Frederick Engels 1881
Written: on December 2 or 3, 1881;
First published: in French, in L'Egalité, No. 1, December 11, 1881;
Source: Paul Lafargue, "Personal Recollections of Karl Marx" in Karl Marx: Man, Thinker, and Revolutionist: a Symposium edited by David Ryazanoff, Martin Lawrens Limited, London, 1927, pp. 205-208;
Translated: by Eden and Paul Cedar;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, 2025.
Friends, the high-minded woman whom we are burying here to-day was born at Salzwedel in the year 1814. Soon afterwards her father, Baron von Westphalen, was transferred to Treves as councillor of State, and there became an intimate of the Marx family. The children grew up together. The two highly-gifted natures were mutually attractive. When Marx's student days at the university began, they had already made up their minds to join their lives.
They were married in 1843, after the suppression of the "Rheinische Zeitung," which Marx had edited for a time. Ever since, Jenny Marx has not simply shared the fortunes and the labours and the struggles of her husband, but has passionately and actively and with the fullest understanding made them her own.
The young couple went to Paris, for an exile which was at first voluntary, but soon became enforced. The Prussian government extended its persecution of Marx even to that distant spot, and with grief I have to say that no less a man than Alexander von Humboldt did not shrink from being intermediary in the negotiations which led to the Marxes' expulsion from France. They removed to Brussels. Then came the February revolution. During the disturbances that ensued in Brussels, the Belgian government was not content with arresting Marx, but thought fit (without a shred of evidence against her) to throw his wife into prison as well.
The revolutionary movement begun in 1848 collapsed in 1849. Further exile ensued for the Marxes, at first in Paris, and then, thanks to a renewed decree of expulsion by the French government, in London. This time for Jenny Marx it was indeed exile with all its terrors. She bore up against the material difficulties thanks to which three of her children, two boys and a girl, died. But it was a terrible blow to her when the [Prussian] government and the bourgeois opposition, both the liberals and the democrats, made common cause against her husband; when they bespattered him with the most detestable calumnies; when the whole press closed its columns against him, so that for a while he stood defenceless against the onslaught of foes whom he and his wife could not but despise. This state of affairs lasted for a long time, but not for ever. The European proletariat once more secured conditions of existence in which a certain amount of independent mobility became possible. The International was founded. The class struggle of the workers spread from land to land, and Karl Marx, her husband, fought in the front rank of the vanguard. Now began a period in which she received compensation for many of the grievous troubles of the past. She saw the calumnies which had been showered on Marx, scattered like chaff before the wind; she saw his doctrines, which the reactionaries of all shades of opinion from the feudalists to the democrats had done their utmost to suppress, being preached from every housetop in all the languages of the civilised world; she saw the proletarian movement, which to her seemed bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, shaking the foundations of the old order from east to west, from Russia to America, and pressing forward to victory despite the most strenuous opposition. One of her last joys was to note the striking proof of inexhaustible energy so recently given by our German workers in the elections to the Reichstag.
What such a woman, with so keen and critical an understanding, with so much political tact, so much energy and impetus, with so much devotion on behalf of those who fought shoulder to shoulder with her in the working-class movement -- what such a woman has done during the last forty years, is not recorded in the annals of the contemporary press. It is known only to those who have lived through it all. But this much I am sure, that the wives of the refugees from the Commune will often think of her, and that many of us will sadly miss her bold and prudent advice -- bold but never boastful, prudent but never dishonourable.
I need not speak of her personal qualities. Her friends know them, and will not forget them. If there was ever a woman whose supreme delight it was to make others happy, it was she.