Bonapartism
French political ideology
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Through Napoleon, Authoritarianism and Centralisation
The term developed a broad definition used to mean political movements that advocate for an authoritarian centralised state, with a military strongman and charismatic leader with relatively traditionalist ideology.
Beliefs
Marxism and Leninism developed a vocabulary of political terms that included Bonapartism, derived from analysis of the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Karl Marx, a student of Jacobinism and the French Revolution, was a contemporary critic of the Second Republic and the Second Empire.
Noted political scientists and historians greatly differ on the definition and interpretation of Bonapartism. Sudhir Hazareesingh's book The Legend of Napoleon explores numerous interpretations of the term.
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Bonapartist claimants
List of Bonapartist claimants to the French throne since 1814
Those who ruled are indicated with an asterisk.
Marxism
In Marxist theory, the term "Bonapartism" was coined to describe the political trajectory of Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon I, who was known as Louis (Napoleon) Bonaparte before his coronation as Emperor. 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 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."