Letter to Friedrich Engels, after October 4, 1848

Author(s) Elisabeth Engels
Written 5 October 1848


First published: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, Jg. 18, Heft 10, Berlin, 1970
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 38


To Frederick Engels in Brussels

Barmen [after 4 October 1848]

Dear Friedrich,

You will have received your father's letter; I should have liked to add a few words to it, but I felt too sick at heart. Now you have really gone too far. So often have I begged you to proceed no further, but you have paid more heed to other people, to strangers, and have taken no account of your mother's pleas. God alone knows what I have felt and suffered of late. I was trembling when I picked up the newspaper[1] and saw therein that a warrant was out for my son's arrest.[2]

I can think of nothing else but you and then I often see you as a little boy still, playing near me. How happy I used to be then and what hopes did I not pin upon you. Dear Friedrich, if the words of a poor, sorrowing mother still mean anything to you, then follow your father's advice, go to America and abandon the course you have pursued hitherto. With your knowledge you will surely succeed in finding a position in a good firm and if, later on, you should not like it, you could always take to something else. For so many years now I have never been able to think of you without a pang; pray send me for once some piece of news that will gladden my heart a little. You are now separated from your friends—why not break away from them too now and go your own way for once, or listen for once to what your mother has to say. Nobody, surely, can mean so well by you as I do, so why have you refused to listen to my plea?

Do write to me soon, dear Friedrich, and let me have good news of you, I beseech you. May God have mercy on you and not forsake you.

But believe me when I say that your father, no less than I, will bless the day when you return to us again and once more consent to be our child and walk the same path with us. May God soon grant us that joy. Then we shall forget all the worry and distress we have endured on account of you.

Write soon to your deeply grieving mother

Elise Engels

  1. ↑ 'Steckbrief', Kölnische Zeitung, No. 271, 4 October 1848 (see present edition, Vol. 7, p. 593).
  2. ↑ On 26 September 1848 the Prussian authorities, fearing the growing revolutionary-democratic movement, declared a state of siege in Cologne (it was lifted on 2 October). By order of the military command political organisations and associations were banned, the civic militia disbanded, democratic newspapers, including the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, suspended, and an order issued for the arrest of Engels and a few other editors. Engels and Dronke had to leave Cologne. For a time Engels lived in hiding in Barmen. On 5 October Engels and Dronke arrived in Paris after a short stay in Belgium whence they were expelled by the police. Dronke remained in the French capital and wrote to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from there, while Engels started on foot for Switzerland via the south-west of France. About 24 October he arrived in Geneva and at the beginning of November moved to Lausanne (these facts served as a basis for establishing the date of this letter and those by Marx which followed and were not dated); Engels arrived in Neuchâtel on 7 November and in Berne on 9 November. He stayed there until mid-January 1849 when it was possible for him to return to Germany. Engels' letter written to Marx from Geneva has not been found.