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cynical readings, is precisely what both Caesars and both Bonapartes did with respect to the republican orders they supplanted but pretended to maintain. The repeated emphasis on “unconventional adaptation”71 may not need to be stretched too far to be understood as a euphemism for extra-legal action. The observation that each transformation in U.S. constitutional history further nationalized the federal government at the expense of state power will not endear Ackerman to Tocquevillian critics of the administrative state. Each of these is an element of traditional Caesarism. Yet, Ackerman puts them in the service of a deliberating populace rather than a demagogic individual or group of elites. In contrast to the bogus populism of the Caesarist case, the people themselves advance their claim to power through procedures that if followed can allow and facilitate “sovereign” change. Ackerman is comfortable with the fact that the people of the United States could reach any social goal desired, so long as they do so through the time-extended and institutionally arduous procedures of constitutional change. It is precisely the elements of time and procedure that separate liberal sovereign dictatorship, if that is what we should call it, and Jacobin or Bonapartist sovereign dictatorship.72
CONCLUSION
Schmitt’s theory of dictatorship fulfills his own prophecy that the merging of sovereign will and emergency circumstances would serve as the occasion for Caesarist coups against constitutional orders. When an individual like a Caesar or a Bonaparte can claim both (1) to bring stability to a republican order that has become ungovernable and (2) to represent the whole people when so doing, constitutional government is finished. Schmitt comes to the conclusion that history has decreed that increasingly economically egalitarian forces will make such moves in times of crisis to enact sovereign dictatorships that liberals would make no effort to counter with commissarial emergency measures. Thus, he takes it upon himself to formulate a right-wing version of sovereign dictatorship. It emphasizes nationalism over egalitarianism and attempts to buy off populaces, not with straightforward social welfare measures, but those mediated through military service. To exclude any alternative other than his fascist theory of sovereign dictatorship
71Ibid., 22.
72These qualities are what separates Ackerman’s version of what Andrew Arato calls “constitutional dictatorship” from the more pathological ones that arise from easy access to the apparatus of constitutional emendation. See Andrew Arato, “Elections, Coalitions and Constitutionalism in Hungary,” East European Constitutional Review 3, nos. 3 and 4 (Summer/Fall 1994), 72–83.
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and its Bolshevist adversary, Schmitt fashions a narrative about liberalism and political exceptions that insures that liberals will be unable to intercede in the debate and that if they do, they will further jeopardize their politics and principles.
Two challenges to Schmitt on these points: First, left-wing Caesarism did not have a monopoly on the practice of dictatorship in the years just preceding and following the turn of the century, as shown by the official regime of the second Bonaparte in France and the de facto one of General Erich Ludendorff in Germany during World War I. Consequently, there was not the dire need for the conceptually brilliant and historically cunning alternative theory of dictatorship outlined by Schmitt. Second, the liberal tradition, from Locke to Ackerman, while obviously not as preoccupied with constitutional crisis management as Schmitt, certainly has more to offer on the matter than Schmitt and his historical logic suggest.
Through both diagnosis and demonstration, Schmitt’s writings on dictatorship confirm the socio-political continuity from Caesarism to fascism in the twentieth century. Indeed it serves to remind us of the necessity of further theoretical analysis of the legacy of modern authoritarianism from absolutism to fascism.73 There continues to be a need for scholarship that challenges the comforting narratives which posit an overcoming of organized domination since the end of the Middle Ages, as a result of the wave of revolutions that succeeded the overthrow of the ancien regime in France, or the subsequent emergence of liberal and social democracy. Any account of modern political history and political philosophy that views authoritarian movements and regimes as “exceptions” in the “age of reason” must be dispelled, lest we let down our collective guard permanently. Moreover, work on authoritarianism should resist the temptation to support the equally inaccurate and harmful counter-narrative (one that combines a particular reading of Tocqueville with neoconservatism) which asserts an inherent and unavoidable authoritarian strain in modern politics and expanding forms of mass democracy. Schmitt is a crucial figure for this kind of analysis precisely because his writings point out the dangers of authoritarianism in mass democracy and, more importantly, also serve as a model for how not to respond to such supposed pathologies: specifically, by concluding that some supposedly less evil form of sham mass democracy is an appropriate solution to such dangers.
73See the pioneering work of Melvin Richter, “Toward a Concept of Political Illegitimacy: Bonapartist Dictatorship and Democratic Legitimacy,” Political Theory 10, no. 2 (1982), 185– 214, and Baehr,
Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World.
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Bonapartist and Gaullist Heroic Leadership
Comparing Crisis Appeals to an Impersonated People
JACK HAYWARD
Attempts to simplify by dichotomizing the complexity of French political traditions, either in an attempt to achieve intellectual clarity or from a polemical urge to promote guilt or virtue by repulsion and association, have been numerous since the French Revolution. There have been more historically sensitive efforts to respect the variety within each component of the left/right duality. In particular, Rene´ Remond’s´ distinction between three French rights – ultra-racist legitimist, Orleanist,´ liberal and Bonapartist nationalist – had much to commend it when first formulated in 1954. However, in later editions he sought to force Gaullism into this tripartite straightjacket while warning that “Historical rapprochements are normally only the most subtle form of anachronism.”1 A presupposition of this chapter’s deliberate use of hindsight to see nineteenth-century Bonapartism through the twentieth-century phenomenon of Gaullism is that it allows us to offer a retrospective corrective to ill-considered attributions of either ignominious or glorious ancestry.
While acknowledging that the Bonapartist nationalist right incorporated minority left-wing elements, Remond´ argued that dependence upon its predominantly right-wing support pushed it rightward under Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, Boulanger, and de Gaulle. He was prepared to accept that in theory Bonapartism “lent itself to many interpretations. Political Janus, its ambiguity allowed within limits some scope for adaptation. In 1849 it could, almost equally and with equal likelihood, have given birth to a left-wing or right-wing Bonapartism.”2 In practice, the votes of the peasantry, with the support of the Church, the new business notables, and administrative
1Rene´ Remond,´ La Droite en France, de la Premiere` Restauration a` la VeRepublique´, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1968), 304.
2Rene´ Remond,´ La Droite en France, de la Premiere` Restauration a` la VeRepublique´, 1st ed. (Paris, 1954), 99; cf. 100–117.
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elite inexorably pulled the Second Empire to the right, despite the belated Liberal Empire Orleanist turn toward the center.
In a more fair-minded way than either the communist and noncommunist left polemicists who engaged in a crude assimilation of Gaullism and Bonapartism, Remond,´ as a scrupulous historian with strong Social Catholic affiliations, nevertheless emphasized those features that they shared. These were the control of the media of mass communications; reassuring property owners and business accompanied by “social concerns”; Saint-Simonian technocratic reformism; an assertive foreign and military policy and an authoritarian, monocratic political regime, supported by a centralized administrative elite, notably through the partisan activities of the prefects.3 The problem is that all these features are not confined to Bonapartism, even if they were given especially strong expression by it. Leaving to others the discussion of whether Bonapartism is itself incontrovertibly of the right, why did the Gaullist synthesis based upon the founding myth of popular sovereignty succeed in institutionalizing itself when Bonapartism conspicuously failed? Is it not because Gaullism was not merely able to live up to the claim that “Everyone has been, is or will be Gaullist” but that the “republican monarch” did rise above monarchy and republic, legitimism, Jacobinism, Bonapartism, and Orleanism and could not simply be reduced to one of its constituents?
As far as the attempt to equate Bonapartism with nationalism and Gaullism is concerned, Sudhir Hazareesingh has usefully distinguished the two faces of French nationalism. “The aggressive and backward-looking nationalism of the anti-Dreyfusards was overcome by the democratic and progressive nationalism of the republicans; the despondent and penitent nationalism which culminated in the Etat Franc¸ais was swept away by the optimistic patriotism of the resistance, and the retreating and cramped chauvinism of the extreme right over the Algerian question was defeated by the realistic nationalism of Charles de Gaulle.”4 While borrowing from the royalists their preoccupation with legitimate authority, from the republicans’ primacy of the led over the leader, and from the Bonapartists their concern to lead from the front rather than from behind, de Gaulle infused state power with a democratic legitimacy in a personalized but accountable authority: the directly elected president of the republic.
From Karl Marx to Franc¸ois Mitterrand, the left has been addicted to portraying Bonapartism as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and monopoly
3 Rene´ Remond,´ La Droite en France, de la Premiere` Restauration a` la VeRepublique´ , 3rd ed., 302–4. Also summarized by Olivier Duhamel, La Gauche et la VeRepublique´ (Paris, 1980), 106.
4 Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford, 1994), 148.
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capitalism, as relying upon coup d’etat´ to attain power and upon plebiscites and repression to sustain its control of the state. Olivier Duhamel has thoroughly documented the attempt by the French communist and noncommunist left to discredit Gaullism by assimilating it to Bonapartism. Duhamel has convincingly shown how reluctant the communists were to use Marx’s
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte for their crude purpose of pillorying “personal power” in the service of financial speculators and thereby demystifying de Gaulle’s status as a national hero.5 Despite the desire to stress General de Gaulle’s dependence on the military in retrieving power in 1958, it is significant that it was the less glorious Louis-Napoleon, lacking his uncle’s place in the pantheon of French heroes, who was the peg on which the left hung their attacks.
Another way of linking Bonapartism and Gaullism has been to regard them as sharing a desire to subordinate society to the state. In his 1977 study of the aspiration of the French state to political autonomy, Pierre Birnbaum concluded that “From bonapartism to gaullism, this ephemeral pretension of the state to independence is a constant feature of French history.”6 By showing that in The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Civil War in France Marx had acknowledged the partial autonomy of the state from society, which Tocqueville had discussed in relation to bureaucratic centralization, Birnbaum not only exposes why French communist criticisms of the Fifth Republic found it difficult to draw on Marxist analysis. He goes on to argue that de Gaulle’s 1945 creation of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration reflected the Bonapartist urge to build a supra-partisan state power capable of sovereignty by deciding in the national interest.7 We shall return later to the way in which heroic Gaullism had to routinize its charismatic character by a process of partisanization and bureaucratization that was profoundly repugnant to its progenitor and his most faithful disciples. For the present, let us note in passing that while Napoleon established and Louis-Napoleon utilized a centralized state bureaucracy and the Council of State to exert despotic power, de Gaulle was always suspicious that the bureaucracy would pursue its own agenda rather than his. He was also impatient with the Council of State’s independence, seeing it as a herald of the Constitutional Council’s increasing inclination to
5Duhamel, La Gauche, 107–17. See especially Jacques Duclos, De Napoleon III a` de Gaulle (Paris, 1964) and Pierre Juquin, “De Gaulle et le myth du ‘heros’,” Cahiers du Communisme July–August 1961, 1133–69. More generally, see Alain Rouquie,´ “L’hypothese` bonapartiste et l’emergence des systemes` politiques semi-competitifs,´ ” Revue Franc¸aise de Science Politique, XXV, Dec. 6, 1975, 2077–111 and Georges Conchon, Nous, la gauche, devant Louis Napoleon´ (Paris, 1969).
6Pierre Birnbaum, Les sommets de l’etat´ . Essai sur l’elite´ du pouvoir en France (Paris, 1977), 185.
7Ibid., 14–26.
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review judicially not merely the administrative but the legislative acts of government.
While the Socialist Section Francaise de l’Internationale Ouvriere` (SFIO) had helped de Gaulle to power in 1958, it was particularly opposed to the subsequent direct election of the president, its constant desire being to “‘parlementarise’ Bonapartism,” reducing the new institutions to a constitutional parenthesis.8 However, it was Mitterrand, the future leader of the new Socialist Party – who as president of the republic exploited to the full the power of the Fifth Republic president – who launched the most vitriolic attack on de Gaulle’s regime in 1964. “There is in our country a solid permanence of Bonapartism in which converge the monarchic traditional vocation of national grandeur and the Jacobin passion for national unity. In 1958 Gaullism had no difficulty in bringing together the scattered components and reviving the synthesis sought by the protagonists of personal power,” assisted by the “tried and tested recipe of Napoleonic plebiscite.”9 Mitterrand attacked the “second style Gaullism (as one says Second Empire),” with May 13, 1958, being de Gaulle’s December 2, 1851.10 “Between de Gaulle and the republicans there is first and always the coup d’etat´ .”11 However, Mitterrand traced the problem back to de Gaulle’s use of “illegal action to base his legitimacy on the higher necessity of saving the country over written laws,” asserting that “The match between legality and legitimacy summarizes the history of Gaullism since 1940.”12 Mitterrand put his finger on the contrast between the heroic leader’s exceptional “personal legitimacy, independent of the political context, mystical alliance, indissoluble between the people and him”13 and the conventional representative leader relying upon routine legality. So, it is to Max Weber that we must turn for guidance, before moving on to Stanley Hoffmann’s elucidation of de Gaulle’s heroic style of leadership.
THE HEROIC VARIANT OF CHARISMATIC AUTHORITY
The Napoleons and de Gaulle are classic examples of Weber’s charismatic type of authority that challenges an existing institutional order and then
8Duhamel, La Gauche, 145, 230, quoting among others the first President of the Fourth Republic Vincent Auriol’s Hier . . . demain (Paris, 1945), 237–9.
9Franc¸ois Mitterrand, Le coup d’etat´ permanent (Paris, 1964) quoting from F. Mitterrand, Politique. Textes et discours, 1938–1981 (Paris, 1984), 110.
10Ibid., 111.
11Ibid., 104, 106: “the Fifth Republic is a coup d etat´ regime´ .”
12Ibid., 106–7.
13Ibid., 109. For an analysis of Mitterrand’s changing post-1964 constitutional interpretation of the Fifth Republic, see Duhamel, La Gauche, 252 and ff.
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seeks to found a new order. They could not have done so without changing their character by invoking traditional and legal legitimacy to perpetuate an otherwise ephemeral and exceptional achievement. However, they are its heroic variant, relying initially on the use of force or military prowess, either directly in the case of Napoleon or indirectly for Louis-Napoleon, who traded on the name of his uncle, thereby demonstrating that the response to the question “What’s in a name?” is “Sometimes, a great deal.” The fact that Louis-Napoleon could rely upon familial borrowed finery to gain election as president in 1848 suggests that a dynastic element of traditional authority had been successfully absorbed by French public opinion. There may also be a prophetic aspect, reflected in the memoirs of both Napoleons, but the heroic aspect predominates, specific cases never fully replicating Weber’s pure types. So, it is by reference to their heroic achievements in war and as saviors from defeat and disorder that charismatic military leaders evoke deferential “hero worship.”14
Max Weber emphasizes the importance of the plebiscite as “the specific means of establishing the legitimacy of authority on the basis of the free confidence of those subject to authority, even though it be only formal or possibly a fiction.”15 Once the transmutation of charismatic authority by infusions of legal and/or traditional leadership is under way, “instead of recognition being treated as a consequence of legitimacy, it is treated as the basis of legitimacy” by those subject to it.16 Weber also explains the centralization of prefectural power in the two Empires as being “derived from the charismatic administration of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship,” which demonstrates that “It is not impossible, as in the case of Napoleon, for the strictest bureaucracy to issue directly from a charismatic movement.”17
I have followed Stanley Hoffmann in preferring the term heroic to either charismatic or crisis leadership. The appellation “heroic” is less diffuse and less encumbered with controversial conceptual mystique than is “charisma,” and it is also more clearly related to empirically identifiable activities. “Crisis” leaders do not always act heroically or challenge the traditional or legal norms of authority. Hoffmann’s model of heroic leadership is based on normative collapse resulting in “a blank check given to a superior no longer bound by restraints and bullied by resistance,” a reassertion of personal authority seen as a “heroic exercise of self-expression, a holiday
14Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, ed. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1947), 359; cf. 328.
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Ibid., 387; cf. 362. |
16 Ibid., 386. |
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Ibid., 389, 383. |
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from rules and routine, an exalting spectacle.”18 This is necessary because of the “fragility of routine authority” and “its tendency towards paralysis.”19 Yet Hoffmann goes on to point out that “the resilience of routine political authority explains why resort to a different kind of leadership is postponed until a situation breeds something like a national sense of emergency, a conviction that there is no alternative.”20 Two rival heroic military-cum- political leaders were produced in 1940 in Petain´ and de Gaulle, outsiders who offered to clean up the mess left by a discredited and defeated Third Republic.
Hoffmann’s analysis was influenced by Michel Crozier’s study of The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, which showed the need for agents of change to mobilize mass support to break the stranglehold of the traditional elites, political parties, and sectional interests. As Crozier put it in the early 1960s, no doubt with de Gaulle in mind, “During crises, individual initiative prevails and people eventually come to depend on some strategic individual’s arbitrary whim.”21 De Gaulle in 1932 had described the “divine game of the hero” who rises to the challenge: When the hour of “crisis comes, he is the one followed”; “to him naturally falls the difficult task, the main effort, the decisive mission . . . all he requests is accepted.”22 How can such an outsider create the routine legitimacy to perpetuate innovation in post-crisis circumstances?
Hoffmann picks up the Weber theme of how difficult it is to institutionalize the savior and draws an analogy between the attempts by both Napoleons and de Gaulle to rekindle legitimacy by constitutional plebiscites. De Gaulle’s suicide by plebiscite in 1969 showed how “heroic leadership in France is connected too clearly with a cataclysmic sense of emergency and with the notion of ‘total’ transformation to handle a process of gradual evolution easily and well. Napoleon III tried – by a gliding descent into
18Stanley Hoffmann, “The Rulers: Heroic Leadership in Modern France,” first published in Lewis J. Edinger, ed., Political Leadership in Industrialized Societies (New York, 1967), 127 ff., but quoted as reprinted in Stanley Hoffmann, Decline or Renewal? France since the 1930s (New York, 1974), 71–2; cf. 68.
19 Ibid., 74–5. |
20 Ibid., 77. |
21Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (London, 1964), 196.
22Charles de Gaulle, Le Fil de l’ep´ ee´ (Paris, 1932, 1962 ed.), 54–7. The interpretation of Gaullism in terms of charisma was challenged by Jean Charlot in Chapter 2 of his The Gaullist Phenomenon (1970: English ed., London, 1971). He did so by emphasizing the variations over time of its popularity in relation to the political context to sustain his argument focusing on the increasing importance of the Gaullist party, which I would argue betokened the routinization of de Gaulle’s heroic authority, especially in matters of domestic policy. The Hoffmann conception of heroic leadership was referred to by Philip Cerny specifically in relation to foreign policy in The Politics of Grandeur. Ideological Aspects of de Gaulle’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 1980), 247–8, but he subscribes to the Charlot thesis, 249–54.
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parliamentarism – and failed.”23 De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic managed the transition more effectively but remains bedeviled by the awkward problem of periodically filling the post of presidential semi-heroic leader with someone of adequate stature.
“Routine authority is legitimate because of what it is, the heroic leader is legitimate because of what he does.”24 He does not allow himself to be confined by established procedures and prefers spectacular unilateral initiatives characteristic of military tactics to patient and pedestrian negotiation. Ambitious undertakings as part of an assertive striving for national greatness punctuate the domestic and diplomatic arenas of political action, “which drives heroic leaders into an endless and often reckless gamble for legitimacy” owing to their excessive activism.25 Yet it is necessary periodically to save the routine system from paralysis. Then it is time to return to routine authority. In 1969, the democratic rejection of de Gaulle’s leadership meant that he departed as a decision of the electorate rather then being compelled to do so by the 1968 rioters, giving the Fifth Republic “a decisive seal of legitimacy.”26 By not having been defeated in battle in 1969 (as were Napoleon in 1815 and Louis Napoleon in 1870) but by verdict of the voter, de Gaulle demonstrated acceptance of the subordination of his personal sovereignty to national popular sovereignty. A majority of the people having assumed that a hostile vote would not lead to chaos, de Gaulle drew the conclusion that they wanted to return to routine representative government and that his mission of destiny’s agent to rescue France had come to an end. The transition from heroic to humdrum leadership which Georges Pompidou, his prime minister from 1962–8, had surreptitiously prepared, could now proceed more smoothly.
CONSTITUTIONALIZING THE HEROIC LEADER
Since 1789, France has had some twenty-one constitutions (the precise number depending on those you include) of which only fourteen have actually operated – in the case of the “Benjamine,” Benjamin Constant’s Acte Additionnel aux Constitutions de l’Empire of 1815, for only the two months
23 Hoffmann, Decline or Renewal, 81; cf. 79–80. See also Jack E. S. Hayward, “Presidential Suicide by Plebiscite: De Gaulle’s Exit, April 1969,” Parliamentary Affairs 22/4 (Autumn 1969), 289–319, which makes clear that de Gaulle’s threat to resign if defeated was like making a threat to commit suicide to change the behavior of others, rather than an intention to take one’s own life which went wrong.
24 Hoffmann, Decline or Renewal, 86.
26 Ibid., 104; cf. 103.