Lingering in Paris, Brussels Preludes

Abstract

This chapter begins by examining how Marx’s and Engels’s activity for three Brussels organisations in 1847–1848 impacted the emergence of the Manifesto, and what it achieved. A more meaningful preoccupation was the Communist League, synonymous in Engels’s eyes with a ‘communist party’ as such, and over which Marx and Engels gained control, from late 1847. Marx’s time in Paris, in particular, from 5 March to 6 April 1848, is assessed, via his relationships with leading revolutionary figures such as Blanc, Flocon and Cabet, and the reception of his Poverty of Philosophy, a polemic against Proudhon, written in French. While Paris was the European revolutionary nexus until mid-March and hosted the League’s Central Authority that month, Marx opted to miss the promising ‘March days’ in the German states, where the League was stronger. Engels’s hope on 18 March that ‘we shan’t have to remain very long in Paris’ was insupportably not realised until 6 April. The publication of Demands of the Communist Party in Germany in late March hinted at a focus on practical revolution, but Marx and Engels had already shifted their attention to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.KeywordsCommunist LeagueGerman states more meaningfulNRZ planned before 17 Demands