Society of December 10

The Society of December 10 is Bonaparte’s private army, whose heterogeneous membership makes it a political instrument of class representation rather than a unified social class. In the account developed through Karl Marx, its importance lies in the paradox that a ruler who presents himself as standing above class interests can rely on society’s rejected remainder as his most dependable base.

Identity and Formation

Marx describes the Society of December 10 as the core Bonaparte formed from a disparate body of people at the margins of respectable society. It included ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, vagabonds, discharged soldiers, former prisoners and escaped galley slaves, alongside swindlers, mountebanks, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, and beggars. The range matters: the Society was not defined by a single occupation or shared position within production, but by the disintegration and exclusion that cut across social groups.

Marx gathers these members under the idea of a lumpen proletariat and calls them the indefinite, disintegrated mass known as la bohème. The Society’s political identity thus comes not from a common productive role, but from its status as a remainder of established class divisions. The evidence characterizes it as a private army and identifies the people from whom Bonaparte formed its core; it does not specify a formal organizational structure or enumerate particular operations.

Membership and Political Function

The Society’s members were drawn from varied and often precarious circumstances: some had fallen from bourgeois positions, while others were discharged from military or penal institutions, or survived through itinerant and marginal occupations. Their common feature in Marx’s account is not a single economic interest but their distance from stable class organization. That makes the Society available as a base for a leader who cannot rest his authority on one established class faction alone.

Marx’s formulation sharpens the irony: Bonaparte recognizes in this social refuse the only class on which he can rely unconditionally. The Society therefore gives material support to a political pose of independence from class conflict. Bonaparte’s apparent distance from the competing classes is not a position outside society; it is grounded in those whom its recognized classes have cast off.

Class Representation and Contradiction

The Society exemplifies a broader problem of political representation. In Marx’s analysis, a figure claiming to reconcile society as a whole does not thereby escape particular interests. Rather, the claim to stand above class divisions is supported by a constituency located at their rejected edges. The Society’s heterogeneous composition suits that role precisely because it does not represent one coherent class whose demands would openly limit Bonaparte’s claim to speak for the whole.

This arrangement is unstable in meaning even as it is politically useful. The Society appears as an external residue, yet its members are produced by the very social order whose divisions Bonaparte claims to transcend. Their exclusion does not make them irrelevant to class politics; it lets them serve as the basis for a politics that presents itself as independent of the established classes.

Significance in Marx’s Account

The Society of December 10 makes visible the abject underside of Bonapartist power. Marx’s account does not treat the group as a representative cross-section of society or as a conventional class organization. Instead, its members embody the disintegrated remainder through which Bonaparte can build an unconditional base while presenting himself as the guardian of a wider social order.

The organization’s significance is therefore less a record of specific actions than a structural contradiction: the claim to rise above class interests depends on support from people excluded by those interests. By making that dependence concrete in the Society’s motley membership, Marx exposes the social foundation hidden beneath Bonaparte’s posture of universal representation.