The most famous defender of workers never paid the slightest wage to his own housemaid.
Karl Marx spent his life denouncing the exploitation of man by man.
But under his own roof, the prophet of class struggle acted exactly like certain bourgeois bosses he condemned.
For more than forty years, Helene Demuth was the Marx family's servant.
She washed their laundry, cooked their meals, and raised their children. All of it without ever receiving the slightest regular salary.
The housemaid was simply housed and fed. Available for labor and corvée at will.
In 1851, the author of the Communist Manifesto crossed another line: he got his servant pregnant.
A boy was born of this asymmetrical relationship: Frederick.
For Marx, the existence of this illegitimate son was a catastrophe. It threatened his public image and his marriage to a Prussian aristocrat.
The great defender of the proletariat then coldly refused to recognize his own working-class child.
Worse, he orchestrated a pitiful lie to save his respectability.
He convinced his loyal friend, the wealthy industrialist Friedrich Engels, to publicly claim paternity in his place.
Little Frederick was torn from his mother and discreetly sent to a foster family in the poor neighborhoods of London.
Marx never acknowledged him. He never gave him the slightest penny.
For years, when the boy came to visit his mother, Marx forbade him from entering through the front door of the house. He had to come in through the service entrance, on the kitchen side.
The secret would be fiercely guarded by the fathers of communism.
It was only on his deathbed that Engels finally confessed the true identity of the child's father.
Karl Marx wrote "Capital" while his servant cleaned his floors for free, after having hidden and abandoned the son he had fathered with her.
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