"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" by Karl Marx is an essay written between December 1851 and March 1852. Marx analyzes the 1851 French coup d'état that transformed Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte from president into emperor. Applying his theory of historical materialism, Marx examines how class struggle and divisions among social groups enabled "a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part." The work explores the emergence of the Bonapartist state and features Marx's famous observation that history repeats itself—first as tragedy, then as farce. (This is an automatically generated summary.)