The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (German: Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon) is an essay written by Karl Marx between December 1851 and March 1852, and originally published in 1852 in Die Revolution, a German monthly magazine published in New York City by Marxist Joseph Weydemeyer. Later English editions, such as the 1869 Hamburg edition with a preface by Marx, were entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.[citation needed] The essay serves as a major historiographic application of Marx's theory of historical materialism.
The Eighteenth Brumaire is regarded by the social historian C. J. Coventry as the first social history, the base model or template for E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963).[1] Social history gained popularity in the 1960s. According to Oliver Cussen, the rise of cultural history in the 1990s, in line with neoliberal capitalism, saw Marx's perception of the necessity of revolutionary change replaced with Alexis de Tocqueville's elitist pessimism that popular revolt would only result in despots.[2]
Two of Marx's most recognizable quotes appear in the essay. The first is on history repeating itself: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce". The second concerns the role of the individual in history: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."
In the preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx stated that the purpose of this essay was to "demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part."[3]
The Eighteenth Brumaire, along with Marx's contemporary writings on English politics and The Civil War in France, is a principal source for understanding Marx's theory of the capitalist state.[6]
Marx's interpretation of Louis Bonaparte's rise and rule is of interest to later scholars studying the nature and meaning of fascism. Many Marxist scholars[who?] regard the coup as a forerunner of the phenomenon of 20th-century fascism.[7]
"First as tragedy, then as farce"
The opening lines of the book are the source of one of Marx's most quoted and misquoted[8] statements, that historical entities appear two times, "the first as tragedy, then as farce" (das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce), referring respectively to Napoleon I and to his nephew Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III):
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. The same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire.[9]
Marx's sentiment echoed an observation made by Friedrich Engels at exactly the same time Marx began work on this book. In a letter to Marx of 3 December 1851, Engels wrote from Manchester:
... it really seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness, causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce, Caussidière for Danton, L. Blanc for Robespierre, Barthélemy for Saint-Just, Flocon for Carnot, and the moon-calf together with the first available dozen debt-encumbered lieutenants for the little corporal and his band of marshals. Thus the 18th Brumaire would already be upon us.[10]
Yet this motif appeared even earlier, in Marx's 1837 unpublished novel Scorpion and Felix, this time with a comparison between the first Napoleon and King Louis Philippe:
Every giant ... presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine.... The first are too great for this world, and so they are thrown out. But the latter strike root in it and remain.... Caesar the hero leaves behind him the play-acting Octavianus, Emperor Napoleon the bourgeois king Louis Philippe.[11]
Marx's comment is most likely about Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), Part III: "The Roman World", Section II: "Rome from the Second Punic War to the Emperors", regarding Caesar:
But it became immediately manifest that only a single will could guide the Roman State, and now the Romans were compelled to adopt that opinion; since in all periods of the world a political revolution is sanctioned in men’s opinions, when it repeats itself. Thus Napoleon was twice defeated, and the Bourbons twice expelled. By repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence.
↑ Elster, Jon (1990) [first pub. 1986]. An Introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p.8.
↑ Tucker, R. C. (1978). The Marx-Engels Reader (2nded.). New York: Norton. p.594.
↑ Sorel, George (1908). The Dreyfusian Revolution. Translated by Abidor, Mitch. Paris: M. Rivière. Retrieved 3 June 2009– via Marxists Internet Archive.
↑ Quoted in Francis Wheen (July 2001). Karl Marx: A Life. W. W. Norton & Company. pp.25–26. ISBN978-0-393-32157-9. Retrieved 8 March 2011. Wheen points out the similarity between this passage and the one in Eighteenth Brumaire, but his quotation of the latter is a different translation or version than the one which appears above, or is perhaps a garbled combination of the Marx and Engels passages.
Further reading
Rose, Margaret A. (1978). Reading the Young Marx and Engels: Poetry, Parody, and the Censor. London: Croon Helm.
Cowling, Mark and Martin, James, eds. (2002). Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire (Post)modern Interpretations. London: Pluto Books.
External links
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (Chapters 1 & 7 translated by Saul K. Padover from the German edition of 1869; Chapters 2 through 6 are based on the third edition, prepared by Friedrich Engels (1885), as translated and published by Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1937.)
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, political theorist, political economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his intellectual endeavours. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848. The text is the first and most systematic attempt by Marx and Engels to codify for wide consumption the historical materialist idea that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", in which social classes are defined by the relationship of people to the means of production. Published amid the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents.
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, political theorist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's lifelong friend and closest collaborator, serving as a leading authority on Marxism.
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The coup d'état of 2 December 1851 was a self-coup staged by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, at the time President of France under the Second Republic. Code-named Operation Rubicon and timed to coincide with the anniversary of Napoleon I's coronation and victory at Austerlitz, the coup dissolved the National Assembly, granted dictatorial powers to the president and preceded the establishment of the Second French Empire a year later.
Presidential elections were held for the first time in France on 10 and 11 December 1848, electing the first and only president of the Second Republic. The election was held on 10 December 1848 and led to the victory of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte with 74% of the popular vote. This was the only direct presidential election until the 1965 French presidential election. The six candidates in the election, in order of most votes received, are Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte of the Bonapartists, Louis Eugène Cavaignac of the moderate Republicans, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin of the Montagnards, François-Vincent Raspail of the Socialists, Alphonse de Lamartine of the Liberals, and Nicolas Changarnier of the Monarchists.
Parliamentary cretinism is a pejorative term within Marxist discourse initially referring fixation on parliamentary proeceedings in political conflict to the exclusion of other things, in particular in the context of socialist politics appealing to exclusively parliamentary means, specifically in the 19th century., associated with claims that it means 'confimenent to an imaginary world'.
Karl Marx's thought envisages dividing the history of the State into three phases: pre-capitalist states, states in the capitalist era and the state in post-capitalist society. Complicating this is the fact that Marx's own ideas about the state changed as he grew older, differing in his early pre-communist phase, in the young Marx phase which predates the unsuccessful 1848 uprisings in Europe, and in his later work.
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Joseph Arnold Weydemeyer was a military officer in the Kingdom of Prussia and the United States as well as a journalist, politician and Marxist revolutionary.
In Marxist theory, the Lumpenproletariat is the underclass devoid of class consciousness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.
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Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of what Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx located historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Marxism:
Brumaire was the second month of the French Republican calendar.
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