercantile island, deluded by the doctrine of free trade, besieged by Franco-German statism and dogmatic egalitarianism, strikes a curiously modern note. Here is the British Euro-skeptic’s nightmare, already spelled out in detail in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Manifesto of the Republican Party, signed in London in 1855 by Kossuth, Ledru-Rollin, and Mazzini and published in London that year by G. J. Holyoake, is an early blueprint of similar statements made a century later in such centers of “core Europe” as Strasbourg, Brussels, and Maastricht. The sentiments still sound familiar: “To ensure [victory] we have but to inscribe, not only upon our flag, but on our hearts, on our plans of war, in our every act, the grand word of European solidarity, of which all of us, more or less, misunderstood the value in 1848. And we shall do this. Apart from the sacredness of the principle, source and justification of all our acts, we have all learned since 1848 that our salvation is at this price alone; that we must conquer for all, or succumb.” There was no British signature on this document.
OF ALL THE EXILES, Giuseppe Mazzini was the most ambivalent about England. Ambivalent, because he tried to reconcile the irreconcilable: Anglophilia and revolutionary zeal, admiration for English tolerance and moderation and a fierce, rather Catholic desire to unite mankind in the sacred cause of human progress. He was a political and spiritual perfectionist. Mazzini loved England, “the country of my soul.” But since his beloved England—bourgeois, self-interested, aristocratic, and mercantile—refused to take seriously his own exalted ideals, the love affair was bound to result in disappointments.
Mazzini’s life in England started badly. He arrived in 1837 and was miserable. He was so poor, he hardly left his lodgings in Goodge Street, where his diet consisted of fried hogs’ brains and beer. To pay for his cigars, always a necessity, he had to pawn his clothes. He admired the political and civic sense of the English people and their freedom of speech. He had come, after all, from a state (Piedmont) where such radical terms as “nation,” “constitutional liberties,” and even “railways” were forbidden by government censors. (Railways, a subversive symbol of national unity in Mazzini’s day, would become the proudest feature of Mussolini’s fascist state. This does not make Mazzini a proto-fascist; it simply shows that “unity,” like “nation,” can take many forms.) Yet he was more impressed by the zoological gardens than by the House of Commons. He was baffled by a city where it was rude to speak of shirts and trousers in the presence of a lady, even as you were accosted by prostitutes the moment you stepped into the street. But he admired the London fog. It reminded him of the first scene in Macbeth. The way buildings faded in and out of sight gave to the city a mysterious, romantic, Ossianesque feeling.
It took time, however, to get used to English tastes. When Mazzini submitted an article on Italy to The Westminster Review, the editor found it “too mystical, too soaring.” He wanted Mazzini to write something more “amusing.” An essay on Byron was rejected because the subject was immoral, and an article on Thiers because “it contained too many Continental ideas.” Mazzini wondered what this could possibly mean. Continental ideas? Surely, there were only good or bad ideas. Still, he survived, scribbling furiously in his shabby little apartment filled with books and tame birds. He lived for his causes, the unity and independence of Italy and the progress and democratic fraternity of man. He remained an indefatigable do-gooder. London was full of Italian boys who had been sold into lives of semi-slavery, grinding organs and peddling white mice. Mazzini opened a school for them in Hatton Garden. Among the financial backers of this enterprise were J. S. Mill and Lady Byron.
He was well connected, then, especially after being received by the Carlyles. Thomas found him a “gifted and noble soul,” even though he could not abide “his Republicanism, his ‘Progress,’ and other Rousseau fanaticism.” But the way Mazzini first became famous in Britain could only have increased his ambivalence toward his country of exile.
Mazzini had grand friends in London, but he had grander enemies in Europe: Metternich in Vienna, the pope in Rome, and various despotic courts around Italy. His agitation for Italian independence posed a threat to their rule. So Metternich asked the British government to open Mazzini’s mail and pass on useful information. Not only was this done, but the contents also found their way to The Times, which was unsympathetic to Mazzini and other revolutionary exiles. Now, Mazzini was used to official snoops in Vienna, Paris, or Rome, but this was England, the land of the free. In 1844, he lodged a formal protest to Parliament against this “disgracefully un-English behaviour.”
This was good rhetoric, but in fact Mazzini did not find the behavior atypical of England at all. It was in his opinion typical of a monarchical system; every government “founded on the absurd principle of hereditary power,” governed by the notion that the balance of powers is the true method of progress, and conducting its diplomacy in secret, “is inevitably drawn into immorality sooner or later.” British policies, he thought, were inspired not by the collective morality of the people, but by the arcane and artificial fictions of a tiny elite. An individual Englishman would never open another man’s private mail. But it was in the nature of aristocratic government that even honorable men would behave in political life in ways they would find reprehensible in private.
So much, then, for the actions of Lord Aberdeen (Foreign Secretary) and Sir James Graham (Home Secretary), who not only had Mazzini’s mail opened, but called him an assassin. There was another side to the Mazzini Affair, which showed Britain in a more positive light. Long debates were held in both houses of Parliament. Macaulay, among others, sprang to the Italian’s defense. Using the post office to do police work was “abhorrent to the public feeling,” he said. Dickens stood up for him too, as did Carlyle, who wrote a letter to The Times comparing government spying to the actions of a pickpocket. Graham was forced to retract his remarks about Mazzini. He was pilloried in Punch as Paul Pry. And
the government had to admit that it had been opening people’s mail regularly for the last forty years. Mazzini’s defense of his rights made him a popular figure in Britain; his portraits were sold in the streets. Like the case of Dr. Bernard, it was an amazing thing: in a contest, fought with nothing but rhetoric, between a foreign exile and the most powerful government in the world, the foreigner won. It was this aspect of Britain that Mazzini admired without reservation. This is why, at the pinnacle of his glory, when he was declared an honorary citizen of Rome by an elected assembly in 1849, he spoke out for the freedom of conscience and speech and quoted Oliver Cromwell.
When he was asked, in that same year, to lead the new Republic of Rome after the pope had fled south, he tried to put his theory into practice: a new constitution was drawn up, the death penalty was abolished, the Jews were freed from the ghetto, tariffs on trade were removed, and the people were free to speak their minds. Prayers were held at St. Peter’s, not only for the glory of God, but for universal liberty and brotherhood. It was a time of frantic activity, and Mazzini was never to wield so much power again. Yet England was still on his mind. He wrote to a friend: “I think very often under these radiant skies of the London fogs and always regretfully. Individually speaking, I was evidently intended for an Englishman.” After only one hundred days the republic collapsed. Troops from France, Austria, Naples, and Spain restored the despotic authority of the Vatican, and Mazzini had to flee to Switzerland. He consoled himself with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the poems of William Wordsworth.
