Karl Marx:
THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS NAPOLEON
I
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and
personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time
as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis
Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of
1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs
in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains
of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with
revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not
exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they
anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service,
borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to
present this new scene in world history in this time-honored disguise
and this borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle
Paul, the Revolution of 1789-18I4 draped itself alternately in the
guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of
1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now I789, now the
revolutionary tradition of I793-95. In like manner, the beginner who
has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother
tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses
himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old
and when he forgets his native tongue.
When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a
salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton,
Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and
the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their
time -- that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society --
in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases. The first one destroyed the
feudal foundation and cut off the feudal heads that had grown on it.
The other created inside France the only conditions under which free
competition could be developed, parceled-out land properly used, and
the unfettered productive power of the nation employed; and beyond the
French borders it swept away feudal institutions everywhere, to
provide, as far as necessary, bourgeois society in France with an
appropriate up-to-date environment on the European continent. Once the
new social formation was established, the antediluvian colossi
disappeared and with them also the resurrected Romanism -- the
Brutuses, the Gracchi, the publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and
Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality bred its own
true interpreters and spokesmen in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards,
Benjamin Constants, and Guizots; its real military leaders sat behind
the office desk and the hog-headed Louis XVIII was its political chief.
Entirely absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful
competitive struggle, it no longer remembered that the ghosts of the
Roman period had watched over its cradle. But unheroic though bourgeois
society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil
war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere
classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators
found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they
needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of
their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great
historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century
earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old
Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois
revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois
transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke
supplanted Habakkuk.
Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose
of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of
magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its
solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not
making its ghost walk again.
From 1848 to 1851, only the ghost of the old revolution circulated --
from Marrast, the republican in yellow [kid] gloves who disguised
himself as old Bailly, down to the adventurer who hides his trivial and
repulsive features behind the iron death mask of Napoleon. A whole
nation, which thought it had acquired an accelerated power of motion by
means of a revolution, suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct
epoch, and to remove any doubt about the relapse, the old dates arise
again -- the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts, which had
long since become a subject of antiquarian scholarship, and the old
minions of the law who had seemed long dead. The nation feels like the
mad Englishman in Bedlam who thinks he is living in the time of the old
Pharaohs and daily bewails the hard labor he must perform in the
Ethiopian gold mines, immured in this subterranean prison, a pale lamp
fastened to his head, the overseer of the slaves behind him with a long
whip, and at the exits a confused welter of barbarian war slaves who
understand neither the forced laborers nor each other, since they speak
no common language. "And all this," sighs the mad Englishman, "is
expected of me, a freeborn Briton, in order to make gold for the
Pharaohs." "In order to pay the debts of the Bonaparte family," sighs
the French nation. The Englishman, so long as he was not in his right
mind, could not get rid of his idee fixe of mining gold. The French, so
long as they were engaged in revolution, could not get rid of the
memory of Napoleon, as the election of December 10 proved. They longed
to return from the perils of revolution to the fleshpots of Egypt, and
December 2, 1851, was the answer. Now they have not only a caricature
of the old Napoleon, but the old Napoleon himself, caricatured as he
would have to be in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry
from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself
before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former
revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to
smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century
must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own
content. There the phrase went beyond the content -- here the content
goes beyond the phrase.
The February Revolution was a surprise attack, a seizing of the old
society unawares, and the people proclaimed this unexpected stroke a
deed of world importance, ushering in a new epoch. On December 2 the
February Revolution is conjured away as a cardsharp's trick, and what
seems overthrown is no longer the monarchy but the liberal concessions
that had been wrung from it through centuries of struggle. Instead of
society having conquered a new content for itself, it seems that the
state has only returned to its oldest form, to a shamelessly simple
rule by the sword and the monk's cowl. This is the answer to the coup
de main of February, 1848, given by the coup de tete of December, 1851.
Easy come, easy go. Meantime, the interval did not pass unused. During
1848-51 French society, by an abbreviated because revolutionary method,
caught up with the studies and experiences which in a regular, so to
speak, textbook course of development would have preceded the February
Revolution, if the latter were to be more than a mere ruffling of the
surface. Society seems now to have retreated to behind its starting
point; in truth, it has first to create for itself the revolutionary
point of departure-the situation, the relations, the conditions under
which alone modern revolution becomes serious.
Bourgeois revolutions like those of the eighteenth century storm more
swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each
other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the
order of the day- but they are short-lived, soon they have reached
their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [crapulence] takes hold of
society before it learns to assimilate the results of its
storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian
revolutions like those of the nineteenth century constantly criticize
themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return
to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride
with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness
of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the
latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again
more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite
colossalness of their own goals -- until a situation is created which
makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call
out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
["Here is the rose, here dance!" From Aesop's fable, "The Swaggerer,"
referring to one who boasted that he had made a gigantic leap in Rhodes
(which also means "rose" in Greek) and was challenged: "Here is Rhodes,
here leap!" Marx's paraphrase, "Here is the rose, here dance," is from
the quotation used by Hegel in the preface to his book Outlines of the
Philosophy of Right (182I). -- Ed.]
For the rest, every fair observer, even if he had not followed the
course of French developments step by step, must have had a
presentiment of the imminence of an unheard-of disgrace for the
revolution. It was enough to hear the complacent yelps of victory with
which the democrats congratulated each other on the expectedly gracious
consequences of the second Sunday in May, 1852. In their minds that
second Sunday of May had become an idee fixe, a dogma, like the day of
Christ's reappearance and the beginning of the millennium in the minds
of the chiliasts. As always, weakness had taken refuge in a belief in
miracles, believed the enemy to be overcome when he was only conjured
away in imagination, and lost all understanding of the present in an
inactive glorification of the future that was in store for it and the
deeds it had in mind but did not want to carry out yet. Those heroes
who seek to disprove their demonstrated incapacity by offering each
other their sympathy and getting together in a crowd had tied up their
bundles, collected their laurel wreaths in advance, and occupied
themselves with discounting on the exchange market the republics in
partibus for which they had already providently organized the
government personnel with all the calm of their unassuming disposition.
December 2 struck them like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, and those
who in periods of petty depression gladly let their inner fears be
drowned by the loudest renters will perhaps have convinced themselves
that the times are past when the cackle of geese could save the
Capitol.
The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue
and red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the
platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire
literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the
civil law and the penal code, liberte, egalite, fraternite, and the
second Sunday in May, 1852 -- all have vanished like a phantasmagoria
before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a
sorcerer. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for the
moment, so that with its own hand it may make its last will and
testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of
the people itself: "All that exists deserves to perish." [From Goethe's
Faust, Part One. -- Ed.]
It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken
unawares. Nations and women are not forgiven the unguarded hour in
which the first adventurer who came along could violate them. Such
turns of speech do not solve the riddle but only formulate it
differently. It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six
millions can be surprised and delivered without resistance into
captivity by three knights of industry.
Let us recapitulate in general outline the phases that the French
Revolution went through from February 24, 1848, to December, 1851.
Three main periods are unmistakable: the February period; the period of
the constitution of the republic or the Constituent National Assembly
-- May 1848, to May 28, 1849; and the period of the constitutional
republic or the Legislative National Assembly -- May 28, 1849, to
December 2, 1851.
The first period -- from February 24, the overthrow of Louis Philippe,
to May 4, 1848, the meeting of the Constituent Assembly -- the February
period proper, may be designated as the prologue of the revolution. Its
character was officially expressed in the fact that the government it
improvised itself declared that it was provisional, and like the
government, everything that was mentioned, attempted, or enunciated
during this period proclaimed itself to be only provisional. Nobody and
nothing ventured to lay any claim to the right of existence and of real
action. All the elements that had prepared or determined the
revolution -- the dynastic opposition, the republican bourgeoisie, the
democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie, and the social-democratic
workers, provisionally found their place in the February government.
It could not be otherwise. The February days originally intended an
electoral reform by which the circle of the politically privileged
among the possessing class itself was to be widened and the exclusive
domination of the aristocracy of finance overthrown. When it came to
the actual conflict, however -- when the people mounted the barricades,
the National Guard maintained a passive attitude, the army offered no
serious resistance, and the monarchy ran away -- the republic appeared
to be a matter of course. Every party construed it in its own way.
Having secured it arms in hand, the proletariat impressed its stamp
upon it and proclaimed it to be a social republic. There was thus
indicated the general content of the modern revolution, a content which
was in most singular contradiction to everything that, with the
material available, with the degree of education attained by the
masses, under the given circumstances and relations, could be
immediately realized in practice. On the other hand, the claims of all
the remaining elements that had collaborated in the February Revolution
were recognized by the lion's share they obtained in the government. In
no period, therefore, do we find a more confused mixture of high-flown
phrases and actual uncertainty and clumsiness, of more enthusiastic
striving for innovation and more deeply rooted domination of the old
routine, of more apparent harmony of the whole of society; and more
profound estrangement of its elements. While the Paris proletariat
still reveled in the vision of the wide prospects that had opened
before it and indulged in seriously meant discussions of social
problems, the old powers of society had grouped themselves, assembled,
reflected, and found unexpected support in the mass of the nation, the
peasants and petty bourgeois, who all at once stormed onto the
political stage after the barriers of the July Monarchy had fallen.
The second period, from May 4, 1848, to the end of May, 1849, is the
period of the constitution, the foundation, of the bourgeois republic.
Immediately after the February days not only had the dynastic
opposition been surprised by the republicans and the republicans by the
socialists, but all France by Paris. The National Assembly, which met
on May 4, 1848, had emerged from the national elections and represented
the nation. It was a living protest against the pretensions of the
February days and was to reduce the results of the revolution to the
bourgeois scale. In vain the Paris proletariat, which immediately
grasped the character of this National Assembly, attempted on May 15, a
few days after it met, to negate its existence forcibly, to dissolve
it, to disintegrate again into its constituent parts the organic form
in which the proletariat was threatened by the reacting spirit of the
nation. As is known, May 15 had no other result but that of removing
Blanqui and his comrades -- that is, the real leaders of the
proletarian party -- from the public stage for the entire duration of
the cycle we are considering.
The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a
bourgeois republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the
bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie
will now rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris
proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this
declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat
replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the
history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On
its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie,
the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat
organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and
the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none
but itself. More than three thousand insurgents were butchered after
the victory, and fifteen thousand were deported without trial. With
this defeat the proletariat passes into the background on the
revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward again on every
occasion, as soon as the movement appears to make a fresh start, but
with ever decreased expenditure of strength and always slighter
results. As soon as one of the social strata above it gets into
revolutionary ferment, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it
and so shares all the defeats that the different parties suffer, one
after another. But these subsequent blows become the weaker, the
greater the surface of society over which they are distributed. The
more important leaders of the proletariat in the Assembly and in the
press successively fall victim to the courts, and ever more equivocal
figures come to head it. In part it throws itself into doctrinaire
experiments, exchange banks and workers' associations, hence into a
movement in which it renounces the revolutionizing of the old world by
means of the latter's own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather,
to achieve its salvation behind society's back, in private fashion,
within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily
suffers shipwreck. It seems to be unable either to rediscover
revolutionary greatness in itself or to win new energy from the
connections newly entered into, until all classes with which it
contended in June themselves lie prostrate beside it. But at least it
succumbs with the honors of the great, world-historic struggle; not
only France, but all Europe trembles at the June earthquake, while the
ensuing defeats of the upper classes are so cheaply bought that they
require barefaced exaggeration by the victorious party to be able to
pass for events at au, and become the more ignominious the further the
defeated party is removed from the proletarian party.
The defeat of the June insurgents, to be sure, had now prepared, had
leveled the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and
built, but it had shown at the same time that in Europe the questions
at issue are other than that of "republic or monarchy." It had revealed
that here "bourgeois republic" signifies the unlimited despotism of one
class over other classes. It had proved that in countries with an old
civilization, with a developed formation of classes, with modern
conditions of production, and with an intellectual consciousness in
which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of
centuries, the republic signifies in general only the political form of
revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of
life -- as, for example, in the United States of North America, where,
though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but
continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux,
where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a
stagnant surplus population, rather compensate for the relative
deficiency of heads and hands, and where, finally, the feverish,
youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world
of its own, has neither time nor opportunity left for abolishing the
old world of ghosts.
During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of
Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of
socialism, of communism. They had "saved" society from "the enemies of
society." They had given out the watchwords of the old society,
"property, family, religion, order," to their army as passwords and had
proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: "In this sign thou
shalt conquer! " From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous
parties which gathered under this sign against the June insurgents
seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest,
it goes down before the cry: "Property, family, religion, order."
Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts,
as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every
demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary
liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow
democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an "attempt on society" and
stigmatized as "socialism." And finally the high priests of "religion
and order" themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods,
hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison vans,
thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the
ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to
pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order.
Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs
of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses
bombarded for amusement -- in the name of property, of the family, of
religion, and of order. Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms
the holy phalanx of order and the hero Crapulinski installs himself in
the Tuileries as the "savior of society."
