There once was a politician who ran for President, on a platform of restoring national greatness and helping the working class. His main opponent was quite unpopular among the lower and the lower-middle classes in particular, but nonetheless, it came as a surprise to many observers when the first-mentioned politician comfortably won the election. He ruled for some years in a somewhat unsystematic manner, often changing his ministers. A while before the end of his presidency, he made clear that he would not leave.
And finally, in December 1851, Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, or just Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte or even Louis Bonaparte, carried out a coup d'état.
In May 1852, Karl Marx published a short book about this event, its background, and his interpretation: "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" (renamed for a later edition: "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte").[33] In the 20th century, the book appeared to some to be the first analysis of fascism, or at least an early similar political movement. It is not always clear to me how much value there can be found in the post-war "Marxist" analyses of fascism. But maybe Marx himself had something to contribute. His economics may not be his best contribution (or, depending on the viewpoint, it may just be better to read economics by those who followed in his tradition), but maybe his sociology, his political science or his contemporary journalistic observations yield insight and have stood the test of time. To find out, the "Eighteenth Brumaire" probably is a good starting point. (For the book, see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm; that is were the quotes from the books used in this review are from.)
Spoiler: Having read the book, it is still up to interpretation how much it is about fascism. However, the book might yield insights about coups, about political stability, about democracy, and about the worldview of Karl Marx. The book is about class, but though this book was written only four years after Marx had published the Communist Manifesto, the proletarians and the bourgeoisie are not its main characters.
Before actually diving into the book, there are three things to do. The first is to comment on the most famous quote from the book and, in this context, on the book’s writing style. If you want to become an influential intellectual, you should be quotable. Plenty of the books and essays that Karl Marx wrote contain memorable quotes. Sometimes, it seems like such a quote contains a profound insight, and you think hard about a deeper meaning, just because you don't realize that it was, basically, a joke. In the "Eighteenth Brumaire", one such quote reads: "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." As far as I can tell after reading the book and some contextual literature, there is no deep philosophical or "historicistic" meaning behind it. It's just a sarcastic summary of what Marx thought about Louis Napoleon, whose coup d'état in 1851 was, in Marx' eyes, a "farce" compared to the "tragedy" of his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état that took place on the 18 Brumaire, Year VIII of the French revolutionary calendar (by our calendar, 9 November 1799). The tragedy was the dictatorship that buried the French revolution. The farce was the dictatorship that ended the bourgeois dictatorship (in Marx’s view). Marx had privately already used this kind of comparison to compare another one of his contemporaries to Napoleon in a similar way, and in the Brumaire it seems he had a kind of admiration for Napoleon (seeing Napoleon's putsch as tragic, but Napoleon as a great personality or historic person), whereas he saw Louis Napoleon as, well, a farce.[34]
Hegel never really said what Marx put into his mouth, but Wikipedia was not yet around. Which puts us in a better position than Marx. Indeed, Wikipedia often helps when reading the Brumaire, at least if you care about the meaning of cultural references that Marx uses extensively. If you don't google every once in a while while reading the book, you may at best feel like I did when watching Family Guy – the scenes that are based on cultural references are often funny without understanding the cultural references, but sometimes you miss the entire point of the joke. (And sometimes you don't understand the joke at all and it's not funny.) In addition, the author apparently assumes some knowledge of what is happening or has happened in France, including the first French Revolution. He also describes some important events only superficially.
So the second thing to do is to give some historical background on the situation in France during the time that Marx covers, which I'll do in the next section, before then actually getting back to the book. In later parts, I'll also try to fill in the historical details that Marx neglects. However, when you try to understand this historical episode using Wikipedia, you run into trouble: The editions of Wikipedia in different languages, and even articles in the same language edition, are sometimes contradictory and, for example, several articles strongly use works by Marx and Engels as sources about the historic events. This would be problematic even if they were completely neutral sources, given that they wrote immediately during these days and had incomplete information; it is more problematic because Marx and Engels wrote from a very specific worldview and were partisans in the events. So I'll try to check in different articles and use additional sources; nonetheless, take the information with a grain of salt.
Third, a brief comment on Marx’ writing style. From today's point of view, the continuous usage of cultural references is symptomatic of a writing style that, depending on your taste, may be clever or affected (maybe a bit like the cartoons of The New Yorker), Marx’ judgements may be sassy or derisive, a “rousing polemic”[35] or chillingly arrogant and overconfident. The structure is confusing, an orientation about the timing of the events appears too late in the book and does not fully correspond to the chapter structure. Probably, today's medium for this type of text would not be a book. Marx published this book as a series of articles, nowadays it would be a series of blog posts.
To understand the book, some background on events, people, and political movements that Marx mentions is necessary. A good starting point is the French Revolution of 1789. So let us start with Philippe Egalité. Granted, he is only a loosely related character, but hopefully the story of his life is interesting enough to be a good place to start.
The French revolution created some weird, and ironic, stories that could fit perfectly into a book like “A Song of Ice and Fire”; but George R. R. Martin then would also have to write about the political ideas in Westeros. One example is the story of Philippe Egalité and the House of Orléans. Louis Philippe Joseph d'Orléans, or Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, was a cousin of the King of France, Louis XVI, and Premier prince du sang – that is, he would be the next in line to become King of France after the King's Sons and Grandsons. He was one of the richest men in France, a womanizer, and a naval commander who reported a victory after a battle that, in fact, did not go so well; this damaged his reputation. He was a member of the influential Jacobins, a fan of Rousseau and, accordingly, wanted to replace France's Absolutism with a constitutional monarchy. He was one of the major protagonists of the French Revolution of 1789. When the king summoned the assembly called the Estates General in 1789, composed of representatives of the three Estates – the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners – Philippe was elected and headed the liberal minority among the nobility.[36] In 1792, he changed his name to Philippe Égalité (Philippe Equality). When the National Convention, the parliament in 1792, considered the fate of Louis XVI, Philippe Egalité voted in favor of execution, shocking many. However, in the following year, Philippe Égalité's son, Louis Philippe, "who was a general in the French army, joined General Dumouriez in a plot to visit the Austrians, who were at enmity towards revolutionary France. Although there was no evidence that convicted Égalité himself of treason," he was arrested and guillotined.[37]
For the sake of chronological order, I’ll mention another important event at this point. In 1799, faced with economic, military and political difficulties, Director (i.e., member of the executive, the French Directory) Sieyès asked Napoleon if he would be willing to carry out a coup d'état. Under the pretext of an alleged Jacobin coup, the legislature was evacuated from the city of Paris on 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799), and the putschists around Sieyès and Napoleon now demanded a constitutional change. After some commotion among the parliamentarians, soldiers cleared the hall and eventually some members of the Parliament approved the constitutional amendment. The people of Paris did not protest. Because he commanded the troops and was popular, Napoleon could virtually dictate the new constitution. He became First Consul and thus de-facto dictator. The new constitution was approved by referendum, with the new interior minister, Napoleon's brother Lucien Bonapartes, massively falsifying the result. A few years later, Napoleon became consul for life through a constitutional amendment and crowned himself emperor on December 2, 1804.[38]
Back to the story of the old royal family. When in 1814, Emperor Napoleon I. was defeated, Louis XVIII, the brother of Louis XVI, became King of France. Louis XVIII had declared that he would retain the modern administrative and judicial system that Napoleon had established, and grant amnesty to those who had supported the revolution or Napoleon. He implemented a relatively liberal constitution; however, suffrage was granted only to those who paid a certain amount of taxes, and taxes were paid by land owners, such that the electorate was restricted to extremely rich landowners. Thus, though the new constitution was more liberal than the Ancien Regime (i.e., Absolutism before the Revolution), it was not necessarily more democratic.[39] When Napoleon returned from his exile on the island of Elba, Louis XVIII had to flee. After his second defeat, Napoleon was sent much further away, to the small Atlantic island of St. Helena, and the King ruled again. The Chamber of Deputies elected in August of 1815 turned out to be reactionary: the ultra-royalists had an overwhelming majority (census suffrage and the ultra-royalists' White Terror are discussed as the reasons for that). After the King dissolved the Chamber, the new one was more moderate. However, in 1820, the number of deputies in the Chamber was increased from 258 to 430, and the additional deputies were to be elected by the wealthiest quarter of the population in each département.[40]
When Louis XVIII died in 1824, he was succeeded by his youngest brother, who became King Charles X. Charles was the leader of the ultra-royalists who wanted to return to the old ways, which meant rule by divine right instead of guaranteed civil liberties. Nonetheless, the first thing he did was to grant "the style of Royal Highness to his cousins of the House of Orléans, who had been deprived of this by Louis XVIII because of the former Duke of Orléans' role in the death of Louis XVI". Charles was not only reactionary, but also unpopular. In 1830, after failing to gather a parliamentary majority twice, the king and his ministers suspended the constitution, introduced press censorship, dissolved the parliament, and changed the electoral system (abolishing the eligibility of 75 % of voters). The opposition called for resistance. Anti-Bourbon and pro-constitution protestants gathered, riots and clashes with the police emerged, and the situation escalated when the police shut down the newspapers.[41] Charles remained uncompromising, and thus, the liberals decided that his cousin Louis-Philippe d'Orléans should be the new king. While Charles was fleeing to a safer place, Louis-Philippe met the revolutionaries' offer to become Lieutenant General of the Kingdom, basically the regent when the king is absent. Charles X abdicated in favor of his grandson, and it would have been Louis-Philippe's job to make sure that this grandson would become the new king. However, he ignored the king's demand and instead became King of the French (as opposed to the previously-used title King of France).[42]
The revolutionaries of 1830 opted for a constitutional monarchy because they thought that making France a republic would lead to conflict with the rest of Europe. Louis-Philippe was seen as a credible "Citizen King", a compromise ruler that the republicans would accept. Industrialization was taking root, and Louis-Philippe was close to the bourgeoisie. The Charter of 1830 was a new constitution, seeking compromise with the republicans' demands. For instance, it included a reestablishment of the National Guard, a citizen militia with democratic tradition, that had been dissolved by Charles X. But with opposition by republicans and radicals on the one hand and Legitimist monarchists on the other, France remained in unrest. Economic policy was pro-business, including tariffs and policies against labor organizations. The government became more authoritarian over time.[43]
In 1846/47, France slid into an economic crisis, and political unrest increased. Oppressive actions of the king’s government led to riots. The king resigned in favor of his nine-year-old grandson Philippe and fled to England. But instead of getting a new monarch, France again became a republic in February 1848.[44]
Nonetheless, the monarchist camp was strong. However, there were not only two but three monarchist groups in France. There were the Legitimists, who supported the Bourbon main line's claim to the throne and represented, in Marx' reading, the land-owning grande bourgeoisie (maybe including aristocrats); the Orléanists, who supported the Philippe-Egalité line and represented the industrial and merchant bourgeoisie; and finally, there were the Bonapartistes.
Recall that in 1815, Napoleon had been sent to exile. Nonetheless, a Bonapartiste movement emerged that wanted Bonaparte – or at least some Bonaparte – back. Napoléon’s son Franz died in 1832. The son of Napoléon's younger brother Louis, Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, was a Swiss army officer. He was politically ambitious, and in 1833 he started publishing his political ideas.
In 1836, he attempted a coup, being "convinced that, if he marched to Paris, as Napoleon Bonaparte had done in 1815 during the Hundred Days" (after fleeing his first exile on Elba), "France would rise up and join him". He found a regiment in Strasbourg to support his cause. Before this mutiny could become anything relevant, the regiment was outnumbered by loyalists, and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte fled back to Switzerland. Switzerland did not extradite him to France, as he was a Swiss soldier and citizen. In reaction, France threatened by sending soldiers to the Swiss border. Bonaparte left Switzerland, traveled to the United Kingdom and the USA (and the things that the Wikipedia article does not answer is: Why was he welcomed by the English and American elite, and why were the mutineers acquitted in France?). But he tried again. "In the summer of 1840 he bought weapons and uniforms and had proclamations printed, gathered a contingent of about sixty armed men, hired a ship ..., and on 6 August 1840, sailed across the Channel to the port of Boulogne. The attempted coup turned into an even greater fiasco than the Strasbourg mutiny. The mutineers were stopped by the customs agents, the soldiers of the garrison refused to join, the mutineers were surrounded on the beach, one was killed and the others arrested. Both the British and French press heaped ridicule on Louis-Napoleon and his plot. The newspaper Le Journal des Débats wrote, ‘this surpasses comedy. One doesn't kill crazy people, one just locks them up.’ He was put on trial, where, despite an eloquent defense of his cause, he was sentenced to life in prison in the fortress of Ham in the Somme department of Northern France."[45]
How do ideologically ambitious putschists spend their time in prison? They write. One of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's works in prison was a book about poverty of the French working class and what to do about it. Meanwhile, fandom of his uncle Napoleon I grew in France. Louis Napoleon left the prison in disguise, friends had prepared his escape and he took a boat to England. He again seemingly had no problem getting accepted in the English society. His older brother Joseph had died in 1844, his younger brother Louis (sr.) died in 1846, so our protagonist Louis (jr.) now was the next in line.[46]
The events that Marx discusses in the book begin when France becomes a republic in 1848. After some general observations on – or interpretations of – revolutions and historic developments (that strongly suggest that Marx is very certain about his assessment of history and society), he begins his report about the actual events, giving an overview about the periods or "phases that the French Revolution went through from February 24, 1848, to December, 1851 ... : the February period; the period of the constitution of the republic or the Constituent National Assembly – May 1848 to May 28 1849; and the period of the constitutional republic or the Legislative National Assembly – May 28 1849 to December 2 1851." Way too late, at the end of Chapter VI, the author presents a more detailed timeline, including short summarizing titles, that I will make use of in the following.
The “February period” is the time from the abdication of Louis-Philippe (February 24) until May 4, when the Constituent Assembly convened. According to Marx, everything was "provisional" in this period; all groups who had taken part in the revolution were part of the government: "the dynastic opposition, the republican bourgeoisie, the democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie, and the social-democratic workers", and he thinks that it had to be like this because the original intention of the would-be revolutionaries had been an expansion of the franchise, in order to tear down the financial aristocracy's exclusive rule. The cooperation between different classes is something that Marx sees as unsustainable, and so his headline for the February period is "Universal-brotherhood swindle". He claims that while the Proletarians of Paris were discussing how to solve social problems, the old powers regrouped and were unexpectedly supported by the masses of the peasants and the petty bourgeoisie.
Strangely, Marx neither mentions the economic crisis into which the young republic had slided, making many workers unemployed, nor does he mention the National Workshops that were established such that people could work there to attain unemployment relief. These Workshops seemingly were so important to the workers that their later abolishment caused the June uprisings.[47]
The second period that Marx identifies starts on May 4, 1848, and it ends in May, 1849. He calls it "the period of the constitution, the foundation, of the bourgeois republic", and he notes that the newly-elected National Assembly "was a living protest against the pretensions of the February days and was to reduce the results of the revolution to the bourgeois scale". On May 15, 1848, there was a small uprising or attempted coup by socialists against the Assembly.[48] Marx does not write about the event in detail; he just notes that thereby the leaders of the proletarians were removed from the public scene (because they were arrested).
When discussing the second period, Marx spends surprisingly little space commenting on the 1848 June uprising of the Paris proletariat, even though he refers to it as "the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars". In Marx' reading, the new republic is necessarily bourgeois, and different from the previous monarchy; "whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people". This bourgeoisie had decided that the demands of the Paris proletarians were "utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection". Or so says Marx, without describing the actual events.
The situation was that the National Workshops, a core part of the social programme of the government promising a right to work to the unemployed, had grown from 21,000 workers in March to 115,000 in May[49] and had to be subsidized by taxes on land, and thus by the rural population.[50] At some point, the National Assembly decided to close down the National Workshops, to conscript the 17- to 25-year old unmarried men working there and to send the others to construction sites far away from Paris[51] – possibly also because the National Workshops were seen as centers of radicalism.[52]
This initiated the June uprising – a revolt of the working-class districts, with barricades and heavy fighting. Military units commanded by General Cavaignac crushed the revolt, resulting in five thousand dead insurgents; additionally, "fifteen thousand were arrested, and four thousand deported."[53] In the course of the events that Marx covers in the book, the main significance of this "colossal event" is that it alienates the working class from the rest of the classes that drove the revolution three months earlier: On the side of the "bourgeois republic ... stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself." After the June uprising, the proletariat is no longer an active player, but occasionally enters into "alliances" with other classes. Marx also interprets the events as showing that the “bourgeois republic ... signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes." This, however, seems a bit contradictory, after listing who stood against the proletarians. Moreover, Marx introduces the (conservative) Party of Order that had formed as a union of "all classes and parties ... against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism." The reader might note that Marx simultaneously thinks that the "bourgeoisie" is the dictatorial class and that a social (or political) coalition is in power that, in particular, encompasses the "rural population" (that will play an important role later in the book). Also, it seems a little strange that Marx identifies "the proletarian class" with "the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism" – is a party the same as a class? A reason for this particular confusion is that it is sometimes hard to disentangle whether Marx actually describes something or whether he expresses what he thinks others, maybe the bourgeois intellectuals, think. Finally, note that identifying the actions and demands of the rioting Paris workers with the working class as a whole requires a certain kind of partisan conviction.
With the June uprising, the sub-period ends that Marx in his later overview summarizes as "May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days."
The Constituent National Assembly continued its work, and Marx now describes the following time as one in which the "pure republicans", the "republican faction of the bourgeoisie" (that is, the moderate or conservative republicans) was in power but also in disintegration. The republicans had been an accepted, official part of the previous bourgeois monarchy. Interestingly, Marx does not see "common interests" or "specific conditions of production" of this group (except that they are a "clique of republican-minded bourgeois, writers, lawyers, officers, and officials"), but ideological commonalities like nationalism and "concealed imperialism". They were against the "aristocracy of finance", favored protectionism (a shared interest with the industrial bourgeoisie) and were against Communism and Socialism (an aversion shared with all of the bourgeoisie). The pure republicans were unpopular "with the democratic petty bourgeois, and in particular with the revolutionary proletariat". The pure republicans had excluded the socialists from the Executive Committee formed after the february revolution, and Cavaignac took dictatorial powers after the June insurgency, thereby displacing the Executive Committee and thus, excluding the rival "petty-bourgeois, or democratic, republicans".
In late 1848, the constitution was finally adopted by the Constitutional National Assembly. Marx makes some weird points about its content, criticizing the principle that rights are only valid when they don't violate the rights of others or the public order. For him, such restrictions seem to be characteristic of class rule; he does not explain how the balance between different people's interests should otherwise be solved. Additionally, he points out that basically anybody can claim to act for public order when in power – a point that resurfaces during the later events of the book.
Marx then offers some clever observations on the content of the constitution by discussing the constitutional division of powers between "the Legislative Assembly on the one hand, the President on the other", and this sure is one of the valuable parts of the book.
The National Assembly has members that are elected by universal suffrage, that can be reelected, and it "enjoys legislative omnipotence, decides in the last instance on war, peace, and commercial treaties, alone possesses the right of amnesty, and, by its permanence, perpetually holds the front of the stage". While that seems really powerful, its counterpart, the President, holds "all the attributes of royal power, with authority to appoint and dismiss his ministers independently of the National Assembly, with all the resources of the executive power in his hands, bestowing all posts and disposing thereby in France of the livelihoods of at least a million and a half people, for so many depend on the five hundred thousand officials and officers of every rank. He has the whole of the armed forces behind him. He enjoys the privilege of pardoning individual criminals, of suspending National Guards, of discharging, with the concurrence of the Council of State, general, cantonal, and municipal councils elected by the citizens themselves. Initiative and direction are reserved to him in all treaties with foreign countries." Thus, the President has an enormous amount of personal power, many people depend on him and even when he acts against elected bodies, the constitution has given him the legitimacy to do so, again increasing his powers. Another factor skews the favors against the National Assembly: Its legislative actions take place in view of the public, whereas the president can go about his official business without being observed.
Moreover, even constitutional mechanisms to limit presidential power may have unintended consequences. In particular, the president could only be elected for one term, and the National Assembly could remove him. But these limits do not do much to restrict the power of a president while in office. Instead, it implies incentives to the president to abolish the National Assembly and the constitution, so as not to lose his office.
What kind of power does the parliament have on its side? Marx states that the constitution assigns the factual power to the President, but "it seeks to secure moral power for the National Assembly. Apart from the fact that it is impossible to create a moral power by paragraphs of law, the constitution here abrogates itself once more by having the President elected by all Frenchmen through direct suffrage. While the votes of France are split up among the seven hundred and fifty members of the National Assembly, they are here, on the contrary, concentrated on a single individual. …"; thus, the "elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation, but the elected President in a personal relation, to the nation. The National Assembly, indeed, exhibits in its individual representatives the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President this national spirit finds its incarnation. As against the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the people." And this seems a very valid point; a point that Julian Linz also made in a 1990 essay about presidential government[54] on which Matthew Yglesias founded his conclusion that "American democracy is doomed";[55] indeed, in a later version of the essay, Linz cites Marx' observations.[56]
The problem identified is there may be a conflict between institutions that is hard to resolve because both the president and the parliament are elected by the people and thus build on the same source of legitimacy, yet a directly elected president has a natural advantage of personal legitimacy, as he always represents a majority. But is it indeed "impossible to create a moral power by paragraphs of law"? At least, paragraphs do not seem enough; it thus seems plausible that it is essential for a stable democracy to accept the institution of parliament – though not necessarily the members of this parliament, and to see the checks and balances that a parliament provides as a kind of moral authority.
Next, Marx notes that the Republicans, which already expected their electoral decline and feared attacks on the new constitutional order from all sides, introduced high thresholds "for a revision of the constitution". It requires "three-quarters of the votes, cast in three successive debates with an entire month between each, with the added proviso that not less than five hundred members of the National Assembly must vote.” Thereby, the Republicans would ensure that they could even continue to rule as a minority, via the rules and institutions they had embedded in the constitution.
A final relevant property of the months starting with the June Uprising is that Paris was in a state of siege. Marx notes the military may grow fond of this governmental role, such that it may also get used to the thought of directly taking power.
The next important event of the "second period" are the presidential elections of December 1848, the first presidential elections of the French republic. To understand the setting, it is again necessary to review some of the background about Louis Bonaparte. (Quotes in the next paragraphs are, again, not from the book.)
When Bonaparte had heard of the French Revolution of 1848 in February, he went to Paris, but only briefly. "He did not run in the first elections for the National Assembly, held in April 1848, but three members of the Bonaparte family ... were elected..." There were by-elections on June 4[57], and he ran successfully, voted mostly by left-wing peasants and workers, and seemingly he was considered a left-wing or socialist candidate, due to his pamphlet on "The Extinction of Pauperism". However, he did not yet return, to avoid being arrested by the provisional government.[58]
Still in London, "Louis Napoleon was not connected either with the uprising, or with the brutal repression that had followed". He ran for the next National Assembly by-elections in September, where he was very successful, and returned from London.[59]
The first presidential elections of the Second Republic were scheduled for December 1848. The candidates were Louis Napoleon, General Cavaignac, Lamartine, the "leader of the provisional government; Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, the leader of the socialists; and Raspail, the leader of the far left wing of the socialists." Louis Napoleon had a platform appealing “to both the left and right. His election manifesto proclaimed his support for 'religion, family, property...'. But it also announced his intent 'to give work to those unoccupied; to look out for the old age of the workers; to introduce in industrial laws those improvements which do not ruin the rich, but which bring about the well-being of each and the prosperity of all'."[60] He had the backing of the conservatives (though not enthusiastically), and won with 74.2 % (55.6 of registered voters) of votes cast, Cavaignac received 19.7 %, the socialist Ledru-Rollin had 5 % and the other two candidates were basically irrelevant. "Louis Napoleon won the support of all segments of the population: the peasants unhappy with rising prices; unemployed workers; small businessmen who wanted prosperity and order; and intellectuals such as Victor Hugo."[61]
According to Marx, the election of December 10, 1848 was a "reaction of the peasants, who had had to pay the costs of the February Revolution, against the remaining classes of the nation; a reaction of the country against the town. It met with great approval in the army, for which the [pure republicans] had provided neither glory nor additional pay; among the big bourgeoisie, which hailed Bonaparte as a bridge to monarchy, among the proletarians and petty bourgeois, who hailed him as a scourge for Cavaignac".
(Notably, and again, Marx is inconsistent here; first, the election is a reaction of the peasants against all other classes, but then he lists several other classes who also supported Bonaparte, even contradicting the alleged country-vs-town conflict.)
The sub-period that thereby ends is later summarized as "Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. Proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December 10 by the election of Bonaparte as President."
Marx summarizes the sub-period that now begins (December 20, 1848, to May 28, 1849) as "Struggle of the Constituent Assembly with Bonaparte and with the party of Order in alliance with him. Passing of the Constituent Assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie."
In Marx's reading, December 1848 was the beginning of the complete decline of the pure republicans. They had founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, fought the revolutionary proletarians and silenced the democratic petty bourgeoisie, but now the mass of the bourgeoisie is not republican, but monarchist. It supports the Party of Order, consisting of the legitimist large landowners, the Orleanist "aristocrats of finance and big industrialists" and others (Officers, Academics, Clerics, advocates, journalists) who are in either of those factions. The republic was the kind of state where these groups could rule together.
Marx does not write much about the election of Bonaparte (he says he has done so elsewhere). The Conservatives had formed the Party of Order during the June insurrection, uniting Legitimists (landowners) and Orléanists (industrial bourgeoisie) and a small group of Bonapartists. Bonaparte chose Odilon Barrot from this party to become prime minister. The parliament (or Constituent Assembly) had been elected earlier, and the parliamentary majority is still (600 of 880 seats according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1848_French_Constituent_Assembly_election) Republican.
In early January of 1849, a Party-of-Order representative proposed to dissolve the parliament to allow for new elections and now seemingly the whole conservative movement started a campaign for this proposal – including via petitions and protests all over France. The National Guard and the Military were under the command of General Changarnier, a representative of the Party of Order. When the Constituent National Assembly had to decide about its own dissolution on January 29, it found "the building where its sessions were held occupied by the military", troops were concentrated in Paris and force was threatened for the case that the Assembly would not comply. It complied. Marx notes that this basically was already a coup d'état by the royalists against the Republican National Assembly, but the royalists did not see what a precedent this might constitute – they only saw themselves in charge.
Elections were scheduled for March 19, later postponed to May 13 and 14. France was still in a state of siege, political clubs are forbidden in March; in April, the verdicts against the leaders of the May 1848 were proclaimed; moreover, the government replaced the (Republican) prefects with its own.[62]
A particular political event deserves being mentioned. The French Revolution of 1848 had not been an isolated event; similar revolutions had followed in other European countries. One result was the Roman Republic in the Papal states. On April 16, the French Constituent Assembly voted to send a military expedition to Italy. The Republicans' aim seemingly was to help the Italian Revolutionaries. Bonaparte and Barrot also supported the expedition, but with the completely different aim of supporting the pope. General Oudinot's expedition occupied Civitavecchia near Rome.[63] In May 1849, before the new elections, the Constituent National Assembly protested against this occupation. As Marx notes, Bonaparte published a congratulation letter to the general, whereby he presented himself as protector of the army – "protecting" it against the republicans' protests. The royalists seemingly did not see this public emphasis on the relationship between the president and the army as a problem; they "regarded him simply as their dupe".
With the elections in May, the second of the periods that Marx identifies is over.
In chapter III of the “Brumaire”, Marx starts telling the period of the constitutional, or parliamentary, republic, from the first meeting of the Legislative National Assembly on May 28, 1849, until its dispersal on December 2, 1851. The first sub-period is "May 28, 1849, to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the petty-bourgeois democracy." Marx describes the emergence of the Social-Democratic party, the Montagne, a "coalition between petty bourgeois and workers", named after a group that was central to the original French Revolution. With the union of these classes under the roof of the Montagne (which, it seems, was previously only a petty-bourgeois party), the "revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to the social demands of the proletariat; the purely political form was stripped off the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and their socialist point thrust forward". This led to an ideological change of the Montagne: "The peculiar character of social-democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony." The Montagne's aim is the "transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided." So the petty-bourgeois democrats understand themselves as representatives of societal interests which are above and beyond class interests and class struggles. (A view that nowadays seems like mainstream politics, but Marx finds naive.)
Marx now describes how the Party of Order allegedly lured the Montagne into a trap. The government's war against the Roman Republic was anti-constitutional for several reasons, and had been condemned by the previous parliamentary majority. But now the Montagne has no majority, such that its bill of impeachment against Bonaparte and his ministers is useless. The Montagne leaves the parliament, and threatens with insurrection; but as the Montagne (and apparently also the National Guard) rally unarmed, they are dispersed, arrested etc. by the army. According to Marx, the party was overconfident, and it misjudged how the army would behave. Notably, the army was at war and would not react sympathetically if the Montagne would call its military campaign into question. Moreover, potential working-class supporters of the Montagne were distrustful due to memories of the 1848 Uprising, and to overcome this, "it was necessary for great common interests to be at stake. The violation of an abstract paragraph of the constitution could not provide these interests. Had not the constitution been repeatedly violated, according to the assurance of the democrats themselves? Had not the most popular journals branded it as counterrevolutionary botchwork?" So having repeatedly cried wolf in the past left the Montagne without credibility or mobilizational power.
This marks the beginning of the sub-period "June 13, 1849, to May 31, 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of Order. It completes its rule by abolishing universal suffrage, but loses the parliamentary ministry."
Now as Marx notes, the Party of Order "had effected the subordination of the constitution to the majority decisions of the National Assembly. And it understood the republic thus: that the bourgeoisie rules here in parliamentary forms, without, as in a monarchy, encountering any barrier such as the veto power of the executive or the right to dissolve parliament." Yet by "surrendering numerous deputies without further ado on the demand of the courts, it abolished its own parliamentary immunity", weakening its own position and the institution of parliament. Moreover, by "branding an insurrection for the protection of the constitutional charter an anarchic act aiming at the subversion of society, it precluded the possibility of its appealing to insurrection should the executive authority violate the constitution in relation to it", so the victory may turn against the winner.
Chapter IV starts in October 1849. (This does not start a new sub-period; it is still part of "Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of Order.") The National Assembly meets, and on November 1, Bonaparte unexpectedly dismisses the Party-of-Order government (or "Ministry") Barrot-Falloux and appointed a new ministry d'Hautpoul, without the rank of prime minister. Marx characterizes Bonapartes' motives: "He had appointed the Barrot Ministry in order to blast the republican National Assembly in the name of the party of Order; he dismissed it in order to declare his own name independent of the National Assembly of the party of Order."
In the following time, Bonaparte's behavior seems rather volatile, his "brusque message was followed by the most servile declaration of allegiance to the National Assembly. As often as the ministers dared to make a diffident attempt to introduce his personal fads as legislative proposals, they themselves seemed to carry out, against their will and compelled by their position, comical commissions whose fruitlessness they were persuaded of in advance. As often as Bonaparte blurted out his intentions behind the ministers' backs and played with his 'idees napoleoniennes,' his own ministers disavowed him from the tribune of the National Assembly. … He behaved like an unrecognized genius, whom all the world takes for a simpleton."
What, then, had Bonaparte really gained by dismissing Barrot-Falloux in November 1849? The Party of Order thereby lost control over the ministry. And that is a lot. Marx writes (in chapter IV), that with the "Barrot-Falloux Ministry ... the party of Order lost ... an indispensable position for the maintenance of the parliamentary regime, the lever of executive power. It is immediately obvious that in a country like France, where the executive power commands an army of officials numbering more than half a million individuals and therefore constantly maintains an immense mass of interests and livelihoods in the most absolute dependence; where the state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends, and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to the private existence of individuals; where through the most extraordinary centralization this parasitic body acquires a ubiquity, an omniscience, a capacity for accelerated mobility, and an elasticity which finds a counterpart only in the helpless dependence, the loose shapelessness of the actual body politic — it is obvious that in such a country the National Assembly forfeits all real influence when it loses command of the ministerial posts, if it does not at the same time simplify the administration of the state, reduce the army of officials as far as possible, and, finally, let civil society and public opinion create organs of their own, independent of the governmental power." But this is something that the bourgeoisie cannot do because it depends on the state, because "with the maintenance of that extensive state machine in its numerous ramifications … the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are interwoven in the closest fashion. Here it finds posts for its surplus population and makes up in the form of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profit, interest, rents, and honorariums. On the other hand, its political interests compelled it to increase daily the repressive measures and therefore the resources and the personnel of the state power, while at the same time it had to wage an uninterrupted war against public opinion and mistrustfully mutilate, cripple, the independent organs of the social movement, where it did not succeed in amputating them entirely. Thus the French bourgeoisie was compelled by its class position to annihilate, on the one hand, the vital conditions of all parliamentary power, and therefore, likewise, of its own, and to render irresistible, on the other hand, the executive power hostile to it."
Thus, explicitly, Marx is no proponent of making the state stronger and more powerful. He sees the state as repressive, and it has enormous power by making everyone depend on it. For Marx, the state is a parasitic body, and the "army of officials'' is a rent-seeking institution of the bourgeoisie.
Marx notes about the new ministry of November 1849:
"The Hautpoul Ministry contained only one man of parliamentary standing, the moneylender Fould, one of the most notorious of the high financiers. To his lot fell the Ministry of Finance. Look up the quotations on the Paris Bourse and you will find that from November 1, 1849, onward the French fonds [government securities] rise and fall with the rise and fall of Bonapartist stocks."[64]
According to Marx, the Party of Order governs in an authoritarian way, restricts liberties and depicts every discontent, every idea of a reform, every protest as "socialist". And in a way, this is justified because civil liberties now become liberties for the Socialists. Marx is a Communist and he looks down to the democratic socialists. "In this menace and this attack it rightly discerned the secret of socialism, whose import and tendency it judges more correctly than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself; the latter can, accordingly, not comprehend why the bourgeoisie callously hardens its heart against it, whether it sentimentally bewails the sufferings of mankind, or in Christian spirit prophesies the millennium and universal brotherly love, or in humanistic style twaddles about mind, education, and freedom, or in doctrinaire fashion invents a system for the conciliation and welfare of all classes."
Bonaparte now seems like a modern populist who at least knows how to keep his followers happy:
"While Bonaparte's ministry partly took the initiative in framing laws in the spirit of the party of Order, and partly even outdid that party's harshness in their execution and administration, he, on the other hand, sought by childishly silly proposals to win popularity, to bring out his opposition to the National Assembly, and to hint at a secret reserve that was only temporarily prevented by conditions from making its hidden treasures available to the French people. Such was the proposal to decree an increase in pay of four sous a day to the noncommissioned officers. Such was the proposal of an honor-system loan bank for the workers. Money as a gift and money as a loan, it was with prospects such as these that he hoped to lure the masses. ... Never has a pretender speculated more stupidly on the stupidity of the masses.”
Interestingly, Marx rejects redistribution via such presents, sees it as detestable, both with respect to the decision makers and with respect to the recipients. There is a mysterious distinction between, on the one hand, the reordering of society and economy that Marx has in mind and, on the other hand, the demands of those whom he sees as naive socialists or petty-bourgeois democrats, or as a bourgeoisie that only wants to provide for its own losers. Overcoming inequality via reforms is something that he does not necessarily see as morally wrong but as systematically impossible. But why and how this is so distinct from his own ideas remains vague.
Finally, tensions rise. "The National Assembly flared up repeatedly over these unmistakable attempts to gain popularity at its expense, over the growing danger that this adventurer, whom his debts spurred on and no established reputation held back, would venture a desperate coup. The discord between the party of Order and the President had taken on a threatening character when an unexpected event threw him back repentant into its arms. We mean the by-elections of March 10, 1850." (The lack of a reputation he could lose is something that makes Bonaparte similar to some, hm, unorthodox politicians of today.)
Recall that the pure Republicans, when they had a majority in the parliament, had tried to make their decisions hard to revert by writing them into the constitution and making it hard to change that constitution. The Party of Order uses a more obviously class-based strategy. On May 8 it brought in a bill that scrapped universal suffrage, made the right to vote conditional on a three-year residence on the place of voting and workers had to prove this residence with a certificate from their employer. And the Democrats "preach order, ... lawful action, that is to say, blind subjection to the will of the counterrevolution, which imposed itself as the law", seemingly only resorting to the "reproach" against the Party of Order of that its actions were revolutionary.
Can such a shaming reproach work? For this to have any effect, it is probably necessary that both sides believe in the same basic principles of democracy. By contrast, if the side that is more powerful in a given situation and exploits everything that the law permits against the spirit of the law, then all that is left for you is the good feeling that you actually represent the majority, or the ethically right side, or whatever.
The law was passed on May 31, 1850; Marx calls it "the coup d'état of the bourgeoisie". Moreover, while reducing the number of eligible voters from ten to seven million people, the National Assembly did not change the constitutional requirement that two million votes were necessary "to make an election of the President of the Republic valid. If none of the candidates for the presidency received this minimum, the National Assembly was to choose the President from among the three candidates to whom the largest number of votes would fall." Thus, the constitution now required a larger vote share and had thus made it more likely that it would have a final say on the election of the President. To Marx, this was a further way how the Bourgeoisie took power from the people.
The next sub-period, "May 31, 1850, to December 2, 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte." is even split in four sub-sub periods.
Chapter V covers "(1) May 31, 1850, to January 12, 1851. The Assembly loses the supreme command of the army."
After the crisis, the struggle between Bonaparte and the National Assembly starts anew, as a quarrel about money. Since his election, Bonaparte already had been able to get a de-facto doubling of his salary to 1.2 million Franc. Now he wanted more money that he could distribute (an annual civil list), and while the National Assembly did not grant that, it gave him a one-time payment of 2.16 million Franc. (It remains unclear why it did grant that much.)
In the parliamentary recess period of 1850, Bonaparte visited several cities and more or less openly talked about his restoration plans. (As monarchists of different factions, the members of the Party of Order had restoration plans of their own.) Now he was accompanied of a supporting secret society whose members Marx depicts as the "lumpenproletariat":
"On these processions ... he was constantly accompanied by persons affiliated with the Society of December 10. This society dates from the year 1849. On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpen proletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux (pimps), brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10."
This depiction seems cartoonish and extremely resentful. In contrast to the proletariat, which he of course sees favorably, he makes up the lumpenproletariat as a collection of all bad and dubious kinds of behavior and character traits, which Bonaparte himself embodies. To Marx, being parasitic seems to be the core characteristic of being part of the lumpenproletariat – all the members of the Society of December 10 "felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the laboring nation". So the characterization of the lumpenproletariat seems like an obvious case of looking down to a group at the bottom of society. And the only reason why his ingroup – the proletariat – should be different from the outgroup is, well, its labor, such that it is, in Marx' economic worldview, the opposite of both the lumpenproletariat and the bourgeois, all of which are parasitic in some way. This says little about personal responsibility for your place in society, but the moral accusation is implied, and Marx leaves the judgement to the reader whether these people became part of the lumpenproletariat because of their character or vice versa. (In German, Lumpen are rags, while at the same time, a Lump is an unscrupulous person of inferior character, a scoundrel.)
Bonaparte is the leader of this detestable group. "This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery."
The Society of December 10 is depicted as a cheering, dragged-along crowd, faking support of the population where Bonaparte arrives, but also as a thug squad. And while beforehand, all of his power was "put into his hands by the force of circumstances" or copied by him "from the deeds of others", this "secret society ... of disorder, prostitution, and theft" was his own making. At the same time, his public face was that of caring about "order, religion, family, and property". This depiction probably is part of why Marx is, by some, called an early analyst of Fascism (different aspects come later in the book); the Society of December 10 supposedly is, partly, a kind of SA. But note that the Society seemingly has no ideology. It seems its only aim is personal enrichment.
At some point, the Society of December 10 became a potential cause of trouble for Bonaparte as it is involved in a conspiracy to murder General Changarnier and Dupin, the President of the National Assembly. Before a parliamentary inquiry would lay bare the "Bonapartist secret world", Bonaparte disbanded it, "naturally only on paper".
"The Society of December 10 was to remain the private army of Bonaparte until he succeeded in transforming the public army into a Society of December 10." So Bonaparte began using the money that the National Assembly had granted him to win the army over to his side. Apparently, Bonaparte organized parties or banquets first for the officers and non-commissioned officers, then for the enlisted ranks. This led to tensions between Bonaparte and Changarnier, the commander-in-chief of the army in Paris, who at the same time represented the parliament and the Party of Order as a member of the permanent commission. The army develops a split loyalty. Finally, on November 12 1850, Bonaparte sent a letter to the National Assembly in which he mentioned that he was constitutionally responsible for the army, stressing France's demand for "tranquility", and noting his own intention to bow to the "lawfully expressed will" of the people, while speculating about a revision of the constitution (with respect to his term limit). Thus, "Bonaparte committed acts that aimed at usurpation, but the party of Order committed "unrest" if it raised a row about these acts and construed them hypochondriacally." But because the parliament did not dare to mobilize the masses when it would be relevant and likely find public support, it engages in petty arguments with Bonaparte in the next months. Meanwhile, Bonaparte and his allies held a lottery to raise money, apparently involving fraud and intent to embezzle the prize.
Next, sub-sub-period (2) "January 12 to April 11, 1851. It is worsted in its attempts to regain the administrative power. The party of Order loses its independent parliamentary majority. It forms a coalition with the republicans and the Montagne."
In January, Changarnier, commander of the army and national guard, was deposed after being accused of anti-parliamentary activities. He assured his loyalty to the Parliament, which was satisfied by that, but Bonaparte deposed him nonetheless. After some indecisiveness on both sides, emissaries from the Party of Order tried to dissuade Bonaparte from this plan. But: "Whomever one seeks to persuade, one acknowledges as master of the situation. On January 12, Bonaparte, assured by this step, appoints a new ministry in which the leaders of the old ministry, Fould and Baroche, remain."
Next, Bonaparte split the command of National Guard and Army, and the events losing Changarnier and losing control over the National Guard and the army basically left the National Assembly without defense. "War between the two powers has now been openly declared, is openly waged, but only after the party of Order has lost both arms and soldiers. Without the ministry, without the army, without the people, without public opinion, after its electoral law of May 31 no longer the representative of the sovereign nation, sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans everything, ..." The formal resistance in parliament remained toothless and moderate. A vote of no consequence against the ministry was composed in an inconsistent way, because by now the Party of Order was divided, such that the pure Republicans and the social Democrats had to be aboard. Together with the Montagne, the Party of Order rejects "the grant to the President of 1,800,000 francs which the chief of the Society of December 10 had compelled his ministerial clerks to propose", but at the same time rejected the Montagne's proposal to release the political prisoners, so as not to "play with fire" of further "class struggle".
Bonaparte now seemed to consider different compositions of the Ministry, from different factions of the Party of Order, thereby playing them off against each other, while at the same time alarming "them as a whole by the prospect of a republican ministry and the consequent inevitable restoration of universal suffrage", and "at the same time" he engendered "in the bourgeoisie the conviction that his honest efforts to form a parliamentary ministry were being frustrated by the irreconcilability of the royalist factions."
Sub-sub-period (3): "April 11, 1851, to October 9, 1851. Attempts at revision, fusion, prorogation. The party of Order decomposes into its separate constituents. The breach between the bourgeois parliament and press and the mass of the bourgeoisie becomes definite."
In this situation of seemingly chaotic politics, an economic crisis began, leading to further political unrest. "Under these circumstances Bonaparte could venture, on April 11, to restore the ministry of January 18 ... reinforced by M. Leon Faucher, whom the Constituent Assembly during its last days had, with the exception of five votes cast by ministers, unanimously stigmatized by a vote of no confidence for sending out false telegrams. The National Assembly had therefore gained a victory over the ministry on January 18, had struggled with Bonaparte for three months, only to have Fould and Baroche on April 11 admit the puritan Faucher as a third party into their ministerial alliance. In November, 1849, Bonaparte had contented himself with an unparliamentary ministry, in January, 1851, with an extra-parliamentary one, and on April 11 he felt strong enough to form an anti-parliamentary ministry, which harmoniously combined in itself the no-confidence votes of both Assemblies, the Constituent and the Legislative, the republican and the royalist."
Marx notes that the parliament still did not take Bonaparte seriously.
On May 28, the National Assembly and in it the Party of Order had to choose between "continuing the constitution unaltered" or a revision of the constitution. The Bonapartists simply wanted to delete the term limit. The Republicans saw any revision of the constitution as "universal conspiracy against the republic" that they would reject with their blocking minority. Marx notes that for the Party of Order, there are only bad decisions: "If it should reject revision, it would imperil the status quo, since it would leave Bonaparte only one way out, that of force; and since on the second Sunday in May, 1852, at the decisive moment, it would be surrendering France to revolutionary anarchy, with a President who had lost his authority, with a parliament which for a long time had not possessed it, and with a people that meant to reconquer it." (May, 1852 would be the month of the next presidential election.) "If it voted for constitutional revision, it knew that it voted in vain and would be bound to fail constitutionally because of the republicans' veto. If it unconstitutionally declared a simple majority vote to be binding, it could hope to dominate the revolution only if it subordinated itself unconditionally to the sovereignty of the executive power; then it would make Bonaparte master of the constitution, of its revision, and of the party itself. A partial revision, which would prolong the authority of the President, would pave the way for imperial usurpation. A general revision, which would shorten the existence of the republic, would bring the dynastic claims into unavoidable conflict, for the conditions of a Bourbon and an Orleanist restoration were ... mutually exclusive." So this is a prime example of a situation where there is a threat of a would-be dictator but it seems impossible to unite against him. In this situation, by Karl Popper's criterion for a democracy, namely the peaceful transfer of power to another government, democracy seems unable to survive; the current President does not want to leave office, and the factions who could overcome him are disunited by mistrust and contradictory aims. Perhaps the Party of Order could take up the fight against the executive decisively, but as previously stated, its members fear unrest.
With some forth and back and reordering of alliances and factions, a revision was rejected because it did not have the necessary supermajority. "Thus the majority of parliament declared against the constitution, but this constitution itself declared for the minority and that its vote was binding." This leaves the parliament in a situation of dangerous contradictions, in which "revision of the constitution meant nothing but continuation of the presidential authority, just as continuation of the constitution meant nothing but Bonaparte's deposition. Parliament had declared for him, but the constitution declared against parliament."
And so it seems that the Party of Order fled into some more or less intentional passivity: "In order that the head of the executive power might be able the more undisturbedly to draw up his plan of campaign against it, strengthen his means of attack, select his tools, and fortify his positions, it resolved precisely at this critical moment to retire from the stage and adjourn for three months, from August 10 to November 4."
Meanwhile, the intellectual environment of the Party of Order also quarreled outside of parliament, and the "Legitimists in the provinces, with their limited horizon and unlimited enthusiasm, accused their parliamentary leaders, Berryer and Falloux, of deserting to the Bonapartist camp and of defection from Henry V." At the same time, the previously Orleanist "aristocracy of finance" had become Bonapartist and now demanded stability. Marx' alleged reason for that is that the government debt has strongly increased the finance bourgeoisie's interest in the state and its stability. And the industrial bourgeoisie also rejects the Party of Order's cooperation with the Montagne.
The bourgeoisie had become conservative and thus wanted Bonaparte to stay in power. One victim of this was the press. "Still more unequivocally than in its falling out with its parliamentary representatives, the bourgeoisie displayed its wrath against its literary representatives, its own press. The sentences to ruinous fines and shameless terms of imprisonment, on the verdicts of bourgeois juries, for every attack of bourgeois journalists on Bonaparte's usurpationist desires, for every attempt of the press to defend the political rights of the bourgeoisie against the executive power, astonished not merely France, but all Europe." The "extraparliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie, ... by its servility toward the President, by its vilification of parliament, by its brutal maltreatment of its own press, invited Bonaparte to suppress and annihilate its speaking and writing section, its politicians and its literati, its platform and its press, so it would then be able to pursue its private affairs with full confidence in the protection of a strong and unrestricted government", preferring stability over democracy.
Marx notes or denounces that the bourgeoisie, or its intellectual influencers like The Economist, called for calm and then, after Napoleon's coup d'état, accused the proletarians of not having fought for them, of having betrayed them. (Indeed, The Economist's choice of words seems embarassing. "I refer, for example, to the already quoted Economist, which as late as November 29, 1851, that is, four days prior to the coup d'état, declared Bonaparte to be the "guardian of order" but Thiers and Berryer to be "anarchists," and on December 27, 1851, after Bonaparte had quieted these "anarchists," is already vociferous about the treason to "the skill, knowledge, discipline, spiritual insight, intellectual resources, and moral weight of the middle and upper ranks" committed by the masses of "ignorant, untrained, and stupid proletaires."")
The French also seemed to attribute the economic downturn to political uncertainty (although it was also felt in England). Marx sees the crisis as an overproduction crisis, especially in the textile industry. A Liverpool trading house, which he quotes, apparently saw it the same way. According to Marx, this crisis made the bourgeoisie susceptible to political panic. Bonaparte saw this as demand that he could fulfill, at the same time he could not change the constitutional term limit, and the candidature of François d'Orléans, prince de Joinville, from his perspective additionally called for action.
Already since shortly after his election in 1849, says Marx in Chapter VI, Bonaparte had been toying with the idea of a coup d'état, as a “fixed idea”, and he “was so obsessed by it that he continually betrayed it and blurted it out. He was so weak that, just as continually, he gave it up again. The shadow of the coup d'état had become so familiar to the Parisians as a specter that they were not willing to believe in it when it finally appeared in the flesh." In autumn, there were rumors about this in the European press; it was assumed that Bonaparte wanted to restore universal suffrage.
Sub-sub-period (4): "October 9 to December 2, 1851. Open breach between parliament and the executive power. The Assembly performs its dying act and succumbs, left in the lurch by its own class, by the army, and by all the remaining classes. Passing of the parliamentary regime and of bourgeois rule. Victory of Bonaparte. Parody of restoration of empire."
At the end of chapter VI, Marx describes Bonaparte's way to the actual coup d'état.
"On October 10 Bonaparte announced to his ministers his decision to restore universal suffrage", and in the next weeks, he formed the new Thorigny Ministry, replaced the Police Prefect and "the head of the First Military Division, Magnan, concentrated the most reliable regiments in the capital". When the National Assembly "resumed its sessions" on November 4, it immediately "received the message from Bonaparte in which he demanded the restoration of universal suffrage and the abolition of the law of May 31, 1850. ... The National Assembly at once rejected the ministry's motion of urgency and rejected the law itself on November 13 by three hundred and fifty-five votes to three hundred and forty-eight." To Marx, this is the parliament's confirmation that it does not represent the population but rules over it. (Marx does not comment on how slim this majority is.)
The parliament now considered a so-called Quaestors' Bill, which would "establish its right of directly requisitioning troops, of forming a parliamentary army", for protection against Bonaparte. The law lacked a majority, because the Montagne voted against it – it has to fear as much from the Party of Order as from Bonaparte. Marx indeed analyzes the events quite astutely, but the identification of the institution of parliament with the interests of a class seems to stand in his way; there is little or no discussion of the formation of alliances, the quality of leadership in parliament etc. In the next paragraph he summarizes: "By splitting up into its hostile factions, the party of Order had long ago forfeited its independent parliamentary majority. It showed now that there was no longer any majority at all in parliament. The National Assembly had become incapable of transacting business. Its atomic constituents were no longer held together by any force of cohesion; it had drawn its last breath; it was dead." And the question of why contradictory interests can sometimes cooperate and sometimes can't even in the face of a threat would deserve some more analysis.
Bonaparte wins the bourgeoisie over to his side by promising to ensure peace and order and, with them, economic growth, and posing as a fighter for universal suffrage. Finally, he conducts his coup d'état. Marx, who paints him as a ridiculous figure who is always just a caricature of his role models (Napoleon I and Cromwell are mentioned), again stresses Bonaparte's criminal character and behavior:
"He robs the Bank of France of twenty-five million francs, buys General Magnan with a million, the soldiers with fifteen francs apiece and liquor, comes together with his accomplices secretly like a thief in the night, has the houses of the most dangerous parliamentary leaders broken into, and Cavaignac, Lamoricière, Le Flô, Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze, etc., dragged from their beds and put in prison, the chief squares of Paris and the parliamentary building occupied by troops, and cheapjack placards posted early in the morning on all the walls, proclaiming the dissolution of the National Assembly and the Council of State, the restoration of universal suffrage, and the placing of the Seine Department in a state of siege. In like manner he inserted a little later in the Moniteur a false document which asserted that influential parliamentarians had grouped themselves around him and formed a state consulta." What a pity that we don't know how all these behind-the-scenes events can be known.
The rump parliament still met, mainly consisting of the two monarchist factions, it "votes the deposition of Bonaparte amid repeated cries of 'Long live the Republic,'" and is finally arrested.
What is striking about this depiction is that the actual role that Bonaparte's secret society, which Marx has described in detail, plays in the coup remains unclear; after all, Marx had also stressed that Bonaparte has the army on his side.
In chapter VII, Marx reflects on the coup d'état. He notes that after the social republic and the democratic republic, the parliamentary republic has been abolished. "The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpen proletariat to domination, with the Chief of the Society of December 10 at the head." Now the bourgeoisie, which had suppressed the people and spread the fear of "red anarchy", is brutally suppressed by Bonaparte and his "drunken army of order". The proletariat does not start an insurrection after the putsch because this would only bring the bourgeoisie and the army together again. (At least that is Marx's interpretation; however, this seems to suggest quite a coordinated and conscious behavior of the proletarians – whereas the classes often seem to act against their own class-interest during the events. So did everything turn out as it had to, or was it stupidity on the part of the actors?) In any case, during the night of December 1-2, Bonaparte has the leaders of the Paris proletariat arrested, and an organization of the proletarians via secret societies is used as an excuse to disarm the National Guard.
The overthrow of the parliamentary republic will lead to a proletarian revolution, Marx believes, but the immediate result is tyranny. "France … seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to fall back under the despotism of an individual, ... The struggle seems to be settled in such a way that all classes, equally powerless and equally mute, fall on their knees before the rifle butt. " So the way out of the class struggle is to employ an oppressor. This interpretation is a second way in which Marx is a predecessor of later Marxist interpretation of fascism as an authoritarian way of ending class struggles.
Marx claims that before Louis Bonaparte's time, the state, the bureaucracy, had not yet been developed fully enough, so that it was an instrument of the bourgeoisie. But now the state takes on a life of its own. "The executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its wide-ranging and ingenious state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million – this terrifying parasitic body which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all its pores sprang up in the time of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system which it had helped to hasten. The seignorial privileges of the landowners and towns became transformed into so many attributes of the state power, the feudal dignitaries into paid officials, and the motley patterns of conflicting medieval plenary powers into the regulated plan of a state authority whose work is divided and centralized as in a factory."
At this point, 20th-century Soviet Marxists might be inclined to pause. Sure, if you think that the coming to power of a communist party basically completes the "social revolution," then its state—the Soviet state—can't do much wrong. But doesn't Marx's description at least sound like a warning of a danger that could develop whenever you establish a strong and extensive state sector? What are the institutions preventing that?
But though Marx has implicitly identified the state sector as a class of its own, this class is not enough of a power to explain Bonaparte. Next to the definition of the lumpen proletariat, probably the second best-known part of the class analysis in the book is the claim that "Bonaparte represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasants." This thesis seems a truism if it just states empirical election results; though the election was long before the putsch, and there is no way in which voters could have clearly anticipated the course of events. If the thesis refers to more than that, it is not false as it is not falsifiable. Except that Marx previously had suggested that other classes had carried Bonaparte – the bureaucracy, the lumpenproletariat, the financial aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie... Anway. "The chosen of the peasantry is not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament but the Bonaparte who dismissed the bourgeois parliament. For three years the towns had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the December 10 election and in cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the Empire. The election of December 10, 1848, has been consummated only by the coup d’état of December 2, 1851." But when does Bonaparte become the chosen one? How do the peasants know whom to vote for, and what he will do? And wasn't Bonaparte's personal ambition and the willingness to overcome the term limit at least part of the explanation? Mentioning the class connection so late at least allows Marx not to reflect too much on the previous personal traits and motivations.
In any case, if Bonaparte represents the peasants, it is clear why he fights for universal suffrage, and why the (other factions in the) Party of Order wanted to curtail the franchise, suppressing the majority. Marx thinks that the smallholder peasant families' mode of production, their poverty and poor means of communication isolate them, atomize them, so in his reading they are a class, but do not act as such and are incapable of collective action. (This is a little surprising, given that there are numerous farmers' parties in the world. Marx at least writes as though there were none in the France of his time.) Because the peasants cannot represent themselves, they need someone who represents them and protects them (against the other classes) and at the same time subordinates them to himself as their leader. But why should he do that? Why doesn't he betray them, having amassed all the power? Marx does not consider this question, but he closes the "Bonaparte represents the peasants" story by claiming that "Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. ... The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people." The reader can vaguely guess that it was the first Napoleon's deed to bring the revolution's nationalism together with a first version of modern authoritarianism such that he united the small-holding peasants for the first time, and now his nephew is Napoleon I's sequel. But then, what would have happened if there had not been another person called Napoleon?
The whole story that the peasants are behind Bonaparte feels a bit like a movie where the true antagonist is revealed close to the end of the story.[65] At the same time, the analysis feels incomplete. The reason for that is not just that the relative importance of arbitrary events, personal behavior and class determinism remains unclear, but also that the peasants as a class seem politically heterogenous.
Marx tries to counter this criticism in advance.
Having presented the peasants as a class with class interests, Marx notes "the peasant uprisings in half of France, the raids of the army on the peasants, the mass incarceration and transportation of the peasants". How is that possible? "The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice..."
But there lies the rub, in several ways. First, some peasants are revolutionary, others are reactionary, and this is just arbitrary, an observation without explanation. Marx cites the peasants of the Vendée province as an example for reactionary peasants. This refers to an uprising against the French Revolution. Yet contrary to this buzzword, it seems the Vendée peasants had originally not been reactionary. Apparently, they were revolutionary in the beginning, but revolutionary Paris had little sympathy for them, their preferences found no acceptance among the Parisian Jacobins. Moreover, they did act in their own (class?) interest, a bit ineffectual but not disorganized or atomized; organized religion might have been a help in bringing this about. And it was not the case that the Vendee peasants would have cheered the original Napoleon (which you would expect because in 1851 Marx identifies Bonaparte's voters with the Vendée).
"The three years’ stern rule of the parliamentary republic freed a part of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and revolutionized them, even though superficially; but the bourgeoisie violently repulsed them as often as they set themselves in motion.", claims Marx, but these events and the political dynamics remain vague. A fight between "the modern and the traditional consciousness of the French peasant ... took the form of an incessant struggle between the schoolmasters and the priests. The bourgeoisie struck down the schoolmasters." (But why? Apparently, the conservatives seemed more harmless.) Constant conflicts between the peasants and the central state led to the violent repression of the peasants by the parliamentary republic. "And this same bourgeoisie now cries out against the stupidity of the masses, the vile multitude that betrayed it to Bonaparte. ... The bourgeoisie .... is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses so long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary." The uprisings of the peasants were directed against Bonaparte, but also against their own votes of 1848 – whatever that still meant in December 1851. People's ideas were perhaps somewhat inconsistent, and many among the "reddest" voters saw him as the countryside's liberator from urban domination, says Marx. (Before drawing comparisons to today's conflicts between urban and rural areas, note that in the middle of the 19th century a much larger share of the population lived in the countryside. That is exactly why it was enough for Bonaparte's electoral majority.)
So what was the socio-economic situation of the French peasants? According to Marx, the French Revolution "had transformed the semi-feudal peasants into freeholders"; in these years, the peasants became a bulwark (of the bourgeoisie) against the "against the recently overthrown landed aristocracy". So feudalism couldn't come back.
Now, in the middle of the 19th century, these peasants are in economic misery: "progressive deterioration of agriculture and progressive indebtedness of the agriculturist", a form of the economy as reason for peasant impoverishment. The reader can guess what Marx means by this: he sees the constant tendency towards concentration – a characteristic of Marxist economics and different from the economists of his time and the later neoclassical emphasis of the benefits of competition. Now, if Bonaparte shares the peasants' illusion that it is not parcel ownership but external influences that are causing their misery, he may pursue impossible economic policies to preserve the peasants' economic conditions.
Instead of being exploited by aristocratic landowners, the peasants are now being exploited by bourgeois capitalists who draw "profits, interest, and rent from the soil". The peasants live in poverty and misery, which Marx vividly describes. "The bourgeois order" and its state, which were liberators of the peasants in the beginning of the 19th century, are now their oppressors. And the picture that Marx paints is less that of lumpen proletarians but that of rural proleterians: "To the four million (including children, etc.) officially recognized paupers, vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes in France must be added another five million who hover on the margin of existence and either have their haunts in the countryside itself or, with their rags and their children, continually desert the countryside for the towns and the towns for the countryside. Therefore the interests of the peasants are no longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with, but are now in opposition to bourgeois interests, to capital. Hence they find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task it is to overthrow the bourgeois order." And yet Bonaparte's platform includes “strong and unlimited government” to protect the "material order".
Concerning the state, Marx notes that it exploits the smallholding peasants via taxes that finance "the bureaucracy, the army, the priests, and the court – in short, ... the entire apparatus of the executive power." Because the peasant small holdings are so fragmented, it permits domination by a (state) center, because the layer in between – the aristocracy – has been abolished. (Here we could ask whether this predicts a completely different development for capitalism in cases where federal or at least less centralized statehood persists.) Moreover, the small-holding peasantry "produces an unemployed surplus population which can find no place either on the land or in the towns and which perforce reaches out for state offices as a sort of respectable alms, and provokes the creation of additional state positions", that is, the bureaucracy which is the basis for Bonaparte and whose alimentation he already ensures when he is elected president.
Bonaparte also relies on the church, wanting to use it as an "instrument of government". Marx notes that the peasants were "naturally religious" when they emerged as "small-holding owners, in their accord with society, in their dependence on natural forces and submission to the authority which protected them from above"; but now that they are victims of the economic development, and get offered religious promises instead of prosperity, this religion fades away, and the "priest then appears as only the anointed bloodhound of the earthly police". Marx is confident that the peasants "have become naturally irreligious" and would turn against the church.
The last one of the „idées napoléoniennes“ that Marx discusses is the "ascendancy of the army". In the France of Napoléon I, the army was the pride of the "small-holding peasants, it was they themselves transformed into heroes, defending their new possessions against the outer world, glorifying their recently won nationhood, plundering and revolutionizing the world. The uniform was their own state costume; war was their poetry; the small holding, enlarged and rounded off in imagination, was their fatherland, and patriotism the ideal form of the sense of property." The war of the French revolution, including the years of Napoleon I seemingly was a collective defense of the new private property against foreign powers. But now the relevant enemies of the French peasant are not foreign countries, but the bailiffs "and the tax collectors. The small holding no longer lies in the so-called fatherland but in the registry of mortgages." The army is part of the oppressive state, it consists of morally depraved peasant lumpen proletarians.
So the „idées napoléoniennes“ that Bonaparte had published in 1839 and now sets out to put into practice (maintaining the material order, strong state, the church as a vicarious agent of the state, strong military) do, according to Marx fit into the time of Napoleon I., but in 1851 they are completely obsolete, outdated by the economic development, as the small-holding has become obsolete. The idées are "words transformed into phrases, spirits transformed into ghosts." But Marx also thinks that this "parody of imperialism was necessary to free the mass of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition between state power and society. With the progressive deterioration of small-holding property, the state structure erected upon it collapses." To him, the new system is stamped with an expiration date; he assumes that it will collapse and sees the "military-bureaucratic government machinery" as a transition phase which was necessary to overcome feudalism and will be replaced by the kind of "centralization of the state that modern society requires".
After this analytical digression, Marx returns to the events. On December 20 and 21, in a French constitutional referendum, "voters were asked whether they approved of the continuation of the authority of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte and to delegate the powers required to produce a new constitution."[66]
The Bourgeoisie, Marx claims, votes Bonaparte as the last savior of the bourgeois society, with all the contradictions that this entails. Marx' assessment seems to be that bourgeois society can no longer be saved in a less repressive way, due to its internal contradictions. Bonaparte feels committed to the "bourgeois order", more precisely: the "middle class", as whose representative he sees himself. At the same time, he has gained his political power at their expense and must prove himself as the political power of the middle class. The problem with that? "But by protecting its material power he revives its political power." Similarly, he sees himself as representative of the peasants and of the lower classes against the bourgeoisie while protecting the bourgeois order, but "above all, Bonaparte knows how to pose as the Chief of the Society of December 10, as the representative of the lumpenproletariat to which he himself, his entourage, his government, and his army belong, and whose main object is" personal enrichment. (However, the definition of the lumpenproletariat remains sufficiently vague so that it is still not fully clear why Bonaparte is part of it; the class analysis notwithstanding, it mostly seems to be a question of character.) The result is inconsistent and contradictory politics, like granting "innumerable railroad concessions" to promote industry and trade, combined with some kind of underhand dealings for the enrichment of the own "lumpen proletarians"; because of the low demand for railroad stocks "obligation of the Bank to make advances on railroad shares", a transfer of profits to the government and an abolishment of transparency rules such that personal enrichment is possible. (The timing of these events is not clear from the book.)
Marx paints the picture of a kleptocracy in which Bonaparte enriches himself and his entourage. In this situation he sees Bonaparte's behavior as necessarily contradictory, confused and distracting. "Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being at the same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon’s successor, by springing constant surprises – that is to say, under the necessity of arranging a coup d’état in miniature every day – Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the Revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution and makes others lust for it, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping the entire state machinery of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous." In the end, Marx ‘predicts’ that Louis Bonaparte will style himself as emperor again, but also sees this as a kind of degradation of the original Napoleon. Or maybe the prediction is just a sarcastic comment. (After the events of the book, Bonaparte became Emperor Napoleon III, and of course that is cited as evidence for Marx's predictive quality.)
What is the book about, what are the core insights? Sure, it is a report of the short life of the French republic from 1848 till its end in 1851. But it is mainly a book of how Marx interprets the political fights in France as driven by and reflecting class struggles that are in turn caused by the underlying more or less natural and expectable development of the economic structure of society.
Marx makes a number of predictions that were too optimistic (from his point of view); Bonaparte's state survived until his military defeat in 1871, and the 20th century saw an enormously expanded "military-bureaucratic government machinery" in many parts of the world. At the same time, you can see why sometimes falsifying a whole theory may be difficult even though some predictions are falsified: Falsifying some predictions does not mean that the author's interpretation of contemporary society immediately loses its attraction, and accordingly the predictions were adapted later on; the Lakatosian "hard core" of Marx might be the basic interpretation of societies and their 'laws of motion' as being determined by a certain necessary structure and order of economic development, together with the antagonism of the interests of the classes that develop.
The book lays out the class antagonism in many ways. But chapter VII in particular, which aims at laying bare the class structures behind the political unrest, has one main protagonist: the development of the peasants and how this brings them into a conflict of interest with the bourgeoisie and the political authority. The greatest weakness of the analysis is that Marx does not have a model to clearly explain – to the extent that it could predict – the support of the peasants for Bonaparte and their protests afterwards. The explanations he gives seem plausible, but a bit ad-hoc and arbitrary. The peasants may want Bonaparte to keep the bourgeoisie at bay – or maybe Marx just projects his interpretations as explanations which may then just explain everything and nothing. To be fair, the lack of polling data would have made it hard to clearly test a predictive model.
More generally, Marx's description of which party represents which class seems intuitive as a description, but where it could be meant causally, there is a need for a clear model of how class interests actually translate into the behavior of political parties. Maybe this is unfair, because 170 years later we still do not have an easy model for that. But then again, if someone today were as confident as Marx was, he should be able to earn a lot of money on Metaculus.
According to the assessment by Brad DeLong, Marx's general project consisted of:
"An undeveloped philosophy of human liberation.
An oppositional, revolutionary political stance (with absolutely no sense of how revolutions eat their own children).
About ten paragraphs' worth of asides in the "Communist Manifesto" and in the preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" about how economic change creates and transforms social classes which then struggle for political power and how those struggles then shift the path of economic development.""
And DeLong thinks that the third of these is Marx's "primary contribution", "But it is really only ten paragraphs laying out this theory of 'historical materialism.' It's a powerful insight–but it is not a huge part of his lifetime work. I wish it had been: the historical materialist chapters of Capital in which he tries to apply his ten paragraphs are very good."[67]
The “Brumaire” definitely is about “how economic change creates and transforms social classes which then struggle for political power”. We can add it to DeLong’s short list. Note also that Marx is not constrained by a two-class cliche worldview when writing this book; rather he develops his philosophy as he sees history, with some fixed ideas, sure, but open enough to adapt his theory.
Then again, some Marx fans seem to exaggerate the insights of the book. For example, in Friedrich Engels’ preface to the third edition, he writes quite enthusiastically that Marx discovered the great law of motion of history according to which all battles and fights in history are basically class struggles and they depend on the economic basis of society. This law, he states, is as important for understanding history as the law of energy conversion is for science. In the introduction to their online edition of the book, the authors of Marxists.org[68] claim that Marx proves in the book that the coup was the necessary result of the previous development, the lawful result of the “counterrevolutionary attitude of the bourgeoisie”, the book develops the “role of class struggle as the driving force of history” and demonstrates the “limitation and contradictions of bourgeois democracy”. Well, maybe. But then, which form of society does not have contradictions? What would have happened if the political leaders mentioned in the book would have behaved differently? (Or couldn’t they? Why not?) And are there really so many insights here which a modern ("bourgeois"?) sociologist or economic historian would not accept?
Even if we disregard the class-struggle topic, Marx offers some useful insights into political fights and how they may play out.
First, we already saw how factions in power during the events try to make sure that their influence does not collapse after the next election. The first attempt was that of the pure republicans to write a republican constitution and make the supermajority threshold for changing it very high. This works for a while, but if playing by the rules makes changing the rules very hard, the acceptance of the rules themselves may suffer, possibly leading to a constitutional crisis. The second attempt is the restrictive franchise introduced by the Party of Order. This reduces the influence of the masses, but only if they still accept the system and do not coordinate and revolt exactly because they are disenfranchised. It also allows Bonaparte to act as a defender of the rights of the poor.
Second, attempts to circumvent the rules may also backfire. For instance, the Party of Order had itself attacked the parliamentary order – by an outer-parliamentary campaign that questioned the parliament's legitimacy including the military threatening the parliament until it dissolved itself. But this can contribute to diminishing the special status of the parliament and of the representatives, which would be worthy of protection.
Third, we saw that the division of powers and rules to keep leaders in check may also be counterproductive. The division of powers between parliament and president may lead to split legitimacy in which the president has several advantages. And a rule like a term limit may make it attractive to putsch before the term is over (however, if someone does that because of a term limit, we can doubt that he would accept being voted out if there were no term limit).
Fourth, a democracy that is not supported by the majority of the population is unsustainable. In France in 1848, the majority of the population were conservative monarchists, and additionally, conservative monarchists who supported different monarchs, which created instability even in the conservative party. The royalist factions could rule together in the republic as long as they would not question this contradiction, but this is not sustainable. Class-struggle has to imply instability. But even if political parties are more flexible with respect to their class identity, mutual mistrust is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and clinging to mutually exclusive ideas implies an impossibility of sustainable cooperation.
Fifth, sometimes a compromise can be something that both parties do not really want, but it may work for a while for pragmatic reasons. For instance, “The parliamentary republic was more than the neutral territory on which the two factions of the French bourgeoisie, Legitimists and Orleanists, large landed property and industry, could dwell side by side with equality of rights. It was the unavoidable condition of their common rule, the sole form of state in which their general class interest subjected to itself at the same time both the claims of their particular factions and all the remaining classes of society. As royalists they fell back into their old antagonism, into the struggle for the supremacy of landed property or of money, and the highest expression of this antagonism, its personification, was their kings themselves, their dynasties."”
Sixth, it is important to keep in mind that abuse of power, the development of forceful institutions, and justifications for government action can backfire, develop lives of their own, and it may be impossible to control them afterwards. For instance, the conservative coalition against the June uprising (or against the radicals before that) had "'saved' society from “the enemies of society.” They had given out the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order,” to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou shalt conquer!” From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest, it goes down before the cry: “property, family, religion, order.” Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an 'attempt on society' and stigmatized as 'socialism.' And finally the high priests of 'religion and order' themselves are (...) hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement – in the name of property, of the family, of religion, and of order." (Chapter I)
Seventh, there is something that is not discussed explicitly in the book but that is implicit and very central. It may even be overlooked because it seems trvial, but it should be stressed: Having the loyalty of the armed forces is central to having power. Marx talks at length about the Society of December 10, but it remains a bit unclear how important that society really is as a kind of paramilitary.[69] However, having command over the army and being able to appoint its commanding officers yields a power that is hard to overcome. It would be worthwhile to work out in detail why armies are able to coordinate so well and how it is determined who gets their loyalty, but if we take the coordination as given, it is tautological that those who have the army's loyalty have a lot of power.
Finally, if there is someone who attempts to do a coup d’état, and later on becomes president and talks of doing it again, you should suspect that he might actually be serious.