From Subject to Citizen (Princeton Legacy Library) - Softcover

Hazareesingh, Sudhir

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691058482 ISBN 13: 9780691058481

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1998

Synopsis

From Subject to Citizen offers an original account of the Second Empire (1852-1870) as a turning point in modern French political culture: a period in which thinkers of all political persuasions combined forces to create the participatory democracy alive in France today. Here Sudhir Hazareesingh probes beyond well-known features of the Second Empire, its centralized government and authoritarianism, and reveals the political, social, and cultural advances that enabled publicists to engage an increasingly educated public on issues of political order and good citizenship. He portrays the 1860s in particular as a remarkably intellectual decade during which Bonapartists, legitimists, liberals, and republicans applied their ideologies to the pressing problem of decentralization. Ideals such as communal freedom and civic cohesion rapidly assumed concrete and lasting meaning for many French people as their country entered the age of nationalism.

With the restoration of universal suffrage for men in 1851, constitutionalist political ideas and values could no longer be expressed within the narrow confines of the Parisian elite. Tracing these ideas through the books, pamphlets, articles, speeches, and memoirs of the period, Hazareesingh examines a discourse that connects the central state and local political life. In a striking reappraisal of the historical roots of current French democracy, he ultimately shows how the French constructed an ideal of citizenship that was "local in form but national in substance."

Originally published in 1998.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

About this title

About the Author

Sudhir Hazareesingh is an Official Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Subject to Citizen

The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy

By Sudhir Hazareesingh

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1998 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-05848-1

Contents

Illustrations, ix, 
Preface, xi, 
Introduction Democracy and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century French Political Culture, 3, 
Chapter 1 The Paradoxes of Bonapartist Democracy, 29, 
Chapter 2 Tradition and Change: Legitimist Conceptions of Decentralization, 96, 
Chapter 3 Between Hope and Fear: The Limits of Liberal Conceptions of Decentralization, 162, 
Chapter 4 The Path Between Jacobinism and Federalism: Republican Municipalism, 233, 
Conclusion The Second Empire and the Emergence of Republican Citizenship, 306, 
Bibliography, 323, 
Index, 357, 

CHAPTER 1

THE PARADOXES OF BONAPARTIST DEMOCRACY

As noted in the introduction, the Second Empire was long demonized in French republican historiography. Later generations of historians typically remembered the circumstances of the founding of the regime, the brutal and repressive nature of its authoritarian phase, the decadent frivolity of its court, and the humiliating defeat of French troops at Sedan. Prefacing his Histoire du Deuxième Empire in 1874, Charles Barthelemy commented that France had been governed by a "diseased dreamer"; the reign of Napoleon III had simply been "a lie that lasted eighteen years." Writing in 1886, Augustin Challamel summed up the Second Empire as the era of the "absorption of the rights of a nation into the interests of one man."

No less damning was the general verdict on imperial elites, whose shadowy status was immortalized in Haussonville's contemptuous image of men standing "barefoot in patent-leather boots." Equally flattering was Prince Napoleon, who told his cousin the emperor that his ministers seemed to dress like "coachmen or cooks." In the Orleanist writer Xavier Marmier's memoirs, we find the dignitaries of the Empire "avid for fat salaries, hungry for profits, and eager to derive every possible advantage from their position, whether with dignity or indignity, by fair means or foul." Such men were nothing but vain and unscrupulous adventurers, who were incapable of the slightest elevation of spirit or thought. In Louise Colet's republican satire Ces petits messieurs, the spirit of the late Second Empire is painted in equally somber tones: the predominant qualities attributed to the agents of Empire are cynicism, moral callousness, coarseness, and incompetence.

In recent decades, a growing number of works on the Second Empire have attempted to correct this negative impression. The overall mechanics of the imperial political system have been reassessed, and its key agents have emerged as dynamic and purposeful figures, whose will was indeed often autonomous of that of their political and administrative masters. Biographical studies have emphasized the managerial talents of the emperor's ministers and advisers; erudite monographs have underlined the devotion to the public good of his prefects and councillors of state; dictionaries have brought attention to the wealth of individual and collective accomplishments between 1852 and 1870;" copious articles have underscored the professional qualities of the imperial police; and (perhaps most startlingly of all) private letters have revealed that even the austere members of the elite Finance Inspectorate were "men of flesh and blood." Yet, for all these welcome additions to our knowledge, Second Empire Bonapartism remains somewhat underconceptualized. In his classic book Les droites en France, René Rémond points to the political originality of Bonapartism and stresses three key elements in its ideological "system": the reference to 1789, the principle of authority, and the constant search for "glory." Rémond distinguishes between a right- and left-wing tendency within Bonapartism and notes the preponderance of the former by 1870. However, there is no development of his conceptual analysis or an explanation of how this ideological divide might relate to other types of Bonapartism he identifies. In a wide-ranging study of Bonapartism between 1800 and 1850, Frédéric Bluche also notes certain elements of continuity (most notably the revolutionary legacy) but concludes with the "permanent ambiguity" of the Bonapartist phenomenon.

The ambivalent quality of Bonapartism is undeniable. The image of heterogeneity it has left behind is partly the product of Napoleon Ill's reluctance to form a distinct Bonapartist party or even to establish a doctrinal review. With reference to the Second Empire alone, contemporaries and later historians have identified a wide range of manifestations of the Bonapartist phenomenon — authoritarian and liberal, nationalistic and chauvinistic, but also conservative and rural, notabilist, Orleanist and neolegitimist, democratic and popular, red and white, clerical and anticlerical, technocratic and Saint-Simonian, and even socialist. The mere distinction between liberal and authoritarian Bonapartism is therefore manifestly insufficient to make sense of this social and intellectual diversity. At the same time, it is perhaps going too far to argue, as Rothney does, that "one could speak of an entire Bonapartist spectrum ranging from extreme left to extreme right." This claim is acceptable only in the sense in which it might apply to all other broad political families during the Second Empire. As we will see in the rest of this book, liberals, republicans, and even legitimists were broad churches, within which a wide ideological spectrum could be distinguished. But this view is not to be confused with the location of these specific ideologies on a more general political spectrum. Indeed, the claim that Bonapartism (or any other political grouping, for that matter) occupies the entire political spectrum is unhelpful, because it shies away from addressing the necessary question of its core ideological principles.

The underconceptualization of Bonapartism is apparent in another dimension. Many areas of Bonapartist writing continue to be exempted from any manner of ideological analysis. In particular, there is a continuing tendency to downplay — if not altogether to disregard — the ideological aspects of the Bonapartist conceptions of the state, largely because its Jacobinism is simply taken for granted. Thus, in his analysis of Bonapartist administrative institutions under the Second Empire, Guy Thuillier exemplifies this atheoretical approach by arguing that the development of the imperial administration between 1852 and 1870 occurred without any theoretical or ideological guiding principles. In short, the reassessment of the history of the Second Empire has yet fully to come to terms with the richness and diversity of Bonapartist ideology. The dominant view now seems to be that however discerning and effective they may have been as statesmen and administrators, the men of Empire were mere empiricists whose actions were guided by a mixture of public interest and opportunism rather than ideology.

One of the primary purposes of this chapter is to correct this view, by offering a broad analysis of Bonapartist discourse on centralization. This analysis serves two revisionist purposes: first, to demonstrate clearly the existence of Bonapartist theories of the state and public administration, which were formulated and argued over among Bonapartist elites (as well as with other political groups); second, to bring to light a range of Bonapartist writings on decentralization. In traditional approaches to the French Right, this aspect of Bonapartism is generally passed over in silence. For their part, historians of decentralization tend to regard the advocacy of greater local liberty during the Second Empire as the exclusive preserve of opposition groups. From their perspective, decentralism appears primarily as a revisionist — and even subversive — enterprise orchestrated by political movements to undermine the power and authority of the Napoleonic regime. Even those historians of the Second Empire who recognize the regime's commitment to liberal reform during the 1860s often ignore the phenomenon of Bonapartist decentralization, or else they present it as an opportunistic response to the clamors of opposition groups and public opinion more generally.

None of these approaches, therefore, seriously entertains the notion of a genuinely Bonapartist form of decentralization. Yet during the 1860s the regime of Napoleon III took a number of political and legislative initiatives to promote greater local liberty in France. The last of these measures was the creation of an extraparliamentary commission of inquiry in February 1870, whose wide-ranging discussions were interrupted only by the outbreak of the war with Prussia. The promotion of local liberty therefore became an integral part of the Bonapartist regime's discourse. In this chapter I will assess the nature and extent of its commitment to the cause of decentralization and will offer three general conclusions. First, decentralization was a response to a growing internal crisis produced by the contradictions of the imperial political and administrative system. However, divisions within the Bonapartist movement prevented this response from developing to its full potential, which explains the limited progress that the promotion of decentralist legislation had achieved by the time the Second Empire collapsed in September 1870. At the same time, civic and political practices evolved significantly in the direction of greater local autonomy, to such an extent that the local government regime of 1870 in effect bore little resemblance to the centralist order that the Empire had sought to promote in 1852.

Second, the debates over decentralization also provide an illustration of the problematic nature of local politics for the Bonapartist state. Considerations of administrative efficiency had to be reconciled with political and ideological imperatives; for example, the regime was eager to derive its legitimacy from male universal suffrage, which was restored in December 1851. At the same time the Second Empire sought to maintain close administrative control over the communes and departments and to promote a depoliticized conception of communal citizenship. The regime was also torn between its instinctive desire to preserve order and stability in the provinces and a genuine aspiration to breathe life into the quiescent structures of municipal and departmental administration. Finally, there were conflicts of interest between different branches of the imperial state (especially between the prefects and the elected representatives). The question of decentralization thus exposed a number of critical problems the regime faced in its attempts to reconstruct the machinery of the state and redefine the nature of citizenship. Despite its failure to maintain itself after 1870, however, the Bonapartist regime played an important role in preparing the terrain for the irruption of democratic politics in France in the later nineteenth century.

This chapter begins with a description of the philosophy and practice of Bonapartism, particularly its attachment to centralization under the Second Empire. This account is followed by an analysis of the political utility of centralization for the Bonapartist regime. I then examine the dysfunctions of the local government system and the social, political, and institutional reasons that impelled the Empire to put forward decentralist proposals. These measures and their justifications are subsequently contrasted with the views of authoritarian and centralist Bonapartists, who fiercely opposed any scheme that devolved substantive powers to the departments and communes. This conflict between centralist and decentralist views was played out fully in the workings of the 1870 extraparliamentary commission, whose inconclusive efforts demonstrated the limits of the Bonapartist conception of decentralization. My analysis ends with an overall assessment of the empire's record in local politics and the promotion of principles of good citizenship.

Bonapartism: Unity and Diversity

The common ideological core of Second Empire Bonapartism was based almost exclusively on an interpretation of the achievements of the emperor Napoleon. As a Bonapartist weekly put it in 1850, "The Napoleonic cause is the same in 1848 as in 1802." This lineage was further emphasized after the reestablishment of the empire in 1852. In the words of a Bonapartist pamphleteer, "The eternal honor of the great emperor is to have understood the great Revolution, to have adopted its principles, to have proclaimed and sanctioned them, covering them with the authority of his genius."

These key Bonapartist principles of the Revolution were the abolition of feudalism, the introduction of civil equality, the principle of taxation, the admission of all citizens to public offices, and the subordination of the church to the state. All Bonapartists also recognized the strategic importance of cultivating the rural world; in the words of one of the emperor's most proficient ministers, "It is in this milieu that are preserved a pure sense of morals and a strong devotion to the empire." Although the Bonapartist vision of the rural world stressed the importance of the values of "authority, order, and hierarchy," it was distinct from traditionalist and clericalist conceptions in that it saw itself as a progressive force; one rural Bonapartist declared his commitment to "the moral revolution brought about by progress." Provincial Bonapartists also welcomed the spread of education and were often suspicious of clerical and noble influences. Thus in 1869 Ernest de Bouteiller, the official candidate in the constituency of Metz (Moselle), underscored his commitment to "the propagation of education for all" and the "moral and material improvement of the condition of France."

As noted earlier, historians have identified divisions between progressive and authoritarian subcultures within Bonapartism — in the political terminology of the time, between "liberals" and "Arcadians." The latter have been seen to favor order, religion, military glory, and social conservatism and to depend for their support on traditional social elites. The former are said to stress the popular and democratic aspect of the Bonapartist tradition, which was attached to civil equality and universal suffrage. But this dichotomy often obscures rather than illuminates the reality of Second Empire Bonapartism. The attachment to order and authority appears as a characteristic feature of all Bonapartists, who commonly subscribed to the view that "nothing can be created, live, and develop without order and regularity." Indeed, such views served as the basis for the justification of Louis Napoleon's coup in 1851. At the same time, this dichotomy does little to capture the place of the Bonapartist ideologue Persigny, whose political instincts were nothing if not authoritarian but who nonetheless — and unlike many Bonapartists of this variety such as Jérôme David, Boilay, and the Cassagnacs — regarded the principle of universal suffrage as a core component of Bonapartist ideology.

Indeed, Bonapartists and republicans often expressed a common attachment to universal suffrage; however, there were differences in the manner in which it was conceived and practiced. Republicans tended to stress the civic and participationist advantages of universal suffrage, whereas Bonapartists saw it as an "essentially conservative" instrument. Bonapartists also rejected the republican emphasis on representative and deliberative forms of democracy; in the words of the imperialist poet Merimee, "Parliamentary democracy is one of the worst governments for a country that lacks a strong aristocracy." Hence the Bonapartist fondness for plebiscites. Furthermore, it is difficult to locate Saint-Simonian or technical approaches, which were embraced by many Bonapartist elites, within the strict dichotomy between liberalism and authoritarianism. Indeed, many Bonapartists advocated a technical conception of politics as opposed to an ideological one, in which greater emphasis was placed on good management and sound finance; as with figures such as Eugène Rouher, there was often an element of intellectual flexibility — if not opportunism — in the demeanor of these Bonapartists. Finally, to complicate matters even further, the antielitist strand in the Bonapartist tradition, which often expressed strong hostility to traditional notables and religious institutions, was by no means the exclusive property of liberals.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from From Subject to Citizen by Sudhir Hazareesingh. Copyright © 1998 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691058482
• ISBN 13: 9780691058481
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 408