Bonapartist
Encyclopedia
In French political
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
history, Bonapartism has two meanings. In a strict sense, this term refers to people who aimed to restore the French Empire
Second French Empire
The Second French Empire or French Empire was the Imperial Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic and the Third Republic, in France.-Rule of Napoleon III:...
under the House of Bonaparte, the Corsica
Corsica
Corsica is an island in the Mediterranean Sea. It is located west of Italy, southeast of the French mainland, and north of the island of Sardinia....
n family of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I of France
Napoleon I of France
Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...
) and his nephew Louis (Napoleon III of France
Napoleon III of France
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was the President of the French Second Republic and as Napoleon III, the ruler of the Second French Empire. He was the nephew and heir of Napoleon I, christened as Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte...
). In a wider sense, it refers to a political movement that advocates the idea of a strong and centralized state
Centralized government
A centralized or centralised government is one in which power or legal authority is exerted or coordinated by a de facto political executive to which federal states, local authorities, and smaller units are considered subject...
, based on popular
Populism
Populism can be defined as an ideology, political philosophy, or type of discourse. Generally, a common theme compares "the people" against "the elite", and urges social and political system changes. It can also be defined as a rhetorical style employed by members of various political or social...
support of a strongman or caudillo
Caudillo
Caudillo is a Spanish word for "leader" and usually describes a political-military leader at the head of an authoritarian power. The term translates into English as leader or chief, or more pejoratively as warlord, dictator or strongman. Caudillo was the term used to refer to the charismatic...
.
Ideology
Philosophically, Bonapartism was the adaptation of principles of the French RevolutionFrench Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
to suit Napoleon's imperial form of rule. Desires for public order and French national glory had combined to create a Caesarist coup d'etat for General Bonaparte on 18 Brumaire
18 Brumaire
The coup of 18 Brumaire was the coup d'état by which General Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the French Directory, replacing it with the French Consulate...
. Though he espoused obeisance to revolutionary precedents, he himself "styled his direct and personal rule on the Old Regime monarchs." For Bonapartists, the most significant lesson of the Revolution was that unity of government and governed was paramount. The honey bee
Honey bee
Honey bees are a subset of bees in the genus Apis, primarily distinguished by the production and storage of honey and the construction of perennial, colonial nests out of wax. Honey bees are the only extant members of the tribe Apini, all in the genus Apis...
was a prominent political emblem for both the First and Second Empires, representing the Bonapartist ideal of devoted service, self-sacrifice and social loyalty.
The defining characteristics of political Bonapartism, however, were flexibility and adaptability. Napoleon III once made a sardonic comment on the diversity of the members of his cabinet, united under the single banner of Bonapartism. Referring to the leading figures in the government of the Second Empire, he remarked: "The Empress is a Legitimist, Morny is an Orléanist
Orléanist
The Orléanists were a French right-wing/center-right party which arose out of the French Revolution. It governed France 1830-1848 in the "July Monarchy" of king Louis Philippe. It is generally seen as a transitional period dominated by the bourgeoisie and the conservative Orleanist doctrine in...
, Prince Napoleon is a Republican
Republicanism
Republicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, where the head of state is appointed by means other than heredity, often elections. The exact meaning of republicanism varies depending on the cultural and historical context...
, and I myself am a Socialist. There is only one Bonapartist, Persigny – and he is mad!"
History
Bonapartism had its followers from 1815 forward among those who never accepted the defeat at WaterlooBattle of Waterloo
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815 near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands...
or the Congress of Vienna
Congress of Vienna
The Congress of Vienna was a conference of ambassadors of European states chaired by Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, and held in Vienna from September, 1814 to June, 1815. The objective of the Congress was to settle the many issues arising from the French Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic Wars,...
. Napoleon I's death in exile on Saint Helena
Saint Helena
Saint Helena , named after St Helena of Constantinople, is an island of volcanic origin in the South Atlantic Ocean. It is part of the British overseas territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha which also includes Ascension Island and the islands of Tristan da Cunha...
in 1821 only transferred the allegiance of many of these persons to other members of his family; however, particularly after the death of Napoleon's son, the Duke of Reichstadt (known to Bonapartists as Napoleon II), there were several different members of the family on whom the Bonapartist hopes rested.
The disturbances of 1848 gave this group hope. Bonapartism as an ideology of politically neutral French peasants and workers (EJ Hobsbawm) was essential in the election of Napoleon I's nephew Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as President of the Second Republic
French Second Republic
The French Second Republic was the republican government of France between the 1848 Revolution and the coup by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte which initiated the Second Empire. It officially adopted the motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité...
, and gave him the political support necessary for his 1852 discarding of the constitution and proclaiming the Second Empire
Second French Empire
The Second French Empire or French Empire was the Imperial Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic and the Third Republic, in France.-Rule of Napoleon III:...
. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte assumed the title Napoleon III to acknowledge the brief reign of Napoleon's son Napoleon II at the end of the Hundred Days
Hundred Days
The Hundred Days, sometimes known as the Hundred Days of Napoleon or Napoleon's Hundred Days for specificity, marked the period between Emperor Napoleon I of France's return from exile on Elba to Paris on 20 March 1815 and the second restoration of King Louis XVIII on 8 July 1815...
in 1815.
In 1870, the French National Assembly
French National Assembly
The French National Assembly is the lower house of the bicameral Parliament of France under the Fifth Republic. The upper house is the Senate ....
forced Napoleon III to sign a declaration of war that led France to a disastrous defeat at the hands of Prussia
Prussia
Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...
in the Franco-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...
. The emperor surrendered himself to the Prussians and their German allies to avoid further bloodshed at the Battle of Sedan (1870), and went into exile after a parliamentary coup created the Third Republic
French Third Republic
The French Third Republic was the republican government of France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed due to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, to 1940, when France was overrun by Nazi Germany during World War II, resulting in the German and Italian occupations of France...
.
Afterwards, Bonapartists continued to aspire and to agitate for another member of the family to be placed on the throne. However, from 1871 forward, they competed with Monarchist groups that favoured the restoration of the family of Louis-Philippe, King of the French (1830–1848) (the Orléanist
Orléanist
The Orléanists were a French right-wing/center-right party which arose out of the French Revolution. It governed France 1830-1848 in the "July Monarchy" of king Louis Philippe. It is generally seen as a transitional period dominated by the bourgeoisie and the conservative Orleanist doctrine in...
s), and with those who favoured the restoration of the House of Bourbon
House of Bourbon
The House of Bourbon is a European royal house, a branch of the Capetian dynasty . Bourbon kings first ruled Navarre and France in the 16th century. By the 18th century, members of the Bourbon dynasty also held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma...
, the traditional French royal family
Royal family
A royal family is the extended family of a king or queen regnant. The term imperial family appropriately describes the extended family of an emperor or empress, while the terms "ducal family", "grand ducal family" or "princely family" are more appropriate to describe the relatives of a reigning...
(Legitimists). The strength of these three factions combined was almost undoubtedly greater than that of the Republicans
Republicanism
Republicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, where the head of state is appointed by means other than heredity, often elections. The exact meaning of republicanism varies depending on the cultural and historical context...
of the era, but as the three proved to be irreconcilable on the choice of who should be the new French monarch, Monarchist fervor eventually waned and the French Republic became more or less a permanent facet of French life; Bonapartism was slowly relegated to being the civic faith of a few romantics as more of a hobby than a practical political philosophy. The death knell for Bonapartism was probably sounded when Eugène Bonaparte, the only son of Napoleon III, was killed in action while serving as a British Army
British Army
The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...
officer in Zululand
Zulu Kingdom
The Zulu Kingdom, sometimes referred to as the Zulu Empire or, rather imprecisely, Zululand, was a monarchy in Southern Africa that extended along the coast of the Indian Ocean from the Tugela River in the south to Pongola River in the north....
in 1879. Thereafter Bonapartism ceased to be a significant political force.
The current head of the family is the Prince Napoleon great-great-great-grandson of Napoleon I's brother Jérôme Bonaparte, Jean-Christophe Napoléon (born 1986). There are no remaining descendants in male line from any other of Napoleon's brothers, and no serious political movement that aims to restore any of these men to the imperial throne of France.
The Bonapartist claimants
The "Law of Succession" Napoleon I established on becoming Emperor in 1804 provided that the Bonapartist claim to the throne should pass firstly to Napoleon's own legitimate male descendants through the male line. At that time he had no legitimate sons, and it seemed unlikely he would have any due to the age of his wife JoséphineJoséphine de Beauharnais
Joséphine de Beauharnais was the first wife of Napoléon Bonaparte, and thus the first Empress of the French. Her first husband Alexandre de Beauharnais had been guillotined during the Reign of Terror, and she had been imprisoned in the Carmes prison until her release five days after Alexandre's...
. His eventual response was the unacceptable one, in Catholic eyes, of engineering a dubious annulment, without Papal approval, of his marriage to Josephine and undertaking a second marriage to the younger Marie Louise
Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma
Marie Louise of Austria was the second wife of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French and later Duchess of Parma...
, with whom he had one son. The law of succession provided that if Napoleon's own direct line died out, the claim passed first to his older brother Joseph and his legitimate male descendants through the male line, then to his younger brother Louis and his legitimate male descendants through the male line. His other brothers, Lucien and Jerome, and their descendants, were omitted from the succession (even though Lucien was older than Louis) because they had either politically opposed the Emperor or made marriages of which he disapproved. By Marie Louise Napoleon had one son, in whose favour he abdicated after his final defeat in 1815. Although the Bonapartes were now deposed and the old Bourbon monarchy restored, Bonapartists recognized this child as Napoleon II. However, he was sickly, virtually imprisoned in Austria, and died young and unmarried, without leaving any further direct descendants of Napoleon I. When the Bonaparte Empire was restored to power in France in 1852, the Emperor was Napoleon III, Louis Bonaparte's only living legitimate son (Joseph having died in 1844 without ever having had a legitimate son, only daughters).
In 1852, Napoleon III, having restored the Bonapartes to power in France, enacted a new decree on the succession. The claim first went to his own male legitimate descendants in the male line (though at that time he had none; he would later have one legitimate son, Eugène Bonaparte, who would be recognized by Bonapartists as "Napoleon IV" before dying young and unmarried). If his own line died out, the new decree allowed the claim to pass to Jerome, Napoleon's youngest brother who had previously been excluded, and his male descendants by Princess Catharina of Württemberg
Catharina of Württemberg
Princess Catharina Frederica of Württemberg was the second wife of Jérôme Bonaparte.-Family:Catharina was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia to the later King Frederick I of Württemberg and Duchess Augusta of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel...
in the male line (but not his descendants by his original marriage to the American commoner Elizabeth Patterson
Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte
Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte , known as "Betsy", was the daughter of a Baltimore, Maryland merchant, and was the first wife of Jérôme Bonaparte, and sister-in-law of Emperor Napoleon I of France.-Ancestry:Elizabeth's father, William Patterson, had been born in Ireland and came to North America...
, which Napoleon I had greatly disapproved). The only remaining Bonapartist claimants since 1879, and today, have been the descendants of Jerome and Catherine of Württemberg in the male line.
In their willingness to ignore primogeniture
Primogeniture
Primogeniture is the right, by law or custom, of the firstborn to inherit the entire estate, to the exclusion of younger siblings . Historically, the term implied male primogeniture, to the exclusion of females...
(the exclusion of Lucien Bonaparte
Lucien Bonaparte
Lucien Bonaparte, Prince Français, 1st Prince of Canino and Musignano , born Luciano Buonaparte, was the third surviving son of Carlo Buonaparte and his wife Letizia Ramolino....
and his descendants) and their cavalier approach to the Catholic belief in the indissolubility of marriage and to the Pope's rights as final arbiter on the validity of marriages, the Bonapartist laws of succession were far from traditional; but then, the whole claim of the Bonaparte family to rule France was far from traditional.
List of Bonapartist claimants to the French throne since 1814
- Napoleon INapoleon I of FranceNapoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...
, Emperor of the French (1804–1814 and 1815), Claimant (1814–1815) - Napoleon IINapoleon II of FranceNapoléon II , after 1818 known as Franz, Duke of Reichstadt, was the son of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, and his second wife, Marie Louise of Austria...
, Emperor of the French (1815), Claimant (1815–1832), son of Napoleon I. Briefly reigned as Emperor in France for a fortnight in June–July 1815, after his father's abdication following the defeat at Waterloo. Died 1832, unmarried, no children. - Joseph BonaparteJoseph BonaparteJoseph-Napoléon Bonaparte was the elder brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, who made him King of Naples and Sicily , and later King of Spain...
, Claimant (1832–1844), Napoleon I's oldest brother, former King of Spain, Died 1844, two daughters but no legitimate male children. - Louis BonaparteLouis BonaparteLouis Napoléon Bonaparte, Prince Français, Comte de Saint-Leu , King of Holland , was the fifth surviving child and the fourth surviving son of Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino...
, Claimant (1844–1846), Napoleon I's second youngest brother, former King of Holland. Died 1846. - Napoleon III, Emperor of the French 1852-1870, Claimant (1846–1852 and 1870–1873), the only living legitimate child of Louis BonaparteLouis BonaparteLouis Napoléon Bonaparte, Prince Français, Comte de Saint-Leu , King of Holland , was the fifth surviving child and the fourth surviving son of Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino...
. He was President of France 1849-1852. - Napoléon Eugène, Prince ImperialNapoléon Eugène, Prince ImperialNapoléon, Prince Imperial, , Prince Imperial, Fils de France, was the only child of Emperor Napoleon III of France and his Empress consort Eugénie de Montijo...
(Napoleon IV), Claimant (1873–1879), the only legitimate child of Napoleon III. Died 1879, unmarried, no children. - Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul BonaparteNapoléon Joseph Charles Paul BonaparteNapoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte, Prince Français, Count of Meudon, Count of Moncalieri ad personam, titular 3rd Prince of Montfort was the second son of Jérôme Bonaparte, king of Westphalia, by his wife Catherine, princess of Württemberg...
, nicknamed 'Plon-plon', Claimant (1879–1891); however, Eugène Bonapartes' will excluded him from the succession in favor of his son Napoleon Victor, leading to fierce disputes. The only male child of Jérôme BonaparteJérôme BonaparteJérôme-Napoléon Bonaparte, French Prince, King of Westphalia, 1st Prince of Montfort was the youngest brother of Napoleon, who made him king of Westphalia...
, Napoleon I's youngest brother, with Catharina of WürttembergCatharina of WürttembergPrincess Catharina Frederica of Württemberg was the second wife of Jérôme Bonaparte.-Family:Catharina was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia to the later King Frederick I of Württemberg and Duchess Augusta of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel...
(though Jerome had had another son earlier with Elizabeth PattersonElizabeth Patterson BonaparteElizabeth Patterson Bonaparte , known as "Betsy", was the daughter of a Baltimore, Maryland merchant, and was the first wife of Jérôme Bonaparte, and sister-in-law of Emperor Napoleon I of France.-Ancestry:Elizabeth's father, William Patterson, had been born in Ireland and came to North America...
). Died 1891. - Napoléon Victor Jérôme Frédéric BonaparteNapoléon Victor Jérôme Frédéric BonaparteVictor, Prince Napoléon, titular 4th Prince of Montfort was the Bonapartist pretender to the French throne from 1879 until his death in 1926...
(Napoleon V), Claimant (1879–1926) (though many Bonapartists preferred his younger brother Louis). Until his father's death in 1891, he and his father both put themselves as rightful claimant. Died 1926. - Louis Jerome Victor Emmanuel Leopold Marie BonaparteLouis Jerome Victor Emmanuel Leopold Marie BonaparteLouis, Prince Napoléon, as Napoleon VI was the claimant to the Imperial throne of France of the Bonaparte dynasty from 1926 until his death.-Early life:...
(Napoleon VI), Claimant (1926–1997), son of Napoleon Victor. Died 1997. - Charles Marie Jérôme Victor Napoléon BonaparteCharles Marie Jérôme Victor Napoléon BonaparteCharles, Prince Napoléon is a French politician, and is, himself or, the father of the head of the Imperial House of France, Jean Christophe, as male heir to the rights and legacy established by his great-great-grand-uncle, Emperor Napoléon I.-Family background:Charles is the son of the late...
(Napoleon VII), Claimant (1997–present), son of Louis. - Jean-Christophe Napoléon, Claimant (1997–present), son of Charles, appointed heir by his grandfather Louis.
'Bonapartist' as a Marxist epithet
Karl MarxKarl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
was a student of Jacobinism and the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
as well as a contemporary critic of the Second Republic
French Second Republic
The French Second Republic was the republican government of France between the 1848 Revolution and the coup by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte which initiated the Second Empire. It officially adopted the motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité...
and Second Empire
Second French Empire
The Second French Empire or French Empire was the Imperial Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic and the Third Republic, in France.-Rule of Napoleon III:...
. He used the term Bonapartism to refer to a situation in which counterrevolutionary
Counterrevolutionary
A counter-revolutionary is anyone who opposes a revolution, particularly those who act after a revolution to try to overturn or reverse it, in full or in part...
military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and then use selective reformism
Reformism
Reformism is the belief that gradual democratic changes in a society can ultimately change a society's fundamental economic relations and political structures...
to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes. In the process, Marx argued, Bonapartists preserve and mask the power of a narrower ruling class
Ruling class
The term ruling class refers to the social class of a given society that decides upon and sets that society's political policy - assuming there is one such particular class in the given society....
. He saw Napoleon I and Napoleon III as having both corrupted revolutions in France in this way. Marx offered this definition of and analysis of Bonapartism in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written in 1852. In this document, he drew attention to what he calls the phenomenon's repetitive history with one of his most quoted lines, typically condensed aphoristically as: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."
A Bonapartist regime for Marx appears to have great power, but only because there is no class with enough confidence or power to firmly establish its authority in its own name, so a leader who appears to stand above the struggle can take the mantle of power. It is an inherently unstable situation where the apparently all-powerful leader is swept aside once the struggle is resolved one way or the other.
The term was used by Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
to refer to Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
's regime, which Trotsky believed was balanced between the proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
, victorious but shattered by war, and the bourgeoisie, broken by the revolution but struggling to re-emerge. However the failure of Stalin's regime to disintegrate under the shock of the Second World War, and indeed its expansion into Eastern Europe, challenged this analysis. Many Trotskyists
Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...
thus rejected the idea that Stalin's regime was Bonapartist, and some went further – notably Tony Cliff
Tony Cliff
Tony Cliff , was a Trotskyist who was a founding member of the Socialist Review Group which went on to become the Socialist Workers Party...
who described such regimes as State Capitalist and not deformed workers' states
Socialist state
A socialist state generally refers to any state constitutionally dedicated to the construction of a socialist society. It is closely related to the political strategy of "state socialism", a set of ideologies and policies that believe a socialist economy can be established through government...
at all. In the last year of his life, Trotsky responded to these elements with the example of Napoleon's expanding empire, which brought about the abolition of serfdom in Poland and other French holdings, yet was still unarguably "Bonapartist."
Some modern-day Trotskyists and others on the left use the phrase left Bonapartist more loosely to describe those like Stalin and Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
who control left-wing or populist authoritarian regimes.
Bonapartism in the French political spectrum
According to historian René RémondRené Rémond
-Biography:Born in Lons-le-Saunier, Rémond was the Secretary General of Jeunesses étudiantes Catholiques and a member of the International YCS Center of Documentation and Information in Paris, presently the International Secretariat of International Young Catholic Students The author of books on...
's famous 1954 book, Les Droites en France, Bonapartism constitutes one of the three French right-wing families, the latest one, created after far-right Legitimism and center-right Orleanism. Both Boulangisme and Gaullism
Gaullism
Gaullism is a French political ideology based on the thought and action of Resistance leader then president Charles de Gaulle.-Foreign policy:...
would be forms of Bonapartism.
However, Bonapartists have consistently disagreed with this classification, as one of the fundamentals of Bonapartism as an ideology is the refusal to adhere to the left-right divide, which they see as an obstacle to the welfare and unity of the nation. Martin S Alexander, in his book "French History since Napoleon" (London, Arnold, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) notes that Bonapartism as an idea would not have made a significant impact if it had been either classifiable as left-wing or as right-wing. The historian Jean Sagnes in "The roots of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's Socialism" notes that the future Emperor of the French edited his political works through far-left publishers (Jean Sagnes, Les racines du socialisme de Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Toulouse, Privat, 2006). Today the Bonapartist philosophy would fit into the space occupied by the Parti Socialiste, the Mouvement Démocrate, the Nouveau Centre and the left wing of the conservative Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, as these parties occupy the ideological space between parties advocating class struggle and race-based politics, both of which are anathema to Bonapartists, as contrary to the ideal of national unity and religious and ethnic tolerance. This is demonstrated by Napoleonic policy towards industrial disputes, one expression of which – as Frank McLynn writes – is that strikes were forbidden by Napoleon I in exchange for a guarantee by employers that wages would remain high (Frank McLynn, Napoleon, Pimlico 1998 Ch 21, p482), while another is the assimilation and protection of the Jews.
Napoleon and the Jews
The ascendancy of Napoleon Bonaparte proved to be an important event in European Jewish emancipation from old laws restricting them to ghettos, as well as the many laws that limited Jews' rights to property, worship, and careers.- Napoleon's Law and the Jews :...
The Marxist theory of "Left" and "Right" Bonapartism can be considered an illustration of what McLynn (Napoleon, Pimlico, 1998, Conclusion, p667) refers to as Napoleon I's appeal in equal measure "to both the Right and the Left", and what Vincent Cronin describes as "middle of the way", or "moderate" government (Napoleon, 1994, HarperCollins, Ch 19, p301). Napoleon III situated Bonapartism (or the "Napoleonic Idea") between the radicals and conservatives (respectively the Left and the Right) in "Des Idées Napoléoniennes, published in 1839. He expounded on this point to explain that Bonapartism, as practiced by his uncle Napoleon the Great (and represented by himself) was in the middle of "two hostile parties, one of which looks only to the past, and the other only to the future" and combined "the old forms" of the one and the "new principles" of the other.
Modern Bonapartism
In the modern era, the term Bonapartism has been applied to Fascist states and other authoritarian regimes; more generally, it is used to refer to any "autocratic, highly centralized regimes dominated by the military."An official Mouvement Bonapartiste survives in France, headed by Paul-Napoléon Pierre Calland with an unknown number of members. Its official mission statement is as follows:
"[T]o defend, make known and to spread the principles and values of Bonapartism. [The movement] is based on popular support for a policy of recovery combining the efforts of individuals, associations and State services. The movement defends the Bonapartist principles on which it is founded, and which govern its internal organisation. It also defends the memory of Napoleon the Great, as well as those of Napoleon III and their sons, Napoleon II and Napoleon IV. It recognises Napoleon IV as having reigned without governing, by virtue of the plebiscite of May 1870. The movement recognises no emperor after 1879, because of the absence of a plebiscite. Republican, it gives priority to the happiness, interest and glory of peoples, and envisages the restoration of the Empire only if the foundations of the regime are republican and approved by referendum."
See also
- Bonapartism (epithet)
- Boulangism
- GaullismGaullismGaullism is a French political ideology based on the thought and action of Resistance leader then president Charles de Gaulle.-Foreign policy:...
- Neo-BonapartismNeo-BonapartismNeo-Bonapartism or neo-Bounapartism refers to political movements focusing around a strong leader, who is often a hero to the people, and upholds - or at least seems to uphold - the ideals of the people. With Bonapartism specifically referring to the case of Napoleon I of France, the term...
- Vine and Olive ColonyVine and Olive ColonyThe Vine and Olive Colony was an ill-fated effort by a group of French Bonapartists who, fearing for their lives after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Bourbon Restoration, attempted to establish an agricultural settlement growing wine grapes and olive trees in the Alabama wilderness...
Further reading
- Bonapartism After Sedan, by John Alexander Murray Rothney (Cornell University Press, 1969)