Karl Marx

Engels was astonished to discover that the organs of the British bourgeoisie provided so much incriminating evidence against themselves. After quoting several gruesome cases of disease and starvation, published in the middle-class Manchester Guardian, he exulted: ‘I delight in the testimony of my opponents.’ One need only study the citations from government Blue Books and The Economist in the first volume of Capital to see how much Karl Marx learned from this technique.

Marx and Engels complemented each other perfectly. While Engels couldn’t begin to match Marx’s erudition, having missed out on university, he had invaluable firsthand knowledge of the machinery of capitalism. But the ‘complete agreement in all theoretical fields’ didn’t extend to their respective habits and styles. One might almost say that the two characters were Thesis and Antithesis incarnate. Marx wrote in a cramped scrawl, with countless deletions and emendations as blotchy testimony to the effort it cost him; Engels’s script was neat, businesslike, elegant. Marx was squat and swarthy, a Jew tormented by self-loathing; Engels was tall and fair, with more than a hint of Aryan swagger. Marx lived in chaos and penury; Engels was a briskly efficient worker who held down a full-time job at the family firm while maintaining a formidable output of books, letters and journalism – and often ghost-writing articles for Marx as well. Yet he always found the time to enjoy the comforts of high bourgeois life: horses in his stables, plenty of wine in his cellar and mistresses in the bedroom. During the long years when Marx was almost drowning in squalor, fending off creditors and struggling to keep his family alive, the childless Engels pursued the carefree pleasures of a prosperous bachelor.

In spite of the obvious disparity of advantage, Engels knew that he would never be the dominant partner. He deferred to Marx from the outset, accepting that it was his historic duty to support and subsidise the indigent sage without complaint or jealousy – even, come to that, without much gratitude. ‘I simply cannot understand, (#litres_trial_promo)’ he wrote in 1881, nearly forty years after that first meeting, ‘how anyone can be envious of genius; it’s something so very special that we who have not got it know it to be unattainable right from the start; but to be envious of anything like that one must have to be frightfully small-minded.’ Marx’s friendship, and the triumphant culmination of his work, would be reward enough.

They had no secrets from each other, no taboos: if Marx found a huge boil on his penis he didn’t hesitate to supply a full description. Their voluminous correspondence is a gamey stew of history and gossip, political economy and schoolboy smut, high ideals and low intimacies. In a letter to Engels on 23 March 1853, to take a more or less random example, Marx discusses the rapid increase in British exports to the Turkish dominions, Disraeli’s position in the Conservative Party, the passage of the Canadian Clergy Reserves Bill through the House of Commons, the harassment of refugees by the British police, the activities of German communists in New York, an attempt by Marx’s publisher to swindle him, the condition of Hungary – and the alleged flatulence of the Empress Eugénie: ‘That angel suffers, it seems, from a most indelicate complaint. She is passionately addicted to farting and is incapable, even in company, of suppressing it. At one time she resorted to horse-riding as a remedy. But this having now been forbidden her by Bonaparte, she “vents” herself. It’s only a noise, a little murmur, a nothing, but then you know that the French are sensitive to the slightest puff of wind.’

As stateless cosmopolitans they even evolved their own private language, a weird Anglo-Franco-Latino-German mumbo-jumbo. All other quotations in this book have been translated to spare readers the anguish of puzzling over the Marxian code, but one brief sentence will give an idea of its expressive if incomprehensible syntax: ‘Diese excessive technicality of ancient law zeigt Jurisprudenz as feather of the same bird, als d. religiösen Formalitäten z. B. Auguris etc. od. d.. Hokus Pokus des medicine man der savages.’ Engels learned to understand this gibberish with ease; more impressively still, he was able to read Marx’s handwriting, as was Jenny. Apart from those two close collaborators, however, few have managed the task without tearing their hair out. After Marx’s death, Engels had to give a lengthy course of instruction in paleography to the German Social Democrats who wished to organise the great man’s unpublished papers.

Engels served Marx as a kind of substitute mother – sending him pocket money, fussing over his health and continually reminding him not to neglect his studies. In the earliest surviving letter, written in October 1844, he was already chivvying Marx to finish his political and economic manuscripts: ‘See to it that the material you’ve collected is soon launched (#litres_trial_promo) into the world. It’s high time, heaven knows!’ And again on 20 January 1845: ‘Do try and finish your political economy book, even if there’s much in it that you yourself are dissatisfied with, it doesn’t really matter; minds are ripe and we must strike while the iron’s hot … So try and finish before April, do as I do, set yourself a date by which you will definitely have finished, and make sure it gets into print quickly.’

Fat chance. Marx was led astray by Engels himself, who made the mistake of proposing that they collaborate on a pamphlet demolishing Bruno Bauer and his troupe of clowns, under the working title Critique of Critical Criticism. He emphasised that it should be no more than forty pages long, since ‘I find all this theoretical twaddle daily more tedious (#litres_trial_promo) and am irritated by every word that has to be expended on the subject of “man”, by every line that has to be read or written against theology and abstraction …’

Engels dashed off his portion of twenty pages while still at the flat in the Rue Vanneau, and then returned home to the Rhineland. He was ‘not a little surprised’, several months later, to hear that the pamphlet was now a swollen monstrosity of more than 300 pages and had been renamed The Holy Family. ‘If you have retained my name on the title page it will look rather odd,’ he pointed out. ‘I contributed practically nothing to it.’ But this was not the only reason for wanting his name removed. ‘The Critical Criticism has still not arrived! (#litres_trial_promo)’ he told Marx in February 1845. ‘Its new title, The Holy Family, will probably get me into hot water with my pious and already highly incensed parent, though you, of course, could not have known that.’ The angry parent was, of course, his bigoted and despotic father, who had begun to fear for the boy’s Christian soul. ‘If I get a letter, it’s sniffed all over (#litres_trial_promo) before it reaches me,’ he grumbled. ‘I can’t eat, drink, sleep, let out a fart, without being confronted by the same accursed lamb-of-God expression.’ One day, when Engels staggered home at two in the morning, the suspicious patriarch asked if he had been arrested. Not at all, Engels replied reassuringly: he had simply been discussing communism with Moses Hess. ‘With Hess!’ his father spluttered. ‘Great heavens! What company you keep!’

He didn’t know the half of it. ‘Now all my old man has to do is to discover the existence of the Critical Criticism and he will be quite capable of flinging me out of the house. And on top of it all there’s the constant irritation of seeing that nothing can be done with these people, that they positively want to flay and torture themselves with their infernal fantasies, and that one can’t even teach them the most platitudinous principles of justice.’

The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Consorts was published in Frankfurt in the spring of 1845. Rereading the book more than twenty years later, Marx was ‘pleasantly surprised to find that we have no need to feel ashamed (#litres_trial_promo) of the piece, although the Feuerbach cult now makes a most comical impression on one’. Few other readers have shared his satisfaction. By the time Marx started writing this scornful epic, the brothers Bruno, Edgar and Egbert Bauer – the holy family of the title – had already slipped from militant atheism and communism into mere buffoonery, rather like the Dadaists or Futurists of the 1930s. All they deserved or needed was a quick slap, not a full-scale bombardment. Who shoots a housefly with a blunderbuss?

Marx’s scattergun hit other targets who were no more worthy of his attentions. There were several chapters of invective against Eugène Sue, an author of popular sentimental novels, whose only offence was to have been praised in Bruno Bauer’s Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. Though Sue may well have been every bit as dire as Marx suggested, the punishment was absurdly disproportionate to the crime: try to imagine, by way of a modern equivalent, a magnum opus by Professor George Steiner attacking The Bridges of Madison County. Even Engels had to admit that Marx was wasting his sourness on the desert air. ‘The thing’s too long,’ he wrote. ‘The supreme contempt we two evince towards the Literatur-Zeitung is in glaring contrast to the twenty-two sheets [352 pages] we devote to it. In addition most of the criticism of speculation and of abstract being in general will be incomprehensible to the public at large, nor will it be of general interest. Otherwise the book is splendidly written …’

Or, as the tactful curate said on being served a rotten egg by his bishop, ‘No, my lord, parts of it are excellent!’

4 The Mouse in the Attic (#ulink_7a6c1bf7-b34d-5675-a43b-a4dd19022010)

Had Marx confined himself to twitting obscure Hegelians and second-rate novelists, he might have been left in peace. But he couldn’t resist the chance to tease a bigger and more dangerous beast. In the summer of 1844, after surviving an assassination attempt, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia issued this brief message of thanks to his loyal subjects before departing on holiday: ‘I cannot leave the soil of the Fatherland, although only for a short time, without expressing publicly the deeply felt gratitude in My and the Queen’s name by which Our heart has been moved.’ Marx thought this hilarious – and said so, con brio, in an article for Vorwärts!. The King’s syntax, he wrote, seemed to imply that the royal bosoms were moved by the royal name:

If amazement at this peculiar movement makes one think again, (#litres_trial_promo) one sees that the relative conjunction ‘by which our heart has been moved’ refers not to the name but to the more remotely situated gratitude … The difficulty is due to the combination of three ideas: (1) that the King is leaving his homeland, (2) that he is leaving it only for a short time, (3) that he feels a need to thank the people. The too compressed utterance of these ideas makes it appear that the King is expressing his gratitude only because he is leaving his homeland …

If Marx thought that he could get away with this lèse-majesté, he had forgotten that monarchs have their own masonic solidarity. On 7 January 1845, at an audience with King Louis Philippe in Paris, the Prussian envoy Alexander von Humboldt handed over two items – a valuable porcelain vase, and a letter from Friedrich Wilhelm IV protesting at the outrageous insults and libels published by Vorwärts!. Louis Philippe agreed that there were indeed far too many German philosophers in Paris: the magazine was closed down two weeks later, and the interior minister François Guizot ordered Marx’s expulsion from France.

Where now? The only king in mainland Europe still willing to accept refugees was Leopold I of Belgium, though even he demanded a written promise of good behaviour. (‘To obtain permission to reside in Belgium I agree to pledge myself, on my word of honour, not to publish in Belgium any work on current politics. [signed] Dr Karl Marx.’) While Jenny stayed on for a few days to sell their furniture and linen, Marx left Paris in the company of Heinrich Bürgers, a young journalist from Vorwärts! who was quitting the country in disgust at ‘the punishment inflicted on the man who was my friend and faithful guide in my studies’. As their two-man coach rattled through Picardy, Bürgers tried vainly to lift his mentor’s spirits with choruses from German drinking songs.

A good night’s sleep was rather more restorative. The next morning Marx was already impatient for action, telling Bürgers to hurry up with his breakfast because ‘we must go and see Freiligrath today’. Ferdinand Freiligrath, a quondam court poet to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, had fled to Belgium some weeks earlier to escape arrest after publishing a treasonous Confession of Faith. Once a regular butt of the old Rheinische Zeitung, he was now granted instant absolution as a convert to the anti-Prussian cause. Other new arrivals from the radical diaspora included Moses Hess, Karl Heinzen, the Swiss radical Sebastian Seiler, the former artillery officer Joseph Weydemeyer (who was to become a lifelong friend), a gaggle of Polish socialists – and, most importantly, Friedrich Engels, who needed little persuasion to escape from the stifling propriety of Barmen and follow Marx into exile. Jenny’s brother Edgar von Westphalen, the lovable if incontinent puppy of the family, came too.

By the time Marx’s wife and daughter joined him, he was already back in the old routine – reading, writing, boozing, scheming. ‘We were madly gay,’ Weydemeyer recalled. There were long mornings in cafés and even longer nights of card-playing and tipsy conversation. For once, even the family finances were in credit: two days before leaving Paris Marx was paid a 1,500-franc advance by a publisher in Darmstadt for his embryonic work on political economy, and a whip-round by Engels added another 1,000 francs to the kitty, mostly from supporters in Germany. Engels also handed over the fee for his own book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, so that ‘at least the curs shan’t have the satisfaction of seeing their infamy cause you pecuniary embarrassment’. But, he added presciently, ‘I fear that in the end you’ll be molested (#litres_trial_promo) in Belgium too, so that you’ll be left with no alternative but England.’

Jenny, pregnant once more, tried to conceal her disappointment at forsaking the shops and salons of Paris for boring old Brussels, but her mother was worried enough by this latest domestic upheaval to send her maidservant from Trier, Helene Demuth, on permanent loan. The twenty-five-year-old Demuth, who spent the rest of her life holding the Marx household together through countless crises and vicissitudes, was a small, graceful woman of peasant stock – round faced, blue eyed and always immaculately neat and well groomed even when surrounded by squalor. Her domestic efficiency was formidable and unflagging. As late as 1922, an Englishwoman who had visited the Marxes as a girl still recalled Helene’s excellent cooking: ‘Her jam tarts are a sweet and abiding memory (#litres_trial_promo) to this day.’ Not that she was a meek little drudge: she guarded her new employers with tigerish ferocity, and any guests who outstayed their welcome could expect a severe mauling.

For the first couple of months Marx and his family lodged in hotels or the spare rooms of friends. But as soon as they found a more permanent billet – a small terraced house at 5 Rue D’Alliance, at the eastern end of the city – Jenny set off with her daughter and maid for a summer vacation in the Baroness von Westphalen’s residence in Germany, leaving Karl to make the place habitable. ‘The little house should do (#litres_trial_promo),’ Jenny wrote from Trier. A room would have to be set aside for childbirth, but ‘having concluded my important business on the upper floor, I shall remove downstairs again. Then you could sleep in what is now your study and pitch your tent in the immense drawing-room – that would present no difficulty. The children’s noise downstairs would then be completely shut off, you would not be disturbed upstairs, I could join you when things were quiet … What a colony of paupers there is going to be in Brussels!’ On 26 September, only a fortnight after travelling back from Trier, Jenny added to the colonial population by giving birth to another daughter, Laura.

Marx had promised the Belgian authorities not to publish anything on current politics, but thought he was quite within his rights to participate in politics and to pursue his studies in economic history. Hence the summons to Engels, by now an indispensable lieutenant. In the summer of 1845 the two men paid a six-week visit to England, partly to take advantage of the well-stocked libraries in Manchester and London but also to meet the leaders of the Chartists, the first working-class movement in the world. On their return, Engels rented a house next door to the Marxes and set about organising the socialist flotsam of Brussels into a comparable political force.

First, however, there was the small matter of Marx’s book. The research trip to Britain and the long hours he spent in Brussels’s municipal library must have raised the hopes of his publisher, Karl Leske, who was expecting the Critique of Economics and Politics by the end of the summer. But Marx had already set the manuscript aside after writing no more than a table of contents. ‘It seemed to me very important (#litres_trial_promo),’ he explained to Leske, ‘to precede my positive development with a polemical piece against German philosophy and German socialism up till the present. This is necessary in order to prepare the public for the viewpoint adopted in my Economy, which is diametrically opposed to German scholarship past and present … If need be, I could produce numerous letters I have received from Germany and France as proof that this work is most eagerly awaited by the public.’

Not so: his ‘polemical piece’, The German Ideology, didn’t find a publisher until 1932. The only public demand for it came from Marx himself, who was now being caricatured by the Young Hegelians as an unthinking disciple of Ludwig Feuerbach. This infuriated him: Feuerbach’s demystification of Hegel had indeed been a glorious moment of revelation, like Keats’s first glimpse of Chapman’s Homer, but Marx had long since concluded that the critique merely substituted one myth for another. Feuerbach, the man who had turned Hegel upside down, was now due for the same treatment – or, as Marx put it, a ‘settlement of accounts’.

His exercise in philosophical bookkeeping began in the spring of 1845 when he scribbled down the brief notes now known as the Theses on Feuerbach. ‘The chief defect of all previous materialism (#litres_trial_promo) (that of Feuerbach included) is that things, reality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice.’ Feuerbach had exposed the secular basis of religion, but then allowed the secular realm itself to float off into clouds of abstraction. ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking,’ Marx argued, ‘is not a question of theory but is a practical question … All social life is essentially practical … The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Theory without practice was a form of scholastic masturbation – pleasurable enough, but ultimately infertile and of no consequence. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels proceeded to spend the winter of 1845–6 theorising like billy-o as they composed their German Ideology.

The book begins with one of Marx’s attention-grabbing generalisations: ‘Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be.’ This is followed by another favourite trick, the provocative parable:

Once upon a time a valiant fellow (#litres_trial_promo) had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to get this notion out of their heads, say by avowing it to be a superstitious, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful consequences all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.

These thinkers were sheep labouring under the delusion that they were wolves, whose vapid bleating ‘merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class’.

One sheep was Ludwig Feuerbach himself, whose conception of the world was ‘confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling’. He thus failed to notice that even the simplest natural objects are in fact products of historical circumstance. For instance: ‘The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become a “sensuous certainty”.’ To Feuerbach, the cherry-tree was simply there, one of nature’s altruistic gifts.

Oddly enough, although the book had been intended as a settling of accounts with Feuerbach, he merited no more than a couple of short chapters. Bruno Bauer – ‘Saint Bruno’ – was dispatched with similar speed. But 300 unreadable pages were devoted to the follies of Max Stirner, an anarchic Young Hegelian author who proposed that heroic egoism and self-indulgence would liberate individuals from their imaginary oppression. Though Stirner’s existentialist credo deserved its come-uppance, a quick stiletto jab would have done the job far more effectively than Marx’s verbose sarcasm – which, ironically, looked very much like an example of the self-indulgent egoism that Stirner advocated.

For all its longueurs, however, The German Ideology is a most revealing account of what the twenty-seven-year-old Marx had learned from his philosophical and political adventures. Having rejected God, Hegel and Feuerbach in quick succession, he and Engels were now ready to unveil their own scheme of practical theory or theoretical practice – otherwise known as historical materialism. ‘The premises from which we begin,’ they announced, ‘are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life … These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.’ Whereas Feuerbach had argued that you are what you eat, Marx and Engels insisted that you are what you produce – and how you produce it. ‘The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour …’ And so on. These various refinements in the division of labour reflected the development of property – from primitive tribal property to ancient communal and state property, thence to feudal or estate property and onwards to bourgeois property. ‘The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals … It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.’ Slavery could not be abolished without the steam engine or the mule jenny, just as serfdom could not be abolished without improvements in agriculture, and in general ‘people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity’.

What would this liberation feel like? Though the new materialism of Marx and Engels was presented as the negation of idealism, their own vision of paradise turned out to be a pastoral idyll – bizarrely ironic in view of Marx’s contempt for country life, which he usually described as ‘rural idiocy’. Under the present division of labour, they noted, each man was trapped in an exclusive sphere of activity:

He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

A rather exhausting Nirvana, some might think. Engels certainly enjoyed hunting and criticising, but did his heart really thrill at the promise of postprandial cattle-rearing?

The Marxist paradise was evoked rather more enticingly in the interminable diatribe against Stirner, who had suggested that the division of labour applied only to those tasks which any reasonably trained person could perform – baking or ploughing, for instance. No one, he maintained, could have done Raphael’s works for him. This was an unfortunate example: Raphael had teams of assistants and pupils to complete his frescoes, as Marx and Engels were quick to point out. Besides, the communists didn’t believe that everyone should or could produce the work of a Raphael, but only that a potential Raphael must be allowed to develop without hindrance.

Sancho [i.e. Stirner] imagines that Raphael produced his pictures independently of the division of labour that existed in Rome at the time. If he were to compare Raphael with Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, he would see how greatly Raphael’s works of art depended on the flourishing of Rome at that time, which occurred under Florentine influence, while the works of Leonardo depended on the state of things in Florence, and the works of Titian, at a later period, depended on the totally different development of Venice. Raphael as much as any other artist was determined by the technical advances in art made before him, by the organisation of society and the division of labour … In a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities.

Activities such as hunting, fishing and sheep-shearing, presumably. The question of who would clean the lavatories or hew the coal was neither asked nor answered. When a German smart aleck tried to catch him out by wondering aloud who would polish the shoes under communism, Marx replied crossly, ‘You should.’ A friend once suggested that she couldn’t imagine Marx living contentedly in an egalitarian society. ‘Neither can I,’ he agreed. ‘These times will come, but we must be away by then.’

Since its belated publication this century, extravagant claims have been made for The German Ideology as a ‘comprehensive exposition’ of the Marxist conception of history. Marx himself was more realistic about its limitations. ‘We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice,’ he wrote, ‘all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification.’ The tattered pages of the surviving manuscript do indeed appear to have been nibbled at the margin by small rodents, possibly of an unreconstructed Hegelian tendency.

Having sorted out the theory to their satisfaction, Marx and Engels moved swiftly on to the practice – ‘to win over the European, and in the first place the German, proletariat to our conviction’. And where was the German proletariat to be found? In Paris, London and Brussels, of course.

The earliest organisation of exiled German communists, the League of Outlaws, had been founded in Paris in 1834. Its members were mostly middle-class intellectuals – ‘the most sleepy-headed elements’, as Engels called them – who soon dozed off altogether. The clandestine League of the Just, which split away from it in 1836, was an altogether livelier outfit run by self-educated artisans who spent many a happy evening plotting putsches and conspiracies. Their politics, however, still amounted to little more than a vague egalitarianism derived from the eighteenth-century utopian Gracchus Babeuf. After participating in the botched Parisian uprising of May 1839 several of the League’s leaders fled to London, where they set up a respectable-sounding German Workers’ Educational Association as a front for their secret society. The most important of these figures were Karl Schapper, a burly typesetter and sometime forestry worker who had won his revolutionary spurs during the storming of a Frankfurt police station in 1833; Heinrich Bauer, a witty little cobbler from Franconia; and Joseph Moll, a watchmaker from Cologne of medium height but huge physical courage. ‘How often,’ Engels wrote, ‘did Schapper and he victoriously defend the entrance to a hall against hundreds of onrushing opponents!’ (Heroic to the last, Moll was shot dead on a German battlefield during the Baden uprising of 1849.)

Engels came to know the triumvirate while he was visiting London in 1843. They were the first working-class revolutionaries he had ever met, and to an impressionable bourgeois youngster their status as ‘real men’ easily outweighed the narrowness and naïvety of their ideology. Besides, they were undoubtedly efficient, having rebuilt the League of the Just as a thriving concern in London and created a network of supporters in Switzerland, Germany and France. Where workers’ associations were banned by law, their ‘lodges’ masqueraded as choral societies or gymnastic clubs.

Although these conspirators still looked to Paris as the mother-city of revolutions, they no longer treated French philosophy with quite the old awe or deference. For the League now had a theoretician of its own, the journeyman tailor Wilhelm Weitling, whose book Mankind As It Is and As It Ought To Be had been published by the League in 1838.

Weitling, the illegitimate son of a German washerwoman, had the pious, anguished demeanour of a martyred prophet. He would have been quite at home among the travelling chiliastic preachers of the Middle Ages, or the communist millenarian sects that flourished at the time of the English Civil War, but he had little in common with the thinkers or agitators of nineteenth-century revolution. His creed was a home-made cocktail of the Book of Revelation and the Sermon on the Mount, in which the cloying sweetness of Sunday-school homily was spiced up with a dash of fire and brimstone. When not warning of imminent Armageddon he babbled happily of a return to Eden, an Arcadia in which hatred and envy would be unknown. It was as if one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse had suddenly dismounted to stroke a passing cat.

Still, there was no denying the power of his evangelism. ‘The respect he enjoyed in our circles was boundless,’ wrote Friedrich Lessner, another communist tailor from Germany. ‘He was the idol of his followers.’ And, because of his wanderings through Europe, these disciples formed an impressive multinational brigade. Escaping to Switzerland after the failed French rebellion of 1839, he established branches of the League of the Just in Geneva and Zurich which eventually brought him to the attention of Swiss officialdom. During a raid on his lodgings the police found more incriminating evidence of his wickedness – an autobiographical manuscript, The Gospel of a Poor Sinner, in which he likened himself to Jesus Christ as an impoverished outcast who had been crucified for daring to speak out against injustice. This impudence earned him six months in jail for blasphemy, followed by deportation to Germany – where he was soon arrested again, this time for deserting from the army to avoid national service. By the time he reached London, in 1844, the thirty-six-year-old tailor was a legendary figure who drew large crowds of expatriate German socialists and English Chartists with his revivalist rhetoric. In one of his favourite coups de théâtre, he would hitch up an elegant trouser leg (as a tailor himself, Weitling always wore well-cut suits) to reveal the livid scars left by the chains and shackles of his jailers.

It’s hard to imagine anyone less likely to appeal to Marx than this vain utopian dreamer, whose political programme was summarised in a toe-curling preface to his book Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom: ‘We wish to be free as the birds in the sky; we wish to dart through life like them, carefree in joyful flight and sweet harmony.’ The best way of achieving lift-off, Weitling suggested, was to recruit a 40,000-strong army of convicted thieves and robbers – who, driven on by their burning grudge against private property, would bring down the mighty from their seats and usher in a new age of peace and joy. ‘Criminals are a product of the present order of society,’ he wrote, ‘and under communism they would cease to be criminals.’ In Weitling’s earthly paradise everyone would be provided with identical clothes (designed by himself, no doubt), and those who wished to wear anything else would have to earn it by working overtime. Eating would take place in communal canteens, though policy on cutlery had still to be decided. (‘These tailors are really astounding chaps,’ Engels commented after meeting some of Weitling’s followers. ‘Recently they were discussing quite seriously the question of knives and forks.’) When people reached the age of fifty they would be removed from the labour force and dispatched to a retirement colony – a sort of communist Eastbourne, though perhaps without the bowls club.

One can almost hear Marx snorting with derision at this twaddle. But he hesitated to condemn it publicly. Although he had proclaimed in 1844, with patriotic hyperbole, that ‘the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat’, the truth was that until the mid-1840s he had met very few German workers. (‘What the proletariat does we know not and indeed could hardly know,’ Engels reminded him in March 1845.) At first, therefore, his reaction to the emergence of a truly working-class thinker from his homeland was like that of Dr Johnson to the dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well but you are surprised to find it done at all – and, consequently, you reward the performing mutt with extravagant praise. ‘Where among the bourgeoisie (#litres_trial_promo) – including its philosophers and learned writers – is to be found a book about the emancipation of the bourgeoisie – political emancipation – similar to Weitling’s work Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom?’ Marx wondered. ‘It is enough to compare the petty faint-hearted mediocrity of German political literature with this vehement and brilliant literary début of the German workers, it is enough to compare these gigantic infant shoes of the proletariat with the dwarfish, worn-out political shoes of the German bourgeoisie, and one is bound to prophesy that the German Cinderella will one day have the figure of an athlete …’

The itinerant Cinderella never did go to the ball, either in glass slippers or running shoes. Though Messrs Schapper, Bauer and Moll gave Weitling a generous reception when he arrived in London in 1845, they quickly concluded that his ideas were too cranky by half. He was grievously disappointed by their unwillingness to invest in his many ingenious schemes – the creation of a new universal language, the invention of a machine for making ladies’ straw hats – and even more upset when they refused to elect him as president of their association. At the beginning of 1846 he went off to try his luck in Brussels.

‘If I tell you what kind of life we have been leading here (#litres_trial_promo), you would certainly be surprised at the communists,’ Joseph Weydemeyer wrote to his fiancée in February. ‘To crown the folly, Marx, Weitling, Marx’s brother-in-law and I sat up the whole night playing. Weitling got tired first. Marx and I slept a few hours on the sofa and idled away the whole of the next day in the company of his wife and his brother-in-law in the most priceless manner. We went to a tavern early in the morning, then we went by train to Villeworde, which is a little place nearby, where we had lunch and then returned in the most cheerful mood by the last train.’ It will be noticed that Weitling, after retiring early, played no part in the morning-after amusements: his halo of sanctity made him uncongenial company, especially for bourgeois intellectuals. As Engels wrote, ‘He was now the great man (#litres_trial_promo), the prophet, driven from country to country, who carried a prescription for the realisation of heaven on earth ready-made in his pocket, and who imagined that everybody was out to steal it from him.’

When Heinrich Heine met Weitling, he was outraged by ‘the fellow’s utter lack of respect while he conversed with me (#litres_trial_promo). He did not remove his cap and, while I was standing before him, he remained sitting with his right knee raised by the aid of his right hand to his very chin and steadily rubbing the raised leg with his left hand just above the ankle’. Cue the old trick with the trouser leg and the prison scars; but even this left Heine unmoved. ‘I confess that I recoiled when the tailor Weitling told me about these chains. I, who had once in Münster kissed with burning lips the relics of the tailor John of Leyden – the chains he had worn, the pincers with which he had been tortured and which are preserved in the Münster City Hall – I who had made an exalted cult of the dead tailor, now felt an insurmountable aversion for this living tailor, Wilhelm Weitling, though both were apostles and martyrs in the same cause.’

Marx and Engels had a similar revulsion, especially when Weitling took to addressing them as ‘my dear young fellows’, but they did their best to conceal it, if only out of respect for his proletarian status and his long years of persecution. Early in 1846 they invited him to become a founder member of the new Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels, whose purpose was to maintain ‘a continuous interchange of letters’ with the League of the Just and other fraternal associations in western Europe. Since the committee was the original Adam from which all the many subsequent Communist Parties were descended, it may be worth listing the eighteen founding signatories: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Jenny Marx, Edgar von Westphalen, Ferdinand Freiligrath, Joseph Weydemeyer, Moses Hess, Hermann Kriege, Wilhelm Weitling, Ernst Dronke, Louis Heilberg, Georg Weerth, Sebastian Seiler, Philippe Gigot, Wilhelm Wolff, Ferdinand Wolff, Karl Wallau, Stephan Born. Like most of its twentieth-century successors this communist cell asserted its authority by purging anyone suspected of deviation from official correctness; inevitably, Weitling was picked out as the first sacrificial victim.