family members ignored primogeniture (by excluding Lucien Bonaparte and his descendants); they annulled marriages to achieve their goals; and they did not submit to the Pope's rights as final arbiter on the validity of marriages. The very claim of the Bonaparte family to rule France was far from traditional. List of Bonapartist claimants to the French throne since 1814 Those who ruled are indicated with an asterisk. Marxism Based on the career of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Marxism and Leninism defined Bonapartism as a political expression. 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 Bonapartism to refer to a situation in which counterrevolutionary 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." Marx believed that a Bonapartist regime could exert great power, because there was no class with enough confidence or power to firmly establish its authority in its own name. A leader who appeared to stand above the class struggle could take the mantle of power. He believed that this was an inherently unstable situation, as the apparently all-powerful leader would be swept aside when the class struggle in society was resolved. Other Bonapartists In 1976, when Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a great admirer of Napoleon, made himself Emperor Bokassa I of Central Africa, he declared that the ideology of his regime was Bonapartism and added golden bees to his imperial standard. See also List of political systems in France Poujadisme Caesarism References Bibliography Further reading Alexander, Robert S. Bonapartism and revolutionary Tradition in France: the Fédérés of 1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2002) Baehr, Peter R., and Melvin Richter, eds. Dictatorship in history and theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and totalitarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Dulffer, Jost. "Bonapartism, Fascism and National Socialism." Journal of Contemporary History (1976): 109–128. In JSTOR Mitchell,