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Marx’s debt to the liberal historians of the nineteenth century, and in particular to Augustin Thierry, has long been a key formula in the “materialist conception of history,” through which the crucial function of the concept of “class struggle” is explained. The present article offers a reconsideration of this presumption, by way of an examination of various sources (including some little-known notes by Marx published as part of the MEGA— Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe—project). The analysis addresses both the question of what Marx actually read and drew from Augustin Thierry, and in particular from his essay The Formation and Progress of the Tiers État, or Third Estate in France, and the way in which Marxism constructed a positive reference to Augustin Thierry (in particular through the mediation of Plekhanov), consequently evading some of Marx’s intuitions. In its conclusion, the article reconsiders some of the tensions arising from a historical analysis in terms of class struggle, between a focus on the short time frame of the revolutionary period (1789, 1848) and the integration of a detailed, longue durée analysis of social classes (in particular the medieval era and the Ancien Régime).