MARX, Karl.

£200,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Herr Vogt. First edition of the polemical work that took Marx the best part of a year away from the writing of Capital to complete, corrected in his hand. It was his response to attacks made against him by the German writer and politician Karl Vogt, a former revolutionary who had drifted into support for Napoleon III's regime.In 1859, during the Second Italian War of Independence, the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, a major liberal German newspaper, published reports insinuating that Vogt had accepted money from the French government to promote its interests among German democrats. Vogt was outraged and sued the paper for libel. Having reached a settlement that allowed him to claim victory, Vogt published a pamphlet, Mein Prozess gegen die Allgemeine Zeitung, which accused Marx and his circle of running a "Brussels-London conspiracy" involved in criminal and revolutionary intrigues. Marx replied with Herr Vogt, a book-length character assassination. He refuted Vogt's accusations point by point, using evidence and sarcasm to expose contradictions and forgeries. He denounced Vogt as a paid agent of the French imperial government - a claim he supported with documents suggesting Vogt's links to Napoleon III - and defended his own reputation and that of his movement, while turning the petty affair into a broader critique of the émigré press, factionalism among exiled revolutionaries, and the corruption of bourgeois liberal politics.Stylistically, Herr Vogt is one of Marx's most vit

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