Bonapartism

In French political history, Bonapartism has two meanings. In a strict sense, this term refers to people who aimed to restore the French Empire under the House of Bonaparte, the Corsican family of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I of France) and his nephew Louis (Napoleon III of France). In a wider sense, it refers to a right-wing/center-right political movement that advocates the idea of a strong and centralized state, based on popular support.

History

Bonapartism had its followers from 1815 forward among those who never accepted the defeat at Waterloo or the Congress of Vienna. Napoleon I's death in exile on Saint Helena 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 in which the Bonapartist hopes rested.

The disturbances of 1848 gave this group hope. Bonapartists were essential in the election of Napoleon I's nephew Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as President of the Second Republic, and gave him the political support necessary for his 1852 discarding of the constitution and proclaiming the Second Empire. 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 in 1815.

In 1870, Napoleon III led France to a disastrous defeat at the hands of Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War, and he subsequently abdicated. 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 Orléanists), and with those who favoured the restoration of the House of Bourbon, the traditional French royal family (Legitimists). The strength of these three Monarchist factions combined was almost undoubtedly greater than that of the Republicans 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 Eugene Bonaparte, the only son of Napoleon III, was killed in action while serving as a British Army officer in Zululand in 1879. Thereafter Bonapartism ceased to be a political force.

The current head of the family is the Prince Napoleon (Charles Marie Jérôme Victor Napoléon Bonaparte, born 1950), great-great-grandson of Napoleon I's brother Jérôme Bonaparte by his second marriage; he has a son Jean (born 1986) and a brother, Jérôme Bonaparte (born 1957), unmarried. 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 honey bee was a prominent political symbol in the empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, representing the Bonapartist bureaucratic and political system.

Napoleon III himself once made a sardonic comment on the philosophical incoherence of Bonapartism. Referring to the leading figures in the government of the Second Empire, he remarked: "The Empress is a Legitimist, Morny is an Orleanist, Prince Napoleon is a Republican, and I myself am a Socialist. There is only one Bonapartist, Persigny - and he is mad!"

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 at that time he had no legitimate sons, and it seemed unlikely he would have any due to the age of his wife Joséphine. 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, 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, Eugene 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 in the male line (but not his descendants by his original marriage to the American commoner Elizabeth Patterson, 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 (the exclusion of Lucien Bonaparte 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 I, Emperor of the French (1804-1814 and 1815), Claimant (1814 - 1815)
*Napoleon II, 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 Bonaparte, Claimant (1832 - 1844), Napoleon I's oldest brother, former King of Spain, Died 1844, two daughters but no legitimate male children.
*Louis Bonaparte, 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 Bonaparte. He was President of France 1849-1852.
*Napoléon Eugène, Prince Imperial (Napoleon IV), Claimant (1873 - 1879), the only legitimate child of Napoleon III. Died 1879, unmarried, no children.
*Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte, nicknamed 'Plon-plon', Claimant (1879 - 1891); however, Eugene Bonapartes' will excluded him from the succession in favor of his son Napoleon Victor, leading to fierce disputes. The only male child of Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon I's youngest brother, with Catharina of Württemberg (though Jerome had had another son earlier with Elizabeth Patterson). Died 1891.
*Napoléon Victor Jérôme Frédéric Bonaparte (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 Bonaparte (Napoleon VI), Claimant (1926 - 1997), son of Napoleon Victor. Died 1997.
*Charles Marie Jérôme Victor Napoléon Bonaparte (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 Marx was a student of Jacobinism and the French Revolution as well as a contemporary critic of the Second Republic and Second Empire. He used the term "Bonapartism" to refer to a situation in which counterrevolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and then use selective reformism 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. 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: "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 Trotsky to refer to Stalin's regime, which Trotsky believed was balanced between the proletariat, 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 thus rejected the idea that Stalin's regime was Bonapartist, and some went further - notably Tony Cliff who described such regimes as State Capitalist and not deformed workers' states 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 who control left wing or populist authoritarian regimes.

Bonapartism as one of the three French right-wing families

According to historian René Rémond'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 would be forms of Bonapartism. Today the Bonapartist philosophy would fit into the conservative UMP political party.

ee also

* Gaullism
* Boulangism
* Neo-Bonapartism
* Right Wing
* Left Right Politics
* Populism
* Liberal Conservatism
* Nationalism
* Enlightened Despotism
* Constitutional Monarchy
* French Consulate
* First French Empire
* Second French Empire
* Referendum