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

Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and Napoleon III
very well since he extensively relied upon it during his exile years. This very situation which
enabled the Prince Napoleon to shake Louis Philippe’s reign aroused his awareness of the
powerful impact of a liberated press serving as a tribune of freely expressed dissidences and
oppositions. Not that Napoleon III feared his opponents: as explained before, once they were
spotted by the regime, their fate was put between the hands of the police (a situation which
ended up either in imprisonment or in exile). In point of truth, since the emperor seated his
legitimacy on popular plebiscite, controlling the perception of the French population of his rule
via a strict monitoring of the press was primal. D’Alembert cited in his Dictionnaire Politique
Napoléonien the emperor saying according to which he “must preserve the freedom of the press
from the two excesses that compromise it: the arbitrary and its own license” (1849).
Accordingly, quick and radical measures were taken to ‘protect the freedom of press’, and
mainly the Press Law of July 16 th 1850 which “required all articles on political or theological
questions to be signed, and handicapped editors in many other ways” (Thompson, 1955) like the
mandatory caution deposit imposed on editors as a proof of their “good will” (in reality the
latter served as a gambling card the authorities used for blackmailing the indocile publications).
Miller details even further the silencing of the press with evocating the Decree Law of 1852
which “introduced a system whereby newspapers directors were allowed only two warnings
before a newspaper was liable to suspension” (1997). Such a situation ended up in a press
whose maneuver of action was limited to the transcription of the imperial accomplishments,
and preferably in a gracious tone: a state of affairs denounced by an angry Regnault citing the
British Times saying that “Louis Bonaparte had put civil liberties under the heel of his boots”
(1907) and an exiled Hugo bemoaning the suppression of one hundred publications “twenty in
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