ABSTRACT
In theory (as discussed in the previous chapter), presidential rhetoric should not have any place in a democracy, or should be restricted to formal ventriloquy-ceremonial rhetoric extolling the virtue of the abstract republic. Under the French Third Republic, this kind of Barthesian zero-degree presidential rhetoric was mockingly referred to as inaugurer les chrysanthèmes-to lay wreaths, verbal wreaths. Nineteenth-century democratic deliberation deliberately placed a“mute”command on the voice of the President, with its potential for garnering power; the President’s was after all the only unmistakably solo voice speaking from the seat of executive power-while the two correlated powers, the legislative and the judicial, were multi-personed, dislocated, dissonant, even cacophonous. To allow true presidential rhetoric would have been too close for comfort, redolent of Napoleonic proclamations, of multiple public voices entrusted to a singular voice (neatly encapsulated in the Gallic oxymoron of a“Republic entrusted to an Emperor”).1 “Rhetorical caesarism,” as it might be termed, has nonetheless shone, in perilous times, through the voices of Lincoln, F. D. Roosevelt, Churchill, Kennedy, and de Gaulle. (Whether rhetorical democracy was actually better served by these incursions of rhetorical caesarism is open to debate.) In contrast, postmodern democracies are routinely subjected to rhetorical caesarism, with spindoctors and publicists playing a role similar to that of the Sophists of imperial Rome.
