Bonapartist

In French political history, Bonapartists were monarchists who desired a French Empire under the House of Bonaparte, the Corsican family of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I of France) and his nephew Louis (Napoleon III of France).

'Bonapartist' as a Marxist epithet

Karl Marx was a student of Jacobinism and the French Revolution as well as a contemporary critic of the Second Republic and Second Empire. He used the term Bonapartism to refer to a situation in which counterrevolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and then use selective reformism to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes. In the process, Marx argued, Bonapartists preserve and mask the power of a narrower ruling class. He saw Napoleon I and Napoleon III as having both corrupted revolutions in France in this way. Marx offered this definition of and analysis of Bonapartism in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," written in 1852. In this document, he drew attention to what he calls the phenomenon's repetitive history with one of his most quoted lines: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."

Related Topics:
Karl Marx - Jacobinism - French Revolution - Second Republic - Second Empire - Counterrevolutionary - Revolutionaries - Reformism - Ruling class - France - The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte - 1852

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Many modern-day Trotskyists and other leftists use the phrase left Bonapartist to describe those like Stalin and Mao who controlled 20th century bureaucratic socialist regimes.

Related Topics:
Trotskyists - Stalin - Mao

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