Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte | Page 4

finance, in turn dethroned Louis Philippe. The affair, also named from
the month in which it took place, is the "February Revolution. "The
"Eighteenth Brumaire" starts with that event
Despite the inapplicableness to our affairs of the political names and
political leadership herein described, both these names and leaderships
are to such an extent the products of an economic-social development
that has here too taken place with even greater sharpens, and they have
their present or threatened counterparts here so completely, that, by the
light of this work of Marx', we are best enabled to understand our own
history, to know whence we came, and whither we are going and how
to conduct ourselves.

D.D.L. New York, Sept. 12, 1897

The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte

I

Hegel says somewhere that that great historic facts and personages
recur twice. He forgot to add: "Once as tragedy, and again as farce.
"Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the "Mountain"
of 1848-51 for the "Mountain" of 1793-05, the Nephew for the Uncle.
The identical caricature marks also the conditions under which the
second edition of the eighteenth Brumaire is issued.
Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole
cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out
of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations
weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living. At the very time when
men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in
bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of
revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service the
spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes
to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and with
such borrowed language Thus did Luther masquerade as the Apostle
Paul; thus did the revolution of 1789-1814 drape itself alternately as
Roman Republic and as Roman Empire; nor did the revolution of 1818
know what better to do than to parody at one time the year 1789, at
another the revolutionary traditions of 1793-95 Thus does the beginner,
who has acquired a new language, keep on translating it back into his
own mother tongue; only then has he grasped the spirit of the new
language and is able freely to express himself therewith when he moves
in it without recollections of the old, and has forgotten in its use his
own hereditary tongue.
When these historic configurations of the dead past are closely

observed a striking difference is forthwith noticeable. Camille
Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Juste, Napoleon, the heroes as
well as the parties and the masses of the old French revolution,
achieved in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases the task of their
time: the emancipation and the establishment of modern bourgeois
society. One set knocked to pieces the old feudal groundwork and
mowed down the feudal heads that had grown upon it; Napoleon
brought about, within France, the conditions under which alone free
competition could develop, the partitioned lands be exploited the
nation's unshackled powers of industrial production be utilized; while,
beyond the French frontier, he swept away everywhere the
establishments of feudality, so far as requisite, to furnish the bourgeois
social system of France with fit surroundings of the European continent,
and such as were in keeping with the times. Once the new social
establishment was set on foot, the antediluvian giants vanished, and,
along with them, the resuscitated Roman world--the Brutuses, Gracchi,
Publicolas, the Tribunes, the Senators, and Caesar himself. In its sober
reality, bourgeois society had produced its own true interpretation in
the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants and Guizots;
its real generals sat behind the office desks; and the mutton-head of
Louis XVIII was its political lead. Wholly absorbed in the production
of wealth and in the peaceful fight of competition, this society could no
longer understand that the ghosts of the days of Rome had watched
over its cradle. And yet, lacking in heroism as bourgeois society is, it
nevertheless had stood in need of heroism, of self-sacrifice, of terror, of
civil war, and of bloody battle fields to bring it into the world. Its
gladiators found in the stern classic traditions of the Roman republic
the ideals and the form, the self-deceptions, that they needed in order to
conceal from themselves the narrow bourgeois substance of their own
struggles, and to keep their passion up to the height of a great historic
tragedy. Thus, at another stage of development a century before, did
Cromwell and the English people draw from the Old Testament the
language, passions and illusions for their own bourgeois revolution.
When the real goal was reached, when the remodeling of English
society was accomplished, Locke supplanted