Letter to Friedrich Engels, May 21, 1851

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 21 May 1851


First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. I, Stuttgart, 1913
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 38, pp. 359-362

To Engels in Manchester

[London,] 21 May 1851

Dear Engels,

Freiligrath is here and sends you his regards. He's come to look around for a situation. If he doesn't find one, he intends to go to America.

He brought quite good news from Germany. The people in Cologne[1] are very active. Their agents have been travelling about since September. They have two tolerably good representatives in Berlin and, since the democrats are constantly coming to Cologne to consult them, they as constantly put spokes in those other gentry's wheels. For instance, the Brunswickers were all set to give Schimmelpfennig 2,000 talers for the London Committee (social). But first they sent Dr Lucius to Cologne, and so the matter came to nothing.

Kinkel is seriously discredited in the Rhine Province, particularly in Bonn. The committee there had sent Johanna[2] £200, but after a fortnight she was already asking for more. This greatly displeased the philistines.

In a few weeks' time the people in Cologne will be holding a communist congress.

Sigel, the general-in-chief, is here and has attached himself to Windmill Street.[3]

Further, General Haug has brought out an issue of Kosmos.

It contains puffs for Willich, Kinkel and Göhringer. The various bands are becoming more and more alike. Never have I seen or heard such inflated and complacent twaddle. Amongst other things it contains a harlequinade by Arnold Winkelried Ruge.[4] This creature pretends to have received a letter from a German 'hospitable friend' in which the latter expresses surprise at everything he reads in the papers about 'English hospitality', and anxiety lest Ruge, 'being overwhelmed by affairs of state', may be prevented from enjoying his fair share of this 'sybaritism of hospitality', and asks him:

'It was not, I take it, the traitor Radowitz who was invited to Windsor, but Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, Citizen Willich, Kinkel and yourself?'

Ruge then proceeds to disabuse his friend and assure him that English hospitality will not prevent them from returning to Germany torch in hand. L'imbécile!

The style of the whole is pretentious, puerile, piffling and of a complacent stupidity unequalled in the annals of world history. To cap it all, an unheard-of want of talent. But I must try and hunt out a copy of this rubbishy sheet for you.

That bedbug Meyen is busily scurrying around here telling everyone who will listen the secret that Marx and Engels have lost all influence and support in Germany. Frightful Meyen!

To give you but one example of the bare-faced forwardness of these blackguards, of their shabby importunities:

Last Sunday[5] I was at John Street where old Owen was giving a lecture on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Despite his idées fixes, the old man was ironical and endearing. When the old gentleman had finished, one of the Kosmos satellites pushed his way through to him and thrust the Kosmos into his hand, saying that the paper expressed his principles. And the old man actually commended it to the audience. C'est par trop drôle![6]

That evening, by the way, I was unable to avoid speaking to Harney again; he came up to me, rather the worse for drink and, with a very ingratiating air, asked after you.

Willich's begging business is doing pretty well. When the Schleswig-Holstein refugees arrived here, he wheedled over £200 'for the latter' (!) out of the City-Merchants.

Girardin does indeed say that Cavaignac is now the only serious candidate of the parti de l'ordre,[7] of the bourgeois mass. He himself, however, furiously attacks both him and Changarnier, and his polemic recalls once more the best period of his battle with the National. This fellow is responsible for more agitation in France than the whole gang of Montagnards[8] and reds[9] put together. Bonaparte would seem to be hors de question.[10] However, if the royalist majority in the National Assembly again violates the Constitution and, with a simple majority, decides upon its revision, it will finally be compelled—having lost all legal standing—to conclude a compromise with Bonaparte as the holder of executive power. In which case there could be serious clashes, since Cavaignac is unlikely to let such an opportunity be snatched away under his nose again.

All the Neue Rheinische Zeitung lads will be here soon.[11] I'm surprised that Lupus should not have arrived yet, and only hope some misfortune has not befallen him.

I am now spending every day, from 10 in the morning until 7 in the evening, at the library and am saving up the industrial exhibition till you come.[12]

Did you read the bogus and the genuine epistle by Mazzini in the Débats?[13]

Your

K. M.


Musch[14] sends his love to 'Friedrich Engels'.

Apropos, Willich and Schimmelpfennig have published the inevitable appeal to 'their brothers in the Prussian Army'.

  1. ↑ members of the Central Authority of the Communist League in Cologne
  2. ↑ Johanna Kinkel (Gottfried Kinkel's wife)
  3. ↑ The London German Workers' Educational Society (see Note 52) had its premises in Great Windmill Street.
  4. ↑ Marx compares Arnold Ruge to Arnold Winkelried, a semi-legendary fourteenth-century Swiss warrior.
  5. ↑ 18 May
  6. ↑ It's really too funny!
  7. ↑ These were the two factions in the so-called Party of Order—a conservative bloc of the monarchist groups formed in 1848 which had the majority in the Legislative Assembly of the French Republic (opened at the end of May 1849).
    The Philippists or Orleanists were supporters of the House of Orleans (a lateral branch of the Bourbon dynasty) overthrown by the February revolution of 1848; they represented the interests of the financial aristocracy and the big industrial bourgeoisie; their candidate for the throne was Louis Philippe Albert, Count of Paris and grandson of Louis Philippe.
    The Legitimists, supporters of the main branch of the Bourbon dynasty overthrown in 1830, upheld the interests of the big hereditary landowners and the claim to the French throne of the Count of Chambord, King Charles X's grandson, who called himself Henry V. Some of the Legitimists remained outside the bloc of monarchist groups.
  8. ↑ Montagnards—during the French revolution of 1848-49 representatives in the Constituent and subsequently Legislative Assembly of a bloc of democrats and petty-bourgeois socialists grouped around the newspaper La Réforme. They called themselves the Montagne by analogy with the Montagne in the Convention of 1792-94. On 13 June 1849 the Montagne staged a peaceful demonstration to protest against the sending of French troops to suppress the Roman Republic. The demonstration was dispersed by the army and the bourgeois detachments of the National Guards and there followed a counter-revolutionary offensive, persecution of democrats and proletarian activists, including emigrants.
  9. ↑ i.e. democrats and socialists of various trends
  10. ↑ out of the question
  11. ↑ Despite this conjecture Freiligrath moved from Cologne to London in the second half of May 1851 (see this volume, pp. 355, 359). Of the other members of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung editorial board (not counting Heinrich Bürgers, who was only so in name), Marx and Ferdinand Wolff were already in London; Wilhelm Wolff and Ernst Dronke were expected and Engels planned to go to London in the second half of May, and as emerges from his letters he did arrive there at the end of the month (see this volume, pp. 365, 373). Georg Weerth, then in England, also intended to go to London but did not do so until July.
  12. ↑ Engels visited Marx in London presumably on 31 May 1851 and stayed for two weeks, till about 15 June.
  13. ↑ C. Mazzini, 'Au Rédacteur', Journal des Débats politiques et littéraires, 18 May 1851.
  14. ↑ Edgar Marx