The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Based on Wikipedia: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
History Repeats Itself—First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
In December 1851, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte—nephew of the legendary Napoleon—staged a coup and made himself emperor of France. Karl Marx watched this unfold with a mixture of fascination and contempt. Here was a man Marx considered a "grotesque mediocrity" somehow seizing the reins of history. Within months, Marx had written one of the most penetrating political analyses ever produced, and in doing so, gave us one of the most quoted lines in all of political philosophy.
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice," Marx wrote. "He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
The tragedy was Napoleon Bonaparte—the original, the conqueror, the man who reshaped Europe. The farce was his nephew, a pale imitation riding his uncle's coattails to power.
What's in a Name?
The title of Marx's essay puzzles many readers at first glance. "The Eighteenth Brumaire" sounds like something from another language—because it is. Brumaire was a month in the French Republican Calendar, that strange invention of the Revolution that replaced the traditional months with names derived from nature. Brumaire, from the French word for fog or mist, roughly corresponded to late October and November.
On the 18th of Brumaire in Year VIII of the Revolutionary Calendar—which translates to November 9th, 1799, in our conventional dating—the original Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the government and seized power. It was one of history's great pivots, the moment when revolutionary France began its transformation into an empire.
Fifty-two years later, almost to the day, his nephew pulled the same trick. Marx's title is itself a joke at Louis-Napoléon's expense: you're not writing a new chapter of history, Marx was saying. You're just poorly copying your uncle's homework.
The Puzzle Marx Wanted to Solve
But Marx wasn't interested in merely mocking a political opportunist. He had a deeper question. How could this happen?
France had just experienced the Revolution of 1848, which had overthrown King Louis-Philippe and established the Second Republic. Revolutionary energy was surging. The working class was organized. Progressive forces seemed ascendant. And yet, somehow, France ended up with another emperor—and not even an impressive one.
Marx wanted to understand the mechanics of this failure. His answer drew on what he called historical materialism—the idea that material conditions, particularly economic relationships and class interests, drive historical change. But what he discovered in the French case was something that didn't quite fit his theory, and he was honest enough to say so.
A Tangle of Classes
Marx laid out the French political landscape with the precision of a battlefield commander surveying opposing forces. There were the large landowners, clinging to their estates and their privileges. There were the aristocrats of finance—the bankers and speculators who had grown rich in the previous decades. Big industrialists. The high dignitaries of the army. The university. The church. The legal profession. The academies. The press.
Each group had its own interests. Each pulled in a different direction.
Below them sat the petty bourgeoisie—small business owners, shopkeepers, professionals who aspired to wealth but hadn't achieved it. They feared being pushed down into the working class almost as much as they resented the elite above them.
Then there were the peasants, the vast majority of France's population. They owned small plots of land, which made them technically property owners, but they were isolated from one another, unorganized, largely unable to articulate their collective interests politically.
And the revolutionary workers, concentrated in Paris, ideologically sophisticated but numerically weak.
Here was Marx's key insight: no single class was strong enough to dominate. The bourgeoisie was fragmented. The workers were isolated. The peasants were scattered. Each group could prevent the others from ruling, but none could rule alone.
Enter the Mediocrity
Into this deadlock stepped Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.
He had one supreme asset: his name. To the peasants scattered across the French countryside, "Napoleon" meant glory, national pride, and order. They remembered (or misremembered) the first Napoleon as a champion of their interests. The nephew traded shamelessly on that nostalgia.
But Louis-Napoléon wasn't merely lucky. He was cunning in his mediocrity. Because he represented no powerful class directly, he could present himself as standing above all classes. He could promise each group whatever it wanted to hear. To the bourgeoisie: order and protection of property. To the workers: social programs and employment. To the peasants: glory and tradition. To the church: respect for religion. To the army: prestige and adventure.
He was everything to everyone, which meant he was nothing in particular—but that nothing proved surprisingly durable.
The Bonapartist Exception
This presented Marx with a theoretical problem. His framework held that the state was fundamentally an instrument of class rule. Whoever controlled the state used it to advance their class interests. But Louis-Napoléon's regime didn't fit that pattern.
Marx's solution was to identify what he called "Bonapartism"—a special type of state that emerges when class forces are so evenly balanced that the state apparatus becomes semi-autonomous. It doesn't serve any single class directly. Instead, it hovers above them all, playing them against each other while pursuing its own institutional interests.
This was a genuinely new idea, and it would prove remarkably useful for later analysts. Political scientists would later see Bonapartism as a template for understanding other authoritarian regimes that claimed to stand above class conflict. Robert C. Tucker, for instance, argued that Marx's analysis of Louis Bonaparte served as a "prologue to later Marxist thought on the nature and meaning of fascism."
The connection makes sense. Like Louis-Napoléon, fascist leaders rose to power by claiming to represent the nation as a whole rather than any particular class. Like him, they exploited deadlocks between existing power centers. Like him, they combined appeals to tradition with promises of dramatic change.
Men Make History—But Not As They Please
Beyond the specific analysis of French politics, Marx offered a broader reflection on how history works. His formulation has become one of the most quoted passages in social theory:
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.
This captures something profound about the human condition. We are agents. We make choices. We act. But we never act on a blank slate.
Every generation inherits the institutions, the ideas, the languages, the technologies, the prejudices of those who came before. The past shapes what we can imagine, what we consider possible, what tools we have at our disposal. Even revolutionaries who want to destroy the old order find themselves thinking and speaking in categories inherited from that order.
The French revolutionaries of 1789 dressed up their radical innovations in Roman republican costumes. They gave themselves Roman names and posed as reincarnations of ancient heroes. They couldn't imagine a new world except through the lens of an old one.
And Louis-Napoléon? He dressed up his rather sordid power grab in the borrowed glory of his uncle's legend. The past returned not as living inspiration but as theatrical costume—tragedy degraded into farce.
The First Social History?
The Eighteenth Brumaire had an influence far beyond Marxist circles. Social historian C. J. Coventry has argued that it represents the first true social history—a study that goes beyond the actions of kings and generals to examine how broader social forces, class relationships, and material conditions shape events.
This approach would flower more than a century later. E. P. Thompson's monumental work, The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963, took Marx's method and applied it to British history. Thompson wasn't interested in what the elite did to the workers; he wanted to understand how working people made themselves into a class, developed their own consciousness, created their own institutions.
Social history became one of the dominant modes of historical writing in the 1960s and 1970s. Historians turned away from diplomatic history and the study of great men to examine ordinary people—their work, their families, their beliefs, their struggles.
But fashions change. According to scholar Oliver Cussen, the rise of cultural history in the 1990s—with its emphasis on discourse, representation, and identity rather than material conditions—corresponded with the triumph of neoliberal capitalism. Marx's insistence on the necessity of revolutionary change gave way to the more pessimistic view associated with Alexis de Tocqueville: that popular revolt inevitably produces new despots, so perhaps it's better to work within existing systems.
The Ghost in the Machine
There's a curious footnote to the essay's most famous line. Friedrich Engels, Marx's lifelong collaborator and friend, had written something strikingly similar in a letter to Marx dated December 3rd, 1851—just as Marx was beginning work on the essay.
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.
Did Marx borrow from Engels? Did both men arrive at the same insight independently? They were so intellectually intertwined, corresponded so constantly, that distinguishing their contributions is often impossible. The image of Hegel's ghost directing history from beyond the grave, forcing repetition, was clearly circulating in their conversations.
But the idea appeared even earlier, in an unpublished novel Marx wrote as a young man in 1837—fifteen years before the Brumaire essay. There, comparing the first Napoleon to King Louis-Philippe, Marx wrote:
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.
The theme of historical diminishment, of greatness followed by smallness, clearly fascinated Marx throughout his life.
Reading Hegel Reading History
And what of the Hegel reference itself? Where does Hegel say that history repeats itself?
Marx was probably thinking of Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History, specifically a passage about Julius Caesar. Hegel observed that political revolutions only become accepted as legitimate when they happen twice. Napoleon was defeated twice. The Bourbon dynasty was expelled twice. Repetition, Hegel suggested, transforms what initially appears as mere chance into something that seems necessary and established.
Marx took this observation and gave it a twist. Yes, history repeats—but each repetition is a degradation. The second time lacks the vitality, the necessity, the meaning of the first. It becomes performance, imitation, parody.
This is why the coup of 1851 could only be farce. Louis-Napoléon was going through motions that had already been gone through. He was playing a role in a drama whose script had already been written by a greater actor.
Why This Still Matters
The Eighteenth Brumaire remains essential reading for anyone trying to understand how politics actually works. Its insights recur with unsettling regularity.
When deadlock paralyzes democratic institutions, when established parties fail to address genuine grievances, when nostalgia for past greatness meets present frustration—these are the conditions that produce Bonapartist figures. They appear to stand above the partisan fray. They promise to cut through the gridlock. They invoke past glory while offering vague futures.
Marx's analysis also reminds us that understanding politics requires understanding class. Not in a crude way that reduces everything to economics, but in a sophisticated way that recognizes how material interests shape political possibilities. Who gains from a policy? Who loses? Who has the power to block change? Who benefits from confusion?
And perhaps most importantly, Marx reminds us of the weight of the past. We think we are free agents making fresh choices. But we inherit a world already structured by previous choices, previous conflicts, previous compromises. The dead generations really do weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Our task is not to escape that weight—we cannot—but to understand it well enough to work within its constraints and perhaps, sometimes, to shift them.
History does not repeat exactly. But patterns recur. And those who cannot recognize the patterns are condemned, as another writer would later say, to repeat them without even the dignity of tragedy—only farce.