Tea at Trianon: Karl Marx’s Shameful Life

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Karl Marx’s Shameful Life

From The Federalist:

The Marx family’s sentiments regarding their son’s profligate tendencies was shared by his wife, Jenny von Westphalen. She told him: “Karl, if you had only spent more time making capital instead of writing about it, we would have been better off.”

Indeed, only a year after “Communist Manifesto” was published, Marx’s landlord evicted him and his family. The landlord, Kengor tells us, was also frustrated with Karl’s grooming. “Washing, grooming, and changing his linens are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk,” notes one Prussian police report on him.
Even sadder, Marx earned so little money that in the winter of 1849-1850 they were forced to take refuge in a dilapidated boarding house. There, their infant child Heinrich Guido died. An eight-year-old son Edgar died in 1855.

Marx at one point admitted to Engles: “Every day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their graves, and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, torments, and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable.” It did not seem to dawn upon Marx that he was most to blame for their poverty and misfortune.

At one point a servant girl, Helene Demuth, who had been a housemaid for his wife’s family was sent to help the Marx family while they were living in Brussels in 1845. Marx never paid Demuth a penny. He did, however, initiate a long-running extramarital affair with her.

In June 1851, Demuth gave birth to a baby boy, Freddy. Marx refused to acknowledge that the child was his. Instead, Engels took responsibility for the boy. On his deathbed, Engels admitted that Freddy was indeed sired by Marx. (Read more.)