“The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living.³⁷³ At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed 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 1848 know what better to do than to parody at one time the year 1789, at another the revolutionary traditions of 1793–95.” This was what Marx wrote in December 1851 (though plundering images and phrases from an earlier letter from Engels of December 3); and before that, between November 1850 and March 1851, in Sorrento, Alexis de Tocqueville was working away on his Souvenirs of the revolution of 1848 (“there have no doubt been crueler revolutionaries than those of 1848 but certainly not, I believe, more stupid”), noting in this respect in May: “It was the parody of February 24, in the same way that February 24 was itself the parody of other revolutionary scenes.”^{374, 375} Earlier, recording the attack on the Chamber of Deputies, he had written: “Our Frenchmen, especially in Paris, gladly mix memories of literature and theater with their more serious manifestations; and this often leads to the idea that the feelings they demonstrate are false, whereas they are just awkwardly decorated.³⁷⁶ In this case, the imitation was so apparent that the terrible originality of the events remained hidden. That was the time when everyone’s imagination was tinged with the garish colors used by Lamartine in his Girondins. The men of the early revolution were alive in everybody’s spirit, their actions and their words present in everyone’s memory. All that I saw that day carried the visible mark of those memories; and it always seemed to me that everyone was far more concerned about acting out the French Revolution than continuing it … Although I could see the end of the performance would be terrible, I could never really take the actors seriously; everything seemed to me like a bad tragedy performed by a few provincial amateurs.”

Both Marx and Tocqueville had therefore recognized that they lived in an age blinded by the New, even though it continued practicing the cult of bloody repetition. The sequence tended to be this:

the New has to happen (from the time when the spirit of “eternal revision,” as Burckhardt would soberly describe it, receives the anointment of sovereignty);³⁷⁷

the New tends inevitably to repeat some fragment of the Canonical Phases, which had in turn repeated other specters;

the eruption of technology continually modifies dimensions and weights, distorting actions in a continual anamorphosis, which invades time;

repetition unleashes its unforeseen novelty and the New is faithfully repeated in the alliance between grotesque, atrocious and portentous, which transmits the psychic shock of the Modern.