6 - Bonapartism as the Progenitor of Democracy: The Paradoxical Case of the French Second Empire

Summary

The proposition that Bonapartist political thought and political practice may have contributed significantly to the emergence of modern French republican democracy may appear to be stretching intellectual provocation to the point of extravagance. The Eighteenth Brumaire, after all, killed off the First Republic and instituted despotic monarchical rule under Napoleon I; and the latter's nephew Louis followed the same pattern in 1851 by his coup d'état, which abolished the Second Republic and restored hereditary rule under the Second Empire. On both occasions, a legally constituted republican political order was overthrown by force; and the “sovereignty of the people” as construed by the republican tradition (a government chosen through freely elected representative institutions and accountable to them) was replaced by a “Caesarist” political system in which ultimate power was exercised by one individual.

Indeed, the antidemocratic properties of the Bonapartist regime that governed France between 1852 and 1870 have long been proclaimed from a variety of sources and ideological perspectives. In his writings, Marx stressed that the overthrow of the “bourgeois” republic of 1848 was the consequence of intense class struggles in France, whose result was the emergence of a tyrannical authority which stood above all social groups: “the struggle seems to have reached the compromise that all classes fall on their knees, equally mute and equally impotent, before the rifle butt.”