Letter to César de Paepe, September 14, 1870

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 14 September 1870


First published in L'Actualité de l'histoire, No. 25, Paris, 1958
Translated from the French
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 44


MARX TO CÉSAR DE PAEPE

IN BRUSSELS

[London,] 14 September 1870

Dear Citizen,

Herewith two copies of our Address,[1] one for L'Internationale, one for La Liberté. I have no time to translate it, Dupont is in Manchester, and Serraillier in Paris as delegate of the General Council. My time is fully occupied with correspondence with Germany and with the agitation amongst the English working men.

On 5 September our Central Committee at Brunswick published an appeal 'To the German Workers' to oppose the ANNEXATION of French territory and to support peace with the Republic.[2] On the orders of General Vogel von Falckenstein, the infamous Prussian who (in 1866) distinguished himself by his vandalism in Frank- furt,[3] not only were the copies of the manifesto seized, but all the members of the Committee—as well as the unfortunate printer[4] of the manifesto—were arrested, clapped in irons like criminals and transported to Lötzen,[5] a town in East Prussia.[6] As you know, on the pretext of a French landing, the entire coast of Northern Germany has been placed under martial law, thus enabling those gentlemen, the military, to arrest, pass sentence and shoot whenever they think fit. But even in those parts of Germany where martial law has not been proclaimed, the Prussians, aided and abetted by the middle classes, have intro- duced a reign of terror directed against all independent opinion. Despite this terror and despite the hubbub raised by the bour- geois patriots, the German working man is conducting himself admirably.

Unfortunately I cannot say the same of our French comrades. Their manifesto was absurd.[7] 'Recross the Rhine!' They forget that, in order to return home, the Germans have no need to recross the Rhine: rather they can simply withdraw to the Palatinate and the Khine (Prussian) Province. You can imagine how this chauvinist catchphrase has been exploited by Bismarck's official journals! The whole tone of the manifesto is absurd and contrary to the spirit of the International.

I have not had the time to copy out for you the whole of the letter I received from Serraillier, but the following passage should suffice to enlighten you on the state of affairs in Paris. It is our duty not to deceive ourselves with illusions.

'It is unbelievable that for six years people can be Internationalists, abolish frontiers, no longer recognise anyone as a foreigner, and arrive at the stage they have now reached, simply in order to preserve a factitious popularity to which they will sooner or later fall victim. When I express indignation at their conduct, they tell me that, were they to speak otherwise, they would be sent packingl Accordingly it seems to them more appropriate to deceive these unfortunate fellows over the true situation in France than to seek, at the risk of losing their popularity, to bring them back to their senses, a course that would, I believe, be of much greater use to our France. Moreover, what a situation they are creating for the International by their ultra-chauvinist discourses! How many generations may it not take to erase the profound antagonism of nationality which they are seeking to revive by whatever means their feeble imagination can suggest! Not that they are stupid, far from it. But like me they know that when you flatter the people, you deceive them; they feel they are cutting the ground from under their own feet and, I might even say, they are afraid of openly saying they are Internationalists, a foolishness from which it follows that they can think of nothing better than to parody the revolution of '93.'

This state of affairs will, I trust, all be over come the early and inevitable capitulation of Paris. The misfortune of the French and even of the working men, is to hark back to great thingsl It is essential that events should once and for all destroy this reactionary worship of the past!

The manifesto printed in the supplement to La Solidarité did not surprise me. I well knew that those who preach total abstention from politics—as though working men were monks who established a world of their own away from the world at large—would always revert to bourgeois politics at the first summons of the historic tocsin.

With the exception of a very few papers the English press has been bought, the majority by Bismarck, the minority by Louis Bonaparte, the latter having saved enough money to buy an entire army. Nevertheless I have found the means to wage a war to the death against those gentry, the Prussians.

Our friends in Paris have been bombarding me with telegrams telling me what I ought to do in Germany. I believe I am a little more familiar than the Parisians with the way in which one must deal with my compatriots.

You would oblige me by dropping me a few lines on the state of affairs in Belgium. Fraternal greetings,

Karl Marx

  1. ↑ K. Marx, 'Second Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association on the Franco Prussian War'.
  2. ↑ At the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War members of the German colony in Manchester (Carl Schorlemmer, G. Beer, J. G. Wehner and others) organ ised a committee to assist the war victims. Engels joined the committee but in September 1870, when the war ceased to be defensive on the German side, he withdrew.
  3. ↑ This letter was written on a letterhead of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association.
  4. ↑ Sievers
  5. ↑ Polish name: Gizycko.
  6. ↑ This refers to the Déclaration réglant divers points de droit maritime (Declaration Regulating Various Items of Maritime Law), a supplement to the Paris Peace Treaty of 1856 which marked the end of the Crimean War of 1853-56. It was signed on 16 April 1856 by the representatives of Austria, France, Britain, Prussia, Russia, Sardinia and Turkey. The Declaration formulated the rules of war at sea, incorporating the principles of armed neutrality, which were proclaimed in 1780 by the government of Catherine II and envisaged the abolition of privateering, immunity of neutral cargo in enemy vessels and of enemy cargo in neutral vessels (with the exception of war contraband), and the recognition only of a real blockade. Lord Clarendon, British representative at the Paris Congress, signed the Declaration on behalf of his country.
  7. ↑ On the passage which Frederick Greenwood, the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, added at the end of Engels' article 'Notes on the War.—XIII', see present edition, Vol. 22, Note 45.
    Engels provided a correct description of the siege of Strasbourg by the Prussians in his 'Notes on the War.—XVII' (see present edition, Vol. 22).