Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels

[On Karl Blind]

Written between 22 and 30 August 1870.

From the manuscript.

From the English.

The article ought to have been headed not with “Prince N[apoleon] etc.” but with “I”. For every single use of the name Prince Napoleon, the pronoun “I” is used at least twenty times, apart from its oblique cases and derived forms. What is said in this article about Prince Napoleon has already been printed often enough, and what is said about the “I” has been reported, printed and published in England so much, as the owners and editors of defunct and existing Sunday papers know to their grief.

Stripped of its pretexts, the newspaper brings a new version of the old story of Herr Blind: how Karl Blind was, alas, prevented by various adverse circumstances from altering the course of history. First comes the oft-repeated legend he peddles above all: how he was supposedly sent on a diplomatic mission by the deathly sick provisional government of the South German insurrection of 1849 to the then government of the French Republic, but in reality to the revolutionary government of Ledru-Rollin, which, it was expected, would shortly be installed by a popular movement. But, alas! The government that had sent him was chased into Swiss exile by the Prussians without much ceremony, and the demonstration of 13 June, which was to install the government to which he was actually accredited, was likewise dispersed without much ceremony. He had the good fortune to be delivered from a rather grotesque mission, with which he had been charged by a dead government to an unborn government, by the existing French government, which arrested him on 13 June at the “peaceful” demonstration of the excited Paris National Guard and eventually expelled him from the country. Had the government that sent him survived,

and had the government to which he was actually sent been brought into being, what might not Karl Blind have achieved! By procuring a mission from someone in Baden to someone in Paris, Blind, in a “diplomatic” fashion, managed to avoid the slightest possibility of a risky encounter with the approaching Prussian army. At all events, he did something.{1}

In 1870, on the outbreak of the Franco-German War, there was again the possibility that Italy might ally itself with France. But Karl Blind was on the watch. “Had King Victor Emmanuel, etc.” (page 519). Yet once again it was a matter of a mission from a non-existent government to another non-existent government. Louis-Napoleon refused to leave Rome to Victor Emmanuel. Thereby he forced the latter to take the city occupied by the French and thus made an alliance between Italy and France impossible. Once again Karl Blind’s services and offers, whatever they may have been worth, were rejected. And so this perpetual diplomat *in partibus*, instead of altering the course of history, had to content himself with Mazzini’s “warmest thanks”.

One is involuntarily reminded of the braggart who, when caught up in a brawl, cried: “Hold me back, friends, or I shall do a terrible deed.” Unfortunately for the world, but perhaps fortunately for Herr Karl Blind, whenever he is about to step into the foreground of historical events, some unfavourable circumstance prevents him from performing that “terrible deed” which was to make him immortal.

Let us hope that this is the last learned treatise at least in the English language that Karl B. has written about K. B. for K. B.