MARX, Karl and Friedrich ENGELS. [Laura LAFARGUE, translator]. ~ Manifeste du Parti Communiste. Paris: [Pivoteau in Saint-Amand (Cher) for] Ère nouvelle, [1895].
8vo (380 × 150 mm), pp. [2], 36, plus original printed yellow wrappers. Lightly browned, inner margins fragile (slight cracking) to first and last leaves, wrappers spotted. Preserved in later red half morocco, spine lettered in gilt.
First separately published edition of the first full French translation of the Communist Manifesto. Partial French translations had appeared swiftly after the first edition of the German original but remained unpublished. Indeed, the influence of Marxist thought in France only took root from the 1880s, when it became dominant in French socialism. The translation of the manifesto is by Marx’s daughter, Laura Lafargue and appeared first in the journal of the Parti Ouvrier Français, Le Socialiste (29 August, 1885), followed by a version corrected by Engels himself in La France socialiste in 1886 and another journal appearance (Ère nouvelle, September 1894) but it did not appear in book form until our edition of 1895.
The translator Laura Lafargue, née Jenny Laura Marx (26 September 1845 – 25 November 1911) was the second daughter of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen. She married revolutionary writer Paul Lafargue in 1868, translated Marx into French and was instrumental in spreading Marxist theory on the continent. She committed suicide by lethal injection with her husband in 1911 and is buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise.
Exceptionally scarce: copies at British Library and Stanford (Hoover Institution) only outside continental Europe. Andréas, Le Manifeste communiste de Marx et Engels. Histoire et bibliographie 1848-1918, 331 and see Printing and the Mind of Man 326 (first edition, 1848)