Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

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 – 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, 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,