CUisis AuthoU(s): ReinhaUt Koselleck and Michaela W ... - iSites

Koselleck + Crisis
have to present ourselves. Until that crisis ensues, I must live."93 And Mol-
tke, to cite someone loyal to the state, used the term "crisis" again and
again to diagnose internal and external turning points in the course of the
(1848) Revolution.94
To explain the coup d'&tat of Napoleon III historically, Constantin
Frantz uses a concept of crisis that encompassed all previous temporal di-
mensions. He depicts the thirty-five years prior to the coup "as a never-
ending cycle of ministerial crisis upon ministerial crisis."95 Avoiding super-
natural or demonizing versions of the concept, he describes the 1848 Revo-
lution instead in "physiological" terms as "having been merely a crisis of an
illness in the nation's life, the source of which can be clearly recognized."96
Moreover the coup itself was the inevitable consequence of an acute "cri-
sis."97 As for the questionable figure of the new Napoleon, Frantz predicted:
"France will remain in a state of crisis until there is no longer a divorce
between what turns truth into reality and what reveals the falsity of lies.
That is the solution, or else none exists."98 To Frantz, the origins of this
permanent crisis lay in the discrepancy between a changing social structure
and forms of government (Herrschaftsformen). Unable to adapt to the new
structure of society, all these governments had lost their legitimacy. The
only possible way out of this dilemma was a dictatorship-provided that it
could succeed in representing itself as the product of the popular will.99
Once "crisis" had become a commonly employed expression, its use
became an indicator of both the intensity of a crisis and the perception of it
as such. The frequent changes of chancellors after Bismarck's fall, rapidly
led to an inflationary use of the term "Chancellor crisis," the sources of
Kapp to his father, 5 July, 1848, printed in his Vom radikalen Frhbsozialismus
des Vormirz zum liberalen Parteipolitiker des Bismarckreiches. Briefe 1843-1884. ed.
Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Frankfurt a.M., 1969), 55.
94 Helmut von Moltke to his mother, 8.3. 1848 ; also letter to his brother Adolf,
11.17.1848; letter to his brother Ludwig, 3.21.1850; in Gesammelte Schriften und Denkwiirdigkeiten,
vol. 4 (Berlin, 1891), 122, 129, 142.
95 Constantin Frantz, Louis Napoleon (1852), reprint of the 1933 edition (Darmstadt,
1960), 34.
96 Ibid., 54
97 Ibid., 16
98 Ibid., 76
" Already in 1850 Romieu used a similarly polysemic concept of "crise" to demand a
dictatorship. His premise was "that the nineteenth century will not see the foundation of
anything permanent." Auguste Romieu, Der Cdisarismus oder die Notwendingkeit der
Sdbelherrschaft, dargetan durch geschichtliche Beispiele von den Zeiten der Casaren bis
aufdie Gegenwart (1850), German translation of the 2nd French edition (Weimar, 1851),
7, 47, 59, 79.
93 Friedrich
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