The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The National Assembly debated the question of whether or not the constitution should be reformed. Napoleon’s supporters, the Bonapartists, pushed to abolish Article 45 of the French Constitution, which prevented a president from being reelected for a second term. The conflict over constitutional reform was worsened by the fact that the Legitimists and Orleanists had split again, preventing them from simply reestablishing the monarchy. The two factions could not agree to a compromise where the childless Legitimist claimant to the French throne, Henri V, would name the Orleanist claimant, Louis-Philippe II, as his heir.

However, Marx views this struggle as not really being about the rival royal dynasties themselves, but about “their general class interests” (82). Specifically, it was the clash between those who controlled property, represented by the Legitimists, and the financial class, represented by the Orleanists. Marx argues that the failure to reach a compromise over dynastic rights “destroyed their parliamentary fusion” (85), meaning the actual important compromise between their material interests.

Since the two factions of the Party of Order failed to work with each other on the issue of constitutional revision, their own bourgeois supporters in the public turned against them.