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Bonapartism


Bonapartism is the political ideology of Napoleon Bonaparte and his followers and successors. It was later used to refer to persons who hoped to restore the House of Bonaparte and its style of government. After Napoleon, the term was applied to the French politicians who seized power in the coup of 18 Brumaire, ruling in the French Consulate and subsequently in the First and Second French Empires under the House of Bonaparte (the family of Bonaparte and his nephew Louis-Napoleon). The term was used more generally for a political movement that advocated a dictatorship or authoritarian centralized state, with a strongman charismatic leader based on anti-elitist rhetoric, army support, and conservatism.

Marxism and Leninism developed a vocabulary of political terms that included Bonapartism, derived from their analysis of the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Karl Marx was a student of Jacobinism and the French Revolution, and was a contemporary critic of the Second Republic and Second Empire. He used "Bonapartism" to refer to a situation in which counter-revolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and use selective reforms to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes. Marx argued that in the process, Bonapartists preserve and mask the power of a narrower ruling class.


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