This dazzling chronicle written by Marx between December 1851 and March 1852 shows an indisputable validity today, when the celebration or challenge of the past crushes the imagination of other futures. Dotted with powerful images that are part of our political language even without us knowing it (“history happens twice: once as tragedy and again as a farce,” “the tradition of all dead generations oppresses as
A nightmare the brain of the living”), is a masterpiece both to think about the effects of fear and discontent of peoples and to elucidate the springs of politics, their leadership and their populist drifts.
The European revolutions of 1848 were an extraordinary event. In this “Spring of the Peoples”, the appearance of the proletariat as a class
independent seemed to ratify the optimistic prophecies of the Communist Manifesto. In the eighteenth brumary of Luis Bonaparte, Marx follows step by step the turbulent course of the Second French Republic (1848-1852), deciphering how it could happen that the popular barricades were
betrayed and repressed by the various factions of the bourgeoisie until the coup d'état of Luis Bonaparte restored the imperial order. How to explain that a declassed, a discredited and unsupported individual
Party or parliamentarian, will he hoard absolute power in a matter of months? And that the industrial bourgeoisie, called to lead the destinies of the state, could be humiliated by that gift no one who plundered the tax, closed the National Assembly and proclaimed himself emperor? How to understand the anomaly of “bonapartism”? Was it really a “ray in serene heaven”?
This new edition of The Eighteenth Brumary, in the care of Horacio Tarcus, confirms it as a fundamental work of Marx, in which he reformulates his own conceptions of the State and of ideology to explain how
The specters of the past can condition political actors and stifle the energies of the future.