He invited me to provide this weekly with a history of the coup d'etat. Meanwhile, Weydemeyer's original plan had fallen through. Instead, in the spring of I he began to publish a monthly, Die Revolution, whose first number consists of my Eighteenth Brumaire. A few hundred copies of this found their way into Germany at that time, without, however, getting into the actual book market. A German bookseller of extremely radical pretensions to whom I offered the sale of my book was most virtuously horrified at a "presumption" so "contrary to the times.
From the above facts it will be seen that the present work took shape under the immediate pressure of events and its historical material does not extend beyond the month of February, Its republication now is due in part to the demand of the book trade, in part to the urgent requests of my friends in Germany.
Of the writings dealing with the same subject at approximately the same time as mine, only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo's Napoleon le Petit and Proudhon's Coup d'Etat. Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty invective against the responsible producer of the coup d'etat. The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual.
He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history. Proudhon, for his part, seeks to represent the coup d'etat as the result of an antecedent historical development. Inadvertently, however, his historical construction of the coup d'etat becomes a historical apologia for its hero. Thus he falls into the error of our so-called objective historians. I, on the contrary, demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part.
A revision of the present work would have robbed it of its particular coloring. Accordingly, I have confined myself to mere correction of printer's errors and to striking out allusions now no longer intelligible.
