MARX, KARL. AUTOGRAPH NOTE SIGNED. 2 OCTOBER 1848(?)

in French, 1 page on bifolium (8 1/2 x 5 1/2 in.; 216 x 140 mm) with integral address leaf, Brussels, 2 October [1847], to M. Gottrand, Brussels; vertical and horizontal folds.

Condition as described in catalogue entry.
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…J’ai l’honneur de vous faire parvenir l’original de mon petit discours inséré au Northern Star. Je me fais un Plaisir d’y ajouter un exemplaire de mon livre contre M. Proudhon… Karl Marx wrote several pieces for Friedrich Engels’s Northern Star in 1847, so it is not clear which manuscript (“l’original”), he enclosed to Gottrand. But the book he enclosed was the recently published was The Poverty of Philosophy, a pivotal work in Marx’s thinking and an attack on the anarchist Pierre-Joséph Proudon’s Philosophy of Poverty. Marx memorably described his opponent as “petit bourgeois”, a epithet which resounded in all later Communist literature. Marx’s book paved the way for the Communist Manifesto, written between December 1847 and January 1848.

Marx has dated the letter "2 octobre" from his Brussels address in the rue d’Orléans. The letter is docketed "1848" in another hand. Marx was expelled from Brussels earlier in 1848, so the date of the letter must be 2 October 1847, which was also the year of publication of The Poverty of Philosophy.