Letter to Paul Lafargue, February 16, 1886

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 16 February 1886


First published in Le Socialiste, No. 115, Paris, 24 novembre 1900
Printed according to the newspaper
Translated from the French
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE

IN PARIS

[Excerpt]

[London,] 16 February 1886

My dear Lafargue,

My congratulations. The sitting of the French Chamber on the 11th was an historical event.[1] The ice — the parliamentary omnipotence of the Radicals[2] —has been broken and it matters little whether those who dared to break it numbered three or thirty. And it was this superstition amongst the Parisian working men — this belief that by going further than the Radicals they would endanger the Republic or at least play the Opportunists' game by dividing the 'revolutionary party'—which lent strength to the Radicals.

This is the definitive defeat of Utopian socialism in France. For the Radicals were all 'socialists' in the old sense of the term. What survived of Louis Blanc's and Proudhon's theses served them as socialist trappings; they represent French Utopian socialism stripped of the Utopias and hence reduced to a phrase pure and simple. On 11 February this antiquated French socialism was crushed by the international socialism of today. The Poverty of Philosophy!

So far as your propaganda in Paris and in France generally is concerned, this is an event of prime importance. The effect will be felt very quickly. The Radicals — whether they make a clean break with the workers or whether they temporise by granting them more or less sterile concessions — will lose their influence over the masses and, along with that influence, such little potency as is left in traditional socialism will be lost, and people's minds will become more receptive to a new order of ideas...

Z...[3] has left me in no doubt that Clemenceau and the rest of his gang, embroiled as they are in ministerial intrigues, have caught the parliamentary disease, that they no longer see clearly what is going on outside the Palais Bourbon and the Luxembourg, that it is here that, for them, the pivot of the movement lies and that, in their eyes, extra-parliamentary France is of no more than secondary importance. All this has given me the measure of these gentlemen.

In short I have seen that flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo[4]

is not to their taste. Their backsides are seated on the same chute as that down which Ranc, Gambetta & Co. once slid. What frightens them is the proletarian Acheron.

I told Z...: So long as the Radicals allow themselves to be frightened, as for example at the inconclusive elections, by the cry 'The Republic is in danger', they will be nothing more than the servants of the Opportunists, will act as their cat's paw. But give each workman a gun and 50 cartridges and the Republic will never again be in danger!

  1. ↑ See previous letter.
  2. ↑ The Radicals — in the 1880s and 1890s a parliamentary group which had split away from the party of moderate republicans in France ('Opportunists', see Note 236). The Radicals had their main base in the petty and, to some extent, the middle bourgeoisie and continued to press for a number of bourgeois-democratic demands: a single-chamber parliamentary system, the separation of the Church from the State, the introduction of a system of progressive income taxes, the limitation of the working day and settlement of a number of other social issues. The leader of the Radicals was Clemenceau. The group formed officially as the Republican Party of Radicals and Radical Socialists [Parti républicain radical et radical-socialiste) in 1901.
  3. ↑ Presumably Charles Longuet.
  4. ↑ If Heaven be inflexible, Hell shall be unleashed (Virgil, Aeneid, VII, 312).