... What kind of people our Progressives  are is shown once more by their conduct in the combination question. (By the way, the Prussian Anti-Combination Law, like all continental laws of this description, takes its origin from the decree of the Constituent Assembly of 14 June 1791, in which the French bourgeois strictly punish anything of the sort, and indeed any kind of workers associations condemning violators to, for instance, a year s loss of civil rights on the pretext that this is a restoration of the guilds and a contravention of constitutional liberty and the rights of man . It is very characteristic of Robespierre that at a time when it was a crime punishable by guillotining to be constitutional in the sense of the Assembly of 1789, all its laws against the workers remained in force.)
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1865