Bonapartism - what is it?

[Revoltorb]

I was reading some excerpts of Trotsky last night (I think it was The Revolution Betrayed, not quite sure though) and the word "Bonapartism" kept cropping up. But I've also heard it used here occasionally describing various stances/descriptions of events. What is it, exactly? I can form an educated guess to assume it means a counter-revolution during a democratic revolution wherein a single person seizes power in a new auto-/bureaucratic fashion, often under the guise of democratic consent. Am I close or way off?

[islandmilitia]

I was reading some excerpts of Trotsky last night (I think it was The Revolution Betrayed, not quite sure though) and the word "Bonapartism" kept cropping up. But I've also heard it used here occasionally describing various stances/descriptions of events. What is it, exactly? I can form an educated guess to assume it means a counter-revolution during a democratic revolution wherein a single person seizes power in a new auto-/bureaucratic fashion, often under the guise of democratic consent. Am I close or way off?

Beginning with Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire, Bonapartism is used to describe a situation where the balance of class forces is such that no class is able to impose its hegemony over politics and society, and as a result the state is able to gain a certain level of independence, such that it more or less adjudicates between the interests of the contending classes, or exercises control over those multiple classes, rather than being the coercive instrument of the dominant class. The reason that Trotsky uses the term so extensively is that he viewed the Soviet bureaucracy as precisely such a force, situated between the working class and the international forces of counter-revolution. The key point for Trotsky is that, like other historical cases of Bonapartist regimes, the weight of the bureaucracy was the product of a highly specific set of historical conditions, and the bureaucracy did not itself constitute a new ruling class, because it was highly dependent on those specific conditions.

[Geiseric]

A bonapartist is somebody who zigzags between right and left politics in order to retain power. Napoleon seemed like a monarchist, although he acted in the interests of the bourgeois class. Stalin & co. weilded and used their power to negotiate socialism in one country with the french, german, and british capitalists. hitler was also a bonapartist, he had to buy the support of capitalists and make the working class think he was acting in their interests, which only was possible since the KPD was influenced by SioC. Basically the old story of "he had all the answers to our problems (which meant the halocaust), so we followed him when we were desperate," is the quintesential character of bonapartism

[Davide]

Bonapartism is used to refer to a situation in which counter-revolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and then use selective reformism to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes.