Susan Watkins is the author of Feminism for Beginners and co-author of 1968: Marching in the Streets. She is the managing editor of New Left Review.
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Vol. 21 No. 10 · 13 May 1999
pages 19-21 | 4025 words
War on God! That is Progress!
Susan Watkins
- Paul Lafargue and the Flowering of French Socialism, 1882-1911 by Leslie Derfler
Harvard, 382 pp, £27.95, July 1998, ISBN 0 674 65912 0
Paul Lafargue drove Engels to despair. Negotiating with other French socialists over the founding of the Parti Ouvrier Français in 1881, he committed ‘blunder after blunder’ and nearly wrecked the whole thing. In 1889, charged with organising the founding conference of the Second International in Paris, he was making ‘a terrible hash of things’. Wilhelm Liebknecht, the ageing leader of the SPD, had to chase all over Paris finding lodgings for the German delegation. The hall that had been booked was far too small (four hundred delegates nevertheless squeezed in, Keir Hardie, Eleanor Marx and William Morris among them). The translating was shambolic, the resolutions so badly drafted that there was a tremendous row when it came to settling on 1 May as International Workers’ Day. Yet at the end there was a tremendous cheer for the symbolic handshake between Liebknecht and Edouard Vaillant, representing the unity of the French and German proletariats against militarism and war.
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[*] Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism, 1842-82 (Harvard, 298 pp., £30.95, 14 March 1991, 0 674 65903 1).
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 11 · 27 May 1999
From Neil Forster
In her richly informative article on Paul Lafargue (LRB, 13 May), Susan Watkins makes the point that, once he became a member of the Chambre des Députés in 1893, Jean Jaurès 'envisaged a far broader role for the Socialist Party than Lafargue and Guesde had done. Taking a position on the Dreyfus question, on social reform, on internationalism and the war, it would speak not just for Zola's France but for a section of Proust's as well.' So far as the 'Dreyfus question' was concerned, the shameful fact is that Lafargue and Guesde had refused to take up any public position on that profoundly political miscarriage of justice, on the grounds that, since the wretched Captain Dreyfus was, as an Army officer, self-evidently a member of the bourgeoisie, he had no moral claim on proletarianists such as themselves. So much, you might say, for the purportedly universalist principles of 1789, of which Lafargue and his kind saw themselves as the heirs. Their ideological gymnastics in this conjoncture, all too familiar though they have become in the course of the present century, make depressing reading and will surely have been in the mind of Julien Benda when he eventually came to write La Trahison des clercs.
Neil Forster
London N1
From G.A. Parish
Susan Watkins told me several things I did not know about the extended Marx family, but her piece about Paul Lafargue also contained a few errors. Wilhelm Liebknecht was a leader, but not the leader of the SPD. It is generally accepted that Freddy Demuth was Marx's illegitimate son, but the main evidence, a typewritten copy of a letter from Engels's housekeeper to August Bebel (the SPD leader), only surfaced in 1950 and is less than convincing. Will Susan Watkins's forthcoming novel throw any new light on the matter?
G.A. Parish
Croydon
