Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and ...

Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and Napoleon III
Bonapartism. With his accession to power, Napoleon III himself coined the term Bonapartism as
a label for his ideology, defining it in his earlier correspondence with Laity in date of July 1838,
quoted by D’Alembert in his Napoleonian Political Dictionary in 1849 as “a system which is not
the pale imitation of the English or American constitutions, but rather the governmental
formulation of the principles of the revolution: the hierarchy within democracy, the equality in
front of the Law, the recompense of the patriotic merit (…)” (1838).
The death of Napoleon III and the consecutive ending of the Napoleonic empires in France did
not affect the development of Bonapartism. On the contrary, and as a matter of fact, the
interest aroused by this ideology sustained a discontinuous redefinition of its dynamics and
components. Answering the question – what is Bonapartism after the end of the imperial
experience in France – Bluche asserted that it is “a new form of political power, allying the
(passive) democracy to (active) authority; a centrist formula relying on a composite legitimacy;
in sum a form of authoritarian governance and centralizing administration” (1980). The chain of
realignments to Bonapartism expanded even supplementary with the observations of Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels who successively developed “the earliest and most fruitful model of
Bonapartism” (Dulffer, 1976). Dulffer presents an even further developed vision of the
Bonapartist framework by stating that : “plebiscitarian approval, censorship, centralism, finance
capitalism, the terror of the state as well as the appeal to workers and peasants along with the
simultaneous extension of the army as an instrument of power are among his topics” (1976).
Sequentially presented as a political model relying on the “monopoly of all state powers”
(Richter, 2005), and as an instrument of class domination by Marx, Bonapartism is today
perceived as a centuries-crosser political model based on a “political movement associated
A website dedicated to this project is available starting Dec 7 th 2010 at: http://www.aui.ma/personal/~Y.Assaoui/
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