131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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tempt. I believe that the history of this image of the bourgeois is just as important as the
history of the bourgeoisie itself. A figure of contempt first created by the aristocracy was
propagated in the nineteenth century by romantic artists and poets. Since the growth of
Stendhal's influence, all literati hold the bourgeoisie in contempt, even when they live off
him or when they are the favorite lecturers of a bourgeois public, just as Murger with his
Bohéme. More important than such caricatures is the hatred of a socially déclassé genius such
as Baudelaire, who infuses a new life into this image. The figure created in France by French
authors based on the French bourgeois has taken on the dimension of a world-historical
construction through the work of Marx and Engels. They gave it the meaning of the last
representative of a prehistorical humanity that was divided into classes, the very last enemy
of mankind, the last odium generis humani. In this way the image of the bourgeois has been
boundlessly extended and carried further away toward the east with a fantastic, not only
world-historical, but also metaphysical background. There it was able to give new life to the
Russian hatred for the complication, artificiality, and intellectualism of Western European
civilization, and in turn be reinvigorated by it. All the energies that had created this image
were united on Russian soil. Both the Russian and the proletarian saw now in the bourgeois
the incarnation of everything that sought to enslave life's art in a deadly mechanism.
This image migrated from the west to the east. But there it seized a myth for itself that no
longer grew purely out of the instinct for class conflict, but contained strong nationalist
elements. Sorel dedicated the last edition of his Réflexions sur la violence in 1919 to Lenin,
as a kind of testament or apology. 23 He called him the greatest theorist of socialism since
Marx and compared him as a statesman to Peter the Great. The difference was that today
Russia no longer assimilated West European intellectualism, but on the contrary, the
proletarian use of force here at least had reached its apotheosis—namely, that Russia again
could be Russian, Moscow again the capital, and the
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