The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Louis-Napoleon seized power in December 1851 and had made himself emperor within a year. Marx wrote this account in the months immediately after, and it stands as both his sharpest political journalism and his clearest demonstration of what class analysis can do with a single event. He traces the French republic from February 1848 to the coup, showing how each faction (the peasants, the shopkeepers, the finance aristocracy, the army) cancelled out the others until a nephew coasting on his uncle’s name could take the whole thing. The opening pages contain the remark about history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce, and the line about men making their own history, though not under circumstances they choose. Free PDF and EPUB.