Review: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte cuts through the headlines and drama to understand how the French Second Republic fell to Bonaparte III in 1852 after just four years of existence. This is Marx applying class analysis to his present day, de-tangling the conflicts between peasantry and landed bourgeoisie, proletariat and industrial bourgeoisie, and between the various factions of the bourgeoisie. The value of the work is in understanding how Marx saw class conflict, and in Marx’s vivid writing; this work contains many of Marx’s best known lines, but many unsung passages are similarly poetic. Marx’s understanding of history is one of individual actors acting according to their interests (his Hegelian roots are evident), without seeing all of history as just the whims and wills of great individuals. He shows how relationships to the means of production shape individual decision-making without deterministically dooming history to unfold a certain way. 

Marx writes for an audience that would have been intimately familiar with the events of the day. His work seeks to make sense of the causes, so that readers might apply these hard-earned lessons to future conflicts. It makes for a challenging read for the 21st century reader. Marx refers to the “June Days” with the familiarity a millennial author might refer to the “George Floyd Protests” in a dissection of the COVID pandemic era. (I, a millennial author, shall leave this comment with little further explanation. Like Marx, I assume my reader already knows the details and infers my meaning.) My annotated version (Leopard Books) provided some useful context but I still found myself needing to look up historical details.

For understanding the phenomenon of Bonapartism and how it relates to the problems of governance of today, I preferred Losurdo’s Democracy or Bonapartism. Losurdo writes with the advantage of over a century of Bonapartist leaders since the one that gave the term its name. Tracing the pattern across countries and historical contexts makes it easier to identify the commonalities and causes. Losurdo’s book is also a great introduction to Marx's: the problem of universal suffrage, the charismatic leader pushing aside inter-party strife to unite the nation, the attacks on the means of theoretical production, the child-like multitude, the externalization of threat — all these characteristics Losurdo draws out are there in Marx, if sometimes under-emphasized.

I’m glad to have read this work cover-to-cover, to have familiarized myself with the shape of its contents. It is a major work, often cited. There are so many interesting threads to pull at. For example, towards the end, Marx discusses the centralization of state power as something that “modern society requires” — how should we interpret this line with respect to Marx’s vision for the role of the state in socialism? In other passages, Marx appears to have a strong appreciation for soft power and democratic norms; he often chides the liberal Party of Order for trampling on liberties, absconding from responsibility, or disrespecting institutions, showing how these actions impeded their ability to maneuver politically and resulted in their own demise. In his analysis of the peasantry, Marx refers to the isolated nature of their work and the lack of scientific thinking in their work as reasons for their combining together like potatoes in a potato sack, rather than in the transformative way the proletariat unites. In our modern age of swathes of isolated workers, do we have classes that resemble the peasantry more than the tools of their trade might suggest? It is a rich text, and I am sure I will return to it often.