Back in 2016, I wrote a post, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump, echoing one of Karl’s greatest hits, remarking as follows:
In 1852, Karl Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, commemorating in contempt the seizure of power of Napoleon’s nephew in the previous year and coining the immortal one-liner, “History, Hegel tells us, repeats itself. He forgot to add, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” We can only hope that the Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump is only a farce.
Well, we got our share of tragedy and farce alike with Donald, but, thanks to Jonathan Beecher’s excellent new book, Writers and Revolution Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848, I learned that the “tragedy/farce” line was not Karl’s. Louis Napoleon, aka “Napoleon III,” rode his famous name to power to win the first (and, as it turned out, only) presidential election in the Second French Republic in 1848. When he was unable to obtain a revision of the new constitution to allow him to run for a second term, he organized a successful coup in December 1851 and assumed personal power. Immediately thereafter, Fredrich Engels, Marx’s famous No. 2 man, wrote to Karl as follows (edited by Beecher):
Can one imagine anything funnier than this travesty of the 18th Brumaire, effected in peacetime with the help of discontented soldiers by the most insignificant man in the world without, so far as it has hitherto been possible to judge, any opposition whatsoever? And how beautifully have all the old jackasses been caught! The slyest fox in the whole of France, old Thiers, the astute advocate of the barreau, M. Dupin, caught in the trap set for them by the most notorious blockhead of the century.
. . .
It really seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness, causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, Barthélemy for Saint-Just, Flocon for Carnot, and the moon-calf [Louis Bonaparte] together with the first available dozen debt-encumbered lieutenants for the little corporal and his band of marshals. Thus the 18th Brumaire would already be upon us.
So it was Fredrick rather than Karl who came up with the “immortal one-liner”!
Afterwords
The “18th Brumaire” refers to the original Napoleon’s coup, which occurred on that date in the year VIII, using the new calendar invented by the French revolutionaries, “Brumaire” being the second month of the new calendar, occurring in the fall, because the new calendar measured the beginning of each year from the autumnal equinox (September 21 on the standard Gregorian calendar.) The Gregorian date for Bonaparte’s coup is November 9, 1799.
The notion that the ‘48ers all over Europe were just aping the great figures of the First Republic occurred to many people. The great unity and power of the first revolution came first from the literal bankruptcy and general helplessness of poor Louis XVI, whom the aristocracy regarded with contempt, the desire of the urban bourgeoise for a political voice, the literal hunger of the Parisian artisans and workers, who provided the speechifiers with real muscle and capacity for violence, and the desire of the peasantry to be free from their numerous financial burdens. In 1848 the bourgeoise and the Parisian workers became enemies almost immediately, when the bourgeoise rejected the workers’ claim for guaranteed full employment, while the peasantry was infuriated by the passage of a land tax.
