THE LEGACY OF THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE

The year now departing was the 150th anniversary of publication of Marx's celebrated 1852 study, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.¹ This work examines the period of French history from February 1848 to December 1851, from the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe to the coup d'etat of Louis Bonaparte and his installation as Napoleon III.

The Brumaire (hereafter 18B)² has been the subject of numerous debates since its publication. Some readers find in it a confirmation of the general principles of historical materialism set forth both earlier and later, in the Communist Manifesto and in the Preface to the 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Others see the opposite: a denial-in-practice of the programmatic statements of Marx's general social theory and a vindication of the contingent, political and subjective over the necessary, economic and objective. About 20 years ago, a student was listening with increasing exasperation to one of this writer's lectures setting forth an attempted rigorous reconstruction of a general historical materialism.³ The student finally exclaimed: "You can have your 1859 Preface; just let me have my Eighteenth Brumaire!" The implication is that one can choose one's own truth -- about Marx, about the world, or both. Ah, the joy of hermeneutics! To be able to pick a textual reading to one's liking, without a perceived need to confirm the logical consistency, empirical relevance or practical usefulness of the position thus adopted.

By all accounts, 18B is a difficult, hard-to-penetrate work. To grasp it fully, one must combine the skills of a 19th-century French historian, a Hegel scholar, and a profound student of Greek mythology and Shakespeare, not to mention a solid grounding in political economy. At a century-and-a-half, we have the advantage of being able to do a reading in the light of all subsequent history, offset by the disadvantage of being much further removed from the events and personalities under scrutiny.

Marx's analysis of the 1848-1851 interregnum is based on a detailed periodization. The February 1848 insurrection and overthrow of Louis Philippe marks a brief moment in which the proletariat is center stage. The second period begins May 4, 1848 and lasts until May 29, 1849. This is the period of formation of the Republic (known to history as the Second Republic); it is marked by the work of the Constituent National Assembly. The latter date also represents the start of the third period: the Constitutional Republic in place, as revealed in the existence and acts of the Legislative National Assembly. This period lasts until the coup of December 2, 1851. There are further subdivisions.

At first glance, Marx's analysis seems (this is admittedly a matter of perception and judgment) to stand squarely in the framework of the "classic" theory. Political actors are seen as representatives of socioeconomic classes. Thus, Bonaparte is an expression of the class interest and vision of the peasantry (18B, ch. 7). The extreme economic isolation and lack of differentiation of individual peasants is the basis of that class' social poverty and limitations. Marx here argues that the arbitrariness and vagueness of Bonaparte's positions, recognizable as the structural ambivalence that is nowadays identified with populism and with some forms of fascism, has its foundation in the disarticulated and free-floating experience of the peasants -- who constitute the vast bulk of the French population all the way through to the end of the century.

The factional strife in the Party of Order, which dominates the Legislative National Assembly, is traced to the split among the monarchists, between the legitimist (Bourbon) and the Orleans groupings. These in turn are traced back to division within the bourgeoisie, between the landed interest and the industrialists. But the point is precisely the tension between these fundamentals and the contingent historical specifics. Here is Marx:

What kept the two sections [legitimists and Orleanists] apart was not any so-called principles. They were sundered by their material conditions of existence, by two different forms of property. The divergence of their outlooks was an expression of the old conflict between town and country, the rivalry between Capital and Landed Property. But at the same time they were loyal to one or other branch of the royal house? They were bound by old memories, personal enmities, hopes and fears, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, by convictions and articles of faith and principles? Who denies it! Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, as foundation, there is built a erstructure of diversified and characteristic sentiments, illusions, habits of thought, and outlooks on life in general. The class as a whole creates and shapes them out of its material foundation, and out of the corresponding social relationships. The individual, in whom they arise through tradition and education, may fancy them to be the true determinants, the real origin, of his activities. (18B, 54-55.)

This, of course, is vintage 1859 Preface, right down to language ("material foundation," "erstructure"). It also presents the familiar distinction between real content and nominal form; 18B is filled with examples. But many readers have been puzzled. The French choreography of oscillation between monarchy and republic, and in particular the 1848-51 events, are not explained by the productive forces being fettered by production relations (another central 1859 Preface concept), so it is not clear how, within a historical materialist frame, the complex events described in 18B are actually being theorized. I have a few suggestions which, if valid, would contribute to filling in the layers of abstraction between the high theory of successive modes of production, on the one hand, and the concrete analysis of political events, on the other, using 18B as a guide.

To begin, we have the general correspondence between the economic power of an ascendant class and its political remacy. But this correspondence emerges differently in different circumstances. Consider, for example, the English and French pathways out of feudalism. In England capitalist socioeconomic relations emerged and took root within the old political structure, only subsequently to be validated by the political convulsions of the 17th century. In the French case, by contrast, mass revolt against the ancien regime created the space for subsequent development of commercial society and, eventually, capitalism. The French Revolution of 1789 was, in effect, a bourgeois revolution without significant bourgeois agency; its politics, appropriate to the bourgeois epoch, moved way out in front of the actual emergence of capitalist social relations.⁴ The incipient bourgeoisie had to find its way without a solid foundation in its own practice, and without the ideological hegemony that corresponds to that practice. This accounts, in broad fashion, for the French political cycle: to gain some economic breathing room, the bourgeoisie (or its antecedents) calls the petty bourgeois masses, together with the small working class, into action against the monarchy and aristocracy; but it then fears its own creations, and swings to the right, forming a new coalition with precisely those retrograde forces against "communism" and "anarchy"; hence, the "Party of Order." This cycle repeats well into the 20th century.

Cycles, of course, are not mechanically self-repeating; in addition to the specificity of each moment, there is an evolutionary directionality underlying them ("time's cycle, time's arrow," in a phrase created by the late Stephen Jay Gould). But if the French industrial revolution is still in the future and the petty bourgeois character of production is essentially unaltered in the first half of the 19th century, what accounts for the directionality? What is the material base for the difference between the great Revolution and its 1848 echo? This is a major theme of 18B, which opens with the famous remark that "great events and personalities" appear on Hegel's "stage of universal history" twice: on the first occasion "as tragedy; on the second, as farce." The grotesque character of Louis Bonaparte, his insufficiency, his regime as a parody of that of his uncle, is the basis for many of the real-nominal distinctions appearing in the political analysis: a "republican" assembly made up largely of royalists; a "president" with near dictatorial powers, etc. In the great Revolution, the popular masses exerted increasing power from stage to stage, regardless of the ideological self-conception of each stage, due to the forward momentum of their movement; thus, a republican monarchy. In the 1848-51 period, the situation is reversed: the ebb of popular mobilization forces absolutist content to seep into revolutionary forms; so we find, in the degraded National Assumbly, the working of a monarchist republic. But the question remains: What explains this difference?

If a conditional generalization can be extracted from Marx's study, it might be this. Great revolutionary cataclysms set in motion a long cycle of mass activity and consciousness. The democratic wave unleashed by 1789 could be partially contained, and legitimized, by the various regimes, from the Jacobins to Robespierre to the Directorate, and even after the Napoleonic Restoration. The wave, however, could not be decisively reversed until it had spent itself. By the time of the overthrow of the July monarchy, its direction had shifted; the proletariat and petty bourgeoisie could no longer trust their leaders (as Marx comments), and especially not the bourgeoisie. The mass base, in effect, for the political drive of the bourgeoisie was now not present in the same way it had been 50 years earlier. In these circumstances, the bourgeois forces adopted royalist garb, even within their own parliament. Their own divisions (legitimist, Orleanist) could not be overcome except within a radical republican framework; but that too was not possible, because of the "nether forces" of popular rebellion this threatened to call up.

Marx: "As long as the dominion of the bourgeois class was not fully organized, as long as it had not yet acquired its own pure political expression the contrast between the bourgeoisie and the other classes could not appear in all its sharpness. In so far as it did appear, it could not take that dangerous trend which transforms every struggle with the State authority into a struggle with Capital" (18B, 73-74). This is a clear statement of the logic behind the retreat from the Republic: the as-yet undeveloped material and ideological hegemony of the capitalist class.

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