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

Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and Napoleon III
of Petainism in Sarkozy’s political discourse through the exacerbation of a “collective
disorientation; an expression of this disorientation, Pétainism, paints servility as moral
regeneration, defines national decline as a moral crisis and identifies foreign blueprints (like the
Anglo-Saxon model) as solutions” (Bickerton, 2009). This political derive relies mainly on the
following scheme: a kind of melancholy toward the glorious past of a country, which needs to
be reinstated to avoid the chaos consequent from the detachment vis a vis the noble values of
the ancestors. Add to this the exacerbation of the threats brought to the nation by external
factors (and here for instance via immigration), and you end up with a society paralyzed by a
state of collective fear. Cited by Bickerton, Badiou identified the components of this “grandiose
claim: the nostalgia of the old world, of social order, of civil servants solidly organized, teachers
in the secular school, and finally the French countryside, its villages, of the ‘quiet force’” (2009).
Still according to Badiou, Petainism is an exacerbated form of populism that is supported by the
“provincialisation of French thoughts” (2009) based upon a highly personalized leadership
which legitimacy is supported by a consensual approach toward the masses. Sarkozy’s
supposed inclination toward Petainism was recently even more outlined after his expulsion of
10 177 Romanians and 889 Bulgarians, mostly Roms from the French territory last summer
after his muscled Grenoble’s speech which was dotted with fear innuendo. Being the only
European leader who explicitly supported Sarkozy’s deportations policy as he openly declared
the 15 th of September, Silvio Berlusconi ended up along with Sarkozy on the cover of the Leftist
Italian publication Il Manifesto under a significant cover title “Figli di Pétain” (literally sons of
Petain) as quoted by Tronche (2010).
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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