Marx's 'Eighteenth Brumaire': (Post)modern Interpretations

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Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire (Post)modern Interpretations

Edited by

Mark Cowling and James Martin

Pluto

P

Press

LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2002 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Mark Cowling and James Martin 2002; ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx: Later Political Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1996, edited and translated by Terrell Carver. Reproduced by permission of the translator and publisher. The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 1831 2 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1830 4 paperback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. [Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte. English] Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’ : (post)modern interpretations / edited by Mark Cowling and James Martin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–1831–2 (hardback) –– ISBN 0–7453–1830–4 (pbk.) 1. Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, 1808–1873. 2. France––History––Coup d’état, 1851. 3. France––History––February Revolution, 1848. 4. France––History––Second Republic, 1848–1852. I. Title: Eighteenth Brumaire. II. Title: Marx’s ‘18th Brumaire’. III. Cowling, Mark. IV. Martin, James, 1968– V. Carver, Terrell. VI. Title. DC274 .M27 2002 944.07––dc21 2002008652

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, England

Contents

Acknowledgements 1. Introduction Mark Cowling and James Martin Part 1

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The Eighteenth Brumaire as History

5. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte: ‘Hero’ or ‘Grotesque Mediocrity’? Roger Price 6. The Appeal of Bonapartism Geoff Watkins Part 4

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The Eighteenth Brumaire as Discourse

3. Imagery/Writing, Imagination/Politics: Reading Marx through the Eighteenth Brumaire Terrell Carver 4. Performing Politics: Class, Ideology and Discourse in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire James Martin Part 3

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The Text

2. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Trans. Terrell Carver) Karl Marx Part 2

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The Autonomy of the State?

7. The Political Scene and the Politics of Representation: Periodising Class Struggle and the State in the Eighteenth Brumaire Bob Jessop 8. Making Sense of the ‘Relative Autonomy’ of the State Paul Wetherly

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Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire

Part 5

The Eighteenth Brumaire, Classes and Class Struggle, Then and Now

9. The Eighteenth Brumaire and Thatcherism Paul Blackledge 10. Marx’s Lumpenproletariat and Murray’s Underclass: Concepts Best Abandoned? Mark Cowling 11. Here Content Transcends Phrase: The Eighteenth Brumaire as the Key to Understanding Marx’s Critique of Utopian Socialism Darren Webb Notes on the Contributors Index

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to express their thanks to the following for their assistance in the development of this book: members of the Marxism Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association (UK) for their offer of contributions; Anne Beech at Pluto Press for her enthusiasm for the project; and the staff at the British Library and at the University of London Library (Senate House) for their help in providing materials. All references to Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte are to the translation by Terrell Carver contained in Part 1 of this volume. This text was first published in Terrell Carver (ed. and trans.), Karl Marx: Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 31–127. We are grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint it here. Where possible, all other references to the works of Marx and Engels are to the (so far) 47 volumes of Karl Marx–Frederick Engels. Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–). These are referenced in the endnotes with the abbreviation C.W., followed by volume and page numbers.

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Introduction Mark Cowling and James Martin

On 2 December 1851, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte – nephew of the great Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and, since late 1848, elected President of the Second French Republic – announced the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly and, with the backing of the army, ordered the parliamentary chamber to be occupied by troops, the leaders of the main parties arrested and placed himself in sole charge of government. A year later he declared himself Emperor Napoleon III, head of the Second French Empire. Bonaparte’s coup d’état brought to an end not only the republican regime ushered in after the revolution of 1848 but also the period of unstable, limited ‘bourgeois democratic’ government and experimentation with constitutional monarchy since the defeat of his uncle in 1815. For those radicals and socialists who in 1848 hoped to transform the wave of democratic revolutions into a more substantial movement for economic and social reform, Napoleon’s coup symbolised and underscored a demoralising defeat at the hands of popular reaction. Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a bitter, richly entertaining account of these events by one of the radicals who had observed events at first hand. A journalist, intellectual and self-proclaimed communist, Marx, too, had participated as a propagandist in the events of 1848 as co-founder of the ‘Communist League’ and in his Manifesto of the Communist Party of that year, co-written with Frederick Engels, he had encouraged socialist revolutionaries to participate in the revolution alongside the republican bourgeoisie in order to bring to the fore the demands of the proletariat. The Eighteenth Brumaire, written and published in 1852, narrated the rise and decline of the revolution in France from the proclamation of the ‘Second Republic’ to the coup of 1851. By contrast with the Manifesto – characterised by its (deliberately) optimistic reading of history as a series of class struggles leading, ultimately, to communism – the Eighteenth Brumaire tells a more complex and less ‘progressive’ story. It is also one of Marx’s few lengthy analyses of political history and it is widely regarded as one of his most colourful.1 Yet within Marxist scholarship the Eighteenth Brumaire’s novelty is often noted but the 1

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text is rarely commented upon at any length. It is the purpose of this volume, one hundred and fifty years after Marx’s publication, to begin to fill that gap. In the remainder of this Introduction we shall give a brief summary of the content of the Eighteenth Brumaire and then discuss its themes in relation to the concerns of later Marxists and the Marxist tradition generally. Finally we offer a brief overview of the content of the chapters that follow. MARX’S EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE: THE TEXT The text of the Eighteenth Brumaire (reprinted after this Introduction in a new translation) is a challenge even for those familiar with Marx’s work. Its focus is the transformation of a revolution against a constitutional monarchy (the ‘July Monarchy’ of Louis XV), through a series of internal disputes between the political groups involved, until the dissolution of the Second Republic by Bonaparte’s coup. In this respect, the distance between us and the characters and events in question makes the Eighteenth Brumaire an unfamiliar, and consequently rather burdensome, read. Yet the text is more than a description of events. It is also a reflection, amongst other things, on the nature of revolutions, political leadership and class struggle. In this respect, too, Marxists might find the text less instructive than Marx’s more theoretical works since these political issues are presented in the form of a concrete set of circumstances whose ‘universal’ relevance is at best uncertain. Finally, for those accustomed to reading Marx’s philosophical studies or his critical engagement with political economy, the Eighteenth Brumaire will seem a curiously unscientific commentary, replete with undeclared normative assumptions and personal invective, richly figurative language and with no evident purpose other than of recounting the events and ridiculing the characters under examination. Yet if the Eighteenth Brumaire is a challenge to read, it is not because it lacks substance as a work of political commentary. For all its difficulties as a text, it remains fascinating and provocative for Marxists and non-Marxists alike. Before we consider some of the themes that can be said to ‘derive’ from the Eighteenth Brumaire let us first consider its contents as a commentary on events. Marx takes under examination the period from February 1848 to December 1851. He divides this period into three separate phases, in which different alliances of classes and groupings ruled.

Introduction

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In the first phase (the February Period), King Louis Philippe, whose rule Marx identifies with the finance aristocracy, was overthrown by a broad coalition. It comprised: • large landowners: these were Legitimists (supporters of a restoration of the Bourbons) and not Orléanists, and had been excluded from power under the July Monarchy • republican bourgeoisie: this social category simply comprised members of the bourgeoisie who were anti-monarchist • manufacturing bourgeoisie: interested in cheap government and thus endangered by the rule of the finance aristocracy • democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie: horrified at the corruption of the finance aristocracy • peasantry: also horrified at the extravagance of the finance aristocracy in stark contrast to its own poverty following crop failure and potato blight in 1845–47 • the proletariat: revolted because it identified the rule of finance aristocracy with that of capital. This alliance was modified by the elimination of the proletariat as a political force, first through their immediate diversion to the Hotel de Ville, where they formed a parallel and impotent government, and second through the manoeuvring of the proletariat into a badly organised revolt in June 1848, the failure of which ensured they would play little part in subsequent events. These manoeuvres were carried out by the reigning social category, the republican bourgeoisie. The second phase was brought on by the decline of the republican bourgeoisie, seen in the election of Bonaparte to the Presidency on 10 December 1848. This was achieved by an electoral alliance of: • the peasantry, voting against the taxes the ‘proletarian’ republican government had lain on them • the petty bourgeoisie, voting against the abolition of the progressive tax, by which the bourgeois republicans had hoped to gain the support of the big bourgeoisie; and also voting against Cavaignac, who had put down the June revolt • the big bourgeoisie, who were voting for a restoration of the monarchy (the election of Bonaparte being seen as a step in this direction) • the army, a social category seeking money • the proletariat, who were voting against Cavaignac.

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The result of this alliance was the rise of the Party of Order as the ruling alliance: the Party of Order was the royalist parliamentary party representing the unity of the two bourgeois factions, the large landowners who had ruled under the Restoration and were therefore Legitimists, and the Orléanists, the finance aristocracy who had ruled under the July monarchy. Their rule was paradoxically only possible within the framework of the parliamentary republic and against the background of indefinite postponement of the Restoration. When parliament was recessed in 1850 and 1851, when there seemed a real prospect of restoration, or when Bonaparte dangled the possibility of a ministry representing one faction only, the two factions split up again. The third phase was the one which brought Bonaparte to power. Besides Bonaparte’s manoeuvrings to split the Party of Order into fractions it disintegrated through the desertion of individual members, through a fear of struggle and to safeguard their posts; and, as a result of this, from the necessity of an alliance with the pure republicans and the Montaigne against Bonaparte and the army – which put the remnants of the Party of Order in worse odour with their erstwhile supporters. This disintegration paved the way for the coup which brought Bonaparte to power. The alliance behind Bonaparte were: • finance capital, because Bonaparte represented their interest in state debt, and because he represented stability against the disintegration of the Party of Order • the Legitimist landed aristocracy, which had effectively merged its interests with the finance aristocracy • the industrial bourgeoisie, concerned with public order to secure good trading conditions, but not in a sufficiently developed condition to make a bid for power on its own (parliamentary struggles were seen as a threat to good trading conditions) • the lumpenproletariat (bribed) • the state officials and the army (interested in the expansion of the state). The tone of Marx’s analysis is set by the remarks he makes at the start of the Eighteenth Brumaire concerning bourgeois revolutions and these remarks make the text more than simply a ‘neutral’ telling of history. Marx suggests that revolutions inevitably are enacted in the

Introduction

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guise of earlier, classic moments in history. The English Civil War made reference to the Old Testament, the French Revolution of 1789 referenced the Roman Republic, and the 1848 revolution made reference to the French Revolution. It is precisely these guises or ‘spirits of the past’ to which Marx is referring when he remarks that ‘Traditions from all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ That is, agents in the present are compelled, and yet simultaneously restricted, by the imagery and symbols of the past when they come to fulfil some historic task. In this instance, however, Marx claims the reference to tradition resembles ‘farce’. Marx’s analysis then proceeds in this tenor, sarcastically deriding the failure of the agents to live up to the fanciful imagery and phrases deployed to justify their actions. Throughout the text Marx exposes the limitations of bourgeois and royalist forces, alerting the reader, on the one hand, to the class interests often (though not always) at work behind the shifting alliances and petty intrigue of politics and, on the other, the unrealistic or reactionary delusions motivating others. Unlike earlier bourgeois revolutions, where the invocation of the past served to undermine aspects of the feudal order and promote a whole new conception of society, the 1848 revolution simply couldn’t fulfil its promise. Bonaparte’s coup was final evidence of a bourgeoisie forced to backtrack on its political ambitions for fear of its own success. If the Eighteenth Brumaire is written as an account of a revolution that declined into farce, nevertheless Marx makes one reference to a point of principle that can be understood as classically ‘Marxist’ – namely, the distinction between an economic base and an ideological and political superstructure. Towards the start of the third section of the text Marx reminds the reader that ‘On the different forms of property, the social conditions of existence, arises an entire superstructure of different and peculiarly formed sentiments, delusions, modes of thought and outlooks on life.’2 Classes build upon the ‘material foundations’ of these property relations but it is their interests at that level that ultimately motivate them. We are advised not to be taken in by the ‘fine words and aspirations’ of political forces but to look to ‘their real interests’ as an explanation for their behaviour. The same point will be made at slightly greater length in Marx’s ‘Preface’ of 1859 to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Here, however, the point is made in passing, positioned a good way through the text rather than at the start. Yet its presence serves to remind us that Marx was not simply engaging in pure

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sarcasm and denunciation (something he was quite good at). Although it is not presented as such, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire might be conceived as an example of the application of theoretical principle to the analysis of concrete political history. The theoretical principle in question is the ‘materialistic conception of history’ or ‘historical materialism’ that he and Engels worked out in the mid1840s and which is given fullest expression in the jointly authored but unpublished German Ideology of 1845–46. Yet before we rush to classify the Eighteenth Brumaire as a direct application of principle to practice, we should alert ourselves to the fact that at no point does Marx actually claim this work builds on a theory of historical materialism, and its location in the text suggests that this is not his priority. Even if it was, closer analysis makes it evident that Marx is not applying the principle in any strict sense. There is a considerable degree of autonomy and independent effect granted to ideas, ideologies and other such elements of the ‘superstructure’. This is, perhaps, inevitable given that the interests of the propertied classes could find expression in at least three groupings, the two rival royalist factions of Legitimists and Orléanists, loyal to different branches of the French royal family whose smooth pattern of primogeniture had been shattered by the Revolution of 1789, and those who aspired to revive the rule of the Empire of the first Napoleon Bonaparte. Thus the text of the Eighteenth Brumaire is a complex, fascinating commentary upon political events. But what is its importance for the Marxist tradition? We can only offer tentative suggestions here by highlighting the ‘themes’ that have engaged later Marxists and which inform the contributions to this volume. THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE AS HISTORY If the Eighteenth Brumaire was an extended attempt by Marx to write history, the immediate question for a new reader is whether his account of the rise of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte III was any good by the standards of subsequent historians. Was he involved in gross distortions or gross ignorance? The general verdict is that Marx makes quite a respectable job of narrating and explaining this episode. The main criticisms made by historians have to do with the role of the proletariat. Marx aims to identify proletarian support for Napoleon as support by the lumpenproletariat, or as a negative vote against General Cavaignac, who had put down the June insurrection. In fact proletarian support for Bonaparte was considerably more substantial than Marx allows. In

Introduction

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turn this allows Marx to present Bonaparte as a buffoon and a swindler, playing down his positive appeal on the basis of the Napoleonic legend and as a potential moderniser.3 POLITICS, CLASS AND THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE The Eighteenth Brumaire focuses upon an area of social life that the Marxist tradition is typically considered to have neglected, namely: politics. Marxism, it is widely thought, embodies above all a theory of history and social change. History, Marx suggests in the 1859 ‘Preface’, is the movement produced by the contradiction between the ‘forces’ and ‘relations of production’. Politics, in this schema, is relegated to a secondary status, an effect of this wider logic in which modes of production form and then succumb to their own internal contradictions, to be replaced by new modes of production. However, Marx and Engels also argue, in the Manifesto, that history is ‘the history of class struggles’, a perpetual, if often disguised, conflict between economic classes. In its interpretation of society and history the Marxist tradition has moved between these poles of ‘structural determination’ by overarching historical ‘laws’ and a more open-ended account of classes in struggle. Whereas the first approach emphasises the general limits to thought and action set by economic conditions, the second emphasises the role of political agents (ultimately, economic classes) in historical change. It is this latter account of historical change that occupies Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire. Its central concerns are classes as political agents. Unlike the Manifesto, as we have already suggested, the kind of struggle that Marx narrates in the Eighteenth Brumaire is not a triumphant march through history but a more complex process of advance and retreat in which economic classes are not always the principal agents. This raises an issue about which there is some disagreement between the authors in this collection. One obvious traditional Marxist approach to the Eighteenth Brumaire is to see it as an attempt to develop a more subtle analysis of classes than that found in the Manifesto: Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.4

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Faced with a real society Marx recognised a whole series of groupings beyond these, and subdivisions within them. In the above series of alliances we find not merely the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but also large landowners, the finance aristocracy, the manufacturing bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat. In addition we find groupings united at least in the first instance by their ideas, such as the republican bourgeoisie and the democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie, and by economic interests which are not class interests, such as the army or state officials. Plainly, too, classes do not simply represent themselves; their members need to form political parties such as the Party of Order, which may disintegrate for various reasons. We are looking at something much more complex than a two class model. One way forward from the text, then, is to scrutinise the classes and groupings Marx recognises to see whether they are coherent and whether a better analysis could be produced. Thus one could look forward from Marx’s account of the French smallholding peasantry as being like ‘potatoes in a sack’ – living in similar conditions but not really forming a proper class because they had very limited means of communication with each other and no proper political representation.5 At least two issues arise. What exactly counts as a proper class? Could members of a more developed peasantry, for example, see themselves as a class because they had established a party and a body of ideology, but be seen by someone else as still underdeveloped? The second issue is one that was subsequently central to the Leninist branch of Marxism. Could all French peasants really be seen as the same? Did forms of land tenure vary, and if so how would one make sense of that? Were some peasants tending to turn into capitalist farmers, whilst others were sinking into the proletariat? Marx’s own main discussion of the peasantry is an abstract and implied one in ‘The Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer’ in Capital Vol. I and ‘The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent’ in Vol. III, Ch. XLVII. One could move on from this to look at Lenin’s writings on the peasantry, notably The Development of Capitalism in Russia and his gradual development of a rural programme, notably in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. This would lead into a study of what actually happened in the Russian revolution, with the acceptance of the Socialist Revolutionaries’ peasant programme in 1917, the splitting of the village in War Communism, the encouragement of rural enterprise in the period of the New Economic Policy and the treatment of the kulaks, the

Introduction

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peasants who had again started to become capitalist farmers, during collectivisation. The analysis of class divisions amongst the peasantry was also central to the revolutions in other countries such as China and Vietnam.6 In the classical Western Marxist tradition Marx’s writing on the peasantry was followed up by Karl Kautsky.7 A similar approach could be taken with other classes. One could ask whether large landowners and the finance aristocracy shared the same fundamental interests as the capitalist class, and what should be seen as the main subdivisions amongst capitalists – industrial, financial and commercial, perhaps. Beyond this lies the question of other groupings. Is the lumpenproletariat to be seen as a class? Is the analysis of it in the Eighteenth Brumaire a good foundation for further work? (Mark Cowling in this volume argues that it is not.) What should we think of Marx adding social categories held together mainly by ideas, such as the republican bourgeoisie or the democraticrepublican petty bourgeoisie to his account? Isn’t this a deviation from his programme of reducing political groupings to class interests? And aren’t there similar problems with state officials and the army, held together with economic interests but not class interests? It has to be said that the analysis of class generally and the more specific Marxist analysis of class has become less fashionable in recent years. One standard explanation is that class conflict has not been acute in Europe since the Second World War; armed conflicts have been ethnic. Further, the working class in the sense of people who depend on labour for their living remains very large, but is extremely diverse, and parts of it are very affluent (hence a large Marxist literature on the ‘new middle class’ of technical and state personnel and supervisors). Finally, the rise of second wave feminism has added a further significant division that Marxism was not designed to explain, and which has complicated class relationships as many women have become members of the ‘new middle class’ in their own right.8 An alternative approach is the one hinted at above, and developed in the contributions from Carver and Martin to this volume, which might be termed the postmodernist approach. This emphasises that politics is constituted through language, and that class and group interests by no means translate readily into political or ideological representation. Thus beneath the deceptions of self and others mentioned above there will certainly lie material interests, but there is no ready way to reduce representation to material interest. The

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Eighteenth Brumaire is certainly one of the places Marx comes closest to postmodernism. A final comment on the question of politics. A commonplace judgement on Marx is that he failed to foresee the rise of functioning democracies. These may not be perfect, but the advanced capitalist world is now ruled by systems where parties may freely organise, the results of elections are basically respected by the military and the civil service, and changes of government on the basis of elections make some difference. Marx had little experience of such societies, and the revolutions that occurred across Europe in 1848 were disappointing for democrats. His cynicism about electoral democracy must have been greatly encouraged by French politics from 1848 to the triumph of Bonaparte. THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE AND THE STATE In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels describe the state as a ‘committee for organising the common affairs of the bourgeoisie’.9 In the Eighteenth Brumaire it is plain that something much more complex is going on. At minimum, as we saw above, there were three candidates for the ruling group which would represent the bourgeoisie. But Marx argues that there is something special about France, where ‘the state restricts, controls, regulates, oversees and supervises civil life … where through the most extraordinary centralisation this parasite acquires an all-knowing pervasiveness ...’.10 To do this it uses more than half a million civil servants. The ‘material interests of the French bourgeoisie are intertwined in the most intimate way’ with the maintenance of the machinery of state; they need it to repress other classes and they benefit directly from connections with the bureaucracy. For this reason ‘the French bourgeoisie was compelled by its class position both to negate the conditions of existence of any parliamentary power, including its own, and to make the power of the executive, its adversary, irresistible’.11 It thus decried any popular agitation as ‘socialistic’.12 The upshot of this, of course, was that the bourgeoisie went along with, and benefited from, Bonaparte’s coup. This analysis raises several questions. Are all states parasites on society? Is this true of all state functions including road repairing or weather forecasting? Is there something special about the French state? Is the autonomy achieved by the French state from French society at all typical – should we be thinking in terms of a new idea of Bonapartism in which the state achieves a degree of autonomy

Introduction

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from society?13 Was Bonaparte simply representing his own interests and those of his cronies, or was he representing a particular class interest or range of class interests? All these matters have subsequently been debated at length, and the chapters in this volume from Jessop and Wetherly give some introduction to the extensive literature generated. THE CHAPTERS The individual contributions to the book are preceded in Part I by Terrell Carver’s new translation of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire first published by Cambridge University Press.14 The great merit of this version is its accessibility, especially when compared to earlier, rather stodgy and dated translations. As well as modernising its language, Carver has included textual clarifications of certain details (such as dates) in square brackets. The reader should find this text a much smoother and more enjoyable read than earlier versions. Part 2 takes as its theme broadly ‘postmodern’ readings of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire focusing in particular on the relation between its language and the politics it promotes. In Chapter 3 Carver investigates the text and considers how we might unravel its various meanings today. Drawing attention to its extravagant imagery and terminology Carver argues against ‘stripping away’ the metaphors and irony to find an analysis that fits with traditional preconceptions about Marx and Marxism’s purported ‘scientific’ claims. The style of Marx’s work is itself part of its force: dramatic imagery and figurative language are not incidental to the text, they are fundamental. The Eighteenth Brumaire, he suggests, ought not to be viewed as a strictly sociological or historical analysis but as a political intervention in its own right. Understood that way Marx’s own, frequent deviations in the text from a linear or deterministic view of history and politics begin to make sense. In Chapter 4 James Martin draws parallels between Marx’s text and recent developments in ‘post-Marxist’ political theory. Taking his cue from Marx’s theatrical metaphors and imagery, he argues that there is in the Eighteenth Brumaire the basis of an understanding of politics as a ‘performative’ activity in Austin’s sense of a statement that produces, or acts out, what it states. Political struggle is conceived as, at least in part, a contest over meanings and not just over preconstituted ‘material’ interests. Martin summarises the way in which the notion of ‘performativity’ is central to the work of three major political theorists: Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau. He

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points out that disenchantment with Marxist uses of categories such as ‘class’ and ‘ideology’ have led to a growing concern with ‘identity’ and ‘discourse’. These developments, he argues, should not be conceived as a retreat from radical politics but – given their early presence in Marx’s own work – as an effort to deepen our comprehension of and involvement in political struggles. The character and historical significance of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte is the topic of Part 3. In Chapter 5 Roger Price aims to assess Marx’s understanding of Bonaparte. Filling out the background to the events of 1848–51, Price highlights the difficulty that the political conflicts and Bonaparte’s emergence as a popular figure had for Marx’s class-based interpretation of history. Indeed, Marx and Engels underestimated the widespread appeal of Napoleon and his ability to combine the demand for ‘order’ with a degree of popular legitimacy. Driven by a powerful sense of personal destiny, Bonaparte – who ruled until 1870 – showed rather more political acumen than his detractors were ever prepared to admit. In Chapter 6 Geoff Watkins also draws attention to the peculiar appeal of Bonaparte. Like Price, he underlines Marx’s failure to grasp how Louis-Napoleon skilfully exploited French attachment to the ‘Bonaparte legend’. Bonaparte’s rise to power was prefigured by his own efforts in the 1840s to re-engage the myth of his uncle as the symbol of the revolutionary ideals of equality, liberty and, at the same time, order and stability. In exploiting this legend, Bonaparte projected himself as heir to a tradition that stood above the divisions of French politics and as the incarnation of values that transcended divided loyalties. Bonaparte’s manipulation of symbols, suggests Watkins, reveals an understanding of mass politics that Marx simply missed. Part 4 concerns the theory of the capitalist state and its purported ‘autonomy’ from the relations of production. In Chapter 7, Bob Jessop reads the Eighteenth Brumaire as a complex, multilayered account of the political and historical conjuncture; it is undoubtedly a text in which class politics and the state are figured in a variety of ways. Jessop outlines his view of Marx’s own ‘periodisation’ of the overlapping ‘time horizons’ of 1848–51. In Marx’s narrative, he argues, neither class struggle nor the state can be easily aligned to any single historical trajectory, for each modifies the other, has its own specific logic and has unintended effects that cannot be foreseen. The institutional separation of the state from the relations

Introduction

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of production that is typical under capitalism therefore allows for a wide variety of ‘strategic and tactical possibilities’. In Chapter 8 Wetherly takes issue with the concept of the state’s ‘relative autonomy’ which has been criticised as ‘redundant’ by Jessop. Starting from Marx’s various, sometimes contrasting, conceptions of the state as both a class instrument and as autonomous from class control, Wetherly argues that the idea of relative autonomy remains plausible for Marxist theory. He summarises Jessop’s critique and preferred alternative: namely, a ‘strategic-relational’ theory which looks to the ‘contingent’ connections between the state and capitalist economy. Against this Wetherly argues that relative autonomy can be retained as part of a theory of the general tendency of the state and economy to ‘correspond’. The question of Marx’s analysis of class politics and its contemporary relevance is the topic of Part 5. In Chapter 9, Paul Blackledge draws parallels between the defeat of the working class following the revolutions of 1848 and the experience of ‘Thatcherism’ in the UK in the 1980s. Surveying the interpretations of Thatcherism by those on the left (such as Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop) who had openly renounced a crude class-reductionism in favour of a more complex picture of the conjuncture, Blackledge argues that working class agency was typically removed altogether from their analyses. As a result, it became impossible to imagine the revival of working class politics and socialism after Thatcher. However, he continues, writers in The Socialist Register and elsewhere did succeed in rejecting reductionism without losing sight of class politics and their analyses remain relevant today. In Chapter 10 Mark Cowling discusses Marx’s concept of the lumpenproletariat, which plays a major role in the Eighteenth Brumaire. He argues that it is not coherently defined, and that it would not make sense to undertake research based on Marx’s concept. The lumpenproletariat functions in the Eighteenth Brumaire as a whipping boy, brought out for criticism whenever the proletariat, or parts of it, fails to fulfil its revolutionary destiny. The evidence that the lumpenproletariat, to the extent it has any reality, is a tool of the right, is also weak. Cowling then goes on to discuss the concept of the underclass in the recent work of Charles Murray. Seen by Murray as idle thieving bastards this group is a close approximation to the lumpenproletariat. Cowling argues that this concept functions in Murray as a way of blaming the unemployed victims of

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right wing government policies and global capitalism, but that some questions raised by Murray require socialist answers. In Chapter 11 Darren Webb draws attention to the critique of ‘utopian socialism’ at work in the Eighteenth Brumaire. This, he argues, underscores Marx’s view of class politics as based on a proper awareness of ‘material conditions’. The critique of the utopians was central to Marx’s socialism because it underscored his argument that politics must reason from a realistic analysis of social relations and not merely from fantasies of a ‘better world’. In the Eighteenth Brumaire this point is made clear in Marx’s claim that the class ‘content’ of the revolutions of the nineteenth century ‘transcends’ the heroic ‘phrases’ through which the bourgeoisie justifies its actions. Such phrases conceal the real interests beneath the surface of political struggle. However, argues Webb, for Marx working class emancipation must supersede ‘fantastic abstractions’ if it is to be successful. Being properly grounded in the present, he suggests, continues to distinguish Marx’s analysis of politics from others on the left. NOTES 1. Aside from a vast number of short analyses and commentaries on political events across the world written throughout his life, Marx wrote lengthy studies only on French politics. See his earlier survey of events before Bonaparte’s coup, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, C.W., Vol. 10, and his later analysis of the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France, C.W., Vol. 22. 2. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this volume, p. 43. 3. See the chapters by Price and Watkins in this volume. 4. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, C.W., Vol. 6, p. 485. 5. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, pp. 100–1. 6. Apart from the works by Lenin mentioned in the text this discussion could be followed up in Athar Hussain, Marxism and the Agrarian Question, Vol. 2, Russian Marxism and the Peasantry, 1861–1930 (London: Macmillan, 1981). 7. See Karl Kautsky, The Agrarian Question, trans. Peter Burgess, 2 Vols (London: Zwan, 1988). For further discussion see Athar Hussain, Marxism and the Agrarian Question, Vol. 1, German Social Democracy and the Peasantry, 1890–1907 (London: Macmillan, 1981). 8. As might be expected there is a large literature in this area. Works of interest include overviews such as Tom Bottomore, Classes in Modern Society, 2nd edn (London: HarperCollins, 1991); Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959); and John Westergaard, Class in a Capitalist Society (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1975). The earliest major critique is Bernstein’s

Introduction

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

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assertion of the persistence of the petty bourgeoisie in Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, ed. and trans. Henry Tudor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Nicos Poulantzas’ important attempt to apply the concept to modern societies is in Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973); Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978) and further discussion much of which takes Poulantzas as a major starting point, e.g. Guglielmo Carchedi, On the Economic Identification of Social Classes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977); Guglielmo Carchedi, Problems in Class Analysis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); Eric O. Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978). More critical and sceptical accounts include Barry Hindess, Politics and Class Analysis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory – A Bourgeois Critique (London: Tavistock, 1979); Michael Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000); Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, The Death of Class (London: Sage, 1995). For one attempt to make sense of the relationship between gender and class see Mark Cowling, ‘Femininities: a way of linking Feminism and Socialism’ in Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds (eds), Marxism, the Millennium and Beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 486. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 53. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 56. One Marxist author who makes considerable use of the concept of Bonapartism is Trotsky. His concept looks back to the great Bonaparte, but includes Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte III, and has refinements such as ‘Bonapartism of the epoch of imperialist decline, which is qualitatively different from Bonapartism of the epoch of bourgeois rise’, and ‘half, or pre-Bonapartist’ regimes. Trotsky finds variants of Bonapartism in, at least, the USSR, Germany in the years leading up to the Hitler regime, pre-Fascist Italy and France. The exact definition, scope and validity of his concept is clearly a study in its own right (see, for example, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism’, ‘German Bonapartism’, ‘A Program of Action for France (1934)’ and ‘Bonapartism, Fascism and War’, all in the Trotsky Internet Archive, ). See Terrell Carver (trans. and ed.), Marx: Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 31–127.

Part 1

The Text

2

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Trans. Terrell Carver) Karl Marx

I Hegel observes somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur twice, so to speak. He forgot to add: the first time as high tragedy, the second time as low farce. Caussidière after Danton, Louis Blanc after Robespierre, the montagne [democratic socialists] of 1848–51 after the montagne [Jacobin democrats] of 1793–5, and then the London constable [Louis Bonaparte], with a dozen of the best debt-ridden lieutenants, after the little corporal [Napoleon Bonaparte], with his roundtable of military marshals! The eighteenth Brumaire of the fool after the eighteenth Brumaire of the genius! And there is the same cartoon-quality in the circumstances surrounding the second imprint of the eighteenth Brumaire. The first time France was on the verge of bankruptcy, this time Bonaparte is on the brink of debtors’ prison; then the coalition of the great powers was on the borders – now there is the coalition of RugeDarasz in England, of Kinkel-Brentano in America; then there was a St. Bernard [Pass] to be surmounted [when Napoleon defeated the Austrians in 1800], now a company of policemen to be dispatched across the Jura [Mountains to demand republican refugees from the Swiss]; then there was a [Battle of] Marengo to be won and a lot more, now there is a Grand Cross of the Order of St. Andrew [from the Tsar] to be gained and the esteem of the Berlin [newspaper] National-Zeitung to be lost. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited. Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they appear to be revolutionising themselves and their circumstances, in creating something unprecedented, in just such epochs of revolutionary crisis, that is when they nervously summon up the spirits of the past, borrowing from them their names, marching orders, uniforms, in order to enact new scenes 19

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in world history, but in this time-honoured guise and with this borrowed language. Thus Luther masqueraded as the Apostle Paul, the [French] revolution of 1789–1814 draped itself alternately as Roman republic and Roman empire, and the revolution of 1848 could come up with nothing better than to parody 1789 at one point, the revolutionary inheritance of 1793–5 at another. Likewise a beginner studying a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue; but only when he can use it without referring back, and thus forsake his native language for the new, only then has he entered into the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently. Examination of this world-historical invocation of the dead reveals a further striking distinction. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon – these heroes of the former French revolution, as well as the political parties and massed crowds alike – accomplished the business of the day in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases: the unfettering and establishing of modern bourgeois society. The first [of these heroes] harrowed up the feudal ground and mowed down the feudal heads sprouting there. The last [of these, Napoleon] created within France the conditions in which free competition could be developed, land sales from estates could be exploited, the unfettered industrial productive power of the nation could be utilised; and beyond French borders he swept away feudal institutions in every direction, and as far as was necessary to provide an appropriate up-to-date environment on the Continent for French bourgeois society. Once the new social formation was established, the antediluvian colossi, and along with them the resurrected Romans – the Brutuses, the Gracchuses, the Publicolas, the tribunes, the senators and Caesar himself – all vanished. Amidst a dreary realism bourgeois society produced its true interpreters and spokesmen in the Say’s, Cousin’s, Royer-Collard’s, Benjamin Constant’s and Guizot’s; its real commanders were in the counting houses, and the fat-head Louis XVIII was its political chief. Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it could no longer comprehend that the spectres of Roman times had kept watch over its cradle. But unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless required heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and national conflict to bring it into the world. And in the strict classical traditions of the Roman republic its gladiators found the ideals and art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed, in order to hide from themselves the constrained, bourgeois character of their

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

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struggles, and to keep themselves emotionally at the level of high historical tragedy. Thus at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and the English had borrowed Old Testament language, passions and delusions for their bourgeois revolution. When that goal was actually attained, when the bourgeois transformation of English society was complete, [the prosaic empiricist] Locke supplanted [the sorrowful prophet] Habakkuk. Thus the resurrection of the dead in those revolutions served to glorify new struggles, not to parody the old; to magnify fantastically the given task, not to evade a real resolution; to recover the spirit of revolution, not to relaunch its spectre. The period 1848 to 1851 saw only the spectre of the old revolution on the move, from Marrast, Républicain en gants jaunes, who disguised himself as the old [Jean Sylvain] Bailly [the revolutionary liberal guillotined in 1793], to the adventurer [Louis Bonaparte], who covers his low and repulsive visage with the iron death mask of Napoleon. A whole people, believing itself to have acquired a powerful revolutionary thrust, is suddenly forced back into a defunct era; and so that there is no mistake about the reversion, the old dates rise again, the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts, which had long declined to mere antiquarian interest, and the old functionaries, who had seemed long decayed. The nation is like the mad Englishman in Bedlam [asylum] who thinks he is living in the time of the pharaohs and complains every day how hard it is to work in the Ethiopian gold mines, immured in a subterranean prison, a flickering lamp fixed to his head, behind him the overseer with his long whip, and at the exits a mass of barbarian mercenaries who can understand neither the slave labourers in the mines nor one another, since they have no common language. ‘And all this is demanded of me’ – sighs the mad Englishman – ‘me, the freeborn Briton, in order to extract gold for the ancient pharaohs.’ ‘In order to pay the debts of the Bonapartes’ – sighs the French nation. The Englishman, so long as his mind was working, could not rid himself of his obsession with gold mining. The French, so long as they made revolutions, could not rid themselves of the memory of Napoleon, as was demonstrated by the [presidential] election of 10 December [1848]. Out of the perils of revolution they yearned for the fleshpots of Egypt, and the [coup d’état of the] second of December [1851] was the answer. Not only do they have the caricature of the old Napoleon, they have caricatured the old Napoleon himself as he must have looked in the middle of the nineteenth century.

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The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin till it has stripped off all superstition from the past. Previous revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realise its own content. There phrase transcended content, here content transcends phrase. The February revolution [of 1848] was a surprise attack, an ambush of the old society, and the people proclaimed this unexpected coup a world-historical deed inaugurating a new epoch. Then on the second of December [1851] the February revolution is conjured away by the stroke of a cheat, and now what seems to have been overthrown is not the monarchy so much as the liberal concessions wrung from it over centuries of struggle. Instead of society gaining for itself a new content, it seems that the state has merely reverted to its oldest form, to the shameless, bare-faced rule of sword and cross. So in answer to the coup de main of February 1848 we have the coup de tête of December 1851. Quickly won, quickly lost. Meanwhile the intervening years did not go to waste. During the period 1848 to 1851 French society learnt the lessons of experience – to be sure in a foreshortened, revolutionary way – that would otherwise have preceded the February revolution in its normal or textbook development, so to speak, if it were ever to do more than ripple the surface. Society now seems to have fallen back behind its starting point; in fact it had first to create for itself the revolutionary starting point, the situation, the relationships, the exclusive conditions for the development of a real modern revolution. Bourgeois revolutions, such as those of the eighteenth century, storm along from strength to strength; their dramatic effects outdo one another, people and events seem to have a jewel-like sparkle, ecstasy is the feeling of the day; but they are short lived, quickly attaining their zenith, and a lengthy hangover grips society before it soberly absorbs the resulting lessons of such Sturm und Drang. By contrast proletarian revolutions, such as those of the nineteenth century, engage in perpetual self-criticism, always stopping in their own tracks; they return to what is apparently complete in order to begin it anew, and deride with savage brutality the inadequacies, weak points and pitiful aspects of their first attempts; they seem to strike down their adversary, only to have him draw new powers from the earth and rise against them once more with the strength of a giant; again and again they draw back from the prodigious scope of


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their own aims, until a situation is created which makes impossible any reversion, and circumstances themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze! [There’s no time like the present!] Moreover any competent observer, even if he had not followed all the French developments step by step, must have known that the revolution was in for an unprecedented humiliation. It sufficed to hear the self-satisfied yelps of victory as ‘distinguished’ democrats congratulated each other on the benefits to follow the 9th of May 1852 [when President Louis Bonaparte’s presidency, constitutionally limited to one term, would have lapsed]. In their heads that day had become an obsession, a fundamentalist dogma, like the day Christ reappears and a reign of a thousand years commences, as in the heads of the chiliasts. As always the feeble found refuge in a belief in miracles, believing that the enemy has been vanquished when they have only conjured it away in a fantasy, sacrificing any understanding of the present to an ineffectual glorification of the future in store for them, and of deeds that they had in their hearts but did not want to bring to fruition just yet. They are the heroes who try to deny their proven incompetence by offering each other sympathy and banding together; they packed up their things, donned their laurel wreaths in advance of the games, and busied themselves on the financial exchanges with selling off piecemeal the republics for which they had already taken care, in their quiet and unassuming way, to nominate the government. The second of December [1851] struck them like a bolt from the blue, and the peoples that were willing enough to allow their innermost fears – in an era of cowardly dejection – to be assuaged by the most vociferous loudmouths will perhaps have convinced themselves that cackling geese can no longer save the Capitol. The constitution, the national assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue [right-wing] and the red [left-wing] republicans, the heroes of [the Algerian wars in] Africa, the thunder from the grandstand, the sheet-lightning of the daily press, all the literature, political names and intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberty, equality and fraternity, and the ninth of May 1852 – all that has magically vanished under the spell of a man whom even his enemies would deny was a sorcerer. Universal manhood suffrage seems to

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have lasted just long enough to make its own testament in the eyes of the world and to declare in the very name of the people: ‘What’s worth building is worth demolishing’ [Goethe, Faust, I]. It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation has been taken unawares. A nation like a woman is not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first rake that tries can take her by force. The riddle will not be solved by mere phrases that merely state it in other terms. What needs to be explained is how a nation of 36 millions can be taken unawares by three common con-men [Louis Bonaparte, the duc de Morny his half-brother, and the Minister of Justice Rouher] and marched off unresisting into captivity. Let us recapitulate in bold strokes the course of the French revolution in its phases from 24 February 1848 to [2] December 1851. Three main periods are unmistakable: the February period; 4 May 1848 to 28 May 1849, the period of constituting the republic or the constituent assembly for the nation; 28 May 1849 to 2 December 1851, the period of the constitutional republic or the legislative national assembly. The first period from 24 February, or the overthrow of [King] Louis Philippe, to 4 May 1848, the meeting of the constituent assembly, the February period proper, can be termed the prologue to the revolution. Its character was expressed officially when the improvised government declared itself provisional, and like the government everything that was proposed, attempted or proclaimed in this period was passed off as merely provisional. Neither anyone nor anything dared to claim a right to exist or to take real action. The factions which had prepared or made the revolution, the dynastic opposition [legitimists and Orléanists], the republican bourgeoisie, the democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie, the social democratic workers, all provisionally found their place in the February government. It could not have been otherwise. The original intention in the February days [of 1848] was for an electoral reform through which the circle of political privilege amongst the possessing classes was to be widened and the exclusive rule of the finance aristocracy overthrown. But when it came to actual conflict the people mounted the barricades, the national guard behaved passively, the army offered no serious opposition, and the monarchy decamped, so the republic appeared as a matter of course. Every party construed this in its own way. Once their weapons had been wrested from their


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hands, the proletariat set its stamp upon it and proclaimed it a social republic. Thus the general content of modern revolution was signalled, a content which – as is always the case in dramatic prologues – stood in the most bizarre contradiction to everything that could be put into practice there and then, given the material available, the level of popular education, present circumstances and conditions. On the other hand, the claim of all the other factions taking part in the February revolution was made good when they obtained the lion’s share in government. In no period do we find a more confused mixture of superfluous phrases and practical uncertainty and helplessness, of more enthusiastic striving for innovation and of more fundamental dominance of old routine, of seeming harmony in the whole society and of deep alienation amongst the factions that compose it. While the Paris proletariat still revelled in the vision of a grand prospect opening before it, and had indulged itself collectively in earnest discussion on social problems, the old powers of society had regrouped, rallied, composed themselves and found unexpected support in the populace at large, the peasants and petty bourgeoisie, who were all thrown onto the political stage after the fall of the July monarchy [of the Orléanist King Louis Philippe, 1830–48]. The second period, from 4 May 1848 up to the end of May 1849, is the period of constituting, founding the bourgeois republic. Just after the February days the dynastic opposition was surprised by the republicans, the republicans by the socialists, indeed all France by Paris. The constituent assembly, drawn from the votes of the entire nation, met on 4 May 1848 and represented the whole. It was a living protest against the aspirations of the February days and was to reduce the achievements of the revolution to bourgeois standards. Grasping at once the character of this constituent assembly, the Paris proletariat tried vainly though forcefully to negate it a few days after its meeting on 15 May [1848], to dissolve it, to shatter the organic whole into its individual constituent parts, as in national reaction was posing a threat. The well known result of 15 May [1848] was that Blanqui and associates, i.e. the real leaders of the proletarian party, the revolutionary communists, were removed from the public arena for the entire duration of the events we are considering. Louis Philippe’s bourgeois monarchy could only be followed by a bourgeois republic, i.e. if a limited section of the bourgeoisie has ruled in the king’s name, so now the whole of the bourgeoisie rules in

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the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian humbug which must be stopped. To this declaration of the constituent assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection [of 1848], the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic was triumphant. On its side stood the finance aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle classes, the petty bourgeoisie, the army, the lumpenproletariat organised as a militia, the intellectual authorities, the church and the landowners. On the side of the Paris proletariat there was none but itself. More than 3000 insurgents were massacred after the victory, and 15,000 were transported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat moves into the background on the revolutionary stage. Every time events appear to take a fresh turn, it tries to press forward again, but with ever declining bursts of strength and always diminishing results. As soon as one of the higher social strata plots a revolutionary trajectory, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it and thus shares all the defeats which successive parties suffer. But these further blows are of ever diminishing force the more they are distributed over the whole surface of society. Its more important leaders in the assembly and in the press are sacrificed one after another in the courts, and ever more ambiguous figures take up leadership. Amongst other things it throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, cooperative banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement renouncing an overthrow of the old world by means of its own great resources, and instead seeks to attain its salvation behind society’s back, privately, within its own limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily coming to naught. It seems unable to rediscover revolutionary prowess or to renew its energy from fresh alliances, until all the classes it struggled with in June are lying flat out beside it. But at least it was defeated with the honours of a great world historical struggle; not only France but all Europe trembles at the June earthquake, while the ensuing defeats of the higher classes are so cheaply purchased that they require blatant exaggeration by the victorious party in order to pass as events at all, and these events become the more disgraceful the further the losing party is from the proletariat. To be sure the defeat of the June insurgents had prepared level ground for founding and constructing the bourgeois republic; but it had demonstrated at the same time that in Europe the question of today is something other than ‘republic or monarchy’. It had


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revealed that bourgeois republic means the unlimited despotism of one class over the others. It had proved that in long-civilised countries with a developed class structure, with modern conditions of production, and with an intellectual consciousness representing centuries of effort in dissolving traditional ideas, the republic signifies in general only the revolutionary way to destroy bourgeois society and not a conservative way to develop it, as for example in the United States, where there are already classes, to be sure, but they have not yet solidified, rather they are in constant flux, changing and switching their component parts; where modern means of production compensate for the relative paucity of heads and hands, instead of declining together with a stagnant surplus population; and where finally the feverish youth of material production, which has a new world to appropriate, left neither time nor opportunity for exorcising the spirits of the old. During the June days [of 1848] all classes and parties that had united as the party of order were against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had ‘saved’ society from ‘the enemies of society’. They had made the catchphrases of the old society, ‘property, family, religion, order’ into military passwords and had proclaimed to their counter-revolutionary crusaders: ‘Under this sign shalt thou conquer!’ From this time on, whenever one of the many parties banded together under this motto against the June insurgents seeks to claim the revolutionary high ground in its own class interest, it succumbs to the call: ‘property, family, religion, order’. Society is saved as often as its circle of rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against the wider one. Even the simplest demand for bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most formal republicanism, for the most basic democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an ‘outrage to society’ and stigmatised as ‘socialism’. Finally the high priests of the ‘religion of order’ are kicked off their Pythian tripods, hauled from their beds in the dead of night, flung into prison vans, thrown into gaols or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their laws torn to shreds in the name of religion, property, family, order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their family gods are profaned, their houses are bombarded for amusement – in the name of property, family, religion and order. Finally the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order

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and the hero Crapulinski [Louis Bonaparte] seizes the [Palace of the] Tuileries as ‘saviour of society’. II Let us pick up the thread once again. The history of the constituent assembly since the June days [in 1848] is the history of the rise and fall of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie, the faction known variously as tricolour republicans, pure republicans, political republicans, formal republicans, etc. Under the bourgeois monarchy of [the Orléanist King] Louis Philippe they had formed the official republican opposition and hence a recognised part of the political world of the time. The faction had its representatives in the legislative chambers and an influential circle in the press. Its Paris organ, Le National, was considered just as respectable in its way as the [Orléanist] Journal des débats. This position under the constitutional monarchy accorded with its character. It was not a faction of the bourgeoisie held together through substantial common interests and set apart by peculiar conditions of production. It was a coterie of republican-minded businessmen, writers, lawyers, officers and officials whose influence rested on the personal antipathy of the country to Louis Philippe, on recollections of the old republic [of 1789–99], on the republican faith of a number of enthusiasts, above all on French nationalism, a continuously awakened hatred for the Vienna treaties [of 1814–15] and the [restoration] alliance with England. A large part of the following enjoyed by the National under Louis Philippe was due to this hidden Napoleonic sentiment, later to emerge in the person of Louis Bonaparte as a deadly rival to the republic. It fought the financial aristocracy, as did the rest of the bourgeois opposition. Polemics against the budget, which coincided in France with the struggle against the financial aristocracy, created such a lot of cheap popularity and such rich material for puritanical ‘leading articles’ that exploitation of this was irresistible. The industrial bourgeoisie was grateful to it for its slavish defence of French protectionism, adopted more on grounds of national than economic interest, and the bourgeoisie as a whole for its virulent denunciations of communism and socialism. In general the party of the National was purely republican, i.e. it demanded a republican rather than a monarchical form of bourgeois rule, and above all the lion’s share in power. About the conditions for this transformation it was not at all clear. What was clear as daylight, on the other hand, and was


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publicly clarified at the reform meetings in the last days of Louis Philippe, was its unpopularity with the democratic petty bourgeoisie, and in particular with the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans, as is always the way with pure republicans, were on the point of settling for a regency of the duchess of Orléans [mother of Louis Philippe’s grandson], when the February [1848] revolution erupted and appointed their best known representatives to a place in the provisional government. At the outset they naturally had the confidence of the bourgeoisie and a majority in the constituent assembly. They at once excluded the socialist elements of the provisional government from the executive commission [which replaced the provisional government], formed when the national assembly first met, and the party of the National then used the outbreak of the June [1848] insurrection to dismiss the executive commission and to get rid of its nearest rivals, the petty bourgeois or democratic republicans (Ledru-Rollin, etc.). Cavaignac, the general of the bourgeois-republican party, commander for the June [1848] massacre, replaced the executive commission with a kind of dictatorship. Marrast, formerly editor-in-chief of the National, became the permanent president of the constituent assembly, and the cabinet posts, like all the other important appointments, came home to the pure republicans. The republican faction of the bourgeoisie, which had long considered itself the legitimate heir of the [Orléanist] July monarchy, found its fondest hopes surpassed, but it came to power, not by means of a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, as it had dreamt during the time of Louis Philippe, but rather through a proletarian riot against capital, put down with grape-shot. What it had imagined as the most revolutionary event occurred in reality as the most counter-revolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life. The exclusive rule of the bourgeois republicans lasted only from 24 June to 10 December 1848. It is summed up in the drafting of a republican constitution and in the siege of Paris. The new constitution was at bottom only a republicanised version of the constitutional charter of 1830. The restricted suffrage of the July monarchy, which excluded a large portion of the bourgeoisie from political power, was incompatible with the existence of the bourgeois republic. The February revolution [of 1848] had at once proclaimed a general right to vote in place of this suffrage. The bourgeois republicans could not undo this event. They had therefore

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to content themselves by restricting it to include a six months residence requirement in the constituency. The old administration – local government, the judicial system, the army, etc. – was left untouched, or where altered by the constitution, the change concerned the table of contents, not the content, and the names, not the substance. The inescapable roll call of the freedoms of 1848 – freedom of the person, press, speech, association, assembly, education and religion, etc. – obtained a constitutional guise, making them invulnerable. Each of these freedoms was proclaimed as the absolute right of the French citizen, but always with the marginal gloss that it is unlimited so far as it does not limit the ‘equal rights of others and the security of the public’, or through ‘laws’ which were to integrate individual freedoms harmoniously with one another and with the security of the public. For example: ‘Citizens have the right to associate, to assemble peaceably and unarmed, to petition and to express their opinions in the press or otherwise. The enjoyment of these rights has no limit besides the equal rights of others and the security of the public’ (chapter II of the French constitution [of 1848], § 8) – ‘Education is free. The free exercise of this right is to be enjoyed under conditions fixed by law and under the supervision of the state.’ (chapter II, § 9). – ‘The home of every citizen is inviolable except in circumstances prescribed by law.’ (chapter II, § 3), etc. etc. – The constitution therefore constantly refers to future organic laws which are to implement these glosses and regulate the enjoyment of these unlimited freedoms so that they conflict neither with one another nor with the security of the public. Later these organic laws were promulgated by the friends of order and all those freedoms regulated so that the bourgeoisie finds no obstacle to its enjoyment of them in the equal rights of other classes. Where it denies these freedoms wholly to ‘others’ or permits enjoyment of them only under conditions which are just so many police traps, this always happens solely in the interest of ‘public security’, that is, the security of the bourgeoisie, as the constitution prescribes. Consequently both sides can appeal with perfect justice to the constitution, the friends of order, who subverted all those freedoms, just as much as the democrats, who demanded them all outright. Each paragraph of the constitution contains its own antithesis in itself, its own upper and lower house, namely freedom in general terms, and subversion of freedom in the glosses. Hence so long as freedom is nominally respected and only its actual exercise is hindered, in a very legal way


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you understand, then the constitutional existence of freedom remains undamaged, untouched, however much its commonplace existence is murdered. This constitution, made inviolate in so ingenious a manner, was nevertheless vulnerable in one place, like Achilles, not in the heel, but in the head, or rather in two heads as the thing developed – the legislative assembly, on the one hand, and the president, on the other. Leafing through the constitution one finds that the paragraphs in which the relationship between the president and the legislative assembly is defined are the only absolute, positive, uncontradicted, untwistable ones that it contains. Here we see the bourgeois republicans making themselves secure. [Chapter V] §§ 45–70 of the constitution are so drafted that the national assembly can remove the president constitutionally, but the president can remove the national assembly only unconstitutionally, by removing the constitution itself. Hence it invites its own forcible destruction. Not only does it sanctify the separation of powers as under the charter of 1830, it widens this to an unendurable contradiction. The constitutional power game, as Guizot called the parliamentary squabble between legislative and executive power, is constantly played out in the constitution of 1848 at the highest stakes. On one side are 750 representatives of the people, elected by universal manhood suffrage and eligible for re-election, who form an uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible national assembly, a national assembly which enjoys legislative omnicompetence, has the final say in war, peace and trade, possesses sole right of amnesty, and as a continuing body is always at centre stage. On the other side is the president, with all the appurtenances of royal power, but augmented, in that he appoints and dismisses his ministers independent of the national assembly, and has all the tools of executive power in his hands, bestowing all offices and disposing of over 11⁄2 million livelihoods, for so many depend on the 500,000 officials and on officers of every rank – the whole of the armed forces are behind him, and he is possessed of the privilege of pardoning individual miscreants, of suspending the national guard, of proroguing – in conjunction with the council of state – the elected general, cantonal and municipal councils nominated and elected by the citizens, reserving to himself the initiation and negotiation of all agreements with foreign countries – unlike the assembly, which is constantly on the boards and continuously exposed to the glare of public criticism, he leads a secluded life in the elysian fields [i.e. Elysée Palace], but with

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[chapter V] § 45 of the constitution before his eyes and in his heart, crying out to him every day [like the ascetic Trappists]: ‘brother, one must die’. ‘Your power runs out on the second Sunday in the lovely month of May in the fourth year of your term! Then is power at an end, there is no second performance, and if you have debts, see to it that you pay them off in time with the 600,000 francs settled on you by the constitution, unless perhaps you prefer to wander down to Clichy [debtors’ prison] on the second Monday of the lovely month of May!’ – If the constitution assigns all actual power to the president, it tries to secure moral authority for the assembly. Leaving aside that it is impossible to create moral authority through legal phrases, here again the constitution subverts itself by having the president directly elected by all Frenchmen. While French votes are divided up amongst the 750 members of the national assembly, here they are concentrated on a single individual. While each individual delegate of the people merely represents this or that party, this or that city, this or that outpost, or even just the necessity of electing any old seven hundred and fifty where neither the man nor the matter is closely examined, He is the elect of the nation, and electing him is the trump card which the sovereign people plays once every 4 years. The elected national assembly stands in a metaphysical relation to the nation, but the elected president stands in a personal one. Through its individual members the national assembly well represents manifold aspects of the national character, but the president is the spirit of the nation incarnate. As opposed to the assembly he has a kind of divine right, he is president by the people’s grace. Thetis, the sea goddess, prophesied to Achilles that he would die in the bloom of youth. The constitution, which had its weak spot like Achilles, also had its forewarning that it would have to go to an early death. It sufficed for the pure republican constitutionalists to cast a glance from the high heavens of their republican ideals down to the base world below in order see how the morale of the royalists, of the Bonapartists, of the democrats, of the communists, and also their own discredit, increased proportionally each day as they neared completion of their great legislative masterpiece, without any need for Thetis to leave the sea and communicate this secret to them. They sought to cheat destiny through constitutional shenanigans in [chapter XI] § 111, according to which every motion for a revision of the constitution must be supported by at least 3⁄4 of the votes, not less than 500 members of the national assembly taking part, and in three


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successive debates, between each of which there must always be a whole month. At a time when they controlled a parliamentary majority and all the resources of governmental authority, they saw themselves prophetically as a parliamentary minority, and made only an impotent attempt to exercise a power, which was day by day slipping from their feeble grasp. Finally in a melodramatic paragraph, the constitution entrusts itself to ‘the vigilance and patriotism of the people of all France and of every single Frenchman’, after it had previously entrusted ‘vigilant’ and ‘patriotic’ Frenchmen to the tender yet necessarily very painful ministrations of its own high court of justice, or ‘haute cour’, in another paragraph. Such was the constitution of 1848, overturned on 2 December 1851, not by a knockout, but felled at the mere touch of a hat; indeed the hat was a three-cornered Napoleonic one. While the bourgeois republicans in the assembly were busy with picking over, arguing about and voting in this constitution, outside the assembly Cavaignac mounted the siege of Paris. The siege of Paris was midwife for the constituent assembly in the birth throes of the republic. If the constitution were later dispatched from the world with bayonets, it must not be forgotten that it had to be protected with bayonets, and to be sure, bayonets turned against the people, even in its mother’s womb, and it had to be brought into the world with bayonets. The [revolutionary] forefathers of the ‘honest republicans’ had sent their symbol, the tricolour, on a tour [of conquest] round Europe. For their part they made a discovery which found its way over the whole continent, but which came back to France with ever increasing affection, until it became a true citizen in half its départements – the state of siege. A splendid invention, periodically employed in each successive crisis in the course of the French revolution. But barrack and bivouac, which were periodically applied to the head of French society to compact the brain and render the body torpid; sabre and musket, which were periodically allowed to judge and administer, to tutor and to censor, to act the policeman and to do duty as night watchman; moustache and uniform, which were periodically trumpeted as the highest wisdom and saviour of society – were not barrack and bivouac, sabre and musket, moustache and uniform finally bound to hit on the idea of saving society once and for all by touting their own regime as best and setting bourgeois society free from the trouble of governing itself? Barrack and bivouac, sabre and musket, moustache and

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uniform were all the more bound to come to this realisation because they could then expect better cash payment for their enhanced services, while from merely periodical sieges and transitory rescues of society, at the behest of this or that faction of the bourgeoisie, there was little substantial gain, other than a few dead and wounded and some bourgeois smirks of friendship. Should not the military once and for all play out a siege in its own interest and for its own benefit, and at the same time help itself to the wallets of the bourgeoisie? One should not forget, be it noted in passing, that Colonel Bernard, the president of the military commission under Cavaignac who transported 15,000 insurgents [of June 1848] without trial, is again acting at this very moment [early 1852] as head of the military commission for Paris. Though with the siege of Paris the honest, pure republicans laid the seedbed in which the praetorians of 2 December 1851 grew strong, they still deserve praise because instead of exaggerating national sentiments as they had done under Louis Philippe, now, when they had the power of the nation at their bidding, they relinquished it, and instead of conquering Italy for themselves, they let the Austrians and Neapolitans reconquer it. The election of Louis Bonaparte as president on 10 December 1848 put an end to Cavaignac’s dictatorship and to the constituent assembly. The constitution states in [chapter V] § 44: ‘The president of the French republic must never have lost his status as a French citizen.’ The first president of the French republic, one L.N. Bonaparte, had not simply lost his status as a French citizen, had not merely been an English special constable, he was in fact a naturalised Swiss. I have explained elsewhere the significance of the [presidential] election of 10 December [1848]. I will not advert to this here. It suffices to say that it was a reaction by the peasantry, which had had to bear the costs of the February revolution [of 1848], against the other classes of the nation, a reaction of the country against the town. This struck a chord in the army, for which the republicans of the National had provided neither glory nor a pay rise, also amongst the highest of the bourgeois who hailed Bonaparte as a transition to monarchy, and amongst the proletarians and petty bourgeoisie, who hailed him as a scourge for Cavaignac. I shall find an opportunity later to go more thoroughly into the relationship between the peasantry and the French revolution. History from 20 December 1848 [when Bonaparte’s presidency succeeded Cavaignac’s dictatorship] to the dissolution of the


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constituent assembly in May 1849 marks an epoch in the downfall of the republican bourgeoisie. After founding a republic for the bourgeoisie, driving the revolutionary proletariat from the field and reducing the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the time being, they were themselves shoved aside by the bulk of the bourgeoisie, who with some justice seized this republic as its property. However, this great bourgeoisie was royalist. One part of it, the large landowners, had held power under the restoration [of the Bourbons after 1815] and was therefore legitimist. The other, the financial aristocracy and great industrialists, had held sway under the July monarchy [1830–48] and was therefore Orléanist. The highest echelons of the army, the universities, the church, the legal profession, the academy and the press divided themselves between the two camps, though in varying proportions. Here in the bourgeois republic, which bore neither the name of Bourbon nor that of Orléans, but rather the name capital, they found a type of state through which they could rule conjointly. The June insurrection [of 1848] had already united them in the ‘party of order’. The next business was to remove the coterie of bourgeois republicans who still held seats in the national assembly. When it was a matter of holding their republicanism and their legislative rights against the power of the executive and of the royalists, these pure republicans were just as cowardly, shamefaced, dispirited, broken down, incapable of fighting, even in retreat, as they had been brutal in using physical force against the people. There is no need to relate the ignominious tale of their disintegration. It was a fade-out, not a blow-up. Their history has ceased forever, and in subsequent times, whether inside or outside the assembly, they figure as memories, memories which seem to come to life whenever the republic is merely named and as often as revolutionary conflict threatens to sink to new depths. I note in passing that the journal which gave this party its name, the National, turned in subsequent years to socialism. Therefore the period of constituting or founding the French republic falls into three periods: 4 May to 24 June 1848, a struggle of all the classes and their allies united in February under the leadership of the bourgeois republicans against the proletariat, [with a] terrible defeat of the proletariat; 25 June 1848 to 10 December 1848, rule of the bourgeois republicans, drafting of the constitution, siege of Paris, Cavaignac’s dictatorship; 20 December 1848 to the end of May 1849, struggle by Bonaparte and the party of order with the republican constituent assembly, defeat of same, downfall of the bourgeois republicans.

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Before we finish with this period we must cast a backward glance at two powers, one of which destroyed the other on 2 December 1851, and yet the two had lived as a happy couple from 20 December 1848 up to the departure of the constituent assembly [in May 1849]. I have in mind Louis Bonaparte, on the one hand, and the party of the royalist coalition, of order, of the great bourgeoisie, on the other. On acceding to the presidency Bonaparte at once formed a ministry of the party of order, placing Odilon Barrot at its head, the former leader, take note, of the most liberal faction of the parliamentary bourgeoisie. M. Barrot had finally bagged the cabinet which he had been stalking since 1830, and still better the premier post in that cabinet; but not, in the way that he had envisaged under Louis Philippe, as the ablest leader in the parliamentary opposition, but rather as charged with the task of putting a parliament to death, and as the confederate of all his arch-enemies, Jesuits and legitimists. He brought the bride home at last, but only after she had been prostituted. Bonaparte himself seemed completely eclipsed. This party acted for him. The very first cabinet meeting decided on the expedition to Rome, which, so it was agreed, was to be conducted behind the back of the national assembly, and resources for which were to be wrested from it under false pretences. So they began by swindling the national assembly and conspiring secretly with absolutist powers abroad against the revolutionary Roman republic. In the same way and with the same manoeuvres Bonaparte prepared his coup of 2 December [1851] against the royalist legislature and its constitutional republic. Let us not forget that this same party which formed Bonaparte’s cabinet on 20 December 1848 also formed the majority of the legislative national assembly on 2 December 1851. In August [1848] the constituent assembly had resolved not to disband itself without debating and promulgating an array of organic laws to augment the constitution. On 6 January 1849 the party of order had its representative Rateau propose to the assembly that the organic laws should be abandoned and that it should resolve its own dissolution instead. At that time all the royalist representatives in the national assembly, not just the cabinet headed by M. Odilon Barrot, pestered it that its dissolution was necessary for the maintenance of credit, for the consolidation of order, for bringing provisional arrangements to an end and for establishing a definite state of affairs; it hindered the efficacy of the new government and sought to eke out its life from sheer rancour, the country was weary


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of it. Bonaparte noted well all this invective against the power of the legislature, learnt it by heart and showed the parliamentary royalists on 2 December 1851 that he understood it. He quoted their own catchphrases back to them. The Barrot cabinet and the party of order went further. They drew up petitions to the national assembly throughout all France, in which this body was most kindly requested to dissolve itself, to disappear. Thus they led the unorganised populace into the fray against the national assembly, the voice of the people organised constitutionally. They taught Bonaparte to appeal from parliamentary assemblies to the people. Finally on 29 January 1849 the day had come on which the constituent assembly was to make a decision concerning its own dissolution. The national assembly found its chambers occupied by soldiers; Changarnier, the general of the party of order, in whose hands was united the supreme command of the national guard and regular troops, staged a grand show of force in Paris, as if a battle were in the offing, and the royalist coalition put threats to the constituent assembly that force would be used if it did not comply. It was compliant and merely bargained for a very short lease of life. What was 29 January 1849 but the coup d’état of 2 December 1851, only carried out by royalists together with Bonaparte against the republicans of the national assembly? These worthy men did not notice or did not want to notice that on 29 January Bonaparte had taken the opportunity to have a portion of the troops go on parade before the Tuileries and had thus seized with avidity this first proclamation of military might against parliamentary power, alluding to Caligula. Doubtless they saw only their Changarnier. The organic laws augmenting the constitution, like the education bill, the bill on religion, etc., were a particular motive for the party of order to cut short the lifespan of the constituent assembly by force. For the royalist coalition everything lay in making these laws themselves, and in not letting the increasingly mistrustful republicans do it. Amongst these organic laws there was even one on the accountability of the president of the republic. In 1851 the legislative assembly was occupied with drafting such a law when Bonaparte anticipated this coup with the coup of 2 December. What would the royalist coalition not have given in their campaign in the parliamentary winter of 1851 to have found the article of accountability ready to hand, and drawn up at that by a mistrustful, hostile republican assembly!

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After 29 January 1849, when the constituent assembly destroyed its last weapon itself, the Barrot cabinet and the friends of order hounded it to death, leaving nothing undone which could humiliate it, and wresting laws from its self-pitying weakness that cost it all remaining public regard. Preoccupied with his Napoleonic idée fixe Bonaparte was impudent enough to exploit this abasement of parliamentary power in public. On 7 May 1849, when the national assembly censured the cabinet for the occupation of Civitavecchia by [General] Oudinot and ordered the expedition to Rome to return to its original purpose, Bonaparte published a letter to Oudinot in the Moniteur that evening congratulating him on his heroic exploits and posing as the munificent protector of the army, in contrast to the pen-pushing parliamentarians. The royalists chuckled at this. They regarded him simply as their dupe. At last when Marrast, president of the constituent assembly, believed for a moment that the security of the national assembly was endangered, he appealed to the constitution and requisitioned a colonel and his regiment; the colonel refused, citing proper discipline and referring Marrast to [General] Changarnier, who haughtily demurred with the comment that he did not like bayonets with brains. In November 1851 when the royalist coalition wanted to mount the decisive contest with Bonaparte, they tried to go too far and to force through the direct requisition of troops by the president of the national assembly in their infamous commissioners’ bill. One of their generals, Le Flô, had signed the proposed law. In vain did Changarnier vote for the bill and in vain did [the Orléanist politician] Thiers pay homage to the foresight of the erstwhile constituent assembly. The Minister of War [the Bonapartist] Saint-Arnaud answered him as Changarnier had answered Marrast – and all to the cheers of the [social-democrats of the] montagne. Thus the party of order itself, though as yet still the cabinet, and not yet the national assembly, denounced the parliamentary regime. And it protests when 2 December 1851 banishes the parliamentary regime from France! We wish it a pleasant journey. III On 28 May 1849 the national assembly gathered in legislative sessions. On 2 December 1851 it was dispersed. This period comprises the lifespan of the constitutional or parliamentary republic. It falls into three main periods: 28 May to 13 June 1849, conflict between


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democrats and the bourgeoisie, defeat of the petty bourgeois or democratic party; – 13 June 1849 to 31 May 1850, parliamentary dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, i.e. of the Orléanists and legitimists in coalition, or of the party of order, a dictatorship which fulfilled itself by abolishing universal manhood suffrage; – 31 May 1850 to 2 December 1851, conflict between the bourgeoisie and Bonaparte, collapse of bourgeois rule, demise of the constitutional or parliamentary republic. In the first French revolution the rule of the constitutionalists is succeeded by the rule of the Girondins, and the rule of the Girondins by the rule of the Jacobins. Each party leans on the more progressive party for support. When each has led the revolution to a point where there is no going further, still less of going on ahead of it, each is pushed aside by the keener ally waiting in the background and sent to the guillotine. The revolution thus follows an ascending path. The revolution of 1848 is just the reverse. The proletarian party appears as an annex of the petty bourgeois democrats. The proletarians are betrayed and dropped by the democratic party on 16 April, 15 May and in the June days [of 1848]. The democratic party, for its part, rides on the shoulders of the bourgeois republican party. The bourgeois republicans no sooner believe themselves set up than they shake off their burdensome friend and support themselves on the shoulders of the party of order. The party of order hunches its shoulders, allows the bourgeois-republicans to topple off and heaves itself onto the shoulders of the armed forces. It fancies that it is still sitting on those shoulders when one fine morning it realises that the shoulders have been transformed into bayonets. Each party kicks back at the one pressing from behind, and leans forward on the one pushing back. It’s no wonder that in this ridiculous position each loses its balance, and after making the inevitable faces, each collapses in curious spasms. Thus the revolution follows a descending path, and it commenced retrograde motion before the last barricade of February [1848] had been cleared away and the first revolutionary authority set up. The period unfolding before us comprises the most motley mixture of crying contradictions: constitutionalists who conspire openly against the constitution; revolutionaries who are confessedly constitutional; a national assembly which wants to be all-powerful and still remains parliamentary; a montagne that makes a career out of patience and parries present defeats with prophecies of future victories; royalists who are the founding fathers of the republic, and who are forced by the situation to maintain inimical royal houses,

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which they support, in exile abroad, and the republic, which they hate, at home in France; an executive power that finds its strength in its own weakness, and its respectability in the contempt that it provokes; a republic that is none other than the disrepute of two monarchies, the restored Bourbons and the July monarchy, combined with an imperial etiquette – alliances whose first proviso is separation; contests whose first law is indecision; wild, senseless agitation in the name of peace, and the most solemn preaching of peace in the name of revolution; passion without truth, truth without passion; heroes without exploits, history without achievements; development driven solely by the calendar and wearisome through constant repetition of the same tension and release; antagonisms which seem periodically to reach a peak only to go dull and diminish without resolution; pretentious interventions for show and small-minded terror that the world will end; and at the same time the saviours of the world play out the pettiest intrigues and high comedies, redeemers whose inaction reminds us less of the Day of Judgement than of the [confusions of the anti-absolutist] Fronde [rebellion amongst the nobility of 1648–53] – the whole genius of official France disgraced by the artful foolishness of a single individual; as often as it is voiced in a general election, the will of the whole nation seeks self-expression in superannuated enemies of the general interest, finding this at last in the self-will of a racketeer. If any episode in history has been coloured grey on grey, this is the one. Men and events appear as Schlemihls in reverse, as shadows that have lost their bodies. The revolution has paralysed its own proponents and has endowed only its enemies with passion and violence. The counter-revolutionaries continually summon, exorcise and banish the ‘red spectre’, and when it finally appears, it is not in the phrygian cap of anarchy but in the uniform of order, in [the soldiers’] red breeches. We have observed: the cabinet, which Bonaparte installed on 20 December [1848], his Ascension Day [to the office of president], was a ministry for the party of order, the coalition of legitimists and Orléanists. This Barrot-Falloux cabinet outlasted the constituent assembly for the republic, whose lifespan it had shortened, more or less forcibly, and found itself still at the helm of state. Changarnier, the general of the united royalists, continued to unite in his person the general command of the First Army and the Paris National Guard, and the general election [of 28 May 1849] had finally secured a large majority in the national assembly for the party of order. Here


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the deputies and peers of Louis Philippe met up with a holy order of legitimists who emerged from hiding after great quantities of voting papers from the nation had been transformed into admission tickets to the political arena. The Bonapartist representatives of the people were sown too thinly to be able to form an independent parliamentary party. They were sufficiently to hand to make up numbers in a general call-up against the republican forces. They appeared merely as pitiful hangers-on of the party of order. Thus the party of order was in possession of the powers of government, the army and the legislative bodies, in short: the whole might of the state, bolstered morally by the general elections which made its rule appear to be the will of the people, and by the simultaneous triumph of counterrevolution on the whole of the European continent. Never did a party inaugurate its campaign with greater resources and under more favourable auspices. The shipwrecked pure republicans found that they had dwindled in the national assembly to a clique of about 50 headed by generals from the north African wars: Cavaignac, Lamoricière, Bedeau. The principal opposition party however was made up of the montagne. The social-democratic party christened itself with this parliamentary name. It commanded more than 200 of the 750 votes in the national assembly and was therefore at least as powerful as any of the other three factions of the party of order taken singly. Its relative inferiority compared to the whole of the royalist coalition seemed to be mitigated by special circumstances. It was not only the case that voting in the départements revealed that they had won a significant following amongst the rural population. It counted in its ranks almost all the deputies from Paris, the army had pledged a confession of faith in democracy in the election of three junior officers, and the leader of the montagne Ledru-Rollin, in contradistinction to all the other representatives of the party of order, had been raised to the heights of parliamentary distinction by five départements pooling their votes for him. Hence on 29 May 1849 the montagne appeared to have all the makings for success to hand, given the inevitable clashes of the royalists between themselves and of the entire party of order with Bonaparte. Fourteen days later they had lost everything, honour included. Before going any further with this parliamentary history, a few introductory remarks are necessary to avoid widespread misconceptions concerning the overall character of the epoch which lies before us. From a democratic point of view, the period of the national

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assembly was concerned with what the period of the constituent assembly was concerned with, a straightforward conflict between republicans and royalists. Yet they sum up the events themselves with one word: ‘reaction’, a night in which all cats are grey and which allows them to rattle off clichés like a night watchman. And indeed at first glance the party of order appeared to be a tangle of different royalist factions not only intriguing against one another to put their own pretender on the throne and exclude the pretender of the opposing party, but also uniting in a common hatred of and attacks on the ‘republic’. The montagne for its part appears in opposition to this royalist conspiracy as a representative of the ‘republic’. The party of order appears continuously occupied with a ‘reaction’ directed against the press, voluntary associations and the like, no more and no less than in [Prince Metternich’s] Austria, and executed in a brutal police intervention in the state bureaucracy, the local constabulary and the judiciary, as in Austria. The ‘montagne’ for its part is just as constantly occupied with fighting off these attacks and protecting the ‘natural rights of man’ as every so-called people’s party has been, more or less, for a century and a half. Nevertheless on closer inspection of the situation and the parties, this superficial appearance, which veils the class struggle and the peculiar physiognomy of this period, disappears, and it thus becomes a gold mine for saloon bar politicians and republican-minded gents. As we said, legitimists and Orléanists make up the two great factions of the party of order. Was what bound these factions to their pretenders and kept them mutually at odds – was it nothing but the lily and tricolour, the royal house of Bourbon and the royal house of Orléans, different shades of royalism? Was it their royalist faith at all? Under the Bourbons the large propertied interests governed with priests and lackeys, under Orléans rule it was high finance, largescale industry, large commercial interests, i.e. capital with its retinue of lawyers, professors and smooth-talkers. The legitimate monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the feudal lords, and the July monarchy was likewise merely the political expression for the usurping rule of bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property; it was the old opposition between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal antipathies, hopes and fears, prejudices and delusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith


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and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, whoever denied this? On the different forms of property, the social conditions of existence, arises an entire superstructure of different and peculiarly formed sentiments, delusions, modes of thought and outlooks on life. The whole class creates and forms them from the material foundations on up and from the corresponding social relations. The single individual, to whom they are transmitted through tradition and upbringing, can imagine that they form the real motives and starting-point for his actions. As Orléanists, as legitimists, each faction sought to convince itself and the other that loyalty to their two royal houses separated them, yet facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests which forbade their unification. Just as in private life one distinguishes between what a man thinks and says, and what he really is and does, so one must all the more in historical conflicts make the distinction between the fine words and aspirations of the parties from their real organisation and their real interests, their image from their reality. Orléanists and legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic with the same demands. If each side wanted to carry out the restoration of its own royal house in opposition to the other, then this signified nothing but the desire of each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie had split – landed property and capital – to restore its own supremacy and to subordinate the other. We are talking in terms of two interests within the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, in spite of its flirtations with feudalism and pride in its pedigree, has been thoroughly assimilated to the bourgeoisie by the development of modern society. Thus the Tories in England long fancied that they were in raptures about royalty, the church and the beauties of the ancient constitution, until a time of trial tore from them the confession that they were only in raptures about rent. The royalist coalition pursued their intrigues against one another in the press, at Ems [in Germany amongst the Bourbons], at Claremont [in England amongst the Orléanists], outside parliamentary bounds. Behind the scenes they donned their antique Orléanist and legitimist livery once again and pursued their old tournaments. But on the public stage, in high politics and matters of state, as a grand parliamentary party, they pawned off their royal houses with token acts of reverence, and adjourned the restoration of the monarchy ad infinitum, and did their real business as the party of order, i.e. under a social rather than a political banner, as a representative of the bourgeois world order, not as knights seeking fair ladies,

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as the bourgeois class against other classes, not as royalists against republicans. And as the party of order they exercised a more unrestricted and sterner dominion over the other classes of society than they had been able to do under the restoration or the July monarchy, as was possible only in a parliamentary republic, for only under that form could the two great divisions of the French bourgeoisie unite and make the rule of their class the order of the day, instead of the regime of one of its privileged factions. If in spite of that as the party of order they insulted the republic and expressed aversion to it, this did not happen as the result of mere royalist recollections but rather from the instinct that the republican form made their political dominion complete and stripped it of all alien appearances, but at the same time undermining its social basis in that they have to confront the subjugated classes, and to grapple with them without a mediator, without the crown for cover, without being able to distract the interests of the nation with their secondary quarrels amongst themselves and with royalty. This results from a weakness which causes them to recoil from the pure conditions of their own class rule and to hanker after the incomplete, undeveloped and on that account less dangerous forms of dominion. On the other hand every time that the royalist coalition come into conflict with the pretender opposing them, with Bonaparte, they believe their parliamentary might to be threatened by the power of the executive, and they have to pull out the political title to their rule, they come forward as republicans and not as royalists, from the Orléanist Thiers who warns the national assembly [on 17 January 1851] that the republic would divide them least to the legitimist Berryer, who on 2 December 1851 harangues the assembled people of the tenth arrondissement in the name of the republic as a tribune, swathed in the tricolour on the steps of the town hall. To be sure a mocking echo calls: Henri V! Henri V! [the legitimist pretender and self-styled king]. Opposed to the bourgeoisie in coalition there was a coalition between the petty bourgeoisie and the working classes, the so-called social-democratic party. The party regarded themselves as badly rewarded after the June days of 1848, their material interests endangered and the democratic guarantees, which ought to have assured the exercise of these interests, called into question by the counter-revolution. Hence they drew near to the workers. On the other hand, their parliamentary representation, the montagne, pushed aside during the dictatorship of the republican bourgeoisie, had reconquered its lost popularity because of the struggle between


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Bonaparte and the royalist ministers during the second half of the constituent assembly’s lifespan. It had struck an alliance with the leaders of the socialists. In February 1849 there were banquets to celebrate the event. A joint programme was produced, joint election committees were instituted and joint candidates put up. The revolutionary sting was taken from the social demands of the proletariat, and a democratic cast was given to them; the merely political form was stripped back from the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and a socialist sting revealed. In that way socialdemocracy arose. The new montagne, the result of this combination, contained the same elements as the old montagne only numerically stronger, apart from a few token workers and a few socialist sectarians. But in the course of development it had altered, along with the class which it represented. The peculiar character of socialdemocracy is epitomised in the way that democratic and republican institutions are demanded as a means of weakening the conflict between capital and labour, and of creating a harmony between the two extremes, but not of transcending them both. Different markers for reaching this goal may be proposed, and it may be embellished with more or less revolutionary notions, but the content remains always the same. This content is the reform of society in a democratic way, but a reform within petty bourgeois limits. Only we must not take the narrow-minded view that the petty bourgeoisie wants on principle to pursue an egoistic class interest. Rather it believes that the particular conditions for its freedom are the only general conditions under which modern society can be safeguarded and escape the class struggle. Even less should one imagine that democratic representatives are all shopkeepers or their admirers. In respect of education and circumstances they could be as far removed from them as the heavens above. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their heads they do not transcend the limitations that others have not surmounted in life, that they are therefore driven to the same problems and solutions in theory that material interests and social life pose for others in practice. In general terms this is the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class to the class that they represent. After the exposition given above, it is self-evident that if the montagne continually contends with the party of order for the republic and the so-called rights of man, neither the republic nor the rights of man are its real goal, just as an army, which one wants to

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disarm and which mounts resistance, has not entered the field of battle in order to safeguard its own weapons. When the national assembly met, the party of order immediately provoked the montagne. The bourgeoisie just then felt the necessity of getting rid of the petty bourgeois democrats, just as a year before it had realised the necessity of putting an end to the revolutionary proletariat. Yet the situation of its adversary was different. The strength of the proletarian party lay in the streets, that of the petty bourgeoisie in the national assembly itself. It was therefore a question of luring them from the national assembly onto the streets and making them destroy their parliamentary power themselves, before time and opportunity could consolidate it. The montagne sprang at full gallop into the trap. The bombardment of Rome by French troops [in June 1849] was thrown to it as bait. It violated article V of the [preamble to the] constitution which prohibits the French republic from turning its military forces against the freedom of any other people. In addition [chapter V] § 54 forbade any declaration of war by the executive without the assent of the national assembly, and by its resolution of 8 May [1849] the constituent assembly had disavowed the expedition to Rome. On these grounds Ledru-Rollin introduced a bill of impeachment against Bonaparte and his ministers on 11 June 1849, and stung by Thiers into action, he let himself get carried away to the point of threatening that he would defend the constitution by any means, even fighting hand-to-hand. The montagne rose up as one man and echoed this call to arms. On 12 June [1849] the national assembly threw out the bill of impeachment, and the montagne walked out of parliament. The events of 13 June [1849] are well known: the proclamation from one part of the montagne by which Bonaparte and his ministers were declared ‘outside the constitution’; the democratic national guard, parading weaponless in the streets, dispersed when they met up with Changarnier’s troops, etc. etc. A part of the montagne fled abroad, another was arraigned before the high court at Bourges, and a parliamentary regulation subjected the rest to the schoolmasterly supervision of the president of the national assembly. Paris was again besieged and the democratic section of the national guard dissolved. The influence of the montagne in parliament and the power of the petty bourgeoisie in Paris was thereby destroyed.


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Lyons, where the signal for a bloody workers’ insurrection had been given on 13 June, was besieged, along with five neighbouring départements, a situation which continues up to the present moment. The bulk of the montagne had abandoned the avant garde, refusing to sign its proclamation. The press had deserted, only two papers daring to publish the broadside. The petty bourgeoisie betrayed their representatives in that the national guard stayed away, or where they appeared, they obstructed the building of barricades. The representatives had duped the petty bourgeoisie, as the alleged affiliates from the army were nowhere to be seen. Finally, instead of gaining additional strength from the proletariat, the democratic party infected it with its own weakness, and as is generally the case with democratic heroism, the leaders took satisfaction in being able to blame the ‘people’ for desertion, and the people in charging the leaders with fraud. Seldom had a charge been sounded with greater alarum than the impending campaign by the montagne, seldom had an event been trumpeted with greater certainty or further in advance than the inevitable victory of democracy. This is for certain: the democrats have faith in the trumpeting that breached the walls of Jericho. And as often as they confront the ramparts of despotism, they try to imitate the miracle. If the montagne wished to triumph in parliament, it should not have resorted to arms. If the call to arms was in parliament, it should not have behaved in a parliamentary way in the streets. If the peaceful demonstration was seriously intended, then it was foolish not to foresee a violent reception. If they had a real war in mind, then it was eccentric to put aside the weapons to fight it. But the revolutionary threats of the petty bourgeoisie and their democratic representatives are mere attempts to bully the enemy. And if they run into a cul de sac, if they compromise themselves enough to force them to carry out their threats, then this will happen in an ambiguous way which avoids nothing so much as the means to an end and which hankers after excuses for failure. The thundering overture announcing the contest dies away to the faintest growl as battle is commenced, the players cease to take themselves seriously, and the affair goes flat like a burst balloon. No party exaggerates its strength more than the democratic one, and none deludes itself with more insouciance about the situation. Since a part of the army had declared for it, the montagne was now convinced that the army would revolt for it. And on what occasion? On an occasion that had no meaning for the troops other than that

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the revolutionaries sided with the soldiers of Rome against the French ones. Concerning the workers, the montagne had to know that the recollections of June 1848 were still too fresh for anything but a deep aversion on the part of the proletariat for the national guard and a thoroughgoing mistrust on the part of the chiefs of the secret societies for the democratic chiefs. To even out these differences would require an overwhelming common interest to come into play. The infraction of an abstract constitutional clause could not provide this. Had not the constitution been repeatedly infringed according to the testimony of the democrats themselves? Had the popular papers not branded it as a counter-revolutionary botch-job? But the democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie, hence a transitional class, in which the interests of two classes are neutralised, fancies himself above class conflict entirely. The democrats admit that a privileged class confronts them, but they together with the whole rest of the nation make up the people. What they represent is the people’s right to rule; their interests are the people’s interests. Hence at a time of impending struggle, they do not need to examine the interests and positioning of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources all that critically. They have only to give the signal, and the people will fall on the oppressors with inexhaustible resources to hand. If in the course of events their interests turn out to be uninteresting and their power turns out to be impotence, then the fault lies either with damned sophists splitting the indivisible people into different warring camps, or the army was too brutalised and too dazzled to understand that the pure aims of democracy are in its best interests, or the whole thing has been wrecked by a mere detail in execution, or else an unforeseen accident has thwarted the party this time. In any case the democrat emerges from the most shameful defeat just as unscathed as he was when he innocently went into it, with the newly won conviction that he is bound to triumph, not that he and his party have given up their long-standing views but rather the opposite, that conditions have to ripen to suit him. Decimated and broken down and humiliated by the new parliamentary order, the montagne should not be thought particularly unfortunate. The remuneration for attendance and their official position were for many of them a source of consolation that was renewed daily. If 13 June [1849] had removed its leaders, then it opened the way for lesser talents who were flattered by this new arrangement. If their impotence in parliament could no longer be


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doubted, then they were justified in limiting their interventions to outbursts of moral indignation and tub-thumping oratory. If the party of order pretended to see in them an embodiment of all the terrors of anarchy, as the last official representatives of the revolution, then they could in reality be all the more insipid and unassuming. They consoled themselves, however, for 13 June [1849] with this profound twist: But if any dare to attack the general suffrage, well then! Then we will show them what we are made of! We shall see! So far as the montagnards who fled abroad are concerned, it suffices to note here that Ledru-Rollin, since he had succeeded in scarcely a fortnight in irretrievably ruining the powerful party that he headed, now found himself called up to form a French regime in exile; his distant figure, far from the scene of action, seemed to increase in stature proportionate to the sinking level of the revolution and the dwarfing of the great and the good of official France, so that he could figure as republican pretender for [the presidential election of May] 1852; periodically he issued circulars to the Wallachians and to other peoples whereby the despots of the continent were threatened with his actions and the actions of his confederates. Was Proudhon wholly wrong when he called out to these men [in 1850]: ‘You’re nothing but braggarts’? On 13 June [1849] the party of order had not only broken the montagne, it had brought about the subordination of the constitution to the majority decisions of the national assembly. And this is what it understood about the republic. That the bourgeoisie rules here in parliamentary form, without encountering any limitations in the veto power of the executive or in the power to dissolve parliament, as there are in a monarchy. That was the parliamentary republic, as Thiers had termed it [in 1851]. But on 13 June when the bourgeoisie secured its supreme power within the parliamentary chambers, did it not afflict parliament itself, as opposed to the executive power and the people, with an incurable weakness by throwing out the most popular section? By surrendering numerous deputies to the writs of the judiciary without further ceremonial, it abolished parliamentary immunity itself. The humiliating regulations to which it subjected the montagne denigrated the individual representatives of the people, and exalted the president of the republic in inverse proportion. By condemning the insurrection to maintain constitutional rule as anarchic and tending to the overthrow of society, it precluded an appeal to insurrection, should the executive power act against it by

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violating a constitutional provision. The irony of history had it that the general who bombarded Rome on Bonaparte’s orders and so provided the immediate occasion for the constitutional fracas of 13 June [1849], that very same Oudinot, had to be the one that the party of order offered, with fruitless supplications, to the people on 2 December 1851 as a constitutional general in opposition to Bonaparte. Another hero of 13 June [1849], [General] Vieyra, praised from the rostrum of the national assembly for leading a gang of national guards linked to high finance to commit brutalities in the offices of the democratic press, this same Vieyra was sworn to Bonaparte and played an essential part in the death throes of the national assembly by depriving it of any protection from the national guard. The 13th of June [1849] had still another meaning. The montagne had wanted Bonaparte out of the way through impeachment. Its defeat was therefore a signal victory for Bonaparte, a personal triumph over his democratic enemies. The party of order gained a victory; Bonaparte had only to cash in. And that he did. On 14 June [1849] there was a proclamation to be read on the walls of Paris whereby the president, quite without meaning to, fighting against it, forced by pressure of events to emerge from cloistered seclusion, intones the calumnies of his enemies against his misprised virtue, and in fact identifies the cause of order with his person whilst seeming to identify his person with the cause of order. Moreover the national assembly had sanctioned the expedition against Rome after the fact, but Bonaparte had taken the initiative. Having installed the high priest Samuel in the Vatican once again, he could hope to enter the Tuileries [crowned by the Pope] as King David. He had won over the church. The revolt of 13 June [1849] was limited, as we have seen, to a peaceful march through the streets. Hence there were no laurels to be won in combating it. At a time when heroes and exploits were scarce, the party of order nevertheless transformed this bloodless encounter into a second [Battle of] Austerlitz [when Napoleon defeated the Austrians and Russians on 2 December 1805]. Speechmakers and leader-writers extolled the army as the champion of order, versus the impotent anarchism of the populace at large, and praised Changarnier as the ‘bulwark of society’. This was a mystification that he finally believed himself. But secretly the army corps that seemed doubtful were transferred from Paris, the regiments that had voted for the democrats were banished to Algiers, hotheads


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amongst the troops were consigned to punishment squads, and finally the press was systematically barred from the barracks and the barracks from civilian life. We have now reached the turning-point in the history of the French national guard. In 1830 it was decisive in the overthrow of the restoration monarchy [of Charles X]. Under Louis Philippe, every time the national guard sided with the troops, the rebellion misfired. In the February days of 1848, when it signalled passivity to the uprising and ambiguity to Louis Philippe, he acknowledged defeat and went under. Thus the conviction took root that the revolution could not win without the national guard, and the army could not win against it. Thus the army had a superstitious belief in an almighty civilian power. That superstition was strengthened when the national guard joined forces with regular troops to put down the insurrection of the June days of 1848. When Bonaparte took office, the standing of the national guard declined somewhat owing to the unconstitutional amalgamation of its command with that of the first army in the person of Changarnier. The national guard itself now appeared to be but an appendage to the regulars, just as its command appeared to be a department of the top brass. It was finally disposed of on 13 June [1849]: not just by the partial dissolution of the national guard, periodically re-enacted all over France, and leaving only fragments behind. The demonstration by 13 June was above all a demonstration of the democratic [elements of the] national guard. They had, to be sure, confronted the army with their uniforms, not with weapons, but the talisman was precisely in the uniform. The army satisfied itself that the uniform was a length of woollen cloth just like any other. The spell was broken. In the June days of 1848 the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie were united as national guards against the proletariat, and on 13 June 1849 the bourgeoisie let the army disperse the pettybourgeois national guards; on 2 December 1851 the bourgeois national guard itself vanished and Bonaparte merely confirmed this fact when he signed an order of dissolution. So the bourgeoisie itself smashed its last weapon against the army, doing this the moment the petty bourgeoisie rebelled and ceased to be its vassal, and generally destroying all its own defences against absolutism once it became absolute itself. Meanwhile in the national assembly the party of order celebrated the reconquest of a power that seemed lost only in 1848 but was recovered in 1849 free from previous restrictions, spouting invective

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against the republic and the constitution, cursing all future, present, and past revolutions including the one their own leaders had made, and passing laws muzzling the press, forbidding free association and making siege controls a permanent institution. The national assembly then adjourned from the middle of August to the middle of October [1849], after naming a commission to rule in its absence. During this recess the legitimists intrigued at Ems, the Orléanists at Claremont, Bonaparte on his princely rounds, and councils of the départements in deliberations on constitutional revision – incidents which regularly recur in the periodic recesses of the national assembly, and which I will examine only when they turn out to be events. Here it is merely noted that the national assembly behaved in an impolitic way by disappearing for long intervals from the stage and leaving only a single figure at the head of the republic, Louis Bonaparte, even if a pitiable one, while the party of order caused a public scandal by separating into its royalist elements with mutually conflicting demands for restoration. Once the distracting din of parliament was silenced by this recess and it had dissolved bodily into the nation, it became inescapably clear that the republic required but one thing for true completion: making parliamentary recess permanent and replacing the republican motto ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ with the unambiguous words ‘infantry, cavalry, artillery’! IV In mid-October 1849 the national assembly went back into session. On 1 November Bonaparte surprised it with a communiqué announcing the dismissal of the Barrot-Falloux cabinet and the formation of a new one. Nobody has sacked his lackeys more unceremoniously than Bonaparte did his ministers. For the moment Barrot and Co. got the boot intended for the national assembly. The Barrot cabinet, as we have seen, was composed of legitimists and Orléanists, a cabinet for the party of order. This was what Bonaparte needed in order to dissolve the constituent assembly, to mount the expedition against the republic in Rome, and to destroy the democratic party. In apparent eclipse behind this ministry, he had delivered governmental authority into the hands of the party of order and masked himself in the unassuming guise of a ‘straw man’, which the respectable ‘guarantors’ of the Paris press bore [under Louis Philippe, when the real editors were in prison]. Now he cast off his larval shell, which was no longer a light covering under which he could hide his features but rather an iron mask which


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prevented him from showing his true face. He had appointed the Barrot cabinet to break up the national assembly in the name of the party of order; in his own name he discharged it in order to declare his independence from the party of order and its national assembly. There was no lack of plausible pretexts for this dismissal. The Barrot cabinet neglected even the formalities that would have let the president of the republic appear to hold power alongside the national assembly. During the recess of the national assembly Bonaparte published a letter to [his military aide] Edgar Ney in which he seemed to object to the liberal policies of the Pope, just as he had published a letter in opposition to the constituent assembly praising Oudinot for his assault on the Roman republic. When the national assembly approved the budget for the Roman expedition, the liberal Victor Hugo brought this letter to attention [on 19 October 1849]. The party of order drowned out the suggestion that Bonaparte’s ideas could have any political weight with exclamations of disbelieving scorn. Not one of the ministers took up the challenge to defend him. On another occasion Barrot, with his usual high seriousness, alluded from the rostrum to his indignation concerning the ‘abominable intrigues’ that in his opinion were going on in the immediate entourage of the president. Finally, though the cabinet obtained a widow’s pension for the duchess of Orléans from the national assembly, it refused to consider an increase in presidential expenses. In Bonaparte the imperial pretender was so intimately bound up with the down-and-out mercenary that his one big idea – that his mission was to restore the empire – was always accompanied by another – that it was the mission of the French people to pay his debts. The Barrot-Falloux cabinet was the first and last parliamentary cabinet that Bonaparte called into existence. Its discharge therefore marks a decisive turning point. In it the party of order lost the lever of executive power, an indispensable position for defending a parliamentary regime, and never again recovered it. In a country like France, where the executive power has at its disposal a bureaucracy of more than half a million civil servants, so holding an immense number of individual interests and livelihoods in abject dependence; where the state restricts, controls, regulates oversees and supervises civil life from its most all-encompassing expressions to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most universal models of existence to the private existence of individuals; where through the most extraordinary centralisation this parasite acquires an all-knowing pervasiveness, an enhanced capacity for speed and action which

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only finds an analogue in the helpless dependence and scatterbrained formlessness of the actual body politic – it is easy to see that in such a country the national assembly forfeits any real influence when it loses control of ministerial portfolios, if it does not at the same time simplify the state administration, reduce the bureaucracy as far as possible, and lastly allow civil life and public opinion to create their own organs of expression independent of governmental authority. But the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are intertwined in the most intimate way with the maintenance of just that wide-ranging and highly ramified machinery of state. Here it accommodates surplus population and makes up in the form of state maintenance what it cannot pocket in the form of profit, interest, rent and fees. On the other hand its political interests force it to increase state repression day by day, hence resources and personnel, while at the same time waging a continuous war on public opinion, suspecting independent movement in society, then maiming and laming its limbs where not wholly successful in amputating them. Thus the French bourgeoisie was compelled by its class position both to negate the conditions of existence for any parliamentary power, including its own, and to make the power of the executive, its adversary, irresistible. The new cabinet was known as the d’Hautpoul ministry. Not that General d’Hautpoul had been granted the title prime minister. With Barrot’s dismissal Bonaparte had also abolished this office which condemned the president of the republic to the legal nullity of a constitutional monarch, though a constitutional monarch without throne or crown, without sceptre and sword, without unilateral power, without unimpeachable possession of the highest office of state, and most fatal of all, without [expenses from] a civil list. The d’Hautpoul cabinet included only one man of parliamentary standing, the Jew Fould, one of the most notorious of the high financiers. The finance ministry went to him. Check the quotations on the Paris bourse and you’ll find that from 1 November 1849 onwards French government securities rose and fell with the fall and rise of Bonapartist shares. While Bonaparte was finding friends on the bourse he also took control of the police, appointing Carlier as prefect in Paris. This change of cabinet had consequences that would only emerge in the ensuing train of events. At first Bonaparte seemed to take a step forward only to be driven conspicuously back again. His abrupt communiqué was followed by the most servile pledge of allegiance


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to the national assembly. Whenever ministers dared to make a diffident attempt to introduce his personal whims as proposed legislation, they appeared unwilling, forced by their position to fulfil comic instructions, convinced in advance of their failure. Whenever Bonaparte babbled out his intentions behind his ministers’ backs and played up his ‘Napoleonic ideals’ [as published in a book of 1839], his own ministers disavowed him from the rostrum of the national assembly. His usurpatory lusts only seemed to come forth so that the malicious laughter of his enemies would not die away. He behaved like an unrecognised genius whom all the world takes for a simpleton. Never did he experience the contempt of all classes to a greater degree than in this period. Never did the bourgeoisie rule more unconditionally, never did it display the insignia of power with more bravado. I do not need to tell the story of the bourgeoisie’s legislative activity here, as it can be summarised for this period in two laws: the reintroduction of the wine tax, and the education act disallowing atheism. Though wine drinking was made harder for the French, they were all the more richly supplied with the water of the living truth. Though the bourgeoisie declared the old, despised tax system in France sacrosanct by reintroducing the despised tax on wine, it tried to secure the old habits of mind that helped people to bear it by passing the education law. It is astonishing to see the Orléanists, the liberal bourgeois, these votaries of Voltaire and apostles of philosophical eclecticism, entrusting the supervision of French intellectual life to their sworn enemies the Jesuits. Though Orléanists and legitimists could part company over pretenders to the throne, they both understood that their joint authority required a combination of the repressive apparatus of two eras, the July monarchy and the restoration, supplementing and strengthening the former with the latter. Out in the départements the peasantry began to agitate, as they were dashed in all their hopes, oppressed more than ever by low price-levels for grain, and by increasing tax burdens and mortgage debts. They were answered with a witch hunt against school teachers, who were subjected to the clergy, a witch hunt against mayors, who were subjected to prefects, and through a system of spying, which subjected everyone. In Paris and the big cities [political] reaction bears the true character of the times and provokes more than it executes. In the countryside it is vulgar, sordid, petty, tiresome and badgering, in a word the gendarme. We know how

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much three years of a police state, blessed by the authority of the Church, must demoralise an unsophisticated population. Despite all the passion and shouting from the rostrum that was directed by the party of order against the minority in the national assembly, its words were always monosyllabic, like the Christian who was to say: Yea, yea; nay, nay! Monosyllables from the rostrum, monosyllables in the press. Boring as a riddle whose solution you already know. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or of the tax on wine, of freedom of the press or free trade, incorporating societies or municipalities, protecting personal freedom or accounting for public money, the universal remedy recurs, one theme is always the same, the verdict is ever ready and is invariably a cry of: ‘socialism’! Even bourgeois liberalism is decried as socialistic, the bourgeois enlightenment is socialistic, bourgeois financial reforms are socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where there was already a canal, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a stick when attacked with a sword. This is not mere rhetoric, fashion or party tactics. The bourgeoisie saw correctly that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism were turned back on their makers, that all the educational institutions it had supported were rebelling against its own civilisation, that all the gods it had created were forsaking them. It knew that all socalled liberty and progress threatened and strained its class-rule both at the foundations of society and at its political heights, and had therefore become ‘socialistic’. In these threats and strains it rightly discerned the secret of socialism, whose tendency and aim it judges more correctly than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself, since it cannot understand how the bourgeoisie stubbornly resists it, even though it snivels sentimentally about the suffering of mankind, or prophesies brotherly love and the millennium like the Christians, drivels humanistically about ideas, education and freedom, or concocts a doctrinaire system for the reconciliation and welfare of all classes. But what it doesn’t grasp is the conclusion that its own parliamentary regime, its political rule in general, must now be condemned universally as socialistic. So long as the organisation of bourgeois class rule is incomplete, and has not taken on its purest political expression, the opposition of other classes cannot emerge in a pure form, and where it does emerge, it cannot take the dangerous turn of calling property, religion, the family and public order into question, and so transforming the struggle against state power into a struggle against capital. If it saw ‘peace and quiet’


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endangered by every stirring of life in society, how could it want to retain at the head of society a regime of unrest, its own regime, the parliamentary regime, a regime that – as one of its spokesmen put it – thrives on conflict? The parliamentary regime lives by discussion, so how is it to forbid it? Every interest, every social organisation is transformed into a generality, debated as a generality, so how is an interest, any kind of institution, to transcend thinking and to impose itself as an article of faith? The war of the orators at the rostrum evokes the war of the printing presses; parliamentary debaters are necessarily supplemented by debaters in the salons and saloon bars; representatives who make constant appeals to public opinion license public opinion to express itself openly in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to majority decision, why then should the great majorities outside parliament not want to make decisions? When you call the tune at the pinnacles of power, is it a surprise when the underlings dance to it? By branding as ‘socialistic’ what it had previously extolled as ‘liberal’, the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests require it to dispense with the dangers of self-government, that in order to restore peace to the countryside the bourgeois parliament must first be laid to rest, that to retain its power in society intact its political power would have to be broken; that the individual bourgeois could continue to exploit other classes ‘privately’ and to continue in untroubled enjoyment of property, family, religion and public order only on condition that his class and all the others be condemned to the same political nullity; that to save its purse it must forfeit the crown, and the sword of state must be hung up like the sword of Damocles. In the domain of bourgeois interests in general, the national assembly proved itself so unproductive that, for example, the negotiations on the Paris-Avignon railway, begun during the winter 1850, were still not wrapped up on 2 December 1851. Where it was not repressive or reactive, it was incurably sterile. While Bonaparte’s cabinet took the initiative, in part, to put the programme of the party of order into law, and surpassed, in part, its harshness in executing and administering it, he also tried to win popularity through silly, childish proposals, to manifest his opposition to the national assembly and to hint at a secret reserve, though conditions temporarily hindered the French people from spending the hidden treasures. Such was the proposal to grant a pay increase of four sous per day to non-commissioned officers. Such was the proposal for unsecured bank loans for workers. Cash in hand

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and cash on tick, that was the perspective with which he hoped to lead on the populace. Gifts and loans – here we have the only economics of the lumpenproletariat, both the refined and the common sort. And here we have the only trips which Bonaparte knew how to wire. Never has a pretender speculated so stupidly on the stupidity of the populace. The national assembly raged repeatedly at these bare-faced attempts to win popularity at its expense, at the growing danger that this shyster, goaded by debt and unrestrained by reputation, would risk a desperate coup. The discord between the party of order and the president had taken on a threatening character when an unexpected event threw him repenting into its arms. We refer to the by-elections of 10 March 1850. These were held to fill seats vacated by deputies exiled or imprisoned after 13 June [1849]. Only socialdemocrats were elected in Paris. Indeed most of the votes there were concentrated on Deflotte, an insurgent in June 1848. Thus did the Paris petty bourgeoisie, in alliance with the proletariat, take revenge for its defeat on 13 June 1849. Though it seemed to disappear from battle at the crucial time, it regained the field on a more propitious occasion with greater forces and a bolder battle-cry. Another circumstance seemed to make this electoral victory more dangerous for Bonaparte. In Paris the army voted for one of the June [1848] insurgents against one of Bonaparte’s ministers, Lahitte, and in the départements mostly for the montagnards, outweighing the enemy there, too, though not so decisively as in Paris. Suddenly Bonaparte saw revolution rising against him once more. On 10 March 1850, as on 29 January and 13 June 1849, he disappeared behind the party of order. He bowed down, he humbly begged pardon, he offered to appoint any cabinet it pleased on behalf of the parliamentary majority, he even implored the Orléanist and legitimist leaders, the Thiers’s, the Berryer’s, the Broglie’s, the Molé’s, in short the so-called grandees, to take the helm of state in person. The party of order did not know what to do with this chance of a lifetime. Instead of boldly seizing power it did not even force Bonaparte to reinstate the cabinet previously discharged on 1 November [1849]; it was satisfied to humiliate him with forgiveness and to attach M. Baroche to the d’Hautpoul cabinet. As public prosecutor, this Baroche had ranted before the high court at Bourges on two occasions, the first time against the revolutionaries of 15 May [1848] and the second against the democrats of 13 June [1849], both times because of the outrage to the national assembly. But none of


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Bonaparte’s ministers had a bigger part in the subsequent abasement of the national assembly, and after [the coup of] 2 December 1851 we meet him once more, comfortably installed and highly paid as vice-president, presiding over the senate. He had spat in the revolutionists’ soup so that Bonaparte could slurp it up. The social-democratic party seemed only to snatch at pretexts for doubting its own victory and for taking the edge off it. Vidal, one of the newly elected representatives for Paris, had also been elected for Strasbourg. He was persuaded to give up the seat in Paris and take the one in Strasbourg. Instead of making its victory at the polls definitive and forcing the party of order into a parliamentary showdown, instead of drawing the enemy into battle at a time of popular enthusiasm and favourable disposition in the army, the democratic party wearied Paris with electoral campaigning in March and April [1850], let popular excitement wear itself out in a game of repeated provisional ballots; let revolutionary energy sate itself in constitutional successes, fizzle out in petty intrigues, hollow rhetoric and illusory actions; let the bourgeoisie rally and prepare itself; and finally, let an April [1850] by-election victory for Eugène Sue become a sentimental commentary on the earlier March vote and weaken its significance. In a word it made 10 March [1850] into April Fool’s. The parliamentary majority knew the weakness of its adversary [the social-democrats or montagne]. Bonaparte had left it the job of organising an attack and taking responsibility for it; seventeen grandees worked out a new electoral law to be proposed by [the minister of the interior] Faucher, who had begged to be entrusted with that honour. On 8 May [1850] he brought in a bill to abolish universal manhood suffrage, to impose a three-year condition of residence on the electors, and finally in the case of workers to make proof of residence depend on certification by their employer. During the electoral contest over the constitution, the democrats had fussed and blustered in a revolutionary way, but now when it was a matter of demonstrating the importance of free elections through force of arms they sermonised in a constitutional way about public order, lofty tranquillity (calme majestueux), legal procedure, i.e. blind subjection to the terms of the counter-revolution, which paraded itself as law. During the debate the montagne shamed the party of order by adopting the dispassionate mien of the honourable law-abiding man, as opposed to its passionate revolutionism, and the montagne cut them down with the fearful reproach that they were revolutionaries. Even the newly elected deputies took care to

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be respectable and discreet to show what a misperception it was to decry them as anarchists and to interpret their election as a victory for revolution. On 31 May [1850] the new electoral law went through. The montagne was content to go to the president of the national assembly and stick a protest in his pocket. The electoral law was followed by a new press law completely eliminating the revolutionary newspapers. They deserved their fate. After this deluge the National and La Presse, two bourgeois papers, remained behind as the most extreme outposts of revolution. We have seen how the democratic leaders did everything to embroil the people of Paris in a sham battle during March and April [1850], and how after 8 May [1850] they did everything to hold them back from a real one. It should also not be forgotten that 1850 was one of best years of industrial and commercial prosperity, so that Paris proletariat was fully employed. But the electoral law of 31 May 1850 excluded it from any part in political power. The field of battle was barred to it. The workers were pariahs once again, as they had been before the February revolution. By allowing the democrats to lead them after such an event and by forsaking the revolutionary interests of their class for transitory comforts, they renounced the honours of conquest, surrendered to their fate, demonstrated that the defeat of June 1848 had rendered them incapable of fighting for years to come and that the historical process would once again have to go on over their heads. As for the petty bourgeois democrats who had cried on 13 June [1849], ‘just one finger on universal manhood suffrage, and then!’ – they now consoled themselves with the thought that the counter-revolutionary blow which they suffered was no blow and the law of 31 May [1850] no law. On 9 May 1852 [when Bonaparte’s term as president was to expire] every Frenchman would appear at the polls, ballot in one hand and sword in the other. For the petty bourgeois democrats this prophecy was self-sufficient. Finally the army was punished by its superior officers for the elections of March and April 1850 as it had been for the one of 29 May 1849. But this time it said decidedly: ‘the revolution will not cheat us a third time.’ The law of 31 May 1850 was the coup d’état of the bourgeoisie. All its previous victories over the revolution had had a merely provisional character. They were called into question once the national assembly had retired from the stage [for an electoral campaign]. They were dependent on the hazards of a new general election, and the history of elections since 1848 had demonstrated


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incontrovertibly that when the political authority of the bourgeoisie went up, its moral authority over the populace went down. On 10 March [1850] universal manhood suffrage made a declaration directly contrary to the authority of the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie replied by outlawing it. Hence the law of 31 May [1850] was one of the requirements of the class struggle. On the other hand, the constitution demanded a minimum of two million votes to validate the election of the president of the republic. Should none of the presidential candidates obtain the minimum, the national assembly was to choose the president from amongst the five candidates at the top of the poll. At the time when the constituent assembly passed this law, there were ten million voters on the rolls. In its view a fifth of the electorate sufficed to validate the election of the president. The law of 31 May [1850] struck at least three million voters from the rolls, reduced the number in the electorate to seven million, and still retained the legal minimum of two million for the election of the president. It therefore raised the legal minimum from a fifth to nearly a third of the eligible voters, i.e. it did everything to wangle the election of the president from the hands of the people into the hands of the national assembly. Thus the party of order appeared to have made its rule doubly secure through the electoral law of 31 May [1850], because it put the election of the national assembly and of the president of the republic into the hands of this stable part of society. V The struggle between the national assembly and Bonaparte broke out again once the revolutionary crisis had blown over and universal manhood suffrage was abolished. The constitution had set Bonaparte’s salary at 600,000 francs. Scarcely six months after his installation he succeeded in doubling his money. This happened when Odilon Barrot extracted an annual supplement of 600,000 francs from the constituent assembly for socalled official expenses. After 13 June [1849] Bonaparte had similar requests put about but this time Barrot did not give them a hearing. Now after 31 May [1850] he seized an auspicious moment and got his ministers to propose a civil list of three million in the national assembly. Leading the life of an adventurous vagabond had endowed him with highly sensitive feelers for searching out the weak moments when he might squeeze money from the bourgeoisie. He was a real blackmailer. The national assembly had violated the

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sovereignty of the people with his cooperation and connivance. He threatened to expose this crime to the people unless it loosened the purse-strings and paid up three million a year in hush-money. It had robbed three million Frenchmen of their right to vote. For every Frenchman put out of circulation he demanded a franc in circulation, three million to be precise. Elected by six million, he demanded compensation from the assembly for subsequently cheating him of votes. The executive commission of the national assembly dismissed this upstart. The Bonapartist press grew threatening. Could the national assembly break with the president of the republic at a time when it had broken decisively with the bulk of the nation on a matter of principle? Admittedly it had thrown out the annual civil list but it had granted one-off supplementation of 2,160,000 francs. Thus it was guilty of a double weakness in granting the money and at the same time displaying an irritation that revealed its reluctance to do so. We will see later what Bonaparte used the money for. After this irritating sequel to the abolition of universal manhood suffrage, in which Bonaparte switched from humility during the crises of March and April [1850] to provocative impudence when challenged by parliament, the national assembly adjourned for three months, from 11 August to 11 November [1850]. It left behind an executive commission of eighteen members containing no Bonapartists but a few moderate republicans. The executive commission of 1849 had included only gentlemen from the party of order and Bonapartists. But at the time the party of order had declared itself implacably opposed to the revolution. This time the parliamentary republic declared itself implacably opposed to the president. After the electoral law of 31 May [1850] this was the only rival confronting the party of order. When the national assembly came back into session in November 1850 it seemed that there would be a ruthless struggle with the president, an inevitable battle to the death between two great powers, instead of the previous petty skirmishing. During this parliamentary recess, just as in the one of 1849, the party of order broke up into factions, each busy with its restorationist intrigues, given new impetus by the death of Louis Philippe [on 26 August 1850]. The legitimist Henri V had even appointed a proper cabinet which met in Paris and included members of the executive commission amongst its numbers. Bonaparte was therefore licensed for his part to progress through the départements of France, canvassing for votes, and airing his own plans for a


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restoration, overtly or covertly, depending on the politics of the town favoured with his presence. On this procession, necessarily celebrated as a triumphal progress by the official gazette and Bonaparte’s minor ones, he was continually accompanied by affiliates of the Society of 10 December. This society dates from the year 1849. Under the pretext of incorporating a benevolent association, the Paris lumpenproletariat was organised into secret sections, each led by a Bonapartist agent, and the whole headed by a Bonapartist general. From the aristocracy there were bankrupted roués of doubtful means and dubious provenance, from the bourgeoisie there were degenerate wastrels on the take, vagabonds, demobbed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers and cheats, thugs, pickpockets, conjurers, card-sharps, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, day-labourers, organ grinders, scrap dealers, knife grinders, tinkers and beggars, in short, the whole amorphous, jumbled mass of flotsam and jetsam that the French term bohemian; from these kindred spirits Bonaparte built up his Society of 10 December. This was a ‘benevolent society’ in that all its members, like Bonaparte, felt a need to benefit themselves at the expense of the nation’s workers. This Bonaparte, installed as chief of the lumpenproletariat, discovering his personal interests here in popular form, perceiving in the dregs, refuse and scum of all classes the sole class that offers unconditional support, here is the real Bonaparte, the genuine article, even though when in power he paid his debt to some of his erstwhile fellow conspirators by transporting them to [the penal colony in] Cayenne [in South America] alongside the revolutionaries. A cunning old roué, he conceives popular history and high politics and finance as comedies in the most vulgar sense, as masquerades where fine costumes, words and postures serve only to mask the most trifling pettiness. So it was [in 1830] when he processed into Strasbourg, where a trained Swiss vulture played the part of the Napoleonic eagle. For his entry into Boulogne [in 1840] he put some London lay-abouts into French uniforms. They stood in for the army. In his Society of 10 December he collected 10,000 ragamuffins who were supposed to represent the people the way that Klaus Zettel represented the lion. The bourgeoisie was playing an utter comedy, but in the most serious way in the world, without infringing even the most pedantic strictures of French dramatic etiquette, and themselves half swindled, half convinced of the solemnity of their own high politics and finance; that was a time when a swindler, who took the comedy

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straight, was bound to win. Only now [in early 1852] that he has removed his solemn opponent, when he has taken on the imperial role in earnest and with his Napoleonic mask means to represent the real Napoleon, does he become a victim of his own world-view, the straight comedian who no longer sees world history as a comedy but his own comedy as world history. What the nationalised workshops were for the socialist workers, what the militia was for the bourgeois-republicans, the Society of 10 December, his very own fighting force, was for Bonaparte. On his journeys, detachments were to pack the trains to improvise a crowd, raise public enthusiasm, howl a salute to the Emperor, insult and beat up republicans, all under the protection of the police, of course. On his return journeys to Paris they were to form an advance guard, forestalling or breaking up counter-demonstrations. The Society of 10 December belonged to him, it was his work, his very own idea. Whatever else he got his hands on, came to him by force of circumstances; whatever else he did, either circumstances did for him or he was satisfied to copy the deeds of others; but he became an artist in his own right when he put official turns of phrase – like public order, religion, the family, and property – before the public, but kept the secret society of racketeers and con-artists, the society of disorder, prostitution and pilfering well out of sight, and the history of the Society of 10 December is his own history. But once there was an exception, when representatives of the party of order got hammered by the December-mob. And there was worse to come. Police commissioner Yon, assigned to security at the national assembly, got a story from a certain Alais and informed the executive commission that a section of the December-mob were plotting to murder General Changarnier and Dupin, the president of the national assembly, and had already found people to carry this out. M. Dupin’s panic is understandable. A parliamentary enquiry into the Society of 10 December, i.e. the profanation of the secret world of Bonapartism, seemed unavoidable. But just before the national assembly came into session, Bonaparte prudently dissolved his society, only on paper of course, for even at the end of 1851, Carlier, the prefect of police, was still pressing him in a detailed but vain memorandum to make the break-up of the December-mob a fact. The Society of 10 December was to remain Bonaparte’s private army until he could successfully transform the official army into the Society of 10 December. Shortly after the adjournment of the national assembly Bonaparte made his first attempt at this, and to be


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sure with the money that he had just extorted from it. As a fatalist, he lived the maxim that there are certain higher powers which a man, and particularly a soldier, cannot withstand. Amongst those powers he reckoned first of all on cigars and champagne, cold chicken and garlic sausage. Hence he began by treating officers and junior officers to cigars and champagne, cold chicken and garlic sausage in his residence at the Elysée Palace. On 3 October [1850] he repeated this ploy with the massed troops reviewed at Saint-Maur and on 10 October the same thing again on a still grander scale at the army’s Satory parade. His uncle Napoleon had invoked the campaigns of Alexander in Asia, the nephew the triumphs of Bacchus in the same land. Alexander was of course a demi-god, but Bacchus was a full-fledged one, and in fact the god watching over the Society of 10 December. After the military review of 3 October [1850], the executive commission summoned the minister of war d’Hautpoul to a hearing. He promised that such breaches of discipline would not be repeated. We know how on 10 October [at St. Maur] Bonaparte kept to d’Hautpoul’s promise. At both reviews Changarnier had been in command as head of the army in Paris. He was simultaneously a member of the executive commission, commander-in-chief of the national guard, ‘saviour’ of 29 January and 13 June [1849], ‘bulwark of society’, presidential candidate for the party of order, the presumed [General] Monk [who restored King Charles II] for two [pretending] monarchs; up to then he had never acknowledged that he was subordinate to the minister of war, had always openly scoffed at the republican constitution, and had acted as a highly placed but ambiguous protector for Bonaparte. Now he was a stickler for discipline against the minister of war and a zealot for the constitution against Bonaparte. Despite the fact that on 10 October [1850] a part of the cavalry raised the cry: ‘Long live Napoleon! and the sausages!’ Changarnier arranged that at least those troops under the command of his friend Neumeyer would observe an icy silence whilst parading by. At Bonaparte’s instigation the minister of war punished General Neumeyer by relieving him of his post in Paris, under the pretext of making him commander of the 14th and 15th divisions. Neumeyer refused this transfer and so had to take his leave. On 2 November [1850], for his part, Changarnier posted an order forbidding the troops from engaging in political sloganising or demonstrations of any kind whilst under arms. The Elyséeist papers attacked Changarnier, the papers for the party of order

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attacked Bonaparte; the executive commission held numerous secret sessions repeatedly proposing a state of emergency; the army seemed divided into two warring camps with two warring general staffs, one in the Elysée with Bonaparte and the other in the Tuileries with Changarnier. It appeared that only the recall of the national assembly was needed to sound the call to arms. The French public reacted to the dissension between Bonaparte and Changarnier rather like the English journalist who characterised it in the following way: ‘Housemaids in France are clearing away the glowing lava of revolution with old brooms and bickering amongst themselves while they do their work.’ Meanwhile Bonaparte hastened to remove the minister of war, d’Hautpoul, speeding him headlong to Algiers and appointing General Schramm in his place. On 12 November [1850] he sent the national assembly a communiqué of American prolixity, overburdened with detail, redolent of order, anxious for reconciliation, acquiescing in the constitution, treating of all and sundry except the burning questions of the time. As if in passing he remarked that according to the express provisions of the constitution, the army was answerable to the president alone. The communiqué concluded with this solemn affirmation: Above all France clamours for peace ... I alone am bound by an oath of office, so I shall stay within the narrow limits that the constitution has set for the president ... Concerning myself, I have been elected by the people and owe my power solely to them, and I shall always submit to their lawful will. Should you resolve on a revision of the constitution at this session, a constituent assembly will determine the extent of executive power. If not, then the people will make their solemn decision in [May] 1852. But whatever the future may bring, let us come to an understanding so that emotion, shock or violence will never decide the fate of this great nation ... What is always at the forefront of my concern is not to know who will govern France in 1852, but rather to use the time at my disposal so that the interim passes without unrest or disorder. I have sincerely opened my heart to you, you will answer my frankness with your trust, my good endeavours with your cooperation, and God will do the rest. In the mouth of Bonaparte – the autocrat of the Society of 10 December and the picnic hero of Saint-Maur and Satory – the


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language of the bourgeoisie – respectable, moderate in its hypocrisy, virtuous in its commonplaces – opened new vistas of meaning. The grandees of the party of order did not delude themselves for a moment concerning the trust that this heartfelt effusion deserved. They had long been blasé about oaths, as they numbered in their midst veterans and virtuosi of political perjury, and they had not omitted to note the passage concerning the army. They remarked with annoyance that the communiqué, in a long-winded enumeration of the latest enactments, had passed over the most important measure, the electoral law, in studied silence, and moreover, that unless the constitution were revised, the election of the president in 1852 would be left to the people. The electoral law was a ball and chain for the party of order, hindering motion of any kind, much less forward assault! Moreover by disbanding the Society of 10 December and sacking the war minister d’Hautpoul, Bonaparte had found scapegoats to sacrifice on the altar of patriotism. He had taken the force from the impending collision. Finally the party of order itself was anxious to avert, mitigate or conceal any conflict with the executive that might be decisive. For fear of losing what it had gained in the revolution, it allowed its rivals to help themselves to the fruits of victory. ‘Above all France clamours for peace.’ The party of order had proclaimed this to the revolution since February [1848], and now Bonaparte’s communiqué proclaimed it to the party of order. ‘Above all France clamours for peace.’ Bonaparte had committed acts that pointed toward usurpation, but the party of order committed ‘unrest’ if it raised the alarm over these acts and exposed its hypochondria. The sausages of Satory were quiet as mice when no one mentioned them. ‘Above all France wants order.’ Thus Bonaparte demanded to be left in peace, and the parliamentary party was doubly crippled by fear – fear of precipitating revolutionary unrest once again, and fear of appearing to its own class, the bourgeoisie, as the instigator. Since above all France clamours for peace the party of order dared not reply ‘war’ to Bonaparte’s communiqué on ‘peace’. The public, anticipating a juicy scandal at the opening of the national assembly, was cheated of this expectation. The opposition deputies, demanding the executive commission’s account of the events of October [1850], were overruled by the majority. All debates that could cause an uproar were avoided on principle. The proceedings of the national assembly during November and December [1850] were entirely without interest.

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At last towards the end of December [1850] guerrilla warfare began over certain prerogatives of parliament. The fighting got bogged down in small-scale manoeuvres over the power of the two branches of government, because the bourgeoisie had wound up the class struggle by abolishing universal manhood suffrage. A court judgement for debt had been delivered against one of the people’s representatives, Maugin. Responding to the petition from the president of the court, the minister of justice, Rouher, declared that a warrant for his arrest should be issued without further formalities. Maugin was therefore thrown into debtors’ prison. The national assembly flared up at news of this outrage. Not only did it order his immediate release, but had him forcibly sprung from Clichy that very same evening by a justice’s clerk. But in order to prove its faith in the sanctity of private property – and with the ulterior motive of opening an asylum in case the montagnards became troublesome – it declared that the people’s representatives might be imprisoned for debt on prior consent of the national assembly. It forgot to decree that the president could also be locked up for debt. It destroyed the last semblance of the immunity encompassing its own members. It will be recalled that police commissioner Yon, acting on reports from a certain Alais, had denounced a section of the December-mob for plotting to murder Dupin and Changarnier. On this account at the very first session the commissioners proposed a parliamentary police, funded from its private budget and completely independent of the prefect of police. The minister of the interior, Baroche, protested at this encroachment on his territory. On that they reached a shabby compromise that the parliamentary police chief should be paid from the private budget [and] appointed and dismissed by parliamentary commissioners, but only on prior agreement with the minister of the interior. Meanwhile the government had taken criminal proceedings against Alais, and here it was easy to represent his information as a hoax and to make a laughing stock of Dupin, Changarnier, Yon and the whole national assembly through the speeches of the public prosecutor. Then on 29 December [1850] Baroche wrote to Dupin demanding Yon’s dismissal. The officers of the national assembly decided to retain Yon in his position, but the national assembly did not approve this, as they were frightened by their own use of force in the Maugin affair and were used to double blows from the executive for every poke they took at it. As a reward for his faithful service Yon was discharged, and the national


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assembly robbed itself of a parliamentary privilege indispensable against a man [Louis Bonaparte] who does not decide by night and act by day, but decides by day and acts by night. We have seen already how the national assembly met with striking opportunities during November and December [1850] in its great battle with the executive, but ducked out or went under. Now we see it compelled to take up the most trivial points. In the Maugin affair it confirmed the principle that representatives of the people may be imprisoned for debt, but reserved the right to apply this only to representatives it found obnoxious, and it haggled with the minister of justice over this dubious privilege. Instead of making the assassination plot an occasion to initiate an inquiry into the Society of 10 December and irrevocably to expose Bonaparte’s real role as chief of the Paris lumpenproletariat before France and all of Europe, it let the conflict sink to a point where all that divided it from the minister of the interior was which of them had the authority to hire and fire the commissioner of police. Thus during the whole of this period we see the party of order compelled by its equivocal position to dissipate and fragment its struggle with the executive into petty disputes over authority, chicanery, legal hair-splitting and demarcation disputes with ministers, and to make the silliest questions of form into the substance of its action. It did not dare to do battle when there was a matter of principle at stake, when the executive was really compromised, and the cause of the national assembly would have been the cause of the nation. By doing that it would have given the nation its marching orders, and it feared nothing so much as that the nation should get on the move. Accordingly it rejected the motions of the montagne at those junctures and proceeded to the business of the day. Having put aside the broad question of principle, the executive calmly bided its time until it could take up again on trivial, insignificant matters of merely local parliamentary interest, so to speak. Then the pent-up rage of the party of order bursts out, it tears down the backdrop, denounces the president, declares the republic in danger; but then its pathos appears absurd and the occasion for battle a hypocritical pretext or hardly worth the effort. The parliamentary storm is a storm in a teacup, the battle an intrigue, the conflict a scandal. The revolutionary classes revel in the humiliation of the national assembly, for they were just as enthusiastic for parliamentary privilege as the assembly was for their civil liberties. And the bourgeoisie outside parliament cannot understand how the bourgeoisie inside parliament can waste its time on such

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trivial back-biting and so compromise public order through such pitiful rivalries with the president. It becomes confused and bewildered by a strategy which makes peace at a time when the whole world expects war, and attacks at a time when the whole world believes that peace has been made. On 20 December [1850] Pascal Duprat [the Orléanist deputy] cross-examined the minister of the interior on the ‘gold bars’ lottery. This lottery was blessed by the Elysée, as Bonaparte and his faithful henchmen had brought it into the world, and Carlier the prefect of police had taken it under his wing, although in France all lotteries, with the exception of charitable raffles, were illegal. Seven million tickets at a franc apiece, the profits supposedly earmarked for the transportation of Parisian riff-raff to California. Partly the idea was to replace the socialist dreams of the Paris proletariat with dreams of glistering gold, and the guarantied right to employment with the seductive prospect of the grand prize draw. Of course workers in Paris did not see through the blaze of California gold to the plain old francs winkled from their pockets. But in the main it was just a straightforward swindle. The riff-raff wanting to open up the gold mines of California without the trouble of leaving Paris were Bonaparte himself and his debt-ridden cronies. They had partied through the three million authorised by the national assembly, and the cash box had to be refilled one way or another. Bonaparte had vainly launched a national subscription for so-called workers’ towns, putting himself at the head for a substantial donation. Meanminded bourgeois awaited this with grave suspicion, and when of course it was not forthcoming, the socialist ‘castles in the air’ crashed to earth. The gold bars were a better draw. Bonaparte & Co. were not satisfied with pocketing part of the profit from the seven million over and above the cost of the prize bullion; they fabricated false lottery tickets, issuing the same number 10 on fifteen or twenty tickets, a financial whiz in keeping with the Society of 10 December. Here the national assembly was confronted with the real flesh and blood Bonaparte, and not with the fictional ‘president of the republic’. Here it could catch him in open violation of the criminal law rather than of the constitution. If it passed over Duprat’s cross-examination and proceeded to the business of the day, this was not just because the motion of confidence in the minister from [the republican deputy] Girardin reminded the party of order of its own systematic corruption. The bourgeois, above all the bourgeois inflated into a statesman, supplements his commonplace practicality with


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theoretical superfluity. As a statesman he becomes a higher form of existence, like the state power facing him, which can only be contested on an ethereal plane. Because he was such a bohemian, and such a prince of thieves, Bonaparte had the advantage over bourgeois grafters of fighting dirty; once the national assembly itself had escorted him over the treacherous terrain of regimental dinners, army reviews, the Society of 10 December and finally the criminal law, he saw that the moment had come to go openly on the offensive. He was little troubled with the minor reversals sustained by the minister of justice, minister of war, minister for the navy and minister of finance, through which the national assembly growled its displeasure. Not only did he prevent ministers from resigning, and thus stop the executive from being accountable to parliament, but he was now able to complete what he had begun during the recess of the national assembly: the severance of military power from parliamentary control, Changarnier’s dismissal. An Elyséeist paper published an order, allegedly sent during May [1850] to the first army division, hence from Changarnier, in which officers were advised to give no quarter to traitors in their own ranks, should there be an insurrection, but rather to shoot them straight away and to refuse any requisition of troops by the national assembly. On 3 January 1851 questions were put to the cabinet concerning this order. To examine these circumstances it requested a stay of three months at first, then a week, and finally a mere twenty-four hours. The assembly insisted on an immediate explanation. Changarnier rose to explain that no such order had ever existed. He added that he would always hasten to comply with any demands from the national assembly and that it could rely on him in case of conflict. It received this assurance with ineffable applause and voted its confidence in him. By putting itself under the private protection of a general, the national assembly abdicated, decreed its own impotence beside the almighty army, but the general was deceiving himself when he put at the assembly’s disposal a force that he held only at Bonaparte’s behest, when he expected protection from the parliament which needed him to be its protector. Changarnier, however, believed in the mysterious power that the bourgeoisie had invested in him since 29 January 1849 [when he and his troops successfully intimidated the constituent assembly]. He considered himself the third governmental power alongside the other two branches of state. He shared in the fate of

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the other heroes or rather saints of this era whose fame consisted in the biassed reports which their own parties put about, but who collapse into ordinary mortals as soon as they are required to perform miracles. Scepticism is the deadly enemy of these reputed heroes and real-life saints. Hence their self-righteous indignation at the dearth of enthusiasm displayed by wits and scoffers. That same evening ministers were summoned to the Elysée Palace; Bonaparte insisted on dismissing Changarnier; five refused to sign this; the Moniteur announced a ministerial crisis; and the press siding with the party of order threatened to form a parliamentary army under Changarnier’s command. The party of order had constitutional authority to take this step. It merely had to appoint Changarnier to the presidency of the national assembly and to requisition any number of troops it pleased for security. It could do this all the more safely as Changarnier was still heading the army and the national guard in Paris and was only waiting to be requisitioned together with the army. The Bonapartist press did not as yet even dare to question the right of the national assembly to requisition troops directly, a legal scruple that did not promise to be of any use under the circumstances. That the army would have obeyed the national assembly is probable, remembering that Bonaparte had to scour all Paris for eight days to find two generals – Baraguay d’Hilliers and Saint-Jean d’Angély – who were ready to countersign Changarnier’s dismissal. That the party of order would have found in its own ranks and in parliament the votes necessary for such a resolution is much more doubtful, considering that eight days later 286 of them took their votes elsewhere, and that the montagne rejected a similar resolution in December 1851 in the last decisive hours [of the parliamentary regime]. Nonetheless the grandees might perhaps have succeeded in spurring the mass of their party to a heroism consisting in feeling secure behind a forest of bayonets and accepting the services of an army which had deserted in order to join their camp. Instead of doing this the grandees betook themselves to the Elysée on the evening of 6 January [1851] to make Bonaparte desist from sacking Changarnier by using statesman-like phrases and scruples. He who seeks to persuade, acknowledges the superiority of the other. Reassured by this, Bonaparte appointed a new cabinet on 12 January [1851], retaining Fould and Baroche, the leaders of the old one. Saint-Jean d’Angély became minister of war, the Moniteur published the decree discharging Changarnier, his command was divided between Baraguay d’Hilliers, who got the first


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army division, and Perrot, who got the national guard. The bulwark of society was dismissed, and while the earth did not move, prices did go up on the stock exchange. The party of order revealed that the bourgeoisie had lost its will to rule in that it had rebuffed the army, which had been at its disposal in the person of Changarnier, and had made it incontrovertibly accountable to the president. A parliamentary cabinet was no longer in existence. Having lost its grip on the army and the national guard, what means were left for retaining the power over the people it had usurped from parliament and its constitutional power vis-à-vis the president? None at all. All that was left was a nugatory appeal to principles, general rules one prescribes to others just to make one’s own actions easier. With the dismissal of Changarnier and Bonaparte’s acquisition of military power, the first part of the period we are considering, the period of conflict between the party of order and the executive power, draws to a close. War between the two authorities was now openly declared and waged, but only after the party of order had lost both weapons and soldiers. Without a cabinet, without an army, without a people, without public opinion, no longer representing the sovereign nation after its electoral law of 31 May [1850], sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans everything, the national assembly was gradually transmuted into a pre-revolutionary parlement which left action to the government and had to content itself with whingeing after the event. The party of order received the new cabinet with a storm of protests. General Bedeau recalled the deference of the executive commission during the recess and the punctiliousness with which it refused publication of its proceedings. The minister of the interior himself now insists on the publication of these minutes which were of course as dull as ditchwater, uncovering nothing new and making not the slightest impression on a blasé public. Following a proposal from [the Orléanist] Rémusat, the national assembly retired to its quarters and appointed a ‘commission for extraordinary measures’. Ordinary life was very little disturbed in Paris as trade was flourishing, factories were busy, grain prices were low, food was plentiful and savings banks took in new deposits every day. The ‘extraordinary measures’ which parliament had announced with such a stir then fizzled out into a vote of no-confidence in the minister on 18 January [1851] without a mention of General Changarnier. The party of order was forced to word its resolution in this way to secure the republican vote, since of all the cabinet’s

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measures the discharge of Changarnier was the sole one that it approved of, while it could not complain about the other ministerial actions as it had in fact dictated them itself. The vote of confidence of 18 January [1851] passed 415 to 286. Hence it was carried only through a coalition of staunch legitimists and Orléanists together with the pure republicans and the montagne. This proved that in its conflicts with Bonaparte the party of order had lost not just the cabinet and the army but its independent parliamentary majority, that a detachment of representatives had deserted out of fanaticism for compromise, fear of conflict, from boredom, nepotism, expectation of cabinet posts (Odilon Barrot), from the base egoism that always inclines the ordinary bourgeois to sacrifice the common interest of his class to this or that private benefit. From the beginning, Bonapartist representatives only belonged to the party of order to do battle against the revolution. The head of the Catholic party, Montalembert, had already thrown his influence into Bonaparte’s begging bowl, because he doubted that the parliamentary party would survive. Finally the leaders of this party, Thiers the Orléanist and Berryer the legitimist, were forced to admit openly their republicanism, to acknowledge that they were royalist at heart but republican in the head, that the parliamentary republic was the only possible form for the rule of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Thus they were forced in front of the whole bourgeoisie to brand the restorationist plots, indefatigably conducted behind the back of parliament, as stupid and dangerous intrigues. The no-confidence motion of 18 January [1851] hit the cabinet and not the president. But it was the president and not the cabinet that had discharged Changarnier. Ought not the party of order to impeach Bonaparte himself? For his restorationist sympathies? These were only added to their own. For conspiracy in the military reviews and in the Society of 10 December? They had long ago buried these matters under business as usual. For dismissing the hero of 29 January and 13 June [1849], the man who in May 1850 threatened to set all Paris ablaze in the event of insurrection? Their allies from the montagne and Cavaignac did not let them re-erect the fallen bulwark of society by sending an official message of sympathy. Indeed they could not dispute the constitutional authority of the president to discharge a general. They were only fussing because he had made an unparliamentary use of a constitutional right. But had they not made repeated unconstitutional use of parliamentary prerogative, in particular abolishing universal manhood suffrage?


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They were therefore constrained to work within strict parliamentary limits. This was part and parcel of a peculiar malady that after 1848 spread to a whole continent, parliamentary cretinism, which confines its victims to an imaginary world and robs them of their senses, their recollection, all knowledge of the rude external world; it was part of this parliamentary cretinism that the party of order took their parliamentary victories to be real ones and believed they had hit the president when they struck his ministers, although they had themselves destroyed the whole basis of parliamentary power with their own hands as they were bound to in battling against other classes. They merely gave him the opportunity to humiliate the national assembly in front of the nation once again. On 20 January [1851] the Moniteur announced that the resignation of the entire cabinet had been accepted. Under the pretext that no parliamentary party had a majority, as was demonstrated by the vote of 18 January [1851] won by the coalition of the montagne and the royalists, Bonaparte appointed a so-called transition cabinet while waiting for a new majority to form; not one member of this cabinet was in parliament, it was all unknown and insignificant individuals, a cabinet of mere clerks and scribes. The party of order could now wear itself out playing with these puppets, the executive no longer thought it worthwhile to be seriously represented in the national assembly. Bonaparte concentrated the entire power of the executive in his own person all the more securely and had all the more room to exploit it for his own ends, the more his ministers were reduced to mere ciphers. The party of order, in coalition with the montagne, revenged itself by throwing out a subvention of 1,800,000 francs to the president which the head of the Society of 10 December had pushed his ministerial clerks to propose. This time a majority of only 102 votes decided it; since 28 January [1851] another 27 votes had departed, and the dissolution of the party of order continued apace. To leave no doubt about the nature of its coalition with the montagne it disdained even to consider a motion signed by 189 members of the montagne for a general amnesty for political offenders. It sufficed for the minister of the interior, a certain Vaïsse, to explain that the present calm was only apparent, but that hidden disorder prevailed, everywhere secret societies were being organised, the democratic papers were preparing to reappear, reports from the départements sounded unfavourable, Genevan exiles were directing a conspiracy beyond Lyons through the whole of southern France, France was on

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the brink of an industrial and commercial crisis, the factories in Roubaix were working short-time, the prisoners on Belle Isle were in revolt – a mere Vaïsse creating a red scare was all that was needed for the party of order to reject without discussion a motion that would have won immense popularity for the national assembly and thrown Bonaparte back into its arms. Instead of allowing the executive to intimidate it with prospects of renewed unrest, it should have yielded a little to the class struggle in order to preserve the dependence of the executive. But it did not feel up to the business of playing with fire. Meanwhile the so-called transitional cabinet continued to vegetate up to the middle of April. Bonaparte tired and teased the national assembly with constant ministerial shuffles. Sometimes he seemed to want to form a republican cabinet with [the poet] Lamartine and [the Bonapartist] Billault, sometimes a parliamentary one with the inevitable Odilon Barrot, whose name never failed to come up when a dupe was needed, sometimes a legitimist one with Vatimesnil and Benoist d’Azy, sometimes an Orléanist one with Maleville. While he set the different factions of the party of order against one another and frightened them with the prospect of a republican cabinet and the inevitable reinstatement of universal manhood suffrage, he made the bourgeoisie believe that his honest efforts to form a parliamentary ministry had foundered on the intransigence of the royalist factions. The bourgeoisie cried all the louder for ‘strong government’, but it found it unforgivable to leave France ‘without administration’, as an economic crisis appeared to be advancing and so recruiting socialists in the cities just as ruinously low farm prices did in the countryside. Trade was getting slacker by the day, unemployed hands were increasing noticeably, in Paris there were at least 10,000 workers without food, in Rouen, Mulhouse, Lyons, Roubaix, Tourcoing, St. Etienne, Elbeuf, etc. innumerable factories were idle. Under these conditions Bonaparte could risk a restoration on 11 April [1851] of the cabinet of 18 January. Messrs. Rouher, Fould, Baroche, etc. strengthened by M. Léon Faucher, who was censured [on 11 May 1849] during the last days of the constituent assembly for telegraphing false dispatches, all of the deputies (save 5 cabinet ministers) having voted no-confidence in him. The national assembly had therefore won a victory over the cabinet on 18 January [1851], then struggled for three months with Bonaparte, so that on 11 April Fould and Baroche could take on the ultra-moral Faucher as third man in their ministerial cabal.


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In November 1849 Bonaparte had been satisfied with an unparliamentary cabinet, in January 1851 with an extra-parliamentary one, on 11 April 1851 he felt strong enough to form an anti-parliamentary cabinet, harmoniously combining no-confidence votes from both assemblies, the constituent and the national, republicans and royalists. This graded progression of cabinets was the thermometer by which parliament could measure the decline in its own vitality. By the end of April this had sunk so low that [the Bonapartist deputy] Persigny could enjoin Changarnier in a personal interview to go over to the presidential camp. He assured him that Bonaparte considered the influence of the national assembly to be completely null and had already perpetrated a proclamation to be published after the coup d’état, continuously in mind but delayed once again for contingent reasons. Changarnier imparted this obituary to the leaders of the party of order, but whoever believes that such fleabites are fatal? And the assembly, defeated, disintegrated, rotting as it was, could not bring itself to see the fight with the grotesque chief of the Society of 10 December as other than a fight with a flea. But Bonaparte answered the party of order as Agesilaus [King of Sparta] answered King [Tachos] of Egypt: ‘I may seem an ant to you but one day I shall be a lion.’ VI In its futile endeavours to keep possession of military power and to reconquer supreme control of executive power, the party of order saw itself condemned to remain in coalition with the montagne and the pure republicans, proving incontrovertibly that it had lost its independent parliamentary majority. The mere advance of dates and ticking of the clock gave the signal on 28 May [1851] for its complete disintegration. The 28th of May marked the beginning of the last year of life for the national assembly. It had now to decide whether to keep the constitution unchanged or revise it. But constitutional revision did not only involve bourgeois rule or petty bourgeois democracy, democracy or proletarian anarchy, parliamentary republic or Bonaparte, it also meant Orléans or Bourbon! Thus the apple of discord fell into the midst of parliament, opening up conflicts of interest and sundering the party of order into warring factions. The party of order was a conglomerate of heterogeneous social components. Constitutional revision raised the political temperature to the point where decomposition had to occur.

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The Bonapartists’ interest in revision was simple. They were concerned above all with the question of abolishing [chapter V] § 45, which forbade Bonaparte’s re-election and any continuation of his authority. No less simple was that of the republicans. They unconditionally rejected any revision, seeing in it a comprehensive conspiracy against the republic. Since they held sway over more than a quarter of the votes in the national assembly, and constitutionally three quarters of the votes were required for a valid motion for revision and for summoning a revising convention, they needed only to tally their votes to make sure of victory. And they were. Compared to these clear positions, the party of order found itself entangled in contradictions. If it rejected revision, it endangered the status quo by leaving Bonaparte only one way out, force, and by abandoning France to revolutionary anarchy at the deciding moment of 9 May [1852], with a president who had lost his authority, with a parliament which no longer possessed it, and with a people who thought they would conquer it again. The party of order knew that to vote for revision in accordance with the constitution would be to vote for nothing and would have to fail constitutionally because of the republican veto. If it declared a simple majority to be binding, in defiance of the constitution, then it could hope to master the revolution only if it subordinated itself unconditionally to the sovereignty of the executive and thus made Bonaparte master of the constitution, of any revision and of the party of order itself. A merely partial revision prolonging the authority of the president would pave the way for an imperial takeover. A general revision which shortened the existence of the republic would bring dynastic claims into inevitable conflict, for the conditions for a Bourbon restoration and for an Orléanist one were not merely different but mutually exclusive. The parliamentary republic was more than the neutral territory where the two factions of the French bourgeoisie, legitimists and Orléanist, large-scale landed property and industry, could take up residence with an equal right. It was the inescapable condition of their joint rule, the sole form of state in which the claims of their particular factions and those of all other classes of society were subjected to the general interest of the bourgeois class. As royalists they relapsed into their old antagonism, a battle for supremacy between landed property and money, and the highest expression of this antagonism, the personification of it, were their kings, their


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dynasties. Hence the resistance of the party of order to the recall of the Bourbons. In 1849, 1850 and 1851 the Orléanist deputy Creton had regularly introduced a measure to rescind the decree exiling the royal families. Parliament just as regularly presented the spectacle of an assembly barring the gate through which their exiled kings could come home. Richard III murdered Henry VI with the remark [in Shakespeare’s play] that he was too good for this world and belonged in heaven. They declared that France was too bad to have the kings back again. They had become republicans through force of circumstances, and they repeatedly sanctioned the decision by the people to banish their kings from France. A revision of the constitution – and circumstances compelled this – called into question the republic as well as the joint rule of the two bourgeois factions, and the possibility of monarchy brought back to life a rivalry between interests it had promoted in turn, and the battle for supremacy of one faction over the other. The diplomats of the party of order thought that they could settle the struggle by merging the two dynasties, a so-called fusion of the royalist parties and their royal houses. The real fusion of the restoration and the July monarchy was the parliamentary republic in which Orléanist and legitimist colours were extinguished and the various varieties of the type bourgeois disappeared into the bourgeois pure and simple, into the bourgeois species. But now the Orléanist was to become legitimist and the legitimist Orléanist. Royalism, which personified their antagonism, was to embody their unity, the expression of their exclusive factional interests to become an expression of the common class interest, the monarchy was to accomplish what only the abolition of two monarchies – the republic – could do and had done. This was the philosophers’ stone, and the learned doctors of the party of order racked their brains to produce it. As if the legitimate monarchy could ever become the monarchy of the industrial bourgeoisie, or the bourgeois kingdom the kingdom of the hereditary landed aristocracy. As if landed property and industry could fraternise together under a single crown, when the crown could be lowered onto a single head, the head of the elder brother or the younger one. As if industry could be reconciled at all with landed property, so long as landed property did not decide to go industrial itself. If Henri V [Bourbon] were to die tomorrow, the [Orléanist] comte de Paris [grandson of Louis Philippe] would not become the legitimist king, unless he ceased being the Orléanist

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king. The philosophers of fusion who achieved wide circulation as the question of constitutional revision came to prominence, who had created an official voice in the daily Assemblée nationale, working away at this very moment (February 1852), explained all the difficulties in terms of the conflict and rivalry between the two dynasties. The attempt to reconcile the house of Orléans with Henri V, begun after the death of Louis Philippe, was only played out, like dynastic intrigues in general, during the recesses of the national assembly, in the intervals, behind the scenes, more sentimental coquetry with ancient superstition than business in earnest; these now became high affairs of state and were performed by the party of order on the public stage instead of in amateur theatricals as before. The couriers flew from Paris to [the legitimist pretender in] Venice, from Venice to [the Orléanists at] Claremont, from Claremont to Paris. The [Bourbon] comte de Chambord [known as King Henri V] issued a manifesto announcing not his own but the ‘national restoration’ ‘with the help of all members of his family’. The Orléanist [politician] Salvandy threw himself at the feet of Henri V. The legitimist leaders Berryer, Benoit d’Azy, Saint-Priest, journeyed to Claremont to persuade the Orléanists but without success. Too late did the fusionists perceive that the interests of the two factions of the bourgeoisie did not lose their differences nor gain in compliance when crystallised into family interests, the interests of the two royal houses. If Henri V recognised the comte de Paris as his successor – the best outcome that fusion could achieve – then the house of Orléans would not win anything that was not already assured by the childlessness of Henri V, but it would lose everything gained in the July revolution. It would abandon its original objectives, all the authority wrung from the elder branch of the Bourbons in more than a hundred years of struggle; it would have exchanged its historical prerogative, the prerogative of modern monarchy for the prerogative of its ancestral line. Fusion was therefore nothing other than a voluntary abdication by the house of Orléans, a resignation in favour of legitimism, a penitent retreat from the Protestant state church into the Catholic one. A retreat would not bring it to the throne it had lost but to the steps of the throne from which it was born. The old Orléanist ministers Guizot, Duchâtel, etc., who had hastened to Claremont to speak up for fusion, only represented regret for the July revolution in the first place, a despair in the bourgeois monarchy and in the monarchism of the bourgeois, superstitious belief in legitimism as the last amulet to ward off anarchy. In their


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imagination they were mediators between Orléans and Bourbon, but were in reality only backsliding Orléanists, and the prince de Joinville [son of Louis Philippe] received them as such. On the other hand the Orléanists who were wide-awake and wanting a fight – Thiers, Baze, etc. – convinced the family of Louis Philippe all the more easily that if any direct restoration of the monarchy were the fusion of the two dynasties, presupposing the abdication of the house of Orléans, then it corresponded entirely to the tradition of its forebears to recognise the republic straight away and to await the conversion of the president’s seat into a throne when events permitted. Joinville was widely touted as a candidate [for the presidency of the republic], the public curiously was kept in suspense, and a few months later after constitutional revision was rejected, his candidature was announced in September [1851]. The attempt at a royalist fusion of Orléanists and legitimists had not only foundered, it had broken up their parliamentary fusion, their common republican mode, and had again split the party of order into its original constituents; but as Claremont and Venice grew more estranged from each other, their working arrangements collapsed, and support for Joinville mounted, so the negotiations between Faucher, Bonaparte’s minister, and the legitimists grew more pressing and serious. The disintegration of the party of order did not stop at its original elements. Each of the two great factions underwent further fragmentation. It was as if all the old nuances that had previously jostled and conflicted within the two circles, legitimist and Orléanist, were once again brought to life like dried infusoria on contact with water, as if they had regained enough vital energy to form their own groups and take independent positions. The legitimists imagined they had returned to the disputes [during the restoration period] between the Tuileries [where Louis XVIII held court] and the Pavillon Marsan [where the reactionary Comte d’Artois resided], between [the corresponding political rivals] Villèle and Polignac. The Orléanists relived the golden age of knightly tournaments between Guizot, Molé, Broglie, Thiers and Odilon Barrot. The section of the party of order that was eager for constitutional revision, but disunited concerning the bounds of the exercise, composed of legitimists under Berryer and Falloux on the one hand and under La Rochejaquelin on the other, and the battle-weary Orléanists under Molé, Broglie, Montalembert and Odilon Barrot, agreed the following indeterminate and sweeping motion with the

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Bonapartist representatives: ‘The undersigned representatives, aiming to restore the nation to the full exercise of its sovereignty, move that the constitution be revised.’ But at the same time they unanimously declared through their rapporteur [the legitimist historian and deputy Alexis de] Tocqueville that the national assembly did not have the right to undertake the abolition of the republic, that this right belonged only to a constitutional convention. Otherwise the constitution could only be revised in a ‘legal’ manner when the constitutionally prescribed three quarters of the votes were cast for revision. On 19 July [1851], after six days of stormy debate, they threw out constitutional revision, as expected. There were 446 votes in favour but 278 against. The staunch Orléanists Thiers, Changarnier, etc. voted with the republicans and the montagne. A parliamentary majority had declared against the constitution, but the constitution itself had declared for the minority, and for its decision to be binding. But hadn’t the party of order subordinated the constitution to the parliamentary majority on 31 May 1850 and 13 June 1849? Didn’t its whole previous policy rest on subordinating the articles of the constitution to majority decisions in parliament? Hadn’t it left an Old Testament belief in the letter of law to the democrats and punished them for it? But at this moment constitutional revision meant nothing but continuation of presidential power, just as continuation of the constitution meant nothing but the removal of Bonaparte. Parliament had declared for him, but the constitution declared against parliament. Therefore he carried out the will of parliament when he tore up the constitution, and he carried out the will of the constitution when he sent parliament packing. Parliament had declared the constitution and perforce its own authority to be ‘beyond majorities’, it had abolished the constitution with its own decision and augmented the president’s power, and yet was saying at the same time that the one could not die nor the other live so long as parliament itself continued. Its grave diggers were on the doorstep. While it debated the question of revision, Bonaparte relieved General Baraguay d’Hilliers, who was indecisive, from the command of the first army division and appointed General Magnan to the post, the victor [over the workers] of Lyons [on 15 June 1849], the hero of the December days [of 1848], one of his creatures which had more or less compromised himself under Louis Philippe in connection with the march from Boulogne.


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By its decision on constitutional revision the party of order proved that it could neither rule nor obey, neither live nor die, neither tolerate the republic nor overthrow it, neither stick to the constitution nor throw it overboard, neither cooperate with the president nor break off with him. Who then was it expecting to resolve these contradictions? The calendar, the course of events. It stopped pretending to have any control over events. It therefore challenged events to take control, hence surrendering to that power one thing after another in battling the people until it was impotent; hence the chief executive could produce a battle plan undisturbed, strengthen the means of attack, choose the instruments for it, fortify his positions, precisely because they decided to withdraw from the stage during this critical time and to recess for three months, from 10 August until 4 November [1851]. Not only was the parliamentary party divided into its two great factions [party of order and montagne] and each faction divided within itself, but the party of order within parliament had fallen out with the party of order outside parliament. The spokesmen and writers for the bourgeoisie, their publicity and press, in short the ideologues of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie itself, representatives and represented, were caught in mutual estrangement and incomprehension. The legitimists in the provinces, with their limited horizons and unbridled enthusiasm, censured their parliamentary leaders Berryer and Falloux for deserting to Bonaparte’s camp and abandoning Henri V. Their understanding, pure as their fleur de lis, encompassed original sin but not diplomacy. Far more fateful and decisive was the breach between the commercial bourgeois and their politicians. They did not reproach them, as the legitimists had done with theirs, for abandoning their principles, but on the contrary for clinging to principles that had become useless. I have pointed out earlier that after Fould’s accession to the cabinet a part of the commercial bourgeoisie who had taken the lion’s share of power under Louis Philippe, the financial aristocracy, had become Bonapartist. Fould did not only represent Bonaparte’s interests on the bourse, he also represented the interest of the bourse with Bonaparte. The position of the financial aristocracy is depicted most strikingly in a quotation from its European mouthpiece, the London Economist. In its issue of 1 February 1851 there was this dispatch from Paris: ‘Now we have it stated from numerous quarters

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that France wishes above all things for repose. The President declares it in his message to the Legislative Assembly, it is echoed from the tribune, it is asserted in the journals, it is announced from the pulpit, it is demonstrated by the sensitiveness of the public funds at the least prospect of disturbance, and their firmness whenever the executive power is victorious.’ In the issue of 29 November 1851 The Economist itself tells us: ‘The president is recognised by all Europe as the guardian of order, and on all the stock exchanges.’ The financial aristocracy thus condemned the parliamentary battle between the party of order and the executive power as a disruption of order, and celebrated every victory of the president over its own alleged representatives as a victory for order. Under financial aristocracy we must understand here not only the great merchant banks and speculators in public funds whose interests we can immediately grasp as coincident with those of the state. The whole of the modern money market, the whole banking business, is interwoven with public credit in the most intimate way. A part of their business capital is necessarily put out at interest in readily convertible government issue. Their deposits, the capital put at their disposal and divided by them amongst merchants and industrialists, derive for the most part from the dividends of government bondholders. For the whole money market and its priests in every epoch, stability of state power was all the law and the prophets; how could this not be more so today when every deluge threatens to wash away the indebtedness of existing states along with the states themselves? Fanatical for order, the industrial bourgeoisie was also worked up about the quarrel between the parliamentary party of order and the executive. After voting on 18 January [1851] for Changarnier’s dismissal, Thiers, Anglès, Sainte-Beuve, etc. [representatives in the ‘party of order’] received a public reprimand from their constituents in just those industrial districts excoriating their coalition with the montagne as the high treason to the cause. If, as we have seen, the open mockery, the petty intrigues that characterised the struggle between the party of order and the president, deserved no better reception, then on the other hand this bourgeois party, demanding that its representatives let military power slip, just like that, from its own parliament to a fake-on-the-make, was not worth the efforts that were wasted on intriguing for it. It demonstrated that the battle for retaining its public interests, its own class interests, its political


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power, represented only the annoyance and ill-temper of an inconvenience in private affairs. With scarcely an exception the bourgeois dignitaries of the provincial towns, the magistrates, judges, etc. received Bonaparte in the most servile way on his tours, even when he made an unrestrained attack on the national assembly, and especially the party of order, as in Dijon [on 1 June 1851]. When trade was going well, as at the beginning of 1851, the commercial bourgeoisie objected to any parliamentary struggle lest the heart should go out of it. When trade was going badly, as it was persistently since the end of February 1851, they intoned that parliamentary struggles were the cause of the slump and shouted for them to desist so that trade could pick up. The debate on constitutional revision fell into just this period of difficulty. Since it was the existence or non-existence of the state in its present form that was at stake, here the bourgeoisie felt all the more justified in demanding that its representatives put an end to this excruciating interregnum and retain the status quo. There was no contradiction in this. By the end of the interregnum they understood its actual continuation, postponing the moment of decision to a distant future. The status quo could only be retained in two ways: by prolonging Bonaparte’s authority or by retiring him as constitutionally prescribed and electing Cavaignac. One part of the bourgeoisie desired the latter solution and could give its deputies no better advice than to shut up and steer clear of the whole issue. If their representatives did not speak, so they thought, Bonaparte would not act. They wanted a parliamentary ostrich that would hide its head to make itself invisible. Another part of the bourgeoisie wanted Bonaparte to stay as president because he already occupied the position, keeping everything in the same old rut. They were worked up that their parliament had not openly breached the constitution and unceremoniously abdicated. The councils of the départements, those provincial representatives of the richest bourgeoisie, meeting from 25 August [1851] onwards during the recess of the national assembly, declared almost unanimously for constitutional revision, hence against parliament and for Bonaparte. The bourgeoisie vented its ire on its literary representatives, on its own daily press, even more unambiguously than it did when it fell out with its parliamentary representatives. Not only France but the whole of Europe was astounded by the judgements enforcing

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ruinous fines and shamefully long prison sentences that bourgeois juries brought in every time bourgeois journalists attacked Bonaparte’s desire to seize power, or attempted to defend the political rights of the bourgeoisie against the executive. I have shown how the parliamentary party of order, crying for peace, condemned itself to acquiescence, how it declared the political power of the bourgeoisie incompatible with the security and existence of the bourgeoisie by destroying with its own hand all conditions for its own regime, the parliamentary regime, in the war against other classes in society, hence the extra-parliamentary bulk of the bourgeoisie enjoined Bonaparte to suppress, to annihilate its own pen and voice, its publicists and politicians, speakers and press, through its own servility towards the president, its vilification of parliament, its brutal mistreatment of its own press, so that it could pursue its private affairs in full confidence under the protection of a strong and unrestricted government. It declared unambiguously that it longed to be rid of its own political power in order to be rid of the burdens and dangers of ruling. And this miserable, cowardly lot, which was scandalised by the merely parliamentary and literary battle for its own class to govern and had betrayed the leaders of this struggle, now dares to indict the proletariat for not rising up in a bloody struggle, a life and death struggle on its behalf! This lot, who every moment sacrifice their overall class interests, i.e. their political interests, to the narrowest and dirtiest private interests, and expected a similar sacrifice of their representatives, now blubbers that the proletariat has sacrificed the ideal political interests of the bourgeoisie to the material interests of the proletariat. It poses as an uncorrupted soul, misunderstood by an egotistical proletariat led astray by socialists, and abandoned at the decisive moment. And it finds an echo in the bourgeois world. Of course I am not referring here to small-time German politicians and intellectual low-life. I refer for example to The Economist which was still writing as late as 29 November 1851, hence four days before the coup d’état, that Bonaparte was the ‘guardian of order’, and Thiers and Berryer were ‘anarchists’, and then on 27 December 1851, after Bonaparte had silenced these anarchists, it was screaming about a betrayal of the ‘skill, knowledge, discipline, mental influence, intellectual resources and moral weight of the middle and upper ranks of society’ that had been committed by the ‘masses of ignorant, untrained and stupid proletaires’. The stupid, ignorant and vulgar mass was none other than the greater part of the bourgeoisie itself.


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During 1851 France had in any case experienced a kind of minor economic crisis. The end of February showed a decline in exports compared with 1850; in March trade suffered and factories closed down, in April the condition of the industrial départements appeared to be as desperate as after the February days [of 1848], in May [1850] business had still not revived; as late as 28 June the portfolio of the bank of France revealed that production was at a standstill, as there was an immense growth in deposits and an equally great decline in cash advances on bills of exchange, and it was not till mid-October that a progressive improvement in business set in once more. The French bourgeoisie attributed this trade slump to purely political causes, the conflict between parliament and the executive, uncertainty with a merely provisional type of state, the horrifying prospect of 9 May 1852 [when Bonaparte’s presidential term was to end]. I will not deny that all these circumstances depressed some branches of industry in Paris and in the départements. But in any case the effect of political events was only local and insignificant. Does this need any more proof than that an improvement in trade appeared about the middle of October at the time that political conditions got worse, the political horizon clouded over and a thunderbolt from the Elysée was expected at any moment? The French bourgeois, whose ‘skill, knowledge, spiritual insight and intellectual resource’ reach no further than his nose, could otherwise have poked it into the cause of his commercial afflictions at any time during the Great [Industrial] Exhibition [of 1851] in London. While in France factories were closed down, in England there were commercial bankruptcies. While industrial panic reach a high point in France in April and May, commercial panic peaked in England at the same time. As the French woollen industry suffered, so did the English one; as French silk manufacturing, so with English; English cotton mills continued to work, but not with the same profits as in 1849 and 1850. The difference was only that the crisis in France was industrial and in England commercial; while factories in France were idle, the ones in England expanded output but under less favourable conditions then in previous years; in France exports took the major blow, and in England imports. The common factor, which was obviously not to be found within the bounds of the French political horizon, was plain to see. The years 1849 and 1850 were a period of the greatest material prosperity, and a glut only appeared as such in 1851. At the beginning of that year it got a particular boost from the prospect of the [London] industrial exhibition. Special circumstances

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also contributed: first, the partial failure of the cotton crop in 1850 and 1851, then the certainty of a bigger crop than expected; first the rise, then the sudden collapse, in short, fluctuations in the price of cotton. The raw silk harvest, at least in France, turned out to be even lower than average. And finally the wool industry had expanded so much since 1848 that production could not keep up, and the price of raw wool rose out of all proportion to the price of finished cloth. Here in the raw materials for three major world industries we already have the explanation for a trade slump three times over. Abstracting from these special circumstances, the apparent crisis of 1851 was none other than the dead stop that is brought about by overproduction and speculative fever as depicted in every trade cycle before they join forces for a last feverish rush through the final phase to get back to their starting point, the general economic crisis. During such interruptions in trade, commercial bankruptcies break out in England, while in France industry itself is made idle, partly through being forced to withdraw from markets where competition with the English was becoming unsustainable, partly because luxury goods are particularly hit by any slow down in business. So besides the general crisis, France had its own national one, which was defined and conditioned by the general situation in the world markets far more than by local influences in France. It is not without interest to contrast the prejudice of the French bourgeois with the judgement of the English. One of the great commercial houses in Liverpool wrote in its annual report for 1851 [as reported in The Economist]: Few years have more thoroughly belied the anticipations formed at their commencement than the one just closed; instead of the great prosperity which was almost unanimously looked for, it has proved one of the most discouraging that has been seen for the last quarter of a century – this, of course, refers to the mercantile, not to the manufacturing classes. And yet there certainly were grounds for anticipating the reverse at the beginning of the year – stocks of produce were moderate, money was abundant, and food was cheap, a plentiful harvest well secured, unbroken peace on the continent, and no political or fiscal disturbances at home; indeed, the wings of commerce were never more unfettered ... To what source, then is this disastrous result to be attributed? We believe to overtrading both in imports and exports. Unless our merchants will put more stringent limits to their freedom of action, nothing but a triennial panic can keep us in check.


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Now picture the French bourgeois, how in the midst of this commercial panic his trade-sick brain is tortured, addled, stunned by rumours of a coup d’état and of the restoration of universal manhood suffrage, by the struggle between parliament and the executive, by the guerilla warfare between Orléanists and legitimists, by communistic conspiracies in the south, by purported rural revolts in the Nièvre and Cher, by publicity from various presidential candidates, by quackish solutions from the press, by threats from the republicans to uphold the constitution and the general right to vote by force of arms, by evangelising from émigré heroes in exile who predict the end of the world on 9 May 1852, and you’ll now understand why in the middle of this unspeakable, deafening chaos of fusion, revision, dissolution, constitution, conspiracy, coalition, emigration, usurpation and revolution, the crazed bourgeois snorts at his parliamentary republic: ‘Better an end to terror than terror without end!’ Bonaparte understood this cry. His powers of comprehension had been sharpened by the growing uproar amongst creditors, who, seeing settlement day 9 May 1852 draw nearer with every setting of the sun, observed a protest in the stars against their earthly bills of exchange. They had turned into veritable astrologers. The national assembly had cut off Bonaparte’s hopes for a constitutional variance prolonging power, and the candidature of the prince de Joinville forbade further vacillation. If there was ever an event that cast a shadow before it arrived it was Bonaparte’s coup d’état. As early as 29 January 1849, scarcely a month after his election, he had put such a proposal to Changarnier. His own prime minister Odilon Barrot had secretly denounced the politics of the coup in the summer of 1849, and Thiers had done this publicly in the winter of 1850. In May 1851 Persigny had once again tried to enlist Changarnier for the coup, the paper Messager de l’Assemblée had published these negotiations, with every parliamentary fracas the Bonapartist journals threatened a coup, and the nearer the crisis got to them the more noise they made. In the orgies which Bonaparte celebrated every night with the men and women of the ‘mob’, each time midnight approached and flowing drink loosened tongues and excited imaginations, the coup would be fixed for the following morning. Swords were drawn, glasses clinked, representatives thrown out the window, the imperial mantle fell onto Bonaparte’s shoulders, until the next morning the spectre vanished again and an astonished Paris learned of the danger, that it had once

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more escaped, from vestals of little discretion and paladins of indiscretion. During the months of September and October [1851] rumours of a coup d’état came thick and fast. At the same time the shades took on colour like a touched-up photographic plate. If you look up the September and October numbers of the European press you will find word-for-word intimations like the following: ‘Paris seethes with rumoured coup. The capital will be entered by troops during the night, and the next morning will bring decrees to dissolve the national assembly, to place the département of the Seine under siege, to restore universal manhood suffrage, to appeal to the people. Bonaparte is to seek ministers for the execution of these illegal measures.’ The correspondents who bring these reports always end them with the single word ‘postponed’. The coup d’état had always been Bonaparte’s idée fixe. With this obsession he returned to French soil. It possessed him so thoroughly that he continually gave it away and blurted it out. He was so weak that he gave it up again just as often. The shadow of the coup had become so familiar to Parisians as a shade that they could not believe in it when it finally appeared in flesh and blood. What allowed the coup to succeed was therefore neither cautious discretion on the part of the head of the Society of 10 December nor an ambush of an unsuspecting national assembly. When it succeeded, it did so in spite of his indiscretion and with the foreknowledge of the Assembly, a necessary, inevitable result of previous developments. On 10 October [1851] Bonaparte informed his ministers of his decision to restore universal manhood suffrage once again, on the 16th they handed in their resignations, on the 26th Paris learned that a cabinet headed by [the Bonapartist] Thorigny had been formed. At the same time the prefect of police Carlier was replaced by [the Bonapartist] Maupas, the commander of the first army division. [General] Magnan concentrated the most reliable regiments in the capital. On 4 November [1851] the national assembly went back into session. It could do no more than recapitulate what it had already gone through in abbreviated form and to demonstrate that after death comes burial. The first outpost that it lost in the battle with the executive was the cabinet. It had solemnly to acknowledge this loss by giving full credence to the Thorigny cabinet, a mere sham. The executive commission received [the minister of education] M. Giraud with laughter when he presented himself in the name of the new ministers. Such a weak cabinet for formidable measures such as the


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restoration of universal manhood suffrage! But that was just what it was about, to do nothing in parliament, to do everything against it. On the very first day of the new session the national assembly received Bonaparte’s message demanding the restoration of universal manhood suffrage and abolishing the law of 31 May 1850. The same day his ministers introduced a decree to that effect. The assembly rejected straight away the ministers’ motion of urgency, and on 13 November [1851] the law itself, 355 to 348. Thus it tore up its mandate once again, confirming once more that it had transformed itself from the freely elected representative of the people into the usurping parliament of a class; it acknowledged once again that it had cut the integuments linking the parliamentary head with the body of the nation. While the executive appealed over the national assembly to the people, through its proposal to restore universal manhood suffrage, the legislature appealed over the people to the army through its commissioners’ bill. This bill was to establish a right to requisition troops directly, to form a parliamentary army. While it thus designated the army as mediator between itself and the people, between itself and Bonaparte, while it recognised the army as the superior power in the state, it had to confirm, on the other hand, that it had long ago given up its claim to command it. By debating the right of requisition, rather than requisitioning them at once, it made evident its doubts about its own power. By throwing out the commissioners’ bill, it publicly confessed its impotence. This bill was 108 votes short of a majority, so the montagne had decided the outcome. It found itself in the position of Buridan’s ass, though not between two sacks of hay and having to decide which is the more attractive, but between two thorough drubbings and having to decide which is the harder. On the one hand there was fear of Changarnier, on the other, there was fear of Bonaparte. One has to say that the situation did not allow for heroism. On 18 November [1851] an amendment was proposed to the law on municipal elections that had been brought in by the party of order itself, changing the three-year residence requirement for municipal electors to one year. The amendment fell by a single vote, but this single vote was immediately revealed to be an error. When the party of order splintered into hostile factions, it forfeited its independent parliamentary majority. Now it demonstrated that there was no longer any parliamentary majority at all. The national assembly had become incapable of making decisions. Its atomistic

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constituent parts were no longer cohesive, it had drawn its last breath, it was dead. Finally a few days before the catastrophe, the extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie confirmed its break with the bourgeoisie in parliament. Thiers, a parliamentary hero with an incurable case of parliamentary cretinism, had hatched a new parliamentary intrigue together with the council of state, after parliament had died; this was an accountability act to keep the president within constitutional bounds. On 15 September [1851] at the dedication of a new market hall in Paris, Bonaparte charmed the market women, the fishwives, like a second Masaniello [a fisherman who led a Neapolitan rebellion against Spanish rule in 1647] – in any case one fishwife outweighed 17 grandees [of the ‘party of order’] in terms of real power – so in the same way, after the introduction of the commissioners’ bill, he inspired the lieutenants who were wined and dined at the Elysée, and again on 25 November [1851] he enthralled the industrial bourgeoisie who had gathered at the circus [in Paris] to receive their prize medals for the Great [Industrial] Exhibition in London from his very own hand. I present here the most significant part of his speech as reported in the Journal des débats [on the 26th]: With such unhoped-for results, I am justified in repeating how great the French Republic would become if she were allowed to follow her real interests, and to reform her institutions, instead of being incessantly troubled, on the one side by demagogism, and on the other by monarchical hallucinations. (Loud, stormy, repeated applause from every part of the amphitheatre.) The monarchical hallucinations impede all progress and all kinds of serious industry. In place of advancing, there is only a struggle. Men are seen who, heretofore the most ardent supporters of the prerogatives and the authority of royalty, become partisans of a convention for the purpose of weakening that authority, which is the issue of popular suffrage. (Loud and repeated applause.) We see those who have suffered the most from, and who have deplored revolution the most, provoke a new one, simply to fetter the will of the nation ... I promise you public order in future, etc. etc. (Bravo, bravo, a storm of bravos.) And so the industrial bourgeoisie applauded the coup of 2 December [1851], the annihilation of parliament, the downfall of its own government, the dictatorship of Bonaparte, with servile bravos. The


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thunderous cheers of 25 November were answered in the thunderous cannons of 3rd to 6th December [1851], and it was the house of [the industrialist] M. Sallandrouze, who had clapped to the rafters, that got clapped to bits by the most bombs. Cromwell, when he dissolved the Long Parliament, went alone into the midst of the chamber, drew out his watch so that it should not carry on a minute past the limit he had fixed for it, and then drove out every single member with jovial banter and abuse. Napoleon, smaller than his precursor, at least betook himself into the legislative body on 18 Brumaire and read out, even if in a faltering voice, its sentence of death. As it happens, the second Bonaparte found himself in possession of an executive power quite different from that of Cromwell and Napoleon, and he sought his model in the annals of the Society of 10 December, in the annals of criminality, not in the annals of world history. He robs the bank of France of 25 million francs, buys General Magnan with a million and the soldiers bit by bit with 15 francs apiece and booze, gathers his accomplices in secret like a thief in the night, has the houses of the most dangerous parliamentary leaders broken into, and Cavaignac, Lamoricière, Le Flô, Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze, etc. dragged from their beds, the main squares and parliament buildings in Paris occupied by troops, propagandistic notices stuck on all the walls early in the morning proclaiming the dissolution of the national assembly and the council of state, the restoration of the general right to vote and the imposition of a state of siege in the département of the Seine. Shortly after that he inserted a false document in the Moniteur to the effect that influential parliamentarians had grouped themselves around him in a commission of state. The rump parliament, consisting mainly of legitimists and Orléanists, assembled in the mairie of the 10th arrondissement and voted Bonaparte’s removal amid repeated cheers of ‘long live the republic’, harangued the gaping crowds outside to no avail, and is finally marched off by a company of African sharpshooters first to the d’Orsay barracks, later packed into prison vans and transported to prisons at Mazas, Ham and Vincennes. Thus ended the party of order, the national assembly and the February revolution. Before we hasten to our conclusion, here is a brief summary of its history: I. First period. From 24 February to 4 May 1848. February period. Prologue. Sham solidarity.

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II. Second period. Period of founding the republic and of the constituent assembly. 1) 4 May to 25 June 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days. 2) 25 June to December 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. Imposition of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship supplanted by Bonaparte’s election to the presidency on 10 December. 3) 20 December 1848 to 28 May 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 the legislative national assembly. 1) 28 May 1849 to 13 June 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeois with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of petty bourgeois democrats. 2) 13 June 1849 to 31 May 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of order. Completion of its supremacy through the abolition of the general right to vote, but loss of parliamentary control over the cabinet. 3) 31 May 1850 to 2 December 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte. a) 31 May 1850 to 12 January 1851. Parliament loses supreme command of the army. b) 12 January to 11 April 1851. It fails in its attempts to regain administrative authority. The party of order loses its independent parliamentary majority. Coalition with the republicans and the montagne. c) 11 April 1851 to 9 October 1851. Attempts at revising [the constitution], fusing [the royalist parties], suspending [presidential power]. The party of order splits into its constituent parts. The breach between bourgeois parliament and bourgeois press, and the mass of the bourgeoisie, is consolidated. d) 9 October 1851 to 2 December 1851. Open break between parliament and the executive. Parliament completes its


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death scene and fades out, left in the lurch by its own class, by the army, by all other classes. End of the parliamentary regime and of the rule of the bourgeoisie. Victory for Bonaparte. Parody of an imperial restoration.

VII The social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy on the threshold of the February revolution. In the June days of 1848 it was drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it stalked the succeeding acts of the drama as a spectre. The democratic republic then announced itself. It fizzled out on 13 June 1849 with its turncoat petty bourgeoisie, but in fleeing it left redoubled boasts behind. The parliamentary republic and its bourgeoisie occupied the entire stage, living life to the full, but 2 December 1851 buried it amid anguished cries from the royalist coalition of ‘long live the republic!’ The social and democratic republic took a beating but the parliamentary republic, the republic of the royalist bourgeoisie, went onto the rocks, as did the pure republic, the republic of the bourgeois republicans. The French bourgeoisie balked at the rule of the working proletariat, so it brought the lumpenproletariat to power, making the chief of the Society of 10 December its head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless terror at the prospective horrors of red anarchy; Bonaparte sold it this future cheaply when on 3 and 4 December he had the distinguished citizenry of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot through their own windows by the drunken army of order. It deified the sword; now the sword rules over it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; now its own press is destroyed. It put public meetings under police surveillance; now its drawing rooms are spied on by the police. It disbanded the democratic national guard; its own national guard has been disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; now a state of siege has been imposed on it. It replaced juries with military commissions; now its juries have been militarised. It put public education under the influence of the church; now the church subjects it to its own education. It transported people without trial; now it has been transported itself without trial. It suppressed every impulse in society through the use of state power; now every impulse of its society is crushed by state power. It rebelled against its own politicians and intellectuals to line its own pocket; now its politicians and intellectuals have been disposed of; but after

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its mouth was gagged and its presses smashed, its pocket has been picked. The bourgeoisie never tired of proclaiming to the revolution what Saint Arsenius said to the Christians: ‘Fuge, Tace, Quiesce!’ ‘Run away, be quiet, keep still!’ Bonaparte admonishes the bourgeoisie: ‘Run away, be quiet, keep still!’ The French bourgeoisie had long ago resolved the dilemma put by Napoleon: ‘In fifty years Europe will either be republican or Cossack.’ Their resolution was the ‘Cossack republic’. That work of art, the bourgeois republic, has not been deformed by Circe’s black magic. That republic has lost nothing but its rhetorical arabesques, the outward decencies, in a word, the appearance of respectability. The France of today [after the coup d’état] was already there within the parliamentary republic. It required only a thrust of the bayonet for the membrane to burst and the monster to spring forth. The immediate aim of the February revolution was to overthrow the Orléans dynasty and that part of the bourgeoisie which governed under its authority. It was not until 2 December 1851 that this aim was achieved. It was then that the immense possessions of the house of Orléans, the real basis of its influence, were confiscated, and what was expected to follow the February revolution finally came to pass in December [1851]: imprisonment, exile, dispossession, banishment, disarming, humiliation of the men who had wearied France since 1830 with their pleas. But under Louis Philippe only a part of the commercial bourgeois was in power. The other factions in it formed a dynastic and republican opposition, or stood entirely outside so-called legality. Only the parliamentary republic included all factions of the commercial bourgeoisie in the realm of the state. Moreover under Louis Philippe the commercial bourgeoisie excluded the large landholders. Only the parliamentary republic put them side-by side, joined the July monarchy to the legitimist monarchy, and merged two eras in 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 unifying its constituent parts and extending its power to power over its own class, came out into the open. So the revolution first had to create the form in which the rule of the bourgeois class gained its broadest, most general and ultimate expression, and hence could also be overthrown without being able to rise up again. Only now was the sentence executed which was pronounced in February on the Orléanist bourgeoisie, i.e. the most viable faction of


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the French bourgeoisie. Now a blow was struck at its parliament, its legal chambers, its commercial courts, its provincial representatives, its notaries, its universities, its spokesmen and their platforms, its press and its literature, its administrative income and its court fees, its army salaries and its state pensions, its mind and its body. [The revolutionary communist] Blanqui had made the disbanding of the bourgeois guard the first demand of the [1848] revolution, and the bourgeois guard, who in the February of the revolution raised their arms to stop this, disappeared from the scene in December. The Pantheon has been transformed once again into an ordinary church. With the last version of the bourgeois regime the spell, which transformed its eighteenth-century founders into saints, has at last been broken. When Guizot learned of the successful coup d’état of 2 December [1851] he exclaimed: This is the complete and final triumph of socialism! What he meant was: this is the final and complete collapse of the rule of the bourgeoisie. Why did the proletariat not rescue the bourgeoisie? The question boils down to this: Why did the Paris proletariat not rise up after 2 December? The overthrow of the bourgeoisie had only been decreed, but the decree had not yet been carried out. Any genuinely revolutionary uprising of the proletariat would have put new life into the bourgeoisie, reconciled it with the army and ensured a second June [1849] defeat of the workers. On 4 December [1851] the proletariat was goaded into a fight by grocers and traders. On the evening of that day several legions of the national guard promised to appear in the principal squares under arms and in uniform. These traders and grocers had got wind of the fact that Bonaparte had abolished their secret ballot in one of his decrees of 2 December [1851] and enjoined them to inscribe their yea or nay beneath their names in the official register. The bloody confrontation of 4 December [1851] intimidated Bonaparte. During the night he had placards posted on all the street corners of Paris announcing the restoration of the secret ballot. Traders and grocers were convinced they had achieved their aim. But it was the traders and grocers who didn’t turn up next morning. During the nights of Bonaparte’s coup d’état, 1 and 2 December [1851], the Paris proletariat had also been robbed of its leaders, the commanders of the barricades, so it was an army without officers, too enlightened by its own recollections of June 1848 and 1849 and of May 1850 to fight under the banner of the montagnards; it had

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therefore come to a correct assessment of its own power and the general situation when it left to its vanguard of secret societies the task of saving the insurrectionary honour of Paris, which the bourgeoisie had readily given up to the soldiery, so that Bonaparte could later disarm the national guard with this cynical explanation: it was not that he feared the misuse of their weapons against him but rather that anarchists would misuse these weapons against the guard itself. ‘It is the complete and final triumph of socialism!’ This was Guizot’s characterisation of 2 December [1851]. Though the overthrow of the parliamentary republic contains the triumph of the proletarian revolution in embryo, the immediate tangible result was Bonaparte’s victory over parliament, the executive over the legislature, force without words over the force of words. The unitary power of the ancien régime is thus freed from its limitations, becoming an unlimited absolute power. In parliament the nation elevated its general will into law, i.e. the law of the ruling class was elevated into its general will. It abdicated its own will before the executive and subjected itself to the sovereignty of an alien will, to authority. The opposition between the executive and legislative powers expresses the opposition between the heteronomy and autonomy of the nation. Hence France seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to revert to being under the despotism of an individual, and under the authority of an individual without authority to boot. The conflict seems to have been settled so that all classes bow down equally powerless and equally voiceless before the rifle-butt. But the revolution is thorough-going. It is still preoccupied with journeying through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By 2 December [1851] it had completed half its preparatory work, and now it is completing the other half. First it developed parliamentary power so that it could be overthrown. Now that this has been attained, it is developing the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, confronting it as sole challenger in order to concentrate all its powers of destruction against it. And when it has brought this second half of its preparatory work to completion the whole of Europe will jump up and cry: Well grubbed up, old mole! This executive with its enormous bureaucratic and military apparatus, with its widespread and ingenious machinery of state, a complement of a half million officials alongside an army of another half million, this fearsome parasitic body, which traps French society like a net and chokes it at every pore, arose at the time of the


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absolute monarchy, accelerating the decline of feudalism. The political prerogatives of landowners and municipalities were transformed into so many aspects of state power, the feudal dignitaries became salaried civil servants, and the variegated pattern of conflicting medieval authorities became the disciplined layout of state power with centralised functions in a factory-like division of labour. The first French revolution had the job of centralisation, breaking down all separate local, territorial, municipal and provincial powers in order to create a civil unity in the nation as begun by absolute monarchy, but at the same time it had to develop the extent, aspects and operatives of governmental power. Napoleon perfected this machinery of state. The legitimist and July monarchies contributed only a further division of labour, growing in proportion as the division of labour created new interest groups within bourgeois society, hence new objects for the state to administer. Every common interest was detached from society and counterposed to it as a higher, general interest, torn away from the independently generated activity of individuals within society and made into an object of governmental administration, from bridges, schools and community projects in a village up to railways, national public works and the national university of France. Finally in its struggle with the revolution the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen the apparatus and centralisation of governmental power with repressive measures. All upheavals perfected this machinery instead of destroying it. The parties that grappled in turn for power regarded possession of this immense edifice of state as the chief booty of the victor. But under the absolute monarchy, during the first revolution [1789–99], under Napoleon [1799–1815], bureaucracy was only the means of preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Under the restoration [1816–30], under Louis Philippe [1830–48], under the parliamentary republic [1848–51], it was the instrument of the ruling class, however much it also strove for power in its own right. Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have achieved independence with respect to society and to have brought it into submission. The independence of the executive comes through clearly when its head no longer needs ingenuity, its army no longer needs glory, and its bureaucracy no longer needs moral authority in order to justify itself. The state machine has established itself so firmly vis-à-vis commercial life that the head of the Society of 10 December provides sufficient leadership, a soldier of fortune

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swooping down from abroad, elevated to leadership by a drunken soldiery that he bought with grub and drink and at which he has to go on chucking sausages. Hence the shamefaced despair, the feeling of terrible humiliation, degradation, which weighs down upon France and suffocates her. France feels dishonoured. Just as under Napoleon there was scarcely any pretext for freedom, so under the second Bonaparte there was no longer any pretext for servitude. But state power is not suspended in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a class, indeed the most numerous class in French society, the smallholding peasants. Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of large landed property and the Orléans the dynasty of finance, so Bonaparte is the dynasty of peasants, i.e. of the mass of the French people. Not the Bonaparte who knuckled under to the parliament of the bourgeoisie, but the Bonaparte who disbanded it, is the chosen one of the peasantry. For three years the cities were successful in falsifying the meaning of the election of 10 December and cheating the peasantry out of the restoration of the empire. The election of 10 December 1848 has been fulfilled only through the coup d’état of 2 December 1851. The smallholding peasants form an immense mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into complex relationships with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another, instead of bringing them into complex interactions. This isolation is reinforced by the terrible means of communication in France and the poverty of the peasants. Their site of production, the smallholding, does not allow any division of labour in its cultivation, no application of science and therefore no diversity in development, no diversification of talents, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, producing the greatest part of its consumption directly and getting its means of subsistence more in brutal exchange with nature than in relationships within society. The smallholding, the peasant and the family; alongside them another smallholding, another farmer and another family. A few score of these make a village and a few score villages make a département. Thus the great bulk of the French nation is formed by simple accretion, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. In so far as millions of families get a living under economic conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes and counterpose them as enemies, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection amongst peasant


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proprietors, the similarity of their interests produces no community, no national linkage and no political organisation, they do not form a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or constitutional convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must also appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unrestricted governmental power which protects them from other classes and watches over them from on high. The political influence of peasant proprietors is ultimately expressed in the subordination of parliament to the executive, society to the state. Through historical tradition it has come to pass that the French peasantry believed in a miracle, that a man of the name of Napoleon would bring them back their former glory. And there came an individual who presented himself as such a man because he bore the name Napoleon, in accordance with the Napoleonic Code which stipulates: ‘All inquiry into paternity is forbidden.’ After twenty years of bumming around and a string of grotesque adventures, the prophecy was fulfilled and the man became emperor of the French. The idée fixe of the nephew was realised because it coincided with the idée fixe of the most numerous class of the French. But, it may be objected, what about the peasant uprisings over half of France [in late December 1851], the raids on the peasantry by the army, the mass incarceration and transportation of peasants? Since the time of Louis XIV France has not experienced a similar persecution of the peasantry ‘for intriguing with demagogues’. But let us be clear about this. The Bonaparte dynasty does not represent the revolutionary peasants, but rather the conservative ones, not the peasant who reaches beyond his social condition of existence, the smallholding, but rather the one who wants to shore it up more firmly, not the country people who want to overthrow the old order under their own steam in conjunction with the towns, but rather the exact opposite, those who are stupidly locked up within the old order and want to see themselves saved and preferred along with their small holdings by means of the ghost of an empire. It represents peasant superstition, not enlightenment, prejudice not judgement, the past not the future, the modern Vendée [royalist revolt of 1789–94], not the modern Cévennes [antifeudal revolt of 1702–5]. Three years hard rule under the parliamentary republic had freed a part of the French peasantry from Napoleonic illusions and revo-

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lutionised them, albeit only superficially, but the bourgeoisie repressed them forcibly whenever they tried to do anything. Under the parliamentary republic the modern consciousness of the French peasantry fought with the traditional one. The contest advanced in the form of an incessant battle between schoolmasters and the church. The bourgeoisie defeated the schoolmasters. For the first time the peasantry made efforts to act independently against government machinations. This showed up in the persistent conflict between mayors and prefects. The bourgeoisie removed the mayors. Finally during the parliamentary republic, peasants from different parts of France rose up against their own monstrous offspring, the army. The bourgeoisie punished them with states of siege and foreclosures on property. And this is the bourgeoisie that now whines about the stupidity of the masses, the vile multitude that has betrayed it to Bonaparte. It has greatly strengthened the fervour for empire amongst the peasant class; it conserved the conditions which are the breeding ground of this peasant religion. In any case the bourgeoisie is bound to fear the stupidity of the peasant masses so long as they remain conservative, and the insights of the peasantry as soon as they become revolutionary. In the uprisings after the coup d’état a portion of the French peasantry mounted armed protests against its own vote of 10 December 1848. Since 1848 they had schooled their wits. But they had enrolled in the underworld of history, and history kept them to their word, and the majority was still so prejudiced that even in the reddest of départements the peasant population openly supported Bonaparte. In its view the national assembly had hindered his progress. He had now merely broken the fetters which bound the will of the countryside to the towns. Here and there they entertained the grotesque idea that a constitutional convention could co-exist with a Napoleon. After the first revolution had transformed the semi-feudal peasantry into freeholders, Napoleon confirmed and regulated the conditions in which they could exploit their newly acquired land in France and satisfy their new found passion for property undisturbed. But what is now causing the ruin of the French peasant is his smallholding itself, the division of the land and soil, the form of property which Napoleon consolidated in France. These are the material conditions which made the French feudal peasant a smallholding peasant and Napoleon into an emperor. Two generations were sufficient to produce the inevitable result: further deterioration of


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agriculture, further indebtedness of agriculturists. The ‘Napoleonic’ form of property, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the condition for the liberation and enrichment of French country dwellers, has developed in the course of a century into the law of their enslavement and pauperisation. And it is just this law which is the first of the ‘Napoleonic ideals’ 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 smallscale property, but outside it in the influence of secondary factors, then his experiments will be smashed on the relations of production like soap bubbles, cutting that illusion off from its last hiding place and at best making the disease more acute. The economic development of small-scale landed property has fundamentally turned round the relationship of the peasantry to the other classes of society. Under Napoleon the parcelling out of land and soil complemented free competition and the beginnings of large-scale industry in the cities. Even the preferment of the peasant class was in the interest of the new bourgeois order. This newly created class was the complex expansion of the bourgeois regimes beyond the gateways of the cities, its realisation on a national scale. This class was the ever present protest against the recently overthrown landed aristocracy. If it was preferred over all, it was also suited above all as a point of attack for the restoration of feudalism. The roots that small-scale property had struck in French soil deprived feudalism of all nourishment. Its boundary stones formed a natural fortification for the bourgeoisie against any reprisals from its former overlords. But in the course of the nineteenth century the place of feudal orders was taken by urban usurers, the place of feudal obligation attached to the land by the mortgage, and the place of aristocratic landed property by bourgeois capital. The smallholding of the peasant is only a means for capitalists to draw profit, interest and rent from the soil, leaving to the farmer himself how to extract his wages. The mortgage interest weighing on French soil imposes on the French peasantry an interest burden equal to the annual interest on the whole of the British national debt. In this slavery to capital, as it inevitably develops, small-scale landed property transforms the bulk of the French nation into a nation of troglodytes. Sixteen million peasants (women and children included) dwell in hovels of which the greatest number have only one opening, others only two and the best of the lot only three. Windows are to a house as five senses are to the head. The bourgeois

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order, which at the beginning of the century made the state a sentry over the newly emerged smallholding and manured it with laurels, has turned into a vampire which sucks out its blood and brains and throws them into the alchemist’s vessel of capital. The Napoleonic Code is now but a code for foreclosures on property, public auctions and forced sales. To the four million (including children, etc.) official paupers, vagrants, criminals and prostitutes in France must be added five million people who hover on the margin of existence and either house themselves in the countryside itself or continually desert the countryside for the cities or the cities for the countryside, together with their rags and their children. The interests of the peasants are therefore no longer in accord with the bourgeoisie, as under Napoleon, but in deadliest opposition to the interests of the bourgeoisie, to capital. Hence the peasants find their natural allies and leaders in the urban proletariat whose task is the overthrow of the bourgeois order. But strong and unlimited government – and this is the second ‘Napoleonic ideal’ which the second Napoleon is to carry out, has the job of defending this ‘material order’ by force. This ‘material order’ also serves as a catch-phrase in all Bonaparte’s proclamations against peasant unrest. Beside the mortgage which capital imposes on it, the smallholding is burdened with taxes. Taxation is the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army, the church and the court, in short the whole apparatus of executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical. Small-scale landed property by its very nature provides a basis for an all-pervasive and numerous bureaucracy. It uniformly levels people and relationships over the whole surface of the land. Hence it also permits uniform action from a sovereign centre to all points. It destroys the aristocratic middle levels between the mass of the people and the state power. Hence it calls forth from all sides the direct intervention by this state power and the direct use of its agents. Finally it produces an unemployed surplus population which can find a place neither in the country nor in the towns and hence seizes on state offices as a kind of respectable charity and promotes the creation of state employment. Under Napoleon these numerous government personnel were not just directly productive, since in fact they provided for the newly arisen peasantry through state coercion in the form of public works, what the bourgeoisie could not yet provide through the means of private industry. State taxation was a necessary means of coercion to maintain exchange between town and country. Otherwise the smallholder, by becoming a self-


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sufficient peasant, would have broken off any connection with the towns, as happened in a part of Switzerland, [and] in Norway. Napoleon repaid the forced taxation with interest when he opened new markets with the bayonet and plundered continents. This was a spur to peasant industry, though they now rob his industry of its last source of help and break down the last barriers to pauperism. And an enormous bureaucracy, well-decorated and well-fed, is the ‘Napoleonic ideal’ which appeals the most to the second Bonaparte. How could it be otherwise since he is compelled, alongside the actual classes of society, to create an artificial caste for which the maintenance of his regime is a bread-and-butter question. Consequently one of his first financial acts was to raise official salaries once again to their old level and to create new sinecures. Another ‘Napoleonic ideal’ is the dominance of the Church as an instrument of state. But while the newly developed smallholding was naturally religious in its accord with society, in its dependence on the powers of nature and in its subjection to an all-high protecting authority, it becomes naturally irreligious when riddled with debt, at odds with society and authority, and driven past its own limits. Heaven was just a beautiful annex to the narrow strip of land just acquired, especially as it makes the weather; it becomes an insult as soon as it is offered as a substitute for the smallholding. The priest then appears as but the anointed bloodhound of the earthly police – another ‘Napoleonic ideal’ – whose duty under the second Bonaparte is not, as it was under Napoleon [I], to spy on the enemies of the peasant regime in the cities, but to spy on Bonaparte’s enemies in the country. Next time the march on Rome [to put down an insurrection] will take place in France itself, but in a sense opposite to that of M. de Montalembert [who advocated a war on socialism]. The culmination of the ‘Napoleonic ideals’ is the predominance of the army. The army was the point d’honneur for the smallholding peasantry; it transformed them into heroes, defended their new possessions from outside threats, glorifying their recently acquired nationality, plundering and revolutionising the world. The dazzling uniform was its own national dress, war its poetry, the smallholding, extended and rounded off in the imagination, was its fatherland, and patriotism was the ideal form of their sense of property. But the enemies against whom the French peasant now has to defend his property are not the cossacks but the bailiffs and tax collectors. The smallholding is no longer in the so-called fatherland but in the mortgage register. The army itself is no longer the flower of peasant

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youth, it is the fetid bloom of the peasant lumpenproletariat. It consists in the greater part of place-holders, substitutes, as the second Bonaparte is himself only a place-holder, a substitute for Napoleon. It performs its deeds of valour in hunting down peasants like game, in police duties, and if the internal contradictions of his system drive the head of the Society of 10 December over the French border, the army will reap no laurels after skirmishing but rather take a beating. It’s plain as day: ‘all Napoleonic ideals’ are ideals of the undeveloped smallholding in its heyday, but for the smallholding that has outlived this, they are an absurdity. They are merely hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed into phrases, ideas into spectres, befitting dress into preposterous costumes. But the parody of the empire was necessary to liberate the bulk of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition between state and society. The demolition of the state machine will not endanger centralisation. Bureaucracy is only the low and brutal form of a centralisation which is still afflicted with its opposite, feudalism. When disappointed with the Napoleonic restoration, the French peasant will cease to believe in the smallholding, the whole edifice of state erected on this smallholding will collapse, and the proletarian revolution will obtain the chorus without which its solo becomes a swan song in all peasant countries. The condition of the French peasantry solves the riddle for us of the general elections of 20 and 21 December [1851] which led the second Bonaparte up Mount Sinai, not to receive the laws but to give and execute them. Anyway in those fateful days the French nation committed a mortal sin against democracy, which falls to its knees and prays daily: Holy Universal Suffrage, pray for us! The believers in universal manhood suffrage naturally do not want to dispense with the miraculous power which has brought great things to pass for them, which has transformed Bonaparte II into a Napoleon, a Saul into a Paul, and a Simon into Peter. The spirit of the people speaks to them through the ballot box as the God of the prophet Ezekiel [37:5] spoke to the dry bones: ‘Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones: “Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.”’ Evidently the bourgeoisie had no choice other than to elect Bonaparte. Despotism or anarchy. Naturally they voted for despotism. When the puritans complained at the council of Constance [1414–18] about the dissolute lives of the popes and moaned about the necessity for moral reform, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly


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thundered at them: ‘Only the devil himself can save the Catholic church, and you are demanding angels.’ In the same way after the coup d’état the French bourgeoisie cried: Only the head of the Society of 10 December can save bourgeois society! Only theft can save property, only perjury, religion; bastardy, the family; disorder, order! As an executive with independent power, Bonaparte felt that it was his vocation to safeguard ‘bourgeois order’. But the strength of this bourgeois order is in the middle classes. Hence he sees himself as the representative of the middle class and issues decrees on that basis. However he is only where he is, because he has destroyed the political power of this middle class, and does it again every day. He therefore sees himself as the enemy of the political and literary power of the middle class. But because he protects its material power, he generates its public, its political power anew. The cause must therefore be kept alive, but the effect where it is revealed must be dispatched from this world. But this cannot happen without some slight confusion of cause with effect, since both lose their distinguishing characteristics when they interact. There are new decrees that muddle the boundary lines. Bonaparte sees himself opposing the bourgeoisie as the representative of the peasantry and of the people in general at the same time, wanting to please the lower classes within bourgeois society. There are new decrees that rob the ‘true socialists’ of their administrative brainstorms in advance. Above all Bonaparte sees himself as head of the Society of 10 December, as representative of the lumpenproletariat, to which he himself, his entourage, his government and his army belong, and for which the chief concern is how to do well oneself and to extract prizes for the California lottery from the national treasury. He vindicates himself as head of the Society of 10 December with decrees, without decrees and despite decrees. The contradictory tasks that face this man explain the contradictions of his government, the confused poking about to try to win over and then to humiliate now this, now that class, turning them all equally against himself; and his uncertainty in practice forms a highly comic contrast to the peremptory and categorical style of governmental decrees, a style obediently copied from the uncle [Napoleon]. So the speed and recklessness of these contradictions is supposed to imitate the complicated doings and quick-wittedness of the Emperor. Industry and commerce, the occupations of the middle class, are to flourish in this hothouse regime of strong government. They are granting an innumerable number of railway concessions. But the

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Bonapartist lumpenproletariat is to enrich itself. So there is insider trading with the railway concessions on the stock exchange. But this draws no capital for the railways. So the bank is obliged to make advances on railway shares. But at the same time the bank is to be exploited for a certain person and therefore must be cajoled. So it is released from the obligation to publish a weekly report. Then the government makes a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose deal with the bank. The people are to be provided with employment. So instructions are issued for public works. But the public works raise the tax burden of the people. Hence the taxes are reduced by attacking the rentiers through the conversion of 5 per cent bonds to 41⁄2 per cent. But the middle class must again receive a sweetener. Hence the doubling of the wine tax on the people, who buy it retail, and halving of the wine tax for the middle class, who drink it wholesale. Disbanding of real workers’ association, but promises of future miracles of association. There is to be help for the peasantry. So there are mortgage banks to increase their indebtedness and promote the concentration of property. But these banks are to be used to garner money for a certain person from the confiscated estates of the house of Orléans. But 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 without taking from another. At the time of the Fronde [1648–53], it was said of the duc de Guise that he was the most obliging man in France, because he had transformed all his property into credits that his partisans were obliged to repay to him, and so Bonaparte would like to be the most obliging man in France and transform all his property, all the labour of France, into credits to be repaid to himself. He would like to steal the whole of France in order to be able to give it back, or rather to be able to buy France back with French money, for as the head of the Society of 10 December, he has to buy what is to belong to him. And all the institutions of state, the senate, the council of state, the legislative chamber [under the new constitution of 14 January 1852], the legion of honour, military decorations, wash-houses, public works, railways, the general staff of the national guard excluding common ranks, and the confiscated estates of the House of Orléans become a saleroom. Every place in the army and in the governmental machine is up for sale. But the most important thing in this process of taking France in order to give it back is the percentage which goes to the head and members of the Society of 10 December during the transaction. The


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witty countess L[éhon], the mistress of the duc de Morny [half brother of Louis Bonaparte], characterised the confiscation of the Orléanist loot in this way: ‘It’s the first flight [vol = theft] of the [Napoleonic] eagle.’ That fits every flight of this eagle, which is more like a raven [that feeds on carrion]. Every day he and his hangers-on call to each other as the Italian Carthusian called out to the miser who made a show of counting up the money on which he would be drawing for years to come: ‘You are counting up your goods, but you should first be counting up your years.’ So as not to get the years wrong, they count the minutes. A gang of louts are pushing their way into the court, the ministries, the chief offices in administration and the army, of whom the best to be said is that no one knows where they come from, a noisy, foul, rapacious crowd of bohemians, crawling into gold braid with the same grotesque dignity as [the emperor] Soulouque’s stuffed shirts [in Haiti]. The higher stratum of the Society of 10 December can be clearly discerned by reflecting on the fact that [philistines such as] Véron-Crevel preaches its morals and [the journalist] Granier de Cassagnac its wisdom. When Guizot made use of this Granier at the time of his cabinet [during the 1840s] for a provincial rage against the [legitimist] dynastic opposition, he was wont to boast of him with the quip: ‘He’s the king of the fools’. It would be an injustice to recall the regency [of the duc d’Orléans 1715–23] or [the reign of] Louis XV [1723–74] in conjunction with Louis Bonaparte’s court and clique. For ‘France has often had a government of mistresses, but never before a government of kept men’ [as Mme. Girardin, the editor’s wife, put it]. And Cato who took his own life so that he could walk in the Elysian Fields with heroes! Poor Cato! Driven by the contradictory demands of his circumstances, and having to keep in the public eye as a substitute for Napoleon, hence executing a coup in miniature every day, Bonaparte, like a conjuror who has to come up with constant surprises, brings the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable during the revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution and others desirous of it, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while stripping the halo from the whole machinery of state, profanes it, and makes it loathsome and laughable. He replicates the cult of the holy tunic of Trier in Paris as the cult of the imperial mantle of Napoleon. But when this imperial mantle falls at last onto the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze of Napoleon, high on the column in the Place Vendôme, will plunge to the ground.

Part 2

The Eighteenth Brumaire as Discourse

3

Imagery/Writing, Imagination/Politics: Reading Marx through the Eighteenth Brumaire Terrell Carver

Readers have choices, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their choices).1 Around Marx there is a highly developed politics of reading. Readers do not read just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they read in present circumstances, given and inherited. There are nightmares weighing on their brains, and disciplinary practices violating their choices. Shifting all the dead generations is really very hard work.2 Why would anyone want to? I wouldn’t claim that a new, antitraditional or ‘against the grain’ reading of Marx will revolutionise him. Nor would I claim that interpreting him will change the world. However, his interventions in politics were based mostly on writing (rather than other forms of so-called direct action), and he clearly thought that readers would change things, or at least try to. We know very little in general, or even specific terms most of the time, about what he thought his relation to his readership was, or should be. What we know for dead and absolute certain is that he wrote a lot; since the Fall of the Wall, MEGA2 (Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe, 2nd series) has been riven with strategies, economic and academic, for coping with the Nachlaβ, currently planned for about 120 double volumes. There are prefaces and letters that get us close to what Marx thought about his writing and his readership, but even they don’t really explain who was supposed to do what with whom in relation to him, having read him. If he had been running a group or party in an acknowledged leadership role, then we would be on surer ground. Whether working for newspapers, or advising the International Working Men’s Association, he seems rather on the outside, sending messages to those within. When he famously said (or rather is said to have said) that he was ‘not a Marxist’, even that didn’t tell us exactly what he thought a ‘Marxist’ was, nor what he himself thought he was instead.3 This political self-characterisation was 113

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about as unhelpful and enigmatic as his (rare) philosophical characterisation that he was not an idealist, but a ‘materialist’.4 Discuss. Marx was discussed, not least by Engels, and we know rather more about the latter’s relationship to his own texts, and to the texts by Marx that he came to own in later life. Engels organised a politics of reading for Marx, saying who he was and why he was important, saying what he said in fewer words, and explaining why he (Engels) was entitled to do this. Engels thus worked to gather a readership for Marx, a followership of Marxists, and therefore some kind of consistent influence or control over thoughts and events. Whether Marx agreed with all of this, or with any of this, has been a question of debate the last 100 years, and is part of the nightmare of reading Marx. It has certainly weighed on my brain.5 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a difficult work. The title alludes to the calendar and events of the French Revolution, and I venture to say that most contemporary readers have to look this up.6 Louis Bonaparte is not one of the major features of anyone’s politics of memory in France, a country in which there is no shortage of collective memorialisation. His presidency of the Second Republic (which?), and his reign as Emperor Napoleon III (who?), do not surface as important in the republican tradition even as threats, precisely because the original Napoleon (of which he was a selfconscious copy) occupied the same ambiguous position: the people’s dictator who dictates to the people, the republican who destroyed the republic. Of those in France who would know the story, few would actually disagree with Marx’s overall judgement and overweening scorn: Louis Bonaparte was ridiculous and disastrous.7 All the current websites I have looked at take the same view. Napoleon himself had epic grandeur, and was brilliant at delivering it, but not across the generations. Charles-Louis-Napoleon was the son of a marriage that Napoleon had arranged between his stepdaughter Hortense de Beauharnais (that is, his first wife Josephine’s daughter from her first marriage to a revolutionary general) to Napoleon’s own brother Louis Bonaparte, eventually (and briefly) King of Holland. This makes our Louis Bonaparte the nephew or step-grandson of his ‘original’, depending on which way you construe the relationship. The major shrines to the man who was Emperor of the French for nearly 20 years (and his Empress Eugénie de Montoja) are in a very grand château at Compiègne, near Paris, and in a small, dusty and utterly obscure former hunting lodge in Les Landes, near the wild

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Atlantic coast. The tastelessness of the decor and furnishings of the former have to be seen to be believed, and the treasures of the latter can best be left to the imagination – though I was particularly fascinated by a set of crockery depicting the Emperor’s triumphs, such as a grand entry by train into Cherbourg. Perhaps his most notable memorialisation outside France is the cameo role he plays in Hollywood’s romance with Maximilian and Carlotta down Mexico way, tragic characters caught in a mad overseas caricature of the Second Empire. The Eighteenth Brumaire has not survived, then, because Louis Bonaparte/Napoleon III went on to greater things, and so carried Marx with him. Rather it is the other way around. Similarly, if Marx had memorialised the Second Republic (1848–51), perhaps it would have survived better as an episode in the republican tradition, precisely because he had done so. He did this later with the Paris Commune (1871) in The Civil War in France, another work of instant history (written in English) that is near-contemporaneous with events. While it is hardly the case that the Commune survives because of Marx, a strong connection developed over the years, and indeed there was a connection at the time. His advocacy of the cause made him the ‘Red Terror Doctor’ in England, and this was, indeed, his own entry into mainstream history.8 Perhaps hanging his politics on Louis Bonaparte was a bit of a mistake for Marx. Bonaparte didn’t last, no one was that moved by Marx’s scorn (either way) at the time, and hardly anyone wants to know about him now. He seems to have become a justly obscure and Eurotrashy Emperor with terrible clothes who wandered into Marx’s life ... briefly. Introducing a new edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire in 1885, Engels said it was, ‘in truth a work of genius’. It ‘laid bare the whole course of French history since the February days [of 1848] in its inner interconnection, [and] reduced the miracle of [the coup d’état of] December 2 [1851] to a natural, necessary result of this interconnection’. It was a work of science because: It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes ... This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science – this law gave

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him here, too, the key to an understanding of the history of the Second French Republic. He put his law to the test on these historical events, and even after thirty-three years we must still say that it has stood the test brilliantly. It is difficult to square this reading of the Eighteenth Brumaire with the discursive character of the text, organised as historical narrative, and famous for personal invective and bitter sarcasm. The closest Engels got to commenting on the language and politics of the text was to say that it is ‘concise [and] epigrammatic’. Engels concluded that ‘Marx did not even need to treat the hero of the coup d’état otherwise than with the contempt he so well deserved’, thus inverting the apparent aim of the text, which was to rubbish the newly proclaimed emperor as thoroughly as possible at the outset of his career.9 Presumably Marx intended the text as a political intervention, though as mentioned above, it is difficult to know exactly what this was supposed to mean. It was written in German, published in New York in May 1852, about six months after the coup of 2 December 1851. Writing in 1869 Marx commented that a ‘few hundred copies found their way into Germany at that time’, but did not seem to have an opinion as to what happened to the main print run, or indeed what was supposed to happen to any of this work. The works to which he compared it were not science of any kind but rather contemporary polemics by Victor Hugo and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The nearest he got to a scientific justification was one that was much fuzzier than the law-governed reductionism Engels had in mind: ‘I [Marx] ... 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.’ 10 There is a prediction in the work, but not one that follows deductively from laws of science, nor one that is falsifiable and easy to understand. In 1869 Marx wrote that the concluding words of his work – which he says he has not robbed of its ‘peculiar colouring’ – have already been fulfilled: ‘but when this imperial mantle [of Napoleon] falls at last onto the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze of Napoleon, high on the column in the Place Vendôme, will plunge to the ground’ (109). The statue, however, was not literally taken down until the spring of 1871 during the Commune. In 1869 Marx was presumably referring to the part of his prediction fulfilled by Louis Bonaparte’s assumption of the title Emperor in December


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1852, which occurred shortly after Marx had finished writing his text in March. This sets the stage for the primary way that the Brumaire has been read ever since. Does it confirm a scientific method for Marx in the way its arguments and evidence are constructed, and in its authorial intent? If so, what are the key passages, and why then the invective? If not, what are the implications for the view that Marx was a scientist of history and politics? Moreover, does the text actually state a version of the ‘great law of motion’ that Engels attributes to Marx? If so, how do those sections of the text relate to other places where Marx (and, additionally, Engels) state these propositions? If not, what do those sections of the text say instead, and what does that imply about the status of other passages in other texts that are thought to state this law? The Eighteenth Brumaire lies between The German Ideology manuscripts (1845–46) and the ‘Preface’ (1859) to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. If you read Marx through this lens – the ‘law and the propositions’ of ‘the materialist interpretation of history’ – then you can read the 1852 version chronologically as another stage on the way to the ‘Preface’ (1859), or you can read the 1852 text itself doctrinally through the ‘final’ version of the ‘materialist interpretation of history’, as we have it from the 1859 ‘Preface’ and Engels’s glosses of that year and later.11 However, if you think that the Eighteenth Brumaire produces a version of these famous generalisations that is significantly different from either of the other versions, then you can join mainstream commentary which values the work, either because it contains a sociologically more sensitive version than elsewhere, or because it crucially demonstrates that Marx was intellectually confused about the whole issue. Alternatively, and radically, there may be a way of reading Marx through his ‘historical’ works, in which he really gets to grips with political analysis. His more abstract generalisations can then be reinterpreted in that light, rather than chopped about in a Procrustean way to fit a preconceived notion of science. Some of these generalisations are indeed rather lengthy and worked out to a certain degree; the discussions in The German Ideology are a case in point (though there are irresolvable interpretive problems with that text).12 Other formulations are much more concise, most famously the rather confused and confusing ‘materialist conception of history’ passages in the ‘Preface’ (1859) to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. I sense a certain diffidence and half-heartedness about that

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text (as well as signs of panic at being late for a publisher’s deadline). Why should readers really need a ‘guiding thread’? It looks tacked on. This ‘Preface’ really does not sound like some great law from which a work of science necessarily unfolds from within itself. By the time of Capital, Vol. I, this locus classicus of Marxian scientific methodology has shrunk to a footnote.13 The Eighteenth Brumaire rehearses a number of ideas very similar to Marx’s generalisations of 1859, and these passages suffer from much the same defects. Or rather they seem to, if our expectations as readers tell us that Marx should be writing in clear, testable propositions. If they don’t, then he’s not in trouble. If he’s not in trouble in the Eighteenth Brumaire, then perhaps the onus is on readers to get to grips with the extensive and problematic character of his critique of political economy (which is what happens after the now famous ‘Preface’ in the book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), and indeed to make use of the ‘Preface’, if at all, only in the manner of a ‘guiding thread’. Much the same then applies to the Eighteenth Brumaire, in that the now famous ‘forerunner’ passages (42–3), less than half a page in all, and less than one paragraph, can sink back into the narrative flow and sociopolitical analysis of class struggle. In that way the interplay between individual characters, groups and factions, and the overarching features of a class-divided economy, will come to the fore, and much more of Marx’s technicolour writing will reach the reader. This will have the effect of opening out the issue of class struggle politically, rather than closing it down to an academic problem scientifically. Marx’s analysis is sharp and his writing is vivid. Present-day readers will find analogies in contemporary politics. My own was to think of the militarised and authoritarian character of the ‘Thatcher years’, not to mention the sleaze, and then to gasp, when Marx was thundering through the events of the coup, ‘How close we got to it!’ Of all Marx’s writings the Eighteenth Brumaire has the most extravagant imagery, withering scorn and scathing satire. I am leaving the issues around the ‘materialist interpretation of history’ aside now, and, contra Engels, taking the view that Marx’s invective and sarcasm was the point. These were intended, presumably, to have illocutionary force in international politics, that is, writing that Louis Bonaparte was rubbish would actually rubbish him. The Eighteenth Brumaire is also the victim of the worst translation into English of any of his works; the ‘classic’ English text dates from


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1897–98, and was done by Daniel de Leon in New York. This is a shame, and clearly detracts from any perlocutionary force that present-day readers might experience, subject to appropriate historical and contextual transference, that is, they might make judgements and actions about contemporary politics as a result of reading Marx’s text. Much of the language in that translation is neither English nor German, and Marx’s brilliance as a writer, in this text above all, has been sleeping for about 100 years in the Englishspeaking world. Marx advanced his arguments in the Eighteenth Brumaire through writing that deploys metaphor on a sliding scale from the literal to the burlesque. There are also ideas in the images and tropes, rather than the other way round, and remarkable levels of irony, even for Marx. Marx wrote about politics in France for a German audience, and employed terms for French institutions in French as well as in Germanised loan words from French. Making this intelligible for contemporary readers of English is something of a challenge, particularly as there are no exact political equivalents in Anglophone history for the institutions Marx was writing about. Getting his highly coordinated choice of terms to work together in a different language, in a different time, and still make him Marx (and not some honorary Victorian Englishman), is tricky.14 In the discussion that follows I canvass some of these issues and suggest that rather than stripping away the linguistic extravagance to find the ideas, we reverse the process and find the ideas in the choice of words and imagery. After all, Marx wrote it that way. This strategy displaces the established reading, which is that Marx’s texts have to be about science, and about historical materialism, or they are not really worth reading, and certainly not for the verbal effects. Actually those special effects were the closest Marx could get to the movies. There are a number of controlling, analytical ideas in Marx’s text, to which he adapted his metaphors, some of which are extraordinarily visual and dramatic. Within the register of the visual and dramatic, he was equally at ease with images from Greek and Roman literature, the Bible and Church doctrine, and a huge range of other ideas from magic to masquerade. The introductory section set a very tight framework, which the succeeding six sections filled out. No doubt there are other ways of analysing what Marx was doing when he selected and manipulated his imagery, but in terms of controlling ideas I would choose the following: hero/fool,

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original/caricature, masquerade/parody, downward slope/upward slope, progress/reversion, construction/destruction. At the outset the overall trope is repetition, captured in the opening line: ‘Hegel observes somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur twice, so to speak’ (19). The corresponding footnotes in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, and in MEGA2, trace the origins of this to Hegel’s Philosophy of History, where the idea is that the same thing simply happens twice, or more specifically, that a transformation in state power must occur twice before it is sanctioned by the opinion of the people. Hegel wrote that those wanting to undo a coup (such as the conspirators against Julius Caesar) needed to do more to restore the Roman Republic than merely kill him. Repetition creates realities seems to be Hegel’s message: ‘Thus, Napoleon was defeated twice and twice the Bourbons were driven out.’ Marx was possibly recalling a letter from Engels (of 3 December 1851) in which historical events are described as ‘the first time high tragedy and the second time low farce’. Engels was possibly recalling earlier works by Marx in which world historical events culminate in comedy or in the rule of a comedian. Both were recalling the intellectual fireworks of their youthful days as Young Hegelians.15 Marx thus developed the notion of repetition, making the first and second occurrences different, and eventually substituting a much more dynamic idea as to what is required to produce a revolutionary overthrow of state and society. Marx’s notion of repetition with difference was thus enriched by the notion of a decline from heroism to foolishness: ‘... the London constable [Louis Bonaparte] ... after the little corporal [Napoleon Bonaparte] ... The eighteenth Brumaire of the fool after the eighteenth Brumaire of the genius!’ (19). Not content with denigration Marx moved on to the cartoon send-up, and the notion of the second imprint or bad copy. This is a realm of living satire and reductio ad absurdum: ‘The first time France was on the verge of bankruptcy, this time [Louis] Bonaparte is on the brink of debtors’ prison’ (19). The most famous passage in the Eighteenth Brumaire also occurs in the introductory section: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited.’ The most astonishingly original and egregiously underestimated of Marx’s devices in the Eighteenth Brumaire is not the idea


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that people make history albeit under constraints. The novelty is rather the identification of ‘circumstances, given and inherited’ – not with economic conditions or relations of production or any such ‘material’ feature of experience – but with something quite different: ‘tradition from all the dead generations’ weighing ‘like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ (19). The next shock for the contemporary reader is finding out that this nightmare world of tradition is, in Marx’s view, politically productive. From ‘things happening twice’, to ‘the second time as low farce’, Marx moved on to a notion of doing something once and once only, but in the guise of a previous event, thus making masquerade the opposite of farce.16 Farce as cartoon reductio is embarrassing; performing revolution in the costumes of a prior age is enabling. The repetition here is in the clothes and set dressing, rather than in the events. Indeed the revolutionary events that Marx was interested in were described by him as ‘creating something unprecedented’ (19). Substantively Marx declared that there have been ‘epochs of revolutionary crisis’, in which ‘spirits of the past’ are ‘nervously’ summoned up, not just in the minds and language of those participating but in uniforms, guise and art forms (19–20). The fusion here of the nightmare in the individual brain with collective recollection enacted in ritual is intellectually forward-looking, to say the least. Thus Luther masqueraded as the Apostle Paul, the [French] revolution of 1789–1814 draped itself alternately as Roman republic and Roman empire, and the revolution of 1848 could come up with nothing better than to parody 1789 at one point, the revolutionary inheritance of 1793–5 at another. (20) Strikingly Marx conceptualised the performative side of revolutionmaking in emotional terms. Referring to the pre-history of the 1848 revolution – the heroic events of 1789–1814 – Marx noted that the unheroic outcome had required an evocation of antique heroism, a world of ‘antediluvian colossi, and ... resurrected Romans – the Brutuses, the Gracchuses, the Publicolas, the tribunes, the senators and Caesar himself’: But unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless required heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and national conflict to bring it into the world. And in the strict classical traditions of the Roman republic its gladiators found the ideals and art forms, the

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self-deceptions that they needed, in order to hide from themselves the constrained, bourgeois character of their struggles, and to keep themselves emotionally at the level of high historical tragedy. (20–1) The complication here is that the latter stage of bourgeois revolution (1848) evoked only the ‘antiquity’ of the revolution of 1789–1814, which was itself conducted in Roman dress. Bourgeois revolutions, Marx seems to say, require this historical evocation for emotional reasons, as otherwise the revolution will not be satisfactorily performed. Nonetheless the sequence of revolutionary crises (1789–1814, 1830, 1848) evidently required to enact this kind of revolution, and the substantive goal of bourgeois society itself (a ‘dreary realism’ antithetical to the ‘classical traditions of the Roman republic’) meant that productive masquerade attenuated into evasive parody and immaterial spectrality: Thus the resurrection of the dead in those revolutions [1789–1814] served to glorify new struggles, not to parody the old [1848–51]; to magnify fantastically the given task, not to evade a real resolution; to recover the spirit of revolution, not to relaunch its spectre. (21) Just to reinforce his point Marx added that at an even earlier stage (pre-1789) in this historical development, ‘Cromwell and the English had borrowed Old Testament language, passions and delusions for their bourgeois revolution’. This extends Marx’s revolutionary sequence back to the 1640s and 1650s, and his line of productive, parodic counterparts further back to pre-Roman Old Testament political dramaturgy (21). The performative aspect of this conceptualisation of what it takes to get progressive political change (towards this particular goal, bourgeois society) was explained by Marx in psychological terms as a theory of language-learning, or rather second language-learning: [A] beginner studying a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue; but only when he can use it without referring back, and thus forsake his native language for the new, only then has he entered into the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently. (20)


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Thus the new must come into being through a process of imaginative anachronism that gives a comforting illusion of familiarity, an emotional high of heroism and a collective act of performative intercommunication that actually enacts the requisite changes: Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon – these heroes of the former French revolution, as well as the political parties and massed crowds alike – accomplished the business of the day in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases: the unleashing and consolidation of modern bourgeois society. (20) What, then, is the connection between antediluvian colossi, whether of the Old Testament or of classical Rome, and the making of bourgeois society? Marx seems to say that the work of political parties, massed crowds and heroes – that is, the dramatis personae of the sequential revolutionary crises, working in masquerade and thus resurrecting the dead – were destroying feudalism as a system of authority and property relationships. In that way they were creating the conditions for free competition and so unfettering ‘the industrial productive power of the nation’ (20). Whether this was an unfettering of pre-existing ‘forces of production’ or an unfettering of the ability to create such forces is rather a moot point. It is worth considering that in Marx’s scheme of things – a certain kind of jerky linearity in historical development – it really doesn’t matter. Change happens. The added value here is Marx’s emotionally, psychologically and performatively perceptive account of how progressive politics takes place. Given Marx’s self-proclaimed goal (in the Communist Manifesto of 1848) of moving history on to the next phase, proletarian revolution and communist society, it is perhaps surprising, yet again, that his sequential view of this historical process is remarkably different from his etiology of bourgeois revolution: The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin till it has stripped off all superstition from the past. Previous revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realise its own content. There phrase transcended content, here content transcends phrase. (22)

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The overall trajectory here has more jerkiness than linearity. The trajectory from feudalism through to bourgeois society is both upward sloping, towards eventual proletarian revolution, and downward sloping, towards the immediate ‘content’ of bourgeois society. This content seems to be the ‘revolutionary starting point, the situation, the relationships, the exclusive conditions for the development of a real modern revolution’. Politically this is described as a ‘situation ... which makes impossible any reversion, and circumstances themselves cry out:’ Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze! [There’s no time like the present!] (23)17 Marx’s depiction of these circumstances was again highly imaginative, including allusions to death, dementia, dejection and demolition. The bourgeois republic must be destroyed, he said, before the conditions for successful proletarian revolution are in place, but the agent of destruction is not the proletariat: The constitution, the national assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue [right-wing] and the red [left-wing] republicans, the heroes of [the Algerian wars in] Africa, the thunder from the grandstand, the sheet-lightning of the daily press, all the literature, political names and intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberty, equality and fraternity, and the ninth of May 1852 [when Bonaparte’s presidency was supposed to expire, but didn’t] – all that has magically vanished under the spell of a man whom even his enemies would deny was a sorcerer. Universal manhood suffrage seems to have lasted just long enough to make its own testament in the eyes of the world and to declare in the very name of the people: ‘What’s worth building is worth demolishing’ [Goethe, Faust, I]. (23–4) Moreover (ultimately) successful proletarian revolutions progress in an almost backwards way, according to Marx, so he did not conceive of proletarian victory until, paradoxically, the revolutionary class had reached a dead-end in a sequence of defeats: [P]roletarian revolutions, such as those of the nineteenth century, engage in perpetual self-criticism, always stopping in their own


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tracks; they return to what is apparently complete in order to begin it anew, and deride with savage brutality the inadequacies, weak points and pitiful aspects of their first attempts; they seem to strike down their adversary, only to have him draw new powers from the earth and rise against them once more with the strength of a giant ... (22) Marx seems to see the proletariat victorious only when stripped of illusions and superstition, unlike the bourgeoisie, who, through productive masquerade, were actually rather used to these things. What buoyed them up (in getting rid of feudalism) then dragged them down, not as victims of the proletariat, but as victims of authoritarian militarism of a very low sort. Marx identified Louis Bonaparte and his thuggish associates and hangers-on with cheats, crooks, con-men etc. As the story unfolds towards the coup d’état Marx painted the supposed saviours of the Republic (from workingclass insurrection) as more and more nakedly criminal and enemies, in fact, of the bourgeoisie and their ideas of ‘order’: Finally the high priests of the ‘religion of order’ are kicked off their Pythian tripods, hauled from their beds in the dead of night, flung into prison vans, thrown into gaols or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their laws torn to shreds in the name of religion, property, family, order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their family gods are profaned, their houses are bombarded for amusement – in the name of property, family, religion and order. Finally the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order and the hero Crapulinski [Louis Bonaparte] seizes the [Palace of the] Tuileries as ‘saviour of society’. (27–8) Marx was scathing about the elements of bourgeois society that fooled themselves that this campaign against working-class interests was being run for the benefit of the republican bourgeoisie: [T]hey packed up their things, donned their laurel wreaths in advance of the games, and busied themselves on the financial exchanges ... The [coup d’état of the] second of December [1851] struck them like a bolt from the blue, and the peoples that were willing enough to allow their innermost fears – in an era of

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cowardly dejection – to be assuaged by the most vociferous loudmouths will perhaps have convinced themselves that cackling geese can no longer save the Capitol. (23) The drama here is the dissolution of the bourgeois republic, supposedly the vehicle for the development of industrial wealth within a competitive economy, as it collapses into an authoritarian and decidedly unbourgeois regime of banditry: Society is saved as often as its circle of rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against the wider one. Even the simplest demand for bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most formal republicanism, for the most basic democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an ‘outrage to society’ and stigmatized as ‘socialism’. (27) What brings this on is a temporary collusion between forces uniting themselves against the massed working class, that is, bourgeois republicans and armed criminals. Marx memorialised the working class in its ‘June days’ insurrection of 1848, in which it was defeated, and after which it went down to further defeats: As soon as one of the higher social strata plots a revolutionary trajectory, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it and thus shares all the defeats which successive parties suffer. But these further blows are of ever diminishing force the more they are distributed over the whole surface of society. Its more important leaders in the assembly and in the press are sacrificed one after another in the courts, and ever more ambiguous figures take up leadership ... It seems unable to rediscover revolutionary prowess or to renew its energy from fresh alliances, until all the classes it struggled with in June are lying flat out beside it. But at least it was defeated with the honours of a great world historical struggle; not only France but all Europe trembles at the June earthquake ... (26) The truth of these circumstances, for Marx, was that ‘bourgeois republic means the unlimited despotism of one class over’ (26–7). This seems to be excellent Hegelianism – progressive development arising, phoenix-like, from the ashes of irreconcilable contradictions – but rather poor sociology and politics, not to mention strategy and tactics for armed revolutionary conflict. However, Marx’s portrayal


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of bourgeois democrats as weak and therefore vulnerable to authoritarians, who can manipulate the politics of class, was prescient. Further, Marx’s short treatise on the performative power of anachronistic allusions and invocations is startling. The Eighteenth Brumaire represents a politics of imagination done through writing with extraordinary imagery. It isn’t everything, but it’s a tremendous start. NOTES 1. Apologies to Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), p. ix. 2. Apologies to Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), this volume, pp. 19–20. Hereafter numbers in brackets after quotations from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire refer to this edn. 3. Engels to Eduard Bernstein, 2–3 November 1882, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, C.W., Vol. 46, p. 356; see also Engels to Carl Schmidt, 5 August 1890, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, trans. I. Lasker, ed. S. Ryazanskaya, 2nd edn (Moscow: Progress, 1965), p. 415. 4. Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 6 March 1868, in C.W., Vol. 42, p. 544. 5. See Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1983); and Terrell Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), Ch. 8. 6. Napoleon’s coup d’état of 9 November 1799 (18 Brumaire VIII by the revolutionary calendar) overthrew the ruling Directory of the (First) Republic. 7. Karl Marx, ‘Preface’ (1869) to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 2nd edn, in C.W., Vol. 21, pp. 56–8. 8. See Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, new edn (London: Fontana, 1995), p. 189. 9. Frederick Engels, ‘Preface’ (1885) to Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 3rd edn, in C.W., Vol. 26, pp. 302–3. 10. Marx, ‘Preface’ (1869), pp. 56–7. 11. These issues are discussed in Terrell Carver, Marx’s Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); for a comparison of the 1845–46 and 1859 texts see Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels, pp. 72–6; see, of course, G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 12. I discuss problems in and about The German Ideology in Terrell Carver, Postmodern Marx, Chs 5, 8, 10. 13. Carver, Marx’s Social Theory. 14. I have aired some of these issues in Terrell Carver, ‘Translating Marx’, Alternatives, Vol. 22 (1997), pp. 191–204, and Postmodern Marx, Ch. 7. 15. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, C.W., Vol. 11, p. 643, n. 65; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MEGA2 (Berlin: Dietz, 1985), Vol. I.11.Apparat, pp. 738–9.

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16. My use of the notions of masquerade and performativity is derived from Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990). 17. This quotation derives from Hegel’s ‘Preface’ to his Philosophy of Right, and consists of a Greek passage from Aesop, followed by a Latin translation. The quotation comes from a story in which a braggart boasts that he once made a stupendous jump in Rhodes, and then a bystander says, in effect, ‘if so, you can do it here’. Hegel constructs a German version, punning first on the Greek (Rhodos = Rhodes, rhodon = rose) and then on the Latin (saltus = jump, salta = dance!), alluding obscurely to Rosicrucianism, which finds the rose in the cross, and joy in tragedy – or at least that is what Hegel seems to think. See G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 303, n. 31, n. 33, n. 34. Given that the Latin line from Aesop was something of an adage, I have given an English ‘drift’ of this in square brackets. Warm thanks and grateful acknowledgement to Henry Hardy, Wolfson College, Oxford, for his scholarly work on this widely misinterpreted conundrum.

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Performing Politics: Class, Ideology and Discourse in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire James Martin

The end of 1851: revolutionary advances have swiftly degenerated. Bourgeois reaction and petty intrigue have led to a coup d’état by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. The bourgeoisie, unable to stabilise its political rule, has opted to destroy its own parliamentary power-base passing the reins to a ‘fake-on-the-make’. How does Marx choose to narrate this miserable historical episode? Not with the distanced ‘objectivity’ of a social scientist but with the bitter prejudgement of a theatre critic. The Eighteenth Brumaire is a review of a ‘low farce’ in three acts. While it is a ‘class analysis’ of a particular historical conjuncture, what stands out are the tropes of farce. In interpreting the crisis Marx presents us with improbable events, inversions of expected behaviour and exaggerated responses all performed in outlandish costume. In this chapter I want to draw some parallels between Marx’s text and contemporary theories of politics as a ‘performative’ activity in Austin’s sense of a ‘speech act’ that brings into being a certain state of affairs.1 A performative differs with a constative that seeks to ‘reflect’ or describe the world. The words ‘I do’ in a wedding ceremony do not reflect or describe a state affairs, they effectively bring it about. On the basis of this recognition certain strands of contemporary theory make the claim that politics is not so much a reflection of something that pre-exists it (such as Reason, selfinterest, etc.) but is, rather, a performative act. Agents and/or the contexts in which they act are themselves produced in the process of action itself. This logic of the performative cuts across any strict distinction between the ‘real’ or material and the mental or ‘imagined’. Such a view is closely associated with the ‘linguistic turn’ in social and political theory, particularly its most recent ‘postmodern’ incarnations. The idea that the world is constituted through ‘discourses’ that frame the meaning of its subjects and objects is increasingly commonplace, if still controversial, in the texts of the social and political sciences. 129

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There is no space here for a full treatment of this argument or its implications but it is certain that it challenges the widespread notion that political activity always masks a more fundamental, ‘underlying’ reality of interests or motivations. This does not mean that the world is simply fabricated in any way we please, that things are ‘whatever we say they are’. It means that what we take as the ‘material’ conditions of politics (its agents, their interests, structural constraints, etc.) are, in a fundamental sense, fictive constructs that set limits to how we might think or act.2 To understand politics it is not enough simply to ‘reveal’ the true forces at play ‘beneath the surface’. It is necessary to understand how the parameters of politics are themselves defined and contested by and through processes that are performative in nature. I will argue that this logic of the performative is evident in an untheorised but nevertheless tantalising way in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. I will then go on to discuss three contemporary theorisations of politics which take the performative as their point of departure. STAGING THE REVOLUTION Marx opens his analysis of the Eighteenth Brumaire with a short commentary on the imaginary themes through which revolutions are made that sets the tone for much of the rest of the book. It has been necessary, he claims, for revolutionaries to ‘summon up the spirits of the past ... to enact new scenes in world history’.3 Bourgeois revolutions often invoke historical references and symbols – the ‘dead weight of tradition’ – to legitimise and so ease the momentous breach they make with earlier orders. Yet he draws a crucial contrast between the French revolution of 1789 and that which overthrew the July Monarchy in 1848. Whereas the first was brought about by ‘heroes’ and invoked images of the Roman republic in order to ‘glorify new struggles’ and to ‘magnify fantastically the given task’, the second was a grotesque ‘parody’ whose ‘resurrection of the dead’ (that is, its referencing of the events and characters of 1789) ultimately resolved nothing. The revolution of 1848 represents ‘low farce’ when compared to its more edifying original. In a further contrast, he points out that the future proletarian revolution will ‘let the dead bury the dead’. It will require none of this ‘superstition’ and fanciful rhetoric to fulfil its promise. Instead it will be nourished on ‘perpetual self-criticism’ and a realistic understanding of the task at hand. What is striking about Marx’s analysis is that despite his invocation of the more austere, self-critical character of a proletarian

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revolutionary perspective – with which we must assume he identifies – he nevertheless employs a rich, figurative language to describe and evaluate the events he is examining. The theatrical dimension – though employed to disparage the events as ludicrous – is incorporated into his own analysis as part of his critical interpretation. Clearly, in his view classes are the underlying forces but they figure as dominant interests rather than as evidence of the ‘determination’ of society in general by the economic base. The succession of events is narrated not simply as the conjunctural interplay of class forces but precisely as the ‘low farce’ he announces in his first paragraph – with all its ridiculous characters and sudden, implausible turns in the plot. Needless to say, class interests are presented at various points, and somewhat inconsistently, as the motivation behind a number of decisions. But what occupies the narrator is not exclusively the ‘real interests’ obscured by the day-to-day events but also the imaginary terrain of political conflict in which alliances shift, paradoxes arise, events are mishandled. Superstitions, blind prejudices, and blatant opportunism come into play just as much as the interests of social classes. Considering the shifting meanings of the revolution’s ‘catch-phrases’ (for example, ‘property, family, religion, order’),4 the hysterical positioning of different factions in relation to each other (for example, ‘Even bourgeois liberalism is decried as socialistic …’)5 and Bonaparte’s ability to represent the peasantry ‘by means of the ghost of an Empire’6 we are encouraged to understand this complex process by taking into account the self-perceptions and motivations, however deluded, of the actors themselves. It is precisely these symbolic ‘phrases’ and not exclusively their material ‘content’ that shape the flow of events and their eventual outcome. Marx offers us little in the way of sound methodological pointers for conducting such a political analysis. What he does say is not consistently followed through in the text. For instance, he makes a key reference to the way ‘different forms of property’ give rise to a ‘superstructure of different and peculiarly formed sentiments, delusions, modes of thought and outlooks on life’. An individual may mistake this surface ‘image’ for ‘real motives’ which in fact derive from property relations.7 This familiar analytical framework is not, however, rigorously employed by Marx himself. At times class interests seem to be the real motivations, at other times peculiarly formed sentiments are clearly at work. This does not suggest that Marx is working with an implausible methodology – it is not evident that he is working with one at all. That makes it difficult, if we are

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looking for a clear Marxist ‘method’, satisfactorily to reconcile the Eighteenth Brumaire with Marx’s more well-known remarks on history and society. Clearly this was not, in this instance, Marx’s own preoccupation. For those who believe Marxism is a theory of history first and only secondly a political theory this is clearly a dilemma. There is no evidence in this analysis that property relations are understood to ‘determine’ consciousness in anything but an indirect and haphazard way. But for those not seeking such a method the Eighteenth Brumaire suggests a rather more interesting lesson: that a symbolic dimension is integral to the ‘material’ operation of the social, especially political, world and requires interpretation as such. We might say that the staging of events must be the object of analysis because there is nobody hiding in the wings directing the action. The 1848 revolution in France was profoundly ambiguous, in itself and in its implications, especially for direct observers and those involved. This point is underlined by art historian T.J. Clark who, considering the effect of the events of 1848–51 on French painters, argues that the precise meaning of the revolutions was never at all transparent.8 The diverse composition of class forces in February meant that ‘[t]he revolution was a triumph for the bourgeoisie, yet it struck fear into its heart’.9 Ordinary people were both revered and reviled as both the symbol of popular revolt and as ‘barbarians’ only too ready to destroy civilisation. This was not simply paranoia: workers actually fought on both sides of the barricades in June 1848, that is, both for and against the republican bourgeoisie. The political forces in February (and later) consisted of unstable and complex coalitions of bourgeoisie, shopkeepers, craftsmen, artisans, rural peasants, etc. The political terrain was shifting and deeply confused and there was not always clarity as to who was fighting for what. In this context, conjuring up the ‘spirits of the past’ was not just some sly effort at propaganda but a way of stabilising a volatile situation by ‘calling on old resentments and memories’.10 Marx’s figurative language might be understood, then, not simply as evidence of his flare for the dramatic but an implicit recognition that the events of 1848–51 must be understood in terms that recognise the symbolic dimension in which they unfolded. That ‘class interests’ are key to this process is undoubtedly true for him, yet that particular ‘Marxist’ insight never overwhelms his analysis in the way encouraged by the crude base/superstructure model (often taken to be the essential principle of Marxist social theory). Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire embodies a recognition (though not a theorisa-


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tion) of the ‘performative’ character of politics, that is, the manner in which the symbolic is not simply some secondary ‘level’ perched upon the hard rock of property relations but is itself integral to the materialisation of class power. One hundred and fifty years later, that point has become central to innovations in theorising politics and the political. PERFORMING POLITICS: BEYOND CLASS AND IDEOLOGY Contemporary ‘post-Marxist’ theories have increasingly focused on the symbolic dimension in the constitution of political identities and the defining of their terrain of contest. In particular ‘class’ and ‘ideology’ have been diminished as operative terms in political analysis and substituted by concepts such as ‘identity’ and ‘discourse’. Whilst some Marxists pass this off as a bizarre postmodern delusion in which once sophisticated Marxist theoreticians have swapped serious analysis for some kind of fantasy world where ‘anything goes’, a less reactionary approach makes clear the effort to conceive politics and the political more critically than reference to class and ideology has allowed.11 The problem with class analysis lies in its abstract and reductive character. Whilst it is possible to abstractly identify different class positions in relation to a capitalist economy, any concrete analysis has to take into account a wider variety of social forces that do not easily fall into a ‘proletarian’ or ‘bourgeois’ camp. At the same time, trying to place individuals, their actions and beliefs into a class category involves a reduction of social complexity that, increasingly, is considered illegitimate. This is not to say that ‘class’ is not at times a useful shorthand for a variety of phenomena. But it is an imprecise shorthand and fails to fully grasp the character of different social identities and antagonisms. Few post-Marxists would deny the classdivided character of capitalism. But to say that classes are the major social forces upon which the entirety of society is built is a different matter altogether. As Barry Hindess argues, classes do not exist as coherent collective agents able to act on the basis of pre-existing ‘interests’ that can be derived from a social structure.12 We may classify the distribution of certain of the benefits and losses of capitalism in terms of classes but this does not make an automatic case for political agency. Debates on ideology over the past three decades have followed this growing dissatisfaction with class analysis. Ideology – in the sense of beliefs, identities, language and other ‘forms of conscious-

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ness’ – cannot be shown to have an automatic ‘class’ character. Many different types of ideological thought (e.g. ethnic or sexual identity) and practice (e.g. participation in democratic elections) are irreducible to a specific position in a class structure, although actual classes may adopt and modify them on certain occasions. The alignment between class position in an economic structure and ideology has come to be conceived by some as a ‘relatively autonomous’ relationship, for others as ‘non-necessary’. 13 For others still, the symbolic realm denoted by the concept of ideology needs to be entirely rethought in such a way that its independence is not always asserted in relation to an economic base external to it. In the late 1970s and 1980s, under the influence of different currents of ‘post-structuralist’ and psychoanalytic thought, the argument became increasingly popular that language and discourse can be regarded not just as ‘autonomous’ but rather as a constitutive dimension of social life. This does not mean that social structures do not influence political identities but rather that they cannot be conceived as external and independent of the discursive realm. This movement away from a reliance on class and ideology as ‘objective’ references in social and political analysis has been fundamental in providing space for the concept of the performative in radical political theory. Let us consider briefly three contemporary proponents of this argument: Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau. The idea of politics as a type of performance is today closely associated with the feminist theorist Judith Butler.14 Butler has developed the idea that sexual identity is discursively performed rather than ascribed by nature. In Gender Trouble her argument follows Foucault’s notion that bodies are ‘sites of inscription’ onto which particular conceptions are projected through the discursive practices of medicine and so on. Foucault rejects the idea of a preconstituted subject as the starting point of social analysis; subjects are themselves produced in distinctive ways through acts of power in which the self is moulded through techniques and knowledges applied to it. For Butler, the argument extends to sexual identity, in particular the notion of heterosexual difference (that is, the idea that there is by nature an essential difference between male and female sexes). Heterosexuality is typically assumed to be a natural, structural difference around which a variety of social constructions – or ‘genders’ – are later moulded. Such an assumption has been crucial to the feminist movement who typically argue from the position of


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the subordinated other: namely, ‘woman’. However, Butler challenges this notion by claiming that heterosexual difference is not an ‘essential’ structure of human life but a social construction. Heterosexual difference – the binary distinction between ‘male’ and ‘female’ – is conceived by Butler in terms of Austin’s notion of a performative, that is, a claim whose validity stems from being acted out or performed. For Butler, sex classifications are not descriptions of natural dispositions but are the effects of practices that invoke the reality that ‘male’ and ‘female’ purport to describe. Sexual identity is ultimately a product of performed practices that generate appearances that imply an internal essence: ‘what we take to be an “internal” feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts’.15 This is not say that sexual identity is simply a matter of the will, of ‘dressing up’ as one pleases. In Bodies that Matter Butler develops her argument by recognising the materiality of sexual difference, its apparently ‘natural’ and incontestable character. Yet materiality, she argues, is the ‘effect of power’, the embeddedness of cultural constructions in practices that efface their own contingency and therefore seem natural. Thus ‘performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act”, but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces effects that it names’.16 The widespread and persistent performance of sexual difference – as though it inhered within the body as a natural disposition – endows it with a material presence and provides its bearer with a sense of legitimate ‘personhood’. Yet, performativity highlights acts of subversion as well as imposition; the meaning and character of ‘sex’ is open to modification in the same moment as it is reproduced. Thus it is the performative character of sexual identity that makes ‘parody’ and other kinds of symbolic manipulation so fascinating. Parodic practices such as cross-dressing both affirm the assumed reality of sexual difference and subvert it by revealing its contingency on the outward display of an elusive internal essence. Butler has expanded the notion of performativity from her initial concern with sexual identity to wider contexts of political interest. In Excitable Speech she examines the power of ‘hate’ speech to constitute subjects as intrinsically inferior. Importantly, for our discussion, in 1998 she published a piece in New Left Review rejecting claims that the politics of sexuality and ‘race’, along with other new social movements, could be dismissed by Marxists as ‘merely cultural’ in contrast to the materiality of class politics.17 She argues

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that the cultural construction of legitimate personhood (which her theory of performativity takes as its focus) is integral to the materiality of political economy. Sexuality and its regulation must be understood as part of the mode of production not an entirely separate concern or related only marginally.18 The family, welfare entitlements, civil law and so forth are elements of ‘the economy’ in the broad sense of ‘the reproduction of goods and the social reproduction of persons’19 and are fundamental sites in the social regulation – and hence performativity – of sexual identity. The ‘material’ character of ideology is a key theme in the work of Slavoj Zizek and bears a certain resemblance to the notion of performativity in Butler. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Zizek argues that fantasy should be understood as a necessary support to social reality not its opposite. Rejecting the common Marxist notion of ideology as misrecognition of an external reality, Zizek insists that the real issue isn’t really what people believe. It is crucial only that people act as if certain things were true.20 So long as their actions are regulated by this ‘as if’ then their experience of the world retains a degree of ‘normalcy’. Thus he insists that people tend to know the gloss of propaganda is never literally true, that, for example, money isn’t intrinsically valuable or that the totalitarian state isn’t really working efficiently. Drawing on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Zizek argues that ideology should be conceived in terms of the ‘fantasy space’ that structures social experience prior to any specific belief we hold within it. Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our reality itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations …21 The illusion is necessary because human subjects are, according to Lacanian theory, constitutively lacking a positive identity: ‘Fantasy is … an imaginary scenario the function of which is to provide a kind of positive support filling out the subject’s constitutive void.’22 The ideological fantasy regulates our often mundane reality and in a quite material way constructs our sense of ‘being’; it serves as a space into which certain desires can be projected and an essential emptiness can be filled.23 The fantasy ‘sets a scene’, stages a play, in which we may play a role, yet we need not fully identify with that role. We can be as cynical as we like, yet still exchange commodities


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in capitalism; or we can demand our ‘universal rights’ as ‘free’ individuals, yet be perfectly aware that such rights are not all compatible or equally shared. Paradoxically, Zizek points out that ‘too literal’ an identification with an ideology can in fact undermine its functioning. The zealots of capitalism or of totalitarian societies believe too much that equal exchange or the command economy can produce a harmonious society and so cannot adequately explain the empirical anomalies. For fantasy to work, a certain ‘distance’ must be taken between individual belief and the fantasy scenario that regulates the subject’s behaviour.24 Indeed, ‘[t]his very distance is ideology. Ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it.’25 If fantasy functions to conceal the traumatic lack in the subject, it is nevertheless a fragile construction, constantly haunted by the emptiness it seeks to occlude. As often as he highlights the fantasy at work in material practices, Zizek alerts us to the ‘obscene’, ‘repressed’ and ‘horrific’ elements that return to undermine the world it constructs. The other side of fantasy is an anxiety produced by the gap between our image of a well-ordered reality and the leftover (the Real) that cannot be assimilated. The fantasy can be maintained only by neutralising the remainder. Following Lacan, Zizek argues that this remainder embodies jouissance (enjoyment), the image of a pre-symbolic fullness that destabilises our neatly regulated fantasy space. The disruption of fantasy is typically given form by the identification of an ‘other’ who wants to ‘steal our enjoyment’. Thus the fantasy of settled national identity is often constructed around a fascination with the pleasures of the other who ‘undermines’ the nation’s purity. For example, the sexual, culinary or personal habits of the Jews, blacks or Catholics whose presence supposedly ‘hinders’ the full realisation of the fantasy-nation. It is just this obsessive concern with the pleasures of the other that Zizek notes in contemporary racial and nationalist discourses. But it can also be detected in liberal democratic ideas in which the fantasy of the harmonious liberal community persistently slides into an obsession with the ‘enemies’ of the nation.26 Our third and final theorisation of the performative character of politics lies in the work of Ernesto Laclau. In a number of recent works Laclau has developed a political theory of discourse that builds upon the arguments first published with Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.27 In that text Laclau and Mouffe

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argued against a Marxist ‘economism’ which theorised politics exclusively from the perspective of a determining economic base. Rejecting the idea of an economic instance autonomous from the rest of the social totality and exerting a ‘necessary’ determining force over it, Laclau and Mouffe claim that society is constituted ‘discursively’. That is, its organising principles are not fixed and law-like but symbolic patterns of differences that overlap, mutually constrain and modify each other. Political subjects cannot, therefore, be inferred a priori from some pure, abstract structure but are contingent products of concrete struggles and conflicts. Social classes, therefore, have no privileged place in left-wing struggles; their leading role in socialist politics is not guaranteed by the ‘laws of history’ or the primacy of the economic structure in historical change. For Laclau and Mouffe, political identities are the outcome of particular conflicts that succeed in unifying a multiplicity of demands around a generalised antagonism. Importantly, it is ‘antagonism’ itself that unifies or, adapting Gramsci, hegemonises particular identities by generating a ‘chain of equivalence’ amongst their different demands and positioning them against a global oppressor (e.g. capitalism, the state, ‘infidels’, etc.).28 For Laclau and Mouffe, antagonism is not algorithmic, the calculable outcome of a structural contradiction (e.g. between classes); rather, it is a distinctive social experience in which particular identities face an enemy deemed to ‘threaten’ or negate the very being of a social group. This sense of threat modifies the identity of the group, causing it to lose its differential character in relation to other groups and permits it to be placed alongside them in a common space. Laclau and Mouffe claim that ‘antagonism is the limit of all objectivity’, it is the limit of the social.29 By this they mean that political identities do not have an essentially objective character that can be determined prior to the context in which they emerge. What we are as political subjects (for example, nationalists, workers, Royalists, Christians, etc.) is dependent upon what we identify as a limit on our being, as ‘Other’ (e.g. foreigners, capitalists, republicans, heathens, etc.). Thus the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘false’ interests or needs around which social agents are formed is bound up with the effort to define social reality. In short political struggle is a process with intrinsically symbolic dimensions in which ‘objectivity’ is itself part of the contest. Laclau has developed his theory of discourse in recent years to interpret the processes of signification at work in politics.30 Central


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to his argument has been the concept of the ‘empty signifier’. An empty signifier is a sign which loses its particular reference and comes to stand as the symbol of a generic equivalence between differential identities.31 Concepts such as ‘Justice’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Order’ typically function in this way as the unifying theme articulating a variety of identities and demands. The distinctive role of empty signifiers is to serve as a generic ‘frontier’ separating legitimate and illegitimate demands and symbolising a shared aspiration to overcome repression. Because particular identities are always partial and incomplete, contingently produced through differences raised in the process of struggle and conflict, the empty signifier symbolises what Laclau calls an ‘absent fullness’, the (impossible) settled identity that is yet to be attained. Thus, paradoxically, it is what negates a group that gives it a positive identity. Political struggle involves, for Laclau, certain social groups trying to present themselves as the ‘incarnation’ of this absent fullness, that is, as the unique social agency able to embody the universal demand for Order, Justice, etc. It is this attempt to incarnate universal categories that Laclau conceives as the key move in the politics of hegemony. These theoretical approaches differ in important ways and it would be wrong to assume there is an easy fit between each (as a recently published ‘dialogue’ between the authors shows).32 However, there are a number of overlapping concerns that unify them: a rejection of the notion of a preconstituted ‘self’ or subject; the rejection of class and economic structures as a privileged starting point for analysis; a concern with the way the subject’s identity is contingently constructed through a socio-symbolic (or discursive) process which constitutes the subject as ‘already given’, that is, as having a positive essence that exists prior to its context; and a conception of ideological mechanisms not as concealing an independent reality but, on the contrary, as concealing the impossibility of a fully determined, independent reality. For each, political struggle involves a performative dimension whereby certain kinds of imaginary identification bring into being the terrain on which subjects contest their ‘interests’, however these are then defined. CONCLUSION Inevitably, doubts will arise as to how political analyses that focus on, or begin from, a symbolic dimension can remain properly engaged with the effective constraints of socio-economic and political struggles. Importantly, however, none of the theories above

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denies the significance of capitalism as a fundamental context in which political struggle occurs. Indeed, for Zizek the commodification of individual identity in capitalism is key to his continued commitment to a form of Marxism.33 Yet, the explicit rejection of a distinction between the symbolic and the material sets these thinkers apart from a traditional Marxist agenda. Capitalism is one of a number of overlapping contexts around which discursive identifications might be made. For Butler and Laclau, in particular, this steering away from capitalism as the baseline of all political action underscores strong support for a radical pluralism in which a variety of social movements are conceived as legitimate agents of change. Critics may well bemoan this focus on the discursive as a distraction from the underlying forces at work in the contemporary global-capitalist order. But the above thinkers’ arguments are not in any way ‘anti-Marxist’ if by that we mean opposed to a critical account of the structuring effects of capitalism on society, its role in producing conflict and antagonism and, at the same time, generating ideology that obscures its effects. Indeed, it is interesting to note that key elements in these theories are already present in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: the parodic character of the 1848 revolutions, and Louis-Napoleon in particular; the colliding fantasy worlds of the different bourgeois, socialist and Royalist parties; the struggle by Bonaparte and the parties to hegemonise empty signifiers such as ‘Order’ and ‘the Republic’. However, where these thinkers differ fundamentally from Marx is with his claim that the symbolic dimension, or its need, will be surpassed by a more honest ‘facing the facts’ by a genuinely radical political subject. The realm of fantasy, imagination and discourse are not exclusively bourgeois instruments but must be integral to any collective mobilisation; indeed, they are a constitutive dimension of collectivity itself. By suggesting that proletarian revolutionaries will abandon superstition Marx seems to indulge in the very ideological misconception that contemporary theorists warn us against: namely, to believe that ‘reality’ can be accessed and transformed without recourse to fantasy, imagination and discourse. Of course, Marx does not set out a theory of the performative or try in some way to anticipate post-modern concerns with language, discourse and identity. But implicit in what he writes is an assumption that political struggle must, at some level, be read in terms of its symbols and imaginary constructions because these are effective elements in making history. If contemporary social and


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political theorists take this point much further than Marx, they do so not to diminish the constraints on political action but to ensure that however ‘new scenes in world history’ are ‘acted out’ the performance will not be an empty ‘resurrection of the dead’. NOTES I am grateful to Alan Finlayson and Adrian Little for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 2. Setting limits, it should be pointed out, is not the same as ‘determining’. The claim that discourses set limits does not imply that such limits cannot be contested and/or transformed. Indeed, in political conflicts that is precisely what we should expect to occur. 3. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this volume, pp. 19–20. 4. See ibid., p. 27. 5. Ibid., p. 56. 6. Ibid., p. 101. 7. See Ibid., p. 43. 8. T.J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973). 9. Ibid., p. 10. 10. Ibid., p. 15. 11. For the reactionaries, see, for example, Norman Geras, ‘Post-Marxism?’, New Left Review, 163 (May–June 1987); Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991); Ellen Meiskins Wood, The Retreat from Class, revised edn (London: Verso, 1998); Jeremy Lester, Dialogue of Negation (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Paul Reynolds, ‘Post-Marxism: Radical Political Theory and Practice Beyond Marxism’, in Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds (eds), Marxism, The Millennium and Beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 12. See Barry Hindess, Politics and Class Analysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), esp. Chs 2, 6 and 7. 13. See the discussion by Gareth Stedman Jones in the ‘Introduction’ to his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 14. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 2nd edn (New York and London: Routledge, 1999). 15. Ibid., p. xv. 16. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 2. 17. Judith Butler, ‘Merely Cultural’, New Left Review, 227 (January–February 1998), pp. 33–44. 18. Here Butler takes issue with Nancy Fraser’s distinction between a politics of ‘recognition’ and of ‘redistribution’. See Nancy Fraser, Justice

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘PostSocialist’ Condition (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). Butler, ‘Merely Cultural’, p. 40. Slavoj Zizek , ‘How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?’ in Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p. 36. Ibid., p. 45. Slavoj Zizek, ‘Beyond Discourse Analysis’, in Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), p. 254. Slavoj Zizek, ‘Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach’, in Elizabeth Wright and Edmund Wright (eds), The Zizek Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 89–92. See also, Slavoj Zizek, ‘From Reality to the Real’, in Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1991), p. 8. Zizek, ‘Fantasy as a Political Category’, pp. 97–9. Ibid., p. 97. Slavoj Zizek, ‘Formal Democracy and its Discontents’, in Looking Awry, p. 165. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2001). Ibid., pp. 127–34. See ibid., pp. 122–7. See Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time and Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996). See Laclau, ‘Why do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?’ in Emancipation(s). See Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000). See his comment in his ‘Preface’ to The Zizek Reader (p. ix) that ‘a return to the centrality of the Marxist critique of political economy is crucial for my project: the proliferation of the new forms of postmodern political agents is for me the obverse of the tacit acceptance of global capitalism as “the only game in town”’.

Part 3

The Eighteenth Brumaire as History

5

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte: ‘Hero’ or ‘Grotesque Mediocrity’? Roger Price

The debate on the nature of the state continues to be informed by the contribution of Karl Marx. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) he contended that ‘the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. It represented the organised power of one class for oppressing another.1 The forms taken by a state were the product of class rule at a particular stage of social development. In the first volume of Capital Marx would insist on the importance of political repression: during the historic genesis of capitalist reproduction … [t]he bourgeoisie, at its rise, wants and uses the power of the state to ‘regulate’ wages, i.e., to force them within the limits suitable for surplus value making, to lengthen the working day and to keep the labourer himself in the normal degree of dependence. This is an essential element of the so-called primitive accumulation.2 This stress on the role of the state was supplemented by an insistence on its employment of education, religion and patriotism in order to reinforce its position – an emphasis foreshadowing Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. This is nowhere more clearly expressed than in The German Ideology, written in 1845–46, in which Marx and Engels wrote that the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: that is, the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class that has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that on the whole, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the 145

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dominant material relations, … hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. Those who controlled the machinery of state were able ‘to represent its interest … as the general interest’.3 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s election as President of the Republic in December 1848 and his coup d’état in December 1851 clearly caused problems for Marx. Previously, he had conceived of a situation in which the state was able to achieve a degree of autonomy only ‘in those countries where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where the estates, done away with in more advanced countries, still play a part and there exists a mixture, where consequently no section of the population can achieve dominance over the others’.4 In contrast Bonaparte’s coup appeared to represent the renunciation of power by the ‘ruling classes’ and a step back from bourgeois liberalism to absolute monarchy, to a situation in which the ‘executive with its … complement of half a million officials alongside an army of another half million, this fearsome parasitic body, … traps French society like a net and chokes it at every pore’.5 Furthermore it raised questions about the role of the individual in history. The exceptionalism of the first Napoleon had been considered in 1845 in The Holy Family. Assuming the role of protector of the interests of the bourgeoisie, he had come to regard ‘the state as an end in itself’ and had both ‘oppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society’ and ‘showed no more pity for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests’. However, this exception seemed to Marx to have had only limited significance for general historical development. Once he had served his purpose the bourgeoisie had deserted the Emperor.6 Now, a second Bonaparte had seized power, creating a military-bureaucratic regime in which the army was ‘the superior power in the state’.7 Bonapartism posed a threat to a class-based interpretation of history. In the 1869 preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx described his purpose as being to ‘demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relations that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part’.8 Marx was not alone in expressing surprise and disquiet at the ability of a man widely regarded as without aptitude or principles to gain power. Alexis de Tocqueville, who briefly served the Prince-President as

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foreign minister, was hardly less scathing, pointing out that ‘a dwarf on the summit of a great wave is able to scale a high cliff which a giant placed on dry ground at the base would not be able to climb’.9 The complex economic and social crisis lasting from 1845 until 1852 and particularly the 1848 Revolution and the introduction of manhood suffrage had established the conditions of political instability and social fear in which large sections of the population were tempted to look for a ‘saviour’. According to the eminent republican politician Victor Schoelcher, this was ‘the circumstance’ that together with the Bonapartist legend – ‘this deplorable prestige of a name’ – ‘entirely made the incredible fortune of M. Bonaparte’. These were the typically negative assessments of an adventurer who did not fit into a conventional mould. However, as the leading liberal politician Charles de Rémusat pointed out, although He lacks all the qualities of an ordinary man of merit, judgement, instruction, conversation, experience, all of these things are so lacking that one is tempted to assume that he is beneath contempt … this idiot is endowed with a rare and powerful faculty – that of placing himself at the centre of human affairs ... His presence has changed the course of history ... Whoever is able to intervene in the affairs of the world and impose and produce or modify events according to his will possesses I don’t know what gift of daring or strength which sets him apart from the crowd and places him amongst the rank of historical personalities.10 Assessing the impact of ‘historical personalities’ is never easy. As Ian Kershaw points out in his study of Adolf Hitler – ‘Biography … runs the natural risk of over-personalising complex historical developments, over-emphasising the role of the individual in shaping and determining events, ignoring or playing down the social and political context in which these actions took place.’ He adopted Marx’s dictum that ‘men do make their own history, but … under given and imposed conditions’.11 The actions of the individual need to be considered in relation to their historical context. In similar fashion, if much less ambitiously, I would like to set Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s actions in context as a means of considering the value of Marx’s analysis to the historian, examining first of all the background to the coup d’état, before proceeding beyond the Eighteenth Brumaire into the Second Empire.12

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THE ELECTION OF A PRINCE-PRESIDENT Recent work by historians represents France at mid-century as a society in transition, undergoing complex processes of industrialisation and urbanisation, as part of which agriculture was increasingly commercialised and the rural world integrated into the national society. Political debate during the July Monarchy (1830–48) had largely been restricted to the wealthy members of older (landowning and bureaucratic) and newer (financial and business) elites competing, and not necessarily across ‘class’ lines, for a share of political and economic power. The introduction of manhood suffrage as a result of the February 1848 revolution represented an important stage in mass politicisation. One result was the election on 4 June 1848, as a parliamentary deputy, of LouisNapoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great Emperor, to the amazement of the political elite. Personality is at least as much the product of private as of public experience. As a result of his family background and upbringing, Louis-Napoleon possessed an intense sense of personal destiny. Furthermore, he was the major beneficiary of a sentimental cult of Napoleon and of a more prosperous, happy and glorious epoch kept alive by an outpouring of books, pamphlets, plays, lithographs, songs, and stories. His friend from childhood, Mme. Cornu described his ‘mission’ as ‘a devotion first to the Napoleonic dynasty, and then to France … His duty to his dynasty is to perpetuate it. His duty to France is to give her influence abroad and prosperity at home.’13 In a letter to his cousin Napoleon-Jérôme, Louis-Napoleon would insist that ‘when one bears our name and is head of government, there are two things to do: satisfy the interests of the most numerous classes, attach to oneself the upper classes’.14 This would require a constant juggling act but he was determined to eliminate the ‘party’ divisions, which he believed were responsible for successive revolutions, and to secure the foundations of a social system based upon the conservative trinity of the family, private property and religion. Bonaparte’s first electoral success stimulated a further explosion of Bonapartist sentiment. Unwilling to be associated with the growing disorder in Paris, however, he resigned and returned to London. He was anyway easily re-elected in five departments on 18 September. It was becoming increasingly evident that, as a candidate for the presidency of the new republic, Bonaparte was likely to attract considerable support. Unable to agree on a candidate


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themselves, conservative politicians were drawn reluctantly towards someone who appeared to be fully committed to the restoration of social order. To conservative leaders like Adolphe Thiers, LouisNapoleon appeared to be weak, a clown they could use. Marshal Bugeaud’s warning that the peasants would be voting not for a president but for an emperor went unheeded.15 Even republicans were attracted. After all, the great Emperor had defended the work of the revolution and enhanced the glory of the nation. This was the strength of Bonapartism – to be able to appear as ‘all things to all men’. One Bonapartist manifesto promised that ‘The nephew of the great man, with his magic, will give us security, and save us from misery.’16 Louis-Napoleon’s electoral victory in December 1848 was overwhelming. He gained 74 per cent of the votes cast. In rural areas, which were to remain the basis of Bonaparte’s electoral strength for decades to come, this support represented both a vote against the republic, which had brought tax increases instead of prosperity, and for the man of providence whose election heralded a better future. This unique election of a man with complete faith in his historical ‘mission’, and determined once having gained power, to retain it, had made a coup d’état almost inevitable. In the immediate aftermath of his election, however, the new president’s support for political repression reassured conservatives. Then, gradually, he replaced those ministers who saw themselves as primarily responsible to parliament with men dependent on himself, insisting that a ‘community of ideas’ between the president and his ministers was essential for the effective conduct of government. THE COUP D’ÉTAT In a situation of continuing economic depression and widespread fear of socialist revolution there was considerable support for ‘strong’ government. The constitution prevented Bonaparte from standing for a second term in office but, as head of the executive of a centralised state, he was well placed to mount a coup d’état. The decisive factor was the army. Trusted officers were moved into strategic positions. The coup, which occurred on 2 December 1851, was planned carefully. Although directed against both the monarchist majority in the National Assembly and the republicans, the fact that only the latter offered resistance gave it an essentially anti-republican character. In this respect the coup could be seen as the culmination of a long period of repression beginning with the crushing of the June 1848 insurrection in Paris. It allowed a ‘final’

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settling of accounts. 26,000 republican militants were arrested. Resistance, especially in rural regions in the southeast, helped to convince conservatives that the coup had been necessary. They were badly frightened by grossly exaggerated accounts of ‘red’ atrocities. According to the Bishop of Nancy in an address to the President, the ‘triumph of your cause ... is that of France and Religion ... God wishes to use you for his own purposes.’17 Salvation seemed to be offered by the police state. The coup was undoubtedly illegal and brutal. The authoritarian regime it established was, however, conceived of in the ancient Roman sense, by a classically educated elite, as a short and exceptional period of ‘dictatorship’ when the rule of law was suspended. Of course this did not end the process of repression. A complex of old and new laws, and especially their more rigorous enforcement would continue to deter political opposition. On 20 December the electorate was asked to vote on whether ‘the people wishes to maintain the authority of Louis-Napoleon and delegate to him the powers necessary to establish a constitution on the basis of the proclamation of 2 December’. This appeal to popular sovereignty by means of a plebiscite was to be a characteristic of the new regime. Louis-Napoleon was determined to secure a large majority as a means of legitimising his actions. It was made clear to all officials that their continued employment depended upon enthusiastic campaigning. In place of the era of disorder opened in 1848, a new period of order, peace and prosperity was promised. Coercion was employed but the result was primarily due to the immense popularity of the Prince-President. He was perceived as the only safeguard against renewed revolution and by some as offering protection against the restoration of the ancien régime. The strength of latent Bonapartist sentiment was clearly evident. Nationally, 7,500,000 voted ‘yes’, 640,000 ‘no’ and 1,500,000 abstained. The coup d’état required abdication from power by the social elites, the landowners and wealthy businessmen, in return for the protection of their ‘vital’ interests and most notably private property, against the threat of revolution. Subsequently, the popularity of the monarch was to be enhanced by the ‘invention’ of ritual and by the provincial tours, facilitated by railway travel, which sought to personalise the bonds between ruler and people. Invariably wearing military uniform, the Emperor posed as the symbol of national unity and as the supreme warlord. This resurgence of the monarchical state was glorified in school, church and in the developing mass media. In practice, however, in spite of the vested interests of its personnel,


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the independence of the state would continue to be circumscribed by the power and influence of social elites and its own recruitment of key personnel from within their ranks. Clearly much of the support offered to Bonaparte was conditional. This was indeed a strange republic! The effigy of the Prince-President stared from coins and stamps. On 10 May 1852 new flags and imperial eagles were distributed at a parade of 60,000 troops on the Champ-de-Mars, watched by some 400,000 spectators, to shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ However, Louis-Napoleon remained to be convinced that an imperial restoration was the popular will. At Bordeaux on 9 October undoubtedly impressed by the reception organised by Haussmann the local prefect, he finally made up his mind. Through the procedure known as a senatus consultum on 7 November the senate formally revised the constitution – ‘the imperial dignity is reestablished. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte is Emperor of the French, under the name of Napoleon III.’ Another plebiscite sanctioned the proposal on 21 November with 7,824,000 positive votes, and only 253,000 against, although with nearly 2 million abstentions. Clearly Marx found it difficult to explain these events in terms of a class struggle. The ‘proletariat’ had certainly failed to live up to his expectations. A heroic legend could be constructed around the Parisian insurrection in June 1848, described as ‘the first great battle … fought between the two classes that split modern society’.18 Its defeat also provided an explanation of the removal of the ‘proletariat’ from the centre of the revolutionary stage.19 It made it clear, furthermore, that in future it would be the army, soon to be ‘personified by its own dynasty’ which ‘must represent the State in its antagonism with Society’.20 According to Engels, writing in 1865, Bonapartism is the necessary form of the state in a country where the working class, although having attained a high level of development in the towns, but numerically inferior to the small peasants, has been defeated in a great revolutionary struggle by a class of capitalists, the petty bourgeoisie and the army.21 That workers had fought on both sides in the struggle in June 22 was explained by the participation of the ‘lumpenproletariat’,23 the ‘social scum’24 – the mass of underemployed people attempting to subsist in the rapidly growing city. They would reappear as Bonaparte’s hired thugs.25 Substantial working class support for Bonaparte in the presidential election was portrayed as largely rep-

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resenting a negative vote against General Cavaignac, the ‘Butcher of June’.26 The workers’ subsequent quiescence was explained by the renewal of prosperity and the institutionalisation of protest through elections,27 as well as by the establishment of the ‘police state, blessed by the authority of the Church, [which] must demoralise an unsophisticated population’.28 This explained the feebleness of resistance to the coup, although an exasperated Engels would complain that the workers’ inaction was evidence of ‘childish stupidity’.29 Evidently it was difficult to accept that for many workers Louis-Napoleon had a positive appeal and more palatable to explain his successes in terms of peasant support,30 and the bourgeoisie’s ‘crying for peace’.31 Clearly the majority of smallholding peasants lacked class-consciousness. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interests in their own name … They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must also appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unrestricted governmental power which protects them from other classes and watches over them from on high. The political influence of peasant proprietors is ultimately expressed in the subordination of parliament to the executive, society to the state.32 However, judged by ‘his personal interests’ the ‘real Bonaparte’, is none other than the ‘chief of the lumpenproletariat … perceiving in the dregs, refuse and scum of all classes the sole class that offers unconditional support …’.33 The bourgeoisie had renounced power in favour of a gangster regime! These contortions and contradictions, together with recent historical research which emphasises the heterogeneity of the various identifiable social groups, implies that Marx’s conclusions, although invariably suggestive, are subject to so many exceptions as to render them unsatisfactory as generalisations and to throw doubt on the value of ‘class’ as an all-embracing explanatory factor. Although Marx’s contemporaries frequently employed the language of class, in practice individuals were inspired by a range of historically constructed political options, and subject to influence exercised by the various groups to which they belonged – family, social peers, community, and confessional associations, as well as ‘class’, and to pressure from those best able to exercise ‘power’ – landlords, employers, priests and government officials.


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In order to further assess the stature of the ‘grotesque mediocrity’ who had become Emperor it might be worth considering the achievements of the regime he had created. THE SECOND EMPIRE The decision to retain ‘universal’ suffrage clearly distinguished the Second Empire from previous monarchical regimes. This was a monarchy which owed its legitimacy not to divine right but to the popular will. The regime was committed to the principles of 1789 and particularly to equality before the law and to popular sovereignty. It also offered strong, centralised government. Napoleon insisted that only the Bonapartist dynasty could represent these twin principles of order and democracy effectively. The constitution required plebiscites to sanction major constitutional change, and regular elections to a Corps législatif with limited power. Every election would be a quasi-plebiscite on the regime. The problem was to recognise popular sovereignty whilst retaining control. The entire administrative machine would be deployed to support the government’s candidates and to counter opposition. In order to reinforce social order, urgent efforts were made to increase the effectiveness of civilian policing. Even more importance was attached to the progress of ‘moral’ reform. The ideal was to secure the ‘willing’ collaboration of subordinate groups, self-discipline and respect for the established social hierarchy. The agents of this policy were to be the clergy and primary school teachers. Already the education laws of 1833 and 1850 had defined the ‘civilising mission’ of primary instruction. The masses were to be assimilated into a well-ordered police state. Prosperity was to be secured through economic modernisation. The Emperor was convinced also that this was essential to the survival of France as a great power. He was determined to emulate Britain, the model of a modern society. He shared with his closest advisers a progressivist ideology, which ascribed a positive economic role to the state. The rapid completion of the rail network and urban reconstruction were the clearly defined objectives. This technocratic romanticism was at the heart of the regime’s economic policy. The Emperor had long dreamed of rebuilding Paris as the capital of a modern empire. Haussmann, appointed Prefect of the Seine department, contributed a systematic approach to overcoming the complex practical and financial obstacles to the realisation of these dreams. As with the railways, state initiative would again be closely associated with private enterprise. The new thoroughfares, each

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focusing on major public buildings and monuments or on the reconstructed railway stations, together with their gas lighting, street furniture and public gardens, conformed to a coherent urban plan. They provided for the easier circulation of traffic within the city centre and between the railway stations – the symbols of a new society. Reconstruction also provided an opportunity to improve public hygiene through slum clearance, improved water supply, and the construction of a sewer network. Urban renewal also sought to ‘cleanse’ the city through greater social segregation. It provided those who could afford the rents with more spacious and comfortable accommodation. The poor, however, expelled from the centre by demolition and rising rents were crowded into the older streets surviving behind the boulevards or pushed out to the periphery. The twin threats of revolution and disease, so often linked in bourgeois social imagery, were thus to be destroyed. Although strategic concerns were of secondary importance in determining the shape of the new city centre, it would have been surprising, in the aftermath of a bloody revolution if they had not assumed considerable importance. More difficult to barricade and with barracks strategically placed at crossroads, broad new boulevards provided for the easy movement of troops. A similar combination of demographic pressure and political factors promoted urban reconstruction in the provinces. These massive construction projects provided work on a substantial scale. Prosperity and order went together but the essential objectives were supervision, control and, if need be, repression. Haussmann became the symbol of authoritarian government. THE RISE OF OPPOSITION In seeking to limit the historical significance of this second Bonaparte, Marx suggested that, like his uncle he ‘would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one without taking from another’. Indeed, ‘because he protects its [the bourgeoisie’s] material power, he generates its public, its political power anew’. Eventually it would feel able to do without its ‘protector’.34 On 15 January 1860 the Emperor outlined his ‘programme for peace’. It combined further investment in transport with a commercial treaty with Britain designed to force the pace of industrialisation. Businessmen expressed concern about what was bound to be a difficult period of transition. Substantial parts of the social elite and business classes felt that their views had been ignored and that their vital interests were being sacrificed. Their confidence


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in the regime was badly shaken by this ‘new coup d’état’. Already there was considerable resentment of the absence of parliamentary control over public works expenditure. Provincial taxpayers objected to paying for the embellishment of the capital. The rising tide of opposition was swelled further by criticism of the Emperor’s adventurous foreign policy. Alienated by the 1859 war in Italy which had unintentionally led to the collapse of the Papal states, Catholics together with protectionists, critics of the regime’s expenditure and all those made anxious by the arbitrary and seemingly erratic character of government, wanted to restrain the Emperor’s personal initiatives. Authoritarian government appeared less justifiable as the threat of revolution diminished. These ‘liberals’ were determined to impose parliamentary controls over the monarch. In a brilliant speech to deputies on 11 January 1864 Thiers called for the reintroduction of freedom of assembly, of association and of the press – for the ‘necessary liberties’, essential to prevent arbitrary government. The Empire, he warned, would survive only if it made substantial concessions. In return liberals would be prepared to collaborate. Their growing desire for ‘liberty’ was balanced always by social fear, however. Remembering 1848 they were deeply suspicious of manhood suffrage, which they associated both with revolution and the ‘rural imbecility and provincial bestiality’ (Prévost-Paradol), which provided mass support for a demagogic imperial regime. The liberal ideal remained leadership by a social and intellectual elite. There was little space for social reform in their vision. This was the liberalism of social elites anxious to restore their own political power. They posed a threat to the regime because their views were shared not only by its opponents, including moderate republicans, but also by many government supporters. LIBERALISATION Unlike his predecessors, Napoleon III was prepared to adapt to changing political circumstances. The first liberalising measures in 1860, conceded wider rights of debate and publicity to the Corps législatif, and represented concessions by a regime at the height of its power. Quite what the Emperor intended remains open to debate. Napoleon’s ideal would probably have been a parliament without parties, offering loyal support for his various initiatives. He was horrified by the prospect of a ‘faction’ ridden parliament together with freedom of the press. The problem was how to liberalise the regime without destabilising the system of government. However,

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liberals would never be satisfied with anything less than a return to a parliamentary system similar to that of the July Monarchy, in which deputies enjoyed the right to question ministers, reject their proposals and to initiate legislation. The further concessions made to the liberal politicians from January 1867 were in response to growing opposition particularly from within the sociopolitical elite which provided the regime with its ministers, senior officials and army officers, and whose members alone possessed the qualifications thought necessary for participation in ‘high’ politics. From May 1868 substantial freedom was restored to the press and public meetings, providing the means for a spectacular revival of political life. Nevertheless, following the 1869 elections 116 deputies signed a motion in favour of further reform. A Note from the Emperor’s cousin Prince Napoleon spelled out the options – 1. A reactionary policy. This might succeed in the short term, but for only as long as the Emperor lived; 2. maintenance of the status quo. This would mean gradual but inevitable decline; 3. ‘conciliation’, which demanded that the Emperor take a decisive lead in liberalisation.35 Only the last would guarantee the regime’s survival. The formation of the Ollivier ministry on 2 January 1870, represented the real beginning of the liberal Empire. Like most liberals, the former moderate republican, Ollivier, saw strong government as essential to the maintenance of public order and appreciated the continued potency of the Napoleonic legend. Additionally he wanted the Emperor to rule with the support of public opinion. It was proposed to enlarge the rights of parliament to initiate debate, to vote the budget, and decide on customs tariffs. Ministers were to be responsible to both the Emperor and parliament. However, the Emperor’s own power to determine constitutional development was preserved. Napoleon retained the right to dissolve parliament and appeal to the country, the authority to negotiate treaties, declare war and command the army. It was this retention of the right to consult voters through the plebiscite which more than any other provision symbolised the survival of the Emperor’s personal power. In the plebiscite on the new constitution held on 8 May 1870, 7,350,000 voted positively, 1,538,000 against and 1,900,000 abstained. The results represented a widespread rallying to the Liberal Empire. Most liberals with monarchist sympathies, as well as a significant minority of moderate republicans, found it impossible to reject the reforms. The official plebiscite campaign had appealed to the social fear created by a carefully manipulated ‘red’ scare. ‘Liberty’ depended


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both on the curbing of the personal power of the Emperor and on the preservation of order. Certainly the results of the plebiscite came as a considerable shock to the republicans who remained the only irreconcilable opponents of the Empire. Although they retained considerable support in the major cities and industrial centres, this was relatively weak amongst the propertied classes, in the countryside, and wherever the clergy were influential. Moreover republicans remained divided, often bitterly, between the legalistic and essentially liberal-democratic moderates like Favre and ‘radicals’ like Gambetta, and the revolutionary socialists popularly identified with Blanqui. As late as the early summer of 1870, there appeared to be no real threat to the Empire. The establishment of a Liberal Empire with a strong executive power held in check by rejuvenated parliamentary institutions, seemed to herald a long period of political stability. The elites had been reassured, their right to a share in political power commensurate with their wealth and status had been recognised. At the same time the popular support necessary to legitimise the regime had survived. As Ludovic Halévy, the librettist and secretary to the Corps législatif, perceptively wrote in his notebook the danger now was – ‘Too many Yes votes. The Emperor will believe that this is still the France of 1852 and do something stupid.’36 WAR AND REVOLUTION In July 1870 France again went to war. The report of a subsequent commission of enquiry blamed the disaster entirely on the Emperor and his leading generals. Military greatness and martial display were essential features of Bonapartism. Napoleon’s particular objectives appear to have been to ‘restore France to its proper rank’ as the preeminent European power, and to ensure the pacification of Europe by means of its reconstruction on the basis of its major nationalities, assembled in loose (con)federal structures, too weak to challenge French predominance. The regenerated continent would be given a greater sense of mutual dependence through free trade. However, the main result of Napoleon’s foreign policy was to ensure growing international distrust of French intentions and diplomatic isolation. When, following the Prussian victory over Austria at Sadowa in 1866, Napoleon proposed alliances to both Austria and Italy, in an effort to defend French security, it was too late. Sadowa had substantially upset the European balance of power. The final crisis was provoked by the candidature of a Prussian prince for the Spanish

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throne and French fear of ‘encirclement’. Consulting only his foreign minister the Duc de Gramont, on 12 July the Emperor demanded a firm guarantee that this candidature, already withdrawn, would never be renewed. The Prussian chancellor Bismarck responded with the deliberately provocative ‘Ems telegram’. The Emperor and his advisers fell into this trap because of their failure to assess the diplomatic and military risks calmly. Suffering acute pain from gallstones the Emperor was too physically and mentally exhausted to provide effective leadership. He succumbed to pressure from the close circle of courtiers and politicians identified with the authoritarian Empire who were convinced that a successful war would lend weight to their counter-attack against the liberal regime. On 28 July, accompanied by the Prince-Imperial, Napoleon left Saint Cloud to assume command of the armies. News of defeat and capitulation at Sedan and the widespread sense of national humiliation, which this engendered, rendered the collapse of the regime almost inevitable. Its legitimacy had been destroyed. Already demoralised by a succession of defeats ministers were stunned by the gravity of this news. They would prove unable to provide effective leadership. On 4 September 1870 a bloodless revolution occurred in Paris. CONCLUSIONS Napoleon III had believed firmly in his historical destiny. His role was to be that of a ‘charismatic’ leader, a ‘dictator’ at the centre of an authoritarian political system drawing its legitimacy from the manipulation of a mass electorate. The Second Empire was established and endured in part due to the political skills of its leading personalities. If policy options were inevitably constricted and the problems of a society undergoing industrialisation and urbanisation particularly complicated, Napoleon III and his ministers worked hard to enlarge the possibilities open to them. With a considerable degree of success, they had developed a policy of economic and social modernisation. Large sections of the community benefited from greater prosperity. However, the effect of this adventurous politics was to alienate powerful groups, which felt that their vital interests were under threat. As opposition increased the regime had adapted, whether of the Emperor’s free will, or increasingly, under pressure. It had gone down the extremely tortuous path of liberalisation and, as the May 1870 plebiscite suggested, again with considerable success. Napoleon III himself can be allowed to sum up the regime’s achievements. In a sketch for a


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novel found amongst his papers, a M. Benoit who had emigrated to America in 1847, returned to France in April 1868. In America political refugees had warned him that: France is groaning under despotism and he could expect to find it debased and impoverished … Imagine his surprise! Amazed by universal suffrage Amazed by the railways, which criss-cross France; by the electric telegraph. Arrives in Paris: embellishment … He wants to purchase various objects, which are much cheaper, due to the commercial treaty. No riots; no political prisoners; no exiles. 37 Who knows what might have happened if the war of 1870 had been avoided? However, that it occurred and ended in a humiliating defeat, represented governmental failure on an unacceptable scale. For Marx and Engels the collapse of the Second Empire came as a great relief. It appeared to confirm the ‘logical’ necessity for historical evolution to pass through a bourgeois democratic phase.38 Again Engels confidently asserted that a Bonapartist, or indeed Bismarckian, regime might exist only ‘By way of exception’, the products of ‘periods … in which the warring classes balance each other so clearly that the state authority, as ostensible mediator, acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both’.39 In the intervening years, however, they had seemingly come to accept that Louis-Napoleon’s role was not as exceptional as had initially been suggested. It had appeared that in Germany too, From the moment when it became necessary instead of protecting the nobility against the onrush of the bourgeoisie to protect all propertied classes against the onrush of the working class, the old, absolute monarchy had to go over completely to the form of state expressly devised for this purpose: the Bonapartist monarchy.40 In an article in the New York Tribune in 1856 Marx had reached similar conclusions regarding Spain.41 It had also been recognised that in the Austrian empire ‘different class interests, the national features of narrow-mindedness, and local prejudices’ had ‘allowed the old scoundrel Metternich the utmost freedom to manoeuvre’.42 More generally, it appeared that substantial portions of all social classes

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might renounce their political rights, might be bought off by prosperity and chauvinistic appeals. In a letter to Marx on 13 April 1866 Engels maintained that ‘Bonapartism’, which ‘promotes the great material interests of the bourgeoisie’, ‘really is the true religion of the modern bourgeoisie’.43 In 1871, in an emotional defence of the Paris Commune, Marx seemed to return to the concept of ‘alienation’, which had dominated his writing in the early 1840s. Historically, Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally through simple division of labour. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society.44 From this perspective, Bonapartism represented not an exception so much as the culmination of a lengthy process. The Bonapartist analogy would certainly enjoy a long shelf life. Historians described Napoleon III in the 1930s and 1940s as a precursor of fascism. However, in comparison with twentieth century dictatorships, his was much less brutal. The Second Empire lacked both the bureaucratic machinery of the ‘totalitarian’ state and the determination to invade the private space of its citizens and to ignore the ‘rule of law’. The regime became less rather than more authoritarian, accepting, in particular, the need to share power with the social elites it had managed to exclude briefly in December 1851. The institutions created as part of a violent counter-revolution were adapted to meet the needs of a changing society with different political aspirations. Bearing many similarities to the presidential system of the Fifth Republic established by General de Gaulle, the new regime was probably viable. The liberal experiment was cut short by catastrophic military defeat, however. The Emperor could hardly escape responsibility for this. Under the constitution of the Liberal Empire he had retained the right to pursue his own foreign policy objectives. Inspired by the Napoleonic legend and the dream of reliving the glories of the First Empire he had been unwilling to risk the loss of prestige, which would have resulted from humiliation by Prussia. Napoleon III had determined on a course of action, which was risky in the extreme. He had not inherited his uncle’s military genius, and success ultimately depended on a flawed military machine. Defeat destroyed both the legitimacy of the regime and the strength of the army, in the circumstances the only


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force capable of protecting the Empire against Revolution. Reversing the order of Marx’s words, the situation seemed to ‘demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a hero to play a grotesque mediocrity’s part’, and with important consequences for the subsequent course of European history. NOTES I would like to thank Heather Price for her comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, C.W., Vol. 6, p. 486. 2. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, C.W., Vol. 35, p. 726. 3. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, C.W., Vol. 5, pp. 59, 47. 4. Ibid., p. 90. 5. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this volume, p. 98. 6. Karl Marx in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, C.W., Vol. 4, pp. 123–4. 7. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 91. 8. Karl Marx, ‘Preface’ (1869) to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, C.W., Vol. 21, p. 57. 9. Alexis de Tocqueville to Beaumont, 29 Janury 1851, in Oeuvres complètes, Vol. 8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 369. 10. Victor Schoelcher, Histoire des crimes du deux décembre (London: J. Chapman, 1852), p. 402; C. de Rémusat, Mémoires de ma vie, Vol. 4 (Paris: Plon, 1962), pp. 359–60. 11. Ian Kershaw, Hitler. 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. xxi. 12. A first attempt appeared as The French Second Republic: A Social History (London: Batsford; Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1972). This was a scaled down, and far less theoretical, version of ‘Karl Marx as a Historian of Nineteenth Century France’ (PhD thesis, University of Wales, Swansea, 1970). Some of the themes developed in this article are taken up in Roger Price, Napoleon III and the Second Empire (London: Routledge, 1997) and The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 13. Nassau William Senior, Conversations with M. Thiers, M. Guizot and other Distinguished Persons During the Second Empire, Vol. 2 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1878), p. 115. 14. Archives nationales (AN) 400 AP 150 Fonds Bonaparte. 15. Letter to Thiers 4 November 1848, in Bibliothèque nationale (BN) naf 20617. 16. Enclosed with a report from the state prosecutor at Metz 1 December 1848, in AN BB18/1471. 17. 10 December 1851, in AN AB XIX 173.

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18. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, C.W., Vol. 10, p. 67. 19. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 26. 20. Quoted by Maximilien Rubel (ed.), Karl Marx devant le Bonapartisme (Paris: La Haye, 1960), pp. 49–50. 21. ‘Die preussische Militärfrage und die deutsche Arbeiterpartei’ in ibid., pp. 116–17. 22. Marx, Class Struggles, p. 62. 23. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 63. 24. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 494. 25. Marx, Class Struggles, p. 143. 26. Ibid., p. 80. 27. Ibid., p. 137; Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 60. 28. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 56. 29. Engels to Marx, 3 December 1851, C.W., Vol. 38, p. 505. 30. Marx, Class Struggles, p. 80. 31. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 86. 32. Ibid., p. 101. 33. Ibid., p. 63. 34. Ibid., pp. 108, 107. 35. AN 400 AP 150. 36. Quoted in L. Girard, Questions politiques et constitutionnelles du Second Empire (Paris: CDU, n.d.), p. 138. 37. AN 400 AP 150. 38. Engels to Bernstein, 27 August 1883, and to Kautsky, 26 April 1884, C.W., Vol. 47, pp. 51–2 and 131–3. 39. Frederick Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, in C.W., Vol. 26, pp. 271. 40. Frederick Engels, ‘Supplement’ to the ‘Preface’ of 1870 for The Peasant Wars in Germany (1874), C.W., Vol. 23, p. 627. 41. Karl Marx, ‘Revolution in Spain’, C.W., Vol. 15, pp. 98–9. 42. Frederick Engels, ‘The Magyar Struggle’, C.W., Vol. 8, pp. 229–30. 43. Engels to Marx, 13 April 1866, C.W., Vol. 42, p. 266. 44. Frederick Engels, ‘Introduction’ (1891) to Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, C.W., Vol. 27, p. 189.

6

The Appeal of Bonapartism Geoff Watkins

Rejecting the notion that the coup d’état of 2 December 1851 was unforeseeable, Marx sets out as his main purpose to explain ‘how a nation of 36 millions can be taken unawares by three common conmen and marched off unresisting into captivity’.1 The use of the term ‘common con-men’ to describe Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte himself, his half-brother Morny and his Minister of Justice Rouher is an indication of the dismissive contempt Marx felt for the Bonapartists. However, he also recognised that contempt alone, such as that expressed by Victor Hugo in his Napoléon le Petit, does not allow lessons to be drawn from what he calls the ‘unprecedented humiliation’2 of the revolution of 1848. Marx’s explanation concentrates on Louis-Napoleon’s period in office as President of the Republic, when, with the proletariat rendered impotent by its defeat in the June Days of 1848, he was able to manipulate and defeat the various factions of the bourgeoisie and prepare his coup. Whilst Marx lays great stress on the support of the lumpenproletariat in the form of the Society of 10 December, he also acknowledges two more formal elements which contributed to Louis-Napoleon’s success. First, the Constitution gave a great deal of real power to the President as the ‘elect of the nation’;3 second, and perhaps more importantly, the head of the executive controlled a state apparatus which in France ‘restricts, controls, regulates, oversees and supervises civil life from its most all-encompassing expressions to its most insignificant stirrings’.4 The importance Marx attaches to this factor can be seen in the way he returns to it in his conclusion, referring to ‘this executive with its enormous bureaucratic and military apparatus, with its widespread and ingenious machinery of state, a complement of a half million officials alongside an army of another half million’.5 However, it was only his election as President on 10 December 1848 that gave Louis-Napoleon these advantages, and Marx gives little attention to the reasons for this electoral triumph. Yet the fact that Louis-Napoleon was able to win the ballot so overwhelmingly was fundamental to everything that followed. Not only was there clearly no question of his having been able to seize power by force in 1848 (his two previous attempts to do this had also ended in 163

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complete failure), but more importantly the popular vote enabled him to reinforce his position of power with claims of legitimacy. Marx himself acknowledges this implicitly when he asserts that ‘the President is the spirit of the nation incarnate. As opposed to the Assembly, he has a kind of divine right, he is president by the people’s grace.’6 Louis-Napoleon emphasised the same point in a speech on 25 November 1851, only a week before the coup d’état, when he accused his opponents in the Assembly of seeking to ‘weaken that authority which is the issue of popular suffrage’.7 Indeed, the insistence that only the vote of the whole nation could legitimise authority had always been fundamental to the Bonapartist claims. As early as 1836, in a letter to Odilon Barrot after the failure of the Strasbourg coup, Louis-Napoleon had argued that he was the only true representative of popular election because the people had not voted as a whole since approving the hereditary rule of the Bonapartes in Napoleon’s plebiscite of 1804; neither the Bourbon Restoration nor the July Monarchy, then, had any legitimacy, since ‘a principle cannot be annulled by deeds, it can only be annulled by another principle; neither the twelve hundred thousand foreigners of 1815 nor the Chamber of the 221 of 1830 have the authority to nullify the principle of the election of 1804’.8 Of course, Marx was not unaware of the importance of the presidential election, and he explains his brief treatment of it in the Eighteenth Brumaire by noting that he has already dealt with its significance elsewhere.9 However, the passage in The Class Struggles in France to which he is referring is itself little more than a sketchy outline.10 For Marx, ‘10 December 1848 was the coup d’état of the peasants’,11 a point he reiterates in the Eighteenth Brumaire,12 refining it in the conclusion to observe that ‘the Bonaparte dynasty does not represent the revolutionary peasants, but rather the conservative ones’.13 He explains, very briefly, how ‘the other classes helped to complete the election victory of the peasants’,14 through a mixture of protest vote and manipulation for their own ends. However, there are a number of problems with this interpretation. First, whilst Louis-Napoleon undoubtedly did attract a great deal of support from the rural population, his votes in fact came from all kinds of social and geographical groups; his success in urban areas (he obtained well over half the votes in five of the eight largest cities in France, including Paris) was such that ‘coup d’état of the peasants’ is not an adequate explanation for the scale of his victory. Second, Marx rightly saw

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conservatives and monarchists as seeking to use Louis-Napoleon’s candidature for their own ends, and their backing was a considerable boost to him in the last weeks of the campaign. However, they only turned to him after failing to put forward a candidate of their own because he was already attracting enough popular support to look like a possible winner. As de Tocqueville observed in his memoirs, ‘As public opinion increasingly favours Louis-Napoleon, he carries the parliamentary leaders with him; … most of them in the end let themselves be swept along in the maelstrom; it is emphatically society’s tail which wags its head.’15 Their backing, then, was a consequence of that popular support, the reasons for which need to be examined more fully. Finally, in placing emphasis more on reasons for voting against Cavaignac than for Louis-Napoleon, Marx underestimates the positive appeal which Bonapartism could exert in a society which has been shown to exhibit greater and more complex social differentiations than Marx’s broad class categorisation allows.16 In order to understand the overwhelming nature of the victory achieved on 10 December (the scale of it surprised even Louis-Napoleon’s own supporters), it is necessary to consider how that appeal was carefully and skilfully exploited by Louis-Napoleon and his allies both before and during the electoral campaign. The opponents of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte always maintained that all he had was his name, a claim repeated by generations of French historians writing in the Republican tradition. Undoubtedly much simplistic exploitation of that name did take place in 1848, and references such as that found in a broadsheet circulated in Metz to ‘the great man’s nephew with his magical name’ were frequent.17 The very name of Napoleon certainly had considerable resonance in France, and it is telling that both Marx and the anti-Bonapartist newspaper Le National refer simply to ‘Louis Bonaparte’,18 whilst Louis-Napoleon himself consciously foregrounded the association for several years after he published his Napoleonic Ideas of 1839 in the name of ‘Prince Napoléon-Louis’.19 However, to suggest that Louis-Napoleon was simply the fortunate beneficiary of the Napoleonic legend overlooks both the extent to which that legend had to be re-politicised in the 1840s and the way it had to be imbued with specific political associations which would have broad appeal for Frenchmen in the mid-nineteenth century. The memory of Napoleon and the myths that surrounded his name were kept alive after 1815 through such traditional forms as poems, songs, engravings, prints, brochures and almanacs, as well

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as a strong oral tradition fuelled by veterans of the Imperial armies.20 Initially, the name of the Emperor served as a rallying point for disparate opponents of the restored Bourbons, but after 1830 the tradition became largely devoid of any direct political meaning. The tales and images of the past were concerned to render homage to a great man and a great age, but they did not suggest in any way that this age could return. Indeed, their sentimental appeal was founded on a nostalgia for something which was lost forever. The former dignitaries of the Empire had been rehabilitated by the July Monarchy, to which they were in turn fully reconciled, and 127 of them sat in the Chamber of Peers which condemned LouisNapoleon after his second attempted coup in 1840.21 As late as 1846, one of the most prolific of the propagators of the Napoleonic legend, Emile Marco de Saint-Hilaire, launched a new almanac which revived the title of the Imperial Almanac founded by Napoleon himself. In so doing, he affirmed in the first number, he was offering ‘intimate recollections of the time of the Empire’, because ‘we do not believe that it will ever rise like the phoenix from the ashes. This is our true motive in exhuming this title, which is by now as innocent as it is inoffensive.’22 The political establishment of the July Monarchy, too, felt there was sufficiently little threat from Bonapartism as a political movement to sponsor the return of Napoleon’s remains from Saint Helena in 1840 and to support through the king’s subscription a new journal, La Revue de l’Empire, founded in 1842. This royal patronage was misplaced, however, despite the disingenuous claim of the journal’s founder Charles-Edouard Tremblaire that as ‘an impartial echo of all the glories of the Consulate and the Empire, our Revue will be purely historical’.23 In fact, Tremblaire, a journalist with unequivocal Bonapartist sympathies, used the journal to mix exaltation of a glorious past with constant justification of Bonapartist ideology and praise for Louis-Napoleon himself.24 Such a journal was symptomatic of a move amongst supporters of the Bonapartist cause to remind Frenchmen just what it was about the Consulate and Empire that should be brought back. Louis-Napoleon provided the foundation for this development with the publication in 1839 of his Napoleonic Ideas, a long pamphlet in which he expounded the merits of Napoleonic government, contrasted them with the disappointments the French now had to suffer, and presented himself as the heir and guardian of the Bonapartist tradition. This last aim is implicit in the text of the


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pamphlet, but was made explicit by a brochure which LouisNapoleon produced to accompany its publication and which dealt with the Imperial future. It is striking that he plays down the element of military glory which forms the staple diet of much of the popular culture referred to above, and he insists in the concluding section ‘that the Napoleonic idea is not one of War, but a social, industrial, commercial idea which concerns all mankind’; 25 he repeated this ‘eschewing of militarism’26 in his manifesto for the presidential election, arguing that the wars from 1792 to 1815 had been forced on France, and that the Bonapartes had always stood for honourable peace. What Louis-Napoleon did in Napoleonic Ideas was to exploit the ambiguous symbolism of his name, a symbolism which Price identifies as a means of blurring the political spectrum;27 he represents Napoleon (and by extension himself) as simultaneously the guardian of social order and the heir of the French Revolution. Order and stability are portrayed as especially important after periods of upheaval when passions and excess are in danger of creating disruption and chaos, for ‘when in a country become thoroughly democratic like France, the principle of equality is not generally applied, it must be introduced into all the laws before liberty is possible’;28 it is the ‘want of stability and perseverance which is the great defect of democratic republics’.29 This order does not represent a return to the ancien régime, for it is only uncontrolled democracy which is rejected, not democracy itself; the Napoleonic system is one in which the ‘basis is democratic since all the powers are derived from the people, whilst the organization is hierarchical, since it provides different grades in order to stimulate all capacities’.30 Napoleon ‘cleared up the chaos of nothingness and glory’31 that characterised the decade of revolution and brought to France an administrative order which provided the foundation ‘for the prosperity of a 30 million population’.32 Thus, Louis-Napoleon establishes the link between stability and prosperity which, as we shall see, he was to use to full effect in the campaign of 1848. In order to have mass appeal, it was vital for the Bonapartists not to be seen as standing simply for the establishment of order, and the Revolutionary legacy was a key element in the message to be sent out. Louis-Napoleon explicitly demands, ‘let us not overlook the fact that everything Napoleon undertook to effect a general fusion was done without renouncing the principles of the Revolution’,33 and he stresses throughout Napoleonic Ideas the extent to which

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Napoleon made a reality of the Revolutionary ideals of equality, careers open to talents and, crucially, liberty. Challenging those libertarians who sought to portray his uncle as a tyrant, Louis-Napoleon insists that ‘the Emperor Napoleon has contributed more than anyone else to hasten the reign of liberty by preserving the moral influence of the Revolution and diminishing the fears which it inspired’.34 It was this balance which enabled Napoleon to unite a divided France, and it was this unity which Bonapartism was portrayed as guaranteeing (as we have seen, Louis-Napoleon as President constantly reiterated the claim that only he represented the whole of the nation). Napoleonic Ideas, then, provided a series of social and political goals, and it specifically linked their accomplishment to Napoleonic rule. From this basis both the conservative and the radical implications of the pamphlet were reinforced in a number of ways, in order to ensure that the foundations were strengthened to support a future Bonapartist bid for power, if and when circumstances favoured it. One element which was of central importance in terms of both social order and overcoming divisiveness was religion. Marx certainly exaggerates when he refers to ‘the shameless, bare-faced rule of the … cross’ and ‘the dominance of the Church as an instrument of state’,35 for both the principle and the practice of Bonapartist rule placed the Church firmly under state control. Neither Napoleon nor his nephew, however, espoused the fierce anti-clericalism of the Jacobin Republicans, preferring to see religion as a way of reinforcing the civil order. Louis-Napoleon referred both to the need for religion if liberty is to flourish and to the fact that Napoleon had made public worship freely available,36 and he was careful in his presidential manifesto to reassure Catholics who might feel threatened by the new Republic. Such policy statements from the Bonapartists were supported by an iconography which constantly showed the Church approving their deeds. From the signing of the Concordat of 1801 and the Imperial catechism of 1806 every public ceremony was represented in pictures and prints with the Church in prominent attendance;37 its role was to enhance the moral legitimacy of the Bonaparte dynasty, not to extend its own power. At the same time, steps were taken to recall the extent to which Bonapartism was and had always been the protector of the menu peuple. As with religion, an iconographical tradition already existed which depicted Napoleon as the friend of the ordinary man, whether sharing a chicken leg with soldiers on the eve of battle or being lifted


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shoulder high on his return from Elba. Once again, Louis-Napoleon added political substance to these images by receiving Radical Republican leaders in prison, establishing links with the progressive artisanal journal L’Atelier and, above all, writing The Extinction of Pauperism in 1845. In this work he showed he was aware of the plight of the poor at a time when the government seemed to offer nothing but neglect, and he proposed solutions, including the idea of national workshops, which were close to those of the socialist Republican, Louis Blanc. This work and the activities which surrounded it provided Louis-Napoleon with the ideal credentials in the presidential election to oppose the man who had backed the closure of the National Workshops of 1848 and led the army against the workers in June. It was no coincidence that when Tremblaire was editing the Oeuvres de Louis-Napoléon in 1848, he arranged for The Extinction of Pauperism to be reissued separately in September of that year. The examples discussed above suggest that the process by which the Bonapartist appeal was given greater political substance in the 1840s did not involve replacing the sentimentality of the Napoleonic legend; on the contrary, it was a case of building upon it. It was the interaction of the two elements which would contribute so powerfully to the eventual attraction of Louis-Napoleon for the electorate. Even writers less intellectually contemptuous of political Bonapartism than Marx have tended to draw a sharp distinction between it and the sentimental attachment to the name of Napoleon. For Albert Guerard, ‘it was Louis-Napoléon alone who turned sentimental Napoleonism into political Bonapartism’;38 more recently, Frédéric Bluche has argued that Bonapartism was not the product of the Napoleonic legend, but that it drew its content from the ‘doctrine’ of the Empire,39 whilst Bernard Ménager opens his study by insisting that popular Bonapartism, a politically motivated movement with the aim of restoring power to Napoleon or his heirs, must again be seen as quite separate from the legend.40 My contention here is that the two were in fact part of the same process and were deliberately made to be so by the Bonapartists of the 1840s, that the legend on its own may not have been sufficient to sustain a political movement a generation after Napoleon’s death, but that the movement based on a political programme was all the more powerful for being placed under the stewardship of the nephew and heir of the Emperor himself (many of Louis-Napoleon’s detractors, including Marx, implicitly acknowledge this in attempting to cast doubt on Louis-Napoleon’s parentage).41

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In many cases, exploitation of the legend involved nothing more than ‘cashing in’ on material produced by people who had no connection with the political movement. As I have argued elsewhere, much of the popular literature, images and bric-a-brac which appeared had more to do with making money than supporting a political cause, and very little of it made even indirect reference to Louis-Napoleon before 1849.42 The Bonapartists did, however, also take a number of steps to highlight the link between Louis-Napoleon and his uncle on an emotional, as well as a political, level. Once again, Napoleonic Ideas sets the tone; for all that it is a work of exposition, its final chapter ends with a sentimental flourish, ‘Full of beauty and honour are the obsequies of the sovereign whom a nation in tears and glory clothed in mourning accompany to his last resting place’,43 as does the overall conclusion, ‘May the shade of the Emperor repose, then, in peace! His memory grows greater every day.’44 The reference to ‘his last resting place’ highlights the fact that Louis-Napoleon deliberately timed the publication of Napoleonic Ideas to benefit from the publicity which surrounded the impending return of Napoleon’s remains from Saint Helena. This place of exile already had its own mythology, fuelled in particular by the publication of Las Cases’s Memorial of Saint Helena (much of which had been dictated by Napoleon himself); a picture had been established of a lonely, suffering man, unjustly treated by his captors, reduced to living out his days on a wild and distant island. This image was projected by a vast array of engravings and prints which created an imaginary landscape of barren rock, often portrayed as no more than a few metres across, on which the lonely Emperor was perched, as in Pierre-Eugène Aubert’s Napoleon on the Rock of Saint Helena.45 After Napoleon’s death, a series of mournful images of the lonely grave in a willow grove so far from France completed the sense of martyrdom.46 It was precisely this sense of martyrdom that LouisNapoleon sought to show himself as sharing, and this provides a very good example of the exploitation of sentiment referred to above. In an extraordinary two-page brochure published in Paris in 1840 (and again using the name Napoleon-Louis), entitled To the Shade of the Emperor, Louis-Napoleon parallels the suffering of Napoleon, which has come to an end, with his own, which continues. Under the guise of apologising to the Emperor for being unable on account of his imprisonment to participate in the glorious ceremony, he links both his fate and his ideas to those of his uncle. After protesting that nobody had understood him when he spoke of Napoleon’s ideas,


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ideas which the present age had renounced, he asserts triumphantly, ‘it is in vain that they say you were a meteor which left no trace, it is in vain they deny your civil glory, they will never disinherit you’. He then finishes by having the shade of Napoleon say to him, ‘You have suffered for me, friend, I am pleased with you!’47 A whole cluster of messages is clearly sent by this brochure: Napoleonic ideas are still relevant today, Louis-Napoleon is the legitimate heir to whom those ideas have been entrusted, and because of this he too experiences the martyrdom inflicted on his uncle. In short, both were made to suffer because they loved France. The image of Louis-Napoleon as the victim of tyranny and injustice was reiterated throughout the 1840s, with frequent evocations of the Bonapartes’ exile and his own imprisonment. The same is true of the other idea invoked in the climax of To the Shade of the Emperor, namely that the great Napoleon bestows his full approval on the actions of his successor. The popular propaganda of 1848 took up this theme to the full to promote the idea that support for Louis-Napoleon was the natural extension of admiration for his uncle, as the following two examples demonstrate. After Louis-Napoleon’s election to the Assembly in September 1848 a broadsheet was circulated in which this link was put forward in both words and picture. The five verses of a song are addressed by the Emperor to France, each ending with the same call to reciprocate the love he had always shown for his country with equal love towards his chosen heir, who, we are reminded, is his godson. In the picture which is placed above the words of the song, Napoleon (instantly recognisable in his grey riding coat and three-cornered hat) presents Louis-Napoleon to a female allegorical figure who represents France.48 Another broadsheet followed which took the form of a letter ‘addressed from heaven by the Emperor Napoleon to his nephew’, refuting claims that Louis-Napoleon sought power only for himself. Speaking to ‘you, who I call my child and who I believe to be worthy of that name’, and invoking his own ‘agony of Saint Helena’, Napoleon urges his nephew to expect nothing for himself but to think always of the ‘people’; do this, he says, ‘and you will take your place at my side, and I will bless you as I bless all who contribute to our beautiful France’.49 The close identification of Louis-Napoleon with his uncle did undoubtedly play a significant part in the former’s electoral success, but it would not have done so to the same extent without the sustained efforts of the Bonapartists over several years to highlight

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the nature of the association. If many rural voters were like the agricultural labourer questioned by Nassau William Senior, who said his village all voted for Louis-Napoleon ‘partly because of his uncle who was the greatest man who ever lived’,50 if there is truth in the claim that peasants in some parts of France thought they were voting for Napoleon himself, and if such responses do suggest that the uncle and the nephew were conflated into one figure at the time of the presidential election, then this has been shown to be a process which was encouraged and enhanced by the efforts of the Bonapartist campaigners. Moreover, the peasant cited by Nassau Senior only based his vote ‘partly’ on the association with Napoleon. In order to succeed, LouisNapoleon had to have something to offer in his own right, especially when it came to attracting support from those less politically simple than was much of the peasantry. In this respect, the Bonapartist campaign consciously referred back to the two strands developed in Napoleonic Ideas. It has already been seen how the idea of a radical Louis-Napoleon, heir of the Revolution and friend of the worker, was promoted. Even more insistent was the promise that LouisNapoleon, like his uncle, would bring order out of chaos without sacrificing progress, and would thus promote prosperity for all. Marx quotes the Economist as judging the President to be the guardian of order in late 1851,51 but this quality had already been recognised in Louis-Napoleon before his election by the Gazette de France, which on 5 December 1848 gave its support to the candidate whose ‘name is a living protest against tendencies to anarchy and disorder’.52 In a sense, Marx was right to observe that Louis-Napoleon was able to ‘signify everything’, but in arguing that this was ‘because he was nothing’,53 he implies that no more than a series of hollow promises lay behind the appeal. This view does less than justice to the fact that Louis-Napoleon’s ability to attract support from so many different groups was enhanced by the way the promises could be made to seem consistent with what he had been saying and doing for the past ten years. A carefully edited version of his own record was deliberately grafted on to that of Napoleon to lend conviction to the pledge that he would provide solutions for French society’s present ills. How, then, are we to assess Marx’s analysis of Bonapartism in the Eighteenth Brumaire? Roger Price, in The French Second Republic, undertakes a detailed examination of French society at this time explicitly as a critique of Marx’s essays, for he believes that Marx put


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forward a view which has led to false preconceptions of that society and its institutions. However, whilst Price is correct in pointing to a considerable number of differentiations in what Marx treats as broad single classes, the ‘simplification’ which leads to ‘mistakes of interpretation by Marx himself’54 has less bearing on the election of 10 December than on other aspects of the Second Republic (Price’s interpretation of the June Days of 1848, for instance, differs quite fundamentally from that of Marx in Class Struggles in France).55 In fact, Price’s analysis of the election56 contains nothing that is not in broad agreement with that of Marx. It is not so much that Marx is guilty of ‘mistakes of interpretation’ in this context, but rather that his analysis lacks substance and as such only tells half the story. It is in the nature of Marx’s approach to subject politics and political movements to rigorous intellectual analysis, and it is perhaps not surprising that he should be unimpressed by a programme seemingly as loose and full of contradictions as that offered by Louis-Napoleon and his supporters. But Bonapartism was not based on intellect, and it did not propose a coherent political ideology; it was from the outset eclectic in approach, and it functioned ultimately more through suggestion than argument. For Marx, this meant that its appeal must remain shallow. If LouisNapoleon attracted support, it was only because various class groups saw him as the temporary means of achieving their own ends; therefore, any success he enjoyed would be short-lived, as Marx suggests at the end of the Eighteenth Brumaire,57 and again in his Preface to the Second Edition of 1869.58 In this analysis, Marx underestimates the positive appeal that a movement such as Bonapartism can exert. Even if the Second Empire did collapse completely in 1870 (although not in the way that Marx had predicted), the attraction of populist authoritarianism remained, especially in periods of crisis. Marx’s legacy in this respect has proved to be far-reaching, for Marxist political parties and Marxist intellectuals well into the twentieth century have frequently failed to grasp the extent of the appeal of populist right-wing movements and have therefore underestimated them as political opponents. The arguments which portray Louis-Napoleon as a ‘proto-fascist’59 or as part of a tradition of French ‘Caesarism’60 remain unconvincing, but in terms of electoral techniques he did establish an approach which was much imitated. As one of the first to gain national office through universal manhood suffrage (Napoleon had only obtained plebisci-

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tary approval when already in power), he demonstrated an ability to come to terms with the demands of mass politics. The dismissive contempt that Marx showed for Louis-Napoleon and his ideas has found parallels in the attitude of many of his followers. To cite merely one of the most notorious examples, many left-wing intellectuals of the 1920s and early 1930s were quite dismissive of the potential of Hitler, whose speeches in this period showed just the combination of sentiment and promise analysed in this essay. Establishing emotional sympathy with a long relation of his own personal struggle, he would then go on to offer simple solutions to seemingly intractable problems, ending with an affirmation that he had the will to carry out these solutions.61 Irrational and inconsistent this may have been, but, as LouisNapoleon had recognised at an early stage, mass politics is not always about rational and coherent argument. It would prove a lesson that the Marxists of Western and Central Europe took a long time to learn. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this volume, p. 24. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 92. Letter of 15 November 1836, quoted in Adrien Dansette, Histoire du Second Empire: Louis-Napoléon à la Conquête du Pouvoir (Paris: Hachette, 1961), p. 141 (my translation). Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 34. C.W., Vol. 10, pp. 80–2. Ibid., p. 80. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 34. Ibid., p. 101. C.W., Vol. 10, p. 80. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1975), pp. 348–9. See Roger Price, The French Second Republic (London: Batsford, 1972), esp. pp. 5–30. Roger Price (ed.), Documents on the French Revolution of 1848 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 113. Ibid., p. 115. Brison D. Gooch (ed.), Napoleonic Ideas: Des Idées Napoléoniennes, par le Prince Napoléon-Louis Bonaparte (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 3.


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20. A classic evocation of this storytelling can be found in Balzac’s novel The Country Doctor. 21. Four ministers, six marshals, fifty-six generals, fourteen councillors of state, nineteen prefects, seven ambassadors and twenty-one chamberlains. 22. Almanac Impérial pour 1846, Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), LC22.144. 23. Revue de l’Empire, Bibliothèque Nationale, LC2.1540 (my translation). 24. Frédéric Bluche, Le Bonapartisme (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1980), pp. 254–8; Bernard Ménager, Les Napoléons du Peuple (Paris: Aubier, 1988), p. 91. 25. Gooch, Napoleonic Ideas, p. 125. 26. R.S. Alexander, Napoleon (London: Arnold, 2001), p. 47. 27. Price, Second Republic, p. 214. 28. Gooch, Napoleonic Ideas, p. 43. 29. Ibid., p. 39. 30. Ibid., p. 86. 31. Ibid., p. 33. 32. Ibid., p. 61. 33. Ibid., p. 49. 34. Ibid., p. 34. 35. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, pp. 22, 105. 36. Gooch, Napoleonic Ideas, pp. 43, 59. 37. See, for example, Jacques-Louis David, Le Sacre (Musée du Louvre); Goubaud, Baptism of the King of Rome in Notre-Dame (Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris); Boullay, Exhumation des Cendres de L’Empereur Napoléon (Bibliothèque Nationale); Imagerie Pellerin, Exhumation des Cendres de Napoléon (Musée Carnavalet). 38. Albert Guerard, Reflections on the Napoleonic Legend (London: Fisher Unwin, 1924), p. 149. 39. Bluche, Bonapartisme, p. 10. 40. Ménager, Napoléons du Peuple, p. 7. 41. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 101. 42. Geoff Watkins, ‘Selling Bonapartism or Merely Selling Copies? The Napoleonic Legend and Popular Almanacs’, in Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (eds), Propaganda (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999) pp. 131–48. 43. Gooch, Napoleonic Ideas, p. 122. 44. Ibid., p. 126. 45. Musée national du Château de Malmaison. 46. See, for example, Georgin, Imagerie Pellerin, Tombeau de Napoléon (Paris, Musée de l’Armée). 47. Aux Mânes de l’Empereur, printed in Paris by P. Bredolin, 15 December 1840 (Bibliothèque Nationale) (my translation). 48. Bibliothèque Nationale, Ye 969 (50); the final words of each stanza are ‘l’enfant dont je fus le parrain’. 49. Lettre adressée du Ciel par l’Empereur Napoléon à son Neveu le Prince Louis Bonaparte (Paris: Charles Boze, 1848) (my translation). 50. Nassau William Senior, Journals kept in France and Italy from 1848 to 1852 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), Vol. 2, p. 180.

176 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.


Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 84. Price, Second Republic, p. 212. C.W., Vol. 10, p. 81. Price, Second Republic, p. 12. Ibid., pp. 155–92. Ibid., pp. 208–25. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 109. Karl Marx, ‘Preface’ (1869) to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 2nd edn, C.W., Vol. 21, pp. 56–8. 59. For examples of this argument, see Brison D. Gooch (ed.), Napoleon 3rd: Man of Destiny: Enlightened Statesman or Proto-Fascist? (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1963). 60. See Philip Thody, French Caesarism from Napoleon I to Charles de Gaulle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). 61. For a discussion of Hitler’s rhetoric, see in particular, J.P. Stern, Hitler, the Führer and the People (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1975).

Part 4

The Autonomy of the State?

7

The Political Scene and the Politics of Representation: Periodising Class Struggle and the State in the Eighteenth Brumaire Bob Jessop

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte has a key place in debates over Marx’s theory of the state and his account of political representation. For some critics, this text provides evidence for two Marxian theories of the state: whereas Marx normally saw the state as the executive committee or direct instrument of the ruling class, in other contexts he argued that it can become relatively autonomous from the various classes in society even if it continues to perform a class function.1 For others, however, this same text reveals devastating inconsistencies in Marx’s class-based account of the state, since it allows for an executive (apparatus) that wins autonomy for itself against the dominant class(es). This inconsistency is said to be especially clear in Marx’s later remarks on the tendential rise of a praetorian state, in which the army led by Bonaparte III, starts to represent itself against society rather than acting on behalf of one part of society against other parts.2 According to Mehlman, for example, ‘the piquancy of Bonapartism lies entirely in the emergence of a State which has been emptied of its class contents’.3 Yet others suggest that Marx himself resolves these alleged inconsistencies ‘by analysing the Bonapartist regime, if not as the organized rule of a class bloc, nevertheless as the determined product of the class struggle’.4 For others again, the same text confirms the generic (rather than exceptional) tendency of the capitalist state to acquire relative autonomy in order the better to organise the interests of the dominant class(es) and to win the support of subordinate classes.5 The exceptional nature of state autonomy in the Bonapartist case merely serves to indicate the exceptional nature of the circumstances in which this role has to be played.6 The Eighteenth Brumaire poses similar problems for the nature and significance of representation in the wider political system. For the 179

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complexity of the ideological and organisational forms in which Marx claims to discern class interests at work seems to undermine any attempt to show a one-to-one correlation between economic classes and political forces. For some commentators this indicates the need to take political identities, political discourses, and political forms of representation seriously in theoretical analysis and to explore the practical problems this poses in advancing economic interests.7 For others this simply confirms the radical disjunction between the economic and the political with no unilateral translation or relay mechanism that might ensure that politics reflects economic class interests.8 This highlights the problem of economic class reductionism that allegedly plagues Marxism and leads to the twin conclusions that political representation has its own dynamic and that it is invalid to look behind the political stage in order to discover hidden economic forces. And for yet others, this text illustrates the great extent to which Marx anticipated subsequent discourse-theoretical insights into the performative nature of language, the discursive constitution of identities and interests, and their role in shaping the forms and terms of political struggle. For Marx interpreted politics in the Eighteenth Brumaire as formative rather than superstructural, performative rather than reflective.9 For these and other reasons we can see the Eighteenth Brumaire as a key text for the interpretation of Marx’s state and political theory. Thus its implications for state theory and class analysis are typically contrasted with a ‘standard’ Marxian position derived variously (and with quite different results) from The Communist Manifesto, the 1859 ‘Preface’ to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, or the three volumes of Capital. This is a highly dubious procedure since the Manifesto is a programmatic text, the status of the 1859 ‘Preface’ as a canonical text is highly questionable, and Capital’s class analysis is incomplete even in economic, let alone political or ideological, terms. There can be no innocent reading of a text such as the Eighteenth Brumaire but it could well be useful to read it initially without adopting preconceived views about Marx’s theory of the state and class politics that have been derived from other studies that were not concerned with specific political conjunctures. In this sense the first question to ask is what does Marx set out to achieve in his history of the Eighteenth Brumaire? WHAT DOES THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE DO? First, as a substantive exercise in historiography, the Eighteenth Brumaire describes the background to Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état

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on 2 December 1851 and suggests that this is the farcical repetition of the tragic coup d’état made by Napoleon Bonaparte on 9 November 1799 (or, as it was identified in the new revolutionary calendar, the 18 Brumaire VIII). It presents the run-up to this coup d’état in terms of a periodisation of political developments that is presented and analysed in terms of four closely interwoven objects of enquiry. These comprise: (a) the political scene, that is, the visible but nonetheless ‘imaginary’ world of everyday politics as acted out before the general public through the open and declared action of more or less wellorganised social forces.10 Marx employs a wide range of theoretical metaphors and allusions to describe and map the political stage and to critically assess how the resulting political theatre is played out by actors who assume different characters, masks and roles according to changing material circumstances, strategies and moods (b) the social content of the politics acted out on this stage. This involves a closer inspection of ‘the rude external world’11 based on looking ‘behind the scenes’12 of ‘the situation and the parties, this superficial appearance, which veils the class struggle’.13 This class struggle is nonetheless related to the present situation and its various strategic and tactical possibilities rather than to abstract, eternal and idealised interests that are attached to pregiven classes defined purely in terms of their position in the social relations of production. Thus Marx emphasises the concrete-complex articulation of the economic and extraeconomic conditions for the ‘expanded reproduction’14 of specific class relations and what this implies for the reordering of what are always relative advantages in the class struggle. In this sense he also describes avant la lettre the stakes, strategies and tactics involved in what Gramsci would later term ‘wars of position’ and ‘wars of manoeuvre’15 (c) the transformation of the institutional architecture of the state and the wider political system insofar as this entails a structural framework that differentially constrains and facilitates the pursuit of particular strategies and tactics in wars of position and/or manoeuvre, provides a target of strategic action in its own right as diverse political forces struggle to maintain or transform it, and, indeed, itself derives from the results of past

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class (or, at least, class-relevant) struggles in the ideological, political and economic realms (d) the interconnected movements of the local, national and international economy over different timescales insofar as these shape the political positions that could feasibly have been adopted in given conjunctures. Here too, although Marx strongly asserts his belief (and, indeed, even protests too much in this regard) that the ultimate victory of the proletarian social revolution is guaranteed, he also emphasises the need to relate political action to the present situation. Second, Marx also poses questions throughout the Eighteenth Brumaire about the language and other symbols in and through which the class content of politics comes to be represented or, more commonly, misrepresented. He explores the semiotic forms, genres, and tropes through which different political forces articulate their identities, interests, and beliefs and also reflects on the appropriate political language in which the proletariat might formulate its demands. In this context he argues that the social revolution of the nineteenth century must develop its own, novel political language rather than draw, as did earlier revolutions, on the ‘poetry from the past’.16 In this sense, the Eighteenth Brumaire is more concerned with the discursive limitations on the representation of class interests (‘tradition from all the dead generations’, ‘the superstition from the past’, ‘an entire superstructure of different and peculiarly formed sentiments, delusions, modes of thought and outlooks on life’)17 than it is with the organisational forms in and through which they might be advanced. This need to develop an appropriate political language holds particularly for the proletariat and its potential allies. Indeed, one could well interpret this text as a contribution to the critique of semiotic economy, i.e., to an account of the imaginary (mis)recognition and (mis)representation of class interests, rather than to the political economy of capital accumulation. The most extreme illustration of this is found in the floating signifier himself, Louis Bonaparte. For, as Marx argued in The Class Struggles in France, although Bonaparte was ‘the most simple-minded [einfältig] man in France’, he had ‘acquired the most multiplex [vielfältig] significance. Just because he was nothing, he could signify everything.’ So different class forces could project their own hopes and fears onto Bonaparte; and he in turn skilfully manipulated and exploited this polyvalence to advance his own interests.


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Third, as a serious and self-consciously literary work in its own right, the Eighteenth Brumaire adopts a highly distinctive and powerful set of literary techniques to narrate the historical background of the coup d’état. Above all it adopts the form of parody to unfold this narrative, to portray the ironies in French history, to express the problems of class representation, and to resolve the relative importance of external circumstances and willed action in shaping the course of history. In this regard Marx’s use of language is itself performative at several levels. Indeed, as he himself puts it in his preface to the second edition, he intended to submit the cult of the first Napoleon to ‘the weapons of historical research, of criticism, of satire and of wit’.18 In this sense his withering descriptions of Louis Bonaparte also serve to belittle the stature of his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte. As an intervention intended to influence the subsequent course of French politics, Marx’s use of a specific literary genre and choice of language has specific pedagogical and political purposes. Far from being arbitrary, then, his mode of emplotting the historical background to the Eighteenth Brumaire is organically related to the intended political effects of this narrative. ON PERIODISATION Marx’s text presents a complex periodisation of contemporary history rather than a simple chronology. This makes it a model of political analysis that has inspired many subsequent Marxist analyses and also won the respect of many orthodox historians for its theoretical power and empirical insight. In the first instance Marx relates key turning points in the class struggle to the unfolding of actions and events on the political stage. He distinguishes three successive periods, the first of brief duration, and the second and third having three phases each, and the third phase of the third period having four steps.19 His periodisation is based mainly on movements in parliamentary and party politics as these are influenced by actions and events occurring at a distance from the state (e.g. in the press, petitions, salons and saloon bars, the streets of Paris, the countryside, etc.).20 Marx identifies the three periods as follows: (a) the ‘February’ period from 24 February to 4 May 1848 in which, after the overthrow of Louis Philippe, the stage was prepared for the republic – the period of improvised or provisional government; (b) the period of constituting the republic or the constituent assembly for the nation; and (c) the constitutional republic or legislative national assembly.21 It is worth noting here

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that Marx offers three interpretations of each period. In distinguishing the periods, he refers first to their immediate conjunctural significance, then to the primary institutional site in and around which the political dramatic unfolds. In addition, each period (and its phases, where these are distinguished) is discussed in terms of its past, its present and, as far as it was already on the public record or Marx deemed it knowable, its future significance. Periodisations and chronologies differ in three ways. First, whereas a chronology orders actions, events, or periods on a single unilinear time scale, a periodisation operates with several time scales. Thus the Eighteenth Brumaire is replete with references to intersecting and overlapping time horizons, to unintended as well as self-conscious repetitions, to dramatic reversals and forced retreats as well as surprising turnarounds and forward advances, and to actions and events whose true significance would only emerge in the ensuing train of events. Second, while a chronology recounts simple temporal coincidence or succession, a periodisation focuses on more complex conjunctures. It classifies actions, events, and periods into stages according to their conjunctural implications (as specific combinations of constraints and opportunities on the pursuit of different projects) for the actions of different social forces on different sites of action over different time horizons. For each period, Marx identifies the possibilities it offers for different actors, identities, interests, horizons of action, strategies and tactics. He also interprets periods from diverse perspectives (e.g. from a long-term democratic viewpoint as opposed to the immediate stakes declared by protagonists); emphasises how the balance of forces comes to be transformed over time (e.g. the neutralisation of democratic elements in the army through a series of deliberate manoeuvres); and identifies decisive turning points (for example, the Party of Order’s loss of the lever of executive power when it was excluded from the Cabinet).22 Third, whereas a chronology typically provides a simple narrative explanation for what occurs by identifying a single temporal series of actions and events, a periodisation rests on an explanatory framework oriented to the contingent, overdetermined interaction of more than one such series. In this regard there can be no doubt about the complex emplotment of the Eighteenth Brumaire. For it presents a story marked by repetition and deferral, tragedy and farce, high politics and low cunning, political theatre and mob violence – set against a background in which a modern French national capitalism is gradually being consolidated in city and countryside


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alike in the broader context of an increasingly integrated world market. This provides the basis for a complex narrative. THE POLITICAL STAGE Marx is especially concerned with the language and effectivity of political action on the political stage and explores this in terms of a wide range of theatrical metaphors. This could well reflect both real changes in the nature of politics following the French Revolution and Marx’s own interest in literary forms, styles and tropes along with his extensive knowledge of specific plays and novels. For, on the one hand, the French Revolution coincided with major changes in the actors’ art in the literary theatre and in the official politics of representation. As Friedland has shown, based on detailed analyses of French theatre and politics from 1789 to 1820, the theatre and acting were politicised and French politics was theatricalised. Given our concern with the Eighteenth Brumaire, it is important to note that French revolutionary politics did, indeed, adopt old political languages, old character masks and old roles as its protagonists sought to develop a new politics of representation in which the national assembly now claimed to actively ‘represent’ the nation rather than, as occurred in the Estates system of the ancien régime, serving as its corporate embodiment.23 Marx, too, stresses the theatricality of politics not only as metaphor but also as a selfconscious political practice on the part of political actors as they sought to persuade and impress their audience by adopting character masks and roles from the historical past and/or from a dramatic repertoire. And, on the other hand, Marx himself had a solid grounding in ancient and modern philosophies of literature and drama, their theory and history, and an immense range of what he and Engels described in the Communist Manifesto as ‘world literature’.24 This is reflected in his passionate use of parody as a mode of emplotment to ridicule the two Bonapartes. Marx takes great pains to emphasise how the political stage has its own effectivity. Far from being a simple political reflection of economic interests, it has its own logic and its own influence on class relations. This is quite consistent, of course, with The Communist Manifesto’s claim that every class struggle is a political struggle. This is almost painfully evident in Marx’s initial attempts in the first instalment of the Eighteenth Brumaire, written it should be recalled in separate parts over several months and intended for serial publication,25 to establish correspondences between different

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political parties and different classes or class fractions. But even here Marx recognises that there is no one-to-one fit between party and economic class interests (see, e.g. his analysis of the pure republican faction which, as Marx himself emphasises, is little more than a political-intellectual côterie unified by shared political antipathies and nationalist sentiments).26 Over the course of writing the Eighteenth Brumaire, however, Marx moves towards an account of the logic of political struggle in the modern (and capitalist type of) state and the manner in which specific conjunctures and distinctive institutional ensembles shape the forms and content of the political struggle. Thus he builds on the institutional separation and potential antagonism between state and civil society that he had already taken for granted in his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right;27 and he explores how the institutional terrain of the state apparatus and its articulation to the wider public sphere shapes the forms of politics. He therefore notes many distinctive features of the state’s organisation and articulation to the public sphere – electoral, parliamentary, presidential, bureaucratic, administrative, military, state-orchestrated mob violence, etc. – that directly condition not only the various struggles on the political stage but also struggles to modify the political balance of forces discursively, organisationally and institutionally. Among the many effects of the forms of politics on the course of political struggle we can note, first, the (inevitably constrained) choice of political genre and language in and through which the aspirations of different political forces can be expressed. For, implicitly conceding that there is no neutral language in and through which social identities, interests, and aspirations can be truly and unambiguously expressed, Marx emphasises that every political movement needs to find appropriate discourses and symbolism as means of political expression to advance its interests. Second, Marx refers to the political space that this creates for the literary representatives of a class.28 Thus he notes the emergence of a parliamentary republican faction organised around political sentiments rather than common material interests or position in the relations of production. He describes this pure republic faction as no more than a coterie of republican-minded businessmen, writers, lawyers, officers and officials whose influence rested on the personal antipathy of the country to Louis Philippe, on recollections of the


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old republic [of 1789–99], on the republican faith of a number of enthusiasts, above all on French nationalism.29 Third, there is the phenomenon of ‘parliamentary cretinism, which confines its victims to an imaginary world and robs them of their senses, their recollection, all knowledge of the rude external world’.30 A fourth (but far from final example) is the emergence of a selfinterested military and bureaucratic caste (see below). THE SOCIAL CONTENT OF POLITICS Marx’s account of the superficial (but nonetheless significant and causally effective) movements on the political stage is combined with an analysis of the ‘social content of politics’.31 The economic ‘base’ figures in these analyses in two main ways. First, the necessary institutional separation and the potential antagonism between state and civil society (and hence the existence of a specific type of political scene and its possible disjunctions from the economy) depend on a particular form of economic organisation. Second, and, for present purposes, more important, the economic ‘base’ is treated, rightly or wrongly, as the ultimate source of the social or material conditioning of political struggles. Here Marx refers both to the changing economic conjunctures and successive modes of growth in which political struggles occur and to the more general, underlying connection between these struggles and basic economic interests in a fundamentally capitalist social formation. Nonetheless the social content of politics is related mainly to the economic interests of the contending classes and class fractions in specific conjunctures and/or periods in a particular social formation rather than to abstract interests identified at the level of a mode of production. This approach is particularly important, of course, for intermediate classes (e.g. the petite bourgeoisie), classes with no immediate role in production (for example, the surplus population), or declassé elements (e.g. the lumpenproletariat). But it also applies for other classes. For example, in writing about the central role of the peasantry in French politics, Marx noted how industrialisation and the increasing power of financial capital had transformed its class position. Whereas it had been a major beneficiary of land redistribution under Napoleon I, parcellisation and debt had undermined the viability of many smallholdings and prompted a growing division between a revolutionary and a conservative peasantry. It was the latter whose proprietorial identity and traditional aspirations

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Bonaparte claimed to represent (whilst doing little to help them in practice) and whom he also mobilised as a crucial supporting class in his political manoeuvres against other social forces. Likewise, over the course of his successive analyses of the relations between the financial aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie, Marx would later come to emphasise how their original antagonism was moderated through the development of a modern form of finance capital.32 In addition, Marx takes pains to emphasise the scope for disjunction between the surface (but nonetheless effective) movement and the deeper social content of political struggle. Thus he writes that [j]ust as in private life, one distinguishes between what a man thinks and says, and what he really is and does, so one must all the more in historical conflicts distinguish between the fine words and aspirations of the parties and their real organisation and their real interests, their image from their reality.33 It is important, for example, to distinguish the ‘“so-called” people’s party’ from a real people’s party.34 Likewise, writing about the Orléanist and Legitimist factions of the bourgeoisie, Marx argues that, on the public stage, in high politics and matters of state, as a grand parliamentary party, they pawned off their royal houses with token acts of reverence, and adjourned the restoration of the monarchy ad infinitum, and did their real business as the party of order, i.e., under a social rather than a political banner, as a representative of the bourgeois world order, … as the bourgeois class against other classes, not as royalists against republicans.35 Interestingly and significantly, Marx also tends to suggest that, the more critical the economic situation, the less significant does the disjunction between the political and the social become. For divisions within the political field are then realigned, if possible, around more basic social conflicts. Divisions within the bourgeoisie are overcome, for example, when the bourgeoisie as a whole is threatened. Political crisis may also prompt a realignment of state and society when their separation risks becoming too antagonistic and conflictual. Thus, some years after the Eighteenth Brumaire, when a more or less completely autonomised Bonapartist ‘rule of the sword’


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over society is threatened by social unrest, Napoleon III recognises the need to retreat and rebuild his links to bourgeois civil society.36 THE STATE APPARATUS AND ITS TRAJECTORY A further dimension of Marx’s analysis concerns the increasing centralisation of state power in France and its implications for the development of the antagonism between state and society. For present purposes, and given the limited space for this chapter, I will make only two brief points in this regard. The first concerns how changes in the overall architecture of the state shape the terrain of political struggle and also condition the political balance of forces. For strategic and tactical possibilities altered as the articulation between parliament, Cabinet, and presidential authority was modified; or, again, as the state acquired increasing control over every aspect of social life throughout the land. This claim was taken further, of course, in Marx’s later remarks on the praetorian state; and was even more carefully elaborated in The Civil War in France.37 It reinforces the point that the very existence of an institutionally separate state (and wider political system) excludes any possibility that the political field can be a simple reflection of economic class interests. Instead the general form of the state and the particular form of political regimes modify the balance of forces and thereby become stakes in the class struggle itself. Marx develops this point most forcefully in exploring the implications of the transition from a monarchical regime to a parliamentary republic for the capacity of the two main fractions of the bourgeoisie to defend their common interests. Thus he writes that: The parliamentary republic was more than the neutral territory where the two factions of the French bourgeoisie, legitimists and orléanists, large-scale landed property and industry, could take up residence with an equal right. It was the inescapable condition of their joint rule, the sole form of state in which the claims of their particular factions and those of all other classes of society were subjected to the general interest of the bourgeois class. As royalists, they relapsed into their old antagonism, a battle for supremacy between landed property and money, and the highest expression of this antagonism, the personification of it, were their kings, their dynasties.38

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Second, and as Marx takes pains to demonstrate, such state transformations are far from innocent. For they are partly the result of political actions consciously directed at securing modifications in the balance of forces. The clearest example of this in the Eighteenth Brumaire is, of course, Louis Bonaparte’s conduct of a war of position to centralise power in the hands of the president and then, through a final war of manoeuvre, to venture the coup d’état that serves as the dénouement of this particular Bonapartist farce. But it does not follow that all such transformations are deliberate and their consequences intended (even if they are anticipated). For Marx also notes the double bind in which the French bourgeoisie found itself in the same conjuncture. Indeed, it ‘was compelled by its class position both to negate the conditions of existence for any parliamentary power, including its own, and to make the power of the executive, its adversary, irresistible’.39 CONCLUSIONS One should not write long conclusions to a short chapter. Instead I will simply make five remarks about the problematic dialectic of historical circumstances and social action from this far from innocent (re-)reading of the Eighteenth Brumaire. First, rather than denying it, Marx clearly recognises the so-called ‘problem of representation’. From the outset he problematises the semiotic resources available to political forces to express their identities, interests, and aspirations. If men do make their own history but not just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves, then one key feature of the present circumstances, given and inherited is the semiotic repertoire that they inherit from the past.40 Engels makes much the same point in his commentary on The Peasant War in Germany when he writes that all revolutionary social and political doctrines directed against German feudalism were necessarily theological heresies because of the dominance of religion in feudal legitimation.41 This is why it is so important for the proletariat to seek a ‘new poetry’ to express its identities, interests and aspirations. Second, another key feature of these circumstances is the topography of the political stage on which leading political forces appeal for support from multiple audiences and the problems this produces for political choreography. Marx regards the political scene as the site of an experimental theatre as political actors adopt different character masks, roles and styles of political action. A third key feature of these circumstances is the political conjuncture. This


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makes it imperative for different political forces to read the present situation correctly in order to identify the horizons of possibility (that is, the scope of possible actions in specific, but moving, fields of political action) and the appropriate strategies and tactics to maximise gains in an unfolding, open and indeterminate field. Marx indicates the importance of reading the general line (ascending, descending, etc.) of political development and choosing one’s actions accordingly. In the conditions facing them from June 1848 up to Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état, for example, it was quite right for the defeated revolutionary proletariat to remain passive before the advance of Bonapartism. Indeed, as a far from neutral observer who was nonetheless confined to the sidelines, Marx hoped this would serve to crystallise the gulf between state and society and thereby clarify what was at stake for the revolutionary movement. A fourth dimension of the circumstances confronting political actors is the class-biased structure of the state and the need to overcome this bias through actions to transform the state. Bonaparte proved himself as a skilful practitioner of politics as ‘the art of the possible’ in this regard. In The Civil War in France Marx will eventually suggest that the commune is the most appropriate political form for a revolutionary political regime. And fifth, these other dimensions must be seen against the background of the nature of the economic base and the dynamic of class struggles that provide framework of possibilities. Two fine examples of this are Marx’s account of the changing economic conditions of the peasantry (see above) and of the increasing fusion between financial and industrial capital associated with the rise of a modern fisco-financial system during the 1840s and 1850s and the novel Bonapartist institution of the Crédit Mobilier.42 Indeed this aspect will play an increasing role in Marx’s analysis of Bonapartism and its role in the development of a modern capitalist economy – and hence in further modifying his analysis of its significance as a form of capitalist state. NOTES 1. For example, Ralph Miliband, ‘Marx and the State’, The Socialist Register 1965, pp. 278–96. 2. Thus Marx writes that ‘the rule of the naked sword is proclaimed in most unmistakable terms, and Bonaparte wants France to clearly understand that the imperial rule does rest not on her will but on 600,000 bayonets ... Under the second Empire the interest of the army itself is to predominate. The army is no longer to maintain the rule of one part of the people over another part of the people. The army is to maintain its

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire own rule, personated by its own dynasty, over the French people in general … It is to represent the State in antagonism to the society. It must not be imagined that Bonaparte is not aware of the dangerous character of the experiment he tries. In proclaiming himself the chief of the Pretorians, he declares every Pretorian chief his competitor.’ Karl Marx, ‘The Rule of the Pretorians’, in C.W., Vol. 15, pp. 464–7. Cited by Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat’, Representations, Vol. 31 (1990), pp. 69–95, p. 80; see also R.N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels. II. Classical Marxism, 1850–1895 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), pp. 47–56. David Fernbach, ‘Introduction’ to Karl Marx: Surveys from Exile (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 15; cf. B. Berberoglu, ‘The 18th-Brumaire and the Controversy Over the Theory of the State’, Quarterly Review of Historical Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1986), pp. 36–44. For example, Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973). See also Hal Draper, Marx’s Theory of Revolution. Part One: State and Bureaucracy, Vol. 2 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). Dominick LaCapra, ‘Reading Marx: The Case of The Eighteenth Brumaire’, in Dominick La Capra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 268–90; Claude Lefort, ‘Marx: from One Vision of History to Another’, Social Research, Vol. 45, No. 4 (1978), pp. 615–66; C.J. Katz, ‘Marx on the Peasantry: Class in Itself or Class in Struggle?’, Review of Politics, Vol. 54, No. 1 (1992), pp. 50–71; Gregor McLennan, Marxism and the Methodologies of History (London: New Left Books, 1981). For example, Barry Hindess, ‘Classes and Politics in Marxist Theory’, in Gary Littlejohn et al. (eds), Power and the State (London: Croom Helm, 1980); Paul Q. Hirst, ‘Economic Classes and Politics’, in Alan Hunt (ed.), Class and Class Structure (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977). Sandy Petrey, ‘The Reality of Representation: Between Marx and Balzac’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 14 (1988), pp. 448–68; Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, pp. 246–7. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this volume, p. 75. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 42. The term ‘expanded reproduction’ (see Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975)) refers to the economic and extra-economic conditions involved in the reproduction of class relations qua economic, political, and ideological relations. This notion is well expressed by Marx when he writes of how the Orléanist faction of bourgeoisie, which was ‘the most viable faction of the French bourgeoisie’, was seriously weakened when ‘a blow was struck at its parliament, its legal chambers, its commercial courts, its provincial representatives, its notaries, its universities, its spokesmen and their platforms, its press and its literature, its administrative income and its court fees, its army salaries and its state pensions, its mind and its body’ (Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, pp. 96–7).


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15. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). 16. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 22. 17. Ibid., pp. 16, 22, 43. 18. Karl Marx, ‘Preface’ to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, C.W., Vol. 21, p. 57. 19. Ibid., pp. 110–11. Terrell Carver’s translation uses periods for both; here I follow Nicos Poulantzas’ terminology in Fascism and Dictatorship (London: New Left Books, 1974) in distinguishing periods, phases, and steps. 20. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, pp. 55, 37, 45, 55, 37. 21. Ibid., p. 24. 22. Ibid., pp. 41, 50, 53. 23. P.A. Friedland, ‘Representation and Revolution: the Theatricality of Politics and the Politics of Theater in France, 1789–1794’, unpublished PhD thesis, Berkeley, University of California; P.A. Friedland, Métissage. The Merging of Theater and Politics in Revolutionary France (Princeton: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1999), Occasional Papers No. 4. 24. See, in general, S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) and, on the Eighteenth Brumaire in particular, Petrey, ‘The Reality of Representation’; J.P. Riquelme, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Karl Marx as Symbolic Action’, History and Theory, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1980), pp. 58–72; M.A. Rose, Reading the Young Marx and Engels (London: Croom Helm, 1978); Peter Stallybrass, ‘“Well Grubbed, Old Mole”: Marx, Hamlet, and the (Un)fixing of Representation’, Cultural Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1998), pp. 3–14; and Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 25. This also explains many of the repetitions in this text on repetition as well as changes in argument over different instalments. 26. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, pp. 28–9. 27. Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, C.W., Vol. 3, pp. 3–129. 28. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 45. 29. Ibid., p. 28. 30. Ibid., p. 75. 31. Ibid., pp. 43–4. 32. For details, see Draper, Marx’s Theory of Revolution; S. Bologna, ‘Money and Crisis: Marx as Correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune, 1856–57 (Part I)’, Common Sense, Vol. 13 (1993), pp. 29–53; and S. Bologna, ‘Money and Crisis: Marx as Correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune, 1856–57 (Part II)’, Common Sense, Vol. 14 (1993), pp. 63–88. 33. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 43. 34. Ibid., p. 42. 35. Ibid., pp. 43–4. 36. On the Bonapartist ‘rule of the praetorians’, its specificity, and its limitations, see especially Marx, ‘The Rule of the Pretorians’; and, for a

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire conspectus and critical interpretation of Marx’s writings on this issue, see Draper, Marx’s Theory of Revolution, pp. 459–63. Marx, ‘The Rule of the Pretorians’; and The Civil War in France, in C.W., Vol. 22, pp. 307–57. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, pp. 78–9. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 19. Engels, ‘The Peasant War in Germany’, C.W., Vol. 10, pp. 412–13, cf. pp. 421, 451. On this see Bologna, ‘Money and Crisis’, Parts I and II.

8

Making Sense of the ‘Relative Autonomy’ of the State Paul Wetherly

Rummaging in dustbins is generally an unpleasant business but can occasionally uncover items of great value. The item in question here is the concept of relative autonomy which has been consigned by Bob Jessop to his theoretical dustbin.1 The aim of this chapter is to make sense of the relative autonomy of the state by putting forward a version of this concept that is theoretically coherent and may be plausible. In the process Jessop’s criticisms of relative autonomy will be confronted, and aspects of his alternative ‘strategic relational’ theory of the state will be criticised. It is a commonplace that Marx’s writings on the state comprise a diverse collection and do not provide a coherent unified perspective.2 However there is a fair degree of consensus that there are two principal views and that a tension exists between them. One view portrays the state as an instrument controlled by the capitalist class while the second emphasises the relative autonomy of the state from this class. It is a matter of debate which is primary and which secondary.3 In contrast to this conventional presentation arguably a better interpretation of Marx, and certainly a better exposition of Marxist state theory, identifies two connected theoretical strands as instrumentalist and structuralist and uses the notion of relative autonomy to characterise the theoretical claims made in each of these strands. Expressed simply, Marxism contains a general theory of the state in the form of economic determination within which the instrumental and structural explanations constitute specific causal mechanisms.4 This chapter defends the possibility of a general theory of the state against Jessop’s preference for ‘contingent necessity’ as an explanatory method. The Communist Manifesto contains Marx’s best known view of the state in what is usually seen as an explicit statement of the instrumentalist position. This is the claim that the bourgeoisie has … conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the 195

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modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.5 According to Miliband the Manifesto reveals Marx’s primary view on the state,6 but there is a secondary or subordinate view found in the Eighteenth Brumaire. This is a view of the state as ‘independent from and superior to all social classes, as being the dominant force in society rather than the instrument of a dominant class’.7 Expressed in these ways Marx’s two views are directly at odds with each other. In the instrumentalist view the state is subordinate to the capitalist class in whose hands it is controlled as a mere instrument. In the secondary view the capitalist class, in common with other classes, is subordinate to the state which, no longer seen as a class instrument, is now the dominant force in society. Elster contrasts instrumentalism with abdication (or abstention) and class balance theories. The Eighteenth Brumaire analyses Bonapartism in terms of ‘a voluntary abstention from power by the industrial bourgeoisie … motivated by a desire to split the attention of the subjugated classes’.8 Alternatively a class balance interpretation of the text suggests that ‘the struggle between two opposed classes allows the state to assert itself by divide and conquer’.9 Although these appear as two forms of the autonomous state thesis they differ in a crucial respect. Only the class balance view accords with Miliband’s secondary view of the state as the dominant force for in this case the state is able to ‘assert itself’. But in contrast to this autonomy the abstention view suggests that the bourgeoisie could take political power back into its own hands if it chose to. The state’s autonomy is thus more apparent than real – the state is still subordinate to the capitalist class which is, however, content to rule at arm’s length. Thus the abstention view does not involve the genuine autonomy of the state and is better seen as a special case of the instrumental approach. A problem with this way of presenting Marx’s views is that it tends to encourage a dichotomous conception. Thus for Elster ‘the central question in the Marxist theory of the state is whether it is autonomous with respect to class interests, or entirely reducible to them’.10 Similarly we might think of the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ views as alternatives. This dualism can take the form of seeing the ‘normal’ state as a class instrument and the Bonapartist autonomous state as ‘exceptional’. This normal-exceptional distinction would seem to be supported by the idea that the state acquires the capacity

The Relative Autonomy of the State

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to assert itself only in the specific context of class balance. However two considerations show that this dualism is unsustainable. First, the state might not be an instrument of the capitalist class yet be controlled by other class interests. The possibility of the state being used as an instrument by the working class is the most obvious idea within a simple Marxist framework, but we might easily identify a range of interests which might seek to control state power including non-capitalist classes and non-class social forces. It should also be noted that the autonomy of the state should not be conceived only in terms of the presence of various external social forces and their relative strengths but also in terms of its own interests and capacities. This suggests that the ability of the state to assert itself does not arise only negatively from a particular balance of external forces but from its own capacities as a differentiated institutional complex. Further, as will become clear, the state might not be an instrument of any of these social forces yet have limited autonomy on account of facing constraints of a structural kind. Second, and quite apart from other causal influences, class reductionism (instrumentalism) versus state autonomy is a false antithesis. The central question should be posed not in terms of whether or not the state is an instrument controlled by the capitalist class but how far the capitalist class is able to exercise such control. This is not an either–or question but one of degree to which answers may be in the form ‘not very much’ or ‘a great deal’. Thus within an instrumental framework state power should be conceived as a reflection of the unstable balance between societycentred and state-centred influences – the capacity of dominant and subordinate classes to control the state in their own interests and the capacity of the state to assert itself over against these external forces. The question is whether this balance is essentially open-ended or contingent or one of the elements tends to be more weighty than the others. The possibility that the interests of the capitalist class will tend to have more weight in determining the character of state power involves a claim that the capitalist class is able to wield more potent power resources over against pressure from below and the capacity for independent action on the part of the state itself. In that case the political sway of the capitalist class would be not exclusive but predominant. That is, roughly, the claim against which the instrumental view of the state in capitalist society must be tested.11 And it is the claim that the idea of the ‘relative autonomy’ of the state is intended to capture.

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So far we have only investigated one dimension of Marx’s account of the state – characterised as an instrumental view – and one dimension of relative autonomy. The question is who holds/controls/exercises state power? However there is a second, structural, dimension of explanation in Marx’s writing on the state. Structural explanation focuses on the structural context or terrain in which strategic actors operate, normally involving a claim that structure constrains, influences or determines agency.12 For example in the Eighteenth Brumaire structural explanation is invoked in conjunction with the claim that the Bonapartist state is able to assert itself as superior to all social classes. The structural explanation effectively qualifies this claim, seemingly to the point of its total negation. Although Marx’s analysis emphasises that the state under Bonaparte is not a mere instrument of the capitalist class, nevertheless ‘Bonaparte feels it is his mission to safeguard “bourgeois order”. But the strength of this bourgeois order lies in the middle class.’13 In other words the Bonapartist regime, despite its independence from the capitalist class, still safeguards capitalist society. Thus, in effect, it seems to matter little whether or not the capitalist class is able to capture political power since in any case the structural context of the state induces the same mission of securing the interests of the dominant class. In order to explain state action to preserve the ‘bourgeois order’ in the absence of capitalist rule there needs to be a reason why such action is necessary for the state itself in the sense that it protects state interests. This necessity can be expressed simply in terms of a notion of dependence, in the following terms: 1. running the state, and achieving any kind of political objective, requires revenue 2. revenue requires production 3. in a capitalist society production is controlled by capitalists who own means of production 4. since the state cannot undertake production on its own account it must rely on taxation for revenue 5. the potential tax take depends on the productiveness of the capitalist economy and the associated flow of income 6. maintaining a stable potential tax take requires economic stability, and increasing the potential tax take requires capital accumulation (economic growth)


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7. in its own interests the state must undertake actions that promote accumulation, and refrain from actions that threaten accumulation 8. some state actions are required to secure conditions of accumulation (for example, the legal enforcement of a normal working day) 9. in sum, the state needs capital accumulation, which needs the state. The requisite state action is ‘dictated by necessity’. The point about structural analysis of this kind is that it does not rely upon capture of state power by the capitalist class to show that the state will tend to favour policies that are functional for continued capital accumulation. Indeed it allows for the autonomy of state actors in relation to class forces or, as Block expresses it, a ‘division of labour between those who accumulate capital and those who manage the state apparatus’.14 The structural argument shows why state policies will tend to favour capital accumulation even in the absence of political power or influence exercised by the capitalist class. The causal mechanism at work here is the dependence of the state on capital accumulation. In this view state policies support capital accumulation not as an end in itself but as a means to an end, that is as the best way for the state to realise its own interests. Just as the structural argument seems to qualify, or even negate, the capture and use of the state apparatus by dominant or subordinate classes to advance their own interests so it effectively seems to leave no room for the idea of the independent state or state autonomy. This is because if the structural context forces the state to pursue policies that favour capital accumulation this effectively shuts out the possibility that state managers face strategic choices. However this conclusion is mistaken for two related reasons. First, the argument is that state policies will favour capital accumulation because this is the best option for state managers to realise their own interests such as, as Block suggests, to stay in power.15 Thus the interests of state managers matter in this argument: it is because of the character of state managers’ interests that policy favours accumulation. If the interests of state managers were defined differently then they would act differently within the same structural context. For example it makes a difference to state policies whether state managers act in accordance with a ‘public service ethic’ or, as Block claims, to maximise their power, prestige and wealth. Second, the structural argument need not involve the claim that structural

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constraints are so powerful that only one outcome is possible and, in fact, such a claim would be highly implausible. This means that the state always has room for manoeuvre. For example Block claims that state managers are ‘dependent on the maintenance of some reasonable level of economic activity … since their own continued power rests on a healthy economy’.16 Likewise ‘business confidence’ is not an on–off variable but is defined by a spectrum within which there may conceivably be a range that is acceptable for state managers. The room for manoeuvre equates to policy discretion and allows the possibility that some policies may even be at odds with business confidence within an overall policy package that maintains business confidence at an acceptable level. And even if we assume, implausibly, that the state must single-mindedly court business confidence as a way of promoting economic health there will always be some element of policy discretion because there will always be more than one possible ‘accumulation strategy’.17 Thus the structural argument does not negate the idea that the state has some degree of autonomy, some capacity for choice and independent action, i.e. relative autonomy. It is clear that the structural view is not an alternative to the instrumental conception of the state. The state is indeed an instrument and political forces do struggle to control state power in their own interests. What the structural view adds to this perspective is the recognition that whoever exercises state power does so within a structural context. However unless the structural constraints are conceived as overwhelming it still makes a difference who controls state power. For example, the interest of state managers in raising tax revenues may induce them to support capital accumulation as a means to this end, but if state managers have to respond to effective ‘pressure from below’ the accumulation function of state policy may have to be compromised by the need to make concessions to working-class interests. Thus state power is not the simple expression of either political forces using the state as an instrument to advance their interests or of constraints emanating from the structural context in which the state is located. Rather it is the effect of the struggle of political forces to exercise state power within a structural context. In other words, state theory has to combine the influences of both ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. The notion of relative autonomy is intended to convey the claim that these are the primary or preponderant influences on the state but do not tell the whole story. The remainder is filled out by secondary or less weighty influences which


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may include the state’s capacity to ‘assert itself’ or the mobilisation of ‘pressure from below’. This understanding of relative autonomy can be defended against criticisms made by Bob Jessop by way of developing his alternative ‘strategic-relational’ theory of the state. Relative autonomy is to be understood, first and foremost, as a theoretical claim about the relationship between the economic structure and the ‘legal and political superstructure’ that retains the central Marxist principle of economic determination (or causation) yet does not involve commitment to economic determinism or reductionism. Jessop defines economic reductionism as the claim that the forms and functions of non-economic systems necessarily correspond to the forms and functional needs of the economy. It also treats economic factors as the mechanism which generates this correspondence. In this sense it denies that non-economic systems have any significant autonomous institutional logic and also denies they can have significant independent effects on the economy.18 The natural contrast with the idea of ‘necessary correspondence’ is ‘non-necessary correspondence’ and this provides a provisional understanding of relative autonomy. Jessop aims ‘to show how a nonnecessary correspondence can emerge among various institutional orders and their operations so that the different economic and extraeconomic conditions for capital accumulation come to be secured’ while also allowing for economic causation.19 Yet Jessop rejects the idea of relative autonomy. The clue to the difference lies in the conceptualisation of ‘non-necessary’. For Jessop this term is synonymous with ‘contingent’ so that he is concerned with ‘explaining how the different systems [economic and non-economic] come to be articulated in a contingent, non-necessary manner which sustains capital accumulation’.20 In other terms Jessop insists on the ‘contingent necessity’ of social phenomena, such as the emergence of correspondence between economic and political orders. This is defined in terms of the non-necessary interaction of different causal chains to produce a definite outcome whose own necessity originates only in and through the contingent coming together of those causal chains in a definite context.21

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This means that determinate explanations of social phenomena can be developed, but this will involve multiple determinations (causal chains) and the manner of their coming together or interaction will vary according to the specific context and cannot be known in advance or outside of this definite context. In each case there is a definite outcome (necessity) but it all depends on the particular circumstances in that particular context (contingency). This is a recommendation for the analysis of specific conjunctures and an argument against the ambition to construct general theory, such as a general theory of the capitalist state. According to Hay the implication is that ‘there is no Marxist theory of the state – there couldn’t be’.22 The ‘contingent necessity’ coupling can be taken apart. The aspect of necessity ‘refers to determinacy in the real world’ and involves the claim that all social phenomena have real causes that are knowable, and this presents no challenge to relative autonomy.23 There are two aspects to contingency: first, that there are multiple determinations (which rules out the possibility that explanation can ever be accomplished through reduction of any social phenomenon to just one of these, such as economic reductionism): and second, that the manner in which these determinations interact to produce a definite outcome is essentially unpredictable. Relative autonomy may be defined in a way that allows for the operation of multiple determinations, but it is firmly located within the tradition of general theory and thus rejects Jessop’s idea of the essential uniqueness of each definite context. Relative autonomy involves a different way of conceptualising the ‘non-necessary’ correspondence between the economic structure and the state while retaining the principle of economic determination (or causation). We may say that correspondence between A and B is non-necessary but ask how likely it is that such correspondence will emerge. In other terms we can ask whether such correspondence is a strong or weak tendency. Among the multiple determinations that may combine to cause (or prevent) such correspondence in definite contexts we may also ask whether there are some enduring determinants that are, in general, more powerful than others. If there is indeed a strong tendency to correspondence then it seems an obvious question whether there are particular causes that explain this outcome. We may feel that such a strong tendency is more likely to result from the consistent operation of certain powerful causal mechanisms


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rather than from a series of unpredictable and unique combinations of multiple causal chains. Jessop’s ‘contingent necessity’ and relative autonomy are united in refusing to see economic causation as an all-or-nothing or either–or question. They both advocate a position in between these two extremes. Since economic causation is not nothing it must amount to something, but since it is not the whole story it must leave a gap in the explanation. In turn this means that there must be other, noneconomic, determinants of the state. One way of distinguishing Jessop’s position from relative autonomy is in terms of whether it is possible to make any general statement about what this something amounts to and, correspondingly, the dimensions of the remaining explanatory gap. In Jessop’s view relative autonomy is an empty concept in the two possible meanings he identifies. In the first it is ‘just an abstract, formal concept’ that merely states what it does not stand for, that is neither crude reductionism nor absolute autonomy. In thus stressing ‘the mutual interaction and co-evolution of different institutional orders’ it points to ‘the need to explore the structural contradictions and dilemmas involved in the dialectic between the operational autonomy and functional interdependence of different orders’.24 In other words without this exploration relative autonomy is empty – it doesn’t tell us anything about how this dialectic works itself out in concrete terms. Further, the term embodies ‘a contradictio in adjecto: either a system or political agent is autonomous or it is not – autonomy cannot be relative’.25 In a second meaning it is a ‘concrete, descriptive concept’ which refers to ‘the relative capacities of different forces to realize their aims and interests in specific conjunctures’ and, more specifically, to ‘the capacity of state forces to pursue policies against the expressed wishes of non-state forces where these policies subsequently prove to advance the interests of the latter’.26 But here the concept remains empty as a principle of explanation since ‘the circumstances to which [it] refer[s] are always conjuncturally specific and in need of explanation’.27 Thus, again, the concept merely points to the need for an explanation rather than providing one. In either case the ‘troubling phrase’ would be better dispensed with and replaced by referring to the specific form of analysis and explanation required. However contingency and conjunctural specificity is not the only alternative to either end of the all-or-nothing dichotomy. Jessop believes that the only way to give content to the notion that the

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economic and political orders co-evolve or interact is through analysis of specific contexts. This will reveal in each particular context the peculiar coming together of multiple determinants that results in a specific outcome. But we may, instead, make a general claim about the nature of the interaction between different institutional orders which assigns causal weights to each. In this approach relative autonomy is neither ‘just an abstract, formal concept’ since it asserts a definite asymmetry in the causal relationship between the base and superstructure, or a ‘concrete descriptive concept’ since it takes the form of a general theoretical claim. Whether such a general claim is plausible will depend on how well it is supported by theoretical argument and empirical evidence. But there seems to be no compelling logical objection to such a general theory. Indeed the assumption behind contingent necessity that multiple determinations may combine in any number of ways so that each specific context is seen as unique seems less plausible than the assumption of a hierarchy of determinations which may be found in each context. At any rate there are no grounds for arguing that there may not be such a hierarchy, for ruling it out as a possibility. And, given that it is a possibility, it can be argued that developing general theories by identifying such hierarchies of determinants is intrinsic to the endeavour of social science. The idea of relative autonomy can be defended as a species of such a general claim or theory. Allied to economic determination it involves the claim that the autonomy of the state is constrained or, conversely, that the reach of economic causation is limited.28 More specifically it asserts a definite causal asymmetry in the interaction between the economic and political orders which may be expressed in the claim that the economic structure enjoys explanatory primacy in relation to the state. Relative autonomy is consistent with Cohen’s characterisation of the causal relationship between the ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in Marx’s theory of history. This asserts that ‘the character of non-economic institutions is largely explained by the nature of the economic structure’.29 This formulation does not rule out the influence of other causal influences (i.e. multiple determinations) since it does not claim that the economic structure exclusively explains the character of the state, but it assigns these other influences a minor role. And the large role played by the character of the economic structure in explanation of the state is clearly intended as a general theoretical statement or claim. The general form of this claim is, for example, that ‘the character of the


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state in a capitalist society is largely explained by the nature of the capitalist economy’. So, far from an analysis of the coming together of multiple causal chains (to which economic causation may or may not contribute a greater or lesser part) acting on the state in a manner that happens to sustain capital accumulation in a specific conjuncture, we have the claim that economic causation plays a primary role in explaining state action to sustain accumulation as a general feature of capitalist society. The state normally sustains accumulation and this is largely explained by the nature of the economic structure. ‘Contingent necessity’ and ‘relative autonomy’ may be contrasted in terms of two related issues: the range of determinants and their interaction, and the specificity of explanation. Contingent necessity seems to involve opening up the range of determinants and narrowing down the explanation to a specific conjuncture. It is because there are multiple determinants or causal chains that may come together in a variety of ways that explanation must involve the analysis of specific conjunctures. In contrast relative autonomy seems to narrow down the range of determinants and open up the explanation towards a general theory. It is because of the notion of explanatory primacy according to which some determinants exercise more weight or influence than others that explanation may take the form of a general theoretical claim. Thus the alleged explanatory primacy of ‘economics’ in relation to ‘politics’ allows the general theory that the character of the state is largely explained by the nature of the economic structure.30 ‘Contingent necessity’ and ‘relative autonomy’ are best understood not as dichotomous standpoints but as positions on a spectrum. This is because all social theory necessarily involves closure within the set of conceivable causal influences. In other words all social theory involves selecting certain determinants as members of a set whose interaction may explain a particular social phenomenon, and thereby excluding others. The claim that ‘state power is a complex social relation that reflects the changing balance of social forces in a determinate conjuncture’ opens up the range of determinants compared to the narrow focus of class reductionism.31 Social forces encompass class forces (capitalist and non-capitalist) and non-class forces. However there is still closure here in the assumption that it will be these social forces, however defined, and not other possible ‘non-social force’ determinants that state power will ‘reflect’. And Jessop’s statement is clearly a general claim.

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Although there will be a ‘changing balance’ of social forces it will still be these social forces that state power will, in general, reflect. Even though the changing balance is key to understanding the peculiarity or specificity of each ‘determinate conjuncture’ this term rather conceals the definition of a conjuncture. For example, does Thatcherism constitute a determinate conjuncture for the purpose of state theory, or the first term in office, or particular decisions or actions of that government? If the first of these it is clear that analysis of a ‘determinate conjuncture’ can involve theoretical claims pitched at quite a high level of generality, such as Thatcherism as a specific form of state or hegemonic strategy. Explanation in terms of general theory or analysis of determinate conjunctures clearly involves a spectrum. Once it is recognised that all social theory involves some degree of generality the question becomes what level of generality can be sustained by a plausible social theory. The two theories in question here clearly push in different directions. Relative autonomy is a version of a general theory of a particularly ambitious kind. The claim that the character of the state is largely explained by the nature of the economic structure is entered not just in relation to capitalist societies but, as a central claim of the theory of history, in relation to previous modes of production and therefore as a generalisation that applies to the broad sweep of history of human society. In contrast contingent necessity is a reaction against this kind of general theory and pushes in the direction of more concrete analyses of specific conjunctures. The general theory does not reject the need for conjunctural analysis but expects this to reveal peculiarities that are, in general, consistent with higher level theoretical claims. Thus the general claim that the state serves the interests of capital is consistent with variation in terms of the closeness of the ‘functional fit’ between state and economy, how these functions are carried out, the responsiveness of the state to other social forces, and so on. In contrast contingent necessity denies that analyses of determinate conjunctures can be seen as exemplifying a more general theoretical claim for it is precisely such a general theory that is being ruled out. Whereas contingent necessity sees Marxism as over-reaching itself in the general claims associated with the old-fashioned theory of history and the state, relative autonomy sees this kind of generalisation as the legitimate ambition of social theory. The possibility of a general theory of the state does rest on the idea of explanatory primacy, and thus the plausibility of the particular


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mechanisms of economic determination – the instrumental and structural arguments – proposed in Marxist theory. The plausibility of these mechanisms needs further argument than has been provided here. However there seems to be no compelling logical objection to either the idea of explanatory primacy or, what it supports, a general social theory. This means, contrary to Hay, that there could be a Marxist theory of the state.32 NOTES 1. Bob Jessop, State Theory. Putting the Capitalist State in its Place (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 103. 2. Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State (Oxford: Robertson, 1982), Ch. 1; Colin Hay, ‘Marxism and the State’, in Andrew Gamble et al. (eds), Marxism and Social Science (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). 3. See Ralph Miliband, ‘Marx and the State’, in Socialist Register 1965; David Held, ‘Central Perspectives on the Modern State’, in Gregor McLennan et al. (eds), The Idea of the Modern State (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1984); Mike Evans, Karl Marx (London: Allen & Unwin, 1975). 4. The general theory of the state is one element of Marx’s more ambitious general theory of history. It may be conceived as the second stage of a two-step functional explanation. Thus a more detailed exposition than is possible in this chapter would present structural and instrumental explanations as specific causal mechanisms or elaborations of functional explanation, this being the form of explanation which economic determination invokes. This approach is based on G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 5. C.W., Vol. 6, p. 486. 6. Miliband, ‘Marx and the State’, p. 283. 7. Ibid. 8. Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 411. 9. Ibid., p. 422. 10. Ibid., p. 402. 11. For a detailed assessment of instrumentalism see Clyde Barrow, Critical Theories of the State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). 12. Colin Hay, ‘Structure and Agency’, in David Marsh and Gerry Stoker (eds), Theory and Methods in Political Science (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 194. 13. Karl Marx in Miliband, ‘Marx and the State’, p. 284. See also Evans, Karl Marx, p. 118. 14. Fred Block, Revising State Theory. Essays in Politics and Postindustrialism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), p. 54. 15. Block goes as far as to say that ‘state managers collectively are selfinterested maximizers, interested in maximizing their power, prestige and wealth’, ibid., p. 84. 16. Ibid., p. 58 (emphasis added). 17. Jessop, State Theory, p. 159.

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18. Ibid., p. 79. This formulation closely follows the definition of determinism as ‘the thesis that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could have happened’ by Roy Bhaskar, ‘Determinism’, in Tom Bottomore, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 139. 19. Jessop, State Theory, p. 79. 20. Ibid., p. 80. 21. Ibid., p. 11. 22. Hay, ‘Marxism and the State’, p. 171. 23. Jessop, State Theory, p. 12. 24. Ibid., p. 101. 25. Ibid., pp. 101–2. 26. Ibid., p. 102. 27. Ibid. 28. In this sense ‘relative autonomy’ is clearly not, contrary to Jessop, a contradiction in terms. In general it is not true that ‘either a system or political agent is autonomous or it is not’ since autonomy is usually exercised within constraints. Political agents are never completely autonomous, and the important question concerns the nature and strengths of the constraints. The question is ‘how far am I able to act autonomously?’ not whether I am autonomous or not. I might express this by saying that my autonomy is relative, meaning that it depends on the constraints I face in particular situations or contexts. This is the sense in which we may speak of the relative autonomy of the state – how far is the state able to act autonomously in the face of constraints emanating from the nature of a capitalist economy? 29. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, p. 217 (emphasis added). 30. The issue here is not, strictly speaking, the number of determinants or causal chains. The idea of relative autonomy is not inconsistent with multiple determinants (equally, contingency can be emphasised even with a restrictive catalogue of determinants). The key point is the rejection of contingency in favour of explanatory primacy. 31. Jessop, The Capitalist State, p. 221. 32. Hay, ‘Marxism and the State’, p. 171.

Part 5

The Eighteenth Brumaire, Classes and Class Struggle, Then and Now

9

The Eighteenth Brumaire and Thatcherism Paul Blackledge

After the defeat of the revolutions of 1848, and the subsequent massive economic boom of the 1850s and 1860s, Marx moved away from direct political activity to work on Capital. This shift in the focus of his activity did not represent a fundamental break in his thought, for when in the 1860s the workers’ movement across Europe began to re-emerge from defeat, so too did Marx return to the political fray.1 He was able to make this shift from theoretical to practical work because he believed that under capitalist relations of production any defeat suffered by the proletariat could never be absolute, workers would retain the potential to become active agents of change; they were never mere victims of the system. In this chapter I ask whether socialists today, in conditions where the labour movement is recovering from the defeats of the 1970s and 1980s, can learn anything from the shift that Marx made in the 1860s with respect to the possibility of the re-emergence of a socialist challenge to capitalism. To this end I survey some of the competing Marxist accounts of the rise of Thatcherism with an eye to Marx’s method as outlined in the Eighteenth Brumaire. My aim is to locate the basis for contemporary strategic controversies on the Marxist left within the framework of a matrix of competing interpretations of the defeats suffered by the British proletariat in the late 1970s and 1980s. My choice of explanatory frameworks from the myriad that were made of Thatcherism is based upon a remark made by Perry Anderson in 1980. Anderson lamented New Left Review’s (NLR) failure to develop a comparable analysis of the ‘changing balance of class forces in Britain today’ to the ‘substantial attempts’ made by ‘Hall, Jacques, Gamble or Cliff’.2 These authors represented a spectrum of opinion from the most revisionist to the most classical Marxist interpretations of Thatcherism. Without agreeing with the detail of any of these positions Anderson was impressed by their power and originality. He aimed to follow their lead and to publish in NLR an analysis of Thatcherism that could underpin a viable socialist strategic practice. To this end NLR published important essays by Anthony Barnett and Bob Jessop et al. in the early 1980s. The core 211

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of this chapter is then a survey of these competing attempts to analyse Thatcherism, with a concluding comment as to their contemporary strategic implications. In the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx argued that Bonaparte had come to power as a consequence of two developments; the proletarian rising of 1848 had been ‘drowned in … blood’, and the triumphant bourgeoisie had then proved itself to be too factional to rule.3 The actual mechanism of Bonaparte’s triumph was an election which saw him win the vast majority of the votes of France’s enormous peasantry.4 However, while this class had sided with reaction in 1848 it would find itself increasingly exploited under Bonaparte’s regime. Marx located the basis for this dynamic in the changing class structure of France. Under the ancien régime the peasantry had been exploited by a feudal class, and therefore shared a direct material interest with the bourgeoisie in breaking the power of feudalism. However, with the triumph of the bourgeois revolution, the bourgeois order became ‘a vampire which sucks out [the peasantry’s] blood and brains and throws them into the alchemist’s vessel of capital’.5 Herein lay the central contradiction of Bonaparte’s rule. Unable to act as the ‘patriarchal benefactor of all classes’, he was compelled to take from one class to give to another.6 In as far as he acted to ‘safeguard “bourgeois order”’ he enacted programmes that enriched the urban bourgeoisie at the expense of the peasantry. ‘The interests of the peasants are therefore no longer in accord with the bourgeoisie, as under Napoleon, but in deadliest opposition to the interests of the bourgeoisie, to capital. Hence the peasants find their natural allies and leaders in the urban proletariat.’7 France’s executive power was thus to become increasingly isolated so that the ‘old mole’ of the revolution would continue to develop the objective basis for its future success even through defeat.8 Paralleling Marx’s analysis of social relations in Bonaparte’s France, all of the socialists whose ideas I discuss in this chapter interrogated Thatcherism with an eye to the internal contradictions of her regime. However, despite their admiration for the Eighteenth Brumaire, most of these socialists dismissed Marx’s political theory as crude, mechanical and reductionist.9 Unfortunately, rather than attempt to replace this model with a more sophisticated account of the basis for proletarian agency in the socialist revolution, they developed versions of historical materialism which, to one degree or another, removed working-class agency, and indeed the possibility of socialism, from the realm of realistic politics. So, Eric Hobsbawm,

The Eighteenth Brumaire and Thatcherism

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Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop all criticised Thatcherism, yet denied the possibility of the development of a socialist alternative to it. By contrast socialists around The Socialist Register and the Socialist Workers Party, amongst others, defended, in distinct ways, a version of historical materialism which had at its centre a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between working-class socialist agency and the contradictions operating at society’s economic base. This version of Marxism left open the possibility that after the defeats of the 1970s and 1980s a socialist labour movement could re-emerge. MARXISM TODAY In 1978 Eric Hobsbawm argued that the British labour movement was experiencing a deep and protracted crisis. This he believed had begun around 1950.10 Since then, while proletarianisation continued apace, the weight of the manual working class within the broader proletariat began a dramatic decline.11 Furthermore, British capitalism had changed through a combination of a technological revolution, increased standards of living for the majority, and an expansion of the public sector.12 These processes led to an increased sectionalism within the working class, undermining the traditional homogenising forces that had taught workers a basic solidarity, and out of which the traditional mass parties of the working class had been born.13 Thus fragmented, sections of the new proletariat were open to the appeal of political forces beyond traditional Labourism. In the first half of the century, we could rely on a growing number of workers accepting the equation: class equals support for the workers’ party equals being against capitalism, equals for socialism … But today we can’t rely on the automatic growth of class consciousness with these implications any more.14 Hobsbawm’s objectivist account of the rise of Thatcherism had an important political consequence, he nowhere discussed ‘seriously’ how the actions of the Labour Party in office might have fostered the crisis of labour.15 This lacuna opened the door for him to insist that ‘like it or not, the future of socialism is through the Labour Party’.16 Rather than address the anti-working-class politics of previous Labour governments, Hobsbawm criticised their lack of direction. The solution to this problem was for Labour to develop a programme.17 Hobsbawm proselytised for the moderation of Labour’s programme as a basis for the building of a broad anti-Tory

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electoral bloc.18 But a new ideology was necessary to consolidate such an alliance. It was to this issue that Stuart Hall addressed his key contributions to the debate on Thatcherism. Hall based his analysis of the rise of Thatcherism on a critical reading of Poulantzas’ State, Power, Socialism. However, whereas Poulantzas located a general tendency towards ‘authoritarian statism’ in the West, Hall preferred the concept of authoritarian populism.19 In a magnificent book, Policing the Crisis, Hall and his co-writers traced the evolution of the British state from the postwar settlement to the birth of Thatcherism, arguing that Thatcher’s project was aimed at the hegemonisation of the changing British social formation. And while Hall argued that the changing organisation of the British state was based upon ‘the persistent and growing weakness of the economic structure of British capitalism’, he concentrated his analysis on the state’s changing ‘legal and political’ aspects.20 Hall argued that from around 1966 Britain’s old order had entered a period of crisis. Wilson had been elected in 1964 on a programme to modernise Britain through a strategy of corporatism. Unfortunately this strategy was sacrificed to the ‘religion of sterling’, and, with the Red scare during the Seamen’s strike of 1966, Wilson lost all credibility with the left. From then on in consensus declined into dissensus.21 This crisis manifested itself as a ‘passage Gramsci describes from the “moment of consent” to the “moment of force” … A shift from a “consensual” to a more “coercive” management of the class struggle by the state’.22 Of particular importance to this transition was the ideological identification of black people with crime, and in particular with the street crime of ‘mugging’. In this respect Hall argued that Enoch Powell’s role in articulating a popular racism was incredibly important.23 The discourse of racism functioned to provide a scapegoat for the long-term crisis of the British state in the 1970s, as the crisis of the political system was translated into a moral panic about black crime.24 From then onwards English society was not only racist, ‘it worked through race’.25 So, in contrast to classical Marxism’s confidence in the homogenising force of modern capitalism, the experience of race divided workers.26 ‘Race is one of the main mechanisms by which, inside and outside the workplace itself, this reproduction of an internally divided labour force has been accomplished’.27 Moreover, popular racism functioned to legitimate a shift in the nature of the state itself, as it increased its coercive powers. Thus the interposition of the law into class relations


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under Heath, through the Industrial Relations Act, while to a certain degree exposing the political role of the state, simultaneously had the effect of ‘making it more legitimate for “public opinion” to be actively recruited in an open and explicit fashion in favour of the “strong state”’.28 The importation of the American racist myth of the black mugger from around 1972 followed this, and increased the tendencies towards a strong state.29 Heath cautiously backed off from this project in the last years of his premiership, but Thatcher promised to accelerate the evolution towards a strong state when she came to office.30 Moreover, she aimed to colonise common sense with a reactionary racism that would enable her to dictate the political trajectory henceforward followed by modern Britain.31 How did this ideological shift relate to the other moments of Britain’s crisis? Hall argued that it was through the discourse of race that ‘the economic, political and ideological factors converge’.32 Indeed, ‘the British crisis is, perhaps, peculiar precisely in terms of the massive displacement of the political class struggle into forms of social, moral and ideological protest and dissent’.33 Elsewhere Hall argued that Thatcherism had ‘recuperated to the “legitimate” terrain of parliamentary politics the extremist racism of the National Front’.34 Indeed, while the NF may have desired a violent revolution, Thatcher was orchestrating a ‘passive revolution’ that incorporated much of its racism.35 This passive revolution spelt an end to any vestiges of the social democratic consensus. Andrew Gamble outlined this interpretation of the Thatcherite Programme most elegantly. He argued that Thatcher’s strategy was to create a free economy and a strong state.36 Thus under Thatcher ‘the state is to be rolled back in some areas and rolled forward in others’.37 Specifically, social democratic constraints upon the operation of the free market were to be overthrown, while the coercive powers of the state were to be strengthened so as to underpin those free market operations. However, the strength of the state was not simply to be measured in terms of its coercive capacity. For a state was stronger if its coercive agencies were seen to be legitimate.38 It was precisely the social democratic welfarist policies that had previously legitimised the state’s authority. Given that since the rise of mass democracy the Tories had relied upon working-class votes to attain power, then a replacement for the legitimising function of the welfare state had to be found if they were to be electable. It was Hall’s argument that the ideology of race played this new legitimising role.

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Unfortunately, Hall’s utilisation of Althusser’s uniform concept of ideology did not readily suggest a strategy to counter Thatcherism. Indeed despite his protestations that he did not believe that Thatcher’s ideological project had triumphed, he did claim that on the key issue of economic management Thatcher had ‘already largely won the ideological campaign’.39 As the 1980s wore on, however, Hall looked to Laclau’s more pluralistic model of ideology to underpin a coherent counter-hegemonic strategy.40 He argued that Britain was entering ‘New Times’ and that Thatcherism’s strength lay in its attempt to hegemonise this moment. Hall characterised New Times as a qualitative transformation of the sociocultural landscape, which included shifts from modernism to postmodernism, Fordism to post-Fordism, industrialism to post-industrialism, and the revolution of the subject.41 Moreover, the novelty of this period negated any attempts by the left to utilise its old Fordist ideologies to win a struggle for hegemony. However, ‘Thatcherism’s conception of new times is partial and inadequate … [it] increasingly appears as a weighty and powerful anachronism.’42 A viable socialist counter-hegemonic strategy, Hall insisted, should be based upon the realisation that the new ‘disorganised’ capitalism tended to fragment the population and thus demanded a new conceptualisation of socialism as the ‘struggle for popular identities’.43 Indeed in a world of different identities, rather than of unified classes, it was to the idea of citizenship that Hall looked as a mechanism through which a social consciousness could be forged in a fragmented world. His socialism therefore had much to learn from liberalism.44 Indeed it was perhaps through the concept of citizenship that all progressive forces, irrespective of party affiliation, could be united in a broad anti-Conservative alliance. So it seemed that Hall offered to Hobsbawm’s political strategy an ideological underpinning. NEW LEFT REVIEW The first developed analysis of Thatcherism to appear on the pages of NLR was made by Anthony Barnett as a stunning critique of the Falklands War.45 However, Bob Jessop et al. penned what was perhaps NLR’s most sophisticated account of Thatcher’s Britain: Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations. The Marxism of Jessop and his colleagues derived, like Hall’s, through Poulantzas from Althusser. Jessop had been impressed by Poulantzas’ discussion of authoritarian statism, but unlike Hall sought to outline a more thoroughly materialist analysis of Thatcherism. His analysis of Thatcherism grew


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out of a critique of what he called Hall’s ideologism.46 Hall was correct, Jessop claimed, to suggest that Poulantzas’ concept of authoritarian statism only weakly addressed the issue of ideology. However, where Poulantzas had begun to address this issue in his later work, Hall had refused to learn from him the importance of discussing the new form of state.47 In this vein Jessop sought, in his analysis, to integrate the economic, political and ideological moments of Thatcherism.48 At the core of Jessop’s analysis lay the claim that Thatcher’s rise was premised upon the ‘demise of the social democratic power bloc’ through the crisis of the Keynesian welfare state.49 Social democracy represented a ‘one nation expansive form of hegemony’, underpinned by a Fordist regime of accumulation.50 Thatcherism, by contrast, represented the ‘two nation polarisation of society’ premised upon a limited movement towards a post-Fordist accumulation strategy.51 At the heart of Thatcher’s successes was a ‘formidable capacity to work with, rather than against, powerful social and economic trends’.52 Thus, contra Hall, Jessop firmly integrated economic developments at the centre of his analysis.53 Moreover, he argued that Thatcher’s ‘future support depends on the effectiveness of the government’s accumulation strategy’.54 For Jessop, while Thatcher’s accumulation strategy was obviously bourgeois, it differed from other capitalist accumulation strategies as it served a social base that was made up of both the petty bourgeoisie and ‘significant sections of workers’.55 Moreover, while agreeing with Hall that authoritarian populism was the ideological means through which the Thatcherites had attempted to hegemonise society, he denied Hall’s implication that this hegemonic project had yet been successful.56 Indeed he claimed that Powell’s original racist discourse, because it was linked to constitutionalism and Manchester liberalism, was cut ‘off from a broader base of popular support’, that was, in the 1960s, broadly social democratic.57 Jessop insisted that there was little evidence that the hegemony of this ideology had been overturned in the 1980s, and in fact the electorate appeared, if anything, to have moved to the left.58 Thatcher’s strength lay in her ability to forge an alliance that was based upon a material stake in popular capitalism, which she offered to workers in core industries. It was this material basis that underpinned any incipient trends towards the growth in ideological support for popular capitalism against the welfare state.59 Jessop claimed that these tendencies were weak, but could easily grow.60 The strength of Hall’s analysis lay in

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his attempt to address this novel issue, his weakness was that he, like Gramsci, ‘neglected the structural determinations of hegemony’.61 His Marxism could thus too easily foster a deep sense of political pessimism.62 It was to avoid this pitfall that Jessop challenged the methodological basis of his work.63 Unfortunately Jessop’s own work was not able to underpin a realistic, yet ultimately more optimistic political perspective. Jessop was able to show how Hall’s implied pessimism was ill judged, but his own obituary of the Keynesian Welfare State implied an equally pessimistic perspective. This was less apparent in the earlier essays that make up his book, for these chapters were written before the collapse of municipal socialism and the defeat of the miners’ strike.64 Unfortunately, as Jessop accepted that Thatcher’s electoral triumphs were underpinned by a new accumulation regime that generated a division within the labour force between a core and periphery, he appeared to be incapable of imagining a socialist alternative to Thatcherism. Thus the most radical goal he envisaged was based upon the development of a reformist socialist version of flexible accumulation.65 Returning to this issue in the months just prior to Thatcher’s resignation, Jessop suggested ‘it is difficulties and contradictions in the economic strategy of the Thatcher government which seem to have precipitated the current crisis’.66 Indeed, ‘the very dynamic of Thatcherite neo-liberalism is undermining its social base … even the privileged nation has growing doubts about the Thatcherite project’. 67 However, this process did not suggest to Jessop the possibility of the growth of a socialist working-class opposition to neo-liberalism. Indeed, from a rejection of the ‘orthodox expectation that economic crisis would generate political radicalism’, Jessop seemed to go to the opposite extreme of denying the possibility of any socialist political consequences rising from the crisis. 68 In effect the working class had ceased to be Marx’s potential agents of change and had instead become simple victims of capitalism. Thatcherism’s weaknesses would not favour the rebirth of a socialist movement, rather they would strengthen the neo-statist radicals, in particular the ‘more statist forces within the Conservative Party’. 69 ALTERNATIVES If Jessop had begun his analysis of Thatcherism as a critique of Hall’s idealism and pessimism, he ended with an equally pessimistic, if more materialist, perspective for the future of the left. A more militant critique of the pessimism associated with the Marxism Today


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wing of the Communist Party came from within the same party’s Morning Star faction. Unfortunately, this group premised their analysis of Thatcherism with a dismissal of the claim that the left was in retreat.70 In contrast, others did defend classical Marxism, while keeping their feet firmly on the ground. Amongst these were the editors of The Socialist Register. John Saville for instance suggested that Marxism Today had ‘misread the history of the 1980s in quite remarkable ways … They have … examined only the surface phenomenon’.71 His collaborator Ralph Miliband suggested that the ‘new revisionism’, with which he associated Marxism Today, ‘far from offering a way out of the crisis, is another manifestation of that crisis’.72 He argued that there was not ‘any good reason to believe that this recomposed working class is less capable of developing … “class consciousness”’.73 Against a pessimistic reading of the operation of the ideology of racism Miliband suggested that Hall had failed to ‘recall that [it] has on many occasions been at least partially overcome in struggle’.74 Finally he argued that Hobsbawm’s call for the politics of moderation was ‘certain to disable and disarm the labour movement, and nullify, precisely, its ability to be the organising force of a set of alliances which would encompass that ‘vast majority of Britains who earn wages and salaries’.75 Similarly, Bob Looker insisted that ‘capitalism is fundamentally built upon class exploitation and necessarily produces class conflict’.76 Thatcher’s economic strategy included using the slump to ‘undermine the strength and combativity of organised labour’.77 Thatcher could win victories using this strategy only because the social contract of the previous Labour government ‘had sapped both shop floor organisation and economistic militancy’.78 If the labour movement were to turn this situation around, Looker argued, it must ‘reject and transcend the politics of Labourism’.79 This would include rejecting Hobsbawmism, for the whole ideology of Labour’s forward march, halted or otherwise, was a reformist myth.80 Ellen Wood similarly pointed out the irony of a situation where just as the ruling class were becoming increasingly clear that they were class warriors, the left was rejecting the concept of class struggle.81 If Miliband, Saville, Looker and Wood were amongst those within the academy who challenged Marxism Today’s pessimistic reading of Thatcherism, on the activist left it was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that combined a continuing affiliation to classical Marxist politics with a realistic assessment of the balance of class forces under Thatcher. In the late 1970s Tony Cliff argued that there had been a

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threefold crisis of ideas, leadership, and organisation in the labour movement which had underpinned the defeats of the left, and thus opened the door to Thatcherism.82 Cliff argued that the recommendations of the 1968 Donovan Commission, that stewards should be integrated into the full-time union machine, far from being dropped for more authoritarian approaches to industrial relations, had proved the decisive weapon in the bureaucratisation of sections of the steward movement.83 This organisational process served to isolate stewards from their fellow workers and, in the period of the Social Contract, reinforced their existing social democratic consciousness. This in turn left them ill equipped to struggle against a Labour government. Indeed many stewards acted as media for the government’s message of national unity during the years of the Social Contract, thus helping to defuse sectionalist militancy. This was especially true of those stewards, influenced by the Communist Party, who were recognised nationally as the leadership of the shop stewards’ movement.84 For Cliff the mid to late 1970s was the decisive moment when the burgeoning militancy of the early 1970s, that underpinned a real if limited growth in socialist consciousness within the working class, was broken by the hegemonic Labourist ideology. Overviewing the crisis of the 1970s from the vantage point of the defeated miners’ strike, Cliff summarised the 1970s thus: In the years 1968–74 there was an unstable balance between the political generalisation on the employers side – incomes policy and industrial relations legislation – and the industrial militancy on the workers’ side. Such a situation cannot last for long. The unstable equilibrium can lead to one of two outcomes: to political generalisations of the industrial militancy, or to decline of sectional militancy. In fact the unstable equilibrium [was] destroyed by the policies [of] Labourism.85 In was in the context of this chaos that Thatcher could appear to be so strong. She could also be much firmer with the unions because they had, prior to her victory, alienated many of their own members. However, the unions were not a spent force, and Thatcher had failed subsequently to break them completely. So in contrast to Hall’s picture of an authoritarian approach to industrial relations, undertaken by a strong state, and underpinned by a reactionary populist ideology, the SWP insisted that the crisis of the labour movement had been fundamentally underpinned


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through the organisational incorporation of shop stewards into the union bureaucracy, and policed by a Labourist trade union bureaucracy, whose ideas were hegemonic within the labour movement. This did not mean that the SWP refused to acknowledge anything new in Thatcherism. Alex Callinicos partially agreed with Hall that Thatcherism represented a novel form of rule.86 However, he denied that Thatcherism represented an exceptional form of capitalist state; under Thatcher the social content of democracy was still underpinned by the negotiating function of the trade union bureaucracy.87 Thatcher’s project is not to destroy workers’ organisation, but to create an Americanised trade union movement … The Eurocommunists thus confuse the emergence of a new capitalist political current with a change in the form of bourgeois domination. They are led to this because of a pre-occupation with ideological factors.88 This did not signify that the SWP denied that the Tories were attempting to make an important shift towards a more authoritarian approach to industrial relations.89 Rather, they insisted that this shift remained confined within the parameters of traditional bourgeois democratic power structures. Indeed Sparks insisted that while a popular authoritarian ideology did exist, this was only one of a number of ideologies competing for the hearts and minds of the British public, strongest amongst which was an adherence to the traditional social democratic consensus.90 This level of continuity between Thatcherism and other postwar governments allowed Harman to place her crucial defeat of the miners’ strike of 1984/85 in context. While the defeat was very real, it was as nothing when compared to those suffered by the left in Germany in 1933 or Chile in 1973. After these defeats the working class required decades to rebuild its organisation from scratch. Thatcher, on the contrary, had won an expensive victory, but had failed to break the back of the British working class.91 Moreover, the continued resilience of workers coincided with Thatcher’s failure to improve significantly ‘the performance of the British economy relative to its major rivals’.92 Britain’s economic weakness had underpinned Thatcher’s initial assault on the British working class, and as a consequence of her failure to solve this problem the SWP expected repeated assaults upon the wages of the British workers as attempts were made to ‘compensate for the productivity gap’ between Britain and its

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competitors.93 In these conditions socialists could begin the slow process of rearming the movement from the bottom up, in the expectation of future confrontations between capital and the working class.94 RESULTS AND PROSPECTS The defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1848, and the ensuing economic upswing of the 1850s and 1860s marked a decisive turning point in world history. It also marked a key point in Marx’s learning curve. After this date his initial over optimistic perspectives for socialism were mediated by a growing realisation that the struggle for socialism would involve a long hard slog.95 However, in these conditions, Marx analysed the continuing contradictions within society which meant that socialism could never be abolished as capitalism’s spectral other, even if its victory could never again be assumed as the automatic working out of these contradictions. A century and a half later a smaller defeat for the British proletariat and a weaker economic boom have left Marxists less sure about future prospects for socialism. In the decade and a half after the defeat of the miners’ strike the internal debates on the Marxist left may have appeared to become increasingly irrelevant to a world dominated by neo-liberalism. However, over the last few years there has re-emerged a growing anti-capitalist movement that has once again put the possibility of building a socialist alternative to capitalism onto the political agenda. In these circumstances the interpretations of the past made by Marxists will necessarily inform their relationship to the new movement. Hobsbawm’s obituary of the socialist labour movement relied, despite his own criticisms of Marx’s supposed reductionism, on a mechanical and economistic history of postwar Britain. Moreover, it led him to accept a deeply pessimistic strategic perspective; ‘I cannot look to the future with great optimism.’96 Hall’s ideological explanation for the rise of Thatcherism underpinned an account of the ideological contradiction between Thatcherism and New Times that might be exploited by a modernised left. This perspective, however, negated the Marxist hope for a break with capitalism. In place of this perspective Hall proselytised what was in effect a reinvigorated liberalism in the guise of citizenship theory.97 More recently, a special issue of Marxism Today confined its remarks on Blair’s government to a series of moderate criticisms of his policies, with no sense that they might be the logical consequence of the


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right-wing trajectory that Marxism Today had itself proselytised in the 1980s.98 Jessop developed a more materialist reading of Thatcherism, and therefore was much more acutely aware of the limitations of Thatcher’s hegemonic project. However, his materialism did not immunise him from essentially concurring with Hall’s pessimistic obituary of socialism. Indeed, Jessop moved to imply that the socialist struggle could no longer be against capitalism but would rather remain within it, for a fairer regulative regime.99 Jessop came to this conclusion, because, like Hobsbawm and Hall, he rejected the argument that members of the working class could move from being victims of the system to actors fighting for a socialist alternative to it. Similarly Perry Anderson has recently signalled NLR’s profoundly pessimistic reading of the present conjuncture.100 For all of these thinkers, the falsification of Marxist ‘orthodoxy’, which they understood to imply a mechanical relationship between class location, economic crisis and the growth of socialist class-consciousness, implied the falsification of Marx’s project of a socialist overthrow of capitalism. Other socialists agreed that there existed no mechanical relationship between the evolution of socialist working-class agency and economic crises, but refused to move from this position to its obverse of denying the possibility of the growth of a strong working-class socialist movement in the future. Thus, the present editors of The Socialist Register insist that the ‘essence of the socialist project – the idea of transcending the alienation and escalating risks of capitalist accumulation – is anything but finished’.101 More recently Alex Callinicos defended the idea of the continuing relevance of the socialist project, especially under conditions of rampant postThatcherite neo-liberalism. The very intensity of pressures in the workplace, and the pervasive job insecurity that is a consequence of economic liberalisation, can generate resistance … [And] despite all their efforts to out-source, contract out and atomise their workforces, multinational corporations remain vulnerable to strategically placed groups of workers.102 That the optimistic perspectives of Panitch and Leys, and Callinicos are closer to that which one would expect Marx to have made in similar circumstances is palpable, but are Hall’s, Hobsbawm’s and Jessop’s perspectives ultimately more realistic? Without making a

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definitive judgement on this issue we can perhaps say that it is a testimony to the vitality of historical materialism that it has proved itself capable of fostering such a range of intelligent, yet competing, perspectives on one of the key political issues of the last few decades. Conceivably Marx’s answer to the question as to which of these perspectives is closest to the truth would begin with a detailed analysis of the present conjuncture, but who could deny that he would finally call for the reality of his answer to be proved, one way or another, in practice. NOTES Thanks to Matthew Caygill, Graeme Kirkpatrick, Zoë Anne Marsden and the contributors to a debate at Colin Barker’s Alternative Futures conference in Manchester in the spring of 2001 for comments on this chapter in draft. For a suggestive use of the Eighteenth Brumaire to analyse Thatcherism see Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 39ff. 1. Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement (London: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 14–30. 2. Perry Anderson, New Left Review 1975–1980, New Left Review Internal document 1980, p. 14. 3. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this volume, pp. 95 and 106. 4. Ibid., p. 100. 5. Ibid., p. 104. 6. Ibid., p. 108. 7. Ibid., p. 104. 8. Ibid., p. 98. 9. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 3 and 41, and Bob Jessop et al., ‘Farewell to Thatcherism? Liberalism and “New Times”’, New Left Review (hereafter NLR), 179 (1990), pp. 81–102, p. 83. 10. Eric Hobsbawm et al., The Forward March of Labour Halted (London: Verso, 1981), pp. 1 and 16. 11. Ibid., p. 3. 12. Ibid., p. 8. 13. Ibid., p. 14. 14. Eric Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational Left (London: Verso, 1989), p. 83. Cf. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The State of the Left in Western Europe’, Marxism Today (October 1982), pp. 8–15, p. 10. 15. Leo Panitch, Working Class Politics in Crisis (London: Verso, 1986), p. 12. 16. Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational Left, pp. 38 and 78. 17. Ibid., pp. 169–79 18. Ibid., pp. 2–3 and 240.


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19. Bob Jessop et al., Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 100. 20. Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 263 and 201. 21. Ibid., pp. 235–8. 22. Ibid., pp. 239 and 218. 23. Ibid., p. 246. 24. Ibid., p. 234. 25. Ibid., p. 254. 26. Ibid., p. 256. 27. Ibid., p. 346. 28. Ibid., p. 304. 29. Ibid., p. 305 ff. 30. Ibid., pp. 309 and 315. 31. Ibid., pp. 156 and 163. 32. Ibid., p. 343. 33. Ibid., p. 320. 34. Stuart Hall, ‘Popular-Democratic vs Authoritarian Populism: Two ways of “Taking Democracy Seriously”’ in Alan Hunt (ed.), Marxism and Democracy (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1980), pp. 181–2. 35. Ibid., p. 182. 36. Andrew Gamble, ‘The Free Economy and the Strong State’, The Socialist Register 1979, pp. 1–25 and Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State (London: Macmillan, 1988). 37. Andrew Gamble, ‘Thatcherism and the Conservative Party’ in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 121. 38. Gamble, The Free Economy, p. 31. 39. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal, p. 205 and Jessop et al., Thatcherism, p. 103. Cf. Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational Left, p. 177. 40. Colin Sparks, ‘Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and Marxism’ in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 86. 41. Stuart Hall, ‘The Meaning of New Times’ in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), New Times (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), p. 117 and Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, ‘Introduction’ in Hall and Jacques, New Times, p. 17. 42. Hall, ‘The Meaning of New Times’, p. 127. 43. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal, pp. 275–82. 44. Stuart Hall and David Held, ‘Citizens and Citizenship’ in Hall and Jacques, New Times, p. 178. 45. Anthony Barnett, Iron Brittannia (London: Allison and Busby, 1982). A slightly shorter version of this essay was originally published as a special edition of NLR in July/August 1982, NLR, 134, pp. 5–96. 46. Jessop et al., Thatcherism, p. 117. 47. Ibid., p. 111. 48. Ibid., p. 69. 49. Ibid., p. 178. 50. Ibid.

226 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire Ibid., pp. 179 and 129. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., pp. 137 and 73. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., pp. 149 and 137. Ibid., pp. 61 and 167. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. vii. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. 140. Jessop et al., ‘Farewell to Thatcherism?’, p. 83. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid. Ibid., p. 102. Ben Fine et al., Class Politics: An Answer to its Critics (London: Leftover Pamphlets, 1984), p. 62. John Saville, ‘Marxism Today: An Anatomy’, The Socialist Register 1990, pp. 35–59, p. 48. Ralph Miliband, ‘The New Revisionism in Britain’, NLR, 150 (1985), pp. 5–26, p. 6. For Miliband’s earlier analyses of the left under Thatcher see the last two chapters of State Power and Class Power (London: Verso, 1983). Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 22. Bob Looker, ‘Class Conflict and Socialist Advance in Contemporary Britain’ in David Coates et al. (eds), A Socialist Anatomy of Britain (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), p. 237. Ibid., p. 229. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid. Ibid., p. 223. Ellen Wood, The Retreat from Class (London: Verso, 1986), p. 182. Tony Cliff, ‘The Balance of Class Forces in Britain Today’, International Socialism, 6 (1979), pp. 1–50, p. 42. Ibid., p. 27 ff. Tony Cliff, ‘Patterns of Mass Strikes’, International Socialism, 29 (1985), pp. 3–61, p. 52. Ibid., p. 48. Alex Callinicos, ‘The Politics of Marxism Today’, International Socialism, 29 (1985), pp. 128–68, p. 147. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 150.


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89. Chris Harman, ‘1984 and the Shape of Things to Come’, International Socialism, 29 (1985), pp. 62–127, p. 103. 90. Colin Sparks, ‘Towards a Police State?’, International Socialism, 25 (1984), pp. 69–90, p. 80. 91. Harman, ‘1984 and the Shape of Things to Come’, p. 115. 92. Pete Green, ‘British Capitalism and the Thatcher Years’, International Socialism, 35 (1987), pp. 3–70, p. 64. 93. Ibid., p. 9. 94. Harman, ‘1984 and the Shape of Things to Come’, p. 123. 95. Karl Marx, ‘Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne’, C.W., Vol. 11, p. 403. 96. Eric Hobsbawm, The New Century (London: Little, Brown, 2000), p. 167. 97. For a version of this argument see Andrew Gamble, ‘The Legacy of Thatcherism’ in Mark Perryman (ed.), The Blair Agenda (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), pp. 36–7. 98. Martin Jacques, ‘Good to be Back’, Marxism Today (November– December 1998), pp. 2–3, p. 3. 99. Bob Jessop, ‘Capitalism and its futures: Remarks on Regulation, Government and Governance’, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Autumn 1997), pp. 561–81, p. 577. 100. Perry Anderson, ‘Renewals’, NLR (Second Series), 1 (2000). 101. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism (London: Verso, 1997), p. 262. Cf. Ralph Miliband, Socialism for a Sceptical Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). 102. Alex Callinicos, Against the Third Way (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 115.

10 Marx’s Lumpenproletariat and Murray’s Underclass: Concepts Best Abandoned? Mark Cowling

The Eighteenth Brumaire features Marx’s most extended discussion of the lumpenproletariat. In this chapter I shall give a brief account of his analysis of the lumpenproletariat and their political role. I shall then challenge the coherence of this account and argue that Marx uses the concept as a way of vilifying the part of the proletariat which supported Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte on the one hand and vilifying and trivialising Bonaparte himself on the other. Finally I shall point out that there is a considerable similarity in both definition and function between Marx’s view of the lumpenproletariat and Charles Murray’s contemporary theory of the underclass. The account of the lumpenproletariat which follows is not original, but is needed to make subsequent discussion clear.1 Although possibly presaged in Engels’ account of the Irish immigrants in The Condition of the Working Class in England, the lumpenproletariat make their initial appearance in the Communist Manifesto: The ‘dangerous class’, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.2 Mobile Guards, each a thousand strong, composed of young men from fifteen to twenty years old. They belonged for the most part to the lumpenproletariat, which in all big towns forms a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu [men without hearth or home], varying according to the degree of civilisation of the nation to which they belong, but never renouncing their lazzaroni character – at the youthful age at 228

The Lumpenproletariat and Murray’s Underclass

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which the Provisional Government recruited them, thoroughly malleable, as capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest corruption.3 From the aristocracy there were bankrupted roués of doubtful means and dubious provenance, from the bourgeoisie there were degenerate wastrels on the take, vagabonds, demobbed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers and cheats, thugs, pickpockets, conjurers, card-sharps, pimps, brothel-keepers, porters, day-labourers, organ grinders, scrap dealers, knife grinders, tinkers and beggars, in short the whole amorphous, jumbled mass of flotsam and jetsam that the French term bohemian … 4 To summarise what emerges from these lively definitions, the lumpenproletariat is: 1. apparently, a tightened-up version of the common ideas of the time about the ‘dangerous classes’, although the proletariat itself tended to be identified in the terms reserved by Marx and Engels for the lumpenproletariat before socialists including Marx and Engels managed to revise common meanings5 2. people drawn from both pre-capitalist and capitalist social formations but who had left or been evicted from their previous social class 3. people who do not accept the idea of making their living by regular work 4. a source of criminals 5. importantly, for Marx, comprised of people who are liable to be tempted by illicit pickings into the service of the right, particularly of the finance aristocracy, who share the approach to life and morality of the lumpenproletariat. Anyone not totally degenerate would hate to be identified as a lumpenproletarian, which leads on to the use Marx makes of the concept. One way the concept functions is to dissociate the proletariat from supporting the bourgeoisie or Bonaparte: the Mobile Guards are lumpenproletarians, not proletarians;6 proletarian support for the regime is actually lumpen elements; the members of the Society of 10 December are lumpenproletarians.7 The other is to use the disreputable lumpenproletariat to impugn first the finance aristocracy:

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The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society … in 1847, on the most prominent stages of bourgeois society, the same scenes were publicly enacted that regularly lead the lumpenproletariat to brothels, to workhouses and lunatic asylums, to the bar of justice, to the dungeon, and to the scaffold.8 And also Bonaparte: the central puzzle of the Eighteenth Brumaire is how a swindling nonentity managed to become President of France and to get rid of the National Assembly. Bonaparte’s association with the Society of 10 December enables Marx to stress the shallowness of Bonaparte and the relative insubstantiality of his regime.9 Take away his lumpen characteristics and other explanations have to be found, such as the ones put forward by Geoff Watkins and Roger Price elsewhere in this volume, respectively that the Bonaparte legend was very powerful in French politics, and that Bonaparte’s regime offered an effective path to modernisation. Elsewhere Marx’s conspiratorial rivals for leadership of the working class are tarred with the lumpenproletarian brush.10 In a well-researched and comprehensive article Bovenkerk argues that a major function of the lumpenproletariat in Marx and Engels is to explain away parts of the proletariat which failed to behave in a proper revolutionary fashion.11 Let us move on to look at the problems with Marx’s definitions above. To start with, we are left unclear who the lumpenproletariat really are. ‘That passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society’ sounds as though we might be dealing with, for example, peasants displaced from the land by enclosure or by the problems Marx charts in the Eighteenth Brumaire.12 Historically these gravitated towards the cities and formed, often reluctantly, the beginnings of the industrial proletariat. So the difference between a recent ex-peasant who is becoming a proletarian rather than a lumpenproletarian seems to be a matter of attitude rather than of relation to the means of production: the proletarian has become more resigned to selling his labour power. Displaced peasants could also feature as ‘people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu’, but again one would expect such people to turn into proletarians over time. What about displaced proletarians – people whose industries have closed for one reason or another, people who cannot easily find work because they are old, sick, injured? These are definitely not the


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lumpenproletariat, we learn in Capital. The lumpenproletariat are ‘vagabonds, criminals [and] prostitutes’, the ‘“dangerous” classes’; instead displaced proletarians are the ‘lazarus-layers’ of the proletariat.13 And yet, mightn’t at least some displaced proletarians turn to crime or to temporary jobs sometimes, particularly if the alternative was the workhouse? Marx is ambivalent about how easy it would be for a proletarian thrown out by one branch of industry to find employment in another. Some of his writing about the worker as a mere appendage of the machine suggests that one might turn easily from the appendage of one machine into the appendage of another; on the other hand, there are suggestions that people become so distorted by one machine that they are not suitable to work with another. Again, there may be problems about accepting factory life at all, which mean that one has to start life in a factory young, although perhaps moving to another factory might not be so difficult.14 Perhaps this ambiguity corresponds to real life in the mid-nineteenth century: one factory might involve more training or more distortion of the person or worse conditions than another; the demand for hands would be greater at one time than another. Any difficulties would surely lead some proletarians towards lumpen expedients.15 Coming to Marx’s most detailed definition, ‘porters, day-labourers, scrap dealers, knife grinders [and], tinkers’ all make their living through labour. They are seen as lumpenproletarians because they are self-employed and because their forms of work are very easy to take up and abandon. The question of how easy it would be to take up proletarian employment is discussed in the previous paragraph. On the face of things, if it was easy to become a proletarian there is nothing to stop at least some lumpenproletarians making the transition; if it was hard to enter a new proletarian job then lumpenproletarians would be more stuck but would tend to be joined by displaced proletarians. ‘Conjurers, card sharps and brothel keepers’ and ‘prostitutes’ raise another question. Let us assume that cardsharps are actually professional gamblers rather than fraudsters. Conjurers provide legitimate entertainment; professional gamblers are part of a substantial industry which is basically legal in modern Britain, although forms of gambling are certainly banned by some governments; and prostitution can be seen as sex work although, again, there is much debate about whether prostitution or forms of it is exploitative of women’s sexuality. However, whether we use Marx’s attempts at distinguishing productive and unproductive labour or whether we rely on

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various arguments about the legitimacy of particular activities we are unlikely to get a list of illegitimate activities which would command widespread agreement, whether in the society generally or amongst socialists. As a personal example I would put people who slaughter animals and sell meat, estate agents, people who pressurise children to buy useless toys and people who send spam emails or do telephone cold calling on my list of dubious characters deserving to be part of the lumpenproletariat, but remove from it people who offer services such as prostitutes and drug dealers. What is going on here seems to be that Marx is including an assortment of occupations which command widespread dislike to make the lumpenproletariat seem less reputable rather than engaging in any kind of serious social (or socialist) analysis. Marx’s account of the finance aristocracy is also problematical. Whilst manipulating large amounts of money can certainly spill over into gambling and into illegalities such as fraud, stealing pension funds or insider trading there is a legitimate function in capitalist economies for people who move capital from less to more profitable investments, assess levels of risk in investments, offer advice to others etc. In other words, this activity is part of the general evils of capitalism rather than a specially serious excrescence, and it is hard to see how a capitalist economy could function without at least some role for a stock exchange, futures markets, currency trading etc. There may well be scope for socialists to benefit from splits amongst the bourgeoisie. For obvious reasons they would tend to side with manufacturing capital which employs people and develops the forces of production against finance capitalists simply concerned with shortterm profits. This presents a particularly difficult problem for British socialists given the size and relative success of the City of London compared with British manufacturing. But short of an unlikely worldwide revolutionary expropriation of capital the way forward would seem to be to try to reduce speculation (perhaps in the British case by joining the euro), and encourage long-term socially and environmentally responsible investment rather than eliminating financial capital. In this context the simple identification of city financiers with lumpenproletarian pleasures and vices is not helpful. My analysis of Marx’s main definitions leads me to sympathise with Bovenkerk’s conclusion, based on a wider range of references: In their [Marx and Engels’] more theoretical works, their definition of the term lumpenproletariat is unclear and inconsistent. Anyone


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who tries to base further study upon their interpretation of the term will soon be at his or her wits’ end.16 Marx has also been challenged on the grounds that the lumpenproletariat is not always associated with the right. Historically the workers most willing to engage in revolutionary activity have been those who have recently left the land and experience factory work as inhuman and unnatural. Thus revolutions have typically happened in newly industrialised countries rather than those which are more mature. A common observation in Russia was that the more established skilled workers supported the Mensheviks whilst more recent arrivals tended to support the Bolsheviks. And it would be the new arrivals whose relatives would tend to be living a hand-tomouth urban existence as knife grinders and porters, but who would in many cases sympathise politically with revolutionary socialism. There are similar comments in Mao17 and Fanon.18 The most credible group of revolutionary socialists in the US since the Second World War were the Black Panthers, who also thought of much of their following as lumpenproletarian, and even boasted a supporting rock group entitled the Lumpen.19 I now turn to a modern version of the idea of the lumpenproletariat, the idea of the underclass. I want to consider this idea as found in one of its most prominent exponents, Charles Murray. What sort of people, according to Murray, are the underclass? Murray says that he first noticed the underclass in the town where he grew up. ‘Their homes were littered and unkempt. The men in the family were unable to hold a job for more than a few weeks at a time. Drunkenness was common. The children grew up ill schooled and ill behaved and contributed a disproportionate share of the local juvenile delinquents.’20 Murray sees this kind of person as distinct from blue-collar workers. This description lacks the picaresque features of Marx’s definitions of the lumpenproletariat, but seems to be a description of a similar social group. Murray made his reputation with analyses of the United States, but was then invited to the UK by The Sunday Times. He offered two accounts of the underclass here, which were published together with British criticisms of his ideas in Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Developing Debate. In brief, Murray argues that areas of Britain have come to be inhabited by an underclass. There are three interlocking features of his account, illegitimacy, crime and idleness. Illegitimacy has been increasing substantially. From the time of Henry VIII to

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that of Elizabeth II English illegitimacy rates stayed around 4.5 per cent. They then moved up somewhat in the 1950s and 1960s, but went up dramatically in the late 1970s and after so that by 1994 they hit 31.2 per cent. Alongside this the rate of divorce has increased to a record high, and the rate of marriage, particularly first marriage, has declined. People are setting less value on being married. Illegitimate children are concentrated in the poorest areas where there are most mothers from social class V, areas such as Middlesbrough. Obviously cohabitation has risen as an alternative to marriage, but Murray sees this as an unstable relationship, probably leading on to serial cohabitation. Murray argues that professional people are continuing to marry and that amongst professionals there will be a reversion to Victorian values and thus the ‘new Victorians’ will be surrounded by the New Rabble.21 The decline in marriage has occurred because of a cultural assault from feminists and because state benefits have made it too easy to raise children outside marriage.22 One might wonder to what extent this is a black problem: isn’t there a tradition of illegitimacy amongst people who originate from the West Indies? Murray acknowledges that there is, but says there are so few blacks in Britain that this boosts the illegitimacy statistics by a mere 1 per cent.23 Apart from the general change in British culture a major reason for the increase in illegitimacy amongst the poorest is the benefit system which makes it easier to bring up children in the absence of fathers than it was in the past. Murray’s image of these families is that they essentially lack fathers. They thus tend to become unruly, and well-behaved children who live in communities where there are many single-parent families have to be violent in self-defence. This is all made worse by the other two features of the underclass. Murray says that the prevalence of crime in areas where there is an underclass is damaging in two ways: it makes life difficult for lawabiding people who live there, and it gives children growing up there the wrong kind of socialising norms. One tends to think of England as more law-abiding than the US, but it has a higher rate of burglary and probably of motor theft.24 Violent crime in England is rising very rapidly even if the homicide rate is well below that in the US, and overtook the US in 1996.25 This is not surprising because: ‘in every respect – the chances of getting caught, the chances of being found guilty and the chances of going to prison – crime has become dramatically safer in Britain throughout the post-war period, and most blatantly safer since 1960’.26


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The third major feature of the underclass is the number of ablebodied young men unwilling to work. Young men see unemployment benefit as a ‘right’, and are not willing to work at realistic rates of pay. If offered work they tend to decline and are insufficiently self-disciplined to hold down a job. This is potentially a disaster as they are ‘barbarians’ who need the civilising influence of work and supporting a wife. For Marx the major immediate worry concerning the lumpenproletariat was that they might be used as foot soldiers by the right, notably by the finance aristocracy. Murray describes his politics as those of a Whig,27 and not surprisingly his worries are different. The main concerns which come out of his British writings are that the underclass costs a lot in welfare benefits and in paying for police and prisons; that the underclass culture tends to spread and is pernicious: obviously most men need to work; and that underclass habits make life very difficult for people trying to bring up children well in areas where the underclass is the main class. He adds, but does not really explain, that the underclass is a threat to the survival of ‘free institutions and a civil society’.28 Why has an underclass been developing in Britain? Murray’s explanations are: the increased cultural acceptability of illegitimacy; the way in which the welfare state makes it possible for single mothers to bring up children without fathers; the way that benefits make low paid work unattractive, particularly for men and the way that crime has become an easier way of life. Murray’s account obviously immediately raises many theoretical and empirical questions. As a matter of theory, do Murray’s three aspects really hang together?29 Would an underclass be pretty much the same thing as a lumpenproletariat, and if we wish to retain a Marxist framework of analysis but reject the concept of the lumpenproletariat, does this also point to rejecting the idea of an underclass? As a matter of fact, have we, as he claims, been developing an underclass in Britain? Is there really such a phenomenon in the US? A British empirical reply to Murray is easy to construct, and is politically important. The most important riposte is in terms of the relationship of cause and effect. Back in the 1960s Britain had virtually full employment. I can recall from my days in the student Socialist Society at Manchester University a leading light predicting in 1968 that unemployment was likely to go over 250,000 shortly and that this would lead to a revolutionary situation … Unemployment at that level, before the numerous statistical adjustments of

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the 1980s designed to disguise the extent to which unemployment had grown, left little scope for an underclass. Unemployment then grew in the 1970s thanks to increased international competition, the oil crisis and, arguably, the unrestrained use of trade union power. Then came the Thatcher victory in 1979, followed by a range of specific policies which led to massive rises in unemployment: the vigorous application of monetarism even at the height of the 1983 recession; specific anti-union measures in a series of five Acts of Parliament; cuts in benefits and in higher rates of tax and the promotion of an individualist ideology most notoriously encapsulated in ‘there is no such thing as society’. Thatcherite policies, which have continued in a less abrasive form under Major and Blair, left Britain more exposed than, for example, France, to increasing international competition and at least some shifting of manufacturing jobs to Third World countries offering cheap labour.30 Middlesbrough is specifically cited by Murray as a venue where the underclass has developed. The starting point of a local study fits the above analysis well: in the late 1960s there was a stable social structure underpinned by ‘near full employment in relatively well paid, long-term and skilled jobs in Teesside’s chemical, steel and heavy engineering industries’. However, ‘between 1975 and 1986 one quarter of all jobs and half of all manufacturing jobs were lost on Teesside’.31 This is at a time when living off the state was generally being made harder.32 Indeed, by 2000 although overall unemployment on Teesside had fallen, in Middlesbrough those unemployed and claiming benefit, people on training schemes and people who would like to work but were not formally unemployed totalled some 35 per cent of the labour force.33 In these circumstances it is plain that the major problem was unemployment facilitated by the policies of new right politicians. These same politicians found Murray’s doctrines appealing in that they shift the blame for unemployment and deprivation to ‘generous’ welfare measures on the one hand and features of the communities suffering unemployment on the other. There are a series of more general ripostes to Murray published alongside his articles and elsewhere which are worth rehearsing briefly.34 He argues that illegitimacy is much greater in areas inhabited by the underclass than amongst the population generally and specifically amongst well-paid young people who are in work, who, he says, are the ‘new Victorians’, whereas actually there has been a major tendency for couples to live together and have children


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across all social classes; and single mothers tend to remarry eventually.35 The idea that there is a culture of deprivation which reproduces itself was a pet theme of an early adviser to Mrs Thatcher, Sir Keith Joseph (his eugenic ideas led to the nickname ‘Sir Sheath’). A substantial research programme failed to produce much support for his views.36 In fairness to Murray his American writings seem to be based more on the idea of the immediate rational choices of the poor than of a culture of poverty on the lines of Oscar Lewis.37 In the Teesside study there was strong evidence of the persistence of working class rather than underclass values amongst young people living in Willowdene, an estate which would certainly be a home of the underclass if one really existed on Teesside: a consistent finding of the research was that, whatever the nature of individual experiences, young people shared a conventional outlook and aspiration to marry, settle down and have children themselves. This aspiration was found throughout the sample, including among persistent criminals and drug users who had had the least positive experiences of family life. For virtually all young people in the sample the future is seen conventionally as ‘nice husband or wife, nice house and nice car’.38 Because getting a steady job was very difficult in the area: people worked outside the formal labour-market: caring for children and in the home, in more informal economic activities, on youth training schemes or New Deal programmes, or in a criminal enterprises. There was a general resistance to living a life on benefits.39 It was striking how far these values extended. Thus the sons of a heroin dealer unable to carry on because of imprisonment took over the family business; thieving is termed ‘grafting’, and often approached in the same way in the sense of establishing regular hours of work; one thief commented: ‘I’m not a dole-waller. I never sign on. I was a thief, that’s my own occupation.’40 Thus although Murray comes from a very different part of the political spectrum from Marx, and the political impact of the idea of the underclass is very different from that of the proletariat, the same comment can be made on both of them: the concept is being used for its political impact rather than because it provides good

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explanations. The political impact of both concepts is pernicious and both are an obstacle to clear analysis. This general rebuttal of Murray (and indeed, Marx on the lumpenproletariat) is not the end of the story because it leaves too many loose ends. Going back to the empirical account of Britain there may not be an underclass as a group sharply distinguished from the working class, but there are certainly geographical areas where the problems alluded to by Murray are experienced: there is such a level of crime that it is not possible to go out to work to acquire things in the normal way, because your house will probably be burgled in your absence;41 where the schools are so bad that the chances of leaving literate, numerate and with a decent set of GCSEs is very low; and where the local economy provides so little demand that it is difficult to operate businesses successfully. In the same way, to the extent there are people with lumpenproletarian characteristics they might well present a problem under Marx’s socialism in which all work and are paid accordingly. Here the discussion has basically moved from a discussion of the underclass to that of social exclusion, a situation where the impact of a whole range of poor facilities and problems interact to make for a poor quality of life and for difficulties in any attempts to ameliorate them.42 Without commenting on Labour’s actual attempts to deal with social exclusion the idea that it is a problem and that a coordinated solution is needed is plainly valid. A dimension of these problems which Murray does not discuss in his British writings is the problem caused by acquisitive crime aimed at keeping up addicts’ drug supplies. In the Middlesbrough study the coming of heroin in the early 1990s was widely seen as worsening the quality of life on the estate, and plainly requires specific attention be it more effective policing or legalisation.43 Moreover, there is such a lot more to Murray which relates to his ideas about the underclass and which would repay attention by socialists. To start with, his specific claim about the underclass in the US is that it developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s at a time when the general economy was booming, so that the ready British answer above won’t wash, although a very specific response discussing the job situation in the inner city might.44 It is very important to get this right because Murray’s claim is that enhanced welfare and less effective policing led to the growth of an underclass, and this idea has been used by the right in US politics as a justification for cuts in welfare and more imprisonment. Part of Murray’s appeal is that he uses a very straightforward rational choice


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explanation for the choices of poor people. Thus men drifting in and out of work, women having children outside marriage on welfare and students failing at school are all explained by Murray in terms of changes in US state policy as they would impact on any ordinary person in that situation. For socialists there must be something wrong with these arguments, and it would benefit us to pinpoint what. And while there is some pleasure in reading Murray’s recent arguments to the effect that the underclass has not gone away even though unemployment and crime in the US have gone down very substantially, one feels that he may still be making some points worth discussing.45 Beyond this there is a range of claims about race made by Murray. In Losing Ground he claims that US blacks have been particular victims of foolishly generous welfare policies, compounded with the pernicious effects of affirmative action programmes which pass students and promote individuals beyond their current merits, thus discrediting blacks generally.46 In The Bell Curve he claims that general intelligence or g is something real and measurable; that US society is increasingly meritocratic in that people’s position in society is now closely aligned with their intelligence; that black people are on average less intelligent than whites; and that affirmative action frequently takes particular groups of blacks beyond their abilities in dangerous and discrediting ways. Apart from the pleasure of seeing someone dare to engage in so much political incorrectness in so many directions at once, Murray’s obvious concern not to be thought simplistically racist, or simply hostile to welfare makes him someone worth attending to and criticising. Equally, however, there is the problem that Murray makes three common-sense assumptions about human nature: of rational calculation, chiefly in Losing Ground; of the idea of a dependency culture, as found in his British writings on the underclass; and of crime being linked to stupidity in The Bell Curve.47 Then in In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government we find Aristotelian ideas about happiness followed by the use of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs analysed as preconditions of happiness, combined with explicitly classical liberal ideas about the role of the state.48 It is difficult to make these compatible.49 Thus although the lumpenproletariat/underclass should be seen as invalid as a substantive concept, there are plenty of issues surrounding it which need attention. For socialists these include the following. Do people who have developed some lumpen character-

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istics simply get back to work when offered decent opportunities? If not, what should be done about it? How much does it matter if some unskilled people choose to live on welfare benefits rather than do boring jobs? Is it genuinely true that the services of some less skilled and less able people are becoming superfluous in capitalist society? What should socialists aim to do about this? Particularly if it is because unskilled manufacturing jobs have shifted to third world countries which this work is helping to develop? NOTES 1. For the best scholarly account of the lumpenproletariat in Marx see Hal Draper, ‘The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat in Marx and Engels’, Economies et Sociétés, Vol. 6, No. 12 (December 1972), pp. 2285–312. 2. C.W., Vol. 6, p. 494. 3. Karl Marx, Class Struggle in France, C.W., Vol. 10, p. 62. 4. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this volume, p. 63. 5. See Robert L. Bussard, ‘The “Dangerous Class” of Marx and Engels: The Rise of the Idea of the lumpenproletariat’, History of European Ideas, Vol. 8, No. 6 (1987), pp. 675–92, pp. 678–9. Stallybrass points out that Marx’s exotic lists are similar to those compiled by journalists at the time – see Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat’, Representations, Issue 31 (Summer 1990), pp. 69–95, p. 72. For the link to generally used ideas, see Huard on the distinction between le peuple and la populace, the latter corresponding to the lumpenproletariat: Raymond Huard, ‘Marx et Engels devant la marginalité: la découverte du lumpenproletariat’, Romantisme, Vol. 18, No. 59 (1988), pp. 4–17, p. 4. 6. For a series of references to work which shows the Mobile Guard actually comprised proletarians see Frank Bovenkerk, ‘The Rehabilitation of the Rabble: How and Why Marx and Engels Wrongly Depicted the Lumpenproletariat as a Reactionary Force’, The Netherlands Journal of Sociology, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1984), pp. 13–41, and Peter Hayes, ‘Utopia and the Lumpenproletariat: Marx’s Reasoning in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’, Review of Politics, Vol. 50, No. 3 (1988), pp. 445–65, p. 462–3, n. 13. Huard points out Marx’s own verbal ambiguity here, suggesting he was aware this move does not entirely work (‘Marx et Engels devant la marginalité’, p. 10). 7. Cf. Bussard, ‘The “Dangerous Class” of Marx and Engels’, p. 687. 8. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, C.W., Vol. 10, p. 51. 9. Hayes interprets this in terms of the dialectic of history, ‘Utopia and the Lumpenproletariat’, p. 452. 10. Ibid., p. 447; cf. Hayes on Marx and crowds, ibid., p. 460. 11. Bovenkerk, ‘The Rehabilitation’, p. 37. 12. For example, p. 104. 13. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. XXV, in C.W., Vol. 35, pp. 637–9. 14. Ibid., Ch. XIV, Sect. 3, pp. 347–55; Ch. XV, Sect. 4, pp. 420–30.


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15. And, indeed, Huard suggests on the basis of one brief comment that Marx came to accept this – Huard, ‘Marx et Engels devant la marginalité’, p. 13. 16. Bovenkerk, ‘The Rehabilitation’, p. 34. 17. Mao says these elements, including Triads, can become revolutionary given proper leadership: Mao Tse Tung, ‘Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society’, Selected Works (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), Vol. 1, p. 19. 18. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 102–3. 19. For a careful survey of the cases where Marx and Engels attribute a political role to the lumpenproletariat, with the conclusion that they were invariably wrong about its reactionary role, see Bovenkerk, ‘The Rehabilitation’, pp. 22–34. 20. Charles Murray, Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Developing Debate (London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit in association with the Sunday Times, 1996), p. 22. 21. Ibid., p. 114. 22. Ibid., p. 111. 23. Ibid., p. 29. 24. Ibid., p. 34. 25. Ibid., p. 35. See also Charles Murray, Underclass + 10 (London: Civitas, 2001), p. 6. 26. Murray, Underclass, p. 43. For further reflections in this vein see Charles Murray et al., Does Prison Work? (London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1997). 27. More specifically: ‘on the right (though more libertarian than conservative)’. See Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 555. 28. Murray, Underclass, p. 127. 29. See, for example, Ken Roberts, ‘Is There an Emerging British “Underclass”’? in Robert MacDonald (ed.), Youth, the ‘Underclass’ and Social Exclusion (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 39–54. 30. Obviously Thatcher’s New Right policies were generally paralleled by those of Reagan in the US. For an analysis of the resulting growth in inequality see Norman Fainstein, ‘A Note on Interpreting American Poverty’ in Enzio Mingione (ed.), Urban Poverty and the Underclass (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 152–9. 31. Les Johnston et al., Snakes and Ladders: Young People, Transitions and Social Exclusion (Bristol: The Policy Press/Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2000), p. 1. 32. For a summary of the cuts in welfare provisions affecting young people at this time, see Hartley Dean, ‘Young People and Social Citizenship’ in MacDonald, Youth, the ‘Underclass’, pp. 55–69, pp. 59–60. 33. Johnston et al., Snakes and Ladders, p. 1. 34. The most trenchant being the wonderfully titled P. Bagguley and K. Mann, ‘Idle Thieving Bastards? Scholarly Representations of the “Underclass”’, Work, Employment and Society, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1992), pp. 113–26.

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35. Melanie Phillips in Murray, Underclass, pp. 156 ff. Buck points out that from 1979 to 1986 the number of inactive couple households grew by 350 per cent, far outstripping the rise in inactive single parent households – see Nick Buck, ‘Labour Market Inactivity and Polarisation’ in David J. Smith (ed.), Understanding the Underclass (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1992), pp. 9–31, esp. p. 16. 36. Alan Walker in Murray, Underclass, p. 68. 37. For example, Oscar Lewis, La Vida (New York: Random House, 1966). 38. Johnston et al., Snakes and Ladders, p. 26; cf. Dean, ‘Young People and Social Citizenship’, p. 58; Gill Jones in MacDonald, Youth, the ‘Underclass’, p. 112; Anthony Heath, ‘The Attitudes of the Underclass’, in Smith, Understanding the Underclass, pp. 32–47 – see pp. 35–6. 39. Johnson et al., Snakes and Ladders, p. 26; cf. Rob MacDonald, ‘Fiddly Jobs, Undeclared Working and the Something for Nothing Society’, Work Employment and Society, Vol. 8, No. 4 (December 1994), pp. 507–30. 40. Johnston et al., Snakes and Ladders, p. 29. 41. Cf. ibid., p. 9. 42. Indeed, one British response to Murray has been to define the underclass as the ‘socially excluded’, thus including, for example, poor pensioners and the disabled in it (see, for example, Field in Murray, Underclass; Debbie Baldwin et al., ‘The Formation of an Underclass or Disparate Processes of Social Exclusion’ in MacDonald, Youth, the ‘Underclass’, pp. 83–95). This is plainly not Murray’s intent. For the idea of a link between US liberalism and the idea of an underclass on the one hand and European collectivism and the concept of social exclusion on the other, see Hilary Silver, ‘National Discourses of the New Urban Poverty’ in Mingione, Urban Poverty, pp. 105–38. 43. Johnson et al., Snakes and Ladders, pp. 27–8. 44. See, for example, Loic J.D. Wacquant and William Julius Wilson, ‘The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City’, pp. 25–42 of William Julius Wilson (ed.), The Ghetto Underclass (Newbury Park: Sage, 1993). Their description of what happened to the Black Belt in Chicago bears a striking resemblance to what happened in Middlesbrough, although against a background of less state intervention – see ibid., p. 30. For a more general account of the collapse of unskilled employment in US inner cities, see John D. Kasarda, ‘Urban Industrial Transition and the Underclass’ in Wilson, The Ghetto Underclass, pp. 43–64. For Murray’s claim that black youth idleness has grown despite a booming economy, see Charles Murray, ‘The Underclass Revisited’, at 45. Murray, ‘The Underclass Revisited’. 46. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 47. Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve, Ch. 11. 48. Charles Murray, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994). 49. See, for example, the brief critique by Jock Young in Murray, Does Prison Work?, pp. 31–2.

11 Here Content Transcends Phrase: The Eighteenth Brumaire as the Key to Understanding Marx’s Critique of Utopian Socialism Darren Webb

The key to understanding Marx’s critique of utopian socialism lies in the pages of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and more specifically in one particular sentence drawn from those pages. The sentence in question is this: ‘There phrase transcended content, here content transcends phrase’, and the key to understanding Marx’s critique of utopian socialism lies, or so I shall argue in what follows, in comprehending why phrase had to transcend content in both the English and French Revolutions (‘there’) but why the content of the social revolution of the nineteenth century (‘here’) was so real that no utopian phrase could do it justice. The key lies in understanding why the spokespersons of the English and French Revolutions could not inspire action without the aid of deceptive and utopian language but why theoreticians of the proletarian class such as Marx could now set people in motion without having to provide them with utopian descriptions of anything. The key lies in understanding how Marx considered himself able to generate radical hope and invoke the spirit of revolution without foreclosing the future or undermining the principles of proletarian self-emancipation and self-determination. The key lies in understanding why, in this context, the utopians’ recourse to fantastic speculation was nothing short of silly, stale and reactionary. UTOPIAN SOCIALISM For Marx, as for others at the time, the term ‘utopian socialism’ referred primarily to the thought of Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and Henri Saint-Simon – ‘the big three’ as it were – together with lesser lights such as Etienne Cabet and Wilhelm Weitling. In what sense, however, were these thinkers regarded as ‘utopian’? What, in other words, did Marx consider ‘utopian’ about the utopian 243

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socialists? The answer to this question is supplied by Marx when he accounts for the utopian form taken by socialist thought at the time of its first articulation: The first socialists (Fourier, Saint-Simon, etc.), since social conditions were not sufficiently developed to allow the working class to constitute itself as a militant class, were necessarily obliged to limit themselves to dreams about the model society of the future ...1 Here Marx indicates what he considers a utopia to be, namely, a dream about the model society of the future. What was ‘utopian’ about the utopian socialists, therefore, was that they busied themselves constructing utopian models of future society. Marx also indicates that utopian socialism as a movement was relevant to, because it was a product of, the early stages of capitalism, a period during which the proletariat lacked both historical autonomy and political initiative. This point is developed in the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels say of the utopians’ utopias that: Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, corresponded with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.2 Whilst the undeveloped state of capitalism, the proletariat and the class struggle accounts for the utopian form taken by socialism at the time of its emergence, the original utopian socialists were nonetheless still criticised by Marx for their utopianism. Or rather they were criticised for disguising their fantastic systems beneath the cloak of science. Indeed, it is precisely because the first socialists – and this applies equally to Fourier, Saint-Simon and Owen – proclaimed their respective visions of emancipated humanity to be the product of rigorous scientific ardour that Marx spent so much time pointing out that, in spite of their repeated claims to the contrary, the ‘doctors in social science’ had succeeded in concocting nothing more than ‘idealistic fantasies’;3 that their ‘new social science’ boiled down to introducing ‘an organisation of society specially contrived by these inventors’;4 and that they each sought science ‘in their minds’ rather than in a critical interrogation of the

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real movement of the present.5 In short, Marx was at pains to emphasise the utopian – in the sense of fantastic, conjured, contrived, imagined and dreamed – nature of the utopians’ utopias. This is not to deny Marx’s obvious admiration for the original utopian socialists and their occasional flashes of inspiration. One must nevertheless be careful not to overstate the importance attached by Marx to their ideas. When it came to their utopian descriptions of society the best Marx could say was that they had once possessed ‘propaganda value as popular novels’.6 True, these novels were ‘full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class’7 but the value of this material – indeed the value of utopian systems full stop – was transient and ephemeral: In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification.8 As the party develops, these systems lose all importance and are at best retained purely nominally as catchwords.9 It was in this context that Marx attacked his contemporaries for continuing to peddle utopian fantasies at a time when the proletariat, the class struggle and the party had each developed to the extent that such fantasies had lost all importance, all theoretical justification and all practical value. In a letter to Sorge of 1877 Marx could barely contain his frustration: In particular, what we had been at such pains to eject from the German workers’ heads decades ago, thereby ensuring their theoretical (and hence also practical) ascendancy over the French and English, – namely Utopian socialism, the play of the imagination on the future structure of society, – is once again rampant and in a far more ineffectual form, not only as compared with the great French and English Utopians, but with – Weitling. It stands to reason that Utopianism which bore within itself the seeds of critical and materialist socialism, before the advent of the latter, can now, post festum, only seem silly, stale and thoroughly reactionary.10 Marx thus defined as ‘utopian’ those socialists who indulge in ‘the play of the imagination on the future structure of society’ and he

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criticised contemporary utopians – with Eugen Dühring being the specific target of Marx’s scorn here – because they were still playing with these pictures now. Whilst the fantasies of utopians such as Fourier and Owen had possessed a certain propaganda value, the belated fantasies of Dühring were not only futile (and the unfavourable comparison with Weitling meant they were very futile indeed) – they were silly, stale and reactionary from the roots up. The key to understanding why Marx regarded them as such lies in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. CONTENT AND PHRASE IN THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE In the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx offers a brief historical analysis of the role played by utopian imagery in the process of social and political transformation. The principal conclusion reached by Marx is that utopian phrases have played a compensatory role, serving to disguise the lack of radical emancipatory content in the historical and political movements they have been called upon to justify. What distinguishes the social revolution of the nineteenth century from those of the seventeenth and eighteenth, however, is precisely the fact that its content is so real that no utopian phrase can do it justice. Marx famously begins his analysis by bemoaning the fact that revolutionaries have always felt the need to disguise their actions in clothes borrowed from the past: Thus Luther masqueraded as the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789–1814 draped itself alternately as Roman republic and Roman empire, and the revolution of 1848 could come up with nothing better than to parody 1789 at one point, the revolutionary inheritance of 1793–5 at another.11 The disguises of 1789–95 differed from those of 1848, however, in that they formed a necessary part of the revolutionary process: unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless required heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and national conflict to bring it into the world. And in the strict classical traditions of the Roman republic its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the selfdeceptions that they needed, in order to hide from themselves the constrained, bourgeois character of their struggles, and to keep themselves emotionally at the level of high historical tragedy.12


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The revolutionaries required heroic Roman ‘phrases’ in order to conceal from themselves the unheroic nature of the revolution’s ‘content’. Indeed, without these phrases the revolutionaries’ enthusiasm would have waned and the revolution itself would have come to nought. The same is true of the English Civil War, argues Marx, in which ‘Cromwell and the English had borrowed Old Testament language, passions and delusions for their bourgeois revolution.’13 As a consequence, ‘the resurrection of the dead in those revolutions served to glorify new struggles, not to parody the old; to magnify fantastically the given task, not to evade a real resolution; to recover the spirit of revolution, not to relaunch its spectre’.14 The disguises of 1848, on the other hand, had served to parody old struggles, evade real resolutions, etc., because: The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin till it has stripped off all superstition from the past. Previous revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to realise its own content. There phrase transcended content, here content transcends phrase.15 In arguing that the revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its inspiration from the past, Marx is attacking those revolutionaries who, in 1848, had attempted to do exactly that, and who, as a consequence, had been ‘evading real resolutions’. In addition, however, he was pointing out that it did not matter that the content of the future could not be phrased because, by virtue of transcending any phrases that could be conjured now, it would attract support without the aid of utopian self-deception. The content of the revolution of the nineteenth century thus transcended the phrase in two senses: first, in the sense that a knowledge of this content lay beyond anyone’s epistemological reach; and second in the sense that the magnificence of the coming content itself defied representation in terms of the phrases available to one now – it was to be so qualitatively different that it lay beyond even our most imaginative attempts to phrase it. For Marx this new-found understanding of the content of the social revolution of the nineteenth century spelled the end for utopian socialism. No longer in need of utopian prophets and their

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stale fantasies to dull themselves to the content of their own revolution, the proletarians would mobilise around the promise of a content that was destined to exceed and confound all fantastic attempts to phrase it. This is not to say that Marx sought to inspire radical hope on the basis of a blind faith in the promise of future redemption. For such chiliastic excitement was a defining feature, not of proletarian revolutions, but rather of previous bourgeois revolutions in which ‘people and events seem to have a jewel-like sparkle, ecstasy is the feeling of the day’.16 In stark contrast, however, proletarian revolutions, such as those of the nineteenth century, engage in perpetual self-criticism, always stopping in their own tracks; they return to what is apparently complete in order to begin it anew, and deride with savage brutality the inadequacies, weak points and pitiful aspects of their first attempts; they seem to strike down their adversary, only to have him draw new powers from the earth and rise against them once more with the strength of a giant; again and again they draw back from the prodigious scope of their own aims, until a situation is created which makes impossible any reversion.17 The strength of the proletarian revolution lies in its refusal to seek ‘refuge in a belief in miracles’, its refusal to ‘conjure away’ the enemy ‘in fantasy’ and its refusal to sacrifice an understanding of the present ‘to an ineffectual glorification of the future’.18 In lieu of ecstatic excitement one thus finds perpetual self-criticism; in lieu of utopian fantasies which lend events a jewel-like sparkle one finds an understanding of the present which again and again draws the proletariat back from the prodigious scope of its aims; in lieu of phrases which transcend, belie and disguise a paucity of real content one finds a content which transcends and defies all attempts to phrase it. Drawn on by the promise of such a phrase-defying content the proletarian revolution of the nineteenth century hides behind no disguises, deceives itself with no fancies and evades no real resolutions. In this context, to appeal to the proletariat with fantastic pictures of the future structure of society would be nothing short of silly, stale and reactionary. UTOPIAN POLITICS AND THE DEFEAT OF 1848 For Marx, utopian systems had no place in the political landscape of the mid-nineteenth century. Utopian system-building had lost all


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importance, all practical worth and all theoretical justification. For this reason the proletariat’s ultimate recourse to ‘doctrinaire experiments’ is taken as a key indicator of its own terrible defeat following the June insurrection of 1848, a symbol of its inability ‘to rediscover revolutionary prowess’.19 Like the utopian disciples criticised in the Communist Manifesto for clinging on to the ‘dream of an experimental realisation of their social utopias’,20 so the proletariat is mournfully criticised in the Eighteenth Brumaire because it throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, cooperative banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement renouncing an overthrow of the old world by means of its own great resources, and instead seeks to attain its salvation behind society’s back, privately, within its own limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily coming to nought.21 In other words, the proletarians were evading a real resolution to social conflicts, and were opting instead to conjure the enemy away through ineffectual flights of fancy. Of course, ‘that the revolution was in for an unprecedented humiliation’ was clear to ‘any competent observer’.22 With every class and party united against it (as the party of order), and with ‘the organisation of bourgeois class rule’ as yet incomplete, yet to find ‘its purest political expression’, the great struggle of the proletarian class (the party of anarchy) could not itself ‘emerge in a pure form’ and was thus foredoomed to failure.23 Nonetheless, proletarian revolutions engage in perpetual self-criticism and the proletariat’s recourse to utopianism was for Marx one of the more pitiful aspects of its first attempt at revolution. This becomes clearer still if one reads the Eighteenth Brumaire in conjunction with Marx’s earlier analysis the proletariat’s first attempt at revolution, namely, The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850. There he refers repeatedly to the utopian self-delusions of the revolutionaries, to the ‘petty figures’ of ‘the socialist doctrinaires of the proletariat’;24 to the way in which their illusions, poetry and rhetoric lent the February revolution an ‘imaginary content’;25 to the way in which the utopian fantasy of universal brotherhood engendered a ‘pleasant dissociation from class antagonisms’ and a ‘visionary elevation above the class struggle’;26 to the fact that the February revolution could usher forth nothing more than a bourgeois republic because ‘the Paris proletariat was still incapable of going beyond the bourgeois republic otherwise than in

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fancy, in imagination’.27 Only with its defeat in June 1848 does the proletarian struggle attain the status of proletarian revolution proper because there ‘the phrases have given place to the real thing’.28 This fleeting glimpse aside, however, the real thing defers to the phrases of ‘utopia, doctrinaire Socialism’, which exalts ‘the cerebrations of the individual pedant’ and views the emancipation of humanity ‘as an application of systems, which the thinkers of society, whether in companies or as individual inventors, devise or have devised’.29 Crucially, the party of anarchy is criticised here for proclaiming itself the means of emancipating the proletariat and the emancipation of the latter as its object. Deliberate deception on the part of some; self-deception on the part of others, who give out the world transformed according to their own needs as the best world for all ...30 Because the spokespersons of the party were giving out their own pedantic cerebrations as ‘the best world for all’, they were deceiving the masses (and often themselves) at the same time as they were heralding themselves as prophets. In proclaiming that the emancipation of humanity lay in the realisation of their own particular visions, in a transformation of the world in accordance with their own particular needs, the spokespersons of the party of anarchy were subscribing to a utopian model of socialist politics ‘which was the theoretical expression of the proletariat only as long as it had not yet developed further into a free historical movement of its own’.31 But of course the proletariat had developed into a free historical movement of its own. Indeed, Marx cites the presidential election of 10 December 1848, in which the revolutionary proletariat put forward and voted for its own candidate Raspail in opposition to the petty-bourgeois Ledru-Rollin, as ‘the first act by which the proletariat, as an independent political party, declared its separation from the democratic party’.32 Having achieved political independence, ‘doctrinaire Socialism is ceded by the proletariat to the petty bourgeoisie’ whilst ‘the proletariat increasingly organises itself around revolutionary Socialism, around Communism’.33 At least in theory anyway. For in practice this theoretical and organisational shift had not taken place to the extent that Marx had either expected or hoped for. Neither the spokespersons for the proletariat nor the proletariat itself had let the dead bury the dead in order to realise the content of their own revolution. Instead, they were still parodying old


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struggles and evading a real resolution to their own. In short, they had yet to come to terms with the fact that here, in the social revolution of the nineteenth century, content transcends phrase. In both the Class Struggles in France and the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx bemoans the fact that the party of the revolutionary proletariat is still engaging in utopian phrasemongery. Nor was this a minor issue of petty party tactics. Rather it was an issue of profound theoretical and political importance. For whilst previous revolutionary leaders had of necessity conjured fantastic utopian phrases in order to disguise and conceal the banal and unheroic content of their respective revolutions, the content of the social revolution of the nineteenth century transcends all attempts to phrase it. More than this, to continue to adhere to a utopian mode of politics which sees the contrived fantasies of false prophets given out as the best world for all is to sacrifice an understanding of the present to an ineffectual glorification of the future whilst assuming that the proletarians comprise only gaping asses incapable of determining for themselves what their own best world might be. With the insurrection of June and the presidential election of December 1848, however, the proletariat constituted itself as an independent class and in so doing dispensed with the need for utopian fantasies. Henceforth the proletariat becomes capable of developing its own emancipatory strategy, of letting the dead bury the dead in order to realise the content of its own revolution. To appeal to the proletariat with fantastic pictures of the future structure of society is, in this context, silly, stale and reactionary. PHRASE-DEFYING CONTENT AND THE MATERIAL CONDITIONS FOR EMANCIPATION Whilst it can be argued that Marx himself painted a fantastic picture of the future structure of society, it can scarcely be suggested that he did so in a systematic fashion or that his aim in so doing was to construct a utopian vision with which to appeal to the proletariat. Indeed, the unsystematic manner in which Marx’s ‘utopian’ vision is articulated and presented, together with its lack of detail and substance, has been recognised by virtually ever scholar who has discussed it.34 The issue of his own ‘utopia’ aside, what is certain is that Marx sought at every opportunity to highlight the differences between his own approach to the realisation of socialism and that which he associated with the utopians. The key difference was summarised by Marx and Engels thus:

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Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premises.35 Communism was conceived by Marx as a movement, the premises of which were now in existence, rather than an ideal ‘end’, the realisation of which would demand adjustments being made to reality by some independently conceived ‘means’. In his own mind at least, therefore, what distinguished his ideas from those of the utopians was that he had established a real and necessary link between the capitalist present and the communist future. Never before had this link been made, or, to put it another way, all previous attempts to make this link had been utopian ones – fantastic images of the classless society abstracted from the horrors of contemporary class divisions and heralded as ‘oughts’. What Marx thought he was doing that was new, then, was superseding the fantastic abstractions and wishful thinking that typified utopianism by grounding the socialist future in the present. In this way Marx considered himself able to argue that ‘here’ content does indeed transcend phrase, and he explains how theoreticians of the proletarian class such as himself are able to articulate the phrase-defying content so tantalisingly hinted at in the Eighteenth Brumaire: So long as the proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, and consequently so long as the very struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political character, and the productive forces are not yet sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie itself to enable us to catch a glimpse of the material conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the formation of a new society, these theoreticians are merely utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science. But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece.36 One thus finds that phrase transcended content – that is, theoreticians were necessarily obliged to limit themselves to the


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improvisation of utopian systems – just so long as the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat remained obscure. Once the productive forces had developed sufficiently to allow a glimpse of these material conditions to be had, however, theoreticians could do away with the inventions of the mind and could focus instead on the radical content developing before their very eyes. Marx presents the same argument in his obituary to Proudhon. Here he tells us that ‘the utopians are hunting for a so-called “science” by means of which a formula for the “solution of the social question” is to be devised a priori’.37 Immediately following this, however, and directly contrasting his position to utopian a priori derivation, he says that he derives his ‘science from a critical knowledge of the historical movement, a movement which itself produces the material conditions for emancipation’.38 An important point to note is that both here and in The Poverty of Philosophy it is ‘the material conditions for’ the emancipated society that are grounded in the present and not the nature of that society itself. The same phrase reappears in the Manifesto, appears again during Marx’s critique of the Jacobins, again in Grundrisse and elsewhere as well.39 From this it seems reasonable to conclude that the fundamental distinction (as perceived by Marx) between his own position and those of the utopians – that is, the distinction which allowed him to displace the false promise held out by utopian phrases with the real promise of a content transcending all attempts to phrase it – was that he had discovered ‘the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat’. With hindsight, we can probably all agree that Marx’s claims to have made such a discovery were based less on science than they were on wishful thinking. What interests us here, however, is what Marx thought he had discovered and the significance he attached to it. What he thought he had discovered – expressed in categories used by Marx himself when specifically contrasting his position to utopianism – can be summarised as follows: that the ‘mounting fury’ of the masses and ‘the positive development of the means of production’, which together comprise ‘the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat’, offer a ‘sufficient guarantee’ that when ‘a real proletarian revolution’ breaks out it will be the ‘classless society concealed within’ these conditions that will follow. Because, therefore, ‘present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies’ towards a ‘higher form’, a science based upon the critical knowledge of these facts allows one to avoid the ‘idealistic

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fantasies’ and ‘a priori derivations’ which define the utopian methodology. If science ‘takes note of what is happening before its eyes’ it can also show why ‘here content transcends phrase’.40 In articulating this discovery and directly contrasting it to utopian philanthropy, Marx was engaging in something more than petty party politics. His aim was not merely to rubbish his political rivals or to develop a distinct political line that would distinguish himself from them. His aim instead was to demonstrate that his own brand of critical communism had superseded utopian socialism; that socialist thought itself had developed such that critical communism had both preserved and developed the radical, inspirational aspects of utopian socialism whilst resolving and suppressing its more reactionary dimensions. Thus, the idea that the theoreticians of the proletarian class can discover ‘the material conditions for emancipation’ by merely taking note of what is happening before their eyes serves several distinct purposes for Marx: first, by establishing that the emancipation of the proletariat is grounded in the material conditions of the present, Marx’s claims are kept safely within the epistemological confines of the present; second, by establishing, through mere observation, that the emancipation of the proletariat is grounded in the material conditions of its own existence, Marx avoids the idea that these conditions have to be imported from outside; third, because it is the material conditions for the emancipated society, and not the nature of that society itself, which are grounded in the present, the future is not foreclosed; and finally, by emphasising that the material conditions for the emancipated society of the future are grounded in the present, the theoreticians are able to glorify and magnify the struggle of the present and thereby capture the spirit of revolution. Marx’s critique of utopian socialism, his historical method and his political project thus become inextricably entwined. Historical materialism becomes more than just a theory of history; it becomes a theory of history capable – as utopian socialism had been in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – of setting people in motion by imbuing them with the future optimism required in order to invoke the spirit of revolution. By sufficiently grounding the existence of a future world of human emancipation in the material conditions of the present, Marx not only (in his own mind) enabled the workers to conceptualise a better future but he did this without foreclosing the future or resorting to the deceitful exhortations of the utopian prophet. As a consequence, utopian


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socialism, in the era of Marx’s materialistically critical socialism, had become silly, stale and reactionary from the roots up. CONCLUSION Whilst utopian visions had once possessed propaganda value as popular novels they had, for Marx, lost all importance, all theoretical justification and all practical worth by the time that he himself was writing. Utopians contemporaneous with him were ridiculed for peddling outdated fantasies which had become silly, stale and reactionary. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte helps us better to discern the theoretical and political dimensions of Marx’s radical critique of utopian system-building. It allows us to perceive clearly that contemporary utopians had become silly because utopian politics itself had become counter-productive, sacrificing (as was evident following the defeat of June 1848) an understanding of the real movement of the present to an ineffectual glorification of the future. It allows us to recognise that utopian phrasemongering had become stale because Marx had revealed that the content of the social revolution of the nineteenth century transcended all attempts to phrase it. And finally it makes it clear that the utopian mode of politics had become reactionary because it ignored, denied and stifled the political creativity of the proletarian class. One interpretation of Marx’s own political project would see it as an attempt to capture and retain the radical and inspirational core of utopian socialism whilst simultaneously resolving and transcending its more reactionary – paternalistic, messianic, deceitful – dimensions. This remains a project awaiting completion. For on the one hand Marx’s critique of utopian socialism was both sophisticated and accurate (to the extent that one would be hard pressed to identify a political utopian in the socialist tradition who did not parade his or her own pedantic cerebrations as the best world for all) whilst on the other the political significance of radical hope – of igniting and harnessing it – hardly requires stating. Indeed, one could even say that the problem (methodological and political) of generating radical hope and of thereby capturing the spirit of revolution without the aid of deceptive utopian phrases – in other words, the problem of persuasively arguing that there exists an emancipatory content which is there to be gained but which transcends all prophetic attempts to phrase it – is one of the most complex and significant of those bequeathed to us by Marx.

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NOTES 1. Karl Marx, ‘Political Indifferentism’, C.W., Vol. 23, p. 394. 2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, C.W., Vol. 6, pp. 515–16. 3. Marx, ‘Political Indifferentism’, p. 394. 4. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 515. 5. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, C.W., Vol. 6, p. 177. 6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, C.W., Vol. 5, p. 462. 7. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 515. 8. Ibid. 9. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 461. 10. Marx to Friedrich Adolf Sorge, 19 October 1877, C.W., Vol. 45, p. 283. 11. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this volume, p. 20. 12. Ibid., pp. 20–1. 13. Ibid., p. 21. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 22. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., pp. 22–3. 18. Ibid., p. 23. 19. Ibid., p. 26. 20. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 516. 21. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 26. Italics in original. 22. Ibid., p. 23. 23. Ibid., p. 56. 24. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, C.W., Vol. 10, p. 98. 25. Ibid., p. 53. 26. Ibid., p. 58. 27. Ibid., p. 66. 28. Ibid., p. 69. 29. Ibid., p. 126. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 81. 33. Ibid., p. 127. 34. See, for example, David McLellan, ‘Marx’s View of the Unalienated Society’, in Review of Politics, Vol. 31, No. 4 (1969), p. 98; Bertell Ollman, ‘Marx’s Vision of Communism: A Reconstruction’, in Critique, Vol. 8 (1977), p. 8; Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Hemel Hempstead: Philip Allen, 1990), p. 40; Terrell Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 98. 35. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 49. 36. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, pp. 177–8. 37. Marx to J.B. Schweitzer, 24 January 1865 (‘On Proudhon’), C.W., Vol. 20, p. 29. 38. Ibid. 39. See Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 514; Karl Marx, ‘Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality’, C.W., Vol. 6, p. 319; Karl Marx, Grundrisse, C.W.,


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Vol. 28, p. 97; Karl Marx, First Draft of The Civil War in France, C.W., Vol. 22, p. 499. 40. Quotations in this paragraph taken or adapted from: Marx to Ferdinand Domela-Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881, C.W., Vol. 46, pp. 67; ibid.; Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 515; Marx to Ferdinand DomelaNieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881, p. 67; ibid.; Marx, Grundrisse, p. 97; Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, C.W., Vol. 22, p. 335; Marx, ‘Political Indifferentism’, p. 94; Marx to J.B. Schweitzer, 24 January 1865 (‘On Proudhon’), p. 29; Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 117; Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 22.

Notes on the Contributors Paul Blackledge is lecturer in the School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University. Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol. He is the author, editor and translator of several books and articles on and by Marx and Engels, including The Cambridge Companion to Marx (ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Rational Choice Marxism (edited with Paul Thomas, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), Engels after Marx (edited with Manfred B. Steger, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), Karl Marx: Later Political Writings (ed. and trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Mark Cowling is a Principal Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Teesside. His previous publications include: Approaches to Marx (edited with Lawrence Wilde, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), The Communist Manifesto: New Interpretations (ed., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), Date Rape and Consent (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), Marxism, the Millennium and Beyond (edited with Paul Reynolds, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Bob Jessop is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. His books include: Traditional Conservatism and British Political Culture (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods (Oxford: Robertson, 1982), Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought: Critical Assessments, 4 Vols, (ed., London: Routledge, 1990). James Martin is lecturer in politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is author of Gramsci’s Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), co-author of Contemporary Social and Political Theory: An Introduction (Milton Keynes: Open 258

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University, 1999) and editor of Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments, 4 Vols (London: Routledge, 2002). Roger Price is Professor in the Department of History, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. His publications include 1848 in France (ed., London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), Revolution and Reaction: 1848 and the Second French Republic (ed., London: Croom Helm, 1975), An Economic History of Modern France, c.1730–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1981), The Modernization of Rural France: Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in 19th Century France (London: Hutchinson, 1983), A Social History of Nineteenth Century France (London: Hutchinson, 1987), The Revolutions of 1848 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), A Concise History of France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Documents on the French Second Republic (ed., Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), and Napoleon III and the Second Empire (London: Routledge, 1997). Geoff Watkins is Principal lecturer in History at the University of Teesside and is a specialist in the Napoleonic legend. He is currently completing an illustrated history, Napoleon: Life and Legend (for Tempus Publishing), and has recently published on Bonapartist propaganda in 1848. Darren Webb is a researcher at Coventry University. His publications include Marx, Marxism and Utopia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Paul Wetherly is Principal Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is the author of several articles on Marxism and editor of Marx’s Theory of History: The Contemporary Debate (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992). His forthcoming book on Marxism and the State will be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Index A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx, K., 1859), 5, 7, 117, 118, 180 Achilles, 31, 32 affirmative action, 239 Ailly, Cardinal P. d’, 106 Alais, L.P.C., 64, 68 Alexander (Emperor), 65 alienation, 25, 160, 223 Althusser, L., 216 Ancien Régime, 150, 185, 212 Anderson, P., 211, 223 Angély, General St-J. d’, 72 Anglès, F. E., 84 army, 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 24, 26, 30, 34, 35, 38, 41, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 58, 59, 60, 63–7, 71–4, 82, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97–109, 146, 149, 151, 156, 160, 163, 169, 179, 184 Artois, Count d’, 81 Aubert, P.E., 170 Austerlitz, Battle of, 1805, 50 Austin, J. L., 11, 129, 135 Austrians, 19, 34, 50 authoritarian populism, 214, 217 Azy, Benoit d’, 76, 80 Bacchus, 65 Bailly, J.S., 21 Barnett, A., 211, 216 Baroche, P.J., 58, 68, 72, 76 Barrot, O., 36, 37, 38, 40, 52, 53, 54, 61, 74, 76, 81, 89, 164 bastards, idle thieving, 13 Baze, J.D., 81, 93 Beauharnais, H. de, 114 Bedeau, M.A., General, 41, 73 Bell Curve, The (Murray, C. and Herrnstein, R.), 239 Benoit, 80, 159 Bernard, St., Pass, 19, 34 Berryer, P.A., 44, 58, 74, 80, 81, 83, 86 Billault, A.A.M., 76

Black Panthers, 233 Blair, T., 222, 236 Blanc, L., 19, 169 Blanqui, L.A., 25, 97, 157 Block, F., 199, 200 Bluche, F., 169 Bodies That Matter (Butler, J.), 135 Bolsheviks, 233 Bonapartism, 10, 38, 41, 54, 62, 63, 64, 72, 74, 76, 77, 82, 83, 89, 90, 108, 146-153, 157, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172, 173, 179, 188, 190, 191, 196, 198 bourgeoisie, 7 and state, 86 base egoism, 74 big, 3 commercial, 96 industrial, 4, 26, 28, 79, 84, 92, 188, 196 interests threatened by parliamentary democracy, 57 manufacturing, 3, 8, 232 republican, 1, 3, 8, 9, 24, 35, 39, 44, 94, 125, 132 Bovenkerk, F., 230, 232 Broglie, A.C., 58, 81 Brutus, M.J., 20, 121 Bugeaud, Marshal, 149 Butler, J., 11, 134, 135, 136, 140 Cabet, E., 243 Caesar, J., 20, 120, 121 Callinicos, A., 221, 223 Capital (Marx, K.), 8, 118, 145, 180, 211, 231 capitalist class, 9, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199 capitalist state, 12, 179, 191, 202, 221 Carlier, P., 54, 64, 70, 90 Cassagnac, G. de, 109 Catholic party, 74 Cato, 109

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Index Caussidière, M., 19 Cavaignac, General L.E., 3, 6, 29, 33, 34, 35, 41, 74, 85, 93, 152, 165 Cévennes, 101 Chambord, Count H.C. (Henri V), 80 Changarnier, General N.A.T., 37, 38, 40, 46, 50, 51, 64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 82, 84, 89, 91, 93 Charles Murray and the Underclass: the developing debate (Murray, C.), 233 China, 9 church, 26, 35, 43, 50, 80, 95, 97, 102, 104, 107, 150 citizenship, 216, 222 civil society, 186, 187, 189, 235 Civil War in France, The (Marx, K.), 115, 189, 191, 258 Civil War, English, 5, 247 Civitavecchia, 38 Claremont, 43, 52, 80, 81 Clark, T.J., 132 class balance, 159, 196, 197 class conflict, 9, 48, 219 class fractions, 186, 187 class struggle, 1, 2, 7, 12, 42, 45, 61, 68, 76, 116, 118, 146, 151, 161, 179, 181, 183, 185, 189, 191, 214, 215, 219, 244, 245, 249 Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850, The (Marx, K.), 249 Cliff, T., 211, 219, 220 Cohen, G.A., 204 collectivisation, 9 commune, 191 Communist League, 1 Communist Party (British), 219, 220 communists, 25, 32 Concordat, 168 Condition of the Working Class in England, The, (Engels, F.), 228 Constant, B., 20 Constituent Assembly, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,

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40, 42, 45, 46, 52, 53, 61, 66, 71, 76, 94, 183 cooperative banks, 26, 249 corporatism, 214 Corps législatif, 153, 155, 157 coup of 1851, 1 Cousin, V., 20 Crapulinski see Louis Napoleon Bonaparte III Crédit Mobilier, 191 Creton, N.J., 79 crime, 62, 214, 231–5, 238, 239 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Marx, K.), 186 Cromwell, Oliver, 21, 93, 122, 247 culture of poverty, 237 Danton, G. J., 19, 20, 123 de Leon, Daniel, 119 Deflotte, P., 58 Desmoulins, C., 20, 123 Development of Capitalism in Russia, The (Lenin, V.I.), 8 discourse, 12, 129, 133–40, 180, 186, 214, 215, 217 Donovan Commission (1968), 220 Duchâtel, C., 80 Dühring, E., 246 Dupin, A. M., 64, 68 Duprat, P., 70 economic base, 5, 131, 134, 138, 187, 191, 213 economic crisis, 76, 87, 88, 218, 223 economic determination, 195, 201, 202, 204, 207 Economist, The, 83, 84, 86, 88, 172 Education Act, France, 1849, 55 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9–14, 111–20, 127, 129, 130, 132, 133, 140, 146, 147, 164, 172, 173, 179, 180–90, 196, 198, 211, 212, 228, 230, 243, 246, 249, 251, 252, 255, 258

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election of 10 December 1848, 3, 29, 34, 35, 100, 102, 163, 164, 250 electoral democracy, 10 Elster, J., 196 Emperor Napoleon III see LouisNapoleon Bonaparte III empty signifier, 139 Ems, 43, 52, 158 Engels, F., 1, 6, 7, 10, 12, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 145, 151, 152, 159, 160, 185, 190, 228, 229, 230, 232, 244, 251, 258 English Revolution, 1642, 243 Estates, 185 Eurocommunists, 221 Excitable Speech (Butler, J.), 135 Extinction of Pauperism. The (Bonaparte, L.-N.), 169 Falloux, A., 40, 52, 53, 81, 83 Fanon, F., 233 farce, 5, 19, 120, 121, 129, 130, 131, 184, 190 Faucher, L., 59, 76, 77, 81 Faust, 24, 124 Favre, J., 157 February Period (February 1848), 3 February Revolution (1848), 22, 24, 25, 29, 34, 60, 93, 95, 96, 148, 249 feminism, 9 feudalism, 20, 43, 56, 99, 103, 106, 123, 124, 125, 190, 212 finance aristocracy, 3, 4, 8, 9, 24, 26, 28, 35, 83, 84, 188, 229, 230, 232, 235 and the state, 84 finance capital, 4, 188 floating signifier, 182 Fordism, 216 Fould, A., 54, 72, 76, 83 Fourier, C., 243, 244, 246 freedoms of 1848, 30 French nationalism, 28, 187 French Revolution of 1789, 5, 6, 20, 28, 39, 99, 101, 121, 122, 130, 153, 187, 243, 246

French Revolution, 1848, 1, 20, 39, 109, 121, 130, 163, 246 French Second Republic, The A Social History , 172 Friedland, P.A., 185 Fronde, 40, 108 Gambetta, L., 157 Gamble, A., 211, 215 Gaulle, General C. de, 160 Gazette de France, 172 Gender Trouble (Butler, J.), 134 general intelligence, 239 German Ideology (Marx, K., and Engels, F.), 6, 117, 145 Girardin, D. de, 109 Girardin, E. de, 70 Giraud, C. J. B., 90 Girondins, 39 Goethe, J.W., 24, 124 Gracchuses, G.S. and T.S., 20, 121 Gramont, Duke de, 158 Gramsci, A., 138, 145, 181, 214, 218 Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf), 1857–8 (Marx, K.), 253 Guerard, A., 169 Guise, Duke de (Henri II of Lorraine), 108 Guizot, F.P.G., 20, 31, 80, 81, 97, 98, 109 Habakkuk, 21 Halévy, L., 157 Hall, S., 13, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223 Harman, C., 221 Haussmann, E.J., 151, 153, 154 Hautpoul, A.H. d’, 54, 58, 65, 66, 67 Hautpoul, General A.H. d’, 54 Hay, C., 202, 207 Heath, E., 215 Hegel, G.W.F., 19, 120, 186 Hegelianism, 126 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau, E., and Mouffe, C.), 138 Henri V, 44, 62, 79, 80, 83

Index Hic Rhodus, 23, 124 Hilliers, General B. d’, 72, 73, 82 Hindess, B., 133 historical materialism, 6, 115, 116, 119, 212, 213, 224 Hitler, A., 147, 174 Hobsbawm, E., 212, 213, 216, 219, 222, 223 Holy Family, The (Marx, K and Engels, F.), 146 Hotel de Ville (Town Hall), 3 Hugo, Victor, 53, 116, 163 idleness, 233 illegitimacy, 233, 234, 235, 236 illocutionary sarcasm, 118 Imperial Almanac, 166 In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government (Murray, C.), 239 Industrial Relations Act (Heath), 215 International Working Men’s Association, 113 Jacobins, 39, 253 Jacques, M., 136, 211 Jessop, Bob, 11, 12, 13, 179, 195, 201, 202, 203, 205, 211, 213, 216, 217, 218, 223 Joinville, Duke F.F.P.L.M, 81, 89 Joseph, Sir K., 237 Journal des Débats (Orleanist newspaper), 28 July Monarchy, 2, 3, 4, 25, 29, 35, 40, 42, 44, 55, 79, 96, 130, 148, 156, 164, 166 June 1848, revolt, 3, 6, 34, 35, 48, 58, 60, 94, 97, 132, 148, 149, 151, 163, 173, 191, 212, 249, 250, 251, 255 June days see June 1848, revolt. June insurrection see June 1848, revolt Jura, 19 Kautsky, K., 9 Kershaw, I, 147 Kinkel-Brentano, coalition of, 19 kulaks, 8

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L’Atelier, 169 La Presse, 60 La Revue de l’Empire, 166 La Rochejaquelin, Marquis H.A.G., 81 Labourism, 213, 219, 220 Lacan, J., 136, 137 Laclau, E., 12, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 216 Lahitte, General J.E., 58 Lamartine, A., 76 Lamoricière, C.L.L., General, 41, 93 landowners, 3, 4, 8, 9, 26, 35, 99, 150 Las Cases, 170 ‘lazarus-layers’ of the proletariat, 231 Le Flô, General A.E.C., 38, 93 Le National (republican newspaper), 28, 165 Ledru-Rollin, A.A., 29, 41, 46, 49, 250 Legislative Assembly, 1, 31, 37, 84 Legitimists (supporters of the Bourbons), 3, 4, 6, 24, 36, 39–43, 52, 55, 74, 78, 81, 83, 89, 93, 188, 189 material basis of, 42 Léhon, Countess, 109 Leninism, 8 Lewis, O., 237 Leys, C., 223 Locke, John, 21 Looker, B., 219 Losing Ground (Murray, C.), 239 Louis Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon I, 114 Louis Philippe see Louis XV Louis XV, 2, 24, 25, 28, 29, 34, 36, 41, 51, 52, 62, 79–83, 96, 99, 109, 183, 186 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte III, 1–7, 10–12, 19, 21, 23, 24, 28, 34–41, 44–6, 50–78, 81–109, 114, 115, 116, 118, 120, 124, 125, 129, 131, 140, 145–54, 163–65, 168, 179, 180, 182,

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183, 188, 190, 191, 198, 212, 228–30, 258 class basis, 109 lumpenproletariat, 4, 6, 8, 9, 13, 26, 58, 63, 69, 95, 106–8, 151, 152, 163, 187, 228–39 as supporters of the left, 233 definition, 229 Luther, M., 20, 121, 246 Magnan, General B.P., 82, 90, 93 Major, J., 236 Maleville, L., 76 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx, K., and Engels, F.), 1, 7, 10, 123, 145, 180, 185, 195, 196, 228, 244, 249, 253, 258 Mao, 233 Marengo, Battle of, 19 Marrast, A., 21, 29, 38 Marx, Karl, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 136, 140, 141, 145, 146, 147, 151, 152, 154, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 172, 173, 174, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 195, 196, 198, 204, 211, 212, 218, 222, 223, 224, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235, 237, 238, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 258 Marx as a historian, 6 Marxism Today, 213, 218, 219, 222, 223 Masaniello, 92 materialist conception of history see historical materialism materialist interpretation of history see historical materialism see historical materialism materialistic conception of history see historical materialism Maugin, F., 68, 69 Maupas, C.E. de, 90

MEGA2 (The Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, i.e. the new critical edition of Marx and Engels’ collected works), 113, 120 Mehlma, 179 Memorial of Saint Helena (Las Cases), 170 Ménager, B., 169 Mensheviks, 233 Metternich, Prince K., 42, 159 middle classes, 26, 107 Middlesbrough, 234, 236, 238 Miliband, R., 196, 219 miners’ strike, 218, 220, 221, 222 Mobile Guards, 228, 229 Modernisation, 7 modes of production, 7, 206 Molé, L.M., 58, 81 Moniteur, 38, 72, 75, 93 Monk, General G., 65 montagne, 19, 38, 39–50, 59, 60, 69, 72, 74, 75, 77, 82–4, 91, 94 Montaigne, 4 Montalembert, C., 74, 81, 105 Montoja, Empress Eugénie de, 114 Morning Star, 219 Morny, Duc de, 24, 109, 163 Mouffe, C., 137, 138 mugging, 214 municipal socialism, 218 Murray, Charles, 13, 228, 233 Nancy, Bishop of, 150 Napoleon Bonaparte (First Emperor), 1, 6, 19, 20, 21, 110, 114, 120, 171, 181, 183, 228 Napoléon le Petit (Hugo, V.), 163 Napoleon on the Rock of Saint Helena (Aubert, P.E.), 170 Napoleonic Ideas (Bonaparte, L.-N.), 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172 Napoleon-Jérôme, 148, 156 National, 60 national assembly, 23, 24, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44–82, 85, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 102, 124, 149, 183, 185, 230 National Front, 215

Index national guard, 24, 31, 37, 40, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 65, 72, 73, 95, 97, 98, 108 nationalised workshops, 64 National-Zeitung, 19 Neumeyer, General M.G.J., 65 New Economic Policy, 8 New Left Review (NLR), 135, 211, 216, 223 new middle class, 9 New Rabble, 234 New Times, 216, 222 new Victorians, 234 Ney, E, 53 non-necessary correspondence, 201, 202 Oeuvres de Louis-Napoléon (ed. Tremblaire, C.E.), 169 Old Testament, 5, 21, 82, 122, 123, 247 Ollivier, 156 Orleanists, 3, 4, 6, 24, 39, 40, 42, 43, 52, 55, 74, 80, 81, 82, 89, 93, 188, 189 material basis of, 42 Oudinot, General N.C.V., 38, 50, 53 Owen, R., 243, 244, 246 Panitch, L., 223 Paris Commune, 115, 160, 258 Paris, Comte de (Albert, Louis Philippe), 79, 80 parliamentary cretinism, 75, 92, 187 parliamentary republic, 4, 38, 39, 44, 49, 62, 74, 77, 78, 79, 89, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 189 Party of Order, 4, 8, 27, 35–53, 56–86, 91–4, 184, 188, 249 Paul, Apostle, 20 Peasant War in Germany, The (Engels, F.), 190 peasantry, 3, 8, 9, 25, 34, 55, 100–8, 131, 172, 187, 191, 212, 230 and Napoleon I, 102 as basis of French state bureaucracy, 104 conservative, 101, 164, 187 French and the army, 106

265

French peasantry and mortgages, 103 French peasantry not a class which represents itself, 100 potential alliance with proletariat, 104 relation to the bourgeoisie following 1789, 103 revolutionary, 101, 164, 187 small-holding, 100 performative utterances, 11, 121–3, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 180, 183 performativity, 11, 135, 136 Periodisations, 184 Perrot, General B.J., 73 Persigny, Count J.G.V., 77, 89 petty bourgeoisie, 3, 8, 9, 24, 25, 26, 29, 34, 35, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 58, 95, 151, 187, 217, 250 and democracy, 48 Philosophy of History, The (Hegel, G.W.F.), 120 Philosophy of Right (Hegel, G.W.F.), 186 Policing the Crisis (Hall, S. et al.), 214 Polignac, Prince A.J.A.M., 81 political conjuncture, 190 political economy, critique of, 2, 118, 136, 182 populism, right wing, 173 post-Fordism, 216 postmodernism, 9, 10, 11, 129, 133, 140 potato blight, 3 Poulantzas, N., 214, 216, 217 Poverty of Philosophy, The (Marx, K.), 253 Powell, E., 214, 217 Price, R., 12, 145, 167, 172, 173, 230, 258 primitive accumulation, 145 proletariat, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 13, 24–6, 29, 35, 45–51, 58, 60, 70, 86, 94, 95, 97, 104, 124, 125, 126, 151, 163, 182, 190, 191, 211–13, 222, 228–30, 237, 244, 245, 248–54 in Britain, 211

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Proudhon, P.-J., 49, 116, 253 Publicola, P.V.P., 20, 121 pure republicans, 4, 28, 29, 34, 35, 41, 74, 77 racism, 214, 215, 219 Raspail, 250 rational choice, 238 real movement, 245, 252, 255 relations of production, 7, 12, 103, 121, 181, 186, 211 relative autonomy, 13, 179, 195–206 of state, 13 within structural view of state, 200 Rémusat, Count C.F.M., 73, 147 republican faction of the bourgeoisie, 28, 29 Restoration, 4, 164 restoration monarchy (of Charles X), 51 revolution bourgeois, 21, 22, 122, 123, 212, 247 proletarian, 22, 98, 106, 123, 124, 130, 228, 248, 250, 253 Russian, October 1917, 8 Robespierre, M., 19, 20, 123 Roman antecedents of French Revolution, 20 Roman Republic, 5, 120 Rome, 36, 38, 46, 48, 50, 52, 105, 123 Rouher, E., 24, 68, 76, 163 royalists, 32–44, 75, 77, 78, 188, 189 Royer-Collard, P.-P., 20 Ruge-Darasz, coalition of, 19 Sadowa, battle of, 157 Saint-Arnaud, A.J.A.L. de, 38 Sainte-Beuve, P.H., 84 Saint-Hilaire, E.M. de, 166 Saint-Just, L.-A., 20, 123 Saint-Priest, Viscount E.L.M, 80 Saint-Simon, H., 243, 244 Sallandrouze, C.J., 93 Salvandy, Count N.A., 80

Saville, J., 219 Say, J. B., 20 Schoelcher, V., 147 Schramm, General J.P.A., 66 scientific method, 117, 118 Seamen’s strike of 1966, 214 Second Empire, 115, 147, 153, 158–60, 173 Second French Republic, 1, 2, 114–16, 173 Sedan, 158 senatus consultum, 151 Senior, N.W., 172 separation of powers, 31 social categories, 3, 9 Social Contract (British Labour, 1970s), 220 social exclusion, 238 social-democratic party, 41, 44, 59 ‘Socialism’ in French National assembly, 1849, 56 Socialist Register, The, 13, 213, 219, 223 Socialist Revolutionaries, 8 Socialist Workers Party (formerly International Socialists), 213, 219, 220, 221 Society of 10 December, 63–77, 90, 93, 95, 99, 106–9, 163, 229, 230 Sorge, F.A., 245 Soulouque, F., 109 Sparks, C., 221 speech act, 129 state apparatus in France, 10, 53, 98, 146, 163 autonomous state thesis, 196 bureaucracy, France, 53 instrumentalist view of, 195 independence, 99 officials, 4, 8, 9 strong state, 215, 220 ‘strategic-relational’ analysis, 201 structural analysis, 199 theories of, 179 State, Power, Socialism (Poulantzas, N.), 214 Strasbourg coup, 164 Sue, Eugene, 59

Index suffrage, manhood, 23, 31, 39, 59, 60, 61, 62, 68, 75, 76, 89–91, 106, 124, 147, 148, 155, 173 Sunday Times, 233 superstructure, ideological and political, 5, 6, 43, 131, 132, 182, 201, 204 Teesside, 236, 237 Thatcher, M., 13, 118, 214–37 Thatcherism, 13, 206–23 Thiers, A., 38, 44, 46, 49, 58, 74, 81, 82, 84, 86, 89, 92, 93, 149, 155 Thorigny, P.F.E., 90 To the Shade of the Emperor (Bonaparte, L.-N.), 170, 171 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 82, 146, 165 Tories, 43, 215, 221 translation problems, 127 Tremblaire, C.E., 166, 169 Tuileries (Palace), 28, 37, 50, 66, 81, 125 Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (Lenin, V.I.), 8 underclass, 13, 228, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239 conventional values in, 237 United States, 27, 233

utopian socialism, 14, 243, 244, 247, 254, 255 Vaïsse, C.M., 75, 76 Vatimesnil, A., 76 Vendée, 101 Vendôme, Place, 109, 116 Véron-Crevel, L.D., 109 Vidal, F., 59 Vietnam, 9 Vieyra, General, 50 Villèle, J., 81 Voltaire, F.M., 55 Wallachians, 49 War Communism, 8 war of manoeuvre, 181, 190 war of position, 181, 190 Watkins, G., 12, 163, 230, 258 Weitling, W., 243, 245, 246 Wilson, H., 214 wine tax, 55, 108 Wood, E., 219 workers’ associations, 26, 249 working-class agency, 212, 223 Yon, 64, 68 Zettel, K., 63 Zizek, Slavoj, 11, 134, 136

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