has passed into a cry. But now when it comes to business, these book checks are of no use.75
Bagehot cited the recently published correspondence between William IV and Lord Grey at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, and commended the latter: here was a minister ‘able to manage his sovereign without a trace of artifice, and without impairing his peculiar patrician austerity’. But this only revealed how much had changed. ‘We talk of Mr. Disraeli’s wonderful manipulation both in the Cabinet and the House of Commons. But the very name of Victoria is not mentioned, though in 1832 William was prominent and constant in everyone’s mouth. The check of royalty upon democratic change has turned out to be a fancy.’
Yet this was exactly what Bagehot had been saying it was all along. In the English Constitution he had urged the Queen to remain ‘hidden like a mystery’, a relic, ‘not to be brought too closely to real measurement’. Now in the Economist even he lamented her powerlessness. ‘Who cares about managing the Queen? She goes away to Scotland, and the world hardly knows where she is.’76 His objection to the ‘paper description’ of the constitution was that it took the idea of checks and balances at face value. His theory, however cheeky, was not so different: checks and balances were illusions, of course, but given the mental haze of the housemaids and footmen of England, he had counted on them being effective blocks on democratic change.77
The French Constitution
The trade-offs between democracy and socioeconomic stability were even more glaring in France, where the Second Empire exercised a lifelong fascination for Bagehot. Indeed, no one in history has made the case for Louis-Napoléon – the portly, preening nephew of the first Emperor, whose rule over France ended in a catastrophic defeat to Prussia in 1870 – quite like him. Bagehot never shared the view of much of the press: that ‘Plonplon’, Louis-Napoléon’s nickname, was an adventurer and a slightly ridiculous facsimile of his famous uncle. The Economist, on the contrary, treated him as a genius, who understood the French better than an elected assembly ever could.
Bagehot began his complex love affair with Louis-Napoléon in 1851, excusing his coup d’état as the surest way to restore ‘confidence’ and ‘security of industry’ to France, in the Inquirer. At this time, Bagehot based his support for a regime in Paris that he would never have tolerated in London on the concept of ‘national character’. Frenchmen were too ‘excitable, volatile, superficial, over-logical, uncompromising’ to enjoy the same freedoms as the English.78 What the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions in Europe had ‘taught men’ was just the opposite: ‘that no absurdity is so great as to imagine the same species of institutions suitable or possible for Scotchmen and Sicilians, for Germans and Frenchmen, for the English and the Neapolitans.’79
As editor of the Economist, Bagehot was somewhat more sober in his praise of Louis-Napoléon, but consistently backed his regime in France – a restless, revolutionary nation, in need of a firm hand to force down the bitter medicine of political economy.80 What nuance did enter the picture during the 1860s had more to do with the intellectual situation in England. Here disciples of the positivist French philosopher Auguste Comte were winning converts, Bagehot worried, with arguments that rapid material progress backed by a strong central state in France held lessons for overly individualistic, market-oriented England. In 1867 Bagehot attacked these thinkers, whose support for the Second Reform Bill was bad enough. They also believed, he said, ‘Parliamentary government is complex, dilatory, and inefficient. An efficient absolutism chosen by the people, and congenial to the people, is far better than this dull talking.’81 In Physics and Politics, he named ‘the secular Comtists, Mr. Harrison and Mr. Beesly, who want to “Frenchify English institutions” – to introduce here an imitation of the Napoleonic system, a dictatorship founded on the proletariat.’82 The Economist aimed at a similar audience of Francophiles, but tried to teach them different lessons: the point was to admire the view across the English Channel, not to import what they saw there.
Bonapartism, or Caesarism, as Bagehot often called it, ensured stability now, but in the long run no one could predict what would happen after Louis-Napoléon – now Napoleon III – died; and it was too democratic, cutting out the urban educated middle class, in favour of direct appeals to the ‘dumb majority’, the ‘populace, the peasantry and the army’.83 The ultimate sign of its shaky foundations? A few times a year the Economist was confiscated in Paris. ‘At one time any article with “French despotism” in it was seized, no matter what followed, and though it were laudatory’, Bagehot complained of censors too dim to tell a friendly editor from a subversive. ‘If the Economist would make a revolution, what would not make a revolution?’84 The English system was better, then, provided the people living under it were English. Any country would be wise to adopt the ‘true British constitution’, he said – that is, the secret one – but few could.
Yet despite his attempts to warn ‘young Englishmen’ off Bonapartism, its appeal in England had a lot to do with the Economist, where each week Bagehot reported the progress of France under Napoleon III in vivid detail. In 1863 ‘The Emperor of the French’ informed English Liberals of the popularity of this ‘Crowned Democrat of Europe’.85 In 1865 it hailed him as a progressive, vastly superior not just to the ancient ‘democratic despot’ Julius Caesar but the old monarchs of Europe as well. ‘Louis Napoleon is a Benthamite despot. He is for the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.”’ His regime was renowned for ‘orderly dexterity’, his ‘bureaucracy is not only endurable but pleasant.’ And whereas the English intellect was freer than the French, and better able to ‘beat the ideas of the few into the minds of the many’, it ‘has rarely been so unfinished, so ragged’. In Parisian society ‘higher kinds of thought are better discussed than in London, and better argued in the Revue des deux Mondes than in any English periodical.’
Above all Napoleon III had kindled an economic miracle to ‘amaze Europe and France itself’. ‘No government has striven to promote railways, and roads, and industry, like this government. France is much changed in twelve years.’86 The usual objection to despotism was that it made property insecure. But the modern model erected in France had nothing to do with this ‘coarse Asiatic despotism’. The Emperor handled property rights with ‘ostentatious care’, being ‘too wise to kill the bird which lays the golden egg’, and ‘is as good a free trader as there is in France’. As for a ‘common English notion that such freedom stimulates the demand for political freedom’, Bagehot wrote, with a wink, he ‘is aware that very often it does nothing of the kind’.87
Readers could be forgiven for wondering what if anything was wrong with ‘Caesareanism as It Now Exists’, the title of one Economist leader. To Bagehot there was a major flaw, which he identified in 1865. ‘Credit in France, to an Englishman’s eye, has almost to be created.’88 In the summer of 1867 the French and Austro-Hungarian emperors seemed to be plotting a war against Prussia. ‘Every bourse in Europe is trembling’, he wrote in ‘The Mercantile Evils of Imperialism’, for their intentions were ‘incalculable’. Parliaments had their uses, after all: furnishing businessmen with ‘data to spell the future’. The Economist brimmed with illustrations of what this stunted financial development meant for France. ‘An English traveller sees nothing incalculably inferior to England. Means of communication, trade, agriculture, are all excellent.’ Only, ‘the French banking system is childish.’ Napoleon III had merely postponed the day of political reckoning that retarded the growth of financial capitalism. ‘A French banker, in answer to all comments upon his timidity, has a single reply: he says, “It is all very well for you to talk in England; but we in Paris, have revolutions; you were not here in 1848, I was.”’ Paris ‘is a great place of pleasure, – she is an inferior place of lending business.’89
Nations, Nationalism and the Franco-Prussian War
