MARX (Karl).
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
"First as tragedy, then as farce".
The first English translation of Marx’s essay on the 1851 French coup d’état in which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte became emperor of the Second French Empire as Napoleon III. The text is one of Marx’s major political writings, an important application of his concepts of historical materialism, and also the source of Marx’s famous quote:
“Hegel says somewhere that, upon the stage of universal history, all great events and personalities reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add that, on the first occasion, they appear as tragedy; on the second, as farce.”
The translation was undertaken by the prolific translators Eden and Cedar Paul, who provided their own translator’s preface which appears alongside Marx’s preface to the first German edition of 1869 and Engels’s preface to the third German edition of 1885.
