ABSTRACT
This article examines the genesis of the first French translation of Capital and the intellectual context in which Marx undertook its revision. In the early 1870s, Marx learned Russian in order to learn about the issues being discussed within the Narodnik movement. The work that Marx undertook in his rereading of the Roy translation is thus linked to a reflection on the relationship between history and logic, as well as on the question of alternatives to capitalist development. Marx is thus led to relativize some of his assertions, and not only to adapt to an unphilosophical French-speaking readership. But this comes into tension with Marx’s desire to show how capitalism forms a system, against Proudhon’s desire to defend some of its functions (market exchange) against others (capitalist accumulation). These questions make the Roy translation, reread by Marx, an important piece of the intellectual history of the old Marx. But it also raises the question of the uses of Capital on the margins of the capitalist world, a question that will be bitterly discussed later within the Russian world.
