Letter to Paul Lafargue, November 14, 1885

ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE

IN PARIS

London, 14 November 1885

My dear Lafargue,

Thanks for the portrait — what a surly face they make me pull in France, a country where they nevertheless laugh from time to time, or so it is said. Perhaps they will laugh at me too. Nim says it makes me look ten years older, out of flattery no doubt.

The insurrections of May 1849 were provoked by the refusal of most of the German governments to accept the constitution for Germany as a whole approved by the National Assembly at Frankfurt.^[1] This assembly, which never had any real power and neglected any steps to acquire some, also contrived to lose the last vestige of its moral power just at the moment when it had realised on paper its somewhat romantic 'constitution'. Nevertheless that constitution was then the sole banner under which it was still possible to try to launch a new movement — if they were not to deprive themselves of one after victory had been achieved. In the smaller states, therefore, they sought to compel the governments to recognise it. There followed the insurrections in Dresden (3 May) and, a few days later, in the Bavarian Palatinate and the Grand Duchy of Baden where the Grand Duke^[2] took flight, the army having declared itself for the people.

The Dresden insurrection was put down after a heroic resistance — the fighting went on for four days — with the help of Prussian troops.

(In Prussia reaction had gained the upper hand as a result of the coup d'état of November 1848; Berlin was disarmed and placed under a state of siege.) But to subdue the Palatinate and Baden an army was needed. So in Prussia they made a start by calling the Landwehr^[3] to arms. At Iserlohn (Westphalia) and Elberfeld (Rhenish Prussia) men refused to march. Troops were sent, who found the towns barricaded and were repulsed. About a fortnight later Iserlohn was taken after two days' resistance. Elberfeld offered relatively few opportunities for defence and so, with troops bearing down on them from every side, the defenders, about a thousand in number, resolved to fight their way through to the states that had risen in the south. They were cut to pieces en route, but a fair number managed to get down there with the help of the population. I was aide-de-camp to Mirbach, the commandant at Elberfeld. Before carrying out his plan he sent me on a mission to Cologne, in other words into the enemy's camp, where I hid in Daniels' house. The truth is that he did not want to have a known communist in his corps for fear of alarming the bourgeoisie of the regions through which he was to pass. He made a rendezvous with me in the Palatinate but failed to turn up, having been taken prisoner (acquitted by the Elberfeld jury a year later). Mirbach had gone through the campaigns in Greece from 1825 to 1829 and Poland from 1830 to 1831; he later again returned to Greece where he died.

Meanwhile the insurrection in the south was gathering strength, but it made the fatal blunder of not attacking. The troops of the small adjacent states were only looking for a pretext to join the insurrection, at that time they were determined not to fight against the people. A pretext was then provided, namely that they should advance on Frankfurt in order to protect the assembly against the Prussian and Austrian soldiers who were surrounding the place. After the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Marx and I had gone to Mannheim to recommend this move to the leaders. But they produced all manner of excuses — that the army was disorganised by the flight of their former officers, that they were short of everything, etc., etc.

About the beginning of June the Prussians on the one hand and the Bavarians on the other, reinforced by those same troops from the smaller states whom we could have won over with greater daring, but who saw themselves drowned in an ocean of reactionary armies, advanced on the insurgent areas. It took them no more than a week to clear the Palatinate — there were 36,000 Prussians against 8-9,000 insurgents, and the two fortresses of the country were in reactionary hands. We withdrew to the troops in Baden, some 8,000 men of the line and 12,000 irregulars, themselves beset by 30,000 reactionary troops. There were four general engagements in which numerical superiority and the violation of Württemberg territory, a move that enabled them to outflank us at the decisive moment, gave the reactionaries the advantage. After six weeks of fighting the remains of the rebel army had to cross over into Switzerland.

During this war I was aide-de-camp to Colonel Willich who commanded a corps of irregulars of marked proletarian character. I took part in three minor engagements and also in the last decisive battle of the Murg.

That, I trust, will enable you to sum the whole thing up in a few lines if you absolutely insist on writing a commentary on Citizen Clarus' fine work.

I trust your interesting furuncle will discharge its purulent contents before long. Wash the sore with 2% carbolic acid in 98% water; it's a capital way of killing suppurating cells.

A kiss for Laura.

Yours ever,

F.E.