The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte(十八世纪路易斯波拿巴的雾月革命)

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The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The Eighteenth Brumaire

of Louis Bonaparte

by Karl Marx

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Translator's Preface

"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" is one of Karl Marx'

most profound and most brilliant monographs. It may be considered the

best work extant on the philosophy of history, with an eye especially upon

the history of the Movement of the Proletariat, together with the bourgeois

and other manifestations that accompany the same, and the tactics that

such conditions dictate.

The recent populist uprising; the more recent "Debs Movement"; the

thousand and one utopian and chimerical notions that are flaring up; the

capitalist maneuvers; the hopeless, helpless grasping after straws, that

characterize the conduct of the bulk of the working class; all of these,

together with the empty-headed, ominous figures that are springing into

notoriety for a time and have their day, mark the present period of the

Labor Movement in the nation a critical one. The best information

acquirable, the best mental training obtainable are requisite to steer

through the existing chaos that the death-tainted social system of today

creates all around us. To aid in this needed information and mental

training, this instructive work is now made accessible to English readers,

and is commended to the serious study of the serious.

The teachings contained in this work are hung on an episode in recent

French history. With some this fact may detract of its value. A pedantic,

supercilious notion is extensively abroad among us that we are an "Anglo

Saxon" nation; and an equally pedantic, supercilious habit causes many to

look to England for inspiration, as from a racial birthplace Nevertheless,

for weal or for woe, there is no such thing extant as "Anglo-Saxon"--of al

nations, said to be "Anglo-Saxon," in the United States least. What we

still have from England, much as appearances may seem to point the other

way, is not of our bone-and-marrow, so to speak, but rather partakes of the

nature of "importations. "We are no more English on account of them

than we are Chinese because we all drink tea.

Of all European nations, France is the on to which we come nearest.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Besides its republican form of government--the directness of its history,

the unity of its actions, the sharpness that marks its internal development,

are all characteristics that find their parallel her best, and vice versa. In

all essentials the study of modern French history, particularly when

sketched by such a master hand as Marx', is the most valuable one for the

acquisition of that historic, social and biologic insight that our country

stands particularly in need of, and that will be inestimable during the

approaching critical days.

For the assistance of those who, unfamiliar with the history of France,

may be confused by some of the terms used by Marx, the following

explanations may prove aidful:

On the 18th Brumaire (Nov. 9th), the post-revolutionary development

of affairs in France enabled the first Napoleon to take a step that led with

inevitable certainty to the imperial throne. The circumstance that fifty

and odd years later similar events aided his nephew, Louis Bonaparte, to

take a similar step with a similar result, gives the name to this work--"The

Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte."

As to the other terms and allusions that occur, the following sketch

will suffice:

Upon the overthrow of the first Napoleon came the restoration of the

Bourbon throne (Louis XVIII, succeeded by Charles X). In July, 1830,

an uprising of the upper tier of the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class--the

aristocracy of finance-- overthrew the Bourbon throne, or landed

aristocracy, and set up the throne of Orleans, a younger branch of the

house of Bourbon, with Louis Philippe as king. From the month in

which this revolution occurred, Louis Philippe's monarchy is called the

"July Monarchy. "In February, 1848, a revolt of a lower tier of the

capitalist class-the industrial bourgeoisie--, against the aristocracy of

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

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

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

CHAPTER 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

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

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 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

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

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.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

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 what seems to have been accomplished, in

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

order to start over anew; scorn with cruel thoroughness the half measures,

weaknesses and meannesses of their first attempts; seem to throw down

their adversary only in order to enable him to draw fresh strength from the

earth, and again, to rise up against them in more gigantic stature;

constantly recoil in fear before the undefined monster magnitude of their

own objects--until finally that situation is created which renders all retreat

impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out:

"Hic Rhodus, hic salta !" [#2 Here is Rhodes, leap here! An allusion to

Aesop's Fables.]

Every observer of average intelligence; even if he failed to follow step

by step the course of French development, must have anticipated that an

unheard of fiasco was in store for the revolution. It was enough to hear

the self-satisfied yelpings of victory wherewith the Messieurs Democrats

mutually congratulated one another upon the pardons of May 2d, 1852.

Indeed, May 2d had become a fixed idea in their heads; it had become a

dogma with them--something like the day on which Christ was to reappear

and the Millennium to begin had formed in the heads of the Chiliasts.

Weakness had, as it ever does, taken refuge in the wonderful; it believed

the enemy was overcome if, in its imagination, it hocus-pocused him away;

and it lost all sense of the present in the imaginary apotheosis of the future,

that was at hand, and of the deeds, that it had "in petto," but which it did

not yet want to bring to the scratch. The heroes, who ever seek to refute

their established incompetence by mutually bestowing their sympathy

upon one another and by pulling together, had packed their satchels, taken

their laurels in advance payments and were just engaged in the work of

getting discounted "in partibus," on the stock exchange, the republics for

which, in the silence of their unassuming dispositions, they had carefully

organized the government personnel. The 2d of December struck them

like a bolt from a clear sky; and the 'peoples, who, in periods of timid

despondency, gladly allow their hidden fears to be drowned by the loudest

screamers, will perhaps have become convinced that the days are gone by

when the cackling of geese could save the Capitol.

The constitution, the national assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

and the red republicans, the heroes from Africa, the thunder from the

tribune, the flash-lightnings from the daily press, the whole literature, the

political names and the intellectual celebrities, the civil and the criminal

law, the "liberte', egalite', fraternite'," together with the 2d of May 1852--

all vanished like a phantasmagoria before the ban of one man, whom his

enemies themselves do not pronounce an adept at witchcraft. Universal

suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, to the end that, before

the eyes of the whole world, it should make its own testament with its own

hands, and, in the name of the people, declare: "All that exists deserves to

perish."

It is not enough to say, as the Frenchmen do, that their nation was

taken by surprise. A nation, no more than a woman, is excused for the

unguarded hour when the first adventurer who comes along can do

violence to her. The riddle is not solved by such shifts, it is only

formulated in other words. There remains to be explained how a nation

of thirty-six millions can be surprised by three swindlers, and taken to

prison without resistance.

Let us recapitulate in general outlines the phases which the French

revolution of' February 24th, 1848, to December, 1851, ran through.

Three main periods are unmistakable:

First--The February period;

Second--The period of constituting the republic, or of the constitutive

national assembly (May 4, 1848, to May 29th, 1849);

Third--The period of the constitutional republic, or of the legislative

national assembly (May 29, 1849, to December 2, 1851).

The first period, from February 24, or the downfall of Louis Philippe,

to May 4, 1848, the date of the assembling of the constitutive assembly--

the February period proper--may be designated as the prologue of the

revolution. It officially expressed its' own character in this, that the

government which it improvised declared itself "provisional;" and, like the

government, everything that was broached, attempted, or uttered,

pronounced itself provisional. Nobody and nothing dared to assume the

right of permanent existence and of an actual fact. All the elements that

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The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte(十八世纪路易斯波拿巴的雾月革命)

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