The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Glossary

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"Crapulinsky" and Bonaparte's Satirical Names: One of several mocking epithets Marx applies to Louis Bonaparte across the book, evoking crapulence and dissolute unseriousness — part of a running rhetorical strategy of refusing Bonaparte any dignity even while taking seriously the social forces that put him in power. Marx elsewhere calls him a mere "remplacant" (substitute) for the real Napoleon, underscoring the farce framing set up in Chapter I.; Related: Tragedy and Farce, Louis Bonaparte
"Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!": The Aesop's-fables tag ("Here is Rhodes, leap here!") Marx uses to close his account of how proletarian revolutions differ from bourgeois ones: rather than rushing from triumph to triumph, they "criticize themselves constantly... come back to what seems to have been accomplished, in order to start over anew," until a situation is reached where "all retreat impossible" and action can no longer be deferred to an imagined future.; Related: Proletarian vs. Bourgeois Revolutions
"Property, Family, Religion, Order": The Party of Order's rallying slogan after the June Days, used to brand any dissent — however moderate — as an "assault upon society." Marx traces its ironic collapse across the book: as the ruling coalition narrows, the slogan is turned against ever more of its own former users, until finally, in Chapter VII, he shows Bonaparte's coup completing the cycle by turning every one of the bourgeoisie's own repressive weapons back on the bourgeoisie itself.; Related: The Party of Order, The June Days (1848)
"Well Hast Thou Grubbed, Old Mole": Marx's borrowed Hamlet line (via Hegel) marking the moment he expects the revolution to complete its second, deeper phase — dismantling the executive power after having already matured and destroyed the legislative power. It expresses his conviction that the coup, despite appearing to be pure counter-revolution, is unintentionally clearing ground for a more thoroughgoing reckoning still to come.; Related: Executive Power vs. Legislative Power

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18 Brumaire: The date in the French Revolutionary calendar (November 9, 1799) when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power, ending the Directory. The book's title identifies Louis Bonaparte's coup of December 2, 1851 as this history's farcical echo — a nephew restaging an uncle's decisive act as parody, complete with borrowed name and imagery.; Related: Tragedy and Farce, The Coup of December 2, 1851

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Blanqui and the May 15 Uprising: The failed attempt by the Parisian proletariat to storm and dissolve the Constituent National Assembly on May 15, 1848, which resulted in the removal of Auguste Blanqui and other genuine proletarian leaders "from the public scene for the whole period of the cycle" the book covers — a formative early defeat that leaves the workers' movement without its sharpest leadership going into the June Days.; Related: The Constituent National Assembly, The June Days (1848)
Bonaparte's Financial Manipulations: The catalog Marx compiles in Chapter VII of Bonaparte's contradictory economic favors to each class he claims to represent — railroad loans that enrich insiders rather than build railways, tax cuts for wholesale wine buyers paired with doubled taxes on the retail wine the poor actually drink, mortgage banks announced but never funded — presented as evidence that Bonaparte's regime can only rob one group to bribe another, never truly reconcile their interests.; Related: Louis Bonaparte, Bonapartism
Bonapartism: The book's central political concept, though Marx never uses the later coinage directly: a state that achieves apparent independence from every social class once the bourgeoisie and proletariat have fought each other to a standstill, letting an executive power backed by the army and bureaucracy dominate society from above. Marx calls the resulting apparatus "this fearful body of parasites, that coils itself like a snake around French society, stopping all its pores."; Related: Executive Power vs. Legislative Power, The Allotment Peasantry

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Executive Power vs. Legislative Power: Marx's framing of the coup's deeper meaning: not merely Bonaparte defeating parliament, but "the triumph of Bonaparte over parliament, of the Executive over the Legislative power, of force without phrases over the force of phrases." He argues the revolution methodically matures each power in turn — first ripening and then destroying the Legislature's authority, then doing the same to the Executive — as stages toward a final reckoning.; Related: Bonapartism, The Coup of December 2, 1851

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Guizot: François Guizot, the leading statesman and historian of the July Monarchy, quoted by Marx reacting to the December coup with grim irony: "C'est le triomphe complet et definitif du Socialisme!" ("It is the complete and definitive triumph of Socialism!") — a remark Marx uses to show even Bonaparte's bourgeois opponents sensed something larger than an ordinary power grab had occurred.; Related: The Coup of December 2, 1851, The Party of Order

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Idées Napoléoniennes: The bundle of ideological claims Marx says Louis Bonaparte must uphold to justify his rule: the sanctity of the small-allotment property system, a strong centralized bureaucracy, clerical authority, and military glory. Marx systematically shows each has curdled from its original, historically progressive Napoleonic form into "the hallucinations of its death struggle; words turned to hollow phrases, spirits turned to spooks."; Related: The Allotment Peasantry, The Mortgage and the Allotment System

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Legitimists and Orleanists: The two royalist factions that composed the Party of Order — Legitimists backing the elder Bourbon line, Orleanists backing the House of Orleans (Louis Philippe's family). Marx argues their public loyalty to "their respective royal House" was really a mask for underlying and irreconcilable economic interests: "large landed property" versus "high finance and large-scale industry."; Related: The Party of Order
Louis Bonaparte: The book's subject: nephew of Napoleon I, elected President of the Second Republic in December 1848 largely on the strength of his name among the allotment peasantry, who seizes dictatorial power in the coup of December 2, 1851. Marx insists his rise cannot be explained by personal genius or trickery alone — "Bonaparte represents an economic class... the Allotment Farmer" — making him a symptom of French social contradictions rather than their sole cause.; Related: The Allotment Peasantry, The Society of December 10, Bonapartism

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Proletarian vs. Bourgeois Revolutions: Marx's contrast in Chapter I: bourgeois revolutions like those of the eighteenth century "rush onward rapidly from success to success" but are short-lived, while proletarian revolutions of the nineteenth century "constantly interrupt themselves in their own course... scorn with cruel thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and meannesses of their first attempts," recoiling repeatedly before their own vast, still-undefined objectives.; Related: "Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!"

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The Allotment Peasantry ("A Sack of Potatoes"): Marx's account of France's smallholding farmers, formed by identical conditions of life but lacking the mutual contact needed to organize as a class: "a bag with potatoes constitutes a potato-bag" — a mass, not a class-in-action. His famous conclusion: "They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them." This structural need for a master figure, Marx argues, is what Louis Bonaparte fills.; Related: Bonapartism, The Mortgage and the Allotment System
The Code Napoléon: Napoleon I's civil law code, invoked by Marx both literally (its rule that "la recherche de la paternite est interdite" — the inquiry into paternity is forbidden — is noted alongside rumors of Louis Bonaparte's own illegitimate birth) and as a symbol of how the legal order built to protect the allotment peasantry's new property has, by the 1850s, become, in Marx's words, "but the codex of execution, of sheriff's sales and of intensified taxation."; Related: The Mortgage and the Allotment System, Louis Bonaparte
The Constituent National Assembly: The body elected to frame a constitution (May 1848 – May 1849), which Marx describes as a "living protest" against the February days' radical promise, intended to bring the revolution "back to the bourgeois measure." The Parisian proletariat's attempt to dissolve it by force on May 15, 1848 fails and costs the workers' movement its leadership, including Blanqui.; Related: The February Revolution (1848), Blanqui and May 15
The Constitutional (Parliamentary) Republic: The period from May 1849 to December 1851 when the Party of Order's legislative assembly and Bonaparte's presidency were locked in an escalating, mutually destructive struggle over executive versus legislative power. Marx narrates this as a slow process in which the Party of Order, in fighting the workers, systematically dismantled the very liberties and institutions it would later need to check Bonaparte.; Related: The Party of Order, Executive Power vs. Legislative Power
The Coup of December 2, 1851: Louis Bonaparte's seizure of dictatorial power, dissolving the National Assembly and arresting his opponents — the event the entire book builds toward and dissects. Marx frames its aftermath ironically as the Party of Order's own logic turned against itself: every repressive tool the bourgeoisie built to suppress the workers (the state of siege, transportation without trial, military commissions replacing juries) is now used against the bourgeoisie itself.; Related: 18 Brumaire, Bonapartism
The February Revolution (1848): The uprising that toppled Louis Philippe and opened the period the book covers, which Marx calls "the prologue of the revolution": a government that declared itself "provisional" in every particular, uniting dynastic opposition, republican bourgeoisie, and the social-democratic labor element in an uneasy, temporary coalition before their interests diverged.; Related: The June Days, The Constituent National Assembly
The June Days (1848): The Parisian workers' uprising against the constituent assembly's bourgeois republic, crushed with over 3,000 killed and 15,000 deported without trial — what Marx calls "the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars." He treats it as the pivot of the whole period: the moment the proletariat is defeated and "steps to the background on the revolutionary stage," while "Property, Family, Religion, Order" becomes the Party of Order's rallying cry.; Related: The February Revolution (1848), "Property, Family, Religion, Order"
The Lumpenproletariat: Marx's term for the declassed, disorganized poor whom Bonaparte organizes as his street muscle — cataloged in a long list: "ruined roues... vagabonds, dismissed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, sharpers, jugglers, lazzaroni, pickpockets, sleight-of-hand performers, gamblers, procurers, keepers of disorderly houses, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, scissors grinders, tinkers, beggars." Distinct from the industrial working class, this is the social base Marx identifies for Bonaparte's power.; Related: The Society of December 10, Bonapartism
The Mortgage and the Allotment System: Marx's economic explanation for why the same allotment-farming class that Napoleon I emancipated now supports Napoleon III: the mortgage has replaced feudal dues, and "the City Usurer stepped into the shoes of the Feudal Lord." The debt burden on French farmland, he notes, carries an annual interest "as great as the annual interest on the whole British national debt," turning what was once a guarantee of independence into a mechanism of ruin.; Related: The Allotment Peasantry, Idées Napoléoniennes
The Mountain (Montagnards): The democratic-socialist left faction of 1848-51, named after the radical "Mountain" of the 1793 Convention — one of Marx's clearest instances of the tragedy/farce pattern, since he pairs it directly with its 1793 namesake as an example of history's costumed repetition. Their eventual alliance with elements of the Party of Order against Bonaparte fails to prevent the coup.; Related: Tragedy and Farce, The Party of Order
The Party of Order: The parliamentary coalition of Legitimists and Orleanists that united against the workers' movement after the June Days, giving out "Property, Family, Religion, Order" as its passwords. Marx tracks its collapse across the book: it wins the National Assembly's majority, then destroys itself through internal royalist rivalry and its own repressive machinery, which Bonaparte ultimately turns against it.; Related: Legitimists and Orleanists, "Property, Family, Religion, Order"
The Society of December 10: The organization Bonaparte builds from the lumpenproletariat, formally a benevolent society but functioning as his private army of agents — "organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist General at the head of all." Marx calls Bonaparte throughout "the chief of the 'Society of December 10,'" using the phrase almost as his real title, more accurate than "President" or "Emperor."; Related: The Lumpenproletariat, Bonapartism
The Weight of Tradition: Marx's argument that revolutionary actors borrow costumes from the past even while making something new: "the tradition of all dead generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living." He traces the pattern through Luther masquerading as the Apostle Paul and 1789 draping itself as Roman Republic, then argues 1848-51 differs because only "the ghost of the old revolution wandered about" — a hollow repetition rather than a genuine act of self-transcendence.; Related: Tragedy and Farce
Tragedy and Farce: The book's opening frame, adapting Hegel: "all great world-historic facts and personages occur, as it were, twice... Once as tragedy, and again as farce." Marx lists the pairings directly — "Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the 'Mountain' of 1848-51 for the 'Mountain' of 1793-95, the Nephew for the Uncle" — making Louis Bonaparte's 1851 coup the farcical repeat of his uncle Napoleon's 1799 coup of the same name.; Related: 18 Brumaire, The Weight of Tradition

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Universal Suffrage's Self-Abolition: Marx's bitter observation that the December 1851 plebiscite, conducted under universal male suffrage, produced Bonaparte's coup — so that "universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, to the end that, before the eyes of the whole world, it should make its own testament with its own hands, and, in the name of the people, declare: 'All that exists deserves to perish.'"; Related: The Allotment Peasantry, The Coup of December 2, 1851