The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.63/No.3           January 25, 1999 
 
 
What Are The Characteristics Of Bonapartism?  

BY GEORGE NOVACK
The following selection is from Democracy and Revolution: From Ancient Greece to Modern Capitalism by George Novack. The excerpts are taken from the chapter "Bonapartism, Military Dictatorship and Fascism." The book is copyright (c) 1971 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

The movement to the right, away from the parliamentary regime, can assume diverse forms. These reactionary replacements range from Bonapartism through unconcealed military dictatorship to fascism. The latter is the most terroristic system of monopoly-capitalist domination.

Which of these methods of rule may be adopted depends upon the actual circumstances in the unfolding of the class struggle and the specific distribution of power among the contending forces. Parliamentary government, with its constitutional guarantees, democratically elected majorities, contesting factions and periodic party campaigns, becomes a liability to big capital when the middle classes are radicalized, the workers take the offensive and the country appears to be slipping out of its control....

[W]hen social tensions tighten to the breaking point, parliament is less and less able either to settle the disputes at the top or to act as a buffer between the power of property and the wrath of the masses. General disappointment with its performance plunges bourgeois parliamentarism together with its parties into a period of acute crisis. The resolutely reactionary forces in the ruling class thereupon conspire to get out of their bind by shunting parliament aside and going over to a more exclusive method of rule....

Bonapartism
The first step away from a decrepit parliamentarism is Bonapartism. This is a bureaucratic-military dictatorship born of a deep-going but incompletely resolved confrontation of openly antagonistic class forces.

Unlike the parliamentary order which bases itself upon a (presumably) democratically elected majority and its party representation, the main props of a Bonapartist type of regime are to be found in the police, the army and the administrative apparatus.

Bonapartism carries to an extreme the concentration of power in the head of the state already discernible in the contemporary imperialist democracies. All important policy decisions are centralized in a single individual equipped with extraordinary emergency powers. He speaks and acts not as the servant of parliament, like the premier, but in his own right as "the man of destiny" who has been called upon to rescue the nation in its hour of mortal peril.

Whether the "man on horseback" usurps authority through extrapartliamentary force or under a legal cover, he exercises it by decree. His regime need not immediately dismantle or wholly discard parliamentary institutions or parties; it renders them powerless. These may be permitted to survive, provided they play merely supernumerary and decorative roles. Whether they rubber-stamp or resist the mandates from on high, these prevail as the law of the land.

The dictator may pay a hypocritical homage to the tradition of popular consent by means of occasional plebiscites in which the people are asked to endorse some proposal desired by the government. But this purely formal consultation is usually carried out in an atmosphere of intimidation wherein the propagandists of the ruling clique predict the direst consequences unless the proposition is confirmed.

The Bonapartist regime makes a big show of total independence from special interests. Its head invariably claims to be above the brawling party factions which have misruled the nation and led it to the brink of ruin, from which he has providentially snatched it in time. He parades as the anointed custodian of the eternal values, the true spirit of the people who have been victimized by selfish warring cliques or threatened by alien and subversive mischief-makers.

Actually, the "man of iron" is mandated to defend the social interests of the magnates of capital by blunting the class conflicts which created the opportunity for his despotism. He can exact a heavy price from the property owners for performing these salutary services....

Since the French Revolution, that country has been the classic home of bourgeois Bonapartism. The "man on horseback" enters the scene, writes Trotsky, "in those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence of classes -in reality, only the freedom necessary for a defense of the privileged."

Brief history of Bonapartes
The dictatorship of Napoleon the First fulfilled these requirements. The little Corsican concentrated supreme power in his hands by overthrowing the Directory through the coup d'etat of the eighteenth of Brumaire (November 9), 1799, during the recession of the French Revolution. As first consul and emperor, he waged war and directed the affairs of state with a firm hand in his own name - and to the greater glory of the French bourgeoisie.

The legend of his triumphs helped make his far less talented nephew president and then emperor after the bourgeoisie had crushed the insurgent masses in the Revolution of 1848. Napoleon the Little outmaneuvered the representatives of the royalists, the bourgeois republicans and the democratic petty bourgeoisie at odds with one another, and overturned the constitutional republic with the aid of the army, police and state apparatus and the support of the reactionary countryside. The industrial bourgeoisie in particular saluted the coup of December 2, 1851, which dissolved the legislative National Assembly and sealed Napoleon's monopoly of executive power. The second Bonaparte wrested political power from the bourgeoisie only to protect them against the masses. Under the Second Empire, their economic affairs prospered exceedingly - until the top-heavy edifice collapsed in 1870 as the result of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

The role of a Bonapartist regime in the epoch of imperialism and the decline of capitalism is no different from that in the period of its rise. It intervenes to head off a potential state of civil war in a divided nation by referring all disputed issues to a supreme arbiter invested with exorbitant power. The master of destiny seeks to use his authority to reduce social tensions and stabilize class relations for the benefit of the threatened property owners....

The Achilles' heel of Bonapartism lies in its lack of a broad mass base. Since it does not represent a significant social force, it is precariously poised and highly vulnerable to the shocks of setbacks at home or abroad. It provides a halfhearted solution to the crisis of the bourgeois order, because it does not carry through the civil war of big capital against the workers or the demolition of democracy to the very end. It can come to grief when the class antagonisms that it temporarily but not totally annuls flare up anew....

How fascism differs
Unlike other forms of antidemocratic rule, which represent differing degrees of bourgeois reaction, fascism spearheads a political counterrevolution. It thoroughly extirpates all institutions of both bourgeois and proletarian democracy and all independent forces. It binds the masses hand and foot, gags them, atomizes the working class and thrusts the nation into a totalitarian straitjacket....

Fascism differs in one decisively important respect from other political expressions of reaction. It is a mass movement based upon the activity of a particular social force, the dispossessed and despairing petty bourgeoisie. Unlike Bonapartist and military dictatorships which are imposed from above, the fascist movement surges up from below. It has a plebeian composition, impetus and leadership.

Fascism attracts to its banner the most discontented elements from the battered and bruised intermediate layers of bourgeois society. Its following embraces shopkeepers, professionals, white-collar workers, small artisans and functionaries in the cities and towns, and small landholders in the countryside. It recruits its shock troops from the lumpen proletariat, the unemployed and the most demoralized and backward toilers. It can make strong appeals to jingoistic war veterans who feel out of place and unrewarded in civilian life, to misled youth and to alarmed pensioners beset by inflation and insecurity.

 
 
 
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