August 28, 1844

Friedrich Engels

Marx and Engels begin their collaboration at their second Paris meeting

Their first meeting, in Cologne two years earlier, had been cold. The second produced ten days of near-continuous argument and planning.

Paris, on or about 28 August 1844

Friedrich Engels, returning from Manchester to his family home in Barmen, stopped in Paris and met Karl Marx on or about 28 August 1844.

Standard biographies place the substantive meeting at the Café de la Régence near the Palais-Royal — a café famous for elite chess rather than for politics.

This was their second encounter, not their first: they had met briefly and coolly at the Rheinische Zeitung office in Cologne in November 1842.

Ten days at the Rue Vaneau

A long initial conversation led them to spend roughly the next ten days together at Marx's Rue Vaneau home. Engels was 23; Marx was 26.

The convergence was not manufactured over one café table. Each had already read the other's contributions to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, and Marx had been particularly struck by Engels's "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy."

Engels's Manchester years had independently moved him toward communism and materialist social analysis.

What they actually planned

During the visit they recognised broad theoretical agreement and completed the plan and outline of a polemic against Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians — published in 1845 as The Holy Family.

They did not found a party or write the Communist Manifesto that week: they were approached to join the Communist League only in early 1847.

Engels was not carrying a finished Condition of the Working Class in England either; he was still assembling and writing it, and it appeared in German in 1845.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Traditional date

How this was checked

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Traditional date. This date is the conventional one, not one fixed by a contemporary record.

What the sources leave uncertain

August 28 and the Café de la Régence are standard in modern biographies, but some scholarly chronologies cautiously say “about August 28” or only “late August–early September.” No contemporaneous diary entry fixing the café and hour was located.
Later accounts call this the beginning of their friendship and joint work, but it was their second face-to-face encounter.