The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx

Preface to the Second Edition (1869)

My friend Joseph Weydemeyer, whose death was so untimely, intended to
publish a political weekly in New York starting from January 1, 1852.
He invited me to provide this weekly with a history of the coup d’etat.
Down to the middle of February, I accordingly wrote him weekly articles
under the title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Meanwhile,
Weydemeyer’s original plan had fallen through. Instead, in the spring
of 1852 he began to publish a monthly, Die Revolution, whose first
number consists of my Eighteenth Brumaire. A few hundred copies of this
found their way into Germany at that time, without, however, getting
into the actual book market. A German bookseller of extremely radical
pretensions to whom I offered the sale of my book was most virtuously
horrified at a “presumption” so “contrary to the times.”

From the above facts it will be seen that the present work took shape
under the immediate pressure of events and its historical material does
not extend beyond the month of February, 1852. Its republication now is
due in part to the demand of the book trade, in part to the urgent
requests of my friends in Germany.

Of the writings dealing with the same subject at approximately the same
time as mine, only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo’s Napoleon le Petit
and Proudhon’s Coup d’Etat. Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and
witty invective against the responsible producer of the coup d’etat.
The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees
in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice
that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to
him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history.
Proudhon, for his part, seeks to represent the coup d’etat as the
result of an antecedent historical development. Inadvertently, however,
his historical construction of the coup d’etat becomes a historical
apologia for its hero. Thus he falls into the error of our so-called
objective historians. I, on the contrary, demonstrate how the class
struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it
possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.

A revision of the present work would have robbed it of its particular
coloring. Accordingly, I have confined myself to mere correction of
printer’s errors and to striking out allusions now no longer
intelligible.

The concluding words of my work: “But when the imperial mantle finally
falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of
Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendome Column,”
have already been fulfilled. Colonel Charras opened the attack on the
Napoleon cult in his work on the campaign of 1815. Subsequently, and
especially in the past few years, French literature has made an end of
the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, criticism,
satire, and wit. Outside France, this violent breach with the
traditional popular belief, this tremendous mental revolution, has been
little noticed and still less understood.

Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the
school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called
Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is
forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place
only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free
poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves,
formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget
Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the
expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the
proletariat. With so complete a difference between the material,
economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the
political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common
with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High
Priest Samuel.

Karl Marx,

London, June 23, 1869

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