The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Karl Marx · 1851-12-1852-03 (composed for publication after the 2 Dec 1851 coup; draft/parts written 1851–52) primary

passage 77 of 77 · Section 111 of the Constitution, according to which every motion to revise the Constitution had to be discussed three successive times between each of which a full month was to elapse and required at least a three-fourths majority, with the additional proviso that not less than 500 members of the National Assembly voted. They thereby only made the impotent attempt, still to exercise as a parliamentary minority, to which in their mind’s eye they prophetically saw themselves reduced, a power, that, at this very time, when they still disposed over the parliamentary majority and over all the machinery of government, was daily slipping from their weak hands. > Part of the Mountain fled abroad, another part was assigned to the High (53/53)

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in brief

Marx concludes that Bonaparte, harassed by contradictions, throws the bourgeois system into disorder by using constant small coups, profaning government’s sanctity and staging reversals like a reenacted cult until Napoleon’s mantle finally falls.

of Louis XV. by the court and the kit of Louis Bonaparte’s: “Often did France have a mistress-administration, but never yet an administration of kept men.” [#15 Madame de Girardin.]

Harassed by the contradictory demands of his situation, and compelled, like a sleight-of-hands performer, to keep, by means of constant surprises, the eyes of the public riveted upon himself as the substitute of Napoleon, compelled, consequently, everyday to accomplish a sort of “coup” on a small scale, Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois social system into disorder; he broaches everything that seemed unbroachable by the revolution of 1848; he makes one set people patient under the revolution and another anxious for it; he produces anarchy itself in the name of order by rubbing off from the whole machinery of Government the veneer of sanctity, by profaning it, by rendering it at once nauseating and laughable. He rehearses in Paris the cult of the sacred coat of Trier with the cult of the Napoleonic Imperial mantle. But when the Imperial Mantle shall have finally fallen upon the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, then will also the iron statue of Napoleon drop down from the top of the Vendome column. [#16 A prophecy that a few years later, after Bonaparte’s coronation as Emperor, was literally fulfilled. By order of Emperor Louis Napoleon, the military statue of the Napoleon that originally surmounted the Vendome was taken down and replaced by one of first Napoleon in imperial robes.]

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topics: censorship and the press · faction, party, and civil strife · revolution and the fall of states

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte · Karl Marx · 1851–1852