MY FRIEND Joseph weydemeyer,whose death wasVso untimely, intended to publish a politicalweekly in New York starting from January，1852.He invited me to provide this weekly with a historyof the coup d'etat.Down to the middle of February,l accordingly wrote him weekly articles under thetitle: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.Meanwhile Weydemeyer's original plan had fallenthrough. Instead, in the spring of 1852 he published amonthly，Die Revolution,the first number of whichconsists of my Eighteenth Brumaire. A few hundredcopies of this found their way into Germany at thattime, without,however，getting into the actual booktrade. A German publisher of extremely radical pre-tensions to whom I offered the sale of my book wasmost virtuously horrified at a "presumption" so "con-trary to the times."

From the above facts it will be seen that thepresent work took shape under the immediate pres-sure of events and its historical material does notextend beyond the month of February (1852). Its re-publication now is due in part to the demand of thebook trade,in part to the urgent requests of myfriends in Germany.

Of the writings dealing with the same subject andappearing approximately at the same time as mine,only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo's Napoléon lePetit and Proudhon's Coup d'Etat.