La France insoumise is the last Bonapartist party in France. Its leader dismissed by democracy, it now lives a thwarted love with the Republic. The slayers of the "presidential monarchy" do not survive the twilight of one who behaved like an emperor without bearing the title. Like Augustus who safeguarded the appearances of the Roman Republic while dedicating himself princeps senatus ("prince of the Senate"), Jean-Luc Mélenchon claimed to be the leader of nothing while being the center of everything.
Of course, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was not, like Napoleon III, Head of State. Similarly, the Insoumis do not have – and have never had – the majority in Parliament. It is not a question here of equivalence or formal comparison, but systemic. That said, the parties organized around a leader have points in common that go beyond political divisions. Thousands of pages have been written in an attempt to demonstrate that authoritarian regimes, including fascists, of the 20th century were inspired by the reigns of Napoleon I and Napoleon III. We will not return here to the extravagance and dishonesty of the arguments put forward by these facetious ideologues.
Nevertheless, the dependence of an organization, whatever its nature, on its founder, or on an extraordinary personality, is a known phenomenon, including moreover within commercial enterprises: it suffices, to be convinced of this , to remember the correlation between the stock market value of Apple and the health of its leader, Steve Jobs. The phenomenon is so systematic that it becomes obvious, and it belongs less to the domain of convictions than to that of anthropology. Patriarchy, or matriarchy, in short what is commonly called "chieftaincy", is an incompressible given of the human adventure. Those who claim to detach themselves from it, in general, are lying. La France insoumise lies, of course, but she lies badly. Its triumph, materialized by the creation of the Nupes, crumbles visibly, and the profits drawn from the last polls are spent in a mismanagement of adolescent jokes.
By dint of snubbing the Fifth Republic, repeating that it was not good enough for it, La France insoumise forgot the rules of a sophisticated democracy. His collapse invites him to relearn a lexical field, that of moderation, and gives him the opportunity to continue his learning by discovering the meaning of a new term: the majority. Otherwise it will have been only a flamboyant but brief imperialism, a staggering but sterile individual adventure. You become a Bonapartist faster than you think, and sometimes without even realizing it.
Book Reference:
Éric Anceau, France from 1848 to 1870: between order and movement, Paris, Le Livre de poche, 2022.
Thierry Lentz, Napoleon III, unfinished modernity, Paris, Perrin, 2023.
* Born in 1990, Arthur Chevallier is a historian and editor at Passés Composites. He curated the exhibition "Napoleon" (2021), produced by the Grand Palais and La Villette. He has written several books devoted to the political and cultural posterity of Napoleon Bonaparte and the First Empire, Napoleon told by those who knew him (Grasset, 2014), Napoleon without Bonaparte (Cerf, 2018), Napoleon and Bonapartism (Que do I know?, 2021) or Napoleon's Women (Grasset, 2022).
