his political sympathies prevented him from receiving a position in the state-controlled university system. Instead, Marx turned to journalism where his radical politics attracted the attention of Prussian censors. The publication for which he worked was shut down for its politically incorrect commentary, and the frustrated Marx traveled to Paris.
             Paris in 1843 was an international center of social, political, and artistic activity and the gathering place of radicals and revolutionaries from all over Europe. In Paris Marx became involved with socialists and revolutionaries such as Proudhon and Bakunin. Most significantly, though, it was in Paris that Marx met Friedrich Engels, the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer in England who had become a socialist after observing the deplorable condition of workers in his father's factories. Together, Marx and Engels began to develop the ideas, which became Communism (an economic system in which the state, governed by an elite party, controls production, labor, and distribution, and common way of life). Eventually, Marx was exiled from France in 1845 at the behest of the Prussian government for antiroyalist writings.
             After leaving Paris, Marx traveled to Belgium where he became involved with a group of artisans calling themselves the Communist League. In 1847 the Communist League commissioned Marx and Engels to pen a statement of their beliefs and aims. This statement became the Communist Manifesto, which Marx zealously composed in anticipation the revolutions of 1848. When revolution did begin in Germany in 1848, Marx traveled to the R
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