This is a complex essay written about Karl Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It describes why the revolution was doomed to failure from the outset and the travesty of Bonaparte's failure.

The revolution of 1848 was doomed to failure from its very beginnings. Marx states that historical events such as this draw their ideas from the past, thus the revolution of 1848 had nothing better to parody than the revolution of 1789. The fault here, however, is that the 1848 revolution sought to mirror a revolution that had failed. An absolute monarch led to a dictatorship. To follow such a trend it is easy to understand why conservative forces quickly …

…help from a man who bore the name Louis Napoleon in an attempt to regain the glory they had once attained. Napoleon III, however, was not a strong enough political authority to achieve the ends the peasantry sought and thus, when the revolution failed, France had no better recourse than return to the status quo. In addition, the conservatives were more organized than the peasantry and as a result, well positioned to regain political control.