|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: not rid then selves of the Napoleonic memory, as the election of
December 10th proved. They longed to escape from the dangers of
revolution back to the flesh pots of Egypt; the 2d of December, 1851 was
the answer. They have not merely the character of the old Napoleon, but
the old Napoleon himself-caricatured as he needs must appear in the
middle of the nineteenth century.
The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry
from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start
upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the
past. Former revolutions require historic reminiscences in order to
intoxicate themselves with their own issues. The revolution of the
|
