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6 000 €

Réf : 85992

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Karl MARX (Traduit par) Joseph ROY

Le Capital

Librairie du Progrès - Directeur Maurice Lachatre & Cie, Paris s.d (1875), 19,5x28cm, 351 pp, relié.

First edition in French, translated by Joseph Roy, partly previously unpublished, with corrections and additions by Karl Marx.
Complete with the two title pages addressed to Lachatre, a frontispiece portrait of Karl Marx, the facsimile of his letter to the publisher and his reply on the verso, removed from later editions.
Simple contemporary bronze half-cloth binding, smooth spine framed in gilt, gilt title, bookbinder's ticket at foot of the pastedown, “Buchbinderei Schey & Co, Zürich”. 

This first French edition of 'Das Kapital' was published in parts between 1872 and 1875, but met with no success, as the publisher writes in a letter to Marx dated 24 December 1873: “Sales are nil on your book (...). The print run is 1100 copies, almost all still in store”. Unsold quires were partly reassembled and offered in bound paperback volumes in early 1876. As the book was barely finished, booksellers were already sabotaging distribution. In June 1879, La Châtre wrote to Marx:

“There are still three hundred copies left of the last parts, printed at a thousand copies. We would therefore have sold only 600 or 700 copies in a span of six years. It is a very sad result...”

This was a major disappointment for Karl Marx, who had put a great deal of effort into this French edition, the only translation he personally edited, and last one published in his lifetime.
Marx “wished to leave a mark with Le Capital in French theoretical and political debates, strongly influenced by the legacy of Proudhon, in a country where the International was more effectively organized than anywhere else, and whose capital had ‘set itself up as a Commune'. In France, Le Capital was in a way the epilogue to a long theoretical and political debate begun in French twenty years earlier with the first polemic against Proudhon. (...) In 1872, Marx simultaneously corrected and revised Joseph Roy's translation and reworked the first German edition in preparation for the second edition published by Meissner. This twofold work constantly intersecting with each other, is partly responsible for the many differences that remain between German texts of the 2nd (and even later) editions and the French version, which Marx was correcting separately and simultaneously. At each stage of the process (preparation of the original text for Roy, correction of the proofs for Meissner, correction of the translation sent by Roy, correction of the proofs sent by the printer), Marx made changes, much to the despair of the printers. For many authors, this division of labor into different phases would result in a large number of small variants. For Marx, it encouraged a tendency that didn't need encouraging, the tendency to perpetual rewriting, to palimpsest.” (Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, introduction to the 1983 reprint of Le Capital published by Editions Sociales).
On 28 April 1875, Karl Marx makes additions to a notice to the reader that would appear in the last issue, on p. 348, stating his involvement in this French version and its importance within his work:
“[M. J. Roy's scrupulous translation has] forced me to modify the wording, with the aim of making it more accessible to the reader. Since the book was published in separate parts, these changes were made one after the other, and were carried out with uneven attention to detail, resulting in stylistic discrepancies. Having once undertaken this revision work, I was led to apply it also to the substance of the original text (the second German edition), to simplify some developments, to complete others, to give additional historical or statistical material, to add critical insights, and so on. Whatever the literary imperfections of this French edition, it has a scientific value independent of the first edition and should be read even by readers familiar with the German language”.
Our copy was undoubtedly acquired by a fellow countryman of Karl Marx, as it was bound at the time by a Zurich bookbinder, Schey & Co. In 1957, it was purchased by a bibliophile in Zagreb, in Tito's Yugoslavia, as evidenced by the marginalia on the title page.
Contemporary ownership inscription written three times: on the endpapers and both title pages.
A precious copy of the French edition, as important as the first in German.

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