Letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht, July 10, 1871

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 10 July 1871


First published, in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Vol. 1 (VI), Moscow, 1932
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 44


ENGELS TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT

IN LEIPZIG

[London,] 10 July 1871

Dear Liebknecht,

Herewith the rest of Section III.[1] Section IV will follow in 2-3 days, and at all events by the end of the week.[2] The proofs today or tomorrow.

Ad vocem[3] deportation,[4] the examples you give of deportations from Prussia and Mainz will not hold water, because they took place in wartime and so were legal. You ought by some means or other to force a decision on the cases in Saxony: either by the refusal of those involved to leave, or by appeal and petition to the Reichstag. The Party of Progress cannot refuse you support on this matter without ruining itself totally.[5] As long as the Reichstag does not explicitly refuse to recognise the rights of citizenship and the freedom to live and move where one likes, the issue is not settled. As to your particular case, you could have brought it to the boil very quickly by going to Berlin 8 days before the opening of the Reichstag and waiting to see what happened. I am convinced that they would not have touched you, and that would have been the end of it. If they had made a move against you, there would have been a fearful outcry and they would have had to release you as soon as the Reichstag convened; you would then have been able to expose the Reichstag in the eyes of the entire world if they had not behaved properly. There are certain decencies that even the most wretched assembly cannot openly violate in untroubled times. However, now that you are no longer in the Reichstag, it is no longer so simple. But if you allow all these rights that you possess on paper to be taken from you in reality without any sort of struggle, and if you do not force the Reichstag to decide publicly for or against its own creation, then there is no helping you.

The imperious tone in which you demanded that we should found a paper here amused us hugely. You must have confused London with Crimmitschau to have imagined that one can just go ahead and establish a Bürger- und Bauernfreund here without more ado.[6] You surely ought still to be aware that just as London is larger than Crimmitschau so too the difficulties in setting up a paper and all the demands made of it are correspondingly greater. If you can put some £10,000 at our disposal, we shall be at your service.

Ad vocem Odger, you forget that the man was elected by the Congress and could not be expelled without a valid reason.[7] From what you say on this point it is quite clear that you have completely lost touch with the situation here, which is not surprising since the papers maintain a total silence about events within the workers' party.

We have now thoroughly and definitively broken off relations with The Pall Mall Gazette.

Best regards to you and yours from my wife[8] and the Marx family.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ The reference is to the German translation of Marx's The Civil War in France.
  2. ↑ The German translation of Marx's The Civil War in France was made by Engels and published in Der Volksstaat (Nos. 52-61, 28 June and 1, 5, 8, 12, 16, 19, 22, 26 and 29 July 1871), and, in abridged form, in Der Vorbote in August-October 1871; it also came out as a pamphlet in Leipzig.
  3. ↑ As to
  4. ↑ Following his expulsion from Prussia in 1865, Liebknecht became a Hessian subject but settled in Saxony. On 24 May 1871 Liebknecht wrote to Engels about his intention to give up Hessian citizenship and apply for Saxonian citizenship because he was in danger of being expelled from Saxony too.
    In the same letter Liebknecht asked Engels to recommend him as a correspondent for The Pall Mall Gazette; he also suggested that the Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper be used to publish the International's documents.
  5. ↑ The Party of Progress was formed by members of the Prussian liberal bourgeoisie in June 1861. It advocated the unification of Germany under Prussian supremacy, the convocation of an all-German parliament, and the establishment of a liberal ministry responsible to the Chamber of Deputies. In 1866, after a split in the Party of Progress, its Right wing, the National Liberals (see Note 229), formed a separate party. Following the unification of Germany in 1871, the Left wing declared themselves the party of opposition, but this opposition remained only on paper.
  6. ↑ A Social-Democratic daily newspaper, Crimmitschauer Bürger- und Bauernfreund, Organ des gesamten Osterlandes, was founded in the summer of 1870 in Crimmitschau (Saxony).
  7. ↑ General Council members Odger and Lucraft expressed their disapproval of the Address of the General Council The Civil War in France, virtually joining in the campaign of slander against the International started by the bourgeois press when this Address was published. At its meetings on 20 and 27 June 1871 the General Council unanimously condemned Odger and Lucraft and accepted their resignations.
  8. ↑ Lydia Burns