Authors: Ian Buruma
However, even the proudest Britons submitted to the tyranny of public opinion, of society’s prejudices, of fashion. And this led to the “conglomerated mediocrity” that Mill deplored. This is what made England seem so pinched, so bourgeois, so joyless, so narrowly conformist, so unimaginative, so relentlessly gray and hypocritical to generations of Continental Europeans. It is this that produced the tabloid press, sniffing at the merest whiff of scandal and hounding those unlucky enough to be caught at transgressing the norms of bourgeois society.
Herzen wrote: “The freer a country is from government interference, the more fully recognised its right to speak, to independence of conscience, the more intolerant grows the mob: public opinion becomes a torture chamber; your neighbour, your butcher, your tailor, family, club, parish, keep you under supervision and perform the duties of a policeman.”
This was a shrewd and not altogether flattering assessment. But if all Herzen had done was to point out the un-Byronic nature of Victorian society, he would not have done a great deal. He went further, however, and wondered whether only a people incapable of inner freedom could manage to have a liberal form of government. It is a peculiar paradox—that only a nation of inhibited conformists could live in freedom, that only a natural order based on custom and tradition could produce and sustain liberal institutions. And that these institutions were the products not of logic, or grand ideas, but of history, grown over time like a fine variety of rose, adapted perfectly to the conditions of the English clay. Although he deplored English conformism, this was something that appealed to Herzen. He was, after all, tired of grand ideas and prepared to see a certain elegance, even poetry in the growth of liberal institutions.
How different it all was from France! A Frenchman, he thought, would never understand the world of self-government, decentralization, expanding capriciously of its own initiative. English law, resting on an incongruous multiplicity of precedents, was like a dark forest, with majestic trees and an abundance of flowers and plants. How
could a Frenchman, used to “his little Codex, with its sanded paths, its clipped shrubs and policemen-gardeners in every avenue,” be expected to see the beauty of these luxuriant English woods?
Here the Russian Anglophile sounds like a classic English Tory philosopher, a Bagehot, an Oakeshott, a Roger Scruton before his time. In fact, of course, his ideas were very much of Herzen’s time, for it was then, in the wake of the European revolutions, that the shibboleths of the Enlightenment and 1789 were being most severely tested. All this organic language was a conservative antidote to ideas of universal salvation. Herzen’s rhapsody of the English landscape was far removed from Voltaire’s coconuts, which, after all, could in theory do well anywhere. But Herzen was not an abstract thinker. He was above all an observer, a superb journalist who tested his thoughts on reality. His admiration for the British law found its highest expression in his descriptions of how it worked in practice.
There was, for example, the case of Simon Bernard. Dr. Bernard was arrested in 1858 for his alleged involvement in a bomb plot against Napoleon III. Bernard was French, and although the bomb had been prepared on English soil, the French government made menacing noises. This frightened English businessmen with interests in France. Since unprincipled cowardice was in Herzen’s opinion the natural consequence of capitalism, Lord Palmerston’s government felt the French had to be appeased; hence Bernard’s arrest, hence the introduction of a Conspiracy Bill aimed at politically active foreigners, hence the confiscation of an obscure pamphlet concerning the pros and cons of tyrannicide, and hence the arrest of an even more obscure Polish exile whose name was amongst the subscribers.
The interesting thing was the response of the British people. A massive demonstration was planned in Hyde Park, where people would gather from all over Britain to petition the queen. Palmerston was called a traitor. Not that the protesters had any special love for foreigners, but they cherished the right of asylum, as they did their right to free speech. Palmerston was threatening an institution. And Palmerston lost: the bill was dropped, and Lord Derby took over as prime minister. But he was just as fearful as his predecessor of trouble with France. It was bad for business. So to restore good relations, everything possible was done to see Bernard hang.
Herzen attended the court case. He was astonished by the stamina
of judge and jury, which he put down to the Englishman’s habit of overeating and galloping across hedges and fields. He was amused but also impressed by the antiquated pomp of the court, with its rituals, its wigs, and its robes. It quickly became clear under cross-examination that the witnesses for the prosecution were shifty French agents, paid to discredit Bernard. The judge, a dry Scot whom Herzen likened to the wolf who had just consumed Little Red Riding-Hood’s grandmother, summed up at length. The jury declared Bernard not guilty. As soon as the verdict was announced by telegraph, messengers ran around the streets of every town and city, spreading the good news. Crowds gathered all over Britain to celebrate the acquittal. Members of the jury were mobbed by well-wishers on their way to the pub. Women cried, and men threw their hats up into the air. Even the policemen were happy. And so, wrote Herzen, “England celebrated a fresh triumph of her liberty!”
V
OLTAIRE
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S
A
NGLOPHILIA WAS
typical of eighteenth-century rationalism. He admired English thinking. Herzen was different. He liked the often irrational customs of English life; he had a taste for the Gothic complexities of English politics and law. Herzen said Britain, compared to France, was like Shakespeare versus Racine. Marx was his antithesis in this respect. Not that Marx disliked Shakespeare: he grew up reading Shakespeare, as well as Voltaire and Byron, and loved quoting from the famous soliloquies. Family picnics on Hampstead Heath would begin with a lunch of ale and cold beef, followed by duets sung with Engels, such as “Oh Strasburg, du wunderschöne Stadt,” and end with citations from Shakespeare. Marx’s problem with Britain was not cultural; it was simply that Britain refused to conform to Marx’s blueprint for the world. Things never happened the way he predicted they would. The English forest defeated him.
Despite his dictum that Britain was a fine place, as long as you didn’t have to live there, Marx lived in London from 1849 until his death in 1883. Although a typical German bourgeois in his tastes (heavy food, heavy books, heavy humor), Marx and his family spent much of their lives in squalor. He wrote articles for the
New-York Daily Tribune
and various German newspapers, lectured here and there,
often for the German Workers’ Education Union, studied in the British Museum, and fulminated against everything.
He fulminated, for example, against the exiles who were at the American consul’s dinner. Mazzini and Kossuth were bourgeois Philistines. Mazzini in particular he denounced for “licking the arse of the bourgeoisie.” Herzen was bourgeois too, and a Russian bourgeois to boot, the worst possible combination in Marx’s eyes. He didn’t want Herzen on the International Committee; he refused even to sit on the same platform with him: “I am not of the opinion that ‘Old Europe’ can be rejuvenated by Russian blood.” He fulminated against his own friends too, including Wilhelm Liebknecht, father of Karl and founder of German trade unionism. Marx said Liebknecht was full of “South German sentimental haziness” and showed dangerous signs of sympathy for “philistine democracy.” And Marx fulminated against Britain.
Most of his fulminations are recorded in his journalism and his letters to Friedrich Engels, who, unlike Marx, cultivated an air of
gentlemanismo
. Marx favored a tone of heavy sarcasm, which later infected generations of party hacks from East Berlin to Beijing.
The Daily Telegraph
was not only a reactionary, bourgeois paper, but “a shit barge which only takes on politics as ballast” or “a sewer, whose editorials drip with all the social filth.” His picture of Britain was not entirely off the mark, but it was a crude caricature. In Britain, he said, everything was measured in “blood and gold”—the latter either inherited or for sale. Parliament was a sham, a tool of landlords and money-lords. The British army was a band of slaves, flogged daily with the cat-o’-ninetails soaked in urine: “The nine-tailed cat is the Cerberus guarding the treasure of the aristocracy.” By selling its offices to the highest bidder, the established church traded “in the ‘souls’ of the English people.”
Marx’s analysis of British politics was naturally couched in terms of class conflict and economics. The Tory aristocracy, protective of its landed wealth, was being challenged by the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie (the “Bankocracy” and “Millocracy”), which wanted to open the country to unfettered trade. As Marx put it: “Rent of land is conservative, profit is progressive; rent of land is national, profit is cosmopolitan; rent of land believes in the State Church, profit is a dissenter by birth.” The Whig aristocracy served as the advocate of bourgeois interests in Parliament, thereby ensuring its continuing monopoly on political power. But this was a hopeless quest in Marx’s
opinion, for the laws of time would exact their proper toll, and with the ascendancy of the Bankocracy and Millocracy, the Whigs would go down with the Tories into the great dustbin of history. This then would pit the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, and revolution would follow, as surely as night follows day. After all, the English workingmen were “the first sons of modern industry,” and they would be the first to launch the world revolution. They would end the universal tyranny of “capital-rule and wages-slavery,” and the rest of the world would follow their example.
In his reports for the
New-York Daily Tribune
Marx was forever announcing that the revolution was shortly at hand. A typical case was the Sunday Trading Bill riot in 1855. It started with the Beer Bill, introduced by pietists in Parliament. The earl of Shaftesbury, in particular, was worried that the English working people were staying away from church. This would never do. Where would it all end? In sloth and impudence, of course. The Beer Bill ensured that all places of entertainment would henceforth be shut on Sundays, except between 6:00 and 10:00
P.M
. The big brewery owners agreed to this after they were guaranteed a monopoly on the beer business through a license system. The next step in official piousness was the Sunday Trading Bill. Shops would be closed on Sundays too. The victims of such measures were not the upper classes, who hardly needed Sundays to do their shopping and didn’t frequent pubs. The victims were the working-class men and women, who had no other day to enjoy themselves. Sunday was their only day of liberty.
London society had the habit of showing off its finery on Sundays in Hyde Park, gliding along the Serpentine in high coaches and phaetons, doffing their hats and exchanging pleasantries as they passed one another. It was there that the Chartists decided to organize a protest meeting on the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-fourth of June. By midafternoon two hundred thousand men, women, and children had gathered round the Serpentine. There was nothing the police could do to chase them away. When the ladies and gentlemen arrived in their coaches-and-four, with liveried lackeys in front and behind, they were swiftly surrounded by the mob. For once Marx was inspired by the British people. The toffs were greeted by “a cacophony of grunting, hissing, whistling, squeaking, snarling, growling, croaking, shrieking, groaning, rattling, howling, gnashing sounds!”
The toffs didn’t know what had hit them. One fine old lady handed her prayer book to the crowd, as though it were a piece of cake. She was told to give it to her horse to read. A venerable gentleman was unwise enough to stick out his tongue. Ah, said someone in the crowd, he must be a parliamentary man, a windbag: “He fights with his own weapons!” So impressed was Marx by what he saw that he announced to his readers in New York the next day that
“the English Revolution began yesterday in Hyde Park”
(his italics). In fact, the laws were still in force when I first moved to London more than a century later.
Marx’s own background was bourgeois and Jewish. His father came from a line of rabbis but changed his name from Herschel to Heinrich, grew up on Voltaire and Lessing, converted to Christianity to cope with the anti-Jewish laws in 1816, and lived a secular life in Trier as a lawyer. His politics were those of the enlightened Prussian bourgeoisie: patriotic and monarchist. Heinrich Marx, then, tried to escape his ancestral world through discreet assimilation. His son Karl tried to escape from the same thing by declaring war on it. He hated the bourgeoisie and the Jews in equal measure. He associated Jews with greed, materialism, selfishness, lack of values, and parasitism, precisely the sort of things that Anglophobes associated with England, and anti-Americans with America. Judaism and economic liberalism, or what the French still like to call “Anglo-Saxon values,” are often confused. Marx, in any event, was an enemy of those “values.”
There were more or less genteel ways to express Marx’s brand of anti-Semitism. Marx often chose the less genteel. His friend Wilhelm Liebknecht quoted him as saying that “Judaism” had become universal and had turned “dispossessed Man and Nature into disposable, saleable objects, a prey to serfdom of egoistic wants, of barter.” He also said that “money is the zealous God of Israel, before whom no other god may be.” And that Hebrew was “the muse of stock exchange quotations.” He called his friend Ferdinand Lassalle, the German socialist, a “Jewish nigger” whose blood showed traces of African camp followers during the Exodus from Egypt. Marx imagined a world in which national, religious, ethnic, and class distinctions would cease to matter, or indeed would cease to exist at all. That is why the revolution had to come. Then he himself could no longer be classified as a bourgeois Jew, for there would be no more bourgeois Jews. As he put it to
Liebknecht: “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from the Jew.”