Letter to the Editorial Committee of Le Socialiste

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Citizens,

In your issue of the 17th you publish an extract from a private letter which I had addressed to one of you. This letter was written in haste, so much so that in order to catch the post I did not even have time to read through it. Allow me, therefore, to qualify a passage which does not express my thoughts very clearly.

While speaking of M. Clemenceau as the flag-bearer of French radicalism I said: “It is most important that he comes to power, not as the bulwark of property against the communists, but as the saviour of the Republic against the monarchy. In this case he will be more or less forced to keep his promises; otherwise he would be behaving (here it is necessary to insert ‘perhaps’) like the others who thought, like Louis Philippe, that they were ‘the best of the republics: we are in power, the Republic can sleep peacefully; our takeover of the ministries is enough, so do not speak to us any more of the promised reforms.”

First of all, I have no right to assert that M. Clemenceau, if he came to power in the routine way of parliamentary governments, would inevitably act “like the others”. Secondly, I am not the one who explains the actions of governments as a matter of pure will, whether good or bad; this will itself is determined by independent causes, by the general situation. Thus it is not M. Clemenceau’s will, good or bad, which concerns us here. What does concern us, in the interests of the workers’ party, is that the radicals come to power in such a situation that the implementation of their programme is imposed on them as the sole means of holding on. Let us hope that the two hundred monarchists of the Chamber will be sufficient to create this situation.

London, 21 October 1885

F. Engels