| Author(s) | Karl Marx |
|---|---|
| Written | 10 November 1878 |
MARX TO ALFRED TALANDIER[1]
IN PARIS
[Draft]
[London, about 10 November 1878]
I have undertaken to write to you regarding the letter attacking MR Barry in the Marseillaise of 6 October.[2]
When the Marseillaise of 6 October eventually and quite by chance—which I can prove—fell into MR Barry's hands, he at once wrote a reply in English which he requested me to translate into French for him. For several days I postponed doing as he had asked—why, you will understand when you have read my letter. MR Barry could not divulge all the facts
1) without compromising Hirsch, whose fate has not yet been decided[3] ;
2) without compromising Hirsch's brother-in-law[4] who is still living in Paris;
3) without citing me and thus probably getting me involved in a public dispute with you;
4) without attacking certain individuals who figure in your letter;
5) without exposing the bad faith of the Marseillaise. In my opinion, it is not an 'opportune' moment to arouse the mirth of the reactionaries by squabbling in this way. On the other hand, MR Barry is fully entitled to defend himself. And there we have the dilemma. The only hope of diverting him from his purpose seemed to me to be Mr Hirsch's arrival in London (which he had given me to expect in the event of his being expelled from France). Then, by the publication of a few lines in the Marseillaise, compromising no one, he could have satisfied MR Barry. Unfortunately, there has been no sign of life from him since his expulsion. At length MR Barry lost all patience and, since he perfectly understood my objections to the publication of his reply (which would have appeared, if needs be, in a Swiss newspaper), we agreed
1) that he would leave his reply in my hands for the time being and
2) that I would endeavour to settle the matter by writing to you. I now come to the nub of the matter.
Facts
1) The Social-Democratic Club (which was a section of the International while that organisation existed), 6 Rose Street, Soho, consists of two sections, one German, the other English. The former elected Mr Ehrhart as [its] representative at the congress, the latter MR Barry. It having been noised about London that the congress, banned by the police, would be held in Lausanne, the mandates were sent to the office of the Lausanne congress.[5]
Here is a copy of MR Barry's credential, the original of which has been entrusted to me:
'Fr. Kitz, Secretary, English Section, Social-Democratic Club.'*
Again, after MR Barry's return, he was called on, in a letter from the secretary Kitz, to account to the club for the execution of his mandate. This letter is also in my possession.
It is thus completely proven that MR Barry was the mandatory of a Social-Democratic (working-class) society and not, as you have disseminated, somewhat 'lightly', of the 'international police'.
2) You further say that, in his letter to the Marseillaise,[6] Barry complains 'of not having been arrested by the French police', to which you add: 'Citizen Hirsch does not, for his part, complain of not having been arrested, etc.', so giving the public to understand that you were speaking in Hirsch's name. But, in a letter to me dated 14 October, Citizen Hirsch describes your letter as 'infa- mous' and says he had not been told of it until after his release. You forget, by the way, that Barry was not the only English delegate to the congress, there having been at least a dozen, not one of whom was arrested by the French police. The Vorwärts, the central organ of the German Socialist Party (now suppressed), evidently grasped the point of that passage in Barry's letter when it remarked that 'the French government was perfectly prepared to please Mr Bismarck by arresting Hirsch, etc., but did not dare take complaisance so far as to lay hands on Englishmen.'[7] For that matter, Mr Barry, still acting in concert with Hirsch's brother-in- law, expressed his opinion fairly and squarely to Mr Gigot and, since the latter had minutes taken of that discussion, you are in a position to inform yourself from official sources as to the close relationship between Mr Barry and the French police.
But I forget that, for the greater glory of 'those who govern us', you seem intent on suggesting that the French police is not a member, but the dupe of 'the international police'. The powers- that-be of the Republic thought otherwise, excusing themselves vis-à-vis Hirsch's brother-in-law by insinuating that 'those who govern us' should show some consideration for 'neighbouring powers'.
3) Now, what are the grave facts which authorised you to become 'the disseminator of so terrible an accusation', namely that Mr Barry 'owed his appointment as delegate to those men' (the men, that is to say, of the international police)?
They are founded on nothing, i.e. on futile tittle-tattle which a highly suspect private individual by the name of Schumann retailed to you in secret, without MR Barry's knowledge.3
Let us revert for a moment to Schumann. After his return to London, he had nothing more urgent to do [than] announce the happy news of his release to The Standard, a 'Tory and Bonapartist newspaper'. Then this same individual, wholly unknown to me up till then, gained entry to my house on a false pretext. As I was hauling him over the coals for the tittle-tattle repeated in your letter, he replied: 'But Mr Talandier did wrong; I told him expressly that all I was retailing was mere hearsay, that I personally knew nothing about Barry, etc.'b
Of his own accord he asked me for Barry's address, in order that he might be able to apologise to him. In fact he did nothing of the kind but, on the contrary, confided to a refugee, of whose connections with myself he knew nothing, that in an interview with him Marx had affirmed that he had also denounced Barry as a spy. This would seem to render superfluous any further discussion of the honourableness of your client and guarantee. Since then I have received some particulars about him which will find their way to Copenhagen.
In your letter you ask: 'How did Mr Maltman Barry... come to write to the Marseillaise?' Very simply, if you please. MR Barry, to whom I had given a letter of recommendation to Hirsch, was taken by the latter to the Marseillaise and presented to Mr Maret. After his return to London, MR Barry sent a letter in English to Hirsch's brother-in-law, who was supposed to decide when the time was ripe for its insertion in the Marseillaise. The said brother-in-law, thinking it might be of service to Hirsch, translated the letter into French and handed it in person to the editorial department of the Marseillaise. Hence, by publishing your denuncia- tion without any comment whatsoever, that paper perpetrated a gross impropriety, which can only be explained by your letter to Mr Henri Maret, published in the same issue of the paper.[8] This is especially improper when it is taken into consideration that you are a friend and correspondent of MR Bradlaugh[9] who is a personal enemy of MR Barry and of the late International.
4) Another complaint weighing on MR Schumann's tender conscience and mentioned by you, is MR Barry's alleged activity in Paris as 'correspondent... of The Standard, an English Tory and... Bonapartist newspaper'.
To call The Standard a 'Bonapartist' newspaper is a joke. So long as Louis Bonaparte remained a useful ally, exploitable by England, he was cosseted by The Standard, but not in such a disgusting manner as by The Times, nor so naively as by Messrs Bright and Cobden, then the leaders of the English radicals, and The Standard never sold itself to him as did the liberal newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. Today—and still in the English interest—The Standard, along with almost the whole of the English press, has changed, where French affairs are concerned, into a partisan of the 'moderate', if not 'opportunist' republic.[10]
All that remains, then, is the epithet 'Tory'. Kindly note that the said Tory newspaper never ceases to attack the new Holy Alliance 143 and its chief, MR Bismarck, whereas The Times acts as his semi-official organ, as he himself declared in the German Reichstag. Well, now, MR Eccarius—-one of the delegates of the so-called INTERNATIONAL LABOUR UNION, to which Schumann and MR Bradlaugh belong, acted as Times correspondent at the Paris Congress. So why should MR Barry not have done likewise for The Standard? You have lived long enough in England to know that the English working class has no newspaper at its disposal and is therefore compelled, on the occasion of working men's congresses, etc., to look for publicity to the papers of its masters, whether Whig or Tory, and that in neither case is it expected to accept responsibility for the opinions of either. You have lived long enough in England not to seek to attach labels, borrowed from the vocabulary of the French parties, to English political relations. For otherwise, I feel sure, you would never have accepted the post of English government official.
5) The circumstances being what they were, this would only have been considered reprehensible had you—like that great republican Karcher, correspondent of the République française— dedicated a book to His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge.[11]
Finally, I come to the last item in your accusation against MR Barry. In the first place, it seems that he committed an unpardonable offence in having acted in a manner contrary to the views of L'Homme libre and of MR Bradlaugh on the Eastern Question. It has to be admitted that, if this places a man under suspicion of being affiliated to the international police, then the great majority of socialists in all the countries of Europe and in the United States would have to share the ill-fortune of MR Barry.
7)[12] And now I come to the last item in your philippic. And very grave indeed it is—MR Barry allowed a week to go by before deigning to reply to one of the scurrilous articles published by MR Bradlaugh in The National Re former[13] ... But there are attenuat- ing circumstances/
8) MR Barry was the less concerned about MR Bradlaugh's articles dated 22 and 29 August in that, as early as 13 July, he had published in The Spectator an article under his own name in which he explained at some length the line of conduct adopted by him during the dispute among the English parties provoked by the Eastern War. He took care to 'disseminate' that article by getting it reprinted in the form of a flysheet.
It was for the compatriots of MR Barry to decide between the latter and MR Bradlaugh for—be it noted—the articles in The National Reformer of 22 and 29 August were nothing more than a 'rehash'. And decide his 'compatriots' did—on the 22nd of July. On that day there was a big public meeting (in London), convened by the Social-Democratic Club, to uphold the cause of the German Socialist Party vis-à-vis Bismarck; all the newspapers published verbatim accounts of it and did not conceal from the public that the chairman, elected chairman of that meeting was—MR Mailman Barry.
9) I will not touch on the attitudes adopted by the various parties during the Eastern War. If all those who failed to follow the line set by MR Bradlaugh, not to say L'Homme libre, have incurred the suspicion of being affiliated to one kind of police or another, I very much fear that the vast majority of socialists in Europe and the United States will find themselves tarred with the same brush as MR Barry. But we should be perfectly capable of calling in question the competence of a tribunal which seems to us, at any rate, to be an abettor of the new Holy Alliance. On top of everything else, MR Barry had one particular reason for overlooking MR Bradlaugh's impertinence, namely the resolution passed in 1871 by the members of the majority on the former General Council of the International (to which MR Barry belonged) to ignore MR Bradlaugh until such time as he had refuted the public denunciations by that Council in respect of 1) the intimate relations between the editor of The National Reformer and Plon-Plon and other Bonapartists, both male and female; 2) the lies he published about the International; 3) the calumnies directed against the Communards in London, deriving from the muddied waters of the Bonapartist and gutter press.
At all events, you now know that there is no substance whatever in your letter attacking MR Barry. All that is wanted of you is a declaration in the Marseillaise, stating in a few lines that, after having received the required information, you withdraw your denunciation.
Yours very faithfully,
Karl Marx