Paul Lafargue

Origins and early life

Paul Lafargue was born at Santiago de Cuba on 15 January 1842, in a family whose lines crossed three continents: his father François Lafargue was a French planter of Saint-Domingue who had fled to Cuba, and his mother's parents were Abraham Armagnac, a member of a French Jewish colonial family of Saint-Domingue, and Margarita Frijie, a Carib woman of Kingston in Jamaica.

Work and career

This fiche places him by descent through that named maternal grandfather, and states plainly two things: that Lafargue was not raised in Judaism, and that this genealogy rests on family-genealogical sources rather than archival ones, which is why the site records it with its origin named. Lafargue himself spoke with pride of his mixed ancestry — African, Carib, Jewish and French — and it was used against him by opponents, who in the antisemitic and racialist press of the Third Republic attacked him for all of it at once.

He came to France to study medicine, was expelled from the French universities for republican agitation, finished his studies in London, and there met Karl Marx, whose daughter Laura he married in 1868. He founded the Spanish and Portuguese sections of the International, fled the repression of the Commune, and in 1880, with Jules Guesde, created the French Workers' Party, the first Marxist party in France. His pamphlet The Right to Be Lazy, written in Sainte-Pélagie prison in 1880, ridicules the worship of work as the ideology by which the poor consent to their own exhaustion, and it remains one of the most reprinted socialist texts ever written.

He was elected deputy for Lille in 1891 while still in prison. On 26 November 1911 he and Laura took their own lives together at Draveil, having decided not to grow old; Lenin spoke at the funeral.