Friedrich Engels

Born in 1820 to a wealthy Prussian textile family, Engels shed their Pietist faith early and drifted into Young Hegelian circles during military service in Berlin. His father dispatched him to Manchester in 1842 to manage a cotton mill investment; what he saw in the factories became The Condition of the Working Class in England. He met Marx in Paris in 1844, and the partnership stuck. They co-wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, fought in that year's revolutions, and fled to England when the barricades fell. For two decades Engels lived a split existence — respectable merchant by day in Manc…