루이 나폴레옹의 브뤼메르 18일/마르크스의 서문

루이 나폴레옹의 브뤼메르 18일
◀	마르크스의 서문	▶
국문 1852년 1월 1일부터 뉴욕에서 정치 주간지를 발행하려고 했던 내 친구 조셉 위디마이어(Joseph Weydemeyer), 그의 죽음은 너무 일렀다. 그는 이번 주에 쿠데타의 역사를 알려달라고 나를 초대했다. 2월 중순에 이르기까지, 그의 말에 따르자면 나는 '루이 보나파르트의 브뤼메르 18세'라는 제목으로 그에게 주간 기사를 써 주었다. 한편, 위디마이어의 원래 계획은 무산되었다. 대신, 1852년 봄에 그는 월간 '혁명' 지를 출판하기 시작했고, 그의 첫 번째 번호는 나의 '브뤼메르 18일'로 구성되어 있다. 이 책의 수백 부는 그 당시 독일로 유입되었지만 실제 책 시장에는 진출하지 못했다. 내가 내 책을 팔겠다고 제안한 극도로 급진적인 척하는 독일 의 서점 가는 "시대와 반대되는" "추측"에 가장 크게 겁을 먹었다. 위의 사실로부터, 현재의 작품은 사건의 즉각적인 압력에 의해 형성되었고 그것의 역사적 자료는 1852년 2월 이후까지 확장되지 않는다는 것을 알 수 있을 것이다. 지금 그것의 출판은 부분적으로 독일에 있는 내 친구들의 긴급한 요청에 의한 책 거래의 요구 때문이다. 영문 My friend Joseph Weydemeyer, whose death was so untimely, intended to publish a political weekly in New York starting from January 1, 1852. He invited me to provide this weekly with a history of the coup d’etat. Down to the middle of February, I accordingly wrote him weekly articles under the title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Meanwhile, Weydemeyer’s original plan had fallen through. Instead, in the spring of 1852 he began to publish a monthly, Die Revolution, whose first number consists of my Eighteenth Brumaire. A few hundred copies of this found their way into Germany at that time, without, however, getting into the actual book market. A German bookseller of extremely radical pretensions to whom I offered the sale of my book was most virtuously horrified at a “presumption” so “contrary to the times.” From the above facts it will be seen that the present work took shape under the immediate pressure of events and its historical material does not extend beyond the month of February, 1852. Its republication now is due in part to the demand of the book trade, in part to the urgent requests of my friends in Germany. Of the writings dealing with the same subject at approximately the same time as mine, only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo’s Napoleon le Petit and Proudhon’s Coup d’Etat. Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty invective against the responsible producer of the coup d’etat. The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history. Proudhon, for his part, seeks to represent the coup d’etat as the result of an antecedent historical development. Inadvertently, however, his historical construction of the coup d’etat becomes a historical apologia for its hero. Thus he falls into the error of our so-called objective historians. I, on the contrary, demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part. A revision of the present work would have robbed it of its particular coloring. Accordingly, I have confined myself to mere correction of printer’s errors and to striking out allusions now no longer intelligible. The concluding words of my work: “But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendome Column,” have already been fulfilled. Colonel Charras opened the attack on the Napoleon cult in his work on the campaign of 1815. Subsequently, and especially in the past few years, French literature has made an end of the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, criticism, satire, and wit. Outside France, this violent breach with the traditional popular belief, this tremendous mental revolution, has been little noticed and still less understood. Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat. With so complete a difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest Samuel. Karl Marx, London, June 23, 1869
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