1 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Co. is the first joint work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. At the end of August 1844, Engels, on his way back from Manchester to Barmen, stopped over in Paris, where he had his second meeting with Marx, a meeting which marked the beginning of their collaboration as authors.
During the ten days which Engels spent in Paris, he and Marx agreed to publish a criticism of the representatives of the Young Hegelian trend. They drew up the plan of a book which they at first called A Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Co., divided the sections between themselves and wrote the Foreword. Engels wrote his sections before leaving Paris. Marx, whose share comprised the bigger part of the book, continued to work on it till the end of November 1844, considerably increasing the size of the book and drawing on his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts”, on which he had been working during the spring and summer of 1844, as well as on his studies of the history of the French Revolution and his notes and summaries. During the printing of the book, Marx, on the advice of the publisher Löwenthal, added to the tide the words “The Holy Family”. The book was published in February 1845 in Frankfurt am Main by the Literarische Anstalt (J. Rütten) publishers. The table of contents (see contents of this volume, pp. v-xi) showed which sections had been written by Marx and which by Engels. The fact that the book, though of small format, exceeded twenty printed sheets in volume, exempted it from preliminary censorship in accordance with the regulations operating at the time in a number of German states.
“The Holy Family” is a sarcastic nickname for the Bauer brothers and their followers who supported the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung published in Charlottenburg from the end of 1843 to October 1844. While attacking the Bauers and other Young Hegelians, Marx and Engels at the same time critically analysed the idealist philosophy of Hegel himself.
Marx had shown his disagreement with the Young Hegelians already in the autumn of 1842 when, as an editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, he opposed the publication of superficial and pretentious articles submitted by the outwardly ultra-radical Berlin circle of “The Free” (Edgar Bauer, Max Stirner, Eduard Meyen and others). During the two years which had elapsed since Marx’s clash with “The Free”, Marx’s and Engels’ disagreement with the Young Hegelians on questions of theory and politics had deepened still more. This was accounted for not only by the transition of Marx and Engels to materialism and communism, but also by the evolution which had taken place during that time in the ideas of the Bauer brothers and their fellow-thinkers. In the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung Bauer and his group renounced the “radicalism of 1842” and, besides professing subjective idealist views, and counterposing chosen personalities, the bearers of -.pure-Criticism”, to the allegedly sluggish and inert masses, they began spreading the ideas of moderate liberal philanthropy. Marx’s draft of the Preface of his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” shows that already in the summer of 1844 he saw in the evolution of the Young Hegelians’ views a degeneration of that initially progressive trend, a deepening of the features of mysticism and transcendentalism peculiar to Hegel’s idealism, the disintegration of the Hegelian school (see present edition, Vol. 3, p. 233).
It was to exposure of the Young Hegelians’ views in the form which they had acquired in 1844 and to defence of their own new materialistic and communists outlook that Marx and Engels decided to devote their first joint work.
The appearance of The Holy Family evoked a lively response in the German press. It was pointed out that this work was the most profound and the most forceful of all that Marx and Engels had recently written (Mannheimer Abend-Zeitung, March 25, 1845), that it expressed socialist views, since it criticised the “inadequacy of any half-measures directed at eliminating the social ailments of our time” (Kölnische Zeitung, March 21, 1845).
Reactionary circles immediately discerned the book’s revolutionary trend. As early as December 1844, when the work was still printing, it was denounced in reports by Metternich’s agents. The conservative Allgemeine Zeitung, polemising against the assessment of The Holy Family given by the Kölnische Zeitung, wrote with irritation on April 8, 1845, that in this book “every line preaches revolt ... against the state, the church, the family, legality, religion and property”, that in it “prominence is given to the most radical and the most open communism, and this is all the more dangerous as Mr. Marx cannot be denied either extremely broad knowledge or the ability to make use of the polemical arsenal of Hegel’s logic, what is customarily called ‘iron logic"’. A month and a half later, on May 23, 1845, the Allgemeine Zeitung again censured the Kölnische Zeitung for publishing a favourable opinion of The Holy Family.
Bruno Bauer’s attempt to refute the criticism publicly (in the article “Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs”, published in Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift, Leipzig, 1845, Bd. III) boiled down essentially to asserting that he had not been correctly understood. Marx replied to this “anti-criticism” of Bauer’s with an article published in the journal Gesellschaftsspiegel, Elberfeld, January 1846 (see present edition, Vol. 5), which partly coincided in content with the section “Der Heilige Bruno gegen die Autoren der ‘Heiligen Familie'” in Chapter 2 (“Der Heilige Bruno”) of the first volume of The German Ideology (see present edition, Vol. 5).
During the lifetimes of Marx and Engels The Holy Family was not published in English. Only part of subsection d), “Critical Battle Against French Materialism”, of Chapter VI, was reproduced by Engels in the Introduction to the 1892 English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (the German version of this introduction was published in Die New Zeit in 1895 under the title “Über den französischen Materialismus des XVIII. Jahrhunderts”).
In the English language The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, was published for the first time in 1956 by the Foreign Languages Publishing House, now Progress Publishers, Moscow, in the translation by Richard Dixon. The literary features of the work include the broad use of citations from French authors (Eugène Sue, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, and others) in the language of the original, alongside citations translated into German, as well as the use of individual expressions in foreign languages, especially French. This feature is preserved in the present edition, the translations of the citations being given in footnotes. Emphasis in the citations (printed in clear-face italics or hold-face italics in cases of special emphasis) mostly belongs to Marx and Engels, who often translated the citations with abridgments.
2 The reference is to the review made by the bookbinder C. Reichardt of A. T. Woeniger’s Publicistische Abhandlungen, Berlin, 1843. The review was published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft I, December 1843 and Heft II, January 1844, under the general title “Schriften über den Pauperismus” and mentioned the author’s profession. The short excerpts and individual expressions quoted by Engels below and at the end of Chapter 1 are taken from this review.
3 Here and elsewhere Engels quotes Reichardt’s reviews of C. Brüggemann’s book, Preussen Beruf in der deutschen Staats-Entwicklung, und die nächsten Bedingungen zu seiner Erfüllung, Berlin, 1843 and A. Benda’s Katechismia für wahrberechtige Bürger in Preussen Berlin, 1843. Both reviews were published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VI, May 1844.
4 The chapter contains a critical analysis of Julius Faucher’s article, “Englische Tagesfragen”, which was published in she Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VII, June 1844, Heft VIII, July 1844 (with the subtitle “Fortsetzung. Lord Ashley’s Amendment”) and Heft IX, August 1844 (with the subtitle “Fortsetzung. Ricardos Motion in Betreff der Einfuhrzölle”). The excerpts and expressions cited below were taken by Engels from this article.
The word Mühleigner, a literal translation of the English “mill-owner”, does not exist in German. Engels here ridicules J. Faucher’s way of using in his articles words which he himself coins after the English manner (see p. 16 of this volume).
5 The national Anti-Corn Law League was founded in 1838 by the Manchester manufacturers Cobden and Bright. The English Corn Laws, first adopted in the 15th century, imposed high tariffs on agricultural imports in order to maintain high prices for them on the home market. In the first third of the 19th century, 1815, 1822, and later several laws were passed changing the conditions for corn imports, and in 1828 a sliding scale was introduced which raised import tariffs on corn when prices in the home market declined and, on the other hand lowered tariffs when the home market prices rose.
The League widely exploited the popular discontent over the raising of corn prices. In its efforts to obtain the repeal of the Corn Laws and the establishment of complete freedom of trade, it aimed at weakening the economic and political positions of the landed aristocracy and lowering the cost of living thus making possible a lowering of the workers’ wages.
The struggle between the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy over the Corn Laws ended in 1846 with the repeal of these laws.
6 The struggle for legislation limiting the working day to ten hours started in England as early as the late 18th century and spread by the 1830s to the mass of the industrial workers. The representatives of the landed aristocracy saw their chance to use this popular slogan against the industrial bourgeoisie and supported the Ten Hour Bill in Parliament; the “Tory philanthropist” Lord Ashley headed the supporters of the Bill in Parliament from 1833. The Ten Hour Bill, applicable only to youths and women, was not passed until 1847.
7 When an important question is being discussed, the House of Commons sits in “Committee of the Whole House”, which is tantamount to a closed sitting; in this case the function of committee chairman is performed by one of the Members named in the list of committee chairmen and appointed by the speaker.
8 The reference is to the speech made during the debate on the Ten Hour Bill in the House of Commons on March 15, 1844, by Sir James Graham, Home Secretary in Sir Robert Peel’s Tory cabinet (Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates. Third Series, Vol. LXXIII).
9 It was with the letter “J”, the first letter of “Jungnitz”, that the article “Herr Nauwerck und die philosophische Fakultät”, published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VI, May 1844, was signed. The publication of this article was preceded by E. Jungnitz’s review of Karl Nauwerck’s book Über die Teilnahme am Staate, Leipzig, 1844 (Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft IV, March 1844). Engels took the short excerpts given below from this article.
10 The reference is to the dismissal of Bruno Bauer, whom the Prussian Government deprived, temporarily in October 1841 and permanently in March 1842, of the right to lecture in Bonn University because of his works criticising the Bible.
11 The excerpts cited in this paragraph are from the anonymous article “Proudhon” published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft V, April 1844. Its author was Edgar Bauer. Marx gives a detailed critical analysis of this article in section 4 of Chapter IV. E. Bauer’s phrase “the tranquillity of knowledge” was ironically played up also in other sections of this chapter written by Marx and Engels.
12 In this section Engels analyses and cites a review by Edgar Bauer in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft V, April 1844, of Flora Tristan’s Union ouvrière, Paris, 1843.
13 In this section Engels deals with Edgar Bauer’s review of F. F. A. Béraud’s Les filles publiques de Paris et La police qui les régit, t. 1-11, Paris et Leipzig, 1839. This review was published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft V, April 1844, under the title “Béraud über die Freudenmädchen”.
14 In this section Marx criticised and cited Edgar Bauer’s article “Die Romane der Verfasserin von Godwie Castle”, published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft 11, January 1844, and devoted to an analysis of the works of the German novelist Henriette von Paalzow.
15 Marx compares with Edgar Bauer’s article “Proudhon” (Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft V, April 1844), which he criticises and cites in this section, excerpts from the second, 184 1, edition of Proudhon’s Quest-ce que La propriété? ou Recherches sur Le principe du droit et du gouvemement. Premier mémoire (the first edition appeared in 1840 in Paris). Marx quotes Proudhon’s book sometimes from the French original, sometimes in his own German translation.
Marx later made a comprehensive critical appraisal of this work of Proudhon’s in his article “Über Proudhon”, which was published as a letter to Schweitzer, editor of the Social-Demokrat, in 1865.
16 The “Reformists” were a party of radical opponents of the July monarchy. The party consisted of democratic republicans and petty-bourgeois Socialists grouped round the Paris newspaper La Réforme. The leaders of the Réforme party included Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc.
17 Digests or Pandects were part of a compendium of Roman civil law (Corpus iuris civilis) compiled in 528-34 by Emperor Justinian I of the Eastern Roman Empire. They contained extracts from the works of prominent Roman jurists on civil law.
18 Here and to the end of the subsection “Characterising Translation No. 4” Marx compared citations from Bauer’s article with excerpts from another work by Proudhon, Avertissement aux propriétaires, ou Lettre à M. Considérant, rédacteur de La Phalange, sur une défense de la propriété. In content this book was close to Proudhon’s Quest-ce que La propriété?, the closing section of which, “Deuxième mémoire. Lettre à M. Blanqui, professeur d'économie politique au conservatoire des arts et métiers. Sur La Propiétê’, is quoted above.
19 The quotations are from an anonymous review of Thiers’ book Geschichte der französischen Revolution which was published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VIII, July 1844. In “Critical Comment No. 5”, Marx continues giving quotations from Edgar Bauer’s article on Proudhon (Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft V), comparing them with extracts from Proudhon’s book Quest-ce que la propiétê?
20 This chapter deals with and quotes from the review written by the Young Hegelian Szeliga (the pen-name of F. Z. Zychlinski) on the French writer Eugène Sue’s novel Les mystères de Paris, which was published in 1843 and became well known as a sample of sentimental social fantasy woven into an adventure plot.
Szeliga’s review was printed in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VII, June 1844, under the title: “Eugen Sue. Die Geheimnisse von Paris. Kritik von Szeliga”. Marx continues the critical analysis of this article in Chapter VIII.
The excerpts from Sue’s novel in the two chapters are given by Marx either in French or in German translation.
21 The reference is to the Charte constitutionnelle which was adopted in France after the bourgeois revolution of 1830 and was the basic law of the July monarchy.
In its fundamental principles the Charte constitutionnelle reproduced the constitutional charter of 1814, but the preamble of the 1814 charter, which spoke of the constitution being granted (“octryée”)by the king, was omitted and the rights of the upper and lower chambers were extended at the expense of certain royal prerogatives. According to the new constitution the king was considered only as the head of the executive authority and was deprived of the right to abrogate or suspend laws.
The expression “Charte vérité” is an ironical allusion to the concluding words of Louis Philippe’s proclamation of July 31, 1830: “henceforth the charter shall be the truth.”
22 Here and elsewhere quotations are made from Bruno Bauer’s anonymous article, “Neueste Schriften über die Judenfrage”, which was published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft 1, December 1843. This article was Bruno Bauer’s reply to criticism in the press of his book Die Judenfrage, Braunschweig, 1843, . which was a reprint, with some additions, of his articles on the same subject published in the journal Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst in November 1844.
Marx gave a critical analysis of this book in his article “On the Jewish Question”, which was carried by the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (see present edition, Vol. 3). Later Bauer replied to criticism of his book in an article he published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. In The Holy Family Marx ironically designates that article as “The Jewish Question No. 1”, and the following articles as “The Jewish Question No. 2” and “The Jewish Question No. 3”.
23 Ludwig Feuerbach’s “Vorläufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie” was written in January 1842 and prohibited by the censor in Germany. it was published in 1843 in Switzerland in the second volume of the collection, Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik. This two-volume collection also contained articles by Karl Marx, Bruno Bauer, Friedrich Köppen, Arnold Ruge, and others.
24 Doctrinaires-a group of French bourgeois politicians during the Restoration (1815-1830). They were constitutional monarchists, enemies of the democratic and revolutionary movement and wished to unite the bourgeoisie and the nobility. Their ideal was a political system after the English model, formalising these two privileged classes’ monopoly of governmental power in opposition to the broad .'uneducated” and propertyless sections. The best known Doctrinaires were the historian François Guizot and the philosopher Pierre Paul Royer-Collard.
25 Concerning Reply No. 1, Bruno Bauer’s first article against critics of his Die Judenfrage, see Note 22. In this article Bauer polemises with the authors of a number of reviews on his book, as well as with the authors of books and pamphlets, including the following: Die Judenfrage von Bruno Bauer näher beleuchtet, by Dr. Gustav Philippson, Dessau, 1843; Briefe zur Beleuchtung der Judenfrage von Bruno Bauer, by Dr-. Samuel Hirsch, Leipzig, 1843; Literaturblatt des Orients, 1843, No. 25 & ff. (Recension der Judenfrage von Bruno Bauer und der Briefe von Hirsch); Der Israelit des neunzehnten Jahrhundert, published by Dr. M. Hess, 1843, and others.
26 This quotation is from Bruno Bauer’s third article in reply to criticisms of his book Die Juden frage. The article, a polemic against Marx and his work “Zur Judenfrage”, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, was printed anonymously in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VIII, July 1844, under the title: “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?” Below Marx resumes his quotations from and criticism of Bruno Bauer’s first article, “Neueste Schriften über die Judenfrage” published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft I, December 1843.
27 The allusion here is to the five Napoleonic codes.
28 Here and elsewhere Marx criticises and quotes Bruno Bauer’s review of the first volume of a course of lectures by the right Hegelian Hinrichs: Politische Vorlesungen, Bd. I-II, Halle, 1843. This review appeared anonymously in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft I, December 1843. Subsequently the same monthly (Heft V, April 1844) carried Bauer’s reviews of the second volume of lectures, which is analysed in the same chapter of The Holy Family under the title: “Hinrichs No. 2. ‘Criticism’ and ‘Feuerbach’. Condemnation of Philosophy.”
29 Here and elsewhere Engels quotes and analyses Bauer’s anonymous review of the second volume of Hinrichs’ lectures. The review was printed in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft V, April 1844.
30 Here and elsewhere Marx quotes and analyses Bauer’s second article in reply to criticism of his Die Judenfrage. it was printed anonymously under the same title as the first-"Neueste Schriften Über die Judenfrage"- in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft IV, March 1844. The article analyses four polemical works, including Die Judenfrage. Gegen Bruno Bauer, by Dr. Gabriel Riesser in Hamburg, which appeared in Weil’s Konstitutionelle Jahrbücher, 1843, Bd. 2 and 3.
31 The reference is to the measures taken by the Convention against speculators in foodstuffs. in September 1793 the Convention decreed the establishment of a general maximum-fixed prices for the main food products and consumer articles; the death penalty was introduced for speculation in @and concealment of products.
32 “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?” was the title of an article by Bruno Bauer printed anonymously in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VIII, July 1844. It was the third polemical article against critics of his Die Judenfrage, in this case primarily against Marx’s article “Zur Judenfrage” in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. This article of Bauer’s is quoted and analysed by Marx not only under the title “Absolute Criticism’s Self-Apology. Its ‘Political’ Past” but also under the other tides in the section “Absolute Criticism’s Third Campaign”.
33 In January 1843 the Young Hegelians’ journal Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst, then appearing in Leipzig (up to July 1841 it had been published in the Prussian town of Halle under the title Hallische Jahrbücher für Deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst), was closed down by the government of Saxony and prohibited throughout Germany by a decree of the Federal Diet. On January 19 of the same year the Prussian Government decided to forbid as of April 1, 1843, the publication of the Rheinische Zeitung für Politik, Handel und Gewerbe, which had been appearing in Cologne since January 1, 1842, and which, under the editorship of Marx (from October 1842), had acquired a revolutionary-democratic trend. Marx’s resignation from the editorship on March 18, 1843, did not cause the government to rescind its decision, and the last issue appeared on March 31, 1843.
34 Concerning Bruno Bauer’s dismissal from the chair of theology, see Note 10, Bauer replied to the Government’s repressive measures by the publication in Zurich and Winterthur in 1842 of the pamphlet: Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegegen.
35 The reference is to the review by Karl Christian Planck of Bauer’s Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, Bd. 1-2, Leipzig, 1841, Bd. 3, Braunschweig, 1842. (“Synoptics” is the name given in the history of religion to the compilers of the first three Gospels.) The review was published in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, Berlin, June 1842, Nos. 107-114. Planck disputed Bauer’s Young Hegelian theory on the origin of Christianity from the positions of the more moderate criticism of the Gospel sources given by Strauss.
36 Marx has in mind the section of Hegel’s book Phänomenologie des Geistes entitled “Die Kampf der Aufklärung mit dem Aberglauben”.
37 The article in question is Bruno Bauer’s “Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden”, which was published in the collection Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, Zurich and Winterthur, 1843; along with the book Die Judenfrage (an enlarged edition of Bauer’s articles on this subject first published in 1842), this article was subjected to a critical analysis by Marx in his article “Zur Judenfrage” in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.
38 The reference is to the attempt to unite the various Lutheran trends by means of the forced Union of 1817, when the Lutherans were united with the Reformed (Calvinist) Church to form the Evangelical Church. The Old Lutherans, who opposed this union, seceded to form their own trend defending the “true” Lutheran Church.
39 The reference is to the policy of de-christianisation pursued in France by Hébert and his supporters in the autumn of 1793. Outwardly it was expressed in the closing of churches and the renunciation of Catholic rites. The forcible methods used to implement these measures outraged believers, especially among the peasants.
40 In their efforts to consolidate the Jacobin dictatorship, Robespierre and his supporters opposed the policy of de-Christianisation. A decree of the Convention on December 6, 1793, prohibited “all violence or threats directed against the freedom of worship”.
41 Cercle social — an organisation established by democratic intellectuals in Paris in the first years of the French Revolution. Its chief spokesman, Claude Fauchet, demanded an equalitarian division of the land, restrictions on large fortunes and employment for all able-bodied citizens. The criticism to which Fauchet and his supporters subjected the formal equality proclaimed in the documents of the French Revolution prepared the ground for bolder action in defence of the destitute by Jacques Roux, Théophile Leclerc and other members of the radical-plebeian “Enragés”.
42 Marx has in mind the Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution français, t. 1-40, Paris, 1834-38, published by the French historian and publicist Ph. J. Buchez jointly with P. C. Roux-Lavergne. It consisted of numerous documents. The introductory articles by Buchez, a former Republican and pupil of Saint-Simon, who adopted the views of Christian Socialism in the 1830s, praised the Jacobins’ activity and their revolutionary traditions but censured the steps taken by them against the Catholic clergy.
43 Robespierre’s speech, “Rapport sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationals dans 1'administration intérieure de la République, fait au nom du comité de saint public, à la séance du 5 février (17 Pluviôse) 1794”, is quoted according to the German translation of the Histoire parlementaire de La Révolution française, by Buchez and Roux-Lavergne, t. 31, Paris, 1837.
44 The report made by Saint-just in the name of the Committees of Public Safety and of General Security at the Convention’s sitting of March 31 (11 Germinal), 1794, is quoted according to the German translation of the Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, by Buchez and Roux-Lavergne,.t. 32, Paris, 1837.
45 The text of the report made by Saint-just on the police at the Convention’s sitting of April 15 (26 Germinal), 1794, was published in the Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, by Buchez and Roux-Lavergne, t. 32, Paris, 1837.
46 The Directory- the regime established in France as a result of the overthrow of the Jacobin government on July 27 (9 Thermidor), 1794, and the introduction on November 4, 1795, by the Thermidor Convention, of a new anti-democratic constitution. Supreme executive power was concentrated in the hands of five Directors. The Directory, whose rule was marked by the flowering of enterprise and speculation, remained in existence until the coup d'état of November 9 (18 Brumaire), 1799, which completed the bourgeois counter-revolution and led to the personal rule of General Napoleon Bonaparte.
47 The reference is apparently to the relevant articles in the Staats-Lexikon, oder Encyklopädie der Staatswissenchaften, Bd. 1-15, 1834-48, published by the German liberal historian C. Rotteck and the German liberal jurist C. Welcker. Rotteck was also the author of the four-volume Allgemeine für Weltgeschichte für alle Stände, von den frühesten Zeiten bis zum Jahre 1831, Stuttgart, 1833.
48 The first complete edition of the work of P.J.G. Cabanis appeared in Paris in 1802. But a considerable part had been published in 1798 and 1799 in the Transactions of the French Academy, under the title: Traité du physique et du moral de 1'homme.
49 The Jansenists — named after the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen — were an opposition trend among French Catholics in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Their views were vigorously resisted by official Catholicism.
50 A large excerpt from this subsection of The Holy Family. beginning with this sentence and ending with the words: “... deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion"'(see p. 129 of this volume), was subsequently included with a few changes by Engels in his Introduction to the 18'92 English edition of his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Accordingly the passage is here given in Engels’ translation except for the changes which he made.
51 The Nominalists were adherents of a trend in medieval scholasticism, generally considered heretical and dangerous, which maintained that only individual things exist and that generality belongs only to words. They criticised the traditional .,realist” doctrine, derived from Plato, that universals or “ideas” have real existence above and independent, of individual things, and likewise the “conceptualist” view that while universals do not exist outside the mind they do exist in the mind as general conceptions. The doctrine of Nominalism was later forcefully taken up and developed by the English materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
52 Homoemeriae, according to the teaching of the ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, are tiny qualitatively determined material particles which are infinite in number and variety and form the primary basis of all that exists; their combinations constitute all the variety of things.
52a In his Introduction to the 1892 English edition of his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels gives the following explanation of this term: “'Qual’ is a philosophical play upon words. Qual literally means torture, a pain which drives to action of some kind; at the same time the mystic Böhme puts into the German word something of the meaning of the Latin qualitas; his ‘qual’ was the activating principle arising from, and promoting in its turn, the spontaneous development of the thing, relation, or person subject to it, in contradistinction to a pain inflicted from without.”
53 Claude Adrien Helvétius, De 1'homme, de ses facultés intellectual et de son éducation, London, 1773. The first edition of this work, published after the author’s death, appeared in London due to the efforts of the Russian ambassador in Holland, D.A. Golitsyn.
54 Many of the works by the philosophers mentioned were vigorously denounced by the Church and the Government authorities. La Mettrie’s book, L'homme machine, published anonymously in Leyden in 1748, was burned and its author was banished from Holland, where he had emigrated from France in 1745. When the first edition of Holbach’s Système de La Nature, ou des Loix du Monde physique et du Monde moral was put out in 1770, the name of the author was given as J. B. Mirabeau, secretary of the French Academy who had died in 1760.
55 The first edition of Helvétius’ book De l'esprit was published anonymously in Paris in 1758 and was burned by the public executioner in 1759.
56 The first edition of Holbach’s Système social, ou principes naturels de la morale et de la politique was published anonymously in three volumes in 1773.
57 This is an allusion to the hostile campaign conducted for a number of years by the conservative Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung against socialism and communism. In October 1842, this paper accused the Rheinische Zeitung, whose editor was Marx, of spreading communist views. In reply Marx published his article “Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung” (see present edition, Vol. 1).
58 The reference is to members of a political grouping which formed in France around the newspaper La Réforme (see Note 16). One of the leaders of this grouping, the petty-bourgeois Socialist Louis Blanc, put out in 1839-40 a pamphlet entitled L'organisation du travail, which became widely known.
59 This is an ironic allusion to the ancient Roman tradition about the geese whose cackling saved Rome in 390 B.C. by waking the guards at the approach of the Gauls who had laid siege to the Capitol.
60 The quotation is taken from Bruno Bauer’s review of the book Leben und Wirken Friedrich von Sallet’s, nebst Mitheillungen aus dem literarischen Nachlasse Desselden Breslau, 1844. The review was published anonymously in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VIII, July 1844.
61 Below Marx gives excerpts from the following reports: Zerrleder, “Correspondenz aus Bern” (Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft III, February 1844, Heft VI, May 1844); E. Fleitchhammer, “Correspondenz aus Breslau” (ibid., Heft IV, March 1844); Hirzel, “Correspondenz aus Zürich” (ibid., Heft IV, March 1844, Heft V, April 1844); “Correspondenz aus der Provinz” (ibid., Heft VI, May 1844).
62 Bruno Bauer’s reply (on behalf of the paper’s editorial board) to the Tübingen correspondent was published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VI, May 1844, under the heading “Correspondenz aus der Provinz”. Excerpts from the reports published under this heading in the same issue are given below.
63 Berlin Couleur was the name by which the correspondent of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung mentioned above designated the Berlin Young Hegelians who did not belong to Bruno Bauer’s group and criticised the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung on a number of petty points. Max Stirner was one of them.
The excerpts quoted in this and the concluding subsection of the chapter are from the anonymous letters published under the heading “Correspondenz aus der Provinz” in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Heft VI, May 1844, as are also the editors’ replies to these letters.
64 By the “philosophy of identity” is meant Schelling’s early philosophical views which he expounded at the beginning of the 19th century. These views were based on the idea of the absolute identity of thinking and being, consciousness and matter as the root of everything which exists. These views represented a transitional stage in the development of German classical philosophy, from the subjective idealism of Fichte to the absolute idealism of Hegel. But Schelling himself, in whose philosophical outlook religiosity and mysticism later came to dominate, not only condemned Hegel’s philosophy in his subsequent pronouncements, and particularly in his lectures on the “Philosophy of Revelation” in Berlin University in 1841-42 (which were critically analysed by the young Engels in his pamphlet Schelling and Revelation); he even renounced the rational elements of his own “philosophy of identity” (see present edition, Vol. 2).
65 The reference is to F. Gruppe’s pamphlet Bruno Bauer und die akademische Lehrfreiheit Berlin, 1842, directed against Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians.. Marx had criticised this polemical pamphlet, which was written from a conservative standpoint (see present edition, Vol. 1, pp. 211-14).
66 The reference is to the article “Emigranten und Märtyrer. Ein Beitrag zur Charakteristik der Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher’, by H. L. Egidius, published in the journal Konstitutionelle Jahrbücher, 1844, Bd. II.
67 The quotations from Fourier’s works Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées, generales (the first edition was published in 1808) are given by Marx in his own translation and the quotation from Théorie de l'unité universelle is in French.
68 Marx had in mind Théodore Dizamy, Jules Gay and their supporters, whose materialistic outlook he characterised in Chapter VI of The Holy Family (see p. 131 of this volume). The revolutionary and materialistic trend of French utopian communism included also the secret Babouvist societies of the 1840s influenced by the “travailleurs égalitaires”, which consisted mainly of workers and published the journal l'Égalitaire, and the “humanitaires”, supporters of the journal l'Humanitaire. In 1843 Engels wrote about the criticism of bourgeois marriage and family relations by representatives of these societies in his article “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent” (see present edition, Vol. 3, p. 392)
69 This is an allusion to the leading role played by K. H. Sack, a professor of Bonn University, in the campaign waged by reactionary theological circles against the Young Hegelians, which began in connection with Bruno Bauer’s transfer as a privat-dozent from Berlin to Bonn in 1839. Especially sharp attacks were made against Bauer’s criticism of the Gospel sources and the atheistic conclusion, following from his views on the origin of Christianity. In March 1842, Bauer was dismissed from Bonn University. The theological opponents of the Young Hegelians were ridiculed in Engels’ satirical poem “The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible”, in which Sack figures under the ironical name of Beutel (in German, Sack means sack, Beutel — pouch) (see present edition, Vol. 2, pp. 313-51).
70 The reference is to the petty German princes who lost their power and saw their possessions annexed by larger German states as a result of the reshaping of the political map of Germany during the Napoleonic wars and at the Vienna Congress (1814-15).
71 “Young England” was a group of conservative writers and politicians, including Disraeli and Lord John Manners, who were close to the Tory philanthropists and formed a separate group in the House of Commons in 1841. Voicing the landed aristocracy’s dissatisfaction at the political and economic strengthening of the bourgeoisie, they criticised the capitalist system and supported half-hearted philanthropic measures for improving the condition of the workers. “Young England” disintegrated as a political group in 1845 and ceased to exist as a literary trend in 1848. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels characterised the views of “Young England” as “feudal socialism” (see present edition, Vol. 6). See Engels’ characterisation of it in the footnote on p. 578 of this volume.
72 Engels’ article on “Continental Socialism” was written in the form of a private letter, which the addressee forwarded to the editorial office of the weekly The New Moral World, preceded and followed by accompanying texts (it appeared in this form in the paper). However, there are grounds for assuming that the introductory and concluding texts, written in the third person, were also written by Engels, who had his reasons for resorting to this indirect way of publishing his writings. This assumption is supported by the fact that the accompanying text is signed with the pen-name “Anglo-German”, most probably pointing to Engels, who had lived some two years in England and had a good knowledge of conditions there. Apparently the note to the text of the letter was also by Engels.
73 Ham Common folks — a group of English Utopian Socialists who organised the Concordium Colony at Ham Common, near London, in 1842; followers of the English mystic James Pierrepont Greaves (1777-1842), the Ham Common Socialists preached moral perfection and an ascetic way of life; the colony broke up after only a short existence.
74 The reference is to the attempt made by France during her conquest of Algeria to bring neighbouring Morocco also under her control. In August 1844, accusing the Sultan of Morocco of helping Abd-el-Kader, the chief of the Algerian tribes who were resisting French rule, the French started hostilities against Morocco. The Sultan was defeated and forced to cease his assistance to Abd-el-Kader and in 1845 sign a treaty advantageous to France.
75 The “Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence” was compiled by Engels on the basis of materials published in The New Moral World, The Northern Star and other publications. The main source was a series of 29 letters written by the Owenite John Finch and published in The New Moral World between January 13 and October 19, 1844, under the title “Notes of Travel in the United States”. Engels gives some excerpts from Finch’s letters in his own, rather free, German translation and italicises certain words and passages (the features of his method of quoting are taken into account in the present edition). In describing the communist colony of Harmony Hall in Hampshire, which Was founded by Owen’s followers in 1841 and existed until the be-ginning of 1846, Engels drew on Somerville’s essay A Journey to Harmony Hall, in Hampshire; with some particulars of the Socialist Community, to which the attention of the Nobility, Gentry and clergy is earnestly requested. This essay was published in The Morning Chronicle on December 13, 1842, and signed “One who has whistled at the Plough”.
Engels’ “Description” was published in the annual Deutsches Bürgerbuch für 1845 without any signature. Engels’ authorship is confirmed by his own reference to this material in a series of articles on the progress of communism in Germany published in the spring of 1845 in The New Moral World (see p. 240 of this p. 214 volume).
76 The quotation is taken from the correspondence of Lawrence Pitkeithly of Huddersfield, “Where to, and how to proceed. Description of the Shaker Villages” (The Northern Star No. 286, May 6, 1843).
77 The Unitarians (or Anti-Trinitarians) reject the dogma of the “Holy Trinity”. The Unitarian Church first arose in England and America in the 17th century, and its teachings emphasise the moral and ethical side of the Christian religion in contrast to its external ritualist aspect.
78 The series of articles “Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany” was Engels’ last contribution to the London Owenite weekly The New Moral World. The series was written in the form of three letters to the editors, and printed in that form in the newspaper, only the first of them bearing a tide. The numbering of the articles in the present edition is by the editors.
79 The riot of the Silesian weavers took place on June 2-4, 1844, and was described by Marx in his article, “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian"’, and by Engels in his reports “News from Prussia”, and “Further Particulars of the Silesian Riots” (see present edition, Vol. 3). Soon after the Silesian events, in the second half of June 1844, there was a rising of textile workers in Prague, which led to workers’ uprisings in a number of other Bohemian industrial areas, including Reichenberg (now called Liberec) and Böhmisch Leipa (now called Czeska Lipa). The workers’ movement, which was accompanied by the wrecking of factories and the destruction of machinery, was suppressed by government troops.
80 The reference is to the article “Ein ‘socialistischer’ Spuk”, which was published unsigned in a supplement to the Kölnische Zeitung No. 314, November 9, 1844.
81 The translation was made by Engels after the earlier version of Heine’s poem “Die Schlesischen Weber”. Unlike the text first published in the newspaper Vorwärts! No. 55, July 10, 1844, the first stanza of this translation has an additional line, the third. A later version, edited by the author, with the additional, fifth stanza, was published in 1847.
82 In The New Moral World the letter was dated February 22. But Engels reports on events which he witnessed or took part in between February 2 and 22, in particular the communist meeting at Elberfeld on February 8, not in this, but in the following article of the series (see pp. 237-38 of this volume). Hence either the-dating is a misprint, or else was deliberately changed by the editors in order to disguise the time lag between the writing of the article and its publication.
83 The reference is to the “Associations for the Benefit of the Working Classes” which were formed in a number of Prussian towns in 1844-45 on the initiative of the German liberal bourgeoisie, which had been alarmed by the rising of the Silesian weavers, in the summer of 1844 (see Note 79). They hoped by this means to divert the German workers from militant forms of struggle. But despite the efforts of the bourgeoisie and the governmental authorities to give these associations an innocent and philanthropical appearance, their establishment only gave fresh impetus to the urban masses’ political activity and drew the attention of broad sections of German society to the social question. The scope of the movement to establish such associations was especially great in the towns of the industrial Rhine province, where the antagonisms between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were acute and Prussian absolutism was faced with a radical-democratic opposition. The revolutionary-democratic intelligentsia used meetings called to set up associations and discuss their statutes for the purpose of popularising radical ideas and counteracting the influence of the clergy and the liberal bourgeoisie. Seeing that the associations had taken so unlooked for a direction, the Prussian Government hastily cut short their activity in the spring of 1845 by refusing to approve their statutes and forbidding them to continue their work.
In Elberfeld in November 1844 an Educational Society was founded. From the very beginning its organisers had to fight attempts by the local clergy to bring it under their influence and give its activity a religious colouring. Engels and his friends wished to use the society’s meetings and its committee to spread communist views. The statute of the society was not approved by the authorities and the society itself ceased to exist in the spring of 1845.
84 The reference is to the annual Deutsches Bürgerbuch für 1845, established in Darmstadt by the radical publicist H. Püttmann in December 1844. Besides several articles of the German or “true” socialist trend which was then emerging, the journal carried works by such revolutionary-democratic writers as W. Wolff and the poet G. Weerth. It also contained Engels’ essay “Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence” (see pp. 214-28 of this volume and Note 75). The next issue of the Deutsches Bürgerbuch, which appeared in Mannheim in the summer of 1846, contained Engels’ translation of “A Fragment of Fourier’s on Trade”, which he made in summer and autumn 1845, with an introduction and a conclusion censuring for the first time the tendencies inherent in “true socialism” (see pp. 613, 642-43 of this volume). The “true Socialists” and the publications spreading their views, among them the Deutsches Bürgerbuch, were later criticised in detail by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology and other works (see present edition, Vol. 5).
85 What is meant is the prospectus of H. Püttmann’s projected journal Rheinische Jahrbücher gesellschaftlichten Reform. Only two issues appeared, the first in Darmstadt in August 1845, the second in the small town of Bellevue, on the German-Swiss border, at the end of 1846. Marx and Engels used them to spread their communist views in Germany. The first issue carried the texts of Engels speeches at meetings in Elberfeld on February 8 and 15, 1845 (ace pp. 243-64 of this volume), and the second contained his article “Festival of Nations in London” (see present edition, Vol. 6). It was for this journal that Marx prepared in the spring of 1845 a long article on the German economist List (see pp. 265-93 of this volume). However, the journal was dominated by the “true Socialists”, and Marx and Engels afterwards severely criticised it in The German Ideology (see present edition, Vol. 5).
86 The reference is to the monthly Gesellschaftspiegel Engels helped to organise this publication and compile its prospectus (see pp. 671-74 of this volume), but did not become one of its editors. The journal, which began to appear in 1845 in Elberfeld, edited by M. Hess, carried in January 1846 Marx’s article “Peuchet: On Suicide” (see pp. 597-612 of this volume). But. articles by “true Socialists” predominated.
87 On January 16, 1845, the French authorities decided to banish from France Marx, Heine, Bürgers, Bakunin and other contributors to Vorwärts! The Prussian Government had already made repeated attempts to persuade the Guizot cabinet to close down the paper, and had launched a campaign against it in the reactionary press. Under pressure from public opinion the French Government was forced to annul its decision to expel Heine. But, on February 3, Marx was obliged to leave Paris and settle in Brussels.
Before his departure, on February 1, 1845, Marx concluded a contract with the Darmstadt publisher K.F.J. Leske for the publication of his two-volume work Kritik der Politik und Nationalökonomie (see the Appendices to this volume).
88 The reference is to the collection Neue Anekdota, which was published in Darmstadt in May 1845. It contained newspaper articles by M. Hess, K. Grün, O. Lüning and others, written mainly in the first half of 1844, which had been banned by the censor. Soon after the publication of the collection, Marx and Engels made a number of severely critical remarks about its contents, as can be seen from Grün’s letters to Hess.
89 The reference is to the projected publication in German of the “Library of the Best Foreign Socialist Writers”, which, as we learn from Engels’ letters to Marx from Barmen in February and March 1845, was repeatedly discussed by the two friends.
A list, written by Marx, of authors whose works he proposed for inclusion in the “Library” is still extant (see p. 667 of this volume). But the project was not realised. The only work completed was “A Fragment of Fourier’s on Trade” compiled by Engels with an introduction and a conclusion by him (see pp. 613-44 of this volume).
90 “Secret offices” or “black offices” were establishments under the postal departments in France, Prussia, Austria and a number of other countries to deal with the inspection of correspondence. They had been in existence since the time of the absolute monarchies in Europe.
91 On February 8, 15 and 22, 1845, meetings to discuss communism were held in Elberfeld and aroused considerable public interest. The second and third meetings attracted especially large attendances — from 130 to 200. Discussion of lectures and of readings from socialist literature, including poetry by Shelley and other authors, lasted many hours. As well as socialist-minded intellectuals, the audiences consisted largely of bourgeois from Barmen and Elberfeld with a sprinkling of visitors from other towns in the Rhine province of Prussia (Cologne and Düsseldorf). “All of Elberfeld and Barmen, from the monied aristocracy to small shopkeepers, were represented, the proletariat being the only exception,” Engels wrote to Marx on February 22 about the third meeting, which had just taken place. He also described the two preceding ones. The meetings upset the local authorities, who took steps to put an end to public discussions on the subject.
Engels spoke on February 8 and 15. On February 22 excerpts were read from the essay on Communist Colonies which he had compiled and published about that time (see pp. 214-28 of this volume). An account of the meeting is included in the third report in his series on the progress of communism in Germany, published in The New Moral World (see pp. 237-39 of this volume).
The texts of Engels’ speeches, prepared for publication by the author, were published together with excerpts from other speakers (M. Hess, G. A. Köttgen) in August 1845 in the first issue of Rheinische Jahrbücher zur gesellschaftlichen Reform (pp. 45-62 and 71-86). The tide “Speeches in Elberfeld” has been taken from Engels’ letter to Marx on March 17, 1845, in which he himself uses it.
92 In 1892 Engels returned, in the Preface to the English edition of The Condition of the Working-Class in England, to the problem of the cyclical character of economic crises in the early 19th century. “The recurring period of the great industrial crises is stated in the text as five years,” he wrote. “This was the period apparently indicated by the course of events from 1825 to 1842. But the industrial history from 1842 to 1868 has shown that the real period is one of ten years; that the intermediate revulsions were secondary, and tended more and more to disappear.”
94 The Customs Union (Zollverein) of the German states (initially they numbered 18), which established a common customs frontier, was founded in 1834 and headed by Prussia. By the 1840s the Union embraced most of the German states, with the exception of Austria, the Hansa cities (Bremen, Lubeck, Hamburg) and a few small states. Brought into being by the demand for an all-German market, the Customs Union contributed to Germany’s eventual political unification.
95 In 1842, as a result of the so-called first Opium War, which Britain had been waging against China since 1839, the unequal Nanking Treaty was imposed; one of the clauses envisaged the opening to English trade of five Chinese cities: Canton, Shanghai, Amoy, Ninbo and Fuchou.
96 This work-a draft of an article against the German economist Friedrich List-was recently discovered among Marx’s manuscripts which remained for a long time in the keeping of the grandchildren of his eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet. Marx and Engels had reacted critically to List’s book (published in 1841) as early as February 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (see present edition, Vol. 3, 178, 421). Later they concluded that a full-scale criticism should be published of his views as typifying the attitudes of the German bourgeoisie-its striving for complete freedom of action to exploit the German workers without prejudice to the privileges of the nobility and its support of the feudal-monarchical political system while seeking to force the government to protect bourgeois interests against foreign competition. In a letter to Marx on November 19, 1844, Engels mentioned that he intended writing a pamphlet on List, and in another letter, on March 17, 1845, he greatly approved of Marx’s own plans to publish in the journal Rheinische Jahrbücher zur gesellschaftlichen Reform, projected by Püttmann, a critical analysis of List’s views. In his pamphlet Engels proposed to expand the critical remarks on List’s practical suggestions (introduction of a protective system) which he had made in the second of his “Speeches in Elberfeld” (see pp. 258-62 of this volume). However, Engels did not write that pamphlet.
Neither did Marx’s article on List appear in print. The extant drafts of the manuscript, abounding in abbreviations, erasures, corrections and insertions, are incomplete. The first sheet, apparently containing the author’s title of she article and of the first chapter, is missing. Sheets 10-21 and 22 have also not been found. The extant part consists of large-size sheets numbered by Marx himself. Of these, numbers 2-5, containing four pages of text each, and sheet 6, containing text on the first three pages, belong to the first chapter. Following them is a small fragment on a separate unnumbered sheet. The second chapter, with the author’s title, has reached us more complete and comprises sheets 7-9, containing four pages each. Of the third chapter only sheet 22 (two fragments filling two pages) and sheet 24 (four pages of text) are extant. The fourth chapter has the author’s title and fills one unnumbered sheet (four pages).
In his manuscript Marx analyses and quotes the first volume of List’s book according to the 1841 edition — Friedrich List, Das nationals System der politischen Oekonomie. Erster Band. Der internationale Handel, die Handelspolitik und der deutsche Zollverein, Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1841. At the beginning of 1845 Marx made numerous excerpts from this edition which he used in his work. He quotes French sources in his own German translation, with the exception of one excerpt, from a work by Louis Say, which he purposely quotes in French to show List’s deliberately inaccurate way of quoting. The emphasis in the quotations belongs for the most part to Marx.
In publishing the work in this edition, obvious slips of the pep in the manuscript have been corrected, editorial insertions have been made (in square brackets) where meaning might otherwise be obscure and some passages have been divided into paragraphs additional to those given by the author. Where the author’s titles to chapters are missing, titles (in square brackets) have been supplied by the editors. The numbers of the sheets in the manuscript are given in Arab figures in square brackets. Words and phrases crossed out in the manuscript are not reproduced, although some of them have been taken into account in deciphering illegible passages. In the second chapter a number of paragraphs were crossed out by the author with a vertical line. Marx usually did that when he was using the crossed out passage in another place or in another variant of the work. Since the pages of the manuscript to which these passages could have been transferred are missing, the passages crossed out are reproduced in the context in question in angle brackets.
97 The word “obstacle” is written in the manuscript over the word “inconvenience”. And later in the text Marx repeatedly uses this method of proposing variants. In the translation such words are given in brackets after the word over which the variant is written.
98 A Molossus in ardent prosody was a foot of three Ion syllables Marx uses the term ironically to describe List’s heavy style.
99 In numbering this point 3 Marx probably made a slip, since the preceding point is also numbered 3. The next point in the manuscript is numbered 4 (see below, p. 273).
100 The Tribunate was one of the four legislative institutions introduced in France by the Constitution of 1799 after the coup d'état of 18-19 Brumaire (g- 1 0 November), 1799, which established the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Tribunate was abolished in 1807.
101 The Notice historique sur La vie et les ouvrages du J.B. Say was prefaced to the seventh, supplementary, volume of Say’s course in Political Economy, which was published soon after the author’s death under the title: Cours comput d'économie politique pratique. Volume complimentaire. Milanges et correspondence d'économie politique; ouvrage posthume de J.B. Say, public par Charles Comte, son gendre, Paris, 1833. Marx quotes with abridgments separate passages from pp. iii-xii of the “Notice historique” by Charles Comte.
102 The Anti-Corn Law League — see Note 5.
The movement for land reform, free allotment of plots to every worker and other democratic reforms arose in the 1840s in the United States of America and was headed by the National Reform Association.
103 Ironical allusions to List’s arguments and use of words. The words enclosed in inverted commas by Marx-"freie, mächtige und reiche Bürger” — allude to List’s expression “das Aufkommen eines freien, industriellen und reichen Bürgertums” (the rise of a free, industrial and rich bourgeoisie) on page lxvi of his book. On page lxiv List claims credit for having shown the German gentry how profitable for them was the existence of an industrial bourgeoisie “zealously” working to increase the rents of their estates.
104 “Confederation” is one of List’s favourite words. He speaks of “the confederation of various activities”, “the confederation of various knowledge”, “the confederation of various forces” (see List, op. cit., p. 223).
105 On page 208 of his book, List illustrates his teaching on productive forces and exchange values by the example of two fathers, each of whom has five sons and owns an estate bringing 1,000 talers net annual income in excess of what he expends to support his family. One of them places his 1,000 talers in a bank at interest and forces his sons to perform hard unskilled labour; the other uses his 1,000 talers to give his sons a higher education, so that they become highly skilled agronomists or engineers. According to List, the first father shows concern for the increase of exchange values, the second for the increase of productive forces. On page 209 List speaks of the Christian religion and monogamy as “rich sources of productive force”.
106 List says: “Workshops and factories are the mothers and children of civic freedom, education, the arts and sciences.
107 Below Marx makes clear that he understands “the abolition of labour” to mean the elimination of the existing forms of exploitation of labour, the enslavement and alienation of the working man, and emphasises the need to create social conditions under which industrial labour and industry would cease to be an object and instrument of oppression but would serve as a means for man to use his capacities and to master the forces of nature (see pp. 280-82 of this volume).
108 An allusion to the expression “industrial education”, which is frequently used by List.
109 By manufacturing force (“die Manufakturkraft”) List understands the productive power of factory industry. But he often uses this expression simply in the sense of factory industry.
110 An allusion to List’s statement that his “theory of the productive forces” should be worked out scientifically (“wissenschaftlich auszubilden sei”) side by side with “the theory of exchange values” developed by the “Smith-Say school” (List, op. cit., p. 187).
111 The reference is to List’s argument, in Chapter 24 of his book, about the importance of “continuity” and “uninterruptedness of production” in the development of factory industry, the preservation and perfection of its technical means and the production skills of the workers. In comparing these arguments with those of J. F. Bray, Marx had in mind the latter’s book, Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy; or the Age of Might and the Age of Right, Leeds, 1839, which proved the injustice of the hereditary property of capitalists and landowners as non-productive and parasitic classes. In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) Marx characterised Bray’s views as communist (see present edition, Vol. 6).
112 The term costs of production (“Produktionskosten”) is used by Marx in the sense of value of the product.
114 The Methuen Treaty was a trade treaty concluded on December 27, 1703, between England and Portugal (by Lord Methuen for the English) -allies in the War of Spanish Succession (fought by the Anglo-Austro-Dutch coalition against France and Spain). The treaty opened wide access in Portugal for English woollens, in return for which Portugal received the right to export its wines to England on privileged terms. In his book List emphasised that this treaty was unfavourable to Portugal.
115 Engels’ plans to produce a big work on the social history of England were formed while he was still living in that country (from November 1842 to August 1844). Initially he intended to implement them in the form of a series of articles in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher under the general title of The Condition of England. The February 1844 issue of the journal carried the first article in this series, and the other articles were published later in the Paris Vorwärts! (August-October, 1844 — see present edition, Vol. 3) since the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher had ceased to be published. The series, however, remained incomplete. In the articles he wrote Engels was able merely to touch upon his main theme — the condition of the working class in England. He intended to amplify it later in one of the central chapters of his intended book on the social history of England, but in the end his realisation of the proletariat’s special role in bourgeois society prompted him to make the condition of the English working class the object of a special study.
Upon his return to Barmen early in September 1844, Engels at once set about the accomplishment of his revised plan, using material he had collected while in England. “I am buried up to the neck in English newspapers and books from which 1 am compiling my book on the condition of English proletarians”, he informed Marx on November 19, i844. In January 1845 the work was appreciably advanced and, informing Marx of this on January 20, Engels told him of his intention to start, once it was finished, on a new work: On the Historical Development of England and English Socialism. In mid-March 1845 the manuscript was completed and sent to the Leipzig publisher Wigand. It appeared at the beginning of June 1845, when Engels had already moved to Brussels, where Marx, banished from France, had been since February of that year.
The response in the German press was lively. Many newspapers and journals, in particular the Allgemeine Preussische Zeitung, the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, the Janus. Jahrbücher deutscher Gesinnung, Bildung und That, I845, the Gesellschaftsspiegel, jg. 1845, and a number of others carried reviews of the book. And in socialist circles it was received with great approval. Weydemeyer wrote that Engels’ book was “without doubt one of the most important phenomena in our recent literature” (“Dies Buch gehört dem Volke”, 1845). O. Lüning noted that the book instilled not only “hatred of and wrath against the oppressors”, but also “a feeling of hope and faith in the final victory of reason and justice, in the eternal reason of mankind, which, despite all dangers and storms, will secure a beautiful future” (Deutsches Bürgerbuch für 1846). Revolutionary workers were educated on Engels’ book. F. Lessner, a German worker who subsequently became an active member of the Communist League, recalled, for example, that it “was the first book 1 acquired and from which 1 first obtained an idea of the working-class movement”.
Bourgeois critics, while acknowledging the accurate observation and the literary merit of the book, nevertheless deplored its revolutionary conclusions. Thus, in a review of recent literature published in the Berlin journal Janus. Jahrbücher deutscher Gesinnung, in 1845 (Bd. 2, Heft 18), Professor F. A. H. Huber accused the author of making his work “a call for murder and arson written with bile, blood and passion”. The polemic over Engels’ book continued in the following years. For instance, the prominent German economist B. Hildebrand devoted to its analysis a considerable part of his work Die Nationalökonomie oder Gegenwart und Zukunft, Frankfurt am Main, 1848. Acknowledging the author’s talent and the originality of his research, this critic took great exception to his communist ideas and declared his characterisation of English bourgeois society to be true in detail but incorrect as a whole.
Engels’ book became well known also outside Germany. As early as July 1845, a few weeks after it was published, reviews appeared in Russia (Literaturnaya Gazeta No. 25, July 5, 1845). Engels’ work was highly rated by revolutionary democrats. N. V. Shelgunov, in an article published in the journal Sovremennik in 1861, demonstrated the groundlessness of Hildebrand’s attacks on Engels, whom he called “one of the best and noblest of Germans”. The article summarised with approval the main content of Engels’ work (Sovremennik, LXXXV, Sec. 1).
Marx, in his own economic researches, based himself in many respects on the material and conclusions of his friend’s work, which he quoted in many passages of Capital. But later, Engels himself was very critical of his book. Acknowledging that it was written with genuinely youthful inspiration, “freshly and passionately, with bold anticipation” (see his letter to Marx of April 9, 1863), he at the same time found in it certain weaknesses typical of the initial stage in the development of scientific communism.
In later editions he took steps to warn the reader of its shortcomings. Thus, in the Appendix to the American edition (1887), which was included in the Preface to the English and German editions of 1892, Engels wrote: “... This book exhibits everywhere the traces of he descent of modern Socialism from one of its ancestors-the German philosophy. Thus great stress is laid on the dictum that Communism is not a mere party doctrine of the working class, but a theory compassing the emancipation of society at large, including the capitalist class, from its present narrow conditions. This is true enough in the abstract, but absolutely useless, and sometimes worse, in practice. So long as the wealthy classes not only do not feel the want of any emancipation, but strenuously oppose the self-emancipation of the working class, so long the social revolution will have to be prepared and fought out by the working class alone.” Engels went on to explain why his assumption in 1845 that the social revolution in England was imminent had not been borne out. Among the causes for this he emphasised the decline of Chartism after 1848 and the temporary preponderance of reformist tendencies in the English working-class movement- bred out of England’s industrial monopoly on the world market, which had turned out to be much more lasting than he had assumed.
The Condition of the Working-Class in England had several editions during the author’s lifetime. As early as 1848, Wigand’s publishing house in Leipzig put out a new impression of the work, marked “Second Edition” on the title page, although it was merely a reprint of the first.
The book was published in English for the first time in New York in 1887 in a translation made by the American Socialist Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. The American edition is the authorised one. Engels edited the translation, made a number of changes in the text, omitted the address “To the Working-Classes of Great-Britain” and the Preface to the first German edition of 1845, and provided the book with the new Preface of 1887 addressed to the American reader together with an Afterword (the Appendix written in 1886) dealing with changes that had since taken place in the condition of the English working class. He included in this Afterword the text of the article “England in 1545 and in 1885”, which he had written in 1885. The tide of the book was altered to The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844; in the table of contents only the tides of the chapters were preserved, without the enumeration of the questions discussed in them which had appeared in the German edition of 1845 (at the same time a short subject index was added); some drawings and the plan of Manchester were omitted, a number of references to sources in the text were given as footnotes, etc.
The text of the American edition was reproduced almost without change in the authorised English edition which was published in London in 1892. Engels wrote another special Preface, including in it almost without change the Afterword to the American edition of 1887, while the Preface for American readers was omitted. In the same year the Dietz publishing house in Stuttgart published the authorised second German edition, the text of which reproduced in the main that of 1845. Engels wrote for it a new Preface, identical on the whole with that of the 1892 English edition, but with additions in the concluding part and a number of new footnotes.
The present edition reproduces the English translation made by Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky and edited by Engels himself. This text has also been collated with the original German edition and the major different readings affecting the meaning are given as footnotes. Some parts of the text which were omitted by Engels when he edited the English translation (for instance, the address to the English reader, the Preface to the first edition, the poem “The Steam King” by Edward Mead, the enumeration of subjects in the table of Contents, etc.) have been restored according to the German edition, the relevant indications being given in footnotes or Notes at the end of the volume. The tide of the book has also been given according to the first edition. Slips and omissions made by Florence Wischnewetzky have been corrected; in particular, she did not have at her disposal a number of English sources used by Engels and she gave quotations from them in retranslation from the German (in the American and English editions of 1887 and 1892 this was specially mentioned in the Translator’s Note). In the present edition the texts of English sources quoted by Engels have been given according to the original, taking into account the author’s method of quoting (abridgments, re-arrangement of the text, and so on). Errors in dates and in names of persons and places have been corrected, account being taken of the corrections introduced in the book: Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Translated and edited by W. 0. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner, New York, 1958. Use has been made of some original texts from rare sources quoted in the above-mentioned edition.
The author’s prefaces to subsequent editions and the Afterword to the American edition of 1887 will be included in the relevant volumes of the present edition according to the dates of their writing.
116 The address “To the Working-Classes of Great-Britain” was written by Engels in English with the intention, as he informed Marx in his letter of November 19, 1844, of having it printed separately and sent to “English party leaders, literary men and Members of Parliament”. In the 1845 and 1892 German editions of The Condition of the Working-Class in England the address was reproduced in English; it was not included in the American (1887) and English (1892) editions. In the present volume it is reproduced according to the German edition of 1892.
117 Engels’ Preface to the first German edition of his book was not reproduced in the American (1887) or the English (1892) edition. However. it was included in the 1892 German edition. In the present volume it is given in translation from the German editions published in the author’s lifetime.
118 This intention was not carried out, although in the ensuing years, up to the beginning of the 1848 Revolution, Engels several times returned to it. During his stay in Brussels from April 1845 to August 1846, and in the following months, which he spent in Paris, Engels continued collecting material on England in addition to what he had collected in the preceding years. In July and August 1845, during trips to London and Manchester with Marx, he researched on this subject in the libraries of those cities. Three notebooks are extant, full of bibliographical notes and excerpts from originals (G. R. Porter, The Progress of the Nation, Vol. III, London, 1843; N. Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England, Vol. I, London, 1824; T. Tooke, A History of Prices, Vol. If, London, 1838; F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor, Vols. I-III, London, 1797; [J. Aikin], A Description of the Country from thirty to forty Miles around Manchester, London, 1795; J. Butterworth, The Antiquities of the Town, and a Complete History of the Trade of Manchester, Manchester, 1822; J. W. Gilbart, The History and Principles of Banking, London, 1834, etc. For greater detail see Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 4, S. 503-15). By the end of 1847 Engels’ work had apparently made considerable headway; a short article printed on November 14 that year in the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung, with which Engels and Marx collaborated, mentioned his intention to put out a book under the tide On the History of the English Bourgeoisie. But this plan was not carried out. Nevertheless, in his articles and reports of those years Engels constantly touched upon various aspects of the social and political history of England.
121 Actually, the first iron bridge in England was built in 1779 in Shropshire, over the Severn at Coalbrookdale. The bridge constructed according to Thomas Paine’s design was cast near Rotherham in Yorkshire, but never erected by Paine. Its components, however, were used to build the second great iron bridge, over the river Wear (1796).
122 This figure, taken from G. R. Porter’s book The Progress of the Nation, Vol. 1, London, 1836 (p. 345), applies to the mid-1830s. In Vol. III of his book, published in 1843 (op. cit., Vol. III, p. 86), Porter gives a higher figure 4,877,000 tons for the use of coal in iron-smelting in England in the forties.
123 The Reform Act passed by the British Parliament in June 1832 was directed against the political monopoly of the landed and finance aristocracy, and reformed the basis of Parliamentary representation in favour of the industrial bourgeoisie and “middle classes”. The proletariat and sections of the petty bourgeoisie, who had provided the main support in the preceding campaigns for reform, received no electoral rights.
124 The data given were taken by Engels from the Journal of the Statistical Society of London; in particular, the description of working-class districts in Westminster is based on the “Report of the Committee of the Statistical Society of London, on the State of the Working Classes in the Parishes of St. Margaret and St. John” (Vol. III, 1840) and the description of the district around Hanover Square on C. R. Weld’s article: “On the condition of the working classes in the Inner Ward of St. George’s Parish, Hanover Square” (Vol. VI, 1843). The number of inmates in the working-class houses in the parishes of St. John and St. Margaret is given according to the report by G. Alston quoted below. The Journal of the Statistical Society of London, Vol. III gives another figure — 16,176 persons.
125 The report by the Rev. G. Alston, initially published in the radical paper The Weekly Dispatch, was reprinted in the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star. No. 338, May 4, 1844. Engels quotes from this paper.
126 The description was given in The Times, November 17, 1843, and in The Northern Star. No. 315, November 25, 1843.
127 The facts described in this and the preceding paragraph were apparently taken from a report published in The Times, January 16 and February 12, 1844.
128 The data quoted were apparently taken from materials published in The Times, November 24 and December 22,1843, February 5, 9, and 12, 1844, and The Northern Star, December 23 and 30, 1843.
129 The figures were apparently taken from C. B. Fripp’s “Report of an Inquiry into the Condition of the Working Classes of the City of Bristol” published in the Journal of the Statistical Society of London, Vol. II (1839). They are somewhat inaccurately quoted: the 2,800 families constitute 46 per cent of the Bristol working-class families investigated who occupied only one room or part of one (the total number investigated was 5,981).
130 The quotation is from another ‘work by J. C. Symons, namely the “Report from Assistant Hand-Loom Weavers’ Commissioners”, which he compiled and which was published in Parliamentary Papers, 1839, Vol. XLII, No. A 59, p. 5 1. The following quotation is from the book quoted by Engels in his footnote: J. C. Symons, Arts and Artisans at Home and Abroad, the pages being those given in the footnote.
131 The report, quoted by Engels, of the committee elected at Huddersfield on July 19, 1844, to investigate the town’s sanitary conditions was printed in The Northern Star No. 352, August 10, 1844.
132 Engels gives this name to Kersall-moor-a hill near Manchester where the workers held meetings-by analogy with the Mons Sacer in ancient Rome, to which, tradition has it, the plebeians withdrew in 494 B.C. when they rose against the patricians.
133 The data given here were taken from the article “Wild beasts and rational beings”, published in The Weekly Dispatch, May 5, 1844.
134 The case against the eleven butchers in Manchester was tried somewhat earlier than Engels reports from memory. A report on it was published in The Manchester Guardian, May 10, 1843. The session of the Court Leet (in the 1845 and 1892 German editions Engels calls it the “market court”), which heard cases of this kind, took place twice a year.
135 The Liverpool Mercury of February 9, 1844, is quoted with considerable abridgments, and in the 1845 and 1892 German editions in free translation. In the present edition here, as in other cases, the abridgments have been preserved.
136 On the changes in the length of the crisis cycles see Note 92.
137 The report by the Rev. W. Champneys, quoted by Engels, on the condition of the East End poor employed by the day in the London docks, was first published in 7U Weekly Dispatch and then reprinted in The Northern Star No. 338, May 4, 1844.
138 The author presumably has in mind the Report On the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) by E. Chadwick or Dr. T. Southwood Smith’s two reports to the Poor Law Commissioners on sanitary conditions in the East End of London in 1838 (see, for instance, p. 339).
139 The facts adduced here and below were apparently taken from the article “Frightful spread of Fever from Destitution”, published in The Northern Star No. 328, February 24, 1844.
140 ‘Me information following is taken from the article “Quarterly Table of Mortality” (The Manchester Guardian July 31, 1844), containing tables on the number of inhabitants (in 1841) and deaths (in 1843) in several towns.
141 R. Cowan’s article “Vital Statistics of Glasgow” was published in the Journal of the Statistical Society of London, Vol. III, 1840.
142 The Metropolitan Buildings Act a special law regulating building in London, was passed by Parliament in 1844.
143 Engels refers to the almost complete absence in the report under consideration of information on the textile industrial districts of Lancashire, Cheshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire.
144 The figures on crime quoted here and below were taken by Engels from G. Porter’s book, Progress of the Nation Vol. III, London, 1843, Section VII, Chapter II, and from the Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. vi, 1843 (J. Fletcher, “Progress of Crime in the United Kingdom”).
145 The information was taken from materials submitted by a “Deputation of Master Manufacturers and Mill-owners in the County of Lancaster” and published in The Manchester Guardian. May 1, 1844. The figures concern 412 firms in the industrial county of Lancaster employing 116,281 workers.
146 Lord Ashley’s speech was apparently quoted from The Times No. 18559, March 16, 1844, p. 4.
147 The letter quoted was printed in The Fleet Papers, a journal published by R. Oastler, Vol. IV, No. 35, August 31, 1844. Engels quotes an excerpt in German. This was re-translated from the German in the American (1887) and the English (1892) editions, and the beginning of the quotation was abridged and paraphrased. The beginning of the original excerpt reads as follows: “A shot time since a friend of mine that was out of work and who ust to work with me, at a former pearead, but who had being out of Wark for a Long time wor Compeld to go, on what we Labouring men Call, the tramp and having got to a place Calld Sant Hellins (I think it is in Lonckshire) and meeting with no sucsess, he thought that he would, bend is way towards Monchester, and just as he was Leaving the place, he herd of one of his old mateys Leaving Close on the way — so he resolved that he would make him out if poseble-for he wishd to see him, thinkin that he might perhaps help him to a job, and if not, he might give him a mouthful of something to Eat, and a nights Lodgings, has he said he was very heard-up.”
149 The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act (1802) limited the working time of child-apprentices to twelve hours and prohibited their employment at night. This law applied only to the cotton and wool industries; it made no provision for control by factory inspectors and was practically disregarded by the mill-owners.
150 R. H. Greg’s words were apparently reproduced by Engels from Lord Ashley’s speech in the House of Commons on March 15, 1844, in support of the Ten Hour Bill. (See The Times No. 18559, March 16, 1844, p. 4.)
151 The article mentioned, J. Roberton’s “An inquiry respecting the period of puberty in women”, was printed in the North of England Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. I (August 1830-May 1831). Engels possibly used the account of this article in P. Gaskell’s book, The Manufacturing Population of England, London, 1833.
152 The Factory Act of 1819 forbade the employment of children under nine years of age in cotton spinning and weaving mills and also night work of children up to sixteen; for this category the working day was limited to twelve hours, not counting breaks for meals; since these were arranged by mill-owners as they thought fit, the working day often lasted fourteen hours or more.
The Factory Act of 1825 ruled that breaks for meals were not to total more than 1 1/2 hours a day so that the working day would not come to more than 12 hours. Like the Act of 1819, that of 1825 did not provide for any control by the factory inspectors and was ignored by the mill-owners.
153 What is meant is the “Report from the Select Committee on the ‘Bill to regulate the Labour of Children in the Mills and Factories of the United Kingdom"’, 8th August, 1832 (Parliamentary Papers, Vol. XV, 1831-32).
154 The reference is to “Reports of the Inspectors of Factories for the half-year ending 31st December, 1843.”
155 Dissenters were members of Protestant religious sects and trends in England who rejected to any extent the dogmas and rituals of the official Anglican Church.
156 The reference here is to the proposal made by the Peel cabinet to lower the customs duty on sugar imported from the West Indies in order to open the market for sugar imports from India and other countries.
157 Engels’ prediction came true. On June 8, 1847, the Ten Hour Bill applicable to women and youths working in factories was passed by Parliament.
158 What is meant is the article entitled “The Truck System Extraordinary”, which was published in the Halifax Guardian, November 4, 1843. It was reprinted in 71e Sun, from which it was reproduced in The Northern Star No. 315, November 25, 1843.
159 The poem by Edward P. Mead, “The Steam King” was printed in The Northern Star No. 274, February 11, 1843. The German translation of the poem was made by Engels himself. The poem ends with the following two stanzas, which Engels omitted:
The cheap bread crew will murder you
By bludgeon, ball or brand;
Then your Charter gain and the power will he vain
Of the Steam King’s bloody band.
Then down with the King, the Moloch King
And the satraps of his might:
Let right prevail, then Freedom hail
When might shall stoop to right.
160 The first letter, published in The Morning Chronicle, December 1, 1843, under the tide “Distress at Hinckley”, was reprinted in The Northern Star No. 317, December 9, 1843. Below Engels quotes also the second letter (“Letters to the Editor”), which was published in The Morning Chronicle, December 9, 1843.
161 The author refers to the series of articles by Lion Faucher published under various titles from October 1843 to July 1844, in the journal Revue des deux Mondes. Later they were published by the author in a collection under the title Etudes sur L'Angleterre, Vols. 1-2, Paris, 1845. The term “démocratie industrielle” quoted below occurs in Vol. 2, P. 147.
162 The quotation given above is from the article by A. Knight, “On the grinders’ asthma”, which was published in the North of England Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 1, August 1830-May 183 1. The second half of the preceding quotation is from the same source; the first half is from Knight’s testimony to the Children’s Employment Commission (Appendix to 2nd Report, Part 1, 1842). The same publication contains extracts from his earlier mentioned article, which were possibly used by Engels.
165 The description of this event was taken by Engels from P. Gaskell’s book, The Manufacturing Population of England, which appeared in 1833. The author pointed out that the murderers had not been found. But soon after the book’s publication, the murderers of mill-owner Ashton’s son — Joseph and William Mosley and William Garside — were apprehended, and in 1834 two of them were hanged in London.
The account of the following facts is based mainly on newspaper material (published in The Northern Star, The Manchester Guardian, The Times, and other papers).
166 Tradition has it that the Roman patrician Menenius Agrippa persuaded the plebeians who had rebelled and withdrawn to the Mons Sacer in 494 B.C. to submit by telling them the fable about the other parts of the human body revolting against the stomach because, they said, it consumed food and did no work, but afterwards becoming convinced that they could not exist without it.
167 The reference is to the rising of the Welsh miners organised by the Chartists in Newport and its environs in November 1839. The rising was caused by the miners’ hard condition and the growing discontent among them over Parliament’s rejection of the Chartists’ petition and the arrest of Chartist agitation. The Newport Rising,. possibly intended to he the signal for a general armed struggle for the People’s Charter, was put down by troops and used as a pretext for severe repressions. Later Engels again returned to this rising (see p. 519 of this volume).
The events of 1843 in Manchester were reported by Engels in his article “An English Turnout” (see pp. 584-96 of this volume).
168 A detailed account of the strike at Birley’s mill was given in The Northern Star No. 248, August 13, 1842, p. 5.
169 This body, better known as the London Working-men’s Association, the first Chartist organisation, was formally established on June 16,1836.A project of parliamentary reform which became known as the People’s Charter was published at the beginning of May 1838. (In all the editions of Engels’ book which appeared during his lifetime, 1835 is given as the year when this document was drawn up; this was probably the result of a slip, and is corrected in the present edition.) At the Chartist meeting in Birmingham in August 1838 it was decided to fight for the People’s Charter to be given the force of law. This demand was set forth in a petition to Parliament.
170 Under a law of 1710 candidates to Parliament in borough seats had to own landed property yielding an income of at least £300 annually and in county seats £600 annually.
171 The speech made by Stephens at the Chartist meeting of September 24, 1838, at Kersall-moor, near Manchester, was published in The Northern Star No. 46, September 29. Engels reproduced the relevant passage with abridgments p. 519
172 The author refers to the clashes between the Chartists and the police in Sheffield, Bradford and other towns. They were said to have been caused by provocateurs.
173 The reference is to the National Charter Association, founded in July 1840, the first mass workers’ party in the history of the working-class movement. In the years of upsurge it counted up to 50,000 members. The work of the Association was hindered by the absence of unity in ideas and tactics among its members and by the petty-bourgeois ideology of, most of its leaders. After the defeat of the Chartists in 1848 the Association fell into decline and it ceased its activity in the fifties.
174 Engels refers here to the agrarian plant of F. O'Connor and other Chartist leaders who shared the utopian view that the workers could be freed from exploitation and other social evils by returning them to the land. In 1845 the Chartist Land Co-operative Society was formed for this purpose on the initiative of F. O'Connor (later it operated under the name of National Land Company). It tried to buy up land with the contributions of workmen-shareholders and to rent it out to its members in small plots on easy terms. The scheme was not successful.
175 Home colonies was the name given by Robert Owen and his supporters to their model communist colonies. For details about them see Engels’ article “Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence” (pp. 214-28 of this volume).
176 Mechanics’ Institutes were evening schools in which workers were taught general and technical subjects; such schools first appeared in Britain in 1823, in London and Glasgow. In the early 1840s there were over 200 of them, mainly in the factory towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The bourgeoisie used these institutions to train skilled workers for industry and to bring them under the influence of bourgeois ideas, though initially this was resisted by the working-class activists.
177 The following books were published in English: [Holbach], Système de la nature in 1817, Helvétius’ De l'esprit in 1807, and De 1'homme in 1777. Announcements of popular and inexpensive editions of the classics of French philosophy were carried by the Owenites’ weekly The New Moral World.
178 The English edition of Strauss’ book Das Leben Jesu was published by Henry Hetherington in 1842 in a series of weekly instalments.
179 It was apparently a question of Engels’ intention to give a characterisation of English bourgeois political and economic writings in his planned work on the social history of England. (Concerning this intention see Note 118.)
180 These data were given in The Mining Journal, Vol. 13, No. 420, September 9, 1843.
181 The law forbidding the employment underground of women and of children under ten years of age was passed by Parliament on August 10, 1842, and came into force in March 1843.
182 The Court of Queen’s Bench is one of the oldest courts in England; in the 19th century (up to 1873) it was an independent supreme court for criminal and civil cases, competent to review the decisions of lower judicial bodies.
A Writ of Habeas Corpus is the name given in English judicial procedure to a document enjoining the relevant authorities to present an arrested person before a court on the demand of persons interested to check the legitimacy of the arrest. Having considered the reasons for the arrest, the court either frees the person arrested, sends him back to prison or releases him on bail or guarantee. This procedure, laid down by an- Act of Parliament of 1679, does not apply to persons accused of high treason and can be suspended by decision of P. 542 Parliament.
183 The speech in question was made by Thomas Duncombe in the House of Commons on June 4, 1844. The report on it was first published in The Times, June 5, 1844, p. 2, and later reprinted in the Chartist Northern Star No. 343, June 8, 1844, p. 8.
184 The reference is to the wars of the coalitions of European states against France under the Revolution and under Napoleon, wars which lasted from 1792 to 1815 with a short interruption in 1802-1803. Britain was an active member of these coalitions.
185 The facts adduced are quoted from The Times, June 7, 10, and 21, 1844.
186 The quotations are from an essay by A. Somerville published in The Morning Chronicle, July 6, 1843.
187 Before the Commutation Act of 1838 Irish peasants renting land paid tithes to the Established Church of Ireland. Under the Act of 1838 the tithe was reduced by 25 per cent and commuted into a tax exacted from landlords and landowners. The latter in rum transferred this tax to the tenants, thus raising the rent.
188 The Union of Ireland with Great Britain was imposed on Ireland by the British Government after the suppression of the Irish rising of 1798. The Union, which entered into force on January 1, 1801, abolished the autonomy of the Irish Parliament and made the country still more dependent on England. The demand for the repeal of the Union became the most popular slogan in Ireland from the 1820s. Its leader, Daniel O'Connell, founder of the Repeal Association (1840), tried to steer the movement toward compromise with the British ruling classes.
The agitation revived in the early 1840s.
189 The reference is to the trial of O'Connell and eight other leaders of the Repeal Movement in 1844. The Tory government intended by this trial to deal it a decisive blow. O'Connell and his supporters were sentenced to up to twelve months imprisonment in February 1844, but the sentence was soon quashed by the House of Lords.
190 “Laissez-faire, laissez-aller” was the formula of the advocates of free trade and non-intervention of the state in economic relations.
192 A considerable number of the facts adduced here were taken from The Northern Star. Engels made use, in particular, of the following articles and reports: “Brutality at a Workhouse”, No. 295, July 8, 1843; “Inhuman Conduct of the Master of a Union Workhouse"’, No. 334, April 6, 1844; “Murder! Hellish Treatment of the Poor in the Coventry Bastille”, No. 315, November 25, 1843; “Atrocities at the Birmingham Workhouse”, No. 317, December 9, 1843; “Secrets of the Union Workhouse”, No. 326, February 10, 1844; “St. Pancras Scoundrelism Again!”, No. 328, February 24, 1844; “Infamous Treatment of an Englishman and his Family in Bethnal-Green Workhouse”. No. 333, March 30, 1844; “Infernal Workhouse Cruelties”, No. 359, September 28, 1844; “The Poor Laws.-Disgusting Treatment of the Poor”, No. 328, February 24, 1844; “Horrible Profligacy in the West London Union Workhouse”, No. 334, April 6, 1844.
193 The reference is to the article by Douglas Jerrold “The Two Windows”, published in The Illuminated Magazine, Vol. III, May-October, 1844. .
194 The Gilbert Act of 1782 was one of the Poor Laws. It authorised the formation, on the demand of the rate-payers paying two-thirds of the value of rates, in any parish or group of parishes, of a Board of Guardians to control poor relief. However, unlike the workhouses of the New Poor Law of 1834, which were also administered by Boards of Guardians, the workhouses in “Gilbert Unions” contained only the impotent poor and pauper children. The Gilbert Act was not finally repealed until the early 1870s.
195 Barmecide feast — an expression taken from “The Arabian Nights”. One of the, Barmaks, a noble Persian family, derided a hungry beggar by telling him of an imaginary banquet. The expression was used by T. Carlyle in his Chartism, the first edition of which appeared in 1840, which is what Engels here alludes to.
196 Quoted from The Northern Star. No. 344, June 15, 1844. In an article headlined “Horrible Condition of the Agricultural Labourers” it reproduced with a commentary material on the occurrence which was published in The Times, June 7, 1844, under the title “Effect of the New Poor Law upon Wages”.
197 This article was written by Engels in the spring and summer of 1845 after he had completed The Condition of the Working-Class in England and moved to Brussels. Judging by the title and subtitle, which is numbered 1, and by the first paragraph, it was intended as the beginning of a series to supplement The Condition of the Working-Class in England with concrete illustrations. The article was published in the January and February issues of the journal Das Westphälische Dampfboot in 1846. However, the continuation did not follow and the article was not included by Engels in any of the editions of The Condition of the Working-Class in England published during his lifetime. It was first published in English in 1958 as an Appendix to the book: Engels. The Condition of the Working-Class in England. Translated and edited by W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner, New York, 1958. Engels wrote this article basing himself mainly on material published in The Northern Star Nos. 362-369, 371, 372, 375 from November 1844 to January 1845, which carried detailed reports on the strike described.
198 Van Diemen’s Land — the name initially given by Europeans to the island of Tasmania, which was a British penal colony up to 1853.
199 These words were taken from a resolution passed by a meeting of workers at Ashton-under-Lyne on August 9, 1842, which decided on the action at Manchester.
200 According to a report published by The Manchester Guardian on December 24, 1844, the strike of the Pauling and Henfrey building workers ended the day before. The report admitted that the firm was forced to promise to observe the same working conditions as operated on the other building sites of the city.
201 This work was written by Marx to expose certain repulsive aspects of bourgeois society, its morals and customs, using documentary evidence provided by one of its representatives, the French jurist and economist, custodian of the Paris police archives, Jacques Peuchet. Marx carried out his intention by translating into German and publishing excerpts from Mémoires tirés des archives de La police de Paris, pour servir à 1'histoire de la morale et de la police, depuis Louis XIV jusqu'à nos jours. Par 1. Peuchet, Archiviste de la Police. T. I-IV, Paris, 1838, giving his own comments’ in an introductory section and occasional digressions. The excerpts were taken from Chapter LVIII “Du suicide et de ses causes” (t. IV, pp. 116-82). Marx gives the text with abridgments and sometimes in free rendering, without indicating by suspension periods the passages omitted. He left out altogether the material on pages 143-68, taking only a few phrases (see pp. 159 and 164), which he joined according to the sense to the excerpts from the beginning of the section. Some passages from Peuchet were given by Marx in his own formulation, emphasising their critical trend. The information on the author given by Marx in the introductory section was taken from the Introduction by A. Levasseur, the editor of the Mémoires (t. 1, Introduction, pp. i-xx).
In the present edition Marx’s own text (introductory and closing sections and the digressions in which he sums up) are printed in larger type and the excerpts from Peuchet’s book in small type. Cases of substantial paraphrasing and other digressions from the original as well as re-arrangements made by Marx in quoting are pointed out in footnotes. The emphasis in the quotations is Marx’s in all cases.
202 The Hundred Days is the second period of Napoleon’s rule, from his restoration to the imperial throne on March 20 (after his return from the island of Elba) to his second abdication on June 22, 1815, four days after his defeat at Waterloo.
204 The translation of the fragment from the manuscript of Charles Fourier was made by Engels as a first contribution to the plan which he and Marx had formed at the beginning of 1845 to publish in Germany a “Library of the Best Foreign Socialist Writers” with a general introduction and commentaries to each issue (see Engels’ letters to Marx of February 22-26, March 7 and 17, 1845). The draft plan of this publication, drawn up by Marx (see p. 667 of this volume), shows that it was conceived as a representative series of works of French and English authors. But the plan was not carried out because of publishing difficulties. The translation of a few chapters of Fourier’s Des trois unités externes was the only one carried out in the framework of the plan. It was begun by Engels evidently after he had moved from Barmen to Brussels in April 1845. The introduction and the conclusion were most probably written not before August, since they were a reply to the works of some of the “true Socialists” published at that time. Engels’ translation and commentary were not printed until the middle of 1846 (in the annual Deutsches Bürgerbuch für 1846).
The fragment selected by Engels comprises the first seven chapters of Fourier’s unfinished manuscript Des trois unités externes (written, apparently, between 1807 and 182 1), most of which was published for the first time after the author’s death in the Fourierist journal La Phalange, in the first two issues (January-February and March-April) of 1845. Some passages in the manuscript coincide with passages in the first, anonymous, publication (1808) of Fourier’s work Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinies grates. In the 1845 publication of Des trois unités externes they were replaced by suspension periods and references to pages of that work. In his translation Engels restored these passages according to the edition of the Théorie des quatre mouvements of 1841 (in the present edition all these cases are pointed out in the Notes).
The text of the seven chapters is given by Engels with abridgments, omissions not always being indicated by suspension periods, and in some cases fragments translated are joined by Engels’ insertions. Some passages are translated with abridgments or in the form of a paraphrase, and sometimes the content is given in Engels’ own words.
In the present edition the translation of Fourier’s manuscript is reproduced in the form in which it was produced for publication by Engels. All his digressions from the original have been preserved. The whole of the translation -as distinct from Engels’ introduction and conclusion-is printed in small type. The insertions made by Engels and the passages given in his rendering are printed without quotes. The most important cases of paraphrasing are pointed out in footnotes. The italics in the quoted text are mostly by Engels.
205 By “German theory of the very worst sort” Engels means “true socialism”, which in 1844-45 was spreading among German intellectuals and craftsmen. It was a mixture of the idealistic aspects of Feuerbachianism with French utopian socialism in an emasculated form. As a result, socialist teaching was turned into abstract sentimental moralising divorced from real needs. The vulgarisation of the French Utopian Socialists’ views by “true socialism”, combined with an arrogant and deprecatory attitude towards them, was especially marked in Grün’s book Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien published in Darmstadt in August 1845.
This work of Engels reflects the intention which by then had matured in his and Marx’s minds to dissociate themselves publicly from “true socialism” and to criticise its representatives. Marx and Engels gave a detailed criticism of “true socialism” in The German Ideology.
206 Here the author has in mind Fourier’s fantastic descriptions of the changes which according to his vision of the future were destined to take place in nature: a change in the unpleasant taste of sea water, which would turn into lemonade, the appearance of heat-radiating coronas over the North and South Poles, the transformation of beasts of prey into animals useful to man, and so on.
The method of series is a method of classification typical of Fourier and applied by him in analysing various natural and social phenomena. By means of this method Fourier tried to develop a new social science according to which the social and psychological factor-the attraction and repulsion of passions-would be demonstrated as the main principle of social development (the passions, in turn, were divided into groups or series). In this method and its application by Fourier, unscientific and fantastic elements were combined with rational observations and spontaneous manifestations of dialectics.
207 Engels included in the first section material from the introduction (“Setting of the Question”) and from the first chapter of Fourier’s manuscript, to which the author gave the title “Successive Series of Trade Methods”.
The beginning of the fragments from the words “We now touch on civilisation’s most sensitive spot” to “the mainsprings of circulation” is taken from the Théorie des quatre mouvements, Paris, 1841, pp. 331-32. However, unlike the other passages which coincide textually with passages in Théorie des quatre mouvements and which were omitted in the journal La Phalange, the text of this passage was reproduced in the journal too.
208 By “ideology’ and “ideologists” Fourier means a group of imitators of the French philosophy of the 18th century which was headed by the liberal thinker, economist and politician Antoine L. C. Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), author of the five-volume Elements d'idéologie, published in 1804.
209 At the Aachen Congress (1818) of the states of the Holy Alliance (Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia) the heads of the biggest banking houses in Europe were enlisted to help work out the terms of France’s payment of the contribution imposed on her after the defeat of Napoleon. It was decided to carry out the credit operations for the payment of this contribution through the English Baring Bank and the Anglo-Dutch Hope Bank. Apparently it was these two bankers that Fourier had in mind in this passage.
210 The Federates of 1815 were volunteers who supported Napoleon during his short period of rule in 1815, from his return from Elba till his defeat at Waterloo (the Hundred Days).
211 The author has in mind the bank-notes issued in France in 1716 with the Government’s permission by a special bank founded by the adventurer John Law, who had decamped from France in 1720 after becoming bankrupt. As he had transferred his bank to the state beforehand, its ruin was a concealed form of state bankruptcy.
Assignats were paper money issued during the French Revolution from December 1789 and backed by the revenue from the sale of property confiscated from the feudal aristocracy and the church (national estates). As a result of emissions and speculation, which were particularly intensified after the counter-revolutionary coup in July 1794 (9 Thermidor), they quickly depreciated. In December 1796 their issue was stopped.
212 Fourier mistakenly attributes this operation to the Convention. It was carried out on September 30, 1797, by the Directory-the highest government body of the regime which replaced the Convention. The Directory reduced the value of all state bonds by two-thirds and recognised as payable only one-third, which received the name of Consolidated Third.
213 The text from the words “when a crime becomes very frequent, one gets accustomed to it and witnesses it with indifference” to “in which the speculator steals only half” was taken from the Théorie des quatre mouvements, pp. 341-43. Subsequently, Engels follows the text published in La Phalange.
214 By the new French code Fourier means the Code civile of Napoleon, which was introduced in 1804.
215 In the list of varieties of bankruptcy in Fourier’s manuscript the names of bankrupt businessmen were given. But the publishers of the work in La Phalange omitted these, leaving in the subsequent description of each variety only names which were imaginary or borrowed from literary works. Engels himself points this out in a footnote (see p. 638 of this volume). p. 625 — 216
216 An allusion to the Disputationes de sancto matrimonii sacramento, by Tornas Sanchez, a Spanish Jesuit and theologian at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century. The book was notable for its refined casuistry and, at the same time, its freedom verging on pornography.
217 The text from the words “Banker Dorante has two million” to the end of point 13 (“for people who steal several millions at one go”) was taken from the Théorie des quatre mouvements, pp. 343-46.
218 The text from the words “Judas Iscariot arrives in France” to “everybody avidly seizes the opportunity to commit a theft if it remains unpunished” was taken from the Théorie des quatre mouvements, pp. 348-51.
219 During certain Catholic services the Blessed Sacrament is solemnly carried under a portable canopy.
220 The small town of Beaucaire in the south of France became famous for its big annual fair.
221 The text from the words “Scapin, a petty crook” to the end of point 34 (“after the happy issue of the first bankruptcy, he starts to think of a new one”) was taken from the Théorie des quatre mouvements, pp. 346-47.
222 The March-April issue of La Phalange carried, besides the three chapters of Des trois unités externes (Chapters VIII-X) mentioned by Engels, also Chapters XI-XVIII (“Conclusions from What Has Been Proved About Trade”, “The Tendency of the Trade System to Seven Monopolies”, “On Sea Monopoly of Coarse or Destructive Hoisting”, “On the Navigation Monopoly of a Simple United Structure”, “On the Navigation Monopoly of a Complex United Structure”, “Conclusion on Fraudulent Trade”, “On the Trade Unity of People of Harmonic Structure”, “On the Administrative Unity of People of Harmonic Structure”). The text coinciding with passages from the Théorie des quatre mouvements was omitted.
223 Engels ironically compares the picture of historic development given by Hegel in his Philosophie der Geschichte with the medieval Christian-feudal periodisation of world history according to the four empires: Assyrio-Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greco-Macedonian, and Roman (the “Roman”, in its various forms, including the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, was supposedly to last till the end of time) According to Hegel’s conception, world history, the basis of which is the process of self-knowledge of the Absolute Idea or the world spirit, has gone through three main stages, namely, the history of Asia Minor and Ancient Egypt, the history of the Greco-Roman world, and the history of the German peoples. The nations whose history did not fit into this three-stage system were called “non-historical” by Hegel.
225 The reference is to the project of a “Library of the Best Foreign Socialist Writers” (see Note 89). For this purpose Marx and Engels intended to enlist other members of the socialist movement, including M. Hess. But the fact that the latter had meanwhile embraced “true socialism” and become one of its spokesmen, made it practically impossible to collaborate with him, as also with a number of other editors and publishers of various German journals, and was one of the reasons why the “Library” did not materialise.
226 Engels’ contributions to The Northern Star began late in 1843 and became regular from May 1844 (see present edition, Vol. 3). However, as a result of his departure from England in August 1844 and of his work on The Condition of the Working-Class in England, he discontinued his reports temporarily in the late summer of 1844. In July 1845, Marx and Engels left Brussels for England, where they spent about a month and a half (from July 12 to August 21) in Manchester and in London; they acquainted themselves with English social and political literature and expanded their contacts with the working-class movement. In London, on his way back from Manchester, Engels agreed with G. J. Harney, the editor of The Northern Star, to resume his work with the paper. From September 1845 up to the revolution of 1848 he regularly contributed articles and reports on the various Continental countries and the growth of the revolutionary, and above all, the working-class movement there. The article “The Late Butchery at Leipzig. — The German Working Men’s Movement” was the first in this new series of reports.
227 The massacre at Leipzig was the shooting down of a popular demonstration by Saxon troops in Leipzig on August 12, 1845. The demonstration, on the occasion of a military parade welcoming the arrival of Crown Prince Johann, was in protest against the Saxon Government’s persecution of the “German Catholics” movement and one of its leaders, the priest J. Ronge. The “German Catholics” movement, which arose in a number of German states in 1844, embraced a considerable section of the middle and petty bourgeoisie; rejecting the supremacy of the Pope and many of the dogmas and rites of the Catholic Church, the “German Catholics” sought to adapt Catholicism to the needs of the developing German bourgeoisie.
The Northern Star took notice several times of the events in Leipzig. It carried information on them in Nos. 404 and 406, August 9 and 23, 1845, and in the report “Germany. The New Reformation”, published in No. 408, September 6, 1845 (Engels refers to it at the beginning and the end of his article). The shooting in Leipzig was interpreted as a sign of the ripening of revolution in Germany.
228 Peterloo was the name given, by analogy with the battle of Waterloo, to the massacre by troops on August 16, 1819, of unarmed participants in a mass meeting in support of electoral reform at St. Peter’s Fields, near Manchester.
230 The reference is to the revolution of 1688 (the overthrow of the Stuart dynasty and the enthronement of William III of Orange), after which constitutional monarchy was consolidated in England on the basis of a compromise between the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. p.-647
231 This theme was not developed in detail at the time in Engels’ reports. He merely touched upon it in his article “'Young Germany’ in Switzerland”, which was published in The Northern Star two weeks later, on September 27, 1845 (see pp. 651-53 of this volume). Nevertheless Engels did not abandon his intention of describing the development of the German working-class movement in the 1840s in the columns of the Chartist newspaper, as is borne out by the series of articles on “The State of Germany” which he began in October 1845 but did not complete and carried only to the beginning of -the 1840s (see present edition, Vol. 6).
232 “Young Germany” was a revolutionary conspiratorial organisation of German émigrés in Switzerland in the 1830s and 1840s. Initially it comprised mainly petty-bourgeois intellectuals, whose object was to set up a democratic republic in Germany, but soon it came more under the influence of the trade unions and socialist clubs. In the mid-1830s, the Swiss Government, under pressure from Austria and Prussia, deported the German revolutionaries; the craftsmen’s unions were closed. “Young Germany” virtually ceased to exist, though several groups of its followers still remained in the cantons of Geneva and Vaud. In the 1840s “Young Germany” was revived, when its members, under the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach’s ideas, carried on mainly atheistic propaganda among the German émigrés, sharply opposing the communist trends, especially that of Weitling, although some of the members of “Young Germany” were more and more attracted by social questions. In 1845 “Young, Germany” was again crushed.
The report “On the ‘Discovery of the Conspiracy’ of ‘Young Germany"’ which is quoted by Engels in abridged form in English was published in the Constitutionnel Neuchâtelois No. 109, September 11, 1845. The emphasis in the text is by Engels; in the newspaper only the words “Regicide not excepted” were stressed, and they were reproduced in italics by Engels.
233 The reference is to the armed clash between clerical-patriarchal elements opposed to bourgeois reforms and the democratic forces of the Valais canton in March 1844. With the support of conservative circles in Lucerne and other cantons, the clericals temporarily gained the upper hand. Concerning these events see Engels’ article “The Civil War in the Valais” (present edition, Vol. 3, p. 525).
234 On the “German Catholics” see Note 227.
“Friends of Light” was a religious trend directed against the pietism which, supported by Junker circles, was predominant in the official church and was distinguished by its extreme reactionary and hypocritical character. The “Friends of Light” movement was an expression of German bourgeois discontent with the P. 653 reactionary order in Germany in the 1840s.
235 Weitling and his supporters were arrested in June 1843 by the Zurich authorities and put on trial for communist activity considered dangerous to the state and public order. The trial took place in September, and the public prosecutor failed to secure conviction on the charge of high treason and conspiracy. Weitling was, however, condemned to six months imprisonment for inciting to crimes against property and insulting religion (the court of appeal, on the demand of the public prosecutor, increased the term to ten months) and to deportation from Switzerland; his followers were banished from the canton of Zurich. Weitling’s trial was described by Engels in his article “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent” (see present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 392-408).
236 The article was sent to the Hamburg journal Telegraph für Deutschland through Reichardt’s Newspaper-Correspondence Bureau in Brussels, which provided the progressive German press with reports by German émigrés. Engels himself contributed to this paper only in his younger years, from 1839 to 1841 (see present edition, Vol. 2); he discontinued his collaboration because he was dissatisfied with the ideological and political stand and especially the liberal half-measures of the literary group of “Young Germany”, whose press organ this journal was. In publishing the article the editors accompanied it with a note revealing its source. “As the author of this interesting article,” the note said, “we can name the well-known Engels.” In content the article coincides in part with the corresponding passages in the chapter on the labour movements in The Condition of the Working-Class in England (characterisation of the workers’ unrest in Lancashire in summer 1842,--see pp. 520-21 of this volume), and in part supplements some other sections of that book.
237 What is meant is the Reform Act of 1832, see Note 123.
238 The Bill introducing the sliding scale was drafted by Canning’s Tory cabinet in 1827 and carried through Parliament the following year in a Somewhat revised form by the Tory cabinet under Wellington.
239 The People’s Charter, containing the demands of the Chartists, was published on May 8, i838, as a Bill to be submitted to Parliament. It Consisted of six points: universal suffrage (for men on reaching the age of 21), annual elections to Parliament, secret ballot, equal electoral areas, abolition of the property qualification for Parliamentary candidates, a salary for Members of Parliament.
240 Marx’s note entitled “Hegel’s Construction of the Phenomenology” is at the beginning of his Notebook for 1844-1847 (the first of his surviving Notebooks).
The basic ideas contained in the four points were developed in The Holy Family, in particular in the sections where, criticising the Young Hegelians’ tendency to replace the revolutionary transformation of existing reality by abstract theoretical criticism of what exists, Marx showed that this tendency was based on Hegel’s idealist conception developed in his Phänomenologie des Geistes (see pp. 85-86, 195-97 of this volume).
241 This draft has no author’s title and is near the beginning of Marx’s Notebook for 1844-1847. The main points of the draft coincide with the points of the subject indexes compiled by Marx as early as the summer of 1843 for his “Kreuznach Notebooks” on world history, including the history of the French Revolution. In resuming his study of these problems after his arrival in Paris in the autumn of w’ n that year, Marx intended to write a History of the Convent. For this purpose he compiled a summary of the memoirs of the Jacobin Levasseur (see present edition, Vol. 3). The materials he collected, most of which have not come down to us, were used in part in The Holy Family. It was probably in connection with his plan to write a work on the French Revolution (he did not abandon this idea even in 1845 after his expulsion from Paris to Belgium, as is borne out by a report in the Trier’sche Zeitung of February 6, 1845) that he compiled this draft. In it Marx did not merely reproduce the text of the subject indexes to the “Kreuznach Notebooks”, he made a substantial addition to point 9, adding the words “the fight for the abolition [Aufhebung] of the state and of bourgeois society”, i.e., the fight to abolish the exploiter state and the whole existing system of social-economic relations.
242 The Plan of the “library of the Best Foreign Socialist Writers” is in Marx’s Notebook for 1844-1847, among the notes relating to March 1845. (Concerning Marx and Engels’ intention to put out such a publication and the causes which prevented its realisation see Note 89.) As is seen from further entries in his Notebook, Marx returned to this plan in the following months, recording the names of authors whose works should be added to the “Library” (in particular the names of Thompson, Campanella, Lamennais), and also the persons to be enlisted in the proposed publication (M. Hess was to translate the works of Buonarroti, Dézamy and others).
In listing the names of the Socialists Marx also mentions Lalande. This is probably a slip of the pen. He might have meant de Labord. True, further on in his Notebook Marx mentions Lalande’s De L'Association, but in Capital, Vol. 1, he quotes Labord’s book De l'esprit d'association dans tous les intérêts de la Communauté, Paris, 1818.
244 The reference is to the travailleurs égalitaires and the humanitaires, see Note 68.
245 These entries in Marx’s Notebook for 1844-1847 immediately precede the famous “Theses on Feuerbach”, written in April 1845 (see present edition, Vol. 5). In content the notes correspond to the first point of the “Draft Plan for a Work on the Modern State” given above-evidence that in the first months of his stay in Brussels Marx had not abandoned the plan of writing a work on the French Revolution, but still could not carry it out at that stage. The ideas briefly recorded in his notes have much in common with a number of those developed in The Holy Family (see pp. 122-28, 140-47 of this volume).
246 This address to the readers of and contributors to the Elberfeld journal Gesellschaftsspiegel was written by Engels and Hess. Engels took a part in preparing the publication of the journal, in drawing up its programme, and, as is seen from his letter to Marx of January 20, 1845, in compiling the prospectus published in the first issue in the form of this editorial address. As Engels wrote in one of his reports, “Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany”, published in The New Moral World (see p. 234 of this volume), it was initially proposed that he should be one of the editors. The prospectus reflected Engels’ intention that the journal would expose the evils of the capitalist system and defend the interests of the workers by criticising half-measures and advocating a radical transformation of the social system. Indeed, the concrete plan worked out by Engels for investigating the condition of the workers corresponded in many respects with the tasks he had set himself in writing The Condition of the Working-Class in England. But at the same time, not a few abstract philanthropy sentiments in the spirit of “true socialism”, coming from Hess, had found a place in the prospectus. Dissatisfaction with the position adopted by Hess was apparently one of the causes of Engels’ refusal to become one of the editors. In the third of the mentioned reports in The New Moral World, written in early April 1845, he named Hess alone as the publisher of the Gesellschaftsspiegel (see p. 240 of this volume). Under the editorship of Hess the journal very soon departed from the line envisaged by Engels in the prospectus and became a mouthpiece of the reformist and sentimental ideas of “true socialism”.
247 The reference is to the riot of the Silesian weavers. See Note 79.
248 The reference is to the Associations for the Benefit of the Working Classes in Germany (see Note 83). These associations are characterised in Engels’ article “Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany” (pp. 234, 237 of this volume).
249 Marx studied political economy from the end of 1843, and by the spring of 1844 had set himself the task of writing a criticism of bourgeois political economy from the standpoint of materialism and communism; the draft “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” (see present edition, Vol. 3) written at this time have reached us incomplete. Work on The Holy Family in the autumn of 1844 forced Marx temporarily to interrupt his study of political economy; he returned to it only in December 1844; in February 1845, just before his expulsion from Paris, he concluded the publication contract with Leske. In Brussels Marx continued to study English, French, German, Italian and other economists and added to his Paris notebooks of quotations several more notebooks. In the autumn of 1845 he again turned to other work: he had. concluded that a criticism of political economy should be preceded by an exposition of his new principles of general methodology and a critical review of current philosophical doctrines, and therefore concentrated on writing, jointly with Engels, The German Ideology. On the other hand, he firmly rejected (see his letter to Leske of August 1, 1846) the publisher’s attempts to get him to adapt the projected work to the conditions of the reactionary censorship. On September 9, 1846, Leske informed Marx that, in view of rigorous censorship and police persecution, he would not he able to publish his work. In February 1847 the contract was cancelled.
250 This request was written four days after Marx’s arrival in Brussels upon his expulsion from France by the French Government for taking part in editing Vorwärts! (see Note 87). Shortly after his arrival his wife joined him, with their eldest daughter, Jenny, who had been born in Paris.
Marx received no reply to his request. The Royal Belgian Government was reluctant to grant political asylum to revolutionary émigrés. Marx was immediately placed under secret surveillance as a “dangerous democrat and Communist”.
251 On March 22, 1845, Marx was summoned to the police administration in Brussels and asked to sign an undertaking as a condition for being allowed to stay in Brussels. Marx himself informed Heinrich Heine of this in a letter of March 24, 1845.
252 Marx’s two letters (October 17 and November 10, 1845) to Görtz, the Chief Burgomaster of Trier, were connected with his attempts to obtain the official documents required for emigration to the United States of America. As is clear from the second document, the request was motivated by the fact that after Marx’s arrival in Brussels the Prussian Government, on whose insistence the French authorities had expelled him from Paris, began to try to get him deported from Belgium too. It was apparently in order to deprive the Prussian authorities of a formal pretext for interfering in his affairs, that Marx went to the trouble of requesting permission to emigrate to the U.S.A., the receipt of which would have been equivalent to release from his obligations as a Prussian citizen. There are no other documents to indicate that he had any intention at the time to emigrate with his family to North America. Regardless of the outcome of these steps, which most probably failed, Marx officially renounced Prussian citizenship in December 1845.
253 In 1838 Marx was excused reporting for military service in Berlin because of a lung disease, and in 1841 he was pronounced unfit for military service.