Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

243 Pages·2010·76.119 MB·English

by  Tristram Hunt

ALSO BY TRISTRAM HUNT MARX'S GENERAL
Building Jerusalem
MARX'S GENERAL
THE REVOLUTIONARY LIFE OF
FRIEDRICH ENGELS
TRISTRAM HUNT
ToD.W.H.H.
Metropolitan Books
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10010
www.henryholt.com
Jiil,.
Metropolitan Books'" and are registered trademarks of
Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Copyright© 2009 Tristram Hunt
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hunt, Tristram, 1974-
Marx's general : the revolutionary life of Friedrich Engels I
Tristram Hunt.-1st ed.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8025-4
ISBN-10: 0-8050-8025-2
1. Engels, Friedrich, 1820-1895. I. Title.
HX274.7.E53H896 2009
335.4092-dc22
[B] 2009003845
Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and
premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.
First Edition 2009
Designed by Kelly S. Too
Printed in the United States of America
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations xi
Preface I
I. Siegfried in Zion 11
2. The Dragon's Seed 45
3. Manchester in Black and White 75
4. ·~ Little Patience and Some Terrorism'' 113
5. The Infinitely Rich '48 Harvest 148
6. Manchester in Shades of Gray 178
7. An End to Huckstering 211
8. The Grand Lama of the Regent's Park Road 239
9. Marx's Bulldog 274
10. First Fiddle at Last 317
Epilogue 352
Notes 369
Bibliography 401
Acknowledgments 411
Index 413
r
I
I
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Portrait of Friedrich and Elise Engels (Engels Haus Museum, Wup
pertal)
2. Barmen panorama (Engels Haus Museum, Wuppertal)
3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel lecturing, 1828 (lithograph by Franz
Kugler I AKG, London)
4. Ludwig Feuerbach (AKG, London)
5. Karl Marx as a student (RIA, Novosti)
6. Friedrich Engels self-portrait, 1839 (Topfoto)
7. John Marshall & Sons cotton design (Bridgeman Art Library, Lon
don I Whitworth Gallery, Manchester)
8. Ermen & Engels cotton reels (People's History Museum, Manchester)
9. Ermen & Engels cotton mil~, Weaste, Salford (Working Class Move
ment Library, Salford)
10. Friedrich Engels photo .p ortrait, age twenty (People's History Mu
seum, Manchester)
11. Boy cleaning cotton mill (Art Archive, London)
12. Manchester Piccadilly postcard (Mary Evans Picture Library, Lon
don)
13. Dover House I Albert Club (Working Class Movement Library, Sal
ford)
xii ILLUSTRATIONS
14. Chetham's Library desk (Chetham's Library, Manchester)
15. Dresden riots, 1848 (Bridgeman Art Library, London I Bibliotheque
Nationale, Paris)
16. Berlin riots, 1848 (Bridgeman Art Library, London I Archives
Charmet)
MARX'S GENERAL
17. Cheshire Hunt (painting by Henry Calvert I Tatton Park I Cheshire
County Council I The National Trust)
18. Manchester Town Hall vestibule .(Manchester City Council I Mike
Pilkington photograph)
19. Engels, Marx, and Marx's daughters group portrait (Topfoto)
20. Laura Marx (Bridgeman Art Library, London I Roger-Viollet, Paris)
21. Lizzy Burns (Working Class Movement Library, Salford)
22. Eleanor Marx (Jewish Chronicle Archiv_e London/ HIP I Topfoto)
23. Engels photo portrait (David King Collection, London)
24. Study at 122 Regent's Park Road (photograph by Barney Cokeliss)
25. View over London from Hampstead Heath (painting by John Ritchie
I Bridgeman Art Library I Private Collection)
26. The Paris Commune (Bridgeman Art Library, London I Bibliotheque
Nationale, Paris)
27. The Paris Commune (Bridgeman Art Library, London I Musee de la
Ville de Paris I Musee Carnavalet I Archives Charmet, Paris)
28. The London Dock Strike (Bridgeman Art Library, London I private
collection)
29. The London Dock Strike (Bridgeman Art Library, London I private
collection)
30. Poster in Havana, Cuba (Bridgeman Art Library, London I Roger
Viollet, Paris)
31. Mural in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (photograph by Franfoise Demulder
I Bridgeman Art Library, London I Roger-Viollet, Paris)
PREFACE
On 30 June 1869, Friedrich Engels, a Manchester mill owner, gave up his
job in the family business after nearly twenty years. Ready to greet him
on his return to his small cottage in the Chorlton suburbs were his lover
Lizzy Burns and houseguest Eleanor Marx, daughter of his old friend
Karl. "I was with Engels when he reached the end of his forced labour
and I saw what he inust have gone through all those years," Eleanor later
wrote of Engels's final day at work. "I shall never forget the triumph with
which he exclaimed 'for the last time!' as he put on his boots in the
morning to go to his office. A few hours later we were staQ.ding at the
gate waiting for him. We saw him coming over the little field opposite
the house where he lived. He was swinging his stick in the air and sing
ing, his face beaming. Then we set the table for a celebration and drank
champagne and were happy."1
Friedrich Engels was ·a textile magnate and foxhunter, a member of
the Manchester Royal Exchange, and president of the city's Schiller In
stitute. He was a raffish,high-liviiig, heavy-drinking devotee of the good
things in life: lobster salad, Chateau Margaux, Pilsener beer, and expen
sive women. But Engels also for forty years funded Karl Marx, looked
after his children, soothed his furies, and provided one half of history's
most celebrated ideological partnership as coauthor of The Communist
2 MARX'S GBNBRAL PREFACE 3
Manifesto and cofounder of what would come to be known as Marxism. graveyards for the ironic edification of Cold War cultural tourists. Inex
Over the course of the twentieth century, from Chairman Mao's China plicably, Engels has been given leave to remain, still holding sway over
to the Stasi state of the GDR, from the anti-imperial struggle in Africa to his eponymous town. As a quick conversation with local residents and
the Soviet Union itself, various manifestations of this compelling phi early-evening promenaders in Engels Square reveals, his presence here is
losophy would cast their shadow over a full third of the human race. the product neither of affection nor of admiration. Certainly, there is
And as often as not, the leaders of the socialist world would look first to little hostility toward the cofounder of communism but rather a non
Engels rather than Marx to explain their policies, justify their excesses, chalant indifference and weary apathy. Like the myriad plinths laden
and shore up their regimes. Interpreted and misinterpreted, quoted and with nineteenth-century generals and long-forgotten social reformers
misquoted, Friedrich Engels-the frock-coated Victorian cotton lord that litter the squares of Western European capitals, Engels has become
became one of the central architects of global communism. an unknown and unremarkable part of the civic wallpaper.
In his birthplace, in the Rhineland town of Wuppertal (now a com
muter suburb for the nearby finance and fashion city of Dusseldorf), a
Today, a journey to Engels begins at Moscow's Paveletsky rail station. similar disinterest is evident. There is a Friedrich Engels Strasse and a
From this shabbily romantic tsarist-era terminal, the rusting sleeper Friedrich Engels Allee but little sense of a town overly eager to com
train heaves off at midnight for the Volga plains hundreds of miles memorate its most celebrated son. The site of Engels's Geburtshaus, de
southeast of the capital. A grinding, stop-start fourteen-hour journey, stroyed by a Royal Air Force bombing raid in 1943, remains barren and
alleviated only by a gurgling samovar in the guard's carriage, eventually all that marks the place of his arrival into the world is a dirty granite
lands you in the city of Saratov with its wide, tree-lined streets and at monument modestly noting his role as the "cofounder of scientific so
tractive air of lost grandeur. cialism." Covered in holly and ivy, it is edged into the shadowy corner of
Bolted onto this prosperous provincial center is a crumbling six-lane a run-down park, overlooked by aging portable toilets and a vandalized
highway that bridges the mighty Volga and connects Saratov to its un phone booth.
loved sister city, Engels. Lacking any of Saratov's sophistication, Engels In modern Russia and Germany, let alone in Spain, England, or
is a seedy, forgotten site dominated by railway loading docks and the America, Engels has slipped the bonds of history. Where once his name
rusting detritus ofl ight industry. At its civic center squats Engels Square, was on the lips of millions-as Marx's fellow combatant, as the author
a bleak parade ground encircled by housing projects, a shabby strip mall of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific {the bible of global communism), as
dotted with sports bars, casinos, and DVD stores, and a roundabout the theoretician of dialectical materialism, as the name regularly grafted
clogged with Ladas, Sputniks, and the odd Ford. Here, in all its enervat onto city streets and squares by revolutionary insurgents and left-wing
ing grime, is the postcommunist Russia of hypercapitalism and bootleg councils, as the man whose visionary, bearded features appeared on
Americana. And amid this free market dystopia stands a statue of the currency and in textbooks and, alongside Marx, Lenin, and Stalin,
Friedrich Engels himself. Fifteen feet high, atop a marble plinth and with stared down from vast flags and Soviet Realist billboards onto May
a well-tended municipal flower bed at his feet, he looks resplendent in his Day parades-it is now barely registered in either East or West. In 1972,
trench coat, clutching a curling copy of The Communist Manifesto. an official GDR biography could claim that "nowadays there is hardly a
Across the former USSR and Eastern bloc, the statues of Marx {to corner of this earth of ours where Engels's name has not been heard of, ·
gether with those of Lenin, Stalin, and Beria) have come down. Decapi where the significance of his work is unknown."2 Today, he is so innocu
tated and mutilated, their remains are gathered together in monument ous his statue isn't even pulled down.