evaluation of the emperor suggested a war was impossible between France and Prussia. ‘A singular mixture of tenacity and hesitation, of daring and timidity’, Napoleon III was, the Economist assured readers, the last statesman liable to do something rash. ‘We may feel very confident that he will never face Europe, or run any risk of acting in such a fashion as to combine all Europe against him.’90 In 1867 it counted on his ‘sagacity and self-interest’ to hold back the warlike masses. While the Italian liberal nationalists Mazzini and Garibaldi crafted ‘mischievous projects’ in Italy, the wise rulers of France and Prussia beamed at one another from across the Rhine.91 Just months before Napoleon III was duped into a war in which he allowed his army to be trapped and himself taken prisoner, Bagehot wrote that the future would judge him the greater of the two Napoleons. The career of his uncle was ‘more sudden and brilliant and meteoric’ but though ‘an exciting story’ it did ‘not to our minds furnish one half so singular and unexampled in history as that of the present Emperor’s plodding, painstaking, uphill, intellectual efforts to gauge and adapt himself to both the superficial tastes and permanent demands of the French people.’92
Bagehot was momentarily chastened at the outbreak of hostilities. Maybe those who had called Plonplon ‘a gambler and a desperado’ had been right after all.93 Just a month later, however, he noted that what had failed in France was not ‘personal government’ – since Prussia was ruled by a military autocracy at the pleasure of a king. It was Caesarism: a plebiscitary despotism that had cut out the middle classes, courting ‘the favour of the ignorant peasantry’.94 Bagehot remembered Napoleon III fondly at his death in exile three years later. His defeat at Sedan was excused, attributed to a painful bladder stone that had impaired his usual ‘clearness of insight’. The muse of history blessed the fallen hero. ‘To declare him a great man may be impossible in the face of his failures, but to declare him a small one is ridiculous. Small men dying in exile do not leave wide gaps in the European political horizon.’95
What of those gaps? Just before the collapse of the Second Empire, Bagehot had advised Liberals to refrain from trying to topple it, to ‘defer all ideas of a republic’.96 Rather, ‘thinking Liberals’ should ‘engraft upon it rational and liberal principles’ because the republic they wanted – sober, ‘with no nonsense in it’ – was impossible in France. Under pressure from workers it would turn red, demanding ‘equal division of property’.97 After the fall of the Empire, socialists took power in Paris in 1871, declaring a revolutionary republic and vowing to fight on against the Prussian invaders in defiance of their own government, which had surrendered. The Economist, predictably enough, recoiled in horror. The Paris Commune was a gang of ‘artisans and working men’, ‘desperate poor’, ‘mad with rage and envy’. It only prayed they could be stopped before their ‘settled design to destroy the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Palais Royal’ was realized.98
The Economist was thus grateful to Adolphe Thiers, provisional president of the French national government, for marching 60,000 loyal troops on Paris, aided by the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who released them for this task at Thiers’s urgent plea. In the ensuing bloodbath, around 20,000 civilians were killed – many shot without trial, to be burnt or dumped in open graves, as the opening act of the French Third Republic. The fact that Thiers, a self-avowed republican, had given orders to massacre so many fellow citizens was encouraging. France owed 5 million francs in reparations to a newly united Germany and needed to show markets, where it would have to raise much of the cash, who was in control.99 Above all, the defeat of the Commune ‘effectively severed the name of the Republic from the creed of the delirious Republicans. It left it perfectly open to M. Thiers to identify the idea of the Republic with the soberest possible conceptions.’100
Till the end Bagehot never thought a republic could succeed, however, and welcomed signs of a return to enlightened dictatorship. ‘Why an English Liberal May Look without Disapproval on the Progress of Imperialism in France’, a leader from 1874, argued that while a parliament was just right for England – where a new ministry ‘does not change consols an eighth’, and a monarch sits ‘behind the ministry, to preserve at least an appearance of stability’ – this would never do for the French.101 In a friendly mood, he nevertheless offered to advise the National Assembly meeting at Versailles. He printed his own constitutional template in the Economist, ‘drawn up by one who has great experience in such matters’.102 In it, Bagehot urged the French delegates to vest power in a strongman, elected by an assembly, but who could in turn dissolve it – reminding readers that this was the secret ‘mainspring’ of the English Constitution. The document the Assembly actually adopted in 1875 earned his admiration on this basis. The ‘Conservative Republic’ looked forward – incorrectly, as the history of the Third Republic would show – to an executive more powerful than the US president and British prime minister combined. ‘Indeed, it is not very easy to conceive, outside Russia, a position of more influence and grandeur’, he wrote, thinking the model of the Czar to be an appropriate outer limit for a leader whose aim was to liberalize France.103
National character may have been a key category in comparative explorations of political order for Bagehot. But to nationalism as a leading force of the period he was relatively blind. A necessary precondition for a great nation was, of course, he granted, ‘accordance in sentiment, language and manners’ – but he was unwilling to endorse the existence of pure nationalities, or place them above these looser categories of national belonging. The term was unscientific, ‘a vague sort of faith to vast multitudes – a vague sort of implement to some plotters’. Yet it was also useful, so long as it was helping to build modern states – as in Germany and Italy. As a rallying cry for ‘alien fragments of old races’, however, nationalism was pernicious. ‘To set up the Basque nationality, or the Breton, or the Welsh, would be injurious to the Basque, the Bretons, and Welsh, even more than to Spain, France and England.’104 Its point was to release talented men cooped up in the administration of tiny nations (‘small politics debase the mind just as large politics improve it’), into larger ones, somehow leading to smaller, efficient government – and peace, with big countries less tempted to go to war to snap up weaker neighbours.105
What interest Bagehot’s Economist did take in nationalism was usually focused on its leading proponents. In Mazzini, the founder of Young Italy and champion of Italian unification, it saw a ‘true zealot’, more in love with himself than Italy, obsessed with the name of a republic, and too stubborn to accept its reality under the guise of a constitutional monarch. The brilliant military commander Garibaldi was a dimwit, who fought ‘with windmills instead of giants’. In both cases Bagehot refused to recognize the popular forces backing Mazzini and Garibaldi up and down the Italian peninsula.106 The Economist registered patriotic fervour in France and Prussia, meanwhile, but thought statesmen there would act to restrain lowborn passions at the last moment; in reality, Bismarck manipulated them – while Louis-Napoléon tried and failed to do the same, at home and as far afield as Mexico.107
Nowhere was the misreading of nationalism more pronounced, however, than in America, and the form this drive took in Lincolnism. And here the stakes were highest: of the 800 million pounds of cotton British mills consumed each year, 77 per cent came from the slave plantations of the American South, in which one-tenth of British capital was sunk. The outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 cut off these supplies, endangering the most important industry in Britain, which added up to near half of exports. Anxious industrialists, merchants and investors turned to the Economist not just for analysis of the American situation, but for reports on markets as far afield as Egypt and India, where capital raced to open up new sources of cotton cultivation, leading to a cycle of boom and bust that transformed peasant agriculture and merchant trading networks around the world.108 For Bagehot the conflict also prompted a third constitutional investigation, setting the efficient secret of the English system against the grim realities of the American.
The American Constitution and the Civil War
