Giving them votes would spell disaster, for that would mean ‘the rich and the wise are not to have, by explicit law, more votes than the poor and stupid’ – or, in big towns, the workers, whom he dubbed ‘the members for the public houses’ (i.e. pubs).
It is useless to pile up abstract words. Those who doubt should go into their kitchens. Let an accomplished man try what seems to him most obvious, most certain, most palpable in intellectual matters, upon the housemaid and the footman, and he will find that what he says seems unintelligible – that his audience think him mad and wild when he is speaking what is in his own sphere of thought the dullest platitude of cautious soberness. Great communities are like great mountains – they have in them the primary, secondary, and tertiary strata of human progress; the characteristics of the lower regions resemble the life of old times rather than the present life of the higher regions.71
Bagehot’s defeat in his third attempt to be elected a Liberal MP in 1866, just as he was finishing up the English Constitution, gave to it this very bitter edge, with masters advised to ‘go into their kitchens’ to confirm the witlessness of their servants. Passage of the Second Reform Act the next year – by the Tories, no less – surprised him and deepened his gloom. A change in tone is clear from the 1872 edition of the English Constitution. ‘What I fear is that both our political parties will bid for the support of the workingman.’ There was no worse misfortune ‘for a set of poor ignorant people than that two combinations of well-taught and rich men should constantly offer to defer to their decision’. Or, rather, there was one: the poor and ignorant conferring among themselves. ‘In all cases it must be remembered that a political combination of the lower classes, as such and for their own objects, is an evil of the first magnitude.’72
Yet once again it was in the Economist that Bagehot first registered his shock and disgust at the bill that Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative leader in the Commons, crafted and pushed through both Houses in 1867. The Second Reform Act increased the number of working-class male voters in the towns and cities by extending the vote to occupiers (renters) paying at least £10 a year – in a move that altered neither the basis of the franchise in property, nor the balance of class forces in parliament. ‘We shall not be supposed to like a Reform of the present pattern. We have opposed it for years’, ran an Economist leader, comparing the debate over reform to a botched shareholders’ meeting.73 Bagehot’s constitutional theory was on the line, just a year after it was published. ‘We are not so great a political people as we thought,’ he wrote, ‘or we could not on a sudden change our deepest thoughts upon the most familiar and important of political questions.’74 ‘Why has the “Settlement” of 1832 So Easily Melted Away?’ contained a mixture of bitterness, and swipes at the British elite for misunderstanding the constitution, despite his attempts to enlighten it:
The English people have been told by the received authorities on their Constitution, that it contains, apart from the House of Commons, and in a position to resist that House, great conservative forces on which they might rely. Most people believe that no great change could be effected in a democratic direction, because of these old powers. ‘The Queen would not let it,’ is believed by many more than a London politician fancies, and ‘Thank God we have a House of Lords’ has passed into a cry. But now when it comes to business, these book checks are of no use.75
Bagehot cited the recently published correspondence between William IV and Lord Grey at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, and commended the latter: here was a minister ‘able to manage his sovereign without a trace of artifice, and without impairing his peculiar patrician austerity’. But this only revealed how much had changed. ‘We talk of Mr. Disraeli’s wonderful manipulation both in the Cabinet and the House of Commons. But the very name of Victoria is not mentioned, though in 1832 William was prominent and constant in everyone’s mouth. The check of royalty upon democratic change has turned out to be a fancy.’
Yet this was exactly what Bagehot had been saying it was all along. In the English Constitution he had urged the Queen to remain ‘hidden like a mystery’, a relic, ‘not to be brought too closely to real measurement’. Now in the Economist even he lamented her powerlessness. ‘Who cares about managing the Queen? She goes away to Scotland, and the world hardly knows where she is.’76 His objection to the ‘paper description’ of the constitution was that it took the idea of checks and balances at face value. His theory, however cheeky, was not so different: checks and balances were illusions, of course, but given the mental haze of the housemaids and footmen of England, he had counted on them being effective blocks on democratic change.77
The French Constitution
The trade-offs between democracy and socioeconomic stability were even more glaring in France, where the Second Empire exercised a lifelong fascination for Bagehot. Indeed, no one in history has made the case for Louis-Napoléon – the portly, preening nephew of the first Emperor, whose rule over France ended in a catastrophic defeat to Prussia in 1870 – quite like him. Bagehot never shared the view of much of the press: that ‘Plonplon’, Louis-Napoléon’s nickname, was an adventurer and a slightly ridiculous facsimile of his famous uncle. The Economist, on the contrary, treated him as a genius, who understood the French better than an elected assembly ever could.
Bagehot began his complex love affair with Louis-Napoléon in 1851, excusing his coup d’état as the surest way to restore ‘confidence’ and ‘security of industry’ to France, in the Inquirer. At this time, Bagehot based his support for a regime in Paris that he would never have tolerated in London on the concept of ‘national character’. Frenchmen were too ‘excitable, volatile, superficial, over-logical, uncompromising’ to enjoy the same freedoms as the English.78 What the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions in Europe had ‘taught men’ was just the opposite: ‘that no absurdity is so great as to imagine the same species of institutions suitable or possible for Scotchmen and Sicilians, for Germans and Frenchmen, for the English and the Neapolitans.’79
As editor of the Economist, Bagehot was somewhat more sober in his praise of Louis-Napoléon, but consistently backed his regime in France – a restless, revolutionary nation, in need of a firm hand to force down the bitter medicine of political economy.80 What nuance did enter the picture during the 1860s had more to do with the intellectual situation in England. Here disciples of the positivist French philosopher Auguste Comte were winning converts, Bagehot worried, with arguments that rapid material progress backed by a strong central state in France held lessons for overly individualistic, market-oriented England. In 1867 Bagehot attacked these thinkers, whose support for the Second Reform Bill was bad enough. They also believed, he said, ‘Parliamentary government is complex, dilatory, and inefficient. An efficient absolutism chosen by the people, and congenial to the people, is far better than this dull talking.’81 In Physics and Politics, he named ‘the secular Comtists, Mr. Harrison and Mr. Beesly, who want to “Frenchify English institutions” – to introduce here an imitation of the Napoleonic system, a dictatorship founded on the proletariat.’82 The Economist aimed at a similar audience of Francophiles, but tried to teach them different lessons: the point was to admire the view across the English Channel, not to import what they saw there.
Bonapartism, or Caesarism, as Bagehot often called it, ensured stability now, but in the long run no one could predict what would happen after Louis-Napoléon – now Napoleon III – died; and it was too democratic, cutting out the urban educated middle class, in favour of direct appeals to the ‘dumb majority’, the ‘populace, the peasantry and the army’.83 The ultimate sign of its shaky foundations? A few times a year the Economist was confiscated in Paris. ‘At one time any article with “French despotism” in it was seized, no matter what followed, and though it were laudatory’, Bagehot complained of censors too dim to tell a friendly editor from a subversive. ‘If the Economist would make a revolution, what would not make a revolution?’84 The English system was better, then, provided the people living under it were English. Any country would be wise to adopt the ‘true British constitution’, he said – that is, the secret one – but few could.
Yet