By Nigel Jones | Published in History Today Volume: 62 Issue: 5 2012
Nigel Jones traces the chequered history of European referendums and asks why they appeal as much to dictators as to democrats.
A billboard with a portrais of the Italian dictator Mussolini seeking a yes vote in a forthcoming plebiscite, Rome, 1934. Getty/Keystone-France
Britain held its first ever nationwide referendum on June 6th, 1975, to approve or reject the country’s entry two years earlier to what was then called the European Economic Community (EEC). Yet the idea of directly consulting the electorate on a single political decision was widely regarded as an unwelcome foreign intrusion into the British body politic. Referendums were, in the words of the former Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, ‘a device for despots and dictators’.
Referendums are certainly far more familiar in continental Europe than in Britain. They are used most frequently in Switzerland, where they are triggered if just 100,000 citizens petition for one. Now, with a referendum on Scottish independence looming in 2014, if not earlier, and the oft-promised but always deferred referendum to test how far opinion has changed on Britain’s membership of the European Union, it is fitting to take a closer look at the device which has been used by despots and dictators as often as by democrats.
Modern referendums can be partly blamed on, or credited to, the Bonapartes. France’s first referendum was held in July 1793 in the midst of the revolution, when all adult males were asked to ratify a constitution drafted by the Committee of Public Safety, the blood-stained executive arm of the National Convention. On paper the constitution, like that of Stalin’s Soviet Union, was impeccably progressive, even advocating the people’s right to rebel against tyranny. The problem was that it had been drawn up by Maximilien Robespierre and his cronies, no mean tyrants themselves.
Three quarters of the male electorate abstained. Of the nearly two million who did vote, an impressive 99.41 per cent backed the constitution, while just 11,000 voted against. A year later the five-man collective leadership – the Directory – which had replaced and guillotined Robespierre and his followers, legitimised its coup by appealing again to the popular will. France’s second referendum returned a still impressive 95 per cent approval for the Directory. (Percentage voter approval rates in the 90s have been an infallible hallmark of totalitarian regimes ever since.)
When France’s menfolk next went to the polls, in 1800, it was Napoleon Bonaparte who demanded their approval of his destruction of the very Directory whose creation they had applauded six years before. The brilliant young general had returned home, after a string of military victories in Italy and Egypt, to make himself France’s dictator, or ‘first consul’, in a messy coup organised by his soon-to-be-disillusioned brother Lucien.
It was Lucien Bonaparte, as minister of the interior, who announced the official results: 99.9 per cent of voters approved Napoleon’s assumption of dictatorial power and, although a whopping 77 % had not voted at all, only 1,556 men voted Non. Thus encouraged, Napoleon consulted his people frequently thereafter. In 1802 99 per cent approved of him becoming first consul for life and in 1804 the same percentage of voters said Oui to his ultimate power grab, when he proclaimed himself emperor. Napoleon’s last referendum, held in April 1815 to demonstrate popular support for his return from Elba to oust the Bourbons – even after he had led France to abject defeat – returned another 99 per cent vote in his favour. Two months later a more negative and conclusive verdict on his rule was given at Waterloo.
Like uncle, like nephew: Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, that strange amalgam of tyrant and democrat, reactionary and progressive, relied on referendums to give popular approval to his own violent seizure of power a generation after the first Napoleon had sailed into the sunset of St Helena. Louis Napoleon had been elected president in a genuine popular vote at the end of 1848, Europe’s ‘year of revolutions’. Nearing the end of his term he tried to persuade parliamentarians to allow him to run again. They refused, so he resolved to do it without them.
Louis Napoleon carried out his coup in Paris on December 2nd, 1852, the anniversary of the first Napoleon’s coronation in 1804 and of his great victory at Austerlitz a year later. The coup, carried out with military precision, became a model for succeeding putsches. Troops occupied key points; political opponents were arrested; the press was muzzled; critics – such as the writer Victor Hugo – were exiled; the National Assembly was shut down. In Paris 200 died before resistance was crushed. Another 24,000 were detained for opposing the coup and hundreds were deported to perish in French penal colonies. Karl Marx compared the coup to the first Napoleon’s seizure of power, writing: ‘History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, then as farce.’ For once, Marx was correct.
Again aping his ancestor, Louis Napoleon held a referendum to validate his coup three weeks later. With opposition newspapers suspended and public meetings forbidden, the result was a foregone conclusion. Seven and a half million Frenchmen endorsed his violent action, though 650,000 refused.
A year later his tame legislature voted to kill the second French Republic in favour of the second Bonapartist empire. Another referendum approved the change by 7.8 million votes to 250,000. On the Bonapartes’ big day, December 2nd, France’s new ruler was proclaimed Napoleon III. As his biographer John Bierman caustically observed: ‘Marianne could never claim that she had been raped: she had, in fact, surrendered eagerly to the Napoleonic seducer, as if the illegality, chicanery and outright butchery which accompanied the coup had been nothing more than a little boisterous foreplay.’ The regime lasted for almost two decades – longer than the original empire – only to come crashing down in 1870 with France’s devastating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
A far less benign dictator than either Bonaparte made frequent use of the device, but, like the two Napoleons, Hitler only used referendums when he was sure what the result would be. It helped that techniques for manipulating and influencing public opinion had grown more sophisticated in the half century since Napoleon III’s rule. Under Joseph Goebbels’ control, German radio and cinema ensured that the Nazi regime’s message hit home. In August 1934 Hitler took advantage of the death of the aged President Hindenburg to call a referendum on merging the two posts of president and chancellor into one: the Führer. On August 19th the people gave their verdict. Despite the violent methods that had characterised 18 months of Nazi rule, during which the concentration camp and the rubber truncheon had replaced the ballot box, ‘only’ 89.9 per cent of voters, according to the official tally, agreed to Hitler becoming head of state, chief of the government, leader of the Nazi party and supreme commander of the armed forces.
Subsequent referendums approved Nazi Germany’s absorption of the Saarland (1935) and the Rhineland (1936), but it was when Hitler was preparing his third takeover – of Austria – that he displayed his true attitude towards direct democracy.The Führer had always taken an unfriendly interest in his homeland, where he suffered repeated failure in his youth. He had used Austria’s homegrown Nazis as a terrorist fifth column to undermine the conservative Catholic regime of the diminutive dictator Engelbert Dollfuss. Nazi bombings and sabotage culminated in July 1934 with an abortive Nazi putsch in Vienna during which Dollfuss was murdered. Although Hitler had ordered the putsch, he was forced to disavow it after its failure. But the relentless Nazi pressure on Austria continued. In February 1938 Dollfuss’ successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, was summoned to the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat overlooking Austria. Here the Austrian chancellor was bullied into agreeing to accept an ultimatum, which amounted to surrendering Austrian independence. Hitler’s demands included taking Nazis into his cabinet, allowing German officers to run the Austrian army, releasing Nazi terrorists from jail and lifting the ban on the party.
On returning to Austria Schuschnigg had second thoughts and called a referendum. The question on the ballot was whether Austria should remain a free, independent and Christian country or not. On hearing the news Hitler exploded with anger. He insisted that the poll be cancelled, ordered the Wehrmacht across the Austrian frontier, demanded Schuschnigg’s resignation and effected the long-planned Anschluss – a forced marriage between Austria and Germany. Schuschnigg was arrested and humiliated by being forced to clean the SS toilets when they set up their HQ in Vienna’s Imperial Hotel. He spent the Second World War in concentration camps and was lucky to survive.
The next occasion that a German chancellor exerted pressure to force the cancellation of a referendum in another country and cause the departure of the head of government who had called it came late last year when Angela Merkel stopped the referendum announced by Greek premier George Papandreou on whether his country should continue to accept the economic agony caused by its membership of the eurozone, or be allowed to default and exit the euro. Merkel also arranged the appointment of unelected premiers in both Greece and Italy. History was again repeating itself as farce.
Despite their dubious record, referendums continued to be widely employed across postwar Europe. General de Gaulle was a serial caller of referendums. On returning to power in 1958, after a decade in the wilderness, he hammered out a new constitution for a new republic – France’s fifth since the revolution of 1789. The new framework provided for a strong president (De Gaulle himself) and a weak legislature – reversing the arrangements of the chaotic and corrupt Third and Fourth republics. It also provided for regular referendums on any issue deemed worthy – by the president. The first such test of public approval was the new constitution itself.
De Gaulle hardly gave his opponents a level playing field. The country was plastered with Oui posters and every elector was sent a copy of the constitution together with an address by De Gaulle urging them to vote ‘yes’. Even tax collectors suspended operations for the duration of the campaign. The state-run TV networks were saturated with pro-constitution propaganda, including an eve-of-poll address by the General. France’s chattering class were furious. The leftist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said: ‘The frogs are looking for a prince.’ Le Monde commented: ‘Conceived in sin, the Fifth Republic is going to be born in lies.’ Nonetheless, with nearly 80 per cent of the votes, De Gaulle got his mandate and the Fifth Republic is still with us today.
De Gaulle used repeated referendum wins to keep the French public onside as he betrayed the army and white settlers in Algeria, who had brought him to power, and handed the country over to the nationalist FLN, who had been fighting French colonial rule since 1954. After a decade, France tired of the imperious old man and ditched him when he called a referendum too far in April 1969 on the trivial topic of local government reform, announcing that he would resign if his government lost. It did and he went, dying the following year.
Europe’s new 21st-century power, however, has adopted a more relaxed attitude to referendums. When they are called, the result is generally accepted in Brussels only if it is in line with what Brussels wants to do. In 1992 Denmark voted to reject the Maastricht Treaty on closer European integration. The following year, after a couple of cosmetic changes, the country was forced to vote on the treaty again, this time passing it. The same thing happened in 2005 when referendums in the Netherlands and France rejected the Lisbon treaty: the treaty was tweaked and passed. When voters in Ireland rejected it, they too, like the Danes before them, were made to vote again. The treaty is now in force.
So what conclusions can be drawn from this largely melancholy history? That referendums are usually used for the convenience of rulers rather than the ruled. Much depends – as Alex Salmond realises – on the question on the ballot paper and on who controls the organs of propaganda – radio, TV, newspapers and, today, the Internet. In the 1975 British EEC referendum almost all the media and majorities in the three main political parties were rooting for a ‘Yes’ vote. The ‘Nos’ were lucky to pick up as many votes as they did. Though British public opinion is mainly eurosceptic, the official position of the three parties remains unchanged, which is why there is unlikely to be a staying in/coming out referendum on Europe anytime soon.
Nigel Jones is the author of Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (Hutchinson, 2011)
