Caesarism in the Post-Revolutionary Age Europe’s Legacy in the Modern World Series Editors: Martti Koskenniemi and Bo Stråth (University of Helsinki, Finland) The nineteenth century is often described as Europe’s century. This series aims to explore the truth of this claim. It views Europe as a global actor and offers insights into its role in ordering the world, creating community and providing welfare in the nineteenth century and beyond. Volumes in the series investigate tensions between the national and the global, welfare and warfare, property and poverty. They look at how notions like democracy, populism and totalitarianism came to be intertwined and how this legacy persists in the present day world. The series emphasizes the entanglements between the legal, the political and the economic and employs techniques and methodologies from the history of legal, political and economic thought, the history of events, and structural history. The result is a collection of works that shed new light on the role that Europe’s history has played in the development of the modern world. Published Historical Teleologies in the Modern World, Henning Trüper, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sanjay Subrahmanyam Europe’s Utopias of Peace, Bo Stråth Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires, Adrian Brisku European Modernity: A Global Approach, Bo Stråth and Peter Wagner The Contested History of Autonomy, Gerard Rosich Forthcoming Social Difference in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: An Intellectual History, Francisco A. Ortega Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World, Henning Trüper Caesarism in the Post-Revolutionary Age Crisis, Populace and Leadership Markus J. Prutsch BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Markus J. Prutsch, 2020 Markus J. Prutsch has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: Statue of Napoleon, Cherbourg. Normandy, France (© Doug Scott/Getty Images) This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Licence. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-6754-0 ePDF: 978-1-4742-6756-4 eBook: 978-1-4742-6755-7 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. Contents Preface vii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Object of Research 1 1.2 Scope of Study 7 2 Revolution and Crisis 13 2.1 The French Revolution: Sovereignty, Legitimacy and Radicalism 13 2.2 The Dilemma of the Revolution and the Quest for Leadership 17 2.3 Napoleon Bonaparte: Saviour or Despot? 21 2.3.1 Rise to Power, “Great Parallel” and Legitimacy 22 2.3.2 Contemporary Perceptions of the Napoleonic Regime 36 2.4 Conclusions 43 3 “Bonapartism” as Hazard and Promise 47 3.1 Political Legitimacy in Post-Napoleonic Europe 47 3.2 Conclusions 62 4 From Bonapartism to Caesarism: The Mid-Century and Louis-Napoléon 67 4.1 The Revolution of 1848 and the Dawn of Caesarism 67 4.2 The Coup of 1851 and the Birth of the Second Empire 80 4.3 The Reception of the Coup and Napoleon’s Rule 84 4.3.1 French Voices 85 4.3.2 Perception Abroad: German Reactions 90 4.4 Legitimization Strategies of the Second Empire 102 4.4.1 Economic and Social Reformism 104 4.4.2 Charisma and Plebiscitary Mass Democracy 105 4.4.3 Imperialism and Bellicism 110 4.5 Conclusions 115 5 “Germanic Caesarism” and the Bismarckreich 119 5.1 From Ideal- to Realpolitik: Debates on a German Caesar 119 5.2 Bonapartism and the Ruling Class 125 vi Contents 5.3 Otto von Bismarck: a German Bonaparte? 130 5.3.1 Conservative Dissonances: Recht vs. Macht 131 5.3.2 Bismarck and Napoleon III: Their Two Regimes Compared 134 5.4 Conclusions 146 6 Mass Democracy and “Scientification”: Caesarism at the Turn of the Century 149 6.1 Discourses on a “New Caesar” in the Late Nineteenth Century 149 6.1.1 Great Britain, the USA and Italy 151 6.1.2 France 157 6.1.3 Germany 170 6.2 The Wilhelmine Empire: Caesarism’s Absorption into a Sociology of Domination 174 6.2.1 Wilhelm II and the Political System of the Late Kaiserreich 174 6.2.2 Max Weber: Sociology of Domination and “Leader-Democracy” 177 6.3 Conclusions 183 7 Outlook: Legacies of Caesarism 189 7.1 From Caesarism to Totalitarianism? 191 7.2 Caesarism’s Legacy in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Century 203 8 Concluding Remarks 215 Notes 227 Bibliography 259 Index 281 Preface To be able to say “thank you” is undoubtedly the most pleasant task related to the finalization of a long-term project as work-intensive as this present monograph. At the same time, however, there is the inherent risk of not taking adequate note of each and every one who has contributed in one way or another. I owe my thanks to a great many people for helping me in the various stages of researching and writing this book and the underlying habilitation thesis submitted at Heidelberg University in early 2018, on which its findings are largely based. Even if I fail to mention all of them here by name individually, my gratitude is no less sincere. I would like to express my profound and collective thanks to all the colleagues, friends and companions who over the last few years have made the present study possible with their generous advice and support, be it in the form of valuable recommendations regarding structure and content, suggestions for sources and literature, or their active help in commenting on, revising and editing the draft manuscript. A special acknowledgment in this context to: Roisin Boyd, Deborah Fölsche-Forrow, Kelly L. Grotke, Urban Kirchler, Lars Lehmann, Andrea Nicole Maier and Johan Rooryck. I am particularly indebted to the European Research Council, which supported my preparatory work on this book in the context of the research project Europe 1815–1914 at the University of Helsinki, and to Volker Sellin, who has accompanied my academic life since the beginning of my university studies, and who as the diligent mentor of my habilitation continued to be the committed and conscientious while at the same time unassuming teacher I have always perceived him as. Above all, my thanks go to my entire family, who have been an immeasurable mainstay for my research, above all Lisa, Valentin and Alva: Danke von Herzen for everything. Insufficient though this may be to compensate for the stresses and strains they were prepared to shoulder for this book to reach the stage of publication, I would like to dedicate my humble work to them. Brussels, March 2019 1 Introduction 1.1 Object of Research Debates about the “legitimacy” and “essence” of political rule and the search for “ideal” forms of government have been at the very heart of political thought ever since its beginnings in the Ancient World. Discussions on how a balance between “just” and “effective” government might best be achieved have been particularly intense and controversial, as have those on the need and danger of dictatorship, the scope and limits of democracy, and on whether there might be some sort of “natural” sequence of regime types. The latter view, for example, was articulated within the various cyclical theories of political evolution (anacyclosis), the first of which date back to Greek and Roman constitutional theory. The richness of these debates stands in contrast to an often astonishingly simplistic and ahistorical view on these matters in the post-Second World War era. The idea that today’s Western world represents the outcome of a more or less linear development towards liberal and representative democracy, in which specific inalienable values are upheld, and that the rest of the world is inescapably animated by and moving towards that model, has become deeply entrenched in Western political rhetoric and public debate since 1945. In other words, that view that the nature of (Western) democracy is essentially geared towards some sort of finality antithetical to “dictatorship” has become commonplace. Even so, the teleological assumption of a long-term breakthrough of liberal democracy from the eighteenth century onwards is one-sided and at the same time problematic, because it disregards the complexity of historical developments, and also neglects both the explicit and the implicit tensions, contradictions and conflicts that (Western-style) democracy continues to face even today. The shortcomings of what may be labelled a “democratization imperative” are evident in the difficulty of providing persuasive explanations for the totalitarian experiences of the twentieth century, since they construing them simply as temporary aberrations or “historical exceptions” that prove the “democratic rule” is far from satisfactory. On a contemporary global scale, they are also empirically mirrored by the fact that political systems considered undemocratic or only partly democratic still outnumber those regarded as fully democratic, with a clear tendency toward diminishing global democracy over the last few years,1 thus putting into perspective how pervasive the charms of democracy might have been beyond the frontiers of the “West”.