He’s a Cretin but We’ll Manage Him

Paul North finds a prescient analysis of the end of the American republic in Karl Marx’s essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.”

By Paul NorthMay 30, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

• Politics

AN AUTOCRAT takes over. Why does the legislature permit him to hijack government, pervert institutions and norms, and unburden them of their legitimate power? Why would a representative body like the US Congress willingly injure its own authority? Karl Marx gave an answer in 1852, in his fiery postmortem for the French Republic, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Marx’s answer to the question of why the powerful willingly abandon their own power is unusual because it does not find a rational plan behind the move. A legislature, faced with a potential autocrat, is caught between two impulses and ends up following the wrong one—one that is, in fact, self-destructive. That Democratic legislators do not stand up to Trump is one thing, but the litmus test, according to Marx, was not the actions of the centrists or leftists but of the true Right. Putatively at least, the Right is in power, as it was in the French Second Republic. While Democrats may see what’s going on but are cowardly or weak, the Right is either simply blind or making a dangerous but rational calculation. In his century, Marx called the Right blind, for interesting reasons.

It is hard to imagine what drives the Right today to support the Trump regime. Take Tom Cole, the 10th-term Republican from Oklahoma’s fourth district, poster child for conservative principles and head of the Appropriations Committee, arguably the most powerful position in the House—at least formerly. Regarding Social Security, Cole’s website states that his goal is to “sustain and protect the program for current beneficiaries and future retirees.” Yet, as a recent article by Russell Berman demonstrates, “even Tom Cole is defending DOGE,” which has the hallowed safety net in its sights.

Indeed, the Trump regime has been imperiling Representative Cole’s issues since January 20—Social Security sustainability, loans and subsidies for farmers, stability in international relations, support for small businesses. It has also threatened Cole’s cherished political principles, such as bipartisanship. What’s more, since Trump came into office, his administration has routinely circumvented Cole’s powerful committee, undoing appropriations it once authorized. It is hard to imagine how Cole can accept the attack on his long-standing commitments and his way of practicing politics, but he apparently thinks he can steer the ship from the stern, or at least avoid icebergs. “If I think they’re wrong, I’ll bring it to their attention,” Berman quotes him saying. This is a weaker version of what Adolphe Thiers, a key member of the Party of Order in the French Second Republic, said about the usurper Louis Napoleon: “C’est un crétin que l’on mènera.” Dangerous last words: “He’s a cretin but we’ll manage him.”

It is harder to imagine how Cole can allow the committee he chairs to slip from appropriating funds to rubber-stamping cuts. Chairing what amounts to the Notarization Committee is, by any measure, a step down for Cole and for Congress. To understand this self-inflicted diminishment, we should ask Marx’s question again: what causes legitimate power to abdicate?

It is common to think of The Eighteenth Brumaire as the chronicle of a self-aggrandizing, power-hungry “serious buffoon,” Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. He had failed twice to take power through coups d’état, in 1836 and again in 1840. No one who knew him could deny that coups were his thing. Then, in the confusion after the revolutions of 1848 and on the strength of his name and dynastic ties to his uncle, Louis Napoleon returned to France and, third try’s the charm, became leader of France. No coup was needed this time—he won the new republic’s first presidential election by a wide margin.

In the years that followed, Louis Napoleon engineered a repeal of universal male suffrage, hobbled parliament, and manipulated ministers and generals to his purposes. When it became clear that the Constituent Assembly would not amend the constitution to extend his term in office, he decided (surprise, surprise) to instigate yet another coup: he had opponents arrested by the thousands, constrained the press, and, in November 1852, became emperor of France.

Marx had no end of criticisms for this clever vacuity, this usurper and republic-killer. No doubt the criticisms of the autocrat in his 1852 pamphlet are timely for us today:

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation and being at the same time, like a conjurer, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon’s substitute, by springing constant surprises, that is to say, under the necessity of executing a coup d’état en miniature every day, Bonaparte throws the entire bourgeois economy into confusion.

A coup d’état in miniature every day, to hold the public gaze—parallels between Louis Napoleon and Donald Trump are vivid and many. Peter Gordon drew out the important ones in an essay for the Boston Review. At the most basic level, Trump and Louis Napoleon dress up restoration in the tunic of revolution: both leaders rode in on the backs of the disenfranchised, and both promised a return to a golden age that never existed.

Yet The Eighteenth Brumaire is not primarily the anatomy of an autocrat. For most of its approximately 100 pages, Marx analyzes in detail how other actors in the republic misidentified Louis Napoleon as good for their interests. He focuses particularly on members of the Constituent Assembly, whose influence flowed directly from the existence of the republic itself. Marx skewers assembly members, ministers, and military leadership for their ignorant, self-destructive complicity. The first lesson of his depressing and hilarious pamphlet is not to focus on the autocrat, since it takes a nation to make one, after all.

Someone had to make room for Louis Napoleon to gobble up the legitimate power of others, and he certainly knew this. In a brilliant example of doublespeak, the autocrat said, in a best-selling book a decade before his ascension: “It is a grave error to think that a great man is omnipotent, and that he derives his powers only from himself.” Talking about the original Napoleon, he added: “The Emperor, while re-establishing ancient forms in founding his authority, relied only upon the young and vigorous sap of new interests.” With his usual wit, Marx calls such pseudorevolutionary activity “world-historical necromancy.” French revolutionaries tried to raise the dead of history: they summoned ancient Rome as their paradigm in order to satisfy—or appear to—the freshest interests of the living. Instead of leading to a new republic, however, conjuring the dead led directly to empire: it was a bait and switch, presenting “the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise.”

New interests do produce vigorous sap, and that sap needs to flow, vigorously, toward something concrete. If we concentrate, as Marx does, not on the Caesar but on the political parties, their platforms, and their representatives in the Constituent Assembly, we can ask how they failed to foresee the obvious and forestall the republic’s end.

All the drama in The Eighteenth Brumaire happens in the assembly. Louis Napoleon may be farcical, but the legislature is tragic. “The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June days is the history of the domination and the disintegration of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie,” Marx tells us. To avoid a real republic, right-wing elements circumvented checks and balances, first and foremost the constitution. And then, when Louis Napoleon circumvented the assembly itself in 1851 in order to extend his rule, conservatives suddenly remembered the republic. It was republicanism, they realized, that had brought them to power, and republicanism that had allowed them to exercise it. With its end, they ended.

Just a few years before, the Revolution of 1848 had brought down the French king and introduced liberal freedoms of press, speech, association, and assembly, all secured through a liberal constitution. It also brought about universal, unpropertied male suffrage. Some of these freedoms and entitlements were then progressively taken away by the assembly, the rest by the emperor. It wasn’t Louis Napoleon that caused the demise, however. Parliament dissected itself. It took away the basis of its own power by going around the constitution. Marx’s poignant lines evoke a feeling many of us have today that can only be called “rue.” On one side, Marx rues the way “the collective will of the nation” seeks “its appropriate expression through the inveterate enemies of the interests of the masses, until at length it finds it in the self-will of a freebooter.” The people stood with Louis Napoleon, although he was antithetical to their interests. On the other side, the assembly used its power to do away with its power. Two errors made a fatal combination.

Marx focuses on a relationship within the French Right, between one party in particular, known as the Party of Order (officially Comité de la rue de Poitiers), and supporters of Louis Napoleon, the Bonapartists. The Party of Order held an absolute majority after 1849. Its members were interested in social change: they wanted to do away with liberal reforms and restore a facsimile of the society of orders, in which classes knew their place and dynastic monarchy provided stability. There was a problem, of course. How could they, in good faith, move through a republic to bring about its opposite, a monarchy? It was already a desire driving against itself, and moreover it required them to dig in and get messy with republicanism. The Right had to learn the tricks and traits of negotiation, coalition building, reformulation, and compromise. They had to seem to love the republic intimately in order to dream that they could bring about its demise. And there were no guarantees about what it would become when they were done.

The way the Bonapartists outflanked and outstrategized the Party of Order (largely by disenfranchising about a third of voters through a new requirement to own property) is ultimately less interesting than what drove the traditional Right to make the absurd bet that it could use what mortally threatened it in order to win. It thought it could get in bed with a populist autocrat and wake up in charge. It thought it could consciously, rationally, manipulate a volatile situation in its own favor—“He’s a cretin but we’ll manage him.” This is where Marx’s political analysis gets interesting, approaching a kind of psychoanalysis.

It is a general truth that an autocrat gets into power not by himself but through those who let him. Louis Napoleon came to power by legal means (at least the third time he tried), but he stayed in power through the complicity of those around him. What did they have to ignore in order to continue in their complicity? Marx does not mince words: “If ever an event has, well in advance of its coming, cast its shadow before, it was Bonaparte’s coup d’état.” The coming coup was so obvious, no one could have denied it and remained honest with themselves. This raises some questions. Why did the Right ignore what was in front of their faces? Why, in the presence of real danger, whose long-term effects would be devastating to their political goals, did this group default? Why did they defer to a lesser danger at the cost of denying the existence of a much greater one?

You might think, especially if you know a little about psychoanalysis, that the main players on the right—Thiers and François Guizot, for example—simply identified with the more powerful player on the scene. Identification is a way to avoid cognizance of one’s own weakness by taking satisfaction in someone else’s power. This is not Marx’s psychoanalysis of complicity, however.

How did the assembly go from an elected body, “representative of the sovereign nation,” to a body “sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans everything”? They contracted a “peculiar malady” that Marx names “parliamentary cretinism.” Simply put, reality did not penetrate their thick skulls. They were shut off, acting solely within their own reality. Louis Napoleon could have retorted to Thiers: “Ce n’est pas moi qui suis le crétin,” “it is not I who is the cretin here.” Cretinism “holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world.” This sounds like one of the insults Marx was so fond of hurling, but it isn’t merely that. It is a precise characterization of the psychic situation of those in power, when they are about to give away the store. In the face of obvious evidence to the contrary, parliamentarians were convinced not only that they would get what they wanted in the end but also that they were already getting it. “[T]hose who had destroyed all the conditions of parliamentary power with their own hands” still regarded “their parliamentary victories as victories,” even though the political body had made itself functionally irrelevant.

What holds a body of consummately rational actors in such an irrational state that they take losses as victories? What allowed the Right in mid-19th-century France to believe the steps they were taking toward irrelevance were in fact steps toward the triumph of their political vision? Marx has two answers. On one hand, behind the self-deception, he sees a simple wish: the bourgeoisie as a whole “longed to get rid of its own political rule in order to get rid of the troubles and dangers of ruling.” On this view, the Party of Order made a semirational choice—that a roiling populace would be worse for order than an autocratic fool. In the end, assembly members could relinquish governing and go back to the business of making money—which, according to Marx, was their material desire anyway: “[T]he bourgeois madly snorts at his parliamentary republic: ‘Rather an end with terror than terror without end!’”

This is a psychoanalysis not of complicity, however, but of capitulation. Marx may be correct about the way things ended. He is talking about the Right’s eventual acceptance of autocratic rule, after it became a fait accompli. Once it was clear that they had lost, they could say “There’s nothing we could have done. This way is better for business. It is what we wanted.” They could declare their actions to have been rational all along and go back to their farms or their industries. But why had parliament succumbed to this debacle in the first place? How did they catch the peculiar malady cretinism?

Marx’s analysis comes close to that of Freud and Melanie Klein. The malady resulted from a conflict, internal to parliament and to each parliamentarian. Two facts collided in their psyches. Fact number one was that their power came from the state. Fact number two was that the state was clearly about to turn against them. The two facts couldn’t be maintained as true with the same conviction at the same time. Marx, like Freud and Klein, doesn’t let assembly members off the hook. They are not simply ignorant or blind; they know the state is coming for them, and that scares them. But the knowledge has a peculiar character: they know and they don’t know. The only way to maintain their power is as an illusion. Knowing their danger, they wield ignorance as a shield to protect themselves from the smaller pain of acknowledging what they have already lost and the bigger pain of the coming loss of everything.

Freud and Klein considered this kind of “ego-splitting” a basic human phenomenon. When a parent threatens to cut off the source of pleasure, an infant can either recognize the real danger and renounce the pleasure or, as Freud argues, it can “disavow reality and make itself believe that there is no reason for fear.” In this economy of pleasure, the second reaction wins out over the first. But there is a catch: while disavowing reality, you don’t do away with the danger. Far from it—disavowal only makes sense when there is something to deny. Splitting oneself into two parts in this way might allow one to sustain contradictory positions, but only at the cost of the integrity of one’s soul. A part of oneself knows reality while the other part denies it, and to the extent that the disavowing part is stronger, one sticks with the fantasy that one’s desire will be satisfied, regardless of reality. For a little while at least, the fantasy that things are working out, that one’s desire will continue to be satisfied, provides sufficient pleasure to continue the self-deception. Indeed, as we are seeing now, as the US Congress becomes a puppet, the more absurd their situation gets, the more pleasure they take in the illusion that they are still governing.

Fear of loss and destruction persists, however. It is still there, just hidden. An enormous amount of energy is required to repress the denied truth, which wants to push through to expression. Sometimes it does break through, in a distorted or reversed form. When Thiers characterized the French people who supported Bonaparte as that “vile multitude,” a truth emerged in disguise. He blamed the loss of his own power, not to mention of the republic, on the multitude. He knew the truth—that he was to blame—and denied it at the same time. In no way could the rise of Louis Napoleon have been caused by the destruction of parliament by parliament itself. So trenchant was this belief that, even after the coup, Thiers kept up the illusion that parliament had not been destroyed, and with it representative government. Thiers was a true “cretin” in Marx’s sense, a reality-denying disavower. He was so invested in the fantastical part of his ego that, after parliament had been dissolved, he cooked up what he called a “Responsibility Law,” which was supposed to hold the soon-to-be emperor, who had already carried out the coup, within the bounds of the now-mooted constitution.

“Thus ended the party of Order, the Legislative Assembly, and the February Revolution,” Marx pronounces. The Second French Republic ended in the no-man’s-land of the assembly’s collective split ego.

In clinical practice, psychoanalysts try to help individual neurotics integrate their ego splits. Marx theorized in collective terms, but he also sought to heal splits, one of which he called “alienation,” the other “the class struggle.” He also understood, as psychoanalysts do, that in response to a contradictory demand, where a major source of satisfaction is threatened, the ego splits, trying to hold on to satisfaction as long as possible through the embrace of an illusion.

When Russell Berman asked Tom Cole why he let DOGE take Congress’s job, Cole gave an interesting reply: “A Republican Senate, a Republican House is not going to chain down a Republican president.” This sounds like normal party politics in a democracy, but look a little closer. Here is the moment of complicity that just barely conceals capitulation. Here is the disavowal spelled out. Here is the end of the republic in a nutshell.

Cole’s statement sounds full of the authority that should emanate from his office, that indeed once emanated from it. He talks as if nothing has changed. Already, though, if this was really his decision, it was a decision to give away his committee’s authority, whereupon power becomes a mere illusion of power. The disavowal can be read most clearly in the repeated word “Republican,” which conceals the vast difference between Cole’s values and Trump’s. In one gesture, Cole accepts the power grab and pretends that the authority for it came from him, from the Congress, who judiciously held back from chaining the president down in view of their shared values. As the republic ends, it is bitterly ironic that these values are called “republican.”

Ego splits like this are not hard to see. The hard part is that it is up to the damaged ego, in this case Congress, to overcome the split. If they admit there is a split, first of all, and then, subsequently, if they welcome in and acknowledge the part of themselves that knows the danger is real, it will become harder to disavow it. In 1851, paradoxically, the French Constituent Assembly might have saved the Second Republic, if they had not believed, falsely, that their power continued unharmed. At a minimum, they could have wielded it.

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Featured image: André Gill, Portrait authentique de Rocambole/Napoleon III as the character Rocambole, in La Lune, 1867, is in the public domain. Image has been cropped.