1、The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl MarxThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 2 Translators Preface“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte“ is one of Karl Marx most profound and most brilliant monographs. It may be considered the b
2、est work extant on the philosophy of history, with an eye especially upon the history of the Movement of the Proletariat, together with the bourgeois and other manifestations that accompany the same, and the tactics that such conditions dictate. The recent populist uprising; the more recent “Debs Mo
3、vement“; the thousand and one utopian and chimerical notions that are flaring up; the capitalist maneuvers; the hopeless, helpless grasping after straws, that characterize the conduct of the bulk of the working class; all of these, together with the empty-headed, ominous figures that are springing i
4、nto notoriety for a time and have their day, mark the present period of the Labor Movement in the nation a critical one. The best information acquirable, the best mental training obtainable are requisite to steer through the existing chaos that the death-tainted social system of today creates all ar
5、ound us. To aid in this needed information and mental training, this instructive work is now made accessible to English readers, and is commended to the serious study of the serious. The teachings contained in this work are hung on an episode in recent French history. With some this fact may detract
6、 of its value. A pedantic, supercilious notion is extensively abroad among us that we are an “Anglo Saxon“ nation; and an equally pedantic, supercilious habit causes many to look to England for inspiration, as from a racial birthplace Nevertheless, for weal or for woe, there is no such thing extant
7、as “Anglo-Saxon“-of al nations, said to be “Anglo-Saxon,“ in the United States least. What we still have from England, much as appearances may seem to point the other way, is not of our bone-and-marrow, so to speak, but rather partakes of the nature of “importations. “We are no more English on accou
8、nt of them than we are Chinese because we all drink tea. Of all European nations, France is the on to which we come nearest.The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 3 Besides its republican form of government-the directness of its history, the unity of its actions, the sharpness that marks its int
9、ernal development, are all characteristics that find their parallel her best, and vice versa. In all essentials the study of modern French history, particularly when sketched by such a master hand as Marx, is the most valuable one for the acquisition of that historic, social and biologic insight tha
10、t our country stands particularly in need of, and that will be inestimable during the approaching critical days. For the assistance of those who, unfamiliar with the history of France, may be confused by some of the terms used by Marx, the following explanations may prove aidful: On the 18th Brumair
11、e (Nov. 9th), the post-revolutionary development of affairs in France enabled the first Napoleon to take a step that led with inevitable certainty to the imperial throne. The circumstance that fifty and odd years later similar events aided his nephew, Louis Bonaparte, to take a similar step with a s
12、imilar result, gives the name to this work-“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.“ 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 Ju
13、ly, 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 revol
14、ution occurred, Louis Philippes 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,
15、 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 areThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 4 to such an extent the product
16、s 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
17、are going and how to conduct ourselves. D.D.L. New York, Sept. 12, 1897The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 5 CHAPTER 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 f
18、or 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 doe
19、s 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 bef
20、ore, 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 t
21、he 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 acq
22、uired 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 the
23、se 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 in Roman costumes and with Roman phras
24、es the task of their time: theThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 6 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
25、 under which alone free competition could develop, the partitioned lands be exploited the nations 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
26、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 S
27、enators, and Caesar himself. In its sober reality, bourgeois society had produced its own true interpretation 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 lead. Wholly absorb
28、ed 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 t
29、error, 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 strug
30、gles, 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 reache
31、d, 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
32、to recoilThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 7 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 “Relpublicain en gaunts jaunes,“ #1 Silk-stoc
33、king republican 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 ba
34、ck 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 antiquarians learning; even the old bailiffs, who had long seemed mouldering with decay. The nation t
35、akes 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 overse
36、er 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 ma
37、ke 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 making gold. The Frenchmen, so long as they were busy with a revolution, could not rid then selves of
38、 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 character of the old Napoleon, but the old Napoleon himself-caricatured as he needs
39、 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.The Eighteenth Brumaire of
40、 Louis Bonaparte 8 Former revolutions require 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, th
41、e 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, a
42、nd what is seer 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 a
43、nd the club. Thus, upon the “coup de main“ of February, 1848, comes the response of the “coup de tete“ 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
44、 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 it
45、s 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 se
46、em 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
47、 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, inThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 9 order to start over anew; scorn with cruel thoroughness the
48、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 the
49、ir own objects-until finally that situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: “Hic Rhodus, hic salta !“ #2 Here is Rhodes, leap here! An allusion to Aesops Fables. 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.
