baehr_p_richter_m_dictatorship_in_history_and_theory_bonapar

VI

After the coup d’etat that overthrew the Second Republic, Tocqueville turned to writing his three-volume project. In his 1853 notes, there is an explicit identification of Napoleon and the Empire with “unlimited despotism.” Would Tocqueville have developed a theory of plebiscitary dictatorship? He explicitly linked the two empires as embodying “the idea conceived by Napoleon and even more completely realized by his nephew.”27 In sketching for himself what model he ought to use for the First Empire, he returned to themes prominent in the Democratie´ and his French Academy inaugural:

When I arrive at the Empire, analyze carefully this fabric: the despotism of a single person raising himself upon a democratic base; the combination best suited for producing the most unlimited despotism, the one best supported by the appearance of originating in right [droit] and sacred interest, that is, of the greatest number; and at the same time, the least responsible. How extraordinary [such lack of responsibility] is in a government that pretends to have derived its original mandate from popular election. What is nevertheless true about this claim.28

Tocqueville continued to denounce the Bonapartes’ seizures of power by coup d’etat´ and their efforts after the fact to legitimate such rule by plebiscite. Tocqueville’s notes of the 1850s are explicit, dismissing scornfully such rationalizations as those concocted by Troplong, one of the prominent jurists who rallied to Louis Napoleon.29 Thus, the use of Caesarist arguments by defenders of the Second Empire led Tocqueville to attack First Empire rationalizations of the Eighteenth Brumaire, when Napoleon seized power:

Produce examples to show how jurists [legistes] create a theory and a philosophy [to justify] power in fact created by violence and force. Ever since the spread of Roman law, tyrants in all European nations have found it easier to recruit jurists than hangmen, although under despots both types flourish. Even the most mediocre usurper has his legal expert to prove that violence is law; tyranny, order; servitude, progress.30

This bitter indictment of the Bonapartes as engaging in the cynical manipulation of masses by reversing the meaning of words recalls George Orwell’s 1984. Tocqueville’s most explicit indictment of this aspect of Bonapartism occurred in the single paragraph about the first emperor and Empire in his

27OC, II, 2, 319.

28OC, II, 2, 319. This point had been developed in far greater detail by Tocqueville in his letter to F. Lieber, August 4, 1852, OC, VII, 143–5.

29OC, II, ii, 319; Tocqueville to J. J. Ampere, December 27, 1855, OC, XI, 305.

30OC, II, ii, 319.

analysis he had made in the 1840 Democratie´ of “administrative despotism.”35 The trend toward centralization will produce the same effects in Europe as in those other societies: “a race, very civilized and at the same time, degraded; troops of intelligent men, but never energetic and productive nations.” Thus, Roman history was used for a time by Tocqueville to present admonitory lessons to Frenchmen once again subjected to imperial rule.

Apologists of the Second Empire followed the lead of Louis Napoleon, who wrote a book on Julius Caesar, in seeking to vindicate his regime. Their attempts to legitimate the regime were phrased for the most part as tendentious theories of Caesarism. As a result of them, Tocqueville began to abandon his earlier interest in making his own analysis of French politics dependent upon analogies to Roman history. The Second Empire apologists stressed the need for a redeeming Caesar and an Augustus, who had to seize power in order to restore order and reform a society fallen into anarchy and corruption. By 1856, Tocqueville rejected such comparisons between contemporary France and late Republican Rome as intrinsically misleading and playing into the hands of Louis Napoleon and his apologists.36 Tocqueville believed that those who, like Gobineau, held France to be irretrievably decadent, were in the Imperial camp. Tocqueville had elected to continue his own treatment of modern French history. Fully engaged in this enterprise, he was in no position to follow his friend J. J. Ampere in writing on Roman history in order to refute Imperial propaganda.

In one of his last analyses of France, Tocqueville again rejected any comparison to Roman history:

I am not among those who tell us that our nation is decrepit and corrupted, destined forever to live in servitude. Those who fear and those who hope that this is our situation; those who show us the vices of the Roman Empire, and those who are pleased to believe that we are going to reproduce these vices on a small scale, all such people I believe to live in books alone and not in the reality of their time. Our nation is not decrepit, but fatigued and frightened by anarchy. Although our concept of liberty is not as lofty and healthy as it should be, we deserve better than our current fate. For we are not yet ready for the establishment of a despotism that will be definitive and regular.37

Or, as Tocqueville wrote to Freslon, “I find defective [inexactes] all the comparisons that are being made between our society and that of Rome

35Tocqueville to his nephew, Hubert de Tocqueville, March 25, 1854, OCB, VII, 322–3.

36Tocqueville to Henry Reeve, April 16, 1856, OC, V, 1, 167; Tocqueville to Ampere, January 17, 1856, OC, XI, 305.

37Tocqueville to Beaumont, February 27, 1858, OC, VIII, 3, 543–4.

availed himself of and further developed means for conducting the national mobilization and propaganda developed during the wars of the Revolution. Thus, to these existing post-revolutionary political moeurs, Napoleon added the Empire’s bureaucratic and legal structures, which effectively excluded citizens and their representatives from deliberating together and from making decisions on any level. Once in power, all successor regimes not only used but expanded the machinery put into place by the first Emperor. The Second Empire followed the precedents as well as the theory of the First.

To sum up, although Tocqueville confined his analysis of the two Bonapartes’ empires to France, he did so in terms applicable to democratic theory and administrative practice everywhere. As for the novelty of this, Tocqueville wavered. Sometimes he viewed it as did Constant, as different from any regime previously known because of its post-democratic and postrevolutionary quality; sometimes Tocqueville thought that there were valid historical analogues such as the Caesars after the destruction of the Roman Republic. The military quality of Bonapartism Tocqueville located in its undefined and reckless goals in regard to foreign policy, and in its appeals to the ambitious soldiers of a democratic army.

Tocqueville saw both the Bonapartes as presenting themselves as bastions of order while simultaneously reassuring those who had profited from the Revolution that its settlement would not be reversed. The first Bonaparte defined himself as a bastion against the Jacobins; his nephew, against the socialists. Observing the acceptance in many quarters of the Second Empire despite the loss of political freedoms, Tocqueville could see how exaggerated were the fears of socialism and how they were driven by the appeal to materialism made by the regime. Tocqueville was no less repelled by the church’s rallying to the Empire. His views of the political functions of religion, so favorable in the Democratie´ , were very much altered by the end of his life when he condemned the French church’s support of Napoleon III. It is intriguing to speculate what other changes he would have made in his theory had he lived to complete his work.

Marxists have framed the text as history (rather than theory), but historians on the whole have not been very impressed with it, rather understandably not rating Marx as one of the “pros.” Actually the Eighteenth Brumaire was high-quality political journalism, more like docu-drama or “instant history” as we know it.4 In terms of theory, Marxists have regarded the Eighteenth Brumaire as problematic rather than classic. This is specifically with regard to the base-superstructure model of society, as outlined in Marx’s 1859

“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and the vast subsequent literature on the materialist interpretation of history.5 As a fi- nal blow, the English translation by Daniel de Leon (1898) is the worst of the classic early translations of Marx, producing muddle, inaccuracy, and wodges of a language that is neither English nor German.6 Because the work is so unintelligible in translation, English readers have rightly found much of what is supposed to be mere detail in Marx’s text irrelevant to the Marxism that interests them. Hence they tend to focus on passages in the Eighteenth Brumaire that seem to accord with other texts by Marx (and/or Engels) that are better known (and better translated), especially when those texts deal with what are apparently more abstract issues and higher-level generalizations.

In this chapter, I shall be considering these questions as I go along, in order to refresh the whole question of Marx and Bonapartism. Framing the work with a new contextual account, I examine it politically, drawing out what Marx had to say about the relationship between democracy, dictatorship, and class struggle. Marx’s view of democracy was highly substantive rather than abstractly procedural, and his account of class politics was far from crudely reductionist. A refreshed reading of the Eighteenth Brumaire reveals that Marx was a pioneer analyst of the politics of representation and a first-rank theorist of contingency. Balanced against that, his account reveals a structural dependence between the class content of representative democracy and an impetus to dictatorship that does not come from a “great” and/or “evil” personality. Rather against the grain of most historiography,

4 Or at least that was true until Hayden White recast history as narrative and so reversed the terms of engagement, promoting Marx to the top ranks. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973). Theodore Zeldin rather respectfully credits Marx with journalism and a “heuristic” intent, and notably leans toward Marx’s analysis in considering the “June Days” of 1848 and the relationship between Louis Bonaparte and the class interests of French industrialists, as well as French peasants; France 1848–1945 (Oxford, 1973), 130, 131, 471, 473, 504.

5 Karl Marx, “Preface” (1859) to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Later Political Writings, 158–62. See G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History: A Defence (Oxford, 1978).

6 Terrell Carver, “Translating Marx,” Alternatives 22:2 (1997), 191–204, and later in this chapter; Maximilien Rubel, Bibliographie des oeuvres de Karl Marx (Paris, 1956), 91.

Marx’s theory of dictatorship does not depend on a dictator, his theory of Bonapartism does not depend on a Bonaparte, and his theory of Caesarism is one of resurrection and parody. In the Eighteenth Brumaire, it is the class politics of representative democracy that delivers a deadly dictatorship to the living republic and a mock empire to the farcical Bonaparte. As Marx put it: “Men and events appear as Schlemihls in reverse, as shadows that have lost their bodies. The revolution has paralysed its own proponents and has endowed only its enemies with passion and violence.”7

Marx’s contribution to the theory of Bonapartism is really a contribution to the theory of democracy, but it is not a contribution that many democrats are willing to entertain. Living in a post-Hayekian world in which markets and democracy are said to be indissolubly linked (through a logic of information flows based on mutually reinforcing freedoms), few democrats today are anxious to examine the radically inegalitarian world that Marx portrays in the antidemocratic struggles that took place within the Second Republic.8 This is a world of big capital and vested interests, with little enthusiasm for allocating power to the wider, poorer sections of society. Marx argued that “the party of order” paved the way for Louis Bonaparte’s coup of December 2, 1851, and scornfully detailed the extent to which the party of order fooled themselves into believing that Louis Bonaparte was really the fool he seemed to be. The irony of history is more in evidence in this text than the workings of any dialectic, but more pertinently, Marx identified a dynamic within “free market” liberal democracy that is ever-present. This dynamic is a predictable relationship between capitalist wealth, authoritarian institutions, and the capacity of some politicians to fool most of the people at least some of the time, including themselves. Marx traces out a delusionary politics and focuses on collective as well as individual self-delusions. Those who lived through the “Thatcher Years” in the United Kingdom will surely find some similarities.

MARX AND HISTORY

Marx’s work has been treated by professional historians as politically suspect at best and dismissed as propaganda at worst. Had he been an eyewitness to at least some of the important events (like Thucydides), his account would be an important primary source. Also, his docu-dramatic reconstructions would then be respected (again, rather like Thucydides).9 However, Marx

7Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in Later Political Writings, 53–4.

8F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London, 1960).

9Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth, 1977), 46–8.

political process, whether that of violence and force of arms, or (where possible) that of electoral politics and representative institutions. The final section of the Communist Manifesto (written December 1847/January 1848 and published in February before any overtly revolutionary events) makes this clear, giving a useful rundown on how coalition strategies were expected to differ country-by-country:

They [communists] struggle for the attainment of the immediate aims and interests of the working class, but within the current movement they also represent the future. In France the communists ally themselves to the social-democratic party . . .

In Switzerland they support the radicals . . . In Poland the communists assist the party which works for an agrarian revolution . . . In Germany the communist party struggles in common with the bourgeoisie against absolute monarchy.11

Marx was thus acutely sensitive to the need for coalition politics to make democratization successful, and all his life he was against Blanquism, the strategy of the coup masterminded by the small band of conspirators.12 He had no problems with armed struggle as such, however, but his model was that of calling the population to arms in the French revolutionary tradition (“Aux armes, citoyens!” as it says in “The Marseillaise”). How purely democratic his coalition politics was as a matter of practice rather than of goal-driven practicality, is a matter of debate, as it is bound to be the case with anyone involved in actual politics.

Marx was neither the theorist nor the practitioner of the vanguardist party, and his hands were never very dirty. Possibly this was a fault, but it is not a reason for discounting his commitment to representative and responsible government by and for the people. In the longer term, he expected the people to coincide with the working class, and the bourgeoisie and other reactionary classes to be dissolved in order to make exploitation disappear. That is what made him a communist. That vision is not in itself undemocratic, nor were the methods that he advocated any less democratic than those used by more conventional liberals to establish and secure constitutional forms of government. There has been a good deal of violence, terrorism, armed struggle, civil war, and worse in the history of the foundation and defense of democratic regimes. By definition, none of them emerged through democratic processes, and the closer any struggle comes to force of arms, the less democratic it is bound to become. Probably

11Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, in Marx, Later Political Writings, 29.

12See Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1968); and Michael Levin, Marx, Engels and Liberal Democracy (Basingstoke, 1989).