Letter to Paul Lafargue, March 19, 1888

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 19 March 1888


First published in the language of the original (French) in: F. Engels, P. et L. Lafargue, Correspondance, t. II, Paris, 1956
First published in English in: Frederick Engels, Paul and Laura Lafargue. Correspondence. 1887-1890, Vol. 2, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1960
Published in English in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 48


ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE

AT LE PERREUX

London, 19 March 1888

My dear Lafargue,

I am sending you a Weekly Dispatch which sheds light on the reason why 'friend Fritz' is made to work so hard.[1] Bismarck would give two years of his life to reduce him—Fritz—to a state in which he would be obliged to acknowledge himself unfit to rule. That is why his nose is kept to the grindstone, and that is why Fritz is having to sweat. The intrigue is of long date, its original object being the total elimination of Fritz before the old man's[2] death; this having failed, they are trying to kill him by dint of hard work, state occasions, etc. All this can only lead to an open breach, provided Fritz does not succumb too soon; if he recovers a little in the course of the summer and then brings about a ministerial reshuffle, it will be greatly to our benefit. The main thing is that home affairs should become unstable, that the philistine should lose his faith in the perpetuity of Bismarck's régime and that he should find himself face to face with a situation in which he, the philistine, will have to decide and act instead of leaving it all to the government. Old William was the keystone and, now that it has fallen, the whole building is threatened with collapse. What we need is at least six months of Fritz to undermine it still further, to make philistines and functionaries uncertain of the future, and to conjure up the possibility of a change in home affairs. Fritz is spineless and, even when in good health, he agrees with his last interlocutor, almost always his wife.[3] The only things that will force his hand are the intrigues of Bismarck and of his own son.[4] Once he has brought about a change of front it matters little how long he lasts or does not last; whatever the case, William II will accede in circumstances that are favourable to ourselves.

On the other hand, if Fritz dies sooner, William II will not be the same as William I and we shall nonetheless experience a sudden volte-face on the part of the bourgeoisie. This young man is bound to perpetrate follies which will not be forgiven him as were the old man's. If the doctors slit his father's throat[5] he, the son, may well suffer a similar fate, but at the hands of others. He is not paralysed, by the way. His arm was fractured at birth, no one noticed this at the time, hence the atrophy of that limb.

In any case the ice has been broken. Continuity in home affairs has been disrupted, and movement will take the place of stagnation. That is all we require.

Boulanger is undoubtedly something of a charlatan, but he's not a cipher for all that. He has given proof of military gumption and his charlatanism may serve him well in the French army; Napoleon had his fair share of it, too. But he seems politically inept, perhaps because of his overweening ambition. There can be no doubt that, if the French want to throw away any chance they have of recovering the lost provinces, they need only ape Boulanger's friends—in particular Rochefort, who seems stupid to the point of folly. All that is needed to reconcile the numbskull Alsatians with Germany is an abortive war of revenge; the peasants are mercenaries who, given the choice, will always serve in the victor's army, while the bourgeois will find their profits assured by the German tariff no less than by that of the French. As for the Russians, they are sure to be defeated; I have just been studying their 1877-78 campaign in Turkey[6] —98 incompetent generals to 2 tolerable ones, an exceedingly ill-organised army with officers beneath all criticism, with brave soldiers inured to the utmost hardship (they waded through fords, in minus 10 degrees Reaumur, with water up to their chests), very obedient, but also totally incapable of understanding the only kind of fighting possible today—fighting in extended order. Their strength lay in fighting in close order, a form which no longer exists, and anyone seeking to revive it would be swept by the fire of modern weapons.

But if Boulanger delivers you from plural lists,[7] we'll vote him a Vendôme column[8] without his having to go and earn it on the field of battle.

Tussy and Edward are leaving on Thursday for their 'castle' at Stratford-on-Avon and the Kautskys are to follow them. What a pleasant prospect—a labourer's cottage, with the cold and the wind and the flurries of snow we're now having! As for the rest of us, we have so far stood the winter very well until, a week ago, we had a brilliant, warm, spring day, followed by frost, nor'-easter and snow. It gave Nim the mumps, alias parotitis, and me a 'flu-like cold in the head—difficult things to get rid of in this weather. But nothing particularly irksome.

I enclose cheque for £15. My love to Laura. What are Longuet and the children[9] doing? Nim always asks me for news of them as soon as a letter arrives from Paris.

Yours ever, F.E.

  1. ↑ On 18 March 1888, the newspaper Weekly Dispatch published the manifestos of Frederick III ('Letter to Prince Bismarck', 'Proclamation of the Emperor') (see note 251).
  2. ↑ William I
  3. ↑ Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa
  4. ↑ William (later William II)
  5. ↑ Frederick III had larynx cancer
  6. ↑ Engels alludes to the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78.
  7. ↑ In his letter to Engels of 18 March 1888, Paul Lafargue expressed his conviction that the only chance of preventing General Boulanger from being elected to the Chamber of Deputies would be to abrogate the balloting procedure 'according to the lists', introduced in June 1885 instead of the former procedure providing for voting 'in small arrondissements'. The new system of balloting, effected in keeping with departmental lists, envisaged integration of small constituencies into larger ones, each corresponding to a department in size. A voter would be offered a list of candidates from various parties, and was supposed to cast his ballot for the overall number of candidates due to be elected as deputies in a given department (proceeding from the ratio: 1 deputy to 700,000 of the population). An absolute majority of votes was needed in the first round for a candidate to be elected, but he could do with a relative majority in the runoff.
  8. ↑ The Vendome Column was erected in Paris between 1806 and 1810 in tribute to the military victories of Napoleon I. It was made of bronze from captured enemy guns and crowned by a statue of Napoleon; the statue was removed during the Restoration but re-erected in 1833. In the spring of 1871, by order of the Paris Commune, the Vendome Column was destroyed as a symbol of militarism.
  9. ↑ Jean, Edgar, Marcel and Jenny Longuet