Letter to Étienne Cabet, Editor of the Populaire, March 1848

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The letter to the editor of the Populaire and the Declaration are in Engels’ handwriting. Both documents were drawn up at the end of March 1848 after Engels’ arrival in Paris and reflect the struggle which the leaders of the Communist League were waging against those German petty-bourgeois emigrant leaders in Paris, Herwegh and Bornstedt among others, who intended to speed up revolution in Germany by moving in a volunteer legion organised by using private donations and subsidies from the Provisional Government of the French Republic. Appeals to enlist were accompanied by demagogic appeals to the patriotic and revolutionary sentiments of German emigrants. Marx, Engels and other members of the Central Authority of the Communist League spoke out against the adventurist nature of such plans to “export revolution” and advised German workers instead to return to their home country individually in order to take part in the revolutionary events that were brewing there. “We opposed this playing with revolution in the most decisive fashion,” Engels later wrote in his work On the History of the Communist League. “To carry out an invasion, which was to import the revolution forcibly from outside, into the midst of the ferment then going on in Germany, meant to undermine the revolution in Germany itself, to strengthen the governments and to deliver the legionaries ... defenceless into the hands of the German troops.” The letter and the Declaration were first published in English in the journal Science and Society, 1940, Vol. IV, No. 2. The first publication in the language of the original appeared in the collection Der Bund der Kommunisten. Dokumente und Materialien, Bd. 1, 1836-1849, Berlin, 1970.

Citizen Cabet,

Would you be so kind as to insert the attached Declaration in the next number of the Populaire. The point is not to let the Communist Party be made responsible for an enterprise and conduct which have already reawakened in a part of the German nation the old national and reactionary prejudices against the French people. The Alliance of German Workers, an association of various workers’ societies in all European countries, which counts among its members Mr. Harney and Mr. Jones, the English Chartist leaders, is composed entirely of communists and openly professes itself communist. The so-called German Democratic Society in Paris is essentially anti-communist insofar as it claims not to recognise the antagonism and struggle between the proletarian and bourgeois classes. It is, therefore, a question of making a protest and a declaration in the interests of the Communist Party. And it is this which makes us anticipate your compliance. (This note is strictly confidential.)

Fraternal greetings,

Frederick Engels
Karl Marx

The undersigned committee considers it its duty to inform the various branches of the Alliance of German Workers in the different European countries that it has in no way participated in the proceedings, posters and proclamations to appeal to the French citizens for clothes, arms and money. The German Workers’ Club is the only one in Paris which maintains relations with the Alliance, and it has nothing in common with the society in Paris, called the Society of German Democrats, whose leaders are Herr Herwegh and Herr von Bornstedt.

The Central Committee of the Alliance of German Workers

(signed) K. Marx, K. Schapper, H. Bauer, F. Engels, J. Moll, W Wolff