The Transformation of the World (128 page)

Victoria, Albert, and their advisers adapted the institution to the modern age, both in its political functions and in its symbolic radiance.
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As a woman at the head of the greatest world power, she stood more for matriarchal care than for a greater female role in politics and public life. Yet she embodied the political presence of women in politics as only one other imperial widow did: her slightly younger contemporary, the Dowager Empress Cixi of China. Originally close to the Liberals, Victoria ended her life supporting the conservative elements in British politics. But she held back from extreme forms of aggressive imperialism and left her family a legacy of solicitous care toward the poorer layers of British society.
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At first sight, Japan's imperial institution seems to move in a different orbit from that of the European monarchies. Documentary evidence allows it to be traced back to the end of the seventh century, when a centralized polity first took shape; this would make it approximately two hundred years older than the beginnings of the English (Anglo-Saxon) monarchy, in the time of Alfred the Great (r. 871–899). Despite the great model of the Chinese empire founded eight hundred years before, the tennō institution was from the outset rooted in the cultural and political specificities of Japan. In the nineteenth century, too, it developed outside the monarchical landscape of Europe, which incorporated the Meiji Emperor at best through symbolic acts.
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He had no ties of kinship with the European monarchical class, whereas his only counterpart in the Americas, Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, was after all a cousin of the Austrian emperor. Asian sovereigns could appropriate European royal models only through literature,
in the manner of Shah Nasir al-Din, who learned to admire Peter the Great, Louis XIV, and Frederick the Great by reading their biographies.
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Monarchical solidarity across civilizations did not count for much. After a European trip that took him from capital to capital in 1867, Sultan Abdülaziz felt that only Franz Joseph had treated him in a brotherly spirit free of resentment.
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The Japanese emperor was a figure lost in reverie, not a European-style “bourgeois monarch,” not the head of a courtly society open to the outside. Nevertheless, there are a number of parallels with Europe. Unlike the imperial institution in China, which until its demise in 1911 clung to a self-image dating back to the seventeenth century, the Meiji Emperor was the product of a revolutionary age, a new beginning under the aegis of modernity. Japan, like Britain, underwent a huge revaluation of the monarchy in the course of the nineteenth century. In 1830, when immorality and abuse of authority had largely discredited British royalty, the imperial court in Kyoto was sunk in its customary powerlessness. The country's government revolved around the shogun in Edo. By the time of the Meiji Emperor's death in 1912, the imperial institution had become the highest source of political legitimacy and the most important star in the firmament of national values. On paper as well as in reality, the tennō was more powerful within the Japanese political system than Queen Victoria was in Britain. In both cases, however, the monarchy performed a key integrative function in the national culture. This was stronger in Japan than in Britain because of a conscious drive to breathe new life into the monarchy.

Here two things must be distinguished. On the one hand, the revolutionary edict of January 3, 1868, proclaiming the “restoration” of imperial rule made it the central element in the Japanese state—what Parliament was in Britain. Political power could henceforth have even minimal legitimacy only if it was exercised in the name of the young prince Mutsuhito, who had ascended to the throne at the age of sixteen under the governmental slogan of “Meiji.” The architects of the Meiji Renewal used the emperor to lend authority to a regime that was in essence usurpatory; he more or less agreed with their aims, but he had a will of his own and never allowed himself to be simply instrumentalized. At the end of the century Japan thus became a constitutional state with an unusually strong imperial head—a form of sovereignty (in both senses of the word) that would not be similarly exercised by the Meiji Emperor's two successors. On the other hand, the symbolism of empire as a markedly
national
institution took some time to develop. Internally, it was supposed to cut across all social and regional boundaries, requiring discipline and obedience from the population, bearing a homogeneous national culture in contrast to the plurality of popular traditions, and imparting an outlook in which everyone could recognize themselves.

The emperor was not what the shogun of the House of Tokugawa had been from 1600 until 1868: the supreme feudal lord at the apex of a pyramid of privilege and dependence. He was emperor of the whole Japanese people, an instrument and agency for educating it in a special kind of modernity. Outwardly the
tennō was meant to embody this modern Japan, and he did so with a considerable degree of success. Courtly display became a mixture of old Japanese elements, either authentic or invented, with symbols and practices borrowed from European monarchies of the age. The emperor sometimes appeared in Japanese robes and sometimes in a European-style uniform or suit, his photographs presenting a dual official personality to his own people and the international public. His monogamous family life was in sharp contrast to the harems of his predecessors and other Asian monarchs. Successful symbolic strategies involving everything from imperial emblems to a national anthem had to be first developed and then conveyed to the population at large.

The Meiji Emperor's carefully prepared trips to various parts of his realm, the first undertaken by a Japanese monarch, served to carry the politically crafted national culture closer to his subjects.
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In an age when mass media were not yet capable of forging a national consciousness, these direct encounters between emperor and people created a new sense of what it meant to be Japanese. To have seen the emperor meant to have participated in the awakening of national solidarity. In the 1880s the Japanese monarchy found a new respite: Tokyo was built up as the imperial metropolis, the symbolic and ritual core of the nation, whose displays were not a whit inferior to those of Western capitals. Here the spectacle of monarchy went hand in hand with normative disciplining and “civilizing” through institutions such as the school and the army.
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This, too, was no different from trends in the monarchies and republics of the West, but Japan was especially skillful in its instrumentalization of the ruler, at first itinerant and later firmly established in his capital. As soon as the new political system was up and running, with all power concentrated in Tokyo, the emperor no longer needed to take to the road. In the more heterogeneous Russian Empire, despite the risks of assassination (the fate suffered by Alexander II in 1881 at the hands of revolutionaries), it was advisable for the tsar to seek personal contact from time to time with the provincial nobility. In the case of Abdülhamid II, such tensions led to a split between the ruler's self-image and the way he was seen by others. The sultan wanted to appear as a modern monarch, with a state more deeply rooted than ever before in the daily lives of the Ottoman population, but his obsession with personal security meant that he showed himself to his peoples less often than many of his predecessors had done and never traveled abroad. An extensive symbolic politics was therefore necessary to compensate for the visibility deficit.
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It emphasized, for example, his religious role as caliph of all believers.

The caliph's supranational appeal was more serviceable for pan-Islamic aims than for the building of imperial or even national identity. In Japan, however, the monarchy became the most important integrative factor of the emerging nation-state. In the post-1871 German Reich, much more federal and less unitary than Meiji Japan, Kaiser Wilhelm I (r. 1871–88) cut a less dashing figure but played a roughly similar role, without inspiring a semireligious cult or making “loyalty to the emperor” the highest political criterion. In Britain, including
Scotland (for which Victoria had a special fondness), the integrative force of the renewed monarchy was also very strong. It was less powerful in the empire, although the persistence of the Commonwealth, adaptable across time and space, demonstrates even today the bonding power of the Crown. The second-largest European colonial empire, the one administered by the French Third Republic, did not bequeath such a lasting voluntary association of former colonies with the mother country.

The third new type of monarchy also fulfilled a primarily integrative function. Napoleon III's empire (1852–70) was the regime of an outsider and social climber who, while linking up with the myth of his uncle, could never make people forget that he did not come from one of Europe's great ruling houses. Unlike Yuan Shikai in a later age in China, he did manage in a postrevolutionary republic to convert himself from an elected president into an imperial dynast. Despite his putschist past, the parvenu gained respect among other European rulers; some monarchs in Asia even saw him as a paragon of enlightened autocracy.
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Britain immediately recognized his regime, above all for foreign policy reasons, and Napoleon soon acquired the trappings of monarchy and learned to observe the correct etiquette. It was a triumph for him to receive Victoria and Albert in Paris as early as 1855—the first trip to the French capital since 1431 by reigning Britain monarchs. It was not a meeting between blue-blooded cousins but a modern-style state visit.
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Like the Meiji Emperor, though in a very different way, Napoleon III was a revolutionary profiteer; he did not enter into an alliance with a revolutionary elite (the Japanese model) but created a power base of his own, first by being elected president of the republic in December 1848, then by staging a coup d'état in 1851 and founding a hereditary empire within the space of twelve months. Napoleon was a self-made man. Unlike Mutsuhito sixteen years later, he could not base himself on the institutional continuity of imperial office.

Historians are still debating the character of Napoleon III's rule, with the help of concepts such as Caesarism or Bonapartism.
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But they generally agree with writers of the time such as Karl Marx or the Prussian journalist Constantin Frantz that it was a regime of a
modern
type. If we leave aside the question of its social foundation, this modernity is apparent in three features.
First
, the president and then emperor paid homage to the revolutionary rhetoric of popular sovereignty, grounding himself on the plebiscite of December 1851 that gave him a majority of 90 percent of the eight million French voters. The emperor considered himself accountable to the people and, in the Constitution of 1852, reserved the right to consult them again at any moment. He could be fairly sure that his rule would accord with the wishes of a large part of the French population, especially in the countryside. It was a monarchy that drew its legitimacy from popular consent, while taking greater care than any of its predecessors to humor the people by means of festivities, ceremonies, and gala events.
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Second
, by mid-nineteenth-century standards, it was modern that an initially bloody and repressive regime should seek to develop constitutional forms, hesitantly
after 1861 but with greater energy from 1868 on. Louis Napoléon situated himself within the continuum of French constitutional history, and this enabled him, from the early sixties on, to conduct an orderly liberalization and gradually to endow other state bodies with considerable rights and scope for initiative. The monarch's position within the system, at first one of near omnipotence, could thus be reduced.
Third
, the emperor envisaged that the state would play an active role in producing the conditions for prosperity. His commitment to renovate the city of Paris was an expression of this attitude, as were a raft of economic measures. The regime was unprecedentedly interventionist in its economic policy.
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Certain parallels with Japan are undeniable. True, the Meiji project lacked the concept of popular sovereignty (never accepted by Emperor Franz Joseph, either),
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but it also crowned the process of national integration with a carefully prepared constitution, and its economic interventionism after the early 1880s recalls the basic policy approach pioneered by Napoleon III. The Japanese monarchy also set itself the task of “civilizing” a nation that had fallen behind internationally, and did not shy from authoritarian measures to achieve that end. No one would have described the Meiji Emperor as a dictator. But then the use of that label for Napoleon III leads to misconceptions, at least if it suggests twentieth-century practices such as relentless mobilization of the population and long-term systematic repression or murder of political opponents. Napoleon III was normally not in a position to enforce his will by mere fiat. He had to take many different interests into account, including the aristocrats and
grands bourgeois
who had served the French state under the Restoration (1814–30) and the July Monarchy (1830–48). Genuine Bonapartists were rare even in the circle around the emperor.

The territorial pillars of the regime were the prefects responsible for manifold governmental and administrative tasks at the level of the
département
, who were subject to a range of local pressures and also had to deal with elected counselors. For although the head of state occupied a lifetime post (one important element of a monarchy), the common practice of elections in the
départements
amounted to what would today be called a system of “guided democracy.” There were official candidates, and it was made difficult for others to win. But, as the opposition gathered strength and extracted compromises from the emperor, it acquired considerable leeway to express itself and to take independent initiatives.
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A relatively free referendum in May 1870 made it clear how wide the support was for Napoleon III and his government, especially in the countryside and among the bourgeoisie. It showed how successful he had been in projecting himself as a bringer of prosperity and a bulwark against social revolution. When the Napoleonic system fell later in 1870, as a result of international politics and its own diplomatic incompetence, it had been heading less toward further internal “liberalization” (as many historians have claimed) than toward consolidation of an illiberal top-down democracy in monarchical garb.
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