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The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is Karl Marx's analysis of Napoleon Bonaparte III's coup d'etat of December 1851, in which he elucidates the social forces and mechanisms at work during the political crisis. The "eighteenth Brumaire" (18 Brumaire) refers to the 9th November, 1799 in the French Revolutionary Calendar (or French Republican Calendar), which was the day Louis Napoleon Bonaparte staged his coup d'etat.
It was written between December 1851 and February 1852, and first published in Die Revolution (a New York German-language monthly established by Joseph Weydemeyer). Later editions (such as a 1869 Hamburg edition) were entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
In this work, Marx concludes that the key to the survival of a revolution is the elimination of the bourgeois state machinery.
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