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Special pages :
Letter to Lucien-Leopold Jottrand, September 30, 1847
First published: slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Russian Edition, 1934.
To Lucien-Leopold Jottrand in Brussels
Brussels, 30 September 1847[edit source]
Dear Sir,
Being obliged to leave Brussels for several months, I find myself unable to carry out the functions which the meeting of 27 September saw fit to entrust to me.[1]
I therefore request you to call on a German democrat resident in Brussels to participate in the work of the committee charged with organising a universal democratic society.
I would take the liberty of proposing to you one of the German democrats in Brussels whom the meeting, had he been able to attend it, would have nominated for the office which, in his absence, it honoured me by conferring upon myself. I mean Mr Marx, who, I am firmly convinced, has the best claim to represent German democracy on the committee. Hence it would not be Mr Marx who would be replacing me there, but rather I who, at the meeting, replaced Mr Marx.
Assuring you, Sir, of my profound esteem, I am,
Yours very sincerely
Frederick Engels
Mr Marx, who was absent from Brussels at the time of the meeting, lives at 42, rue d'Orléans, Faubourg de Namur.
- ↑ 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.