Frederick Engels, the son of a German industrialist who owned textile factories in Manchester, had met a fellow radical, Karl Marx, in Paris in 1844 when they were aged twenty-three and twenty-six, and together they developed the idea that the working class – which they called the proletariat – would become the engine of world revolution. Marx was the son of a Jewish lawyer from Triers, Herschel Marx, descended from a line of rabbis, who converted to Protestantism and changed his name to Heinrich. Marx was both heartbroken and impoverished by his father’s death, but he married a well-connected, intellectual aristocrat, Jenny von Westphalen, with whom he had already had three children. While her husband planned revolution, her brother was the Prussian interior minister who helped suppress it.
As both an industrialist and a lover – guided by his paramour, an Irish millworker named Mary Burns – Engels knew Mancunian workers, and he had money, enabling him to take Marx on a study tour of Manchester. Marx and Engels observed how industrialized cities were killing the working class: even after the improvements of medicine and food, life expectancy was falling. Liverpudlians died at twenty-five. Working-class Britons now lived seventeen years less than the upper classes, many of them killed by cholera. Doctors believed this was caused by ‘miasma’. In the USA, life expectancy had fallen by thirteen years between 1800 and 1850; in New York City child mortality was almost 50 per cent. Many mothers now gave birth in maternity units in hospitals, but as many as 10 per cent of mothers were dying – and it turned out that it was doctors themselves who (with the best intentions) were killing them.*
Just as improvements in healthcare and urban hygiene were about to launch a massive improvement in life expectancy, the two Germans, adapting Saint-Simon, saw the new system of capitalism as the culprit. In January 1848, they wrote their
In Vienna, Milan and Prague, Franz Josef overpowered the rebels, but Hungary embraced national independence, as did the Ottoman provinces of Wallachia and Moldova, aspirations that could easily spread to Nicholas’s Polish and Ukrainian subjects. The tsar occupied Bucharest and Moldavia and offered to crush Hungary. Franz Josef humiliatingly agreed; 190,000 Russian troops hacked their way into Budapest, and the young kaiser never forgave the arrogant tsar for his help. In Berlin, the Flounderer revoked his constitution and restored a limited version of his earlier power. Having enforced order in their own kingdoms, the dynasts watched France. The one name they did not want to hear was Napoleon.
Louis Napoleon, staying in a Parisian hotel in a country he scarcely knew and whose language he spoke with a German accent, had always believed in the magic of the name Bonaparte. At first he let his old uncle, the ex-king Jérôme, and two other cousins run for the National Assembly while he returned to London, where Chartist crowds, infected with the spirit of revolution, demonstrated for more democracy. Wellington, now seventy-nine, massed troops, and Bonaparte registered as a special constable. In Paris, Jérôme and the others were elected. Persigny stuck up posters across the city with Louis Napoleon’s picture and the message ‘
The workers of the National Workshops armed themselves, adopting red as the colour of revolution; the bourgeois panicked at this Red Menace. ‘The spectre of 1792, the sound of the guillotine, was heard,’ observed Gustave Flaubert, a young writer.* The war minister, General Cavaignac, crushed the rebels, who resisted fiercely. In the fighting, thousands were shot. Cavaignac became the favourite to win the first presidential election, but Louis Napoleon ran too, aided by a new brother he scarcely knew he had. When he was three, his mother had vanished to give birth to Auguste de Morny, who, a debonair player in politics, sex, finance and the Jockey Club, had supported Louis Philippe while he made a fortune in sugar beet. But now he joined his half-brother. Persigny and Morny offered all things to everyone – order and security, socialism and glory.
