Acknowledgements Contributors 1. Marx's Lumpenproletariat and Murray's Underclass: concepts best abandoned? Published by Pluto Press in Sep Back to Top.
I wish to bring you into the richest plains in the world. Wealthy provinces, great cities will be within your power. You will meet with honour, glory and riches. Soldiers of Italy, might you lack the courage or the staying power? In only a few months, Bonaparte succeeded in defeating four disciplined Austrian armies in battle, expanding the territory of the Republic, and establishing two sister republics, before finally forcing most of the dynastic sovereigns of the Italian peninsula to negotiate with him directly.
Owing to his achievements on the Italian front, Bonaparte became very popular and extended his influence amongst those at the highest rungs of power. After successfully negotiating the Treaty of Campo Formio with the Austrians in October , he returned triumphantly to Paris where, in March , the Directory appointed him commander of the highly secretive expedition to Egypt.
The French expeditionary corps put boots on Egyptian soil during the night of July. The Egyptian campaign began without any major difficulties, with Bonaparte winning victories over the Mamluks notably at the Battle of the Pyramids on 3 Thermidor An VI 21 July , but the situation rapidly disintegrated. Although forced into retreat, the French army directly under Napoleon saw one last success in Egypt defeating the Ottomans at Aboukir on 25 July At this point Bonaparte knew that his troops, depleted in number, were exhausted, afflicted by fatigue and illness, and therefore incapable of continuing with the expedition beyond the territory they had already conquered.
However, the political situation had changed considerably since his departure. The Directory was in tatters, war had broken out again, and France now had to face the Second Coalition. Despite its victory over the Montagne, the Party of Order became increasingly subservient to Louis Bonaparte, and in November , the president felt strong enough to dismiss the royalist ministry and appoint a government of men loyal only to him. At this point the Party of Order might have attempted to mobilize all the pro-democracy forces against the growing executive power of President Bonaparte.
In fact it did just the opposite. In March , elections were held to replace the radical leaders who had been expelled from the Legislative Assembly the previous June. When Parisian voters handed a sweeping victory to the Montagne and Social Democrats, the Party of Order moved to abolish universal suffrage, disenfranchising 30 percent of the French electorate.
From this point on, the Party of Order began to collapse as a political force. Having lost its majority in the Legislative Assembly, it was forced to rely on a coalition with the radicals of the Montagne—the very force it had just been in conflict with.
The weakness of the conservative parliamentarians allowed Louis Bonaparte to consolidate his power over the course of the summer and fall of , wresting control of the army away from the Assembly and appointing an even more conservative and sycophantic ministry.
In October, he undermined the Legislative Assembly still further by declaring his intention to restore universal male suffrage. Finally, on December 2, , Bonaparte carried out a coup and dispersed the Legislative Assembly—he would soon go on to declare himself emperor of France. The very title of his book provides one important clue to his analysis of these events.
During the first French Revolution, which began in , the revolutionaries got rid of the Roman calendar and renamed the months of the year. Intended to symbolize a complete break with the old, pre-revolutionary way of doing things, the new names were in use from —the most radical stage of the revolution—to He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
As he notes on the first page:. Just when [people] seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language…. The revolution of knew nothing better to do than to parody, now , now the revolutionary tradition of to Some of the main questions Marx asks in the Eighteenth Brumaire are: why was it impossible to reenact the French Revolution fifty years later; what had changed in French society in the intervening years; why was any attempt to recreate fated to result in the dictatorship of a frankly rather buffoonish character, Louis Bonaparte?
The politics of social classes In order to answer these questions, Marx studied the events in question with a method he called historical materialism. From the mids, Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels had been developing a theoretical framework for understanding the development of human societies. Hegel, they insisted that the material conditions of life, and not ideas, drove the development of human society; in contrast to the materialist philosophy of German thinkers such as Ludwig Feuerbach, they insisted that humans were capable of altering the world around them.
Historical materialism began to emerge as a fully formed theory in works such as The Holy Family and The German Ideology As Frederick Engels wrote in the s:. Marx…first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it.
This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science—this law gave him here, too, the key to an understanding of the history of the Second French Republic. He put his law to the test on these historical events, and even after thirty-three years we must still say that it has stood the test brilliantly. On the face of it, the events of — can seem pretty confusing, especially for readers unfamiliar with the basic contours of French history.
Marx wants to know the social and economic interests that these different factions, parties, and individuals represent, and how the conflicts between them reflect the struggles taking place at the base of society. Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations.
The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity…. In historical struggles one must distinguish…the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality. Marx had a love-hate relationship with this class. The French bourgeoisie plays a much less revolutionary role in The Eighteenth Brumaire.
One of the major goals of the book is to explain why the vanguard of the European bourgeoisie could, just a couple of generations after its heroic role in one revolution, do everything in its power to limit the spread and scope of another revolution. Marx identifies three main factions within the French bourgeoisie: the big landlords, the industrialists, and the finance capitalists. Two of these factions, the landlords and industrialists, form antagonistic wings of the Party of Order—the landlords favoring a return to the Bourbon dynasty of Louis XVI and operating under the name of Legitimists, and the industrialists supporting the Orleans dynasty of Louis Philippe.
For Marx, the political rule of the bourgeoisie is in a certain sense at its strongest and most secure under a democratic republic. He argues that the democratic republic allows the different factions of the capitalist class to work out their differences and disagreements in a peaceful fashion and to put the interests of the class as a whole above the sectional interests of any particular group of capitalists. Marx expresses this phenomenon with a neat dialectical formulation:. The republic, true enough, makes their political rule complete, but at the same time undermines its social foundation, since they must now confront the subjugated classes and contend against them without mediation, without the concealment afforded by the crown, without being able to divert the national interest by their subordinate struggles among themselves and with the monarchy.
This is the key to the different political role played by the bourgeoisie in as compared to the class struggle between the workers and the capitalists was now at a much more advanced stage than it had been fifty years earlier, and the bourgeoisie had consequently become much more conservative.
Investor Relations. Review a Brill Book. In the second part I analyse the theatrical register chosen by Marx in order to represent the Second Empire as a society without a body, a phantasmagoria in which the Constitution, the National Assembly and law — in short, everything that the middle class had put up as essential principles of modern democracy — disappear. In the third part I argue that Marx does not elaborate a theory of revolution that is good for every occasion.
What interests him is a historiography capable of grasping, in the various temporalities of the revolution, the chance for a true liberation. Adamson Walter L. Cassina Cristina Il bonapartismo, o la falsa eccezione. Fietkau Wolfgang Schwanengesang auf Kouvelakis Stathis Goshgarian G. The MIT Press. Moss Bernard H. Padover Saul K. Tomba Massimiliano Thomas Peter D.
Wendling Amy E. Marx , p. See also the new German edition with a commentary by Hauke Brunkhorst: Marx a. On the formula tragedy-farce and comedy, see Marx a, pp. See Marx and Engels , Apparat, p. See also, for bibliographical references regarding this term, Cassina , pp. Marx , pp. See Neocleous Marx and Engels , p. In a letter to Arnold Ruge of March , Marx was already using the image of tragedy and comedy in relation to historical facts: cf.
Marx and Engels , pp. Osborne , p. White , p.
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