Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire

J. M. Thompson

• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781787206694
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Französische Geschichte

An excellent one volume portrait of Napoleon III and the short-lived second French Empire which was brought to ruins by the 1870 Franco-Prussian war."ONCE again J. M. Thompson has given us a colorful, arresting, and interpretative account of a period of French history—this time of the Second Empire. In this instance, as in previous works, the author makes the biography of a man (Louis Napoleon) the vehicle for a history of a period, thereby infusing the warmth of a very human personality throughout the history of a complex and fateful era. Thus we follow the life of a man who followed his star of fate from youthful refugee to insurrectionist, prisoner, president, emperor, economic reformer, arbiter of a continent, prisoner-of-war, and, alas, to refugee again until death.Nothing of the romance, the contrasts, the shaded significances is lost by the author's telling. Those who have read his French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte cannot fail to discern and appreciate the same trenchant pen and deft brush which restore life and odor to a much-told tale of the past. While Mr. Thompson does not attempt to conceal the faults and mistakes of the man, in the main he joins with some current revisionists in understanding (not justifying) the "crime of December 2nd" and crediting Napoleon Ili with constructive policies at home and abroad and exonerating him of the major responsibility for the outbreak of the war of 1870. The author rightly blames Bismarck and French public opinion of all classes for pushing Louis Napoleon into the war (p. 272) rather than just a small war party and the empress."-Lynn M. Case

CHAPTER I — THE HEIR (1808–1831)

“Remember thee!

Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat

In this distracted globe. Remember thee!

Yea, from the table of my memory

I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,

That youth and observation copied there;

And thy commandment all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain,

Unmix’d with baser matter.

Hamlet, I, v”

1

The place; No. 17 rue Cérutti (now Lafitte), Paris: the time; the night of April 20th–21st, 1808.

THE family, the country, and the continent into which Louis Napoleon was born were dominated by a single will: that of his uncle, the Emperor Napoleon. Nine years ago the Corsican exile had made himself master of Paris. Four years ago he had been crowned Emperor of the French people. In less than ten years, by efficient autocracy and a series of military successes, he had ordered France, Italy, the Netherlands, and western Germany under his rule, and had dictated terms to Prussia, Austria, and Russia. His code of law, his economic system, his garrisons and officials, his ambassadors and spies were in action all over Europe. There was hardly a man, from general to merchant, from bishop to statesman, who must not consider, before he made a decision, what Napoleon would think of it; or, more probably, what he should do in view of some decision that Napoleon had already made. For without any question the Emperor held the initiative: his was the master mind.

Napoleon’s seven brothers and sisters called him Sire and Votre Majesté. Joseph was King of Naples, and would soon be King of Spain. Louis was King of Holland, Jérôme King of Westphalia. Elisa and Pauline became Princesses, Caroline a Queen. Only Lucien refused the obedience that could have earned a crown. Napoleon dictated their marriages, their divorces, and the names of their children. They had to come when and where he summoned them, and could not travel without his leave. In return they had wealth, palaces, and flattery; but all just so long as his favour might last, or his fortune hold. Nouveaux riches and nouveaux royales, they were unsure of themselves, shallow-rooted in an alien soil, and without traditions amongst some of the oldest aristocracies in Europe.

When Napoleon made himself Emperor the Bonapartes became a dynasty, and quarrelled over his succession. They were already jealous of the Beauharnais—the Empress Joséphine, her son Eugène, and her daughter Hortense; and soon became doubly so, because Hortense’s sons by Louis, Napoléon-Charles (1802) and Napoléon-Louis (1804), were the only male Bonapartes of the next generation in the line of succession; for Joseph Bonaparte had only daughters, and Charles-Lucien, son of Lucien Bonaparte, and Jérôme, son of Jérôme Bonaparte, were excluded, with their fathers, because their mothers were commoners.

When Hortense’s third son, Louis-Napoléon, was born (1808) he stood fourth in the line of succession after his uncle Joseph, his father Louis, and his elder brother Napoléon-Louis: for his eldest brother, Napoléon-Charles, had died the year before (May 5th, 1807): but within less than three years the birth of Napoleon’s legitimate son, the King of Rome (March 20th, 1811), made it unlikely that Louis’ branch of the family would be needed to supply a successor; and the abdication of 1815, followed by fifteen years’ reign of the restored Bourbons and eighteen of the Orléanist Louis-Philippe, might seem to end all hope of another Napoleonic Empire. Yet for thirty years Louis stubbornly believed that he was destined to fulfil his uncle’s last dream at St. Helena, and took as omens of it every event that brought him nearer to that goal: the deaths of Napoleon (1821), of Napoléon-Louis (1831), of the King of Rome (1832), of Joseph Bonaparte (1844), and of his father Louis (1846); till in 1848 he remained the only legitimate heir of Bonapartism.

During these years Louis was formulating in his own mind, and using for dynastic propaganda, a view of the Napoleonic Empire not unlike that which the Emperor himself had tentatively adopted in the acte additionnel of 1815, and had elaborated in his conversations at St. Helena—a view which might still make a military dictatorship acceptable to a generation tired of war and demanding a constitution. This new Napoleonism was to be based on popular suffrage; it was to take form in liberal institutions; it was to stand for international peace; it would uphold the right of each people to choose its own government and mind its own affairs. All this was, of course, bad history: the actual Empire had not been at all like that. But it was good propaganda. The common people lives by faith, not facts: its religions are based on myths. Louis’ instinct was right when he founded his appeal to France upon a legendary, not a historical Napoleon.

It would be a mistake to suppose that he did not know what he was doing, and why he was doing it. Thirty years of dull peace, political corruption, and middle-class prosperity had produced a state of mind ready to forget all the harm that Napoleon had done and to remember only his benefits; to regret times when life at home was more exciting, and the country more respected abroad; to lament lost territories, forgetting who had lost them, and to sigh for la gloire, without remembering at what a cost it had been won. Indeed—and here was the inner power of Louis’ appeal—the benefits had been real: life under the Empire, if more dangerous, had also been more invigorating; la gloire might mean suffering and death, but it added to the stature of common humanity. The Napoleonic legend was not a mere travesty of history: it was the prose of Napoleon’s career turned into poetry, fiction made out of fact; and in appealing to it Louis was relying not merely upon what was false in it, but also, and even more, upon what was true. He remembered as well as any of his family or friends what it had meant to be dependent upon the Emperor’s will, and to live under the Imperial regime. He had no illusions as to the real character and aims of that hard, exacting, yet popular autocracy. And in recalling personal memories he was also appealing to national experience. France for better or worse was so deeply marked with fifteen years of that one man’s rule that it had not been able to accommodate itself to any other; and it would be ready, almost at the mere name of Napoleon, whilst clutching at a myth, to fall back into a way of life so well adapted to its traditions and temperament.

‘The mere name of Napoleon’: would that be enough? How long would the legend hold, without a Man to sustain it? Had Louis the intelligence, the character, the power of will to re-impose his uncle’s regime upon a country (let alone a continent) that had changed as much as every society must change after a period of revolution and war? How far and for how long the adventure succeeded; when and why it failed: that is the story of Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire.

2

Of all the royal marriages that Napoleon devised to enlarge his dynasty and secure his succession that of Louis and Hortense seemed to be the most advantageous, and turned out to be the most unhappy. Louis, the fourth of the Bonaparte brothers, was a queer-tempered, morose, invalidish man of twenty-four, with a taste for literature: Hortense, Joséphine’s daughter, was nineteen, a bright attractive girl, fond of dancing, music, and acting, a great favourite of her stepfather Napoleon. It seemed both to him and to her mother a fine idea to make her a link between the Bonapartes and the Beauharnais, and perhaps the mother of a new line of heirs to the throne. She was not in love with Louis, and he did not want to marry: but they could not withstand the Emperor’s will, and were made man and wife by the Papal Legate, Cardinal Caprara, on January 4th, 1802. On October 10th the same year their first son was born, and named Napoléon-Charles; on October 11th, 1804, a second son, named Napoléon-Louis. By this time everyone knew that the marriage was a failure. Louis neglected his wife, disliked her girlish tastes, suspected her friendships, and spied on her at every turn. She pined for Paris and Malmaison, and resented his Puritanical discipline. Whilst Napoleon protected her, and blamed his brother, Joseph and Lucien Bonaparte, aided by Caroline Murat, spread rumours of her misbehaviour, and did their best to break up the marriage. A reconciliation was patched up when in June 1806 Louis became King of Holland; but that autumn Hortense spent with her mother at Mayence, and when she returned to Holland Louis’ treatment of her was such that Napoleon, from the depths of Poland (he was living at Finkenstein with his mistress Marie Walewska) dispatched one of his most stinging rebukes. ‘Your quarrels with the Queen (he said) are becoming public property. If only you would keep for family life the fatherly and effeminate disposition you exhibit in the sphere of government, and apply to public affairs the severity that you display at home! You drill your young wife like a regiment of soldiers...You have the best and worthiest wife in the world, and yet you are making her unhappy. Let her dance as much as she likes: she is just the age for it...Do you expect a wife of twenty, who sees her life slipping away, and dreams of all she is missing, to live in a nunnery or a nursery, with nothing to do but bath her baby?...Make Hortense happy—she is the mother of your children. The only way is to treat her with all possible trust and respect. It’s a pity she is so virtuous: if you were married to a flirt, she would lead you by the nose. But she is proud to be your wife, and is pained and repelled by the mere idea that you may be thinking poorly of her.’{1}

Louis, who also had his grievances, replied that Napoleon had been listening to court gossip, for which the French ambassador at the Hague was chiefly to blame, and said that his jealous watch on his wife was due to affection—as indeed, in such a neurotic and religious nature, it may well have been.{2} Within a fortnight the marriage was put to a supreme test: the eldest son, Napoléon-Charles, was taken ill and died. Hortense was distracted with grief, and Louis shocked into a temporary solicitude. Napoleon covered his disappointment at the loss of an heir with easy exhortations to be calm and cheerful: ‘They tell me (he wrote to Hortense) you have lost interest in life, and are indifferent to everything. That is not as it should be, and not what you promised me. Your son was all you cared for? What about your mother and myself?’{3} But he agreed that a change of scene would do her good, and sanctioned a holiday in the Cauterets district of the Pyrenees, where Barèges and Bagnères-de-Bigorre had been frequented as watering-places since the fifteenth century: were they not visited by Montaigne, Froissart, Henri IV, and Madame de Maintenon? Louis followed Hortense (he had tried a cure at Barèges before his marriage), and they were together at Cauterets from June 23rd to July 6th. There followed a month during which Hortense and her friends carried through a round of excursions, ending with the well-known mountain route from Cauterets to Gavarnie by the Lac de Gaube and the Col de Vignemale, even now a ten hours’ affair (‘guide advisable’), and at that time thought impossible for a woman. On August 12th Hortense rejoined her husband at Toulouse: she had worked off her sorrow and recovered her health. It was an affectionate reunion: Je me jettai dans vos bras, Louis wrote afterwards; and in a letter to her brother Eugène ten days later Hortense said: ‘I am with the King, and we are getting on well together. I don’t know whether it will last, but I hope so, for he wants to treat me better, and you know I have never deserved ill treatment.’{4}

This episode has been given in more detail than it might seem to deserve because of its bearing on the birth of Hortense’s third son, Louis-Napoléon, on April 21st, 1808. Apparently for no better reason than that this date fell less than nine months after Louis and Hortense came together again at Toulouse, the gossip which had never spared Hortense discovered a reason for accusing her of misconduct with one or another of her companions during the holiday in the Pyrenees. Louis himself, in later moments of suspicion, would assert that Louis-Napoléon was not his son. The matter is not unimportant, because it makes a considerable difference to one’s estimate of Louis’ character whether he was a Bonaparte as well as a Beauharnais, and in one’s judgment of his career whether Bonapartism was an idea that he adopted or an inheritance that he could not avoid.

The temporary reconciliation at Toulouse did not last. When Louis returned to the Hague in September, Hortense, who was now with child, refused to go with him, and insisted on remaining in Paris till its birth the following April. Louis’ grievances against his wife were not made easier to bear by a double disagreement with Napoleon: he refused to accept the crown of Spain, and he insisted upon ruling Holland in his own way. Another letter from the Emperor reproaching him with his treatment of his wife (August 17th, 1808) seemed to his suspicious mind a proof that Hortense was plotting against the family, and drove him to the extreme measure of disowning her. ‘Madame, (he wrote on August 29th) our unhappy quarrels have been the cause of all my family troubles...My only consolation is to live away from you, to have nothing to do with you and nothing to expect of you...Adieu, Madame...Adieu for ever.’ Nothing came of this move at the moment; but later in the year he visited Paris (but not his wife) to ask Napoleon’s approval of a separation, with an allowance for Hortense, and his own custody of the elder child. The question was put to a family council at the Tuileries on December 24th, 1809, ten days after a similar gathering had sanctioned Joséphine’s divorce, and Louis’ request was refused: one divorce was sufficiently damaging to the Imperial prestige. For two months in the following year (April 11th-June 1st, 1810) Hortense tried once more to live with her husband, now at Amsterdam; but the Dutch climate and the King’s conduct drove her away again, for a cure at Plombières. A month later Louis, harassed by Napoleon’s criticisms and demands, abdicated the Dutch throne, and fled to Töplitz in Bohemia, appointing Hortense Regent for her elder son. When she asked Napoleon what she should do, he replied that he intended to annex Holland to France, and that she was now free to live quietly in Paris, where he arranged that she should enjoy a settlement of £100,000.

She saw no more of her husband for three years. The later part of that summer she s...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CHAPTER I - THE HEIR (1808-1831)
• CHAPTER II - THE PRETENDER (1831-1840)
• CHAPTER III - THE OUTLAW (1840-1848)
• CHAPTER IV - THE PRESIDENT (1848-1852)
• CHAPTER V - THE EMPEROR (1852-1856)
• CHAPTER VI - THE LIBERATOR (1856-1859)
• CHAPTER - THE ADVENTURER (1859-1869)
• CHAPTER VIII - THE LIBERAL (1860-1869)
• CHAPTER - THE GAMBLER (1863-1869)
• CHAPTER X - THE FATALIST (1869-1870)
• EPILOGUE
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER