MARX, Karl.

£130,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Autograph letter signed, to Lucien-Léopold Jottrand. An unpublished autograph letter signed in French, representing Marx's earliest known communication with the Belgian radical journalist and politician Lucien-Léopold Jottrand, president of the Democratic Association in Brussels, of which Marx would soon become vice president. Under the influence of Marx and Engels, the Association developed into one of the principal centres of the international democratic movement, and the present letter constitutes Marx's formal introduction to its president.Marx writes to announce that he is sending Jottrand the manuscript of an article written for Engels's Northern Star, together with a copy of his recently published Misère de la philosophie. Marx's polemical response to Proudhon's Philosophie de la misère marked a decisive stage in his intellectual development. It introduced the enduring characterization of Proudhon as "petit bourgeois" and directly paved the way for the Communist Manifesto, written between December 1847 and January 1848. Marx dates the letter "2 octobre" from his Brussels address in the rue d'Orléans; it has been erroneously docketed "1848" in a later hand.The immediate context of the letter was the "Workers' Banquet" held in Brussels on 27 September 1847, led by Engels and Jottrand, at which the foundation of a Democratic Association was agreed. Engels was elected to the organizing committee but warned Jottrand that he might soon be forced to leave Belgium, proposing M

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