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Monday 23 November 2009

Eat, drink and be communist

In a time of recession, Tristram Hunt celebrates the inspiration of Friedrich Engels, who saw no contradiction between socialist beliefs and aristocratic pleasures

In 1890 Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, celebrated his 70th birthday. ‘We kept it up till half past three in the morning,’ he boasted to Laura Lafargue, daughter of his old friend Karl Marx, ‘and drank, besides claret, sixteen bottles of champagne — that morning we had had 12 dozen oysters.’

This was not an isolated act of indulgence. During the 1870s his Primrose Hill home had become a popular venue for socialist excess. ‘On Sundays, Engels would throw open his house,’ recalled the communist August Bebel. ‘On those puritanical days when no merry men can bear life in London, Engels’s house was open to all, and no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning.’ Pilsner, claret, and vast bowls of Maitrank — a May wine flavoured with woodruff — were consumed while Engels sang German folk-songs or drunkenly recited ‘The Vicar of Bray’.

Engels’s personal exuberance was an expression of his political ideology: an almost Rabelaisian belief in the capacity of socialism to fulfil human pleasure. It was an attractive, seductive approach to progressive politics which has since been abandoned. In the 20th century, the myriad factions which Marx and Engels inspired systematically sucked the life out of left-wing politics. Composite motions, sensible dress, study groups and a paranoid avoidance of decadence — these were the attributes of proper socialists. But that was never how Engels envisioned it. He was the first, greatest and most unapologetic champagne communist.

Perhaps it was a reaction to a relentlessly prim childhood. The son of a reactionary, God-fearing capitalist, Engels was brought up in the Rhineland town of Barmen destined to join the family textile firm. But the prospect of Calvinist piety and bourgeois self-reserve rapidly lost its appeal. Sent as an apprentice to the more freewheeling city of Bremen, Engels’s thirst for enjoyment quickly became apparent. ‘We now have a complete stock of beer in the office; under the table, behind the stove, behind the cupboard, everywhere are beer bottles,’ he wrote to his sister Marie before going on to describe his hectic diary of dinner engagements, Beethoven concerts and fencing duels.

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