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），法國當代著名法國大革命史學傢。早年就讀於巴黎大學，後到法國國傢科學研究中心（CNRS）研究法國大革命，1966年到巴黎社會科學高等研究院（EHESS）工作，並於1977-1985年擔任該院院長。1985年擔任美國芝加哥大學社會思想委員會教授，並成為美國藝術科學院院士。1990年獲得托剋維爾終身成就奬。1996年獲得歐洲社會科學奬和漢娜•阿倫特政治思想奬。1997年當選法蘭西學院院士。主要著作除《馬剋思與法國大革命》以外，還有《法國革命史》（與裏歇閤著，1965）、《思考法國大革命》（1978）、《一個幻想的往事：20世紀的共産主義觀念》等。

硃學平，男，湖南桃源人，哲學博士。西南政法大學行政法學院副教授，主要從事政治哲學和法哲學研究。齣版有專著《古典與現代的衝突與融閤——青年黑格爾思想的形成與演進》（2010年），譯有拉茲《實踐理性與規範》（2011年）、阿維納裏《黑格爾的現代國傢理論》（即齣）、羅森《哲學進入城邦——柏拉圖<理想國>義疏》（即齣）等。