The appearance of the Manifesto of the Communist party, written by Marx and Engels, February 1848, coincided with the outbreak of the revolution in Europe.

The revolution began in France on February 22-24, the bankers’ king, Louis Philippe, was dethroned and a republic proclaimed. The first reports of the revolution reached Marx while he was in Brussels. On behalf of the Brussels Democratic Association, Marx warmly greeted France’s Republican Government.

MARX, in the Poverty of Philosophy, clearly set forth the principles of his theory of social history. “The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist,” he wrote, examining the dialectical interaction of the productive forces and production relations. Prospects were opened before the reader for the revolutionary struggle of the working class and all working people.

MEANWHILE, the reactionary Prussian government which had kept Marx’s activities in Paris under close observation from the first day on, succeeded in January 1845 in getting the French authorities to expel him. He was ordered to leave Paris within 24 hours, and to be out of France in the shortest possible time. When the liberal press protested against this outrageous act, the French Government offered to let him stay on in Paris if he withdraw from all anti-Prussian agitation. Marx’s answer was to leave France.

UNDER Marx’s editorship, the Rheinische Zeitung soon began to flourish. The Prussian authorities imposed strict censorship on the paper and demanded that it change its tune. For a while the paper, before publication, had to be submitted daily to the Government President for his approval. The intellectual level of the Prussian censor in Cologne – very reminiscent of our own censors of the Emergency period – was such that he struck out a notice for Dante’s Divine Comedy saying that it was impermissible to mix comedy with divine things.

THE possibilities for a secure career had worsened drastically. Friedrich Wilhelm IV had come to the throne in Prussia in 1840. The Prussian bourgeoisie reiterated its demands, particularly the one for a decisive share of political power, especially in the administration of the State in law-making. When the King rejected these demands, the economically leading section of the industrialists—the bankers and the merchants, with the Rhinelanders in the forefront—went over to the liberal opposition and put itself at the head of the popular movement.