Status Updates From O 18 de brumário de Luís Bo...

The difference between Legitimists (Bourbon) and Orleanists (Orleans) have nothing to do with 'the more legitimate claim to the crown' and instead it's all about competing land regimes, legitimist aristocracy and orleanist bourgeoisie.

Social democracy is born from the petit bourgeoisie seeking to bring the proletariat under its fold to fight against the landed aristocracy and big bourgeoisie.

While in the Great Revolution, the conservative partners relied on the radical parties for support and so the cycle was one of ever growing radicalism, in 1849, it was the radical partners that relied on conservative parties and so the cycle was one of growing reaction.

The seeds for the January 1852 coup were planted all the way back on the first military parade inaugurating President Bonaparte. The military was in his hands, and anyway the Jan. 1852 coup was only a formality, the power had been taken in December of 51.

The Constitution of this Second Republic was one where the bourgeoisie reserved all unequivocal language for the important matters — the relation of the President to the National Assembly — while all else was left vague, or were just empty words. But, while the bourgeoisie wanted all moral powers to itself, it left all real power on the President who was elected by universal suffrage, the Republic dug its own grave.

II

The national bourgeoisie did not want to share the State with a monarch, but wanted the whole State for itself as a Republic.

The bourgeois monarchy is gone and the only thing that could follow was a bourgeois republic and the attempts by a weak, but still growing and strengthening proletariat, to overthrow a republic were premature and were brutally squashed.

Preface

Marx's understanding of French history, including the Great Revolution, and of the development of the classes in France, led Marx to not be surprise and even predict the coup of Bonaparte on 18 Brumaire.