Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

For the moment, however, the newcomer would be content to listen and learn.

      There was music in the cafés at night, revolution in the air. With the ‘bourgeois monarchy’ of Louis Philippe tottering, another high-voltage excitement seemed inevitable and imminent. ‘The bourgeois King’s loss of prestige among the people is demonstrated by the many attempts to assassinate that dynastic and autocratic prince,’ Ruge reported. ‘One day when he dashed by me in the Champs-Elysées, well hidden in his coach, with hussars in front and behind and on both sides, I observed to my astonishment that the outriders had their guns cocked ready to fire in earnest and not just in the usual burlesque style. Thus did he ride by with his bad conscience!’ Ruge, Marx and the poet Georg Herwegh – the presiding triumvirate of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher – arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1843. Ruge travelled from Dresden in a ‘large omnibus’ accompanied by his wife, a swarm of children and a large leg of veal. Inspired by the utopian Charles Fourier, he proposed that the three couples should form a ‘phalanstery’ or commune, in which the women would take it in turns to shop, cook and sew. ‘Frau Herwegh summed up the situation at first glance,’ her son Marcel recorded many years later. ‘How could Frau Ruge, the nice, small Saxon woman, get on with the very intelligent and even more ambitious Frau Marx, whose knowledge was far superior to hers? How could Frau Herwegh, who had only been married so short a time and was the youngest of them, find herself attracted by this communal life?’ Georg and Emma Herwegh had a taste for luxury – and, since her father was a rich banker, the means to indulge it. They declined Ruge’s invitation. But Karl and Jenny (who was now four months pregnant) decided to give it a try. They moved into Ruge’s apartment at 23 Rue Vanneau, next door to the offices of the Jahrbücher.

      The experiment in patriarchal communism lasted for about a fortnight before the Marxes decamped and found lodgings of their own further down the street. Ruge was a prim, puritanical homebody who couldn’t tolerate his co-editor’s disorganised and impulsive habits: Marx, he complained, ‘finishes nothing, breaks off everything and plunges ever afresh into an endless sea of books … He has worked himself sick and not gone to bed for three, even four, nights on end …’ Shocked by these ‘crazy methods of working’, Ruge was downright scandalised by Marx’s leisures and pleasures. ‘His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs,’ he wrote a few months later, ‘and the poor devil cannot ride nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to “have” – a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.’ It’s an implausible shopping list: Marx was uninterested in luxuries or fripperies. If he did desire such things it was undoubtedly on behalf of Jenny, who delighted in them. These early months in Paris were the first and only time in her married life when she could afford to indulge the appetite, since Karl’s salary was augmented by a donation of 1,000 thalers sent from Cologne by former shareholders in the Rheinische Zeitung. Besides, he wanted her to enjoy a last spree before being cribbed and confined by the demands of maternity. On May Day 1844 she gave birth to a baby girl, Jenny – more often known by the diminutive ‘Jennychen’ – whose dark eyes and black crest of hair gave her the appearance of a miniature Karl.

      The novice parents, though doting, were hopelessly incompetent, and by early June it was agreed that the two Jennys should spend several months with the Baroness von Westphalen in Trier learning the rudiments of motherhood. ‘The poor little doll was quite miserable and ill after the journey,’ Jenny wrote to Karl on 21 June, ‘and turned out to be suffering not only from constipation but downright overfeeding. We had to call in the fat pig [Robert Schleicher, the family doctor], and his decision was that it was essential to have a wet-nurse since with artificial feeding she would not easily recover … It was not easy to save her life, but she is now almost out of danger.’ Better still, the wet-nurse agreed to come back to Paris with them. But in spite of Jenny’s happiness (‘my whole being expresses satisfaction and affluence’), she couldn’t entirely dispel her old forebodings. ‘Dearest heart, I am greatly worried about our future … If you can, do set my mind at rest about this. There is too much talk on all sides about a steady income.’ A steady income was one necessity of life that always eluded Karl Marx.

      His job in Paris, which seemed to promise financial security, turned out to be even more temporary than his last editorship. Only one issue of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher appeared before the breach with Ruge became irreparable – and it scarcely lived up to the cross-border promise of its title. Though France was well supplied with writers, not one of them was willing to contribute. To fill the gap, Marx included his essays on the Jewish question and on Hegel, together with an edited version of his correspondence with Ruge over the previous year or two. The only non-German voice was that of an exiled Russian anarcho-communist, Michael Bakunin. ‘Marx was then much more advanced than I was,’ he recalled. ‘He, although younger than I, was already an atheist, an instructed materialist, and a conscious socialist … I eagerly sought his conversation, which was always instructive and witty, when it was not inspired by petty hate, which alas! was only too often the case. There was, however, never any frank intimacy between us – our temperaments did not permit. He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him vain, perfidious and sly, and I was right too.’

      For all its obvious deficiencies, the first and last issue of the Jahrbücher did have one contributor of international stature – the romantic poet Heinrich Heine, whom Marx had revered since childhood and befriended soon after arriving in Paris. Heine was a painfully thin-skinned creature who often burst into tears at the slightest criticism; Marx was a pitiless critic of magnificent insensitivity. For once, however, he restrained his icon-smashing inclinations, in deference to a genuine hero of literature. Heine became a regular visitor to the Marxes’ apartment in the Rue Vanneau, reading aloud from works in progress and asking the young editor to suggest emendations. On one occasion he arrived to find Karl and Jenny frantic with worry over little Jennychen, who had an attack of the cramps and was – or so they believed – at death’s door. Heine took charge at once, announcing that ‘the child must have a bath’. And so, according to Marx family legend, the girl’s life was saved.

      Heine was not a communist, at least in the Marxian sense. He cited the tale of a Babylonian king who thought himself God but fell miserably from the height of his conceit to crawl like an animal on the ground and eat grass: ‘This story is found in the great and splendid Book of Daniel. I recommend it for the edification of my good friend Ruge, and also to my much more stubborn friend Marx, and also to Messrs Feuerbach, Daumer, Bruno Bauer, Hengstenberg, and the rest of the crowd of godless self-appointed gods.’ He contemplated the victory of the proletariat with dread, fearing that art and beauty would have no place in this new world. ‘The more or less clandestine leaders of the German communists are great logicians, the most powerful among them having come from the Hegelian school,’ he wrote in 1854, referring to Marx. ‘These doctors of revolution and their relentlessly determined pupils are the only men in Germany with some life in them and the future belongs to them, I fear.’ Shortly before his death in 1856 he wrote a last will and testament begging forgiveness from God if he had ever written anything ‘immoral’, but Marx was prepared to overlook this lapse into piety – which in anyone else would have provoked his most savage scorn. As Eleanor Marx wrote, ‘He loved the poet as much as his works and looked as generously as possible on his political weaknesses. Poets, he explained, were queer fish and they must be allowed to go their own ways. They should not be assessed by the measure of ordinary or even extraordinary men.’

      The Jahrbücher may have been a financial disaster but it enjoyed great succès d’estime, not least because of Heinrich Heine’s satirical odes on King Ludwig of Bavaria. Hundreds of copies sent to Germany were confiscated by the police, who had been warned by the Prussian government that its contents were an incitement to high treason. An order went out that Marx, Ruge and Heine should be arrested at once if they