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 Bakunin never succeeded in staying long in one place without incurring the enmity of the authorities. In November 1847, as the result of a speech praising the Polish rising of 1830, he was expelled from France at the request of the Russian Embassy, which, in order to rob him of public sympathy, spread the unfounded report that he had been an agent of the Russian Government but was no longer wanted because he had gone too far. The French Government, by calculated reticence, encouraged this story, which clung to him more or less throughout his life.

Being compelled to leave France, he went to Brussels, where he renewed acquaintance with Marx. A letter of his, written at this time, shows that he entertained already that bitter hatred for which afterwards he had so much reason. "The Germans, artisans, Bornstedt, Marx, and Engels—and, above all, Marx—are here, doing their ordinary mischief. Vanity, spite, gossip, theoretical overbearingness and practical pusillanimity—reflections on life, action, and simplicity, and complete absence of life, action, and simplicity—literary and argumentative artisans and repulsive coquetry with them: 'Feuerbach is a bourgeois,' and the word 'bourgeois' grown into an epithet repeated ad nauseam, but all of them themselves from head to foot, through and through, provincial bourgeois. With one word, lying and stupidity, stupidity and lying. In this society there is no possibility of drawing a free, full breath. I hold myself aloof from them, and have declared quite decidedly that I will not join their communistic union of artisans, and will have nothing to do with it."