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

Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and Napoleon III
and questions. Hannaford provided a rather cynical answer on that matter estimating that
Sarkozy “presides over a country with permanently high unemployment, low productivity and
growth, but oodles of cradle-to-grave social services; it's no wonder he wants to glorify the
state, since competing effectively in the markets of the world seems not possible” (2009).
At this point, the previously mentioned blurring of the political barriers as a basic
component of Bonapartism at the political level ends up in the reliance on mercantilism at the
economic one. It is interesting to envisage from the latter Napoleon III’s rule as “an anticipated
state socialism; Napoleon used to joke that he was “The Socialist Emperor”, as cited by the
Southern State California University’s report on the Saint-Simonian’s aspects of the imperial
economic policy. This report also awards the emperor the fatherhood of the legal existence of
labor unions in France since he legalized “Limited Liability Corporations” and granted them the
right of striking. The encouraging of exports ended up in 1860 in the signature of the Cobden-
Chevalier treaty of trade with Great Britain which increased heavily the French trade balance
and turned its economy into an export-led one. As explained by Miller, the “volume of French
foreign trade tripled between 1850-1870” as a result of the imperial policy which was at the
origins of the improving of communications: the country disposed of 1200 miles of railway in
1848, by 1871 it reached 11500 miles (1997). The flourishing of the industry reached its peak in
the latest years of the empire: Napoleon III wanted to display the success of his mercantilist
economic policy by an unmatched event within the nineteenth century Europe, the Paris
Exhibition of 1867.
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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