Letter to Hermann Jung, January 18, 1871

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 18 January 1871


First published abridged, in the language of the original (English), in: G. Jaeckh, Die Internationale, Leipzig, 1904 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVI, Moscow, 1935. Reproduced from the original. Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 44


MARX TO HERMANN JUNG

IN LONDON

[London,] 18 January[1] 1871

Dear Jung,

I have in yesterday's sitting of the General Council fully exposed the past history of Jules Favre. I send you a few main points relating to his counterrevolutionary deeds.

The Council has also yesterday passed a Resolution instructing you to write to the Editors of the Felleisen—as the Organ of the German Arbeiterbildungsvereine[2] in Switzerland—in the following sense:

1) What is the position of those Vereine and their organ, the Felleisen, to the International Workingmen's Association?

2) Till now they have never paid any contribution to the General Council.

3) In their organ—the Felleisen—the annexation to Germany of Alsace and Lorraine is defended in flagrant contradiction to the circulars of the General Council[3] of which not even an extract has ever been published by them.

4) If they persist in the non-fulfilment of their duties (point 2) and in their opposition to the policy of the General Council (point 3), which is in consonance with the Statutes of the International, the General Council, using the right deferred to him by the Basel Congress, will provisionally—that is to say until the meeting of next General Congress—exclude them from the International[4]

Yours fraternally,

Karl Marx

Ladendorf is no longer the Editor of the Felleisen. You must address your letter: 'Redaktion des Felleisen. Deutscher Arbeiterbildungsverein, in Gassen, Zürich'.

Jules Favre

The infamous decree of 27th June 1848, by which many thousand Parisian workmen made prisoners during the June Insurrection,[5] were, without even the formality of any judicial inquiry, to be transported to Algeria, etc., was drawn up by Jules Favre. Afterwards, he constantly refused to join the motions of amnesty, brought forward from time to time by the Republican party of the Constituent Assembly.

Jules Favre was one of the most notorious tools of the reign of terror inflicted on the French working class by General Cavaignac after the Insurrection of June. He supported all the shameless laws then passed with a view to suppress the right of reunion, coalition, and the freedom of the press.[6]

On the 16th April 1849, Jules Favre, as the spokesman of the counterrevolutionary majority of a parliamentary committee, proposed to grant Louis Bonaparte the 1,200,000 francs he demanded for the expedition against the Roman Republic.[7]

  1. ↑ In the original: '17 January'.
  2. ↑ workers' educational societies
  3. ↑ the first and second Addresses of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association on the Franco-Prussian War
  4. ↑ This refers to Administrative Resolution VI passed by the Basle Congress, 'The Procedure for Expelling Sections from the Association'. It conferred on the General Council the right to suspend individual sections of the International until the meeting of the next Congress.
  5. ↑ The reference is to the June 1848 insurrection of the Paris workers.
  6. ↑ The reference is to the reactionary laws passed by the Constituent Assembly of the French Republic after the suppression of the June 1848 insurrection. The press laws of 11 July and 11 August envisaged severe punishment for the printing of articles against the government, the existing order and private property. The decree on clubs, adopted on 28 July 1848, placed them under the surveillance of the authorities.
  7. ↑ In April 1849 the French bourgeois government, in alliance with Austria and Naples, intervened against the Roman Republic for the purpose of suppressing it and restoring the Pope's secular power. Despite its heroic resistance the Roman Republic was overthrown and Rome occupied by French troops.