The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1852

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-7

Key Figures

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Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

Karl Marx begins with a quote attributed to the early 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Hegel, claiming that all important events and people in history appear twice. Marx adds the idea that they happen “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (10). This is because the past has a tremendous influence over the present. When dramatic change happens, the people carrying out that change invoke authorities and traditions from the past. As Marx puts it, “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (10). He gives the examples of Martin Luther resembling Apostle Paul, Oliver Cromwell’s government in England drawing on the Old Testament, the First Republic of France imitating the ancient Roman Republic, and the 19th-century socialist politician Louis Blanc imitating the French Revolution leader Robespierre (10-11).

Particularly, Marx focuses on the First Republic of France as a “bourgeois society” that originally drew on images of the Roman Republic while it was being established with the French Revolution. However, these ancient images were abandoned once the First Republic was firmly established. Marx admits that the goal of the French revolutionaries was not to mock the Roman Empire. Instead, the goal was to establish and revive a sense of glory. Still, Marx concludes that, to succeed, revolution can only draw from the future, not from the past.

Next, Marx looks at the Revolution of 1848 in France (which he calls the February Revolution) that toppled the monarchy of King Louis-Philippe and brought about the Second Republic of France. However, because the Second Republic only saw the rise of Emperor Napoleon III in 1851, Marx dismisses the 1848 Revolution. He describes it as starting as a true revolution, but when the monarchy was overthrown, it also got rid of “liberal concessions that were wrung from it by centuries of struggle” (13). Under Napoleon III, France returned to an ancient form of government dominated by the army and the clergy.

Here, Marx distinguishes between bourgeois revolutions, which may begin radically but eventually bring about moderate change, and proletarian revolutions, which constantly move forward until going back to the status quo before the revolution is no longer possible (13-14). He breaks down the period from February 1848 to December 1851: the “February period” (the overthrow of King Louis-Philippe), the “period of the constitution of the republic” from May 4 to May 28, 1851 (when the government was run by the Constituent National Assembly), and the “period of the constitutional republic” from May 28, 1849 to December 2, 1851 (the main period of the Second Republic) (15).

Describing the February period, Marx sees it as the end of Louis-Philippe’s “bourgeois monarchy,” in which a small part of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, followed by a “bourgeois republic,” which has the entire bourgeoisie claiming to represent the masses (17). The June Insurrection, which took place from June 22 to June 26, 1848, ended with the proletariat losing its influence over the revolution and the victory of the bourgeois republic.

For Marx, the bourgeois republic only represents “the unlimited despotism of one class over classes” (18). The victory of the bourgeois republic begins with the proletariat being villainized as socialists in the name of “property, family, religion, order” (19). Next, the leaders of the revolution, whom Marx mockingly calls the “high priests of ‘the religion and order,’” are themselves eliminated and replaced by the “scum of bourgeois society” (19).

Chapter 1 Analysis

In this introductory chapter, Karl Marx first elaborates on his concept of The Bourgeoisie and the Rise of Authoritarianism. In general, he explains the theory that he will use in his analysis of the transition from the Second Republic to the reign of Napoleon III. As the bourgeoisie, or just the higher ranks of the bourgeoisie, takes control of revolutionary movements and of the new governments that follow, they appeal to tradition, which Marx mockingly calls “property, family, religion, order” (19). Once the bourgeoisie achieves absolute power within the Second Republic, they find opposition from the lower classes so overwhelming they cannot hold on to political power.

As Marx will explain later in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, by achieving so much power, the bourgeoisie will be forced to surrender its “political power” in order to preserve its “social power” (55). When this happens, in order to protect its property and influence, the bourgeoisie hands power over not to the working class, but to the underclass of the unemployed and criminals, whom Marx terms the “lumpenproletariat.” For Marx, Napoleon III represents this lumpenproletariat (63, 101). The regime established under Napoleon III will, like more ancient forms of government, exercise its power purely through military force and claim legitimacy from religion. Marx calls this the “shamelessly simple domination of the sabre and the cowl” (13). Even without Napoleon III, Marx hints that this process—or something much like it—would have been inevitable because of the nature of bourgeois rule and the competition between different classes.

At the same time, Marx’s theory regarding The Relationship between Base and Superstructure becomes apparent. He writes about the history of the revolutions in France in these terms. The French Revolution of 1789 represented the fall of the feudal mode of production (that is, how society organized the making and distribution of goods and services) and the rise of the capitalist mode of production, dominated by the bourgeoisie. As much as the revolutionaries of 1789 invoked the history of ancient Rome, they also set up the first “modern bourgeois society” and “knocked the feudal basis to pieces and mowed off the feudal heads that had grown under it” (11).

However, the process of transition is not a straight line. The Revolution of 1848 perhaps had the potential to be a “deed of world importance” (13). Instead, it led into the Second Republic, which, as Marx will argue later, would experience a consolidation of bourgeois rule (52, 59). Under Napoleon III, the bourgeoisie would lose its political power, only to be replaced by Napoleon’s government, which denied power to any class (55). This shows how, for Marx, history may be a progression between different modes of production, but it is rarely ever a smooth progression—it is full of false starts, like the Revolution of 1848.