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Letter to Georg Herwegh, October 26, 1847
First published in: 1848. Briefe von und an Georg Herwegh, Munich, 1898
To Georg Herwegh in Paris
Brussels, 26 October 1847 rue d'Orléans, 42, Faubourg Namur[edit source]
Dear Herwegh,
I wanted to give Engels a letter to bring you, but there was so much pressing business on the day of his departure that this was lost sight of and forgotten.
I had further been asked by Countess Hatzfeld to write you a few lines of introduction for her. I imagine that by now you will already have made her acquaintance. For a German woman, she has developed great vigour sparring with her husband.[1]
Here in Brussels we have founded two public democratic societies.
1. A German Workers’ Society[2] which already has about 100 members. Besides debates of quite a parliamentary nature, there is also social entertainment with singing, recitation, theatricals and the like.
2. A smaller cosmopolitan-democratic society to which Belgians, French, Poles, Swiss and Germans belong.[3]
If you come up here again you'll find that even in little Belgium more can be done by way of direct propaganda than in big France. Moreover, I believe that, however minor it may be, public activity is infinitely refreshing for everyone.
It is possible, there being now a liberal ministry [formed in August 1847] at the helm, that we shall run into some trouble with the police, for liberals always remain liberals.
But we shall be able to deal with them. Here it is not as in Paris, where foreigners confront the government in isolation.
Since it is impossible in present circumstances to make any use of the book trade in Germany, I have agreed with Germans from Germany to produce a review-monthly — supported by subscriptions to shares.[4] In the Rhine Province and Baden a number of shares have already been bought up. We intend to make a start as soon as there’s enough money to last 3 months.
If subscriptions in any way permitted, we would establish our own type-setting room here, Which could also be used for printing separate works.
Now I should like you to tell me:
1. Whether you, for your part, would also be prepared to drum up a few subscriptions for shares (25 talers per share).
2. Whether you are prepared to collaborate and to figure as a collaborator on the title page.
But I would ask you, since you have in any case long owed me a letter, to overcome for once your aversion to writing and to reply soon. I also wanted to request you to ask Bakunin by what route, to what address and by what means a letter can be conveyed to Tolstoy.
My wife sends her warm regards to you and your wife.
The strange business of the Prussian Embassy in Paris[5] is certainly indicative of our sovereign’s [Frederick William IV of Prussia] mounting and impotent rage.
Farewell.
Your
Marx
[The address written by Jenny Marx on the fourth page of the letter]
Dr Gottschalk, General Practitioner in Cologne.
[Beneath it Karl Marx has written]
Dear Herwegh,
Due to an oversight, the above wrong address nearly appeared on this letter.
- ↑ Marx alludes here to Countess Hatzfeldt’s divorce case which lasted from 1846 to 1854.
- ↑ The German Workers’ Society was founded by Marx and Engels in Brussels at the end of August 1847, its aim being the political education of the German workers who lived in Belgium and dissemination of the ideas of scientific communism among them. With Marx, Engels and their followers at its head, the Society became the legal centre rallying the revolutionary proletarian forces in Belgium. Its most active members belonged to the Communist League. The Society played an important part in founding the Brussels Democratic Association. After the February 1848 revolution in France, the Belgian authorities arrested and banished many of its members.
- ↑ The international banquet of democrats in Brussels on 27 September 1847, of which Engels speaks here, adopted the decision to found a Democratic Association. Engels was elected to its Organising Committee.
The Democratic Association united proletarian revolutionaries, mainly German refugees and advanced bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats. Marx and Engels took an active part in its establishment. On 15 November 1847 Marx was elected its Vice-President (the President was Lucien Jottrand, a Belgian democrat) and under his influence it became a centre of the international democratic movement. During the February 1848 revolution in France, the proletarian wing of the Brussels Democratic Association sought to arm the Belgian workers and to intensify the struggle for a democratic republic. However, when Marx was expelled from Brussels in March 1848 and the most revolutionary elements were repressed by the Belgian authorities, its activity assumed a narrow, purely local character and in 1849 the Association ceased to exist. - ↑ Marx’s intention to start a joint-stock company for the publication of a communist monthly in 1847 did not materialise.
- ↑ Marx presumably has in mind here the refusal of Baron Arnim, Prussian Ambassador to Paris, to give Emma Herwegh, Georg Herwegh’s wife, a visa for Berlin. The fact was reported in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung on 21 October 1847. Later Emma Herwegh set out with a Swiss passport without a visa.