Marx’s rancor toward the petty bourgeoisie stems from his tastes as a classicist. Forms, for him, could only be closed and clear cut. Profiles had to stand out against a bare and indifferent background. The aristocrat has such a profile, as does the bourgeois (so long as he keeps to the basic vices and virtues that define him)—and so too, finally, does the worker. But what lies between these forms is the most irredeemable evil. For Marx, the petty bourgeoisie are the Lumpen (“rags”) of the bourgeoisie. The Lumpen are evil itself. What worries him about them is a certain metamorphic and pliable character, the lack of a personal physiognomy, which enables them to become anything whatsoever, with no respect for the ranks endorsed by history. In those damp sands of spite, ambition, resentment, and delirium he could already see the birth of Bolshevism and Fascism. And this was fine for the Bolsheviks: the acid bath of the Cause would be enough to render them unrecognizable. The revolutionary, by definition, has no origins (“he doesn’t even have a name,” according to Nechayev’s Revolutionary Catechism): he has only a purpose. But it was the countless other proliferating Lumpen that frightened Marx and seemed beyond control, like migrating jellyfish. He recognized Stirner as the harbinger of that venomous array. Stirner’s individual provided the anthropological model, not for the petty bourgeois, as Marx and Engels would claim for reasons of tactical argument, but for something far more frightening: the model for the breakdown of the class system, the chaotic irruption that came, just before the final act, to destroy the sacred drama of history. This was the ultimate unforgivable sin—and is enough to explain the fury of the attack against Stirner.

Stirner prepares for gratuitous terror on the basis of a solid Hegelian education; Maurice Barrès prepares to plunge into the wisdom of blood on the basis of the keenest dandyism. Paul Bourget regarded the young Barrès of Un Homme libre as a “delicate nihilist,” who possesses “all the aristocracies of nerves” and who derides the world, which has already reached the “puberty of silliness” (Huysmans).^{529, 530} All that is left then is to breathe in the stench of cattle stalls, and ask for everything to “be part of the race again.”⁵³¹ The intermediary will be a young tainted child, Bérénice. We are told that “she adopted as a doll a small gilded statue of Our Lady, whose stomach opened to reveal the Trinity.”⁵³² People take hold of the past, of race, of blood, when the delicate nihilist’s ego has reached its weary end, when the experimentally produced barbarity needs an Order to cling to. (That Ego had taken form in the latter years of the nineteenth century, ready for the “boys of 1889.”⁵³³ Before then, there was a barely detectable trace of that aesthetic arrogance: after, it would disappear or would become mixed with many other tastes of the masses—but it had now lost its clandestine, isolated, and depraved quality).

One of the prime characteristics of The Ego and Its Own is its brutality. But a reasoned brutality, which is reached through education, indeed through the most ambitious pedagogical system the West has produced, the only one that could claim to absorb, incorporate and subsume everything, in its frenzy of Aufhebung. The teachers of Germanic idealism strove, working obscurely on the concept to cancel out anything immediate, conspicuous, fleeting, or violent that might emerge. Even Stirner’s enemies recognize that he had the malicious gift of consistency. It remained to be seen how the peak of culture would be viewed from the unknown land of artificial barbarity to which Stirner introduces us with the gentle smile of the teacher opening his classroom door, where Madame Gropius’s young girls are waiting.