Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx [electronic reader TXT] 📗

who displayfully counted the goods on which he could live for many years to come: “Tu fai conto sopra i beni, bisogna prima far il conto sopra gli anni.” [#11 “You count your property you should rather count the years left to you.”] In order not to make a mistake in the years, they count by minutes. A crowd of fellows, of the best among whom all that can be said is that one knows not whence he comes—a noisy, restless “Boheme,” greedy after plunder, that crawls about in gallooned frocks with the same grotesque dignity as Soulonque’s [#12

Soulonque was the negro Emperor of the short-lived negro Empire of Hayti.] Imperial dignitaries—, thronged the court crowded the ministries, and pressed upon the head of the Government and of the Army.

One can picture to himself this upper crust of the “Society of December 10” by considering that Veron Crevel [#13 Crevel is a character of Balzac, drawn after Dr. Veron, the proprietor of the “Constitutional”

newspaper, as a type of the dissolute Parisian Philistine.] is their preacher of morality, and Granier de Cassagnac their thinker. When Guizot, at the time he was Minister, employed this Granier on an obscure sheet against the dynastic opposition, he used to praise him with the term: “C’est le roi des droles.” [#14 “He Is the king of the clowns.”]

It were a mistake to recall the days of the Regency or of Louis XV. by the court and the kit of Louis Bonaparte’s: “Often did France have a mistress-administration, but never yet an administration of kept men.”

[#15 Madame de Girardin.]

 

Harassed by the contradictory demands of his situation, and compelled, like a sleight-of-hands performer, to keep, by means of constant surprises, the eyes of the public riveted upon himself as the substitute of Napoleon, compelled, consequently, everyday to accomplish a sort of “coup” on a small scale, Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois social system into disorder; he broaches everything that seemed unbroachable by the revolution of 1848; he makes one set people patient under the revolution and another anxious for it; he produces anarchy itself in the name of order by rubbing off from the whole machinery of Government the veneer of sanctity, by profanting it, by rendering it at once nauseating and laughable. He rehearses in Paris the cult of the sacred coat of Trier with the cult of the Napoleonic Imperial mantle. But when the Imperial Mantle shall have finally fallen upon the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, then will also the iron statue of Napoleon drop down from the top of the Vendome column. [#16 A prophecy that a few years later, after Bonaparte’s coronation as Emperor, was literally fulfilled. By order of Emperor Louis Napoleon, the military statue of the Napoleon that originally surmounted the Vendome was taken down and replaced by one of first Napoleon in imperial robes.]

 

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