Letter to the Editor of La Presse, July 27, 1849

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Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 27 July 1849


MIA-bannière.gif
Source: Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 9, p. 480;
First published: in La Presse July 30, 1849.
Collection(s): Neue Rheinische Zeitung
Keywords : France, Press, Revolutions of 1848, Letter

Your item published in La Presse of July 26 concerning my stay in Paris, which has been reprinted word for word by other newspapers, contains such erroneous assertions that I am compelled to write a few lines in reply.

In the first place, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, of which I was the owner [1] and editor-in-chief, was never banned. Its publication was suspended only for five days because of the state of siege. When the state of siege was lifted, the newspaper reappeared, and continued to appear during the following seven months. Since the Prussian Government could not see any possibility of legally prohibiting the newspaper it had recourse to a strange measure: It got rid of the owner, that is to say, it forbade me to reside in Prussia. As regards the legality of this measure, this will be decided by the Prussian Chamber of Deputies which is ‘ shortly to meet.

After being forbidden to stay in Prussia, I went first of all to the Grand Duchy of Hesse, in which — as in other parts of Germany — I was not forbidden to reside. I did not go to Paris as a refugee, as your newspaper asserts, but of my own accord with a regular passport and with the sole aim of collecting additional material for my work on the history of political economy, which I had begun already five years earlier. [2]

Neither was I ordered to leave Paris immediately; on the contrary, I was given time to address a complaint to the Minister of the Interior. This complaint has been handed in and I now await the result.[3]

Kindly accept etc.,

Dr. K. Marx

  1. ↑ In view of the great financial and organisational difficulties which arose after the introduction of the state of siege in Cologne on September 26, 1848 and the suspension of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. On September 26, 1848 the authorities, frightened by the upsurge of the revolutionary-democratic movement in Cologne, declared a state of siege there “to safeguard the individual and property”. The military commandant’s office issued an order prohibiting all associations pursuing “political and social aims”, banned all meetings, disbanded and disarmed the civic militia, instituted courts martial and suspended publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and a number of other democratic newspapers. A protest campaign compelled the Cologne military authorities to lift the state of siege on October 2. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung resumed publication on October 12. Marx was compelled to take financial responsibility for the newspaper’s publication upon himself; he invested in it all the cash he had and thus, in fact, became its owner.
  2. ↑ Marx began to study political economy at the end of 1843 and, in the spring of 1844, set himself the task of giving critical examination of bourgeois political economy from the standpoint of materialism and communism. The draft written in this connection — Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — has reached us in an incomplete form. In February 1845, just before his first expulsion from France, Marx concluded a contract with the Leske publishers in Darmstadt for the publication of a two-volume Kritik der Politik und Nationalökonomie, which he continued to work on in Brussels (see MECW, Vol. 4, p. 675). In September 1846, however, Leske informed Marx that, in view of rigorous censorship and police persecution, he would not be able to publish the work. The contract was soon cancelled. Nevertheless Marx did not cease his economic studies and added new material to his notebooks containing extracts on political economy. He set out the results of his economic research in a book directed against Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy, in his Speech on the Question of Free Trade, in his Wage Labour and Capital and other works (see MECW, Vol. 6 and Vol. 9 pp. 197-228). Marx did not give up his intention of writing a big treatise on political economy, but during the intensive revolutionary activities of 1848-49, he had to postpone it. Marx managed to resume his economic research on a regular basis only after he moved to London in August 1849
  3. ↑ On July 19, 1849 in an atmosphere of repression against democrats and socialists following the events of June 13 in Paris, the French authorities informed Marx that an order had been issued for his expulsion from Paris to Morbihan, a swampy and unhealthy place in Brittany. Marx protested and the expulsion was delayed, but on August 23 he again received a police order to leave Paris within 24 hours. At the end of August, Marx set off for London where he spent the rest of his life
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