History Repeats Itself First As Tragedy

Marx opened The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) with a variation on this idea: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." The essay analyzed Louis Napoleon's 1851 coup d'état as a grotesque repetition of his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte's seizure of power. Friedrich Engels later cited the work as one of Marx's finest examples of historical analysis.