Throughout his life Karl Marx commented on the French Revolution, but never was able to realize his project of a systematic work on this immense event. This book assembles for the first time all that Marx wrote on this subject. Francois Furet provides an extended discussion of Marx's thinking on the revolution, and Lucien Calvie situates each of the selections, drawn from existing translations as well as previously untranslated material, in its larger historical context.

With his early critique of Hegel, Marx started moving toward his fundamental thesis: that the state is a product of civil society and that the French Revolution was the triumph of bourgeois society. Furet's interpretation follows the evolution of this idea and examines the dilemmas it created for Marx as he considered all the faces the new state assumed over the course of the Revolution: the Jacobin Terror following the constitutional monarchy, Bonaparte's dictatorship following the parliamentary republic.

The problem of reconciling his theory with the reality of the Revolution's various manifestations is one of the major difficulties Marx contended with throughout his work. The hesitation, the remorse, and the contradictions of the resulting analyses offer a glimpse of a great thinker struggling with the constraints of his own system. Marx never did elaborate a theory of an autonomous state, but he never stopped wrestling with the challenge to his doctrine posed by late eighteenth-century France, whose changing conditions and successive regimes prompted some of his most intriguing and, until now, unexplored thought.

傅勒（François Furet ，1927-1997），法国当代著名法国大革命史学家。早年就读于巴黎大学，后到法国国家科学研究中心（CNRS）研究法国大革命，1966年到巴黎社会科学高等研究院（EHESS）工作，并于1977-1985年担任该院院长。1985年担任美国芝加哥大学社会思想委员会教授，并成为美国艺术科学院院士。1990年获得托克维尔终身成就奖。1996年获得欧洲社会科学奖和汉娜•阿伦特政治思想奖。1997年当选法兰西学院院士。主要著作除《马克思与法国大革命》以外，还有《法国革命史》（与里歇合著，1965）、《思考法国大革命》（1978）、《一个幻想的往事：20世纪的共产主义观念》等。

朱学平，男，湖南桃源人，哲学博士。西南政法大学行政法学院副教授，主要从事政治哲学和法哲学研究。出版有专著《古典与现代的冲突与融合——青年黑格尔思想的形成与演进》（2010年），译有拉兹《实践理性与规范》（2011年）、阿维纳里《黑格尔的现代国家理论》（即出）、罗森《哲学进入城邦——柏拉图<理想国>义疏》（即出）等。