The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis BonaparteKarl Marx

Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire in early 1852, within weeks of Louis Bonaparte's coup d'état. It is his most sustained work of political analysis and his most brilliantly written, a study of how a mediocrity seized power in a nation that had just made a revolution.

The famous opening sets the frame: Hegel says somewhere that all great events in world history occur twice; Marx adds, "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Napoleon I's seizure of power was tragedy; his nephew's repetition of the gesture is farce. But the analysis beneath the wit is serious. Marx traces how each class and faction in French society, from the finance aristocracy to the lumpenproletariat, acted out of its material interests while dressing those interests in borrowed costumes: the republicans in the language of 1789, the Bonapartists in the imagery of the first Napoleon, the peasantry in nostalgia for Napoleonic glory.

The result is a theory of political crisis in which no class is strong enough to rule in its own name. The bourgeoisie, unable to govern directly without exposing its interests, cedes executive power to a figure who appears to stand above all classes. Bonaparte represents not a class but the political exhaustion of a society in which class struggle has reached a temporary deadlock. The analysis has been applied, with varying success, to authoritarian seizures of power ever since.