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 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
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.
