In 1860, Marx was forced again to interrupt his work of political economy. The reason for this new suspension was a violent conflict with Carl Vogt [1817–1895]. Representative of the left in the National Assembly of Frankfurt during 1848–1849, Vogt was, at the time, professor of natural sciences in Geneva, where he lived in exile. In the spring of 1859, he published the pamphlet Studies on the Present Situation in Europe, which articulated a Bonapartist foreign-policy outlook.1 In June of the same year, an anonymous flyer appeared which denounced the intrigues of Vogt in favour of Napoleon III, especially his attempts to bribe some journalists to furnish philo-Bonapartist versions of contemporary political events. The accusation – which was later shown to be the work of Karl Blind, a German journalist and writer who had emigrated to London – was taken up by the weekly Das Volk [The People], which counted Marx and Engels among its contributors, and by the Augsburg daily Allgemeine Zeitung [General Newspaper]. This induced Vogt to file a lawsuit against the German daily, which could not rebut the charge due to the anonymity in which Blind wished to remain. Although the libel suit failed, Vogt was the moral victor in the whole affair. Thus, in publishing his account of the events – My Case Against the Allgemeine Zeitung (1859) – he accused Marx of betraying the workers:
He laughs at the fools who blindly repeat his proletarian catechism after him […]. The only men he respects are aristocrats, those who are pure aristocrats, and are conscious of being so. To oust them from power he requires a force, which he can find only in the proletariat. This is why his system is tailored to fit that force.2
Vogt also wrote that Marx had inspired a plot against him, and he charged Marx of being the leader of the ‘Brimstone Gang’,3 a band that lived by blackmailing those who had participated in the revolutionary uprisings of 1848, threatening to reveal the names of those who had not paid them to be silent:
I say quite bluntly: everyone who engages in political machinations with Marx and his associates will sooner or later fall into the hands of the police. For these machinations are no sooner under way than they are made known and betrayed to the secret police and hatched out by them as soon as the time appears to be ripe. […] The instigators, Marx & Co., are of course sitting in London out of reach.4
Vogt described the ‘Brimstone Gang’ as a group of ‘people who, after being scattered throughout Switzerland, France and England, gradually congregated in London, and there they revered Mr Marx as their visible leader’.5 According to Vogt, ‘their slogan [was] “Social Republic, Workers’ Dictatorship” [and] their business [was] establishing contacts and hatching plots’.6 The Genevan professor warned against:
the machinations of a small group of depraved men whose aims and efforts are all directed toward seducing the worker away from his job, implicating him in conspiracies and communist intrigues, and finally, after living from the sweat of his brow, driving him cold-bloodedly to his destruction. Now once again this small group is using every possible method to ensnare the workers’ associations in its toils. Whatever they may say, you may rest assured that their true aim [was] to exploit the worker for their own selfish ends and finally to abandon him to his fate.7
In fact, Marx had not heard of this ‘Brimstone Gang’ before the appearance of Vogt’s book. One of the most faithful and accurate statements about the real face of this group was written by the German revolutionary of 1848 Johann Phillipp Becker [1809–1886]:
This company, essentially a company of idlers, was referred to jestingly and mockingly as the Brimstone Gang. It was a club which consisted, as it were, of a motley crowd brought together by chance; it had neither president nor programme, neither statute nor dogma. There is no question of its having been a secret society, or of its having had any political or other goal to pursue systematically; they merely wanted to show off and that with openness and frankness that knew no bounds. Nor did they have any connection with Marx, who for his part could certainly have known nothing of their existence and whose socio-political views moreover diverged widely from theirs. […] Who would have thought that after ten years’ slumber the long-forgotten Brimstone Gang would be set alight once more by Professor Vogt in order to ward off imagined aggressors by spreading a foul stench which was then transmitted by obliging journalists with great enthusiasm.8
Besides having an echo in France as well as England, the London Daily Telegraph reported Vogt’s accusations. Marx took his revenge later, when he had the chance to write what he thought about this British newspaper:
By means of an ingenious system of concealed plumbing, all the lavatories of London empty their physical refuse into the Thames. In the same way, every day the capital of the world spews out all its social refuse through a system of goose quills, and it pours out into a great central paper cloaca – the Daily Telegraph. Liebig9 rightly criticizes the senseless wastefulness, which robs the Thames of its purity and the English soil of its manure. […] At the entrance, which leads to the sewer, the following words are written in sombre colours: ‘Hic quisquam faxit oletum!’,10 or as Byron translated it so poetically, ‘Wanderer, stop and – piss!’11
Vogt’s published account was quite successful in Germany and created a sensation in liberal newspapers: ‘The jubilation of the bourgeois press is, of course, unbounded.’12 Berlin’s National-Zeitung [National Newspaper] published a summary in two long editorials in January 1860, and Marx consequently sued the newspaper for libel. However, the Royal Prussian High Tribunal rejected the complaint, declaring that the articles did not exceed the limits of allowed criticism and did not constitute an offence. Marx’s sarcastic comment on the judgement was: ‘like the Turk who cut off the Greek’s head without intending to hurt him’.13
Not allowed to defend himself in open court, Marx decided that the dishonourable infamies directed against him and his ‘party comrades’ by Vogt required a ‘literary refutation now that the road to a public rebuttal in the courts ha[d] been definitively barred’.14
Vogt’s text skilfully mixed real events with others wholly invented, so as to plant doubts regarding the real history of emigration among those who were not acquainted with all the facts. In order to protect his reputation, Marx therefore felt obliged to organize his own defence, and so in late February 1860 he began to gather material for a book against Vogt. He adopted two paths. Above all, he wrote dozens of letters to militants with whom he had had political relationships during and since 1848, with the aim of obtaining from them all possible documents regarding Vogt.15 At the end of this work, Marx wrote of Vogt’s skunk-like ‘shameless impertinence’ in accusing him and his friends, who had always sacrificed their ‘private interests to defend those of the working class’, of living ‘from the sweat of the workers’ brow’:
In America there is a small animal called a skunk, which has only one method of defending itself at moments of extreme danger: its offensive smell. When attacked it releases a substance from certain parts of its body, which, if it touches your clothes, will ensure that they have to be burnt and, if it touches your skin, will banish you for a period from all human society. The smell is so horribly offensive that when hunters see that their dogs have accidentally started a skunk they will hurriedly take to their heels in greater panic than if they had found that a wolf or a tiger was pursuing them. For powder and lead is an adequate defence against wolves and tigers, but no antidote has been found to the a posteriori of a skunk.16
Beyond the many polemical passages, in order better to illustrate the politics of the principal European states and to reveal the reactionary role played by Bonaparte, Marx carried out vast studies on the political and diplomatic history of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.17 The latter is doubtless the most interesting part of the work and – along with the section reconstructing the history of the Communist League18 – the only part that still has value for the contemporary reader, beside the pleasure of (re)discovering Marx’s rhetorical art.
At any rate, as was always the case with Marx, his studies greatly increased the size of the book, which grew ‘without [his] noticing it’.19 Moreover, the time needed to complete the work kept increasing. In fact, although Engels urged him – ‘Do try and be a bit superficial for once, so that you get it done in time’20 – and wrote to Jenny Marx: ‘We’re forever producing truly splendid things, but take care to see that they never appear on time, and so they are all flops. […] An immediate riposte to Vogt three sheets long would, after all, have been of far greater value than anything that has since been done. Insist for all you’re worth on something being done – and done immediately – about a publisher, and on the pamphlet 9 being finished at long last’.21 – Marx decided to finish it only in September.
Marx had wanted to entitle the book ‘Dâ-Dâ-Vogt’22 to evoke the similarity of views between Vogt and the Bonapartist Arab journalist Dâ Dâ Roschaid, a contemporary. The latter, in translating Bonapartist pamphlets into Arabic on order of the Algerian authorities, had defined emperor Napoleon III as ‘the sun of beneficence, the glory of the firmament’23 and to Marx nothing appeared more appropriate for Vogt than the epithet of ‘German Dâ-Dâ’.24 However, Engels convinced him to opt for the more comprehensible Herr Vogt.
Further problems involved the book’s place of publication. Engels strongly urged publishing the book in Germany: ‘You must at all costs avoid having your pamphlet 6 printed in London. […] The experience is one we have been through hundreds of times with émigré literature. Always the same ineffectuality, always money and labour gone down the drain – not to mention the irritation.’25 Nevertheless, since no German publisher became available, Marx had the book published in London by Petsch, and, what is more, this was only made possible by a collection made to pay its expense. Engels commented that ‘printing in Germany [would have been] preferable and could undoubtedly have been arranged[;] a German publisher [being] in a much stronger position to break the conspiracy of silence’.26
The rebuttal of Vogt’s accusations occupied Marx for an entire year, obliging him to completely neglect his economic studies, which according to his contract with the Berlin publishing house of Duncker were to continue with the sequel to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). Before the undertaking started, Engels understood its ‘dangerousness’. In January 1860, he had tried to convince Marx to concentrate exclusively on his work, which – in his opinion – would have been the only real instrument to defeat the opponents of the time and advance anti-capitalist theory:
I believe that if, despite Vogt and Co., we are to keep our end up so far as the public is concerned, we shall do it through our scientific work. […] In Germany itself direct political and polemic action, as our party understands it, is a sheer impossibility. So, what remains? Either we hold tongues or we make efforts that are known only to the immigration and the American Germans but not to anyone in Germany, or else we go on as we have begun, you in your first instalment [A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] and I in Po and Rhine. […] The early appearance of your 2nd instalment is obviously of paramount importance in this connection and I hope that you won’t let the Vogt affair stop you from getting on with it. Do try for once to be a little less conscientious with regard to your own stuff; it is, in any case, far too good for the wretched public. The main thing is that it should be written and published; the shortcomings that catch your eye certainly won’t be apparent to the jackasses; and, when time becomes turbulent, what will it avail you to have broken the whole thing before you have even finished the section on capital in general? I am very well aware of all the other interruptions that crop up, but I also know that the delay is due mainly to your own scruples. Come to that, it’s surely better that the thing should appear, rather than that doubts like these should prevent its appearing at all.27
Despite these strong recommendations, the frenzy that drove Marx during this affair also infected those closest to him. His wife Jenny found Herr Vogt a source of ‘endless pleasure and delight’; Lassalle greeted the text as ‘a magisterial thing in every way’;28 Wilhelm Wolff said ‘it is a masterpiece from beginning to end’;29 and even Engels declared the work to be ‘the best polemic work you have ever written’.30
Many acquaintances of Marx, as the letters included in Herr Vogt show, had tried to dissuade him from undertaking this work. The Russian journalist Nikolai Ivanovich Sazonov [1815–1862] asked Marx to
ignore all this wretched pettiness; all serious men, all scrupulous men are on your side, but they expect something other than sterile polemics from you; they would like to study the continuation of your admirable work as soon as possible. […] Keep in good health and as in the past for the enlightenment of the world without concerning yourself with petty stupidities and petty acts of cowardly malice.31
Bartholomäus Szemere [1812–1869], former minister of the interior and head of the revolutionary Hungarian government of 1849, asked him: ‘Is it really worth your while to bother your head with all this tittle-tattle?’32 Finally, the teacher and political activist Peter Imandt tried to dissuade him by arguing: ‘I would not like to be condemned to write about it and I shall be most astonished if you can bring yourself to immerse your hand in such a brew.’33
Marx’s principal biographers unanimously consider this work to have been a notable waste of time and energy.34 One of its most striking features is Marx’s frequent use of literary references in his argument: for example, Pedro CalderÓn de la Barca [1600–1681], William Shakespeare [1564–1616], Dante Alghieri [1265–1321], Alexander Pope [1688–1744], Cicero [106 BC–43 BC], Matteo Maria Boiardo [1441–1494], Johann Fischart [1545–1591], Laurence Sterne [1713–1768] and various sources from Middle-High German literature. Otherwise who appear include: Virgil [70 BC–19 BC], figures from the Bible, Johann C. F. Schiller [1759–1805], George G. Byron [1788–1824], Victor Hugo [1802–1885], and, of course, his beloved Miguel de Cervantes [1547–1616], Voltaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine and Honoré de Balzac.35 However, these citations – and the precious time employed to insert them into the text – did not simply respond to Marx’s wish to demonstrate the superiority of his culture as against that of Vogt, nor to an attempt to make the pamphlet more enjoyable to the readers through satire.
They reflect two essential characteristics of Marx’s personality. The first is the great importance he attributed throughout his life to style and structure in his works, even in the minor or merely polemical ones, such as Herr Vogt. The mediocrity of the great bulk of the writings with which he clashed in so many battles, their inferior form, their uncertain and ungrammatical construction, their illogical formulations and the presence of many errors always aroused his indignation.36 Thus, alongside the conflict over content, he inveighed against the intrinsic vulgarity and lack of quality in his adversaries’ works and wanted to show them not only the correctness of what he wrote but also the best way of doing it.
The second typical characteristic, evidenced throughout the imposing preparatory work for Herr Vogt, is the aggressivity and unrestrained virulence, which he directed at his primary adversaries. Whether they were philosophers, economists or political militants, and whether they were called Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Vogt, Lassalle or Mikhail Bakunin, Marx wanted in essence to destroy them, to demonstrate in every way possible the groundlessness of their concepts, to compel them to surrender by making it impossible for them to object to his assertions. Thus, under this impulse, he was tempted to bury his antagonists under mountains of critical arguments, and when he was seized by this fury to the point of making him lose sight even of his project of critique of political economy, then he no longer contented himself ‘only’ with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, David Ricardo or with citing historical events, but made use of Aeschylus [525 BC–456 BC], Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
Herr Vogt was a kind of fateful coincidence of these two components of his character. A short circuit caused by one of the most glaring examples of the literary slovenliness so loathed by Marx, and by his will to destroy the enemy who, through lies, had threatened his credibility and attempted to sully his political history.
With this book, Marx hoped to create a sensation and did everything to get the German press to speak of it. However, the newspapers and Vogt himself paid absolutely no attention: ‘the dogs […] want to kill the thing with silence’.37 Also, ‘the appearance of a much abridged French version, which is now in press’38 was blocked when the volume was the target of censorship and included in the list of prohibited books. During the lifetimes of Marx and Engels, no other edition of Herr Vogt appeared, and only short selected passages were reprinted.
Contributing to the delay of Marx’s work and terribly complicating his personal situation were his two eternal sworn enemies: poverty and illness. This period, in fact, was one in which Marx’s economic situation became truly desperate. Besieged by the claims of his many creditors and with the constant shadow of injunctions by the broker and the judicial official, on his door, he complained to Engels: ‘how I shall continue to make shift here I can’t imagine, for the rates, school, house, grocer, butcher and God knows what else are denying me any further respite’.39 At the end of 1861, the situation became even more desperate, and to survive, aside from being able to count on the constant help of his friend – to whom he showed immense gratitude ‘for the outstanding proofs of friendship’40 – Marx was obliged to pawn ‘everything that was not actually nailed down’.41 To his friend, as always, he wrote: ‘If I were quit of this wretched situation and did not see my family oppressed by miserable adversities, how overjoyed I would be at the fiasco of the Decembrist financial system, so long and so frequently prognosticated by me in the [New-York] Tribune.’42 And when, at the end of December, he sent him his New Year’s greetings, he said, ‘If it’s anything like the old one, I, for my part, would sooner consign it to the devil’.43
The disheartening financial problems were promptly accompanied by health problems, to which the former contributed. The deep depression which affected Marx’s wife Jenny for many weeks, made her more vulnerable to contracting smallpox with which she was taken ill at the end of 1860, with serious risk to her life. Throughout the whole illness and convalescence of his companion, Marx was constantly at her bedside and only resumed his own activities when Jenny was out of danger. During this period, as he wrote Engels, work was completely out of the question: ‘the only occupation that helps me maintain the necessary quietness of mind is mathematics’44 – one of the great intellectual passions of his life. Moreover, a few days later, he added that a circumstance that had ‘greatly helped [was] a severe toothache’. After extracting a tooth, the dentist had by mistake left a chip in his mouth, which gave him a face that was ‘swollen and painful along with a half-closed throat’. And how did this help him? Well, this is how, Marx in fact said stoically: ‘This physical pressure contributes much to the disablement of thought and hence to one’s powers of abstraction for, as Hegel says, pure thought or pure being or nothingness is one and the same thing.’45 Despite these problems, these weeks afforded him the opportunity to read many books, among them Charles Darwin’s [1809–1882] On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), printed just one year previously. The comment in the letter Marx sent to Engels was destined to provoke discussion among armies of scholars and socialist militants: ‘Although developed in the crude English fashion, this is the book which, in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views.’46
Following this period, at the beginning of 1861, Marx’s condition worsened because of an inflammation of the liver that had affected him in the previous summer: ‘I am as tormented as Job, though not as god-fearing’.47 In particular, being bent over caused him great pain and he was forbidden to write. Thus, to overcome the ‘highly disgusting condition, which incapacitate[d him to] work’,48 he took refuge again in literature: ‘for recreation in the evenings I have been reading Appian’s Civil Wars of Rome in the original Greek. A most valuable book. […] Spartacus emerges as the most capital fellow in the whole history of antiquity. A great general (not a Garibaldi), of noble character, a real representative of the proletariat of ancient times.’49
Having recuperated from his illness by the end of February 1861, Marx repaired to Zalt-Bommel in Holland to seek a solution to his own financial difficulties. There, he received help from his uncle Lion Philips [1794–1866], businessman and brother of the father of the future founder of the lamp factory, the ancestor of one of the world’s most important producers of electrical equipment, who agreed to advance him 160 pounds sterling from his future maternal inheritance. From here Marx clandestinely went to Germany, where for four weeks he was Lassalle’s guest in Berlin. Lassalle had repeatedly urged collaboration between the two on the founding of a ‘party’ organ, and now, with the amnesty decree of January 1861, the conditions were present for Marx to regain his Prussian citizenship – annulled after his expulsion in 1849 – and to move to Berlin. However, Marx’s sceptical view of Lassalle prevented the project from ever being seriously considered.50 Back home from his journey, he described to Engels the German intellectual and militant in these terms:
Lassalle, dazzled by the esteem earned him in certain learned circles by his Heraclitus 19 and, in another circle, consisting of spongers, by his good wine and food, doesn’t know, of course, that he is of ill repute with the public at large. And then his intractability; his obsession with the ‘speculative concept’ (the fellow actually dreams of a new Hegelian philosophy raised to the second power, which he intends to write), his inoculation with early French liberalism, his arrogant pen, importunity, tactlessness, etc. If subjected to rigid discipline, Lassalle might be of service as one of the editors. Otherwise, we would simply make fools of ourselves.51
Engels’s judgement was no less sharp: ‘the man is incorrigible’.52 In any case, Marx’s request for citizenship was quickly rejected, and since he never had himself naturalized in England, he remained stateless for the rest of his life.
Marx’s correspondence supplies entertaining accounts of this German sojourn, which helps us to understand his character. His hosts, Lassalle and his companion Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt [1805–1881], did their utmost to organize for him a series of activities, which only his letters show how deeply he detested. From a brief account of the first days spent in the city, we see him up against high society. On Tuesday evening, he was among the audience at a ‘Berlin comedy, full of Prussian self-glorification […] altogether a disgusting affair’. On Wednesday, he was obliged to be present at three hours of ballet at the opera – ‘a really mortally boring thing’ – and, what is more, ‘horribile dictu’,53 ‘in a box close to that of “handsome Wilhelm”’,54 the King in person. On Thursday, Lassalle gave a luncheon in his honour, at which some ‘celebrities’ were present. Anything but cheered by the occasion, Marx gave this description of his neighbour at table, the literary editor Ludmilla Assing [1821–1880]: ‘she 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, constantly trying to say something extraordinary, playing at false enthusiasm, and spitting at her audience during the trances of her ecstasis’.55 He wrote to Carl Siebel [1836–1868], Rhenish poet and distant relative of Engels: ‘I am bored stiff here. I am treated as a kind of lion and am forced to see a great many professional “wits”, both male and female. It’s awful.’56 Later, he could not deny to Lassalle that for him cosmopolitan London exerted ‘an extraordinary fascination’,57 although he admitted that he lived ‘a hermit’s life in this gigantic place’.58 And so, having passed through Elberfeld, Bremen, Cologne, his own Trier, and then again through Holland, he arrived home at the end of April.
Awaiting him was his ‘Economics’. In June 1859, Marx had published the first instalment of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and was intending to follow it with a second as soon as possible. Notwithstanding his customary optimism – in September 1860 he wrote to Lassalle: ‘I think that second part may very likely come out before Easter’59 – events ensured that two years would pass before he was able to return to his studies. He was profoundly frustrated and complained to Engels in July: ‘I’m not progressing as fast as I should like, owing to much domestic trouble’;60 and again in December: ‘My writing is progressing, but slowly. Circumstances being what they were, there was, indeed, little possibility of bringing such theoretical matters to a rapid close. However, the thing is assuming a much more popular form, and the method is much less in evidence than in first part.’61
In the last phase of 1861, Marx resumed his collaboration with the New-York Tribune and wrote for the Viennese liberal daily Die Presse [The Press], a paper that was one of the most popular in the German language, with 30,000 subscribers and the largest circulation in Austria. Most of his correspondence in this period centred around the Civil War in the United States. In this war, according to Marx, ‘the struggle played out between the highest form of popular self-government ever realized up to now and the most abject form of human slavery known to history’.62 This interpretation makes clear, more than anything else can, the abyss that separated him from Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) who had refused the offer from the U. S. Union government to take up a command post in the army, because he felt that the war was only a power conflict and did not have to do with the emancipation of the slaves. Regarding this viewpoint and the attempted initiative at reconciliation between the two sides, Marx commented to Engels: ‘Garibaldi, the jackass, has made a fool of himself by a solidarity letter to the Yankees’.63
In his articles, moreover, Marx analysed the economic impact of the American conflict on England, specifically examining the development of commerce, the financial situation, as well as the opinions running through English society. As regards this point, an interesting reference is also contained in a letter to Lassalle: ‘The whole of the official press in England is, of course, in favour of the slaveholders. They are the selfsame fellows who have wearied the world with their antislave trade philanthropy. But cotton, cotton!’64
As always in the letters to Lassalle, Marx developed various reflections regarding one of the political themes on which he lavished his greatest attention in those days: the violent opposition to Russia and its allies Henry Palmerston [1784–1865] and Louis Bonaparte [1778–1846]. In particular, Marx made an effort to clarify to Lassalle the legitimacy of the convergence in this battle between their ‘party’ and that of David Urquhart, a Tory politician with romantic views. Concerning the latter, who had the audacity to republish, for anti-Russian and anti-Whig purposes, Marx’s articles against Palmerston, which had been published by the official organ of the English Chartists, he wrote:
He is […] subjectively reactionary […] this in no way precludes the movement in foreign policy, of which he is the head, from being objectively revolutionary. [… It] is to me a matter of complete indifference, just as in a war against Russia, say, it would be a matter of indifference to you whether, in firing on the Russians, the motives of your neighbour in the firing-line were black, red and gold or revolutionary.65
Marx continued: ‘It goes without saying that, in foreign policy, there’s little to be gained by using such catchwords as “reactionary” and “revolutionary”.’66
The first known photograph of Marx dates back to 1861.67 The image shows him standing with hands leaning on a chair in front of him. His thick hair is already white, while his dense beard is jet black. His resolute look does not betray the bitterness of the defeats he suffered and the many difficulties that gripped him, but rather the steadfastness that characterized him throughout his life. And yet, unease and melancholy touched even him who wrote in the same period the photograph was taken: ‘To help overcome the intense annoyance I feel about my in every respect unsettled situation, I am reading Thucydides [460 BC–400 BC]. At least, these Ancients remain ever new.’68
1In 1870, among the documents in the French archives published by the republican government after the end of the Second Empire, proof was found that Vogt was on the payroll of Napoleon III. The latter, in fact, remitted 40,000 francs from his secret fund to Vogt in August 1859. See Papiers et correspondance de la famille impériale. Édition collationnées sur le texte de Vimprìmerie nationale, vol. II. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1871, p. 161.
2Karl Marx, Herr Vogt, in MECW, vol. 17, p. 89.
3Ibid., p. 28.
4Ibid., p. 48.
5Ibid., p. 28.
6Carl Vogt, Mein Prozess gegen die Allgemeine Zeitung: Stenographischer Bericht, Dokumente, und Erläuterungen. Genf: Selbst-Verlag des Verfassers 1859, as quoted in Marx, Herr Vogt, p. 29.
7Marx, Herr Vogt, p. 69.
8Ibid., p. 61.
9Justus von Liebig [1803–1873] was an important German chemist.
10Translation: ‘Here it is permitted to make bad odours!’
11Marx, Herr Vogt, p. 243.
12Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 31 January 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 13.
13Marx, Herr Vogt, p. 272.
14Ibid., p. 26. Moreover, the analysis of this ‘concoction’ gave Marx ‘the opportunity to dissect an individual who stands for a whole trend’, ibid.
15On the importance of these letters as a means of political communication between the revolutionary militants of 1848–1849, and to comprehend the conflict between Marx and Vogt from a general perspective – that is, not only from Marx’s own point of view, which is the main purpose of the present essay – see Christian Jansen, ‘Politischer Streit mit harten Bandagen. Zur brieflichen Kommunikation unter den emigrierten Achtundvierzigern – unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Controverse zwischen Marx und Vogt’, in Jürgen Herres and Manfred Neuhaus (eds), Politische Netzwerke durch Briefkommunikation. Berlin: Akademie, 2002, which examines the political motivations behind Vogt’s support for Bonaparte. The chapter also includes an appendix, consisting of letters written by Vogt as well as others addressed to him. Also interesting, since they are free of the conventional and often doctrinal interpretation by Marxists, are the writings of Jacques Grandjonc, and Hans Pelger, ‘Gegen die ‘Agentur Fazy/Vogt. Karl Marx’ Herr Vogt’, in Marx-Engels-Forschungsberichte, no. 6, 1990; Georg Lommels, ‘Die Wahrheit über Genf: Quellen und textgeschichtliche Anmerkungen’, in Marx-Engels-Forschungsberichte, vol. 1990, n. 6, pp. 37–68; and Lommels, ‘Les implications de l’affaire Marx-Vogt’, in Jean-Claude Pont, Daniele Bui, Françoise Dubosson and Jan Lacki (eds), Carl Vogt (1817–1895). Science, philosophie et politique. Chêne-Bourg: Georg, 1998, pp. 67–92.
16Marx, Herr Vogt, pp. 68–9.
17This research resulted in the six notebooks containing passages from books, journals and newspapers of widely varying orientations. This material – still unpublished – is useful to see the way in which Marx used the results of his studies in his own writing. See in particular IISH, Marx-Engels Papers, B 93, B 94, B 95, B 96.
18See Marx, Herr Vogt, pp. 78–99.
19Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 6 December 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 225.
20Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 29 June 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 170.
21Friedrich Engels to Jenny Marx, 15 August 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 179.
22Cf. Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 25 September 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 197.
23Cf. Marx, Herr Vogt, pp. 182–3.
24Ibid.
25Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 15 September 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 191.
26Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 5 October 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, pp. 204–5.
27Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 31 January 1860, pp. 13–14.
28Ferdinand Lassalle to Karl Marx, 19 January 1861, in MEGA2, vol. III/11, p. 321.
29Wilhelm Wolff to Karl Marx, 27 December 1860, in MEGA2, vol. III/11, p. 283.
30Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 19 December 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 231.
31Marx, Herr Vogt, p. 42.
32Ibid., p. 43.
33Ibid., p. 41.
34Recalling how various acquaintances of Marx had tried to dissuade him from undertaking this work, Franz Mehring [1846–1919] affirmed how ‘one would have hoped that he would have listened to these voices, [since] it blocked […] his great life’s work […] due to the costly waste of energy and time without any real gain’, Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, p. 296. Of the same mind, Karl Vorländer [1860–1928] wrote: ‘it is reasonable to doubt if, in this miserable affair which lasted a year, it was worth the effort to waste so much spiritual labor and so much money to write a small work of 191 pages crafted with so much wit, with sayings and quotations from all of world literature’, Karl Vorländer, Karl Marx, p. 189. Boris Nikolaevskii [1887–1966] and Otto Maenchen-Helfen [1894–1969] also reproached him: ‘Marx had employed more than a year to defend himself, by way of a libel suit, against the attempt to put an end to his political life […] only toward the end of 1861 was he able to resume his work on economics’, Boris Nikolaevskii and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, pp. 249–50. For David McLellan the polemic against Vogt ‘was a clear example of [Marx’s] ability to spend a great deal of energy on topics of very little importance and to waste his talent on invective’, David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and His Thought, p. 311. Francis Wheen asks: ‘to respond to the slander published in the Swiss press by an obscure politician like Carl Vogt, was it really necessary to write a 200-page book?’ And he noted that ‘the economic notebooks lay closed on his writing desk while their owner distracted himself with a spectacular but unnecessary quarrel’, Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A life, pp. 152 and 238. In defence of Marx it must be said that Vogt was not an unknown figure, but among the major exponents of the Frankfurt National Assembly of 1848–1849. On a contrary note, Carver has challenged the ‘standard view’ of Herr Vogt that has ‘downgrad[ed] Marx’s contemporary political success as against the longer-term interest’ for theory, cf. Terrell Carver, ‘Marx and the Politics of Sarcasm’, in Marcello Musto (ed.), Marx for Today, pp. 127–8. Nevertheless, Herr Vogt was a fiasco and Marx could have defended himself more quickly.
35In this connection, see the reflections of Siegbert S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature. London: Verso, 2011, p. 264: ‘In Herr Vogt Marx is incapable of treating any political or social phenomenon without referring to a work of world literature’; and his indication that this text can be studied as ‘an anthology of the various methods adopted by Marx to incorporate literary allusions and quotations into his polemics’, ibid., p. 266. Also see Ludovico Silva, Lo stile letterario di Marx. Milan: Bompiani, 1973.
36On this point, see once again the brilliant observations of Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, p. 261.
37Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 January 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 249.
38Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 16 May 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 290.
39Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 29 January 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 252.
40Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 27 February 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 266.
41Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 30 October 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 324.
42Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 November 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 328.
43Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 27 December 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 338.
44Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 23 November 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 216.
45Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 28 November 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 220.
46Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 19 December 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 232. The debate on Marx and Darwin has for a long time been vitiated by the myth that Marx wanted to dedicate Capital to the English naturalist. In order to reconstruct correctly this affair, see Lewis S. Feuer, ‘Is the “Darwin-Marx Correspondence” Authentic?’, Annals of Science, vol. 32 (1975), n. 1, pp. 1–12; Margaret A. Fay, ‘Did Marx Offer to Dedicate Capital to Darwin? A Reassessment of the Evidence’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 39 (1978), pp. 133–46; and Ralph Colp Jr., ‘The Myth of the Darwin-Marx Letter’, History of Political Economy, vol. 14 (1982), n. 4, pp. 461–82.
47Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 January 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 247.
48Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 January 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 250.
49Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 27 February 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 265.
50For more information on Marx’s stay in Berlin, see Rolf Dlubek, ‘Auf der Suche nach neuen politischen Wirkungsmöglichkeiten: Marx 1861 in Berlin’, Marx-Engels Jahrbuch, vol. 2004, pp. 142–75.
51Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 7 May 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 281.
52Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 6 February 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 257.
53Karl Marx to Antoinette Philips, 24 March 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, pp. 270–1.
54Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 10 May 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 288.
55Karl Marx to Antoinette Philips, 24 March 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 271.
56Karl Marx to Carl Siebel, 2 April 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 273.
57Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 7 May 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 281.
58Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 8 May 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 284.
59Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 15 September 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 193.
60Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 20 July 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 315.
61Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 9 December 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 333.
62Karl Marx, ‘The London Times on the Orleans Princes in America’, in MECW, vol. 19, p. 30. On Marx’s conception of slavery see Wilhelm Backhaus, Marx, Engels und die Sklaverei. Dusseldorf: Schwann, 1974.
63Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 10 June 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 293.
64Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 29 May 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 291.
65Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 1 or 2 June 1860, in MECW, vol. 41, pp. 152–3. Among the numerous studies dedicated to Marx’s political conception of Russia see David Ryazanov, ‘Karl Marx über den Ursprung der Vorherrschaft Russland in Europa’, in Die Neue Zeit, 1909, n. 5, pp. 1–64; and Bernd Rabehl, ‘Die Kontroverse innerhalb des russischen Marxismus über die asiatischen und westlich-kapitalistischen Ursprünge der Gesellschaft, des Kapitalismus und des zaristischen Staates in Russland’, in Ulf Wolter (ed.), Karl Marx. Die Geschichte der Geheimdiplomatie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Über den asiatischen Ursprung der russischen Despotie. Berlin: Olle & Wolter, 1977, pp. 112–78. See also Bruno Bongiovanni, Le repliche della storia. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989, in particular pp. 171–89.
66Ibid., p. 154.
67This is datable to the month of April; see MEGA2, vol. III/11, 465.
68Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 29 May 1861, in MECW, vol. 41, p. 292.
Karl Marx in London, April 1861. Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images.
Karl Marx and his daughter Jenny in Margate, March 1866. Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images.
Karl Marx and his daughter Jenny in London, 1869. World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo. Marx’s daughter Jenny wore a cross commemorating the Polish insurrection of 1864.