3 i8 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYopinion on the Franco-Austrian War of 1859. Immediately on its outbreak
Engels had - again through the agency of Lassalle - published a pamphlet
entitled Po and Rhine in which he declared that Bonaparte was interfering
in his own interests in North Italy preliminary to an attack on the Rhine.
Lassalle also published a pamplet, but his views were noticeably different:
he considered that any purely nationalistic German war against France
could only serve the cause of the reaction which would be increased
enormously by an Austrian victory; Bonaparte was a bad man, but the
cause he was supporting was good and anyway he was too weak to pose
a serious threat to Germany; if it became plain that he had serious
territorial designs in Italy, Prussia should retaliate with a war of liberation
in Schleswig Holstein. Marx, who enthusiastically approved Engels' pam-
phlet and was obsessed by the fear of a Russian alliance with France and
by the urgent necessity to unseat Bonaparte, called Lassalle's pamphlet
'an enormous blunder'.^87 He wrote to Engels: 'we must now absolutely
insist on party discipline or everything will be in the soup',^88 and delivered
Lassalle a long lecture on publishing his views without prior consultation.
Events, however, showed that Lassalle had the more realistic view of the
situation.
What made Marx even more annoyed was that he thought that
Lassalle's pamphlet had been given priority by Duncker over his own
Critique of Political Economy. And when Lassalle informed him of his
intention to publish a two-volume work on economics, he attributed the
ignoring of his Critique to Lassalle's influence, though he comforted
himself with the thought that, to judge from Lassalle's Heraclitus, he
would 'find to his cost that it is one thing to construct a critique of a
science and thus for the first time to bring it to a point where a dialectic
presentation is possible, and quite another to apply intimations of an
abstract, ready-made system of logic'.^89 Lassalle had not replied to Marx's
lecture on party discipline, but by January i86 0 Marx felt the urgent need
for assistance in his battle of words with Vogt and asked Engels to write
Lassalle a diplomatic letter excusing his roughness. However, Lassalle
refused to let himself be persuaded that Vogt was a Bonapartdst agent:
although he sympathised with Marx's case, he thought it unwise to have
attacked Vogt without firm proof; he also reproached Marx with his
'mistrust', whereupon Marx sent him - from Manchester where he was
staying with Engels - an anonymous denunciation of Lassalle that he had
received from Baltimore and also informed him that 'official complaints'
from Dtisseldorf were now in the party archives.^90 Lassalle replied in a
justified outburst:
Why do you send me this stuff with so triumphant a mien, so proud a