Galicia’s autonomous status was in fact a doubletrack affair. On the one hand Galicia became a shining example of freedom and autonomy, embedded in the new constitutional order of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while on the other hand it was tied down to a monarchical absolutism which offered only limited protection of individual rights. The press in particular was caught in the dilemmas produced by this situation, especially in the sensitive areas of political loyalty and religion.

The ‘incriminated (suppressed) text’ and its removal remains the key object on the conceptual map of censorship studies. In this approach to censor ship the analysis focuses on demonstrable facts of official intervention in the media, the documentation of the process as well as the reconstruction of the effects of individual gagging orders for the author, the publisher and the editor in charge. An alternative, historical approach to censorship takes a much broader view of the subject. It looks at the institutions involved, their competences, procedures and aims (ranging from prevention to repression) as well as the tools at their disposal. The latter approach, systemic and comparative in scope, requires ‘digging up’ considerably more information than establishing the fact of a censor’s intervention.

The subject of this article is an analysis of the earliest of Karl Marx’s articles, Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction. The essence of his views presented in that article was to protest against the restriction of the right to free expression of opinions by journalists. Marx pointed out that the new Prussian Censorship Instruction only seemed to liberalize censorship, but in fact in many aspects tightened the rules, for example, reinforced those that pertained to religious criticism. He thought that the Prussian Censorship Instruction was not an enactment of law, because by limiting freedom, lawmakers acted against the essence of the press, law and state. Marx thought that a press law was needed to guarantee freedom of the press and that censorship should be abolished entirely.