n Roman
costumes and with Roman phrases the task of their time: the emancipation
and the establishment of modern bourgeois society. One set knocked to
pieces the old feudal groundwork and mowed down the feudal heads that
had grown upon it; Napoleon brought about, within France, the conditions
under which alone free competition could develop, the partitioned lands
be exploited the nation's unshackled powers of industrial production be
utilized; while, beyond the French frontier, he swept away everywhere
the establishments of feudality, so far as requisite, to furnish the
bourgeois social system of France with fit surroundings of the European
continent, and such as were in keeping with the times. Once the new
social establishment was set on foot, the antediluvian giants vanished,
and, along with them, the resuscitated Roman world--the Brutuses,
Gracchi, Publicolas, the Tribunes, the Senators, and Caesar himself.
In its sober reality, bourgeois society had produced its own true
interpretation in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants
and Guizots; its real generals sat behind the office desks; and the
mutton-head of Louis XVIII was its political lead. Wholly absorbed in
the production of wealth and in the peaceful fight of competition, this
society could no longer understand that the ghosts of the days of Rome
had watched over its cradle. And yet, lacking in heroism as bourgeois
society is, it nevertheless had stood in need of heroism, of
self-sacrifice, of terror, of civil war, and of bloody battle fields
to bring it into the world. Its gladiators found in the stern
classic traditions of the Roman republic the ideals and the form, the
self-deceptions, that they needed in order to conceal from themselves
the narrow bourgeois substance of their own struggles, and to keep their
passion up to the height of a great historic tragedy. Thus, at another
stage of development a century before, did Cromwell and the English
people draw from the Old Testament the language, passions and illusions
for their own bourgeois revolution. When the real goal was reached, when
the remodeling of English society was accomplished, Locke supplanted
Habakuk.

Accordingly, the reviving of the dead in those revolutions served the
purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; it
served the purpose of exaggerating to the imagination the given task,
not to recoil before its practical solution; it served the purpose of
r