Abstract
It is said that when Chou-en-Lai was asked what he thought of the consequences of the French Revolution, he replied: 'It is too soon to tell'. Apocryphal or not, this remark with its recognition that the Revolution of 1789 still reverberates in the modern world, makes an appropriate opening to an essay which sets out to explain why contemporary writers and film-makers adopt the 'time-honoured disguise' and speak the 'borrowed language' of the French Revolution. These famous phrases are, of course, from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) by Karl Marx who, in analysing the revolutionary events in France from 1848-5 I, said the following about the appeal to past authority: The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirit of the past to their service and borrow from their names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.1
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