The empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesales financial swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had shocked them moraly by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to the freres Ignorantins, it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made - the disappearance of the empire.

- Karl Marx, in "Civil War in France"

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