Eighteenth Brumaire

(of year VIII of the Republic, according to the republican calendar of the Great French Revolution), a coup d’etat carried out on Nov. 9-10, 1799, by Napoleon Bonaparte. It led to the overthrow of the Directory and the establishment of a military dictatorship in France, first in the form of the Consulate and later the Empire (from 1804). The coup d’etat of 18th Brumaire, which was organized by the big bourgeoisie to consolidate its rule, was supported by the wealthy peasants, who saw in the military dictatorship a way of protecting their property from attacks by the poor peasants as well as the feudal nobility. The toiling masses, who had not yet recovered from their defeats in the Germinal and Prairial uprisings in 1795 and from the failure of G. Babeuf’s plot (1797), could not actively oppose the coup d’etat of 18th Brumaire. The coup d’etat completed the process of the bourgeois counterrevolution, which had begun with Thermidor in 1794.