One of the most famous dates in the modern era is the 18 Brumaire, the day of the year VIII (1799-1800 in our calendar) when Napoléon overthrew the Directory in favor of the Consulate, the precursor to the First French Empire, and which in the eyes of many historians marks the end of the French Revolution. The original 18 Brumaire followed from the backwards policies of the Directory, itself a consequence of the Thermidorian Reaction. In this, it can be seen as a midway point in the reactionary march from the heights of the Revolution in 1793 to the eventual restoration of the Bourbons in 1815.
It is in this sense that Marx wrote his famous essay Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon (“The 18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoléon”), opening with perhaps one of the most famous paragraphs in writings on history as a whole:
Hegel says somewhere that great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: “First as tragedy, then as farce.” Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the “Mountain” of 1848-51 for the “Mountain” of 1793-05, the Nephew for the Uncle. The identical caricature marks also the conditions under which the second edition of the eighteenth Brumaire is issued.
For Marx was not speaking of the original 18th Brumaire, but of Napoléon’s nephew Louis-Napoléon, who pulled off a coup d’état of his own in 1851. Once again this had occurred after a revolution–the Revolutions of 1848–and Marx showed how the brief Second Republic of 1848-51 was destroyed by the bourgeoisie who treated its affairs as their own property. In this comes the prototype of most Marxist analyses of fascism (and indeed of the capitalist state as a whole), and the prediction that as capitalism advances in history, it will have a tendency to become more monolithic and less democratic. One is then confronted by the dichotomy which Rosa Luxemburg would famously express in the slogan “socialism or barbarism”.
The day 18 Brumaire will occur at least once more in the annals of world-history, and that is with Election Day in the US this year. For if one converts the date “November 8th, 2016” to the French Republican Calendar, one finds that it is “18 Brumaire, An. CCXXV”. An ominous portent indeed, especially considering the vast wealth of apocalyptic literature that has sprouted up in response to the events of the 2016 election. Both of the likely victors of this election have portrayed their opponents as not only illegitimate usurpers, but potential fascist dictators. And indeed, both can be read as descendants, ideologically, of Louis-Napoléon. For Trump it is obvious–not only is it the explicit violence he threatens against people of color, women, LGBT people (through his intensely homophobic counterpart Pence), and journalists, it is also the movement of reactionary militias that his campaign has given a new lease of life and the far-right youth who are trying to use him as a useful idiot. But Clinton is also an heir of Louis-Napoléon. Liberals love to treat her war crimes in Honduras and Haiti (among other places) as if they were mere talking points. This merely shows that they don’t care about America’s imperialist expeditions and the people whose lives they destroy and devastate; they care only for their own well-being and conditionally for people who they can use as tokens to discredit their enemies. Combined with Clinton’s earlier work to create mass incarceration in the US and her current rhetorical sabre-rattling against Russia, we see here another future of monolithic, barbaric capitalism.
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