ABSTRACT
Few analogies can have proved more historically seductive than the one linking the political achievements of Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte, a resemblance that has exercised the imagination of scholars, journalists, artists, and propagandists for almost two centuries. Between 1850 and 1871, Louis Bonaparte's career became enmeshed in a major dispute about "Caesarism," a term that, until Bismarck, it made virtually its own. The discussion in European educated circles about Caesarism and the masses is important not only as an index of incredulity and concern among many witnesses of the nascent democracies. It sheds light also on the intellectual paucity of the republican tradition itself once confronted with a situation for which its concepts were singularly ill-adapted to deal. In consequence, critics of Napoleon III had few specifically republican conceptual resources to fall back on as they sought to address alternatives to the "Caesarist" model.
