My friend Joseph Weydemeyer(1) who died so early, intended to publish a political weekly in New York starting from January 1, 1852. He invited me to provide a history of the coup d'état for it. Down to the middle of February, I accordingly wrote him weekly articles under the title: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Meanwhile Weydemeyer's original plan had failed. Instead, in the spring of 1852 he began to publish a monthly, Die Revolution, the first issue of which consists of my Eighteenth Brumaire.[79] A few hundred copies of this found their way into Germany at that time, without, however, getting into the actual book trade. A German bookseller of extremely radical pretensions to whom I offered the sale of my book was most virtuously horrified at a "presumption" so "contrary to the times".[80]
It will be seen from the above that the present work was written under the immediate pressure of events and its historical material does not extend beyond the month of February (1852). Its republication now is due in part to the demand of the book trade, in part to the urgent requests of my friends in Germany.
Of the works on the same subject written at approximately the same time as mine, only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo's Napoléon le petit and Proudhon's Coup d'état?
Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty invective against the responsible publisher of the coup d'état. The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative such as would be without parallel in world history. Proudhon, for his part, seeks to represent the coup d'état as the result of preceding historical development. Unnotice-ably, however, his historical construction of the coup d'état becomes a historical apologia for its hero. Thus he falls into the error of our so-called objective historians. In contrast to this, I demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relations that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part.
A revision of the present work would have robbed it of its specific colouring. Accordingly I have confined myself to mere correction of printer's errors and to striking out allusions now no longer intelligible.
The concluding words of my work[3]: "But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will crash from the top of the Vendôme Column[81]", have already been fulfilled.
Colonel Charras opened the attack on the Napoleon cult in his work on the campaign of 1815.b Subsequently, and particularly in the last few years, French literature made an end of the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, of criticism, of satire and of wit. Outside France this violent breach with the traditional popular belief, this tremendous mental revolution, has been little noticed and still less understood.
Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute towards eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi's significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.0 With so complete a difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest Samuel.
Karl Marx
London, June 23, 1869
Endnotes
[78] The second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written by Marx between December 1851 and March 1852 (see present edition, Vol. 11), appeared in Hamburg in 1869. The bourgeois press kept silent about the new edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire. Marx's preface to the 1869 edition of his work was first reprinted in Der Social-Demokrat, No. 117, Supplement, October 6, 1869. Der Volksstaat did not announce the second edition of the book until March 16, 1870 (in a supplement to No. 22); at the same time it published the text of the preface. This preface was also reproduced in the third edition that came out in 1885 under Engels' editorship. In 1889 the preface was translated into Polish. A French translation was published in January 1891 in Le Socialiste, organ of the Workers' Party of France, and in the same year in a separate edition of the book which came out in Lille. In Russian, the preface was published in the first Russian edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that came out in Geneva in 1894. The first English translation of this work was published 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.
[79] On Marx's advice Joseph Weydemeyer published The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 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, present edition, Vol. 39).
[80] Marx presumably refers to a letter from the Leipzig publisher and bookseller Otto Wigand of March 20, 1852, in which he refused to publish Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, since there was a "risk of being persecuted by the state".
[3] Marx wrote this item on the basis of a letter from Johann Baptist Schweitzer dated April 29, 1868. The item was included in the report of the General Council meeting of May 12, 1868 published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 344, May 16, 1868, but is not to be found in the Minute Book. Informing Engels of Schweitzer's letter, Marx wrote to him on May 4, 1868 that he intended "to use this question in the interests of the Party", and insisted on an inquiry into the condition of the workers employed in the iron trade of the Rhine Province (see this letter and Marx's letter to Engels of May 7 and the latter's reply of May 6-7, 1868, present edition, Vol. 43).
[81] 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 and 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.