Engels to Gennaro Bovio in Trani

London, 16 April 1872

To Citizen Gennaro Bovio, Trani

Esteemed Citizen,

With thanks I am returning to you with this letter the various documents which I had the honour of receiving from you through the mediation of the esteemed Citizen Enrico Bignami.

Since the General Council of the International is an administrative committee with specific functions, it has been unable officially to take cognisance of these documents and to pass resolutions on them; I, however, considered it my duty to submit them to those of its members who understand Italian, and they have all read them with great pleasure.

We gladly recognise that at the time when an international union of workers came into being for the first time here in London, you in far-off Apulia took up the same idea and energetically defended it at the Congress of Naples. We thank you for communicating this fact, for it furnishes a fresh proof that the union of the workers of the entire civilised world was already recognised in 1864 as a historical necessity, even in those countries with which we could not then establish contact because we did not know whom we should address. And we sincerely regret that the Italian workers’ associations, by not adopting your idea in 1864, have greatly retarded the development of the proletarian movement in Italy. If in 1864 they had taken up your ideas and simultaneously called into being an Italian labour movement proceeding from the social conditions of their country, there would now undoubtedly be fewer workers’ societies in Italy championing sectarian doctrines, not Italian, but French and Russian. In the movement of the working class, in my opinion, the truly national ideas, i.e. those which correspond to the economic, industrial and agricultural facts prevailing in the nation concerned, are at the same time always the truly international ideas. The emancipation of the Italian peasant will not be accomplished in the same form as that of the English factory worker; but the better both learn to grasp the form that corresponds to their own situation, the better they will be able to reach an understanding on what is essential.

We were greatly pleased to read your articles in the *Liberta* in defence of the Paris Commune against V. Hugo and others; we readily believe that these were the first articles written in Italian for that purpose. At the same time we published here the General Council’s manifesto on “The Civil War in France”; on 23 March I took the liberty of sending you a copy of it in English and one in German, as I did not have the French translation here and the Italian one (in the *Eguaglianza* of Girgenti) was not ready. From this pamphlet you will see that our ideas coincide on this point as well, and that we too have not neglected our duty.

Greetings and fraternity.

Friedrich Engels
Secretary for Italy on the General Council
of the International Working Men’s Association