The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

These chapters contain Marx’s most detailed discussion of The Relationship between Base and Superstructure within the essay. He argues that the rival dynastic factions, the Legitimists and the Orleanists, represented different types of wealth within the upper bourgeoisie. Supporters of the Orleans’ claim to the French throne were often involved in banking and finance. The Legitimists were large landowners. This demonstrates for Marx “an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life” that emerge “out of […] material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations” (37). In other words, the way an economy makes and allocates products and services and how that affects society is what shapes culture, religion, and politics. In this case, the dynastic and political struggle between the Legitimists and Orleanists is the superstructure of the development of financial capital and its clash against an older form of wealth, owning land and property.

Marx also views the creation of the social-democratic party, the Montagne, through the lens of social and economic demands and class. Specifically, he notes that the alliance between the petty bourgeoisie and the workers did not lead to a serious challenge against the system of “capital and wage labor,” but was a way for the petty bourgeoisie to try to avoid “class struggle” and preserve their “material interest and social position” (40-41). In Marx’s interpretation of history, it is not always as simple as one class against another. In the case of the Montagne, they are still within the framework of the bourgeoisie like their opponents, the Party of Order. Instead, they, like the Orleanists and Legitimists themselves, represent different economic and social interests within the bourgeoisie.

Through his analysis of the downfall of the National Assembly’s social-democratic party, the Montagne, Marx illuminates The Bourgeoisie and the Rise of Authoritarianism. Through their opposition to the Montagne, which represented the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the upper bourgeois-dominated Party of Order ultimately weakened themselves and the National Assembly as a whole while empowering President Napoleon Bonaparte with what Marx calls a “direct victory” for the future Napoleon III. Marx writes, “The humiliating regulations to which it subjected the Montagne exalted the President of the republic in the same measure as it degraded the individual representatives of the people” (45).

By weakening themselves and the National Assembly and empowering Napoleon in this way, the Party of Order paved the way for their own downfall. This is what Marx means when he concludes that “it became unmistakably clear that only one thing was still wanting to complete the true form of this republic: to […] replace the latter’s inscription: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité by the unambiguous words: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery!” (48). It also fits with Marx’s overall argument that the bourgeoisie was willing to relinquish their control over the Second Republic, as a result of the fact that political control made them too much of a target for the other classes (55).