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

THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE

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 i