Letter to Paul Lafargue, March 25, 1889

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 25 March 1889


First published in full, in the language of the original (French), in: F. Engels, P. et L. Lafargue, Correspondance, t. II, Paris, 1956
Printed according to the original
Translated from the French
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 48


ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE[1]

AT LE PERREUX

London, 25 March 1889

My dear Lafargue,

You speak of a congress in August, although you know that the conference[2] resolved to hold it at the end of September. I repeat: If you deviate by so much as a fraction of an inch from what was agreed to by everyone at The Hague, you will provide the Belgians with a pretext for withdrawing, and then, as Bebel has told you, everything will be jeopar- dised. I am quite willing to urge the Germans to put pressure on the Belgians, but I shall do nothing until I know for certain that you, the French, like everyone else, unreservedly assent to the resolutions taken at the conference. Otherwise people will tell me, and with reason: How can you ask us to commit ourselves for the sake of people who do not respect their own commitments?

Either, then, you hold a congress as resolved at The Hague, or you do not hold one at all. And only on the day when I am given the assur- ance that you Parisians whole-heartedly and unreservedly assent to the resolutions that have been taken, only then shall I feel able to act, and shall act.

It is not a question of deciding which would be better, August or September—that question has already been decided and to raise it again would be to play into the Possibilists' hands.

As for Boulanger, I myself feel pretty sure that you will have to put up with him and that that idiot Rochefort, if he doesn't become a complete scoundrel, may, as a reward for his services, find himself once again in Caledonia.[3] Every now and again the French go through a Bonapartist phase, and the current one is even more shameful than the last. They will pay for the consequences of their own actions—that is the law of history—and the day of reckoning will probably be the centenary of their great revolution.—That is the irony of history. What a fine spectacle it will present to the world at large—France celebrating her revolutionary jubilee by paying homage to an adventurer such as this.

Doubtless he will bleed the big financiers, if only to pay the debts incurred during his dictatorial campaign and to reward his gang. And the money from the big financiers will not be enough. As Marx said of Boustrapa,[4] he would have to rob France of all her money in order to use that money to bribe the whole of France.[5] And as for you, he will crush you.

As for war, that is, to my mind, the most terrible of eventualities. Otherwise I shouldn't give a fig for the whims of Mme la France. But a war in which there will be 10 to 15 million combatants, unparalleled devastation simply to keep them fed, universal and forcible suppression of our movement, a recrudescence of chauvinism in all countries and, ultimately, enfeeblement ten times worse than after 1815, a period of reaction based on the inanition of all the peoples by then bled white— and, withal, only a slender hope that that bitter war may result in revo- lution—it fills me with horror. Especially when I think of our move- ment in Germany, which would be overwhelmed, crushed, brutally stamped out of existence, whereas peace would almost certainly bring us victory.

Nor, during such a war, would France be able to have a revolution for fear of impelling her only ally, Russia, into the arms of Bismarck and finding herself crushed by a coalition. The slightest revolutionary move would be a betrayal of one's country.

How the Russian diplomats would laugh!

Yours ever,

F. E.

  1. ↑ An excerpt from this letter was first published in the journal La Pensee, No. 61, 1955. About the first English publication of the letter, see note 77.
  2. ↑ The International Socialist Conference was held in the Hague on 28 February 1889. It was attended by representatives of the socialist movement of Germany, France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. The conference was convened at the suggestion of the Social Democratic faction in the German Reichstag with the aim of framing the conditions for the calling of an International Socialist Working Men's Congress in Paris. The Possibilists refused to attend the conference despite the invitation and did not recognise its decisions. The conference defined the powers of the forthcoming congress, its date and agenda. The International Working Men's Congress took place on 14 July 1889.
  3. ↑ In the latter half of the 1860s the government of the Second Empire exiled Henri Rochefort to New Caledonia for his virulent attacks against Napoleon III. In the 1880s, being an active supporter of General Boulanger and one of the editors of the newspaper LTntransigeant, he placed it at the disposal of the Boulangists.
  4. ↑ Boustrapa - nickname of Louis Bonaparte, composed of the first syllables of the names of the places where he and his supporters staged Bonapartist putsches, or coups: Boulogne (August 1840), Strasbourg (October 1846) and Paris (coup d'etat of 2 December 1851).
  5. ↑ K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, present edition, Vol. II, pp. 195-96.