Bonaparte understood this cry. His power of comprehension was 
sharpened by the growing turbulence of creditors who, with each 
sunset which brought settling day, the second Sunday in May 1852, 
nearer, saw a movement of the stars protesting their earthly bills of 
exchange. They had become veritable astrologers. The National 
Assembly had blighted Bonaparte’s hopes of a_ constitutional 
prorogation of his authority; the candidature of the Prince of 
Joinville forbade further vacillation. 

If ever an event has, well in advance of its coming, cast its shadow 
before it, it was Bonaparte’s coup d’état. As early as January 29, 
1849, barely a month after his election, he had made a proposal 
about it to Changarnier. In the summer of 1849 his own Prime 
Minister, Odilon Barrot, had covertly denounced the policy of coups 
d’état; in the winter of 1850 Thiers had openly done so. In May 1851 
Persigny had sought once more to win Changarnier for the coup; the 
Messager de l’Assemblée had published an account of these negotia- 
tions. During every parliamentary storm, the Bonapartist journals 
threatened a coup d’état, and the nearer the crisis drew, the louder 
grew their tone. In the orgies that Bonaparte kept up every night 
with men and women of the swell mob,” as soon as the hour of 
midnight approached and rich libations had loosened tongues and 
fired imaginations, the coup d’état was fixed for the following 
morning. Swords were drawn, glasses clinked, representatives were 
thrown out of the window, and the imperial mantle fell upon 
Bonaparte’s shoulders, until the following morning banished the 
spook once more and astonished Paris learned, from vestals of little 
reticence and from indiscreet paladins, of the danger it had once 
again escaped. During the months of September and October 

* Abroad.— Ed. 
Marx uses the English expression “swell mob” .— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 177 

rumours of a coup d’état followed thick and fast. Simultaneously, the 
shadow took on colour, like a variegated daguerreotype. Look up the 
September and October copies of the organs of the European daily 
press and you will find, word for word, intimations like the 
following: “Paris is full of rumours of a coup d’état. The capital is to 
be filled with troops during the night, and the next morning is to 
bring decrees which will dissolve the National Assembly, declare the 
department of the Seine in a state of siege, restore universal suffrage 
and appeal to the people. Bonaparte is said to be seeking ministers 
for the execution of these illegal decrees.” The reports that bring 
these tidings always end with the fateful word “ postponed”. The coup 
d’état was ever the fixed idea of Bonaparte. With this idea he had 
again set foot on French soil. He was so obsessed by it that he 
continually betrayed it and blurted it out. He was so weak that, just as 
continually, he gave it up again. The shadow of the coup d’état had 
become so familiar to the Parisians as a spectre that they were not 
willing to believe in it when it finally appeared in the flesh. What 
allowed the coup d’état to succeed was, therefore, neither the 
reticent reserve of the chief of the Society of December 10 nor the 
fact that the National Assembly was caught unawares. If it 
succeeded, it succeeded despite his indiscretion and with its 
foreknowledge, a necessary, inevitable result of antecedent develop- 
ment. 

On October 10 Bonaparte announced to his ministers his decision 
to restore universal suffrage; on the 16th they handed in their 
resignations; on the 26th Paris learned of the formation of the 
Thorigny ministry. Police Prefect Carlier was simultaneously re- 
placed by Maupas; the head of the First Army Division, Magnan, 
concentrated the most reliable regiments in the capital. On 
November 4 the National Assembly resumed its sittings. It had 
nothing better to do than to recapitulate in a short, succinct form the 
course it had gone through and to prove that it was buried only after 
it had died. 

The first post that it forfeited in the struggle with the executive 
power was the ministry. It had solemnly to admit this loss by 
accepting at full value the Thorigny ministry, a mere sham. The 
Permanent Commission had received M. Giraud with laughter when 
he presented himself in the name of the new ministers. Such a weak 
ministry for such strong measures as the restoration of universal 
suffrage! Yet the precise object was to get nothing through in 
parliament, but everything against parliament. 

On the very first day of its re-opening, the National Assembly 
received the message from Bonaparte in which he demanded the 

restoration of universal suffrage and the abolition of the law of May 
31, 1850. The same day his ministers introduced a decree to this 
effect. The National Assembly at once rejected the ministry’s motion 
of urgency and rejected the law itself on November 13 by 355 votes 
to 348. Thus, it tore up its mandate once more; it once more 
confirmed the fact that it had transformed itself from the freely 
elected representatives of the people into the usurpatory parliament 
of a class; it acknowledged once more that it had itself cut in two the 
muscles which connected the parliamentary head with the body of 
the nation. 

If by its motion to restore universal suffrage the executive power 
appealed from the National Assembly to the people, the legislative 
power appealed by its Questors’ Bill from the people to the army. 
This Questors’ Bill was to establish its right of directly requisitioning 
troops, of forming a parliamentary army. While it thus designated 
the army as the arbitrator between itself and the people, between 
itself and Bonaparte, while it recognised the army as the decisive 
state power, it had to confirm, on the other hand, the fact that it had 
long given up its claim to dominate this power. By debating its right 
to requisition troops, instead of requisitioning them at once, it 
betrayed its doubts about its own powers. By rejecting the Questors’ 
Bill, it made public confession of its impotence. This bill was 
defeated, its proponents lacking 108 votes of a majority. The 
Montagne thus decided the issue. It found itself in the position of 
Buridan’s ass, not, indeed, between two bundles of hay with the 
problem of deciding which was the more attractive, but between two 
showers of blows with the problem of deciding which was the harder. 
On the one hand, there was the fear of Changarnier; on the other, 
the fear of Bonaparte. It must be confessed that the position was no 
heroic one. 

On November 18 an amendment was moved to the law on 
municipal elections introduced by the Party of Order, to the effect 
that instead of three years’, one year’s domicile should suffice for 
municipal electors. The amendment was lost by a single vote, but this 
one vote immediately proved to be a mistake. By splitting up into its 
hostile factions, the Party of Order had long ago forfeited its 
independent parliamentary majority. It showed now that there was 
no longer any majority at all in parliament. The National Assembly 
had become incapable of transacting business. Its atomised constituents 
were no longer held together by any force of cohesion; it had drawn 
its last breath; it was dead. 

Finally, a few days before the catastrophe, the extra-parliamentary 
mass of the bourgeoisie was solemnly to confirm once more its 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 179 

breach with the bourgeoisie in parliament. Thiers, as a parliamen- 
tary hero infected more than the rest with the incurable disease of 
parliamentary cretinism, had, after the death of parliament, hatched 
out, together with the Council of State, a new parliamentary intrigue, 
a Responsibility Law by which the President was to be firmly held 
within the limits of the Constitution. Just as, on laying the foundation 
stone of the new market halls in Paris on September 15, Bonaparte, 
like a second Masaniello, had enchanted the dames des halles, the 
fishwives—to be sure, one fishwife outweighed seventeen burgraves 
in real power; just as after the introduction of the Questors’ Bill he 
enraptured the lieutenants he regaled in the Elysée, so now, on 
November 25, he swept off their feet the industrial bourgeoisie, 
which had gathered at the circus to receive at his hands prize 
medals for the London Industrial Exhibition. I shall give the 
significant portion of his speech as reported in the Journal des 
Deébats*: 

“With such unhoped-for successes, I am justified in reiterating how great the 
French Republic would be if it were permitted to pursue its real interests and reform 
its institutions, instead of being constantly disturbed by demagogues, on the one hand, 
and by monarchist hallucinations, on the other. (Loud, stormy and repeated applause 
from every part of the amphitheatre.) The monarchist hallucinations hinder all 
progress and all important branches of industry. In place of progress nothing but 
struggle. One sees men who were formerly the most zealous supporters of the royal 
authority and prerogative become partisans of a Convention merely in order to 
weaken the authority that has sprung from universal suffrage. (Loud and repeated 
applause.) We see men who have suffered most from the Revolution, and have 
deplored it most, provoke a new one, and merely in order to fetter the nation’s will... 
I promise you tranquillity for the future, etc., etc. (Bravo, bravo, a storm of 
bravos.)” 

Thus the industrial bourgeoisie applauds with servile bravos the 
coup d’état of December 2, the annihilation of parliament, the 
downfall of its own rule, the dictatorship of Bonaparte. The thunder 
of applause on November 25 had its answer in the thunder of 
cannon on December 4, and it was on the house of Monsieur 
Sallandrouze, who had clapped most, that they clapped most of the 

bombs. . 
Cromwell, when he dissolved the Long Parliament, went alone into 

its midst, drew out his watch in order that it should not continue to 
exist a minute after the time limit fixed by him, and drove out each 
one of the members of parliament with jovial humorous taunts. 
Napoleon, smaller than his prototype, at least betook himself on the 
eighteenth Brumaire to the legislative body and read out to it, 

* For November 26, 1851.— Ed. 

though in a faltering voice, its sentence of death. The second 
Bonaparte, who, moreover, found himself in possession of an 
executive power very different from that of Cromwell or Napoleon, 
sought his model not in the annals of world history, but in the annals 
of the Society of December 10, in the annals of the criminal courts. 
He robs the Bank of France of twenty-five million francs, buys 
General Magnan with a million, the soldiers with fifteen francs 
apiece and liquor, comes together with his accomplices secretly like a 
thief in the night, has the houses of the most dangerous parliamen- 
tary leaders broken into and Cavaignac, Lamoriciére, Le Fld, 
Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze, etc., dragged from their beds, 
the key points of Paris and the parliamentary building occupied 
by troops, and cheapjack placards posted early in the morning on all 
the walls, proclaiming the dissolution of the National Assembly and 
the Council of State, the restoration of universal suffrage and the 
placing of the Seine department in a state of siege. In like manner, 
he inserted a little later in the Moniteur* a false document which 
asserted that influential parliamentarians had grouped themselves 
round him and formed a state consulta. 

The rump parliament, assembled in the mazrie building of the 
tenth arrondissement and consisting mainly of Legitimists and 
Orleanists, votes the deposition of Bonaparte amid repeated cries of 
“Long live the Republic’, unavailingly harangues the gaping crowds 
before the building and is finally led off in the custody of African 
sharpshooters, first to the d’Orsay barracks, and later packed into 
prison vans and transported to the prisons of Mazas, Ham and 
Vincennes. Thus ended the Party of Order, the Legislative Assembly 
and the February revolution. 

Before hastening to close, let us briefly summarise the latter’s 
history: 

I. First period. From February 24 to May 4, 1848. February period. 
Prologue. Universal brotherhood swindle. 

II. Second period. Period of ‘constituting the republic and of the 
Constituent National Assembly. 

1. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes against the 
proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days. 

2. June 25 to December 10,. 1848. Dictatorship of the pure 
bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the Constitution. Procla- 
mation of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship 
set aside on December re by the election of Bonaparte as 
President. 

*“ For December 3, 1851.— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 181 

3. December 20, 1848 to May 28, 1849. Struggle of the 
Constituent Assembly with Bonaparte and with the Party of 
Order in alliance with him. End of the Constituent Assembly. 
Fall of the republican bourgeoisie. 

III. Third period. Period of the constitutional republic and of the 
Legislative National Assembly. 

1. May 28, 1849 to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the petty 
bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat 
of the petty-bourgeois democracy. 

2. June 13, 1849 to May 31, 1850. Parliamentary dictator- 
ship of the Party of Order. It completes its rule by abolishing 
universal suffrage, but loses the parliamentary ministry. 

3. May 31, 1850 to December 2, 1851. Struggle between 
the parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte. 

a) May 31, 1850 to January 12, 1851. Parliament 
loses the supreme command of the army. 

b) January 12 to April 11, 1851. It is worsted in its 
attempts to regain the administrative power. The 
Party of Order loses its independent parliamentary 
majority. Its coalition with the republicans and the 
Montagne. 

c) April 11, 1851 to October 9, 1851. Attempts at 
revision, fusion, prorogation. The Party of Order 
dissolves into its separate constituents. The breach of 
the bourgeois parliament and bourgeois press with the 
mass of the bourgeoisie hardens. 

d) October 9 to December 2, 1851. Open breach 
between parliament and the executive power. Parlia- 
ment performs its dying act and succumbs, left in the 
lurch by its own class, by the army and by all the 
remaining classes. End of the parliamentary regime 
and of bourgeois rule. Victory of Bonaparte. Empire 
restored as parody. 

VII 

On the threshold of the February revolution, the social republic 
appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy. In the June days of 1848, it was 
drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it haunts the 
subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost. The democratic republic 
announces its arrival. On June 13, 1849 it is dissipated together with 
its petty bourgeois, who have taken to their heels, but in its flight it 

blows its own trumpet with redoubled boastfulness. The parliamen- 
tary republic, together with the bourgeoisie, takes possession of the 
entire stage; it enjoys its existence to the full, but December 2, 1851 
buries it to the accompaniment of the anguished cry of the 
coalitioned royalists: “Long live the Republic!” * 

The French bourgeoisie balked at the power of the working 
proletariat; it has brought the lumpenproletariat to power, with the 
chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The bourgeoisie 
kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy; 
Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he 
had the eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the 
Boulevard des Italiens shot down at their windows by the 
liquor-inspired army of order. The bourgeoisie apotheosised the 
sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its 
own press has been destroyed. It placed popular meetings under 
police supervision; its salons are under the supervision of the police. 
It disbanded the democratic National Guards; its own National 
Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is 
imposed upon it. It supplanted the juries by military commissions; its 
juries are supplanted by military commissions. It subjected public 
education to the sway of the priests; the priests subject it to their own 
education.’ It transported people without trial; it is being trans- 
_ ported without trial. It repressed every stirring in society by means of 
the state power; every stirring in its society is suppressed by the state 
power. Out of enthusiasm for its purse, it rebelled against its own 
politicians and men of letters; its politicians and men of letters are 
swept aside, but its purse is being plundered now that its mouth has 
been gagged and its pen broken. The bourgeoisie never wearied of 
crying out to the revolution what Saint Arsenius cried out to the 
Christians: “Fuge, tace, quiesce! Flee, be silent, keep still!” Bonaparte 
cries to the bourgeoisie: “ Fuge, tace, quiesce! Flee, be silent, keep still!” 

The French bourgeoisie had long ago found the solution to 
Napoleon’s dilemma: “Dans cinquante ans, l'Europe sera républicaine ou 
cosaque.”* It had found the solution to it in the “république cosaque’’. 

* The 1852 edition has the following paragraph here: “The social and the 
democratic republic suffered defeats, but the parliamentary republic, the republic 
of the royalist bourgeoisie foundered, as did the pure republic, the republic of the 
bourgeois republicans.” — Ed. 

b According to the list of misprints in the 1852 edition, the second part of this 
sentence should read as follows: “the priests subjected themselves to their own 
education”. However, this alteration was not reproduced in the 1869 edition.— Ed. 

“ “In fifty years Europe will be republican or Cossack.” (The words are taken from 
the book by Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Héléne.)— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 183 

No Circe, by means of black magic, has distorted that work of art, the 

bourgeois republic, into a monstrous shape. That republic has lost 

nothing but the semblance of respectability.* Present-day France” was 

contained in a finished state within the parliamentary republic. It 
only required a bayonet thrust for the abcess to burst and the 
monster to spring forth before our eyes.° 

* In the 1852 edition this sentence reads as follows: “That republic has lost 
nothing but its rhetoric arabesques, its manners, in a word, the semblance of 
respectability.” — Ed. 

> France after the coup d’état of 1851.— Ed. 

© In the 1852 edition two paragraphs follow here: 

“The immediate aim of the February revolution was to overthrow the Orleans 
dynasty and that part of the bourgeoisie which ruled under it. It was not until 
December 2, 1851 that this aim was achieved. Then the immense possessions of the 
house of Orleans, the real basis of its influence, were confiscated, and what had 
been expected after the February revolution came to pass after December: the 
imprisonment, flight, deposition, banishment, disarming and humiliation of the 
men who from 1830 on had wearied France with their appeals. But only part 
of the commercial bourgeoisie ruled under Louis Philippe. Its other factions 
formed a dynastic and a republican opposition or stood entirely outside the 
so-called legal country [Marx has legalen Landes, which is a translation of the French 
expression pays légal]. Only the parliamentary republic included all factions of the 
commercial bourgeoisie in its political sphere. Moreover, under Louis Philippe the 
commercial bourgeoisie excluded the landowning bourgeoisie. Only the parliamen- 
tary republic placed them side by side as possessing equal rights, wedded the July 
monarchy to the Legitimist monarchy and amalgamated two epochs of the rule of 
property into one. Under Louis Philippe the privileged part of the bourgeoisie 
concealed its rule beneath the crown; in the parliamentary republic the rule of the 
bourgeoisie—after it had united all its elements and made its empire the empire of 
its class—revealed itself. So the revolution had first created the form in which the 
rule of the bourgeois class received its broadest, most general and ultimate 
expression and could therefore also be overthrown, without being able to rise 
again. 

“Only now was the sentence executed which was passed in February upon the 
Orleanist bourgeoisie, i.e. the most viable faction of the French bourgeoisie. Now a 
crushing blow was struck at its parliament, its legal courts, its commercial courts, its 
provincial representations, its notary’s office, its university, its tribune and its 
tribunals, its press and its literature, its administrative income and its court fees, its 
army salaries and its state pensions, in its spirit and in its body. Blanqui had made 
the disbanding of the bourgeois guards the first demand on the revolution, and the 
bourgeois guards, who in February extended their hand to the revolution in order 
to hinder its progress, disappeared from the scene in December. The Pantheon 
itself is again turned into an ordinary church. With the last form of the bourgeois 
regime, the spell too has been broken which transfigured its eighteenth- 
century founders into saints. Therefore when on December 2 Guizot learned 
about the success of the coup d’état, he exclaimed: Cvest le triomphe complet 
et définitif du soctalisme! This is the complete and final triumph of socialism! 
That means: this is the final and complete collapse of the rule of the bour- 
geoisie.”’ — Ed. 

Why did the Paris proletariat not rise in revolt after December 27° 

The overthrow of the bourgeoisie had as yet been only decreed: 
the decree had not been carried out. Any serious insurrection of the 
proletariat would at once have put fresh life into the bourgeoisie, 
would have reconciled it with the army and ensured a second June 
defeat for the workers. 

On December 4 the proletariat was incited by bourgeois and 
épicier” to fight. On the evening of that day several legions of the 
National Guard promised to appear, armed and uniformed, on the 
scene of battle. For the bourgeois and the épicier had got wind of the 
fact that in one of his decrees of December 2 Bonaparte abolished 
the secret ballot and enjoined them to record their “yes” or “no” in 
the official registers after their names. The resistance of December 4 
intimidated Bonaparte. During the night he caused placards to be 
posted on al] the street corners of Paris, announcing the restoration 
of the secret ballot. The bourgeois and the épicier believed that they 
had gained their end. Those who failed to appear next morning 
were the bourgeois and the épicier. 

By a coup de main during the night of December | to 2, Bonaparte 
had 10obbed the Paris proletariat of its leaders, the barricade 
commanders. An army without officers, averse to fighting under the 
banner of the Montagnards because of the memories of June 1848 
and 1849 and May 1850,% it left to its vanguard, the secret societies, 
the task of saving the insurrectionary honour of Paris, which the 
bourgeoisie had so unresistingly surrendered to the soldiery that, 
later on, Bonaparte could sneeringly give as his motive for disarming 
the National Guard—his fear that its arms would be turned against 
itself by the anarchists!* 

“Crest le triomphe complet et définitif du socialisme!” Thus Guizot 
characterised December 2. But if the overthrow of the parliamentary 
republic contains within itself the germ of the triumph of the 
proletarian revolution, its immediate and palpable result was the 
victory of Bonaparte over parliament, of the executive power over the 

* In the 1852 edition this paragraph reads as follows: “Why did the proletariat 
not rescue the bourgeoisie? Implied in this is the question: Why did the Paris 
proletariat not rise in revolt after December 2?” — Ed. 

Pejorative term for shopkeeper.— Fd. 

“In the 1852 edition: “The bloody resistance” .— Ed. 

d In the 1852 edition the beginning of this sentence reads as follows: “An army 
without officers, too enlightened by its memories of June 1848 and 1849 and May 
1850 to fight under the banner of the Montagnards, it was therefore correctly 
assessing its own strength and the general situation when....” — Ed. 

In the 1852 edition: “his fear, not that it would turn its arms against him, but 
that the anarchists would turn them against itself” — Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 185 

legislative power, of force without words over the force of words.’ In 
parliament the nation made its general will the law, that is, it made 
the law of the ruling class its general will. Before the executive power 
it renounces all will of its own and submits to the superior command 
of an alien will, to authority. The executive power, in contrast to the 
legislative power, expresses the heteronomy of a nation, in contrast 
to its autonomy. France, therefore, seems to have escaped the 
despotism of a class only to fall back beneath the despotism of an 
individual, and, what is more, beneath the authority of an individual 
without authority. The struggle seems to be settled in such a way that 
all classes, equally impotent and equally mute, fall on their knees 
before the rifle butt. 

But the revolution is thorough. It is still journeying through 
purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851 it had 
completed one half of its preparatory work; it is now completing the 
other half. First it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be 
able to overthrow it. Now that it has attained this, it perfects the 
executive power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up 
against itself as the sole target, in order to concentrate all its forces of 
destruction against it. And when it has done this second half of its 
preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exultantly 
exclaim: Well burrowed, old mole! 

This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military 
organisation, with its extensive and artificial state machinery, with a 
host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another 
half million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body 
of French society like a net and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the 
days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, 
which it helped to hasten. The seignorial privileges of the 
landowners and towns became transformed into so many attributes 
of the state power, the feudal dignitaries into paid officials and the 
motley pattern of conflicting medieval plenary powers into the 
regulated plan of a state authority whose work is divided and 
centralised as in a factory. The first French Revolution, with its task 
of breaking all separate local, territorial, urban and _ provincial 
powers in order to create the civil unity of the nation, was bound to 
develop what the absolute monarchy had begun: the centralisation, 
but at the same time the extent, the attributes and the agents of 
governmental power. Napoleon perfected this state machinery. The 

* The 1852 edition adds: “Thus the one power of the old state is at first only 
freed from its limitation, becoming an unlimited, absolute power.” — Ed. 
4 A reference to Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5.— Ed. 

Legitimist monarchy and the July monarchy added nothing but a 
greater division of labour, growing in the same measure as the 
division of labour within bourgeois society created new groups of 
interests, and, therefore, new material for state administration. 
Every common interest was straightway severed from society, 
counterposed to it as a higher, general interest, snatched from the 
activity of society's members themselves and made an object of 
government activity, whether it was a bridge, a schoolhouse and the 
communal property of a village community, or the railways, the 
national wealth and the national university of France. Finally, in its 
struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found 
itself compelled to strengthen, along with the repressive measures, 
the resources and centralisation of governmental power. All 
revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The . 
parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the 
possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the 
victor. 

But under the absolute monarchy, during the first revolution, 
under Napoleon, bureaucracy was only the means of preparing the 
class rule of the bourgeoisie. Under the Restoration, under Louis 
Philippe, under the parliamentary republic, it was the instrument 
of the ruling class, however much it strove for power of its 
own. 

Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have 
made itself completely independent.’ As against civil society, the state 
machine has consolidated its position so thoroughly that the chief of 
the Society of December 10 suffices for its head, a casual adventurer 
from abroad, raised up as leader by a drunken soldiery, which he has 
bought with liquor and sausages, and which he must continually ply 
with more sausage. Hence the downcast despair, the feeling of 
most dreadful humiliation and degradation that oppresses the 
breast of France and makes her catch her breath. She feels 
dishonoured.” 

And yet the state power is not suspended in mid air. Bonaparte 

“In the 1852 edition this sentence reads thus: “Only under the second 
Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself independent of society and 
subjected it.” The text went on as follows: “The independence of the executive 
power emerges into the open when its chief no longer requires genius, its army no 
longer requires glory, and its bureaucracy no longer requires moral authority in 
order to justify itself.” — Ed. 

> The 1852 edition further has: “Just as Napoieon hardly left her any excuse 
for freedom, so the second Bonaparte no longer left her any excuse for ser- 
vitude.” — Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 187 

represents a class, and the most numerous class of French society at 
that, the small-holding peasantry. 

Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of big landed property and 
just as the Orleans were the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are 
the dynasty of the peasants, that is, the mass of the French people. 
Not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament, but 
the Bonaparte who dispersed the bourgeois parliament is the chosen 
man of the peasantry. For three years the towns had succeeded in 
falsifying the meaning of the election of December 10 and in 
cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the empire. The 
election of December 10, 1848 has been consummated only by the 
coup d’état of December 2, 1851. 

The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of 
which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold 
relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them 
from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. 
The isolation is increased by France’s bad means of communication 
and by the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the 
smallholding, admits of no division of labour in its cultivation, no 
application of science and, therefore, no diversity of development, 
no variety of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual 
peasant family is almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the 
major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life 
more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. 
A smallholding, a peasant and his family; alongside them another 
smallholding, another peasant and another family. A few score of 
these make up a village, and a few score of villages make up a 
department. In this way, the great mass of the French nation is 
formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as 
potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of 
families live under economic conditions of existence that separate 
their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the 
other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they 
form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among 
these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests 
begets no community, no national bond and no political organisation 
among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently 
incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name, 
whether through a parliament or through a convention. They 
cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their 
representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an 
authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that 
protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and 

* 

188 Kart Marx 

sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding 
peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power 
subordinating society to itself.* 

Historical tradition gave rise to the belief of the French peasants in 
the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all the glory 
back to them. And an individual turned up who gives himself out as 
the man because he bears the name of Napoleon, as a result of the 
Code Napoléon, which lays down that la recherche de la paternité est 
interdite.” After a vagabondage of twenty years and after a series of 
grotesque adventures, the legend finds fulfilment and the man 
becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the Nephew was 
realised, because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most 
numerous class of the French people. 

But, it may be objected, what about the peasant risings in half of 
France,'’ the raids on the peasants by the army, the mass 
incarceration and transportation of peasants? 

Since Louis XIV, France has experienced no similar persecution of 
the peasants “for demagogic practices”. 

But let there be no misunderstanding. The Bonaparte dynasty 
represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not 
the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social 
existence, the smallholding, but rather the peasant who wants to 
consolidate this holding; not the country folk who, linked up with the 
towns, want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, 
but on the contrary those who, in stupefied seclusion within this old 
order, want to see themselves and their smallholdings saved and 
favoured by the ghost of the empire. It represents not the 
enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasant; not his judg- 
ment, but his prejudice; not his future, but his past; not his modern 
Cévennes, but his modern Vendée.!9 

The three years’ rigorous rule of the parliamentary republic had 
freed a part of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and 
had revolutionised them, even if only superficially; but the 
bourgeoisie violently repressed them whenever they set themselves 
in motion. Under the parliamentary republic the modern and the 
traditional consciousness of the French peasant contended for 
mastery. This progress took the form of an incessant struggle 
between the schoolmasters and the priests. The bourgeoisie struck 
down the schoolmasters. For the first time the peasants made efforts 

‘ 

* In the 1852 edition the end of the sentence reads as follows: “...the executive 
power subordinating parliament and the state subordinating society to itself”.— Ed. 
> Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 189 

to behave independently in the face of the activity of the 
government. This was shown in the continual conflict between the 
maires and the prefects. The bourgeoisie deposed the maires. Finally, 
during the period of the parliamentary republic, the peasants of 
different localities rose against their own offspring, the army. The 
bourgeoisie punished them with states of siege and punitive 
expeditions. And this same bourgeoisie now cries out about the 
stupidity of the masses, the vile multitude,’ that has betrayed it to 
Bonaparte. It has itself forcibly strengthened the imperial sentiments 
of the peasant class, it conserved the conditions that form the 
birthplace of this peasant religion. The bourgeoisie, to be sure, is 
bound to fear the stupidity of the masses as long as they remain 
conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become 
revolutionary. 

In the risings after the coup d’état, a part of the French peasants 
protested, arms in hand, against their own vote of December 10, 
1848. The school they had gone through since 1848 had sharpened 
their wits. But they had made themselves over to the underworld of 
history; history held them to their word, and the majority was still so 
prejudiced that in precisely the reddest departments the peasant 
population voted openly for Bonaparte. In its view, the National 
Assembly had hindered his progress. He had now merely broken the 
fetters that the towns had imposed on the will of the countryside. In 
some parts the peasants even entertained the grotesque notion of a 
convention side by side with Napoleon. 

After the first revolution had transformed the peasants from 
semi-villeins into freeholders, Napoleon confirmed and regulated 
the conditions on which they could exploit undisturbed the soil of 
France which had only just fallen to their lot and slake their youthful 
passion for property. But what is now causing the ruin of the French 
peasant is his smallholding itself, the division of the land, the form 
of property which Napoleon consolidated in France. It is precisely 
the material conditions which made the French feudal peasant a 
small-holding peasant and Napoleon an emperor. Two generations 
have sufficed to produce the inevitable result: progressive deteriora- 
tion of agriculture, progressive indebtedness of the agriculturist. 
The “Napoleonic” form of property, which at the beginning of the 
nineteenth century was the condition for the liberation and 
enrichment of the French country folk, has developed in the course 
of this century into the law of their enslavement and pauperisation. 

* An expression used by Thiers in his speech in the Legislative Assembly on 
May 24, 1850.— Ed. 

And precisely this law is the first of the ‘‘idées napoléoniennes” which 
the second Bonaparte has to uphold. If he still shares with the 
peasants the illusion that the cause of their ruin is to be sought, not in 
this small-holding property itself, but outside it, in the influence of 
secondary circumstances, his experiments will burst like soap bubbles 
when they come in contact with the relations of production.* 

The economic development of small-holding property has radical- 
ly changed the relation of the peasants to the other classes of society. 
Under Napoleon, the fragmentation of the land in the countryside 
supplemented free competition and the beginning of big industry in 
the towns.” The peasant class was the ubiquitous protest against the 
landed aristocracy which had just been overthrown.‘ The roots that 
small-holding property struck in French soil deprived feudalism of 
all nutriment. Its landmarks formed the natural fortifications of the 
bourgeoisie against any coup de main on the part of its old 
overlords. But in the course of the nineteenth century the feudal 
lords were replaced by urban usurers; the feudal obligation that 
went with the land was replaced by the mortgage; aristocratic landed 
property was replaced by bourgeois capital. The smallholding of the 
peasant is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw 
profits, interest and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the tiller of 
the soil himself to see how he can extract his wages. The mortgage 
debt burdening the soil of France imposes on the French peasantry 
payment of an amount of interest equal to the annual interest on the 
entire British national debt. Small-holding property, in this enslave- 
ment by capital to which its development inevitably pushes forward, 
has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes? 
Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell in 
hovels, a large number of which have but one opening, others only 
two and the most favoured only three. And windows are to a house 
what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at 
the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the 
newly arisen smallholding and manured it with laurels, has become a 
vampire that sucks out its blood and brains and throws them into the 

* The 1852 edition adds: “depriving that illusion of its last hiding place and at 
best making the disease more acute”.— Ed. 

The 1852 edition further has: “Even the advantages given to the peasant class 
were in the interest of the new bourgeois order. This newly created class was the 
all-round extension of the bourgeois regime beyond the gates of the towns, its 
realisation on a national scale.” — Ed. 

© The 1852 edition further has: “If it was favoured most of all, it was also 
suited most of all as a point of attack for the restoration of feudalism.” — Ed. 

In the 1852 edition: “into a nation of troglodytes” .— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 19] 

alchemist’s cauldron of capital. The Code Napoléonis now nothing but 
a codex of distraints, forced sales and compulsory auctions. To the 
four million (including children, etc.) officially recognised paupers, 
vagabonds, criminals and prostitutes in France must be added five 
million who hover on the margin of existence and either have their 
haunts in the countryside itself or, with their rags and their children, 
continually desert the countryside for the towns and the towns for 
the countryside. The interests of the peasants, therefore, are no 
longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with, but in opposition’ to the 
interests of the bourgeoisie, to capital. Hence the peasants find their 
natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task is the 
overthrow of the bourgeois order. But strong and unlimited govern- 
ment—and this is the second “idée napoléonienne”, which the second 
Napoleon has to carry out—is called upon to defend this “material” 
order by force. This “ordre matériel’ also serves as the catchword in 
all of Bonaparte’s proclamations against the rebellious peasants. 
Besides the mortgage which capital imposes on it, the small- 
holding is burdened by taxes. Taxes are the source of life for the 
bureaucracy, the army, the priests and the court, in short, for the 
whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and 
heavy taxes are identical. By its very nature, small-holding property 
forms a suitable basis for an all-powerful and innumerable 
bureaucracy. It creates a uniform level of relationships and persons 
over the whole surface of the land. Hence it also permits of uniform 
action from a supreme centre on all points of this uniform mass. It 
annihilates the aristocratic intermediate grades between the mass of 
the people and the state power. On all sides, therefore, it calls forth 
the direct interference of this state power and the interposition of its 
immediate organs. Finally, it produces an unemployed surplus 
population for which there is no place either on the land or in the 
towns, and which accordingly reaches out for state offices as a sort of 
respectable alms, and provokes the creation of state posts.” By the 
new markets which he opened at the point of the bayonet, by the 
plundering of the Continent, Napoleon repaid the compulsory taxes 

* In the 1852 edition: “in the deadliest opposition” .— Ed. 

> The 1852 edition further has: “Under Napoleon this numerous government 
personnel was not only directly productive in that it provided for the new 
peasantry, by state coercion, in the form of public works, etc., what the bourgeoisie 
was still unable to provide with the resources of private industry. The state taxes 
were an essential means of coercion for maintaining exchange between town and 
country. Otherwise the smallholder would, in peasant self-complacency, have 
broken off the connection with the towns as was the case in Norway and in part of 
Switzerland.” — Ed. 

with interest. These taxes were a spur to the industry of the peasant, 
whereas now they rob his industry of its last resources and complete 
his inability to resist pauperism. And an enormous bureaucracy, 
well-braided and well-fed, is the ‘“idée napoléonienne”’ which is most 
congenial of all to the second Bonaparte. How could it be otherwise, 
seeing that alongside the actual classes of society he is forced to 
create an artificial caste, for which the maintenance of his regime 
becomes a bread-and-butter question? Accordingly, one of his first 
financial operations was the raising of officials’ salaries to their old 
level and the creation of new sinecures. 

Another “‘idée napoléonienne” is the domination of the priests as an 
instrument of government. But while in its accord with society, in its 
dependence on natural forces and its submission to the authority 
which protected it from above, the smallholding that had newly 
come into being was naturally religious, the smallholding that is 
ruined by debts, at odds with society and authority, and driven 
beyond its own limitations naturally becomes irreligious. Heaven was 
quite a pleasing accession to the narrow strip of land just won, 
especially as it makes the weather; it becomes an insult as soon as it is 
thrust forward as substitute for the smallholding. The priest then 
appears as only the anointed bloodhound of the earthly 
police—another “idée napoléonienne”.* On the next occasion, the 
expedition against Rome will take place in France itself, but in a 
sense opposite to that of M. de Montalembert.’”° 

Lastly, the culminating point of the “idées napoléoniennes” is the 
preponderance of the army. The army was the point d’honneur of the 
small-holding peasants, it was they themselves transformed into 
heroes, defending their new possessions against the outer world, 
glorifying their recently won nationhood, plundering and rev- 
olutionising the world. The uniform” was their own state dress; war 
was their poetry; the smallholding, extended and rounded off in 
imagination, was their fatherland, and patriotism the ideal form of 
their sense of property. But the enemies against whom the French 
peasant has now to defend his property are not the Cossacks; they 
are the huissters‘ and the tax collectors. The smallholding lies no 
longer in the so-called fatherland, but in the register of mortgages. 

* In the 1852 edition this sentence reads as follows: “The priest then appears as 
only the anointed bloodhound of the earthly police—another ‘idée napoléonienné — 
whose duty under the second Bonaparte is not, as under Napoleon, to watch 
the enemies of the peasant regime in the towns, but Bonaparte’s enemies in the 
country.” — Ed. 

> In the 1852 edition: “The dazzling uniform” .— Ed. 

© Bailiffs.— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 193 

The army itself is no longer the flower of the peasant youth; it is the 
swamp-flower of the peasant lumpenproletariat. It consists in large 
measure of remplacants, of substitutes, just as the second Bonaparte is 
himself only a remplacant, the substitute for Napoleon. It now 
performs its deeds of valour by hunting down the peasants like 
chamois, and in organised drives, by doing gendarme duty, and if the 
internal contradictions of his system chase the chief of the Society of 
December 10 over the French border, his army, after some acts of 
brigandage, will reap, not laurels, but thrashings. 

One sees: all “idées napoléoniennes’ are ideas of the undeveloped small- 
holding in the freshness of its youth; for the smallholding that has 
outlived its day they are an absurdity. They are only the 
hallucinations of its death struggle, words that are transformed into 
phrases, spirits transformed into ghosts.* But the parody of the 
empire was necessary to free the mass of the French nation from the 
weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition 
between the state power and society. With the progressive undermin- 
ing of small-holding property, the state structure erected upon it 
collapses. ‘The centralisation of the state that modern society requires 
arises only on the ruins of the military-bureaucratic government 
machinery which was forged in opposition to feudalism.” 

The condition of the French peasants provides us with the answer 
to the riddle of the general elections of December 20 and 21, which bore 
the second Bonaparte up Mount Sinai, not to receive laws, but to give 
them. 

Manifestly, the bourgeoisie had now no choice but to elect 

* The 1852 edition adds: “appropriate costumes transformed into absurd fancy 
dress” .— Ed. 

Instead of the last two sentences, the 1852 edition has: “The demolition of 
the state machine will not endanger centralisation. Bureaucracy is only the low and 
brutal form of a centralisation that is still afflicted with its opposite, with feudalism. 
When he is disappointed in the Napoleonic Restoration, the French peasant 
will part with his belief in his smallholding, the entire state edifice erected on this 
smallholding will fall to the ground and the proletarian revolution will obtain that 
chorus without which its solo becomes a swan song in all peasant countries.” — Ed. 

“In the 1852 edition: “but to give and execute them”. Then follows this 
passage: “Of course in those fateful days the French nation committed a mortal sin 
against democracy, which daily prays on its knees: Holy Universal Suffrage, plead 
for us! The believers in Universal Suffrage are naturally unwilling to dispense with 
the miraculous power which has worked such great things with them, which has 
transformed Bonaparte II into a Napoleon, a Saul into a Paul and a Simon into a 
Peter. The popular spint speaks to them through the ballot box as the God of the 
Prophet Ezekiel spoke to the dry bones: ‘Haec dicit dominus deus ossibus suis: Ecce, 
ego intromittam in vos spiritum et vivetis. “Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones: 
Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shail live’” [Ezekiel 37 : 5].— Ed. 

Bonaparte.* When the puritans at the Council of Constance’! 
complained of the dissolute lives of the popes and wailed about the 
necessity of moral reform, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly thundered at 
them: “Only the devil in person can still save the Catholic Church, 
and you ask for angels.” In like manner, after the coup d’état, the 
French bourgeoisie cried: Only the chief of the Society of December 
10 can still save bourgeois society! Only theft can still save property; 
only perjury, religion; bastardy, the family; disorder, order! 

As the executive authority which has made itself an independent 
power, Bonaparte feels it to be his mission to safeguard “bourgeois 
order”. But the strength of this bourgeois order lies in the middle 
class. He looks on himself, therefore, as the representative of the 
middle class and issues decrees in this sense. Nevertheless, he is 
somebody solely due to the fact that he has broken the political 
power of this middle class and daily breaks it anew. Consequently, he 
looks on himself as the adversary of the political and literary power 
of the middle class. But by protecting its material power, he 
generates its political power” anew. The cause must accordingly be 
kept alive; but the effect, where it manifests itself, must be done away 
with. But this cannot pass off without slight confusions of cause and 
effect, since in their interaction both lose their distinguishing 
features. New decrees that obliterate the border line. As against the 
bourgeoisie, Bonaparte looks on himself, at the same time, as the 
representative of the peasants and of the people in general, who 
wants to make the lower classes of the people happy within the 
framework of bourgeois society. New decrees that cheat the “true 
Socialists” !*? of their statecraft in advance. But, above all, Bonaparte 
looks on himself as the chief of the Society of December 10, as the 
representative of the lumpenproletariat, to which he himself, his 
entourage, his government and his army belong, and whose prime 
consideration is to benefit itself and draw. California lottery prizes 
from the state treasury. And he vindicates his position as chief of the 
Society of December 10 with decrees, without decrees and despite 
decrees. 

This contradictory task of the man explains the contradictions of 
his government, the confused, blind to-ing and fro-ing which seeks 
now to win, now to humiliate first one class and then another and 
arrays all of them uniformly against him, whose practical uncertainty 
forms a highly comical contrast to the imperious, categorical style of 

* The 1852 edition further has: “Despotism or anarchy? Naturally it voted for 
despotism.” — Fd. : 

> In the 1852 edition: “its public, its political power” .— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 195 

the government decrees, a style which is faithfully copied from the 
uncle.’ 

Industry and trade, hence the business affairs of the middle class, 
are to prosper in hothouse fashion under the strong government. 
The grant of innumerable railway concessions. But the Bonapartist 
lumpenproletariat is to enrich itself. The initiated play tripotage” on 
the bourse with the railway concessions. But no capital is forthcoming 
for the railways. Obligation of the Bank to make advances on railway 
shares. But, at the same time, the Bank is to be exploited for personal 
ends and therefore must be cajoled. Release of the Bank from the 
obligation to publish its report weekly. Leonine agreement of the 
Bank with the government. The people are to be given employment. 
Initiation of public works. But the public works increase the 
obligations of the people in respect of taxes. Hence reduction of the 
taxes by an onslaught on the rentiers, by conversion of the five per 
cent bonds to four-and-a-half per cent. But, once more, the middle 
class must receive a douceur.© Therefore doubling of the wine tax for 
the people, who buy it en détail,’ and halving of the wine tax for the 
middle class, who drink it en gros. Dissolution of the actual workers’ 
associations, but promises of miracles of association in the future. 
The peasants are to be helped. Mortgage banks that expedite their 
getting into debt and accelerate the concentration of property. But 
these banks are to be used to make money‘ out of the confiscated 
estates of the House of Orleans. No capitalist wants to agree to this 
condition, which is not in the decree, and the mortgage bank remains 
a mere decree, etc., etc. 

Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all 
classes. But he cannot give to one class without taking from another. 
Just as at the time of the Fronde it was said of the Duke of Guise that 
he was the most obligeant man in France because he had turned all his 
estates into his partisans’ obligations to him, so Bonaparte would fain 
be the most obligeant man in France and turn all the property, all the 
labour of France into a personal obligation to himself. He would like 
to steal the whole of France in order to be able to make a present of 
her to France or, rather, in order to be able to buy France anew with 

* The 1852 edition further has: “So the haste and precipitateness of these 
contradictions is to ape the many-sided activities and promptness of the 
Bree yore Ed. 

° Hanky- panky.— Ed. 
, Sop.— Ed. 
“ Retail.— Ed. 

; © Wholesale.— Ed. 

In the 1852 edition: “to make money for oneself” .— Ed. 

196 | Karl Marx 

French money, for as the chief of the Society of December 10 he 
must needs buy what ought to belong to him. And all the state 
institutions, the Senate, the Council of State, the legislative body, the 
Legion of Honour, the soldiers’ medals, the wash-houses, the public 
works, the railways, the état-major* of the National Guard excluding 
privates, and the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans—all 
become parts of the institution of purchase. Every place in the army 
and in the government machine becomes a means of purchase. But 
the most important feature of this process, whereby France is taken 
in order to be given back, is the percentages that find their way into 
the pockets of the head and the members of the Society of December 
10 during the transaction. The witticism with which Countess L.,” the 
mistress of M. de Morny, characterised the confiscation of the 
Orleans estates: “C'est le premier vol* de l’aigle’ “is applicable to every 
flight of this eagle, which is more like a raven.'”? He himself and his 
adherents call out to one another daily like that Italian Carthusian 
admonishing the miser who, with boastful display, counted up the 
goods on which he could yet live for years to come: “ Tu fat conto sopra 
t beni, bisogna prima far il conto sopra gli anni.” ** Lest they make a 
mistake in the years, they count the minutes. A gang of shady 
characters push their way forward to the court, into the ministries, to 
the head of the administration and the army, a crowd of the best of 
whom it must be said that no one knows whence he comes, a noisy, 
disreputable, rapacious boheme that crawls into braided coats with 
the same grotesque dignity as the high dignitaries of Soulouque. One 
can visualise clearly this upper stratum of the Society of December 
10, if one reflects that Véron-Crevel*** is its preacher of morals and 
Granier de Cassagnac its thinker. When Guizot, at the time of his 
ministry, utilised this Granier on a hole-and-corner newspaper 
against the dynastic opposition, he used to boast of him with the 
quip: “C'est le roi des dréles,” “he is the king of buffoons.” “One would 
do wrong to recall the Regency '™ or Louis XV in connection with 
Louis Bonaparte’s court and clique. For “often already, France has 

* Vol means flight and theft. 
** “Thou countest thy goods, thou shouldst first count thy years.” 
*** In his novel Cousine Bette, Balzac delineates the thoroughly dissolute Parisian 
philistine in Crevel, a character based on Dr. Véron, owner of the Constitutionnel. 

“ General Staff.— Ed. 
> Lehon.— Ed. 
“ “It is the first flight (theft) of the eagle.” — Ed. 
Quoted in the article by Dupont “Chronique de I’Interieur”, Voix du Proscrit, No. 
8, December 15, 1850.— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 197 

experienced a government of mistresses; but never before a 
government of hommes entretenus.” *? 

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation and being at 
the same time, like a conjurer, under the necessity of keeping the 
public gaze fixed on himself, as Napoleon’s substitute, by springing 
constant surprises, that is to say, under the necessity of executing a 
coup d’état en miniature every day, Bonaparte throws the entire 
bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed 
inviolable to the revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of 
revolution, others desirous of revolution, and produces actual 
anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping its 
halo from the entire state machine, profanes it and makes it at once 
loathsome and ridiculous. The cult of the Holy Coat of Trier’” he 
duplicates in Paris with the cult of the Napoleonic imperial mantle. 
But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis 
Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will crash from the top of 
the Vendéme Column.’ 

* The words quoted are those of Madame Girardin. 

* Hommes entretenus: kept men. The 1852 edition further has: “And Cato, who 
took his life to be able to associate with heroes in the Elysian Fields! Poor 
Cato!” — Fa. 

198 

Frederick Engels