Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte | Page 5

Habakuk.
Accordingly, the reviving of the dead in those revolutions served the

purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; it
served the purpose of exaggerating to the imagination the given task,
not to recoil before its practical solution; it served the purpose of
rekindling the revolutionary spirit, not to trot out its ghost.
In 1848-51 only the ghost of the old revolution wandered about, from
Marrast the "Relpublicain en gaunts jaunes," [#1 Silk-stocking
republican] who disguised himself in old Bailly, down to the
adventurer, who hid his repulsively trivial features under the iron death
mask of Napoleon. A whole people, that imagines it has imparted to
itself accelerated powers of motion through a revolution, suddenly
finds itself transferred back to a dead epoch, and, lest there be any
mistake possible on this head, the old dates turn up again; the old
calendars; the old names; the old edicts, which long since had sunk to
the level of the antiquarian's learning; even the old bailiffs, who had
long seemed mouldering with decay. The nation takes on the
appearance of that crazy Englishman in Bedlam, who imagines he is
living in the days of the Pharaohs, and daily laments the hard work that
he must do in the Ethiopian mines as gold digger, immured in a
subterranean prison, with a dim lamp fastened on his head, behind him
the slave overseer with a long whip, and, at the mouths of the mine a
mob of barbarous camp servants who understand neither the convicts in
the mines nor one another, because they do not speak a common
language. "And all this," cries the crazy Englishman, "is demanded of
me, the free-born Englishman, in order to make gold for old Pharaoh."
"In order to pay off the debts of the Bonaparte family"--sobs the French
nation. The Englishman, so long as he was in his senses, could not rid
himself of the rooted thought making gold. The Frenchmen, so long as
they were busy with a revolution, could not rid then selves of the
Napoleonic memory, as the election of December 10th proved. They
longed to escape from the dangers of revolution back to the flesh pots
of Egypt; the 2d of December, 1851 was the answer. They have not
merely the character of the old Napoleon, but the old Napoleon
himself-caricatured as he needs must appear in the middle of the
nineteenth century.
The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry

from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon
its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past.
Former revolutions require historic reminiscences in order to intoxicate
themselves with their own issues. The revolution of the nineteenth
century must let the dead bury their dead in order to reach its issue.
With the former, the phrase surpasses the substance; with this one, the
substance surpasses the phrase.
The February revolution was a surprisal; old society was taken
unawares; and the people proclaimed this political stroke a great
historic act whereby the new era was opened. On the 2d of December,
the February revolution is jockeyed by the trick of a false player, and
what is seer to be overthrown is no longer the monarchy, but the liberal
concessions which had been wrung from it by centuries of struggles.
Instead of society itself having conquered a new point, only the State
appears to have returned to its oldest form, to the simply brazen rule of
the sword and the club. Thus, upon the "coup de main" of February,
1848, comes the response of the "coup de tete" December, 1851. So
won, so lost. Meanwhile, the interval did not go by unutilized. During
the years 1848-1851, French society retrieved in abbreviated, because
revolutionary, method the lessons and teachings, which--if it was to be
more than a disturbance of the surface-should have preceded the
February revolution, had it developed in regular order, by rule, so to
say. Now French society seems to have receded behind its point of
departure; in fact, however, it was compelled to first produce its own
revolutionary point of departure, the situation, circumstances,
conditions, under which alone the modern revolution is in earnest.
Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, rush
onward rapidly from success to success, their stage effects outbid one
another, men and things seem to be set in flaming brilliants, ecstasy is
the prevailing spirit; but they are short-lived, they reach their climax
speedily, then society relapses into a long fit of nervous reaction before
it learns how to appropriate the fruits of its period of feverish
excitement. Proletarian revolutions, on the contrary, such as those of
the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly; constantly
interrupt themselves in their own course; come back to