baehr_p_richter_m_dictatorship_in_history_and_theory_bonapar

counterrevolution, sometimes as rule by a dominating class and church. On both the right and left, connections were alleged between “dictatorship” and democracy, defined either generically (by its liberal or reactionary opponents) or in its bourgeois form (as by Marx). Elaborate theories were evolved to explain how powerful leaders could claim to be democratic at the same time that they interdicted popular participation in government. Appealing to “the masses” by manipulating opinion and the use of censorship, such rulers could claim democratic legitimacy because of their success in plebiscites. At the same time, they dominated “the masses” through a centralized state with police, military, and administrative controls at a level never before attained. Such characteristics could be made to fit into the diagnoses made by Marx and Engels in terms of class struggle and the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie.

The implications of this putatively new type of government for future politics, for the state, society, and economy were to preoccupy practicing politicians as well as political and social theorists for the rest of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Even those who believed that the two Bonapartes and their empires had created a uniquely modern postrevolutionary and post-democratic type of regime could not agree on what it should be called. Among the names most frequently given to it were “Bonapartism,” “Napoleonism,” “Imperialism,” and “dictatorship,” now greatly expanded from previous formulations limited to Roman republican emergency rule of limited duration.2

Against this view that a novel form of rule had been created by the two Bonapartes out of the French revolutions of 1789 and 1848, there arose another perspective that insisted upon the resemblances of the governments produced by these episodes to the regime Julius Caesar or, alternatively, Augustus had created out of the Roman Republic at its close. Those who argued such a view might either condemn or approve what they chose to call “Caesarism.” Some of its supporters regarded it as the only possible authoritative response in their time to revolution, anarchy, and the crisis produced by the breakdown of both monarchical and republican institutions after 1789 and 1848. Others treated this phenomenon as a warning, as proof that democracy and the principles of the French Revolution – by

2 Careful treatments of the histories of all these terms as political and social concepts occur in the entries for “Casarismus,¨ Napoleonismus, Bonapartismus, Fuhrer,¨ Chef, Imperialismus” by Dieter Groh and

“Diktatur” by Ernst Nolte in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, eds. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (9 vols.; Stuttgart, 1972–95), I, 726–71, 900–24. For brief histories in English of Bonapartism, Caesarism, and dictatorship, see the entries by Peter Baehr in The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought, eds. W. Outhwaite and T. Bottomore (Oxford, 1993).

giving power and legitimacy to the will of the masses – led ineluctably to Caesarism.3

With this verdict, Marx in part agreed, but for the most part dissented. Using a rhetorical formula that was to become famous, he denied the identity between the first and second Napoleons, their coups, and their empires. Yet he conceded that each Bonaparte in his time had achieved an extraordinary degree of control over France through further centralizing the French state. When Marx placed both empires within his general interpretation of history as class struggle, he explained bureaucratic centralization as the means indispensable to the French bourgeoisie in first breaking the power of the feudal aristocracy, and then establishing and maintaining bourgeois domination.

A number of the essays in this volume treat the history of these two coups, the contested descriptions and analyses of the empires they produced, and the no less disputed conceptualizations of them as a distinctive type of regime. During the second half of the nineteenth century, each version of these regime types played a prominent but very different part in the arguments employed in European political and social theories and ideologies. In an unstable context, where, as in France, revolution, counterrevolution, restoration, and imperial foundation occurred more than once, these regime types became what Reinhart Koselleck has called basic political concepts (Grundbegriffe):

As distinguished from concepts in general, a basic concept . . . is an inescapable, irreplaceable part of the political and social vocabulary. . . . Basic concepts . . . become indispensable to any formulation of the most urgent issues of a given time. [T]hey are always both controversial and contested.4

What a regime was called and how it was characterized could not be matters of indifference to political actors, whether incumbents or contenders for power. Nor could their agents and intellectual supporters neglect counterarguments and alternative hostile descriptions. To establish convincing reasons for supporting any regime necessitated disestablishing the claim of its rivals; a positive position required negating that of its opponents. Persuasion entailed dissuasion; dissuasion, in turn, entailed denying, neutralizing, redefining, or redescribing competing regime types and principles. In such a situation,

3 See Peter Baehr, Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998) for the nineteenthand twentieth-century usages of the concept of Caesarism.

4Reinhart Koselleck, “Response to Comments,” in The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts. New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte, eds. Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (Washington, D.C., 1996), 64. For the context of this statement, which is a reply to J. G. A. Pocock, see Melvin Richter, “Opening a Dialogue and Recognizing an Achievement,” Archiv fur¨ Begriffsgeschichte, 39 (1996), 19–26.

political theorists had to master more than the one set of terms they themselves preferred – for they could not ignore the audiences they addressed. Unless polemicists took notice of those concepts favored by their opponents, they could not successfully attack them and succeed in convincing their publics of the superiority of their own positions.5

Thus the title of this book is not meant to suggest that any of these competing regime forms – Bonapartism, Caesarism, and dictatorship – can be, or have ever been, uncontroversially used. Such contestation was no less true of names and concepts characterizing fascist and communist rule in the twentieth century than of the two Bonapartes and their regimes in the nineteenth. The present volume underlines the fundamental disagreements separating those who have described, sought to conceptualize, explain, and evaluate two of the most critical periods of the past two centuries. Several chapters stress the use of regime types in political argument, thus shifting attention away from the adequacy of such terms as descriptions of actual cases or examples.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the concepts of Bonapartism, Caesarism, and dictatorship were once again applied as regime types. At first, these were the names given to governments created by fascist movements that had overthrown representative democracies and replaced them with regimes more ideological and repressive than anything experienced in France during the nineteenth century. Although dictatorship came to be used more often than any other term to characterize such twentieth-century creations, its adequacy as an empirical classification was frequently called into question. This was because dictatorship was frequently, although not invariably, used as a positive self-characterization by fascist regimes. To be sure, much depended upon their ideologies. Hitler rejected the title of dictator in part because of its contemporary use by Marxist regimes and parties to justify the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” He claimed, in contrast, to be the Fuhrer¨

of his racially pure people, a concept of leadership he alleged to be unique to organic Germanic thought. Hitler saw dictatorship, democracy, and the worldwide Jewish conspiracy (Diktatur, Demokratie, Judentum) everywhere.6 All were inseparably linked and condemned in Nazi ideology. After World War II, the concept of totalitarianism, applied to both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, became similarly contested on both empirical and theoretical grounds. Because even the mention of totalitarianism has become so

5This analysis is developed in Melvin Richter, “Toward a Concept of Political Illegitimacy,” Political Theory, 10 (1982), 185–214.

6Hitler, Speech of March 7, 1936, cited by Nolte, “Diktatur” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, I, 922.

controverted, a recent book devoted to a sophisticated treatment of Stalinism and Nazism calls both regimes dictatorships. The editors of that book – Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin – apparently were searching for a neutral comparative term less controversial than “totalitarianism.”7

The present volume, by contrast, is devoted in good measure precisely to the relentless controversy over political categories, controversy made urgent to both theorists and actors of the day by alarming (or at least surprising) contemporary political developments. Disputes about the nature, impact, and reception of the sequences connected with Napoleon and Louis Bonaparte assumed center stage. Both regimes provoked their share of admiration and hatred, of emulation and repulsion, or, in the case of Prussia, emulation out of repulsion. Both stamped France with administrative structures that long seemed indestructible. And both furnished images – heroic and demonic alike – of a regime type employed by subsequent political thinkers as a template against which political realities of their own time were to be measured.

But first of all the template itself had to be worked out, a task as unstable as its subject was protean. Practicing politicians such as Bismarck, theorists such as Tocqueville, Proudhon, Marx and Engels, Bagehot, Lorenz von Stein, Donoso Cortes, Jacob Burckhardt, and Max Weber – all sought to analyze, explain, and explore the implications for the future of this novel form of rule, at once post-revolutionary and post-democratic. In the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, several issues separated those choosing one or another conceptualization of the Bonapartist or Caesarist phenomenon.

The first question was whether that phenomenon was distinctively French or whether it could occur elsewhere in Europe or the world. Some of the most detailed and most valuable modern historical studies of Bonapartism simply evade this historiographical question, even though it assumed major importance at the time. Fred´ eric´ Bluche, for instance, in both his brief and more extensive books, treats the subject from a purely French point of view.8 Louis Bergeron’s excellent volume not only shares Bluche’s historical exceptionalism, or view of Bonapartism as a French Sonderweg, but passes judgment on the relation of the First Empire to the French revolution by his choice of title, L’episode´ napoleonien´ .9 Explanations in terms of national character, although seldom flattering, provide still another way of restricting

7Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, eds. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Cambridge, 1997).

8Fred´ eric´ Bluche, Le bonapartisme (Paris, 1981) and Le bonapartisme (1800–1850) (Paris, 1980).

9Louis Bergeron, L’episode´ napoleonien´ (Paris, 1972).

this type of regime to France. In a passage combining his theory of national character with his dim view of democracy, Chateaubriand wrote:

[T]he French are instinctively attracted by power; they have no love for liberty; equality alone is their idol. Now equality and tyranny have secret connections. In these two respects, Napoleon had his fountain-head in the hearts of the French, militarily inclined toward power, democratically enamoured of a dead level. Mounting the throne, he seated the common people beside him; a proletarian king, he humiliated the kings and nobles.10

Second, was it feasible or credible to insert the two Bonapartist reigns into previous regime classifications, such as those of Aristotle, Polybius, or Montesquieu? Alternatively, was a new concept other than tyranny or despotism needed to designate the features of what many regarded as a distinctively modern phenomenon? Often this type of disagreement was phrased in terms of what Dieter Groh has called “the great parallel” between the termination of the Revolution and the history of how the Roman Republic came to its end at the hands of Julius Caesar or else of Augustus, who engineered the transition to the Principate. In the second German edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx attacked this kind of thematic juxtaposition and the term Caesarism associated with it. (See Terrell Carver’s chapter in this volume.)

A third question concerns how much weight to attach to the military origins and character of the first Bonaparte, his and his nephew’s use of the army in their respective seizures of power, and the pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy of conquest in the name of national glory. Here again, there is wide disagreement. Some historians of the First Empire insist that it was an unequivocally civil rather than a military dictatorship. Their argument has an authoritative precedent since it was Napoleon Bonaparte himself who, in 1802, claimed that: “I govern not as a general, but because the nation believes that I possess the civilian qualities needed to govern.”11 On the other hand, it has been held that the First Empire was dominated by military values, that mobilization and conscription were its administrative priorities, and that its key features, not least in foreign policy, must be understood in that light. Again, Louis Napoleon pursued what many have regarded as an aggressiveness counterproductive to both his personal and French national interests.

10 Franc¸ois-Rene´ Chateaubriand, Memoires´ d’outre-tombe, eds. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier (2 vols.; Paris, 1951), I, 1004; The Memoirs of Chateaubriand, ed. and trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, 1965), 329.

11 Cited in Bluche, Le bonapartisme, 8.

Fourth, in what relationship did the two Bonapartes stand to the French Revolution? Did they terminate it? Or was there some significant sense in which they preserved its basic achievements while putting an end to the disorder it provoked, and to the dangers posed by extremists urging the reign of virtue and permanent revolution? Did the two empires retain the revolutionary preference for equality over liberty? Did they secure the new interests created by the revolution? Was the source of such legitimacy as they attained in fact the general will of the citizens, as they claimed, or did the Bonapartes create and manipulate opinion by the skillful use to an unprecedented degree of propaganda and police surveillance?

Fifth, what sort of domination was exercised by this type of government? Did its control over political and social life go beyond that of the ancien regime or of revolutionary governments, including the Committee of Public Safety? Such a position was argued by Benjamin Constant and by Mme. De Stael¨ about the First Empire and by Karl Marx about the Second. Was Bonapartism a type of rule that was illegitimate because of its monopoly of all state powers? Because of its refusal to allow citizens to take a part in decisions involving them? Because of the denial of freedom of association, of freedom of speech and the press, of genuine representation rather than by a fictitious ceding of popular sovereignty? Or was the state as it functioned during the two empires nothing but an instrument of class domination? Alternatively, did the French state, because of exceptional circumstances, ever achieve the autonomy sometimes attributed to it by Marx?

Sixth, did the differences between the two Napoleons, and their regimes, outweigh the similarities? Marx certainly thought so, and his view finds support from modern students of the Second Empire such as Alain Plessis, Theodore Zeldin, and Sudhir Hazareesingh, even if typically they adduce reasons different from the ones Marx himself gave.12

II

The contributors to this volume have sought to provide answers to these enduring questions. Isser Woloch’s essay, for instance, sheds important new light on how Napoleon Bonaparte’s “usurpation”13 actually took place: not

12Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945. Politics and Anger (Oxford, 1979); Alain Plessis, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire (Cambridge, 1987); Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen (Princeton, 1998).

13Benjamin Constant, “The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and their Relation to European Civilization” (1814) in Benjamin Constant. Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge, 1988), 45–167.