The text of the Constitution of the French Republic was originally published in Le Moniteur universel, No. 312, November 7, 1848, and the same year it appeared as a pamphlet. Marx examined this document in 1851 in a special article entitled “The Constitution of the French Republic”. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx often designates articles of this Constitution as paragraphs (§§).

The constitutional Charter, adopted after the bourgeois revolution of 1830, was the fundamental law of the July monarchy. Nominally the Charter proclaimed the sovereign rights of the nation and restricted somewhat the king’s power. But the bureaucratic and police apparatus remained intact, as did the severe laws against the working-class and democratic movement.