ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE>” 
AT LE PERREUX 

London, 3 April 1895 
41, Regent’s Park Road, N. W. 

My dear Lafargue, 

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 zddruga of the Serbians and Bulgarians. This form, it appears 
certain, preceded the peasant commune in Russia, in Germany, etc.; in 
breaking up, the Slav zadruga, 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 

* This Russian word meaning ‘peace’, ‘world’ and ‘community’ is written by Engels in Latin 
letters. - > Cf. F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, present 
edition, Vol. 26, pp. 250-55 

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 moun- 
tains’, 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 [saute- 
relles]. Did they eat grasshoppers in Berry in 1787? I look in my dictionary 
and I find sautero/lle, bird-trap. 

p. 393. Black redistribution—in Russia tchornoi,° black, is used for dirty, 
and in a secondary sense popular, common, vulgar. Tchornoi narod,° 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 has just played me a fine trick. °°” He has taken from my 
introduction to Marx’s articles on France 1848-50 everything that could 
serve his purpose in support of peaceful and anti-violent tactics at any 

* You must note the tripartition of France: France proper, to the Loire, strong Germanic 
influence; Burgundian area, to the East of Saéne and Rhone, less Germanic; Aquitaine, between 
sea, Loire and Rhone, minimal Germanic influence. (Note by F. Engels.) — * Salian land —° B. 
E. Guérard, La terre salique. Bibliotéque de |’Ecole des chartes, November-December 1841. - ° 
These Russian words meaning black redistribution are written in Latin letters. 

price, which he has chosen to preach for some time now, particularly at this 
juncture when coercive laws are being drawn up in Berlin. *** But I preach 
those-tactics only for the Germany of today and even then with many 
reservations. For France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, such tactics could not be 
followed as a whole and, for Germany, they could 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