The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoloeon (1852)

" Peasants.
A class divided against itself- the reactionary vs. the conservative element of the peasantry. In Marx the exploited classes (proletariat as well as peasant) are always trapped between the desire to hold on to the subsistence they have, and their revolutionary ardor- innate desire for freedom.
So the peasants find their “natural ally” in the urban proletariat.

Bureaucrats.
Bureaucracy is a form of parasitism.
The Army as an incarnation of peasants’ desires: their form of honor. Unlike the audience of Constantin Guys’s illustrations of the Crimean War, the peasants appreciate the army in a different way, as an extension of themselves, their new nationhood, their nobility as part of a grand narrative of French history.

Main thesis: Marx is demonstrating how the rise of Bonaparte is a culmination of the French Revolution: the display of how state power works in the bourgeois-driven modern bureaucracy becomes ever clearer, from inchoate forms in the napoleonic ideas, to the highly apparent uselessness of Bonapartist bureaucracy.
The opposition between state power and society.
An analysis of the peasants as a class (largest in France).
Why did the peasants support Bonaparte? What will be the result?

Capital: bureaucracy needs capital, because it needs taxes. Peasants become taxable as soon as they run their own land. This is why their emancipation (by the original Napoleon) from feudal lords was really a pauperization. "


--I would never write "highly apparent".