By Guillaume Le Blanc

Today, I’d like to reflect with you on the meaning we might give to the conservative revolution we’re witnessing before our very eyes, which seems to be taking shape today right here in the United States with Trump’s victory, in Argentina with Milei’s, but also in Europe with the rise of what Alberto Toscano calls “late fascism”^[1] or what Enzo Traverso calls “post-fascism.”^[2] The dangerous links between neoliberalism, neopopulism, and neo-fascism are the subject of a seminar with Cynthia Fleury in Paris this year, and of a colloquium on the subject in December. This is, of course, a conversation that goes beyond Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, but one point is particularly important: it concerns the meaning given by Marx at the end of his text to Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état and the role of the peasantry in supporting it.

Etienne Balibar, recently invited to the Marx 13/13 seminar, suggested a very interesting parallel between contemporary social discontent and the advent of authoritarian populism, on the one hand, and the peasantry’s role in supporting Louis Bonaparte, on the other hand. During my talk, I’d like to explore this parallel and reflect with you on the link between social discontent, the need for revolution, and the production of a counter-revolution, which seems to me to underpin any analysis of the social warfare paradigm, if we take up the hypothesis Foucault calls “Nietzsche’s hypothesis” in his 1976 lecture “Il faut défendre la société”, according to which politics is the continuation of war by other means (the inversion of Clausewitz). The question that interests me is the following: Is the outcome of social discontent necessarily counter-revolution?

We’re living in a period that is both pre-revolutionary and counter-revolutionary at the same time. Instead of leading to a radical questioning of the political and economic foundations of our social order, social unrest is leading to a conservative revolution in which the people give new credence to a leader, apparently naturalized by elections, but profoundly driven by a logic of conservation of the social body of which he is, in a sense, the ultimate bulwark. How do these people, instead of emancipating themselves, reinforce their servitude? It’s a question that, philosophically speaking, has a whole history. Reich, in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, analyzes the rise of fascism in a series of texts written between 1930 and 1933. In this book, Reich asks why the German working class did not oppose Nazism, when all the socio-economic conditions were ripe for a workers’ revolt against Nazism. Deleuze and Guattari, in L’anti-oedipe, take up his analysis and try to provide an answer themselves. Adorno’s work on the authoritarian personality also raises similar questions. But in a way, it was already Marx’s question: why did the people support Louis-Bonaparte?

Yet Marx’s question itself needs to be clarified in the context of a very important dissociation, central to the Eighteenth Brumaire, between the proletarian class, which organizes itself as a revolutionary class, and the peasantry, which never manages to represent itself as a class. One is still in the minority in the eyes of the other, which is why the peasantry, by taking a stand in favor of Louis Bonaparte, completes the process of dispossession of the revolution carried forward by the proletarian class, and produces the counter-revolution. It seems to me—and this is my hypothesis—that we would gain by transporting Marx’s reasoning, which I shall first recall, to our own times, on condition that we accept a certain parallel between the peasantry of the 19th century and today’s precarious workers, including wage earners, the unemployed, part-time workers and so on. This is the hypothesis recently put forward by Peter E. Gordon, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump.”^[3]

I. Class warfare according to Marx

But first, how does Marx pose the problem? What does Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, published in 1852, deal with? In this book, first published here in New York in 1852, then in France, Marx analyzes the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, by which Louis Bonaparte, then President of the Republic since 1848, became Emperor Napoleon III and founded the Second Empire. Marx was not the only one to have written on the subject, as Victor Hugo’s Napoléon le petit and Proudhon’s Le coup d’état were also critically referenced in Marx’s own work. At the start of his book, Marx draws a parallel between General Bonaparte’s revolution on November 9, 1799, to become emperor and overthrow the Directoire, and Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état, which he interprets as a parodic replay of the first coup.

Marx’s thesis is simple: he makes it clear in the Foreword he wrote in 1869 for the German edition: “I show how the class struggle in France has created circumstances and conditions which have enabled a mediocre and grotesque character to play the role of hero” (434). Thus conceived, this text extends Les luttes de classes en France (Class Struggles in France), published in 1850, and anticipates the publication of La guerre civile en France (Civil War in France) in 1871, which deals with the Commune. These three books should be read together as a history of class warfare in France from the revolution of 1848 to the crushing of the Commune in 1871. Here are a few quotations. Letter to Kugelmann, April 17, 1871, on La guerre civile en France: “Thanks to the struggle of the Parisians, the battle of the working class against the capitalist class and state has entered a new phase. Whatever the outcome, it is the conquest of a new starting point of universal historical importance.” The focus of analysis in both Les luttes de classe en France and Le 18 Brumaire is the February 1848 revolution, and what Marx interprets as the defeat of June 1848.

The historical context? On February 24, 1848, after 3 days of rioting, King Louis Philippe was ousted (end of the July Monarchy, 18-year reign), marking the birth of the Second Republic. Universal suffrage was introduced for men over the age of 21, and elections to the Assembly were announced for April. The revolutionary movement was broken in May following the May 15 demonstrations. Then came the cold shower: dissolution of the National Workshops on June 21, forcing workers to enlist in the army; repression by the Minister of War Cavaignac between June 24 and 26; creation of the Party of Order, which led to the election of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte on December 10, 1848, and the party’s success in the legislative elections of May 1849. Finally, in response to the risk of proletarian revolution, Napoleon’s coup d’état was supported by the bourgeoisie, which feared proletarian revolution.

Class Struggles in France analyzes the reasons for the defeat of the February 1848 revolution and the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the monarchy against the proletariat. Le 18 Brumaire analyzes the coup d’état of 1851 and the establishment of an empire with the support of the big bourgeoisie. In both cases, the history of French society is marked by the genealogy of class struggle in 3 phases: its possibility, its impossibility, its necessity.

First, its possibility and impossibility: this is due to the fact that, as Marx acknowledges, while the proletarian class allied itself with the bourgeois class to establish the “bourgeois monarchy” in 1830 (p. 245), and “the republic surrounded by social institutions” in February 1848, it ultimately retreated, unable as it was to emancipate itself from the bourgeois class and bring its own “revolutionary interests” to bear against it (p. 246). Marx recognizes, at the start of Class Struggles in France, that the cause of the June 1848 defeat was the proletarian class’s inability to follow its own revolutionary interests and thus “accomplish its own revolution” against the bourgeois class.

Yet, second, this impossibility is precisely what gives the working class its future revolutionary vigor. For, by abolishing social institutions, the bourgeois class imposed a counter-revolution, the consequence of which was the emergence and universalization of a proletarian class in struggle against the bourgeois class. And this is precisely what the Eighteenth Brumaire aims to analyze.

The Eighteenth Brumaire then serves two purposes: on the one hand, it shows what the bourgeois counter-revolution consisted of, culminating in Napoleon’s coup d’état and the establishment of an empire. For it was the bourgeoisie that created the empire to escape the proletarian peril. Secondly, it shows how a counter-revolution is generated by the bourgeois counter-revolution, insofar as the struggle of the working class against the bourgeois class is objectified and universalized in a picture that is not just French but European.

In these various writings, which are in many ways a “diagnosis of the present,” Marx’s way is forward is a reflection on the present, to which Marx belongs, and which he intends to transform through his own analyses. It is thus the actualization of a logic of confrontation between classes that is restored by Marx. What Marx’s three texts have in common, and in the same historical coherence, is the chronicle of the proletariat’s foretold defeat, with its transformation into a defeated class, but also its resurrection as a triumphant class driven by its revolutionary interests.

The logic of history that Marx unfolds is that of the construction of a social war. Just look at the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto: “The history of every society up to the present day is the history of the class struggle.” War lies at the very foundation of history, and therefore of politics. The model Marx deploys is that of the battle between classes according to an agonistic model of struggle that eventually became binary: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The history Marx reconstructs is not one of distance: it’s a history within the struggle that must be waged on the side of the proletariat. This is precisely what Foucault calls “political historicism,” in which politics is analyzed from the grid of intelligibility of war, while at the same time the historian participates in the combat he describes. On the first side, the analysis of power relations must be conducted in terms of war. I refer to Foucault: the point is to understand how war is “an analyzer of power relations,”^[4] On the second side, the historian is himself caught up in the battle. Here again, to quote Foucault, “the historical knowledge of struggles”^[5] is itself an element of the struggle.^[6]

What I’d like to question in my talk is the meaning to be given to this social war as an extension of war, to the fact that war, to quote Foucault, begins to become the “permanent social relation,” the “ineffaceable foundation of all relations and institutions of power.”^[7] What significance can we give to this model of class warfare in interpreting our world today?

But first, how are we to understand this history of class struggle in Marx’s various texts on France? As much as the Manifesto is written from the point of view of the inescapable victory of the proletarians over the bourgeoisie, to be consecrated by the advent of communism, Marx’s texts on France are written from the point of view of the defeat of the proletarians. As Dardot and Laval write, “Marx, grappling with facts that diverge quite markedly from the triumphant proclamations of the Manifesto, will set out to unravel the threads of a dynamic that led to the revolutionary fiasco.”^[8] What Marx analyzes is the establishment of a counter-revolution, but this counter-revolution must itself be defeated by the Revolution. How can a proletarian revolution emerge from within the bourgeois revolution, which confiscates it in the first instance but precipitates it in the second? Marx writes at the time of the bourgeois counter-revolution that opposes the proletarian revolution, but at the same time he shows that the establishment of this counter-revolution, the establishment of the empire that serves the bourgeois revolution, is what will make the proletarian revolution possible and necessary, by objectifying the war between the bourgeois and proletarian classes hitherto masked in the event of bourgeois revolutions. Marx’s analysis in the Eighteenth Brumaire follows this theoretical logic: the advent of the “social republic” (p. 443) of the February Days is fatally opposed and defeated by the establishment of the “bourgeois republic” (p. 446). One sentence is particularly important: “The defeat of the June insurgents had certainly prepared and smoothed the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and erected; but at the same time, it had shown that, in Europe, we are dealing with issues quite different from the dilemma of republic or monarchy. It had revealed that bourgeois republic means here the unbridled despotism of one class over other classes” (p. 446).

Two elements are essential: 1/ The crushing of the Social Republic by the Bourgeois Republic signifies the definitive end of the synergy of working-class and bourgeois interests against the Monarchy. 2/ What is revealed is not the institutional, political and regime struggle between the monarchy and the republic, but rather the economic class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It was on this new basis that the bourgeoisie formed an alliance with the monarchy, creating the Party of Order to counter the proletarian threat, but this could only be achieved if the big bourgeoisie freed itself from the petty bourgeoisie and maintained domination from above. An ideological synthesis develops with the creation of the Party of Order, uniting property (the very large), the family, religion and order (p. 446) against what Marx interprets as “the party of anarchy, socialism and communism”, according to a model of class struggle that emerges as such. But the very thing that led this party of order to side with Napoleon in 1851, in order to avert the proletarian threat once and for all, was to make the working class more conscious, to endow it with its own language and thus make it truly revolutionary by universalizing it.

II. From peasants to precarious workers. The archaeology of counter-revolution?

In the final chapter of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx analyzes the fundamental role played by the peasantry in supporting Louis Bonaparte, without whom Bonaparte could not have succeeded in his coup d’état. In short, Louis Bonaparte relied on a majority of the people, a silent majority, the peasantry, who did not constitute themselves as a class, and who ended up siphoning off the proletarian class and making it impossible for it to become revolutionary. Marx’s argument is very interesting and important. It goes as follows: The French bourgeoisie, by focusing on the enemy constituted by the proletarian class, brought to power the unorganized mass of the peasant people represented by Napoleon: “Bonaparte represents a class, indeed the most numerous class in French society, the parcel peasants” (p. 532). In fact, the creation of universal suffrage in 1848 sealed the victory of the cities over the countryside and exacerbated peasant discontent by succeeding in “frustrating them with the re-establishment of the empire.” Bonaparte relied on them to carry out his own coup d’état: the counter-revolution is first and foremost that of the victory of those who felt defeated by the advent of the bourgeois republic, the “petit-paysans,” who, Marx tells us, “constitute an enormous mass” and “whose members all live in the same situation” (p. 532). Marx insists that these peasants live in the same situation, yet are not in contact with each other, and are not in a position to form a truly organized class with common interests. What Marx describes are conditions of extremely precarious autonomy, where each peasant is riveted to his own plot of land in order to survive, without any outside input or the slightest organic solidarity in the division of labor: “Their field of production, the plot of land, does not permit, in order to be cultivated, any division of labor, any application of science, hence no diversity of development, no variety of talents, no richness of social relationships. Each peasant family is more or less self-sufficient, producing most of what it consumes itself, and thus earning its livelihood in exchange with nature rather than in trade with society” (p. 533). Marx describes a form of sober autarky imposed by the working conditions of the small peasantry. He pays close attention to the self-sufficiency that creates the illusion of relative autonomy, the main fear of which is precisely that it will be lost. Marx also emphasizes the extent to which France is made up of the unorganized mass of peasants. This mass can be thought of as a class, but at the same time, it doesn’t have to be. It forms a class because its economic conditions and interests are common to millions of families, and are opposed to the interests of other classes. But at the same time, it is not a class insofar as the interests of small farmers remain local, never organize themselves into a national political community, and never form a political party with its own organization.

It is at this point that the famous formula comes into play, and I’d like to quote it in full:

They do not constitute a class. This is why they are unable to assert their class interests in their own name, either through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, so they must be represented. At the same time, their representative must appear as their master, as a superior authority, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them from other classes and dispenses rain and shine from above. The political influence of small farmers thus finds its ultimate expression in the fact that the executive power subjugates society. Historical tradition led French peasants to believe in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring them glory. And an individual has been found who pretends to be this man, because he bears the name of Napoleon (p. 533).

It is in this passage that we understand how the conservative counter-revolution takes place, which holds that “the election of December 10, 1848 was only completed by the ‘coup d’état’ of December 2, 1851” (p. 532). The proletarian revolution of 1848 actually brought to power the bourgeoisie, which split with the proletarian class because it began to fear it and turned back to the Monarchy, and this synthesis of the big city bourgeoisie, the industrialists, the Orleanists and the Legitimists was perceived as a threat to the small peasantry. Bonaparte exploited this threat by establishing himself as the representative of the peasants and carrying out the coup d’état in their name. Even if it meant leaving the previous power relationships, hierarchy, and domination unchanged.

We need to understand why the peasantry sided with Bonaparte. Marx analyzes this point at length. He points out that peasant insurrections in the 18th century were put down by incarceration and deportation. He also points out that the Bonapartes valued the conservative peasant attached to his plot of land over the revolutionary peasant ready to lose it, and who allied himself with the people of the cities. Finally, Marx points out that during the three years of the republic, 1848-1851, the republic’s political measures revived the peasants’ revolutionary spirit, albeit superficially, through uprisings that ended in bloody repression. The result was a peasant hatred of the National Assembly that Napoleon was able to exploit. At the same time, Marx analyzed the achievements of the 1789 revolution and its Napoleonic legacy for the peasantry. As Marx points out, the revolution of 1789 transformed “semi-serfs” into “free landowners” of small plots, and Napoleon made it easier for them to exploit the soil. But with the pauperization of small peasants largely brought about by rising taxes and their indebtedness, the status of the small peasantry became precarious, and it was this peasant precariousness that the second Bonaparte made use of. By defending the Napoleonic idea of peasant property, he became the representative of the peasants, to the point where they supported him en masse after the coup d’état. So, while the bourgeoisie had to relinquish political power by having Bonaparte elected, in order to consolidate its economic power, Bonaparte instituted the coup d’état by relying on the peasantry, while preserving the economic interests of the bourgeois class. As Marx points out, “Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes” (p. 542).

What can we conclude from this analysis of the Eighteenth Brumaire? I believe that Marx’s quotation can be taken in two different directions.

1/ First direction. It seems clear to me that there is a strong link between the support of the small peasantry for Bonaparte and the contemporary support of a section of the salaried workforce for authoritarian leaders in a post-fascist, populist tradition. Of course, we need to historicize and contextualize. What’s happening in France is not what’s happening in the United States, for example. The social properties of some are not the social properties of others. For France, I’m thinking of Robert Castel’s analysis of social insecurity, when he points out that, in France, social security has been thought of as a set of social properties available to wage earners, and as the equivalent of the small property that confers autonomy on the individual in Locke’s scheme^[9] . But precisely when the social state no longer seems to fulfil this function of securing social properties, when the fear of being downgraded, of being precarized, takes precedence over the reality of social security, isn’t it then that a non-progressive theory of social discontent can operate, which could be captured by an authoritarian personality giving the impression to all wage-earners still endowed with social properties but living in fear and in the reality of downgrading that they will once again be, if not protected, at least taken into consideration? As for the United States, we may well ask whether the function of the “illegal immigrant” is not precisely to establish a discourse of social insecurity for average white men, and thus make possible the advent of the authoritarian personality. In any case, the prerequisite for this conservative counter-revolution to come to power is precisely that the silent majority does not find a way to organize itself, to represent its own issues independently of an outside leader.

2/ Second direction. We find it in the margin of Saïd’s book, Orientalism, published in 1978, where he quotes the phrase from the Eighteenth Brumaire about the peasants in the title of his conclusion: “They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” What does Saïd mean? In Orientalism, Saïd analyzes the way in which the West has manufactured the Orient, essentializing it and making it other. Saïd shows, for example, that Bonaparte took on board a group of orientalists (p. 99) with him at the time of the war to conquer Egypt—“the learned wing of the army”, as Saïd calls it. The East is thus annexed through knowledge by the West, which disposes of it through power. What Saïd is questioning is, quite literally, the West’s seizure of power over the East through knowledge. The discourse of truth that the West holds on the East fabricates it as the East, but places it in a position of domination: “Orientalism has more value as a sign of European and Atlantic power over the East than as a truthful discourse on it.” What opens up in Saïd’s reasoning is precisely the construction of a figure of subalternity whose condition is not to be able to speak for oneself and thus to be spoken for by the other who assigns you to the other’s place. Saïd’s quotation of Marx posits that, in colonization, it is the colonial relationship that creates the conditions for the silencing of the colonized populations by colonial knowledge-power, whereas Marx rather implied that it was the peasants themselves who refused to organize themselves into classes and thus placed themselves under a master. Marx’s peasant is not Saïd’s “oriental man,” for the latter is defeated in advance of his ability to speak by colonial knowledge, which functions as power. Saïd echoes Fanon’s analysis of the otherness-essentialization of the figure of the colonized by colonial knowledge, if we think of colonial psychiatry and, in particular, the Algiers school, which defined types of criminality and delinquency specific to the Algerian race. Can we not then read and interpret the quotation from Marx in Saïd’s text as a radical element of a theory of social discontent, the condition of which is the imposition of silence as a political proposal for the alteration of subalterns? Wouldn’t it be a good starting point to propose, within the framework of Marx’s interpretation, that one of the conditions of social war and, more precisely, of social discontent, at the origin of free submission to a leader, is precisely this silence imposed on the most precarious. Isn’t the condition for a class not to represent itself precisely the imposition of a language to speak to it in a set of representations that fabricate and alter it from the outside? If this is the case, then free submission to the leader would be the paradoxical desire to regain one’s voice by conferring it on an authoritarian figure who is supposed to express it.

Watch this Keynote Lecture for Marx 13/13 here

Notes

^[1] Alberto Toscano, Late fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, 2023

^[2] Enzo Traverso, Post-fascism: fascism as a transhistorical concept, Crisis and Critique, 2024

^[3] November 8, 2024, Boston Review.

^[4] March 4, 1976 lecture, Il faut défendre la société, p. 119.

^[5] January 7, 1976, p. 25.

^[6] Cf. Valentina Antoniol, Foucault et la guerre, Mimesis, 2024

^[7]January 21 course, p. 74.

^[8] Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Marx, prénom : Karl, Paris, Gallimard, 2012, p. 247.

^[9] Cf. Claudine Haroche, Robert Castel, Propriété privée, propriété sociale, propriété de soi. Entretiens sur la construction de l’individu moderne, Paris, Fayard, 2001.