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

Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and Napoleon III
inwards the Mediterranean Sea is thus a shifting of policies from the gradual French
detachment in the region, a shift rooted in the Fifth Republic tradition since it was
uninterrupted since the decolonization’s days. World’s leaders discovered with amazement
Sarkozy’s Montpellier speech where, and as cited by Bowen, “praising the dreams of Napoleon
Bonaparte when he invaded Egypt, Napoleon III when he conquered Algeria, and Marshal
Hubert Lyautey, the first French Resident General of Morocco, Sarkozy said they all participated
in a Mediterranean vision, which he called one of “civilization not conquest” (2007).
This Mediterranean dream was to be materialized by one of Sarkozy’s most ambitious proposal:
the creation of a Mediterranean Union led by a France trying to reconcile its past colonial
dominion over the region with the evolution of this latter’s strategic importance within the
international relations arena. On this, Nash considered Sarkozy’s “re-creation of this Napoleonic
dream” as a foresighted enterprise since it relies on the “re-creation of the Roman’s Empire
boundaries - which actually stretched further, but did include all the Mediterranean” (2007).
By this way, the latter resonates with Louis Napoleon’s imperial expansion in the region, even if
his colonial undertaking was far more ambitious than Sarkozy’s. As a matter of fact, the imperial
foreign policy targeted two strategic regions: Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Concerning
the African continent first, the emperor’s conquest of Algeria in 1857 which made him describe
himself “grandly as just as much the emperor of the Arabs as the French” (Miller, 1997), was
closely followed by the establishment of other Southern colonies, and mainly in Senegal,
Guinea, and Dahomey. On the Eastern Mediterranean expansionist policy, the French
expedition to Syria in 1860 and the engineering of the Suez Canal project marked the
boundaries-less colonial appetite of the emperor. On that, Thompson noted that “whatever the
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