WorkKarl Marx

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Marx dissects Louis-Napoleon's 1851 coup and finds history repeating as farce — the essay that gave political thought both a famous opening line and the concept of Bonapartism.

by Karl Marx226 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte
First published: 1852(aged 34)
Original language: German

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Overview

On the second of December 1851, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte — nephew of the emperor, and France's elected president — dissolved the National Assembly, arrested his opponents and made himself dictator; a year later he was Emperor Napoleon III. Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire in the months just after, trying to explain how a mediocrity trading on a famous name had strangled a republic while the classes that should have stopped him stood aside. The title marks the parallel he draws: the first Napoleon had seized power on the eighteenth of Brumaire in 1799, and here was the sequel, the same scene played as low comedy — history, Marx wrote, arriving the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Yet the book's lasting achievement is not the mockery but the analysis. Marx shows the coup resting on a class no one had courted, the smallholding peasants, and on a state machine grown so top-heavy it could float free of every class and serve a single adventurer — the pattern he named Bonapartism. It was published in 1852 in New York, in a German émigré journal edited by his friend Joseph Weydemeyer, whose venture folded before he could distribute it; almost no copies reached Europe, and it was barely read until a second edition appeared in Hamburg in 1869. The word Marx coined in it for rule by a strongman floating above the classes — Bonapartism — outlived both the emperor and the century.

Key concepts

What does the title 'Eighteenth Brumaire' refer to?

The date, in the French revolutionary calendar, when the first Napoleon seized power in a coup in 1799. Marx uses it to frame his subject: Louis-Napoleon's own coup of December 1851, staged by the great man's nephew. The title carries the book's argument in miniature, the original played as tragedy, the sequel as farce.

Why did the smallholding peasants back Louis-Napoleon?

They were the class that carried him. Scattered across the land, too isolated to organise or speak for themselves, France's small farmers looked to a strongman to represent them, and the Napoleonic name still meant land and glory to them. Marx shows the coup resting on this unlikely base, a constituency no other party had bothered to court.

Who does Marx mean by the 'lumpenproletariat'?

The declassed rabble beneath the working class, vagabonds, discharged soldiers, swindlers, beggars and adventurers, whom Louis-Napoleon organised into his Society of the Tenth of December and used as a private following. Marx contrasts this bought, rootless crowd with the productive proletariat, and treats it as the natural instrument of a strongman who serves no honest class interest.

What was the 'party of Order'?

The coalition of the bourgeoisie's monarchist factions that dominated the republic's assembly. Marx's point is that this party, to protect its property and social power, was willing to surrender its own political rule, clearing the way for Bonaparte. It shows the bourgeoisie trading political power for social power, and so undermining the very parliament that was supposed to be its instrument.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A State Floating Above the Classes

How could a mediocrity strangle a republic while the classes that should have stopped him stood aside? A single coup exposes a state machine grown able to serve itself.

Marx explains Louis-Napoleon's 1851 seizure of power by a state apparatus so top-heavy it could float free of every class and answer to one adventurer, propped by a constituency nobody had courted — the smallholding peasants. He named the pattern Bonapartism. The bourgeoisie, unable to rule directly, surrenders political power to keep its social power, and the republic falls to executive force. The concept of a strongman rising above the classes outlived the emperor and handed later Marxism its theory of the state's independence.

state power
executive power
revolution
republicanism
class struggle
bourgeoisie
property

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History Repeating as Farce

When men make their own history, why do they stage it in the borrowed costumes of the dead? A coup dressed in Napoleonic memory raises the question of what really moves events.

The famous line — history arriving first as tragedy, then as farce — opens a materialist reading of how the present drapes itself in the past. Men make history, Marx argues, but not in circumstances of their own choosing; the actors of 1851 conjure the first Napoleon's ghost to dignify a shabby sequel. Beneath the borrowed language he traces the real interests and class alignments at work, turning the reading of a single French coup into a method for seeing politics against its own self-image.

ideology
political representation
peasantry
authoritarianism

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Within this work

passages held: 226
distinct concepts: 357
by passages held, corpus-wide: #322

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “bourgeoisie” and “class struggle”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
bourgeoisie	class struggle	10
bourgeoisie	executive power	8
bourgeoisie	state power	6
bourgeoisie	republicanism	5
class struggle	revolution	5
class struggle	republicanism	4
class struggle	state power	4
executive power	political representation	4
peasantry	political representation	4
political representation	revolution	4
republicanism	revolution	4
bourgeoisie	revolution	2
class struggle	executive power	2
executive power	state power	2
peasantry	revolution	2
peasantry	state power	2
political representation	state power	2
revolution	state power	2
bourgeoisie	peasantry	1
bourgeoisie	political representation	1
class struggle	peasantry	1
executive power	peasantry	1
executive power	revolution	1
republicanism	state power	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1844 On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage)
Written alongside the Hegel critique and published in the same short-lived Paris journal, this is Marx settling accounts with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. It marks his turn away from religion and the state toward the economic life he came to think lay underneath them.
DE
1845 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik)
Overwhelmingly Marx's despite the shared title page, and aimed squarely at Bruno Bauer's circle. It sits on the hinge between the Young Hegelian quarrels Marx was leaving and the historical materialism he was about to work out.
DE
1848 The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei)
Commissioned to a deadline as revolution gathered in 1848, and the most public thing Marx ever put his name to — the opposite pole from the manuscripts he left unfinished in drawers. It states in a few pages the view of history his longer works spent decades grounding.
DE
1849 Wage Labour and Capital (Lohnarbeit und Kapital)
An early, popular run at the economics Marx would spend the next twenty years perfecting. Engels reissued it in 1891 with the term "labour-power" set where Marx had written "labour" — repairing it with a concept that arrived only later.
DE
1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte) you are here DE
1867 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital)
The work of Marx's maturity and the one book of his economics he saw into print. Volume one appeared in 1867; Engels assembled volumes two and three from the unfinished manuscripts after Marx died, in 1885 and 1894.
DE
1888 Theses on Feuerbach (Thesen über Feuerbach)
Eleven notebook jottings, not an argument built for readers but private markers Marx set down in 1845 and Engels rescued in 1888. They register the moment he broke with Feuerbach and put human practice at the centre of his thinking.
DE
1898 Value, Price and Profit (Lohn, Preis und Profit)
A pair of lectures rather than a book — Marx answering a fellow member at the General Council of the International in 1865, in English. His daughter Eleanor found the manuscript and published it in 1898, and it became the shortest way into the economics of Capital.
DE
1927 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts)
His earliest sustained work, written at twenty-five before he had read a page of political economy: a reckoning with the German idealism he had been raised inside. Its published introduction announced the proletariat; the manuscript behind it waited eighty years for a reader.
DE
1939 Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie)
Written a decade before Capital and unknown for almost a century: the notebooks Marx filled to clarify his own thinking, rediscovered only after 1953 and central to the Marx revival that came with the New Left.
DE

— or open another of their works