The following is an excerpt from Curzio Malaparte’s book Coup d’Etat, where he examines the 18th brumaire of Napoleon Bonapart. Writing in 1930’s Italy, this book resulted in his brief imprisonment and several years of exile on a remote island. You can read Coup d’Etat here.

Although it is my plan to demonstrate how a modern State is captured and defended, which was, more or less, the subject treated by Machiavelli, this book is in no sense an imitation of The Prince—not even a modern imitation, which would be something necessarily remote from Machiavelli. In the age from which Machiavelli drew his arguments, his examples and the matter for his reflections, public and private liberties, civic dignity, and the self-respect of men had fallen so low, that I should fear to be insulting my readers in applying any of the teachings of the famous book to the urgent problems of modern Europe.

At first sight the whole political history of the last ten years may seem to be the tale of the operation of the Treaty of Versailles, of the economic consequences of the war, and of the attempts of Governments to ensure the peace of Europe. The true explanation is, however, different, and is to be found in the struggle between the defenders of liberty and democracy, and of the parliamentary State, against the adversaries of those principles. The attitudes of the various parties are political aspects of this struggle. To understand many events of recent years, and to foresee the future of politics within various European States the behaviour of political parties must be considered from this point of view and this alone. In nearly every country there are on the one hand parties out to defend the parliamentary State and to apply the Liberal and democratic method of preserving an internal balance of power. Among these I count every kind of Conservative, from Right Wing Liberals to Left Wing Socialists. And on the other hand there are the parties whose view of the State is revolutionary, parties of the extreme Left and the Extreme Right, Fascists and Communists, modern Catilines. The Catilines of the Right are concerned with the preservation of order. They accuse the Governments of weakness, incapacity and irresponsibility. They proclaim the necessity of a strongly organized State, with a severe control of political, social, economic life. They are the worshippers of the State, the advocates of an absolute State. They see the only guarantee of order and liberty against the peril of Communism in a State which shall take control from the centre, and shall be authoritative, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic. Mussolini’s doctrine is “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” The Catilines of the Left seek to capture the State to install dictatorship of the workers and the peasants. “Where there is liberty there is no State” is Lenin’s doctrine.

The examples of Mussolini and Lenin are of great importance in the development of the struggle between the Catilines of the Right and the Left and the defenders of the Liberal and Democratic State.

Of course Fascist tactics are one thing and Communist tactics another. As yet, however, neither the Catilines nor the defenders of the State appear to have recognised what those tactics are, or to define them in such a way as to show up their differences or their similarities, if any. The tactics of Bela Kun are utterly unlike those of Bolsheviks. The attempts of Kapp, Primo de Rivera and Pilsudski seemed to have been planned in accordance with rules quite different from those of Fascist tactics. Perhaps Bela Kun displayed the most modern tactics, and, being more expert than the other three at the job, was a more dangerous person.

Yet he too in setting out to capture the State proved his ignorance not only of modern tactics of insurrection but also of a modern method of capturing the State.

Bela Kun fancied he was imitating Trotsky. He did not notice that he had got no further than the rules laid down by Karl Marx as a result of the Commune in Paris. Kapp planned to finish off the Parliament of Weimar on the lines of the eighteenth Brumaire. Primo de Rivera and Pilsudski supposed that to overcome the modern State you have only to depose constitutional government with a show of violence.

Neither the Governments nor the Catilines—this much is clear—have ever seriously studied whether there is a modern science of coup d’Etat or what its general rules are. While the Catilines pursue their revolutionary tactics, the Governments continue to oppose them by defensive police measures, thus showing their absolute ignorance of the elementary principles of conquering and defending the modern State. Such ignorance is dangerous, as I intend to show by reciting events of which I have been a witness, in which indeed I have played a certain part myself, the events of the revolutionary season which began in February 1917 in Russia and seems not yet to have ended in Europe.