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‘And so – to Paris, to the old university of philosophy and the new capital of the new world!’ Marx wrote to Ruge in September 1843. ‘Whether the enterprise comes into being or not, in any case I shall be in Paris by the end of this month, since the atmosphere here makes one a serf, and in Germany I see no scope at all for free activity.’ The revolutions of 1789 and 1830 had made the French capital a natural rallying point. It was a city of plotters and poets and pamphleteers, sects and salons and secret societies – ‘the nerve-centre of European history, sending out electric shocks at intervals which galvanised the whole world’. All the best-known political thinkers of the age were Frenchmen: the mystical Christian socialist Pierre Leroux, the utopian communists Victor Considérant and Etienne Cabet, the liberal orator and poet Alphonse de Lamartine (or, to give him his full glorious appellation, Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine). Above all there was Pierre Joseph Proudhon, libertarian anarchist, who had won instant fame in 1840 with his book What Is Property? – a question he answered on page one with the simple formulation ‘property is theft’. All these political picadors would eventually be tossed and gored by Karl Marx – most notably Proudhon, whose magnum opus on ‘the philosophy of poverty’ provoked Marx’s lacerating riposte, The Poverty of Philosophy. 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 attempted to return to their fatherland. In Austria, Metternich promised ‘severe penalties’ against any bookseller caught stocking this ‘loathsome and disgusting’ document.

Arnold Ruge, taking fright, left Marx in the lurch by suspending publication and refusing to pay him the promised salary. Some historians have claimed that the quarrel needn’t have become terminal ‘had not other personal differences, especially on fundamental matters of principle, been developing between them for some time’. But in fact the most ‘fundamental matter of principle’ was a ridiculous squabble over the sex life of their colleague Georg Herwegh, who had already betrayed his new bride by starting an affair with the Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, a former mistress of the composer Liszt and mother of the girl who became Cosima Wagner. ‘I was incensed by Herwegh’s way of living and his laziness,’ Ruge wrote to his mother. ‘Several times I referred to him warmly as a scoundrel, and declared that when a man gets married he ought to know what he is doing. Marx said nothing and took his departure in a perfectly friendly manner. Next morning he wrote to me that Herwegh was a genius with a great future. My calling him a scoundrel filled him with indignation, and my ideas on marriage were philistine and inhuman. Since then we have not seen each other again.’

Although Marx often railed against promiscuity and libertinism with the puritanical ferocity of a Savonarola – if only to disprove the charge that communism was synonymous with communal sex – he observed the amorous escapades of his friends with amusement and, perhaps, a touch of envy. Jenny certainly feared as much. ‘Although the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak,’ she wrote from Trier in August 1844, two months after leaving her husband alone in Paris. ‘The real menace of unfaithfulness, the seductions and attractions of a capital city – all those are powers and forces whose effect on me is more powerful than anything else.’ She needn’t have worried. Among the seductions and attractions of Paris, the rustle of a countess’s skirt could not begin to compete with the clamour of politics. In the summer of 1844 Marx took up an offer to write for Vorwärts!, a biweekly communist journal sponsored by the composer Meyerbeer and now edited by Karl Ludwig Bernays, who had collaborated on the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher.

As the only uncensored radical paper in the German language appearing anywhere in Europe, Vorwärts!, provided a refuge for all the old gang of émigré poets and polemicists, including Heine, Herwegh, Bakunin and Arnold Ruge. Once a week they would gather at the first-floor office on the corner of the Rue des Moulins and the Rue Neuve des Petits for an editorial conference presided over by Bernays and his publisher, Heinrich Börnstein, who recalled:

Some would sit on the bed or on the trunks, others would stand and walk about. They would all smoke terrifically and argue with great passion and excitement. It was impossible to open the windows, because a crowd would immediately have gathered in the street to find out the cause of the violent uproar, and very soon the room was concealed in such a thick cloud of tobacco smoke that it was impossible for a newcomer to recognise anyone present. In the end, we ourselves could not even recognise each other.

Which was probably just as well, if both Marx and Ruge were in attendance: otherwise the ‘violent uproar’ might have degenerated into fisticuffs.

The two enemies continued their feud in the public prints instead. In July 1844, signing himself merely ‘A Prussian’, Ruge wrote a long article for Vorwärts! about the Prussian King’s brutal suppression of the Silesian weavers, who had smashed the machines which were threatening their livelihoods. He regarded the weavers’ revolt as an inconsequential nothing, since Germany lacked the ‘political consciousness’ necessary to transform an isolated act of disobedience into a full-dress revolution.

Marx’s reply, published ten days later, argued that the fertiliser of revolutions was not ‘political consciousness’ but class consciousness, which the Silesians had in abundance. Ruge (or ‘the alleged Prussian’, as Marx called him) thought that a social revolution without a political soul was impossible; Marx dismissed this ‘nonsensical concoction’, maintaining that all revolutions are both social and political in so far as they dissolve the old society and overthrow the old power. Even if the revolution occurred in just one factory district, as with the Silesian weavers, it still threatened the whole state because ‘it represents man’s protest against a dehumanised life’. This was too optimistic by half. The only lasting influence of the revolt was that it inspired one of Heine’s most celebrated verses, ‘The Song of the Silesian Weavers’, which was published in the same issue of Vorwärts!.

‘The German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat, just as the English proletariat is its economist, and the French proletariat its politician,’ Marx wrote in his riposte to Ruge, prefiguring a later assessment by Engels that Marxism itself was a hybrid of these three bloodlines. The twenty-six-year-old Marx was already well versed in German philosophy and French socialism; now he set about educating himself in the dismal science. During the summer of 1844 he read his way systematically through the main corpus of British political economy – Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill – and scribbled a running commentary as he went along. These notes, which run to about 50,000 words, were not discovered until the 1930s, when the Soviet scholar David Ryazanov published them under the title Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. They are now more commonly known as the Paris manuscripts.

Marx’s work has often been dismissed as ‘crude dogma’, usually by people who give no evidence of having read him. It would be a useful exercise to force these extempore critics – who include the present British prime minister, Tony Blair – to study the Paris manuscripts, which reveal the workings of a ceaselessly inquisitive, subtle and undogmatic mind.

The first manuscript begins with a simple declaration: ‘Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker. The capitalist inevitably wins. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker can without him.’ From this premiss all else follows. The worker has become just another commodity in search of a buyer; and it isn’t a seller’s market. Whatever happens, the worker loses out. If the wealth of society is decreasing, the worker suffers most. But what of a society which is prospering? ‘This condition is the only one favourable to the worker. Here competition takes place among the capitalists. The demand for workers outstrips supply. But …’

But indeed. Capital is nothing more than the accumulated fruits of labour, and so a country’s capitals and revenues grow only ‘when more and more of the worker’s products are being taken from him, when his own labour increasingly confronts him as alien property and the means of his existence and of his activity are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capitalist’ – rather as an intelligent chicken (if such an unlikely creature existed) would be most conscious of its impotence when at its most fertile, laying dozens of eggs only to see them snatched away while still warm.

Furthermore, in a prosperous society there will be a growing concentration of capital and more intense competition. ‘The big capitalists ruin the small ones and a section of the former capitalists sinks into the class of the workers which, because of this increase in numbers, suffers a further depression of wages and becomes ever more dependent on the handful of big capitalists. Because the number of capitalists has fallen, competition for workers hardly exists any longer, and because the number of workers has increased, the competition among them has become all the more considerable, unnatural and violent.’

So, Marx concludes, even in the most propitious economic conditions, the only consequence for the worker is ‘overwork and early death, reduction to a machine, enslavement to capital’. The division of labour makes him more dependent still, introducing competition from machines as well as men. ‘Since the worker has been reduced to a machine, the machine can confront him as a competitor.’ Finally, the accumulation of capital enables industry to turn out an ever greater quantity of products. This leads to overproduction and ends up either by putting a large number of workers out of a job or by reducing their wages to a pittance. ‘Such,’ Marx concluded with bleak irony, ‘are the consequences of a condition of society which is most favourable to the worker, i.e. a condition of growing wealth. But in the long run the time will come when this state of growth reaches a peak. What is the situation of the worker then?’ Pretty miserable, you won’t be surprised to learn.

The odds were hopelessly stacked in capital’s favour. A big industrialist can sit on the products of his factory until they fetch a decent price, whereas the worker’s only product – the sweat of his brow – loses its value completely if it is not sold at every instant. A day’s missed toil is as worthless in the market as yesterday morning’s newspaper, and can never be recovered. ‘Labour is life, and if life is not exchanged every day for food it suffers and soon perishes.’ Unlike other commodities, labour can be neither accumulated nor saved – not by the labourer, at any rate. The employer is more fortunate, since capital is ‘stored-up labour’ with an indefinite shelf-life.

The only defence against capitalism was competition, which raises wages and cheapens prices. But for this very reason the big capitalists would always try to thwart or sabotage competitiveness. Just as the old feudal landlords operated a monopoly of land – for which the demand was almost limitless, but the supply finite – so the new breed of industrialists sought a monopoly of production. It was therefore foolish to conclude, as Adam Smith had, that the interest of the landlord or the capitalist is identical with that of society. ‘Under the rule of private property, the interest which any individual has in society is in inverse proportion to the interest which society has in him, just as the interest of the moneylender in the spendthrift is not at all identical with the interest of the spendthrift.’

Marx had a strong if critical respect for Smith and Ricardo. As with Hegel, he used their own words and logic to expose the shortcomings of their theories. And the most obvious shortcoming was this: ‘Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property. It does not explain it.’ Classical economists treated private property as a primordial human condition, rather as theology explained the existence of evil by reference to man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world.

But there was nothing fixed or immutable about it. Already, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, power had transferred from feudal landlords to corporate grandees: the aristocracy of money had supplanted the aristocracy of land. ‘We refuse to join in the sentimental tears which romanticism sheds on this account,’ Marx commented sternly. Feudal landowners had been inefficient boobies who made no attempt to extract the maximum profit from their property, basking in the ‘romantic glory’ of their noble indifference. It was thoroughly desirable that this benign myth should be exploded, and that ‘the root of landed property – sordid self-interest – should manifest itself in its most cynical form’. By reducing the great estates to mere commodities, with no arcadian mystique, capitalism was at least transparent in its intentions. The medieval motto nulle terre sans seigneur (no land without its master) gave way to a more vulgar but honest admission: l’argent n’a pas de maître (money knows no master).

Under this tyranny, almost everyone and everything is ‘objectified’. The worker devotes his life to producing objects which he does not own or control. His labour thus becomes a separate, external being which ‘exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien’. No Marxian scholar or critic has drawn attention to the obvious parallel with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the tale of a monster which turns against its creator. (In view of Marx’s fascination with the Promethean legend, one might also note the novel’s subtitle: A Modern Prometheus.) While suffering from an eruption of boils in December 1863, Marx described one particularly nasty specimen as ‘a second Frankenstein on my back’. ‘It struck me as a good theme for a short story,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘From the front, the man who regales his inner man with port, claret, stout and a truly massive mass of meat. From the front, the guzzler. But behind, on his back, the outer man, a damned carbuncle. If the devil makes a pact with one to sustain one with consistently good fare in circumstances like these, may the devil take the devil, I say.’ Marx mentioned this pustulent incubus to his daughter Eleanor, who was eight years old at the time. ‘But it is your own flesh!’ she pointed out.

The concept of self-alienation was drummed into Marx’s children from infancy, mainly through the fairy stories which he invented to amuse them. ‘Of the many wonderful tales [he] told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one, was “Hans Röckle”,’ Eleanor wrote in a memoir:

It went on for months and months; it was a whole series of stories … Hans Röckle himself was a Hoffmann-like magician, who kept a toyshop, and who was always ‘hard up’. His shop was full of the most wonderful things – of wooden men and women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, workmen and masters, animals and birds, as numerous as Noah got into the ark, tables and chairs, carriages, boxes of all sorts and sizes. And though he was a magician, Hans could never meet his obligations either to the devil or the butcher, and was therefore – much against the grain – constantly obliged to sell his toys to the devil. These then went through wonderful adventures – always ending in a return to Hans Röckle’s shop.

Easy enough in a fairy tale. But how could a worker recover the fruits of labour without recourse to magic? For Hegel, alienation had been simply a fact of life, the shadow that falls between the conception and the creation, between the desire and the spasm. Once an idea had become an object – whether a machine or a book – it was ‘externalised’ and thus divorced from its producer. Estrangement was the inevitable conclusion of all labour.

For Marx, alienated labour was not an eternal and inescapable problem of human consciousness but the result of a particular form of economic and social organisation. A mother, for instance, isn’t automatically estranged from her baby the moment it emerges from the womb, even though parturition is undoubtedly an example of Hegel’s ‘externalisation’. But she would feel very alienated indeed if, every time she gave birth, the squealing infant was immediately seized from her by some latter-day Herod. This, more or less, was the daily lot of the workers, forever producing what they could not keep. No wonder they felt less than human. ‘The result is,’ Marx observed, in a characteristic paradox, ‘that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his most animal functions – eating, drinking and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment – while in his human functions he is nothing more than an animal.’

What was the alternative? By the time he wrote the Paris manuscripts, in 1844, Marx already had a formidable talent for spotting the structural faults of society – the rising damp, the rotted timbers, the joists that couldn’t sustain the weight placed on them – and explaining why the wrecking ball was urgently required. But his skills as a surveyor and demolisher were not yet matched by any great architectural vision of his own. ‘The supersession of private property is … the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes,’ he wrote. ‘Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective human sensitivity – a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short, senses capable of human gratification – be either cultivated or created.’ Communism alone could resolve the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man. ‘It is the solution to the riddle of history,’ he announced, with a grandiloquent flourish, ‘and knows itself to be the solution.’

Maybe so; but what exactly was it? Unable to elaborate on his rather vague humanism, Marx preferred to say what it was not. No solution to the riddle of history could be found in the petty-bourgeois platitudes of Proudhon (‘his homilies about home, conjugal love and suchlike banalities’), or in the pipe-dreams of egalitarians such as Fourier and Babeuf, who – driven by ‘envy and desire to level down’ – would not abolish private property but merely redistribute it. Their imaginary Happy Valley was ‘a community of labour and equality of wages, which are paid out by the communal capital, the community as universal capitalist’. Material possession would still be the purpose of existence, the only difference being that all men – including the former capitalists – would be reduced to the category of ‘worker’. And what of the women? Since marriage was itself a form of exclusive private property, presumably the crude communists intended that ‘women are to go from marriage into general prostitution’ – thus becoming the property of all. Marx recoiled in horror from this ‘bestial’ prospect.

One can see 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 has become clear to me,’ he concluded after this unhappy début, ‘that my rhyming achieves nothing.’

His literary tastes were becoming more political and prosaic. He bought a topical pamphlet, Jacob Grimm über seiner Entlassung, which described the dismissal by Göttingen University of seven liberal professors who had dared to protest at the oppressive regime of Ernst August, the new King of Hanover. ‘It is extraordinarily good and written with a rare power.’ He read no fewer than seven pamphlets on the ‘Cologne affair’ – the refusal, in 1837, of the Archbishop of Cologne to obey the King of Prussia. ‘I have read things here and come across expressions – I am getting good practice, especially in literature – which one would never be allowed to print in our parts, quite liberal ideas, etc … really wonderful.’ In one of his letters to the Graebers, emboldened by beer, he referred to Ernst August as ‘the old Hanoverian he-goat’.

The most obviously ‘progressive’ voices of the time came from the Young Germany group of writers, disciples of Heine who advocated free speech, the emancipation of women, an end to religious tyranny, and abolition of hereditary aristocracy. ‘Who can have anything against that?’ Engels asked, half-mockingly. He was impatient with their easy, vague liberalism, but in the absence of anything more rigorous or analytical he had nowhere else to turn. ‘What shall I, poor devil, do now? Go on swotting on my own? Don’t feel like it. Turn loyal? The devil if I will!’ So, faute de mieux, he became a Young German himself. ‘I cannot sleep at night, all because of the ideas of the century. When I am at the post office and look at the Prussian coat of arms, I am seized with the spirit of freedom. Every time I look at a newspaper I hunt for advances of freedom. They get into my poems and mock at the obscurantists in monk’s cowls and in ermine.’

Back home in Barmen his parents knew nothing of their son’s democratic fever: he did his best to keep them in ignorance, then and for many years afterwards. Even in middle age, when he and Marx were joyfully awaiting the imminent crisis of capitalism, Engels was always on his best behaviour during Friedrich senior’s visits to Manchester, playing the part of a dutiful heir who could be trusted with the family fortune – just as, out riding with the Cheshire Hunt, he was able to pass himself off as a conservative local businessman. His communism, his atheism, his sexual promiscuity: these all belonged to his separate life.

To those in the know, Engels’s true opinions of his parents and their milieu were obvious as early as March 1839, when he wrote a coruscating attack on the smug, complacent burghers of Barmen and Elberfeld for the Telegraph für Deutschland, a Young Germany newspaper. The eighteen-year-old author hid behind the pseudonym ‘Friedrich Oswald’ – a necessary precaution, since the articles were nothing less than journalistic parricide. In the ‘gloomy streets’ of Elberfeld, he reported, all the alehouses were full to overflowing on Saturday and Sunday nights:

and when they close at about eleven o’clock, the drunks pour out of them and generally sleep off their intoxication in the gutter … The reasons for this state of affairs are perfectly clear. First and foremost, factory work is largely responsible. Work in low rooms where people breathe in more coal fumes and dust than oxygen – and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six – is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life. The weavers, who have individual looms in their homes, sit bent over them from morning till night, and desiccate their spinal marrow in front of a hot stove. Those who do not fall prey to mysticism are ruined by drunkenness.

As the reference to mysticism implies, Engels had already identified religion as a handmaiden of exploitation and hypocrisy: ‘For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people.’ He even named some of these snivelling pharisees, though he forbore to mention his own father.

The ‘Letters from Elberfeld’ caused outrage. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ he wrote to Friedrich Graeber, one of the few to be let in on the secret. ‘Do you know who wrote the article in the Telegraph? The author is the writer of these lines, but I advise you not to say anything about it. I could get into a hell of a lot of trouble.’

In the spring of 1841 Engels left Bremen for military service in Berlin, enlisting in the Household Artillery. The choice of Berlin, capital city of Young Hegelianism, was no accident: though his army uniform gave him a camouflage of respectability and reassured his parents, he spent every spare moment immersing himself in radical theology and journalism. He pulled off a similar trick in the autumn of 1842 when dispatched to the Manchester branch of Ermen & Engels: while apparently training himself in the family business, as a dutiful heir should, he took the opportunity to investigate the human consequences of capitalism. Manchester was the birthplace of the Anti-Corn Law League, the centre of the 1842 General Strike, a city teeming with Chartists, Owenites and industrial agitators of every kind. Here, if anywhere, he would discover the nature of the beast. By day he was a quietly diligent young manager at the Cotton Exchange; after hours he changed sides, exploring the terra incognita of proletarian Lancashire to gather facts and impressions for his early masterpiece, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Often accompanied by his new lover, a redheaded Irish factory girl called Mary Burns, he ventured into slum districts which few other men of his class had ever seen. Here, for example, is his picture of ‘Little Ireland’, the area of Manchester south-west of the Oxford Road:

Masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles. In short, the whole rookery furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be equalled in the worst court on the Irk. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity. This is the impression and the line of thought which the exterior of this district forces upon the beholder. But what must one think when he hears that in each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar, on the average twenty human beings live?

What gave the book its power and depth was Engels’s skilful interweaving (he was a textile man, after all) of firsthand observation with information from parliamentary commissions, health officials and copies of Hansard. The British state may have done little or nothing to improve the lot of the workers, but it had collected a mass of data about the horrors of industrial life which was available to anyone who cared to retrieve it from a dusty library shelf. Newspaper reports, particularly from criminal trials, provided yet more details. ‘On Monday, 15 January, 1844,’ Engels noted:

two boys were brought before the police magistrate because, being in a starving condition, they had stolen and immediately devoured a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop. The magistrate felt called upon to investigate the case further, and received the following details from the policeman. The mother of the two boys was the widow of an ex-soldier, afterwards policeman, and had had a very hard time since the death of her husband … When the policeman came to her, he found her with six of her children literally huddled together in a little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken cup and a small dish. On the hearth was scarcely a spark of fire, and in one corner lay as many old rags as would fill a woman’s apron, which served the whole family as a bed.

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,’ 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 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 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!’ 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 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 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!’