[en] The surface energy of ionic materials is empirically related to bulk properties (elastic constants, electronic dielectric constant and optical band gap) through an analysis of the cleavage force. This is evaluated at small and large separations of the two crystal halves from phonon dispersion curves and from van der Waals interactions, respectively, and these two limiting behaviours are connected by a scaling hypothesis introduced for metals by Kohn and Yaniv. The experimental data that are available for a few ionic crystals seem to satisfy the suggested relation, with an empirical universal parameter which has roughly the same value as determined for metals. (author)