Letter to August Bebel, November 9-10, 1891

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 9 November 1891


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVIII, Moscow, 1940
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 49


ENGELS TO AUGUST BEBEL

IN BERLIN

London, 9 November 1891

Dear August,

Thank you for your letter of 29 October and the many other things you have sent me, including the postcard of 30 October.[1]

So Lafargue has won a victory.[2] It's quite an event, firstly because of the immediate impact on France, which will be very great, secondly, because on his occasion literally all the socialist parliamentary groups, including the Possibilists—if sometimes wryly—, pulled together, and thirdly because, with a low cunning and brutality worthy of a Bismarck, M. Constans succeeded in turning what was merely a second ballot into a gripping political drama.

The government had two main vantage grounds: 1. Victory over the common threat, Boulanger. 2. The apparently deliberate display of an intimate relationship with Russia. Add to which a 3rd, namely the display, successful at any rate so far as the plebs were concerned, of France's newly restored military might during the big September manoeuvres. These 3 points enabled the government to compel the extreme Left to support it; the combined 'Republicans' constituted a majority vis-à-vis the combined Monarchists, Boulangists and to some extent also socialists. Then, contrary to the practice of 1869, Constans did not set Lafargue free to enable him to stand as candidate. In this the Radicals could not go along with him. Hence the big debate on the 31st October, following Roche's interpellation,[3] hence the government's Pyrrhic victory — 240 for the government, 160 against, but—170 monarchist abstentions. In reality, therefore, anti-government majority of 90. Defection of Radicals therefore = fall of the Cabinet the moment the Monarchists desire it and vote with the Radicals. After the division, needless to say, the alarm of the Radicals was as great as that of the government, especially since the latter threatened to dissolve parliament while giving the Radicals to understand that they would find the electorate far more pro-government than the present Chamber, as seems more than likely. In short, Constans' behaviour has shown the 'one Republican' mass that, after the disappearance of the only opponent capable of uniting them, there are internal questions which hopelessly divide them; the rift exists, cannot be patched up and, now that Constans is flouting all the republican conventions by his continued detention of Lafargue in Ste-Pélagie, things will liven up still more. Not that I anticipate the early demise of the government as a result of the Radicals' defection— on the contrary, there are likely to be a number of occasions on which the latter, having scored a victory despite themselves, will have to eat humble pie and beg the government's pardon; but within the government itself there is open warfare between Freycinet and Ribot on the one hand and Constans and Rouvier on the other, warfare which another doubtful division might bring to a head, thus inducing a split and, with it, a change of ministers, renewed instability in the Cabinet, i. e. a cooling off of Russia's ardour since what the Tsar needs is stable government in France; and finally — fresh elections under different circumstances and with different results. While Liebknecht goes into ecstasies in the Vorwärts about the non-existence of chauvinism in France, the Paris press — which I have been able to study exhaustively during the period of the elections — and notably Clemenceau's Justice which Liebknecht, I believe, also sees every day, has convinced me that the secret behind the 'Republicans" (Opportunists, Radicals, Possibilists) anti-Boulanger pact was the government's determination to outbid Boulanger in patriotism, to engineer the Russian alliance, to present the army to the world as ready for battle, to rattle its sabre and, should a retaliatory war ensue, to conduct it with might and main — in other words, to head as straight as maybe for a retaliatory war, the dearest wish of every French bourgeois. Just as the republic of 1849 and 1871 was the form most calculated to unite the Monarchists, so now retaliatory war is the issue that will most surely bring all Republicans, i. e. all middle-class ones — for the workers count only as election fodder—into the same fold, indeed the only issue that could bring this about once the republic had been attained and consolidated. Retaliation was the secret of the Boulangists' success — let us preach retaliation! The re-acquisition of Alsace-Lorraine! If you compare La Justice of pre-Boulangist and Boulangist days with that of today, you would find it hard to draw any other conclusion. But that is against Liebknecht's principles. In France, a strong chauvinist tendency cannot be allowed to exist, it would fly in the face of the eternal principles and hence it is denied. If things go on like this, you people may have to pay dearly for the policy pursued by the Vorwärts, and come to rue the fact that the man who directs your foreign policy is colour-blind. I don't know what ideas Hirsch may have on the subject; at one time he, too, used sometimes to harbour curious views in regard to France. But no doubt he will be open to discussion.

10 November. So Lafargue has been set free. For the period of the session — and even Meyer Opper von Blowitz doubts whether he will have to go back to Ste-Pélagie once it's over. That represents another defeat for Constans. At first he and his Opportunists wanted to keep Lafargue in gaol — but the conviction that, if they did, the Radicals and Monarchists would form an anti-government majority and set him at liberty, compelled the gentlemen to give way. So the extreme Left has twice been compelled to disassociate itself from the government.— The politics of the French Chamber, by the by, are completely incomprehensible to anyone who fails to bear constantly in mind that the government and the Opportunists are exploiting their term of office for their personal enrichment in the most outrageous manner and that the vast majority of Radicals are not only implicated but have an interest in these goings-on, and are only waiting for the time when they are strong enough to seize power themselves and skim off the cream which is now the prerogative of the Opportunists.

Now for an example of the vicious stupidity of the French government: a few days before the second ballot at Lille a levy was made in Fourmies as a result of which 30 young men were drafted into the battalion of the 145th Regiment garrisoned at Maubeuge, the regiment which, on May Day in Fourmies, had opened fire on these same men — and among those 30 was the brother of Marie Blondeau, the girl killed on May Day by this self-same battalion. You'd think you were in Prussia. The Vorwärts chooses to ignore all this!

There was much rejoicing here over your victories in Berlin and Vollmar's most resounding and, for him, unpleasant defeat in Munich.[4] It will, I imagine, be some time before you have any more trouble with defections and/or expulsions, and in the meantime the party will grow to such an extent that this particular method of opposition might very well disappear altogether. But whether it will be pleasanter for you when the cabalist crew remains within the bounds of legality is another question.

The Zurich business[5] has shown you yet again how much of a drag on you the foreign associations are. Could you not seize on the opportunity and sort things out once and for all with that gang? The Vorwärts dealt admirably with Hans Müller, but that doesn't prevent these foreign idiots from presuming to subject you to a vote of no confidence. In this country the same thing applies to the Society[6] and Gilles. Unless you counter Gilles' statement by publicly declaring how the said Society stands vis-à-vis the party, no amount of protests in private letters will be of any avail. That you people are responsible for the stupidities of this gang is simply taken for granted over here — and with justice, in view of the Society's past history, so long as you people remain silent.

We were very pleased about Stolp-Lauenburg and your article on the subject in the Vorwärts, which fully accords with my views.[7] The bulk of rural day labourers east of the Elbe (as also in England) are in fact still too much in thrall for our propaganda to have any real effect until they have been through the dame school of Progress.[8] It is the task of the men of Progress to pave the way for us there, and this they will surely do. So if in Berlin their inertia is such that, as opposed to ourselves, the men of Progress must be accounted part of the reactionary mass, in the rural areas their position is decidedly different at any rate as things are now. Admittedly this won't go on for long.

Though the term of the Reichstag has been extended to 5 years,[9] it is likely to be interrupted. Provided the pressure is kept up, the majority will disintegrate and the government will have to resign because it will have no alternative. Particularly in case of war. This very winter you may witness some ludicrous goings-on.

I am glad to hear that so much sympathy is already felt for us in technologically educated circles.[10] But from what I experienced in 1848 and 1870/71 of the French Republicans, who were after all themselves bourgeois, I know only too well just how far one gets with such silent hangers-on and sympathisers — in time of danger — and how horribly one can put one's foot in it, not to wish for a couple of years' respite in which to take a closer look at these gentlemen's qualifications and character, particularly in relation to so important a business as the socialisation of large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture. Not only would this save friction; it might also, at a moment of crisis, avert an otherwise inevitable and decisive defeat. There will in any case be stupendous blunders, and plenty of them — that is inevitable. As you yourself have said, there are, among the postulants, plenty whose ambitions exceed their talents and knowledge, nor have I forgotten what Singer once said to me, apropos of Nonne, about students being driven into the arms of Social-Democracy by their fear of examinations. However, the very fact of their coming is a portent of what lies ahead.

In Russia the famine is assuming fearsome proportions. At Simbirsk, rebellious starvelings are given 500 lashes, i. e. flogged to death. The winter wheat in the south either could not be sown because of drought or else has been killed by an early frost. So there'll be more distress next year. It would seem to me that the Russians are bent on appeasement (Giers' trip to Milan), having also put a bit of a damper on the overhasty overtures of the French, and it was precisely because of this that the Tsar felt he could afford to travel across young William's domains without paying him a visit which is, after all, a flagrant case of lèse-majesté. Only wait till the French Ministry begins to totter, and then you'll see how peace-loving the Tsar becomes— needless to say without desisting from his encroachments in the East and in Central Asia.

Yesterday Salisbury told the jackasses and speculators in the City that not one little cloud troubles the peaceful horizon. That would be a bad sign, for in 1870, a fortnight before the outbreak of war, the same thing was said by Granville, the Foreign Secretary.

The French September manoeuvres with 4 army corps were a fearful sham. Sir Charles Dilke, Parnell's colleague in adultery — albeit on a different basis — described them in enthusiastic Francophil terms, yet his article shows that there was much that was exceedingly rotten and much that had remained unchanged since 1870. Notably the inefficiency of the officers. Once the chaps begin to mobilise on a large scale, even more inadequacies will come to light.

Regards from Louise.

Your

F. Engels

The Russian loan weighs heavily on the Paris bankers. Has dropped 4% below the issue price, and crowds of people in this country are busily disposing of other funds and shares so as to be able to make a fresh payment to the Russians on the 20th of this month in Paris.[11]

  1. ↑ In his letters of 29 and 30 October 1891 Bebel informed Engels that Social-Democratic meetings held in Berlin and other cities had approved the decisions of the Erfurt party congress directed against the opposition (see Note 301).
  2. ↑ In his letter of 24 October 1891 Bebel informed Engels about the results of the Erfurt Congress. He also advised him of the party Executive's decision, adopted at his, Bebel's, proposal, to make available 400 marks for Lafargue's election campaign.
  3. ↑ On 31 October 1891 the Chamber of Deputies discussed an interpellation by Ernest Roche, who had demanded that the government state its motives for keeping Lafargue in prison and thus denying him the possibility to campaign in the election. The government's conduct was criticised by Etienne Alexandre Millerand and Georges Benjamin Clemenceau. The Radicals voted against the government's proposal to proceed to other business. The Monarchists abstained. As a result, the government's proposal was passed with only a small majority.
  4. ↑ Reporting on the Erfurt Congress at a Social-Democratic meeting in Munich on 26 October 1891, Vollmar regretted the expulsion by the congress of some of the leaders of the Jungen from the party (see Note 301). The meeting rejected Vollmar's draft resolution on party tactics. In its unanimously adopted resolution on the report, submitted by Carl Oertel, it declared itself in agreement with the congress decision on tactics and recommended all party members to take it as a guide.
  5. ↑ On 31 October 1891 an open meeting of German Social-Democratic émigrés in Zurich adopted a resolution, tabled by Hans Müller, expressing disagreement with the expulsion of leaders of the Jungen by the Erfurt party congress (see Note 301) and urging the next congress to rescind this decision. In its report on the meeting, Vorwärts, No. 259, 5 November, pointed out that the Erfurt Congress had been attended by people more competent in party matters than Hans Müller.
  6. ↑ Engels means the German Workers' Educational Society in London, which was founded by Karl Schapper, Joseph Moll, Heinrich Bauer and other members of the League of the Just in 1840. After the establishment of the Communist League, its local branches played the leading role in the Society. In 1847 and 1849-50, Marx and Engels took an active part in its work. On 17 September 1850, they and a number of their followers retired from the Society because most of its members had sided with the adventurist sectarian minority (the Willich-Schapper faction) which was challenging the Marx- and Engels-led majority in the Central Authority of the Communist League. Marx and Engels resumed their work in the Society in the late 1850s. When the First International Working Men's Association was founded, the Society — then led, among others, by Friedrich Lessner — became its member. The London Educational Society was closed by the British government in 1918.
  7. ↑ On 28 October 1891 a Reichstag by-election was held in the Stolp-Lauenburg constituency in Pomerania. Bebel analysed its outcome in an article headlined 'Die Reichstagswahl in Stolp-Lauenburg', printed in Vorwärts, No. 256, 1 November. He interpreted the victory of the candidate of the Freisinnige Party (see Note 242) in a constituency which had consistently elected conservatives from 1867 onwards, as important evidence of the weakening of the reactionary forces in rural constituencies.
  8. ↑ The Party of Progress, founded in June 1861, advocated German unity under Prussia's aegis, the convocation of an all-German parliament, and a strong liberal ministry responsible to a chamber of deputies. In 1866, the party's Right wing, capitulating to Bismarck, split away and formed the National Liberal Party (see Note 414). In contrast to it the Progressists continued to describe themselves as an opposition party even after Germany's unification (1871). This attitude, however, was a merely notional one. In 1884 the Progressists merged with the split-away Left-wing National Liberals, forming the Freisinnige Party (see Note 242).
  9. ↑ In February 1888 the term of the German Reichstag was extended from three to five years. Attempts by the Bismarck government to win such an extension in 1881 and 1885 had ended in failure. A longer term for the Reichstag meant a restriction of the voters' rights.
  10. ↑ In his letter to Engels of 26 October 1891 Bebel wrote that revolutionary views were taking hold on people's minds, so that the intellectuals would, in his opinion, side with the Social-Democrats when the time was ripe. Scientists, teachers, officials and technicians, he said, bitterly resented the government pressure.
  11. ↑ The postscript was written by Engels in the margin.