MARX TO LEON FONTAINE!” 

[Draft] 

London, 15 April 1865 

Dear Citizen, 

At its last sitting (see enclosure) the Central Council appointed 
me pro interim* to be secretary for Belgium in place of Citizen Le 
Lubez, whose resignation as Council Member was unanimously 
accepted. Citizen Dupont has taken his place as secretary for 
France. 

I will, if you wish, later give you a brief account of the 
disagreeable incidents which occurred within the Central Council. 
In my opinion, they were really instigated by a person alien to 
our Council, well known as an Italian patriot? but an inveterate 
enemy of the interests of the proletariat, without which repub- 
licanism could be no more than a new form of bourgeois 
despotism. Did he not, as one of his most blindly faithful 
followers‘ confessed to me, go so far as to demand that all the 
passages hostile to the bourgeoisie should be deleted from the 
Italian translation of our ‘Address’. 

Despite these regrettable incidents and the more or less 
voluntary resignation of several individuals, our Association 
is making glorious headway. Founded only a few months ago, 
today it already numbers almost 12,000 members in England 
alone. 

The Central Council will be much obliged to you if you send me 
an official report on the present state of our society in Belgium. 

In your correspondence please be so kind as to keep the official 
letters, which are destined for the Central Council’s archives, 
separate from such private communications as you may be good 
enough to send me. 

4 provisionally - ’ Giuseppe Mazzini - * Giuseppe Fontana - 4 K. Marx, ‘Inaugural 
Address of the Working Men’s International Association’. 

: AWB Gy Fp (heres Nik, 
are d ved Aaa «Ten, 
athe oe FR vwM. ome 
kgs oA fortarh 
PA PIA SL betel (ital aban, Bagh AW 

oreet te 

aoeenl. by, Pree wed Fonte, a. 

Pages of Marx’s Notebook for 1864-65 with the rough draft 
of his letter to Léon Fontaine of 15 April 1865 

My address is: A. Williams,’ Esq., 1 Modena Villas, Maitland 
Park, Haverstock Hill, N. W. London. 
Greetings and fraternity. 

Karl Marx