4. 17. 2025

A Family of Thinkers

Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher

What do you know of the work of Eleanor Marx? Of the impact of Jenny Marx’s or Laura Marx’s influence on Karl Marx? I asked my comrades at Raisons sociales if anyone, over their copious years of education, had even uttered their names?

Their answers were even more evasive than I’d have imagined. Maybe it was bad timing. When this essay first circulated online, I told my friends: Throw everything you’ve got at me. But that’s not what happened. Several political science professors wrote to me to congratulate me and to request more information on Eleanor. At least I could laugh when I answered them, “But you’re the specialist!”

What I mostly heard was that these women led “quite sad lives.” Dead children, poverty, illness, abandonment, self-centred or violent spouses, exile, suicide… Welcome to the Marxes. And yet, my understanding is that the lives of the Marx women were not so wretched.

In stage two of my investigation, I wandered the internet ad hoc, and I found some signs of life. In a famous photo of the Marx couple, Jenny stares, with conviction, beyond the frame. She looks as stern as her husband, which is saying a lot. She was, they say, the only person who could stand up to him, but that’s typical lore when it comes to the legitimate wife archetype. The same was said of Helene Demuth, also known as “Lenchen,” who worked as the Marxes’ governess – a fact that should probably be revisited. I think of Xanthippe. It’s striking that the Marx women, while they have not been granted respect or recognition for their intellectual work, have not been ridiculed by Marxist historians. I’m not going so far as to say that the history of intellectual thought admits it owes anything to the Marx women. But the fact that they’re not described as annoyances – in accordance with a certain literary tradition – seems worthy of mention. No complete works translated into twenty languages exist for these women intellectuals. I was happy to stumble across Lettres d’amour et de combat (Letters of Love and Struggle) by Karl and Jenny Marx (with an introduction by Jacques-Olivier Bégot). What first struck me about this slim book was the lightness with which the publishers treated Jenny’s contribution to these correspondences. The publishers neglected to mention (on the cover or on the title page) that the book reveals a substantial chunk of Jenny’s autobiography. Bégot, although a Marxist specialist, doesn’t seem to be aware of the existence of certain classically sexist biases. Of these letters, Bégot writes that they are “certainly less demanding” than Marx’s other correspondents. He doesn’t bother to translate Jenny’s Latin quotes (content to consider them incomprehensible), and yet she was a funny polyglot, prone to puns and inventive translations. Bégot was, of course, first and foremost addressing Marxist specialists, and I must at least be grateful that he proffered the following scandalous hypothesis: Jenny may have been much more than just a secretary (!).

What’s left a lasting impression on me, throughout my research, is Jenny’s personality. Her anger, her love, her vivacity, her recognizably acid humour, which she liberally lavished on her semi-allies and timid, right-thinking sheep alike. Jenny poked fun at everyone, including herself. When she complained about her condition as a woman, therefore, it was with neither pretention nor hope. She admitted to being torn between her ideals and the constraints of her everyday life. She judged herself with a certain dash of cynicism; a derision that could be cruel when reflected inward but turned to revolt when it came to her daughters.

Jenny teased her husband as she did everyone else, but this teasing is not itself quite criticism. Her laughter was the chortle of a strong personality defying the storm – a matter of survival. She willingly devoted herself to Karl’s work. She supported him in every aspect of his life. As his editor, translator, lover, caregiver, negotiator, watchdog… What has come down to us from her are these letters addressed to Karl and to their children. While her revolutionary impulse is beyond doubt, her particularly feminist revolt remains somewhat shadowed. I am nonetheless struck by her lucidity regarding domestic work and the humility imposed upon women, which leads only to a form of resignation. I don’t know what to think, for example, of this passage from a letter she wrote in her youth, in which Jenny hinted at her frustration at not being able to write:

If only I could level and smooth all these paths for you, make room for everything that might stand in your way. But that is not our lot, we must not energetically meddle with the wheels of fate. We are condemned to passivity by original sin, by the fault of Mrs. Eve, and our lot is to wait, to hope, to endure, and to suffer. At most, we have been entrusted with the task of knitting stockings – needles and keys – and anything beyond that is evil; it is only when it is a question of determining where to print the Deutsche Jahrbrücher that a female veto can be invoked, and that it plays, without being seen, a small yet important part.

If Jenny participated in feminist reflection within the Marx coterie, her writing suggests that it was laced with bitterness. Her writing reveals a woman broken by tragedies – including the deaths of three children – who sometimes hoped her surviving daughters might find an alternative to marriage. She also divulges a remarkable sense of clannishness. Faithful and generous in her friendships, despite the hardships of her era, it is she who shows the Marxes to be a family of thinkers.