Hegel says somewhere that all 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 1848 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 conjurations 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
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 interpreters 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 head. 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 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 “_Républicain en gaunts jaunes_,”[1] 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 of making
gold. The Frenchmen, so long as they were busy with a revolution,
could not rid themselves 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 caricature 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 required 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 seen 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 tête” of
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 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]
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 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 “liberté, égalité, fraternité,”
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 had prepared or determined the revolution—dynastic
opposition, republican bourgeoisie, democratic-republican small
traders’ class, social-democratic labor element—all found
“provisionally” their place in the February government.
It could not be otherwise. The February days contemplated originally a
reform of the suffrage laws, whereby the area of the politically
privileged among the property-holding class was to be extended, while
the exclusive rule of the aristocracy of finance was to be
overthrown. When, however, it came to a real conflict, when the people
mounted the barricades, when the National Guard stood passive, when
the army offered no serious resistance, and the kingdom ran away, then
the republic seemed self-understood. Each party interpreted it in its
own sense. Won, arms in hand, by the proletariat, they put upon it the
stamp of their own class, and proclaimed the social republic. Thus the
general purpose of modern revolutions was indicated, a purpose,
however, that stood in most singular contradiction to every thing
that, with the material at hand, with the stage of enlightenment that
the masses had reached, and under existing circumstances and
conditions, could be immediately used. On the other hand, the claims
of all the other elements, that had co-operated in the revolution of
February, were recognized by the lion’s share that they received in
the government. Hence, in no period do we find a more motley mixture
of high-sounding phrases together with actual doubt and helplessness;
of more enthusiastic reform aspirations, together with a more slavish
adherence to the old routine; more seeming harmony permeating the
whole of society together with a deeper alienation of its several
elements. While the Parisian proletariat was still gloating over the
sight of the great perspective that had disclosed itself to their
view, and was indulging in seriously meant discussions over the social
problems, the old powers of society had groomed themselves, had
gathered together, had deliberated and found an unexpected support in
the mass of the nation—the peasants and small traders—all of whom
threw themselves on a sudden upon the political stage, after the
barriers of the July monarchy had fallen down.
The second period, from May 4, 1848, to the end of May, 1849, is the
period of the constitution, of the founding of the bourgeois
republic. Immediately after the February days, not only was the
dynastic opposition surprised by the republicans, and the republicans
by the Socialists, but all France was surprised by Paris. The national
assembly, that met on May 4, 1848, to frame a constitution, was the
outcome of the national elections; it represented the nation. It was a
living protest against the assumption of the February days, and it was
intended to bring the results of the revolution back to the bourgeois
measure. In vain did the proletariat of Paris, which forthwith
understood the character of this national assembly, endeavor, a few
days after its meeting, on May 15, to deny its existence by force, to
dissolve it, to disperse the organic apparition, in which the reacting
spirit of the nation was threatening them, and thus reduce it back to
its separate component parts. As is known, the 15th of May had no
other result than that of removing Blanqui and his associates, i.e.,
the real leaders of the proletarian party, from the public scene for
the whole period of the cycle which we are here considering.
Upon the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe, only the bourgeois
republic could follow; that is to say, a limited portion of the
bourgeoisie having ruled under the name of the king, now the whole
bourgeoisie was to rule under the name of the people. The demands of
the Parisian proletariat are utopian tom-fooleries that have to be
done away with. To this declaration of the constitutional national
assembly, the Paris proletariat answers with the June insurrection,
the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The
bourgeois republic won. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance,
the industrial bourgeoisie; the middle class; the small traders’
class; the army; the slums, organized as Guarde Mobile; the
intellectual celebrities, the parsons’ class, and the rural
population. On the side of the Parisian proletariat stood none but
itself. Over 3,000 insurgents were massacred, after the victory 15,000
were transported without trial. With this defeat, the proletariat
steps to the background on the revolutionary stage. It always seeks to
crowd forward, so soon as the movement seems to acquire new impetus,
but with ever weaker effort and ever smaller results. So soon as any
of the above lying layers of society gets into revolutionary
fermentation, it enters into alliance therewith and thus shares all
the defeats which the several parties successively suffer. But these
succeeding blows become ever weaker the more generally they are
distributed over the whole surface of society. The more important
leaders of the Proletariat, in its councils, and the press, fall one
after another victims of the courts, and ever more questionable
figures step to the front. _It partly throws itself upon doctrinaire
experiments, “co-operative banking” and “labor exchange” schemes; in
other words, it goes into movements, in which it gives up the task of
revolutionizing the old world with its own large collective weapons
and on the contrary, seeks to bring about its emancipation, behind the
back of society, in private ways, within the narrow bounds of its own
class conditions, and, consequently, inevitably fails._ The
proletariat seems to be able neither to find again the revolutionary
magnitude within itself nor to draw new energy from the newly formed
alliances until _all the classes_, with whom it contended in June,
shall lie prostrate along with itself. But in all these defeats, the
proletariat succumbs at least with the honor that attaches to great
historic struggles; not France alone, all Europe trembles before the
June earthquake, while the successive defeats inflicted upon the
higher classes are bought so easily that they need the brazen
exaggeration of the victorious party itself to be at all able to pass
muster as an event; and these defeats become more disgraceful the
further removed the defeated party stands from the proletariat.
True enough, the defeat of the June insurgents prepared, leveled the
ground, upon which the bourgeois republic could be founded and
erected; but it, at the same time, showed that there are in Europe
other issues besides that of “Republic or Monarchy.” It revealed the
fact that here the Bourgeois Republic meant the unbridled despotism of
one class over another. It proved that, with nations enjoying an older
civilization, having developed class distinctions, modern conditions
of production, an intellectual consciousness, wherein all traditions
of old have been dissolved through the work of centuries, that with
such countries the republic means only the _political revolutionary
form of bourgeois society_, not its _conservative form of existence_,
as is the case in the United States of America, where, true enough,
the classes already exist, but have not yet acquired permanent
character, are in constant flux and reflux, constantly changing their
elements and yielding them up to one another; where the modern means
of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant population,
rather compensate for the relative scarcity of heads and hands; and,
finally, where the feverishly youthful life of material production,
which has to appropriate a new world to itself, has so far left
neither time nor opportunity to abolish the illusions of old.[3]
All classes and parties joined hands in the June days in a “Party of
Order” against the class of the proletariat, which was designated as
the “Party of Anarchy,” of Socialism, of Communism. They claimed to
have “saved” society against the “enemies of society.” They gave out
the slogans of the old social order—“Property, Family, Religion,
Order”—as the pass-words for their army, and cried out to the
counter-revolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou wilt conquer!”
From that moment on, so soon as any of the numerous parties, which had
marshalled themselves under this sign against the June insurgents,
tries, in turn, to take the revolutionary field in the interest of its
own class, it goes down in its turn before the cry: “Property, Family,
Religion, Order.” Thus it happens that “society is saved” as often as
the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more
exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for
the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary
liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest
democracy, is forthwith punished as an “assault upon society,” and is
branded as “Socialism.” Finally the High Priests of “Religion and
Order” themselves are kicked off their tripods; are fetched out of
their beds in the dark, hurried into patrol wagons, thrust into jail
or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths
are sealed, their pen is broken, their law torn to pieces in the name
of Religion, of Family, of Property, and of Order. Bourgeois, fanatic
on the point of “Order,” are shot down on their own balconies by
drunken soldiers, forfeit their family property, and their houses are
bombarded for pastime—all in the name of Property, of Family, of
Religion, and of Order. Finally, the refuse of bourgeois society
constitutes the “holy phalanx of Order,” and the hero Crapulinsky
makes his entry into the Tuileries as the “Savior of Society.”