French’ informed English Liberals of the popularity of this ‘Crowned Democrat of Europe’.85 In 1865 it hailed him as a progressive, vastly superior not just to the ancient ‘democratic despot’ Julius Caesar but the old monarchs of Europe as well. ‘Louis Napoleon is a Benthamite despot. He is for the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.”’ His regime was renowned for ‘orderly dexterity’, his ‘bureaucracy is not only endurable but pleasant.’ And whereas the English intellect was freer than the French, and better able to ‘beat the ideas of the few into the minds of the many’, it ‘has rarely been so unfinished, so ragged’. In Parisian society ‘higher kinds of thought are better discussed than in London, and better argued in the Revue des deux Mondes than in any English periodical.’
Above all Napoleon III had kindled an economic miracle to ‘amaze Europe and France itself’. ‘No government has striven to promote railways, and roads, and industry, like this government. France is much changed in twelve years.’86 The usual objection to despotism was that it made property insecure. But the modern model erected in France had nothing to do with this ‘coarse Asiatic despotism’. The Emperor handled property rights with ‘ostentatious care’, being ‘too wise to kill the bird which lays the golden egg’, and ‘is as good a free trader as there is in France’. As for a ‘common English notion that such freedom stimulates the demand for political freedom’, Bagehot wrote, with a wink, he ‘is aware that very often it does nothing of the kind’.87
Readers could be forgiven for wondering what if anything was wrong with ‘Caesareanism as It Now Exists’, the title of one Economist leader. To Bagehot there was a major flaw, which he identified in 1865. ‘Credit in France, to an Englishman’s eye, has almost to be created.’88 In the summer of 1867 the French and Austro-Hungarian emperors seemed to be plotting a war against Prussia. ‘Every bourse in Europe is trembling’, he wrote in ‘The Mercantile Evils of Imperialism’, for their intentions were ‘incalculable’. Parliaments had their uses, after all: furnishing businessmen with ‘data to spell the future’. The Economist brimmed with illustrations of what this stunted financial development meant for France. ‘An English traveller sees nothing incalculably inferior to England. Means of communication, trade, agriculture, are all excellent.’ Only, ‘the French banking system is childish.’ Napoleon III had merely postponed the day of political reckoning that retarded the growth of financial capitalism. ‘A French banker, in answer to all comments upon his timidity, has a single reply: he says, “It is all very well for you to talk in England; but we in Paris, have revolutions; you were not here in 1848, I was.”’ Paris ‘is a great place of pleasure, – she is an inferior place of lending business.’89
Nations, Nationalism and the Franco-Prussian War
If Bagehot was clear in his political prescriptions for France, his predictions went hopelessly astray. His evaluation of the emperor suggested a war was impossible between France and Prussia. ‘A singular mixture of tenacity and hesitation, of daring and timidity’, Napoleon III was, the Economist assured readers, the last statesman liable to do something rash. ‘We may feel very confident that he will never face Europe, or run any risk of acting in such a fashion as to combine all Europe against him.’90 In 1867 it counted on his ‘sagacity and self-interest’ to hold back the warlike masses. While the Italian liberal nationalists Mazzini and Garibaldi crafted ‘mischievous projects’ in Italy, the wise rulers of France and Prussia beamed at one another from across the Rhine.91 Just months before Napoleon III was duped into a war in which he allowed his army to be trapped and himself taken prisoner, Bagehot wrote that the future would judge him the greater of the two Napoleons. The career of his uncle was ‘more sudden and brilliant and meteoric’ but though ‘an exciting story’ it did ‘not to our minds furnish one half so singular and unexampled in history as that of the present Emperor’s plodding, painstaking, uphill, intellectual efforts to gauge and adapt himself to both the superficial tastes and permanent demands of the French people.’92
Bagehot was momentarily chastened at the outbreak of hostilities. Maybe those who had called Plonplon ‘a gambler and a desperado’ had been right after all.93 Just a month later, however, he noted that what had failed in France was not ‘personal government’ – since Prussia was ruled by a military autocracy at the pleasure of a king. It was Caesarism: a plebiscitary despotism that had cut out the middle classes, courting ‘the favour of the ignorant peasantry’.94 Bagehot remembered Napoleon III fondly at his death in exile three years later. His defeat at Sedan was excused, attributed to a painful bladder stone that had impaired his usual ‘clearness of insight’. The muse of history blessed the fallen hero. ‘To declare him a great man may be impossible in the face of his failures, but to declare him a small one is ridiculous. Small men dying in exile do not leave wide gaps in the European political horizon.’95
What of those gaps? Just before the collapse of the Second Empire, Bagehot had advised Liberals to refrain from trying to topple it, to ‘defer all ideas of a republic’.96 Rather, ‘thinking Liberals’ should ‘engraft upon it rational and liberal principles’ because the republic they wanted – sober, ‘with no nonsense in it’ – was impossible in France. Under pressure from workers it would turn red, demanding ‘equal division of property’.97 After the fall of the Empire, socialists took power in Paris in 1871, declaring a revolutionary republic and vowing to fight on against the Prussian invaders in defiance of their own government, which had surrendered. The Economist, predictably enough, recoiled in horror. The Paris Commune was a gang of ‘artisans and working men’, ‘desperate poor’, ‘mad with rage and envy’. It only prayed they could be stopped before their ‘settled design to destroy the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Palais Royal’ was realized.98
The Economist was thus grateful to Adolphe Thiers, provisional president of the French national government, for marching 60,000 loyal troops on Paris, aided by the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who released them for this task at Thiers’s urgent plea. In the ensuing bloodbath, around 20,000 civilians were killed – many shot without trial, to be burnt or dumped in open graves, as the opening act of the French Third Republic. The fact that Thiers, a self-avowed republican, had given orders to massacre so many fellow citizens was encouraging. France owed 5 million francs in reparations to a newly united Germany and needed to show markets, where it would have to raise much of the cash, who was in control.99 Above all, the defeat of the Commune ‘effectively severed the name of the Republic from the creed of the delirious Republicans. It left it perfectly open to M. Thiers to identify the idea of the Republic with the soberest possible conceptions.’100
Till the end Bagehot never thought a republic could succeed, however, and welcomed signs of a return to enlightened dictatorship. ‘Why an English Liberal May Look without Disapproval on the Progress of Imperialism in France’, a leader from 1874, argued that while a parliament was just right for England – where a new ministry ‘does not change consols an eighth’, and a monarch sits ‘behind the ministry, to preserve at least an appearance of stability’ – this would never do for the French.101 In a friendly mood, he nevertheless offered to advise the National Assembly meeting at Versailles. He printed his own constitutional template in the Economist, ‘drawn up by one who has great experience in such matters’.102 In it, Bagehot urged the French delegates to vest power in a strongman, elected by an assembly, but who could in turn dissolve it – reminding readers that this was the secret ‘mainspring’ of the English Constitution. The document the Assembly actually adopted in 1875 earned his admiration on this basis. The ‘Conservative Republic’ looked forward – incorrectly, as the history of the Third Republic would show – to an executive more powerful than the US president and British prime minister combined. ‘Indeed, it is not very easy to conceive, outside Russia, a position of more influence and grandeur’, he wrote, thinking the model of the Czar to be an appropriate outer limit for a leader whose aim was to liberalize France.103
National character may have been a key category in comparative explorations of political order for Bagehot. But to nationalism as a leading force of the period he was relatively