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The Eighteenth Brumaire

"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" is an 1852 essay by Karl Marx that describes the 1851 coup of the Second Republic of France by Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Louis Bonaparte, eventually Napoleon III. The title of the essay refers the coup by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799 that led to his eventually becoming emperor. Marx uses the parallels of these two coups as a way to explain his theory of the capitalist state.

"The Eighteenth Brumaire" is a date on the French Revolutionary Calendar that corresponds to November 9, 1799 on the Gregorian Calendar.

In some contemporary popular writings, the "Eighteenth Brumaire" appears as an obscure essay, read and known only by academics, such as the snarky New York Times review of academic books on "The Sopranos" in the first quote in the "How It's Used" section below. Or, “Then there is the sheer intellectual candlepower of the article itself. It was written by a person knowledgeable about Communism and in command of a forceful polemical style. Many have noted that the article includes several arcane references. In one place, for example, it refers to the '18th of Brumaire,' saying that Mr. Gorbachev might 'be his own Bonaparte.' The reference, well-known to those few people who have read Karl Marx's journalistic essay 'The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,' was to the day in 1851 when the Second French Republic was overthrown in a coup d'etat by Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Napoleon III. [NOTE: Ironically, this is incorrect—proving either how "arcane" the essay is, or how poor a knowledge of history the writer (who has a Harvard education) and editors of The Times have—and The Times published a correction on February 8, 1990: "An article on Jan. 12 about the authorship of an article that appeared in the quarterly Daedalus under the pseudonym Z referred incorrectly to Marx's essay 'The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte.' The title of the essay is the date in the French Revolutionary calendar on which Napoleon seized power in France in 1799, not the date in 1851 when his nephew Louis Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the Second French Republic. Marx was using the former as a sarcastic allusion to the latter."]”—Richard Bernstein, “A Scholarly Mystery: 'Z' Writes Darkly of Communism, but Who Is 'Z'?” The New York Times, January 12, 1990.

However, this view of the essay might be particularly American, who have a many decades-long cultural aversion to Marx and his writings. There are several well-known quotes from the essay, especially its opening—“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”—usually shortened to "History repeats itself, the first time tragedy, the second time as farce." The arguments and philosophy of the essay appear more frequently in non-American mainstream publications, sometimes even as the title for articles, such as “The 18th Brumaire of Barack Obama" in Canada's Globe and Mail about the economic problems of the United States and the world in mid-2009.

How It's Used

“The most quotable book is This Thing of Ours, edited by David Lavery, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. It is a collection of academic essays, some of them written by scholars and some of them written by professors of communication. Along with an intelligent piece by Ellen Willis that first appeared in The Nation, there is an essay about 'a Canadian experience of "The Sopranos"' and another entitled 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Tony Soprano.' The television professor Robert J. Thompson is here, and it's good to know he's at work on 'a major study of "St. Elsewhere."' Everyone in this volume seems to think of 'The Sopranos' as a 'text' or a 'meta-narrative' or a 'feminist metatext.' But let's allow the writers to speak for themselves. On male girth: 'Fatness is a signifier with many overlapping and even contradictory signifieds.' On male behavior: 'Nearly all of Tony's "business" relationships...are characterized by a phallocentric, linear representation of self.' On female agency: 'Media self-reflexivity operates throughout, as well as being embedded right into the very form of, the "Sopranos" text. Women play an important role in foregrounding these intertextual references.' And my favorite, on female bodies: 'Speaking as a male viewer, I can't say that curse words are as pleasurable to hear as nudity is to see.' If I introspect with sufficient seriousness, I'd have to agree.”

“In memory, my favourite bits [of Brideshead Revisited] were the lush evocations of pre-war Oxford and the scenes with Charles Ryder's outrageous father, who pretends to take no notice of him. After this happy revisitation of the book, these remain my favourite bits. An obvious point had never occurred to me—that the opening scenes, in which Lord Sebastian Flyte is sick through the middle-class Ryder's window—are a more lushly painted and flamboyant version of what will always be my favourite [Evelyn] Waugh novel, Decline and Fall. Marx's words about history repeating itself on the 18th Brumaire come to mind. But here, the first sketch (which is funnier) comes as Firbankian farce, and the second—which, for all its embarrassingness, one would not have missed—as tragedy.”

“Neither an authoritarian nor a humourless dogmatist, Marx in reality wrote subversive and witty accounts of the modern world. Read his essay 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte' if you want to get a truly ironic and perceptive handle on the delusions inside which most political life takes place. And read Capital, if you want to grasp the concept of an economic system as something coherent and organic. Of course it will depress you, as things stand, because it's as obvious as Marx's beard that the madness on the markets is not just going to affect banks, but everyone, with the most shocking political consequences.”

"Karl Marx in his 'Eighteenth Brumaire' wrote that those trying to master a new language always begin by translating it back into the tongue they already know."

Also Known As (AKA)

The 18th Brumaire, the Eighteenth of Brumaire

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