The Arcades Project - Operi

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[The Stock Exchange, Economic History]
"Napoleon represented the last onslaught of revolutionary terror against the
bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against
its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state;
he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society,
on the free movement of private interest, and so forth . . . . Yet, at the same
time, he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a purse-
bearer . ... He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent
revolution . ... If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois societythe
political idealism of its daily practice-he showed no more consideration for its
essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his
political interests. His scorn for industrial hommes d'affa ires was the complement
to his scorn for ideologues . . . . Just as the liberal bourgeoisie was opposed once
more by revolutionary terror in the person of Napoleon, so it was opposed once
more by counterrevolution during the Restoration, in the person of the Bourhons.
Finally, in 1830, the bourgeoisie put into effect. it.s wishes of the year 1789, the only
difference being that its political enlightenment. was now complete, that it. no
longer considered the constitutional represent.ative state as a means for achieving
the ideal of the state, the welfm'e of the world, and universal human aims hut, on
the contrary, had acknowledged it as the official expression of its own exclusive
power and the political recognition of its own special interests." Karl _Marx and
_Friedrich Engels, Die heilige Familie; cited in Die neue Zeit, 3 (Stuttgart, 1885),
pp. 388-389.' [gl,l]
A schema from Edgar Quinet's De la Revolution et de la philosophie: The development
of' German philosophy . .. a sort of theory of the French political revolu­
tion. Kant is the Constituent Assembly, Fichte the Convention, Schelling the
Empire (in light of his venerat.ion of physical force), and Hegel appears as the
Restoration and t.he Holy Alliance." Schmidt-WeissenfeIs, Portraits
aus Frankreich (Berlin, 1881), p. 120 ("'Edgar Quinet und del' franzosische Nationalhall"