ABSTRACT
In a memorable passage in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Karl Marx declared that ‘men make their own history, but not under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. One relatively recent and steadily developing phenomenon which was to share the historical stage throughout Marx's and Engels’ lifetimes was the presence and spread of national consciousness, both within Europe and beyond it. Just as the authors of the Communist Manifesto declared that ‘the working men have no country’, Europe witnessed a remarkable ‘springtime of peoples’. Marx's evaluation of the working classes of the three most advanced societies of his time is worth looking at from at least two angles. Marx was later to acknowledge that some of his most seminal and celebrated concepts were not, strictly speaking, his own creations but rather were derived from his reading of ‘bourgeois’ writers, such as the French historians Thierry and Guizot.
