The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

For Karl Marx, the bourgeoisie is not just the middle class, or a segment of society that makes a certain amount of income. Instead, they are the ones who control factories and businesses. Marx argues that it was this bourgeoisie that set up the Second Republic as a “bourgeois republic” (17). Such a republic represented the interests of not the French public at large, but that of the bourgeoisie itself. This is unlike the monarchy of King Louis-Philippe I, which, Marx argues, only ruled on behalf of a “limited section of the bourgeoisie” (17). In addition, once freedom of the press and electoral suffrage were curtailed, the bourgeoisie ruling the Second Republic achieved what Marx described as a “coup d’etat” (59), after which it ruled “absolutely” (52).

Although the revolution against Louis-Philippe was actually begun by the proletariat, according to Marx (16), it had been hijacked by the bourgeoisie. In addition, the petty bourgeoisie (i.e., owners of small businesses and shops), who tended to be “pure republicans” (21), were also locked out of power in the new republic. Instead, the Second Republic came to be ruled by factions of bourgeoisie royalists, who represented either large landowners or industrialists and bankers (37). Overall, Marx does not view the bourgeoisie as acting as a unified class. Instead, it is the highest and wealthiest ranks of the bourgeoisie who truly rule the Second Republic. They turn against the petty bourgeoisie as much as they turn against the proletariat.

However, even though the bourgeoisie finally created a government that was under their control, they set up their own downfall. Eventually, their government would give way to Napoleon III’s regime, which Marx describes as government in its “oldest form” (13), under the domination of the military and the clergy. Marx sees this process by which rule by the bourgeoisie gives way to authoritarian rule as inevitable.

For starters, Marx suggests the tools of the 18th-century Enlightenment that helped the bourgeoisie question and challenge the rule of the nobility under feudalism became used against the bourgeoisie itself:

The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons which it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education which it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods which it had created had fallen away from it (54).

More specifically, by achieving and maintaining power through calls for order and accusations of socialism against their enemies, the bourgeoisie made itself vulnerable to such attacks (19, 53).

Due to this threat from the other classes, the bourgeoisie was driven to relinquish its own power. As Marx describes it, “the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule” (55). Marx does credit the fall of the Second Republic to a number of actions and circumstances, such as the failure of the Party of Order in the National Assembly to act decisively during the debate over constitutional reform (87). However, at its core, Marx believes the downfall of the Second Republic and the rise of Napoleon III is proof of the inability of the upper bourgeoisie to govern without exciting strong, insurmountable opposition from the petty bourgeoisie and other classes.