KARL MARX

LONDON 221
of the individual factions of the Continental party of Order now indulge
and mutually compromise themselves, far from providing the occasion
for new revolutions are, on the contrary, possible only because the basis
of the relationships is momentarily so secure and, what the reaction
does not know, so bourgeois. From it all attempts of the reaction to
hold up bourgeois development will rebound just as certainly as all
moral indignation and all enthusiastic proclamations of the democrats.
A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis. It is,
however, just as certain as this crisis. 5 '
At the end of 1851, Louis Napoleon seized power in France as
Emperor, thus consolidating the reaction that had followed the 1848
revolution. Marx immediately composed a series of articles which were
published by his friend Weydemeyer, in a short-lived New York journal,
under the title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. They constitute
his most brilliant political pamphlet. The title is an allusion to the date
of the first Napoleon's coup d'etat in 1799 and Marx was concerned
to examine the socio-political background of Louis Napoleon's repeat
performance in December 1851. In a preface to a second edition of his
essay, Marx contrasted his own approach to that of two other well-known
pamphleteers on the same subject, Victor Hugo and Proudhon: Hugo
confined himself to bitter and witty invective; whereas Proudhon, seeking
to represent the coup d'etat as the result of antecedent historical development,
ended up with a historical apologia for its hero. 'I, on the contrary,'
wrote Marx, 'demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances
and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity
to play a hero's part.' 54
Marx began his demonstration by referring to the remark of Hegel
that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occurred
twice and added that the first time was tragedy and the second, farce. So
it was with the two Bonapartes. He continued:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
but under circumstances direcdy encountered, given and transmitted
from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the minds of the living. And just when they seem engaged
in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that
has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis
they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and
borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present
the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this
borrowed language. 55
Marx applied these considerations to the 1848 revolution and drew a