Letter to Leó Frankel, around April 26, 1871

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 26 April 1871


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVI, Moscow 1935
First published in English in full in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On the Paris Commune, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971
Published in English in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 44


MARX TO LÉO FRANKEL

IN PARIS [Draft]

[London, around 26 April 1871] Dear Citizen![1]

I have been authorised by the General Council to issue a most emphatic denial on its behalf of the foul slander being spread by Citizen F. Pyat against Serraillier.[2] Pyat's fury springs from one single source: his hatred for the International. Through the so-called French Section in London,[3] which has been expelled by the General Council, and which has been infiltrated by police spies, one-time imperial guardsmen and touts, Pyat has been trying to pose before the world as the secret leader of our Association, to which he does not belong, and to make us responsible for his absurd manifestations in London and his compromising indiscre- tions in Paris, which, by the way, Citizen Tridon has already flayed during his stay in Brussels.[4] That is why the General Council was forced to disown this dirty schemer publicly.[5] Hence his furies against Dupont and Serraillier. When Serraillier threatened to summon the vile toadies of Pyat in the so-called French Section before an English court to answer for the slander Pyat keeps spreading in Paris, the French Section itself disowned them and branded them as slanderers.

One of these days, the General Council is to issue an Address on the Commune.[6] It has put off this manifesto up to now, because it was expecting the Paris Section from day to day to supply it with precise information. In vain! Not a word! The Council could not afford to wait any longer because the English workers have been eagerly awaiting its explanation.

Meanwhile, time has not been wasted. The true character of this grand Paris revolution has been explained to workers everywhere in letters from various secretaries to sections on the Continent and in the United States.

Since Serraillier's political life has given no occasion for slander,[7]

it was his private life that was attacked. Had Pyat's private life been as clean as Serraillier's, he would not have had to submit

here, in London, to affronts which it takes blood to wash away...[8]

I have had a letter and a visit from a certain citizen over the despatch of you know what. The mistake they made in Paris was not to hand over the papers required to facilitate the operations. You should now have some three per cent securities which circulate freely and which can be sold at the current rate. The citizen will give you any other necessary explanations.

He can be quite safely entrusted with the document.

  1. ↑ Marx drafted this letter after the General Council, at its meeting of 25 April 1871, had entrusted him with answering the slanderous inventions of the French petty-bourgeois democrat Félix Pyat, who had attacked General Council member Auguste Serraillier in connection with the elections to the Paris Commune.
  2. ↑ Crossed out in the original: "representative of the Council'.
  3. ↑ This refers to the French Branch in London, founded in the autumn of 1865. Besides proletarian members (Eugène Dupont, Hermann Jung, Paul Lafargue and others), the Branch also included petty-bourgeois refugees (Victor Le Lubez and later Félix Pyat). In 1868, after the General Council had adopted a resolution proposed by Marx (7 July 1868) condemning Pyat's provocative calls for terrorist acts against Napoleon III (see present edition, Vol. 21, p. 7), a split occurred in the Branch, and its proletarian members resigned. But Pyat's group, having lost virtually all ties with the International, continued to call itself the French Branch in London. It also repeatedly gave support to anti- proletarian elements opposing Marx's line in the General Council. On 10 May 1870 the General Council officially dissociated itself from this group (see present edition, Vol. 21, p. 131).
  4. ↑ This refers to Tridon's letter to the editors of La Cigale, who published it in No. 29, 19 July 1868 under the heading 'La commune révolutionnaire de Paris'. Tridon, who was a Blanquist, condemned the provocative speech made by Pyat at a meeting held in Cleveland Hall, London, on 29 June 1868, to celebrate the anniversary of the June 1848 uprising. At this meeting Pyat read out an appeal, which he had allegedly received from the 'Paris Revolutionary Commune', a secret society, and moved a resolution proclaiming the assassination of Napoleon III to be the sacred duty of every Frenchman.
    The same issue of La Cigale carried a resolution of the General Council disavowing Pyat's behaviour (see present edition, Vol. 21, p. 7).
  5. ↑ See K. Marx, 'Resolution of the General Council on Félix Pyat's Provocative Behaviour'.
  6. ↑ A reference to the appeal The Civil War in France, on which Marx was working at the time. It was first published in London on 13 June 1871, in English, as a pamphlet of 35 pages in 1,000 copies.
  7. ↑ Crossed out in the original: 'even to Pyat, this "honest" fellow whose courage is proverbial'.
  8. ↑ Crossed out in the original: 'public affronts to which he was submitted in London by several', 'by a French worker', 'Résumé: Serraillier's crime consists in his persistent efforts to baffle the'. This is followed by a gap in the original.