language Thus did Luther masquerade as the Apostle Paul; thus did the
revolution of 1789-1814 drape itself alternately as Roman Republic and
as Roman Empire; nor did the revolution of 1818 know what better to do
than to parody at one time the year 1789, at another the revolutionary
traditions of 1793-95 Thus does the beginner, who has acquired a new
language, keep on translating it back into his own mother tongue; only
then has he grasped the spirit of the new language and is able freely to
express himself therewith when he moves in it without recollections of
the old, and has forgotten in its use his own hereditary tongue.

When these historic configurations of the dead past are closely observed
a striking difference is forthwith noticeable. Camille Desmoulins,
Danton, Robespierre, St. Juste, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the
parties and the masses of the old French revolution, achieved in 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