Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx  
in London  
Manchester, 7 February 1856

Manchester, 7 February 1856  
Dear Marx,

You will be very angry with me for not having written for so long. But until I am through with a series of office jobs that will still take me another 14 days or so, I am scarcely capable of keeping other matters in my head. On top of that my old man plagues me shockingly with yarn purchases, etc., for him, and I have to report to him privately at least twice a week.

Enclosed Panslavism NQ II, where the want of content is at least to some extent outweighed by the length of the phrase. With JSs III I am at last getting in médias res.

You must now read the Paris correspondent of the Guardian regularly; very odd things are going on in Paris. The correspondent of the Examiner and Times has for some days past had even more and better details; I was just about to buy you the latest numbers but they were all sold out. Perhaps I can get hold of them from Bielefeld.

Bonaparte is very fast on the decline. You will have seen that Drouyn de Lhuys is missing from the official Senate list for this year; what you will hardly have seen is that he recently left his card with an Orleanist (if I am not mistaken, Rémusat), à propos of a striking act of opposition, with a thick stroke through the title: vice-president du Sénat. When infantry was lately requisitioned against the students who were escorting Monsieur Nisard home, the troops grounded their arms at the cry of vive la ligne and had to be removed in all haste so as not to let the fraternisation become a fait accompli. The recent conspiracy in the southwest, on account of which 5,000 arrests (by Bonapartist reckoning) were made, || had wide ramifications in the army; the school for non-commissioned officers at La Flèche was completely broken up; almost all the pupils were involved and had to be sent back to their regiments; in fact it is said to have cost a great deal of trouble to find reliable regiments to which they could be posted. The other day, when Bonaparte was at the Odéon with his consort, the students who crammed the pit spent the whole evening singing about the sire de Franc Boissy, intoning certain fatal passages with special emphasis. The workers in Paris are singing a little song whose refrain runs:

Voila qu’il part, voila qu’il part,  
Le petit marchand de moutarde,  
Voila qu’il part pour son pays  
Avec tous ses outils.

So that people should certainly know who the petit marchand de moutarde is, the police have banned the song.

The whole impudent display of oppositional and directly anti-Bonapartist appetites, and the corresponding weakness of Mr Bonaparte, prove that a great upheaval is under way. The coup d’état measures no longer work, nor is there any longer the courage to apply them. You will have seen that even The Times, on two consecutive days, first characterised Bonaparte personally as a pure makeshift for France – because not one single man was to be found in which the nation could place its confidence and esteem – and then branded his whole general staff of ministers, etc., as cheats and scoundrels. In today’s Guardian there is again a fine tale about the scoundrel Fiorentino, Bonapartist court feuilletonist and knight of the Legion of Honour. Monsieur L’Espinasse has likewise absconded from Paris; scandals have come to light in connection with him which I shall probably only learn more closely in a day or two. Something is also afoot with de Morny; the fellow has more or less || fallen out with his emperor brother and is again intriguing on his own account.

This Bonaparte, for whom everything previously turned out so luckily, even the stupidest, most cowardly and most infamous things, will now notice that from now on everything goes badly for him. In the war-and-peace business he is already noticing it; everybody laid the blame for the war on him, nobody thanks him for the peaceful turn. Moreover, the peace affair is by no means settled yet. The preliminaries to the preliminaries contain au fond nothing except the Bessarabian clause, and that is outweighed by the complete ignoring of Kars. Everything else contains nothing but sham concessions. Incidentally, for Bonap. it no longer matters on what conditions he concludes peace; for him it is now a question of getting bread, as in the days of old Dolleschall, and I am convinced the Russians know that still better than he does himself. The French have never been so completely indifferent to their gloire as this time; one can see that since ’48 the fellows have, after all, occupied themselves with other things than the old gloire or the parliamentary swindle.

We would have happily escaped the Alien Bill – au train que les choses vont en France, people will soon have no reason to bother about the appetites of Palmerston and his crew. This summer the Bonapartist house of cards will probably collapse in the same way as the Louis-Philippe one did in the scandal year ’47, and when the gust of wind comes that finally blows down the walls is merely a matter of chance. I am now leading a very sober life, but on that day I shall probably get drunk for the last time in Manchester.

Tell me something again soon about old Bruno; the fellow’s new romantic turn is too amusing. Best greetings to your wife and children.

Yours,  
F. E.