KARL MARX

45 2 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
circle, he quickly became notorious. He wrote to Kugelmann on 28 June
1871 that his Address 'is making the devil of a noise and I have the
honour to be at this moment the most abused and threatened man in
London. That really does me good after the tedious twenty-year idyll
in my den!" 29 The New York World sent a correspondent to interview
him at the beginning of July. In the interview Marx refuted convincingly
the more lurid of the rumours about the Commune. He said that the
International 'does not impose any particular form on political movements;
it only demands that these movements respect its aims'. 130 The
London Daily Telegraph and the New York Herald also interviewed Marx;
and he claimed to be under police surveillance even when he spent a few
days at Brighton. On the Marx household the Commune had a profoundly
depressing effect: many of their closest friends were involved in the
slaughter and soon they had to cope with floods of refugees and 'all
the nameless misery and unending suffering' 131 that they brought with
them. Inevitably the burden of relief fell on the International. The refugees,
wrote Jenny, 'were literally starving in the streets' and 'for more
than five months the International supported, that is to say held between
life and death, the great mass of the exiles'. 132 In addition to all the
business of the International, Marx found that he 'not only had to fight
against all the governments of the ruling classes, but also wage hand-tohand
battles with fat, forty-year-old landladies who attacked him when
one or other communard would be late with his rent'. 133
For all its notoriety, the International after the Commune was a spent
force: with the arrival of an apparently durable peace and the tendency
of European nations to become more interested in their internal affairs,
the impetus towards internationalism declined. Reaction could only be
met by better political organisation, and this could only be carried on
within national boundaries. The hope of revolution in France had been
destroyed and, with it, all chance of revolution in Europe. Moreover,
although men like Varlin had helped defeat Proudhonist views in the
International, their syndicalist opposition to political action was soon to
bring them into conflict with the General Council. The General Council
itself was much weakened by co-opting a large number of French refugees
who soon began to bicker among themselves in the same way as after
1848.
All three Marx daughters were intimately involved in the aftermath of
the Commune. Laura and Paul had just got out of Paris before it was
encircled by the Prussians. They went to Bordeaux where their third
child, a boy, was born in February 1871. Paul was active in the cause of
the Commune and both Jenny and Eleanor set off to help Laura, arriving
on 1 May. On the fall of the Commune the four adults and two children