The exceptions to this neglect of The Brumaire are its treatment in Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century(Baltimore, 1973), and in three more recent works: Margaret Rose, Reading the Young Marx and Engels (London, 1978); Paul-Laurent Assoun, Marx et la répétition historique (Paris, 1978); and most recently J. P. Riquelme, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Karl Marx as Symbolic Action”, History and Theory, xix (1980), 58-72. The latter three works came to my attention after this essay had been drafted, and I did not have the benefit of their perspicacious treatments of The Brumaire.
2.
KarlMarx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon [1852, 2nd ed. 1869] (New World Paperbacks, New York, 1963), 15.
3.
KarlMarx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon [1852, 2nd ed. 1869] (New World Paperbacks, New York, 1963), 15.
4.
For a discussion of the meaning of ‘determination’ in Marx and Marxism see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 83-90.
5.
The distinction between a personal error and a world-historical error is borrowed from an earlier work by Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's “Philosophy of Right”, published in 1843. Indeed, the passage in which Marx introduces this distinction is, in many respects, an outline or a blueprint for The Brumaire itself. The passage is so rich and pertinent to my treatment of The Brumaire that it is worth quoting in full:
6.
The struggle against the political present in Germany is the struggle against the past of the modern nations, who are still continually troubled by the reminiscences of this past. It is instructive for them to see the ancien régime, which experienced its moment of tragedy in their history, play its comic role as a German ghost. Its history was tragic so long as it was the privileged power in the world and freedom was a personal fancy; in short, so long as it believed, and necessarily so, in its own justification. So long as the ancien régime, as the existing world-order, struggled against a new world coming into existence, it was guilty of a world-historical, but not a personal, error. Its decline was, therefore tragic.
7.
The present German regime, on the other hand – an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of universally recognized axioms, the nullity of the ancien régime revealed to the whole world – only imagines that it believes in itself, and asks that the world imagine this also. If it believed in its own nature, would it hide that nature under the appearance of an alien nature, and seek its preservation in hypocrisy and sophistry? The modern ancien régime is nothing but the humbug of a world order whose real heroes are dead. History is thorough, and passes through many phases when it conveys an old form to the grave. The final phase of a world-historical form is its comedy. The Greek gods, already once mortally wounded, tragically, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, had to die once more, comically, in the dialogues of Lucian. Why does history proceed in this way? So that mankind will separate itself happily from its past. We claim this happy historical destiny for the political powers of Germany.
8.
KarlMarx, Critique of Hegel's “Philosophy of Right”, transl. Annette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970), 134. An analysis of this text falls outside the limits set by this essay, which focuses on understanding The Brumaire entirely from within. Nonetheless, this passage from The Critique illuminates and informs my explication of The Brumaire.
9.
Marx, The Brumaire, 17.
10.
Marx, The Brumaire, 100.
11.
The use of the word ‘sentimental’ to mean the recreation of a past style or mode in the present is adopted from Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1973), 35. Frye himself derives it from Schiller, and therefore we can assume that such a use of the term would not have been alien to Marx.
12.
Marx, The Brumaire, 102.
13.
Marx, The Brumaire, 33.
14.
Marx, The Brumaire, 49.
15.
Paradoxically, if it had chosen to do so it would not have died so young. See below.
16.
Marx, The Brumaire, 67.
17.
Marx, The Brumaire, 88. Marx refers at other points to the bourgeoisie's inability to rule itself. For example: The Party of Order proved by its decision on revision that it knew neither how to rule nor how to serve; neither how to live nor how to die; neither how to suffer the republic nor how to overthrow it; neither how to uphold the Constitution nor how to throw it overboard; neither how to cooperate with the President, nor how to break with him (p. 102).
18.
And again: By rejecting the Quaestor's Bill, it [the National Assembly] made public confession of its impotence.… The Montagne thus decided the issue. It found itself in the position of Buridan's ass, not, indeed, between two bundles of hay with the problem of deciding which was the more attractive, but between two showers of blows, with the problem of deciding which was the harder. On the one hand, there was the fear of Changarnier; on the other, the fear of Bonaparte. It must be confessed that the position was no heroic one (pp. 113-14).
19.
And again: By rejecting the Quaestor's Bill, it [the National Assembly] made public confession of its impotence.… The Montagne thus decided the issue, 65. In the remaining lines of this passage Marx derides Utopian socialism for its “sentimentality”.
20.
And again: By rejecting the Quaestor's Bill, it [the National Assembly] made public confession of its impotence.… The Montagne thus decided the issue, 66. Marx also indirectly implies in other ways that bourgeois political rule had not yet reached its end. For example, he depicts the proletariat as confused about its role and unable to play a significant part in the revolution afterJune1848. Seep. 71.
21.
And again: By rejecting the Quaestor's Bill, it [the National Assembly] made public confession of its impotence.… The Montagne thus decided the issue, 93. The failure of bourgeois nerve runs throughout the text. In an earlier passage Marx wrote: It [the Party of Order] does not dare to take up the conflict at the moment when this has significance from the standpoint of principle, when the executive power has really exposed itself and the cause of the National Assembly would be the cause of the nation. By so doing it would give the nation its marching orders, and it fears nothing more than that the nation should move (p. 83).
22.
Ironically, this is the one lesson the bourgeoisie might have usefully learned from the great Revolution which it was desperately seeking to imitate. The legislative bodies during the first Revolution were able to use the People to hold the executive in check until1793.
23.
For the role of the Prometheus myth in Marx see Lewis Feuer, “Karl Marx and the Promethean Complex”, Encounter, xxxi (1968), 15-32. The Promethean myth reappears in other writers in the Marxist tradition. It is significant, for example, that Lukács concludes his attack on Existentialism and his defence of Marxism by asserting that “the acquisition of Existentialism is no Promethean deed, no theft of celestial fire, but rather the commonplace action of using the lighted cigarette of a chance passerby to light one's own” (Georg Lukács, “Existentialism or Marxism?”, in Existentialism versus Marxism, ed. George Novak (New York, 1966), 153).
24.
The conclusion cannot be avoided that The Brumaire, far from being an account of the class struggle, is instead an account of the failure of the class struggle to materialize.
25.
Marx, The Brumaire, 64.
26.
Marx, The Brumaire, 73.
27.
Marx, The Brumaire, 101. For a similar example seep. 57.
28.
Marx, The Brumaire, 75-76.
29.
Marx, The Brumaire, 76.
30.
Marx, The Brumaire, 77.
31.
Marx, The Brumaire, 77.
32.
Marx, The Brumaire, 75.
33.
Louis Chevalier, Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1973), passim.
34.
Marx, The Brumaire, 76.
35.
Marx, The Brumaire, 130.
36.
Marx, The Brumaire, 135.
37.
It is not surprising to discover in Marx this link between irony and freedom. After all, he was within the tradition that included Schiller and Diderot. Diderot was, according to Marx himself, Marx's favourite prose writer. Aeschylus, not surprisingly, was one of his favourite dramatists. See DavidMcLellan, KarlMarx: His Life and Thought (New York, 1974), 457.
