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Vogt had stirred up all the 'foggy gossip of the refugees'.79 He caused affidavits to be made left, right and centre, fired off at least fifty letters (that to his lawyer in Berlin alone is twenty printed pages) and entered into a 'secret and confidential'80 correspondence with the Daily Telegraph to try to get them to make amends. He started on the book in August but did not finish it until mid-November; both Jenny and Engels disapproved of the delay and considered Marx's approach much too thorough. It proved impossible to find a publisher in Germany and - despite Engels' warnings - Marx decided on a London publisher for whom Marx's book was his first commercial enterprise; Marx even optimistically persuaded him to agree to share the profits. What with the cost of the lawsuits, gathering material and printing, Marx found that he had spent about £100 to which Engels and Lassalle had to contribute heavily.
It took Marx a long time to decide on the title: he himself, supported by Jenny, favoured Da-Da Vogt, apparently on the grounds that it would 'puzzle the philistines',81 but Engels persuaded him to settle for the simpler Herr Vogt. The book was very long and described by Marx himself as 'a system of mockery and contempt'.82 Vogt, pillaried as a reincarnation of Sir John Falstaff, was pursued through two hundred closely printed pages whose style was so allusive that Engels recommended a resume after each chapter 'in order to present the general impression clearly to the Philistines'.83 Marx was at his most vituperative:
By means of an artificially hidden sewer system all the lavatories of London spew their physical filth into the Thames. By means of the systematic pushing of goose quills the world capital spews out all its social filth into the great papered central sewer called the Daily Telegraph.
Having transformed the social filth of London into newspaper articles, Levy transforms the articles into copper, and finally the copper into gold. Over the gate leading to this central sewer made of paper there can be read these words written di colore oscuro: 'hie.. . quisquam faxit oletum\ or as Byron so poetically translated it: 'Wanderer, stop and - piss!'84
Marx read passages aloud to Jenny and she found them highly amusing. Engels thought it better than the Eighteenth Brumaire and Lassalle called it 'a masterpiece in all respects'. However, few copies sold and subsequent generations have not shared the taste for vituperation so characteristic of mid-Victorian polemics. Disappointment at the book's failure was enhanced when the publisher went bankrupt and Marx was saddled with all the printing costs. Ten years later, following the abdication of Napoleon III, the final stroke was added to the tragi-comedy: the French provisional Government of 1870 published papers found in the Tuileries
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showing, almost beyond doubt, that Vogt did in fact receive subsidies from Napoleon and that Marx, for once in his career as a polemicist, was wholly justified.
III. M A R X A N D L A S S A L L E
During the early 1860s Marx's relationship to working-class politics in Germany was dominated by his relationship to Lassalle which was typical of the ambivalence that characterised all Marx's personal relationships. The son of a self-made Jewish tailor and seven years younger than Marx, Lassalle had become intimate with him during the 1848 troubles. Throughout the 1850s Lassalle had been extremely accommodating to Marx: he had offered to raise subscriptions to publish Marx's 'Economics' and also got him his job as London correspondent of the Neue Oder Zeitung. But Marx was not the man to appreciate favours and lent a ready ear to a series of accusations against Lassalle delivered by one Levy, a self-styled representative of the Diisseldorf workers who had already tried to convince Marx in late 1853 that a revolution was imminent in the Rhineland and paid him a second visit in 1856. According to Levy, Lassalle was only using the working-class movement for his personal affairs; he had compromised himself with the liberals, betrayed the workers and embezzled from friends. Engels was even readier than Marx to give credit to these accusations (although they were not supported by a shred of evidence) and recommended the breaking off of relations, declaring of Lassalle that 'his desire to push his way into polite society, to parvenir, to gloss over, if only for appearance's sake, the dirty Breslaw Jew with all kinds of pomade and greasepaint, was always disgusting'.85 Marx refused to reply to Lassalle's letters thereafter and only gave him a 'short and cool' answer when Lassalle offered him the possibility of writing articles for the Wiener Presse whose editor was Lassalle's cousin. Marx was also looking for a publisher for his 'Economics' and it was Lassalle again who acted as a very competent literary agent in the negotiations with Franz Duncker whose wife was Lassalle's mistress. Thus relations were temporarily restored: Marx complimented Lassalle on his recent publication Heraclitus (though he expressed himself differently to Engels) and Lassalle even turned to Marx for advice on the problem of duelling. Marx's curious reply was that, although duelling was irrational and 'a relic of a bygone culture, bourgeois society was so one-sided that, in opposition to it, certain feudal forms of expressing individuality are justified'.86
This co-operation was, however, soon disturbed by differences of
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opinion on the Franco-Austrian War of 1859. Immediately on its outbreak Engels had - again through the agency of Lassalle - published a pamphlet entitled Po and Rhine in which he declared that Bonaparte was interfering in his own interests in North Italy preliminary to an attack on the Rhine. Lassalle also published a pamplet, but his views were noticeably different: he considered that any purely nationalistic German war against France could only serve the cause of the reaction which would be increased enormously by an Austrian victory; Bonaparte was a bad man, but the cause he was supporting was good and anyway he was too weak to pose a serious threat to Germany; if it became plain that he had serious territorial designs in Italy, Prussia should retaliate with a war of liberation in Schleswig Holstein. Marx, who enthusiastically approved Engels' pamphlet and was obsessed by the fear of a Russian alliance with France and by the urgent necessity to unseat Bonaparte, called Lassalle's pamphlet 'an enormous blunder'.87 He wrote to Engels: 'we must now absolutely insist on party discipline or everything will be in the soup',88 and delivered Lassalle a long lecture on publishing his views without prior consultation. Events, however, showed that Lassalle had the more realistic view of the situation.
What made Marx even more annoyed was that he thought that Lassalle's pamphlet had been given priority by Duncker over his own Critique of Political Economy. And when Lassalle informed him of his intention to publish a two-volume work on economics, he attributed the ignoring of his Critique to Lassalle's influence, though he comforted himself with the thought that, to judge from Lassalle's Heraclitus, he would 'find to his cost that it is one thing to construct a critique of a science and thus for the first time to bring it to a point where a dialectic presentation is possible, and quite another to apply intimations of an abstract, ready-made system of logic'.89 Lassalle had not replied to Marx's lecture on party discipline, but by January i860 Marx felt the urgent need for assistance in his battle of words with Vogt and asked Engels to write Lassalle a diplomatic letter excusing his roughness. However, Lassalle refused to let himself be persuaded that Vogt was a Bonapartdst agent: although he sympathised with Marx's case, he thought it unwise to have attacked Vogt without firm proof; he also reproached Marx with his 'mistrust', whereupon Marx sent him - from Manchester where he was staying with Engels - an anonymous denunciation of Lassalle that he had received from Baltimore and also informed him that 'official complaints' from Dtisseldorf were now in the party archives.90 Lassalle replied in a justified outburst:
Why do you send me this stuff with so triumphant a mien, so proud a
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gesture? In order to prove to me how little you at least are mistrustful of me!
Heavens! N O T to believe such a cut-purse slander behind a man's back - but that is the most elementary of moral duties of man to man. To believe such slanders and such fatuities of me must be for any person of understanding, for any one who knows the least thing about me, a physical impossibility!!! And you think that, by not believing it, you are doing me a favour? You want to impute that to yourself as a merit?
The only conclusion I draw is a firm proof of your inclination to believe all possible evil of every man without evidence, if you count it as a merit, and think it proves something, that in this case you did not believe.91
Marx realised that he had gone too far and for the rest of 1861 he and Lassalle corresponded regularly and good-humouredly.
At the beginning of 1861, when Marx was at last rid of Herr Vogt, he began to toy with the idea of a definitive return to Prussia. In January 1861 Frederick William IV, who had been certified insane for the previous two years, died and was succeeded by his brother Wilhelm I who immediately declared a political amnesty. The conditions of the amnesty were not good: it only applied to those who had been convicted by Prussian courts and refugees had to rely on vague assurances. When Lassalle first proposed a renewal of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung backed by the money of his wealthy patron, the Countess von Hatzfeld, Marx was sceptical, thinking that 'the waves in Germany are not yet riding high enough to carry our ship'.92 Engels suggested that Lassalle launch a weekly and that Marx co-operate if the money were good enough. Although chary of collaborating in anything under Lassalle's control, Marx's income from the New York Daily Tribune was decreasing dramatically owing to the Civil War and he decided to go to Berlin to investigate possibilities. His financial straits obliged him in any case to go to Holland to see his uncle. Borrowing money for the trip from Lassalle he spent two weeks in Zaltbommel with the Philips - 'I have never known a better family in my life"" he wrote afterwards to his uncle - and managed to borrow £160 as an advance on his mother's estate. His uncle was, according to Marx, 'stubborn but very proud of my being an author'94 and Marx got Lassalle to write him the sort of letter that he could 'confidentially'95 show to his uncle to increase his reputation.
On his proceeding to Berlin, he was magnificently entertained for three weeks by Lassalle. He lived in 'a very beautiful house on one of the most beautiful streets of Berlin' and the countess, too, made a favourable impression on Marx: 'She is a very distinguished lady, no blue stocking,
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of great natural intellect, much vivacity, deeply interested in the revolutionary movement, and of an aristocratic laissez-aller very superior to the pedantic grimaces of professional femmes d'espritThere were visits to the theatre and the ballet (which bored Marx to death) and a dinner in Marx's honour where he was placed between the countess and the niece of Varnhagen von Ense. 'This Fraulein', he wrote to Antoinette Philips, 'is the most ugly creature I ever saw in my life, a nastily Jewish physiognomy, a sharply protruding thin nose, eternally smiling and grinning, always speaking poetical prose, playing at false enthusiasm, and spitting at her auditory during the trances of her ecstasis."'7 Marx did, however, manage to persuade the countess to start a press campaign against Blanqui's ill-treatment by the French police. The visit was prolonged since Marx was applying, with Lassalle's active assistance, for the recovery of his Prussian citizenship and the bureaucracy moved slowly. But Marx began to tire of Berlin society very quickly: 'I am treated as a sort of lion and compelled to meet many professionally "intellectual" ladies and gentleman.'98 He found the whole of Berlin engulfed in ennui: bickering with the police and the antipathy between civil and military authorities constituted the the sum of Berlin politics. Marx attended a session in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies and found it 'a curious mixture of bureaucracy and the school room';99 there was a general spirit of dissolution in the city: people of every rank thought a catastrophe inevitable and the next elections would yield a parliament in opposition to the King.
In these circumstances, Marx considered the time ripe for the foundation of a new paper, but he and Lassalle could not agree upon terms. Lassalle insisted that if Engels joined the editorial board in addition to himself and Marx, then Marx and Engels should have only one vote against his own. But, although Lassalle was supplying the money, Marx considered that he could only supply a useful service if he were kept 'under strong discipline'. He wrote to Engels:
Dazzled by the reputation that he has gained in certain learned circles through his 'Heraclitus' and in another circle of spongers through wine and cuisine, Lassalle is naturally unaware that he is discredited in the public at large. There is also his dogmatism, his obsession with the 'speculative concept' (the fellow even dreams of his writing a new Hegelian philosophy, raised to the second power), his infection with old French liberalism, his arrogant pen, importunity, tacdessness, etc.100
In the end, Marx left Berlin without receiving his Prussian nationality (in spite of a personal interview with the Prussian Chief of Police, again arranged by Lassalle) and without a definite decision one way or another on the paper. Marx at least had the satisfaction of finding his old friend