Paul Lafargue - Last Years and Suicide

Last Years and Suicide

In 1908, the different socialist tendencies were unified in the form of a single party after a Congress in Toulouse. Lafargue made his last stand in the gathering, fighting fiercely against the social democrat reformism defended by Jaurès.

In these late years, Lafargue had already distanced himself from any form of political activity, living on the outskirts of Paris in the village of Draveil, limiting his contributions to a number of articles and essays, as well as occasional contacts with some of the most outstanding socialist activists of the time, such as Karl Kautsky and Hjalmar Branting of the older generation, and Karl Liebknecht or Vladimir Lenin of the younger generation. It was in Draveil that Paul and Laura Lafargue put an end to their lives, to the surprise and even outrage of French and European socialists.

He wrote on that occasion:

"Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others. For some years I had promised myself not to live beyond 70; and I fixed the exact year for my departure from life. I prepared the method for the execution of our resolution, it was a hypodermic of cyanide acid. I die with the supreme joy of knowing that at some future time, the cause to which I have been devoted for forty-five years will triumph. Long live Communism! Long Live the Second International!"

Most socialist leaders publicly or privately deplored his decision; a few, notably the Spanish Anarchist leader Anselmo Lorenzo, who had been a major political rival of Lafargue in his Spanish period, accepted his decision with understanding. Lorenzo wrote after Lafargue's death:

"The double, original and, whatever the rutinarians say, even sympathetic suicide of Paul Lafargue and Laura Marx , who knew and could live united and lovers until death, has awakened my memories (...)

Lafargue was my teacher: his memory is for me almost as important as that of Fanelli.

(...) in Lafargue were two different aspects that made him appear in constant contradiction: affiliated to socialism, he was anarchist communist by intimate conviction; but enemy of Bakunin, by suggestion of Marx, he tried to damage Anarchism. Due to that double way of being, he caused different effect in those that had relations with him: the simple ones were comforted by his optimisms, but those touched by depressing passions changed friendship into hate and produced personal issues, divisions and created organizations that, because of original vice, will always give bitter fruit. (...)"

Adolf Abramovich Joffe who later himself committed suicide to protest against the expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party noted in his final letter to Trotsky on the verge of committing suicide that he supported the suicide pact of Lafargue and Marx in his youth:

"When I was still an inexperienced youth, and the suicide of Paul Lafargue and his wife Laura Marx raised such an outcry in the socialist parties, I firmly defended the principled and correct nature of their positions. I recall that I vehemently objected to August Bebel, who was indignant over these suicides, that if one could argue against the age at which the Lafargues chose to die - for here we were dealing not with the number of years, but with the possible usefulness of a political figure - then one could by no means argue against the very principle of a political figure departing from this life at the moment when he felt that he would no longer bring any benefit to the cause to which he had devoted himself."