Men on Horseback--The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution Read online

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  To John Merriman, Richard Kagan, and Gabrielle Spiegel

  The great problem in politics, which I compare to that of the squaring of the circle in geometry … is to find a form of government that sets the law above man. If this form of government is attainable, then let us seek it out and try to establish it … But if, unfortunately, this form of government is not attainable, and I frankly confess I do not think it is, then it is my opinion that we should go to the other extreme and at once put man as high above the law as possible and therefore establish an arbitrary despotism, indeed the most arbitrary despotism possible. I would wish that the despot could be God.

  —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, letter to Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, July 26, 1767

  INTRODUCTION

  CHARISMA

  Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

  Like a Colossus, and we petty men

  Walk under his huge legs and peep about

  To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

  —Julius Caesar, act 1, scene 2

  When Shakespeare’s character Cassius used these words to describe Julius Caesar, he evoked one of the most durable myths in human culture: there are giants among us—titans, heroes, Übermenschen. They may be mortal, but something about them nonetheless seems miraculous and supernatural. They have extraordinary genius, vision, courage, strength, virtue, sheer magnetism. They seem to burn with a flame that leaves the rest of the human race looking cold and gray. In a word—and it is a word that literally means “a gift of divine grace”—they have charisma.

  But read the rest of Cassius’s speech, which this febrile, anxious conspirator, he of the “lean and hungry look,” makes to an audience of one: his fellow Roman senator Marcus Junius Brutus. Cassius has not come to praise Caesar, and his description of Caesar as a colossus comes slathered in thick, pungent irony. For Cassius, Caesar is a man like any other, despite his oversize reputation. The idea that Caesar is a superman both alarms and disgusts him. He recalls episodes in which Caesar (already aging in the play) showed himself weak and helpless, like a “sick girl,” and concludes, in a tone of heavy sarcasm, “And this man is now become a god.” To call Caesar a god is blasphemy; to call him a king, treason. If Caesar lives, and the Romans raise him to royal or divine dignity, then the Republic, in Cassius’s view, will die. Caesar’s charisma is something both false and dangerous, and Cassius’s intention is to enlist the wavering Brutus, Caesar’s protégé, into the conspiracy against him.

  And yet, as is so often true with Shakespeare, the words have a power that goes beyond the characters’ intentions. Cassius wants to ridicule Caesar, to bring the false god down to earth, to smash the idol. But his description of Caesar as a colossus bestriding the narrow world is magnificent, and when his barbed condemnations of Caesar have faded from memory, these words remain, a glimmering reminder of the myth that Cassius wants so desperately to expose as a lie.

  Both the lure and the dangers of charisma pointed to by Cassius remain with us today. Around the world, in both democratic and autocratic states, there is a perennial longing for leaders with magnetic appeal and extraordinary abilities who can unite viciously divided communities, overcome apparently intractable problems, and by sheer force of personality give whole nations a new start. But charisma also generates anxieties—especially in democracies. Modern democracies pride themselves on being governments of laws. What will happen if we treat ordinary, limited, and perhaps even corrupt and criminal individuals as superhuman, making them into idols? What if the intensity of attraction leads whole countries to follow such leaders blindly, unquestioningly, even as constitutions are flouted, human rights trampled, minorities oppressed and killed, and nations marched off to war?

  Democracies are particularly suspicious of charismatic leaders. Yet, paradoxically, the longing for such leaders acquired new importance, and a distinct new shape, during the very same period that witnessed the first stirrings of modern democracy: the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was during the moment of extraordinary intellectual fermentation that we now call the Enlightenment, and then in the great revolutions that washed across much of the Western world between 1775 and the 1820s, that the powerful forms of political charisma we are familiar with today took shape. These forms of charisma posed challenges to democracy but were also symbiotically linked to it. Indeed, from this period onward the stories of charisma and democracy have wound tightly around one another in their own political version of the double helix. They have done so thanks to a revolutionary transformation in the relationship between ordinary people and their political leaders that began in the eighteenth century but that has never been fully understood. That transformation is the subject of this book.

  * * *

  What, exactly, is charisma, and what does it mean to write its history? In popular usage, the word serves as a rough synonym for personal magnetism. A famous photograph of John F. Kennedy greeting enthusiastic admirers on the beach in Santa Monica in 1962 perfectly illustrates this notion—he seems to be drawing people to him as if by invisible threads (figure 1). Kennedy remains, even many decades after his death, the paradigmatic example of a charismatic politician, in the United States and well beyond.

  But this popular notion is vague and elusive. As the magazine Psychology Today puts it, “charisma is often said to be a mysterious ineffable quality—you either have it or don’t have it.” The magazine goes on to propose that charisma in fact inheres in qualities such as “confidence, exuberance, optimism, a ready smile, expressive body language, and a friendly, passionate voice.”1 This definition may seem more useful, but it quickly breaks down as well. Not only are these qualities impossible to measure in any meaningful way, but a moment’s reflection suggests that certain combinations of them could easily strike observers as overbearing and obnoxious, rather than as charismatic.

  A better approach starts from precisely this last point, and from the recognition that charisma is not just an individual quality but a relationship.2 People deserve to be called charismatic only if they are recognized as such—if others believe they possess extraordinary qualities and feel an intense emotional attraction to them, even (as the photograph of Kennedy hints) erotic desire.3 The ability to appear charismatic depends not only on the individual in question but on which traits are likely to elicit such beliefs and feelings within a particular community. In other words, it is a question not just of psychology but of culture. Some things may remain forever mysterious about the appeal of particular individuals: a Kennedy, a Garibaldi, even a Hitler. But we can analyze how they interacted with admirers, how admirers discussed and represented them, and which of their specific qualities, traits, and actions appeared most attractive and emot
ionally resonant.

  Historians have mostly discussed charisma in the course of writing biographies of figures like Kennedy—or Hitler.4 But the subject deserves broader historical attention. If we want to understand why certain democratic regimes have given way to the rule of charismatic authoritarians, we cannot simply ask why the regimes failed. It is also a question of the positive appeal of charismatic leadership itself within a particular culture. By creating a direct, intense, emotional bond between a political leader and followers, charisma can enable the circumvention or even destruction of existing political rules and traditions. It can also create new rules and traditions. To quote the great German social theorist Max Weber—who first developed the modern concept of charisma more than a century ago—it is a “revolutionary force.”5

  This book tells the story of how the revolutionary force of charisma developed during the Enlightenment and then helped shape four of the greatest revolutions in history: in the United States, France, Haiti, and Venezuela (whose break with Spain led to the independence of what eventually became six separate nations). The book does not offer a general history of these revolutions or full biographies of the principal figures it examines: George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Louverture, and Simón Bolívar. It does not look at charisma in nonpolitical contexts. And it is not a theoretical inquiry into the nature of charisma, although readers interested in learning more about the concept are invited to turn to the short excursus at the end of the book entitled “Writing Charisma into History.” My focus is on the way charismatic political leaders came to dominate each of the four revolutions and the consequences for the societies in question.

  What historians have often called “the age of democratic revolutions” appears in a somewhat somber light when examined from this angle.6 But then, despite the hopes of many participants, democratic constitutional rule did not actually fare very well in these revolutions. None of them fully delivered on the promise of the U.S. Declaration of Independence to secure the equal rights of “all men,” to say nothing of women. Very few of the original constitutions survived more than a few years. Very few of the new states avoided calamitous bouts of civil war, and in all of them, dictatorship had a compelling appeal. The revolutionary states did experience what could be called democratization, as millions of men and women began to participate in politics in a newly active, conscious manner. But this participation could take many forms and did not necessarily contribute to the foundation of stable democratic regimes. Indeed, it could include actively supporting authoritarian rulers.7

  Perhaps it is only at this moment in the early twenty-first century, when the forward trajectory of democracy has come to seem anything but inexorable, that we can clearly glimpse this other side of the age of revolution. It is at moments like the present that we are forced to confront the reality that charismatic authoritarianism in no sense represents a backsliding, an atavistic and presumably temporary return to the days of warlords and kings, before the onward march of liberal democracy continues. A potentially authoritarian charisma is as modern a phenomenon as any of the liberal ideas and practices that arose in the age of revolution, including human rights and democratic republicanism and constitutional government. And it had many of the same cultural and intellectual sources. As the epigraph to the book reminds us, even for thinkers considered to be architects of modern democratic theory, the line between democracy and authoritarian one-man rule could be vanishingly thin.8 The study of charisma reveals this darker potential of the age of revolution and of the Enlightenment culture out of which it emerged.

  * * *

  The book argues that while political charisma has existed throughout history, its modern forms started to develop only in the mid-1700s. In previous centuries, in Europe and the European overseas empires, political power had a very different visage from what we know today. It was intensely personal but largely concentrated in monarchs whose legitimacy derived from royal inheritance and from the blessing of established churches. While some rulers—Elizabeth I of England, Louis XIV of France—certainly had a strong charismatic appeal, their rule did not depend on it. Even Oliver Cromwell, the parliamentarian and military commander who rose to supreme power during the British Civil Wars of the 1640s, attracted a large and passionate following above all because his supporters saw him as the chosen instrument of divine Providence, not because they believed he had innate talents that set him high above other men.9 Nor did Cromwell manage to establish a lasting regime. For literate men and women in the early eighteenth-century West, the most prominent examples of leaders who had come to power thanks to their charismatic appeal were not their own contemporaries but ancient Romans and Greeks, who belonged to a seemingly closed chapter of history. The most prominent of these ancient figures was Julius Caesar.

  But in the later eighteenth century, the tectonic plates of Western political culture shuddered and broke apart. Even before minutemen and redcoats opened fire on one another at Lexington in 1775, an intellectual and cultural revolution of sorts had already created the conditions under which figures without royal pedigrees or religious sanction could rise to supreme power on the basis of their charisma. On the one hand, powerful new ideas of human equality were circulating, according to which even the most ordinary of men—although not yet women—might well possess greater talent, leadership ability, and moral worth than nobles and princes. The century’s most audacious writers argued that it was the worthiest, most talented men who should rule. Meanwhile, a media revolution was under way. Striking changes in the world of print were making it possible for men and women from the most ordinary backgrounds to achieve unprecedented fame. They could become, to use a word invented in the period, celebrities.10 Periodicals reported on them on a daily basis—and not only on their public actions but on their private lives as well. Engraving technology made their faces (or, at least, what artists imagined they looked like) familiar to a broad public. And new literary styles associated with that dizzily developing genre, the novel, helped authors to present them as familiar, approachable characters with whom readers could imagine a close, even intimate connection.

  Media revolutions tend to have powerful political consequences, because they so fundamentally alter the way ordinary people and their rulers perceive and relate to one another. The invention of the printing press in pre-Reformation Europe, and the invention of radio and television in the twentieth century, had such consequences. We are living today through yet another media revolution with enormous political consequences. In the age of revolution, similarly profound effects followed from new forms of print media, new genres and styles, and an exponential increase in the sheer amount of print in circulation. The changes played out unevenly across the different revolutionary states. But even charismatic leaders in largely illiterate countries were still creatures of print. They wrote constantly for publication and knew the importance of doing so. They paid close attention to the way newspapers, books, pamphlets, and engravings portrayed them. Their written correspondence bore the mark of prevailing literary styles. It was in large part through these engagements with print that they forged their bonds with their followers.

  And these bonds, the book goes on to argue, deeply shaped the course of political events. In revolutionary regimes that were still fragile, untested, and forbiddingly strange to men and women raised in monarchies and empires, the ability to feel a bond of trust with leaders counted heavily indeed. Charisma mattered. It came to matter even more as the revolutions continued and frail new constitutional structures wavered and sometimes collapsed. In such moments of turmoil, the lure of charismatic leadership came to loom over all political life. No leader enjoyed as enthusiastic a degree of support as his admirers liked to boast, but each could still count on a base of genuinely fervent, indeed sometimes fanatical, followers.

  It was in fact widely believed that the survival of the new states required powerful, charismatic leaders linked to citizens by strong emotional bonds that knit the entire bo
dy politic together into an indivisible whole, the way monarchs had done in earlier states. Was the mere “consent of the governed” enough to hold together fractious states, most of them new creations, riven by regional, ideological, and in some cases racial divisions? Such states needed to be “governed more by sentiments and affections than by orders and laws,” as an acolyte of Napoleon Bonaparte put it. They needed what Simón Bolívar called “acclamation,” a collective enthusiasm that served, in his view, as “the sole legitimate source of human power.” They needed what a well-known British writer called, in reference to an earlier charismatic hero, a “despotism founded … on the affection of love.”11 European monarchs certainly boasted of their subjects’ love, but they never relied on it as the basis of their legitimacy. The intense emphasis now placed on the emotional bond between rulers and ruled was something new, and it meant that the revolutionary leaders were in no sense simply substitute kings. Their political authority was of a fundamentally different sort.

  Contemporaries acknowledged this difference. They did not, however, treat the new form of charismatic leadership as something wholly novel. Instead, most often they sought to legitimize the break with the recent past by appealing to a different, more distant past and depicting the new leaders as figures out of classical antiquity. Just as classically republican and democratic forms of government appeared to be reawakening in the Atlantic revolutions after a sleep of centuries, it now also seemed possible that new versions of Greek and Roman heroes could rise to power.12 In country after country, revolutionaries looked at one another and asked: Which one of us is Caesar? Which one Brutus? (In the same way, Russian revolutionaries in a later century would ask, Which one of us is Robespierre? Which one Bonaparte?) The revolutionary states revived Roman titles such as “consul,” “senator,” even “dictator” (an official granted temporary extraordinary powers). They crowned leaders with Roman-style laurel leaves and paraded them through Roman-style triumphal arches. Such language and practices came easily to cultures where formal education still consisted in large part of immersion in the Greek and Roman classics. Early modern European societies had always invoked the authority of antiquity, but the revolutionaries did so far more intensely and with far more literal intent, almost as if they could actually re-create ancient republics. During one debate in the French revolutionary assembly, a deputy extolled the progress that the human race had made since antiquity. Another immediately shot back, “If we have not been either Spartans, or Athenians, we should become them.”13