The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Written under the pressure of events

Marx wrote the work between mid-December 1851 and 25 March 1852. His friend Joseph Weydemeyer planned a political weekly in New York from January 1852, and Marx sent him a history of the coup in weekly articles down to the middle of February. The weekly fell through; instead the first number of Weydemeyer's monthly Die Revolution (18 May 1852) consisted entirely of the work. Five hundred copies were printed and only a few hundred reached Germany. The title then was The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. A second edition appeared in Hamburg in 1869 as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; Marx held that revising it would rob it of its particular colouring and only corrected misprints and struck out allusions no longer intelligible. A third edition with a preface by Engels followed in 1885. A Korean translation by Choi Hyung-ik was published by Sechang in 2025.

The title refers to 18 Brumaire of the Year VIII (9 November 1799), the day Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the Directory. The mockery is that the nephew repeated his uncle's coup.

In the 1869 preface Marx set his book against two others on the same event. Victor Hugo's Napoléon le Petit saw the coup only as the violent act of a single individual, and so made that individual great instead of little by crediting him with a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history. Proudhon's Coup d'État tried to present the coup as the result of an antecedent historical development, and slipped into an apologia for its hero. Marx, by contrast, set out to show how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part.

Tragedy and farce: revolutions in borrowed costume

The book opens: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Mountain of 1848–1851 for the Mountain of 1793–1795, the nephew for the uncle.

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." So in moments of crisis revolutionaries borrow the names, slogans and costumes of the past. Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, and the revolutionaries of 1789–1814 performed the task of their time, setting up modern bourgeois society, in the costume of the Roman republic and the Roman empire. In 1848 the borrowing became parody: instead of finding once more the spirit of revolution, it only made its ghost walk again.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century, Marx says, cannot take its poetry from the past; it "must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content." Bourgeois revolutions like those of the eighteenth century storm from success to success, soon reach their zenith and fall into a long hangover; proletarian revolutions criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves in their own course, and come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh.

Three periods and a descending line

Chapter I divides 24 February 1848 to December 1851 into three periods: the February period, from Louis Philippe's overthrow to the first sitting of the newly elected assembly on 4 May 1848, the prologue of the revolution; the period in which the assembly that wrote the constitution set up the republic, to 28 May 1849; and the period of the constitutional republic, the Legislative National Assembly, to 2 December 1851. At the end of chapter VI Marx summarises them again in finer subdivisions.

Chapter III draws the process as a descending line. The revolution of 1789 moved along an ascending line, from the Constitutionalists to the Girondins and from the Girondins to the Jacobins, each bolder party pushing aside the one before. 1848 was the reverse. The proletarian party hung on to the petty-bourgeois democrats and was betrayed and dropped by them on 16 April, 15 May and in the June Days. The democrats leaned on the shoulders of the bourgeois republicans and were shaken off; the bourgeois republicans leaned on the party of Order and were let tumble. The party of Order threw itself on the shoulders of the army, and one fine morning found that the shoulders had turned into bayonets. Each party kicks from behind at the one pushing forward and leans in front on the one pressing backward, until it loses its balance and falls.

Chapter II shows how, in the first stage of this descent, the bourgeois republicans and the party of Order each dug their own graves. The exclusive rule of the bourgeois republicans lasted only from 24 June to 10 December 1848 and is summed up in the drafting of a republican constitution and the state of siege of Paris. The constitution proclaimed liberties while making each of them subject to conditions "fixed by law", and the organic laws later written by the friends of order regulated them so that only the bourgeoisie could enjoy them unhindered. While the constitution was being made inside the assembly, Cavaignac maintained the state of siege outside. If the constitution was later put out of existence by bayonets, Marx wrote, it should not be forgotten that it had been protected by bayonets, turned against the people, in its mother's womb. After the December election the republican constitution-making assembly meant to dissolve only once it had passed the organic laws, but on 6 January 1849 the party of Order had the deputy Rateau move that it drop them and decide on its own dissolution. On 29 January, the day of decision, Changarnier's troops occupied the building, and the assembly gave way, bargaining only for a short extension. Marx called the day a rehearsal of 2 December 1851, carried out by the royalists together with Bonaparte against the republican assembly; Bonaparte used it to have troops march past him in front of the Tuileries.

The Roman expedition was the decisive link in the chain. The very first meeting of Bonaparte's council of ministers resolved on an expedition against the Roman republic, to be undertaken behind the assembly's back with funds obtained under false pretences. When on 8 May 1849 the assembly censured the ministry over General Oudinot's occupation of Civitavecchia, Bonaparte published that evening a letter congratulating Oudinot on his exploits and posed as the protector of the army against the parliamentarians. In chapter III Marx reads the French bombardment of Rome as the bait thrown to lure the Mountain out of parliament into the streets, so that it would smash its own parliamentary power. Citing Article 5 of the constitution, which forbade using French forces against the freedom of another people, and Article 54, which forbade war without the assembly's consent, Ledru-Rollin moved the impeachment of the president and his ministers on 11 June and threatened to defend the constitution even with arms in hand. The motion was rejected the next day, and the rising of 13 June was confined to a street procession of unarmed democratic National Guards, which the army dispersed. The Montagnard leaders fled or were put on trial, and Paris and Lyon were again placed under a state of siege. Marx mocks the bluster of petty-bourgeois democrats who talked of arms in parliament without having won over the working class. By the irony of history, the general offered by the party of Order to the people on 2 December 1851 as the defender of the constitution against Bonaparte was Oudinot, the man who had bombarded Rome. Having reinstalled the pope in the Vatican, Bonaparte had won the priests to his side.

Chapter IV follows Bonaparte as he pries executive power out of parliament's hands. On 1 November 1849 a single message dismissed the Barrot-Falloux ministry. This party-of-Order cabinet of Legitimists and Orleanists was the first and last parliamentary ministry Bonaparte ever formed, and with its dismissal the party of Order lost, never to regain it, the lever of executive power indispensable to a parliamentary regime. The new Hautpoul ministry had no prime minister, and its only man of parliamentary standing was the financier Fould, who took the Ministry of Finance; from then on French government securities rose and fell with Bonapartist stock, and by appointing Carlier prefect of police Bonaparte took the police as well.

In the by-elections of 10 March 1850, held to fill the seats left empty by imprisonment and exile after 13 June, Paris elected only social-democratic candidates and gave most votes to De Flotte, an insurgent of June 1848. The army in Paris voted for the June insurgent against one of Bonaparte's ministers, and in the departments too the Montagnards largely kept the upper hand. The Parisian petty bourgeoisie, allied with the proletariat, had avenged 13 June. Faced with revolution once more, Bonaparte disappeared behind the party of Order, as on 29 January and 13 June 1849, and begged its pardon. The party of Order let the chance slip, and only added to the Hautpoul ministry Baroche, the public prosecutor who had raged at the High Court of Bourges against the revolutionaries of 15 May and the democrats of 13 June. The social democrats blunted their own victory: Vidal, elected in both Paris and Strasbourg, was induced to take Strasbourg, and in the April by-election that followed Paris elected the sentimental novelist Eugène Sue. In Marx's words, they made an April Fool of 10 March.

Seventeen party-of-Order leaders drew up a new electoral law, passed on 31 May, requiring three years' residence in one place and, for workers, proof of it by an employer's certificate. At least three million of the ten million registered voters were struck off the rolls. The Mountain contented itself with smuggling a protest into the President's pocket. The electoral law was followed by a new press law that entirely suppressed the revolutionary press, after which two bourgeois papers, Le National and La Presse, were left as the most advanced outposts of the revolution; the revolutionary press, Marx added, had deserved its fate. The petty-bourgeois democrats, who on 13 June had cried that if universal suffrage were ever attacked they would show what they were made of, consoled themselves with the prophecy that on the second Sunday of May 1852 every Frenchman would appear at the polls with a ballot in one hand and a sword in the other. 1850 was a boom year and the Paris proletariat was fully employed, but the law shut it out of the political arena and threw the workers back into the pariah position they had held before the February Revolution.

Classes and their representatives

The party of Order was a coalition of the Legitimists, attached to the Bourbons, and the Orleanists, attached to the House of Orleans. What divided them, Marx argued, was not principles such as the fleur-de-lis and the tricolour but their material conditions of existence, two kinds of property: large landed property and capital. Since the two restorations excluded each other, the parliamentary republic was the only form of state in which both factions could rule together.

The Mountain, the Social-Democratic party, was a coalition of petty bourgeois and workers. Because the democrat represents a transition class in which the interests of two classes are blunted, he imagines himself above class antagonism and speaks for "the people". Marx warns against imagining that the democratic representatives are all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers: what makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the petty bourgeois do not get beyond in life. This account of the relation between a class and its political and literary representatives is one of the reasons the book became a classic of political analysis.

The bourgeoisie, too, split from its representatives. The bourgeois mass outside parliament confessed that to preserve its social power intact its political power must be broken, and amid the commercial slump of 1851 and the chaos of revision, prorogation and dynastic fusion it cried at its parliamentary republic: "Rather an end with terror than terror without end!" Into the gap stepped the Society of 10 December, in which Bonapartist agents under a Bonapartist general had organised the lumpenproletariat of Paris into secret sections since 1849. Marx portrays Bonaparte as the chief of the lumpenproletariat.

The army: from the end of the National Guard to an army of substitutes

Marx also read the politics of these years as a process in which the army gradually took the decision into its hands, and the fate of the National Guard was its gauge. In June 1848 bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, as the National Guard, joined the army against the proletariat; on 13 June 1849 the bourgeoisie let the army disperse the petty-bourgeois National Guard; on 2 December 1851 the bourgeois National Guard itself had vanished, and Bonaparte merely registered the fact when he signed the decree disbanding it. On 13 June the democratic National Guards faced the army unarmed but in uniform, and the army convinced itself that the uniform was a piece of woollen cloth like any other: the spell was broken. The bourgeoisie had smashed its own last weapon against the army.

The party of Order tried to hold parliament on the army, through General Changarnier, who united the command of the Paris army and the National Guard. Bonaparte meanwhile bought officers and men directly. In 1850 he treated officers and non-commissioned officers in the Élysée to cigars and champagne, cold poultry and garlic sausage, and in October repeated the manoeuvre with the mass of the troops at the reviews of Saint-Maur and Satory. When he dismissed Changarnier in January 1851, the party of Order lost its grip on the army and the National Guard; in Marx's words, parliament was left without the ministry, without the army, without the people, without public opinion. Bourgeois constituents in the industrial districts even reproached their own representatives, such as Thiers, for joining the Mountain against the dismissal, as treason to order.

In chapter VII Marx names the ascendancy of the army as the culminating "Napoleonic idea". Under Napoleon I the army had been the point of honour of the smallholding peasants: the uniform was their state costume, war their poetry, and patriotism the ideal form of the sense of property. But the enemies against whom the peasant must now defend his property are not the Cossacks but the bailiffs and the tax collectors, and the smallholding lies no longer in the fatherland but in the registry of mortgages. The army itself is no longer the flower of the peasant youth but the swamp flower of the peasant lumpenproletariat. It consists largely of substitutes paid to serve in others' place, just as the second Bonaparte is himself only a substitute for Napoleon, and it performs its deeds of valour by hounding the peasants like chamois and doing gendarme duty. Bonaparte bought this drunken soldiery with whisky and sausages and had to keep throwing it more sausages.

The state machine and the smallholding peasants

In chapter VII Marx calls the executive power, with "a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million", a parasitic body that enmeshes French society and chokes all its pores. It arose under the absolute monarchy with the decay of feudalism and grew stronger through the Revolution and Napoleon, the Restoration, the July Monarchy and the parliamentary republic. "All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it." Under earlier regimes the state was the instrument of the ruling class; only under the second Bonaparte did it seem to have made itself completely independent.

Yet state power does not hover in mid-air. As the Bourbons were the dynasty of big landed property and the Orleans the dynasty of money, the Bonapartes were the dynasty of the smallholding peasants, the most numerous class in France. The smallholders live in similar conditions, but their mode of production isolates them from one another; they form a nation by simple addition, "much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes", and so are a class and at the same time not a class. They cannot assert their class interest in their own name, through a parliament or a convention: "They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented." Their representative has to appear as their master, an unlimited governmental power that protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above.

Marx thought this base was already giving way. Under Napoleon I the smallholding had been the bulwark of bourgeois society against the feudal lords; in the nineteenth century the urban usurer replaced the feudal lord and the mortgage the feudal obligation. The peasants' interests were now opposed to the bourgeoisie, to capital, and they would find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task is to overthrow the bourgeois order. Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes, but he cannot give to one without taking from another. The book closes with the line that when the imperial mantle finally falls on Louis Bonaparte's shoulders, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendôme Column. In May 1871 the Paris Commune pulled the column down.

What the book left behind

On 12 April 1871 Marx wrote to Kugelmann that the last chapter of the Eighteenth Brumaire had declared that the next revolutionary attempt in France would no longer be to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another but to smash it; the Paris Commune was that attempt. In 1917 Lenin titled chapter II of The State and Revolution "The Experience of 1848–51" and quoted the passage on the state machine from chapter VII as the starting point of the conclusion that the state must be broken, not taken over.

In the 1869 preface Marx rejected the phrase "Caesarism" then current in Germany: in ancient Rome the class struggle was fought within a privileged minority, between free rich and free poor, while the great productive mass of slaves formed its passive pedestal, so the superficial analogy missed the main point. Even so, the problem the book posed, of a balance of classes and the state's apparent independence, became one strand of later Marxist theory of the state. August Thalheimer used the concept to analyse fascism, and Trotsky the crisis governments that preceded it and the Stalin regime, and Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks discussed Caesarism as arising where forces balance each other catastrophically, with Napoleon III among his examples. The political scientist Robert C. Tucker called the analysis a "prologue to later Marxist thought on the nature and meaning of fascism". The later history of the concept is covered under Bonapartism.