The present work was written while the events analyzed were still in progress. It is, as Frederick Engels says, "Marx's first attempt, with the aid of his materialist conception, to explain a section of contemporary history from the given economic situation." The work has long been considered a class in historical materialism as applied to current events, having withstood the test of later and fuller analyses. This edition includes in full Engels' famous Preface of 1895, in which he assessed Socialist strategy and tactics for the previous fifty years. Cover: From a lithograph by H. Daumier symbolizing the reactionaries of the period.

A reprint of the 1934 'enlarged edition', a volume that added newly translated material to the title essay. It includes an introduction by Engels [Do you want to know that this dictatorship of the proletariat looks like? Then look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat], Marx's first and second 'Manifesto On The Franco-Prussian War', the correspondence of Marx & Engels on the Commune, and Engels' 'The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune'.