ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE?” 

AT LE PERREUX 

London, 25 March 1889 

My dear Lafargue, 

You speak of a congress in August, although you know that the 
conference** resolved to hold it at the end of September. | repeat: If you 
deviate by so much as a fraction of an inch from what was agreed to by 
everyone at The Hague, you will provide the Belgians with a pretext for 
withdrawing, and then, as Bebel has told you, everything will be jeopar- 
dised. I am quite willing to urge the Germans to put pressure on the 
Belgians, but I shall do nothing until I know for certain that you, the 
French, like everyone else, unreservedly assent to the resolutions taken 
at the conference. Otherwise people will tell me, and with reason: How 
can you ask us to commit ourselves for the sake of people who do not 
respect their own commitments? 

Either, then, you hold a congress as resolved at The Hague, or you 
do not hold one at all. And only on the day when I am given the assur- 
ance that you Parisians whole-heartedly and unreservedly assent to the 
resolutions that have been taken, only then shall I feel able to act, and 
shall act. 

It is not a question of deciding which would be better, August or 
September—that question has already been decided and to raise it again 
would be to play into the Possibilists’ hands. 

As for Boulanger, I myself feel pretty sure that you will have to put 
up with him and that that idiot Rochefort, if he doesn’t become a 
complete scoundrel, may, as a reward for his services, find himself once 
again in Caledonia.? Every now and again the French go through a 
Bonapartist phase, and the current one is even more shameful than the 
last. They will pay for the consequences of their own actions—that is 
the law of history—and the day of reckoning will probably be the 
centenary of their great revolution —That is the irony of history. What 
a fine spectacle it will present to the world at large—France celebrating 
her revolutionary jubilee by paying homage to an adventurer such as 
this. 

Doubtless he will bleed the big financiers, if only to pay the debts 

incurred during his dictatorial campaign and to reward his gang. And the 
money from the big financiers will not be enough. As Marx said of 
Boustrapa,*©° he would have to rob France of all her money in order to 
use that money to bribe the whole of France.? And as for you, he will 
crush you. 

As for war, that is, to my mind, the most terrible of eventualities. 
Otherwise I shouldn’t give a fig for the whims of Mme la France. But a 
war in which there will be 10 to 15 million combatants, unparalleled 
devastation simply to keep them fed, universal and forcible suppression 
of our movement, a recrudescence of chauvinism in all countries and, 
ultimately, enfeeblement ten times worse than after 1815, a period of 
reaction based on the inanition of all the peoples by then bled white— 
and, withal, only a slender hope that that bitter war may result in revo- 
lution—it fills me with horror. Especially when I think of our move- 
ment in Germany, which would be overwhelmed, crushed, brutally 
stamped out of existence, whereas peace would almost certainly bring 
us victory. 

Nor, during such a war, would France be able to have a revolution for 
fear of impelling her only ally, Russia, into the arms of Bismarck and 
finding herself crushed by a coalition. The slightest revolutionary move 
would be a betrayal of one’s country. 

How the Russian diplomats would laugh! 

Yours ever, 

RE.