ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE” 

AT LE PERREUX 
London, 27 March 1889 

My dear Lafargue, 

You know what Hegel says: Anything that is spoiled is spoiled for the 
best possible reasons. And your Parisians are going to the greatest pains 
to prove it. 

This is the position: 

After the demise of the Socialiste?! your Party disappeared from the 
international scene. You had abdicated, you were dead so far as the other 
Socialist Parties abroad were concerned. It was entirely the fault of your 
workingmen; for they did not choose to read or support one of the best 
papers the Party had ever had. But, after having killed off your medium 
of communication with other Socialists, they must inevitably suffer the 
natural consequences of their behaviour. 

The Possibilists, left in sole possession of the battle field, took advan- 
tage of the situation you had yourselves created for them. They had 
friends in Brussels and in London with whose assistance they have 
presented themselves to the world at large as the sole representatives of 
the French Socialists. They have succeeded in enticing the Danes, the 
Dutch and the Flemish to their congress. And you know what trouble 
we have been to in neutralising the victories they have won. 

Now the Germans are offering you an opportunity, not only of re- 
entering the stage with éclat, but also of seeing yourselves recognised by 
all the organised parties of Europe as the only French Socialists with 
whom they wish to fraternise. They are offering you an opportunity of 
wiping out at one stroke the effect of all the mistakes you have made, 
and of all the defeats you have suffered, and of rehabilitating yourselves 
in the position to which your theoretical understanding entitles you, but 
which has been compromised by your faulty tactics. They are offering 
you a congress which all the genuine workingmen’s parties, even the 
Belgian, will attend, they are offering you a chance of isolating the 

* G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im 
Grundrisse. Theil 1. Die Logik. Werke, Vol. V1, p.249. 

Possibilists so that they will have to confine themselves to a bogus 
congress—in other words, they are offering you far more than you had 
a right to expect, having regard to the position you had placed your- 
selves in. And then—what do you do? Seize it with both hands? Not a 
bit of it. You behave like spoilt children, you haggle, you ask for more 
and, when you have at last been persuaded to assent to what has been 
agreed by everyone else, you insist on conditions which jeopardise 
everything that has been gained for you. 

So far as you are concerned, what is important is that there should be 
a congress and that it should be in Paris, where you can be acknowledged 
by all to be the only French Socialist Party to have gained international 
recognition; also that the Possibilist congress should, for its part, be a 
bogus congress, notwithstanding the éclat deriving from secret funds and 
the 14th of July? Everything else is of secondary, indeed less than 
secondary, importance. If you are to be set on your feet again, your 
congress must be held, no matter if it’s a flop in the eyes of the bourgeois 
public. In order to regain your position in France, what you need above 
all is international recognition of yourselves and international condem- 
nation of the Possibilists, etc. You are offered it—and all you do is sulk! 

As I have already said, I believe your date to be the better one for 
creating an impact in France. But then this should have been explained 
at The Hague. You can’t blame anyone else if, at the critical moment, 
you went to the next room and everything took place in your absence. 
And I have conscientiously explained your line of reasoning to Bebel, 
asking him to give it his serious consideration. However, I felt impelled 
to add that, in my opinion, the meeting of the congress, on no matter 
what date, must be assured, and that any move that might jeopardise that 
meeting would be a false one. You cannot but be aware that, by re-open- 
ing the question of the date, we shall all become embroiled in endless 
discussions and disputes and that we can expect, probably some time 
towards the end of October, to obtain general assent to the date of 14 
July—if, indeed, in the absence of another conference, which will 
certainly never take place, any new date is agreed at all. 

And then, with typically Parisian naiveté, you say: We impatiently 
await the fixing of a date for the international congress! But the date 
had been fixed for the end of September, and it is the same ‘we’ (who 
‘await’, etc.)—the same ‘we’ that want to cancel this date and open a 

414 July 1889 was the centenary anniversary of the capture of the Bastille 

fresh debate. ‘We’ will have to wait until the others have familiarised 
themselves with the new proposals of these same ‘we’, have discussed 
them and have reached an agreement on the matter, if such an agree- 
ment is at all possible. 

‘We also await protests from the Belgians.’ But the Belgians will not 
be the only ones to protest, all are resolved to protest in common. This 
protest would probably already have been lodged, had you not put 
everything in question by demanding a change of date. And as long as 
there is no agreement on this score, nothing will be done. 

So accept what is being offered you, it is, in effect, what matters most: 
victory over the Possibilists. Don’t jeopardise the holding of the 
congress. Don’t give the Brussels people a pretext for extricating them- 
selves from the business, for tergiversating and intriguing, don’t upset 
afresh what has already been gained for you. You cannot have all you 
want, but you can have victory. Don’t press the Germans, who are doing 
everything for you, to the point where they might despair of the possi- 
bility to co-operate with you. Withdraw your demand for a change of 
date, act like men, not like spoilt children who want to have their cake 
and eat it. Without this, I believe, there will be no congress and the 
Possibilists will jeer at you, and with good reason. 

Yours ever, 

EE. 

Needless to say, I have written to tell Bebel that you assent to all the 
Hague resolutions, but he will say that, after all this, you are putting 
everything in question again. 

I have not found Bernstein, so shan’t be able to send you the 
addresses of the Swiss before yesterday. 

Our pamphlet is beginning to have an effect here.