The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu

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Part III: The Saint-Simonian Elements in the New Modes and Orders

Chapter Seven: THE SAINT-SIMONIAN HISTORICAL ELEMENT

Saint-Simonianism and Louis Napoleon

The influence of Saint-Simonianism on Napoleon III was more commonly noted among contemporaries of Louis than among later historians of the Second Empire. For example, Sainte-Beuve is widely reported to have hailed the arrival of Napoleon III on the French political scene as "Saint-Simon on horseback," the historic embodiment of that thinker's thought. [1] Such a view of the Emperor gets its fullest articulation in Joly's Dialogue.

According to Octave Aubrey, the influence of Saint-Simon was a lot more than something Napoleon absorbed from the intellectual atmosphere of nineteenth century France. While a political prisoner for five and half years in the fortress of Ham, Louis Napoleon read deeply in the corpus of Saint-Simon and even annotated his works! Like other despotic ideologues of later times, Napoleon remarked upon the formative experience of his years of study in prison -- "my university," he later dubbed it. Albert Guerard repeats the more common view of the Second Empire -- a "gilded age" of pleasure seeking and profiteering that witnessed "the triumph of materialism in all its forms." However, he sees "another aspect to the period," more revealing of the Emperor himself and "his deeper views." Like observers contemporary to Napoleon, he links such levels of thought in the Emperor to Saint-Simonianism.

According to Guerard, "without being formally associated with the Saint-Simonian school, he was animated by its spirit." In particular, he notes the religious character of such thought expressed in its "fundamental principle" that "the first duty of government is to promote the welfare, material and moral, of the most numerous and poorest class." Furthermore, "it is significant that a number of Saint-Simonians, Father Enfantin, and the Pereire brothers, without abjuring the messianic hopes of their youth, became prominent business leaders under the Second Empire." [3]

Twentieth century historians of the Second Empire, who are aware of Saint-Simonianism, may see it as having some bearing on diverse social and economic projects of the Emperor, but they typically do not see it as having any coherent political influence. Saint-Simon and his intellectual progeny are best studied with other curious thinkers of the day, such as Fourier in France or Owen in Great Britain, who proposed radically flawed social experiments in the face of the dislocation brought on by industrialism. Most noteworthy in this regard is the thinking of George G. Iggers. He meticulously draws out the totalitarian implications of Saint-Simonian doctrine but denies any practical influence to its teaching beyond its contribution to the climate of ideas in the early nineteenth century. For Iggers, Saint-Simonianism is nothing but "a totalitarian fantasy." [4] For Joly, it gave form to the real world in which he lived.

More recent scholarship sees the Iggers thesis as an overwrought distortion of the thrust of Saint-Simonian thinking. Emphasizing certain "softer" elements in the thought of the Saint-Simonians, the Manuels see the revolution they espoused more as a "tender failure" [5] than a "totalitarian fantasy." However, they seem to agree that the Saint-Simonians exerted no great influence on political practice and stand in a line of interpretations beginning with Marx who branded Saint-Simonianism as "utopian," engaged only in sterile speculation because it misperceived the material reality of the historic process.

It is not surprising that current readers of Joly's work largely miss the Saint-Simonian connection to the Dialogue. It is indeed never made explicit there, though numerous references are made to "new theories" of which Machiavelli is the spokesman. In this regard, Joly seems to prefer to follow the real Napoleon who ever remained the enigmatic "Sphinx of the Tuileries." He disguised his motives, never, as Guerard says, formally acknowledging his association with the Saint-Simonian school, which stood in a certain bad repute for its esoteric practices and cultist proclivities. [6]

In establishing the link between Machiavelli in the Dialogue and Saint-Simonianism, we will reestablish the link between Napoleonism and Saint-Simonianism perceived early on by the more astute contemporaries of the Second Empire. Later, we will argue that the earlier view, most richly developed by Maurice Joly, can help resolve the historic controversy surrounding the Second Empire as well as the enigma of Louis Napoleon. The element of Saint-Simonian thought is the key to a full understanding of the Dialogue in Hell and the Emperor.

When Joly wrote the Dialogue in Hell, Louis Napoleon was securely in the saddle. His despotic regime was well in place. The Dialogue in Hell is not merely the step-by-step recounting of the establishment of this regime, as fascinating and informative as this is. Joly was convinced that the actions of the Emperor were fundamentally motivated by a new way of thinking, an ideology that gave coherence to the revolutionary steps he took. The thinking that informed Napoleon's regime is what made it so unique and portentous. We now turn to a brief elaboration of that ideology and its pretensions to world-historic significance.

The Saint-Simonian View of History

The Saint-Simonian understanding of history attempts to synthesize both ancient and modern conceptions. To the ancient way of thinking, history is cyclical. The natural laws of growth and decay serve as the pattern for the understanding of human things. Political history "made sense" not in terms of some ultimate meaning but as belonging to certain cycles-rhythms of genesis, growth, disintegration, and death. This is the fated dispensation of all things ephemeral. It is manifested in the rise and fall of political regimes that, in turn, elicits the response of historical actors. Their conduct in these circumstances remains the most profitable study for understanding the human dilemmas and our common lot. [7]

Different assumptions inform the modern concept of history .Political history is understood, not as part of a natural scheme of things and subject to fate, but as a progression in time of events largely determined by human causes and effects. As expressed by the Montesquieu of the Dialogue, who can be seen as spokesman for such a view, the sequence of events is also progressive.

History came to be perceived as a process, with clear lines of development. It manifests the progress of reason whose advances are cumulative, irreversible, and potentially universal in its effect. The proper posture of man, therefore, is not one of manly equanimity and moderation in dealing with limitations that can not be changed. Rather, it is one of hopeful endeavor in the full realization that the scope of human events and nature itself is not subject to fate alone, but responsive to rational human effort.

As in the modern view, the Saint-Simonians see history essentially as a process reflecting the universal advance of reason but whose political effects are variable, as in the ancient view, passing through progressive extremes of order and dissolution. The historic process is not then an open process of simple linear progress but a varied one, with a definitive and necessary conclusion in the coming to pass of a universal society .Unlike the ancients, this greater dispensation of things is not caused by blind fate beyond human control. It is the product of human effort in the fulfillment of a rationally determined end to which all history can be seen as tending.

In the Paris Lectures of 1828, the Saint-Simonian historical view gets its most detailed elaboration. Like natural phenomena, history is shown to be subject to certain laws. And its future "behavior" can be confidently predicted when these laws stand fully revealed.

"Organic" and "Critical" Moments

"The law of history development" shows itself in two distinct and alternating states of society. [8] In the one state, which is called "organic," all human activity proceeds from a "general theory" or doctrine. "The goal of all social action is clearly defined." It is accepted and acted upon by all orders of society, according to their different capacities and functions. It engages the individual totally in his threefold capacity as an "intellectual, sentient, and physical being." The other state, called "critical," is marked by the cessation of all communion of thought, fellow feeling, and collective action. "Society appears as a mere agglomeration of isolated individuals fighting each other."

Each of these states has occupied two periods "in a long historical series." The first organic period occurred during the religious era of ancient Greece, marked by the ascendancy of the pagan gods. It was followed by a period, commonly called "philosophic" because of the presence of such luminaries as Plato and Aristotle, but which the Saint-Simonians would "term more exactly the critical period" because it opposes the religiously-based orthodoxy that integrated and defined life in the ancient polis. Later, a new doctrine was formulated that finally established dominance over the West. The Church administered a new organic epoch which, in turn, began to dissolve in the sixteenth century, (among other things, the moment of Machiavelli, whose critique of the former order had broadened in the centuries that followed).

Critical epochs themselves can be further subdivided "into distinct periods." The first is marked by the arousal of "the most sensitive men," whose call for the end of the old established order finds a sympathetic response in the masses, loosened from all authority. This period erupts with "accumulated rancor" and issues into a burst of collective action that serves destructive purposes only. "Soon there remains of the former institutions nothing but ruins to testify that there once has been a harmonious society."

The second period in critical epochs marks the interval that separates the destruction of the former order and the construction of the new. At this point, "anarchy has ceased to be violent" but it has grown wider and deeper with the conditions of society replicating themselves in the personality of the individual in a complete divergence of feeling, reasoning, and action. It is an age (most recently, the moment of Romanticism) marked by a sickness in the soul that longs for a return to a time that unites man to his fellows by sympathetic bonds.

As the historical process evolves, it expands to cover wider and wider segments of mankind. The first organic period is identified in a precise geographic place -- Greece. It is succeeded in a second such period by a system that includes "all of the Occident." It follows in Saint-Simonian doctrine that a third organic period will be universal, succeeding in turn the dissolution that affected the West in its recent revolutionary past. Indeed, the universal ground for the Saint-Simonian future is a factor that points to its definitive character.

The new general state of mankind, which the Saint-Simonians proclaim as our future, will form the third and final organic link "in an uninterrupted chain" of history. A simple return to the happy moments in the past presents no practicable solution for modern men. The new era will not be identical with such former "organic" states but "will share striking similarities to them with respect to order and unity" which will advance to its most complete realization "in the full association of humanity." The epoch will evince an ascendancy of a new doctrine that embraces all the modes of human activity, once again reintegrating the individual to society that has been in the process of dissolution under the influence of a destructive critical doctrine.

Organic epochs are characterized by a consensus of beliefs, which the "Doctrine of Saint-Simon" intends to serve in the future. This core set of shared principles finds full expression in society and is reflected in its institutional arrangements. A unity of purpose, effectively organized and looking toward a comprehensive view of things, marks such periods as "philosophic." Strictly speaking, there have been no more philosophic doctrines "worthy of the name" than there have been "general states of mankind," a situation having occurred only twice in the past, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the precise character of which is crucial to understanding the lines of future developments.

"Critical" periods, in turn, may be characterized as the time of the progressive erosion of the former philosophic unity that is the basis of the integrated social order. These critical periods reach their term .in egoism and social confusion, creating an objective "need" for a new order, which falls to the prophetic "genius" to articulate philosophically. The Saint-Simonians identify both critical periods with a presiding figure as they identify the genius of the future "organic" order with their spiritual mentor, Saint-Simon.

It was the appearance of Socrates that marked the beginning of the end of the older order in antiquity. The defenders of this order correctly saw in his life a threat to the city's gods and its fundamental beliefs. But in ordering his death, they unwittingly had served to make his questionable life attractive and respectable, the immediate heirs and beneficiaries of which were Socrates's pupils, Plato and Xenophon. [9] In commanding this individual's death, they liberated the critical spirit and, ironically, guaranteed the "death" of the society they had intended to defend.

The appearance of Socrates, which first marks a period of dissolution, also serves history in a progressive way by making possible the eventual emergence of a new and higher historical order. Indeed, Socratic science (Neo-Platonic and Aristotlean) conjoin with Biblical revelation in the great synthesizers of the Middle Ages (Augustine and Thomas) to form the constitutive elements of a new doctrine. This is given organizational expression by the Church in the society of the Middle Ages. Critical science, it should be well noted, passes into the philosophy of the new epoch and becomes part of the theoretical underpinning of a new faith that reaches its ascendancy under the institutionalized protection of the Church and its Pope.

Such considerations mark critical epochs as inherently ambiguous-destructive from the point of view of political unity, but constructive and progressive in preparing and as a part of a "greater human association. " Thus, the progress of science and philosophy has had varied political effects and may be said to be the cause of history's cyclical turns, which the ancients more narrowly observed and construed as fate.

According to the Saint-Simonians, the appearance of Bacon marks the second critical period and inaugurates .the dissolution of the Middle Ages. Since the sixteenth century, "scientists all follow the road opened by Bacon." [10] With the Enlightenment, we reach the furthest reaches of Baconian science and the beginning of the death throes of the Middle Ages, whose principles and institutions suffer from irremediable attack, preparing the way for an era of revolution and social dissolution that characterizes the present crisis.

Saint-Simonianism and the Dialogue

In the element of Saint-Simonian philosophy, just described, we may now profitably return to the dispute between Machiavelli and Montesquieu that serves as the dramatic focus of Joly's Dialogue. It is their understanding of universal history that is ultimately put to question in their "wager" and this determines the sufficiency of their respective political sciences, invoked in history's name. Montesquieu elaborates his view of history in Part One and Machiavelli in the concluding parts of the Dialogue, where an alternative view is progressively revealed. We thus come to the full historic implications of Machiavelli's teaching eventually. It is only at the end that we come to a full appreciation of what his "founding" portends and the sense that he has elaborated a totally "new" political science, explicitly opposed to the Montesquieuan understanding of things.

The initial lines of their dispute would have us believe that Machiavelli is arguing the ancient or medieval conception of history with the most formidable spokesman of modernity, Montesquieu. The latter confidently expounds the progressive historical view that has superseded and discredited his opponent's position. Machiavelli's cyclical view of history seems to hearken back to a view that would have political life tied to an ineluctable fate which, like the natural order of things, exhibits a time of growth and decay, order and dissolution.

Montesquieu, at least, thinks he is responding to such a view when he claims that the cumulative discoveries of reason have put politics on a progressive course. Through his own efforts, man can eliminate much of the control of fate and with it the ancient debilitating fear of the living agents, "despots" and "priests," who supposedly control it. Montesquieu points to what he thinks is certain historical evidence that vindicates his position. At the same time, he underscores his own contributions to political science in opening society to reason and establishing the stable conditions for self-rule.

The material and moral advance of man is guaranteed in a regime that effectively guards against a lapse into despotism. The new "constitutional era" which Montesquieu celebrates holds no possibility for a return to an "era of revolution," anarchy, and despotic rule. The historic swings between autocracy and anarchy are overcome in a regime of "ordered liberty." This ends the turmoil that formerly marked political life and which was most acute perhaps at the moment of Machiavelli in the sixteenth century.

Evidence from contemporary events alone would challenge Montesquieu's optimism. Cognizant of the recent anarchy that shook the West, Machiavelli launches his first serious attack on the theories of his interlocutor, who is found crucially ignorant of such events. Framed in Saint-Simonian terms, the present moment reveals the active revolutionary period as having ceased with the violence of 1848. The West has arrived at that pregnant moment when the old "critical" epoch has reached its term, as anarchy has grown wider and deeper within society. It is the interval that prepares the "birth" of a new order, the founding of which is the active goal of Napoleon III.

Such considerations give the proper perspective from which to view the real scope of Machiavelli's historical understanding of things. Broader and more complex than that of the ancients, it begins to meld more fully and obviously with the Saint- Simonian understanding of history when we consider the character of the Machiavellian or Napoleonic revolution as aiming precisely at a new and final "organic" order. This leaves the "critical" science of Montesquieu open to the charge leveled by the Saint-Simonians and repeated by the Machiavelli of the Dialogue that it has failed to definitively solve the political problem and has, rather, issued into an "age of revolution" and instability.

The cyclical view of history propounded by Machiavelli is not, as Montesquieu imagines, the ancient or Medieval conception. Machiavelli is not in fact so limited by the time in which he lived and the thought that dominated it. Rather, Machiavelli argues in the mode of the Saint-Simonians and would have those "cycles" of political and social life integrated into the full scope of world history as part of a long and "uninterrupted chain" and process.

Machiavelli gives voice to the Saint-Simonian contention that links the historic crisis facing the West to the diminishing hold of religion and the final passing of the medieval order. Montesquieu initially perceives Machiavelli, who was "born on the borders of such an epoch," as its defender and its last effective spokesman. He sees Machiavelli's opposition to the modern understanding of politics he espouses as stemming from ignorance of more recent historical developments and a stubborn defense of the politics of an epoch -- no matter how "modern" the idiom or how clever the arguments -- that history has passed by.

In such an epoch, Christian doctrine provided the organizational principles of society. Repeating the charges of the Saint- Simonians, Machiavelli claims that the thought of Montesquieu, among others even less prudent, has inevitably bred individualism and atheism, whose effects have been to loosen the bonds of society, setting it upon its anarchic drift. The progress to such a point marks a definitive period that coincides with the most recent "critical" moment in the Saint-Simonian "Law of Historical Development." Its beginning can be said to lie in the Renaissance of the sixteenth century and its tentative steps toward modernity. It ends with "the great Montesquieu" whose works, especially The Spirit of the Laws, represent the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment and the systematized application of modern principles of thought to the understanding of politics and history.

According to Machiavelli, the necessity for order in society requires unlimited personal rule, the legitimacy of which cannot be called into question. Montesquieu claims to have discovered in "popular sovereignty," rightly understood, a new principle of rule and an alternative to the notion of "divine right," defended by Machiavelli as providing the authoritative grounding for the Middle Ages. The modern constitutional regime, organized on a popular basis, better attains the political stability sought by Machiavelli, not by despotic repression of popular will and impulses, but in their liberation and through the guarantee of freedom of thought.

The period roughly from Machiavelli and the Renaissance to Montesquieu, which coincides with the most recent "critical" moment in the Saint-Simonian "Law of Historic Development," also accords with their essential understanding of such epochs. The era over which the thought of Montesquieu presides is founded expressly on "critical" principles, opposed to the political arrangement of the Middle Ages. The success of the Enlightenment project dissolves the former order but fails to secure an enduring basis for politics, at least according to Machiavelli and his reading of contemporary history. This creates the need for a new founding to arrest the anarchy such principles have engendered. The overriding necessity for order requires a return to a political orthodoxy that once again sanctions personal rule in religious terms. The conditions that define "organic" orders as such are reestablished but in accord with certain historical principles, advanced by Montesquieu, which do no violence to critical elements of the "modern spirit."

A Return to the "Organic" Conditions of Society

In conformity with the conditions of an "organic" order, the Saint-Simonian ideologue wants to put an end to what it sees as the alienated modern soul -- the disaccord that one feels between oneself and the "mind" and "heart" of one's fellows, and to put an end to a situation where satisfaction of one's "material interests" can be had only at the expense of others. In sum, to "cure" the sickness" in the soul, the individual once again must be fully integrated with his fellows in a greater community of shared "religious" purpose. It is not by coincidence that successive parts of the Dialogue endeavor to fulfill precisely the Saint-Simonian perspective in this regard and that the discussion as a whole ends with a description of the new "religious consciousness."

More precisely, Part Two explains how in a literate nation the Machiavellian founder will use a "free press," the chief safeguard of the Montesquieuan system, to his own advantage. It contains in outline the essentials of a new orthodoxy and the means to ensure its propagation. The security of autocratic power in modern times is crucially premised on winning over the "minds" of the subject.

The political revolution in Part Two is complemented in Part Three by an economic revolution. The prince promises a vast industrial expansion, led by the state and its use of credit, which ultimately looks toward a more complete scientific organization of the nation's productive forces. This has as its putative goal "the amelioration of the lot of the poor." They were perceived to be systematically excluded from sharing in material benefits as a result of the organization of liberal society and its failure, under uncoordinated conditions, to make good on what was promised by the advance of technological knowledge.

The political and economic revolutions in Part Two and Part Three proceed apace and are integral to each other. On the basis of unencumbered political power, the prince may undertake the reformation of society. On the basis of economic expansion, in which the poor now share, the prince defuses the principal source of revolutionary discontent and begins to win popularity to his new despotic rule. In Part Three, the "material interests" of man are enlisted to the same regime that succeeded in Part Two to win over their "minds."

Part Four represents the keystone in the structure of the Saint-Simonian regime that Machiavelli erects. It describes a revolution in "spiritual" realms that complements the revolution in political and economic realms, previously elaborated in respective parts of the Dialogue. The rule. of the all-powerful prince on behalf of the interests of the "poorest and most numerous classes" is endowed with the higher justifications of religion, the principles of which are advanced by a new kind of leader. The new prince claims the allegiance, not only of the mind, but speaks to deeper levels of truth associated with the "hearts" of his subjects, levels to which religion heretofore uniquely spoke.

The "spirit of the age" is exalted in art and architecture that has the new prince and what he represents as its theme. Art ceases to be "critical" -- individualistic" and "heroically negative" -- as it manifested itself at the moment of Romanticism. As at the time of the Middle Ages, it once again finds inspiration in serving "positive" ends, giving aesthetic embellishment to the new under lying religious consensus of society. [11] Indeed, the revival of art would be the most telling element of the return to organic moments as such.

In a revolution that touches religious consciousness and the nature of civilized life itself, Machiavelli reveals the full scope of the historic change he intends. It is as a god and in terms of a new understanding of religion that the new Machiavellian prince pursues his towering political ambitions and attempts to stamp his personality on the historic order to come. He has combined the role of Romulus and Numa in a new founding that has Rome in many of its particulars as its most relevant precedent. Put succinctly, he attempts a return to the "organic" conditions that formerly characterized politics, but in the context of modernity and looking toward universal influence.

At the end of the Dialogue proper, Machiavelli asserts that the respective positions of the two antagonists, spelled out in Part One, have finally begun "to come together." The elements of Saint-Simonian thought which guide the Machiavellian founding reveal for us the real basis of this "rapprochement." Key principles of "critical" science that opposed the medieval order are reflected in the organization of a new "organic" society, which is offered as the third and final link in a long historical process, succeeding Montesquieu's "constitutional era."

The new order presents itself as completing the democratic thrust of history with which Montesquieu thought he was aligned in establishing the constitutional regime. It replaces the regime of individual "rights," which supposedly remain "cruelly abstract" for the majority of peoples, with a regime of unlimited power, dedicated to the "amelioration of the lot of the poorest and most numerous classes." To the thinker who stands for "progress," the return to unlimited personal rule is associated with "barbarism." The Machiavellian prince, however, presents his rule as an historic advance that draws upon the deepest sources of authority in the West to justify itself in modern times. As Machiavelli argues, such rule gives concrete fulfillment to the material interests of its subjects as it also answers to deeper desires, ultimately of religious origin, which are satisfied in a this-worldly context.

The return to the "organic" conditions of society in the context of modern times, the step that essentially defines the Saint- Simonian project, explains the ambiguity in the character of Machiavelli as well as his regime. Machiavelli is not so limited by the horizon of the Middle Ages as Montesquieu initially presumes. He defends a return to a new kind of personal rule, not as a reactionary, but in terms of historic "progress." At the same time and in dramatic fashion, a "new" Machiavelli emerges which shatters Montesquieu's stereotypic view of his interlocutor and mocks the condescending posture he had assumed toward him.

The Saint-Simonian ideology that lies behind Machiavelli's thought remains unidentified in the Dialogue. This heightens the ambiguity of the character of Machiavelli and his regime while it gives Joly's work its dramatic power. It forces the reader for whom the Dialogue was intended, as it does Montesquieu, to further reflection on the character of Machiavelli and his politics. However, as that politics is associated with the infamous name of Machiavelli, the reader is led to contemplate his regime from the point of view of an unprecedented tyranny, potentially universal in scope. In this way, the literary mode of Joly's teaching opens to political lessons of great consequences to Joly's contemporaries, threatened by such a regime. Joly's way of proceeding in all this is motivated to serve didactic purposes in the most effective way.

In the following chapter, we will discus in greater detail the character of the new regime from the point of view of the new religious foundations for politics. In the chapter after that, we will try to come to terms with the figure of Machiavelli as he has come to light in Joly's work.

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Notes

1. Sainte-Beuve was literary critic at Le Globe and himself frequented Saint-Simonian circles. He was an apologist for the Second Empire and Napoleon III. His statement about Napoleon and Saint-Simon can be found in Albert Guerard, France, new edition revised and enlarged by Paul. A. Gagnon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 312.

2. See Octave Aubrey, The Second Empire, trans. Arthur Livingston (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1940), 22.

3. Guerard, France, 312.

4. See Georg G. Iggers's Preface to the second edition of The Doctrine of Saint Simon. An Exposition (New York: Schoken Books, 1972),22. Iggers denies any appreciable and "direct relevance" of Saint-Simonianism to "later thought and practice." He stresses its large contribution to the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century.

5. See Frank M. and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1979), 63 1 and 635.

6. The Saint-Simonians for a time lived on the Rue Monsigny. The sect eventually split between the followers of Bazard and Enfantin. The latter wished to establish a fantastic sacerdotal commune with very lax notions about the relationship between the sexes. His group moved to Menilmontant, where, distinguished by an extravagant way of dressing, they lived in communistic fashion. The sect was broken up in l 832 after the public trial of Enfantin whose bizarre antics and behavior, influenced in part by his readings of Mesmer, intentionally provoked jurists and audience. He was condemned and imprisoned for outrages against the social order.

7. See Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 4. Lowith describes the ancient understanding of history thus:

The ancients were more moderate [than Hebrew and Christian thinkers] in their speculations. They did not presume to make sense of the world or to discover its ultimate meaning. They were impressed by the visible order and beauty of the cosmos, and the cosmic law of growth and decay was also the pattern of their understanding of history. According to the Greek view of life and the world, everything moves in recurrences, like the eternal recurrence of sunrise and sunset, of summer and winter, of generation and corruption. This view was satisfactory to them because it is a rational and natural understanding of the universe combining recognition of temporal changes with periodic regularity, constancy, and immutability. The immutable, as visible in the fixed order of the heavenly bodies, had a higher interest and value to them than any progressive and radical change.

8. This summary of the "Law of Historic Development" is drawn mainly from Iggers (ed.), The Doctrine, "On the Necessity of a New Social Doctrine" (First Session) and "The Law of the Development of Mankind: Verification of this Law by History" (Second Session).

9. For a discussion of the "critical era" of antiquity, see Iggers, (ed.) The Doctrine, 17 and especially 216.

10. Iggers (ed.), The Doctrine, 7.

II. Think of the epoch's (mankind's?) greatest artistic and architectural achievement -- the medieval cathedral.

It should be well noted that Louis Napoleon showed himself very sensitive to the concerns we are talking about here when he commissioned Charles Gautier to construct the opulent Paris Opera and to give it such prominence in the reconstructed city. The Communists and Nazis were equally sensitive. They, too, thought their respective world historic revolutions would occasion the regeneration of art.

The artistic legacy of Louis Napoleon is decidedly more mixed. It is, at its worst, tinged with Romanticism, an imitative pastiche, tending to ostentation and excess. What are we to say of Mitterand's Opera, la Pryramide, la Defense, and his library (dubbed the T.G.B., the tres grand bibliotheque, in a play on the T.G.V. -- Train de Grande Vitesse)? If contemporary debate is any indication, his legacy is much more douteux than that of Napoleon III.

The adjectives most frequently heard in this regard are "sterile," "grandiose," "shocking," "inaccessible," "pharonical" "playful," "inefficient," "iconoclastic," and "expensive." Defenders would counter that most of these things were said of Mr. Eiffel's tower. Is all this just another example of the old time-lag phenomenon, when mass tastes will eventually catch up with the avante-garde's inspirations? Or is it the case of the advance of a "negative aesthetic," an assault (sometimes bold, sometimes whimsical) on the canons of taste itself?

Mitterand's motivations, I believe, were very much like those of Louis. France would lead the way in giving artist expression to a new age, post-modern, for lack of a better term. He clearly was competing with Eiffel in giving landmarks to the landscape of the City of Light. In any case, Joly was on to something when he gave such emphasis to "building policy" in his book.

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Chapter Eight: THE SAINT-SIMONIAN RELIGIOUS ELEMENT

Religion in Liberal Polities

The religious theme, first introduced by Montesquieu in Part One, assumes increasing importance as the description of Machiavelli's regime progresses. Like a motif, it is heard periodically, as in the treatment of propaganda and papal policy. But in the dramatic conclusion of Joly's work, which completes the portrait of the prince in putting the finishing touches on his "royal countenance," it emerges as perhaps the fundamental issue of the Dialogue, as it is in Saint-Simonian thought per se. Approaching the deepest level of the historic change described by Machiavellian politics, it likewise helps define for us the real nature of the prince's political ambition in his quest for god-like status.

Beyond the institutional obstacles to the consolidation of absolute power within the liberal system of government, the Montesquieu of the Dialogue lists religion as the key bulwark of the liberal regime. In the name of a common God and the ethical duties He enjoins, Montesquieu argues, we find legitimate appeal from worldly rulers who would order what is contrary to our paramount concerns and the clear canons of conscience. "Nations that avow Christianity will always escape despotism, for Christianity elevates man's dignity and places him beyond the reach of tyrants. It develops moral forces over which human power has no sway," he asserts. The check is not limited to Christian nations. As The Spirit of the Laws demonstrates with regard to oriental despotism, the scope of what the Sultan may command is effectively limited by overriding religious duties that he is bound to respect, if he is to attain any measure of security and not fall victim to public odium. [1]

In distinction to the world's other great religions, the Montesquieu of the Dialogue reserves for Christianity a special status. It is the fountainhead of what has nurtured the West's common culture. As it has evolved in the course of history, its profound and pervasive influence has come to serve the social and political mores of the liberal regime, whose very possibility, initially at least, seems to be limited to the Christian West. When asked where his principles find current application, Montesquieu responds: "almost all the countries over which the Roman world formerly extended," listing Christian nations exclusively. [2]

Among other things, he argues that the disposition to work and worldly betterment, as well as the attributes of character that help sustain the conditions for productive enterprise, are tied to deeper cultural attitudes, ultimately of religious and Christian origin. "Societies that live by means of work, exchange, and credit are essentially Christian, for all such powerful and varied forms of industry are basically applications of several great moral ideas derived from Christianity, the source of all strength and truth." [3]

Through Christianity, the ferocity of man is softened and his energies redirected from war to more social means of livelihood, including wider and wider segments of society as participants and beneficiaries. Modern industrial society evolves out of the great moral truths of Christianity .It arrives at a stage where personal attachments and dependencies dissolve, where the modern social order itself becomes the "engine" where "power is generated." According to Christianity, man stands as an equal before God. He will eventually stand as an equal before all earthly powers. Such is the power of the Christian moral teaching -- "source of all strength and truth" -- that it has come from its primitive beginnings as an obscure Eastern sect to change the entire face of the world.

Doctrinal changes introduced by Protestantism were key to transforming the Christian world of the Middle Ages. They had the practical effect of elevating the status of the city of man, which was originally clearly subordinated to the city of God in the earlier Christian teaching. [4] In the all-important matters it ministered, the Church and its Pope claimed supremacy over the Emperor.

The Church held that salvation was possible only through its sacraments and the mediation of priests. To break the hold of its corrupting influence, Protestantism preached that man stood face to face with God in a personal relationship. Salvation was a matter between man and God without the interposition of Peter's institution to guide men, or, more likely, lead them astray. In Protestant doctrine, reform of this world became incumbent upon the religious man as his holy duty. The manifest works performed by the individual in this world were the key to salvation and visible rewards its chief sign. Such convictions changed the fundamental orientation of men and redirected their energies to this world. We are now at the point where the Montesquieu of the Dialogue can maintain that Christianity has effectively imbued the whole of the secular realm with its spirit. Machiavelli, who sees the modern world as having faded into "atheism" and mere "materialism," does not appreciate the subtle but profound transformation that Christianity has brought to it, Montesquieu argues.

Protestantism's influence on the political realm has been formidable and pervasive. The claims of individual conscience it raised in opposition to Church and monarch -- institutions that were formerly seen as divinely sanctioned -- prepares the teaching of secular individualism that underlies liberal theory and gives rise to notions of popular rule and representative government. significantly, it is the same claim of conscience that lies at the origin of the move toward religious toleration, which is expressly guaranteed in the liberal regime. The Montesquieu of Joly's Dialogue points to a political arrangement "where the state has strictly segregated religious authority from worldly politics." Politial power is out of bounds when it infringes upon religious prerogatives belonging to its protected sphere.

According to Montesquieu, "the peoples of the Christian era" may have "had more difficulty putting constitutions in harmony with the dynamics of political life" because of the original religious or papal dominance over the secular realm. But through religious tolerance, a politic balance has been struck. Modern men have "profited from the lessons of antiquity," where religion existed in harmony with civil laws, and "with infinitely more complex civilizations, they have arrived at more perfect results."

Religious freedom can be said to expand the sphere of individual liberty while it also subtly works toward the progressive accommodation of the religious and the secular realm that informs Montesquieu's view of history. Socially, a multiplicity of sects is the product of such tolerance, which, in turn, acts to reinforce its guarantee. Each sect, prohibited by its size alone from attempting to dominate politics directly, attaches itself to the regime that preserves the conditions of its existence and effective propagation. This helps solve the problem of allegiance to the earthly city, potentially strained for such groups in the secular commonwealth, particularly in the face of certain actions necessary to the perpetuation of earthly powers that the religious conscience, strictly speaking, would proscribe.

Prelates no longer dictate to politicians. "The words of preachers are limited to terms found in the Gospels," Montesquieu states. Nevertheless, they play an important role in molding the character of citizens in a private capacity. Their humane influence counters the principle of self-interest given scope in the liberal regime and keeps it in proper bounds. It helps restrain the appetites in ways that make civilized existence possible. The "humble and gentle" message of the Gospels proves "the stumbling bock to degenerate materialism."

As a result of such a political arrangement, religion's voice on public policy is heard indirectly or only on matters that elicit the widest possible consensus among numerous sects. This encourages the emergence of a public teaching that imparts a higher tone to the realm of public life, the distilled elements of a basic Judeo-Christian moral teaching, yet devoid of dogmatic divisiveness. This helps forge national unity in bringing to the people a shared perspective of what is ethically appropriate. Indeed, a common religious idiom becomes the mode of national self-expression. The example of America is pertinent here. Its happy experience owes much to just such arrangements. [5]

According to Joly's Montesquieu, toleration preserves politics from a doctrinaire religious spirit that threatens social harmony and which, as history attests, may lead to the most sanguinary civil wars. At the same time, it employs the Christian teaching to its most politic advantage, indirectly spreading and deepening its social influence. According to objections raised by the Machiavelli of the Dialogue, however, the multiplicity of sects that issue from the liberal arrangement is seen to further fractionalize social life whose unity and cohesive force, in the ancient polity, is traced to the dominance of a unique social and civil religion.

Secular Religion and the New Order

A close reading of the Dialogue finds in religious influence the most important current of historic change. Accordingly, the historic project of the Dialogue's Machiavelli can be shown to rest fundamentally on certain religious principles, effecting a revolution that advances upon Protestant Christianity and the liberal order that issues from it. Succinctly put, it is a revolution that tries to reestablish the strict unity of political and religious life in the ancient city, but sundered by Christianity and further fractionalized by Protestantism. It looks to a new and universal civil or secular religion that puts forth as its putative goal the practical fulfillment of the Christian ethical teaching, already acknowledged by Montesquieu as exerting a pervading influence on our worldly conduct.

The character of this "religion" can be traced to the teaching of the "new Christianity," proclaimed by Saint-Simon shortly before his death. [6] His followers elaborated the doctrine and placed it in the context of a more rigorous and systematic historical account. According to the original teaching, morality has only one principle, best expressed by the Gospels in its essential form when it commands universal love. Unlike physical science, which shows a discernible progress, the moral truth does not vary with time but remains eternally valid. Only its historical applications and embodiment are relative.

Originally, the Gospel's proclamation was a radical and revolutionary principle. As the Montesquieu of the Dialogue states, the pure teaching of the Gospels, "so humble and so gentle," was strong enough to destroy by itself "the Roman Empire, Caesarism, and its power." By the sixteenth century, the Christian principle, now embodied in a universal Church, had been perverted and stood itself in need of regeneration. It had come to serve only the interest of the Church as an institutional, not a moral, power. As Machiavelli points out, far from its primitive beginnings, Christianity was now aligned with the "absolute power" of monarchies in the service of reactionary causes that would protect its worldly influence.

Saint-Simon arraigns the papacy before the bar of primitive Christianity toward a revolutionary end. The original teaching of Christianity, "so gentle and so humble," must again find positive application in the society of the future which is institutionally reorganized to embody the true Christian "spirit" once again. The present Christian world had to be recast to reflect the progress of history and science, which had advanced to the point where "the amelioration of the lot of the poorest and most numerous classes" could be effectively fulfilled, both materially and morally. The present Church stands as an obstacle to the future fulfillment of its own moral truths. Its pope, revealed in such a light, is properly seen as an "anti-Christ" and his followers heretical.

According to Machiavelli in the Dialogue, the decline of the hold of the traditional Christian religion is the root cause of the crisis of the time and propels the final descent into the anarchy sapping Europe in the most recent events hidden from Montesquieu. The reestablishment of a religious foundation for politics marks a new "organic" moment and the only basis for an enduring social order. This makes the religious question the ultimate political question for Machiavelli as for the Saint-Simonians, who themselves herald the rejuvenation of religiosity against the background of Enlightenment skepticism and the opposition of the established Church.

The New "Christianity" in the Dialogue

In accord with the "new" Christianity , the Machiavellian prince of the nineteenth century declares the "welfare of the masses" to be "his constant preoccupation." In the context of the Dialogue, such a goal can be seen as an extension of the historic progress of Christianity. It justifies the authoritarian reordering of society while it endows its institutions with new moral meaning. In taking up the cause of the "poorest and most numerous classes," the new prince simultaneously finds not only the broadest base of political support but moral legitimacy as well.

In the Dialogue in Hell, Machiavelli accuses Montesquieu of having a less than orthodox view of God's role in history. According to Montesquieu, God's presence is no longer marked by his active intervention in the affairs of the world, through miracles and punishments, to correct man's wayward course. Rather, divine presence is manifested in the "Eternal Wisdom" that inexorably guides man's destiny. Such wisdom is revealed in collective history to the foremost minds that participate in it through their individual reason. While there is apparently no providence of a personal Being, the design of things, manifested in the workings of reason, is beneficently disposed toward man, ordering things to a progressive course.

Implicitly, Machiavelli's position is somewhat different and follows Saint-Simonian doctrine. It emerges in the Dialogue as an extension of Montesquieu's thinking, not in a reaction to it. According to the dogma of the "New Christianity," the duties to a personal Godhead recede. "Critical" thought and positive science rightly have purged religion of insubstantial anthropomorphic and metaphysical supports. As with Montesquieu, the presence of God is made known through history, understood according to the Scientific "Law of Human Development." Divine providence and the eschatological hopes of primitive Christianity find concrete fulfillment at the conclusion of history in a society effectively organized to fulfill the "essential truths" of Christian morality on a universal scale.

In this historicized theodicy, the Christian Godhead, who formerly occupied a transcendent realm, makes way for the Saint- Simonian ruler, who presents himself as the living embodiment of "Eternal Wisdom," given "form" and structure in a final and determinative historic order. Like a medieval pope, he is the "anointed representative" of the Divine Presence but makes his claim to "infallibility" on scientific grounds -- a new orthodoxy supported by absolute power, artfully reinforced through propaganda and ceremony, which a large portion of Part Four in the Dialogue is devoted to explaining.

At the end of that section, we noted a certain "imitation of Christ" as the conscious policy of the new prince. Indeed, by his "martyred" death man stands "redeemed" and a "new world" arises. Such a powerful symbol strikes a deep chord in the traditional Christian, now conditioned to shift his allegiance from transcendent to secular realms. Using the metaphor favored by Montesquieu, the prince's death will give "birth" to a new world order that brings fulfillment to the secular hopes and ambitions of the so-called party of "progress" and of "new ideas." Such a synthesis promises to bring peace to the "cultural war" between traditionalists and secularists. As Machiavelli states at the conclusion of the Dialogue, the masses will want to construct "altars" to such a ruler's memory -- more in the style of the mausoleum in the Red Square (or the Invalides) than the crypts of medieval Cathedrals, we can well imagine.

The new "organic" order that inspires the Machiavellian founding is the best background to view the more specific policies and goals of the prince. The papal affairs of Napoleon Ill, for example, which have long vexed historians of the second Empire, come into new light as tied not to mere political maneuvering but a more fundamental historic change. Joly intimates the deeper intentions underlying a policy that was commonly understood as undertaken only to placate the conservative voices of the prince's political constituency.' The relation of papal authority to secular power sounds an important motif in Machiavelli's The Prince, whose teaching can be used to shed considerable light on the policy of Joly's nineteenth-century Machiavellian prince. More precisely, however, it can be fully appreciated only in terms of Saint-Simonian thought and a world historic order premised on finding institutionalized expression for a religious revolution on a scale even greater than that administered by the Christian Church of the Middle Ages.

Paradoxically, the nineteenth-century prince seeks to undermine the papacy by coming to its defense. Initially, this wins the plaudits of the more conservative elements of the new regime. Actually, it intends to so compromise the political existence of the Vatican as to make it a dependent appendage of its defender who profits from the peculiar authority it lends to his new rule. As the new prince uses the institutions of liberalism to cover and disguise his political revolution, he can also be seen to use the authority of the papacy and extant Christianity to move beyond it. As with the prince's revolution in political and economic realms, his religious revolution moves in circumspect ways that hide its more radical agenda.

The Spiritual Father's position will gradually be usurped by the representative of the new historic order, succeeding that over which the Church ruled at the apex of its power during the Middle Ages. The Church, with its retrograde political policies, is no more than an anachronistic reminder of a former order whose vitality has long since passed, sapped by a revolution of thought which culminates with the Enlightenment movement. The eclipse of its prestige is underscored by contemporary events that find the Vatican under military siege by the forces of modern nationalism. [8]

Ultimately, the prince in the Dialogue (Napoleon III) would want to definitively terminate the role of the Church, the political influence of which was necessarily baneful, at least according to the original critique of Machiavelli in The Prince. Viewed as a worldly institution, its inevitable effect was to compromise the source of its own legitimacy, expressed in its moral teachings, in bowing to the inevitable exigencies of politics. Its worldly conduct mocked its other-worldly pretensions; yet, its authority, accepted by other powers on faith, guaranteed the perpetuation of its unhealthy influence.

The essential spirit of The Prince's critique of the old Christianity finds expression in an amusing "bon mot" related by Joly's Machiavelli in the Dialogue. Machiavelli explains how he will act in such a regime. "I would be like Alexander VI and the Duke of Valentinois. There was a saying about Alexander VI at the court of Rome, 'that he never did what he said, , and about the Duke of Valentinois 'that he never said what he did'." Machiavelli's prince is to follow such political men who kept their ultimate aims "impenetrable." Yet, as a deeper reading of The Prince reveals, the necessity for such "dissimulation" was rooted perhaps as much in the character of the times as the character of these particular men.

The worldly pope, Alexander VI, "never did what he said." What he said ever remained the essence of Christian charity, but what he did was motivated by political necessity. On the other hand, Borgia "never said what he did." His murderous acts had to remain shrouded. His plans could not be articulated without offending the Christian temper of the times and exposing himself to rightful retribution as an enemy of God. Borgia and Alexander complement each other in furthering their imperial ambitions in Italy. The one provided the moral authority to cover the crimes that such a goal dictated.

On several occasions, the Machiavelli of the Dialogue, like the Machiavelli of The Prince, adjures the modern founder to follow the likes of Borgia. Yet, a good reader of The Prince knows, peculiarly enough, that Borgia failed. The real Machiavelli overstates the case when he says that a "great malignity of fortune" frustrated the Duke of Valentinois. He could have secured himself by a crime he apparently could not contemplate -- removing Pope Julius -- to guarantee another, like Alexander, complicit with his schemes.

The Machiavellian prince of the nineteenth century would follow through on the "implicit" steps recommended by the real Machiavelli. His actions in Italy intend to render the pope subservient to his own imperial ambitions. But such acts ultimately look to a more radical solution -- the effectual destruction of the power of the papacy, whose influence is already on the decline. Such a project is more audacious than the murder of a pope. It strikes not only at the temporal seat of the pope's power but his moral authority, in the summoning of the masses to a new moral order. It is backed by political power, unprecedented in scope, that would always elude the medieval papacy despite its unholy alliances.

To escape the "great malignity of fortune" that plagued Borgia and Alexander, the division of secular and religious authority, shared by these two figures, would have to be terminated. This is precisely what the Machiavellian prince of the nineteenth century seeks to accomplish in succeeding to Caesarian power as the leader of a "civil religion." Accordingly, the Saint- Simonian prince will preside over institutions that are at once "political and religious," which, by giving unified expression to claims of both secular and moral progress, allows him to succeed to complete and uncompromised authority .The unification of spiritual and political powers effectively ends the fatal division of the world introduced by Christianity .It strikes at the source of strength of the liberal regime by ending the contradiction of authorities that the Montesquieu of the Dialogue labored so hard at keeping in "vital tension" and equilibrium.

According to the Saint-Simonians, the religion of the future, as in all previous "organic" moments, is called upon to take its place in the political order, or, "to be exact," the political institutions of the future, "when considered in their totality are to be religious institutions."9 The potential for a new kind of despotism can be stated in terms of Montesquieu's argument in the Dialogue. Religious ethics lose their position of independence as a sanction and check upon the authority of rulers and a new political doctrine sanctifies worldly rule in higher religious terms. Such rule does not admit the legitimacy of appeals on the grounds either of natural rights or individual conscience.

It is Montesquieu who argues that, contrary to appearances, the influence of Christianity has not waned and can be seen to have infused the secular realm with its spirit. Machiavelli would give an ironic twist to such a contention when it is drawn to its most radical conclusion in the Saint-Simonian thought he expresses. Historical development does not merely evince Christian influences but the actual congruence of the secular and the religious realms. This occurs in the final historical stage that is viewed by the Saint-Simonians as bringing this-worldly fulfillment of the deepest aspirations of the universal religious consciousness first given expression by Christianity but effectively and finally organized in the new revolutionary state.

The Germs of Totalitarianism

The unprecedented authority that this lends to the future ruler may be seen in terms of the universal scope of his rule. Unlike modern autocracies, traditional despotism, or the despotism of the Roman Empire, this ruler alone will deter. mine matters that were formerly perceived to be beyond the province of politics, indifferent to its concerns, or rightly belonging to individual conscience. Such universal and unbounded authority, sanctioned by the higher laws of history and effectively implemented through modern technology, clearly anticipates later totalitarianism. They share a recognition of the growing importance of the masses, as a result of the democratic thrust of the Enlightenment, in any calculus of future history, as well as an effort by a new kind of leader to enlist their passionate allegiance to a new world order.

The attempt to endow secular politics with the higher justifications and devotions formerly associated with the psychology of religion may be viewed as a common ideological trait of totalitarianism and has long been a staple of scholarly efforts that have tried to come to terms with such phenomena. It was Raymond Aron who developed the idea of "secular religions" in France Libre in 1944. He explains himself thus:

I proposed to baptize as 'religions seculaires' those doctrines which take the place of faith in the contemporary mind, and which locate man 's salvation here on earth, in a far-off future, in the form of a social order yet to be created. As religions of salvation, these doctrines lay down the supreme values, and these are embodied in an earthly goal and a missionary party. Thus the zealots of these religions can embrace an unconditioned Machiavellianism in all good faith.

Such doctrines, he goes on to say, "offer an historical perspective," interpreting "past, present, and future in their own way." [10]

In the essay in which Aron writes, he asks after so many years of Nazi scholarship, whether a "mystery" remains in coming to terms with the Nazi phenomenon. Among other things, he implies that his original description of modern despotism through the concept of "secular religion" may remain the most helpful and comprehensive. In the politics of Saint-Simon, we see not only one of the earliest examples of such ideology but the most explicit application of the notion of "political religion." The "new" Christianity provides the cultural matrix of a final world order, ministered by one who would have himself viewed as a god-like being, governing as if by a new version of divine right in the name of the higher truths of history and its all-inclusive process. In such a light, Joly's Saint-Simonian regime may be seen as the archetype of totalitarian phenomena. Machiavelli delineates its essential conditions in the same manner that Montesquieu in the Dialogue explicitly endeavors to delineate the essential "conditions of freedom."

One brief concluding remark remains. I hope it goes without saying that the "new Christianity" maybe "new" but it is not really very Christian at all.

_______________

Notes:

1. While Montesquieu does say that religion in despotic regimes serves to compound the fear in the sovereign (see The Spirit of the Laws IV 14), he also indicates the constraints it puts on him. A belief in the afterlife and divine retribution, for example, mitigates the power he holds over his subjects in forcing them to transgress what religion proscribes. See The Spirit of the Laws XXIV 14.

2. This is, of course, Samuel P. Huntington's argument in his brilliant and provocative work The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Touchstone, 1997). However, Huntington argues that respect for individual rights and freedom, whose origin lies in the West, will largely remain confined to the West. There is very little grounding in hopes for liberal polities in other "civilizations" of the world, Christian Orthodox, Muslim, etc. In this, I think him closer to the real Montesquieu than the one who appears in the Dialogue.

3. While Christian countries "live" by "credit, " the failure of Muslim countries to adapt to the exigencies of modernity can be tied to religious prohibitions against it. See The Spirit of the Laws XX 19.

4. Cf. Acquinas, Summa Theologicala, Q. I, art. 8, ad, 2. Thomas also speaks of the Christian's duty to accommodate oneself to the earthly city while also endeavoring to perfect it. Of course, he does not contemplate this outside the ministering of the Church.

5. How a multiplicity of sects moderates religious zeal as it helps accommodate one sect to another is beautifully explained by Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edwin Cannan, ed., (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 745. It deserves full citation.

The interested and active zeal of religious teachers can be dangerous and troublesome only where there is, either one sect tolerated in the society, or where the whole of a large society is divided into two or three great sects; the teachers of each acting by concert and under a great discipline and subordination. But that zeal must be altogether innocent where the society is divided into two or three hundred, or into as many thousand small sects, of which no one could be considerable enough to disturb the public tranquility. The teachers of each sect seeing themselves surrounded on all sides with more adversaries than friends, would be obliged to learn that candor and moderation which is so seldom to be found among the teachers of those great sects whose tenets being supported by the civil magistrates are held in veneration by almost all the inhabitants of extensive kingdoms and empires, and who therefore see nothing round them but followers, disciples, and humble admirers. The teachers of each little sect, finding themselves almost alone, would be obliged to respect those of almost every other sect, and the concessions which they would mutually find both convenient and agreeable to make to one another, might in time probably reduce the doctrine of the greater part of them to that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, and fanaticism, such as wise men in all ages of the world wished to establish.

6. The text of the "New Christianity" can be found in Saint-Simon, Social Organization, 81-116.

7 .Such accounts typically indicate the extremes to which Napoleon must have been moved to placate his conservative constituency. He was forced to abandon his sympathy for nationalistic causes, particularly as it manifested itself in Italy, where as a youth, he fought in its behalf.

8. It goes without saying in all this that Machiavelli's despot was only the first modern tyrant to underestimate the strength of the Papacy and the peculiar "divisions" it has at its disposition.

9. Iggers makes the same point in his Introduction to The Doctrine of Saint-Simon, xlii-xliii:

In order not to misunderstand the Saint-Simonian emphasis on religion as vague mysticism, one must realize that the Saint-Simonian conception of religion was essentially institutional, an extension and secularization of the Roman Catholic Church. ... The Saint-Simonians saw in the Catholic Church a pattern of autocracy applicable to the organization of society as a whole.

10. Raymond Aron, "Is There a Nazi Mystery?" Encounter ( 1980): 32. Aron thought that he had by and large resolved the historic problem of Nazism. This was before the phenomenon and indeed all history had been re-problematized by the postmoderns. The term "totalitarian," like "holocaust," is promiscuously used today. For example, we are told by the postmoderns that belief in any "truth" is "totalizing" and dangerous. This apparently makes even Jefferson and his truths -- human equality and government in the service of basic human needs -- totalitarian in spirit. It is patently clear, if not self-evident, that something is amiss in all this.

Where I once studied, I would pass daily into an academic building that had "The Truth Shall Set You Free" chiseled in stone above its portal. It was a Jesuit school and the quote, from Acquinas, I think, was appropriate. In the Brave New World of the post-modern university, I propose we sandblast old Thomas. Or, better yet, we could hoist a banner and cover him. Something along the lines of cigarette labels could be written on it. "Warning: The 'Truth' Has Been Determined To Be Dangerous as Well as Toxic to Your Mental Health and Our General Well-Being." This banner could be easily taken down when the new movement in thought passes.

Sydney Hook, citing the American philosopher Charles Pierce, once spoke of the importance of the .'ethics of words." See "How Democratic Is America" (A Response to Howard Zinn) in Points of View, Robert E. DiClerico and Alan S. Hammock, eds., (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995), 14. From his wall, Humpty Dumpty observed those who "employ" words outside of their proper context. He might say that words like "totalitarian," as used today, should be "paid overtime." This chapter is written to recover the proper dimensions of the phenomenon of totalitarianism and to vindicate Joly and Aron in their efforts to come to terms with it. The last chapter would like the reader to consider the "holocaust" in its proper context. Like Sydney Hook, I submit that the promiscuous use of such terms is itself very, very dangerous and distorting. Abusive acts can all too often follow abused words. There may indeed be an ethical responsibility in using certain words correctly.

Parenthetically, I used to think that Charlie Chaplin had also solved the "Nazi mystery" and got Hitler just about right. His was too conventional a view of the dictator and dictatorship, however. When his very unconventional crimes -- "against humanity" -- were revealed, Hitler disappeared as a subject for comedy. For those who had firsthand experience of the regime, nothing was funny about Nazism. A German philosopher once thought that even poetry, post-Hitler, was henceforth impossible.

This does not hold true for later generations. Hollywood even made a sitcom of life in a German POW camp. What person of any sense or sensibility is not appalled by the depiction of the frat house atmosphere that reigns there? While all this zany fun supposedly takes place, real men, women, and children were being starved, gassed, shot, and otherwise exterminated in other such "camps." These things are dreadful, obtuse, vulgar, and popular.

Recent movies show that the Mussolini era in Italy can be laughed at. (Of course, Fellini did that too, but with a dose of surrealism). Perhaps Mussolini's De Orco-like fate was purgative. Anyway, Mussolini's Italy did not burden later generations with the same crimes as Hitler. Twentieth-century history (as life in general) weighs lighter on Italians than on Germans. Maybe that's why Mussolini's party could be resurrected and even share in governing there?

One wonders if the old Fascist dog still has much bite. Even Fascists, post Thatcher, see the marketplace and its peculiar disciplines as requisite to "getting the trains to run time." One only hopes that Marx was correct when he saw the tragic moments of History as repeating themselves only as farce.

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Part 1 of 2

Part IV: The Drama of the Dialogue

Chapter Nine: The Portrait of Machiavelli

Thinkers who have come into contact with Joly appreciate his talents and insights and unfailingly remark upon the gross abuse that the Dialogue in Hell has suffered at the hands of posterity. However, the real nature of this abuse and a true appreciation of Joly's text presume an adequate understanding of the more subtle intentions and teachings of the Dialogue which heretofore have been not sufficiently addressed. This requires greater concentration on the dramatic elements of the Dialogue whose careful construction has been overlooked by scholars whose interest in Joly derives from their greater concern with the Protocols.

In his essay on Joly, Hans Speier summarizes a view of past scholars that he shares, in part, but would also like to refine and correct.

While critics have often pointed out that Joly's sympathies are on the side of Montesquieu, it would be more correct to stress that in the Dialogue he shared Montesquieu's moral preferences but regarded Machiavelli's knowledge of politics as superior to that of his adversary. [1]

Speier senses the need for more clarity in coming to grips with the enigmatic character of the author of the Dialogue in Hell, but his statement, despite his intentions, brings greater obfuscation.

When taken at face value, his comment on Joly's critics leads to some insupportable conclusions that do no justice to Joly, an author Speier obviously respects, or the subtlety of the text, the real significance and continuing relevance of which Speier wished to present. Indeed, the most astute commentator on the Dialogue in Hell would unintentionally force the issue of a more adequate treatment of Joly, whose thought and way of writing is again underestimated and escapes the scholar most capable of grasping its finer points. [2l

Montesquieu is devastated by the arguments of Machiavelli. Following Speier's line of thought, certain perplexing questions arise. If Joly's sympathies lie with Montesquieu, why would he seem so utterly to refute his position? Can we really maintain a preference for a morality that is erected upon baseless assumptions? Joly would be presenting us with a very unpalatable choice. We might have our "moral preferences" but at the sacrifice of reason.

There really is no choice in such a case. Given the limitations of Montesquieu in the portrait of him presented by the Dialogue, we are led to side with Machiavelli. [3] However, if we leave it at that, we would be forced to conclude that Joly's effect, if not his intention, is immoral in seeming to serve the cause of despotism. Finally, we might begin to wonder at the perversity of such a man so obviously in contradiction with himself. We shall see that the resolution of these contradictions begins with a more adequate understanding of the character and thought of the Machiavelli in the Dialogue in Hell.

Dissatisfaction with Speier's account of Joly requires a return to the text. Indeed, a closer investigation of details reveals a certain sympathy to elements of Montesquieuan thought, not within the Dialogue proper but outside it, so to speak, in A Short Introductory Statement and on the Title page. These are the only places where Joly addresses us in a direct manner and not through his interlocutors. They are the logical starting places for distilling a more adequate understanding of Joly and deserve proper emphasis.

There are two quotes from The Spirit of the Laws on the title page.

Soon we should see a frightful calm during which everyone would unite against that power which had violated the laws.

When Sulla thought of restoring Rome to her liberty, this unhappy city was incapable of receiving that blessing.

These quotes are keyed to Joly's deeper intentions. [4l

In the former, we are presented with a glimpse of the future. The statement would aptly refer to the rule of Joly's despot and his violation of the statutes and organic law of the liberal regime as well as, perhaps, the more fundamental laws of religious origin that are the basis of civil life. Inaugurated in violence, his rule moves toward a peace that could be described as "'frightful," if not chilling, due to the apparent success of the despot in overcoming the resistance of his subjects and winning acceptance to their own servitude. We are, however, on the verge of a great social upheaval and may stand in only an interval of a calm before an even more dreadful storm.

In the second quote, Joly presents an ancient partisan of liberty, Sulla, who attempted to restore Rome and its Senate to republican principles. However, there were only the feeble remains of virtue. The succession of Caesars that followed failed to arouse Rome from its lethargy and steadfastly riveted the chains of servitude. When the people struck blows, it was at the tyrant, not the tyranny. [5l

A case can be made that Joly himself takes advantage of this "frightful calm" to teach his contemporaries of the crisis that is ripening and the despotism that is upon them. It is not unlike the despotism that engulfed Rome in the rule of the Caesars who followed in the wake of Sulla 's failure. His addressees, who are not fully cognizant of their situation, dictate the manner in which he presents his teaching. In revealing the tyrant, Joly indicates what makes the present so perilous and tries to arouse his contemporaries from their lassitude. In this regard, his intentions are similar to those of Sulla, although the methods markedly differ, to say the least. He prompts the test of their virtue in the face of the modern Caesar and, conscious of Sulla, doubts their response.

We may see the quotes as an expression of a political crisis that Joly thought was brought to a head by recent Napoleonic policies. Political upheaval remains a distinct possibility in the face of a political order, the closest antecedent of which is Imperial Rome. The possibility for liberty rests in thwarting the aims of that order without unleashing a dangerous anarchy. In the first quote, the destruction of the regime is held forth as a distinct and perhaps imminent possibility. The undertones of mass anarchy make the present moment a truly delicate one, calling for a political teaching that is at once prudent, as well as revealing and frank. Joly's solicitude is not unfounded. He basically accepts the analysis of Joly's Machiavelli regarding the character of his contemporaries. We have only to look to the anarchy of the Commune and its murderous repression, when, indeed, the Napoleonic Empire suddenly fell in war with Germany.6 And as citizens of the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have fresh experience of the mayhem that can follow from the collapse of a powerful despotic empire.

Joly's name is not found on the Title page of his own book. Given the nature of the material in the book and his presentation of the ways of the Napoleonic regime, he presumably does this for prudential reasons of a personal kind. He has his book published in Brussels, a place that was more congenial to projects like his own!

In his preface, he writes that his book will be published anonymously. Giving his name is not important, all considerations of prudence aside. The work does not represent personal views. It is the "public voice" and a "call to conscience" that is contained therein. It is meant to speak in disinterested tones. At least according to its author, we are not to doubt his "moral intentions" or his opposition to despotism.

In A Short Introductory Statement, we also see how the author views the regime described in the Dialogue. He does not simply identify with the teaching of Machiavelli therein. Machiavelli's regime is present reality. The day that it was "enthroned" is "all too distant." It is a regime whose continued existence rests on "corruption " and is an insult to "integrity," as a reading of the last part of the Dialogue, in particular, conveys. The proper interpretation of Joly begins and ends with what is his earliest and most open assessment of the regime and his implied intention to help coalesce the forces that would end it.

Joly indicates why he proceeds as he does. Certain of his contemporaries do not accept "harsh political truths." Their sensibilities would be outraged. These are sons of the Enlightenment, sophisticated and worldly. They trust in the powers of reason to ameliorate political and social life. Indeed, politics is no longer the predominant concern of the educated. Joly's addressees are literate men of goodwill, though politically naive. He intends to teach them "harsh truths about contemporary politics" through a dialogue "that is not without its lively pleasures." The Dialogue in Hell is the vehicle by which he delivers his stern teaching that couches an anti-Caesarian conspiracy. The ultimate resonance of the conspiracy theme, so prominent in the Dialogue, can be appreciated at this point.

Joly's Mode of Writing

Joly chooses the dialogue format to present his teaching even though it might initially cause his work to be mistaken as a purely literary endeavor. A fictional presentation would prove to be more appealing to his addressees and perhaps an aid to getting a distance on themselves and their times proper to a correct perspective. A political tract might be seen as coming from partisan sources, while a more theoretical work would lose the majority of his intended audience. We soon see that Joly is not at all writing fiction, nor can the cause he serves in his attack on Napoleon be seen as narrowly partisan.

In his preface, Joly expressly puts before us the question of his way of writing, a mode that has been adopted with certain diverse and specific intentions in mind. Beyond it, we may glean additional reasons in the body of the text for his proceeding the way he does. These are found in the detailed sections on propaganda and the press. In these passages, the peculiar sensitivity of the new regime to written material of a political nature is revealed, as the control of thought becomes crucial to the success of the new despot.

Joly explains through his Machiavelli that a long political tract would not engage the interests of his reading public. Moreover, such an endeavor would put the author under the immediate suspicion of the secret police, oftentimes with dire consequences, as was explained. Joly's literary mode allows him to reach his proper audience in a manner that engages their interest, while it allows him to escape the closer scrutiny of the censors and the police, who are tolerant and even encouraging, by their laxness, in areas that do not involve direct political concerns.

If the return to a guarded orthodoxy marks the politics of the Second Empire, prudence recommends a mode of writing to express opposition to proper audiences and to escape persecution from official quarters. Machiavelli and Montesquieu wrote in a former such epoch. They may in certain ways be a model or inspiration for such an endeavor on the part of Joly, whose skills are perhaps sharpened by his study of their texts. In fact, the mode of writing adopted by Joly may prove serviceable in multiple ways, as important for prudential considerations in avoiding the scrutiny of several groups as it is in enlisting the attention of several levels of more sympathetic readers.

Albert Guerard notes how censorship and the persecution of writers in this epoch forced individuals (like Joly) to a greater exercise of wit that resulted in a clear gain for both art and thought.

The repressive laws were for the journalist a blessing in their disguise. If, until the closing years, writers could not indulge in violent personal attacks, the loss to genuine freedom was small. If they had to use wit, allusiveness, and irony in the exhilarating game with the censor, the result in thought and an was clear gain. Napoleon III was spared, but Tiberius of Rome and Soulouque (Faustin IlI of Haiti were mercilessly criticized. [8]

In the short autobiographical sketch written while imprisoned in 1870, Joly recounts how he decided upon the dialogue format he chose. The Dialogues sur le Commerce des Bles by the Abbe Ferdinand Galiani (1770) is mentioned as the model. There, the controversial friend of d'Holbach and Mme. d'Epinay had depaned souls wittily discuss tariffs, grain trade, and other important matters. The format was designed to hoodwink the censors while attacking the politics of the time. "While walking on the terrace along the river near Port Royal in bad weather," Joly came to his idea of a conversation in hell between Montesquieu who "represents the policy of justice," and Machiavelli, who describes the "abominable policies" of Napoleon III. Joly specifically indicates the necessity for a "disguise" for writers during the Second Empire. [9]

He probably anticipated a certain celebrity for the Dialogue. [10]o If he were apprehended by the police for the opinions expressed therein, his defense would be aided by the complex elements of his thought, which would provide him a flexible scope for his response. At the very least, this would prove frustrating and embarrassing for prosecutors. As a canny lawyer himself and very familiar with the conduct of Parisian courts, Joly could use a judicial forum to his advantage in publicizing his book and pressing his attack on the Napoleonic regime.

His literary mode avoids a mass readership which, given the quotes on the Title page and the possibilities of anarchy, must be preserved from any political teaching that would for whatever reason enflame its passions. Already, this separates Joly from more doctrinaire liberals who ultimately see no threats from the dispersion of political opinion. The author of the Dialogue in Hell shows a more complex understanding of the relationship of thought to society than that presented by the spokesman for liberalism in his text, who, in many respects, represents a certain naive and doctrinaire view of liberalism.

But where the masses are preserved from certain teachings that would enflame passions, the proper addressees of Joly's work, those educated types who would be the victims of Napoleonic politics, are to be politicized through Joly's harsh lessons. These are the elements in a regime that set its tone and are the target of the prince's covert efforts of suppression and seduction, as explained in Part Two of the Dialogue.

The Portrait of the Philosopher

Finally, beyond such readers, there are other addressees, more attentive readers who are able to appreciate the multiple levels and more subtle intentions of Joly's work. In the deeper reading of the Machiavelli of the Dialogue lies a portrait of the philosopher, less conspicuous than that of the tyrant he has endeavored to reveal, but equally impressive in its own right. This subtler portrait may now come into better focus.

We have noted Joly's use of Montesquieu on the title page as opening the Dialogue to an interpretation that is antagonistic to despotism and sympathetic to a republican cause. But the hidden key in interpreting the drama of the text rests with Machiavelli, whose thought dominates the Dialogue as a whole. Proper understanding of the Machiavelli there presented reveals a character that is not the same as his reputation would depict him. We shall find that Joly presents a more sophisticated portrait of Machiavelli that rises above a naive connection of his name with evil and tyranny. The true Machiavelli comes to light as a philosopher benevolently motivated toward men, as illustrated, ironically enough, by his treatment ofhis interlocutor in the Dialogue.

It is obvious from the outset that Machiavelli is a master of irony. It is in fact employed in his very greeting of Montesquieu, in order to effectively "size up" this celebrated personage. Montesquieu confesses to being very inept in such arts of conversation. At the end of his encounter, he has the strong impression that the portrait of tyranny just sketched is meant as consummate irony. [11] Yet, it is at this point that Machiavelli is his most serious. Far from an ironic presentation, he reveals that his tyranny is current in the world. It is often the case that whenever Machiavelli is most facetious, Montesquieu is most earnest. His seriousness is similarly misinterpreted. In either case, Montesquieu is constantly gulled until the end, when Machiavelli dramatically reveals the most recent events that have escaped Montesquieu's purview.

The final disclosures to Montesquieu are meant to underscore the serious use of Machiavellian irony. In a seemingly playful dialogue, a "friendly wager" issues into a teaching of tremendous consequence to Montesquieu. Its impact is greatly heightened by its mode of presentation. The effect of the conversation is not unlike the intended effect of the Dialogue on its readers, who are suddenly brought to certain very sobering revelations in a book whose seriousness is initially disguised.

As readers, we are encouraged throughout the Dialogue to ponder the irony of Machiavelli and the enigmatic character of Joly's presentation. We shall find that by resolving the one, we shall resolve the other. There are two points of access to Machiavelli's intentions, which allow us "to get behind" his irony, as it were. They are presented to us at the very beginning of the Dialogue and at the very end.

At the end of the Dialogue, Machiavelli reveals to Montesquieu the actuality of the tyranny he has described.

What I have just described -- this mass of monstrous things before which the spirit recoils in fright, this work that only hell itself could accomplish -- all this is done, exists, and is prospering in the light of day, at this very hour, in that place on the globe that you have recently departed.

To this point, Montesquieu has been consistently complacent in the face of Machiavelli's attack. He was first sure of the cause he defended. Later, he takes consolation from the fact that he is only involved in a theoretical discussion, an impression that might have let Machiavelli score some easy debating points which later prove so consequential. In a surface reading of the text, we also assume that Machiavelli has identified himself with the regime he has described. Here, however, he condemns it in no uncertain terms. The condemnation itself reminds us of Joly's own statements in his preface, the most forthright revelation of Joly's views and intentions.

The circumstances that surround Machiavelli's utterances at this point lead us to believe in his sincerity. Machiavelli is being spirited away by the onrush of sinister souls who have haunted the conversation throughout. In his last statement to Montesquieu -- for eternity -- and the denouement of the whole conversation, irony would be singularly out of place. In his frankest and most dramatic moment, Machiavelli distinguishes himself from the "Machiavellianism" he has described. His statement of the political truth, which he so intransigently pursues, does not, it seems, necessarily imply moral approbation. His last statements also constitute a critique of worldly glory and a subtle rebuke to Montesquieu.

Throughout Machiavelli's discourse, we have understood the greatest good for political men to be glory. This is without doubt the chief motive of the new prince, who wants to achieve enduring glory in the most ambitious and lasting of political foundings. Haunting their conversation are men who, according to Machiavelli, also sought celebrity in their earthly existence from various political endeavors. The enigmatic presence of such figures in fact serves an important dramatic function in the Dialogue beyond a periodic reminder of the context of their conversation. In pointing out the present shame of such men, with whom Montesquieu was perhaps intimate, Machiavelli reminds us of the predominance of fortune in political affairs and the evanescence of even the greatest fame. Formerly prominent, these men have been brought low by events, subsequent to their deaths, that mock their life's achievements.

The drama of the moment prompts the question as to whether or not the men of the Enlightenment had in fact laid the foundations for this Napoleonic tyranny. The real Montesquieu poignantly expresses a similar thought in The Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline. There he wonders if all the history of the Roman Republic, a history resplendent with the accomplishments and virtues of heroic individuals not seen since, existed only to appease and satiate the happiness of five or six monsters in the Empire. [12] The grand "spectacle of things human," when contemplated from hen, would diminish even the greatest pretensions to worldly glory and lasting achievement.

lt is therefore significant that the Machiavelli of Joly's Dialogue reveals himself on earth and in hell as personally unmoved by the motive of political glory that he analyzes in the great actors on the world stage. However, he would have been capable, at least by knowledge, if not fortune, of attaining its heights, it seems.

At the very beginning of his encounter with Montesquieu, Machiavelli shows his imperturbability in the face of his personal plight in hell. According to the Joly portrait, his situation is not unlike his life on earth, which is interpreted in the Dialogue as devoted to inquiry and the search for truth. In fact, his situation is perhaps an improvement over his lot on earth which, as Montesquieu points out, saw the defeat in Florence of his republican political cause during a lifetime marked by harassment and disappointment, ending in torture and misery. Here at least, he may find the world's great minds whom he may engage in conversation. Given the present reality on earth, Machiavelli has escaped a worse hell and, in a certain sense, leads a blessed existence free from less important cares and concerns.

Machiavelli's subsequent handling of Montesquieu is marked by what seems to be a harshness that borders on cruelty. He is devastating in the manner by which he disabuses Montesquieu of his reputation and his putative standing before God. Yet, his harsh lesson to Montesquieu is not unjust, if we are to hold the truth at all important. It also conceals a certain humanity. In forcing him to confront his former illustrious cohorts, who are passing nearby, Machiavelli forces Montesquieu to realize the vacuity of glory and the present atrocities in a world which he apparently loves too much. Under the present despotism, it is not a world to be regretted. Machiavelli would seemingly want to impress Montesquieu by his example and teach him the pleasures of his lofty detachment from the vanity that infects his interlocutor.

We remember that knowledge of recent events has escaped Montesquieu, who has met only the deceased from long ago and far away in his wanderings in hell. Apparently, he earnestly seeks to be "filled in" on these events if only for present confirmation of his theories. At the end of his conversation with Machiavelli, he is shown passing before his eyes his chagrined contemporaries who could inform him of it. The point is that one or another of such men will disabuse Montesquieu of his illusions. Machiavelli, in his apparent harshness, would do so in a way that points to his liberation from his ignorance and vain concerns.

Machiavelli predicts that after their confrontation, Montesquieu will anxiously seek him out and wander eternally in his pursuit. This is the reverse of the beginning of the Dialogue where it was Machiavelli who sought out Montesquieu. Machiavelli has brought to Montesquieu a concern for philosophy and inquiry born of the recognition of certain harsh truths and the realization that the human, political problem has not been solved. In this search is not only liberation but a recognition of the true human situation and the highest manifestation of our human autonomy.

As hell is depicted in the Dialogue, it is a stopping place for the deceased before judgment day. The proper attitude would seem to be one of introspection and an examination of conscience before one makes his defense before the tribunal of God. [13] In the case of these two interlocutors, an examination of conscience would involve an examination of political history. More than perhaps all other men, they are personally responsible for the conditions of the world.

Joly characterizes his work in his preface as "a call to conscience." This is the distinct effect of Machiavelli'~ narsh" teaching on the Montesquieu of the Dialogue, though his conversation begins "pleasantly enough." This Montesquieu does not initially recognize his human responsibility, nor is he adequately philosophic. He trusts that the political problem has been solved and exalts in his own role in providing the solution. He therefore feels himself personally secure in hell and in God's eyes. The conversation with Machiavelli is his shock of awareness on these scores.

Joly's Montesquieu is not the philosopher of The Spirit of the Laws, a point to which we will return shortly. The latter has been sacrificed to Joly's literary mode. The Montesquieu of the Dialogue is more the contemporary liberal, a man of good intentions but one who would be the dupe and casualty of Napoleon 's politics. Joly's text is a call to conscience (and consciousness to such types.

Machiavelli and Joly tell such men of the eternal possibilities of despotism and its new and future forms. [14] The politics of the future will not, as Joly sees it, be menaced by a reaction to the Enlightenment but by a regime that emanates from it. It does not appear bloodthirsty. As the great contemporary of Joly, Alexis de Tocqueville, described his own fears in this regard, it has the capacity to degrade men without tormenting them. Its real threat, obscured for these reasons, can be characterized as destroying human autonomy and responsibility to the point where Joly's call, like that of Sulla, falls on deaf ears.

The task of the future is to confront the political situation realistically. Through Machiavelli, we are made aware that the moral good is not supported by mere goodwill or by the evolution of a history which orders affairs to continual progress. Such good is the product of active human concerns that begin with the active concern for the truth. In the context of the Dialogue, only this would justify us in the eyes of God. On this basis, it is Machiavelli who can face God's tribunal with equanimity , despite the infamy attached to his name and his condemnation by inferior earthly judges.

We would be well reminded of a most perspicacious statement that the sixteenth-century playwright Christopher Marlowe attributes to Machiavelli, who appears in his play, The Jew of Malta. There, the Florentine philosopher boldly confesses that "there is no sin but ignorance." [15] There could be no more succinct and fitting epigram to describe the character of the Machiavelli that appears in Joly's work of "fiction." It is the forthright statement of the philosopher that points to what is so impressive in the Joly portrait.

Lifting Joly's and Machiavelli's Mask

A clearer appreciation of Joly's thought and intentions emerges in a deeper probing of the character of Machiavelli as he appears in the Dialogue. As Speier stated, Joly regarded his Machiavelli's knowledge of politics as superior. But this is not, as Speier formulates it, contrary to his more subtle moral intentions or his liberal sympathies. A case can be made that Joly's Machiavelli harbors republican intentions in his open teaching of tyranny, just as he has a humane end in view in his harsh treatment of his interlocutor. This is consistent with a certain sophisticated view of Machiavelli that Joly seems to share, at least as revealed by the teaching and drama of the Dialogue.

The parallels between Joly and this subtler portrait of Machiavelli, as philosopher and republican partisan, are manifold and present us with hints as to the character of the author of the Dialogue in Hell. Like this Machiaveli, Joly shows himself to be indifferent to reputation in hiding what is most deeply revealing of himself in his service to his disinterested call to conscience.

Like Machiavelli's The Prince, Joly's work is subject to misinterpretation. At one extreme, both Joly and Machiavelli are seen as openly teaching and advocating tyranny. At the other extreme, they may be seen as involved in a purely "literary" endeavor. Montesquieu, who wants to pass his time pleasantly with his interlocutor, prefers this latter interpretation which has Machiavalli, as the author of The Prince, merely trying to paint the characters and exploits of his time in the most vivid colors.

It is more than coincidence that Joly refers specifically to the possibility of these very same misunderstandings with regard to his own work. But he warns in his preface of the careful construction of his book. Beyond pleasant fictions, moral causes are being served in a "call to conscience" and deeper, enduring political truths revealed.

In this same preface, Joly reveals his disapprobation of the regime he will shortly describe. At the end of his conversation with Montesquieu, Machiavelli reveals his disapprobation of the regime in terms strikingly similar to those of Joly. His dramatic and disquieting revelation sheds light on the motive for his search of Montesquieu in the beginning. Machiavelli's knowledge of contemporary affairs has rendered him anxious for the future of civil life. It is not for mean or malevolent purposes that he searches out Montesquieu, but to engage him, liberalism's great spokesman, in a conversation to come to terms with its problems.

We are not to assume that the defeat of Montesquieu is tantamount to a definitive defeat of the cause of freedom. Machiavellianism triumphs precisely because of Montesquieu 's ignorance about what has come to pass. The manner by which Machiavelli enlightens his "adversary" would allow for the reconstruction of the case for liberalism, without illusions, and fully cognizant of what is at stake. The MachiaveIlian regime is described as leaving extant the institutions of liberalism, while changing the spirit of the operations. The Dialogue might perhaps be seen as attempting to rekindle that spirit in the face of the despot and the possibility of a renewed outbreak of anarchy.

The Montesquieu that Machiavelli finds in hell is ignorant of contemporary events and singularly complacent. Machiavelli guides the course of their conversation accordingly. What was sought out as a conversation between two philosophers becomes a didactic enterprise on the part of Machiavelli, served by irony. But at the beginning and at the end of their conversation, the real intentions of Machiavelli are manifest. The Machiavelli of the Dialogue, properly understood, is Joly's spokesman and the enlightenment of Montesquieu is really the enlightenment of the reader who shares most of his fatal prejudices.

Machiavelli states that his political teaching was intended for princes and people alike. He has shown the truth to people as he has to kings. He says that Machiavellian princes are not in need of such teachings. They do not learn anything from Machiavelli that they do not know already. The real effect of the open teaching of the techniques of tyrannical politics is to enlighten the people. They stand to learn what threatens them and are made to see politics in a realistic light.

The success of the tyrant requires duplicity and cunning. The open teaching of tyranny removes this possibility by fully revealing the tyrant. Through Joly's conceit of a dialogue in hell, Machiavelli is describing the despot Napoleon III, shorn of his disguise. In what appears as a theoretical discourse between two eminent philosophers, Joly is actually presenting a brutally realistic portrayal of contemporary life. like the Montesquieu of the Dialogue, the readers are blithely ignorant in the crucial sense of what has recently come to pass.

Joly's Machiavelli hints at the intended use of his teaching. He states that Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, in its teaching on liberal government, might be a great aid to Machiavellians who seek to overthrow such regimes. Ironically, it has been Machiavelli's guide throughout the conversation with Montesquieu, and Machiavelli shows that he is capable of accurately quoting its text. The implication is too transparent to miss: the detailed teaching of tyranny in the Dialogue in Hell could properly serve his audience for their own defense. At the beginning of their conversation, Montesquieu wonders how Machiavelli, a staunch republican in life, could be the mentor of tyrants in his writings. The conclusion of the Dialogue would lead us to believe that no such disjunction exists. A republican cause is being served in the very writing that seems to bless tyranny. [16]

That the Dialogue intends enlightenment of his contemporaries is obvious at certain points. Periodically, Machiavelli feigns ignorance. This allows Montesquieu to discourse on liberal institutions and the intentions behind certain political, social, and economic arrangements. Through Montesquieu, we have a reteaching of the general theory of liberal politics. But through the various discussions of Machiavelli, particular attention is drawn to the sensitive points that hold together the political and social fabric of liberalism. The proper addressees of the Dialogue, those concerned with the fate of free government, are prompted by Joly to contemplate the threats that emanate from modern dictators as well as the means by which liberal institutions may be shored up and fortified against the new vulnerabilities that Machiavelli has identified.

Joly shows where the present danger can be found. It is not in a reactionary and rapacious tyranny but in the modern Caesar, whose genius lies in appealing to the passions of the masses and in representing their satisfaction as the legitimate exercise of their rights. Joly recurs to the "timeless wisdom" of Machiavelli to remind us of the eternal threat of Caesarism to republican government. The test of liberal government is to adapt itself in countering what was to be the future threat to its perpetuation, foreseen by Joly in the politics of Napoleon.

In his stunning portrait of modern tyranny, Joly makes his "call to conscience," which demands of his contemporaries as much a moral as an intellectual effort. Implicitly, in the absence of the Enlightenment faith in progress, it is an effort that rests on the determination to be free. Critics who fail to see the moral dimensions of Joly's Dialogue fail to see what is at its core.

If we are permitted to speak of Joly's own view of history, we might say that it clearly does not reflect a process of guaranteed progress. Indeed, it is in the guise of progress that Caesarism threatens to establish itself. Nor, if men are essentially free, can a universal conclusion to historical development be presumed, as the Saint-Simonians and future historicist thinkers down to our day would argue. Joly's primary intention in the Dialogue -- to issue a "call to conscience" is based on the premise of man's irreducible freedom and his capacity as a moral being to respond to his call. [17]

History is open-ended. There can be no scientific certitude in such matters because the future is necessarily indeterminate, always dependent on the contingent actions of men and women. Situations are presented that elicit numerous possible responses that are a constant test of the virtues of history's actors. The shaping of events varies according to the influence of these actors, more so with regard to the Machiavellis and the Montesquieus, of course, but in some degree as well from the more modest efforts of people like Joly.

Speier describes Joly as being equally outraged by the despot as by the ease with which the people let themselves be corrupted. In concentrating on the weaknesses of the majority of men, he leaves himself open to a charge of a certain irascible moralism, a claim that is substantiated by what little is known of his personal life. But, this charge might be leveled only by those, like the subjects of the Empire, unaware of their own corruption. Moreover, he anticipates such charges in the body of the text when he shows an awareness of how singularly strange types like himself will appear among his contemporaries and future generations. His call may fail, as did that of Sulla, but not from simple moralism.

Joly appears to be appealing to the sterner virtues of ancient republics and he might have found himself more at home in such times than in his own century, for which he displays a certain loathing and contempt. Yet, it is such sterner virtues that are under attack in the soft despotism described in the Dialogue. Joly seeks to revive it in his call to conscience as the essential condition for the possibility of republican regimes, even in modern times. In this light, we can appreciate more fully the peculiar appropriateness of his identification with the severe Sulla as well as the more Catonic tones in which he casts his critique of modern life. [18]

At end, it might be helpful to situate Joly with regard to the two great protagonists in the Dialogue. For Montesquieu, man becomes master of his destiny as human reason progressively brings order to the physical universe and political world. For Machiavelli, man is subject to a fatality he cannot ultimately fathom or control. Joly might be said to incline toward the pessimism of the Dialogue's Machiavelli. This is what the experience of the Second Empire forces upon him. But in his call to conscience, he acknowledges man's capacity to affect and better his future. For Joly, it seems, man is neither the lord of history nor its plaything. He would agree with Alexis de Tocqueville, when he counsels prudent human action born of the recognition of human freedom and its ineluctable limits. Our task is to act responsibly within the margins of freedom that the constraints of history leave us. Like his great contemporary, Joly is acutely aware of the decline of civic courage and honorable love of freedom in his fellow citizens. The action that is called for at the moment Joly writes requires clarity of vision and a revival of this civic courage. The Dialogue attempts to provide the first and spur the second.

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Part 2 of 2

Concluding Remarks

Before closing our discussion of Joly, it might again be helpful to elaborate somewhat further his presentation of the two great interlocutors in his work. It would be unseemly to leave the discussion of the Dialogue with the impression that Joly's portrait of Montesquieu and Machiavelli is definitive. The concluding remarks that are in order are not meant to detract from Joly's achievement but to be more just to the great thinkers he employs in his work. They will also let us more fairly assess Joly's contribution to our political understanding. [19] We turn first to Montesquieu.

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu broadens and historicizes the "logical" classification of regimes found in Aristotle's Politics. He famously delineates both the nature and animating principle of the fundamental political alternatives. The republican regime is motivated by virtue, the European monarchy by honor, and despotism by fear. Curiously, Montesquieu's regime of liberty lies outside this classification. It is found in modern England, of course. But, even more curiously, its name is not mentioned. We today fail to grasp its "newness" -- this regime of political liberty, this commercial "republic" embedded and hidden in the "forms" of monarchic government. There, law is no longer the measure of man but his instrument.

Joly is correct in sensing that its lessons somehow lie at the core of Montesquieu's teaching. One is tempted to say that the new political "model" for man falls outside the alternatives that history has heretofore offered. It is a regime outside the "natural" alternatives, so to speak. Its happy circumstance is literally a historic ( and geographic) accident of history .By offering England as a model for the future, Montesquieu shows, perhaps paradoxically, how "history" may be used to better our condition and escape our "historic fate."

In contrast to the regime of liberty, whose influence will be found in the future, the ancient city's time has forever passed. At first blush, Aristotle's classification of regimes seems exhaustive. Indeed, the ancient city can be governed, it would seem, in virtuous or vicious ways, by one, a few, or many. There is inherent logical appeal in such a classification But it actually applies "exhaustively" to only a very narrow political alternative -- the ancient polis.

According to Aristotle, how a city lines up within this schema is what fundamentally determines its way of life. Montesquieu implicitly attacks Aristotle and offers a different conception of the ancient city and what may be judged as "virtue" therein. The "virtue" of the ancient city is not to be judged by its approach to human excellence. It is manifested in a "love of country," regardless of the numbers of individuals who nominally rule. A "patriotism" burns in the ancient soul that is hard for moderns to conceive. This is its animating "principle" -- what gives it "life" -- and what distinguishes it as an historic alternative. [20]

But, for Montesquieu, the historic moment of the polis has passed. and its passing (contrary to the Romantics) is not to be regretted. In despotism, all are equal before the despot -- equally abject, that is. [21] In the ancient city, "equality" belongs to a constricted group of citizens who enjoy their privileges at the expense of a larger class of slaves. Like despotism, the ancient city is an outrage to our rightful sense of basic human dignity while life there mutilates the soul, even of the privileged, by a rigor that resembles the dryly cruel and austere life of the monastery.

Outside of Aristotle's ambit of experience lies modern England, of course, but also the medieval Christian monarchy. At the time that Montesquieu wrote, this historic alternative was at its apogee. And Montesquieu's France was, but for the most recent past, the most beautiful flower of this historic moment.

The latter half of The Spirit of the Laws divides about equally between a segment that describes the modern regime of commerce and a segment that describes feudal law. The former was written under the invocation of a muse. Its passages shine with new luster. The latter is dark, dense, opaque, and labyrinthine. They belong to the scholar, not the poet. But it is here that the soul of France will be found and the labyrinth will lead all the way to a band of men, loyally pledged to one another, in a German forest.

When Montesquieu wrote, he thought that the soul of France had been corrupted. The luxurious court of Louis XIV had suborned honor, the life principle of the regime. The "forms" of medieval honor remained. Indeed, they were respected in ever more exaggerated ways. But the noble merely played at "honor," hypocritically, while he actually sought favor, abjectly, from the reigning sovereign. His stout independence and noble indifference to material blandishments had eroded. In a word, France was adopting the manners of Byzantium. [22]

Montesquieu sensed a coming revolution that would, a century and a half later, undermine the medieval monarchy and render it passe. Where it did perpetuate itself, it would exist (as Walter Bagehot would put it) only in the "decorative" part of modern constitutions and far from where "efficient" power was exercised. As with the ancient city, its vital juices now only nourish poetic imaginations.

The Persian Letters was Montesquieu's most pessimistic (and accurate) assessment of the predicament of France. The long absence of Usbekfrom his Persian seraglio leads to anarchy and revolution that overturns the natural order of things, as the women blindly revolt against their absent god. The horrific lessons for France can be drawn from the homely example from the East. [23] The Enlightenment's attack on the Christian God will see His withdrawal from the political world. His absence will bring unprecedented revolutionary anarchy that will bring the political world to capitulation before the power of a new kind of god -- not the Prince of Peace, for sure, but the man that Clausewitz called "the god of war." The earthly city, built on the ruins of the City of God, will not bring historic liberation but a return to a despotism in a new and more virulent form. Montesquieu's prescience should be well noted and alert us to the power of a political analysis that reaches beyond centuries.

Montesquieu's preferred solution for France's predicament was certainly not "England." A turn at this time (the Regency of Louis XVl to the modern commercial republic would fly in the face of extant institutions and the most deeply etched lineaments in the French soul. Rather, Montesquieu wanted to recover the ancient vitality of his country by a return to its feudal origins. Contrary to the naive "progressive" as he appears in the Joly portrait -- enamored of England as the only historic alternative for the times -- the real Montesquieu may be seen as a "conservative," at least in what regards France. We might even call him a "reactionary" -- a term of even greater opprobrium in the "progressive's" vocabulary. [24] But Montesquieu's preference for this solution was done knowingly and the subsequent history of his country, when cut off from its "natural" origins, bears him out.

Cut loose from its roots, France will in fact relive and suffer the whole course of history as if in microcosm. Periods will be marked by turns to the constitutional arrangements of England. These will lapse into despotism but not before a brief interlude (with Robespierrel that will try to reintroduce the regime of republican virtue. There will be Restorations of the medieval alternative as well as periods of Empire that recall Rome and its fate under the Caesars. Things will not settle until 1958, if we can count on the recent past projecting itself into what now beckons and is called the "new Europe."

Montesquieu is a modern. He did not sketch a "best regime." Such "heavenly principalities" are something "to be prayed for" (perhaps) but can not provide effectual guidance for men today. There is, however, a palpable sense of the "worst regime" and its hovering presence -- despotism. We could say that the summum malum is all too present and real while the summum bonum is all too distant and ambiguous. Accordingly, Montesquieu designs his politics to escape the "worst" and to cultivate prospects for the implantation of the "best" that is available to us. In this light, he sees England as escaping the "worst" the best. The medieval monarchy, on the other hand, despite moderating institutions and a religious grounding, would be perpetually menaced by the "worst."

But a choice of modern England over even the remnants of medieval France could be made only with great reservations. The modern regime is characterized by a vigilant sense of protecting one's own space as well as frenetic and self-forgetting enterprise. Such life threatens the greatness of soul that finds its proper soil in regimes that are historically passe. By the middle of the nineteenth century , at the time of the Second Republic, the monarchic alternative had completely exhausted itself in France. At this time, Alexis de Tocqueville, admirably, takes Montesquieu's lead in trying to infuse the modern life that is our fate with the ennobling characteristics that it naturally resists. [25]

At end, Montesquieu's assessment of despotism is much richer and complex than that found in the Dialogue in Hell. And any transition to "England" as a solution for modern man is a much more troubled, if still desirable, prospect. This our contemporaries, who see a world of liberal politics and marketplace economies as imminently before us, would be well advised to ponder.

Montesquieu has been called the "Hippocrates" of politics. He makes a tour of our fundamental political alternatives to help us purge them of nefarious, even mortal, tendencies. This is done, not in the spirit of facilitating the benign and ineluctable movement of history .Indeed, a reading of The Greatness of the Romans and their Decline is sufficient to cause anyone to question any hope of permanency to political life, especially any notion that would see man as permanently perfecting himself through history. Rather, he acts in the spirit of the good physician, with humanity and wisdom, and more often than not he recommends a medicine or a regimen of moderation that would cause those most in need of his counsel to balk. [26]

Montesquieu has also been called the preeminent political (or philosophic l sociologist. Contrary to Aristotle, the question of who rules does not provide a sufficient entry into a statesmanlike political understanding of things. Man is shaped by many "forces" -- historical and social -- that are equally if not more important than questions of regime, narrowly understood. The statesman must be cognizant of soil, climate, religion, history, mores and manners, and their intricate interplay in setting the course for the future. Again, contrary to ancient philosophy, consideration of what they termed "the best regime" can not possibly furnish appropriate light for modern men. For this we need the capacious intelligence of someone like Montesquieu, who has made the tour of our fundamental historical alternatives with a view to what is concretely possible, not theoretically desirable.

Nevertheless, abiding links still tie Montesquieu and Aristotle together. For both, prudence is the foremost virtue in our practical affairs. They are preeminent among political philosophers, ancient and modern, in counseling political moderation. What crimes have been committed in the last two centuries in the name of "humanity," cut off from moderation, and bathed in the rhetoric of "progress"! How pathetic are most of our contemporaries who facilely claim for themselves this virtue! The humanity of the author of The Spirit of the Laws is of a wholly different order, it goes without saying. [27] Montesquieu (and Aristotle before him) reveals for us the limits of the "progress" we can hope for. They remind us (too late for twentieth-century man) that moderation is not the enemy of "progress" but its essential condition. In this light, the naive and optimistic Montesquieu of Joly's Dialogue seriously distorts "ce grand homme." The real Montequieu, sober but hopeful, is lost from view in the Dialogue in Hell. [28]

How then are we finally to assess Joly? One of the alternatives for post-Revolutionary France was Imperial expansion. It was Joly's view that Louis was successor to Napoleon I's ambitious megalomania. But the Napoleons were only in a certain sense the historic counterparts to the Caesars. Present in their politics was something Raymond Aron detected and analyzed in later regimes and which was absent from the Roman alternative. Modern despotism, unlike the ancient variant, is crucially "ideocratic." [29]

Napoleon I projected power that escaped the most formidable French kings. He reverted to the forms of the past in France to advance modern thought. This was the decisive thing that made his appearance emblematic of modernity and the revolutions and wars of the future. It was "world-historic" ideas and not merely French prestige that put his armies on the move.

He crucially reshaped the "civilizing mission" of France, which was displaced from the realm of culture and made politically aggressive. He would topple the tottering monarchs of Europe, whose legitimacy was being undermined in the thought of its "wisest" men and in the sentiments of its poorest citizens. Joly sees Napoleon III as harboring similarly grand ambitions but endeavoring to give historic form to the thought of Saint-Simon and his followers, a more radical interpretation of the Enlightenment project, as we now see, hopefully more clearly. Joly is the analyst par excellence of ideocratic despotism as it first manifested itself in the nineteenth century. Raymond Aron is the analyst par excellence of the more menacing and devastating ideocratic despotisms of the twentieth century, which found inspiration in the thought of Marx and the racist epigones of Nietzsche. Their lifeworks were complementary and, rightfully viewed, we owe to them a new political awareness and a new sense of our vulnerabilities and possibilities.

My endeavor has been to emphasize the Aronian elements of Joly's thought. Therein lies what is best in him and what deserves most praise. I would praise Aron as the most Montesquieuan of modern political analysts if it were becoming for someone like me to praise these latter figures. [30]

There are also problems with Joly's treatment of Machiavelli who emerges in the deepest reading of the Dialogue as aphilosopher whose political predilections, like those of Joly, lie with republicanism. Joly is perhaps too quick in dismissing or explaining away the tyrannous pronouncements of The Prince and the shocking design of his teaching. His perception of Machiavelli is shared by many learned students of the Florentine who see his writings merely as the forthright statements of "realpolitik." As Joly himself maintains, it is as absurd to blame Machiavelli for describing politics as it really is as it would be to blame a geologist for his analysis of earthquakes.

For all its "learnedness," such an interpretation may in fact be a hindrance to a finer appreciation of the real Machiavellian teaching which is perhaps better approached, initially at least, through the more naive view of Machiavelli as indeed a purveyor of evil. The learned view is a product of the essential Machiavellian project. It therefore underestimates the truly radical character of its teaching, the sense of which is grasped only in a sympathetic appreciation of the philosophic world against which Machiavelli is revolting.

Machiavelli's teaching assumes souls formed by this world, the truth of which, by this late date, is no longer entertained in "learned" circles. The magnitude and audacity of Machiavelli's project escapes more recent interpreters who, importing categories of thought of a later date, might explain Machiavellian thought as the product of its time, conditioned by the moment in which he wrote. Or, worse, they might "psychologize" and trivialize an enterprise like The Prince as merely an effort to secure employment. Interestingly enough, both of these views are present in the Dialogue as Montesquieu's putative conception of the real figure of Machiavelli, whose reputation is finally acknowledged to be undeserved in either case.

The nature of Machiavelli ' s preference for republicanism is indeed a key to his thinking. The Prince praises republics for providing the most stable foundations for political orders. The Roman Republic in particular is repeatedly cited in his works as the proper ground for virtue. By recurring to Rome as an eminently respectable political model, Machiavelli recurs to pre- Christian times. A revolutionary understanding of virtue emerges from the study of ancient republics which crucially informs the project of the future as it renders Christian teachings and ancient political philosophy itself radically suspect.

In the final analysis, Joly's Machiavelli appears as the intransigent seeker of truth, despite personal consequences. His service to and sympathy for liberal republicanism, as portrayed in the Dialogue, would question the older conception of such a figure, while it also robs him of all moral controversy. The real Montesquieu has been sacrificed to the literary and didactic requirements of the Dialogue. Perhaps the real Machiavelli has also been sacrificed, though even more unwittingly, and with full conviction in the exactness of his more sophisticated portrait.

We might agree with Joly that Machiavelli was fundamentally motivated by the search for the enduring principles of political order, whose breakdown was acutely felt in his times. But this did not lead to a simple defense of former times and admiration for political conditions informed by the principle of "divine right." It is an all too obvious distortion to align Machiavelli with positions embraced by "conservative" partisans of the early nineteenth century or with Christian principles of rule that predominated in the Middle Ages. More important, the Machiavelli of the Dialogue is adamantly opposed to the regime he has just described as the "work of hell itself." He is not the sympathetic spokesman for the "new theories," promoted by Napoleon and the Saint-Simonians. Yet, as our analysis of the chapter on the religious founding indicates, there is perhaps an abiding affinity between the real Machiavelli and the Saint-Simonian doctrine that informs the project that Joly's Machiavelli describes.

The Saint-Simonians, like the real Machiavelli, ultimately look to security ( or orderl as the great desideratum of political life. Again, like the real Machiavelli in his praise of Rome, the political virtues appropriate to their historic project are nurtured in the element of a civil religion. In a call to reinfuse society with the elements of a revitalized Christianity, they may be seen as standing at polar opposites from the Florentine. In the end, however, the apparent revolt of the Saint-Simonians against Machiavellianism essentially takes place on Machiavellian grounds.

In jettisoning the transcendent elements of that faith and leaving its moral core, the Saint-Simonians intend to overcome the fatal division of the world introduced by traditional Christianity. This was classically diagnosed by the real Machiavelli as the deepest cause of political strife in holding politics to precepts it can not follow. It is also the source of man's alienation from the earth, while it prevents him from even contemplating the steps necessary to secure its blessings. Machiavelli would be far from "recoiling in fright" from the spectacle of the harsh and despotic steps necessary to achieve a return to the conditions of political health, grandeur, and human happiness, as the Saint-Simonians see it.

Were we, unlike Joly, to take more seriously the scope of the real Machiavelli's vision, we might approach a truer appreciation of such an enigmatic figure. He is more than a mere analyst of tyranny who would warn and enlighten others about harsh truths in the real world. And he is more than a mere republican partisan. We would do well to take at face value his self-proclaimed mission as a new "Columbus." He has discovered a vast continent of thought that accommodates the likes of Bacon as well as Saint-Simon and his followers. From this perspective, the distortion of Machiavelli on Joly's part proceeds, ironically enough, from an underestimation of the thinker he so admired in the pages of the Dialogue. It is also a misreading of his moral intentions. These are much more ambiguous than Joly seems to realize. They should be much more questionable to one so ardently and intransigently moved by such considerations.

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Notes:

1. Speier, "The Truth in Hell," 23.

2. The sensitivity of Speier to an esoteric form of writing as a vehicle to reach several levels of audience in the same work is demonstrated in his essay on Grimelshausen. See Hans Speier, "Grimmelshausen's Laughter," in Ancients and Moderns, Joseph Cropsey, ed., (New York: Basic Books, 1964) 177-212.

3. Note the emphasis given Machiavelli on the Title page by capitalizing his name. The key to the Dialogue surely lies with him.

4. See Montesquieu The Spirit of the Laws III 3 and XIX 27.

5. Sulla's effort on behalf of the Republic is analyzed in greater detail in Montesquieu, Greatness of the Romans XI. Consider the comparison of Sulla and Augustus in light of the Dialogue and Joly's stance vis-a-vis the modern Caesar.

But in Sulla's whole life, even in the midst of his acts of violence, a republican spirit was revealed. All his regulations, although tyrannically executed, tended toward a certain form of republic. Sufla, a man of passion, violently led the Romans to liberty; Augustus, a scheming tyrant, conducted them gently to servitude. Under Sulla, while the republic gained its strength. everyone cried out against the tyranny, and while tyranny fortified itself under Augustus, people spoke of nothing but liberty.

Montesquieu also composed a Dialogue between Sulla and Eucrates. After gathering all power in Rome, Sulla abandons his station in weariness and disgust with his contemporaries. Joly's weariness and disgust is almost palpable.

6. According to a jingle at the time, the choice facing France was "Cavaignac" (order) or "le mic-mac'. (chaos). Paris had not seen such anarchy since the .Revolution. The army's repression of the Paris Commune insurgents was ruthless and chilling. Cavaignac was the Minister of War who designed the plan of battle against the "Reds."

7. The Belgian police had a close working relationship with the French police of the Empire. Belgian cooperation helped keep Paris informed of the refugee press. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs occasionally persuaded Belgian authorities to suppress anti-French literature. Joly is aware of the complicity between France and smaller, easily intimidated countries on her borders. He is thus aware of the risks he ran in going to Brussels to have his work published. However, the freedom of the press that existed in Belgium made it a natural place for those like Joly to gravitate. Despite efforts of the police, the volume of clandestine literature that filtered through such channels was considerable. This included the latest works of Victor Hugo, Louis Napoleon's nemesis. .See Howard C. Payne, The Police State of Napoleon Bonaparte 1852-1860 (Seattle; University of Washington Press, 1960), 158.

8. Guerard, France, 309. The historian hits upon something important. Looking to the experience of the Soviet Union, some have remarked that censorship, not to mention the grossest repression, was conducive of great literary effort. Freedom -- lost-Empire -- does not match up (as yet, anyway). Can what is observed in the Soviet Union be generalized to history as a whole? Can it be possible that artistic freedom stultifies high art? It would seem that the human spirit needs deprivation and a profound sense of lack to stimulate creativity. Nietzsche, in his portrait of the "Last Man" and many other places, has much to say about all this. Rousseau, too.

The ancients (Thomas, included), thought that creativity was something divine (as with the "divine Homer"). Its source was not deprivation and aspiration but a fullness of being.

Those conservatives who fret over the state of contemporary culture and its coarsening effect on the national character are correct. It certainly does seem that rock and roll is here to stay and, as it continues to go down in history, we are fated to dig it to the end.

I wonder if Vaclav Ravel is even writing today. If Solzhenitsyn today wrote a great novel, I would feel more confidence in the ancient view of things.

9. See Bernstein, The Truth About the Protocols, 15-17.

10. Joly was adamant that his book was serious and meant to be taken seriously. He was at pains to distinguish it from "lampoons" and mere "pamphlets." This did not mean that his work would not appeal to his contemporaries in a manner similar to such writings. Albert Sorel beautifully captures the character of those who write and read such material. When "men of letters" (like Joly or Montesquieul write "lampoons" or "pamphlets," the "men of the world are amused by them, courtiers condemn them, the author goes to prison, and the reader rubs his hands." Joly knew very well that he risked prison. I also think he thought his reading public would "rub their hands" before trying to grab a copy of his work. He hoped, once in hand and read, they would then be led to deeper reflection.

11. Thomas Babington Macaulay seems to think that Lord Bacon sees The Prince as "merely a piece of grave irony." It can best be understood as attempting to "warn nations against the arts of ambitious men." The reader is referred to the Appendix for further discussion of these matters.

12. Montesquieu, Greatness of the Romans XV.

13. In an interesting interlude in the Dialogue, a moment arises that shifts the attention of the interlocutors to questions of God's ultimate justice. A pregnant silence is Machiavelli's response. Obviously, we do not find a Christian "heir" in Joly's Dialogue. For example, there is no talk of hellfire, as in Christian mythology of the afterlife. There is talk of "banks" and "shores." This, in fact, reminds us more of Hades, the ancient conception of afterlife, where we find the rivers Styx and Lethe. Perhaps the judgment of a Christian God is not forthcoming. The revelation of this fact would, however, destroy the spur to knowledge and personal responsibility that Machiavelli endeavors to bring to bear on his interlocutor (and presumably the reader). Joly might be indicating to sympathetic readers that he shares the real Machiavelli's skepticism with regard to any hopes for "ultimate justice."

Socrates, of course. brought changes to the orthodox conception of Hades. He gave an account that would have philosophy as the most needful thing for humans. Those parched souls who greedily drink the waters of Lethe do not find relief. Rather, they are drugged into oblivion before their souls reenter the world from which they have departed. The whole human drama is to navigate the passage of Lethe in a manner that will not defile the soul. As it turns out, only the philosopher can do this. All other men, out of ignorance, have chosen defective "souls" -- lives of pleasure or honor -- as their fate in the next life. There is no rest for cities until philosophers are kings. Apparently, there is no rest for the soul until philosophy rules therein. Indeed, "only the truth will set you free," the reconstructed myth of Er seems to say. "Er" is another noble lie, is it not? Its tale would make the listener more philosophic. Is Joly's Machiavelli also perpetrating a lie to nobly benefit Montesquieu? These thoughts are prompted by Joly's account. I wouldn't put it past him that he intended to guide the reader to them. See the "myth of Er" in Plato's Republic 614a-621 d for the Socratic transformation of Hades.

Before being accused of mistranslating the Title of Joly's work, it should be pointed out that a literal rendering would be Dialogue in Hells. This is curious, to say the least. Perhaps Dante's afterlife, with its circles of hell, inspires Joly.

14. Joly was, of course, right when he indicated that we stood, not before a benign end to history, but a new era of unprecedented despotisms. There are those who see that that era has definitively come to end with the fall of Soviet Communism. Daniel Mahoney thinks otherwise. It can not be treated as a mere "episode," -- "an historic parenthesis," -- as it were. Totalitarianism is not something which "contemporary democrats need not reflect about at any length or with any sustained seriousness" as if it were of "merely historical or antiquarian interest." He puts what I want to say very well when he says that "reflexive dismissal of reflection about totalitarianism as part of a distant Cold War past ignores the permanent lessons that can and ought to be discerned from the lived experience of totalitarian despotism." See his Introduction to "Aron and Arendt and the Origins of Totalitarianism" in In Defense of Political Reason, 95. Aron (and Joly) would certainly agree.

15. See Machiavelli's "Prologue" in Christopher Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta" in The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, Irving Ribner ed., (New York: Odyssey Press, 1963), 179. Machiavelli's statement -- "there is no sin but ignorance" -- is shocking to Christian ears and its conception of sin. Indeed, the original sin was to want to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and be the equal of God. Marlowe's Machiavelli, however, expresses sentiments not too distant from the founder of political philosophy, Socrates, (if we are indeed permitted to speak of "sin" in the context of pagan philosophy). Consider his statement that "knowledge is virtue." Ultimately it is as shocking to pagans as, perhaps, it is to Christians. Think through what Socrates was really doing by changing myth in note 12 above.

16. The author of the "Memoir of Machiavelli" (unidentified) writes that Machiavelli once responded to someone who reproved him for the teachings of The Prince with the following retort: "lf I taught princes how to tyrannize, I also taught the people how to destroy them." That Machiavelli really once said this may be taken with a grain of salt. (See Chapter I, note 2l. Nevertheless, this author (Bohn himself?) tries to "make sense of Machiavelli" accordingly. "He probably develops in these words the secrets of his writings," he continues. "He was willing to teach both parties but his heart was with the republic." The "quote" from Machiavelli can be found in The History of Florence, xix. Joly basically agrees that such thinking best explains Machiavelli, indeed, best reveals his "secrets."

Rousseau seems to be the most eminent thinker to share this view of The Prince. "In feigning to give lessons to kings, he gave great ones to peoples. The Prince of Machiavelli is the book for republicans," he declares. See Social Contract III 6. The 1782 edition of this work also had the following note attached to what was just quoted:

Machiavelli was an honest man and a good citizen. But attached to the house of the Medici he was forced by the oppression of his country to disguise his love of liberty. The choice alone of his execrable Heroes manifests fairly clearly his secret intention and how contrary the maxims of The Prince are to those of his Discourses on Titus Liry. And his History of Florence shows how this profound political man has up until now had only superficial and corrupt readers. The Court of Rome censored his book severely, and rightly so. It was what was being depicted in the clearest of lights.

17. Joly's view of history is not, it should be stressed, just a variation of "one damn thing after another" school. Like Tocqueville, he could see inevitable trends that have permanently changed political things. The process of democratization in the West is the most massive and important of these trends, for sure. He would also point to certain "constants" in the human condition that don't change -- ambition and pusillanimity, for example. His endeavor was not to rise to a philosophic view of history but to warn his contemporaries about how the "constants" could change even what appears to be the most auspicious of historic circumstances. Albert Sorel quotes Montesquieu as follows: "As men have at all times had the same passions, the occasions giving rise to great changes have been different, but their causes always the same." This is why the Greatness of the Romans stays fresh and instructive. I believe Joly held to similar views and that is why he thought his little work would provide timeless lessons for those who love liberty. For the Montesquieu quote, see Sorel, Montesquieu, 63.

18. According to Speier, Joly "was a lonely man devoted to moral principles and apparently never forgave anyone who did not live up to his standards. Perhaps his keen insight into politics and society was sharpened by a passionate desire to remain pure and morally inviolate. If so, he paid with his life for such rigor." Speier, "The Truth in Hell," [21].

19. My remarks benefited greatly from the penetrating insights of Pierre Manent on Montesquieu as well as Daniel J. Mahoney's sensitive and illuminating remarks thereon. See Pierre Manent, La Cite de L 'Homme (Paris: Fayard, 1994). See also Daniel Mahoney's review essay on Manent's book "Modern Man and Man Tout Court," in Interpretation 22. no.3 (Spring 1990): 417-438.

The best book I have read that is exclusively on Montesquieu is Thomas L.Pangle's Montesquieu's Philosophy of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

20. See The Spirit of the Laws XI 9 entitled "Aristotle's manner of thinking." This small chapter follows hard upon Montesquieu's discourse on the institutions of contemporary England. Ostensibly, it is a criticism of Aristotle for his misconceptions concerning monarchy. It is, in truth, more sweeping.

21. Who is not stunned by the shortest chapter in the whole of The Spirit of the Laws, which gives an "idea" of the mentality of the despot and what despotic power really entails. Montesquieu writes:

When the savages of Louisiana are desirous of fruit, they cut the tree to the root, and gather the fruit. This is an emblem of despotic government.

Was there not an even greater "savage" mentality in Soviet despotism that ,.cut down" ten million kulaks in the name of increasing agricultural production? This could serve as the "emblem" of Leninism. See The Spirit of the Laws V 13.

22. Montesquieu's words undoubtedly apply to his contemporaries:

The character of the majority of courtiers is marked by indolent ambition, mean-spirited pride, lust for wealth without labor, antipathy to truth, flattery, treachery, perfidy, neglect of all engagements, contempt for civic duties, dread of virtue in the prince, and hope based upon his weaknesses -- above all, an ingrained habit of sneering at virtue.

We should bear in mind that, in Montesquieu's thinking, once the animating principle in a regime is corrupted, there is little possibility to revive it. His hope for reform of France and the recovery of honor to avoid revolution was probably a slender one. The above quote can be fund in Sorel, Montesquieu, 176 and is taken from The Spirit of the Laws III 5.

23. Exotic thinking and new ways of doing things would seduce the mind of France as they seduced the mind of Usbek. France's encounter with the secular apostles of the new order would make it impossible for it simply to return to the old ways. The Enlightenment would change the West, as Montesquieu clearly saw. (So, too, would it change Usbek's East.) He would want to bequeath what is best from the changes that were upon us all.

24. His reputation as a "conservative" is of longer date than the reputation that Joly would fix on him. It was in fact the first reaction to his thought. Helvetius, a not unfriendly contemporary of Montesquieu, criticized the author of The Spirit of the Laws because he was too fixated on the past and because he tried to ameliorate defective regimes and practices. "I know but two classes of government," he wrote, "the good and the bad; and the good are yet to be found." This is the mind of the ideologue who, in accepting nothing short of perfection, would jeopardize what good man can attain. Who can not see in Helvetius the intellectual mindset of today? His remarks on Montesquieu can be found in Sorel, Montesquieu, 163.

25. What is absent from the modern world is the sense of a secure place for the human spirit, which gives rise to a noble use of leisure, taste, and refinement. According to Pierre Manent, this was present in France until the 1960s. It was then that the quintessentially French "aesthetic education" (to use Schiller's term) succumbed. It was, more precisely, when Daniel Cohnendit, on the streets and with a smirk, drove the last and perhaps the greatest representative of old France from political office. The young wanted new heroes. It should be pointed out that in America and France, the new ones did not last too, too long. See Manent, La Cite de l'homme, 43. Before Aron, Montesquieu and Tocqueville were the most noble and intellectually defensible efforts to "plaidoyer pour L' Europe decadent."

26. The French nobility at the time Montesquieu wrote was not likely to appreciate his message: to wit, they were unaware of their own corruption and were leading France to revolutionary destruction. Nor would they like to take the "medicine" of a return to ancestral ways that this political .'Hippocrates" recommends.

Similarly, today's Americans would not likely relish being told that their "optimism" is hopelessly naive and breeds arrogance. Indeed, "radical surgery" would be necessary to disabuse them of this character trait, since all the horrors of the last century apparently were unable to do so. Nor should such "surgery" be undertaken. anyway. This is because much of what is best in the American "spirit" is also inextricably bound up with their optimism. At the source of our "arrogance" are standards that we apply not only to others but to ourselves. America at its best is constantly striving, internally and externally. Complacent self-absorption would be its downfall.

Ultimately, I believe, our optimism stems from a certain belief in morality that sees in the acts of a moral agent of goodwill the necessary and sufficient condition to affect change. Among other things, it discounts the fragility of the moral horizon that envelops civilized life.

All other countries identity themselves with a brief shining moment in the past. They sense that their best as a people somehow lies behind them. More prominent in their memories are the tragedies that still weigh heavily upon them. But what is the world to make of a people whose past weighs so lightly? To Americans, the past is mere grist for the future, not a huge boulder that blocks their way. They are continually building their historic home, only to abandon it before living therein, ever moving confidently forward. It is always just dawn in America. This is a people that has, as yet, not suffered a historic tragedy, at least not at the hands of others. Is this optimism the "tragic flaw" in a people that has heretofore not known tragedy?

A look to the pain of Vietnam (it would take "radical surgery" to remove it from my generation) may be instructive. The "flip side'. of American optimism is a tendency to withdraw from the world when it proves recalcitrant to its "spirit" -- which it inevitably will do, probably more often than not.

Vietnam began, I am convinced, in all optimism and with all good intentions. The war was conducted with our characteristic faith in technology, that is, that "calibrated bombing" would soon end it. We assumed that the "rational" incentives that would move Americans would move the Viet Cong. But Vietnam did not end quickly or well.

The "experience" has been interpreted in at least three different ways. Some Americans believe that we were, in a sense, "stabbed in the back." Our policy would have been vindicated had not certain elements -- nearly "treasonable" -- not blocked our efforts. Our real enemy was "within." Some Americans reacted with hostility to the world that proved so recalcitrant to them. "You 're on your own now: Debrouillez-vous." Retreat from the world and a markedly lower profile followed the experience. (It is likely that Congress, much maligned, effectively represented the majority of Americans in this regard.) Equilibrium, tentative at best, followed only a decade later. And some Americans, like the first group, saw the problem as lying within but attributed it, not to dissident elements, but to something more fundamentally Wrong. It is this group that the first group finds treasonable. It may indeed be the case that our deepest domestic divisions, still with us. have a foreign policy origin.

All these reactions pointed to a new "isolationism," which is really not a policy option anymore but nevertheless remains as a permanent temptation to Americans in the aftermath of their failures -- the "flip side" of their optimism, I would argue. It is part of a post-Vietnam mentality that makes us turn to an "exit strategy" as the first priority in the use of our power, while the darker side of America's former involvement in Asia now forces us to tolerate no casualties to American soldiers and none to enemy civilians, not to speak of unacceptable "collateral" damage. Such presumptions drive the technology of our weapons systems. But what is astonishing is that our commanders in chief seem to accept these parameters as a basis for any military engagements. This can not remain the basis of effective foreign policy, at least given the dangers of the world and the global responsibilities that we have assumed. Our Secretaries of State need a little talking to in the gardens of Rucellai.

Historically, Vietnam has been called a "non-event." This is arguable. In any case. there will inevitably be other Vietnams in America's future, which might indeed alter the course of human events. If Vietnam is in any way an instructive precedent. Americans will withdraw from the world, brood in their tent, Achilles-like (Holden Caulfield-like?), nursing their grievances. A plaintive '.come home, America" will again be heard and, if the pain is deep enough, the bruised son will come back to the maternal call. Meanwhile, the pieces of the world will fall into place without American participation or influence. This will be unfortunate for America. It is not shallow patriotism that makes me think it will be unfortunate for the world, too.

At end, if American optimism can not and should not be rooted out of the American character, it should, nevertheless, be made more clear-sighted, sober, and mature. In a word, it should be more "Montesquieuan." This, I think, would help forestall the appearance of other Vietnams in the future and would ultimately equip us to deal with them better when they happen.

Speaking of Montesquieu, and probably with the French uppermost in his mind. Albert Sorel stated that "when men tried to return to order, moderation, liberty, they returned to him." He also thought that Montesquieu's greatest gift to posterity was '.something better than precepts." This is what I am talking about. "He left a method making it possible to develop his thought, and to apply it to cases that he never had foreseen." See Sorel, Montesquieu, I88 and 209.

27. The multimillionaire rock star, who has climbed the greasy pole of what passes for fame in contemporary America, even passes for "humane." This is when he or she gives a concert for AIDS victims or rain forests and doesn't take a cut in receipts. Imagine! Thomas Pangle even thinks there are "limits" to Montesquieu's "humanity." He writes that Montesquieu believed "that in order to benefit humanity one must never permit the sense of humanity to blur one's clarity of vision." Indeed, without. this "clarity of vision" claims to "humanity" are all too often self-indulgent vanity. See Pangle, Montesquieu's Philosophy of Liberalism, 172.

28. Chapter 10 of this work is a historic survey of the various views of Napoleon III. It is also a polemic against the way history is done today. These remarks on Montesquieu should be kept in mind when reading this later chapter . Among other things, they show that contemporary historicism is not the final word on the proper relation of man to history.

29. Hegel, famously and in a moment of epiphany, literally saw the Emperor in Berlin as the apotheosis of modernity. At Jena, shortly before, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by his force. The modern Caesar was upon Europe. Stendhal had glimpsed the phenomenon even in Italy. We could have had a key to the character of his conquests by his actions in Egypt. A host of scientists disembarked with his armies at the mouth of the Nile. There were 167 of them -- civil engineers, astronomers, physicists, chemists, medical men; also musicians, writers, and artists. They would unlock the mysteries of mankind's deep past as they would infect ever after the life of the East. When former sovereigns conquered, they brought court jesters. Napoleon brought savants. In the age of world empire building to follow and the revolutions and wars of the last century, "ideas" would prove to be the most important arm in conquerors' arsenals. I follow Daniel Mahoney in use of the term "ideocratic" which, I think, he coined.

30. It is not appropriate for "intellectual valets" to praise such "heroes" of thought. I also realize that to confess to having heroes, intellectual or otherwise, is today something quaint, if not bemusing. But I have made my pilgrimage to La Brede, Montesquieu's ancestral home. The best Americans, by the way, in an age of heroes, forthrightly declared their admiration for Montesquieu. They called him "the celebrated Montesquieu" and at the most important moment in their history followed "the legislator of nations" as their guide. It should also be noted that Montesquieu has pride of place in Aron's magisterial study on sociology and its greatest practitioners. He is one of the few legitimate "philosopher-sociologists" in his view. See Aron's two-volume study Main Currents in Sociological Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1967).

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Part 1 of 2

Part V: The Dialogue and History

Chapter Ten: Solving the Enigma of Louis Napoleon

The historical controversy over Napoleon III remains strong even to this day. A good example of the more prominent views of the Emperor and his times is documented by Samuel M. Osgood in an edition of works entitled Napoleon III, part of a series of publications on "Problems in European Civilization." Professor Osgood presents a most useful compendium of the thought of historians and thinkers of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who are justly recognized for their analyses of Napoleon III and his regime. It illustrates well the nature of the ongoing controversy and the major lines of interpretation, each of which are strikingly different and claim many eminent partisans. [1]

Given this controversy, Joly's Dialogue has great value. As a close observer of Napoleon III and his times, he gives us useful insight as one who had actually observed and painfully experienced his rule. However, our claim for Joly is much greater than one that would treat the Dialogue merely as a contribution to historical studies by a contemporary of Louis Napoleon. In the breadth of his analysis, Joly can account for the many views of Napoleon III and, to a great extent, harmonize many of the most disparate interpretations. It may be that Joly's portrait of Louis Napoleon is simply the best and truest likeness to the historic character of the French Emperor.

Because of certain historicist notions he holds, Osgood would deny any claim that would present itself as constituting a more or less definitive understanding of an historical era. His position in this respect represents by now the long-standing thinking of the history profession as a whole. It also shares presumptions with the more radical post-moderns. It might be said of this latter group that they provided "metaphysical grounding" for the profession's historical intimations. [2l

Because such views increasingly reflect the prevailing orthodoxy among contemporary historical thinkers, they are perhaps accepted all too easily and unthinkingly. They will be critically examined here in some detail at the outset. After, we will turn to specific historical interpretations that would compete with Joly's understanding of the Emperor and his regime.

For Professor Osgood, the historical controversy concerning Napoleon III is to be expected, being rooted in the very nature of historical studies.

History is no more the mere enumeration of facts than science is the sole gatherer of data. Any historian worthy of the name must approach his subject from a definite frame of reference, develop a thesis, and reach certain conclusions on the basis of available evidence. Unfortunately, Clio is the most fickle of muses. While she is at the historian's side to suggest the type of questions, she is nowhere to be found when it comes to formulating the answers. Left to his own devices the historian labors under severe handicaps. The unearthed evidence is often fragmentary, the established facts are open to a variety of interpretations and, most damaging, he can never rerun the experiment to test his hypothesis. [3]

Scientific exactitude would seem to be the yardstick by which Osgood measures historical studies. At first view, history seems very much like modern natural science, properly understood. Like the scientific method, the historical method cannot be understood as a passive process and the mere collection of data. Like modern science, we might expect history to advance beyond primitive hypotheses to infinitely more refined explications of historical phenomena. Again, like modern science, historical understanding may be open-ended. It may tolerate numerous hypotheses until research confirms one or the other or points to a new and more conclusive theory -- a "paradigm shift" in the historical understanding of things, if you will. [4]

However, history is necessarily more inexact than modern science, according to Osgood, because of the nature of its subject matter, which deals with human beings in a political context. The "facts" of history are past events beyond present observation. They cannot be retested and the "experiment" rerun. It follows that controversy is endemic to historical study. It is subject to inevitable disputes on a theoretical level among the many hypotheses that are offered to explain phenomena, and, "most damaging" of all, its "facts" can never be wholly adequate or "controlled" to yield the evidence necessary to confirm one interpretation or another.

In this light, it is perhaps more accurate to liken history to poetry rather than to science, and Osgood intimates as much when he says that it is subject to "Clio." Because its subject matter involves human beings, its proper realm belongs more to the muse than to the laboratory.

Following Osgood, a clear image of the status of history eludes us. The character of history seems to lie somewhere between that of science and poetry. While it wants to attain the rigor of science in its study of human phenomena, it is forced to draw upon the poet's peculiar powers to fathom the human soul and plumb the depths of human character in his reconstruction of the past. However, in distinction to poetry, the role of inspiration in its field seems to be constrained by its function to explain past events. The historian is not free to enter the realm of fantasy. The ambiguity of history and the powers it calls forth leaves scope to the intuition of the historian but not so broad as to do serious injustice to given facts, however controversial or fragmentary. [5]

Osgood's reference to an "historian worthy of his name," a name that he obviously prizes as one of honor, sheds some needed light on his conception of the historian's enterprise. According to Osgood, the historian develops a thesis based on available evidence from a "definite frame of reference." The key to the nature of history as irretrievably ambiguous and "fickle" perhaps lies here. The historian who is called to interpret past events does so from a certain point of view or frame of reference. This frame of reference itself would change with the movement of history, so historians continually stand, so to speak, on new grounds from which they observe the past. The differing views of past events are inevitably a part of the historical process itself. Subsequent views are not necessarily superior to less recent ones but are rather indicative of a change of perspective that can not, given the open-ended nature of the historical process, mount to a view of the whole.

The manner in which Osgood introduces and presents the conflicting historical accounts of Napoleon III confirms this as his deepest view of the historian's enterprise. By and large, the main lines of interpretation are shown to change dramatically over time, establishing new perspectives. It is the capriciousness of the historical process itself that ultimately explains the frame of reference and the character of the "fickle" muse who presides over the historian's enterprise. In the realm of history, there are only eternal questions, we are told, with no definitive answers.

The Changing Views of Napoleon

Osgood's volume begins with the scathing portrait of Louis Napoleon by Victor Hugo, the literary giant of the nineteenth century who suffered exile under Napoleon's rule. [6] Hugo accuses his nemesis of "buffoonery" and of being "grotesque," dubbing him "Napoleon Le Petit," a man whose meager talents and lofty pretensions reveal him as totally unfit to have usurped the stage of history.

A similar thought is present in the analysis of Karl Marx, another contemporary of the Emperor. [7] Citing Hegel, Marx claims that all great events and personages reappear in one fashion or another on the great stage of history. Looking to the coup of Napoleon Bonaparte and his world-historic revolutionary achievement, Marx sees the achievement of his nephew as perhaps vindicating this thought of Hegel, but with a caveat. On the first occasion they appear in tragedy, in the second, in farce.

It was the searing prose of Hugo and the weighty authority of Marx that long colored perceptions of Napoleon III and finally, perhaps, prompted later scholars from a new "frame of reference" to struggle out from their influence. Marx, who observed the Napoleonic regime firsthand, and Hugo, who also suffered under it, were, in the minds of some, too close to the phenomenon to appreciate it properly. To Osgood, or at least some of the historians in his volume, such a "frame of reference" might rightfully yield to another that has available a greater store of historical data and is freer from the distortion born of personal experience.

The change in perspective on Napoleon III proceeded slowly. It was long understood that his election to the Presidency of the Second Republic owed much to the "magic of his name." [8] This view continued to denigrate Napoleon, as the key to his political success is found more in an accident of birth than any intrinsic merit. It was challenged by F. A. Simpson who saw in Louis Napoleon the considerable talent to seize and mold what fate had to offer.

The revision of Napoleonic historiography reaches the high-water mark in 1943 with Albert Guerard's Napoleon III. In the Emperor's foreign policy, Guerard sees Napoleon in the role of a "prophet" and as a forerunner of Woodrow Wilson. His desire was to convene a Congress of European powers like the Congress of Vienna, which would reorganize the continent, not on the basis of monarchic legitimacy, but as the .future League of Nations, on the basis of the principle of the right to self-determination. Napoleon III may be indicted at the bar of history for being a failure, but he cannot be condemned, for he worked toward a future that is "still our hope today." [9]

Similarly, in domestic policy, Guerard credits 'Napoleon with espousing a democratic ideal toward which the future would inevitably move. Guerard believes that technological progress, widespread literacy, and the spread of cheap newspapers have removed the obstacles to direct democracy. [10] Indeed, "if we do not believe in direct democracy now, it is because we don't believe in democracy at all."

Guerard's critique of Marx and Hugo is implicit and is meant to speak to the Napoleonic historiography influenced by it. In opposition to Hugo, and a line of interpretation perhaps proceeding from him, Guerard claims that Napoleon's failure should not brand him as a fool or a knave any more than it would Napoleon I, Saint Louis, Lafayette, or Wilson. In opposition to Marx, he claims that Louis Napoleon's regime is "not a feeble caricature of the First Empire, but something altogether different and, in our opinion, of far more vital interest." [11]

In his Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism, J. Salwyn Schapiro sees in the regime of Napoleon III the precursor of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Schapiro writes from a frame of reference acutely sensitized by the events of the Second World War and what it portends for the future of liberalism and a free world. According to Schapiro, the organization and policies of the Second Empire bear a striking resemblance to the fascist dictatorships of his time. He would take strong exception to Guerard and the rest of the revisionists who find "vitality" in Napoleonic policies and the "future hopes" for Europe. Schapiro sees in the plebiscitory democracies extolled by Guerard the possibilities of a frightening form of tyranny backed by popular support. It's the actual experience of Hitler's Germany that would illustrate the full range of such a regime's horrors. [12]

Given Osgood's historicist presumptions, the subtitle of his edition Napoleon III -- Buffoon, Modern Dictator, or Sphinx? is patently disingenuous. The historical figure of Louis Napoleon is necessarily enigmatic and sphinx-like, and this editor of "The Problems in European Civilization" says as much. The historical problem of Napoleon III can not be definitively resolved if, as Osgood implies, each view makes a claim to a certain "validity" from its own particular perspective.

The "problem" of Napoleon III is even more complicated than Osgood might have it. Not only is the historian himself historically conditioned in his view of the French Emperor, but so is the student whose access to Napoleon III is through works that are, in a certain sense, already fundamentally dated from his point of view. It is as if the real phenomenon of Napoleon III retreats with every effort to understand it. It is not merely a fickle muse who presides over the historian's enterprise but a perverse "evil genius." Apparently, we cannot avoid the subtle subjectivism of the historian or even the student who is conditioned by a historical horizon that interposes itself between the phenomenon of Napoleon III and its scholarship.

The Problems of Contemporary Historiography

At this point, certain problems with Osgood's position manifest themselves. If forced at the outset to grant that historical truth is irretrievable, we might expect the slackening of scholarly effort or the trivializing of the historian's task. Serious scholarly effort can be undertaken only in the belief that the past is open to human understanding and that it crucially affects our understanding of things important.

Within Osgood's Napoleon III, we have evidence of the trivializing of historic themes and a scholarship marked by frivolousness on the one hand and pedantry on the other. As students of Joly, we might be surprised to see Napoleon's efforts to control the minds of his subjects through the manipulation of public opinion as nothing too disconcerting. Rather, he is understood as employing methods which might "evoke the admiration of such moderns as George Gallup and Elmo Roper." [13] We may also wonder if the strained literary analogies of calling Napoleon a "Chekovian romantic" or the "Hamlet of history" illuminates anything beyond its pretentiousness. [14] To say the least, such scholarship contrasts with the seriousness of Joly. In 1864, the year the Dialogue was published, Joly thought he discerned a project that would crucially affect the fate of free men. In the depth of his analysis, he exposed some of the currents of modern political life that were, most ominously, to determine subsequent history.

Osgood would have us understand that history, as it unfolds, changes the perspective of the historian and that this crucially influences the interpretations of the past. It follows that the Schapiro view of Napoleon III, sensitized by the phenomenon of Hitlerism, differs from that of contemporaries of the Emperor, who were cut off from such a perspective and were perhaps too close to events to perceive them dispassionately. It is curious then that of all the works in the Osgood collection, it is Schapiro, writing in the aftermath of Hitler, who stands closest to Joly, a contemporary of Napoleon III. Writing from "different frames of reference," the two thinkers assess things in remarkably similar ways. According to them, Napoleon's regime is best understood as an unprecedented attempt at founding a new form of despotism.

Moreover, of all the essays in Osgood's collection, the most disparate interpretations are those of Guerard and Schapiro. We find that the former work was published in 1943 and the latter in 1949, that is to say, both from a perspective that was familiar enough with the phenomenon of Mussolini and Hitler. We may begin to wonder if indeed the historian's thought is so time-bound that it cannot rise to a detached view of the past and that scholarly effort, even beyond centuries, cannot attain similar views in independent approaches to historical reality.

Osgood implied that all historical perspectives, even the most serious, are inherently limited. Alternatively stated in a more positive way, the views of historians can make similar claims to being valid. It is at this point that the bankruptcy of Osgood's position shows itself. The theses of Guerard and Schapiro are diametrically opposed in crucial respects. If they are both to claim a share of validity, then the real phenomenon of Napoleon III may be said to disappear for all intents and purposes. We cannot claim that the policies of Napoleon III "present the hope for us today" and the prototype for Hitlerism, unless we assume that the proponents of these views are fascists, which, most certainly, they are not.

If we were to simultaneously defend the views of both Schapiro and Guerard, then the reality of Napoleon III becomes so vacuous that we might be discouraged from any effort at understanding him in the first place. Thought through, Osgood's position would lead to the trivializing of history. It turns history into a certain kind of historiography that places the emphasis not so much on understanding history as the historian. This is the undeniable bent of Osgood's Introduction and his preoccupation in the individual precis that introduces each historical piece. It is a narcissistic view of the historian that forgets his more humble task of explication. In the end, the "historian worthy of his name," in Osgood's sense, is not.

Furthermore, Osgood's conception of history and the historian's enterprise would also blunt our moral sense, the development of which, in the ancients' view -- one thinks of Plutarch, in particular -- was one of the chief benefits of historical study. The proper study of history was seen to lend sublimity to our lives by presenting us with situations and personalities beyond the reach of our daily occupations. In such situations, we are called to exercise our moral judgment in affairs of state that critically serves our civic education. [15] The ethical relativism that is the upshot of Osgood's position destroys the important critical functions of the study of history. We cannot simply leave the phenomenon of Napoleon III at "Buffoon," "Modern Dictator," "Hope for the Future," "Elmo Roper" -- whatever. If we are to believe Joly, the view espoused by Osgood would also lead us to our peril. The germ of future history lies in the policies of Napoleon III. To Joly and more traditional historians, Osgood's approach would render inscrutable what needs greatest light, what speaks to the knowledge and well-being of future generations.

In denying that historical understanding can be definitively reached, or, alternatively, in maintaining that history is necessarily enigmatic, we are presented with an unexamined dogmatism that masquerades as openness to all historical views. For some of the reasons indicated, we cannot rest satisfied with such a position and would do well to approach our subject matter in a different, less dogmatic, and more modest manner.

The Freshness of the Old Historical Approach

From Osgood's remarks on the nature of history, we might be tempted to see historical studies as flawed because they cannot attain the exactitude of science. In the thought of Aristotle, we can find the proper corrective to the prevailing view of history and historical studies, insofar as Osgood may be deemed a representative spokesman.

In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes: "Our discussion will be adequate if it achieves clarity within the limits of the subject matter. For precision cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike." With evident common sense, Aristotle might accuse Osgood and others of a kind of foolishness for wanting to hold history to strictures it can not meet. Because it fails in this regard, we are not justified in deeming it fundamentally enigmatic. Clarity can be had, but within the limits of the subject matter.

For a well educated man is one who searches for that degree of precision in each kind of study which the nature of the subject matter at hand admits. It is obviously just as foolish to accept arguments of probability from a mathematician as to demand strict demonstrations from orators. [16]

On the one hand, we should expect conflict among historians. This is because the subject matter of history is controversial, dealing with the great political questions, sometimes, indeed, "eternal questions," whose answers determine the lives and happiness of human beings. A historian "worthy of the name" is not, as Osgood insists, a mere codifier of facts or events but must assess the thoughts and actions of men with regard to important matters. For us to come to a reasonable understanding of the past through the use of history, we are forced at some point to deal with the various deeds of historical actors and the opinions of historians themselves. On the other hand, we would be surprised if considerable light were not shed on historical problems through these same opinions. Intelligent men motivated by questions that passionately interest them, men of outstanding heart and intellect, like Hugo and Marx, are bound to understand something of what lies under investigation. Indeed, dealing with the eminent historians in Osgood's edition, "the presumption is that they are right in at least one or perhaps even in most respects," as Aristotle intimates. In consciously choosing provocatively different views of Napoleon III for his edition, Osgood has perhaps obscured vast areas of similarity .Following Aristotle, we might indeed find controversy beyond shared views, but we would be loath to endow it with too much significance, in the manner of Osgood. [17]

Osgood grants too much importance to conflicting historical opinion. The various perspectives of historians confirm a view of history that was Osgood's from the outset -- that is to say, the irremediable enigma of history. Yet, this original view is not without controversy. Indeed, the questions it raises are more controversial than the views of the historians in his edition, whose more limited and modest theses do not presume to rise to a view at such philosophic heights. Rather, they endeavor to understand a concrete historical personage, Napoleon III, and can be judged independently by the ability of their interpretations to explain in a plausible and coherent manner the events and problems of his reign, brought to light in many revealing ways by the efforts of other historians.

Before we would "resolve" the controversy regarding Louis Napoleon in the manner of Osgood, it would be better and certainly less presumptuous to seek a different course. We want an interpretation that can account for the regime of Napoleon III in a way that will also allow us to comprehend some of the reasons why it has been the subject of so much historical attention and dispute. We rest dissatisfied with Osgood, who presents the absurd spectacle of wanting to deal with the Napoleon III controversy by a position that is at once dogmatically accepted and inherently more controversial.

Toward a Better Understanding of Napoleon III

Moreover, contrary to Osgood, the conflicting interpretations of Napoleon III might point the way to a more adequate understanding. Two opinions that obviously conflict, as in the case of Schapiro and Guerard, might shed light on areas of one another's interpretation that would otherwise remain poorly illuminated. The conflict would be a spur to a more adequate interpretation, either by resolving the differences in their views by a third more inclusive and superior interpretation, or when the two are totally irreconcilable, by exercising our best judgment as to the adequacy of one or the other. In effect, in leaving the controversies in his Napoleon III inconclusive and "enigmatic," Osgood abandons the historian's task where it might well begin in seriousness.

In fact, a line of interpretation developed from Joly may lead "within the limits of the subject matter" to the best and truest appreciation of Napoleon III. Beyond all the works in Osgood's edition, it represents the most comprehensive view of the Emperor and his regime and can account for the others' views in doing justice to their particular insights. Its analysis of the political, intellectual, and material forces of the Second Empire can serve as a basis from which to judge the adequacies of competing and less comprehensive positions. Of particular importance to the Joly analysis of Napoleonism is the role that Saint-Simonian thought plays. The reader is asked patience, for we must turn again to it to resolve the ambiguities of his rule.

A Return to Saint-Simonian Thought

The Saint-Simonians perceived the core of the contemporary crisis to be an intellectual one, manifesting itself in the apparently irreconcilable conflict between two traditions of thought. These traditions were characterized as "liberal-humanitarian" and "conservative-authoritarian." [18] The first tradition of thought finds expression in Enlightenment politics and a view of legitimate state authority as derived from individual rights. According to the secular strain of the second tradition of thought, the principles of the Enlightenment misrepresent the nature of the state and would tear apart the fabric of society.

There are no universal rights of man as man predating civil society. There are only rights of men within particular societies, guaranteed by specific institutions. These are informed by age-old historical forces and not by abstract reasoning about man in his "natural state." Far from being an artificial creation, civil society is coeval with human existence and is its condition. History demonstrates that the doctrine of natural rights leads to a revolutionary politics. The regime it would erect, by recurring to consent as the source of legitimacy, tends to disturb the salutary prejudices and habits of the citizen. These are the matrix of civil society and serve to put the necessary authority of the state beyond question. The root of legitimacy in the "conservative-authoritarian" tradition of thought is thus found not in consent but in prescription and the duties to a sovereign that are owed, not conditionally, but as part of a sacred heritage.

The Saint-Simonians saw revolutionary thought as serving a "critical" function that dissolved the ancient authority and prepared the way for the reintegration of society and a state whose authority rested on new principles. Their project was an attempt to harmonize the two traditions of thought and much of its ambiguity lies therein.

The Saint-Simonians lay emphasis on the "humanitarian" aspects of the first tradition of thought in elevating the practical teaching of Christianity to the status of a new religion. Society is to be oriented by the progressive amelioration of the material, moral, and intellectual conditions of the poor. They intend thereby to affect a synthesis of Christianity and the scientific revolution, which was originally heralded by Bacon (following Machiavelli) in a call away from an orientation by "heavenly principalities" and toward "the relief of man's estate." In jettisoning the transcendent elements of Christianity, the Saint-Simonians wanted to retain their moral code, which would then be practically implemented by a scientific society. Science, which is morally neutral, insofar as it increases human power over nature but does not determine the ends for its use, would then serve moral objectives.

Politically, the Saint-Simonian revolution calls for the supplanting of liberal institutions by an authoritarian state. Political power culminates in a leader whose legitimacy is based on an appeal to "genius" in the name of a revolutionary historical project. The liberal system of government was seen as defective in institutionalizing conflict among groups of men and by cutting off from citizens a horizon of higher shared purposes and the leaders who can give effective voice to them. In the Joly analysis, the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which emanates from consent theories of liberalism, finds its proper ground, not in individual voices, but in the all-powerful despot who practically fulfills the historic interests of the people.

Some of the radically democratic features of the first tradition of thought are retained in the policies of Napoleon III. The role of the plebiscite, for example, is to forge direct identification of the masses with the leader, in whose person they are to find he representation of their higher moral and collective selves. As Joly indicates, Napoleon leaves liberal institutions intact, but gutted, and finally replaced by an authoritarian and hierarchical politics. Positions of power were to be filled, not as in conservative regimes, by an aristocracy of birth, but by an aristocracy of "merit." The leader will fill its ranks with those distinguished by dedication and service to the new society.

What emerges in the Joly analysis is a regime that would graft the "humanitarian" aspects of the one tradition of thought to the "authoritarian" and hierarchical politics of the other tradition. Authoritarian politics replaces liberal institutions but is severed from a conservative social order and is oriented toward material progress. The Saint-Simonians accept the standards of what constitutes a healthy "organic" society from the "conservative-authoritarian" tradition of thought but want to reintegrate society on a moral basis that takes for its objective goals that derive from the "liberal-humanitarian" tradition. It is no longer the prescriptive elements of a social order that endow it with legitimacy but its orientation to the future and the fulfillment of the emergent demands of history.

The Napoleonic regime, as presented by Joly, displays a discrete but subtle combination of strains of thought that are fundamental to post-Revolutionary modernity and formerly thought irreconcilable. Rather than demonstrating the validity of historicist premises, the controversy over Napoleon III can be traced to this fact and the peculiar Saint-Simonian synthesis.

A Return to the Controversy

It is from this source that light is shed on both Guerard and Schapiro and the discrepancies in their thought. Guerard identifies with the "humanitarian" aspects of Napoleon III's regime. This distinguishes his empire from that of Napoleon I, whose revolution advanced by the sword and unthroned kings, finally to enfranchise property owners and their narrow class interests. For Guerard, it is the social goals of Napoleon III that render his regime "more vital," democratic, and humane.

In emphasizing the humanitarian aspects of Louis Napoleon 's regime, Guerard reveals himself to be remarkably unperturbed in the face of the authoritarianism that is its political counterpart. The Saint-Simonian view shares with the ideologies of the twentieth century a call for the universal transformation of society as a mandate of history. Authoritarianism and violence are perhaps inherent in such a call and are required in doses proportionate to the radicalism of their visions. So strong is the hold of a "humanitarian" future on the mind of Guerard that he seems willing to exonerate the violence and authoritarianism of Louis Napoleon even in the face of failure.

Unlike other historians, Guerard does not misconceive the anti-liberal bias of the Napoleon regime. He praises the attempt to inaugurate direct democracy in a modern industrial society as the litmus test of our sincerity for democratic principles. Such a regime is taken for granted to be desirable. The spread of cheap newspapers, among other things, makes it feasible. What is astonishing is that Guerard can make such a claim in the face of Hitler, who was indeed "educated" on cheap newspapers.

Up to now, we accused Guerard of being perhaps too complacent in the face of violence and the authoritarian aspects of Napoleonic rule. He is merely perhaps too sanguine about the hold of morality, in the absence of liberal institutions and a restraining system of checks and balances, over the minds of the citizenry. Given unscrupulous rulers and their access to modern communications, it is doubtful whether the better motives of citizens can be relied upon to guarantee a moral politics. In the end, it is Guerard's moral convictions that exonerate Napoleon's crimes in the name of "humanity" and it is his faith in the power of these convictions that leads him to a culpable political naivete.

Still other historians fail altogether to perceive the anti-liberal bias of Napoleonic government. This is the case of Theodore Zeldin, who sees Napoleon as trying to establish in France the liberal and parliamentary government of nineteenth-century England. [19] Zeldin's interpretation hinges on a proper understanding of the last years of Napoleon's reign which, according to certain historians, intended to transform the Authoritarian Empire into the Liberal Empire.

A reading of Joly makes us suspicious of any interpretation of Napoleon that would make of the Emperor a sincere partisan of liberalism. Liberal ideas of liberty -- limited government and individual freedom -- do not represent the expressed Napoleonic idea of the liberty that was to "crown the edifice" of his government. Deference on Napoleon's part to liberal institutions was, at first, a matter of lip-service to effect a transition to a regime of a wholly different character, where liberty is reflected in a "return to loving obedience" to a ruler and to laws that issue from an historic mandate.

The "liberalization" of the regime was a response to a series of setbacks that were "to transform the resolute conqueror of power into a wavering, fumbling Emperor." [20] Joly, writing at the height of Napoleon's power, did not face the ignominious conclusion of the Napoleonic regime. Nevertheless, a line of interpretation that accepts the Joly analysis would see the liberalization of the Empire in the manner of A.F. Thomson, as illuminating the problems of autocracy in attempting to modify itself and placate its critics, without losing control. [21]

The interpretation of J. Salwyn Schapiro would correct any view that misperceives the autocratic intentions of Napoleon and, contrary to Guerard and others, its more ominous implications. To Schapiro, Guerard's politics represents not the rightful extension of democratic principles, but some of the key elements of modern tyranny. Schapiro cites Nazi apologists themselves who claim that the regime of Napoleon is in fact the only relevant historical parallel to the rise of National Socialism. [22]

Schapiro implies that Napoleon shared the same political goals as the National Socialists, which were rooted in a common recognition of the inadequacies of liberal institutions to solve the social problems of the day and mend the cleavages that threatened society. The solution lay in authoritarian and plebiscitory leadership and in re-channeling revolutionary socialism, through certain social policies, toward a virulent form of nationalism.

According to Schapiro, the Second Empire did not differ in kind from Hitlerism but was merely a weaker version of that phenomenon. He lays particular emphasis on the fact or observation that "the weakness of the fascist pattern of Napoleon lay in that it did not include totalitarianism." [23] By this, Schapiro means that Napoleon never attempted to "coordinate" the political, social, and economic life of France into a uniform and unified system run by a dictatorial machine.

Moreover, Schapiro continues, such coordination would have been impossible due to certain external factors. Among these he lists the fact that France was primarily an agricultural nation with no large combination of basic industries or a large organized class of workers. In addition, there was not yet in existence the easy and rapid means of communication and transportation --radio, motion pictures, automobiles, and airplanes, which can be readily used by the dictator for propaganda and other purposes. For these reasons, totalitarian control was beyond the reach of the nineteenth-century dictator who only anticipates his twentieth-century counterpart.

It is interesting in light of the many similarities between them that this reading of Napoleon's intention clashes with that of Joly. Though unfamiliar with twentieth-century totalitarianism, of course, Joly sees an attempt at similar politics by the nineteenth-century Saint-Simonian despot. The Saint-Simonians understood both the present limitation and future opportunities for such social coordination. Such control would be progressively augmented with the advance of scientific society as the principles of material "progress" and authoritarian "order" came to be increasingly reconciled.

For all of Schapiro's contribution in drawing attention to the parallels between Napoleonism and modern tyrannies, he fails to make explicit what distinguishes the former from the latter. Napoleon intended a social revolution different in kind from the National Socialists. The light of Joly and the Saint-Simonians reveals a profound difference between the goals of Napoleonism and Hitlerism. The former can in no way be represented as the latter "in a diluted form." Napoleon may be said to accept certain "humanitarian" aspects of the "liberal-humanitarian" tradition in adopting the relief of man 's estate as the social goal of his authoritarian politics. In fact, it is this element of that tradition which has risen to the status of a practical religion, having the amelioration of the lot of the poor as its central tenet.

In alluding to Napoleonism as merely the herald of Hitlerism and its weaker nineteenth-century version, Schapiro fails to appreciate the truly radical nature of National Socialism and is guilty of confusing the proper understanding of the two phenomena. National Socialism may be said to reject the whole "Iiberal-humanitarian" tradition of which Napoleon accepts and elevates a part. According to the Nazis, "1932" effectively "repeals 1789," that is to say, a revolutionary tradition that was advanced in certain elements of the thought of the Saint-Simonians. [24]

The National Socialists would reject what we have described as the "humanitarian" aspects of Napoleon's policy as a perversion of the natural order, which has the strong serve the weak. For the Nazis, this would represent the extreme of Western decadence by instituting a rule marked by hedonism and animated by a form of "pity" that is elevated to the status of a new religion. Certain historical interpretations, (Guerard's, among others), have insisted upon the "weak" but "well- intentioned" motives of Napoleon. Indeed, he wasn't made of the stuff of Julius Caesar, or his uncle, Napoleon I, not to mention Hitler and the stuff of Julius Caesar, or his uncle, Napoleon I, not to mention Hitler and the Nazis. [25]

An interpretation that simply sees in Napoleon III the premonitions of Hitler fails to grasp what made the latter unique. In rejecting Western tradition, it was not a conservative reaction that was intended but something revolutionary in its own right. The Nazi revolution wanted to go beyond even nationalism and the nation state in erecting a new form of hierarchical rule, universal in scope, which contemplated the reinstitution of slavery in the service of "higher culture" and the racially pure.

In the end, Guerard's and Schapiro's interpretations grasp certain aspects of the phenomenon of Napoleon III but fail to appreciate others that would make their analyses more accurate and complete. Guerard may be criticized for failing to grasp and appreciate the implicit tyranny in the autocratic principles of the emperor because he passionately shares his social goals. Schapiro may be criticized for failing to appreciate those goals, which crucially distinguish Napoleonism from Hitlerism and make it perhaps an early prototype of modern despotism but one that is less radical and "softer." The valid parts of their theses point to their mutual deficiencies and a more comprehensive interpretation that Joly would admirably serve. The Saint- Simonian elements in the Second Empire begin to resolve the ambiguities in the person and policies of Napoleon III. Through such a line of interpretation, the sphinx's riddle begins to be solved, as the two most disparate interpretations are reconciled from its point of view.

Marxian Class Analysis

Beyond Guerard and Schapiro, Karl Marx explains Napoleon's election and consolidation of power in terms of the structure of French society at the time, with particular emphasis on his relation to the peasantry. Such is the authority and influence of Marx that Marxian class analysis has dominated much of subsequent scholarship. Though they would insist that the key to Napoleonism lay not in relation to the peasantry but to other classes, subsequent scholars are perhaps not aware of their deeper indebtedness to Man. Their scholarship shares a view of history as materially determined and dependent on the alignment of certain social forces, however differently interpreted.

According to Marx, an understanding of the underlying social forces can resolve the sphinx-like character of the Second Empire and the apparent contradictions in the rule of Napoleon III.

The conditions of peasant life in France are the solution to the riddle of the general elections of December 20th and the 21st which carried the second Bonaparte to the top of Mount Sinai -- not to receive laws but to give them. [26]

The Eighteenth Brumaire traces the changes in the condition of peasant life between the Empires and its critical political effect. By the revolution of Napoleon I, serfdom was abolished and the peasant, formerly tied to a manor and lord, became a freeholder. The roots of this system of small landholding struck deep and "cut off the supply of nutriment upon which feudalism depended." Peasant landholding bred a staunch sense of individualistic proprietorship. This development represented a social advance over the feudal system. It served as a buffer for the bourgeoisie in guaranteeing against a reactionary coup de main of the old overlords.

By the time of the Second Empire, a system that had first enfranchised and enriched the French country folk now served their exploitation. The Revolution had put in place a system that encouraged free competition and enterprise in the rural districts where agriculture was practiced. It was productive enough to permit the initial growth of industry in the cities. However, the inevitable result, over two generations, was the pauperization of the former peasantry and their exploitation, not by feudal lords, but by the urban usurer. Real modernization in the countryside was effectively blocked by the hidebound conservatism of the peasant who resisted the application of new techniques of cultivation and husbandry .The patchwork nature of the countryside and the small scale of the farming enterprise proved resistant to market forces that would break the hold of that tradition.

The inefficiencies of petty landholding became markedly apparent in its incapacity to support the needs of the burgeoning towns. The local proprietor found it increasingly difficult to support himself and his extended family. His sons were drawn to the ranks of vagabondage or absorbed into the lumpenprolelariat of the city .The local proprietor found himself bilked by the creditor and increasingly pressed by taxation resulting from the revenue needs of an increasingly sophisticated society.

In trying to maintain the capitalist order, the bourgeoisie became the natural ally of the priest and the prefect against the schoolmaster and the mayor. The former impresses upon the peasant the fatality of its lot and preserves it from the influence of more enlightened educators and popular representatives. The credulous masses could be made to see the cause of their ruin not in the social system but in "higher" causes, the chastening hand of God that brings to bear a fateful drought or a bad harvest.

Prior to 1848, there were fewer than 250,000 voters in France. In the 1848 elections to the Constituent Assembly, the franchise reached over 9,000,000, which included the peasant as the vast majority. Such a constituency was prepared for the appearance of a Moses who would lead them from the wilderness, which was, in actuality, the social condition of modern society that resulted in bondage to the bourgeoisie. The sudden leap to universal manhood suffrage created a political void that was filled by Louis Napoleon and "the magic of his name."

Napoleon III ended the political confusion by authoritarian leadership. His "commandments" had for their object the defense of the status quo and the values of traditional French society. The first two "idees napoleonnes" called for the defense of private property, in deference to the interests of the petty landowner, and in defense of the interests of the bourgeoisie. In occupying such ground, the second Bonaparte wanted to extend the principles of the first Bonaparte. Yet, subterranean forces of society had changed so as to render the politics of Louis into a feeble caricature of his uncle, a farcical parody that stood, not for revolutionary advance, but for the more retrograde elements of society.

In Marx 's analysis, the peasantry constitutes a kind of "class" with distinct interests that distinguish it from other classes in society. Their farms are of a size to support only extended families and allow for no division of labor or scientific principles of agriculture. A score of such plots, like individual atoms, form a larger entity, the village. These combine in turn and form aggregates called departments, through which a strong central authority, inherited from the feudal past and modernized to suit the times, exerts its control. To accede to this power is the prize of all revolutions and has a compelling allure for conspirators and romantic adventurers like Louis Napoleon.

Although the peasants share certain interests, they find no organized expression. The poor quality of communications and social intercourse that marks life in the countryside requires that their interests be represented. They cannot assert those interests in their own name. Napoleon III appears as that representative but also as a "lord and master" whose authoritarian rule will protect the peasant against other classes.

Nurtured in superstition, the peasants accept the second Bonaparte as the Messiah and the savior of the old order established by the first Napoleon, whom, by this date, they have come to deify. According to Marx, the political influence of the peasantry find its "last expression" in the autocratic regime of Louis Napoleon. It is through an appeal to the peasant that Napoleon not only comes to power but rules, always dependent on satisfying such a constituency for the continued popularity that is required in his plebiscitory rule.

In the cities, the threat from revolutionary elements likewise drives the bourgeoisie to the strong government of Louis. In a view unclouded by sentiment or superstition, the bourgeoisie sees in Napoleon the savior of the same order that supports their interests and an instrument that could be wielded to serve their will. In thus coming to the defense of property in the city and countryside, Napoleon seemingly stands for a harmony of interests that coalesced behind him in the landslide ejection of president in December 1848.

Yet, what served for purposes of election is the cause of the contradictions of his rule. In fact, the interest of the peasants no longer coincides with the interests of capital and the bourgeoisie, as during the reign of Napoleon I. The election of Napoleon only masks the profound conflict of interest that marks the relation of the bourgeois to the peasant and which rends society at large. It is a conflict characterized by the exploitation of the city over the countryside, and, within the city, of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

The peasants would find their natural allies in the more progressive elements of the urban proletariat. The coalescence of such forces promises to end the contradictions that rend society by the radical overthrowing of the capitalist order that exploits them both. To forestall this, Louis wants to keep the interests of the different classes distinct and increase their separate dependency on the central power of the state. "That is why his government alternatively seeks to win and then humiliate this lass or that." It is a policy that can give to one class only by robbing another. While Louis wants to be the benefactor of all lasses, his policy ends up arraying them all against himself.

The contradictions inherent in such a rule reflect the contradictions inherent in society and create the pressure that leads to the enormous expansion of the state's power. The dictatorial coup d'etat of 1851, which ended the Second Republic, is an event that proceeds logically from what is required to maintain the social order. The after-effects of this event are constantly felt as Louis is forced to a "miniature coup" every day against the forces that would gather strength and align themselves against him. He attempts to resolve the contradictions of society through. continual conspiracy. [27]

The expansion of state power finds expression in a huge bureaucracy, "well fed and well dressed," which creates an "artificial caste" alongside the other classes of society. For them, the survival of the regime is a "bread and butter question." Their goal is to draw "Califomian prizes out of the state treasury." This caste attempts to regulate the pressures of class conflict that plays itself out within the constraints of autocratic rule. The culminating point of the "idees napoleonnes" is the preponderance of the army, whose ranks will be filled with members of the proletariat. The most incendiary elements of modern society are coopted and enlisted to the established order and framework of traditional French society. At the same time, the material interests of the working class are appeased through certain social policies.

Under the First Empire, the army was filled with "the flower of peasant youth" who defended the glory of the nation and a revolution through which they came to own their land. The narrow lives of the peasant were sublimated to a nationalism that appealed to their collective selves as it advanced their private interests. The army of the Second Empire was less sublime in seeking to expand the coercive powers of the state. Its "heroic" feats consisted of police raids to bring the peasantry to heel.

A huge bureaucracy and army, supported by a burdensome taxation, puts further internal pressure on the regime. This is relieved by an imperialistic policy that risks defeat in foreign wars and only delays the dissolution of society .In any event, the state finally exhausts itself and falls along with the social structure that supports its heavy weight. Before it collapses, the opposition of the state to the true interests of society is displayed "in all its nudity." This robs the state of all dignity and renders it loathsome and ridiculous.

Marx sees a revolution forthcoming. In fact, the regime of Napoleon III prepares the way for revolution that alone can resolve the profound contradictions in his empire. Put in place by Louis is a centralized structure of government that is indispensable to modern society. The industry and commerce that temporarily thrive under this strong government augment the ranks of the working class in whose interest the revolution will come and under whose direction it will fall.

By revolution, this class will inherit the machinery of government that will construct a new society based on common property and a rule in the common social interest -- what came to be called the "dictatorship of the proletariat." It is his class alone that as a true social mission. Its consciousness is formed by common productive enterprise in the increasingly interdependent network of industrial society. Its self-interest serves the common interest in a revolution that unleashes the unlimited productive capacities of society with a view to benefits shared by all productive members according to their needs.

The intellectual vanguard of the working class is already present in France and is articulating the growing consciousness of the working class and the future demands of history. Napoleon's string of decrees can only forestall the day of the "true socialists." They have correctly perceived the material nature of history that demands the social revolution that Napoleon III attempts to thwart.

In this light, history proves itself to be quite cunning. Napoleon has served the future in spite of himself. He has augmented the ranks of the working class and helped create the government machinery that their leaders will employ after the revolution. Moreover, his parody of Napoleon Bonaparte has freed the nation from the yoke of tradition in robbing imperial rule of all sublimity. The future will rise upon the ruins of the militarist and bureaucratic government "which was created as a counterblast to feudalism," the "last expression" of which was the regime of Louis. Napoleon III displays the bankruptcy of state authority nakedly revealed to be a conspiracy against society itself. In the absence of a tenable tradition, France will be open to the future, which proceeds according to principles of scientific history, articulated by Marx himself.

While a Marxist revolution will end the contradictions of society, it may also be seen to reconcile the elements of "tragedy" and "comedy" in the human condition that Marx sees reflected in the respective politics of the two Napoleons. The "absolute moment" in the historical process that Marx occupies comprehends the necessity of both Empires in the construction of the future. The "tragic" failure of the first Napoleon is mimicked in the "comic" failure of the second. But from the most comprehensive view, the ultimate triumph of history robs the human condition of its tragic dimension, while it makes less ludicrous what serves a higher purpose.

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Part 2 of 2

The Marxian Historians

Prominent later historians followed the lines of class analysis so richly articulated by Marx but found the essential character of the Second Empire revealed, contrary to Marx, not in relation to the peasantry, but in relation to other classes. Alfred Cobban, for example, sees the Second Empire as basically a bourgeois regime! [8] It is significant that his analysis places due emphasis on the Saint-Simonians in whose economic programs are found the elements that inspire and give coherency to Napoleon's policies. Yet, Cobban fails to elaborate adequately on this connection and is as guilty of distorting Saint-Simonian thought as he is the Second Empire. Cobban shares with Marx a conception of history as materially determined. According to Cobban, the "only real and worthy" achievement of the second Empire was in economic affairs and this justifies his preoccupation with these matters. He is mistaken when he attributes a similar frame of reference to the Saint-Simonians.

Cobban states that Saint-Simon 's "best title to fame" may be found in a little parable. Suppose France were to suddenly lose leading scientist of all kinds, artists, architects, doctors, bankers, merchants, iron-makers, industrialists in every branch, masons, carpenters, and workers in every craft. The country would obviously "sink in the scale of civilization." But, on the other hand, suppose it kept such men but lost the whole royal family, all the ministers and councilors of state, prefects, judges, archbishops, bishops and other ecclesiastics, and, in addition, ten thousand of the wealthiest landlords. A humanitarian country like France would grieve such a loss, we are told, but it would not be materially affected. "In other words," Cobban sums up, "Saint-Simon was asserting the primacy of the productive classes of society, of economic over political ends." [29]

Cobban's "summing up" gives a misleading impression of Saint-Simon and is a bland misreading of the radical implications of the parable. Saint-Simon was not merely asserting the primacy of economic over political ends. Far-reaching political implications are suggested by the parable, even as outlined by Cobban. The expendable personages represent whole classes and institutions that formed the bulwark of traditional French society. The "simple" parable perhaps hides a most revolutionary politics. This would see in the elimination of the traditional elements of French society an advance of civilization, if replaced by a regime that institutes the rule of the few based on talent and their capacity to contribute to society as a whole, morally, intellectually and, of course, economically.

Cobban has interpreted Saint-Simon as asserting the primacy of the productive classes of society that includes "artists" as a constitutive element. Of all groups in society, they are the least apt to being defended on such grounds. In such an anomaly, we are alerted to Cobban's distortion of Saint-Simon, despite what the "simple" parable intends to show.

According to Saint-Simon and his disciples, a more rational and integrated mode of production was a key to the attenuation of the class struggle in the present and to material progress in the future. However, they were not asserting the primacy of the economic or material to other modes of human activities that embrace the sentiments and intellect of man. In fact, material and scientific progress, if not subordinated to moral ends, would lead to social conflict. The artist, albeit "unproductive" in the "material" sense, was to serve the reintegration of the individual to society by giving "spiritual" expression to the religious ideas that bind society and give it moral direction. In giving preeminence to the material aspects of Saint-Simonianism, Cobban is guilty of neglecting the more important elements and objectives of that philosophy that guide economic policy.

Cobban's narrow focus aligns the Saint-Simonian movement with the class interests of the bourgeoisie which, indisputably, but not exclusively, gained by a number of Napoleon 's policies. According to Cobban, bourgeois financiers did not promote the Second Empire, it was the Second Empire that promoted the bourgeois financier. As Joly indicates, in the third part of his work, the advance of commerce and industry was essentially dependent on the availability of credit and capital. During the Empire, there was founded the Compteur d 'Escompte, the Credit Fonyier, the Credit Agricole, the Credit Mobilier -- a virtual financial revolution, whose institutions are still in existence today. This helped furnish the commercial and mortgage finance to promote, among other things, the system of railways, roads, steamships, the reconstruction of cities and towns, and the launching of various industrial and agricultural enterprises.

A wave of economic expansion followed with impressive gains in the production of steel, coal, and iron that were to help build the modern infrastructure of France. Inspired by a Saint-Simonian plan of 1832 and put into effect by Baron Haussman, an ambitious public works project sanitized, modernized, and redesigned the city of Paris. This included the renovation of the Bois de Boulogne and the widening of avenues such as the Champs Elysees. As mentioned before, its architectural achievements were crowned by Charles Gautier in the construction of the Paris Opera. Saint-Simonian universalism was later to inspire the construction of the Suez canal and an end to a world conventionally conceived as divided by an East and a West.

Joly's Dialogue shows a greater comprehension of the Saint-Simonian elements that, Cobban insists, stand behind Napoleori's policies. He is blind to the despotic elements in Napoleon's regime, the immense ambition of the Emperor, and the historic dimensions of his project. These cause us to question a "bourgeois" interpretation of the Second Empire as far too limited. As he has over-simplified the Saint-Simonian parable by neglecting its revolutionary implications, he has done the same with the phenomenon of the Second Empire itself. Cobban downplays certain policies that served social interests beyond those of the bourgeoisie and included the mass of workers in particular. The presence of these elements too would cause us to question an interpretation that conceived of Napoleon as exclusively serving the bourgeoisie and as the historic representative of their material interests.

For Henrick Nicolaas Boon and others, Napoleon inaugurated social legislation that rendered him as much an innovator in such fields as "Bismarck and Cavour were in politics."3o Among other things, Boon cites the development of credit unions, the improvement of housing, the founding of retirement funds, and aid to cooperative movements as evidence of his enlightened stance. He also reads into such policies certain political motives. Napoleon was attempting to lead and channel the aspirations of "the growing multitude" in order "to satisfy their legitimate material and social demands, thus rallying them to the Empire and turning their minds away from politics." [31]

For all of Boon's fine appreciation for the innovations of Napoleon, whom he likens to a "Columbus," he is perhaps not appreciative enough of the real nature of his founding which lies in visionary policies, beyond counterrevolutionary objectives. For Boon, Napoleon was perhaps following England's example in these innovations but was "ahead of his times" in France in seeing the need for new policies and institutions which did not materialize until a later age. However, the opposition of Napoleon to the English system, both politically and socially, is made abundantly clear in Machiavelli's articulation of the policies of the Emperor in the Dialogue in Hell. There, Napoleonic politics is revealed as the very antithesis of Montesquieuan or English liberalism.

Full Circle?

Marx's deprecatory view of Napoleonic politics as essentially reactionary and in the service of traditional French society is perhaps not too far distant from that of Zeldin and others who credit the Emperor with no political vision at all. He was commonly perceived, from the escapades of his youth, as having a romantic temperament bent on adventurism. For Zeldin, success was his goal and this depended on knowing which way the wind was blowing. In sum, he was probably a determined believer in the merits of neither liberalism nor despotism but "an opportunist above all else." [32]

Through seemingly contradictory analyses, we might also arrive at Zeldin's rather disparaging conclusions. This would mark a return to the beginnings of Napoleonic historiography, which has none too high an opinion of Louis, but as a summary of the reflections of the most eminent commentators on the times. [33] The Emperor's actions would, by turns, have for their motives policies that are at once reactionary, economically progressive, and counterrevolutionary, as respectively revealed, for example, in the essays of Marx, Cobban, and Boon. We would perhaps distill from such policies the incoherence of the romantic adventurer with no grander vision than what inspiration and intuition prompted in changing circumstances. To say the least, this asserted lack of coherent policy would contrast most sharply with the view of Napoleonism in the Dialogue in Hell, which integrates economic, political and social realms into a world-historic project.

That Napoleon III was an opportunist, as charged by Zeldin, can not be denied. However, such an accusation is not very revealing as it legitimately can be leveled against any and all political men. That he was a mere opportunist would be denied by Joly, not as his defender, but as part of a more serious charge. He is accused of harboring Caesarian ambitions and of seeing the time ripe for launching a project to satisfy them. He is a worthy object of study, even in his ultimate failure, as reminding of the eternal possibilities of the Caesarian threat, when towering ambition is engaged in the founding of new modes and orders and given opportunity in the critical moments that history will always offer.

In this light, Louis is certainly not a determined believer in the merits of either liberalism or despotism, as commonly understood. Those like Zeldin end up accusing Napoleon of rank opportunism because the real nature of his enigmatic policies escapes them. They may in their own right be accused of the same culpable naivete that infects the Montesquieu of the Dialogue when he addresses the politics described by Machiavelli from the perspective of certain doctrinaire notions of liberalism and with certain limited notions of despotism. It is precisely this limited perspective that Joly wants to educate in his description of the modern Caesar.

In the final analysis, Napoleon is an opportunist and perhaps a romantic, but these qualities are nourished in the element of Saint-Simonian philosophy. The deepest insight into his romanticism might likewise come from a Saint-Simonian source. His founding recurs to certain elements of the ancient city and the life of the Middle Ages as necessary to a new world order -- the reestablishment of the "organic" conditions of politics in modern times.

The Saint-Simonian thought that Joly offers as the most fundamental and revealing phenomenon of Napoleonic politics meets the charge of mere opportunism. In it we find an appeal to the principles of progress and order and a politics that would want to resolve their disparate claims. The failure to appreciate this politics, by Zeldin and others, would have it understood as mere dalliance, indicating an on-again / off-again love affair with liberalism and despotism, when its real goal, at least in the mind of the convinced ideologue, is an historic solution to the human problem consonant with the highest of ambition, which neither liberalism nor mere despotism can serve.

The analyses of Cobban and Boon help to correct the ultimately disparaging conclusion of Zeldin. In the economic policies that supposedly served the class interest of the bourgeoisie and the social policies that benefited the working class, they respectively point to Napoleonic policies that attest to a broader vision. Such analyses would also help to correct Marx's view that Napoleon's policies are reactionary and promote the interests of the most retrograde elements of French society, especially the peasantry.

Such scholars emphasize unique aspects of Napoleon 's policies and present partial aspects of his rule that may be harmonized in the Saint-Simonian perspective of Joly. Thus, we find in Joly, as in Marx, that the root strength of Napoleon's plebiscitory rule lay initially in the peasantry. The Emperor does not want to disturb the prejudices of such types, nor their gullible natures, in order to impress upon them the tenets of a new religion with himself as a secular kind of Pope, a new "Moses," as Marx called him. Interestingly enough, for Marx too, the perpetuation of the regime depends upon preserving the vitality of the religious impulse but to mask and exculpate the "sins" of an exploitative and reactionary society, not to introduce the conditions of a new "organic" and final order.

Through his banking revolution, the Emperor intended to lay down the basis of a sound infrastructure, the precondition for an enormous burst of productive activity. But this was not, as Cobban suggests, to serve the class interests of the bourgeoisie. The Emperor was not intent upon expanding the parameters of private enterprise but to begin a move toward centralizing the economy and exerting social control. Indeed, the social policies to which Boon points show that the regime was not narrowly partisan and bourgeois in Cobban's sense.

In emphasizing the different policies of the Emperor from the point of view of classes other than the peasantry, Cobban and Boon point away from Marx's interpretation. Marx legitimately stands criticized for placing too much weight on the relations of the Emperor to the peasantry to explain the whole of the regime. Moreover, they also point away from the deeper influence of Marx in an interpretation of history that is obliged to see politics in terms of material class interests. Such a class analysis shows itself incapable of grasping the elements of the Saint-Simonian revolution which the Emperor, according to Joly's analysis, tried to effect. It requires taking the "idealist" view of history seriously and shows that the historian's task to understand the past in its own terms is perhaps ill-served and distorted by Marxian reductionism, as powerful a mode of analysis as it is, particularly in the thought of Marx himself. [34]

At first view, Joly's portrait of Napoleon III is most distant from the portrait of Victor Hugo. Parenthetically, the editor of Napoleon III -- Buffoon, Dictator, or Sphinx? is probably least sympathetic to Hugo who appears too splenetic and ready to dismiss the Emperor. However, a close look at Hugo in the light of Joly reveals striking similarities and a common intention in their respective publications.

Both perceive the despotic character of the Emperor and its novel elements. Moreover, both endeavor to galvanize republican opposition to his rule, though they take different routes. Hugo puts emphasis on the petty qualities of the despot which are set in relief by a comparison to ancient despots who showed a grandeur of soul even in the depth and extent of their criminality.

The focus of Joly's work also brings to consideration the differences between ancient and modern despotism. As we have shown, Napoleon recurs to certain ancient or medieval elements in his rule in order to advance upon the Enlightenment project and erect a new and final historic order. Put another way, the distinguishing characteristic of the despotism of the future lies in the role that ideology plays in investing modern despotism with a revolutionary project of millenarian objectives. Joly's Dialogue, between the two giants of modern thought, Machiavelli and Montesquieu, reintroduces us to the themes of political philosophy and, through the doctrines of the Saint-Simonians, to newer currents of thought that open the way to modern totalitarianism. It is in such terms that we are perhaps provided the best access to the study of such a phenomenon.

_______________

Notes

1. Samuel M. Osgood, ed., Napoleon III -- Buffoon, Modern Dictator, or Sphinx? (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1966). The text includes an Introduction that presents the editor's view of the problem of Napoleonic historiography.

2. I realize that I open myself to ridicule by associating the post-moderns with the search for "metaphysical foundations" of anything. They are almost by definition opposed to all "metaphysics" and any "foundational" mode of thinking. We are forced to oxymoron to characterize them (and this would probably not bother them either since they believe that "binary oppositions," embedded Western categories of thought, are radically suspect anyway). In this light, it may be better to speak not of their search for "metaphysical foundations" but of their search for "anti-foundational foundations." If it is still impossible to speak of them in such a way, we might prefer to see their thinking, not as "foundational" at all, but as "strategies" to "destabilize" "logocentric" thinking per se. At end, one wonders why they do not apply their thinking to themselves. Why is their thought not a mere "will 'o the wisp" like all other thought, i.e., radically questionable?

In any case, the post-moderns see history as radically illusive. The traditional historian in his attempt to recover the past ''as it was" is therefore horribly (or comically) deluded. For Derrida, for example, "difference" and an inevitable "slippage" in language make effective "communication" between generations impossible. He speaks of the "aporia" of discourse and the disassociation of words from any "reality." For Foucault, changes in "power relations" make different eras fundamentally incomprehensible to one another. We can not come to know what is "true" about the past or to independent judgments of what each era holds as "true." Language and ideas privilege certain hegemonic groups and are themselves instruments of power. "Knowledge" is not liberating; it is, rather, "authoritarian," or "phallocentric." They are among the now many thinkers who have forced the adjective "totalitarian" from its political context. It is the quintessential description of Western "logocentric" thinking, we are told. The upshot of all this is to disestablish all prevailing notions of "truth." One may naively ask where this leaves us, and the West? There is irony in the fact that such thinkers assume the heroic pose in purging political life of all possibility of heroism. Are they not, in spite of themselves, leading a generation by the hand to the land of the "Last Man"? See Gertude Himmelfarb, "Postmodernist History" in On Looking into the Abyss (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 131-163. To my mind, there is no greater defender and practitioner of "the traditional approach" (she would call it the "modern" approach) to historical studies than Ms. Himmelfarb. In case it is not clear, this is what I argue for in this chapter. She made even clearer to me the importance of the issue.

It is interesting that she sees Theodore Zeldin as a transitional figure from "traditional narrative" history to post-modern historical thought. Among other things, he is regarded as one of the most authoritative historians of the Second Empire. She writes the following:

Theodore Zeldin was one of the first historians (as distinct from philosophers of history) to launch a serious, sustained assault upon modernist history. That history, he claimed -- traditional narrative history -- is dependent upon such 'tyrannical' concepts as causality, chronology, and collectivity (the latter including class as well as nationality), To liberate history from these constraints, he proposed a new history on the model of pointillist painting, composed entirely of unconnected dots. This would have the double advantage of emancipating the historian from the tyrannies of the discipline, and emancipating the reader from the tyranny of the historian, since the reader would be free to make what lines he thinks fit for himself. (138.)

It is perhaps no coincidence that we will come to know Zeldin as the interpreter of Napoleon III that saw no core to his personality or programs.

Osgood's case is interesting in light of all this. He comes before the post-moderns took hold and falls somewhere between the traditionalist approach and the more radical brand of historicism. His thinking, typical enough, shows how the profession could easily be seduced by the latter mode of thought.

3. See Samuel M. Osgood's Introduction to his Napoleon III, xi.

4. This mode of thinking originates with Thomas Kuhn. I do not know if Osgood had him in mind. Perhaps. Kuhn's idea of a "paradigm shift," originally referring to the process of scientific discovery, has been embraced by many post-moderns as indicative of the process of Western thinking tout court, historical thinking included. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

5. Contemporary "historians" are not as loath as Osgood to enter the realm of fiction. I mention in this regard Edmund Moms and Rigoberta Menchu. In his "biography" of Ronald Reagan, the former forthrightly blended a fictional account of the President with the massive facts of his life. "Wholesale history; retail poetry," we might say. The dangers of this should be obvious. In a very real sense we are our past. To understand ourselves and guide our future, we must come to understand it honestly. The traditional historian endeavors to do this, fully conscious of the important role he or she plays in service to the truth and civilized life. The traditional disciplines of the craft, which favor objectivity, are what makes his enterprise so difficult (and rewarding). Himmelfarb deserves extensive quotation here. See On Looking into the Abyss, 136, where she writes the following:

Critical history puts a premium on archival research and primary sources, the authenticity of documents and reliability of witnesses, the need to obtain substantiating and countervailing evidence; and at a more mundane level, the accuracy of quotations and citations, prescribed forms of documentation in footnotes and bibliography, and all the rest of 'methodology' that goes into the 'canon of evidence.' The purpose of this methodology is twofold: to bring to the surface the infrastructure, as it were, of the historical work, thus making it accessible to the reader and exposing it to criticism; and to encourage the historian to a maximum exertion of objectivity in spite of all the temptations to the contrary.

The Morris approach leaves history open to all those with interests apart from history as traditionally conceived. These interests might be ideological or monetary, to provide grist for Hollywood's entertainment mill, for example. In the case of Rigoberta Menchu, who went into denial about her fictional distortions of what happened in Guatemala, it may be fame and notoriety. Who knows? The point is that we risk losing contact with the noble civilizing functions of the historian's true enterprise.

I was much moved by an anecdote about Richard Nixon that Henry Kissinger related. (Most university people I know can see nothing poignant to anything relating to Richard Nixon. ) During the crisis .that saw him leave the presidency, he forced Kissinger to get on his knees with him. The God he was praying to was really the God of History. He would correct the wrongs he thought he had suffered in life. (Does this remind us of certain parts of the Dialogue? Well, it's in there.) His contributions to his country would eventually be seen in a correct light. This God of historic judgment, ruthlessly honest, is the best we have until the appearance of the real God and the Last Judgment. It chastens even the most hardened of historic actors. Contemporary historians don't know what they are doing when they fool with it. See Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999); Rigoberta Menchu, I Rigoberta Menchu An Indian Woman in Guatemala ed. Elizabeth Burgos-Debray; trans. Ann Wright (London: Verso, 1984). and David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999). Stoll was prompted by injustices to history to write his expose.

Parenthetically, isn't what these authors do similar to what Hitler did wi th the Protocols? What the Protocols reveal is "historically" true even if the "Wise Men of Zion" never really historically met. In other words, it doesn't matter if what someone vouchsafes is factually a fraud.

Richard Crosby put things very well when he said to me that once upon a time we found the implications of the factlvalue distinction disturbing. "Now not only are values the realm of fantasy, so are facts."

6. Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 1-5. The Osgood excerpts are taken from Victor Hugo, "Napoleon the Little," in The Works of Victor Hugo (New York: Nottingham Society, circa 1907), VIII, 15-20; 192-195.

7. Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 23-33. The Osgood excerpts are taken from Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Bromaire of Louis Napoleon, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: International, 1926), 23-24; 128-144.

8. See the selection from Charles Seignobos, "The Magic of a Name," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 14-16. Osgood's translation is excerpted from Seignobos's essay in Histoire de France Contemporaire, ed. Ernest Lavisse (Paris: Hachette, 1921), VI, 124-127.

9. To make light of Louis's "failures" in such a way begs the facts -- massive facts -- of his reign. Many other scholars join Guerard and see the Emperor even in failure as basically "well meaning" (as if this were enough to exonerate him). It was Louis who wanted to end the order of Vienna that was imposed on Europe after the defeat of his uncle. This order was designed to prevent the emergence of another Napoleon. And Louis was, well, another Napoleon. His ambitions brought military defeat to France and Europe was cast loose from Richelieu's moorings. From being divided and weak, Germany became united and strong. French dominance on the continent ended.

Both he and Bismarck were playing with fire. Bismarck played better. Conflagration came only after he departed the scene. Louis played with it less well. Destruction came immediately to France. His failures were not trivial, nor can we sympathize with the most egregious of them. Joly wrote in 1864, when Louis dominated France and was extremely influential in Europe. He did not contemplate the end in his book. In the spirit of Joly, we would be tempted to say that the failure of great ambition (as with Lenin and Hitler) has great consequences. Meanwhile, with the end of "Vienna, " new monsters were slouching their way into Europe. See "Two Revolutionaries: Napoleon III and Bismarck," in chapter 5 of Henry A. Kissinger's magisterial work, Diplomacy (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 103-136.

As ruler of the "superpower" on the continent, "Le Petit" thought he "stood taller than the rest" and that his way would lead the way for the rest of the world. The quick reversal of his fortunes might serve as a cautionary tale for us today.

10. Who is not familiar with the same arguments today regarding the internet and the "new" technologies. We are told that they herald the promised land of universal democracy to which everyone aspires.

11. See the selection from Albert Guerard, "A Forerunner of Woodrow Wilson," in Osgood, Napoleon III, 57-65. This is excerpted from Albert Guerard, Napoleon III (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1943), 176-192; 221-222.

12. See J. Salwyn Schapiro, "Heralds of Fascism: Louis Napoleon Bonaparte," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 81-87. This is excerpted from J. Salwyn Schapiro, Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism (New York: McGraw Hill, 1949), 320-331.

13. See Lynn M. Case, "A Voice in the Wilderness," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 65 70. This is excerpted from Lynn M. Case, French Opinion on War and Diplomacy During the Second Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), 270-277. Some post-moderns, unlike Case, may be said to consciously engage in the "trivialization" of history. If history is ineluctably a matter of "interpretation," everything can be turned to material for the irony and wit of the "interpreter." Up until now, they seem to have stopped short at the Holocaust, although I believe it is only a matter of time until some "transgressive" hero of thought really cashes in on the Holocaust's potentialities.

14. The "Chekovian romantic" label belongs to A. F. Thompson. See his "From Restoration to Republic" in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 99-102. This is excerpted from an essay with the same title in France: Government and Society, J. M. Wallace-Handrill and J. McManners, ed., (London: Methuen 1957), 212-217.

15. Plutarch wrote about heroes and has us experience some of the most exalted times that humans ever knew. Tacitus, on the other hand, wrote about "dark times." In The Annals he wrote that history's "highest function" was to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds." The commemorative task fell largely to Plutarch. Tacitus's task was emphatically the more melancholy one. See The Annals, tr. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (Chicago: Great Books, 1952), XV, 60.

Anything this author knows about Tacitus is thanks to the late James Leake, to whom he gives belated thanks. The moments when the human spirit finds a hospitable field to display all its rich potentiality are rare, he once said to me. For the most part, human beings must operate in "dark times" (a phrase he used often in his thesis). They are forced to carve out a niche in the world where, unmolested, they find what dignity and fulfillment they can. The grandeur of Tacitus, according to him, was to reveal the actions of virtuous men against a somber background. What they could do was limited, but it shone, nevertheless -- perhaps, all the more. Seneca is the model.

I remember the enthusiasm when Jim discovered the works of a Tacitus scholar who lived behind the Iron Curtain. In a deft use of Latin quotes and footnotes, he esoterically conveyed the moral truths about the squalid regime he lived under. What could a man do in such "dark times"? As a functionary, soften an inane or brutal directive? Or, as this man -- a scholar -- let the light of the truth shine wherever possible? He had put his "message in a bottle" and cast it forth. No better person in the whole world could have picked it up.

For scholars like these, the truth was something sacred, I feel compelled to say, not a toy to be "deconstructed" and played with.

16. Nichomachean Ethics, 1094b10-25 and 1098b25-30.

17. Aristotle's comments in his Poetics are very pertinent to our discussion of Osgood and contemporary historiography. They may help "educated men" to better understand that "degree of precision" which the study of history admits.

In this regard, it is interesting that, for Aristotle, Homer's muse is superior to Clio. That is, poetry is more philosophic than history. This seems counterintuitive. After all, history deals with what really happened and poetry belongs to fiction. But being true to the facts of the past forces us to acknowledge a large element of chance in human affairs. And what belongs to chance can never be fully intelligible. The best poetry excludes chance and can be more "meaningful" than history, not to mention the kinds of lives we all lead today.

These remarks have benefited from Laurence Berns's fine essay "Aristotle's Poetics" in Ancients and Moderns, Joseph Cropsey ed., (New York: Basic Books: 1964),70-87, esp. 80ff.

18. This is Iggers's characterization in his Introduction to The Doctrine of Saint-Simon, xiii.

19. See Theodore Zeldin, "The Myth of Napoleon III," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 88-94. This is excerpted from an article of the same title as it appeared in History Today, (February 1959), vii, 103 I 10.

20. See Adrien Dansette, "Louis Napoleon: A Vignette," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 13. Osgood's translation is excerpted from Adrien Dansette, "Louis Napoleon a la conquet du pouvoir " in Histoire du Second Empire (Paris: Hachette, 1961), I, 384-386.

21. See A. F. Thompson "From Restoration to Republic," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 102.

22. See Schapiro, "Heralds of Fascism," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 86. Among others, Schapiro cites the Nazi Franz Kemper in this regard.

23. Schapiro, "Heralds of Fascism," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 86. (Schapiro's emphasis).

24. Among other things, such statements indicate the millenarian aspects of Nazi thought. The democratic thrust of history since 1789 was not inevitable or definitive.

25. Unlike Xenophon's "humane" hero, Cyrus the Great, who manically gloated over the sight of battlefield cadavers, it is interesting that Louis Napoleon reportedly wept when he contemplated his casualties. He was not like his uncle in this regard, or like Caesar. Joly would probably interpret such tears as of the "crocodile" variety. I'm not so sure. Napoleon I was said to have said: "I have an income of two hundred thousand men a year." And "what does a man like me care about a hundred thousand lives?" See Guerard, Napoleon III, 172 and Xenophon, Cyropaedia I. iv. 24.

26. Marx, "Eighteenth Brumaire," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 31.

27. Francois Mitterand wrote a rather splenetic book criticizing DeGaulle and the Fifth Republic called The Permanent Coup d'Elat. The title is obviously inspired by Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire. As President, however, he sounded more like Goldilocks. When he then spoke of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, he said "this one is just right."

28. Alfred Cobban, "A Bourgeois Empire," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 75-80. This is excerpted from Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France (Middlesex, G.B.: Penguin Books, 1961), II, 160-169.

29. Cobban, "A Bourgeois Empire," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III,76.

30. Hendrik Nicholas Boon, "The Social and Economic Policies of Napoleon III," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III 41-50. Osgood's translation is excerpted from Hendrik Nicholas Boon, Reve and realite dans I 'a'uvre economique et sociale de Napoleon III (The Hague, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1936), 65-70; 146-156; 167-168.

31. Boon, "The Social and Economic Policies," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 44.

32. Zeldin, "The Myth of Napoleon III," in Osgood, ed., Napoleon III, 90.

33. One would hesitate to say that Napoleonic historiography has returned to a disparaging and dismissive view of Louis Napoleon, given the publication of Philippe Seguin's book, Louis Napoleon le Grand (Paris: Grasset, 1990). In his polemic with Victor Hugo, it is curious that the head (in a double sense) of the RPR would want to burnish the memory of the Emperor. Certain "elective affinities" exist, perhaps, between them. General De Gaulle sheared France from its imperial holdings. But he designed the Fifth Republic so that France could act in the world with "imperial weight." He carried himself, at least in official duties, in a regal manner. A certain predilection for the grandeur of a powerful, if not imperial, France perhaps finds its way into the thinking of the man who carries on the General's legacy. This predilection is far from foreign to the contemporary French political class.

Moreover, the RPR today sees France as going through an "industrial revolution" as profound and consequential as that over which Louis presided. Such revolutionary change will "come from above" and remain solidaire with "the most numerous and poorest classes." At first view, the orientation of the RPR appears to be not too distant from that of the nineteenth-century sovereign, benignly interpreted. Such a view fails, I think, to take the more controversial elements of Napoleonism into account, or fails to understand them. To my knowledge, as Seguin has pointed out, there is still no public building, no street sign, and no metro stop named after Louis Napoleon in Paris. (I once had an undistinguished meal at a bistro near the Butte Chaumont appropriately named Napoleon Ill. It was the Emperor who had changed this former garbage dump into an urban park that could be characterized as, well, "proto-Disney," a Maxwell Parish fantasy come to life in concrete and papier mache. His "imaginative" reconstruction of the castle ruins at Pierrefond clearly anticipates "fantasyland." Saint-Simon has a charming street named after him in the twentieth arrondissement studded with pavilions that would have housed the "poorest and most numerous classes" in the nineteenth century but would now cost a fortune. And metro stops are festooned with the names of prominent nineteenth-century Saint-Simonians.) Historical amnesia seems to surround the Emperor. I find it curious and interesting that someone like Seguin takes pains to end the anathema.

34. One of the burdens of this work is to show that "ideas," contrary to materialist historiography, do indeed have consequences, as do historic personalities and political phenomena, in addition to classes and social phenomena. Raymond Aron, among others, had a deep appreciation for the Eighteenth Brumaire. Of Marx's works, it strayed most from the strict materialism that guided his historical view. See Daniel Mahoney and his interesting comments thereupon in The Liberal Science of Raymond Aron (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), 35. Marx once boasted that he had "stood Hegel on his head." The great sweep of history that he had understood "idealistically" had to be understood "materialistically." Recently, we have seen Hegel get back on his feet, as he now strides once again in intellectual circles around the world. For all this, Marx has not been "stood on his head," in turn. For the moment he has been pushed aside, if not toppled. See Gertrude Hilrunelfaro's essay "From Marx to Hegel," in On Looking into the Abyss, 50-73. Could it be that the long dominance of Marxian class analysis in our historical studies has received a devastating blow?

By now it should come as no surprise that I would recommend Montesquieu to fill the place in our academies that has been occupied far too long by Marx and Marxians. His capacious view of human things would release us from the straitjacket of historical determinism and economic reductionism. What is needed at the very least is a revival of the Montesquieuan spirit, a sense for the full panoply of human things, its richness, and subtle interconnections.

[admin]

Chapter Eleven: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The Discovery of the Protocols

In 1921, a British correspondent to the London Times, Phillip Graves, happened upon one of the original copies of the Dialogue in Hell while stationed in Istanbul. It is highly possible that this rare find had been transported to Turkey by a Russian emigre after the Revolution of 1917. [1] Graves was the first to make the connection between the Dialogue and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which, by the time of the discovery, had been widely published throughout the world. His own newspaper in fact had published the Protocols and had editorialized on the Jewish peril, basing itself on its "revelations."

Scholars have traced the Protocols forgery mainly to two literary works. By far, however, the Dialogue in Hell was the most prominent and substantive source. The forger's plagiarism was extensive as whole passages were copied directly from the Dialogue. "In all, over 160 passages in the Protocols, totaling two fifths of the entire text, are clearly based on Joly. In some of the chapters, the borrowings amount to more than one-half of the text, in one, (Protocol VII) to almost the entire text." [2]

The other source for the Protocols was found in a novel written four years after the Dialogue entitled To Sedan (1868). That work contains a chapter describing a secret congregation of world rabbis in Prague, a centennial event in that city's cemetery. The novel was written under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe, actually a Prussian clerk and rabid anti-Semite named Herman Godsche, who had developed a penchant for writing sensationalist literature. At the cemetery and in the presence of Satan, the rabbis, representing the twelve tribes of Israel, relate their successes since their last meeting in furthering their secret plan for world domination.

In concocting the Protocols, the fabricator combines the arguments of Machiavelli in Joly's Dialogue with some of the more lurid elements of Godsche's tale. He borrows from Joly his considerable political acumen for identifying the opportunities for modern despotism in the vulnerabilities of contemporary society but has Machiavelli's despotic cause pronounced by world Jewry who, as in To Sedan, are revealed to be in sinister pursuit of a longstanding goal of universal rule.

Konrad Heiden, who gives a leading role to the Protocols in his study of Hitler, writes of the powerful blend of elements contained therein.

Godsche's feat was childish and none too convincing. But suppose you take these rabbis conspiring in their cemetery and give them the worldly wisdom, the contempt for humanity, the seductive power of Joly's tyrant. Don't just make them avaricious braggarts, make them subtle and crafty: make them speak the accursed satirical wisdom of Machiavelli, in deadly earnest. Finally, confound the fabulous nocturnal conspiracy with an international Jewish Congress which actually did convene to discuss such sober matters as the problem of immigration. Then, we have before us, in all its bloody romantic horror, the demons of Jewish world domination gathered in a Congress and fixed in a protocol. [3]

Despite the airing of Graves's discovery, the Jewish myth did not die off. It likewise survived the 1934-35 "Bern Trials" where it was charged by Swiss Jews that the former Fuehrer of the Swiss National Socialists had been guilty of violating the law against "improper literature" (schundliteratur) by circulating the Protocols. The Court concluded upon testimony of Graves, noted international scholars, and former Russian officials:

I hope that one day there will come a time when no one will any longer comprehend how in the year 1935 almost a dozen fully sensible and reasonable men could for fourteen days torment their brains before a court of Bern over the authenticity of these so-called "protocols," that, for all the harm they have already caused and may yet cause, are nothing but ridiculous nonsense. [4]

This is in fact the reaction of any reasonable person in reading the fantastic account of the Protocols. The Court was at pains to document its fraudulence, however, given the political use to which the Protocols was being put.

Yet, like a virus, the myth proved to be extraordinarily resilient. It did not respond to the application of sensible men in 1935 because, for all its "nonsense," it was allied to strains much stronger than reason. Efforts were subsequently made to prove the Semitic ancestry of the obscure Joly and to trace his peculiar insights to "diabolical Jewishness." [5] But for Hitler and others, the findings of the Bern Court were not telling, even in the face of a documented forgery.

The "inner truth" of the Protocols was proof against those who sought to discredit the document's authenticity. This was Hitler's already stated position in Mein Kampf and was offered in response to Graves's original discovery. It redeemed the Protocols from such levels of attack, however reasonable, and aligned the document with esoteric truths that only Hitler's demonstrable genius and claimed affinity for such matters could sufficiently plumb. [6]

The Fabrication of the Protocols

With the Dialogue identified as the source of the forgery, the events behind its fabrication were pieced together over the years in a collective effort of scholars and other interested parties. By most accounts, Ilya Tsion, a Russian expatriate and an avowed enemy of Count Sergei Witte, the liberal finance minister under Nicholas II, had come into contact with Joly's work in his Swiss exile. He adapted Joly's critique of Louis Napoleon to the figure of Witte and this version fell into the hands of Peter Ratchkovsky, who was ordered by Witte to burglarize Tsion's home to obtain the manuscript. [7]

Ratchkovsky was in Witte's service as head of the French bureau of the Ochrana, the Russian secret police, and had become a master of intrigue and forgeries. Russian witnesses at the Bern Trial corroborated testimony that pointed to Ratchkovsky as the fabricator of the Protocols. In all probability, it was under the direction of the unscrupulous Ratchkovsky that the Joly text was again gleaned and woven with the conspiratorial elements of Godsche's tale into the first version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The version that comes down to us was sponsored by the Ochrana and published in 1905. It was an appendix to a tract entitled Small Signs Betoken Great Events, The Antichrist Is Near at Hand, written by Sergei Nilus, who was personally acquainted with Ratchkovsky. This mystic's ambition was to pierce the Tsar's entourage and replace a healer of French origin as the Tsar's favorite.

Such machinations and intrigues raise the question as to Ratchkovsky's motives in all this. With the Protocols as the set-piece, no less was sought than a national counterrevolution against the inroads of liberalism countenanced by Witte. The aroused passions of the people wedded to the power of the most autocratic state in Europe were to help serve the reactionary reconstruction of Russian society. It was in the atmosphere immediately following the debacle of the 1905 war with Japan that the Protocols were enlisted to enflame the masses and, through Nilus, to subvert the thinking of the Tsar.

Walter Laqueur, who became convinced of the crucial importance of the Protocols on the Nazi revolution during his research for Russia and Germany, noted Western scholarship's failure to appreciate the strong strains of Russian influence on the formative period of Hitler's Germany. This was not the fault of Konrad Heiden who writes in Der Fuehrer that, through the Ochrana conspiracy, Russia had become the "spiritual mother country of modern fascism, as it later became the world center of Communism." [8]

The Crisis Atmosphere of Postwar Europe

Heiden reconstructs the situation in the aftermath of the Revolution and the White Russian army's retreat from the East. The sense of catastrophe contributed to the strong impression the Nilus text was to have on such men as Alfred Rosenberg. According to L. Poliakov, Rosenberg was to give form to Hitler's inchoate race hatred as one of the main ideologues of Nazism and the author of the Myth of the Twentieth Century, a work which "leads in a straight line from the Protocols." [9]

Rosenberg fled Russia during its revolution and met Hitler in Munich, itself in the throes of revolutionary unrest. He was steeped in the anti-Semitism and the anti-Bolshevism of the White Russians, many of whom later fled to that troubled city. In Nazi ideology, anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism were enmeshed. The Kremlin was dominated by Jews and conspired for world revolution in the name of Communism. Did this not lend credence to the myth of the Protocols? It seems it was Rosenberg who introduced the Protocols to Hitler, who immediately came to share the enthusiasm for its "esoteric truths." Though the Protocols myth struck deepest roots in Germany, it was widely disseminated throughout the world. Copies circulated in Boston and New York after the war. In 1920, Henry Ford's newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, printed the document in full. Since then, it has been translated in all major languages. It may astonish us to hear that Herman Cohn conjectures that the Protocols, after the Bible, was the century's most widely-read text. [10]

The universal appeal of the Protocols testifies to the prevalence of a now perhaps forgotten mood of pessimism, despair, and confusion that belonged to the subterranean level of thought in the nineteenth century only to emerge full-blown after the collective experience of the horrors of the First World War. In the traumatic aftermath of that war, moderate political regimes came under increasing strain. The fate of liberalism was sorely tested, particularly in Germany, bearing the onus of having been imposed on that country as a consequence of a defeat that was portrayed by its domestic enemies as a betrayal. A regime that struggled for the support of citizens whose allegiance was toward other forms of government was ill-equipped to handle the punitive aspects of the Versailles Treaty and to face the difficulties of the Depression. To revolutionaries of both the right and the left, the global impact of the deepening economic crisis signaled the general bankruptcy of the old order and the prelude to world revolution, the course of which found Germany in a truly pivotal position in Europe, geographically and otherwise.

The Protocols Myth as the Explanation of Crisis

The myth of the Protocols provided an explanation for the impasse of liberalism while elevating the Jew to the central role in the denouement of the world's drama. According to the Nazis, liberalism's relation to the Jew was the most revealing phenomenon of that regime. The extension of rights to the Jew was the acid test of its universalistic principles. However, the extension of such rights, according to them, actually served the Jew's ultimate plans by allowing them to work within society and under its protection to effect its undermining.

The Nazis maintained that in the person of the Jew liberal society had accepted into its fold a most intransigent enemy. Liberal tolerance is inwardly spurned and exploited by the Jew to further his secret goal of racial domination, which the crisis of liberalism and the Great Depression prepare. The rights accorded to the individual prove serviceable to the Jew, who shows that the real forces of history ultimately lie not in abstract and universal principles, but along racial lines and according to a conscious project.

The imminent collapse of the liberal order brings world domination, always the secret motive of the Jew, closer to realization. The "truth" of the Protocols offers spectacular evidence of the existence of an age-old plot. In further linking the Jew to Communism, which makes conspiracy and violence legitimate means to their political end, that plot becomes at once more real, explicit, and immediate. This enabled the Nazis to enter the contest for world domination with the Jew on distinct ideological and racial lines.

For the Communist, the class contradictions of capitalism are inherent and tied to the material conditions of society that define the workings of history. For Hitler, however, there is another reality behind the movements and conflicts of history. The existence of a Jewish masterplan, revealed in the Protocols, demonstrates the essentially conspiratorial causes of the movements of history in the light of which the momentous events of the day can be comprehended -- indeed, "small signs betoken great events."

As the active agent of history, the Jew assumes the central role of history that Communism understood to be played by cold and impersonal forces. The complexities and contingencies of history are reduced and explained by the person of the Jew who gives "meaning" to such distraught times. The "inner truth" of the Protocols opens the way to hatred and fear where we find the most potent source of energy for Hitler's historic movement.

According to Hitler, the class struggle between capitalist and Communist, which now occupied the center stage of history, was actually manipulated by the Jews. From time to time, as in the Protocols revelation, the curtain that hid them parted and gave glimpses of what Hitler in fact said existed. Wasn't the Russian Revolution in large part brought to success by Jewish Bolsheviks? And wasn't the Rothschild fortune the pillar of moneyed capitalism? Hitler's privileged perspective allowed him to illuminate for others the hidden truths that put an end to the great deception.

According to Hitler, the class struggle was orchestrated by the Jews for their own profit and eventual domination. The Red Menace strengthened the hands of capitalism led by Jewish financiers who consorted with the sovereigns of the nation states of Europe as equals. Their indifference to the plight of the working classes played into the hands of the Bolsheviks, also led by the Jews, who violently conspired against these same nation states. Society, so riddled and exhausted, would ultimately fall to Jewish direction in any case. [11]

The continued success of the Nazi movement confirmed the faith in Hitler as having apprehended the esoteric truths of history, while any reverses would also show the "reality" of the Jewish threat. Thus, the "truth" of the Protocols, if not the document itself, became an irrefutable article of faith and the linchpin of Nazi ideology.

The Protocols held a deep fascination for Hitler and his cohorts. The historic success of the Jews to survive and prosper in alien and hostile surroundings was impressive. For them, the perseverance of a recognizable "Jewish" identity throughout the history of their dispersion attested to the fundamental importance of race and "blood" inheritance. In the absence of the Nazis, Hitler thought that the future lay with the Jews as depicted in the Protocols. They represented the first historically conscious group whose plans for world domination involved the maintenance of racial purity.

Beyond their use in mobilizing a mass movement, the Protocols reflect even more fundamental levels of Nazism which touch the core of its supposed "inner truths." Hitler shares with the Jews of the Protocols a racial view of history as well as their plans for world domination. For this reason, the Protocols have been noted not only as a rationale for the Nazi movement but as a perverse source of inspiration. The delusion of universal Jewish domination became the basis of the illusion of the future dominion of the Nazis. Himmler is reported to have said that "we owe the art of government to the Jews, namely to the Protocols which the Fuehrer has learned by heart." [12]

The Deeper Connection between the Protocols and Nazism

Despite their '.crackpot manner," framed in terms of mysticism and superstition, Hannah Arendt saw the Protocols as noteworthy for "touching upon every important political issue of the day." [13] The Protocols are anti-national in principle. "The wise men of Zion" share Hitler's belief that the nation state is fundamentally unsound and that world empire will replace the present forms of political arrangements. Not content with a revolutionary seizure of power in one country, they see world conquest as possible through organization alone, regardless of the superiority of numbers, territory, and state power they face.

According to Nazism, history is not a rationally determined process. Reasonable and "moral" motives are not what move those individuals who act in history and determine the course of whole epochs. History bears the stamp of the "genius" of these individuals who share strong affinities with the "artist-creator" in their profound and mysterious inspirations and their capacity to move others. Hitler saw him.'elf in such a romantic mold even as the painter of postcards in pre-war Vienna. lf history is not predetermined in any way, it can be made. For the Nazis, the future is a project and struggle. It can be fashioned in the full consciousness of the power that man holds over it and thus offers possibilities, beyond the present debilitating moralities of the moment, that animate the strong to reassert their superiority and reclaim their right to the earth, usurped by Jewish deceit.

The struggle for the future takes shape in the light of the "inner truth" of the Protocols. Present in the world is a materially determined instinct. This is racially embodied in the Jew in its most thoroughgoing form, as a product of the exigencies of survival caused by their dispersion and unique history as a people. The Nazis see themselves as redeeming the world from a Jewish fate that is gaining through their hidden efforts, coordinated in the various key centers of the world where events have scattered them.

They want to awake the slumbering Hun and set him rampaging in a Europe once again grown soft. In the person of the Jew and what he represents, they are brought to the hatred and cruelty proper to their historic task of reanimating a "decadent" West, counter to the reigning dogmas and ethics, and toward the Nazi ideal. For Hitler in Mein Kampf, the most extreme contrast to the Aryan is the Jew.

Jewish "deceit" is more than a casual association but is rather a racial characteristic, historically conditioned. It is reflected in the Protocols in their centuries-old conspiracy that is brought to imminent success in the context of present political degeneration and international revolution. Borrowing from thought that can be traced to Nietzsche, such deceit is seen as present at the source of the common heritage of the West, the Judeo-Christian faith which, in its origins, is no more than a pious fraud, inspired by the Jews.

Through the remarkable transformation of values, implicit in the decadent Christian world view, the Jew has perpetrated the greatest of revolutions and his ultimate vengeance on the world by elevating a slave morality in the place of the master ethic, the element of his oppression. The National Socialists will bring a counterrevolution against Semitic culture that has wrongfully gained the West and subjected the strong, not by force of arms, but by false doctrine. The world will once again be restored to health and vigor as the master is called again to rule in good conscience and to inherit the earth that is rightfully his.

The Christian core of Western culture reflects those Semitic influences identified as alien, Eastern, and slavish. Herein lies the key to the history of the West that then saw in the triumphs of Communism the secular advance of Semitic culture, culminating in a universal, materialistic, and democratic ethos. This represents, not the proclaimed liberation of humanity through history, but disguised Jewish dominance and the end of higher culture, always the preserve of a spiritual elite and the exclusive legacy of the Aryan race.

The future will see the mystic bond to the Aryan and Nordic past reestablished in a counterrevolution against Jewish heritage that has dominated modern history. In the words of Rosenberg, the struggle is to "revitalize the cells of Nordic conditioned peoples; it contains the reinstatement to ruling authority of those ideas and values for which everything that signifies culture for us stems." On the deepest level, the present struggle is a kulturkampf which restores the Aryan to the proper source of his strength and identity. [14]

A "new-yet-old" type of German is called who proclaims and embodies "new-yet-old" values, the warrior ethic of the blond beast and "Nordic honor," essentially the inverse of Judeo-Christian values, identified disparagingly as humility, submissiveness, and watery compassion. The truly radical character of the Nazis is revealed in opposition to such values while engaging convictions that call for loyalty to the living ruler and the earth, redeemed for the strong.

Through world conquest, the future is to be prepared for the introduction of pure Aryan culture. While such "forward- looking" men of culture, aided by eugenicists, are already busy forming the new man, others are busy eradicating the Jew, his nemesis, from the world. The ovens at Auschwitz are the necessary upshot of their racial policies. They also mark the distance from the hold of Judeo-Christian doctrine and are the clearest manifestation of the ultimate principles of where Nazi doctrine leads.

It is in the thought of Rosenberg that we see reflected the deeper levels of the "truth" of the Protocols. Through his learnedness, the view of the Protocols takes on dimensions beyond those of a common racist tract. The Manichean, obsessive world of Hitler's anti-Semitism is redeemed in the element of kultur and the systematic exposition of racism that could contemplate the "final solution." This anchors the document in a greater reality whose mystic appeals are untouched by the revelations of Graves or evidence from a court of law that reflects perhaps liberal (and ultimately Jewish) justice but not history's "greater truths."

The Protocols Continued Legacy

Hitler was not the last to be influenced by the Protocols, or to use its teaching politically. It suffices to mention one of the spiritual fathers of contemporary pan-Arabism, Abdel Nasser, who came out publicly in support of the Protocols, claiming in a 1958 interview that it contained all that is needed to know about the Jews. Stalin used the conspiracy myth, with Jews as the agents of imperialism, to secure the execution of Jewish members of the Czech Central Committee. The myth was to serve as the pretext for a renewed terror in the so-called doctor's plot, preempted only by Stalin's death.

The myth has thus shown itself adaptable to the most diverse politics and ideologies. It has found most ready application against the state of Israel, where it emerged from the context of the Palestinian problem to take on growing influence throughout the world. In the 1967 war, translations of the Protocols were found in the backpacks of captured Egyptian soldiers. Kadhafi has sponsored its translation and distribution to the developing world. The Saudi government has handed out copies to visitors and at its embassies. Pro-Khomeni Iranians distributed it on college campuses in the United States during the summer of Israel's invasion into Lebanon.

Daniel Pipes again draws our attention to the Protocols, claiming that Arab politics have given it a new lease on life. [15] Pipes lists some of the advantages of the myth for the Arab struggle. Among other things, it makes Israel's very existence sinister. It explains away the defeats of Arabs at the hands of Israel by linking them to a movement of international force and significance. In putting Zionism in the vanguard of international imperialism, the Arab cause takes on world historic importance. This serves to keep destructive passions stimulated while it reaches beyond the region to win broader sympathies in the former colonies of the developing world. [16]

In the years following the war, relatively little notice was taken of Muslim anti-Semitism, though it appears blatantly in the charter document of the PLO. In a classic example of Orwellian inversion, Zionism is there declared to be a political movement "organically associated with international imperialism that is racist and fanatic in nature and fascist in its methods." Western attitudes changed in the 1970s with OPEC and the astounding leverage it lent to the Arab world in projecting their cause against Israel beyond the region. The world has been witness since to a progressively wider assimilation of this PLO view that gained a certain "respectability" in light of the forums where it was pronounced and applauded. In 1975, a resolution equating Zionism with racism was approved in the U.N. Assembly. In 1979, the Havana Conference of the Non- Aligned linked Zionism to hegemonism and condemned it as not only racist but as a "crime against humanity."

The Israeli people, many of whom are the real and tragic victims of racist politics, are now seen as its perpetrators. In such a remarkable perversion of thought and history, the enormity associated with Hitlerism is associated with Jewish Israel. Its conspiratorial agenda in league with the imperialist powers stifles the developing world and is matter enough to exonerate Hitler's crimes. Such thinking gives color to the PLO effort as the vanguard of an anti-fascist movement and engaged in a liberation struggle that allows them to pursue violent methods without moral taint. It is for these reasons that the revocation of the offensive clauses in the PLO charter, mandated by the Oslo Agreement, were so protracted and controversial.

These are not beliefs to be trifled with. Nor can such thinking be turned on and off, like a light switch. The tragedy is that the justice of the cause for Palestinian statehood does not need such support. Such thinking is perhaps the greatest impediment to rational dealings with Israel and the outside world upon which a secure peace hinges. [17] It infects the man in the street as well as elite opinion, as any reader of Al Ahram can attest. It forces the most enlightened leaders of the Arab world to capitulate to it and deprives these people of a future worthy of themselves, their magnificent past, and hopes for the future.

A danger in all this is to so blur and misconstrue the Hitler phenomenon as to deprive it of its horrible reality for a generation of young people who have no firsthand experience of anti-Semitism and its murderous possibilities. This has helped pave the way to a renewed and wider application of anti-Semitism promoted by both the extreme left and right as fitting in with the goals of their respective revolutionary agendas. Pipes underscores his real concern about Muslim anti-semitism as it affects Jews in the Middle East but also as it affects Jews outside the region. The Arab obsession with Israel has been fed by a fund of anti-Semitic ideas imported from Europe and is being given back to its Christian homelands, where political conditions again favor its spread. [18]

The End of the Taboo

The 1970s proved that Hitlerism and the world of the Protocols were not exorcised with Hitler's death. It was the mindset of a group vying for control in Argentina that came eerily close to gaining power. A tortured victim and chief witness to what took place there ended his days in Israel, whose relevance as a sanctuary for victimized Jews is reconfirmed by his experience as it was in the '80s and '90s to millions of Jews from the ex-USSR. [19]

France in the '80s was rocked by the rise of anti-Semitism. Public discourse, not to mention outright criminal attacks, prompted Bernard-Henri Levy to declare that "again the [anti-Semitic] taboo has been lifted: Leftists sympathetic to Third World causes worked at legitimizing anti-Semitism by linking the cause of Israel with American hegemony and imperialism. These years also saw the rise of "revisionism" -- which diminished the significance of the Holocaust or denied it altogether." "Genocide" has become the common coin of political discourse in the post-Communist world. It is heard to characterize a breathtaking variety of humanity's current and past crimes while the case of the Jews, incredibly enough, is coming to be made light of. Concurrent with all this, France saw the rise of a far-right party that winked at such things and transformed the political equation in that country for a generation.

Its success has been duplicated most recently in Switzerland and Austria, where a "Le Pen with a human face" and shorn of his clownishness became leader of the party of opposition. The party ignited political controversy throughout the EU by entering the Austrian government. This is in a country that is prosperous and secure and where historic memories alone would seem enough to inoculate against such politics. Inroads have been made elsewhere by like-minded parties in Belgium and Norway. Italy has had an established Fascist party since the beginning of the last decade. Anti-Semitism is rife in all countries of the ex-USSR and breeds in the atmosphere of dislocation and confusion that grips these unfortunate peoples. Nowhere is the mix of post-Soviet politics and anti-Semitism more potentially lethal than in Russia itself. And nowhere, outside the Middle East, does the phantasmagoria of the world of the Protocols have more palpable hold. It seems that the "new" Europe is spawning the old virulence, long thought dead, but apparently only latent.

Nor is North America immune to such currents. Violent far-right groups have proliferated there in the recent past. Some of the more unsavory aspects of the Buchanan phenomenon flirt with an anti-Semitism that appeals to such groups. The taboo has indeed been lifted in the West. Its politics will remain destabilized by such forces for a long time to come, it is safe to say.

Our situation is made even more precarious by the breakdown of the "peace process" in the Middle East. [21] No one knows the long-term geopolitical consequences of events there and how they will play out in the politics of Israel and the Arab world. A different reaction to these events can be discerned in America and Europe. Simmering violence could cause erstwhile allies to choose different sides in the conflict. Access to oil complicates matters and could prove persuasive in settling dispositions. A wider war in the Middle East is no longer inconceivable and it could occasion a truly destructive rift between the countries of the Atlantic Alliance. Given weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the sworn enemies of Israel, is even another Holocaust inconceivable? There are those who say that Israel's "obsessive" concern with security is at the core of problems which threaten it and destabilize the world. Given the history of this century and the alignment of political forces in the world today, it is difficult to withhold sympathy for this concern.

_______________

Notes:

1. Graves explained that he met a certain Mr. X (for some reason he wanted to remain anonymous), who said he was a Russian landowner with English connections. He described himself as a Constitutional Monarchist and Orthodox, who emigrated from Southern Russia after the Red takeover. He said he had bought some old books from a former officer in the Ochrana (secret police), among which was the Joly book. See Exhibit B in Bernstein The Troth About the Protocols, 259. The Ochrana had sharpened its skills in the revolutionary breakdown of Russian society that occurred after 1905 and the war in the East. It was therein that Ratchkovsky, the likely fabricator of the Protocols, operated. The Bolsheviks inherited its machinery and put it to good use for their purposes. Contemporary Russia, in turn, has inherited the machinery of the Communist secret police and is, like its predecessors, putting it to "good use." It should not be forgotten that the current President of Russia was schooled in practices now of long date.

2. Cohn, Warrantfor Genocide, 74-75.

3. Heiden, Der Fuehrer, 9.

4. See John S. Curtiss, An Appraisal of the Protocols of Zion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 93. A good account of the Bern trial can be found in Exhibit B in Bernstein, The Troth About the Protocols. Excerpts from the Times articles of June 16-18, 1921, exposing the Protocols forgery, can also be found there.

The Bern judge's sentiments are apropos of Holocaust denial. It is regrettable that sensible men are forced to address themselves to this issue. Denying the deniers gives the perverse and the malevolent a status they do not deserve.

5. Some said his real name was Molse Joel.

6. See Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Hough ton Mifflin, 1946), 307-308. There Hitler writes:

To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurt Zeitung moans and screams every week: the best proof that they are authentic. What many Jews do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brain these disclosures originate. The important thing is with positively terrifying certainty, they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people, and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims. Anyone who examines the historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of this book will at once understand the screaming of the Jewish press. For once this book becomes the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken.

Before his research on Russia and Germany, Walter Laqueur confessed that he was more skeptical about the significance of the Protocols, evidence for which he subsequently found "overwhelming." According to Laqueur, much of what Hitler says in his ..magnum opus" is based on the Protocols. See Russia and Germany, 12 and 103.

7. This has led some to surmise that the Protocols of Zion are really the Protocols of Tsion, an insider's joke which Ratchkovsky, apparently, would have reveled in.

8. Heiden, Der Fuehrur, 10.

9. Poliakov's remark is quoted in Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 180. Rosenberg wrote numerous articles touting the deep truths of the Protocols. Heiden singles Rosenberg out as the key figure in transmitting the Protocols from Russia to Germany and for introducing them to Hitler. See Der Fuehrer, 16-21. In Russia and Germany, 24, Laqueur speaks of a "strange twist" of history which saw German anti-Semitism exported to Russia in the eighteenth century and then reimported into Germany after the First World War.

10. See chapter VII of Cohn's Warrant for Genocide, "The Protocols Circle the World" for another description of exactly how the work came to be so widely read and disseminated.

It is interesting to note that Hitler had a portrait of Henrich Ford hanging in his office and liked to point it out to visitors. He also shared with Ford a vision of a yolk's wagon. This could be achieved by first reducing automobiles to simple, basic components and then taking advantage of economies of scale in Taylor-like production facilities to produce a vehicle that common "folk" -- the workers themselves -- could afford. The idea has had a breathtaking impact on the world. In late modernity, the auto is blamed for polluting our air, heating our climate, congesting our cities, and laying waste to our countrysides. In the twentieth century, Ford's idea was also at the source of what made democracies take such deep root. This helped them to withstand the onslaught from regimes such as Hitler's. It is rare, especially in politics, to enjoy an unalloyed good.

Hitler and Ford also had a similar view of "history." Each, in his OWB way, thought it was all just "bunk."

1 I. See in particular a Hitler speech quoted at length in Heiden, Der Fuehrer, 118-123.The speech can also be found in The Speeches of Adolph Hitler, tr. and ed. Norman H. Baynes (New York: Howard Fertig, 1958), I, 21-41.

12. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 360. Arendt earlier states (308) that the Protocols were "a model for the future organization of the German masses for 'world empire'." She refers o Alexander Stein, Adolph Hiller, Schuler der Weisen Die Zion (Karlsbad: 1936), as the first scholarly effort to analyze by philological comparison the ideological identity of the teaching of the Nazis. with that of the "Elders of Zion."

13. See Arendt, Totalitarianism, 358. Konrad Heiden also speaks of "their deeper, genuine content" in this regard. See Der Fuehrer, 13. According to Norman Cohn, -- the prominent part played by Joly's text in the Protocols forgery is the reason why it often seems to forecast twentieth century authoritarianism. See Warrant for Genocide, 74.

14. Alfred Rosenberg, Race and Race History and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Robert Pois (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 86.

15. Daniel Pipes, "The Politics of Muslim Anti-Semitism," Commentary (Aug. 1981): 42. His more recent book, The Hidden Hand, (New York: Saint Martin's Griffin, 1996) provides fuller elaboration and documentation of themes discussed in the essay. The subtitle of his work is "Middle East Fears of Conspiracy." Pipes is not very popular in circles I have recently had contact with. I think of him as the Kenneth Starr of Middle East scholars. In the face of intolerable conduct and denial from those in responsibility, he lays out in considerable detail the twisted and loopy thinking they engage in. Partisans of those he targets therefore do not like him. America, of course, is not free from the grips of "conspiracy thinking." Deep trauma for a people is the breeding ground. The assassination of John Kennedy was an episode in American history, yet it continues to spawn a staggering amount of "theories," not to mention movies that could genuinely be called "loopy." The trauma in the Arab world has been longstanding, not episodic, and there are very real reasons that explain such feelings. I would like to draw attention to Chapter 3 of The Hidden Hand, "Greater Israel," as particularly pertinent to what is said here. Among other things, it would have alerted us to the tenuousness of the Arab / Israeli "peace process," given the thinking that is prevalent in the area, among "front line" peoples and the region's "core states" alike.

16. Taguieff, drawing upon the scholarship of Bernard Lewis, among eminent others, makes the same points in Chapter VII of the first volume of his work Les Protocoles. See that chapter -- "Avatars du Myth Dans le Monde Arabe: La Nouvelle Carriere des Protocoles" -- and a chapter in the second volume by Yehoshafat Harkabi, "Les Protocoles Dans L 'Antisemitisme Arabe," for detailed discussions of the spread of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world.

17. Hear the Ayotollah Sayid Ali Khamanei:

There is evidence which shows that Zionists had close relations with German Nazis and exaggerated statistics on Jewish killing. ... [Zionists did this] as a means to attract the sympathy of public opinion ... paving the way for the occupation of Palestine and justification for Zionist crimes.

Sadly, such thinking is not confined to the leader of Iran. The Khamanei quote was reported by Reuters 25 April 2001.

18. Pipes, "The Politics of Muslim Anti-Semitism," 42.

19. The interview with Levy was conducted and reported by Steven McBride, Christian Science Monitor, 12 January 1983, B3.

20. See Jacobo Tirnmennan, Prisoner Without a Name/Cell Without a Number, tr. Toby Talbot (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 74ff.

21. Oslo was supposed to bring peace within the time frame of a decade. It is ominous now that Jewish leaders and intellectuals speak of the necessity to return to the mindset of 1948 and also speak of the possibility of a repeated destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. When Arab leaders and intellectuals now speak of the political task before them, they reach back to the crusades and a centuries-long struggle as the most appropriate analogy for their situation.

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Appendix: Macaulay's Machiavelli

What Thomas Babington Macaulay has said about Machiavelli has been very influential. Indeed, echoes of it can still be heard today. It is found in an essay that was written in 1828. This was when publication of Machiavelli's complete works appeared in Paris. It was, we presume, a notable event, given the anathema, then about 300 years old, attached to such a personage.

What is valuable in the "Memoir on Machiavelli" in the Bohn edition of the Florentine's works, already mentioned, comes from Macaulay. I also have the suspicion that Joly could at least read English and find it likely that he read Macaulay's essay. At the very least, Joly would place Macaulay "among those who have read and understood Machiavelli" and not among the "vulgar" interpreters. In any case, Joly's view of the "real" Machiavelli stands very close to that of Macaulay. It is for this reason that I beg the reader's indulgence for a brief excursus on Macaulay's Machiavelli.

Macaulay's antiquarian researches unearthed an amusing reference to Machiavelli in a "poem" called Hudibras. This following jingle appears there in Part III Canto I:

Nick Machiavelli had ne'er a trick
Though he gave his name to our old Nick.

The "poet" is heir to a now even longer tradition that associates the surname of Machiavelli with "knavery" and makes his Christian name synonymous with the "devil."

For reasons we will explore, Macaulay does not find it strange that "ordinary readers" of his day regard the author of The Prince as "the most depraved and shameless of human beings." Still, it seems "inconceivable" that the .'martyr of freedom should have designedly acted as the apostle of tyranny." (Joly's Montesquieu expresses the same thought in almost identical terms.) Macaulay writes a bit further on:

The whole man seems to be an enigma, a grotesque assemblage of incongruous qualities, selfishness and generosity, cruelty and benevolence, craft and simplicity, abject villainy and romantic heroism.

This encapsulates the mystery of Machiavelli that Macaulay proposes to resolve in his essay. The publication of Machiavelli's complete works would then be launched in a proper way, a way that would allow Macaulay's generation to come to a true appreciation of the Florentine and, after all these centuries, to once again find delight and profit from him.

After briefly treating and dismissing other "learned interpretations" (including Francis Bacon's), Macaulay will demonstrate that Machiavelli can only be understood by reference to "his times." (Again, this is what the Montesquieu of the Dialogue also says.) The "real" Machiavelli emerges only against the background f a sensitive interpretation of the Renaissance and a sympathetic understanding of the political predicament of Florence and Italy in the sixteenth century.

Briefly, MachiaveIli stands at the first dawn of modernity. He is a product of urban life in a city recognized as preeminent for its wealth and civilization, even among other similarly privileged cities in Italy at the time. There, the mind found itself nourished .in one of the richest intellectual soils ever known to mankind, either before or after. It could flower untrammeled, in a place where authentic talent was honored, almost worshipped. It was in Renaissance Italy that free and full expression was given the whole range of human phenomena -- the low and the high. And Machiavelli equally delighted in the depiction of both extremes.

The contrast with life beyond the Alps is sharp. There, the monarch's court dominated and cities, such as existed, were pitiable sights. Life was lived according to certain "forms," practices inherited from the past and rooted in force and superstition. Life outside the court was stupifyingly ignorant and poor.

If, again we may speak in such a way, the "tragic flaw" infecting Italy stemmed from what made life there so exceptional. The civilized pursuits of urban life left no time for the brute-like martial virtues, exclusively cultivated in the North. In many particulars, the city-states of Renaissance Italy find their closest parallel in the ancient Greek city-states. However, the latter maintained their martial spirit by necessity, that is to say, because of the presence of the war-like Sparta and a large body of restive slaves in their midst.

Italy, like Greece at the time of her decline, eventually became dependent on mercenary soldiers for her defense. She fell victim to invasion and, by turns, was forced to submit to the "brutality" of Switzerland, the "insolence" of France, and the "fierce rapacity" of Arragon. They fought the overwhelming force with the best arms they had, cunning and duplicity. The cultivated and refined Italian stood in relation to his conquerors as the cultivated and refined Greek stood to the Roman. Each disdained the other, but for exactly opposite reasons.

This is the experience that Machiavelli lived and it explains both his person and his writings. He sought to expel the barbarians in order to secure civilization for Italy and his people, as he knew it. The "true" Machiavelli is "the patriot." And his patriotism is elevated by its links to higher human concerns. He lived exclusively for his country and to protect a way of life mortally threatened by outsiders. To achieve his ultimate end, he suffered and compromised much of what he held dear. His persona] tragedy was to live at the end of a grand epoch and to die with the consciousness that his life's enterprise was a failure.

According to Macauley, Machiavelli had his faults, but certainly not those which the "vulgar" think. More precisely, he had "a single defect" but a "most mischievous one."

The great principle, that societies and laws exist only for the purpose of increasing the sum of private happiness, is not recognized with sufficient clearness. The good of the body, distinct from the good of the members, and sometimes hardly compatible with the good of the members, seems to be the object which he proposes to himself. Of all political fallacies, this has perhaps had the widest and most mischievous operation.

In sum, it seems Machiavelli's "defect" was that he was too patriotic in seeing the interests of his country as taking precedence over the happiness of its members -- including himself, we might add. If the virtues of men in the ancient city were derived from "love of country," as Montesquieu claimed, he might be characterized as virtuous in this sense. But, Macauley seems to imply, like Montesquieu, that the ancient city has passed and such virtues are no longer appropriate for truly modern men. Machiavelli's mode of thinking is now "fallacious," if indeed it could ever have been fully defended.

The Renaissance did not last, of course. The Counter-Reformation set in and fixed the reputation of Machiavelli ever after. He became the convenient scapegoat for an era that the Church now repudiated and condemned. But Renaissance Italy saw Machiavelli differently, not as a monster, but as one of its most beautiful products. The moral horizons of the two historic epochs that separate Machiavelli and Macaulay are dramatically different and Macaulay's whole essay can be seen as trying to revive and defend the earlier perspective that formed Machiavelli. He says some startling things and in the most beautiful prose. For brevity's sake we will mention only one, but it is particularly illustrative.

Macaulay claims, astonishingly, that if we saw things like Machiavelli's contemporaries, that is, with all the clarity of these clear-sighted men, we would to a remarkable degree switch our sympathies from Othello to Iago. Iago's "virtues" -- wit, judgment, psychological acuity -- would be more obvious. Othello would inspire "nothing but detestation and contempt." In a similar vein, he tells us, if we lived in fifteenth century Italy, we would better appreciate the qualities of Francesco Sforza, an upstart "hero," -- clanless, lawless, and hearthless -- and depreciate those of Henry V, a mere hero of the (much disdained) "North."

Can Macaulay be serious in heaping admiring praise on iago and so disparaging Othello? The play is about jealousy, not just Othelllo's but Iago's. It is hard to avoid the terms of modern psychotherapy to capture the bent of such a small man with such monstrous, "green-eyed" obsessions. Furthermore, is it possible to put Sforza in the same league with the great-souled Ha]? He speaks of lago's "virtues" without speaking of the perverted use to which they were put. What about Henry's "wit," "judgment," and "psychological acuity?" In Falstarrs protege, they are no less formidable than the same traits found in Iago. But they are put to noble use in founding a truly greater Britain. [1] At end, if all this is an indication of the moral sensibility it takes to redeem Machiavelli from his anathema, clearly something is wrong.

Essentially, Macaulay deals with the shocking things found in Machiavelli by telling us, reassuringly, that they are not really shocking after all. In effect, "this is how people thought back then. Open minds sensitized by history would see things so." This is a lamentably weak, if not "vulgar," argument! Are we really to believe that everyone back then was a Machiavellian? Can anyone read Machiavelli's works and come to the conclusion that he is dealing with a common mind? That, ] maintain, is inconceivable, regardless of when he was read, back then, in the nineteenth century, or even now.

I do not want to be snide in dealing with such a worthy and eminent historian. But I think we can discern in the mild "criticism" that he does make of Machiavelli, a hidden praise of the liberalism of nineteenth-century England. Following Macaulay and accepting momentarily his view that moral perspectives change radically with the times, we might be tempted to say that it is the experience of nineteenth century England that crucially shapes the historian. Machiavelli's "mischievous defect" was that he did not clearly enough see what any nineteenth-century liberal clearly saw, that government was meant to serve the "interests" of society -- the happiness of the individual, however defined. "Hear! Hear! Score one for the political institutions of England!" And score two for its religious arrangements -- the Anglican Church that shelters its people from ultramontane obfuscation, which, among other things, clouds our mind concerning the question of poor, misunderstood Machiavelli.

I have great reservations about Macaulay's thesis, and that of Joly, which stands so close to it. As was said with regard to Joly, to want to turn Machiavelli into a liberal robs his thought of all its moral ambiguity as well as its majestic heights. For sure, he is concerned about the people's interests. A great teacher I knew once remarked that the whole of democratic politics begins with several lines in Chapter IX of The Prince. But the teaching of Machiavelli is decidedly more oriented (if not exclusively so) by concern with the "few," the natural princes of our race (Moses, for example) and "rare" moments, such as political foundings. They are really worthy of attention for they form the horizon in which we all live. He speaks to the rare men -- those not satisfied with an ample meal, a warm bed, and the envious notice of a neighbor -- and he speaks to them about glory. It too has its exigencies, though "happy" men don't feel them. And a politics that neglects these exigencies is incomplete, impoverished, truncated, and vulnerable. [3]

We can not simply ignore the shocking things Machiavelli says and recommends. Nor can we dismiss the concerns they raise as a product of vulgar minds not yet free from Romanish obscurantism. With Machiavelli, we are in the presence of one of those rare individuals. Macaulay would have us think of him, but for a common defect, as a "jolly good fellow." (It is even a "defect" that, paradoxically, does him honor). But I don't think a nation, like Britain, of such decency and propriety, would, then or now, accept what Machiavelli says as quite "cricket." [4] Nor would the country of Shakespeare easily come to such unseemly interpretations of his thought.

I sense that Machiavelli would smile at his scolding for his "mischievous defect." The Church's ban deals with far weightier matters. Its gravamen speaks of the soul and this helps put things in proper perspective.

Macaulay remains a truly grand historian and a sublime writer. However, I see the essay on Machiavelli as perhaps the exception that proves the rule of his worthiness. Machiavelli has disturbed his normally sure judgment. He always has this effect on his readers. It's part of his timelessness.

At end, we should not be so hard on old Macaulay if the historical net he fashioned failed to catch Machiavelli. He's a slippery kind of guy. I suspect that those who have engaged in the chase and really got hold of him are not the same persons that started the hunt. I also suspect that these very few individuals would be loath to tell all about the prize they caught. [5]

_______________

Notes:

1. During the war, Winston Churchill was said to have attended a performance of Henry V in London. His box hovered close to the stage. The actor playing Hal (Sir Laurence Olivier, I believe) complained that every time he was about to deliver Henry's stirring lines, he could hear Churchill's deep and gravelly voice mumbling the words just before him. If the voice belonged to another person, one could imagine the actor stopping in mid-sentence, glaring up, and asking for silence. The point is that at Britain's "darkest hour," indeed our darkest hour, we would be surprised, to say the least, to find the great man sustaining himself with the words of Francesco Sforza. Churchill saved the regime Henry helped found and immortalized the glory of that "blessed plot" that harbors a "happy breed of men. "

2. I used to hear this argument in the classroom almost daily. It is also the argument of the "cultural relativists." I often found the "openness" that is this latter group's boast leading them to a defense of the most questionable, not to say heinous, practices of our species. At end, they are not really "relativists." "Openness" is their absolute openness to the point of vacuity.

3. Abraham Lincoln speaks eloquently about the moral ambiguity of men who have glory as their ruling passion. He explicitly draws attention to Napoleon, who, like Caesar, was willing to destroy a republic and enslave free men to satisfy his ambition. Joly sees his nephew as a pretender to the same "tribe."

When Lincoln wrote the following words, the founding moment in America had passed. That "field of glory" had been "harvested." The question that the country faced was whether or not that founding would last. Lincoln deserves extensive quotation.

But new reapers will arise, and they will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up among us. And when they do, they will naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have done so before them. The question is, can the gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle[.] What! Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memories of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attache to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.

Distinction will be his paramount object; and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm, yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

Lincoln's words are impressive, not to say prophetic and poetic. As usual with him, lofty thoughts find the simplest and homeliest of expression. He gives a homily for democratic ears. Yet, it is absolutely devoid of the slightest tinge of preachiness or flattery. He says only a "general intelligence" can save our republic. All over America "experts" are redesigning our educational systems to better conform to the "Internet age." They should listen to Abe. (No doubt Lincoln felt the ambition he so eloquently speaks of).

For many reasons, this writer has peculiar satisfaction in ending his book about despotism with references to Churchill and Lincoln. For those who periodically feel the need, there's no better tonic than contemplating their words and lives to restore faith in humanity.

Lincoln's words are found in a speech he gave when he was a relatively unknown Illinois politician: "Address before the Springfield Young Men's Lyceum" in 1838 entitled "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions." It can be found in The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln, Richard N. Current ed., (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 11-21.

4. Though if we are to believe the scandals now said to infect this peculiar and incomprehensible sport (throwing matches, fixing scores, bribing umpires, etc.), it might be just that.

5. Macaulay's essay on Machiavelli can be found in Macaulay, ed. G. M. Young (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press: 1967) 235-269. For those who get it into heir head to track down Machiavelli, there is no better guide than Leo Strauss. See in particular his Thoughts on Machiavelli (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969).

The supreme neocon guru is Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who taught politics for many years at the University of Chicago, and later at St. John's of Annapolis. Strauss was a Marburg Kantian of the Herman Cohen school who did his doctorate with the irrationalist Ernst Cassirer. Strauss studied for two years with grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, which he procured with the help of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Among Strauss's students were Alan Bloom, the author of the Closing of the American Mind, and Harvey Mansfield of Harvard. The Straussian-neocon network is now extensive, and stretches over three generations. Neocons are famous for helping one another up the career ladder, and for teaching courses based only on neocon texts. They are narrow-minded, sectarian, and essentially ignorant of philosophy and history. They are an ideological faction, often a fanatical faction. We are talking about Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Luti, Schulsky, Scooter Libby, Cambone, Hadley and others who run the Bush administration. Neocons outside of government include Perle, Woolsey, Irving and William Kristol, Norman and John Podhoretz, Saul and Adam Bellow, and so forth. The older generation of neocons were often Trotskyist communists; they have retained Trotskyite theories like the notion of competing elites; the neocons see a battle between the liberal elite and themselves as central to the political process.

-- "9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA," by Webster Griffin Tarpley

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Index to Dialogue In Hell

Adige, 128
Agathocles, 9
Agesilaus, 130, 132
Alexander the Great, (also, Alexander,
Alexander of Macedon), 9, 127,
148
Alexander VI, 138
Alfred the Great, 130
Alps, 127
Amur, 127
Aristotle, 23
Asia,30, 149
Athenians, 26
Augustus. See Caeser, Augustus.
Austria, 17
Baltic, 128
Barbarossa, Frederich, 12
Barras, Paul, Vicomte de, 25
Belgium, 17
Boileau, Nicolas, 128
Bonaparte, See Napoleon 1.
Borgia, Cesare, 8, 9, 45, 77, 96, 138
Bossuet, Jacques Benigne, 90
Brutus, 10
Byron, 76
Caesar, Augustus, 9, 11, 52, 57, 127 ,
148
Caesar, Julius, 9, 11,44, 127
Caesarism, 94; of Late Empire, 27
Caeser. See Caeser, Julius.
Caligula, 34, 90, 136
Cannes, 128
Catholicism, 95
Cato, 12
Charlemagne, 9,34, 51,128, 136
Charles the Wise, 148
China, 27, 36, 71
Chinese, 27
Christ, 135
Christianity, 26, 36,94
Church, 95
Clovis, 9, 34, 51, 128, 136
Constant, Benjamin, 67
Constantine, 136
Constitution of the United States, 51
Court of Rome, 95
Cromwell, Oliver, 130
Cyrus, 148
Danube, 128
Dialectics, 9
Diderot, Denis, 10
Dion,147
Dubois, Guillaume, 96
Egypt, 127, 149
Encyclopedists, 12
England: 17, 19,23, 11,0,116
Enlightenment, 24
Europe, 7, 10, 11,15, 17, 18, 21, 23,
30,40,52,75, 99, 104, 106, 107,
128, 134, 138, 139, 145
Florentine Republic, 7
France, 12, 17, 19,21,26, 29, 71,76,
82,84,94, 133
Frederick II, 51
French Revolution, 31, 32
Ganges, 127
Gardens of Rucellai, 45
German Confederacy, 17
Germany, 12, 27,76, 138
Gonzalo of Cordova, 9
Gospels, 94, 95
Gracchus, 130, 132
Great Wall of China, 127
Greatness of the Romans and Their
Decline, 57
Greece (also Greek Republics), 11, 27
Hannibal, 127
Helots, 133
Henry IV, 141, 148
Holbach, Paul Henri, Baron d', 10
Holland, 17
Holy Scripture, 34
Holy See, 95, 96
Hugh Capet, 9, 34
Hydra ofLerna, 65
Incas, 127
India, 27, 36
Italian Republics, 12
Italy, 17,27, 76, 95, 138
Jacquerie, 134
Japan, 27
Julius II, 8,12
Lauzon, Antonin, 1 48
LeoX, 12, 89
Louis IV, 12
Louis XI (also Saintly Louis, and Saint
Louis) 9, 130, 149
Louis XII, 8
Louis XIV, 12, 128,129, 136, 148
Louis XVI, 148
Louis XVIII, 26
Dialogue in Hell
Lybia, 127
Lycurgus, 51, 130, 132
Lysander, 9
Machiavelli: on the army: reform ot;
133, usurper's blood pact with, 44-
46, on the budget process and how
to manipulate it, 111-118; the
building policy of, 129-130, 134-
135; on centralization as the
salvation for modern societies, 27;
on Christian periods, 27; on
conspiracies and secret societies:
how to neutralize them, 76-79, how
to make use of them, 100; on the
coup d'etat: the one "little thing"
and one "big thing" to follow, 45-
46; on the countenance of the
prince in detail, 131-147; and his
encounter with Montesquieu, 7-8;
enigma of life of; 7-9; on factions
in contemporary society, 43-44; on
"genius" as the sine qua non of
rulers, 49; on history and its cycles,
26; liberty and critique of, 27-28;
the Papal policy ot; 93-96;on a
police state and how to erect it, 97-
101 ; the praetorian guard of, 133;
on the public debt and new
methods of deficit financing, I 18-
125; on popular sovereignty: and
its incompatibility with
representative government, 25-26;
on the press; measures to defend
against, 63-68, and the uses to
which it can be put" 69-75; 117-
120; on mass society and its
character, 24,27; on the
Constitution; reform of the popular
Assembly, 54-55, refonn of the
Judiciary, 80-81,83-85, 100-101,
reform of ministerial responsibility,
53, reform of the Senate, 57,
ratification by means of plebiscite,
50-51; on reform of other
institutions and practices: the
Council of State, 59-60, 84, the
Public Ministry and sovereign
immunity, 82-83, the Comptroller
and Board of Auditors, 111, 118;
the new modes and orders of: a
"sketch", 38-42, the ways of
proceeding to, 38-41,44-45, 52,
61-61; on social groups and
institutions: the clergy, 93-96, the
militia, 91, the law profession, 91-
92; universities 92; the "theory of
force" of, 9-12, on universal
suffrage: as the basis of the new
constitution, 50-51, and how to rig
votes, 86-90; on the working class
masses: 24, 27, 48 and its
relationship to the prince, 44, 46,
105-106, 129-130, 136-137,146;
on the thought and character of the
works of, 9-12, 18-19,
Maistre, Joseph de, 51
Mandragola, 76
Marquis Hugo, 19
Medici, 8
Mesopotamia, 127
Middle Ages, 15,18, 22
Mississippi, 127
Montesquieu: on authority, divine and
human, and their respective checks
on despotism 32-33;on borrowing
and sinking funds arrangements,
116; on budgeting in modern-day
states, 108-116; on Christianity and
1iberty, 26; on commerce and
industry: effects on modern
societies, 36, as great moral ideas
coming from Christianity 36; on
despotism: the economic and
financial obstacles to despotism in
modern states, 103-107, the
political and institutional obstacles
to, 17-21; its impossibility in
certain regimes today, 13-16, its
poverty and the necessity to
conquer, 103-104, its transitional
role in history , 31; on France, as
immune to sinister doctrines, 29;
the French Revolution as
orientation of works of, 31; on
institutions and their progressive
refinement, 15, 18-20, 30-31 ;on
history: its tendency to perfection
and progress, 30-31, on lack of
knowledge of, 21 -22; on justice and
morality-its relevance to
politics-a rejoinder to
Machiavelli's theory of force, 15;
on liberty as a timeless desideratum
of politics, 31; on the people in
enlightened times, 24; on popular
sovereignty, rightly understood, 32;
34-36; on the press, 21 ;on the
separation of powers and the
constitutional regime, 19-21; on the
Roman Empire and what brought
its downfall, 94; and the wager
with Machiavelli, 36-37,43
Moses, 9
Napoleon 1,25;
Napoleons, 12
Nebuchadnezzar,127
Nero, 9, 34, 44, 136
Osiris, 132
Papacy,96,122
Papal States, 96
Pericles, II, 92
Persia, 103
Peru,127
Peter the First, 51,129
Phillip II, 12
Phillip of Macedon, 9
Piladus, 147
Pisastatus,11,44
Potosi (mines), 116
Prussia, 17, 138
Republic. See Roman Republic.
Robespierre, Augustin, 25
Roman Empire, 11,94, 140
Roman Republic, 11,27, 52, 57
Roman Senate, 57,58
Roman World, 17
Romans, 26, 44
Rome, Title, 52, 77, 95, 127
Romulus, 9
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 10
Russia, 30
Saint Peter, 96
Saint Vincent de Paul, 132
Salic Monarchy, 86
Sardanopolus, 148
Scipio, 127
Sesostris, 9, 51, 127
Smith, Adam, 21
Social Contract, 26
Socrates, 9
Solderini, 8
Solomon 9
Solon, 17,51
Spain, 12
Spanish, 8
Stoicism, 26
Sulla, Title, 77
Sweden, 138
Switzerland, 17
Tacitus, 140
Tamerlane, 133
Tarquin,9,11
Persian Letters, 12, 142
The Prince, 8, 9, 10, 19,21,34, 40,41,
44, 45, 48, 61, 110, 11,139, 136,
140
The Spirit of the Laws, Title, 7, 12, 17,
26, 34, 41,63, 66, 83, 88, 94, 95,
98, 103, 107, 133, 137, 147
United States, 51, 86, 110
Themis, 58
Theodoric, 9
Titus, 34
Titus Livy, 52
Turkey, 30, 103,
Valentinois, Duke de, See Borgia,
Cesare.
Varus, 128
Vespasian,34
Vicar of Christ. See Papacy.
Vishnu, 70,97
Washington, George, 50, 51, 148