On Caesarism

I am, of course, a Caesarist. But by Caesarism I refer primarily to the worldviews of two historical figures: Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, and Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. That is, Augustus and Napoleon III. Whilst one was one of the greatest successful rulers of history, the other is a relatively obscure sequel. I choose them as my exemplars for a historiographical comparative reason: both men were successors to mythopoetic men, namely Caesar and Napoleon, and both took them as their idols and exemplars, and they crystallised their essence into a coherent structure and created a new regime. In other words, for me, Caesarism is not about the great originals, the great men themselves, it’s about channeling the energy of a revolution into the project of a material and spiritual renaissance of society.

Augustus took all sympathisers and people who had worked with his adoptive father and organised them into a tight cohesive faction with which he propelled himself from nowhere, to Dux, and finally princeps, ending the republic and creating an empire which constitutionally would remain modelled on his regime for hundreds of years [1]. Louis-Napoleon wrote a book [2] in which he outlined the essence of his father’s ideas and wrote a compelling apologia for his necessity within world history as well as a manifesto for returning France to greatness. He failed to take the country by force so was exiled, but returned after the 1848 revolution and won the country by populism, seizing the opportunity of the chaos of the second republic to decisively win the December election, after which he created the second empire and once again by populism ratified it by plebiscite, becoming emperor of the French.

Napoleon III’s obscurity is of course due to his disastrous war with Prussia, in which he united the German states against him in a diplomatic faux pas and was consigned to curiosity afterwards. I defend him for two reasons, one I think he was one of the greatest domestic political (if not geopolitical) geniuses in history, and secondly because I think he outlines more clearly than anyone else the essence of Caesarism perfectly. Caesarism is authoritarian technocratic romanticism.

Caesarism is not a return to the old regime, it did not a restore the Roman or French kingdoms. It is not a system based on classist aristocratic privileges, it is a meritocracy [3]. Both Caesar himself and Napoléon I were military commanders of great genius, who appointed the most talented people in their campaigns and were great strategic thinkers who conquered again and again on the battlefield, both of them met their doomed fates for the same reason, they were fundamentally military thinkers. Caesar didn’t know how to win in the game of politics, so he was outmanoeuvred and stabbed to death, Napoléon didn’t know how to govern at peace time and so kept fighting wars until everyone else was able to finally crush him in a large coalition.

Both had political weaknesses but they shared the same fundamental great strategy, they weren’t reactionaries, they were men from the upper crust of society who lived in a corrupt broken system. The ancien regime and the late Roman republic were oligarchies which were failing to deal with the problems of the French and Italian people. The French regime was in deep debt and was failing to centralise and modernise, the Roman Republic was creating a downwardly mobile middle class and resentful working class native urbanites due to rich parasites making money off of cheap rented foreign labour living in the latifundia. Tensions were boiling over. Both men sided with the energy of the great masses and had a deep sense of noblesse oblige, they wanted to do what the entrenched ruling class couldn’t for the benefit of the people.

Napoléon is probably an overall more impressive figure than Caesar. Napoléon was one of the three figures celebrated by Nietzsche as great men, the other two being Goethe and Beethoven [4]. Great men are one of the things which restore our affirmationist stance towards life itself for Nietzsche. The great man pursues the will to power. The will to power is basically transforming the world such that it is in accordance with our will [5]. But one cannot simply wish the world were other than it is as if by a genie, one must force the world to change as a manifestation of one’s excellence as an agent. This is the effective excellence of the Homeric heroes, arête. Napoléon reshaped the world according to his will, as a result of his unbelievable effectiveness. He was of course a military genius, but he was also an administrative one, he travelled across Europe and installed fresh new governments which cleared our corruption and antiquated legal systems and broke old orders to replace them with new ones.

Of course there are exceptions such as his needless nepotism in Spain, but the point overall remains. After his final exile in 1815 the Vienna system was enforced across Europe, in which the old regimes were largely restored, but many of the winning powers had been forced to adapt to Napoleonic governmental reforms in order to win. And the Vienna system was hated across many countries and the Swiss readopted many of the reforms Napoléon had brought about, which in many ways triggered a snowball effect which lead to the paneuropean revolutions of 1848. Beethoven and Goethe made analogous transformations to the worlds of literature and music, ushering in the age of romanticism in art. The veneration of the great man and his vitalisation and forward thrusting effect on the world is the first aspect of Caesarism.

I want to focus on Napoléon III because he has available writings and a track record that can be extensively analysed by statistics. Louis Napoleon had a vision for France of an industrialised, connected superpower which was agriculturally self sufficient but benefited from trade, had a completed railway network, massively improved the urban living conditions of the worker and ended rural poverty. The state would intervene in the economy to stimulate growth, and direct the private sector towards the benefit of the country. The state wasn’t to be omnipotent, it wasn’t to interfere in the genius of individuals or in their property unless for the overwhelming public good [6]. In other words he was a futurist developmentalist and had a pragmatic economic plan to get there, results came first:

The construction sector boomed. The railways entered a golden age. In France, total network mileage rose from 3,248 km in 1851 to 16,465 km in 1869. The insatiable demand for fuel to support the iron and steel industry drove expansion of the coalmines of the Département du Nord. [7]

[8]

Napoléon reorganised the 28 competing rail companies into 6 monopolies and this investment and reorganisation of the rails lead to an immediate boom since the mines needed to fuel the trains and steel was needed for tracks and so forth [9]. The infrastructural connection of a country is fundamental for all future industrial development and so this regime was foundational in the creation of modern France. France would go on to stagnate and falter behind the rest of Europe until the postwar period where many post Vichy centralist planners influenced the great Gaullist projects which laid the foundation for the advanced manufacturing and energy independence for which France is proud of to this day.

You also saw the great urban planning in this period, with Haussmann being in charge of creating modern Paris with a great new centre, completely overhaul the sewage system and provide clean drinking water. The socialist complaints of pauperism and abject conditions for average Europeans were incorporated by the new regime, mass statistical analysis of people’s conditions were done by the new government, and uplifting people became a problem to solve for the government [10]. None of the great programs were achieved in the days of the republic, he needed power to solve the issues of France, and the government was planning a coup against him, but he was able to strike first. Napoléon III saw unlike his uncle the great military conquests to make, but rather saw the almost totally untapped potential for mobilisation in France of the unconnected and undeveloped countryside and successfully brought about the conditions in which that mobilisation could happen, only to have his legacy marred and repressed by catastrophic diplomatic failure.

The second aspect of Caesarism is technocracy, it is a technical and thoroughly planned approach to solving the problems of the people, of radically raising their living standards. It channels the revolution by addressing the concerns of the people, and removes the revolutionary agitation of the people by concretely solving their problems. This is achieved by a meritocratic new elite with no ideological barriers, any means and only the most effective within the technological situation the society lives within are chosen. Caesarism ends the feuding, violence and resentment of revolution by rallying the people around a great leader.

The final aspect of Caesarism is romanticism. People are united in the nation as a historical and political project as patriots. A distinct aesthetic for the regime is created which generates a sense of destiny, again Napoléon III is a shining example, second imperial style architecture as shown at the top is a glorious marvel. I have a great deal of admiration for example for the Asian statesman Yoshida of postwar Japan, Chiang Ching-Kuo of Taiwan, Lee Kuan Yu of Singapore, Park Chung Hee of South Korea and Deng Xiaopeng of China. They all feed into my belief that state centric developmentalist economics is the way forwards with their incredible material achievements. But these countries all saw their birthrates collapse in part due to the psychotic work ethics which were installed to create an absolute dedication to economic growth.

The state has to have a human face, it should represent a real people and their aspirations, there should be great cultural achievements which create solidarity and marvel, a driving forward impulse which invests people in the future of their civilisation. The system we have is broken beyond repair. It won’t confront the decline of our people, of our infrastructure, of our culture, of order as such. I’m not advocating for people to commit any violence or to try to overthrow the government, but I believe that we are heading towards the end of our current equilibrium, change of one variety or another is inevitable. We need a change in course, and it must be Caesarist.

[1] Syme, R. (2002). The Roman revolution.

[2] Napoleon. (1860). Des idées napoléoniennes.

[3] It’s very important to note that any meritocracy in practise looks very similar, but not identically, with a classist oligarchy, which is because genetics underlies social competence, see: Clark, G. (2015). The son also rises: Surnames and the history of social mobility. In Princeton University Press eBooks. Nonetheless explicit class privilege should be abolished due to the societal tension it creates, the trouble is becoming an honest society in which inegalitarian realities can be accepted and understood.

[4] The implicit lurking fourth great man is Nietzsche himself

[5] for this understanding of the will to power see: The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, Harvard University Press, 2006

[6] for an overview of Napoleon III’s economic ideas and their practical implementation see Eric Anceau’s talk here:

[7] Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 Christopher Clark. I should give extra credit to Clark as all reading on the French sources came from the citations in this book, I’m in the early stages of researching this stuff.

[8] image from Cecil O. Smith, The Longest Run. Public Engineers and Planning in France “The American Historical Review 95/3 (1990), pp. 657–92” this has an overview of the history of the influence of the excellent public French engineering Corps throughout modern French history, with it peaking in success during the Vichy, Gaullist and Bonapartist years.

[9] for an overview of the railway policies of Napoleon III see M. Blanchard, ‘The Railway Policy of the Second Empire’, trans. J. Godfrey, in François Crouzet, William Henry Chaloner and Walter Marcel Stern (eds.), Essays in European Economic History 1789–1914

[10] to see the large expansion of the role of stastisticians in the government in this time period see Alain Desrosières, ‘Official Statistics and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century France. The Statistique Générale de la France as a Case Study’, Social History of Medicine 4/3 (1991), pp. 515–37.”