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in terms of the Eighteenth Brumaire coup, about which much is known, but as the step-by-step process that elevated Napoleon from First Consul to Consul for Life and thence to Emperor in 1804. Bonapartism is thus not simply a coup d’etat,´ but a transformation from republic to hereditary empire, “monarchy in a new key” as Woloch felicitously calls it. Self-aggrandizement was undoubtedly one of the driving forces of this transformation, since Napoleon increasingly resented the restraints that the Consulate’s institutions placed on his power. But without a justification for creating a monarchy (toward which the consulship for life was the expedient transitional stage), and without allies to support his imperial pretensions, Napoleon’s ambition would doubtless have been stymied. The justification was left largely to Napoleon’s apologists in the Tribunate, such as Jard-Panvillier, who argued that the Revolution had not originally intended to destroy monarchy; only the Bourbons’ treachery had produced that outcome. The time had arrived to renew the institution, with Napoleon as its founding monarch, a task made even more necessary by Bourbon-English plots to create turmoil in France. Only a hereditary emperor would have the authority to confound such machinations and definitively seal, and thereby protect, the Revolution’s accomplishments.

Those old revolutionaries in the Council of State and the Tribunate who opposed the transformation to monarchy were in the minority. Outmaneuvered, men like Berlier and Boulay chose to support the new order rather than break all ties to it once the Empire was a fait accompli. They did so with a relatively good conscience, convinced that while their objections had been honorable, it was now necessary to rally round their chief and to support the nation’s will. Napoleon had once more prevailed over dissenters. His allies included ministers such as Talleyrand, Roederer, and Regnaud, pliant tribunes and senators, and the army, menacingly orchestrated in the spring of 1804 by Napoleon’s formidable chief-of-staff, Alexandre Berthier.

As we know, Napoleon’s dynastic hopes were short lived: “The Desolator Desolate!/The Victor Overthrown!/The Arbiter of others’ fate/A Suppliant for his own!”14 Having prosecuted a series of military campaigns across Europe, he was himself overwhelmed on the battlefield, just as his nephew would be at Sedan. And central to both defeats was Prussia, arguably the fiercest and most unforgiving of Napoleon’s foes. The depredations Prussia suffered during the war of 1806–7, during the occupation that followed, and in 1811–12, when it became Napoleon’s launching pad for the invasion

14Lord Byron, “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte” (1814) IV: 37–40 in Lord Byron. Selected Poems, eds. and preface by Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning (London, 1996), 308–14, at 309.

of Russia, are all well documented by Tim Blanning in his contribution to this volume.

“As an exercise in counterproductivity,” Blanning points out, “Napoleon’s treatment of Prussia had few equals.” Prussia’s humiliation and near implosion were the catalysts for the Reform Movement of 1806–19, to which King Frederick William III lent his support and authority. The result was a program of “offensive modernization” that reinvigorated the Prussian army, mobilized a popular militia, and extended to Prussian society those legal rights and civil liberties now required by all modern states seeking to galvanize the patriotic allegiance of their citizens. To be sure, Prussian reformers like Freiherr vom Stein and his circle were also influenced by Kantian moral philosophy and the political economy of Adam Smith. Nonetheless, it was hatred of Napoleon more than anything else that propelled the Prussian state into action. With the victory in 1815 over France, Prussia acquired three new regions – the Aachen-Cologne-Krefeld triangle, the Saarland, and the Ruhr – which made possible its subsequent industrialization, economic power, and military might.

Under Napoleon III, a counterproductive French foreign and military policy once again enabled Prussia to gain at its rival’s expense. France’s aggression in the Crimea (1854–6) and intervention in Italy in 1859 not only activated another round of Prussian military reform, but drove a wedge between itself and a potential ally – Russia. With Austria increasingly marginalized and Russia embittered by the neutralization of the Black Sea and Napoleon III’s support of Polish nationalism, France had become dangerously isolated. When war with Prussia broke out in 1870, masterminded by Napoleon III’s nemesis, Otto von Bismarck, defeat was almost instantaneous.

Tim Blanning’s chapter ends with a question that has exercised the minds of many historians and political theorists: to what extent was Bismarck himself a Bonapartist figure? Blanning considers the parallels to be superficial. While Napoleon I was a general, Bismarck was not a military man, and unlike both Bonapartes he was ultimately dependent on his sovereign – not the sovereign people but the Prussian king. In addition, Bismarck was a Realpolitiker who, though restrained by pessimism, looked steadily into the future, not an adventurist with mercurial, fantastic goals. Blanning, as an historian, thus assesses him as a great statesman. But what about the judgment of Bismarck’s German contemporaries, both in regard to Bonapartism and to Bismarck himself ?

David Barclay’s chapter seeks to answer this question by focusing on the changing fortunes and manifestations of Prussian conservatism. Like

Blanning, Barclay notes how hatred of Napoleon Bonaparte provoked the Prussian monarchy into revitalizing itself. But Barclay’s theme is not the Prussian reform movement or the paradoxes of French foreign policy, but the decomposition of Prussian conservatism in the face of “Bonapartist” developments at home.

Prussian conservatism was always a heterogeneous, fluid phenomenon, composed of various strands and preferences: romantic, aristocratic, bureaucratic, Christian, standisch¨ . Of particular interest to Barclay is the High Conservative faction spearheaded by Leopold and Ludwig von Gerlach. The Gerlach brothers, and like-minded individuals such as Friedrich Julius Stahl and Hermann Wagener, were, Barclay explains, “fervent advocates of a divinely ordained, patrimonial, standisch¨ , that is, decentralized and organic-corporative, monarchy.” This led them to oppose just as assiduously “contract theory, parliamentary institutions, or the incendiary, ‘mechanistic,’ universalist principles of 1789.”

Such High Conservatives were not, however, sycophantic apologists of monarchy. Where monarchy degenerated into “absolutism,” they repudiated it absolutely. They initially believed that their monarch, Frederick William IV, entertained values and objectives similar to their own, and, before the revolutions of 1848, they were probably correct to do so. But 1848, when the Prussian throne seemed to be threatened, was the annus mirabilis for Frederick William. From then until his death in 1861, he pursued a modernization strategy of his own. In time, even the Gerlachs came to see the opportunities afforded by constitutions and parliaments to those who could exploit, rather than simply deplore, them. Nonetheless, other initiatives of Frederick William after 1848, or rather of his two key advisors – Otto von Manteuffel (Interior Minister and, later, Minister President) and Carl Ludwig von Hinckeldey (Berlin’s chief of police) – persuaded the High Conservatives that absolutism was once more a danger in Prussia. The manipulation of public opinion, the growth of a spy and intelligence network from which no group – the High Conservatives included – could feel safe, the Haussmannesque rebuilding of Berlin, led them to invoke the stigma of Bonapartism. Their sense of alarm and disenchantment was further aggravated by Bismarck’s political trajectory from conservative “man of principle” to Realpolitiker, willing to traffic with Napoleon III whenever it appeared to be in the Prussian state’s interest to do so. For the Gerlach brothers and their supporters, authority, morality, and the interests of the state were simply indivisible. That Bismarck now thought otherwise, and acted accordingly, proved to them that he had adopted the hated Bonapartism.

The willingness of nineteenth-century political actors to think in terms of such abstract categories as Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Imperialism was immeasurably fortified by the ascent to power of Louis Bonaparte. For after Louis Bonaparte launched his own coup in December 1851 – his own Eighteenth Brumaire, as Marx quipped – and established another postdemocratic and post-revolutionary regime claiming to ensure social order and popular sovereignty, many acute observers concluded that European politics was exposed to a pathological syndrome rather than something contingent, fortuitous, or purely French. Accordingly, political thinkers intensified their attempts both to discern the future direction and shape of European politics and to reinterpret the recent past.

The more they envisaged Bonapartism as an evolutionary or structural principle, the less plausible became heroic, individualistic interpretations of modern history like that of Heinrich Heine, who insisted that Napoleon Bonaparte “could have become a Washington of Europe” if his ambition had not led him astray.15 Increasingly, such views were considered facile and as focusing on epiphenomena, ignoring root causes, and reversing Constant’s insistence that Napoleon exemplified a new tendency: “usurpation.” Constant had conjoined that argument with the hopeful prognosis that a commercial, liberal, and pacific society would soon make extinct the Napoleons of this world. Later thinkers tended to share Constant’s structural approach, while abandoning both his preferred category of usurpation and his optimism.

Among the greatest of such thinkers was Alexis de Tocqueville. Although Tocqueville was no determinist or prophet of doom, he was deeply alarmed at the career of the two Napoleonic empires: perplexed, as Melvin Richter remarks, “that from the two French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848 . . . had emerged not emancipation, but a regime considerably more repressive than the monarchies that had been overthrown.” How was one conceptually to characterize this new kind of regime? Tocqueville struggled for most of his adult life to find a conclusive answer. Of one thing, however, he became increasingly certain: that orthodox descriptions of the First and Second Empires were hopelessly anachronistic. True, both Empires were products of French history; they had extended and intensified the practice of

15Heinrich Heine, “French Painters” (1831), trans. David Ward in Paintings on the Move, ed. Susanne Zantop (Lincoln and London, 1989), 150. Five years earlier, in “Ideas: The Book of Le Grand” Heine had compared Napoleon with Christ and St. Helena to the Holy Sepulchre. “Strange!” Heine observed, “the Emperor’s three greatest antagonists have all met a terrible fate: Londonderry [Lord Castlereagh] cut his throat, Louis XVIII rotted on his throne, and Professor Saalfeld is still a professor at Gottingen,¨ ” in Heinrich Heine, Selected Prose, ed. and trans. Ritchie Robertson (London, 1993), 91–143, at 115.

centralization that absolutist monarchs had begun. To that extent there was continuity with France’s past. Tocqueville also fell back heuristically on the concept of “despotism,” while wavering over the Roman analogy. Nonetheless, the thrust of his analysis pointed repeatedly to the post-republican, post-revolutionary, and post-democratic novelty of the states over which Napoleon I and III presided.

The political culture and attitudes of France, Tocqueville believed, revealed the depth to which the nation’s moeurs had been corrupted. The Consulate and First Empires were the vital precedents for the Second; incrementally, Frenchmen had become ever more habituated to violence in politics and to the normality of state indifference to minority rights. Increasingly the French, drawn to the cult of the omnipotent leader, felt contempt for representative government. They accepted restrictions on the press, on the right to free assembly, and on local government. Coupled with administrative centralization and legal structures that impeded deliberative action in common, the First and Second Empires had worked to eviscerate the practice of democratic citizenship. Napoleonic rule not only encouraged a general opportunistic subservience. It also induced a kind of schizophrenia among its chief agents in which personal probity and scrupulousness could coexist with slavish obedience to orders, whatever the cost or consequence.

Richter also examines Tocqueville’s rich, though equivocating, appraisal of the Bonapartes, especially Napoleon I, as political innovators. In some contexts, Tocqueville grants the importance of Napoleon I’s abilities and skills, the qualities that enabled him to fine-tune the engine of repression with unrivaled mastery and precision. In other contexts, however, the emphasis is very different as Napoleonic rule is assimilated to structural tendencies – centralization, mobilization, repression – deeply, though not indelibly, embedded within the French body politic.

At the time of his death in 1859, his great work on the Revolution and Napoleon unfinished, Tocqueville was more convinced than ever that analogies with Rome in its period of decline were untenable. France retained the capacity to become a free and great nation. In 1859, Louis Bonaparte still appeared to be unassailable, having garnered the support of the church and the propertied classes. Yet, Tocqueville predicted that the Second Empire would fall through defeat in an unnecessary battle brought on by the same aggressive strategy that had brought down the First. While the military legacy, the legend of Bonapartist glory, might have helped bring Louis Napoleon to power, he was also doomed to be the victim of the illusions inherited from his uncle.

The capacity for historical illusion was a favorite target and topos of Karl Marx. We are apt to think of Marx’s materialist interpretation of history and politics as finding its archetypal expression in the “Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859). Terrell Carver, in his reading of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, cautions against such a simplistic interpretation. Rather than emphasizing those passages that seem to foreshadow more abstract and high-level generalizations found in later works of Marx and Engels, Carver examines the text of The Eighteenth Brumaire to reveal “the untidy categories” of Marx’s narrative. Carver proposes to read Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire not as a defective version of the 1859 “Preface,” but the “Preface” as an oversimplification of his Eighteenth Brumaire. Such an interpretation emphasizes what Marx might have been expected to dismiss as mere ideology and superstructure: “Tradition from the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”16 “Through historical tradition it has come to pass that the French peasantry believed in a miracle, that a man by the name of Napoleon would bring them back their former glory.”17 This recalls Tocqueville’s prediction that the Second Empire would fall because of the belief dear to Louis Napoleon: that his position as Emperor depended upon his public image as a reincarnation of his all-conquering uncle, almost always supreme, in Chateaubriand’s words, in “that game which was always being won, yet went on being played.”18 Marx also saw the predominance of the army as crucial to both empires:

The army was the point d’honneur for the smallholding peasantry; it transformed them into heroes, defended their new position from outside threats, glorifying their recently acquired nationality, plundering and revolutionising the world. The dazzling uniform was its own national dress, war its poetry, the smallholding its fatherland and patriotism was the ideal form of their sense of property.19

As Carver emphasizes, Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, did not abandon his “guiding thread,” that is, his economic interpretation of politics. Rather, he produced several highly stimulating variants of that theory, which he applied to the coup and then to the state of Louis Napoleon. In Carver’s view, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire should be appreciated for the contextual richness and complexity of his narrative, the paradoxes and irony of his style, rather than criticized for its logical incompatibility with his later work.

16Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire in Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge, 1996), 32.

17Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 117–18. 18 Chateaubriand, Memoires´ , I, 869; Memoirs, 24.

19Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 122.

Marx’s analysis of class interest in The Eighteenth Brumaire is more complex, open-ended, aware of contradictions and reversals, and psychologically individualist than is usually admitted by those holding a more schematic view of his theory.

The three principal applications of Marx’s general theory of history as class struggle to the French case come from his analysis of the conflicts arising from the nature of capital in mid-century France. This derived from differences in the interests of those groups controlling respectively landowning, finance, and industrial capital. With the political economy of France thus framed, Marx underlines: (1) the opportunity for Louis Napoleon created by the fact that the bourgeoisie had lost, and the working class had not yet acquired the ability to rule the nation; (2) the fact that the bourgeoisie preferred at this time not to rule itself, but to conceal its interests by having its political work done for it first by the Second Republic and then by Louis Napoleon; (3) the exceptional autonomy achieved by the centralized state, thus eluding its more usual function as an instrument of the dominant class.

Yet Sudhir Hazareesingh suggests in Chapter 6 that the Second Empire produced much more ambiguous consequences than Tocqueville might have predicted and than Marx, writing through the entire period of Louis Bonaparte’s ascendancy, understood at the time. Hazareesingh does not deny the obvious: that Napoleon III sought to control France during the Second Empire and marginalize its enemies, with repressive means where necessary. His argument is rather that the Second Empire was a social order with deep contradictions and oscillations. That complexity is often obscured by two assumptions: first, that an “essence” of Bonapartism can be identified, and, second, that the French Napoleonic tradition was guided not by a set of ideas of any sophistication, but simply by commitments to glory and expansion.

Hazareesingh dismisses both assumptions as simplistic. To begin with, Bonapartism is a chameleon.20 “The flamboyant but despotic First Empire was radically different from the ‘popular’ and proto-republican Bonapartism which emerged in the 1820s and 1830s. The Bonapartism of the young Louis-Napoleon in the 1840s was in turn different from the ‘official’ Bonapartism of the Second Empire.” In addition, there are “notable political variations as between the authoritarian years of Napoleon III’s rule and the later ‘liberal Empire.’” As for the visceral “Imperialism” of Louis Bonaparte, it, too, is a simplification that underestimates the political

20On the internal complexity of Bonapartism, see also Zeldin, France, 140–205, and Plessis, Rise and Fall.

concepts that guided the regime. On Hazareesingh’s account, the orthodox republican interpretation of the Second Empire has glossed over its contribution to mass democracy and to the institutions of its successor, the Third Republic.

To support this argument, Hazareesingh focuses on the practice of territorial democracy that unfolded during the Second Empire. Its evolution began in the most unlikely way. The territorial system of the Second Empire was both highly centralized and hierarchical, with each unit (commune, canton, and department) supposedly contributing to the “order, discipline and rationality” of the whole. All levels of administration were, however, subject to state orchestration from above. Following the reorganization of local government in July 1852 and May 1855, mayors and assistant mayors were appointed by the state. So, too, were the departmental prefects whose powers enabled them to override the decisions of municipal councils, suspend them if necessary, and dismiss mayors. Political representation was subjected to strict administrative control. Paternalism, anti-factionalism, and technocracy were the trinity around which citizenship was to be organized.

The regime’s commitment to mass democracy as a principle of legitimation increasingly collided, however, with its equally strong desire to impose state fiat on the nation as a whole. As Hazareesingh notes, bureaucratic formalism provoked frustration and resentment. Appointed mayors who failed to garner the support of their municipal councils faced obstruction and contempt, leading a number of these magistrates to seek election, with the regime’s guarded approval, so the better to secure cooperation and compliance. Yet once elected, mayors were no longer the sole agents of the imperial state. During the 1860s, prefectural control over local politics weakened as it became increasingly challenged by mayors, General Councillors, and elected representatives in the Corps Legislatif´ . As electoral politics became ever more agitated, the regime responded through a decentralist strategy of its own, designed to transform social discontent into government capital and, in particular, to rebuild credibility among the rural populace so to play it off against growing urban hostility. The paradoxical result was “creeping (or incremental) democratization.”

Hazareesingh concludes that there was no radical rupture between the Second Empire and Third Republic. Instead, he considers the republican regimes of the 1870s and beyond as attempts to reconcile the “conflicting imperatives” that the Second Empire had thrown so dramatically into relief: “depoliticization and the practice of universal suffrage, administrative omniscience and citizen involvement in local life, the maintenance of social order and the preservation of the Revolutionary heritage of civil equality,

the cultivation of a traditional and deferential polity and the modernization of political life.”

III

During the twentieth century, the emergence of new regimes prompted advocates, critics, and analysts to coin a correspondingly new terminology to describe them. “Fascism,” “Nazism,” “Stalinism,” “Maoism,” and “totalitarianism” were added to the older lexicon of Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Imperialism. This last term had originally been coined to describe the expansionist policies of the Bonapartes, particularly Napoleon III. After his fall, it took on new meaning as it now came to be applied to the latest mode of international capitalist accumulation. Until roughly the Second World War, the newer and older vocabularies coexisted. Political thinkers and actors alike drew on past experiences and models to interpret current realities. In the process, however, the concepts of Bonapartism and Caesarism were subject to remarkable adaptation. We get a vivid sense of this inventiveness in Gramsci’s analysis of modern Caesarism, to which we shall return, or Trotsky’s urgent attempts in the 1930s to distinguish “preventive Bonapartism” (Giolitti, Bruning¨ -Schleicher, Doumergue) from “Bonapartism of fascist origin” (Mussolini and Hitler) and both of these from the “senile Bonapartism” represented by Marshal Petain´ .21

Still, even before the emergence of the new twentieth-century “dictatorships,” the language of Caesarism and Bonapartism had been stretched far beyond its original referents. The pioneer was Max Weber. Typically remembered for his work on charismatic domination, Weber’s analysis of Caesarism, in contrast, is still not widely known. But, as Peter Baehr maintains, neither concept can be adequately comprehended without identifying the relationship between them. Caesarism, Weber argued, was inevitable under conditions of modern “democracy” because the entry of the “masses” into political life put a premium on plebiscitary leadership and party organization. The real question was not whether Caesarism could be avoided, but which form of Caesarism should be adopted. Historical conditions in Germany had produced a particularly destructive variety of the modern Caesarist phenomenon. The German mutation combined an impotent parliament with an irresponsible monarchy. There was no

21See “German Bonapartism” (1932), “Bonapartism and Fascism” (1934), and “Bonapartism, Fascism, and War” (1940) in Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Europe, ed. Ernest Mandel (London, 1975), 325–31, 451–8, 459–68.

recognition of the distinction between bureaucratic and political modes of behavior. The result was incompetence and drift, which was bad enough in domestic politics. Worse still, it also led to the international isolation of Germany.

Weber found an alternative in Britain, where Caesarism of a decidedly different sort held sway, and he campaigned tirelessly for it during the First World War. Caesarist figures like Gladstone and Lloyd George had immense power to lead the nation, but were nonetheless constrained by the working parliament where they had received their political educations. As a leader of the masses, the British Caesarist leader had immense authority over parliament and over his own party. The reigning British monarch understood that matters of foreign and military policy should no longer be decided by kings. At the same time, an unpopular leader could be ejected from parliament following a general election, and irresponsible policies could be subjected to the scrutiny of parliamentary committees and the press.

Weber developed this theory of Caesarism in his journalistic writings and political speeches. Aiming for an informed and engaged public, he simultaneously drew on the vernacular of the day and subverted it. Weber, extrapolating from the French experience, applied the concept of Caesarism not only to Germany but to Britain and the United States as well; he distinguished between positive and negative varieties of Caesarism; and he showed how it could be compatible with the institutions of parliament and monarchy. Each of these approaches to Caesarism, especially the second and third, was unusual. And they were made utterly unique by a related development in Weber’s work: the migration of fundamental elements of Caesarism into the concept of “charisma” he developed for his comparative studies. Supposedly a scientific notion, charisma concealed and naturalized many of Weber’s most controversial, partisan views about the relationship between leaders and masses.

Although Weber lived to see Germany’s wartime defeat, communist insurrection, and violent antirevolutionary measures by the Freikorps and other rightist organizations, it was left to his younger contemporaries Carl Schmitt and Antonio Gramsci to address the political crisis of the interwar years. Whereas Weber had sought to combine liberalism and German nationalism, Carl Schmitt believed that project to be incoherent. Further, while Weber had discussed modern dictatorship only in passing, Schmitt was resolved to reinvestigate the applicability of the institution for modern times. His starting point, John McCormick observes, was the dire situation in which the Weimar Republic found itself in the early 1920s. On the one side stood its implacable foes: the radical right and, even more