Paul Lafargue

(1842 - 1911)

Paul Lafargue moved to London after he was expelled from the Sorbonne for attending a socialist gathering. He began working as an assistant to Karl Marx (who later declared that “if he is a Marxist, then I am clearly not”) and married Marx’s daughter Laura. In the 1880s, Lafargue cofounded the French Workers’ Party, and he was elected to the French legislature in 1891. He and Laura died by suicide in 1911; he wrote, “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.”