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

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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/ 20
Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and Napoleon III II- An oligarchic political regime: the centralization of powers relying on two main allies (religion and army/police) Oligarchy here is to be understood both from its classical meaning (the holding of power within a limited club of happy few), and the more elaborated definition coined by the German sociologist Robert Michels in 1911. As explained by the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy “refers to the inbuilt tendency of all complex social organizations to turn bureaucratic and highly undemocratic” (2008). From the latter, oligarchy is to be considered as a spillover effect of the democratic governance as such, rather than its founding principle. In addition, Michel identified several sub-components of this oligarchy and mainly popular participation (1911). This latter being already defined in the Napoleon III/Sarkozy parallel as their primal legitimizing attribute of political governance, other mechanisms need to be covered. First of all, and to start with, Louis Napoleon gradually proceeded to a centralization of powers via playing the constitutional reform card. At this regard, two periods are to be identified: the initial strong hold over the political counter-balances and in the late 1860s the liberalization era. The constitution Napoleon III was relying on was based on a bicameral legislature: a Senate whose members are nominated directly by the Executive (that is the Emperor himself) and a Legislative chamber whose representatives are elected via the universal suffrage system. The emperor maneuvered tactfully in order to strongly influence the votes, and thus to minimize the threat of an opposition plebiscited by the population. As explained by Gildea while describing the outcomes of the Legislative Chamber’s election of March 1852, “the election returned a very docile chamber, in which a quarter of the deputies were industrialists, non- A website dedicated to this project is available starting Dec 7 th 2010 at: http://www.aui.ma/personal/~Y.Assaoui/ 21
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