Letter to Laura Lafargue, October 11, 1887

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 11 October 1887


First published, in the language of the original (English), in F. Engels, P. et L. Lafargue, Correspondance, t. II, Paris, 1956
Reproduced from the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 48


ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE[1]

IN PARIS

London, 11 October 1887

My dear Laura,

I was glad to hear you received the cheque all right—a miscarriage with that sort of thing may be a very unpleasant matter and so I was rather anxious about news with regard to it.

I hope by this time you have settled down again, and are not too much disturbed by the precious scandals cropping up around you. This Caffarel affair[2] seems to have been brought forward by the Rouvier- Ferry lot, but if so it was a great mistake. It looks very much like the first scandals brought out by Girardin in 1846/47 and which led much farther than le rusé Emile[3] expected.[4] The ball is once set rolling; and no doubt a good crop of further scandals will come to daylight. There are plenty of them going on behind the scenes and this single affair having been dragged forth, will frighten a lot of petty dabblers in the same kind of thing; in their anxiety to get out of danger they are sure to compel madame la justice to come forward, however reluctantly, and tackle the people who will be denounced by their frightened associates. Even this one affair bodes no good to the ruling lot; if Wilson is implicated, what is old Grévy to do?

It would be a splendid piece of historical irony if the bourgeois republic was doomed to kill itself by the same révolution du mépris[5] which swept away the bourgeois monarchy in 1848.[6]

The Raon-sur-Plaine affair was simply this: within Bismarck's empire this way of treating civilians is quite the rule with the military.[7] They are trained to it, and rewarded for it; and the cowardly bourgeois press praises such things if committed upon working men, and excuses them if committed upon bourgeois. And then it is of course impossible to drive into the same soldiers that on the frontier they must act differently, and that a Frenchman, a Russian or an Austrian is to be treated with more consideration. That drunken brute Kauffman will either be acquit- ted or, if sentenced, for appearances' sake, to a nominal imprisonment, will be treated like le bon dieu en France[8] and promoted hereafter.

The Socialiste in its new shape is a considerable improvement upon the old one.[9] Paul could not do everything and his own articles look more worked out since he has not the whole burden upon his shoulders. It will do Deville good to contribute an article per week, his journalistic practice wanted developing and his articles are getting less ponderous.

Next week I expect Bebel here[10] and also probably Singer. Their Congress seems to have been a great success, and the right wing of the party have got a direct snub:[11] Geiser and Viereck have been too cowardly to sign the Aufrufe for the Congress, and have consequently been declared incapable of further occupying eine Vertrauensstellung in der Partei[12] Bax was also there, he has brought his boy to Zürich where he will be more or less under Bernstein's care and go to Beust's school.

Here things are moving slowly but they are moving. The Trades Union Congress was a splendid symptom.[13] The Tories help us here by all sorts of little police chicanery with regard to open-air meetings— what confounded jackasses they are both here and in Ireland! Jackasses—unless they intend opening next parliament with the announcement that they have tried coercion and broken down and that nothing therefore remains but Home-Rule[14] —thus taking the wind out of Gladstone's sails and bringing in a half-and-half Home-Rule Bill of their own shaping. But I cannot think Salisbury has either so much sense or so much boldness.

In the meantime Champion has openly attacked Hyndman[15] in his paper Common Sense (rather Uncommon Nonsense), and the Fabians[16] —a dilettante lot of egregiously conceited mutual admirers who soar high above such ignorant people as Marx—are trying to concentrate the 'movement' in their hands. Very nice amusements en attendant que la classe ouvrière se mette en mouvement et balaye tous ces mannequins et femmequines[17] (Mrs Besant is of them too).

Yours affectionately

F. E.

Nim sends her love, is just remanaging the carpet in my room over- head. I have not yet had Sonnenschein's account. I have reminded him of its being due.

  1. ↑ This letter was first published, in the language of the original (English), in F. Engels, P. et L. Lafargue, Correspondance, t. 2 (1887-1890), Paris, Ed. sociales, 1956.
  2. ↑ On 6 October 1887, Deputy Chief of the French General Staff General Louis Charles Caffarel was dismissed from his post and arrested on a charge of selling Legion d'honneur Orders. The investigation revealed that MP Daniel Wilson, son-in-law of the President of the Republic, Jules Grevy, was one of the chief accomplices of General Caffarel. As a result, General Caffarel was demoted, stripped of his decorations and discharged with disgrace; Grevy had to retire.
  3. ↑ the cunning Emile
  4. ↑ Engels means the pronouncements made by Emile de Girardin, a French bourgeois journalist and editor of the newspaper La Presse, in 1846 and 1847. E. Girardin accused some of the figures of the July Monarchy and the Guizot Ministry of corruption (selling peer titles, bribery of the press, etc). His exposures had a role to play in exacerbating the domestic political crisis on the eve of the Revolution of 1848. For more details, see Engels' article 'The Decline and Approaching Fall of Guizot - Position of the French Bourgeoisie' (present edition, Vol. 6, pp213-219).
  5. ↑ revolution of contempt
  6. ↑ An excerpt from this letter was first published, in the language of the original (English), in K. Marx and F. Engels, On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976.
  7. ↑ On 24 September 1887 a group of Frenchmen on a hunting party near the Franco-German border at Raon-sur-Plaine (Vexaincourt), was shot at by a German soldier, R. Kaufmann, from German territory; one of the Frenchmen was killed, and another wounded. Kaufmann said he had taken them for poachers. The German government expressed its regret over the incident and pledged to pay an indemnity to the families of the victims.
  8. ↑ our merciful Lord in France
  9. ↑ On 11 June 1887, the newspaper Le Socialiste (2 Serie) resumed its publication following a break from March 26; its format was considerably enlarged.
  10. ↑ Bebel visited Engels as guest in the latter half of October 1887.
  11. ↑ The Congress of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany was in session from the 2nd to the 6th October 1887, at St. Gallen (Switzerland). It was attended by 79 delegates. The congress discussed the following questions: a report of the Reichstag faction of the party, the activity of Social Democratic deputies in the Reichstag and the Landtags, the party's attitude to the issue of taxes and customs duties in connection with the steps taken by the government in the social sphere, the party's policy at the last election and at the election to come, the convocation of an international socialist congress, and the attitude to the anarchists. It was stressed in the congress resolutions that in its parliamentary activities, the party was to concentrate on the critique of the government and on the agitation for the principles of Social Democracy; Bismarck's social policies, it was said, had nothing in common with the genuine concern for working people's needs. It was also pointed out that anarchist views were incompatible with the socialist programme. The congress passed a decision to convene an international labour congress in 1888 to consider labour legislation. Most of the delegates upheld the party's revolutionary wing, led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The leaders of the opportunist wing found themselves in relative isolation.
  12. ↑ a position of trust in the party
  13. ↑ The annual 20th Trades Unions Congress, held at Swansea from the 5th to the 12th September 1887, passed a decision to set up an independent labour organisation. A meeting convened for the purpose outlined a programme of this National Labour Association which was to act as a Labour Electoral Committee. Likewise, the Congress adopted a decision on convening, in November 1888, an international labour congress in London. For the first time ever, the Congress adopted resolutions on nationalisation of landed property, and on holding a plebiscite among the trade union members concerning the struggle for an eight-hour working day, along with other resolutions.
  14. ↑ Home Rule - this refers to the struggle for Irish self government from the 1870s to the beginning of the 20th century. Although Home Rule provided for an Irish parliament and national bodies of administration, it envisaged supreme power being vested with the British cabinet which retained the administration of foreign, military and customs affairs.
  15. ↑ H. H. Champion, 'The Future of Socialism in England', Common Sense, 15 September 1887
  16. ↑ The British Fabian Society was founded by democratic minded intellectuals in 1884. This society was named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus (3rd century B.C.), who was named Cunctator ('the delayer') from his cautious tactics in the war against Hannibal. Playing the leading part in it were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw and others. Local organisations of the Fabian society sometimes included working-class members. Rejecting notions of militant class struggle and the revolution, the Fabians believed it was possible to move from capitalism to socialism by means of reforms implemented within the framework of a municipal socialism.
  17. ↑ until the working class goes into action and sweeps away all these male and female puppets