Available online
here.
Come for the class analysis, stay for the bon mots.
It’s probably fitting that the only way obscure French politicians are
remembered today is through their skewering in this piece.
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. Caussidière
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.
The period that we have before us comprises the most motley mixture
of crying contradictions: constitutionalists who conspire openly
against the constitution; revolutionists who are confessedly
constitutional; a National Assembly that wants to be omnipotent and
always remains parliamentary; a Montagne that finds its vocation in
patience and counters its present defeats by prophesying future
victories; royalists who form the patres conscripti of the
republic and are forced by the situation to keep the hostile royal
houses they adhere to abroad, and the republic, which they hate, in
France; an executive power that finds its strength in its very
weakness and its respectability in the contempt that it calls forth;
a republic that is nothing but the combined infamy of two
monarchies, the Restoration and the July Monarchy, with an imperial
label – alliances whose first proviso is separation; struggles whose
first law is indecision; wild, inane agitation in the name of
tranquillity, most solemn preaching of tranquillity in the name of
revolution – passions without truth, truths without passion; heroes
without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose
sole driving force seems to be the calendar, wearying with constant
repetition of the same tensions and relaxations; antagonisms that
periodically seem to work themselves up to a climax only to lose
their sharpness and fall away without being able to resolve
themselves; pretentiously paraded exertions and philistine terror at
the danger of the world’s coming to an end, and at the same time the
pettiest intrigues and court comedies played by the world redeemers,
who in their laisser aller remind us less of the Day of Judgment
than of the times of the Fronde – the official collective genius of
France brought to naught by the artful stupidity of a single
individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks
through universal suffrage, seeking its appropriate expression
through the inveterate enemies of the interests of the masses, until
at length it finds it in the self-will of a filibuster. If any
section of history has been painted gray on gray, it is this. Men
and events appear as reverse
Schlemihls, as
shadows that have lost their bodies. The revolution itself paralyzes
its own bearers and endows only its adversaries with passionate
forcefulness. When the “red specter,” continually conjured up and
exercised by the counterrevolutionaries finally appears, it appears
not with the Phrygian cap of anarchy on its head, but in the uniform
of order, in red breeches.
The coup d’etat was ever the fixed idea of Bonaparte. With this idea
he had again set foot on French soil. He was so obsessed by it that
he continually betrayed it and blurted it out. He was so weak that,
just as continually, he gave it up again.
The army itself is no longer the flower of the peasant youth; it is
the swamp flower of the peasant lumpen proletariat. It consists
largely of replacements, of substitutes, just as the second
Bonaparte is himself only a replacement, the substitute for
Napoleon. It now performs its deeds of valor by hounding the
peasants in masses like chamois, by doing gendarme duty; and if the
natural contradictions of his system chase the Chief of the Society
of December
10
across the French border, his army, after some acts of brigandage,
will reap, not laurels, but thrashings.