15th December

Reading up on the Second French Empire, I am starting to see how Joly’s satire has its weak points. The satire part consists in inventing a puppet version of Louis-Bonaparte, which is one thing, but far more distorting is the way we only focus on that singular man. The conservatives, the royalists, the anti-republicans in government who in many circumstances were pushing the emperor for tighter laws and more control are completely left out.

16th December

We are closing in on a junction. Up until now, the discussions between Montesquieu and Machiavelli have unfolded guised as roles that are predictable. Machiavelli, the reborn despot, Montesquieu, the intellectual advocate for liberties. They have strayed from their roles, but not much. And they won’t for the remaining dialogues either.

What will change is how thin the roles are wearing.

Underneath the persona of Machiavelli we begin to see Napoleon III, the historical figure as well as the human. Underneath Montesquieu, we begin to see the opposition and probably also a bit of Joly himself.

Joly has the harder part ahead of him. He needs to tempt the reader to see an irresponsible ruler in Napoleon’s modernisations. Like any monarch, Napoleon held immense power. It is well known that power to him meant fulfilling a destiny.

Given how loss of civil liberties can lead to a stronger central government it was a fruit of circumstances that Napoleon could trade liberties for innovation. France (and Paris) was despotically reinvented as a modern state, though Louis Bonaparte did owe much to Haussmann on that account. Nevertheless, the emperor had a dream.

And once again we stand face to face with such “great men” who disrupt a normal society to stir the pot. Sometimes for the better, often for the worse, but almost always structurally heterogeneous in the sense that they rewire everything and leave in their wake new paths and habits. And as history shows: New foundations for a new power elite to fill the space under their umbrella and write several chapters long after the death of the despot.

THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE - ROGER PRICE, 2001

The boulevards and new parks would allow air to flow and provide space - in the Bois de Boulogne, for example - for the fashionable to circulate. The population of the poorer quartiers would be encouraged to enjoy civilised family recreation in the park created amongst the quarries of the Buttes Chaumont. As part of the cleansing process, reconstruction also provided an opportunity to improve public hygiene through slum clearance, improved water supply, and the construction of a considerably enlarged sewer network, although this would take many decades to complete. This was an aspect of urban renewal which appears to have interested Haussmann far more than the Emperor.

One man’s dream is not necessarily shared by all of society, who are more often dreaming about the supposed benefits, not the actual construction of railways and new avenues.

THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE - ROGER PRICE, 2001

[…] the displaced were offered some form of cheap subsidised housing. For the masses Haussmann's work only intensified an already severe housing crisis. Property owners were able to take advantage of scarcity and charge high rents, substantially adding to social tension. Certainly urban renewal provided those who could afford the rents with more spacious and comfortable accommodation. The poor, who needed to live close to their work, however, were crowded into the older streets, which survived behind the boulevards. […] Suburban areas like Belleville experienced a largely uncontrolled in-filling of empty plots with tenements and industrial premises and little concern for public hygiene.

So it goes.

Joly is critiquing his intentions rather than his well-intended methods.

There is one sentence that caught my eye: “Property owners were able to take advantage of scarcity and charge high rents, substantially adding to social tension.”

Property owners?

For a second I want to visit the forbidden town of conservative Russia.

They knew France around the 1860s 1870s. We know Golovinski worked in France. The lexicon says he was a member of an antisemitic circle. Today that amply describes a person. But as I have noticed when reading The International Jew, antisemitism comes in widely different forms in early 20th century: Those who in the Jew see the face of capitalism and a threat of economic slavery, and those who saw a vile, primitive savage. Henry Ford (and to an extent even the author of the Protocols) try to interpose that we hope the Jew will use his genius to share responsibility for the world at large, rather than suck the blood out of existing systems. There is no doubt he admired the Jew as he understood them. That’s the opposite of hate, and yet, antisemitism.

In Golovinski’s Russia, there was plenty of hate, which the pogroms bore witness to. Yet I have encountered numerous passages which were just as far removed from vitriol as Henry Ford’s magazine was. Not in the same direction, though, and this is where I see a major difference: Ford was an inventor who believed in a technocratic society. He admired the Jew’s ability to found business and make it thrive (as he saw it).

In another quadrant above the antisemitic line we find Golovinski who uses the voice of the Jew to remind us that nothing is better than eternal values of duty, faithfulness and bonds between the tzar and the people that, once broken, will unleash our demise. .

How would such a person react to Maurice Joly’s ridicule of Napoleon III - disregarding that Nicholas I himself loathed the upstart Louis Bonaparte’s need for a plebiscite to gain access to the throne? What Nicholas saw in Napoleon was someone who needed the people to vote for him. He legitimised revolution by his very presence as monarch.

That doesn’t mean he and other Russians wouldn’t hate the revolutionary minded people far more. Golovinski could very well have thought to himself: “It’s not the French emperor who causes misery, but the Jewish landlords and speculators who sabotages his plans for improving the lives of everybody.”

Seeing it like that, the pieces would fit.

17th December

In Dialogue 18 something odd happens. As always Montesquieu and Machiavelli are opposites, but this time they end up in strange corners just so they can stay opposites.

Here is what I think happens:

Napoleon III is popular. There is no way around that fact. Opposition comes mostly from the political conscious people in France. Or should I say politically ambitious. Consequently Joly cannot paint a picture of Machiavelli as a bloodsucking feudal leech on the economy, at least not without losing all connection to the actual despot. Louis Bonaparte is a man of the people, who in return understands and appreciates his modernisation projects.

So he shifts attention to Montesquieu who is the epitome of the politically savvy intellectual. Montesquieu explains how taxation of the rich really means taxation of those who were until recently poor. Montesquieu is implicitly trying to argue against financing his despotic state through a tax-the-rich program.

Perhaps I am being mislead because I confound Machiavelli with Machiavelli’s ruler. Actually, we all do, as The Prince describes what will happen if a ruler does this and that, not what Machiavelli himself sees as good or bad.

Or perhaps this really is Joly’s best defence against the dictatorial behaviour of his king? I doubt it, as everything Montesquieu says feels like satire.

In the end Montesquieu returns to his usual program: Fiscal transparency, modern statehood vs medieval Machiavellianism.

Dialogue 18

● War no longer profitable. ● Political despotism requires economic despotism. ● The proletariat must be allowed to grow filthy rich. ● The State Budget offers transparency and broad participation. ● Machiavelli finds it all very interesting.

Joly starts his one-pronged attack with the question of sources of revenue:

Saying between the lines that the despot buys of his men with luxury is of course political satire at its worst which is also its best. It falls under the artistic liberty of caricature to leave out Louis Bonaparte’s feeling of importance, of destiny pressing on his shoulders.

Always we should ask the question: How would Golovinski read those lines? Or indeed anybody who stood on the side of (but therefore also under) the monarchy? Viewing the Protocols as a political reaction that blended a strain of antisemitism - the face of dishonest speculative finance - becomes increasingly straightforward.

Honestly, the logic escapes me. That war was ruinous at the time, I certainly believe in. I am trying to think of a European war in the last thousand years which have not ended up costing dearly both in economic and political terms.

Sometimes I need to step outside Joly’s satiric distortion of his enemy. Consulting a history book:

THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE - ROGER PRICE, 2001

Referring to his uncle’s commentaries on Julius Caesar he pointed out that in the aftermath of revolution an external war was "necessary ... to amalgamate the remains of all the parties". Military greatness and martial display were essential features of Bonapartism. Napoleon’s particular objectives appear to have been to “restore France to its proper rank” as the preeminent European power, by destroying the 1815 peace treaties and securing the natural frontiers on the Alps and Rhine, and to ensure the pacification of Europe by means of its reconstruction on the basis of its major nationalities.

Napoleon’s vision of the unrealised greatness of France was a widely shared feature of the general political culture, reinforced in his case of course by his Bonapartist inheritance. His sense of destiny inspired him to develop personal foreign policy objectives, often employing secret diplomacy. The foreign ministers he appointed were mainly dependent career diplomats, frequently replaced.

Some sees him as a monster of destiny and a government personified in one man. But he is not a Machiavellian Donald Duck who imbecilely imagines the French easy to extort for the sake of pomp. I can easily see the human side over the monster.

In fact the only image I can garner of a politician in power who is not a monster would be someone willing to abdicate when they realised the ends could not justify the necessary means.

Montesquieu is not here to talk about death but taxes.

Perhaps Joly’s Montesquieu is right, if by “people” we mean those in elected positions.

The lower house, the Corps Législatif, was made up of those who made the 1848 election and the 1852 coup happen out of fear of revolution. In other words, they were not for the people, but they probably were of the people.

THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE - ROGER PRICE, 2001

The Corps législatif was, alter all, made up of men of independent means, many of them with substantial political experience, who were always likely to resent and eventually to resist government tutelage.

As Darimon pointed out: "the seed of the liberal Empire was present in the Constitution of 1852, because... as long as there existed an elected chamber, voting on the budget and the military contingent … there was no despotism. Sooner or later the official candidatures would transform themselves into independent candidatures". The 'authoritarian' decade thus saw the partial emergence of a mixed and rather muted opposition - predominantly conservative, liberal, protectionist, and clerical.

To the reader’s ears this sounds like a dilemma. Joly’s Machiavelli has a personality structure that is genuinely shocked at the realisation that people may not jump aside as he waves his hands like a magic wand. This has preciously little to do with the quite a bit more complex political situation in the Second Empire.

THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE - ROGER PRICE, 2001

Politically, amongst the 26o deputies elected in 1852 there were around 70 self-affirmed Bonapartists. Their views varied considerably. Forty were newcomers to politics; another 25 had formerly been identified with the Orleanist dynastic opposition. Amongst the remaining 190 deputies there was a powerful current of gratitude and of loyalty to the regime. There were only three declared Legitimist opponents. Three republicans … were elected, but refused to take the oath of allegiance and were unseated.

When Joly writes in the early 1860s, Bonaparte had already opened up the liberalisation processes which was always on the agenda since right from the start.

THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE - ROGER PRICE, 2001

“His inclination always has been to believe, as he often told me, that repression was by its nature a passing phase. He assumed that sooner or later it would be necessary to make concessions to the renewed desire for independence and believed that it was preferable to avoid waiting until they ceased to be voluntary.”

But in 1852 the entire game in France was about stability. Napoleon III wanted to give them that more than anything, and everybody wanted it rather than another decade with a wreck of a society.

Machiavelli fences off Montesquieu’s conviction that representatives would so easily turn against the hand that feeds them.

“The State’s taxes would not weigh so heavily on them, and I would even arrange things so that taxes do not weigh on them at all.” … An odd thing to say for an advocate for despotism. Joly almost comes across as propagandising on behalf of the propertied amongst the liberals.

I am starting to realise that Joly is coming from a segment of French society whose hands may not be so clean after all. Alternatively, this is the point where Joly mocks liberalists as well as Bonapartists.

When Joly writes in the early 1860s, Bonaparte had already opened up the liberalisation processes which was always on the agenda since the coup.

THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE - ROGER PRICE, 2001

This process would be encouraged by Morny following his appointment as President of the Corps législatif in 1854. Indeed the Emperor himself declared before the assembled senators and deputies on 14 February 1853: "To those who regret that a greater share has not been allotted to liberty, I reply: liberty has never helped to found a lasting edifice; it crowns it when time has consolidated its existence"

Likely there isn’t a single key to unlocking the period of 1850-1870. One key is most certainly a vivid fear of the 1789 revolution taking place again even though French society in 1860 cannot be compared with the ancien régime.

The revolution brought changes in government, and, indeed the ills of parliamentarian debate as an odd echo of court intrigues.

THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE - ROGER PRICE, 2001

Unlike his predecessors Napoleon would be prepared to offer concessions. The Emperor was an admirer of the British and Swiss constitutions, although he insisted that revolution had created a very different context in France. In a speech on 19 January 1858 he insisted that liberty without limits is impossible whilst there exists in a country a faction determined to disregard the fundamental bases of the constitution, because then liberty, instead of serving to enlighten, control, and improve government, is nothing but a weapon in the hands of parties determined to overthrow it.

In which bucket should we put Napoleon III? He is not Joly’s despot, that much is certain, and he is not Machiavellian. But neither was Machiavelli, which becomes apparent for anybody reading The Prince.

The same difficulty we find in cataloguing Napoleon III, we will meet when trying to catalogue Joly’s mirror image of the despot.

The proletarian: Tomorrow’s industrialist

Liberalism is talking. Whether Joly himself is speaking or not, I can’t say. Satire is hard to interpret rigidly. The ideas voiced are certainly not so innocent as they seem.

Imagine this read by someone who saw liberalism as a destabilising Jewish invention. Just try and picture someone like the author of the Protocols; he would be fuming with anger when seeing someone so shamelessly passing off his own greed using a bag of rhetorical tricks and liberal theory to taint the reputation of a class of people whose motives are rooted in their character. And that holds true even for the upstart Napoleon III, although they were all just French and not Russians!

The liberal government is a strange beast. Luckily for the liberals history has provided enough examples of poverty under absolutism that we can in good conscience let a very personal grievance work as the foundation for governing a country - namely the grievance of being ordered how to think and act by a monarch we have not chosen.

We would have problems simply answering the question whether we prefer liberty over poverty if those were in opposition to each other. Much harder would it be to answer if we would prefer our neighbour starving over our own liberty. As it stands, we are convinced that history has shown that in a free society, poverty can be solved.

Golovinski and his ilk are less easily swayed.

THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE - ROGER PRICE, 2001

Again, a few days after the opening of the 1863 parliamentary session, speaking to French exhibitors at the London Exposition, the Emperor observed that: “You have been struck by the existence in England of an unrestricted freedom to express every opinion and to develop every interest. This exists because English liberty respects the foundations on which society and the state are built. France will enjoy similar freedom once we have consolidated the indispensable base for the establishment of a complete liberty”

Is the ruler the guardian whose job it is to protect government from the contriving, conniving, deceitful opportunistic politicians of the people?

A (free) lesson in economics

Montesquieu returns to lecturing.

He lays it on so think I can’t really help thinking this is satire.

For reasons obvious only to a writer’s eye, Montesquieu embarks on the final stretch of the journey to boredom and relates in a dusty soliloquy how the state finances is best run.

Machiavelli capitulates for the time being to the torrent of accounting lore.

PARADISE LOST