The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (German: Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Napoleon) is a work by Karl Marx begun in 1851 and first published in 1852 analyzing the defeat of the 1848 February Revolution in France and its replacement with the government of Louis Bonaparte.

On December 2, 1851, followers of President Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew) broke up the Legislative Assembly and established a dictatorship. A year later, Louis Bonaparte proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III. The title is an ironic reference to the date of Napoleon Bonaparte's 1799 coup, which occurred on the 18th day of the month of Brumaire in the French Revolutionary calendar. Marx traces how the conflict of different social interests manifests itself in the complex web of political struggles, and in particular the contradictory relationships between the outer form of a struggle and its real social content. The proletariat of Paris was at this time too inexperienced to win power, but the experiences of 1848-51 would prove invaluable for the successful workers' revolution of 1871.