This chapter examines Marx’s involvement in French socialist thought and action. Contrary to the standard view, Marx’s ideas were widely available in France at this time through a series of translations that appeared from 1872. These translations presented a ‘French Marx’ that was subtly, but noticeably, different from the German original and other versions, and whose ideas were more finely attuned to French circumstances. The construction of this French Marx was overseen and encouraged by Marx himself, who in translation was often willing to sacrifice the ‘purity’ of his ideas in order to broaden their appeal. The chapter contrasts this with his rigidity in the First International – where most French socialists met Marx for the first time, and which forms the basis for most studies of French Marxism – and argues that historians must combine the two. In order to fully understand why ideas such as Marxism spread, we must supplement the social and organisational histories of international socialism with attentive studies of its ideas, its texts, and their dissemination.

This chapter reappraises the impact of Marx’s ideas in France before the mid-1880s; the years to which historians have traditionally dated the beginning of a potent Marxist influence on French socialism. A wider range of French socialists than the Guesdists (to whom the introduction to Marxism is traditionally attributed) made frequent use of Marxist concepts, while Marx was consistently evoked provocatively by French socialists to maintain their revolutionary credentials. Socialists in particular made use of the French Marx, building upon the translational differences to advance their own theories on matters like the right to work and the role of the state. French socialists saw Marx’s ideas as a useful language for working through pressing social problems rather than a fixed doctrine: in fact, ‘orthodox Marxism’ did not exist during this period. These more complicated interactions also reflected the complex and shifting structures of the revolutionary movement as a whole, and revolutionary thought cannot simply be folded into the social and organisational history of French socialism.