Bonapartism
Bonapartism (French: Bonapartisme) is the political ideology supervening from Napoleon Bonaparte and his followers and successors. The term was used to refer to people who hoped to restore the House of Bonaparte and its style of government. In this sense, a Bonapartiste was a person who either actively participated in or advocated for conservative, monarchist, and imperial political factions in 19th-century France.
Bonapartism emerged in 1814 with the first fall of Napoleon. However, it only developed doctrinal clarity and cohesion by the 1840s.[1]
After Napoleon, the term was applied to French politicians who seized power in the Coup of 18 Brumaire, ruling in the French Consulate and subsequently in the First and Second French Empires. The Bonapartistes desired an empire under the House of Bonaparte, the Corsican family of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I of France) and his nephew Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III of France).[2]
In recent years, the term has been used more generally for political movements that advocate for an authoritarian centralised state, with a strongman charismatic leader, support for the military, and conservatism.
Marxism[edit]
Based on the career of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Marxism and Leninism defined Bonapartism as a political expression.[3] Karl Marx was a student of Jacobinism and the French Revolution, as well as a contemporary critic of the Second Republic and Second Empire. He used the term Bonapartism to refer to a situation in which counter-revolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and use selective reformism to co-opt the radicalism of the masses. In the process, Marx argued, Bonapartists preserve and mask the power of a narrower ruling class. He believed that both Napoleon I and Napoleon III had corrupted revolutions in France in this way. Marx offered this definition of and analysis of Bonapartism in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written in 1852. In this document, he drew attention to what he calls the phenomenon's repetitive history with one of his most quoted lines, typically condensed aphoristically as: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."[4][5]