Letter to Paul Lafargue, April 3, 1895

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To Paul Lafargue at Le Perreux

London, April 3, 1895

41, Regent’s Park Road, N. W.

My dear Lafargue,

I had not yet finished reading your half-book when I received Vol. I of

...

ing Loria (from Labriola) and a heap of Russian journals (from Nikolai Danielson). I am overwhelmed with post. Well, I read yours to the end nevertheless. It has a brilliant style, some very striking flashes of historical insight, there is truth in it and originality and, what is more important, it is not like the German professor’s book where what was true was not original and what was original was not true. Its principal fault is that apparently you were in too great a hurry to be done with it; the arrangement, in particular of the sections on feudal and capitalist property, could have been more careful, especially for a Paris public, accustomed to easy reading and, moreover, adapted for lazy readers; the Parisian, too, asserts his right to be lazy. Many very good passages may possibly lose some of their effect because they are written as though in parentheses, or because you have left the trouble of drawing conclusions and results too much to the reader.

As for the material itself, the main point of criticism is in the chapter on tribal communism. There you lay too much emphasis, I think, on the form in which that phase has been maintained up to our own times, in France, and on the form of its dissolution in that country. The form of coparcenary under which the consanguineous community has gone on so long in France is already in itself a subdivision of the large family community, continued to our day in the zádruga of the Serbians and Bulgarians. This form, it appears certain, preceded the peasant commune in Russia, in Germany, etc.; in breaking up, the Slav zádruga, the German Hausgenossenschaft (genealogy of lex Alamannorum) passed over to the commune of separate families (or, quite often at first, and still today in Russia, to coparcenaries), with separately cultivated fields though subject to periodic redistribution—that is to say, what emerged from it was the Russian mir and the German Markgenossenschaft. The more restricted community of several families which was kept up in France was no more, as I see it, than an integral part of the Markgenossenschaft, at any rate in the North (the Frankish region); in the South (former Aquitaine) it may perhaps have formed a unity holding its land under the superior ownership of the lord of the manor alone, without being subject to the control of the village commune. It is only this special French form which, on breaking up, could pass in one leap to the individual ownership of the land.

This is a point on which there are still many things to study. It is from you that I learn of this special character of tribal communism in France, and since you are already in it heart and soul, you could not do better than to pursue this study, which holds out great promise.

Small errata: p. 338, you make the water of the Peruvian aqueducts flow upwards; as there is scarcely any natural water in Peru save in ‘the heart of the mountains’, and as your aqueducts are expressly built to carry water to them, it must, I suppose, be sea-water?

p. 354. Terra salica. Guérard is making a huge mistake with his derivation of Sala house. So the Salian Franks were Franks living in houses? They were called Salians, Salio, after the small region of Holland, Salland, where the group which conquered Belgium and France between Ardennes and Loire was formed for the conquest; the name still exists today. At the time when the Salic Law was drafted (about 400), the Sala was still, as you have observed yourself, a personal estate among the Germans.

p. 386 ‘another likes to set the snares or prepare grass-hoppers [sauterelles]. Did they eat grasshoppers in Berry in 1787? I look in my dictionary and I find sauterolle, bird-trap.

p. 393. Black redistribution—in Russia tchornoi,c black, is used for dirty, and in a secondary sense popular, common, vulgar. Tchornoi narod,c the black people—the common people, the people as a whole. Tchornoi perediel, black redistribution, means rather therefore the general, universal distribution, where everyone has his share, including the poorest. And in this sense a Narodnik (friend of the peasants) journal in Switzerland was called Tchornoi perediel, which was meant to signify the distribution of aristocratic estates amongst the peasants.

That is all that I have noted and you will have had enough. As for Yves Guyot, I wash my hands of it.

Liebknecht just played me a nice trick. He has taken from my Introduction to Marx’s articles on France of 1848-50 everything that could serve him to support the tactic of peace at any price and of opposition to force and violence, which it has pleased him for some time now to preach, especially at present when coercive laws are being prepared in Berlin. But I am preaching these tactics only for the Germany of today, and even with an important proviso. In France, Belgium, Italy, and Austria these tactics could not be followed in their entirety and in Germany may become inapplicable tomorrow. So please wait for the complete article before judging it—it will probably appear in Neue Zeit, and I expect copies of the pamphlet any day now. It’s a pity that Liebknecht can see only black and white. Shades don’t exist for him.

However, things are warming up in Germany, it promises a splendid end to the century. Young William’s ‘indignation’ is highly amusing. You may be sure our people will answer him in the Reichstag where there is no lese-majesty.

I intended to say a lot of other things to you as well, but I cannot bring them to mind at the moment when I need them. I am gradually aging. So, as I must write a few lines still to Laura before the post goes, goodbye! Greetings from the Freybergers (whose little girl gets on wonderfully well) and from your

F. Engels