"Chronique": Early digital release
The following is a digital release of a peer-reviewed essay, posted here until it is published as part of the journal's next issue.
The Bleeding Reality of the Present: Contingency and the Temporality of the Coup d’État from Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte to Donald Trump
Ty Blakeney
What is the temporality of an authoritarian coup d’état? How do you know when you’re living through one? On 2 December 1851, the President of the Second Republic Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte executed a coup. During the night, the military was transformed into a police force, arresting several prominent assemblymen and taking control of the city’s printing presses. Yet knowledge of the takeover was not widespread. In Histoire d’un crime: déposition d’un témoin, his account of the event, Victor Hugo tells how residents of the Boulevard Saint-Germain were surprised that day to see a parade of assemblymen going to meet because word of the coup hadn’t reached every neighborhood yet (149). More broadly, Hugo recounts how the people didn’t rise up because it was unclear what exactly Louis-Napoléon had done: since his action was couched in his authority as president and formulated as a populist appeal to reinstate universal suffrage against a corrupt and conservative National Assembly, the people weren’t sure that it was a move against the Republic itself. Many of his subsequent actions to establish a hereditary, authoritarian government were draped in the legitimacy of electoral approval, with the plebiscite of December 1851 and the legislative elections of early 1852 marking overwhelming victories for the soon-to-be emperor even though they were held under the threat of violent repression (Unger 81–95). This ambiguity, the inability of many to recognize the coup as such as it was happening was a key reason according to Hugo that it was successful and that no effective movement of resistance could be mounted.
We are now living through our own kind of ambiguous coup. A legitimately elected president has moved to turn the armed forces and ICE into a nationalized police force and is beginning to deploy it against those who resist him (McSwane and Allam). The president’s enemies are being arrested and prosecuted under false charges of criminal behavior (Stone). People are being abducted by secret police and taken to detention centers across the country or deported to concentration camps outside of the reach of the US judicial system (Hawkins). This violent suppression of resistance has been coupled with a move to ensure right-wing victories in future elections through gerrymandering, the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and calls to “nationalize” US elections. As in 1851, however, it is difficult to precisely identify the coup as it is happening and to convince a broad coalition of the public that the very foundation of the Constitution is under threat. What does the history of Louis-Napoléon’s coup have to teach us about our own moment? I propose to return Victor Hugo’s Histoire d’un crime in order to think through the temporality of the authoritarian takeover. Hugo demonstrates that the success of Louis-Napoléon’s coup depends to some extent on the logic of the fait accompli, the widespread belief that he has already succeeded. Against the rigid future projection of the fait accompli, Hugo’s text attempts to resituate the reader in the “bleeding reality” of the present. In doing so, he highlights the contingency of the coup, all the moments in which things could have turned out differently. To conclude, I consider what it might mean to tap into the bleeding reality of our own present through brief reflections on resistance to ICE’s actions in Chicago in 2025.
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Hugo’s text draws our attention to the future-oriented temporality of the coup. He shows how the authoritarian tries to produce the logic of the fait accompli, to convince everyone that the future already has a determined outcome, in order to make any resistance seem pointless. Hugo first identifies the danger of this temporality during a debate between resisting Assembly members early on in the coup. Hugo himself wants to lead some kind of street resistance as soon as possible and says to his comrades: “Un forfait […] veut être saisi flagrant. C’est une grande faute de laisser accepter un attentat par les heures qui s’écoulent. Chaque minute qui passe est complice et donne sa signature au crime. Redoutez cette affreuse chose qu’on appelle le fait accompli. Aux armes!” (note1) [A heinous crime… must be stopped as it is happening. It is a grave error to allow an attack to be accepted by the elapsing hours. Every minute that passes is complicit and signs its approval of the crime. Fear that terrible thing called the fait accompli. To arms!]. The problem Hugo exposes is that mobilizing a mass movement of resistance to the coup is as much a matter of belief as of will. Again and again, Hugo’s narrative demonstrates that attempts to combat the coup are stymied because of the odd temporal shell game of the fait accompli, where the future is substituted for the present. The sense that Louis-Napoléon has already taken over is a self-fulfilling prophecy that ultimately makes people unwilling to resist. The entire narrative recounts a series of aborted beginnings, moments where Hugo and his allies are unable to overcome the inertia of the fait accompli. On the run, the left-wing members of the Assembly who weren’t arrested keep meeting briefly in different locations and replaying the same debate: should they act now or concede that Louis-Napoléon effectively has taken control and regroup in order to organize their resistance over the longer term.
Hugo dramatizes this debate in a conversation he supposedly had with the socialist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who was in jail but by chance had been released on a short permission the day of the coup. Proudhon tells Hugo, “Bonaparte […] réussira et vous échouerez. Il a pour lui la force, les canons, l’erreur du peuple et les sottises de l’Assemblée. […] Cessez de résister, croyez-moi. La situation est sans ressource. Il faut attendre; mais, en ce moment, la lutte serait folle” (note2) [Bonaparte… will succeed and you will fail. On his side he has strength, cannons, the people’s error, and the Assembly’s missteps. … Stop resisting, believe me. The situation is hopeless. We must wait; but right now, to fight would be madness]. This citation points to one of the key questions that the text is attempting to ask. Were Proudhon and the others who advocate this position throughout the text right? Was the coup so well planned and the people so manipulated by Louis-Napoléon that all resistance was effectively futile? Or was this kind of thinking precisely what determined the outcome in the dictator’s favor?
Hugo’s rebuttal comes through the juxtaposition of this moment with another just before it. He tells of another exchange with a member of the working class whom Hugo had apparently saved during the insurrection of June 1848. In an exchange which runs counter to Proudhon’s pessimistic certainty, Hugo says that he doesn’t know whether he will return to the neighborhood. His friend replies, “Personne ne sait ce qui va arriver” (225) [“No one knows what will happen”]. In the face of this uncertainty, solidarity emerges; the worker promises to offer Hugo shelter and to defend him to the death if necessary. To resist the coup is to embrace the unknowability of the future, to struggle to keep open the contingency of history and possible futures that don’t involve the success of the authoritarian power grab, and it is this openness that allows a new form of solidarity to emerge between these two men. Louis-Napoléon may take complete control of the government one day, but he hasn’t yet, and he might not succeed. Again and again, the narrative insists on this kind of contingency, musing about whether the day’s events would have unfolded differently if a certain set of judges had decided to meet in a different room where they wouldn’t have been found by the police (131–46), or whether certain prisoners would have accepted being liberated by a group of workers who found their bus unguarded for a brief moment: “Qui sait ce qui eût pu arriver?” (266) [Who knows what might have happened?].
Critics of Histoire d’un crime have often taken Hugo to task for privileging literary effects over verisimilitude: his penchant for describing scenes he couldn’t have witnessed, such as a conversation between Louis-Napoléon’s inner circle inside the presidential palace, seems to undercut the documentary quality of his text (Gier; Baguley). While Guy Rosa’s meticulous work of cross-referencing demonstrates that Hugo’s account is more historically accurate than it might appear (Rosa 668–69), in fact I want to argue that it is precisely Hugo’s careful attention to narrative effects that makes the text so powerful. Viewed in the light of this debate over the fait accompli, we can see Histoire d’un crime not simply as the mere reporting of a sequence of incidents but as a literary effort to rewrite a completed historical episode as a living event, as an occurrence unfolding in a contingent present, whose future is not necessarily predetermined. (note3) Hugo says as much in the prefatory note he wrote about the text ahead of its publication in 1877:
le récit du coup d’État a été écrit par une main chaude encore de la lutte contre le coup d’État. Le proscrit s’est immédiatement fait historien. Il emportait dans sa mémoire indignée ce crime, et il a voulu n’en rien laisser perdre. De là ce livre. Le manuscrit de 1851 a été fort peu retouché. Il est resté ce qu’il était, abondant en détails et vivant, on pourrait dire saignant, de réalité. (53)
[the account of the coup d’état was written by a hand still warm from the struggle against it. The outcast immediately became a historian. He carried this crime with him in his indignant memory, and he wanted to ensure that nothing would be lost. Hence this book. The 1851 manuscript has been minimally edited. It has remained that which it was, rich in detail and living, one could say bleeding, with reality.]
It is precisely this living, bleeding reality that, as we’ve seen in the text, constitutes the basis of resistance to the coup, an attempt to keep contingency open and foreclose the predetermined authoritarian future of the fait accompli. Hugo notes that his text has a kind of overwhelming detail: it is a painstakingly reconstructed account of the coup that stretches the action of four days over two volumes and hundreds of pages. But it is precisely all of this detail that renarrates contingency into the coup, that shows the ways in which it could have gone differently and ultimately contests the rigid temporal logic of the fait accompli.(note4)
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It is here, I think, that Hugo’s text can offer a resource for us as we watch a new kind of coup unfold in slow motion in front of our eyes. It is almost difficult to catalogue all of the unjust and illegal behavior exhibited by the militarized federal police force that descended in September 2025 on Chicago, where I live, and which has since spread to other cities like Minneapolis. The daily reality in the city for months was that convoys of masked people with no badges or identification were driving around the streets in unmarked SUVs and vans, jumping out and grabbing people who looked Latinx or non-white while they were at work or waiting for the bus, and then disappearing them into a hazy network of detention centers. There was almost always no record of these detentions: fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, even children simply don’t return home one night.
One of the most powerful tools against these illegal acts has been the simple whistle. When community members see ICE, they have started to blow whistles, to warn potentially vulnerable community members, to call on other community members to come document and resist, and ultimately to ensure that ICE cannot act in the dark. The whistle, intervening either just before ICE detain someone or as they are in the process of doing so, has become a mode of keeping alternative futures open and resisting the logic of the fait accompli, giving the vulnerable a moment to run and calling the community to mobilize against what is taking place. I do not mean to be naïvely optimistic or overstate the power of these interventions: these attempts to resist ICE have increasingly been the justification for further violence, from the deployment of chemical weapons in residential streets to murder. And yet, in a small way, a comparison with Hugo’s text can give us insight into what is powerful about these interventions, and that kind of critical reflection may in turn be the basis for future forms of resistance to the inexorable logic of the fait accompli, opening up possibilities, contingencies, and solidarities we hadn’t expected.
Department of French and Italian
Northwestern University
Works Cited
Baguley, David. “Victor Hugo le Grand contre Napoléon le Petit: du génie mauvais genre.” Règles du genre et invention du génie au XIXe siècle: actes du colloque international ayant eu lieu du 18–19 septembre 1998 à l’Université de Western Ontario, edited by Alain Goldschläger, Yzabelle Martineau, and Clive Thomson, Mestengo P, 1999, pp. 19–28.
Bakhtin, M. M. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, translated by Vadim Liapunov, U of Texas P, 1993.
Gier, Albert. “Politiker und Andere Verbrecher: Ideologie und Fiktion in Victor Hugos Histoire d’un crime.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, no. 2, 2018, pp. 304–22. doi.org/10.37307/j.1866-5381.2018.02.07.
Hugo, Victor. Histoire d’un crime: déposition d’un témoin. Edited by Guy Rosa, La fabrique éditions, 2009.
McSwane, J. David, and Hannah Allam. “How Trump Is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force.” ProPublica, 18 October 2025. www.propublica.org/article/trump-dhs-ice-secret-police-civil-rights-unaccountable.
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. La Révolution sociale démontrée par le coup d’État du 2 décembre. 2nd edition, Paris, 1852. gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k61147701.
Rosa, Guy. “Notice.” Hugo, pp. 666–74.
Stone, Peter. “How Trump Is Weaponizing the DoJ to “Bully, Prosecute, Punish and Silence” His Foes.” The Guardian, 4 November 2025. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/04/trump-department-of-justice-weaponization-enemies.
Unger, Gérard. Histoire du Second Empire. Perrin, 2018.
VanderWolk, William. “Remplacer un mythe par un autre: Victor Hugo et Napoléon III.” La Revue française, vol. 10, December 2000, pp. 21–29.
Notes
(note1) 103–04. All translations are my own. Histoire is obviously a piece of retrospective myth-making that places Hugo at the center of events in a way that serves his own image and thus should be taken with a grain of salt as a historical account of the coup. However, as I will show below, absolute historical accuracy may not be the main aim of Hugo’s text.
(note2) 231. Hugo stages this unlikely dialogue as a rebuttal to Proudhon’s text on the coup, La Révolution sociale démontrée par le coup d’état du 2 décembre, in which he takes an accommodationist stance toward Bonaparte in order to promote socialist policies. There Proudhon writes, “Je ne récrimine point, je ne proteste pas, je n’accuse personne. J’accepte le fait accompli….., comme l’astronome tombé dans une citerne acceptait son accident” (2) [I do not recriminate, I do not protest, I do not accuse anyone. I accept the fait accompli... just as the astronomer who fell into a cistern accepted his accident].
(note3) My thinking about the event here draws on Bakhtin’s definition in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, which curiously stands against Hugo’s understanding of the term as he deploys it for example in Enjolras’s famous dream of a twentieth century in which history ends and there will be no more events (see Les Misérables volume 5, book 1, chapter 5).
(note4) In important ways, Hugo also counters the fait accompli with the “longue durée” in which his “déposition” can become the basis of future appeals to justice (VanderWolk 23); documenting the abuses of Trump’s government officials and ICE in the present can provide similar evidence.