Essay: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Overview and Historical Frame

Karl Marx dissects the French coup of December 2, 1851, when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte dissolved the legislature and paved the way to empire, by reading it against the earlier coup of 18 Brumaire (1799) by his uncle. The title signals a drama repeated: first as tragedy, then as farce. Marx’s central claim is that political events are driven by class struggle under concrete social conditions, yet actors cloak their aims in borrowed languages from the past. Men make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing; they stage it in costumes and scripts inherited from earlier revolutions.

From 1848 Revolution to Counterrevolution

The February 1848 revolution toppled the July Monarchy and proclaimed the Republic, momentarily aligning workers, petty bourgeois, and radical democrats. That alliance soon ruptured in the June Days, as the bourgeoisie used the army to crush the Parisian proletariat. A conservative bloc, monarchists of Orléans and Bourbon stripes fused as the Party of Order, seized the Constituent and then Legislative Assemblies, narrowing the Republic to a shell while defending property, religion, and social hierarchy. Universal male suffrage, initially expanded, was curtailed by the Law of May 31, 1850. In this context Louis-Napoleon, elected president in 1848 on vague promises of order and social concern, cultivated a personalist, plebiscitary appeal against parliamentary elites.

Class Forces and Social Bases

Marx anatomizes the classes contending beneath the political surface. The industrial and financial bourgeoisie desired strong order to protect capital, yet feared both the proletariat and the unpredictable president. The petty bourgeois oscillated between democratic aspirations and fear of upheaval. The proletariat had been defeated and dispersed in 1848, limiting its immediate political agency. Crucially, the smallholding peasantry, atomized by scattered property and debt, was numerous but unable to represent itself; it had to be represented. Louis-Napoleon posed as their protector, translating their longing for credit, tax relief, and stability into support for an executive above parties. Around him coalesced the Society of December 10, adventurers, lumpenproletarians, and clientelist networks, forming a mass base for a Bonapartist project.

Bonapartism and the Autonomy of the State

The coup reveals a distinctive regime type: Bonapartism. When class forces reach a stalemate, the executive power can detach itself and claim national representation, balancing factions while buttressing the social order of property. Louis-Napoleon leverages the centralized state machine, bureaucracy, police, and army, built under the old monarchy and Napoleon, refined by the July Monarchy, and misused by parliamentary factions. He appeals to universal suffrage through plebiscites while neutering the legislature, presenting personal rule as the people’s will. Yet this autonomy is relative: the regime ultimately secures the conditions of bourgeois society even as it politically humbles the bourgeoisie, disciplining it in the name of order.

Ideology, Repetition, and Outcome

Political actors, Marx argues, legitimize their aims by reviving old symbols, togas of the Roman Republic, Jacobin rhetoric, Napoleonic myth. Such theatrical repetition turns tragedy into farce when emptied of its original social content. The Party of Order, seeking to curtail democracy, undermined its own parliamentary power and opened space for the president’s plebiscitary appeal. Louis-Napoleon restored universal suffrage on his terms, dissolved the Assembly, and secured popular ratification, transforming the Republic into a personal empire. The result saved bourgeois society from proletarian challenge while suspending bourgeois political liberty. Marx closes by asserting that the apparent victory of order merely postpones the deeper social contradictions, which will reassert themselves as struggles over property, labor, and the state’s role in reproducing them.