3 I8 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYof things, the working class must be genuinely "revolutionary" '."^6 Las-
salle, however, who was in many ways in closer contact with the situation
in Germany than was Marx, might with justice have claimed that Marx
overestimated the revolutionary potential of the Prussian bourgeoisie and
that his own programme represented the only way forward for the
working-class movement. Marx was equally opposed to the idea of uni-
versal suffrage in Germany: Lassalle had learnt none of the lessons of the
manipulation of this political device in France by Louis Napoleon. He
also claimed that Lassalle did not base himself enough on previous
working-class movements in Germany (though in fact many of his collab-
orators were former members of the Communist League);^117 and that
Lassalle had no international dimension to his political agitation. This
last observation was certainly justified: Lassalle had never lived outside
Germany and both his theory and his practice were strictly limited to
German conditions.
Even after his visit to London, Lassalle still hankered after the idea of
editing a newspaper in co-operation with Marx. But Marx's criticisms
became even more pronounced during Lassalle's last year of feverish
political activity. In May 1863 Lassalle's agitation culminated in a request
from the Leipzig workers to attend a conference where the Allgemeine
Deutsche Arbeiterverein (General Union of German Workers), the first
effective German socialist party, was formed. Eleven days before the
conference Lassalle had had an interview with Bismarck with whom he
had already been in secret negotiation. Although Lassalle claimed that
he was 'eating cherries with Bismarck, but Bismarck was getting only the
stones', Lassalle did not live long enough for it to be clear whether he
was right.^118 Marx himself very quickly came to the conclusion that Las-
salle had sold out to Bismarck and complained even more strongly of his
plagiarising the Communist Manifesto and Wage Labour and Capital. But
Lassalle's sudden death intervened: on 28 August 1864 he was mortally
wounded in a duel by a Wallachian Count, the fiance of Helen von
Donniges, a seventeen-year-old girl to whom Lassalle had got himself
engaged barely four weeks before. Engels received the news fairly coolly;
Marx showed more humanity. He wrote:
Lassalle's misfortune has been going damnably round in my head these
last days. He was after all one of the old stock and the enemy of our
enemies. Also the thing came so surprisingly that it is difficult to believe
that so noisy, stirring, pushing a man is now as dead as a mouse and
must shut his mouth altogether. About the cause of his death you are
quite right. It is one of the many tacdessnesses which he performed in
his life. For all that, I'm sorry that our relationship was troubled during
the last years, of course through his fault. ...