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Letter to Friedrich Engels, End of July 1849
First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.
To Engels in Vevey
This letter was first published in English in full in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1979.
Paris, end of July 1849[edit source]
Dear Engels,
I have suffered a great deal of anxiety on your account and was truly delighted when yesterday I received a letter in your own hand. I had got Dronke (who is here) to write to your brother-in-law asking for news of you. He, of course, knew nothing.
My whole family is here[1]; the government wanted to banish me to Morbihan, the Pontine marshes of Brittany.[2] So far I have frustrated their intention. But if I am to write to you in greater detail, both about my own circumstances here and about affairs in general, you must let me have a safer address, for things are really appalling here.
You now have the best opportunity to write a history of or a pamphlet on the Baden-Palatinate revolution.[3] Had you not taken part in the actual fighting, we couldn’t have put forward our views about that frolic. It would be a splendid chance for you to define the position of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung vis-à-vis the democratic party generally. I am positive that the thing will sell and bring you money.
I have embarked on negotiations with a view to starting a politico-economic (monthly) periodical in Berlin which would have to be largely written by us two.[4]
Lupus [Wilhelm Wolff] is also in Switzerland, I believe in Berne. Weerth was here yesterday; he is setting up an agency in Liverpool. Red Wolff is living here with me. Finances are, of course, in a state of chaos.
Freiligrath is in Cologne now as heretofore. If my wife were not in an all too interesting condition, I would gladly leave Paris as soon as it was financially possible to do so.
Farewell. Convey my kindest regards to Willich and write by return to the address: M. Ramboz, rue de Lille, 45.
Your
K. M.
- ↑ Jenny Marx spent June 1849 in her native town of Trier. On July 7 she joined her husband in Paris accompanied by her three children and Hélène Demuth (the Marxes’ housekeeper).
- ↑ On 19 July 1849 in an atmosphere of repression against democrats and socialists following the events of 13 June in Paris (*), the French authorities notified Marx that an order had been issued for his expulsion from Paris to Morbihan, a swampy and unhealthy département in Brittany. Marx protested and the expulsion was delayed, but on 23 August he again was ordered by the police to leave Paris within 24 hours.
Marx compares the département of Morbihan with the Pontine marshes in Italy, mentioned by Strabo in his Geography, Book 5, Ch. 3, § 5, and other ancient authors, which are a breeding-ground of malaria and other diseases.
(*) On 13 June 1849 the Montagne (bloc of democrats and petty-bourgeois socialists grouped around the newspaper La Réforme) staged a peaceful demonstration to protest against the sending of French troops to suppress the Roman Republic. The demonstration was dispersed by the army and the bourgeois detachments of the National Guards and there followed a counter-revolutionary offensive, persecution of democrats and proletarian activists, including emigrants. Many Montagnards were arrested or emigrated. - ↑ Marx’s suggestion was approved and subsequently put into practice by Engels. However, Engels started writing his work, which was later published under the heading, The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution, not earlier than mid-August 1849 after he had moved to Lausanne and did not finish it until February 1850, after his arrival in London from Switzerland.
- ↑ The negotiations mentioned here ended in December 1849 in the foundation of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Politisch-ökonomische Revue. The periodical was planned as a continuation of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung published by Marx and Engels during the 1848-49 revolution. Altogether six issues appeared from March to November 1850, one of them a double one (5-6). The journal was edited in London and published in Hamburg. Most of the articles and literary and international reviews were written by Marx and Engels, who got their followers Wilhelm Wolff, Joseph Weydemeyer and Johann Georg Eccarius to contribute to the Revue. The works published in the journal assessed the results of the 1848-49 revolution and developed further the theory and tactics of the revolutionary proletarian party. The publication of the Revue was discontinued due to police persecution in Germany and lack of funds.