Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, November 14, 1859

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 14 November 1859


First published in: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Bd. III, Stuttgart-Berlin 1922
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


MARX TO FERDINAND LASSALLE[1]

IN BERLIN

London, 14 November 1859 9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

I am answering your by return. It isn't a question of your finding the money, but of a bill transaction. Would you allow me to draw on you at 3 months? // so you would be provided with security (guaranteed not only by myself, but also by Engels) before the bill fell due. It's a question, therefore, of an accommodation bill or, to put it more crudely, kite-flying. It still remains very doubtful, of course, whether I could manage to negotiate a bill of this kind over here. However there might be some CHANCE of it. Engels would have procured what was necessary had not all his liquid assets been tied up as a result of an action for causing bodily harm to an Englishman.[2] The affair is costing more than £100 and accommodation bills drawn in London on Manchester are only possible between businessmen.

I think it is now too late to insert the anti-Meyen statement.[3]

Assuming the Reform and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung accept it, it would arrive too late in Berlin.[4] Assuming they don't accept it, it will in any case be too late for any consideration of the great Meyen's article,[5] which will by then be outdated.

As regards Vogt, it behoves our party—as opposed to vulgar democracy—to force him to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Blind. Both gentlemen seem to be equally anxious to keep their distance. It was very clever of Vogt to make me out to be the source of the denunciation, but also to select as his target the A. Z. in Augsburg rather than the Volk in London. As regards myself, he can attribute the thing to rancour, if only because of the erstwhile opposition to him on the part of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. (You are doubtless aware that, when Lupus came to the National Assembly in Frankfurt, he opposed Uhland's vote of thanks to John, the imperial regent. Vogt seized this opportunity to vent his spleen and made an abusive speech attacking the N. Rh. Z. en general and Lupus in particular. 97 Lupus thereupon called him out. But Vogt thought his skin too valuable to the Fatherland to risk it in this way. Lupus thereupon threatened to box his ears publicly in the street. Thereafter Vogt never made an appearance unless flanked by his sister on one side and a woman acquaintance of his sister's on the other. And Lupus was too courteous, etc.) But again, Mr Vogt knew that Germany's vulgar democrats regard me as their bête noire. Furthermore, had he sued

Das Volk instead of the A. Z., Blind, etc., would have been legally compelled to give evidence on oath and the matter would have been bound to come to light. Finally, it was one thing to break a lance with a revolutionary paper direct, and quite another to do so with the reactionary A. Z. The way in which the 'noble' Vogt (Vogt the 'well-rounded', as his barrister described him,[6] is rather more TO THE POINT) attacked me in the Biel Handels-Courier[7] rejoiced my heart. I am, it seems, in communication with 'the police', live off the workers, and such-like inanities.

As to Kossuth, all the particulars about his transaction with Bonaparte were provided by Szemere (formerly Hungarian Prime Minister, presently in Paris).[8] I sent him my anti-Kossuth article[9]

in the Tribune and shall let you have it as soon as he returns me the cutting from Paris. The nicest part of it is that Kossuth's agent, Pulszky, is the Tribune's London correspondent.

The Schiller festival here was a Kinkel festival.[10] Freiligrath himself, who took part in it despite my warning, now realises that Gottfried used him simply as a tool. He told me that Kinkel's melodramatic speech was a veritable farce which literally had to be seen to be believed. You'd laugh heartily were I to tell you what

went on behind the scenes between Kinkel and Freiligrath before the public performance actually took place.[11] In the days of the

N. Rh. Z. Gottfried invariably figured in the press with a travelling-bag for attribute. Later on, it was a musket, then a lyre, then a distaff. Now our parson never does so without a black, red and gold flag.[12] The so-called 'working men' whom he has gathered round him belong to a guild; article 1 of the rules of their society runs: 'In accordance with the rules, all politics are to be excluded from the society's debates.' Before 1848 these same fellows enjoyed Bunsen's patronage.

Well, enough of gossip, for this note was simply intended to be de re pecuniaria.[13] Salut.

Your

K. M.

  1. ↑ This letter was first published in an abridged English translation in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1979.—12, 30, 45, 54, 61, 67, 70, 93, 110, 128, 132, 224, 227, 254, 265, 319, 333, 359, 407, 430, 448, 459, 461, 518, 524
  2. ↑ Daniells. See this volume, p. 490.
  3. ↑ K. Marx, 'Statement to the Editors of Die Reform, the Volks-Zeitung and the Allgemeine Zeitung'.
  4. ↑ i.e. the editorial office of the Volks-Zeitung
  5. ↑ [E. Meyen,] 'Der Proceß Carl Vogt's gegen die Augsburger Allg. Ztg.', Der Freischütz, No. 132, 3 November 1859.
  6. ↑ Marx puns on the phrase abgerundete Natur ('an intellectually mature character') used by barrister K. Hermann, who represented Vogt in his lawsuit against the Allgemeine Zeitung (see Note 470). The phrase can also mean 'well-rounded character' (in the physical sense), and it is in this sense that Marx later used it in his polemical work Herr Vogt (see present edition, Vol. 17, p. 28).—525
  7. ↑ [K. Vogt,] 'Zur Warnung', Schweizer Handels Courier, No. 150 (supplement), 2 June 1859. The article was reprinted, with editorial comments, in Das Volk, No. 6, 11 June 1859.
  8. ↑ On 23 August 1859 the New-York Daily Tribune published an anonymous item marked 'From Our Own Correspondent' (written by the Hungarian emigrant Ferenc Pulszky) which was an attempt to justify Kossuth's ties with Napoleon III. Early in September Marx sent two articles to the paper exposing the ties of both Kossuth and his followers, including Pulszky, with Bonapartist circles. The facts testifying to Kossuth's dealings with Napoleon III, which Marx cited in the two articles were given to him by Bertalan Szemere on 1 September 1859 when the latter visited him in London. The Tribune published, on 24 September, one article by Marx on the subject, 'Kossuth and Louis Napoleon' (present edition, Vol. 16), possibly combining the two he had sent. Whether Marx's private letter to the Tribune editor, Charles Dana, was used in it is not known, for the letter has not been found. On 28 September the London Free Press published Marx's article 'Particulars of Kossuth's Transaction with Louis Napoleon', which was a condensed version of the Tribune article.—494, 497, 507, 525
  9. ↑ K. Marx, 'Kossuth and Louis Napoleon'.
  10. ↑ Marx refers to the festivities to mark the centenary of Schiller's birth on 10 November 1859. The preparations in London were handled by a jubilee committee consisting of petty-bourgeois refugees headed by Gottfried Kinkel, who hoped to use the festival for his own publicity purposes.—508, 511, 514, 525
  11. ↑ See this volume, pp. 511-12.
  12. ↑ Marx and Engels ridiculed these attributes of Kinkel in their satire The Great Men of the Exile (see present edition, Vol. 11, pp. 252-55). Black, red and gold symbolise the unity of Germany; petty-bourgeois democrats associated the colours with the idea of a union of autonomous lands in the manner of the Swiss Confederation.—526
  13. ↑ about financial matters