Karl Marx was born in a bourgeois family of Jewish extraction, turned protestant in Trier, a peripheral, Catholic province of the Prussian realm. After a militant student time in the 'Burschenschaften', Karl embraced the French philosophy of communism. His revolutionary ideas soon led to exile in Paris, Brussels and London. His family life turned tragic, loosing several young children. He and wife Jenny would have starved in Soho without the support of Friedrich Engels, who even pretended to be Karl's bastard with the maid. His writings, mainly the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, has lasting influence on philosophy, economics and politics, but hardly as he intended.