[Excerpt] 
[London,] 16 February 1886 

My dear Lafargue, 

My congratulations. The sitting of the French Chamber on the 11th 
was an historical event.* The ice——~the parliamentary omnipotence 
of the Radicals *?° — has been broken and it matters little whether 
those who dared to break it numbered three or thirty. And it was this 
superstition amongst the Parisian working men — this belief that by 
going further than the Radicals they would endanger the Republic or 

* See previous letter. 

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Miners on strike in Decazeville, January 1886 

at least play the Opportunists’ game ?°° by dividing the ‘revolution- 
ary party’——which lent strength to the Radicals. 

This is the definitive defeat of utopian socialism in France. For the 
Radicals were all ‘socialists’ in the old sense of the term. What sur- 
vived of Louis Blanc’s and Proudhon’s theses served them as socialist 
trappings; they represent French utopian socialism stripped of the 
utopias and hence reduced to a phrase pure and simple. On 11 Feb- 
ruary this antiquated French socialism was crushed by the interna- 
tional socialism of today. The Poverty of Philosophy! 

So far as your propaganda in Paris and in France generally is con- 
cerned, this is an event of prime importance. The effect will be felt 
very quickly. The Radicals — whether they make a clean break with 
the workers or whether they temporise by granting them more or less 
sterile concessions — will lose their influence over the masses and, 
along with that influence, such little potency as is left in traditional 
socialism will be lost, and people’s minds will become more receptive 
to a new order of ideas... 

Z...° has left me in no doubt that Clemenceau and the rest of his 
gang, embroiled as they are in ministerial intrigues, have caught the 
parliamentary disease, that they no longer see clearly what is going 
on outside the Palais Bourbon and the Luxembourg, that it is here 
that, for them, the pivot of the movement lies and that, in their eyes, 
extra~parliamentary France is of no more than secondary impor- 
tance. All this has given me the measure of these gentlemen. 

In short I have seen that flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo 
is not to their taste. Their backsides are seated on the same chute as 
that down which Ranc, Gambetta & Co. once slid. What frightens 
them is the proletarian Acheron. 

I told Z...: So long as the Radicals allow themselves to be fright- 
ened, as for example at the inconclusive elections, by the cry “The 
Republic is in danger’, they will be nothing more than the servants 
of the Opportunists, will act as their cat’s paw. But give each work- 
man a gun and 50 cartridges and the Republic will never again be in 
danger!