May 5 is Karl Marx’s birth anniversary.Perhaps no one exerted greater influence on historical thinking, also on the writing of history, in the 20th century than Karl Marx. This is remarkable, considering that Marx was not a practising historian. He produced no work, Eric Hobsbawm reminds us, with the word ‘history’ in its title, “except a series of polemical anti -Tsarist articles later published as The Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, which is one of the least valuable of his works”. There are of course some scholars who like to think of his magnum opus, Capital, as a history of capitalism., But, though Marx’s study of capitalism is organised around an enormous amount of historical material and makes copious use of historical illustration, it cannot properly be considered as history, not least because the socio-economic system it seeks to map is still work in progress today, a full one-hundred-and-fifty-nine years after Capital made its first appearance in print. Of course it is impossible to miss the fact that nearly everything that Marx wrote is suffused with a sense of history, or that the materialist conception of history forms the core of Marxism. And yet there is little in what Marx wrote that can be described as history, as historians commonly understand it. That said, there are two monographs of Marx’s that come closest to historical treatises, though they were not written as history, in that they do not study periods or events from the past. Both were written during 1850-52, in the wake of the European revolution of 1848-49, and both focussed on contemporary France, more particularly on the developments leading to, and later undermining, the Second Republic. The first of these two books, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Marx wrote between January and October, 1850, for the London-based monthly Neue Rheinsche Zeitung (a legatee of the great eponymous Marx-edited newspaper published out of Cologne which German authorities had suppressed in May, 1849), while The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was written during December, 1851- March, 1852 and published in the New York-based German language monthly Die Revolution. Each book can be – indeed, should be – read as a companion volume to the other, and together they illuminate the complex web of class relations in France which first brought the revolution about and later made way for the counterrevolution, eventually catapulting Louis Napoleon on to the Emperor’s throne after the Second Republic’s demise. Though both these books revolve around the same broad theme, the Brumaire is much the fuller treatment. It also explores, perhaps for the first time by a political theorist, the phenomenon that later came to be identified as Bonapartism – a process of the coopting and hijacking of a revolution by a leader who eventually derails the revolution and turns it around to serve his personal ambition. And the Brumaire not only pictures Bonapartism in action, it also foregrounds the matrix of production and class relations that made this parasitic overgrowth a possibility at the material time. Engels called the Brumaire “a work of genius”. “This eminent understanding of the living history of the day”, he wrote, “this clear-sighted appreciation of events at the moment of happening, is indeed without parallel”. Aside from the rigour of its analysis of mid-19th century French political economy and the felicity with which it lays bare, in a mere fifty-odd printed pages, the points of intersection of the bewilderingly many strands of recent French history, the Brumaire also remains an outstanding exemplar of epigrammatic prose – crisp, sharp and witty. The anniversary of Marx’s birth is as good a time as any for a somewhat closer look at this 19th century classic. Facsimile of cover page of the journal carrying the ‘Brumaire’.The words “eighteenth Brumaire” mean very little to us today, but in Marx’s time they were laden with symbolism for revolutionary movements across Europe. The great French Revolution of 1789 had dispensed with the traditional Roman calendar in favour of a new republican calendar, with all the months of the year finding new names on that calendar. ‘Brumaire’ was the second month on that calendar, and the eighteenth of Brumaire corresponded to the 9th of November on the Roman calendar, the date on which, in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the Directory and appointed himself ‘First Consul’, thus effectively killing the revolution. Fifty-two years later, in December 1851, Louis Napoleon, the great Bonaparte’s nephew, jockeyed into position as the emperor of France on the ruins of the Second Republic, which, in turn, had emerged from the European revolution of 1848-49. Marx has telescoped these two brazen usurpations – the uncles and his nephews – into the title of his book here. In his preface to the 1869 edition, he writes about his intent to show “how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part”. Indeed, Marx’s portrait of Louis Napoleon drips with frank contempt. He looks at the nephew as no more than a petty adventurer who, by virtue of his ability to be all things to all men, managed to anoint himself as the emperor. “Hegel remarks somewhere”, thus begins chapter one of the Brumaire, “that all great world-historic facts and personages appear twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montaigne of 1848-51 for the Montaigne of 1793-1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire”. (Emphasis added)But how did the derisible caricature slip into the Emperor’s robes? How did he lord it over greater and abler men than himself for twenty years, holding seismic pressures of social change in check? Why did the European revolution of 1848-49 with its epicentre in France expend itself so quickly and apparently so fully? What accounted for the comprehensive defeat of the French working class by forces that had aligned with it in the revolution’s first flush? The Brumaire addresses these questions with stunning lucidity and a breathtakingly sure grasp of the personalities and the social and political forces at play in the drama. The failed revolution did indeed give Marx his first real chance of testing the basic tenet of historical materialism (developed in such mid-1840s tests as The Holy Family and The German Ideology), which (as Engels paraphrased it in the preface to the Brumaire’s 1885 edition post Marx’s death) is that:“(A)ll historical struggles…are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles and social classes, and…The existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production, and of their exchange determined by it.”Marx shows that the revolution of February, 1848 reflected the disenchantment of vast swathes of the Parisian citizenry – workers, artisans, the petty-bourgeoisie (shopkeepers and small business-owners), the republican-minded bourgeoisie, and even sections of the liberal bourgeoisie – with the regime of the ‘July monarchy’ of Louis Phillippe. Europe was then experiencing a series of crises triggered, variously, by the potato crop blight of 1846, the devastating famines of 1847, the precipitous slow-down in some hitherto-vibrant business sectors (like the British railroads) that set off steeply rising business failures and bankruptcies. Unemployment soared, Paris being among the hardest-hit, with probably one Parisian out of three facing loss of livelihood. The regime was increasingly shedding all pretensions of a constitutional monarchy – as it was supposed to be – and embracing steadily more authoritarian practices such as the banning of all dissent and abridging the freedom of the press. Protests escalated even to smaller French towns. And when the army opened fire on a crowd of largely peaceful demonstrators in Paris in the afternoon of 23 February, killing fifty-two protesters, that proved to be the proverbial last straw. Paris erupted in violent resistance. The king abdicated and fled to Britain. The Second Republic was proclaimed, its two major goals being the expansion of democracy and providing work to the swelling ranks of the unemployed. Universal male suffrage was instituted and censorship significantly relaxed. National workshops subsidized by the state were set up to provide employment to tens of thousands of workers. However, a determined push-back began almost immediately, with the bourgeoisie and segments of the petty bourgeoisie demanding a roll-back of the concessions to workers and of the taxes levied to fund public subsidies. The elections in April gave the mandate to conservative and moderate candidates and the government started drifting steadily to the right, cutting back on workers’ aid and scaling down the National Workshops. When on 23 June, the government announced the winding-down of the National Workshops, the workers rose in rebellion, erecting barricades on Paris streets and fighting pitched battles with the National Guard. All their allies of the February days had deserted them by now, however, including the petty bourgeoisie, and soon the insurrection was drowned in blood and put down. The defeat of the workers’ uprising left the forces Marx described as “pure bourgeois Republicans” – i.e., liberals – in charge. Now was the time for a true bourgeois democracy, embodying the broad interests of the whole bourgeoisie as a class, to take shape. However, the dynamics of class relations charted out a different course for France. Two major branches of the bourgeoisie – the ‘aristocracy of finance’ (bankers and financiers) aligned with the big landlords, and the industrial bourgeoisie – vied endlessly for a greater share of state power, and were locked in a permanent state of intrigue against one another, destabilising the government and torpedoing the project of democratic reforms again and again. As a result, the government swung from republican fervour to undemocratic prejudice. Universal (male) suffrage was soon annulled, and the church’s primacy in the area of education was ceded in large measure. Additionally, apprehensive that working class mobilisations would thrive again unless the freedoms of expression and speech were cut back significantly, the industrial bourgeoisie pressed for jettisoning all democratic proprieties altogether. Thus busy keeping the radical elements of society down, and fighting bitter internecine battles with parts of itself, the bourgeoisie made it possible for Louis Napoleon – who owed no allegiance to any of these feuding classes – to enter the stage as it were unannounced. He won the presidential election of December, 1848, projecting himself as the legatee of his great uncle. He enjoyed the support of the numerically strong small-holding peasantry, who owed a debt of gratitude to the uncle because he had broken up the large noble estates and given the land away to the peasants. Once installed as President, Louis set about systematically dismantling the institutions of democracy and centralising all power in his own hands. On December 2, 1851, when his term as president was ending after three years in office, Louis staged a neat coup, suspended all organs of democracy, and put on the emperor’s crown, giving himself the grand title of Napoleon III. The Second Empire was thus delivered out of the womb of the Second Republic. Marx sums up the bourgeoisie’s perverse abdication of political power with devastating irony:“The bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule; that to restore tranquility in the country its bourgeois parliament must first be given its quietus; that to preserve its social power intact, its political power must be broken…that in order to save its purse, it must forfeit the crown…”Marx suggests that the French working class had fought valiantly, but it was not yet numerous enough – hence not strong enough – to count as a real challenger for political power. Unlike in 1789, again, the bourgeoisie was not a revolutionary force any longer and had no reason to stand by the working class in its struggles. Squeezed by economic slow-downs and market crises, the petty-bourgeoisie was disintegrating as a force to reckon with and it vacillated perpetually between the propertied classes and the have-nots. Into this precarious balance of class relations, Louis Napoleon stepped in, as it were as disembodied, but all-powerful and unfettered, state power. The class that propped him up – the peasantry – was of course too fractured and disoriented and too insular to be a potent power in itself. The Brumaire showed that the revolution failed because the protagonists had either not reached their revolutionary potential yet (the working class), or had exhausted that potential by then (the bourgeoisie). Years later, in 1871, Marx’s treatise on the Paris Commune – The Civil War in France – was to remind us how, as absurd and anachronistic as the Second Empire had looked when it rose on the ashes of the revolution of 1848-49, “(I)t was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation.” The dialectic of historical change implicit in this demonstration is also posited brilliantly in the Brumaire’s pages, for example in this celebrated sentence from chapter one:“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own making, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”This was a triumph of historical writing, even if its immediate object was not the writing of history.Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.