Engels’s brief sketch leaves many details unexplained, but brings out the Blanquist and Babouvist roots of the organization, as it grew out of the earlier ‘League of the Just’ founded in Paris in 1836 by radical German workmen influenced by French doctrines. “… the League was at that time actually not much more than the German branch of the French secret societies, especially the Societe des Saisons led by Blanqui and Barbes….” This situation changed in the 1840s, but the link with different societies, notably with Blanqui and his group, was never entirely severed. [1961]