Only after he has removed his solemn opponent, when he himself takes
seriously his own role of emperor, and, with the Napoleonic mask on,
imagines he impersonates the real Napoleon, only then does he become the
victim of his own peculiar conception of history--the serious clown, who
no longer takes history for a comedy, but a comedy for history. What the
national work-shops were to the socialist workingmen, what the "Gardes
mobiles" were to the bourgeois republicans, that was to Bonaparte the
"Society of December 10,"--a force for partisan warfare peculiar to
himself. On his journeys, the divisions of the Society, packed away
on the railroads, improvised an audience for him, performed public
enthusiasm, shouted "vive l'Empereur," insulted and clubbed the
republicans,--all, of course, under the protection of the police. On
his return stages to Paris, this rabble constituted his vanguard,
it forestalled or dispersed counter-demonstrations. The "Society of
December 10" belonged to him, it was his own handiwork, his own thought.
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