The Great Men of Exile, if the rubric fits, is a parody of the cultural tradition that "the dead generations" threw behind the 1848 revolution, a mocking laugh that rips the limits of the bourgeois imagination, in the negative direction of sarcasm. It is understood that The Great Men of Exile was a very annoying libel for the Social Democracy and that the only original manuscript that remained in the hands of Engels, when it fell into those of Bernstein, quite the contrary, to the task of an editor , censored all the places in Marx's correspondence in which the work was alluded to, the reading of which must have been nothing short of insufferable for him. The satirical fury with which the leaders of French Social Democracy, such as Ledru Rollin and the Montagne of 1848, are condemned here, but, above all, the ruthless ridicule of the leaders of German democracy, was capable of spreading a certain apocryphal halo over the Social Democratic leaders of the early 20th century.