Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

why the attempt at communal living with Herr and Frau Ruge was so unsuccessful. For all his mockery of bourgeois morals and manners, Marx was at heart a supremely bourgeois patriarch. When drinking or corresponding with male friends, he loved nothing better than a dirty joke or a titillating sexual scandal. In mixed company, however, he displayed a protective chivalry that any Victorian paterfamilias would have admired. ‘As father and husband, Marx, in spite of his wild and restless character, is the gentlest and mildest of men,’ a police spy observed with surprise in the 1850s. The German socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht – his companion on many a pub-crawl – found Marx’s prudishness touching and rather comical. ‘Although in political and economic discussion he was not wont to mince his words, often making use of quite coarse phrases, in the presence of children and of women his language was so gentle and refined that even an English governess could have had no cause for complaint. If in such circumstances the conversation should turn upon some delicate subject, Marx would fidget and blush like a sixteen-year-old maiden.’

      In August 1844, while Jenny was still on her extended maternity leave in Trier and Karl toiled alone over his economic notebooks at their apartment in the Rue Vanneau, the twenty-three-year-old Friedrich Engels passed through Paris en route from England to Germany. Although the two men had met once before – when Engels visited the office of the Rheinische Zeitung on 16 November 1842 – it had been a cool and unmemorable encounter: Engels was wary of the impetuous young editor who ‘raves as if ten thousand devils had him by the hair’, as Edgar Bauer had forewarned him; Marx was equally suspicious, guessing that since Engels lived in Berlin he was probably an accomplice to the Free Hegelian follies of the brothers Bruno and Edgar Bauer. Engels redeemed himself soon afterwards by moving from Berlin to Manchester, and was allowed to write several articles for the Rheinische Zeitung, but what really stirred Marx’s interest was a brace of essays submitted to the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher – a review of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present, and a lengthy Critique of Political Economy which Marx described as a work of genius. One can see why: though he had already decided that abstract idealism was so much hot air, and that the engine of history was driven by economic and social forces, Marx’s practical knowledge of capitalism was nil. He had been so engaged by his dialectical tussle with German philosophers that the condition of England – the first industrialised country, the birthplace of the proletariat – had escaped his notice. Engels, from his vantage point in the cotton mills of Lancashire, was well placed to enlighten him.

      By the time they renewed their acquaintance in August 1844, Marx’s attitude had thus changed from mistrust to respectful curiosity, and after a few aperitifs at the Café de la Régence – an old haunt of Voltaire and Diderot – Engels was invited back to the Rue Vanneau to continue the conversation. It lasted for ten intense days, fuelled by copious quantities of midnight oil and red wine, at the end of which they pledged undying friendship.

      Strangely, neither of them ever wrote about this epic dialogue. Engels’s account, in a preface written more than forty years later, runs to one sentence: ‘When I visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844, our complete agreement in all theoretical fields became evident and our joint work dates from that time.’ C’est tout: one would hardly guess from his brisk summary that Engels’s stopover in Paris might justly be described as ten days that shook the world.

      Friedrich Engels’s ancestors had lived in Wuppertal for more than two centuries, earning their living in agriculture and then – rather more lucratively – in the textile trade. His father, also Friedrich Engels, had diversified and expanded the enterprise by founding cotton mills in Manchester (1837) and Barmen and Engelskirchen (1841), in partnership with two brothers named Ermen.

      Friedrich junior was born on 28 November 1820. The household was pious, industrious, its strict orthodoxy relieved only slightly by the cheerful disposition of his mother, Elise, whose sense of humour was ‘so pronounced that even in old age she would sometimes laugh till the tears ran down her cheeks’. The father, a far more severe character, watched his eldest son anxiously for any deviation from the paths of righteousness. ‘Friedrich brought home middling reports for last week,’ he wrote to Elise on 27 August 1835. ‘As you know, his manners have improved; but in spite of severe punishment in the past, he does not seem to be learning implicit obedience even from the fear of chastisement. Today I was once more vexed by finding in his desk a dirty book from a lending library, a romance of the thirteenth century. May God guard the boy’s heart, for I am often troubled over this son of ours who is otherwise so full of promise.’ God was apparently not paying attention: young Engels soon moved on to far more dangerous ‘dirty books’.

      He did conform to parental expectations in one respect by entering the family firm – though with no great enthusiasm. In his final school report, at Michaelmas 1837, the headmaster noted that young Friedrich ‘believed himself inclined’ to go into business ‘as his external career’. Internally, he was already germinating other plans. But he needed an income, and a job at Ermen & Engels would be a useful sinecure that guaranteed financial security and plenty of free time.

      He began his apprenticeship in Bremen, where his father found him a place as an unpaid clerk in an export business run by Heinrich Leupold. ‘He’s a terribly nice fellow, oh so good, you can’t imagine,’ Engels said of the boss. In a letter to his old schoolfriends Friedrich and Wilhelm Graeber, dated 1 September 1838, he apologises for not writing at greater length ‘because the Principal is sitting here’. But, as the next paragraph indicates, Leupold wasn’t a hard taskmaster:

      Excuse me for writing so badly, I have three bottles of beer under my belt, hurrah, and I cannot write much more because this must go to the post at once. It is already striking half-past three and letters must be posted by four o’clock. Good gracious, thunder and lightning, you can see that I’ve got some beer inside me … What a lamentable state! The old man, i.e. the Principal, is just going out and I am all mixed up, I don’t know what I’m writing. There are all sorts of noises going on in my head.

      Indeed there were. When not attending to his minimal duties in the office, or writing squiffy letters after lunch, or lying in a hammock studying the ceiling through a haze of cigar smoke, or lolloping on horseback around the suburbs of Bremen, Engels was already listening to those cranial noises. He composed choral music – much of it plagiarised from old hymns – and tried his hand at poetry. One of his poems, ‘The Bedouin’, was accepted for publication by the Bremisches Conversationsblatt in September 1838. Noteworthy as his first published work, it also marked his first encounter with the censoriousness of bourgeois editors.

      As written by Engels, the poem began by lamenting that the Bedouin – ‘sons of the desert, proud and free’ – had been robbed of that pride and freedom, and were now mere performing exhibits for the amusement of tourists. It ended with a stirring battle-cry:

       Go home again, exotic guests!

      Your desert robes do not belong

      With our Parisian coats and vests,

      Nor with our literature your song!

      The idea, he explained later, was ‘to contrast the Bedouin, even in their present condition, and the audience, who are quite alien to these people’. But in the published text this was replaced with a new final stanza, added by the editor himself without the author’s permission:

      They jump at money’s beck and call,

      And not at Nature’s primal urge.

      Their eyes are blank, they’re silent, all

      Except for one who sings a dirge.

      Thus an angry exhortation was reduced to nothing more than a melancholy, rueful shrug of the shoulders. Engels was understandably displeased: in his primitive fashion he had already noticed that society is shaped by economic imperatives, but the editor would not allow him to name or condemn the culprits. ‘It