Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx 1852

Notes

64. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte) was written by Marx from December 1851 to March 1852, immediately following the coup d’état in France engineered by the French President, who called himself “Louis Napoleon.” In the course of his work on the book Marx constantly exchanged views with Engels concerning these events. Thus, in this book Marx developed some of the ideas contained in Engels’ letter of December 3, 1851, in particular the ironical comparison of the Bonapartist coup d’état of December 2, 1851 with the coup of November 9, 1799 (the 18th Brumaire according to the republican calendar), as a result of which the Directory was overthrown and a dictatorship set up under General Napoleon Bonaparte, who was proclaimed First Consul and later, in 1804, Emperor of the French. Besides periodicals and official documents, Marx also used private letters from Paris as his sources.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was originally intended as a series of articles in the weekly Die Revolution, which was being prepared for publication by Joseph Weydemeyer, a friend of Marx and Engels and a member of the Communist League in the United States. But Weydemeyer managed to put out only two issues (January 1852), following which publication ceased for lack of funds. Marx’s articles arrived too late for inclusion. On Marx’s advice, Weydemeyer published this work in May 1852 as the first issue of the “non-periodic journal” Die Revolution, and provided it with a short preface. In giving it the title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Weydemeyer failed to take into account that throughout the book Marx referred to the chief initiator of the coup d’état as Louis Bonaparte, which he did deliberately (see his letter to Jenny Marx of June 11, 1852). Being in financial straits, Weydemeyer could not buy up the bulk of the impression from the print-shop, and only a small number of copies reached Europe. All attempts to publish the book in Germany or England (in an English translation) were unsuccessful.

The second edition of the book, this time under the title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, appeared only in 1869. For this edition Marx revised the text, corrected a large number of misprints, mainly in accordance with the list appended to the 1852 edition, eliminated repetitions, abridged certain passages, and wrote a preface dated June 23, 1869, in which he described the editorial work he had done as follows: “A revision of the present work would have robbed it of its peculiar colouring. Accordingly I have confined myself to mere correction of printer’s errors and to striking out allusions now no longer intelligible.” This 1869 edition is the one translated here, but since the passages omitted by Marx are of great interest because they show how he revised the book and, in a number of cases (especially the abridgments in Chapter VII) because of their theoretical content, they are reproduced in this volume as footnotes.

The third edition came out in 1885 under the editorship of Engels and with his preface. The text in the main coincided with that of the 1869 edition. Passages from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte were published in Der Sozialdemokrat, an illegal organ of the German Social-Democratic Party, on March 18, 1887 (No. 12) and on March 16, 1889 (No. 11). During Engels lifetime two translations were made from the 1885 edition: a French translation (published in Le Socialiste, organ of the Workers’ Party of France. From January to November 1891, and in a separate pamphlet that appeared in Lille the same year) and a Russian translation (appeared as a pamphlet in Geneva in 1894).

In English, excerpts from this work were first published in “A Review of the Literature on the Coup d’état by Georg Eccarius, a Communist League member, which was printed in the Chartist People’s Paper from September to December 1852. In the last section of this review, printed on December 18 1852, Eccarius quoted long passages from Chapter 1 of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In English this work was first published in full in The People, the weekly of the Socialist Labour Party of the United States, in September-November 1897. It was published in book form in New York in 1898.

65. Hegel expressed this idea in his work Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (its first edition came out in Berlin in 1837). In the third part of this work, at the end of Section 2, entitled “Vom der zweiten punischen Krieg bis zum Kaiserthum,” Hegel wrote in particular that “A coup d’état is sanctioned as it were in the opinion of people if it is repeated. Thus, Napoleon was defeated twice and twice the Bourbons were driven out. Through repetition, what at the beginning seemed to be merely accidental and possible becomes real and established.” Hegel also repeatedly expressed the idea that in the process of dialectical development there is bound to be a transition from the stage of formation and efflorescence to that of disintegration and ruin (see, in particular, G.W.F.Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Th. 3, Abt. 3, §347). Developing this thought and Hegel’s idea about the recurrence of historical phenomena Marx wrote in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (end of 1843-beginning of 1844): “History is thorough and goes through many phases when carrying an old form to the grave. The last phase of a world-historical form is its comedy.” A similar interpretation of Hegel’s idea, albeit in the form of a vague hint, can be found in Marx’s article “The Deeds of the Hohenzollern Dynasty” written in 1849.

66. Montagne (the Mountain) – representatives in the Constituent and subsequently in the Legislative Assembly of a bloc of democrats and petty-bourgeois socialists grouped round the newspaper La Réforme. They called themselves Montagnards or the Mountain by analogy with the Montagnards in the Convention of 1792-94.

67. An allusion to the fact that, while in emigration in England, Louis Bonaparte volunteered for the special constabulary (a police reserve consisting of civilians) which helped the regular police disperse the Chartist demonstration on April 10, 1848.

The “Little Corporal” – a nickname of General Bonaparte (later Emperor Napoleon I) popular among the French army.

68. At Marengo (North Italy) Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, which had crossed the Alps at the St. Bernard Pass, defeated the army of the Austrian General Melas on June 14, 1800.

“A company of gendarmes to be sent across the Jura” – Marx refers here to the conflict between France and Switzerland in December 1851-January 1852 over Louis Bonaparte’s demand for the deportation of French republican refugees from Switzerland. The Jura – a mountain range on the French-Swiss border.

Order of St. Andrew – the highest order of the Russian Empire. Marx apparently refers to the need for Louis Bonaparte to be recognised by the Russian Tsar Nicholas I.

69. On December 10, 1848 Louis Bonaparte was elected President of the French Republic by a majority vote.

70. As the Bible has it (Exodus 16:3), during the exodus of the Jews from Egypt the faint-hearted among them, depressed by the difficulties of the journey and by hunger, began to sigh for the days spent in captivity when they at least had something to eat. The expression “to sigh for the fleshpots of Egypt” became a proverb.

71. Hic Rhodus, hic salta! (“Here is the rod, now jump!” – meaning: here is situation, do what the situation demands!) – words addressed to a swaggerer (in a fable by Aesop, “The Boasting Traveller”) who claimed that he had made tremendous jumps. Here is the rose, here dance! is a pun on the maxim used by Hegel in the preface to his work Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. See [MIA Encyclopedia] for clarification.

72. In May 1852 Louis Bonaparte’s term of office as President expired. Under the French Constitution of 1848, presidential elections were to be held every four years on the second Sunday in May, and the outgoing President could not stand for re-election.

73. Chiliasts (from the Greek word chilias, a thousand) – preachers of a mystical religious doctrine that Christ would come to earth a second time and usher in a “millennium” of universal equality, justice and well-being. Chiliastic belief, sprang up in the period of early Christianity and were continuously revived in the doctrines of the various medieval sects which voiced the sentiments of the peasants and the urban poor.

74. The dynastic parties – the Legitimists (see Note 13) and the Orleanists. The latter supported the House of Orleans, which was overthrown by the February revolution of 1848. They represented the interests of the finance aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie.

The blue republicans – bourgeois republicans; red republicans – democrats the socialists of various trends.

The heroes of Africa – Generals Cavaignac, Lamoricière and Bedeau, took an active part in the colonial wars in Algeria.

75. The dynastic opposition-an opposition group in the French Chamber of Deputies during the July monarchy (1830-48). The group, headed by Odilon Barrot, expressed the views of the liberal industrial and commercial bourgeoisie and favoured a moderate electoral reform, which they regarded as a means of preventing a revolution and preserving the Orleans dynasty.

76. On April 16, 1848 a peaceful procession of Paris workers marched towards the Town Hall to present a petition to the Provisional Government for “organisation of labour” and “abolition of the exploitation of man by man.” The workers encountered battalions of the bourgeois national guard and were forced to retreat.

On May 15, 1848 Paris workers led by Blanqui, Barbès and others took revolutionary action against the anti-labour and anti-democratic policy of the bourgeois Constituent Assembly which had opened on May 4. The participants in the mass demonstration forced their way into the Assembly, demanded the formation of a Ministry of Labour and presented a number of other demands. An attempt was made to form a revolutionary government. National guards from the bourgeois quarters and regular troops succeeded, however, in restoring the power of the Constituent Assembly. The leaders of the movement were arrested and put on trial.

77. The Mobile Guard was set up by a decree of the Provisional Government on February 25, 1848 with the secret aim of fighting the revolutionary masses. Armed units consisted mainly of lumpenproletarians and were used to crush the June uprising of the Paris workers. Subsequently, it was disbanded on the insistence of the Bonapartists, who feared that in the event of a conflict between President Bonaparte and the republicans the Mobile Guard would side with the latter.

For Marx’s description of the Mobile Guard see his work The Class Struggle in France, 1848 to 1850.

78. An allusion to a legend according to which the Roman Emperor Constantine (274-337) on the eve of a battle against his rival Maxentius in 312 saw in the sky the sign of the Cross and over it the words: “By this sign thou shalt conquer!” With this legend the Church links Constantine’s “conversion” from the persecution of Christianity to its protection.

79. The Vienna treaties-the treaties and agreements concluded at the Congress of Vienna held by European monarchs and their Ministers in 1814-15. They established the borders and status of European states after the victory, over Napoleonic France and sanctioned, contrary to the national interests and will of the peoples, the reshaping of Europe’s political map and the restoration of the “legitimate” dynasties overthrown as a result of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The Vienna treaties confirmed France’s territory within the borders of 1790 and the restoration of the Bourbons in France.

80. On February 24, 1848 Louis Philippe abdicated in favour of his grandson, the Count of Paris. In view of the latter’s minority, his mother, the Duchess of Orleans, was to assume the regency. But the King’s abdication failed to halt the development of the revolution. Under pressure from the insurgent masses a Provisional Government was set up which proclaimed a republic the next day.

81. The Executive Commission (Commission du pouvoir exécutif) – the Government of the French Republic set up by the Constituent Assembly on May 10, 1848 to replace the Provisional Government, which had resigned. It existed until June 24, 1848, when Cavaignac’s dictatorship was established during the June proletarian uprising. Composed mostly of moderate republicans, the commission included Ledru-Rollin as a representative of the Left.

82. The text of the Constitution of the French Republic was originally published in Le Moniteur universel, No. 312, November 7, 1848, and the same year it appeared as a pamphlet. Marx examined this document in 1851 in a special article entitled “The Constitution of the French Republic”. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx often designates articles of this Constitution as paragraphs (§§).

The constitutional Charter, adopted after the bourgeois revolution of 1830, was the fundamental law of the July monarchy. Nominally the Charter proclaimed the sovereign rights of the nation and restricted somewhat the king’s power. But the bureaucratic and police apparatus remained intact, as did the severe laws against the working-class and democratic movement.

83. “Frere, il faut mourir!” (“Brother, one must die!”) – this is how Trappists, monks of a Catholic order, greeted each other. The order was founded in 1664 and was noted for its strict rules and the ascetic life of its members.

84. Clichy – a debtors’ prison in Paris from 1826 to 1867.

85. This refers to the Cavaignac Government’s attitude towards the new revolutionary upsurge in Italy that began in the autumn of 1848. Though Cavaignac declared a policy of non-interference, he actually rendered diplomatic aid to the ruling circles of the Kingdom of Naples and Austria in their struggle against the Italian national liberation movement. When Pius IX fled to the Neapolitan fortress of Gaeta after the popular uprising in Rome on November 16, which started a series of events that resulted in the proclamation of the Roman Republic on February 9, 1849, Cavaignac offered him asylum in France. Incited by the French Government, Pius IX called on all Catholic states on December 4, 1848 to intervene against the Roman revolutionaries, and Naples and Austria immediately responded to this call. By his policy Cavaignac in effect prepared for the dispatch of a French expeditionary corps against the Roman Republic undertaken later by President Louis Bonaparte.

86. In 1832 Louis Bonaparte became a Swiss citizen in the canton of Thurgau; on his joining the special constabulary in England, see Note 67.

87. An ironical allusion to Louis Bonaparte’s book Des Idées apoleoniennes. which he wrote in England and published in Paris and Brussels in 1839.

88. The French Government managed to get allocations from the Constituent Assembly for the dispatch to Italy of an expeditionary corps under General Oudinot in April 1849 on the pretext of defending Piedmont in its struggle against Austria, and of protecting the Roman Republic. The true aim of the expedition was intervention against the Roman Republic and restoration of the Pope’s temporal power. (On this subject see also Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850).

89. The reference is to the Bill introduced on November 6, 1851 by the royalists Lt. Flô, Baze and Panat, questors of the Legislative Assembly (deputies of the Assembly charged with economic and financial matters and safeguarding its security). It was rejected on November 17 after a heated debate, in which Thiers supported the Bill and the Bonapartist Saint-Arnaud opposed it. When the vote was taken, the Montagne supported the Bonapartists because it saw the main danger in the royalists.

90. On April 16, 1848 a peaceful procession of Paris workers marched towards the Town Hall to present a petition to the Provisional Government for “organisation of labour” and “abolition of the exploitation of man by man.” The workers encountered battalions of the bourgeois national guard and were forced to retreat.

91. The Fronde – a movement in France against the absolutist regime and its prop, the government of Cardinal Mazarin. It was active from 1648 to 1653 and invoked various social sections, which in marry cases pursued opposite aims, from radical peasant and plebeian elements and oppositional bourgeoisie, to high-ranking officials who sought to maintain their privileges, and aristocrats seeking lucrative posts, pensions and allowances. The defeat of the Fronde led to the strengthening of absolutism.

91a. Marx refers here to a Fairy Tale of Hans Christian Andersen, 'The Shadow', published in 1847, which was influenced by Chamisso's 'Peter Schlemihl'. There is a good treatment of the story on Wikipedia. In the Andersen story, the character has 'lost' his shadow, as in Marx's reference; in Chamisso's story, he has sold it to the devil.

92. The ruling Bonapartist circles acid the counter-revolutionary the press, preparing coup d’état of December 2, 1851, did everything they could to scare all timid and law-abiding citizens by the prospect of anarchy, revolutionary plots, a new Jacquerie and encroachments on property, during the presidential election, scheduled for May 1852. A special roMle in this campaign was played by the pamphlet Le spectre rouge de 1852 (Brussels, 1851) by A. Romieu, a former prefect of police.

93. Ems – a health resort in Germany where a Legitimist conference was held in August 1849; it was attended by the Count de Chambord, pretender to the French throne under the name of Henry V.

Claremont – a house near London, residence of Louis Philippe after his flight from France.

94. Marx uses the term “Haupt- und Staatsaktionen” (“principal and spectacular actions”), which has several meanings. In the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century, it denoted plays performed by, German touring companies. The plays, which were rather formless, presented tragic historical events in a bombastic and at the same time coarse and farcical way.

Secondly, this term can denote major political events. It was used in this sense by a trend in German historical science known as “objective historiography” Leopold Ranke was one of its chief representatives. He regarded Haupt- und Staatsaktionen as the main subject-matter of history.

95. The expeditionary corps under General Oudinot, sent to Italy by decision of President Louis Bonaparte and the French Government, was driven back from Rome by the troops of the Roman Republic on April 30, 1849. But, in violation of the terms of the armistice signed by the French, Oudinot launched a new offensive on June 3. Throughout the siege of Rome until the fall of the Republic on July 3, 1849 the city was repeatedly subjected to heavy bombardment.

Article V belongs to the introductory part of the French Constitution of 1848: the articles of the main part of the Constitution are numbered in Arabic numerals.

96. On August 10, 1849 the Legislative Assembly adopted a law under which “instigators and supporters of the conspiracy, and the attempt of June 13” were liable to trial by the High Court. Thirty-four deputies of the Montagne (Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Felix Pyat and Victor Considerant among them) were deprived of their mandates and put on trial (those who had emigrated were tried by default).

On June 13 the editorial offices of democratic and socialist newspapers were raided and many of these papers were banned.

97. The events in Paris sparked off an armed uprising of Lyons workers and artisans on June 15, 1849. The insurgents occupied the Croix-Rousse district and erected barricades there, but were overcome by troops after several hours of stubborn fighting.

98. An ironical allusion to the plans of Louis Napoleon, who expected to receive the French Crown from the hands of Pius IX, whose temporal power he helped restore. According to the Bible, David was anointed king by the prophet Samuel in opposition to the Hebrew king Saul (1 Samuel 16 : 13).

99. The battle of Austerlitz between the Russo-Austrian and the French armies on December 2, 1805 ended in victory for the French commanded by Napoleon I.

100. See Note 87.

101. The wine tax, abolished as of January 1, 1850 by decision of the Constituent Assembly, was re-introduced by a law of the Legislative Assembly on December 1 20-21, 1849.

The education law, which virtually placed the schools under the control of the clergy, was adopted by the Legislative Assembly on March 15-27, 1850. For an assessment of these laws see Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850.

102. The reference is to the commission of 17 Orleanists and Legitimists- deputies of the Legislative Assembly- appointed by the Minister of the Interior on May 1, 1850 to draft a new electoral law. Its members were nicknamed burgraves, a name borrowed from the title of a historical drama by Victor Hugo, as an allusion to their unwarranted claims to power and their reactionary aspirations. The drama is set in medieval Germany, where the Burggraf was governor, appointed by the emperor, of a Burg (city) or district.

103. From March 7 to April 3, 1849 the leaders of the Paris workers’ uprising of May 15, 1848 were tried at Bourges on a charge of conspiring against the government. Barbés and Albert were sentenced to exile, Blanqui to ten years solitary confinement and the rest of the accused to various terms of imprisonment or exile.

On April 16, 1848 a peaceful procession of Paris workers marched towards the Town Hall to present a petition to the Provisional Government for “organisation of labour” and “abolition of the exploitation of man by man.” The workers encountered battalions of the bourgeois national guard and were forced to retreat.

104. The press law passed by the Legislative Assembly in July 1850 (“Loi sur le cautionnement des journaux et le timbre des écrits périodiques et non périodiques. 16-23 juillet 1850”) considerably increased the caution money which newspaper publishers had to deposit, and introduced a stamp-duty, which applied also to pamphlets. This new law was a continuation of reactionary measures which virtually led to the abolition of freedom of the press in France (see also Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850).

105. Lazzaroni – a contemptuous name for declassed proletarians, primarily in the Kingdom of Naples. These people were repeatedly used by reactionary governments against liberal and democratic movements.

106. The reference is to French Guiana where political prisoners were sent for penal servitude.

107. This refers to Louis Bonaparte’s attempts during the July monarchy to stage a coup d’état by means of a military mutiny. On October 30, 1836 he succeeded, with the help of several Bonapartist officers, in inciting two artillery regiments of the Strasbourg garrison to mutiny, but they were disarmed within a few hours. Louis Bonaparte was arrested and deported to America. On August 6, 1840, taking advantage of a partial revival of Bonapartist sentiments in France, he landed in Boulogne with a handful of conspirators and attempted to raise a mutiny among the troops of the local garrison. This attempt likewise proved a failure. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but escaped to England in 1846.

108. The national ateliers (workshops) were instituted by the Provisional Government immediately after the February revolution of 1848. By this means the Government sought to discredit Louis Blanc’s ideas on “the organisation of labour” in the eyes of the workers and, at the same time, to utilise those employed in the national workshops, organised on military lines, against the revolutionary proletariat. Revolutionary ideas, however, continued to gain ground in the national workshops. The Government took steps to reduce the number of workers employed in them, to send a large number off to public works in the provinces and finally to liquidate the workshops. This precipitated a proletarian uprising in Paris in June 1848. After its suppression, the Cavaignac Government issued a decree on July 3, disbanding the national workshops.

For an assessment of the national workshops see Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850.

108a. Schufterle and Spiegelberg are characters in Friedrich Schiller's play 'The Robbers'.

109. The parliaments in France-judicial institutions that came into being in the Middle Ages. The Paris parliament was the highest court of appeal and also performed important administrative and political functions, such as the registration of royal decrees, without which they had no legal force. The parliaments enjoyed the right to remonstrate against government decrees. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they consisted of officials of high birth called the “nobility of the mantle.” The parliaments ultimately became the bulwark of Right-wing opposition to absolutism and impeded the implementation of even moderate reforms, and were abolished during the French Revolution. in 1790.

110. Belle Isle – an island in the Bay of Biscay, a place of detention of political prisoners in 1849-57; among others, workers who took part in the Paris uprising in June 1848 were detained there.

111. Here Marx is drawing a parallel with a story told by the Greek writer Athenaeus (2nd-3rd cent. A.D.) in his book Deipnosophistae (Dinner-Table Philosophers). The Egyptian Pharaoh Tachos, alluding to the small stature of the Spartan King Agesilaus, who had come with his troops to the Pharaoh’s help, said: “The mountain was in labour. Zeus was afraid. But the mountain has brought forth a mouse.” Agesilaus replied: “I seem to you now only a mouse, but the time will come when I will appear to you like a lion.”

112. In the 1850s, the Count of Chambord, the Legitimist pretender to the French throne, lived in Venice.

Claremont – see Note 93.

113. The reference is to tactical disagreements in the Legitimist camp during the Restoration period. Louis XVIII and Villele favoured a more cautious introduction of reactionary measures while the Count d’Artois (King Charles X from 1824) and Polignac ignored the actual situation in France and advocated the complete restoration of the pre-revolutionary regime.

The Tuileries Palace in Paris was Louis XVIII’s residence.

The Pavillon Marsan, one of the wings of the Palace, was the residence of the Count d’Artois during the Restoration.

114. General Magnan directed the suppression of the armed uprising of workers and artisans in Lyons on June 15, 1849 (see Note 97).

115. The Great Exhibition in London, from May to October 1851, was the first world trade and industrial exhibition.

116. On December 4, 1851 government troops commanded by Bonapartist generals suppressed a republican uprising directed against the coup d’état in Paris. The uprising was led by a group of Left-wing deputies of the Legislative Assembly and leaders of workers’ corporations and secret societies. Employing cannon, the government troops destroyed the barricades erected by the defenders of the Republic. While fighting the insurgents, drunken soldiers and officers fired at passers-by, at customers in cafés and at spectators at windows and balconies. Several bourgeois mansions were also damaged in this Bonapartist terror.

117. This refers to the participation of peasants in the republican uprisings in France in late 1851 in protest against the Bonapartist coup d’état. These uprisings, involving mainly artisans and workers of small towns and settlements, local peasants, tradesmen and intellectuals, embraced nearly twenty departments in south-east, south-west and central France. Lacking unity and centralisation they were fairly quickly suppressed by police and troops.

118. Here Marx compares the Bonapartist authorities’ reprisals against the participants in the republican movement, including peasants, with the persecution of the so-called demagogues in Germany in the 1820s and 1830s.

Demagogues inGermany were participants in the opposition movement of intellectuals. The name became current after the Karlsbad Conference of Ministers of the German States in August 1819, which adopted a special decision against the intrigues of “demagogues.”

119. Cévennes – a mountain region in the Languedoc Province of France where all uprising of peasants, known as the uprising of “Camisards” (camise in old French means shirt) took place between 1702 and 1705. The uprising, which began in protest against the persecution of Protestants, assumed all openly anti-feudal character.

Vendée – a department in Western France; during the French Revolution of 1789-94 a centre of a royalist revolt in which the mass of the local peasantry took part. The name “Vendée” came to denote counter-revolutionary activity.

120. This refers to a speech by Montalembert, leader of the Legitimists, in the Legislative Assembly on May 22, 1850, in which he urged them to wage a serious war against.

121. The Council of Constance (1414-18) was convened to strengthen the position of the Catholic Church at that period. The Council condemned the teachings of John Wycliffe and Jan Huss, and put an end to the split in the Catholic Church by electing a new Pope instead of the three pretenders competing for the papacy.

122. The reference is to German or “true socialism” which was widespread in Germany in the 1840s, mostly among petty-bourgeois intellectuals. The “true socialists” – Karl Grün, Moses Hess, Hermann Kriege – substituted the sentimental preaching of love and brotherhood for the ideas of socialism and denied the need for a bourgeois-democratic revolution in Germany. Marx and Engels criticised this trend in the following works: The German Ideology, Circular Against Kriege, German Socialism in Verse and Prose and Manifesto of the Communist Party.

123. This witticism of Countess Lehon and the caustic remark of Madame de Girardin on the Bonapartist regime, which Marx quotes at the end of the paragraph, were forwarded to him, together with many other items used in The Eighteenth Brumaire, by Richard Reinhardt. a German refugee in Paris, Heinrich Heine’s secretary, In his letter to Ferdinand Lassalle of February 23, 1852 Marx quotes a letter to him from Reinhardt, in the following passage: “As for de Morny, the minister who resigned with Dupin, he was known as the of his mistress’ (Countess Lehon’s) husband, which caused Emile de Girardin’s wife to say that while it was not unprecedented for governments to be in the hands of men who were governed by their wives, none had ever been known to be in the hands of hommes entretenus [kept men]. Well, this same Countess Lehon holds a salon where she is one of Bonaparte’s most vociferous opponents and it was she who, on the occasion of the confiscation of the Orleans’ estates let fall ‘C’est le premier vol de l’aigle’.A pun: “It is the first flight of the eagle” and “It is the first theft of the eagle.”] Thanks to this remark of his wife’s, Emile de Girardin was expelled.” .

124.The reference is to the Regency of Philippe of Orleans in France front 1715 to 1723 during the minority of Louis XV.

125.The Holy Coat of Trier – a relic exhibited in the Catholic Cathedral at Trier, allegedly a garment of Christ of which he was stripped at his crucifixion. Generations of pilgrims came to venerate it.

126.The Vendôme Column was erected in Paris between 1806 and 1810 in tribute to the military victories of Napoleon I. It was made of bronze from captured enemy guns arid crowned by a statue of Napoleon; the statue was removed during the Restoration but re-erected in 1833. In the spring of 1871, by order of the Paris Commune, the Vendôme Column was destroyed as a symbol of militarism.