Letter to Maurice Lachâtre, July 23, 1874

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 23 July 1874


First published in the newspaper Les Lettres françaises, No. 310, Paris, 4 mai 1950
Printed according to the newspaper
Translated from the French
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


MARX TO MAURICE LACHÂTRE

IN BRUSSELS

[London,] 23 July 1874
41 Maitland Park Road, N. W.

My dear Fellow Citizen,

After receipt of your last letter but one,[1] I myself informed Rochefort of its contents, but he had already made an agreement with the English publisher who brings out the Lanterne anglo- française in London.

As to the delay with our publication,[2] you may rest assured that no one is more distressed by it than I am. It is not, as you appear to imagine, merely a question of details and of minor corrections of style; rather I had, indeed am still having, to do virtually the whole thing over again. Once condemned to this thankless task I added here and there some important new developments, which will give the French edition—as I shall incidentally point out in the afterword — a value not possessed by the German original.[3] As to my French friends, they can only be of use on a few points of phraseology.

My earlier letters must have convinced you that physical weakness alone has prevented my finishing it. My health has been further aggravated by family misfortunes: Mrs Longuet's only child, a little angel ten months old,[4] has been taken from us by a sudden choleric attack, while my youngest daughter[5] has been suffering for months past from a serious illness.

However my physician[6] —who has given me strict instructions to refrain for the time being from work of any kind—says that a stay at Karlsbad and the taking of its mineral waters will effect a complete cure. I leave on the 15th of August, so that I shall be able to resume work at the end of September, and you have my guarantee that the task will be finished by the end of November.[7]

At present the delay cannot be of much importance, seeing that the dead season has begun.

In any case, the previous delays, for which I was in no way responsible, and the total lack of publicity occasioned by the state of affairs in Paris, had long since killed off sales by instalment.[8] I have in my hands a letter from you (from San Sebastian) in which you say so categorically, adding that it would be impossible to set things in motion again until after the sale of the complete work.

I shall always be most grateful for the interest you have taken in this publication and for the patience with which you have put up with tiresome incidents. The need for a scientific basis for socialism is making itself increasingly felt in France, as everywhere else.

Yours ever,

Karl Marx

  1. ↑ In his letter of 24 June 1874 Lachâtre requested Marx to pass on his proposal to start a joint magazine or newspaper in London to the French émigré journalist Rochefort.
  2. ↑ of the French edition of the first volume of Capital
  3. ↑ See present edition, Vol. 35.
  4. ↑ Charles Longuet
  5. ↑ Eleanor Marx
  6. ↑ Eduard Gumpert
  7. ↑ Marx (accompanied by his daughter Eleanor) took a cure at Karlsbad from 19 August to 21 September 1874. Having returned to London on 3 October, he resumed work on the French translation of the first volume of Capital and finished editing the last instalments in late January 1875 (see this volume, pp. 55-56).
  8. ↑ Under the contract signed by Marx and Maurice Lachâtre in February 1872 (see Note 17), the French edition of the first volume of Capital was to appear in instalments. The delay in the publication, which took four years (1872-75), was caused, alongside the circumstances mentioned in this letter, by the growth of political reaction following the Paris Commune. In mid-1875, the French government transferred legal rights over Lachâtre's publishing house in Paris to Adolph Quest, an official who procrastinated with the printing of the last instalments of Capital and did his best to obstruct its dissemination.