“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.