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Vol. 73/No. 43      November 9, 2009

 
New French edition of
‘Communist Manifesto’
 
BY MICHEL PRAIRIE  
MONTREAL—Pathfinder Press has just published Le Manifeste communiste, a new French-language edition of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Published in 1848, on the very eve of a wave of bourgeois democratic revolutions across Western Europe, the founding document of the modern workers movement remains to this day the single best introduction to communism.

The new Pathfinder edition is the first ever translation into French of the 1888 English-language translation of the Manifesto. This English translation is the only edition of the Manifesto that Engels (or Marx) edited. The numerous edits by Engels significantly helped to make the text sharper and easier to understand. They were never incorporated however into the original German-language edition of the book, which has been the source of all the translations of the Communist Manifesto published in French until now.

The Pathfinder edition also contains an introduction by Leon Trotsky, a central leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which presents “both those ideas in the Manifesto which retain their full force today and those which require important alteration or amplification.” This introduction was written in 1937, in the middle of the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II. Today’s reader cannot but be struck by the timeliness of Trotsky’s remarks as, once again, imperialism is marching working people worldwide into war and depression.

Le Manifeste communiste has a colorful cover, an index, and several pages of explanatory notes. It can be ordered online at www.pathfinderpress.com or from distributors listed on page 10.  
 
 
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