The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: History Repeats ... First As a Tragedy, Then As a Farce

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was written by Karl Marx between December 1851 and March 1852, and originally published in 1852 in Die Revolution. The pamphlet shows Marx in his form as a social and political historian, treating actual historical events-those leading up to Louis Bonaparte's coup d'etat of 2 December 1851-from the viewpoint of his materialist conception of history. Together with Marx's contemporary writings on English politics, the Eighteenth Brumaire is the principal source for our understanding of Marx's theory of the capitalist state. The "Eighteenth Brumaire" refers to November 9, 1799 in the French Revolutionary Calendar-the day Louis Bonaparte's uncle Napoleon Bonaparte had made himself dictator by a coup d'etat. Marx said it was the intention of the work to "demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part." The work contains the most famous formulation of Marx's view of the role of the individual in history: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." Marx's interpretation of Louis Bonaparte's rise and rule is of interest to later scholars studying the nature and meaning of fascism. Many Marxist scholars regard the coup as a forerunner of the phenomenon of 20th century fascism.