November 1848 script 

Nos. 1 and 2, 1898-99 time 

First page of Engels’ travel notes “From Paris to Berne” 

511 

SEINE AND LOIRE 

La belle France! The French certainly have a beautiful country and 
they are right to be proud of it. 

What country in Europe can compare with France in wealth, in the 
variety of its gifts of nature and products, in its universality? 

Spain? But neglect or nature has turned two-thirds of its area 
into a hot, stony desert, and the Atlantic side of the peninsula, 
Portugal, does not belong to it. 

Italy? But ever since world trade has been routed across the ocean, 
ever since steamships have plied the Mediterranean, Italy has lain 
isolated. 

England? But for the last eighty years England has been reduced 
to trade and industry, coal-smoke and cattle-raising, and England 
has a fearfully leaden sky, and no wine. 

And Germany? In the north, a flat, sandy plain, cut off from 
Southern Europe by the granite wall of the Alps, poor in wine, a land 
of beer, schnaps and rye bread, of rivers and revolutions that have 
dried up! 

But France! Washed by three seas, traversed in three directions by 
five great rivers, in the north an almost German and Belgian climate, 
in the south almost Italian; wheat in the north, maize and rice in the 
south; colza’ in the north, olives in the south; flax in the north, silk in 
the south, and wine nearly everywhere. 

And what wine! What a diversity, from Bordeaux to Burgundy, 
from Burgundy to the heavy St. Georges, Lunel and Frontignan of 
the south, and from that to sparkling champagne! What variety of 
white and of red, from Petit Macon or Chablis to Chambertin, 
Chateau Larose, Sauterne, Roussillon and Ai Mousseux! And 

* Rape.— Ed. 

furthermore each of these wines intoxicates in its own way, with a 
few bottles one can experience every intermediate state from a 
Musard quadrille to the Marseillaise, from the exultation of the 
cancan to the tempestuous fever heat of revolution, and then finally 
with a bottle of champagne one can again drift into the merriest 
carnival mood in the world! 

And only France has a Paris, a city in which European civilisation 
has its finest flowering, in which all the nerve-fibres of European 
history unite and from which emanate at measured intervals those 
electric shocks which can shake a whole world; a city whose 
population combines a passion for pleasure with a passion for 
historical action like no other people, whose populace know how to 
live like the most refined Epicurean of Athens and to die like the 
most intrepid Spartan, Alcibiades and Leonidas in one person; a 
city which really is, as Louis Blanc* says, the heart and mind of the 
world. 

If one looks across Paris from a high point in the city or from 
Montmartre or the terrace of Saint-Cloud, if one strolls through its 
environs, one concludes that France knows what it possesses in Paris, 
that France has been prodigal of its best in tenderly fostering Paris. 
Like an odalisque on a glittering, bronze-coloured divan, this proud 
city lies beside the warm, vine-covered hills of the winding Seine 
valley. Where in the whole world is there a view like that from the 
two Versailles railways down over the green valley with its countless 
villages and little towns, and where are there such delightfully 
situated, such smartly and trimly constructed, such tastefully 
laid-out villages and little towns as Suresnes, Saint-Cloud, Sévres, 
Montmorency, Enghien and countless others? By whichever gate one 
may leave, though one choose one’s route at random, everywhere 
one encounters the same fine surroundings, the same taste in the use 
of the topography, the same elegance and cleanliness. And yet again 
it is only the Queen of Cities itself which has created this splendid 
setting for itself. 

But of course you need a France as well, to make a Paris, and only 
when one has become acquainted with the abundant wealth of this 
magnificent country does one understand how this radiant, sump- 
tuous, incomparable Paris could come about. One does not 
understand it, of course, if one comes from the north, speeding by 
train across the plains of Flanders and Artois and the hills of Picardy 

* Evidently a slip of the pen for the words quoted are taken from a draft address to 
the Government of the French Republic submitted by Auguste Blanqui in March 
1848 .— Ed. 

‘From Paris to Berne 513 

with neither forest nor vineyard. There one sees only corn-fields and 
pasture, whose uniformity is interrupted only by marshy river valleys 
and distant scrubby hills; and only when one enters within range of 
the atmosphere of Paris, at Pontoise, does one see something of 
“beautiful France”. One begins to understand Paris a little more if 
one approaches the capital through the fertile vales of Lorraine, the 
vine-garlanded chalk hills of Champagne and along the beautiful 
Marne valley; one understands it better still if one travels through 
Normandy, now following and now cutting across the meanders of 
the Seine on the railway from Rouen to Paris. The Seine seems to 
exhale the air of Paris right down to its mouth; the villages, the 
towns, the hills, everything reminds one of the countryside near 
Paris, except that everything becomes finer, more sumptuous, more 
tasteful as one approaches the centre of France. But I did not fully 
understand how Paris was possible until I went along the Loire and 
from there turned across the hills to the vineyard valleys of 
Burgundy. 

I had known Paris in the last two years of the monarchy, when the 
bourgeoisie was revelling in the full enjoyment of its dominance, 
when trade and industry were faring passably, when the bourgeois 
and petty-bourgeois youth still had money for its pleasures and for 
squandering it away, and when even some of the workers were 
still well enough placed to be able to participate in the general high 
spirits and light-heartedness. I had seen Paris again in March and 
April, in that brief intoxication of the republican honeymoon, when 
the workers, optimistic fools* that they were, cheerfully and without 
any hesitation “decided to endure three months of misery’ for the 
republic’s sake, when they ate dry bread and potatoes by day and 
when evening came, planted liberty-trees along the boulevards, let 
off fire-crackers and sang the Marseillaise for all they were worth, 
and when the bourgeoisie, hiding in their houses all day, attempted 
to appease the wrath of the people with coloured lanterns. I 
returned — much against my will, by Hecker! —in October. Between 
the Paris of those days and now there lay the 15th May and the 25th 
June, there lay the most fearful struggle the world had ever seen, 
there lay a sea of blood and fifteen thousand dead. Cavaignac’s shells 
had blown Paris’s irrepressible gaiety sky-high; the sound of the 
Marseillaise and the Chant du départ had ceased, only the bour- 
geoisie was still humming its Mourir pour la patrie between its 
teeth; the workers, who had neither bread nor arms, ground their 

* Hoffnungsvolle Toren (optimistic fools) from Goethe’s poem “Prometheus” .— Ed. 
> See this volume, p. 148.—Ed. 

teeth in suppressed resentment; in the school of the state of siege, 
the exuberant republic had very soon become respectable, tame, 
well-behaved, and moderate (sage et modérée). But Paris was dead, it 
was no longer Paris. On the boulevards, no one but the bourgeoisie 
and police spies; the dance-halls and theatres deserted; the gamins 
engulfed in mobile guard jackets, bought for 30 sous a day by the 
respectable republic, and the stupider they became the more the 
bourgeoisie celebrated them—in brief, it was the Paris of 1847 
again, but without the spirit, without the life, without the fire and the 
ferment which the workers brought to everything in those days. Paris 
was dead, and this beautiful corpse was all the more uncanny for 
being so beautiful. 

I could endure it no longer in this dead Paris. I had to leave it, no 
matter whither. So first of all to Switzerland. I had not much money, 
that meant going on foot. Nor was I set on taking the shortest route; 
one does not readily part from France. 

Thus one fine morning I set out and without any fixed plan 
marched due south. I lost my way among the villages once I had left 
the city’s outskirts behind me; there was nothing strange in that. 
Eventually I found myself on the highroad to Lyons. I followed it for 
some distance, leaving it from time to time to climb the hills. From 
the top one has splendid views up and down the Seine, to Paris and 
to Fontainebleau. One sees the river meandering far, far away in the 
broad valley, vineyards on the hills on both sides, further away the 
blue hills beyond which flows the Marne. 

But I did not wish to enter Burgundy by so direct a route; I wanted 
to reach the Loire first. So on the second day I left the highroad and 
went over the hills towards Orléans. I lost my way among the villages 
again of course, as my only guides were the sun and the peasants, cut 
off from the whole world and unable to tell right from left. I spent 
the night in some village whose name I was never able to make out in 
the peasant patois, fifteen leagues from Paris, on the watershed 
between Seine and Loire. 

This watershed is formed by a broad ridge which extends from 
south-east to north-west. On either side it is intersected by numerous 
valleys, watered by small streams or rivers. Up on the wind-swept 
summit only corn, buckwheat, clover and vegetables do well; but 
vines grow everywhere on the valley sides. The eastward-facing 
slopes are nearly all covered with great masses of those limestone 
rocks which the English geologists call bolderstones* and which one 

* This form of the English word is used in the manuscript.— Ed. 

From Paris to Berne 515 

often finds in secondary and tertiary hill-country. The huge blue 
rocks, between which green shrubs and saplings grow, provide a 
pleasant contrast to the meadows of the valley and the vineyards of 
the opposite slope. 

Gradually I came down into one of these little river valleys and 
followed it for a while. Eventually I came upon a highway with 
people on it from whom I was able to discover where in fact I was. I 
was not far from Malesherbes, midway between Orléans and Paris. 
Orléans itself lay too far to the west for my purpose; Nevers was my 
next goal, and so I once more went up over the nearest hill, heading 
due south. A very pretty view from the top: the pleasant little town of 
Malesherbes between wooded hills, numerous villages on the slopes, 
and up on a hill-top Castle Chateaubriand. And what was even more 
to my liking: opposite, on the far side of a narrow ravine, a depart- 
mental road leading due south. 

There are three kinds of road in France: the state roads, formerly 
called royal roads, now national, fine broad highways connecting the 
most important towns with each other. These national roads, which 
in the region of Paris are not merely excellently made but true 
luxury roads, magnificent elm-lined avenues sixty feet wide and 
more, and paved in the middle, become poorer, narrower and less 
tree-lined the further one proceeds from Paris and the less 
important the road is. In some places they are then so bad that they 
are scarcely passable for pedestrians after two hours of moderate 
rain. The second class consists of the departmental roads, providing 
secondary communications, financed from departmental funds, 
narrower and less resplendent than the national roads. The third 
class, finally, is made up of the major vicinal routes (chemins de grande 
communication), maintained from canton resources, narrow unas- 
suming roads, but in some places in better condition than the big- 
ger highways. 

I struck uphill straight across country in the direction of my 
departmental! road and found to my extreme delight that it went due 
south in an absolutely straight line. Villages and inns were few and 
far between; after marching for several hours I eventually came 
upon a large farm where I was served most hospitably with some 
refreshments, for which I drew some grotesque faces on a piece of 
paper for the farmer’s children and declared with all gravity: this 
one was a speaking likeness of General Cavaignac and that one of 
Louis Napoleon, these of Armand Marrast, Ledru-Rollin etc. The 
farm-folk stared at these distorted faces in great awe, thanked me in 
their delight and at once fixed these strikingly life-like portraits on 
the wall. These good people also told me that I was on the road from 

Malesherbes to Chateauneuf on the Loire, to which I had still some 
twelve leagues to go. 

I trampled through Puiseaux and another small town whose name 
I have forgotten, and late in the evening arrived in Bellegarde, an 
attractive fair-sized place, where I spent the night. The route over 
the plateau, which incidentally here produces wine in many places, 
was rather monotonous. 

Next morning I set off for Chateauneuf, another five leagues, and 
from there along the Loire on the national road from Orléans to 
Nevers. 

Under almond trees in blossom 
On the verdant banks of Loire, 
To lie dreaming, oh how pleasant, 
Of the place I found my love’*— 

sO sings many an enthusiastic German youth and many a tender 
Teutonic maiden in the melting words of Helmina von Chezy and 
the molten melody of Carl Maria von Weber. But anyone who goes 
looking for almond trees and gentle, sweet romance on the Loire, 
as was the fashion in Dresden back in the twenties, is the victim 
of the kind of appalling delusion which is really permissible 
only in Germany amongst congenital bluestockings of the third gene- 
ration. 

From Chateauneuf via les Bordes to Dampierre one scarcely 
catches a glimpse of this romantic Loire. The road goes over the 
hill-tops at a distance of two or three leagues from the river, and only 
rarely does one see the water of the Loire glinting in the sun far 
away. The district is rich in wine, cereals and fruit; down by the river 
there are luxuriant pastures; the view of the valley, which has no 
woods and is surrounded only by undulating hills, is however rather 
monotonous. 

In the middle of the road, near some farm-houses, I came across a 
caravan of four men, three women and several children, accompa- 
nied by three heavily-laden donkey-carts, cooking their midday-meal 
at a big fire on the open highway. I stopped for a moment: I was not 
mistaken, they were speaking German, in the broadest South 
German dialect. I spoke to them; they were delighted to hear their 
native tongue in the middle of France. They were as it happened 
from the Strasbourg area of Alsace, and travelled into the interior of 
France in this way every summer, earning their keep by basket- 
weaving. When I asked whether this gave them enough to live on, 

* Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Euryanthe (libretto by Helmina von Chezy), Act I, 
Scene 2.— Fd. 

From Paris to Berne 517 

they said: “Hardly, if we had to,buy everything; mostly we’re 
begging.” Slowly, another man, of advanced age, crawled out of one 
of the donkey-carts, in which he had a complete bed. There was 
something very gypsy-like about the whole band with the ill-assorted 
garments they had scrounged. For all that they had an easy-going air 
about them and chattered interminably to me about their journeys, 
and in the middle of the merriest gossiping the mother and the 
daughter, a gentle, blue-eyed creature, almost came to pulling each 
other’s tousled red hair. I couldn’t but admire the irrepressible force 
with which the easy-going and emotional German character would 
come out, even from beneath the most gypsy-like pattern of life 
and attire; I wished them good day and continued my journey, 
accompanied for some distance by one of the gypsies, who before 
eating permitted himself the pleasure of an amble on the sharp- 
boned crupper of a lean donkey. 

That evening I reached Dampierre, a small village not far from the 
Loire. Here the Government was employing three or four hundred 
workers from Paris, the remnants of the former national work- 
shops,”*’ to build a dyke to prevent flooding. They were workers of 
every kind, goldsmiths, butchers, cobblers, carpenters, right down to 
the rag-and-bone man of the Paris boulevards. I found some twenty 
of them at the inn where I spent the night. A hefty butcher, who had 
already been promoted to a kind of supervisory position, spoke of 
the undertaking with great enthusiasm: they were earning between 
30 and 100 sous a day, according to how they worked, it was easy to 
make 40 to 60 sous, if one showed any aptitude. He wanted to enrol 
me in his brigade there and then; I would soon get into the swing 
and certainly be earning 50 sous a day by the second week, I could 
make my fortune, and there was enough work for another six 
months at least. I would not have minded exchanging my pen fora 
spade for a month or two for a change; but I had no papers, and that 
would have landed me in a nice pickle. 

These workers from Paris had not lost any of their old gaiety. 
They pursued their work, ten hours a day, amid laughter and jokes, 
entertained themselves in their leisure hours with outrageous pranks 
and in the evenings amused themselves by “déniaising’’* the peasant 
girls. But apart from this they were quite demoralised as a result of 
being isolated in a small village. Not a trace of concern with the 
interests of their class, and with current political issues which touch 
the workers so closely. They appeared not to read any papers any 
more. Their political activity went no further than giving nicknames; 

i Initiating, seducing — Ed. 

one of them, a big, strong lout, they called Caussidiére, another, a 
bad worker and utter drunkard, responded to the name of Guizot, 
etc. The exhausting work, their relatively good living conditions and 
especially the separation from Paris and transfer to a remote, quiet 
corner of France had reduced their horizon remarkably. They were 
already on the point of turning into rustics, and they had only been 
there for two months. 

The next morning I reached Gien and thus at last the Loire valley 
itself. Gien is a little town with crooked streets, a fine embankment 
and a bridge over the Loire, which here barely equals the Main at 
Frankfurt in breadth. It is altogether very shallow and full of 
sandbanks. .- 

From Gien to Briare the road goes along the valley at a distance 
of about a quarter of a mile* from the Loire. It proceeds in 
a south-easterly direction, and the country gradually assumes a 
southerly character. The avenue is lined with elms, ashes, acacias or 
chestnuts; the valley floor comprises luxuriant pastures and fertile 
fields, amongst whose stubble a second harvest of the richest clover 
was sprouting, and which are bordered by long lines of poplars; on 
the other side of the Loire, in the hazy distance, a line of hills, on this 
side, right by the highroad, a second chain of hillocks, planted with 
vines in its entirety. The valley of the Loire is not at all strikingly 
beautiful or romantic here, as people tend to say it is, but it does 
create a most agreeable impression; all this rich vegetation testifies to 
the mild climate without which it could not flourish. Even in the most 
fertile areas of Germany I have nowhere found plants growing in 
such profusion as on the road between Gien and Briare. 

Before I leave the Loire, a few words as to the inhabitants of the 
area I passed through and their way of life. 

The villages within four or five hours travel from Paris cannot be 
taken as the measure for villages in the rest of France. Their 
disposition, the architecture of the houses, the mores of the 
inhabitants are far too much dominated by the spirit of the great 
metropolis from which they live. Only at a distance of ten leagues 
from Paris, in remote upland areas, does the countryside proper 
begin, does one see real farm-houses. A characteristic of the whole 
region as far as the Loire and into Burgundy is that the 
peasant-farmer conceals the entrance to his house as far as possible 
from the highroad. In the upland areas every farmyard is 
surrounded by a wall; one enters by a gate and then in the yard itself 

* Engels uses the German word Meile, a linear measure which at that time differed 
in length in different German states but can be regarded as roughly 42 miles.— Fd. 

From Paris to Berne 519 

one must look for the door to the house which is usually situated 
towards the rear. In this area, where most of the peasants have cows 
and horses, the farm-houses are fairly big; on the Loire, on the other 
hand, where there is much market-gardening and even well-to-do 
peasants own few cattle or none at all and cattle-raising is a separate 
branch of husbandry left to the larger landowners or tenant farmers, 
the farm-houses become smaller and smaller, often so small that one 
cannot conceive how there is room within for a peasant family with 
its equipment and stores. But here too the entrance is on the side 
facing away from the road, and in the villages the public houses and 
shops are almost alone in having doors facing the street. 

The peasants of this area for the most part enjoy a really good life, 
despite their poverty. The wine, at least in the valleys, is mostly their 
own produce, good and cheap (this year two or three sous a bottle), 
the bread is everywhere, except in the highest places, good, wheaten 
bread and there is in addition excellent cheese and magnificent fruit, 
which people in France eat of course always with the bread. Like all 
country-people they eat little meat, but a lot of milk, vegetable soups 
and in general a vegetable diet of outstanding quality. The living 
standard of the French peasant between the Seine and the Loire is 
three times higher than that of the North-German peasant, even if he 
is significantly better off. 

These peasants are good-natured, hospitable, light-hearted folk, 
helpful and obliging to the stranger in every possible way, and even ~ 
when speaking the broadest patois, still true, courteous Frenchmen. 
Despite their exceedingly highly developed sense of property 
towards the land which their fathers won from the nobility and the 
clergy, they still possess many of the patriarchal virtues, especially in 
the villages set back from the main roads. 

But peasants will be peasants, and the conditions of life of the 
peasants do not for one moment cease to assert themselves. Despite 
all the private virtues of the French peasant, despite the more 
advanced conditions of life he enjoys in comparison with the peasant 
to the east of the Rhine, the peasant in France, as in Germany, is a 
barbarian in the midst of civilisation. 

The isolation of the peasant in a remote village with a rather small 
population which changes only with the generations, the hard, 
monotonous work, which ties him more than any serfdom to the soil 
and which remains always the same from father to son, the stability 
and monotony of all his conditions of life, the restricted circum- 
stances in which the family becomes the most important, most 
decisive social relationship for him — all this reduces the peasant’s 
horizon to the narrowest bounds which are possible in modern 

society. The great movements of history pass him by, from time to 
time sweep him along with them, but he has no inkling of the nature 
of the motive force of these movements, of their origin and their 
goal. 

In the Middle Ages and in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries there was alongside the movement of the middle class in 
the towns a peasant movement, which, however, constantly put up 
reactionary demands and, without producing any significant results 
for the peasants themselves, only succeeded in assisting the towns in 
their struggles for emancipation. 

In the first French revolution the peasants acted in a revolutionary 
manner just so long as was required by their most immediate, most 
tangible private interests; until they had secured the right of 
ownership to their land which had hitherto been farmed on a feudal 
basis, until feudal relations were irrevocably abolished and the 
foreign armies ejected from their district. Once this was achieved, 
they turned with all the fury of blind avarice against the movement 
of the big towns which they failed to understand, and especially 
against the movement in Paris. Countless proclamations by the 
Committee of Public Safety, countless decrees by the Convention, 
above all those concerning the maximum and the profiteers,””* 
mobile columns and travelling guillotines had to be directed against 
the obdurate peasants. And yet no class benefited more from the 
Terror which drove out the foreign armies and put down the civil 
war than these same peasants. 

When Napoleon overthrew the bourgeois regime of the Directory, 
restored calm, consolidated the new property relations of the 
peasants and sanctioned them in his Code civil and drove the foreign 
armies ever further from the frontiers, the peasants rallied to him 
with enthusiasm and became his chief support. For the French 
peasant is nationalistic to a fanatical degree; la France has come to 
mean a great deal to him now that he has become hereditary 
proprietor of a piece of France; foreigners he only knows in the form 
of devastating invading armies which inflict a maximum of damage 
on him. Hence the French peasant’s unbounded nationalism, hence 
his equally unbounded hatred of l’étranger. Hence the passion with 
which he went to war in 1814 and 1815. 

When the Bourbons returned in 1815, when the exiled aristocracy 
once more raised claims to the landed property they had lost in the 
revolution, the peasants saw all their revolutionary conquests 
threatened. Hence their hatred of Bourbon rule and their jubilation 

? Of 1830.— Ed. 

From Paris to Berne 521 

when the July revolution* restored to them security of possession 
and the tricolour. 

From the July revolution onwards, the peasants’ participation in 
the general interests of their country came once more to an end. 
Their wishes had been fulfilled, the land they owned was no longer 
threatened, at the village Mairie the same flag was once more flying 
which had meant victory to them and their fathers for a quarter ofa 
century. 

But as always the fruits they enjoyed from their victory were few. 
The bourgeoisie began at once to exploit its rural allies to the utmost 
extent. The fruits of fragmentation and of the divisibility of the land, 
the impoverishment of the peasants and the mortgaging of their 
land, had already begun to ripen under the Restoration; after 1830 
their manifestations became ever more widespread and ever more 
menacing. But the pressure which big capital exerted on the peasant 
remained for him simply a private relationship between himself and 
his creditor; he did not see and could not see that these private 
relationships, which were becoming increasingly widespread and 
increasingly the rule, were gradually developing into a class 
relationship between the class of big capitalists and that of small 
landowners. It was not the same situation as it had been with feudal 
burdens, whose origin had been long since forgotten, whose 
significance had long since fallen into oblivion, which were no longer 
payment for services rendered, and which had long ago become 
nothing but a burden oppressing one party. In the present case, with 
a mortgage debt, the peasant or at least his father has had the money 
paid out to him in solid five-franc pieces; the debt-certificate and the 
mortgage-repayment book remind him if necessary of the origin 
of the burden; the interest he has to pay, even the oppressive, 
constantly renewed subsidiary payments to the usurer are modern, 
bourgeois liabilities which apply in similar form to all debtors; the 
oppression operates in a quite modern, up-to-date guise, and the 
peasant is bled white and ruined in accordance with precisely the 
same principles of law which alone guarantee him his property. His 
own code civil, his modern-day bible, becomes a rod for his own back. 
The peasant can see no class relationship in the usurious mortgage 
terms, he cannot demand their abolition without simultaneously 
endangering his own property. The pressure of usury, instead of 
propelling him into the movement, utterly confuses him. The only 
way in which he can imagine relief is in a reduction of taxes. 

When, in February of this year, a revolution took place in which 
the proletariat appeared for the first time with demands of its own, 
the peasants showed not the faintest comprehension. If the republic 

had any meaning for them, it was merely: reduction of taxes and 
maybe occasionally something about national honour, war of 
conquest and the Rhine frontier. But when on the morning after 
Louis Philippe’s.fall the war between the proletariat and bourgeoisie 
broke out in Paris, when the stagnation of trade and industry had 
repercussions in the countryside and the peasant’s produce, already 
devalued in a year of good harvests, fell yet further in price and 
became unsaleable, when to crown it all the battle of June spread fear 
and terror to the furthermost corners of France, a universal cry of 
the most fanatical fury arose amongst the peasants against revolu- 
tionary Paris and the eternally dissatisfied Parisians. Of course! For 
what did the stubborn, narrow-minded peasant know of proletariat 
and bourgeoisie, of a democratic social republic, of the organisation 
of labour, of matters whose fundamental conditions and causes 
could never exist within the narrow confines of his village! And when 
occasionally, through the murky channels of the bourgeois journals, 
he acquired a vague notion of what was at issue in Paris, when the 
bourgeoisie had tossed him the great slogan they aimed against the 
workers of Paris: ce sont les partageux, they are people who want to 
share all property and all the land, the peasants’ indignation knew no 
bounds, their cry of fury was redoubled. I have spoken to hundreds 
of peasants in the most diverse regions of France, and all were in the 
grip of this fanatical hatred of Paris and especially the workers of 
Paris. “I wish that cursed Paris would be blown sky-high during the 
day tomorrow”—and that was the most charitable of benedictions. 
It goes without saying that the peasants’ age-old contempt for 
town-dwellers was merely increased and vindicated by this year’s 
events. The peasants, the countryside must save France; the 
countryside produces everything, the towns live off our corn, dress 
in our flax and our wool, we must restore the proper order of things; 
we peasants must take charge of affairs ourselves—this was the 
eternal refrain that sounded, more or less clearly, more or less 
deliberately, through all the peasants’ confused talk. 

And how do they hope to save France, how do they hope to take 
charge of affairs themselves? By electing Louis Napoleon Bonaparte 
as President of the Republic, a great name borne by a confused, vain, 
diminutive fool! Every peasant I spoke to was just as enthusiastic 
about Louis Napoleon as he was full of hatred for Paris. These two 
passions and the most unthinking, bovine amazement at the whole 
European upheaval are the sum total of the French peasant’s politics. 
And the peasants have over six million votes, more than two-thirds of 
all the votes in the elections in France. 

It is true that the Provisional Government did not manage to bind 

From Paris to Berne 523 

the interests of the peasants to the revolution; with the increase of 45 
centimes in the land tax, which chiefly hit the peasants, it made an 
unforgivable, irreparable mistake. But even if it had won over the 
peasants to the revolution for a few months, they would have 
deserted it in the summer. The present attitude of the peasants 
towards the revolution of 1848 is not the consequence of any 
mistakes or chance blunders; it is in the nature of things, it is based 
upon the conditions of life, the social position of the small 
landowner. The French proletariat, before it enforces its demands, 
will first have to put down a general peasants’ war, a war which even 
the writing-off of all mortgage debts can only postpone for a short 
time. 

One must have spent a fortnight in the almost exclusive company 
of peasants, peasants from the most diverse regions, one must have 
had the opportunity of encountering everywhere this same obtuse 
narrow-mindedness, this same total ignorance of all urban, industrial 
and commercial conditions, this same blindness in politics, this same 
wildly uninformed surmising about everything beyond the village, 
this same application of the standards of peasant life to the mightiest 
factors of history — in short, one must have come to know the French 
peasant especially in 1848 in order to experience the utterly 
disheartening effect which this refractory stupidity engenders. 

II 
BURGUNDY 

Briare is a quaint little old town at the mouth of the canal which 
joins the Loire to the Seine. Here I took stock of the route and 
decided it would be better to go to Switzerland via Auxerre instead of 
via Nevers. I therefore left the Loire and turned across the hills 
towards Burgundy. 

The fertility of the Loire valley declines gradually but fairly slowly. 
One climbs imperceptibly, and only five or six miles from Briare, 
in the region of Saint-Sauveur and Saint-Fargeau, does one reach the 
beginnings of the forested, cattle-raising uplands. The ridge between 
the Yonne and the Loire is higher even here, and the whole of this 
western part of the Department of the Yonne is generally fairly hilly. 

It was in the region of Toucy, six leagues from Auxerre, that I first 
heard the peculiar, naively-broad dialect of Burgundy, a patois 
which here and throughout Burgundy proper remains pleasant and 
attractive, whereas in the higher regions of the Franche Comté it 
takes on a ponderous, clumsy, almost didactic tone. It is like the naive 
dialect of Austria, which gradually changes into the coarse Upper 
Bavarian. In a remarkably un-French way the Burgundian patois 
constantly stresses the syllable preceding that which takes the main 
emphasis in good French, it turns iambic French into trochaic and 
in so doing strangely distorts the subtle accentuation which the 
educated Frenchman manages to impart to his speech. But, as I said, 
in Burgundy proper, it continues to sound rather nice and from the 
lips of a pretty girl even charming: Mais, ma foi, monsieur, je vous 
demande tin peu....° 

* But indeed, sir, I ask you ... (the accents.indicate the syllables stressed in the 
Burgundian patois).—Ed. 

From Paris to Berne . 525 

If one can draw comparisons, the Burgundian is on the whole the 
Austrian of France. Naive, good-natured, confiding in the highest 
degree, having a great deal of native wit within their familiar social 
surroundings, full of naively odd ideas about everything that 
transcends them, comically clumsy in unfamiliar circumstances, for 
ever indestructibly good-humoured —in this these good people are 
almost one and all alike. The amiable, good-hearted Burgundian 
peasant is the first one forgives for his complete political vacuity and 
his starry-eyed enthusiasm for Louis Napoleon. 

Incidentally, the Burgundians undeniably have a stronger admix- 
ture of German blood than the French who live further to the west; 
their hair and complexion are lighter, their physique a little bigger, 
especially in the women, there is already a marked decrease in that 
sharp critical intelligence and incisive wit, in place of which there is a 
more straightforward sense of humour and sometimes a faint touch 
of geniality. But the gaiety of the French is still markedly to the 
fore, and in carefree light-heartedness the Burgundian is second to 
none. 

The hilly western part of the Department of the Yonne derives its 
living chiefly from cattle-raising. But Frenchmen everywhere are 
poor cattle-farmers, and these Burgundian cattle appear thin and 
small. However alongside cattle-raising a great deal of corn is grown 
and fine wheaten bread is eaten everywhere. 

The farm-houses here also begin to resemble those in Germany; 
they are again larger and combine dwelling, barn and stables under 
one roof; but here too the door is still mostly sideways from the road 
or turned completely away from it. 

On the long descent that takes one down to Auxerre, I saw the first 
Burgundy vines, for the most part still weighed down with the 
fantastically rich grape-harvest of 1848. On many vines the leaves 
were almost completely concealed by grapes. 

Auxerre is a small, rugged township, rather unimpressive from 
within, with a pretty embankment by the Yonne and in places the 
beginnings of those boulevards which no French departmental 
capital can be without. In normal times it must indeed be quiet and 
dead, and the Prefect of the Yonne cannot have needed to spend 
much on organising the obligatory balls and dinners which under 
Louis Philippe he had to offer to the local notabilities. But now 
Auxerre was full of life, such as only occurs once a year. If Citizen 
Denjoy, the representative of the people who got so worked up in the 
National Assembly because the premises where the democratic social 
banquet in Toulouse took place were decorated in red, if this worthy 
Citizen Denjoy had accompanied me to Auxerre, he would have 

thrown a fit in sheer horror. It was not just one hall here but the 
whole town which was decorated in red. And what a red! The walls 
and staircases of the houses, the blouses and shirts of the people were 
coloured with the most unambiguous, the most blatant blood-red; 
dark-red streams filled even the gutters and bespattered the paving 
stones, and a sinister-looking blackish, foaming-red liquid was being 
carried about the streets in great tubs by sinister bearded men. The 
red republic with all its horrors appeared to be holding sway, the - 
guillotine, the steam guillotine appeared to be working continuously, 
the buveurs de sang,? of which such fearful tales are recounted in the 
Journal des Débats, were obviously celebrating their cannibalistic 
orgies here. But the red republic of Auxerre was most innocent, it 
was the red republic of the Burgundian wine-harvest, and the 
drinkers of blood who consume the noblest produce of this red 
republic with such intense pleasure, are none other than the most 
respectable republicans, the bourgeoisie, big and small, of Paris. And 
in this context that honourable Citizen Denjoy also has a certain 
weakness for things red, despite the best intentions. 

If only one could have had one’s pockets full of money in that red 
republic! The 1848 harvest was so infinitely rich that not enough 
barrels could be found to take all the wine. And what is more, of such 
quality — better than ’46, perhaps even better than ’34! The peasants 
came pouring in from all sides to buy up what was still left of the ’47 
at bargain prices—at 2 francs per cask of 140 litres of good wine; 
cart after cart came in by every gate with empty barrels, and yet they 
could not cope. I saw with my own eyes a wine-merchant in Auxerre 
pouring out several barrels of ’47, quite good wine, into the street, 
simply in order to accommodate the new wine, which offered very 
different prospects to the speculator of course. I was assured that 
this wine-merchant had poured away as many as forty large barrels 
(fits) in this way in a few weeks. 

Having consumed several pints of both the old and the new, I 
crossed the Yonne in the direction of the hills on the right bank. The 
highroad follows the valley; however I took the old, shorter road 
across the hills. The sky was overcast, the weather gloomy, I was 
myself rather tired, and I therefore spent the night in the first 
village, a few kilometres from Auxerre. 

Next morning I set out very early in the most magnificent 
sunshine imaginable. The route passed with never a break between 
vineyards over a fairly high ridge. But on top, I was rewarded for the 
exertion of the climb by a most splendid panorama. Before me, the 

* Drinkers of blood.— Ed. 

From Paris to Berne 527 

hilly downward slope all the way to the Yonne, then the green 
valley of the Yonne, rich in meadows and planted with poplars, 
with its many villages and farms; beyond it the grey stone Auxerre, 
nestling against the scarp on the far side; villages everywhere, 
and everywhere, as far as the eye could see, vines, nothing but 
vines, and the most brilliant warm sunshine, attenuated only in the 
distance by a touch of autumn in the air, beating down over this 
great cauldron in which the August sun brews one of the noblest 
of wines. 

I do not know what the reason is for the peculiar charm of these 
French landscapes which are not distinguished by any particularly 
attractive contours. It is of course not this detail or that, it is the 
whole, the ensemble, which invests them with the stamp of 
satisfaction such as is rarely found elsewhere. The Rhine and the 
Moselle have more beautiful combinations of crags, Switzerland has 
greater contrasts, Italy a fuller palette of colours, but no country has 
regions that make up so harmonious an ensemble as France. It is 
with an extraordinary inner peace that the eye roves from the broad, 
luxuriant meadows of the valley to the hills which are covered with 
vines of equal luxuriance right to their summits, and to the countless 
villages and towns rising from the foliage of the fruit-trees. There is 
nowhere a piece of bare ground, nowhere a discordant patch of 
infertility, or a harsh outcrop of rock with walls inaccessible to 
vegetation. Everywhere flora in profusion, a fine, rich green just 
taking on a shade of autumnal bronze, set off by the brilliance of a 
sun which even halfway through October still burns hotly enough for 
not a single grape to be left unripe on the vine. 

I went a little further and a second, equally fine view unfolded 
before me. Far below, in a narrower bowl in the hills, lay Saint-Bris, a 
small township that likewise earned its livelihood entirely from the 
vine. The same components as before, but more closely huddled 
together. Pastures and gardens down in the valley round the little 
town, vineyards all round about on the slopes of the bowl, only on 
the north side ploughed fields or fields and meadows of green clover 
growing on the stubble. Down in the streets of Saint-Bris the same 
bustle as in Auxerre; everywhere barrels and wine-presses, and all 
the inhabitants busy amidst laughter and jokes with pressing the 
grape-juice, pumping it into the barrels or carrying it through the 
streets in great vats. Amongst it all, a market was being held; in the 
broader streets peasant carts were halted with vegetables, corn and 
other field produce; the peasants with their white Phrygian caps and 
the peasant women with their Madras handkerchiefs round their 
heads thronged gossiping, shouting, laughing amongst the vintners; 

and the little town of Saint-Bris presented a picture of such lively 
bustle that one could believe one was in a big city. 

Past Saint-Bris my way took me once more up a hill by a long 
ascent. But I climbed this hill with especial pleasure. Everybody was 
still occupied with the grape-harvest here, and a grape-harvest in 
Burgundy has a merriness about it of a different order to one in the 
Rhineland even. At every step I found the gayest company, the 
sweetest grapes and the prettiest girls; for here, where there is a 
small town always within three hours travel, where the population 
has a great deal of contact with the outside world by virtue of their 
trade in wine, here a certain degree of sophistication prevails, and no 
one assumes this sophistication more rapidly than the womenfolk, 
for they derive the most immediate and striking benefits from it. No 
French townswoman dreams of singing 

If I were as pretty 

As the girls who’re country-bred, 
I'd wear a yellow straw hat 

With a rose-red ribbon tied.” 

On the contrary, she knows only too well that it is to the town, to 
the absence of arduous labour, to civilisation and its hundred aids to 
cleanliness and arts of toiletry that she owes the perfecting of her 
charms; she knows that even if country girls have not already 
inherited that coarse-boned build from their parents which the 
Frenchman so abhors and which is the pride of the Germanic race, 
country girls—as a result of exacting farm Jabour in the most 
burning sunshine and the heaviest rain alike, the difficulties in the 
way of keeping clean, the absence of any aids to physical culture, and 
their admittedly venerable but no less ungainly and _ tasteless 
attire—will mostly end up as ungainly, waddling scarecrows, 
comically dolled up in garish colours. Tastes vary; our German 
compatriots mostly prefer the farmer’s daughter, and they are 
perhaps right to do so: all due respect for the kicks—similar to those 
of a trooper—and especially the fists of a strapping dairymaid; all 
honour to the grass-green and fiery-red check gown that embraces 
her mighty waist; hats off to that impeccably flat expanse that 
reaches from the back of her neck down to her heels and gives her 
from behind the appearance of a board covered with brightly 
coloured calico! But tastes vary, and so that portion of my fellow 
citizens: which differs from me, though being no less worthy of 
respect for that, must forgive me if the cleanly-washed, smoothly- 
combed, slimly-built Burgundian women from Saint-Bris and 

* Goethe, “Kriegserklarung” (modified).— Ed. 

From Paris to Berne 529 

Vermenton made a pleasanter impression on me than those earthily 
dirty, tousled, young Molossian buffaloes between the Seine and the 
Loire who gape at one as though struck dumb if one rolls a cigarette, 
and take to their heels screaming if one asks them the way in good 
French. 

It will therefore readily be believed that I spent more time lying in 
the grass with the vintners and their girls, eating grapes, drinking 
wine, chatting and laughing, than marching up the hill, and that it 
would have taken me no longer to have climbed the Blocksberg or 
even the Jungfrau than this insignificant ridge. The more so since 
one can eat one’s fill of grapes sixty times over each day and has thus 
the best of excuses at each vineyard to establish contact with these 
constantly laughing and obliging people of both sexes. But every- 
thing must come to an end, and this hill was no exception. It 
was already afternoon when I descended the far side into the 
delightful valley of the Cure, a small tributary of the Yonne, to the 
little town of Vermenton, which has an even finer setting than 
Saint-Bris. 

Not far beyond Vermenton, this attractive region comes to an end. 
One gradually approaches the higher ridge of the Faucillon which 
divides the basins of the Seine, the Rhone and the Loire. From 
Vermenton one climbs for several hours and crosses a broad infertile 
plateau, where rye, oats and buckwheat largely take the place of 
wheat." 

* At this point the following note is written in an unknown hand: “[The 
manuscript breaks off here.]”— Ed. 

19* 

APPENDICES 

533 

RECEIPTS OF THE CENTRAL AUTHORITY 
OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE FOR MONEY RECEIVED 
AND PAID OUT”? 

April 2, 1848 

Communist League 
Workers of all countries, unite! 

The Central Authority certifies that it has received the sum of 
twenty-five francs (f. c.*) from its member Karl Marx. 

Paris, April 2, 1848 For the Central Authority 
K. Marx 

Engels 

Henry Bauer 

Joseph Moll 

II 

Communist League 
Workers of all countries, unite! 

The Central Authority has received an advance of seventy-four 
francs 20 centimes from its member Marx, which is hereby 
confirmed. 

Paris, April 2, 1848 For the Central Authority 
Engels - 

Bauer 

J. Moll 

* Fidei-commissum.— Ed. 

534 Appendices 

III 

Communist League 
Workers of all countries, unite! 

League member Friedrich Criiger acknowledges that he has 
received the sum of twenty-five francs as an advance from the 
Central Authority and he promises to repay this sum as soon as 
possible to the League. 

Paris, April 2, 1848 
Friedrich Criiger 

Kommunisten. Dokumente und Materialen, scripts 

Bd. 1, 1836-1849, Berlin, 1970 

time