Karl Marx: A Life From Beginning to End (Revolutionaries Book 1) by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-11-07T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

The Folly of the French

“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”

—Karl Marx

Although Karl Marx was removed from France to prevent subversive activity, the subversion seemed to have carried on just fine without him since a second French Revolution had erupted right on the heels of his departure. This latest tumult was then followed by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew Louis—or as he was better known, Napoleon III—being elected the president of the Second Republic.

Napoleon III’s presidency only lasted for one term, ending in May 1852; the Second Republic was then transformed into a dictatorship, and Napoleon III was crowned as emperor in December 1852. These actions would inspire Marx from his perch in England to write The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Brumaire was the made-up month invented by the new calendar of the French Republic (falling somewhere between October and November), and it was on the eighteenth day of this Brumaire that Napoleon Bonaparte had overthrown the first French Republic in 1799. So, calling his treatise The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was a slightly sarcastic nod to Napoleon III’s seizure of power in 1851.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a collection of heady critiques and direct analyses of Napoleon III’s takeover and what it meant for the larger scheme of history. Karl Marx famously lambasted Louis Napoleon as a farce and imitator to the throne of his uncle Napoleon I. Along with his critique of Louis Napoleon III, Marx also used this book to advance his ideas on the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeois master class.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the book was his direct criticism of the French working class for allowing a despot such as Napoleon III to seize power in the first place. He placed much blame squarely on the shoulders of the French people for allowing themselves to be, as he put it, “delivered unresisting into captivity by three swindlers.”

Karl Marx openly wondered how the French working class whom he had so closely worked with and vouched for during much of his early life as a social activist, could so easily forfeit their right of self-determination. How they could give in to just a handful of political schemers led by the despotic nepotism engendered by Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis Napoleon III, struck Marx as beyond incredulous.

Marx then goes on to attempt to explain part of the factors involved in this farce having to do with the fact that Napoleon III had actively deceived the Parisian proletariat by promising them a “benevolent society” with him as its grand steward. On the flipside of this—Marx contended—was the fact that where the proletariat had hung their hopes for expanded freedom on the shoulders of Napoleon III, the bourgeoisie viewed him as someone who would bring order to the chaos.

In essence, you had two opposed groups projecting their differing aspirations on the same figure that pretended to cater to them both, yet in reality, left neither fulfilled.

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