Introduction
Caesarism has of late received assiduous coverage in media outlets as well as in political circles.Footnote 1 It has also become increasingly popular as an explanatory model amongst legal experts and cultural commentators, notably vis-à-vis its autocratic (American) version arguably threatening the existence of democracy.Footnote 2 Caesarism is equally being studied by a diverse range of scholars engaged in different research fields.Footnote 3 This is especially the case in intellectual history, where it has been, and very much still is, the subject of a thriving historiography.Footnote 4
These different strands of literature share several claims about the origins and the nature of Caesarism. They acknowledge that the term was coined by Auguste Romieu in L’ère des Césars (1850),Footnote 5 see it as integral to an age of crisis,Footnote 6 describe it as “democracy without liberty,”Footnote 7 and associate it with the plebiscitary endorsement of a strongman.Footnote 8 Moreover, they read Caesarism as a modality of power sustained by a centralized administrative–bureaucratic apparatus, expansionist military policies abroad, and promotion of public works and censorship of the press at home.Footnote 9 Above all, by regarding Caesarism as the affair of a handful of countries (France, Germany, and Italy), they either ignore Britain altogether or maintain that, amongst British thinkers, Caesarism was portrayed as a regime guided by a charismatic leader whose ascendancy over the people was deemed deleterious to parliamentary politics.Footnote 10 At best, they take Walter Bagehot’s engagement with Caesarism as exceptional within the Victorian intellectual panorama, neglecting other works and failing to contextualize Bagehot’s interventions within that same panorama.Footnote 11
This article endeavors to improve on the existing literature in two ways. First, it shows that in Victorian Britain Caesarism was amply discussed in both theoretical parlance and public debate.Footnote 12 One key reason for this is that Caesarism was not only considered an undemocratic phenomenon shaped by tyrannical governance affecting mostly mainland Europe, but also conceived as a core component of mass democracy in Britain itself.Footnote 13 Instead of accentuating the politico-institutional dimension of Caesarism’s illiberality and the role played in it by the philosophy of the grand homme (in other words, a top-down critique), many nineteenth-century British commentators emphasized the broader civilizational nature of its illiberality and the way in which the ethical deficiency of the democratic masses enabled Caesarist politics (a bottom-up critique).Footnote 14 Their critiques of the sociocultural substratum that facilitated the success of Caesars were articulated with the enlargement of the franchise very much in mind, as with the Second (1867) and Third Reform Acts (1884).Footnote 15 Within this framework of democratization, Caesarism was configured as a pathological state of all democratic politics and not just of “[l]a démocratie illibérale.”Footnote 16 In fact, in nineteenth-century Britain, nothing was reputed to be very “liberal” about democracy.
Second, in order to rethink Caesarism’s scope as a cultural category,Footnote 17 the article pays close attention to leading intellectuals such as Bagehot, John Robert Seeley, and Henry Sumner Maine, who theorized about Caesarism and Napoleonism primarily according to cultural considerations.Footnote 18 Their views—and those of other commentators (including some who voiced their opinions in daily newspapers)—are connected with those of authors such as Matthew Arnold, who, despite not addressing Caesarism directly, similarly condemned the intellectual and ethical credentials of the masses.Footnote 19 Their main goal was to expose the (allegedly) damaging consequences of democratic life for British politics and civilization.Footnote 20 They understood “democratic Caesarism”Footnote 21 as a “form of society” (not only as a “form of government”Footnote 22) that revealed democracy’s excessive character. Democratic Caesarism was attacked for being antithetical to a Victorian idea of culture that involved more than knowledge: in Arnoldian terms, it meant “[e]xpansion, conduct, science, beauty, manners.”Footnote 23 This was an inward condition characterized by an intellectual mind-set and a spiritual standing at odds with the masses’ uncultured attitudes, ethical–political irresponsibility, and exaggerated care for their own material interests.Footnote 24
Since British criticism of democratic Caesarism remained consistent during Louis-Napoleon’s regime in France (1851–70) and afterwards,Footnote 25 the following pages proceed chronologically.
Pre-1870: Bagehot–Arnold
In British political discourse, Caesarism meant a plurality of things, depending on where an author chose to lay emphasis. The variety of usages was mirrored by the ideologically composite spectrum of those employing the term and the concept.Footnote 26 Thus, if “Caesarism” was often identified with the “degrading despotism” that had taken hold of the “Roman empire” at a time when it had become corrupt and subject to a humiliating loss of freedom under the yoke of a capricious “tyrant,”Footnote 27 in other cases Caesarism indicated a form of imperialism (often associated with Benjamin Disraeli’s policies).Footnote 28 It was also deployed in antithesis to theocracy or church rule.Footnote 29 In some occurrences still, “Caesarism” was associated with the strong “ties of affection” between a charismatic leader and a gullible mob, as had happened in France, where it conveyed popular “political idolatry” for the sovereign Napoleon.Footnote 30 This last evaluation, though, did not prevent a few analysts from pointing up Caesarism’s benefits for effective government.Footnote 31
The ascent to power of Louis-Napoleon in France led many in Britain to feel vindicated in their hostility to Continental ideas and politics, of which the French were considered the worst exponents.Footnote 32 As Jonathan Parry has explained, “the ease with which Napoleon, specifically, exploited universal suffrage to entrench his despotism strengthened the case of those who opposed major franchise changes.”Footnote 33 Victorian antidemocrats underscored that what had happened in France proved the dangers of “democratic tyranny.”Footnote 34 In fact, despite important differences in terms of political institutions and general social mood in the two countries, some British observers thought France was not the only country at risk of being swept over by democratic Caesarism. Whether bluntly warning that things were heading in a similar direction in a Britain confronted by the rising tide of democratic enfranchisement or observing events in France more detachedly, several writers used Caesarism as a platform from which they addressed, and speculated on, the ruinous consequences of mass democracy over politics as well as culture.
In late 1851, the journalist and political commentator Walter Bagehot (1826–77) witnessed, firsthand from Paris, the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon, whom he praised a few months later in The Inquirer (January–March 1852). As a result, Bagehot became unpopular amongst British liberals.Footnote 35 His tribute to Louis-Napoleon has divided historians: for some, Bagehot supported Caesarism;Footnote 36 for others, he was no friend of Caesarist politics.Footnote 37 Less explored is what Bagehot’s opinions of Caesarism reveal about his broader views of democracy and how they relate to those of other nineteenth-century British thinkers.Footnote 38
To understand Bagehot’s assessment of Caesarism and democracy, one would search in vain for a theoretical (let alone normative) definition of these two categories in his works. Instead, it is crucial to concentrate on his comprehensively negative depiction of “the inferior people” who had made Napoleon III “really strong and really popular.”Footnote 39 In describing the working classes as an unthinking mass deprived of political intelligence and of culture, who were easily manipulated by demagogues like Louis-Napoleon, Bagehot was being neither especially innovative nor extreme within nineteenth-century antidemocratic parameters. For decades, British commentators had argued that, since it was marred by the masses’ violent opinions, servility and mediocrity, democracy was “the parent of tyranny and licence.”Footnote 40
Georgian and Victorian political writers often looked at American democracy as an anti-model, something unfit to be tried out in Britain.Footnote 41 Again, Bagehot followed suit, but this time gave the idea an original twist. He held democracy, with its mobbish customs, responsible for having turned the US into “an almost unmitigated ochlocracy.”Footnote 42 The latter, which meant “mob rule,” referred to Polybius’ cyclical theory of governments as advanced in the second century BCE. Polybius had argued that each of the three traditional forms of government experienced a process of anakyklosis (cyclic decay), whereby kingship degenerated into tyranny and aristocracy into oligarchy, and, following “outrages and iniquities,” democracy turned into “Ochlocracia.”Footnote 43
In deploying the Polybian term, which had been revitalized during the English Civil Wars, where it was framed as an offshoot of Caesar-inspired politics from which a strong dictator was predicted to emerge and act as England’s savior,Footnote 44 Bagehot set the tone for a thorough critique of democracy. Despite obvious contextual differences, ochlocracy and Caesarism served to portray a dismal image of what happened when enlarged democracy and tyrannical aspirations met. They were both targeted for encouraging the politicization of the ignorant multitude. As Bagehot specified, the reason for this ochlocratic turn was that the “only half educated,” or indeed outright “ignorant,” “masses” had grown “everywhere omnipotent.”Footnote 45 This situation showed that Napoleon’s Caesarism, as Bagehot put it, was a “Benthamite” (i.e. democratic) despotism aiming to provide as much popular “happiness” as possible. No divinely appointed ruler, Napoleon was “the people’s agent” who had been inspired by “the first … democratic despot:” the “demagogue ruler” Caesar.Footnote 46
Aware of living through “an age of preeminently democratic tendencies and temper,”Footnote 47 Bagehot drew on another classical trope when explaining that, meek and pliable when playing “servant,” the Caesarist–ochlocratic masses became “capricious, exacting, and relentless” when being “master.”Footnote 48 This crippling condition affected the French emperor directly in that—as Bagehot clarified—he depended on “the support of the lower classes” (urban and rural), having to rely on “the right of numbers” in order to govern. In fact, the French ruler could not “offend” the masses, having to “please” them instead.Footnote 49 Conscious that he could not hold back “the might of the popular masses,” Louis-Napoleon pursued his Caesarist project by setting up a dominion of “one man” grounded on “the great body of the people.” He exploited the masses’ passions but channeled them in the directions he desired. As in an ochlocracy, so in a democratic Caesarism, power called on “brute force,” which, for Bagehot, constituted the biggest challenge to a “civilisation” founded on “moral and intellectual” attributes rather than on “material” premises.Footnote 50
This last passage is particularly important because it denotes a way of thinking vis-à-vis democracy similar to that expounded by Bagehot’s close friend, the poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88).Footnote 51 Both intellectuals addressed democracy’s cultural dimension, not just its typology of government or its institutional arrangements. They combated democracy as a culture of the masses. Molded by an elitist search for the right antidotes to philistinism and materialism, their vision of culture bespoke an exhortation to individuals to attain self-governance. This critique of democracy signified a positive program for creating responsible citizens. Similarly to Samuel Smiles’s philosophy expounded in the well-known Self-Help (1859), which aimed to equip individuals with an elevated spiritual character through education and reading, they conceived of government of the self as a solution to the perils of Caesarism (and the uncertainties intertwined with mass democracy).Footnote 52 In fact, Smiles too attacked Caesarism as “a doctrine which, if taken as a guide, must, by destroying the free conscience of a community, speedily prepare the way for any form of despotism.” For Smiles, “Cæsarism” equaled “human idolatry in its worst form—a worship of mere power” against which it was necessary to erect scientific and literary barriers.Footnote 53
As the author of an article on France from October 1858 observed, one of the greatest threats posed by the Caesarist regime was “the degradation of intelligence” it brought about.Footnote 54 At the same time, he reckoned, Caesarism thrived on the superstitions of the masses.Footnote 55 Such a mutually reinforcing interplay was exemplified by Napoleon’s own strategy. Napoleon had opposed the enlightened few and had striven “to ally himself with those masses whose interests he affirmed had been shamefully neglected by the superciliousness of vain pedants.”Footnote 56 Acting as “the people’s delegate elected to acquire for them their rights,” Napoleon had turned “these rights” into “the stalking-horse for his ambition.” Above all, he had made “the conceited arrogance of barren pedantry … the war-cry of a crusade against education, the corner-stone of all free government.” The Caesarist Napoleon had recognized that, “unless removed and positively crushed,” culture would “prove the block against which his system would be dashed to pieces.”Footnote 57 Therefore he had suppressed the most excellent and independent newspapers, so that those still in operation inculcated “doctrines of absolute government, by clumsy eulogies of Cæsarism as incarnate in the dynasty of Bonaparte.”Footnote 58 Sustained by the credulous masses of France, the article continued, “Bonapartism” flourished thanks to ignorance, aiming “to lower the intellectual vigour of the nation, by breaking up the volume of its thought.”Footnote 59 Key to this scathing appraisal of Caesarism was the observation that, in mass democracy, “public opinion” oscillated very rapidly from one extreme to another, so that the French leader went from being branded “a political clown and adventurer” to suddenly becoming revered “as a mysterious mouthpiece of recondite policy.”Footnote 60
The Francophile Arnold elaborated further on these themes in an essay dedicated to “Democracy” from 1861. He maintained that “[t]he difficulty for democracy is, how to find and keep high ideals,” given that the “bulk” of the people composing it did not seek to achieve “greatness, high feeling, and fine culture” (something that until then the aristocracy had provided to the polity).Footnote 61 With the advent of democracy however, the mass ceased “to be a lower order” and acquired agency. As Arnold saw things, “the grave question” was exactly whether the “democratic” society then emerging would be capable of adopting cultural and ethical standards “higher” than those held by “ordinary” men. Like Bagehot, Arnold believed that empowering “the multitude,” “with no adequate ideal to elevate or guide the multitude,” was extremely dangerous.Footnote 62
In 1865, Bagehot provided a concrete example of such a deleterious scenario. He argued that, although Napoleon’s Caesarist regime was “really the best finished democracy which the world has ever seen,” for this “absolute government” had been administratively efficient, it had nonetheless revealed a major deficiency: a strong attachment to “material prosperity.” Having been able to satisfy “[t]he welfare of the masses,” caring for “the present good of the multitude,” and providing “the bread and meat of the people,” the emperor had demonstrated a degree of sagacity unknown to other governments.Footnote 63 However, Bagehot explained, democratic Caesarism had turned out to be a regime of the “present” addressing “coarse” needs; it was not a regime of the future in that it dismissed “refined purposes.”Footnote 64 Grounded on the uncultured masses, such a government had feet of clay and could not last.
The cultural critique of democratic Caesarism was a constant of public debate: it was articulated by other and less well-known commentators. An article in the Saturday Review (1865) made clear that “Caesarism seldom obtains the suffrages of the educated classes,” securing instead “the suffrages of the people, because it promises to earn, and sometimes does actually earn, them.” Having “neither capacity nor taste for political life, still less for the … dignity of office,” the masses—this piece implied—entrusted a demagogic leader with “all the power and prestige, in the belief that he will look to the material interests of those upon whose shoulders he is carried to the throne.”Footnote 65
The prism through which this criticism was voiced varied according to an author’s priorities, but its underlying motif remained the same. Thus, connecting Roman “Caesarism” with Napoleon’s “Caesarism,” the Liberal politician and historian Edward Augustus Freeman underlined how a depraved democracy had established Caesar’s despotic regime.Footnote 66 Since representative government was back then “unheard of,” the only solution to prevent further popular degeneration had been empowering Caesar.Footnote 67 The latter had become “the leader of a mob not worthy of being called a people” because it did not know how to conduct “any peaceable discussion,” resorting to “weapons, as the best argument they could find to settle their differences.”Footnote 68 The taming of the uncouth rabble by the strongman was deceptive, though: Caesar’s seemingly “peaceable government,” exactly like that of “Buonaparte at this time,” was—Freeman stated—“the most corrupting of all governments.”Footnote 69 This was so because Caesar and Napoleon did not imprison, murder, or plunder. They operated more subtly: they put “people into a sort of fool’s paradise,” giving “them a prosperity like that of the hog in his stye.” Caesarism succeeded because, under its yoke, “people may eat and drink and get rich,” even if—Freeman concluded—it “crushed” “every noble aspiration” and killed all “political or literary life,” so that there remained “nothing for men to do but fall down and worship as they are bid,” learning “to hug their chains.”Footnote 70 For Freeman, “the real sin of Caesarism, Buonapartism, or whatever we may call it” was that it corrupted the masses irreversibly, accelerating overall civilizational decay. Freeman’s lesson was clear: blinded by base interests and marred by cultural poverty, the lower orders showed their “reverence” for the wrong kind of “great men.”Footnote 71
The explicit association between mass democracy and Caesarism was made a few months later in a climate increasingly dominated by fears of ongoing democratic processes: America and France had taught Britain an important “lesson,” namely “that if you will have democracy, you must have something like Caesarism to control it.”Footnote 72 The article—which expressed great terror at the prospect that the ignorant classes, instead of “the educated classes,” will wield political power—opined that “a government” that depended on “the House of Commons” was “only possible so long as that House of Commons is the organ of an educated minority,” not if it depended on “a legislature chosen from the lower class.”Footnote 73 Similarly, with the “question of Parliamentary Reform” at the forefront of public discussion, an article in the Pall Mall Gazette asked whether Britain’s “balanced [politico-constitutional] system” would be maintained or “whether it is to be delivered over to modern democracy or to Caesarism.”Footnote 74
It was in the thick of the political battles surrounding the Second Reform Act (1867)—which gave the right to vote to all male urban householders, to male lodgers paying ten pounds in rent a year for unfurnished accommodation, and to agricultural tenantsFootnote 75—that Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) pitted culture against the creeds of the democratic masses.Footnote 76 To begin with, Arnold was convinced that this group was equipped with only a lower self, which was instinctual rather than cultured.Footnote 77 He dismissed the many as incapable of grasping truth, underscoring the incompatibility between “the best reason and spirit of man” and the “natural taste for the bathos” informing the masses.Footnote 78 Then Arnold argued that, since “the raw and unkindled” “inferior classes” were not gifted with “sweetness and light,” they remained in thrall to “hatred” and “machinery.”Footnote 79 A stark instance of these features, according to Arnold, was the “rowdysim” of the democratic crowds that had rioted in Hyde Park in 1866.Footnote 80 The “assertion” of one’s “personal liberty,” galvanized by the democratic spirit, yielded dire consequences: amongst them was a sense of entitlement spearheading the masses onto a path that threatened Britain’s stability.Footnote 81 For Arnold, it was necessary to shape men with “beauty” (“sweetness”) and “intelligence” (“light”), in order to halt the same brutal force typical of the Caesarist masses that Bagehot had identified with the high road to (French) political disorder.Footnote 82
When addressing the 1867 electoral reform, Bagehot did not mince his words. In referring to what he branded “the ultra-democratic theory,” he once again stressed the civilizational risks of such a change: “Upon this theory each man is to have one twelve-millionth share in electing a Parliament; the rich and wise are not to have, by explicit law, more votes than the poor and stupid.” Consequently, “moderate” men would be kept out of Parliament and the whole system would fall prey to “the clownish mass.”Footnote 83 The Liberal historian Goldwin Smith (who was ambivalent about democracyFootnote 84) echoed similar sentiments when he resorted to Roman history to declare that “a disposition towards Caesarism amongst the masses” was beyond “doubt” just as was the fact that “tyranny” was “the more disastrous the larger the basis on which it relies for support.”Footnote 85 Convinced of the pivotal role of intellectuals in guiding Britain, Smith was a typical exponent of the values expressed in the Saturday Review. Countenancing gradual franchise reform and promoting “education” as a means to reach it, the Saturday Review prized government by the well-educated and intellectually gifted propertied classes. The periodical saw the electoral reform as a righteous act: to enfranchise trustworthy skilled artisans was imperative, especially because it served as a tool with which to prevent the extension of the suffrage to the masses.Footnote 86 Accordingly, already twelve years prior to this outburst, Smith had assuredly stated, “Every sensible man wishes to keep the head of the nation above wild democracy, and to make Government the rule of intelligence, not the rule of the mob.”Footnote 87
Expanding on this perspective, in May 1870 the consistently antidemocratic Bagehot decried the plebiscites of “democratic autocracies” (including Napoleon III’s) as a lethal weapon in the hands of “the people.”Footnote 88 This comment harbored a more fundamental denunciation of the cultural basis of democracy: as Bagehot quipped, “it is the teaching of democracy that the masses should govern the intellect and not the intellect the masses.” Indeed, the vote of the “stupid” had to “count” just as much as that of the “wise,” the peasant’s just as the philosopher’s.Footnote 89 Likewise, at the time of the collapse of Napoleon’s regime, Bagehot reminded his readers that democratic Caesarism meant “the abuse of the confidence reposed by the most ignorant in a great name to hold at bay the reasoned arguments” of the educated class.Footnote 90 Ultimately, dependence on “the wishes of the masses” was “the source of the greatest weakness”Footnote 91 since it denoted dependence on people lacking culture and intelligence.
These pre-1870 critiques portrayed Caesarism as interwoven with the democratic masses’ uncivilized character—so much so that they thought the latter to be the main factor accounting for Napoleon’s success. Crucially, the same critique continued to be advanced after Napoleon’s demise. The catalyst for it was the Third Reform Act (1884), which in Britain gave the franchise to two men out of every three.Footnote 92
Post-1870: Seeley–Maine
The downfall of “the Crowned democrat of Europe” came in 1870, following France’s internal troubles and her defeat at the hands of Prussia.Footnote 93 This event, though, did not stop somebody like Bagehot from linking together democracy, Caesarism, and the empowerment of “ignorance” (instead of “instruction” and “knowledge.”)Footnote 94 As he explained in 1872, “The democratic passions gain by fomenting a diffused excitement, and by massing men in concourses.”Footnote 95 Democracy opposed the rule of a talented elite and meant the rule of the “narrow-minded, unintelligent, incurious” numbers.Footnote 96 Since they were “uneducated,” the democratic masses were easily excitable, succumbing to demagogues and manipulators.Footnote 97 More to the point, since “the average intellect and the average culture” of the democratic body were “excessively low,” they—Bagehot concluded—became “enslaved to authority” of the type France had experienced (and still did).Footnote 98
Theoretical consistency was no prerogative of the bigshot Bagehot. It is clearly encapsulated in the statement of the Coventry Herald that “the interests of civilisation” were antithetical to “the Bonapartist theory” and to “the principle of Caesarism.”Footnote 99 Less than one year later, despite expounding a sympathetic view of “Louis Napoleon … [as] by no means a bad Caesar” (he was “a despot” but “not cruel, and certainly was not ignoble”), an opinion piece in the Pall Mall Gazette branded “Caesarism” “a bad thing in itself.” The reason given was that it had not only “wasted the lives of many of the best men in the country,” but it had “corrupted the national mind” and had “vulgarized society” altogether.Footnote 100 The then conservative Pall Mall Gazette made the connection between democracy and Caesarism more explicitly still in a piece from 1875 where “Caesarism” was defined as “[t]he strongest organization of democracy.”Footnote 101 Four years later, a note in The Examiner referred to “the Bonaparte family” as the artificers of the “well-known” “curious theory of compound democracy and Caesarism.”Footnote 102 The affinity between the two was remarked anew in the aftermath of the 1884 Reform Act in various quarters. For instance, besides reminding its readership that “militarism and mob favour, when combined, are the one unerring mark of coming Caesarism,” the Preston Chronicle tellingly added, “democracy finds a demagogue who, instead of tongue and pen, fights with spur and sword, and it is all over with popular liberty.” In fact, “The tribune of the people” became “imperator,” with the result that only “an imperium pure and simple” survived, whilst “poor liberty, like truth,” had “to go and hide herself in the well.”Footnote 103
Equally fearful for the present and the future of liberty was the Liberal historian John Robert Seeley (1834–95). Seeley attacked democracy by stressing—in terms close to those of Bagehot and Arnold—the intellectually defective disposition of the masses, so glaringly exposed during the Caesarist experience in France.Footnote 104 Wary of the risks of extending the franchise to wider portions of the working classes, Seeley pointed to England sleepwalking into the “infirmity” of “young and sanguine democracy.”Footnote 105 The latter was a government dominated by the “impulsive, popular mind,” which was “childishly ignorant of the larger political questions.”Footnote 106 Seeley considered democracies in their early stages as particularly vulnerable to manipulation due to the masses’ lack of education. This “somnambulist state” was acute in the England before his eyes as “the newly enfranchised classes” had not been prepared to fulfil an active political role. In fact, “the suffrage” was no education: “conferred” on the “entirely untutored,” it caused “error and misconception.”Footnote 107 As a Liberal commentator, Seeley underscored that the want of capacity and talent on the part of the shortsighted and materialist masses could easily drag Britain down into the abyss of uncultivated democratic “Napoleonism.”Footnote 108
Such a menacing phenomenon was compounded, a disapproving Seeley reflected, by the tendency of many politicians to ask for the masses’ opinion about the “most momentous, and most difficult questions.” In so doing, these statesmen behaved in a populist way, namely à la “Robespierre.”Footnote 109 Indeed, their conduct confirmed the Caesarist direction in which the new democratic masses led politics. According to Seeley, it was not simply their fickle nature, but their being enslaved to primitive and prejudiced instincts that made the masses incompetent. He insisted that the multitude was swamped by an “utter childishness” vis-à-vis issues surpassing its own immediate circumstances, which rendered its members unfit not just for active politics but for the right to vote too.Footnote 110
Seeley’s stance signified that democracy was most destructive when it combined with Caesarism–Napoleonism. Accordingly, he decried the materialistic approach to life of the masses, which, even when harboring “good feelings,” had insufficient intellectual strength to resist “deceivableness.” The most blatant example of this situation was that of France, where the masses had been deceived by the “clever” Napoleon. For Seeley, once the franchise was given to the French populace, the popular “voice” made clear its wishes: “it called Louis Napoleon to the head of affairs,” with the terrible consequences of which everyone was aware.Footnote 111 France’s case was typical of what Seeley named “somnambulism,” to avert which “politics” needed more than “mere good intentions.” As with Cromwellian rule, so with “Napoleonism,” Seeley’s verdict was that the many were bewitched by “the man who makes a striking figure on the historical stage.”Footnote 112 The key reason why they became so spellbound was their serious cultural deficit. Since they enjoyed neither the “leisure to acquire” knowledge nor “the just way of thinking,” the “masses” remained in a state of inferiority to “the middle-class,” which was formed by “most of the best educated men in the country.” In contrast to the “working classes,” the middle classes possessed “prudence” as well as “political sense and tact.”Footnote 113 In a nutshell, they were immunized against the virus of Caesarism affecting the lower orders. As he had explained in an earlier essay, to prevent the working classes from falling prey to misleading “utopias,” “a much greater educational movement ought to begin, or rather ought to have begun long since.”Footnote 114
Despite differences, Seeley’s approach to culture and politics resembled Bagehot’s and Arnold’s in that he too prioritized the role of a clerisy of the mind in steering the nation towards success and safety. As for Bagehot and Arnold, so for Seeley the democratic aspirations of the Caesarist–Napoleonist masses had no place in this political scheme. Above all, these aspirations did not suit these authors’ vision of politics because they were deeply antithetical to their ideal of culture. For them, culture meant more than education: it comprised intellectual sensibility, ethical responsibility, and spiritual–moral independence. Hence culture was the opposite of the blinkered mental habits besetting materialistic Victorian Britain—of which the levelling lower orders were once again considered a crude expression.Footnote 115
These arguments concern the important question of the educability of the masses. In this regard, whereas some thinkers recognized the need for extending education to the poorest social groups as a way of remedying their faulty moral habits and preparing them for democracy, others thought that democratic education instilled in the working classes the dangerous illusion of being able to become like their betters.Footnote 116 If, for some commentators, education could succeed in dissuading the masses from embarking upon revolutionary politics or from supporting the kind of sociopolitical experiment Caesarism promoted, for others their educational development could be achieved only in the future.Footnote 117
Whilst Seeley set forth his antidemocratic positions a few years before the Third Reform Act, the jurist and legal scholar Henry Sumner Maine (1822–88) cast his aspersions on all things democratic (including education) in the immediate aftermath of the new law. Through harsh criticism of plebiscites articulated in Popular Government (1885), Maine—an influence on BagehotFootnote 118—saw democracy and despotism as interlaced.Footnote 119 This could be evinced from the events that had embroiled France, an alleged “democracy” where “enormous majorities” had recently provided “a military despot [with] any answer which he desired.”Footnote 120 Maine was adamant that democracy was an excessive form of government that gave “birth to despotism with the greatest facility.”Footnote 121 Therefore democracy was not only politically ruinous, but—because it empowered “the masses”—also detrimental to intellectual progress, scientific innovation, technological advancement, and, more broadly, open-mindedness.Footnote 122 Basically, “human improvement” and democratic “political societies” were incompatible. In line with Bagehot, Arnold, and Seeley, Maine too (albeit in more extreme terms) deemed democratic life the antipode of “civilization”Footnote 123—so much so as to proclaim that in a democratic England “[t]he threshing-machine, the power-loom, the spinning-jenny, and possibly the steam-engine, would have been prohibited.”Footnote 124
To substantiate his statement, Maine resorted to historical iterations of democratic Caesarism. First, he stressed that the years 1792, 1830, and 1848 had witnessed the Parisian “mobs” at their subversive worst, as a result of which “a rigid despotism” had ensued.Footnote 125 Second, he asserted that since the time when “the Roman Emperors were at the mercy of the Praetorian soldiery, there has been no such insecurity of government as the world has seen since rulers became delegates of the community.”Footnote 126 What all of this proved was that, although “[t]he convinced partisans of democracy” denied it, instability was part and parcel of democratic government.Footnote 127 The keynote of Maine’s antidemocratic critique was the new role the intellectually deficient and spiritually flawed masses had assumed in Britain’s post-1884 public arena. As he explicated in a gambit reminiscent of Arnold, from being “a portion of society in a state of dissolution,” loosened from harmonious societal bonds and crippled by “mischief,” “disorder,” and “panic,” a “mob” had become a group with “definite opinions.”Footnote 128 The masses had acquired their own zealous identity anchored in the belief of their own righteousness, which made them fanatically immune to “doubt.” This development was “a product of democratic sentiment,” of which the Caesarist Cromwell represented a major historical embodiment.Footnote 129 In support of his thesis stood recent events too: if the French had disposed of “universal suffrage” after the Terror, it had nonetheless been “twice revived in France, that the Napoleonic tyranny might be founded on it,” and the same had occurred in Germany, so that “the personal power of Bismarck might be confirmed.”Footnote 130 As the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon had amply shown, the plebiscite constituted “the very principle of democracy.”Footnote 131 Therefore, on Maine’s telling, Caesarism–Napoleonism was the political regime that wickedly housed under the same roof talentless people and regressive governance, signaling the end of civilized life in the polityFootnote 132—for Maine, even “education” could not improve things when it came to democracy and its narrow-minded masses.Footnote 133
In a Britain embracing democratic politics more decisively than ever before, these views made headway beyond the world of political writings. An article by W. Earl Hodgson in Time (1885) affirmed that, “With its faulty aims and doings,” “its Caesarism,” “its monstrous beliefs,” and “its sham philanthropy,” “Democracy” (a “degeneration”) was “a political intoxication into which the masses have been seduced by men seeking to profit by the consequent excitement and confusion.”Footnote 134 Above all, according to Hodgson, “Democracy is a malady; and very much more than it, Democracy is a curse to civilisation,” giving an uneducated individual the illusion of being able to have an opinion, and even take decisions, about his country’s affairs.Footnote 135
By the same token, the 7th Earl Cowper, a leading Liberal grandee, wrote that “the degeneration of the people” that came with “democracy” was accompanied by “Caesarism.”Footnote 136 Most importantly, Cowper too adopted Polybius’ theory, according to which “a monarchy is succeeded by an oligarchy; an oligarchy, after a more or less prolonged struggle, by a democracy; and a democracy by the dominion of an autocrat.” When underlining “the chief difference between the king who begins the series, and the despot who ends it,” Cowper clarified that the peculiar nature of democratic despotism was for “the despot” to rely “upon the people whose power he has appropriated.”Footnote 137 Like his earlier Victorian counterparts, Cowper was convinced that, without the perseverance of intelligent and cultivated MPs resisting Caesarism, a deterioration was inevitable. Having first maintained that England’s “national life” was imperiled, and having predicted “that the addition to our constituencies of 2,000,000 voters belonging to the most ignorant and impulsive of our population will for the moment intensify the evil of which I have spoken,”Footnote 138 Cowper concluded on a more hopeful note: whether “democracy takes a wrong direction and ends in a repetition of the old story” or, instead, “democracy takes a right direction and keeps clear of Caesarism” was uncertain.Footnote 139 Once again, much seemed to hinge on whether culture could stymie the growth of “shouting” and “eloquence,” which was “one of the diseases to which democracy is liable,” and protect Britain from the claws of Caesarism.Footnote 140
Eleven years later, these opinions were still common. Not only was it argued that “to identify parliamentary government with democracy” was naive as “the connexion of the two things is rather habitual than necessary,” and that, since “parliamentary government” was in disrepute and “government by the people at large” was “impracticable,” the solution had come from France, where people had endorsed “a man as interpreter of the mass.”Footnote 141 It was also contended that “the legend of Napoleon” was “that of Caesar,” being “the Latin idea of representation of the people by a single man of genius.” Thus “Caesarism” meant “representation of the mass by a man.”Footnote 142 “Curiously enough,” it was “England, rather than France,” that was “developing the conditions of a true Caesarism.” Worse, England was creating “the machinery for a popular dictatorship.”Footnote 143 For this author, too, Caesarism was more than the manifestation of a grand homme. It was the democratic nourishment of “a dictator responsible to the people.”Footnote 144
Conclusion
This article has shown that Caesarism was extensively discussed in Victorian Britain, where it represented one modality by which mass democracy was decried—as happened in the contexts of the Second (1867) and Third Reform Acts (1884). It has suggested that intellectuals such as Walter Bagehot, Matthew Arnold, John Robert Seeley, and Henry Sumner Maine (as well as various less well-known political commentators) connected—explicitly or indirectly—Caesarism–Napoleonism with the uncultured masses’ materialistic preoccupations, superstitious prejudices, and spiritual poverty. Most importantly, it has underlined that since, for these authors, culture entailed values such as openness, emancipation, responsibility, and character, their criticism of Caesarism needs to be read as part of a broader discourse whereby democracy was detrimental to (a certain idea of) civilization.
The article has complexified the standard historiographical picture according to which Caesarism was mostly the affair of a charismatic military leader. It has done so by understanding Caesarism as a cultural category rather than exclusively as a political doctrine. Accordingly, it has claimed that Victorian attacks on democratic Caesarism were undergirded by an array of axioms that reflected a normative vision of personal independence, civic liberty, and collective behavior. This reading has revealed how Caesarism–Napoleonism served to pinpoint the contours of democracy’s excessive character. Caesarism and mass democracy completed each other in that the former was a form of politics and of societal life within which the irrational beliefs of the latter could find the most extreme expression.
Furthermore, the article has proved that negative assessments of democratic Caesarism remained consistent between the 1850s and the 1890s. They had one principal target in their crosshairs: the democratic masses’ cultural deficiencies and (consequent) want of political vision, whose effects on state and society were nefariously Caesarist. Irrespective of political orientation, our authors all concurred that a lethal mixture of extreme carelessness, petty self-interestedness and utter boorishness led the masses to place a Caesar at their head. In a nutshell, for many Victorian critics, Caesarism was made possible because democracy was a cultural–spiritual desert whose aridity killed the intellect altogether, facilitating the empowerment of Napoleon-like figures.
Finally, the article has contributed to the study of Victorian ideas of democracy. Against the grain of much scholarship—where these ideas are examined in conjunction with parliamentary debates, constitutional developments, party politics, and canonical worksFootnote 145—it has focused on a specifically cultural critique of democracy that was articulated in different sources (including some that are little considered in the history of political thought). By focusing on Caesarism, this critique laid bare the considerable extent to which democracy was dreaded. This is to say that Victorian debates about democracy were not simply about governments or legal–institutional arrangements. They circled around moral values, class-related anxieties, and philosophical arguments that addressed the burning question of how a dangerous uncouth mass could be turned into a respectable polished citizenry. In the eyes of intellectuals such as Bagehot, Arnold, Seeley, and Maine, just as in those of less sophisticated observers, the looming specter of British Caesarism did not bode well for the success of such a transformation.
Acknowledgments
I thank Francesca Antonini, Hugo Bonin, Sarah Dry, Elise Garritzen, Alexander Jordan, Iain McDaniel, Sandrine Parageau, Markku Peltonen, and Johann Sommerville for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article and the two Modern Intellectual History anonymous reviewers for their incisive suggestions on its latest versions. I also thank the Gerda Henkel Stiftung Scholarship: Funding Programme Democracy for its financial support.
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