Vive L'Empereur?

Well, I was born in Saint Helena. And, as John writes:

A recent Foreign Policy article by Leon Aron is illustrative of the sorry state of modern conservatism. Aron generally supports the legacy of Boris Yeltsin and the devastating neoliberal "shock therapy" that ushered in an era of gangster capitalism, complete with dramatic increases in suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, crime, and a whole host of other catastrophes, including a demographic disaster. Aron's ideology is a good example of the radical neoliberalism that is usually called “conservatism” in the United States.

Predictably, Aron takes shots at Vladmir Putin, warning of the dangers of “neo-authoritarian Putinism.” I suppose that for today’s Jacobins, Putin is the new Bonaparte. Of course, from a populist perspective, better Bonapartists than neoliberal/neoconservative radicals. At least under Bonapartist political theory, the emperor is supposed to stand above all classes and rule justly in the name of the people, not just for the benefit of a few plutocratic oligarchs.

Indeed, is it just a coincidence that both Trotskyists and neoconservatives have spilled so much ink writing against Bonapartism, and Left Bonapartism in particular? Even though the neocons don’t often use terms like “Bonapartism,” terms such as “neo-authoritarian” and even “fascist” are often used by neoconservatives to describe populist figures who refuse to bow down to the neoliberal consensus on economics and culture. Yes, they might very well be authoritarians (which, emphatically, is not the same thing as being a fascist!), but can we blame people for preferring authoritarian leaders who give them domestic peace and some measure of economic security and justice versus anarchy and gangsterism?

The Slavs in general, and Russia in particular, are the age-old gatekeepers of our Biblical-Classical civilisation, whether against Islam, against Far Eastern domination, or now also against the pseudo-West of the neocons. Something similar is true of la France éternelle, the land of Charles Martel, in which his heirs are valiantly engaged in a demographic war, not only against the rise of a semi-feral underclass which is in any case nothing on that in the “Anglo-Saxon” countries that have ceased to will the means to a properly functioning bourgeoisie and proletariat, but also against the Islamic expansionism that dismembered France as recently as 1962, when she was mutilated by the loss, not of three colonies, but of three départements, integral parts of the French state and nation.

That was the perspective from which, in and through the person of a decorated veteran of the Algerian War, she opposed the greatest catastrophe since 1962 for what was originally Christendom on three continents, covering every inch of the Mediterranean’s shores. For what remained of that, 1962 was the greatest catastrophe since 1948 (itself the greatest since 1923), and 2003 seems set to have been the greatest until a similar intervention in Syria. That will doubtless also be resisted, even if not by Sarkozy, then certainly by of la France éternelle, the conscious, literal rebirth of which will have tremendous consequences in, for example, the United Nations Security Council, where they can expect the support of Russia and will also deserve that of the United Kingdom and the United States.

A post on Friday led to some discussion of René Rémond’s theory of the three French right wings. And of course I quite concur that Orléanism as bourgeois and economically liberal is the Franco-Whiggery against which stand both the populist traditionalism of the Legitimists and the populist authoritarianism of the Bonapartists. But I would not agree that the only continuation of Legitimism is in the more-or-less Lefebvrist wing of the FN and its electorate. Although Gaullism does have obvious Bonapartist roots, just as Boulangism did, yet it strikes me that the popular followings for either and both were and are at least as much Legitimist, especially deep in the countryside.

Especially there, I do not think that the anti-Gaullist Right is entirely Orléanist, either; not for nothing did it most recently rally to a man whose name was not merely Giscard, but Giscard d’Estaing. Not for nothing did Philippe de Villers withdraw from the UDF over Maastricht as surely as Charles Pasqua withdrew first internally and then externally from the RPR. And where does anyone think that the popular constituency for an anti-Marxist Socialist Party first came from, or very largely still does come from? Mitterrand could never decide whether he wanted to be Louis XIV or Napoleon, but he certainly wanted to be one or the other. And deep down, at least, one or the other was what huge numbers of his voters wanted him to be, too. Otherwise, he would never have won. When he did win, he gave a job to Poujade, in whom the Legitimist and Bonapartist populisms of the Right met, who had endorsed him and who did so again.