Letter to Friedrich Engels, January 20, 1857

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 20 January 1857


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXII, Moscow, 1929
Printed according to the original
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


MARX TO ENGELS[1]

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 20 January 1857

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park,

Haverstock Hill

Dear Engels,

I really have monumentally bad luck! For the past 3 weeks or so Mr Dana has been sending me the daily Tribune—obviously with the sole intention of showing me that they aren't publishing any more of my stuff. Except for some 40 lines on the MOVES of the Banque de France,[2] not a single line of mine has been included. Week after week I have put off drawing anything on the Tribune in the belief that the articles would sooner or later appear. BUT NOTHING OF THE SORT. My articles on Prussia, Persia, Austria all regularly REJECTED.[3] Having for some 4 years printed all my things (and yours TOO) under their own name, the curs have succeeded in eclipsing the name I was making for myself among the Yankees and which would have enabled me to find another paper, or to hold over their heads the threat of transferring to one. Que faire?[4]

Good advice is valuable IN THESE CIRCUMSTANCES. As soon as I draw something they will make it a pretext to get rid of me once and for all; and writing two articles a week in the hope of having perhaps one in ten published and paid for is a procedure too ruinous to carry on. And how can I draw anything unless something is published?

And then another piece of bad luck. I've had a look at the November, December and January numbers of Putnam's. No sign of the article on Bazancourt.[5] Either it has got lost (although I took it to the main POST OFFICE myself) or it will not be coming out until later. I can't believe that the fellows had got the thing, don't want to publish it and fail to notify me out of sheer bad manners!

I have not yet succeeded in arranging any definite terms with

[6]

the Urquhartites,[7] and besides, theirs is a tiny little sheet which may bring out short fragments of an article over a month and often not finish it off for 5 to 6 weeks.[8] At best they can serve only as a small, secondary source of income. The Tribune, in exceedingly poor and insipid LEADERS, is moreover adopting a view almost diametrically opposed to all that I write. RUSSIAN INFLUENCE is unmistakable.[9]

So here I am, without any prospects and with growing domestic liabilities, completely stranded in a house into which I have put what little cash I possessed and where it is impossible to scrape along from day to day as we did in DEAN STREET. I am utterly at a loss what to do, being, indeed, in a more desperate situation than 5 years ago. I thought I had tasted the bitterest dregs of life. Mais non! And the worst of it is that this is no mere passing crisis. I cannot see how I am to extricate myself.

The miserable collapse of Switzerland's braggadocio 121 was only to be anticipated. In no way were the fellows driven TO EAT DIRT by force supérieure. For, as Cornelius saw with his own eyes in Paris, the discontent, not only among Parisians, but in the army as well, was so great that in no circumstances could Bonaparte have permitted the Prussians to carry out serious military operations— on the French frontier least of all. Hence his EFFORTS to settle the affair. The discredit of the Swiss is only matched by that of Bonaparte, who first offered to stand surety for Switzerland vis-à-vis the Prussians and vented his spleen in the Moniteur when Switzerland repudiated his authority; then offered to stand surety for Prussia vis-à-vis Switzerland, and now finds himself compelled to admit, in little semi-official articles, that Prussia refuses to enter into any obligation towards himself. He has virtually endorsed the démenti he received from the Neue Preussische Zeitung.122 So low has the fellow sunk. In the meantime his half-brother, Morny, has had the foresight to secure for himself a post in the Russian service.

I don't know whether you've seen that Mr Ledru-Rollin has publicly invited the French 'Republicans' to take part in the elections of Boustrapa's[10] Corps législatif123? So he has descended to the naïveté of legal opposition. While this shows on the one hand that he has relinquished the grandiloquent title of pretender, it shows beyond a doubt on the other that opposition is again

considered feasible actually inside France, and that the bourgeois Republicans are hastening to resume, along with the Orleanists,124

a position in parliament that will enable them to shuffle the next revolution under the carpet.

I think I have already told you that the Brussels Nation has gone under, being now replaced by its rival the National, an inane, uninteresting Belgian gossip sheet. The noble L'Homme, too, has breathed its last. In its stead there appeared a Journal des Proscrits which proved incapable of surviving for more than a fortnight. In addition, diminutive pamphlets after the manner of Pyat's Ave Maria are published from time to time by the French réfugiés— inflated, hollow verbiage—printed crinoline save that they cost less to produce and are harder to sell.

The Tribune has discovered that, during the past 30 years (up till 1851), France has enriched herself far more than England and thus is now also her superior politically.[11] The proof. In France, the value (i.e. nominal) of landed property has increased twofold, in England not so much. True, the French estimate included houses while the English one did not; but since the English population increased by only 33 per cent in the area concerned, the same could be assumed of the number of houses (which the Tribune appears to equate with their value).

Erich has achieved his purpose here without any need for further references.

Your

K. M.

Your military exposé 125 WAS BEAUTIFUL. The Augsburger contained an article in which the passage at Constance is described as very difficult.[12] I have only skimmed over it.

  1. ↑ This letter was first published in an abridged English translation in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1979.—12, 30, 45, 54, 61, 67, 70, 93, 110, 128, 132, 224, 227, 254, 265, 319, 333, 359, 407, 430, 448, 459, 461, 518, 524
  2. ↑ 'The Crisis in Europe'
  3. ↑ A reference to Marx's articles 'The Right Divine of the Hohenzollerns', 'The Anglo Persian War' and 'The Maritime Commerce of Austria' (two articles) all of which were published in the Tribune later.
  4. ↑ What is to be done?
  5. ↑ Engels made excerpts from Bazancourt's book between June and September 1856. In the autumn of that year he summed up the results of his critical analysis in an article entitled 'Saint-Arnaud'. Marx sent the article to the American journal Putnam's Monthly, but the editors returned it unpublished.— 45, 51, 71, 73, 80, 93, 106, 124, 126, 128
  6. ↑ In the original von (by) 5 194
  7. ↑ See this volume, p. 76.
  8. ↑ This refers to a work planned by Marx on the history of-British and Russian diplomacy in the eighteenth century, of which he only completed five chapters of the Introduction. For these he made use of pamphlets, diplomatic documents and unpublished manuscripts, mostly of the period of the Northern War (the Russo-Swedish war of 1700-21), which he found in the British Museum Library. His negotiations with Nikolaus Trübner for publication of the work ended in failure. The chapters of the Introduction appeared by instalments in Urquhart's Sheffield Free Press from late June to early August 1856 as they were sent in by Marx. Eventually publication was stopped because of arbitrary editorial abridgements and printing errors. In June 1856 the London Free Press began reprinting the text from the Sheffield paper, and on 16 August 1856 it started reproducing the chapters from the beginning, with publication continuing until 1 April 1857. In both papers the unfinished work was printed under the title Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century (see present edition, Vol. 15). In 1899 Eleanor Aveling, Marx's daughter, published it in London in book form under the heading Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century.—46, 56, 73, 81, 94, 110, 112, 120
  9. ↑ An allusion to A. Gurowski's influence (see this volume, p. 81).
  10. ↑ Boustrapa—nickname of Louis Bonaparte, composed of the first syllables of the names of the places where he and his supporters staged Bonapartist putsches: Boulogne (August 1840), Strasbourg (October 1846) and Paris (coup d'état of 2 December 1851).—31, 94, 170, 230, 256, 290, 336, 425, 435
  11. ↑ 'That France is rapidly taking the leadership...', New York Daily Tribune, No. 4903, 6 January 1857.
  12. ↑ 'Die örtliche Vertheidigung des Bodensees', Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 13, 13 January 1857. 5*