We have already seen how Marx's historical prognosis makes the future development of capitalism towards socialism depend on the prior existence of conditions which make this social change possible. The criteria for this method of historical explanation are applied by Marx to two other historical phenomena as well: the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848.

Marx formed his opinion about the French Revolution as early as 1843. In On the Jewish Question Marx says that the modern state reached in the French Revolution its emancipation and differentiation from socio-economic life. All political, community-oriented limitations on economic activity were swept away in 1789, and civil society became independent of the political sphere within which it had been embedded in medieval times. This achievement signifies the emergence of the tension between civil society and the state, which institutionalizes the alienation of man from his universality. In The Holy Family Marx supplements this argument by saying that this separation, though formally declared in 1789, was fully established only by the July Revolution of 1830.

Marx does not limit his explanation of the French Revolution to an analysis of its historical impact. Dialectically, the French Revolution has two aspects. Subjectively, it was nothing but an expression of the will of the bourgeoisie to shape the political world according to the principles of civil society, and these goals were finally vindicated, according to Marx, under the Directoire and Napoleon.