The great events of history are repeated, but as a farce: the illustrious characters of the past return, but as jesters. Applicable to the recurrent crises of capitalism or the rise of the extreme right, the origin of this Marxian reflection would be the following: comedy is nourished by the tragedy of Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état of 1799, when the revolutionary flame was already extinct. of the self-coup of his nephew, Louis Bonaparte, in 1851. Before the postmodernists, Marx already understood that the time of great stories had ended and that the clarification of his own present could only be ironic.

In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx narrates the events that occurred in France between 1848 and 1852. From the fall of Louis Philippe of Orleans and the Spring of the People, through the election of Louis Bonaparte as president, to the tensions between the executive and legislative powers that would lead to the coup d'état of the future Napoleon III. A work full of critical irony and profound literary style, this is Marx's most current text and the best example of his work as a political commentator. It is presented in a new edition and translation that includes two unpublished appendices in Spanish.