Brumaire. All this is completely accidental with relation to the general
course of things which was pushing the new class, mistress of the field,
to save from the Revolution that which appeared to it necessary to save,
and that necessitated the creation of a bureaucratico-military
government. It was, however, necessary to find the man, or the men. But
what actually happened came about in the fashion that we know. It
depended on this fact, that it was Napoleon who directed the enterprise
and not a pitiable Monk, or a ridiculous Boulanger. And from that moment
the accident ceases to be accident, precisely because it is this
definite person who gives his imprint and physiognomy to the events,
determining the fashion or the manner in which they have unfolded.

The very fact that all history rests upon antitheses, contrasts,
struggles and wars, explains the decisive influence of certain men in
definite occasions. These men are neither a negligible accident of the
social mechanism, nor miraculous creators of what society, without them,
could have made in no other fashion. It is the very interlacings of the
antithetic conditions, which causes the fact that definite individuals,
generous, heroic, fortunate, mischievous, are called at critical moments
to say the decisive word. As long as the particular interests of the
different social groups are in such a state of tension, that all the
parties in the struggle reciprocally paralyze each other, then to make
the political gearing move, there is need of the individual
consciousness of a definite individual.

The social antitheses, which make of every human community an unstable
organization, give to history, especially when it is seen and examined
rapidly and in its main features, the character of a drama. This drama
in all its relations is repeated from community to community, from
nation to nation, from state to state, because the inner inequalities
concurring with the external differentiations, have produced and produce
the whole movement of wars, conquests, treaties, colonizations, etc. In
this drama have always appeared, in the role of leaders of society, the
men who are characterized as eminent, as great, and empiricism has
concluded from their presence that they were the principal authors of
history. To carry back the explanation of their appearance to the
general causes and the common conditions of the social structure, is a
thing which harmonizes perfectly with the data of