3rd December

Who was Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon III?

An evil despot who understood how to navigate the troubled waters of France until he reached the summit of power?

Or a man who felt it was his destiny to navigate the troubled waters of France until he held the power to change his country?

Joly has one version, but that is his version.

I have read that when in 1848 the July Monarchy broke down and France once again was declared a republic, Louis-Napoleon wrote these words from his exile in London:

I’m going to Paris, the Republic has been proclaimed. I must be its master

All he had was his name. The nephew of the great Napoleon. But what a name.

He believed in Bonapartism as a political philosophy. And people believed in him.

In his youth he published The Extinction of Pauperism, and I believe he meant it.

While the bourgeois majority feared the radical republicans would once again seize power and instigate a bloodbath, and the left tried to spearhead the impoverished masses, Louis-Bonaparte walked past both political wings and secured a massive majority in the election of 1848.

His luck was that the troubled times of 1848 had conveyed the understanding to the ruling class that they had to curb the tides of the angry mob. They buckled and introduced universal male suffrage, which meant ten million voters rather than 250.000 voters.

With one stroke, the radicals could win. But so could a populist.

A Bonapartist would in those day exclaim:

(QUOTE FROM ROGER PRICE - THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE)

The unfortunate die of hunger;
The worker is without work;
The cultivator is no longer able to dispose of his crops;
The merchant sells nothing;
The proprietor no longer receives his rents;
The capitalist no longer dares to invest, lacking security

When people suffer hardship they tend to opt for the man who rises above rivalling parties and their infighting. Someone who is larger than life and can see the road ahead. Someone with a destiny.

Not someone who merely believes he has one since he would just be a clown, but someone who really is guarded by history’s better angels. He must be unscathed by the factional struggles, impervious to pettiness.

Triumph by revelation is a strong force in the human fabric. You cannot easily argue against it.

Election is furthermore a special state of things. Months go by as we see the manifestations of a country who doubts its own self-identity. Who are we? Legio, apparently.

Any election campaign can lay claim to being interwoven with man’s destiny, which is really nothing else than a histiography with the causal chains reversed. The future and the past meets in the dramatic events, and only afterwards can anybody say with the events meant.

4th December

Another thing I must constantly remind myself of is that Louis-Bonaparte interjected himself between the peasants and the impoverished who voted for him and the conservative majority and the assembly and magistrates.

As haunting spectres from the past started to resurge on the streets – shouts like “viva la guillotine” and radical republicans comparing the conservatives with advocators of the ancien régime – the earth started to burn under the feet of the political decision makers.

Adolphe Thiers, as I understand it, was prime minister serving two brief stints in 1836 and 1840, and a liberal in opposition first to Charles X under the Bourbon Restoration period (1814-1830) and then Napoleon III under the Second French Empire (1852-1870).

In the intervening years his position changed slightly, as usually happens. He distanced himself from the radicalism and the socialism that fermented in French society in those years. Roger Price quotes him as saying about the 1850 voting laws which severed off the poorest third of the public who were the most radical. Those he described as the:

[…] vile multitude that has […] delivered over to every tyrant the liberty of every Republic

So in essence not that far from most enlightenment thinkers.

In fact, he took a markedly anti-radical position and advocated some of the measures Maurice Joly has already brought up. He went against his own anti-clerical stance and advocated catholicism in children’s curriculum and the role of the Catholic Church in education.

He was deeply interwoven with the construction of a state that could resist revolutionary uprisings, and so were the rest of the political establishment.

Longevity is both a blessing and a curse in politics. Deputies “by the people and of the people” will sooner or later break off from the people and become part of a new party culture, if they were ever “of the people”. The expression is odd, since most who enter politics are driven to do so, which is exactly what the reminder of the population is not.

5th December

From a very high altitude the question of peace on earth seems to hinge on the viability of almost ten billion people distancing themselves from their own part in some conflict and learn to speak the language of there foes in whatever feud they have immersed themselves in.

Conflict seems to escalate very quickly and remain alive until either of the parties die out, and even then, the fabric of history will have ensured continuity with coming generations.

Are the Marxists right when they say that all conflict is of a material nature?

Would Jews creating Israel and the Arabs in living in Palestine have been at each other’s throats for generations if not the Jewish immigration had strained the material resources of the area?

And even if that was the case, what difference would it have made?

6th December

Is the lamentable conclusion that if we remain true to our human nature, we set ablaze with bitter conflict, or perhaps just silent hatred.

If we abandon our human nature, we can seek peace and build bridges, but only by betraying our historical self.

National identity is also a betrayal of who we are when we are alone. Or is this just me coming from a long tradition of individualism?

That is an easy accusation. One argument against that could be this: When you wake up in the morning after vivid and strange dreams pregnant with significance and ripe with riddles, can you share that dream with those you call your tribe?

Or are dreams siren songs that lure us away?

And if they do, away from what? Collectivism towards individualism? If so, I should be able to share my strangest dreams with my fellow liberal white kinsmen.

But I am not. I cannot share anything with anybody. From a political standpoint the conclusion is obvious: Neither collectivism nor individualism are complete descriptions of the matter of reality. They fail the most important test of all.

Where do the dreams come from that are not of us, the people, not by us, the people and not for us, the people?

PARADISE LOST