History Repeats Itself, First as Tragedy, Second as Farce

On 2 December 1851, the anniversary of the coronation of Napoleon and of his victory at Austerlitz, the president of the French Republic, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, staged a coup and a year later made himself Emperor. He was the nephew of the great Napoleon, and he borrowed the name, the eagle and the symbols. Karl Marx, writing about it the following year in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, began with a remark attributed to Hegel, that all great events and characters of world history occur twice. Hegel forgot to add, Marx said, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

The joke has a serious point. The first Napoleon had risen out of a revolution that destroyed an old order and had conquered a continent. His nephew, in Marx's account, was a mediocre adventurer who succeeded by exploiting the exhaustion of a divided society and the magic of a name. The uncle had real achievements and real victims. The nephew had a costume. Marx's observation was that when people invoke the past to justify a new action, the original grandeur is lost in the imitation.

Others have made similar observations. George Santayana wrote in 1905 that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The remark often attributed to Mark Twain, that history does not repeat itself but often rhymes, is probably apocryphal, but it expresses a widespread feeling. Financial history supplies the most vivid illustrations. The Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s saw bulbs sell for the price of houses. The South Sea Bubble of 1720 ruined investors across Britain, and Isaac Newton, who lost a fortune, is reported to have said that he could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.

Later bubbles have followed the same pattern. The railway mania of the 1840s, the stock market of the 1920s, the dot com boom of the late 1990s and the American housing bubble of the 2000s each involved a new technology or a new financial instrument, a belief that old rules no longer applied and a crash. Each time, those who lost money were told it was different this time, and each time it was not. The first great crash was a tragedy for those who suffered it. Later ones, with the same cast of promoters and the same slogans, begin to seem comic to a historian watching from a distance.

Each time, those who lost money were told it was different this time, and each time it was not.

Politics offers parallels. Nations seem to rediscover the glories of their past in forms that their ancestors would hardly recognise. The Italian dictator Mussolini dressed himself as a Roman emperor and called the Mediterranean mare nostrum, our sea, borrowing the symbols of the ancient empire without its legions. Great powers that withdraw from distant wars often do so in scenes that look alike, with helicopters on rooftops in Saigon in 1975, and crowds at an airport in Kabul in 2021. Whether such events are farce is a delicate question, since the people on the roof and the airfield did not find them funny.

The theatrical image is apt. In Athens a playwright's trilogy of tragedies was followed by a satyr play, a bawdy burlesque that mocked the same myths, so that the audience left the theatre laughing at what had moved them to tears. Repetition performs the same function in history, since familiarity breeds the ridicule that awe had prevented. A reader of Marx's pamphlet laughs at the nephew in his uncle's hat because the uncle's grandeur has already been absorbed.

This is the main objection to the topic. The second performance is not always a farce, and sometimes it is a tragedy again. The cry of never again after the Holocaust was followed by genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia. In July 1995 at Srebrenica, in a region under United Nations protection, more than eight thousand Muslim men and boys were killed within a few days. There was nothing comic in that repetition. Marx's formula suggests that the second time we are insulated from the horror by absurdity, but history shows no such mercy.

The deeper question is whether history repeats at all. Historians are suspicious of the idea, since every event has a unique context. The Russia of 1941 was not the France of 1812, even if both armies froze outside Moscow, and the Great Depression did not recur in 2008 because central banks had learnt lessons from it. In that sense repetition is mainly a matter of what we choose to notice, and the historian's first duty is to say what is different. We pick the similarities that suit the story and ignore the differences. Analogies are the rhetorical tool of every politician, and the habit of reasoning from them has led to ruinous decisions, such as the use of the Munich analogy to justify wars that bore little resemblance to the 1930s.

At the same time, there are reasons why patterns return. Human nature changes slowly. Greed, fear, pride and the wish for a strong leader recur in each generation, and institutions are built to channel them with varying success. The learning that individuals acquire dies with them, and the next generation starts afresh, so that a society must constantly teach its young what the old have lived through. When the memory of the last crash or war fades, the conditions of the next one are recreated. In this sense repetition is the product of forgetting.

If so, the remedy is education, though not of the kind that glorifies the past. The citizen needs to know what happened and also what was different about it, and to be sceptical of those who say that history shows we must repeat a particular action. Even then, it is hard to be sure that the lesson will be heeded. A person who remembers the tragedy and plays the farce all the same is the strangest figure in the story, and Marx did not say what to call the act of repeating a mistake with full knowledge of the first.