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Timeline of events
The 18th Brumaire is important for understanding Marx's real approach to politics and the state, as against the simplistic versions often cited and sometimes encouraged by this or that summary statement of Marx's.
However, it can be difficult to read today, because it was written assuming that readers had prior knowledge of events in France between 1848 and 1852, and of the French revolution of 1789-94, which most of us don't have today.
Below is a basic timeline It may also help to read this narrative (attached), an abridgement from R J Evans's book The Pursuit of Power.
Useful names
Armand Barbès: a prominent comrade of Auguste Blanqui
Louis Blanc: reform socialist, member of the first Provisional Government, had to flee after June 1848
Auguste Blanqui: communist revolutionary in the tradition of secret-society conspiracies (though eventually the "Blanquists" in France would evolve to merge with the Marxists).
Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III): The nephew of the original Napoleon, a political adventurer.
Saint-Arnaud: Louis Bonaparte's Minister of War who played a crucial role in executing the military operations of the 1851 coup.
Marc Caussidière: a radical republican forced to flee after June 1848
Cavaignac: The leader of the "blue" (bourgeois) republicans; the general who suppressed the Paris workers' uprising in June 1848, and later the republican opponent of Bonaparte in the presidential election of December 1848.
Changarnier: A general who had taken part in the June 1848 suppression, and was anti-republican, but also opposed to Bonaparte
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin: A leader of the Montagne, the radical-republican-cum-social-democratic faction in the National Assembly
Legitimist: supporter of the more conservative faction of the monarchists, in power 1815-1830. (Each faction of the monarchists had its own candidate to be king).
Marrast: The President of the Constituent Assembly whose orders to the military were ignored by Bonaparte's loyal generals.
Orleanist: supporter of the mildly-liberal faction of the monarchists, in power 1830-1848
Saint-Arnaud: Louis Bonaparte's Minister of War who played a crucial role in executing the military operations of the 1851 coup.
Adolphe Thiers: A leading historian, Orleanist politician, and prominent figure in the Party of Order who initially allied with Bonaparte before opposing him.
Timeline
1789, May: The absolute monarch Louis XVI has been obliged to call the "Estates-General" in order to try to get taxes approved. It convenes at Versailles. The "Third Estate", with liberals from the nobility and a few from the clergy, are in revolt from the start.
1789, 20 June: Assembly swears Tennis Court Oath, not to disband until they have drafted a new constitution.
1789, 14 July: Parisians storm the Bastille. The unrest tips over into revolution.
1789, July-August: "The Great Fear". Peasant uprisings across France.
1789, 4 August: Assembly abolishes feudal privileges,
1791, June 20-21: The royal family attempts to flee Paris but is captured at Varennes
1791, September: Constitution adopted.
1792, April: Beginning of the Revolutionary Wars, sparked by plots against the revolution by nobles who have fled and by European monarchies such as that of the Hapsburg (Austrian) empire. These wars, seguing into "Napoleonic wars", will continue almost uninterrupted until 1815.
1792, September: Election of the National Convention, which declares the Republic
1793, January: King Louis XVI guillotined
1793, May: The "Mountain" (radical) faction of the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, takes control, pushing aside the "Girondin" (moderate) faction. Adopts more radical-democratic constitution in June.
1794, July 28: "Thermidor". Robespierre is overthrown and executed. Rapid shift to the right.
1795, November: The Directory is established, placing executive power into the hands of five directors (Jacobins, who do this both to hold out against reinvigorated monarchists and to stifle forces to their left)
1796, May: Conspiracy of Equals, which had planned a communist uprising, arrested.
1799, 9 November: "Brumaire". Napoleon Bonaparte overthrows the Directory. He establishes the Consulate, which in 1804 is renamed Empire.
1814-5: Napoleon deposed in favour of restored monarchy, escapes from exile in Elba, resumes power, but then is defeated by Prussia and Britain at the Battle of Waterloo
After Waterloo, conservative, authoritarian regimes, dominated by land magnates, had been imposed on Europe. The bourgeoisie and sections described as petty bourgeoisie – small workshop operators and shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, professors, students – began to crack those regimes from the 1830s. They were impatient to win constitutional government, civil liberties, and free trade, at least for themselves.
In February 1848, the same month that the Communist Manifesto was published, revolution erupted in France and then across Europe. (The exception, paradoxically, was in Britain, where the Chartists had a limp turnout for their long-planned 10 April 1848 demonstration and then went into decline).
Since a moderate revolution in 1830 France had been ruled by the Orleanist faction of the monarchy. It was more liberal than the Bourbons who had ruled from 1815-30; but "it was not the French bourgeoisie as a whole which ruled but only one fraction of it - bankers, stock-market barons, railway barons, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a section of landed proprietors... the so-called financial aristocracy" (Marx).
January 1848: street protests in Palermo against the autocratic rule of the king of Naples, followed by similar upheavals in other Italian cities, including those of the north, ruled by Austria.
22 February 1848: the people of Paris come onto the streets and erect barricades in protest against the banning of a liberal banquet. The National Guard turns against the king.
24 February: the king abdicates. Provisional government set up by the previous liberal opposition (around Le National: Lamartine, etc.) It includes some socialistic democrats (whose paper has been La Réforme: Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc).
Social reforms, including National Workshops to create jobs for the unemployed.
March: liberal revolution in Austria. Upheavals in the German states: creation of the Frankfurt Parliament as an all-German counterweight to the existing states.
23 April: elections to Constituent Assembly in France. Conservative rural votes give a majority to more conservative factions. When the assembly meets on 4 May 1848 the conservatives take control of the government and exclude Louis Blanc and other leftists.
15 May: communist revolutionaries Blanqui and Barbès lead an attempt to dissolve the assembly by force and establish a new emergency government. They are jailed and civil liberties are restricted.
21 June: The conservative-republican government shuts the National Workshops. Workers' protests; street-fighting; suppressed by the new Mobile Guards under the command of Cavaignac; over 3,000 killed, and 15,000 exiled.
(A week earlier an Austrian general has crushed an uprising in Prague. In July another general will re-establish Austrian rule in northern Italy; in October the army will re-establish firm control in Vienna. However, in November the Pope will flee Rome, and a Roman Republic will be established, until the Pope is restored, with the help of the French army, in June 1849).
10 December: elections for president of France: Bonaparte wins thanks to peasant votes.
28 May 1849: elections for National Assembly, to replace Constituent Assembly. Large victory for coalition "Party of Order"; the "Mountain", calling themselves "democratic socialists", come second.
13 June 1849: bourgeois radicals ("The Mountain", led by Ledru-Rollin) stage a protest, especially against the French army's intervention in Rome. They are suppressed, and Ledru-Rollin flees.
10 March 1850: by-elections for National Assembly, to replace left-wing members banned for walking out in protest over the bombardment of Rome. Some leftists, including an outright communist, Paul-Louis de Flotte, are elected.
May 1850: Assembly restricts right to vote
19 July 1851: law put to Assembly to enable president to continue after two-year term specified in November 1848 constitution.
2 December 1851: Bonaparte carries out his coup - dismisses Assembly, restores universal male suffrage. After street protests are suppressed, on 20-21 December a referendum endorses the coup.
7 November 1852: another referendum makes Bonaparte Emperor rather than President, and replaces Second Republic by Second Empire.
The Second Empire would rule from 1852 to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. It is the first "Bonapartist" regime, a regime fundamentally serving bourgeois social power, but doing that through the semi-autocratic but "socially minded" political power of a petty-bourgeois clique which nurtured its main voting support (for plebiscites) among the peasantry. It oversees much railway-building, the rebuilding of Paris, and fairly rapid industrial development. It fights wars (Crimean War 1853-6; war with Austria to push it out of Italy but also grab Nice and Savoy for France 1859-60; colonial wars in Africa and Indochina; sending troops in alliance with Britain to China; attempt to establish a client regime in Mexico, 1861-7; and then the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, where France is defeated and the Empire falls.
After 1859 the Second Empire loosens up its internal regime ("the liberal Empire").
Discussion points
Discussion points: a lot of them, so in a short session you might what to covers only points 1 to 6.
1. Write down a schedule of the main events covered, from February 1848 to December 1851
2. What is happening meanwhile in other major countries of Europe? Austrina empire? The German lands? The Italian lands? Britain?
3. What happened in the French Revolution of 1789-94 (the model for "revolution" until 1917, and frequently referred to by Marx in this text)?
4. Marx writes: "People 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." [Yes, the English translation has "Men...", but Marx writing in German uses a word meaning "humans", not the German word for "men"]. Actually he follows up by describing people making history with ideas transmitted from the past: "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."
a - Why is it destructive to make a revolution in (relatively) modern capitalism with your brain dominated by outdated ideas, when it wasn't so destructive in France in 1789-94 and in England in 1642-9?
b - What makes the outdated ideas outdated is changed social circumstances. How had the following classes in France changed between 1789 and 1848?
-- the working class
-- the peasantry
-- the wealthy classes
5. Until and even during 1848, the French Revolution of 1789-94 was, for almost all radicals, the model for all revolutions. Here Marx suggests that future revolutions may be different: "Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long period of regret takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! [Here is the rose, here dance!]" What are the implications?
6. Marx also writes: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase". Implications?
7. Marx argues that in 1848-51 the bourgeois republic is the only way in which all the factions of the bourgeoisie can rule, but then it breaks down. Which factions? Why only in the bourgeois republic? Why does it break down?
Marx describes seven different political factions or coalitions, with different bases in different classes or fractions of classes. He qualifies all this by writing: "One [must not] imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent".
What does Marx describe as the bases of the following (and what complications or ambiguities arise in each case)?
a - The Legitimists
b - The Orleanists
c - The "pure" or "bourgeois" republicans
d - The "proletarian party"
e - The "social democratic party".
8. With the Bonapartists, it is more complicated. Marx variously describes Bonaparte as based on, or serving, three classes or fractions of classes. Which? And is Marx just contradicting himself, or does this complicated assessment make sense?
9. In much of Marx's writings, polemicising against by non-communist democrats, he insists that the state is shaped by civil society. Here he writes that the state "enmeshes, controls, regulates, supervises, and regiments civil society". Is Marx just contradicting himself, or does this complicated assessment make sense?
10. The Second Empire (1852-70) was different from the old-style monarchies of Austria and Prussia, the constitutional monarchies like Britain, and republics like the USA. How?
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