The fact that a new edition of the `18th Brumaire` has become necessary thirty years after its first appearance proves that this small work has lost none of its value even today. And indeed, it was a brilliant work.

Immediately after the event that stunned the entire political world like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, which some cursed with loud voices of moral outrage and which others accepted as salvation from the revolution and as punishment for its wanderings, which everyone, however, viewed with amazement and which no one understood - immediately after this event, Marx presented a brief, epigrammatic report that described the entire course of French history after the days of February, in its internal coherence and revealed that the miracle of December 2 was nothing but the natural, necessary result of that coherence, without being obliged to treat the hero of the coup in any other way than with the contempt he deserved.

And the picture was painted with such mastery that all the revelations made since then have added only new evidence of how faithfully it reflects reality. And this remarkable understanding of living daily history is truly unique, this clear diagnosis of events at the very moment they were unfolding.

[Excerpt from the text of the preface]