Saint-Napoleon

Sudhir Hazareesingh, historian of Oxford, has been working for ten years to renew the political history of the Second French Empire. Released in 1998, his book From subject to citizen Invited to reconsider the hasty positions of historians who, out of loyalty to republican tradition, continued to describe the regime born from the coup d’etat of December 2, 1851 in the guise of a ruthless dictatorship museing civil society. If the authoritarian and repressive dimensions of the Second Empire are undeniable, the fact remains, according to Hazareesingh, that this regime marks a fundamental step in learning democracy and citizenship in France XIX^e century.

After the publication in French in 2005 of The legend of Napoleonwhich explored the diversity of traces and supports of the memory of Napoleonic glory in French political culture, the Tallandier editions have just translated the work that Sudhir Hazareesingh devoted in 2004 to the study of the celebrations of Saint Napoleon under the Second Empire. Established national holidays by a decree of February 1852, the day of August 15 made it possible to jointly celebrate the assumption of the Virgin and the anniversary of the birth of Napoleon Bonaparte. Not content with reconnecting with a ritual that the first empire had practiced from 1806 to 1813, Napoleon III substituted for republican emblems and rituals a new Bonapartist symbolism. Abandoning the history of political ideas that characterized its previous works, Hazareesingh is based on a vast corpus of police reports, drawn from around twenty departments, to reconstruct the local practices of the commemoration, since the examples of popular and festive participation in civil and religious processions, the illuminations and the games organized by local powers, up to the district, Deviance, even rejection, republican opponents or legitimists to the Bonapartist regime.

Incidental of Mona Ozouf’s works on the “ revolutionary party “, From Rémi Dalisson on the holidays from 1815 to 1870 and Olivier Ihl on the” republican party “, Hazareesingh is not content to emphasize, after others, the importance of rituals and symbols in the construction of citizenship, national feeling and political culture. He especially wants to challenge the idea that the spontaneity and popularity of the celebrations of July 14 Republican would oppose the formalism, bigotry and militarism of the Second Empire festivals. The Saint-Napoleon was according to Hazareesingh a “ success “(P. 234), attested by the voluntary and enthusiastic participation of local associations in commemorative operations. Power technique and “ State Authority Barometer “(P. 144), the festival of August 15 offered the regime the possibility of putting pressure on its agents, so that they are zealous in the organization of the festivities, and gave the administration a measurement tool to probe the” state of minds ».

There remains a question, difficult to decide and yet decisive: if the authorities were satisfied with the observation of a massive participation in the celebrations of Saint Napoleon, can we deduce that the citizens taking part in it communicated without ulterior motive in the cult of Napoleon and the grandeur of the Second Empire ? In other words, the effectiveness of the ritual on the bodies resulted in the adhesion of the spirits to the values conveyed by the commemorations of the Holy Napoleon ? This is in particular the theoretical question raised by the political scientist Nicolas Mariot in his book Crowdspublished in 2006 at Belin, about the analysis of rituals and political festivals.

Major contribution to the study of the Second Empire and, more generally, to the understanding of French political culture, Saint-Napoleon re -registers the festive practices of the Bonapartist regime in the continuity of ritual forms of XIX^e century, beyond institutional forms and caesures. By decompartmentalizing the political history of XIX^e A century, Sudhir Hazareesingh invites us to reflect on the links between Bonapartism and Republicanism, and highlights the persistence of Napoleonic memory in the national imagination.