Lumpenproletariat
In writings on France

In an article analyzing the June 1848 events in Paris Engels wrote of the gardes mobiles, a militia which suppressed the workers' uprising: "The organized lumpenproletariat had given battle to the working proletariat. It had, as was to be expected, put itself at the disposal of the bourgeoisie." Thoburn notes that Marx makes his most detailed descriptions of the lumpenproletariat in his writings of the revolutionary turmoil in France between 1848 and 1852: The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). In The Class Struggles he describes the finance aristocracy of Louis Philippe I and his July Monarchy (1830–1848) as lumpenproletarian: "In the way it acquires wealth and enjoys it the financial aristocracy is nothing but the lumpenproletariat reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society." He distinguished the finance aristocracy from the industrial bourgeoisie as the former became rich "not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others." He further suggests that the lumpenproletariat is a component of the proletariat, unlike his earlier works. He claimed that the gardes mobiles were set up "to set one segment of the proletariat against the other":
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