Tocqueville, Marx and the revolution of 1848

Abstract

In this work we will try to carry out a comparative reading of the analysis that Tocqueville and Marx built on the revulsive cycle that opens in February 1848. Both authors did so not with the supposed dispassionate objectivity of the aseptic intellectual, but with the obvious desire to understand, but also to carry out an active balance of this situation that, for different reasons, threw them towards the paths of defeat and exile. We will work with Tocqueville's Memories of the 1848 Revolution and to analyze Marx's journey we will use Louis Bonaparte's XVIII Brumaire. We will define the comparative look at three different problems: a— the characterization of the February Revolution, b— the dilemmas of the new Constitution and the June days, c— the rise of Bonaparte.