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

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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 A website dedicated to this project is available starting Dec 7 th 2010 at: http://www.aui.ma/personal/~Y.Assaoui/ 54
Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and Napoleon III Paris and eighty in the provinces” (1863). From the latter, the first decade of the French Second Empire witnessed a state-reorganization and control of the journalism and the suppression of its watchdog leverage endangering the sate stability. As a matter of fact, Louis Napoleon used again the populist card to justify his censorship by stating in a speech delivered to the Parliament the 29 th of March 1852: “why was not France moved by the restrictions on press freedom and individual liberties? It is because they have degenerated into license and odious excesses that threatened the rights of each one of you” (1868). At this point, the Second Empire was not satisfied by the control of its national press, but attempted twice to put under its grasp the foreign one. Hugo explains that the emperor brought into court two Belgian publications (“The Bulletin Français” and “The Nation”), but after the failure of his attempt (both were acquitted by the Belgian justice) he decided to impose a ban over their entrance into the French territory; the hostile British press as well was targeted via the expulsion of its correspondents in France (1863). These attempts proved to be “half successes” for Hugo since the foreign journalists escaped the imperial license via various stratagems and subterfuges. One century and a half later, such a direct censorship of the freedom and independence of the press being simply unfeasible and unpractical, Nicolas Sarkozy engaged a lively management and control of the media yet through more insidious ways. Sarkozy’s Bonapartist thirst of control and what it engendered in terms of decline of press and media freedom was recently unveiled by the 2010 annual report of Reporters Without Borders which classified France at the 44 th position (that is to say a fall of 33 places) and made its General Secretary, Jean-François Julliard, assert that “the French government is no longer considered as respectful of the freedom of information”, highlighting by this way that “only Berlusconi’s Italy is worse in Europe with its A website dedicated to this project is available starting Dec 7 th 2010 at: http://www.aui.ma/personal/~Y.Assaoui/ 55
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