The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Contents

1. Translator’s Preface (1897) 6 min 5

   Daniel De Leon, leader of the Socialist Labor Party of America, introduces his 1897 translation, the first in English. He recommends the book as the best work on the philosophy of history and working-class tactics, argues that French history is more relevant to Americans than English precedent, and sketches the French background: Napoleon’s coup of 18 Brumaire (1799), the Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy of 1830 and the February Revolution of 1848.

2. I History Repeats Itself: From February 1848 to the Coup 27 min 28

   History repeats itself, “once as tragedy, and again as farce”: the revolution of 1848 parodied 1789, and Louis Bonaparte parodied his uncle. People make their own history, but in circumstances inherited from the past, whose traditions weigh on the living. Bourgeois revolutions dressed up in borrowed costumes; the coming social revolution must draw its poetry from the future. Marx then poses the book’s question (how could a nation of 36 million be taken prisoner by an adventurer?) and outlines the three periods of 1848–51: the February period, the crushing of the workers in June 1848 under the banner of “Property, Family, Religion, Order,” and the gradual narrowing of power that followed.

3. II The Bourgeois Republicans and the Constituent Assembly 34 min 19

   June 1848 to May 1849. The “pure” bourgeois republicans of Le National ruled briefly, writing a constitution that proclaimed every freedom and then hedged each with exceptions, while Paris lay under martial law. The constitution set a president and an assembly against each other, both elected by universal suffrage. Peasants, angry at new taxes, elected Louis Bonaparte president in December 1848. He and the royalist “party of Order” then pushed the republicans aside, launched an attack on the Roman Republic, and hounded the Constituent Assembly into dissolving itself.

4. III The Party of Order and the Legislative Assembly 42 min 20

   May 1849 onward. Unlike 1789, the revolution of 1848 moved along a descending line, each party leaning on the one to its right until all fell. Marx shows that the royalist factions, Legitimists and Orleanists, represented two forms of property, land and capital, and that ideas and loyalties form a “superstructure” on such interests. He analyses the democratic left (the Mountain) as representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, defines what makes politicians a class’s representatives, and recounts the Mountain’s collapse on 13 June 1849 and the destruction of the National Guard.

5. IV Bonaparte against the Assembly 30 min 14

   October 1849 to May 1850. Bonaparte dismisses his parliamentary ministry and begins building his own power through the bureaucracy and the stock exchange. The party of Order brands every reform “socialist,” restores the wine tax, hands schools to the clergy and, frightened by left-wing by-election victories, abolishes universal suffrage (the law of 31 May 1850), the bourgeoisie’s own coup d’état. In sacrificing its political rights to protect its property, the bourgeoisie prepared its own political abdication.

6. V The Struggle between President and Parliament 51 min 15

   Mid-1850 to April 1851. Bonaparte organises the “Society of December 10” from the Paris lumpenproletariat, bribes the army with champagne and sausages, and dismisses General Changarnier, the Assembly’s military protector. The Assembly, absorbed in petty quarrels, lets every opportunity slip and loses the army, the ministry and finally its own majority. Bonaparte appoints openly anti-parliamentary ministries.

7. VI The Fall of the Parliamentary Republic 55 min 16

   April to December 1851. The attempt to revise the constitution fails; the royalist fusion fails; the party of Order splinters. Crucially, the bourgeoisie outside parliament (bankers, merchants and manufacturers frightened by a commercial slowdown) abandons its own representatives, preferring “an end with fright to a fright without end.” Bonaparte proposes restoring universal suffrage, the Assembly refuses, and on 2 December 1851 he dissolves it by force. A detailed timeline of the whole revolution closes the chapter.

8. VII The Peasants and the Bonapartist State 41 min 41

   What is Bonapartism? The bourgeoisie, having destroyed every weapon it used against the revolution, now sees each turned on itself. The state machine of bureaucrats and soldiers, built up by every regime since the absolute monarchy, now seems to stand independent of all classes. But it rests on a real class: the millions of smallholding peasants, isolated like “potatoes in a sack,” unable to represent themselves and so needing a master to represent them. Marx traces how Napoleonic small property, once liberating, has become a trap of debt and taxation, predicts that Bonaparte’s contradictory regime will lurch between classes, and forecasts the fall of the Napoleonic legend.