The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

For Karl Marx, the bourgeoisie is not just the middle class, or a segment of society that makes a certain amount of income. Instead, they are the ones who control factories and businesses. Marx argues that it was this bourgeoisie that set up the Second Republic as a “bourgeois republic” (17). Such a republic represented the interests of not the French public at large, but that of the bourgeoisie itself. This is unlike the monarchy of King Louis-Philippe I, which, Marx argues, only ruled on behalf of a “limited section of the bourgeoisie” (17). In addition, once freedom of the press and electoral suffrage were curtailed, the bourgeoisie ruling the Second Republic achieved what Marx described as a “coup d’etat” (59), after which it ruled “absolutely” (52).

Although the revolution against Louis-Philippe was actually begun by the proletariat, according to Marx (16), it had been hijacked by the bourgeoisie. In addition, the petty bourgeoisie (i.e., owners of small businesses and shops), who tended to be “pure republicans” (21), were also locked out of power in the new republic. Instead, the Second Republic came to be ruled by factions of bourgeoisie royalists, who represented either large landowners or industrialists and bankers (37).