After Napoleon III's weak leadership led to Prussian triumph in the Franco-Prussian War, and Louis' subsequent abdication, Bonapartists continued to aspire and to agitate for another member of the family to be placed on the throne. However, from 1871 forward, they competed with monarchist groups which favoured the restoration of the family of Louis-Philippe, King of the French (1830-1848) (the Orleanists), and with those who favoured the restoration of the House of Bourbon, the traditional French royal family (Legitimists). The strength of these three monarchist factions combined was almost undoubtedly greater than that of the Republicans of the era, but as the three proved to be irreconcilable on the choice of who should be the new French monarch, monarchist fervor eventually waned and the French Republic became more or less a permanent facet of French life, and Bonapartism was slowly relegated to being the civic faith of a few romantics as more of a hobby than a practical political philosophy. The final death knell for Bonapartism was probably sounded when Eugene Bonaparte, only son of Napoleon III, was killed in action while serving as a British Army officer in Zululand in 1879.

Marxist terminology

Karl Marx was a student of Jacobinism and the French Revolution as well as a contemporary critic of the Second Republic and Second Empire. In Marxist terminology, Bonapartism refers to when counterrevolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and then use selective reformism to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes. In the process, Marx argues, Bonapartists preserve and mask the power of a narrower ruling class. He judged Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon III of having thus corrupted revolutions in France. Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" (1852) gives his analysis of French Bonapartism and what he calls the phenomenon's repetitive history.

Many Trotskyists and left opponents of the 20th centurty bureaucratic socialist regimes, such as under Stalin and Mao, consider them to be left bonapartists.