The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte Notes

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

• All the great events and characters of history occur twice, firstly as tragedy, secondly as farce

  • Louis after Napoleon, democratic socialists (montagne) of 1848-51 after the Jacobin democrats of 1793-93

  • Men make their own history, but not just as they please – they inherit circumstances, symbols and traditions

  • Hence when they attempt to revolutionize themselves they inevitably draw upon spirits of the past, borrowing names, words, uniforms etc

  • French Revolution draped itself alternately as Roman republic and Roman empire

  • Cromwell borrowed Old Testament language, passions and delusions for a bourgeois revolution

  • Men speak in the language of past revolutions as a substitute for understanding what is happening; when they understand the old symbols etc are jettisoned

  • ‘The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future’

• The revolution of 1848 began as a bourgeois attempt to widen the franchise and overthrow the financial aristocracy, but was radicalised by the proletariat

  • Interpreted by the proletariat as having created a ‘social republic’, which stood in ‘the most bizarre contradiction to everything that could be put into practice there and then, given the material available, the level of popular education, present circumstances and conditions’

• After each defeat the proletariat allied themselves with different champions from different strata, and ‘ever more ambiguous figures’ took up leadership

  • the workers sought cooperative banks, workers’ associations etc - choice to ‘attain salvation behind society’s back, privately, within its own limited conditions of existence’ rather than attempting to overthrow the old world by means of its great resources, and hence ‘necessarily coming to naught’

Summary of periods 1848-51

1. February-May 1848: February period. Prologue. Sham solidarity

2. Period of founding the republic and of the constituent assembly

   1. May-June 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of proletariat in June days

   2. June - December. Dictatorship of pure bourgeoisie, drafting of constitution, imposition of state of siege in Paris. Bourgeois dictatorship supplanted by Bonaparte’s election to presidency in December.

   3. December - May 1849. Struggle of constituent assembly with Bonaparte and party of order in alliance with him. End of constituent assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie.

3. Period of the constitutional republic and legislative national assembly

   1. May - June 1849. Struggle of petty-bourgeois with bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of petty-bourgeois democrats.

   2. June - May 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of order. Completion of its supreme through abolition of general right to vote, but loss of parliamentary control over cabinet

   3. May - December 1851. Struggle between parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte.

      1. May - January 1851. Parliament loses supreme command over army

      2. January - April 1851. Parliament fails in attempt to regain administrative authority. Party of order loses independent parliamentary majority. Coalition with republicans and montagne

      3. April - October 1851. Attempts at revising constitution, fusing royalist parties, suspending presidential power. Party of order splits into constituent parts. Breach between bourgeois parliament and bourgeois press/public consolidated.

      4. October - December 1848. Open break between parliament and executive. Parliament defeated after desertion by its own class, the army, and all other classes. End of parliamentary regime and of the rule of the bourgeoisie. Victory for Bonaparte and parody of an imperial restoration.

• In the first French Revolution the constitutionalists were succeeded by the Girondins and the Girondins by the Jacobins - each party leaned on the more progressive for support. The revolution followed an ascending path

  • The 1848 revolution reversed this. The proletarian were an annex of the petty-bourgeois democrats, but were betrayed by them in the June days. Then the democrats rode on the shoulders of the bourgeois republicans, before the bourgeois republicans shook them off and annexed themselves to the party of order. The party of order abandoned the bourgeois republicans and heaved itself onto the shoulders of the armed forces, who cut the party of order loose in the December coup. Thus the revolution followed a descending path

• The revolution contained many contradictions

  • constitutionalists conspiring against the constitutions; constitutional revolutionaries; a national assembly that wants to be all powerful and remains parliamentary; a montagne that makes a career out of patience and prophecies of victory; royalists who found the republic etc etc.

• When the party of order defeated the montagne (petty bourgeois) in June 1849, it also brought about the subordination of the constitution to the majority decisions of the national assembly. By condemning the insurrection to maintain constitutional rule as anarchic, it precluded an appeal to insurrection, in the event of executive usurpation

• The bourgeoisie in late 1849 introduced a wine tax and education act disallowing atheism. They declared the old despised tax system sacrosanct and tried to secure the old habits of mind that allowed it by passing the education act.

• The social democrats did well in early 1850 by-elections, so Bonaparte hid behind the national assembly, who moved against universal suffrage. Having ‘fussed and blustered’ in a revolutionary way during the elections, the montagne now sermonised in a constitutional way about public order, legal procedure etc ie blind subjection to the terms of the counter-revolution, which paraded as law. They were defeated, censored and ‘deserved their fate’

• To prove its faith in private property, the part of order declared that representatives may be imprisoned for debt on the prior...

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