Violets in Their Lapels

David A. Bell

  • The Legend of Napoleon by Sudhir Hazareesingh
    Granta, 336 pp, £20.00, August 2004, ISBN 1 86207 667 7
  • The Retreat by Patrick Rambaud, translated by William Hobson
    Picador, 320 pp, £7.99, June 2005, ISBN 0 330 48901 1
  • Napoleon: The Eternal Man of St Helena by Max Gallo, translated by William Hobson
    Macmillan, 320 pp, £10.99, April 2005, ISBN 0 333 90798 1
  • The Saint-Napoleon: Celebrations of Sovereignty in 19th-Century France by Sudhir Hazareesingh
    Harvard, 307 pp, £32.95, May 2004, ISBN 0 674 01341 7
  • Napoleon and the British by Stuart Semmel
    Yale, 354 pp, £25.00, September 2004, ISBN 0 300 09001 3

France, it has often been said, is a democracy with the manners of an absolute monarchy. Think of the ceremonial splendour with which French presidents surround themselves, the haughty, distant style they tend to adopt, or the way relationships within their entourages tend to mimic, with delicious self-consciousness, patterns of favouritism and intrigue developed long ago at the court of Versailles. No Western head of state in recent memory (British monarchs included) has had a more regal touch than François Mitterrand, alleged socialist. Nothing is more alien to mainstream French democracy than the American-style ‘populism’ practised by politicians from Andrew Jackson to George W. Bush. The word populiste is a deadly insult, most recently deployed by socialists and Chiraquiens alike against anyone who dares interpret the result of the referendum on the European Constitution as a vote of no confidence in the country’s political elites. The only true populist in contemporary French politics is Jean-Marie Le Pen.

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