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

Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and Napoleon III
qualified as xenophobic, though again, he did not create anything. As a matter of fact,
Soubrouillard reminded us that he simply recycled “what the Prodi government in Italy did in
2007 after an isolated act of delinquency of a Romanian tsigane, before Berlusconi’s political
exploitation of it” (2010). Again, the ethnic stigmatization of this community seems to be based
on a desperate populist approach, even if a recent communiqué of the Reuters news agency,
cited by Le Point, unveils that an IFOP opinion polls showed that “56% of the French
disapproved this policy while more than 71% of them estimated that the image of France
abroad was damaged by these deportations”.
At this level emerges the (last) missing link of Sarkozy’s Bonapartism, at least as far as his
political philosophy is concerned: the primacy of security and order. At this regard, Duhamel
comments are worth mentioning: “the order has always been the priority of the Right while the
movement was rooted in the Left; the originality of Bonapartism, this authoritarian and
modernist Right, consists in mixing order with movement and tradition with change. At this
point, Sarkozy is to be affiliated to the Bonapartist family” (2009). The obsession of statistical
results in that domain and Sarkozy’s everlasting and, on the long-run, tiring police state
dynamic roots even more the security card within his political philosophy. However, his latest
declaration supporting the “extension to video-surveillance to all big urban centers” is subject to
virulent debates and raises the question of whether if Sarkozy will stop his securitarian
escalation or if he will simply bypass the Republican conception of civil liberties.
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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