Everyone knows the first sentence, and almost no one reads the book it opens. "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." A few lines on comes the other line everyone knows — "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past" — and then the image that has outlived the book: "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is quoted more than it is read, and that is a loss, because between its famous opening and its half-forgotten close Marx does something he never did at this length again: he takes a single, shabby political event — the coup by which Louis Bonaparte, nephew of the great Napoleon, made himself dictator of France on 2 December 1851 — and shows the whole machinery of class, state and illusion working underneath it. The title names the parallel: the eighteenth Brumaire was the day in the French revolutionary calendar on which the first Napoleon seized power in 1799. The nephew restaged the coup as farce.
Marx wrote the work at white heat, in London exile, between December 1851 and March 1852, for a little German-American monthly, Die Revolution, that his friend Joseph Weydemeyer was trying to launch in New York. It was journalism against the clock, and it is the finest thing of its kind ever written. The present text is the Progress Publishers edition prepared in Moscow, printed from the 1869 edition and checked against those of 1852 and 1885; it is the standard English translation carried in the Selected Works. It is well equipped. It opens with Marx's own Preface to the second edition of 1869, in which he distinguishes his method from the two rival pamphlets on the coup — "Victor Hugo's Napoleon the Little and Proudhon's Coup d'Etat" — the one a shower of indignation, the other a covert apology; Marx, by contrast, sets out to "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." It carries, too, Engels's Preface to the third German edition of 1885, which claims for the book the honour of a first test — Marx "had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles… are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes" — and it closes with the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's notes. The apparatus is where the argument of this introduction has to be made, because the trouble with the Brumaire is not the book but what its owners would not let it say.
What the book does supremely, first, is method turned on the living moment. The opening pages are the most balanced statement Marx ever gave of how history is made — neither by great men imposing their will (the illusion the Bonapartes traded on) nor by impersonal forces grinding out a predetermined result (the fatalism his own followers would later manufacture), but by real people acting under inherited constraints they did not choose. He then applies it without mercy: the revolutionaries of 1848 borrow the costumes of 1793, the bourgeoisie discovers it would rather be ruled than rule, the peasants vote for a name, and a "grotesque mediocrity" walks through the wreckage to a throne. The famous distinction between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions is here — the first storming "swiftly from success to success," the second doomed to "recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims" — and it is one of the deepest things Marx wrote about the difference between a revolution that only has to seize a state and one that has to remake a society.
The second thing the book does supremely, and the thing that matters most for what follows, is its analysis of the state. Watching the coup, Marx sees something his own theory had not yet fully named: that the state apparatus can float free of every class and stand over society as a power in its own right. "This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organisation, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, 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." And the sentence that would become a slogan of the revolutionary tradition against every reformism: "All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it." Here is the germ of the whole later Marxist theory of the state — the theory Lenin would draw out in The State and Revolution — and here, in the figure of Louis Bonaparte balancing between exhausted classes, is the category that the twentieth century would need most: Bonapartism, the rule of a strong man and his apparatus raised above a society whose contending classes have fought each other to a standstill.
Not everything in the book is of one temperature. Marx is at times a ventriloquist, letting each class speak a settled part, and the analysis of the small-holding peasants — the mass on whose votes Bonaparte rode — carries a genuine condescension that has aged badly: "They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them… that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above." As prophecy the book also overreached: its closing promise that when the imperial mantle finally fell on Bonaparte "the bronze statue of Napoleon will crash from the top of the Vendôme Column" came true only twenty years later, and by the hands of the Paris Commune rather than by the logic Marx had traced. These are the marks of a brilliant pamphlet written at speed, not defects that sink it. What sinks nothing, and explains everything, is the state analysis — and it is exactly the state analysis that the book's Soviet custodians could not afford to have read straight.
For here is the question this well-equipped edition does not put to itself: was the state that canonised the Brumaire as the model of Marxist political analysis able to apply the Brumaire's own central discovery to itself? The book teaches that a bureaucratic-military apparatus can raise itself above society and become an "appalling parasitic body"; that a possessing class, terrified of the risks of ruling in its own name, will hand its political power to that apparatus in exchange for the quiet enjoyment of its social power — the party of Order, Marx writes, "longed to get rid of its own political rule in order to get rid of the troubles and dangers of ruling." Turn that instrument homeward and it describes, with uncomfortable precision, the Soviet state under Stalin: a swollen apparatus of officials, standing over a working class in whose name it ruled and which it had relieved of all power; an arbiter risen above the classes once the revolutionary energy of October had ebbed and the international revolution had failed to come to its aid; a plebiscitary dictator resting on a cult, the "grotesque" heir dressing his usurpation in the costumes of the founders — Stalin as "the Lenin of today," the embalmed Lenin as his warrant. The Brumaire had written the analysis of his regime three-quarters of a century before he built it. And so the one Marxist classic most exactly aimed at his own kind of power was printed in millions, praised as method, and never once turned on the society that printed it.
It was turned there, and by the man the Soviet apparatus most needed silenced. Trotsky reached for precisely Marx's category to name the thing that had happened to the revolution: in The Revolution Betrayed and in the 1935 essay "The Workers' State, Thermidor and Bonapartism," he analysed the Stalin regime as a Soviet Bonapartism — a bureaucracy that had lifted itself above the proletariat and the remnants of the old classes alike, balancing between them, arbitrating, and living off the surplus of a society it commanded but did not own. The parallel was not a polemical flourish; it was the Brumaire used as its author meant it to be used, as an instrument for recognising the autonomy of a state machine that no textbook class "owned." That the same regime which reprinted the Brumaire as scripture hunted down the analysis it licenced is the whole story in miniature. This is not, it must be said plainly, a charge that the degeneration was written into Bolshevism or into Marx. The Soviet Thermidor had objective roots the Brumaire itself would have insisted on — the isolation of the revolution once the German rising failed, the ruin of the working class in the civil war, the backwardness and siege of a peasant country encircled by its enemies. Men made that history, but not in circumstances of their choosing. The point is narrower and sharper: the doctrine froze the one book that could have diagnosed its own state into a set of quotations about tragedy and farce, and struck out the diagnosis.
So what is the Eighteenth Brumaire worth now, beyond the sentences everyone can recite? Its value is the value of a method that refuses both of the consolations Marxism was later sold. Against the fatalism that made revolution a matter of waiting for the productive forces to ripen, it insists that men make their own history — that the outcome in December 1851 turned on what people did, on nerve and illusion and the concrete balance of forces, not on a timetable. Against the voluntarism that imagines a strong will can leap over every constraint, it insists just as firmly that they do not make it as they please. And it hands the tradition a working concept — Bonapartism — that the Fourth International would use to read the rise of fascism, the "strong states" of the post-colonial world, and above all the bureaucratic dictatorships that flew the red flag: the recurring modern spectacle of an apparatus standing over a society and calling itself the society's servant. Read with its state analysis restored to the centre, and the peasant chapter and the closing prophecy read as the ambitious excesses of a young pamphlet, the Brumaire stops being a quarry for epigraphs and becomes what Marx wrote it to be: proof that the class struggle can be read even in a farce, and a standard by which the readers of it — including the state that made it holy while forbidding anyone to hold it up to the mirror — can themselves be measured.