Letter to Karl Marx, July 15, 1859

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 15 July 1859


First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


ENGELS TO MARX

IN LONDON

[Manchester,] Friday, 15 July[1] 1859

Dear Moor,

I'd have written something about the peace[2] for the Volk, but since I neither see nor hear anything of what's going on, I conclude that you are dealing with the subject yourself and hence that my article would be double emploi[3] .

Excepting the continuation of the war, nothing could be more welcome to us than this peace. Prussia discredited, Austria discredited, Bonaparte discredited, Sardinia and vulgar Italian liberalism discredited, England discredited, Kossuth ruined, Vogt & Co. discredited, no gains for anybody except the Russians and the revolutionaries, i. e. what little Jew Braun[4] would call a 'tidy revolutionary situation'.[5] But His Excellency Ephraim Artful is the most discredited of all.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ A slip of the pen in the original: 14 July.
  2. ↑ On 8 July 1859 the emperors of France and Austria held a separate meeting—without the King of Piedmont—in Villafranca, at which they reached an agreement on an armistice. The meeting was initiated by Napoleon III, who feared that the protracted war might give a fresh impulse to the revolutionary and national liberation movements in Italy and other European states. On 11 July France and Austria signed a preliminary peace under which Austria was to cede to France its rights to Lombardy and France was to transfer this territory to Piedmont. Venice was to remain under the supreme power of Austria, and the rulers of the states of Central Italy were to be restored to their thrones. It was intended to create a confederation of Italian states under the honorary chairmanship of the Pope. The Villafranca preliminaries formed the basis of the peace treaty concluded by France, Austria and Piedmont in Zurich on 10 November 1859.—464, 465
  3. ↑ needless duplication
  4. ↑ By 'little Jew Braun' and, below, 'Ephraim Artful' Engels means Ferdinand Lassalle.
  5. ↑ Presumably an allusion to Lassalle's letter to Marx and Engels of 27 May 1859 (see Note 445), in which he asserted that 'a collision ... that constantly recurred in all or almost all the past revolutions, and is bound to recur in future ones, is the tragic collision of the revolutionary situation itself.—465