Letter from Karl Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht, May 4, 1871

Author(s) Karl Marx
Friedrich Engels
Written 4 May 1871


First published, in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Vol. I (VI), Moscow, 1932
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 44


MARX TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT

IN LEIPZIG

[London,] 4 MAY 1871

Dear LIBRARY,[1]

Just this in great haste. The Papiers et correspondance de la famille impériale, in which Vogt figures among others as someone who was subsidised from the official coffers,[2] were not published by the Commune, which has no time for such trivia, but by the gouvernement de la défense, i.e. by Jules Favre et Co., the honest republicans so greatly admired by Vogt in his letters to Kolb.[3]

Extracts from these official publications (and particularly the names of those who received subsidies) were printed in almost all the Paris papers. The cutting I enclose comes from the Petit Journal (issue of 3 May 1871[4] ), a paper which to this very day is conducting in Paris the same sort of campaign against the Commune as Signor Vogt in Vienna. From a sense of spiritual affinity with Vogt it even prints a (?) after his name.

Meanwhile, Vogt himself retracts all his talk when he says at the end of his gibberish:

'It is even possible that my name was misused as far back as 1859, albeit, so it seems, without my first name Karl.'[5]

So Louis Bonaparte misused 'Vogt' by inscribing his name in his expenses-book! Vogt as someone subsidised by Louis Bonaparte in August 1859—and moreover, just plain 'Vogt', Vogt without 'first name', Vogt sans phrase—naturally, that could only be the 'celebrated' Karl Vogt of Geneva! Mr Vogt is so well aware of that that he says my name was misused'. The good man feels so stung that he forgets to have recourse to the simple evasion: Just as there are many 'Karls' in the world, so too are there many 'Vogts'. What does it matter to me if some 'Vogt' or other without a first name received 40,000 frs in August 1859 from the Emperor's central treasury? No, says Vogt, I am the Vogt, the Vogt to whom people refer even without 'first name', but my name has been ' misused!

You must use all this to make the necessary statement in your paper. It is quite absurd to mince words for the sake of Mr Weiß and similar 'People's Partyites'.[6]

Your

K. M.

  1. ↑ This nickname was given to Liebknecht by Marx's daughters.
  2. ↑ See this volume, p. 130.
  3. ↑ This refers to Karl Vogt's Politische Briefe an Friedrich Kolb, a pamphlet published in the autumn of 1870, in which the author tried to camouflage his one-time ties with the Bonapartists. This pamphlet was criticised by Engels in his article 'Once Again "Herr Vogt'" (see present edition, Vol. 22).
  4. ↑ In the original a slip of the pen. The correct date is 25 March 1871 (see this volume, p. 146).
  5. ↑ C. Vogt, 'An die Redaktion des Schweizer Handels Couriers', Der Volksstaat, No. 36, 3 May 1871.
  6. ↑ On 3 May 1871 Liebknecht wrote to Marx that after the publication in Der Volksstaat of an item about Vogt receiving subsidies from funds belonging to the Bonaparte family (see Note 182), he was reproached for unnecessarily returning to the 'Vogt affair'. Liebknecht stressed the need to publish more material on this question. In connection with this, Engels sent to Der Volksstaat his article 'Once Again "Herr Vogt"' (see present edition, Vol. 22). On the People's Party see Note 71.