History
Second Empire
The Second Empire refers to the period of French history from 1852 to 1870, when Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, ruled as Emperor. This era was characterized by economic growth, modernization, and the development of Paris as a cultural center. The Second Empire also saw significant political and social reforms, but ultimately ended with the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War.
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11 Key excerpts on "Second Empire"
eBook - ePubTransnational France
The Modern History of a Universal Nation
- Tyler Stovall(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
France under the Second Empire, 1852–1870DOI: 10.4324/9781003057499-4‘First time as tragedy, second time as farce.’ Karl Marx’s famous satire of Louis-Napoleon has haunted his memory, and that of his regime, ever since. For generations French historians, especially those of republican or leftist persuasion, dismissed the Second Empire as a comic opera regime of no real consequence or, worse, as a repressive, authoritarian government that futilely resisted France’s march toward democracy and social justice. Few figures in the history of modern France have been as wickedly lampooned as Napoleon III, often portrayed as the lesser spawn of a great political and military hero. The Empire’s sordid origins in a military coup, and its even more ignoble end in military disaster, have often obscured the accomplishments of the years in between. For the political leaders of the Third Republic in particular, the Second Empire offered little more than a long tale of mistakes it was determined not to replicate.In recent years more nuanced, even positive, perspectives on the regime of Napoleon III have surfaced. Some historians have noted the exceptional growth of the French economy during the Second Empire, arguing that this progress not only brought unprecedented prosperity but also helped create a national market and a national culture. Others have noted the democratic aspect of the regime’s politics, how the Empire combined authoritarianism with universal manhood suffrage, thus leaving an important legacy for French political life in the twentieth century. Still others have pointed to the Empire’s transformation of Paris into a glamorous world capital, controversial at the time but almost universally regarded as an impressive achievement ever since. While Napoleon III clearly failed to equal the military success of his more illustrious uncle, his regime nonetheless laid the economic and political groundwork for the emergence of modern France.
eBook - ePub- Pierre Goubert(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
16 France under Napoleon III: 1851–1870
A REGIME AND A MAN
For the sixth time in less than forty years, France changed its regime. The Second Empire resulted from a coup d’état that had been better prepared than the 18 Brumaire of the first Napoleon. Like all the preceding regimes, it followed a goodly mix of massacres, imprisonments, and deportations. Indeed, the Third Republic had arisen in the same manner, under the watchful eye of the occupying forces, as had the Restoration in 1815. In 1870, the retrograde Second Empire died the same way as the first, in defeat and occupation; seventy years later, the Republic that succeeded it died the same death. Despite some glorious episodes, we must admit that wars, especially great wars, did not bring success to the French state or nation. This statement may appear cruel, but the historian has a duty to bring to light the evidence, and not to hide it behind the veil of modesty or hypocrisy.Helped by a tight circle of fiercely loyal, remarkably intelligent, and passably dishonest advisers, the nephew of the Great Emperor had brutally seized power. His personality has been subjected to the most varied analyses and opinions. To tell the truth, it is tempting to write that his end was his judgment. A lack of intelligence marked both the incredible expedition to Mexico (1862–67) and the six catastrophic weeks of the war of 1870, which, for all practical purposes, ended at Sedan on September 2. It is true that Louis-Napoleon in his seventies had lost both Morny and his own health, and that his entourage (whom he had, after all, chosen) showed an undeniable and vain mediocrity.But the Second Empire cannot be judged only by its dénouement. These twenty years had profound effects on France, primarily because they included the nation’s first industrial revolution, some hundred years after the English example. This revolution may be summed up in four words: credit, banking, railways, and metallurgy
eBook - ePubParis in Modern Times
From the Old Regime to the Present Day
- Casey Harison(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
5 Paris during the Second Empire, 1852–1870 Chronology
Introduction1851 Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état—rebellion in Paris is put down 1852 Declaration of Second Empire—Louis-Napoleon becomes Napoleon III—Bon Marché department store opens—Crédit Mobilier launched 1853 Baron Haussmann appointed prefect—Haussmannization begins—conseils des prudhommes re-established1855 First Paris World Exposition—Parisian Gas Company created 1860 Annexation of suburbs—construction of National Library begins 1864 Labor strikes legalized 1867 Second Paris World Exposition 1868 Passage of law allowing popular meetings 1870 Franco-Prussian War begins 1870–71 Siege of Paris during Franco-Prussian War Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte who became Napoleon III in France’s Second Empire, did not elicit much respect from certain prominent nineteenth-century figures (whose own reputations indeed probably outlived that of Louis-Napoleon): in the Second Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon, which described the seizure of power in the coup d’état of 1851, Karl Marx ridiculed the new French leader as a comical shadow of his great uncle; and the famous French novelist Victor Hugo, who was driven to exile in 1851, relentlessly mocked the Emperor as “Napoleon the Little.” In some ways, the Bonapartist legend never quite recovered from the Second Empire.Unlike the previous French regimes of the Restoration and July Monarchy, Napoleon III’s Second Empire demonstrated an adventurous, sometimes misguided (as it turned out) spirit in foreign affairs and war. In the 1850s, France sent armies to fight alongside Great Britain and other allies against Russia in the Crimean Peninsula, and then against Austria in support of Italian unification. Another French army was dispatched to Mexico to aid the adventure of the Habsburg archduke Maximilian. Napoleon III also solidified the French hold on Algeria. But the foreign wars were not close to the magnitude nor the success of the original Napoleon, and the episode that brought the Second Empire to an end was Napoleon III’s fateful decision to send France to fight yet another war—this one against the large and modern Prussian military.
eBook - ePub- G. Lowes Dickinson(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter VII The Second EmpireL. GRÉGOIRE : Histoire de la France. TAXILE DELORD : Histoire du Second Empire. BLANCHARD JERROLD : Life of Napoleon III. JULES FERRY : La Lutte Électorale en 1863.W. N. SENIOR : Conversations with Distinguished Persons during the Second Empire.K. HILLEBRAND : France and the French in the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century.VILLETARD : Histoire de l'Internationale. J. RAE : Contemporary Socialism. W. F. DAWSON : German Socialism.Articles on the " International " by Professor BEESLY in the Fortnightly Review of 1870 and by Mr. HOWELL in the Nineteenth Century of 1878.Œuvres de Napoléon III.CHAPTER VII THE Second Empire§ 1. The Emperor’s Theory of the Empire
The coup d'état of December was not merely the act of a vulgar adventurer, aiming at power for the sake of power without consideration of public ends. Louis Bonaparte had for years been forming his mind and shaping his ideal on the life and works of the first Napoleon. As early as 1840 he had published his Idées Napoléo-niennes, a work which is at once a tribute to the First and an advertisement of the Second Empire. In it, after celebrating the Emperor as the preserver and founder in practice of the ideas of the Revolution, he proceeds to describe what he believes would have been the conclusion and crown of his labours. After consolidating order and legal equality by means of despotism, Napoleon, it seems, would have proceeded, in the fullness of time, to establish liberty by removing the restrictions on the Press, conferring on the Chambers a genuine legislative power, and permitting their members to be elected directly and freely by universal suffrage. The centralized despotism was a temporary expedient necessary to the creation of solid institutions; once this end was attained, the political system that facilitated it would have done its work. France would have passed through her period of tutelage and be fit to receive the full control of the estate that her guardian meantime had been organizing and practically recreating. The first Napoleon, as he was thus interpreted, had utilized the ancient traditions of centralization to organize the anarchy of the moment in the interest of the revolutionary ideal; and such, according to his nephew, must be the character of every sound policy: " The pact which binds the various members of a society must derive its form from the past, its facts from the present, its spirit from the future of that society." Applying this maxim to his own circumstances and time, he arrived at the conclusion that the only way to save the present and develop the future was to re-establish the Empire. The Restoration had failed because its spirit as well as its form was that of the past; the Monarchy of July because it had existed for the present, without tradition and without ideal; the Republic because, in its zeal for the future, it had ignored both the present and the past. The Empire alone represented the reconciliation of order and progress, the tradition of the past, the facts of the present, and the inspiration of the future. But it would not be sufficient simply to restore what the first Napoleon had established. Forty years had modified both circumstances and men. The nation had become accustomed to parliamentary liberties; it was tormented and perplexed by new industrial and social problems; above all, it was no longer aggressive in arms against the coalition of Europe. It followed that the policy of the third Napoleon must be peace and industrial progress, and ultimately an extension of political liberty in accordance with the modern democratic ideals. It was not, then, as a military despotism that Napoleon III conceived the Empire; rather, the Emperor was the elect of the people, a democratic chief, appointed by the unity of France to control and harmonize her divisions. The Restoration had been the Government of the nobles, the Monarchy of July that of the middle class; he alone represented the nation as a whole. The plébiscites to which he had recourse were a reality to Louis Napoleon; he regarded them as conferring on his Government a legitimacy which could be claimed by no other régime
eBook - PDF- Michael F. Leruth(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- ABC-CLIO(Publisher)
As his nonrenewable four- year term approached its end in 1852, he followed his uncle’s example and staged a coup, soon followed by the establishment of the Second Empire (1852–1870). He took the name of Napoleon III in deference to Napoleon I’s son, the Duke of Reichstadt (1811–1832), who was titular emperor for a short time after his father’s abdication but never reigned. Napoleon III ruled France for eighteen more years, during which industrialization progressed and the country was prosperous. Paris was modernized and given its luxurious grand boulevards under the supervision of Baron Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon III’s prefect of the Seine department (i.e., Paris). This urban transformation and the accompanying expansion of the middle class and leisure were depicted in the poems of Charles Baudelaire and the works of the impressionist paint- ers (e.g., Manet, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Caillebotte, and Degas). French colonial expansion (Algeria, Senegal, Indochina) and intervention in European wars (Crimean War, Italian War) also continued. After its initial “authoritarian” phase (1852–1860), the Second Empire entered a “liberal” phase (1860–1870), characterized by a rap- prochement with liberals and workers and a greater degree of parliamentarianism. However, Napoleon’s armies and his own prowess as a commander were no match for a rising Prussia-dominated Germany, which quickly defeated the French in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). France’s crushing military defeat led to the col- lapse of the Second Empire and the establishment of the Third Republic (1870–1940), dashed hopes for yet another restoration of the French monarchy, resulted in the annexation of Alsace and part of Lorraine by the victorious and newly unified Ger- many, and led to the radical uprising known as the Paris Commune (1871) brutally suppressed by French troops. Napoleon III died in exile in England. See also: Chapter 1: Paris.
eBook - ePub- William Simpson, Martin Jones(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The Second Empire in France, 1851–70Contents
Key dates SECTION A Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and power The flourishing of the Second Empire: the 1850s Failure or fulfilment: 1860–70 SECTION B - TOPICS FOR DEBATE Liberal at home and abroad?KEY DATES1840 Louis Napoleon imprisoned after Boulogne coup fails 1851 1–2 Dec. Louis Napoleon‘s coup sets up ten-year presidency 1852 Jan. Constitution of what became the Second Empire Oct. Napoleon at Bordeaux says ’the Empire is peace’ Dec. Second Empire proclaimed under Napoleon III Press law requires financial deposits from newspapers; Crédit Mobilier founded 1853 Napoleon marries Eugénie, Countess de Montijo 1854 March Crimean war begins; France and Britain ally with Ottoman Empire against Russia 1856 March Treaty of Paris ends Crimean war 1858 Jan. Orsini’s attempt to assassinate Napoleon III July Meeting at Plombieres between Napoleon III and Cavour of Piedmont 1859 June France and Piedmont defeat Austria at battles of Magenta and Solferino 
eBook - ePub- Jeremy D. Popkin(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
14 The Second Empire’s Decade of ProsperityIn 1851, as in 1799, a Bonaparte overthrew a discredited republican regime and replaced it with an authoritarian one. Like his uncle, Louis-Napoleon was initially able to rely on fairly broad popular support because he promised to put an end to the futile squabbling of the politicians he ousted. The new Napoleon benefited during the first half of his reign from a favorable economic climate, but he also strengthened his position through innovative domestic policies and successful ventures abroad. Not everyone accepted the new Napoleonic order; the regime’s police kept a strict watch on the unrepentant republicans, socialists, and legitimists who refused to renounce their ideals. For some ten years, however, the revived Bonapartist regime seemed to have resolved many of the dilemmas that had weakened all the previous postrevolutionary governments.The Empire’s New Clothes
With the opposition to his coup quickly crushed, Louis-Napoleon and his supporters turned to the erection of new institutions that would guarantee his grip on power. The abortive resistance in Paris and the Midi insurrection served as pretexts for the arrest of thousands of republican activists throughout the country, the most important of whom were imprisoned or deported to the French colonies. A plebiscite, called for December 2, 1851 and organized by prefects who had been ordered to produce impressive results, duly provided an overwhelming majority in favor of a new constitution. Under it the president would remain in office for ten years and the powers of the legislature, divided once again into two houses, were greatly curtailed. Parliamentary elections in the spring of 1852 produced a compliant Chamber of Deputies, from which the regime’s opponents were excluded.Not since the first Napoleon had one man held so much power in France. Raised abroad, Louis-Napoleon was an outsider to his own country. Before 1848, his only period of residence there had been a term in the prison-fortress of Ham after his unsuccessful coup attempt in 1840. Years in exile and in prison had taught him to keep his true thoughts to himself and to rely on a small group of loyal followers. The future emperor was not lacking in intelligence, and the pamphlets he had written before 1848 had shown that he was interested in new ideas, particularly Saint-Simonian proposals for overcoming poverty and social conflict through planned economic expansion. His successful campaign in 1848 and his ability in outmaneuvering the parliamentary politicians afterward revealed a combination of unscrupulousness and genuine political skills. To the end of his reign, however, he kept his true intentions to himself, making it difficult for contemporaries and historians to make sense of what often seemed to be inconsistent policies.
eBook - PDFPaths to a New Europe
From Premodern to Postmodern Times
- Paul Dukes(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Then: A score or two of these atoms make up a village, and a few score of villages make up a department. In this way, the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of like entities, much as a sack of potatoes consists of a lot of potatoes huddled into a sack. But the peasants could not act as an independent class, and needed the representation of a lord and master ‘who will protect them against the other classes, and who will send them the rain and the sunshine from above’. Therefore they gave their support to another Napoleon. 1 In this way the peasants of the provinces were getting revenge on the town-dwellers, especially those in Paris. Because of such age-old rival-ries, the great gulf between the peasants and the urban proletariat would never close in the manner predicted by Marx. Moreover, while Napoleon needed to create his own entourage and bureaucracy, the bourgeois were kept happy with tax burdens which did not seem heavy as long as there was prosperity for them. The Second Empire was fortunate in beginning its history with an almost immediate revival from the economic difficulties that had embarrassed the July Monarchy and the Second Republic. With an amalgamation of many railway companies into as few as six, three times as much line as in 1851 was in existence by 1859. Production of coal, iron and steel all shot up, and foreign commerce almost trebled from 1855 to 1867. This expansion meant that other European nations were enjoying prosperity, too. 224 PATHS TO A NEW EUROPE THE CRIMEAN WAR, 1854–6 However, industrial expansion was by no means a promoter of ami-cable international relations. Indeed, the reasons for the outbreak of war in the Black Sea after 40 years of nearly general peace in Europe possessed a pronounced economic aspect along with the more cele-brated personal misunderstandings and arguments.
eBook - PDF- Stefan Berger, Alexei Miller, Stefan Berger, Alexei Miller(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Central European University Press(Publisher)
The First Napoleonic Empire, 1799–1815 Michael Broers apoleonic history was once seen only in terms of the “great man” and his deeds, and those deeds were, almost entirely, military and diplomatic. His shadow, whether for good or ill, sweep across Europe—“the trail of the comet” was a recurring met-aphor for the Napoleonic period—and that was that. The legacy of the years 1799– 1814 was centered on the man and his legend. When historians ventured into this pe-riod on any other errand than the military, biographical, or diplomatic, it was either in the spirit of French nationalism writ large, or with something close to a sense of shame. The former attitude is encapsulated in the very title of Jacques Godechot’s clas-sic study of expansion under the Directory, La Grande Nation , which almost says it all. 1 Historians of the non-French parts of the Empire too often equated the period of Napoleonic hegemony with collaboration and national defeat. Most of these scholars were too professional to identify their interpretations directly with the Nazi occupa-tions of the 1940s, but their sensitivities were obviously influenced by the climate of their times. Something of this tradition survives in more sophisticated form. For those who interpreted the empire in a purely nationalist context, the former assessment is still a powerful current in military and diplomatic history, as in Paul W. Schroeder’s The Transformation of European Politics , and has, perhaps, found a postmodernist ex-ponent in David Bell’s The First Total War . Both are powerful works, rooted in diplo-matic and military concerns, which see the essence of the Napoleonic experience as a negative dynamic. 2 Nevertheless, the winds of change have blown through Napoleonic history, with considerable force. 1 J. Godechot, La Grande Nation , 2 vols. (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1956). 2 P. W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); D.
eBook - PDF- Henry Heller(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Berghahn Books(Publisher)
Italy for a time was virtually a colony of France under these circumstances. 100 On the other hand, Belgium, the Rhineland, Bavaria, Saxony, and Switzerland benefited from the enlarged Continental market, positive legal changes, and the protectionism of the Napoleonic occupation and the Continental System despite French discrimination. In all of these places the foundations for nineteenth-century industrialization appeared under Napoleon. 101 In the meantime, political centralization, dirigisme, and a war economy favored the development of a national mar-ket in France. Market integration, which had progressed only slowly in the eighteenth century, moved ahead rapidly between 1789 and 1815. 102 The Napoleonic period, in contrast to the revolutionary decade that pre-ceded it, was one in which the economy experienced substantial growth. Explosive growth in manufacturing fueled the political ambitions of the Napoleonic regime not only in Europe, but even for a while in the Americas, the Middle East, and India. 103 Nonetheless, the period of Napoleonic power was punctuated by three periods of economic crisis. The first in 1802–1803 was a throwback to the crises of the ancien régime. Provoked by a succession of poor harvests, it led in classic fashion, to higher food prices, a reduction in the market for manufactures, and consequent unemployment among work-ers. As in the past, high food prices and unemployment provoked unrest, including the pillaging of bakeries and granaries and the burning of grain fields and barns by unemployed workers. Napoleon was deeply alarmed by the threat of unrest in Paris, which might threaten the government, as had occurred in the days of revolutionary upheaval. The price and distribution of The Era of Napoleon (1799–1815) 139 bread was brought under close regulation. The provision of soup kitchens, public works for the unemployed, and the massive purchase of grain from English and Dutch merchants, dispelled the menace of disorder.
eBook - ePub- Robert Cole(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Interlink Books(Publisher)
CHAPTER SEVENCreating the Second Empire, 1789-1871Frederick II would not have been wide of the mark had he uttered the famous line attributed to Madame de Pompadour (and he would have done in French): ‘Après nous le déluge’ (After us the flood). In the century after Frederick, Germany experienced more change than at any other time in its history; and it began with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars that followed.The French Revolution and NapoleonRoyal absolutism and aristocratic privilege were increasingly challenged by advocacy of constitutional government and mass democracy. The result was revolution in Paris in 1789. At the centre was an urban middle class, and a rank and file of sans culottes that well fit Karl Marx’s concept of the Proletariat a half-century later.THE GERMAN RESPONSESuch German intellectuals as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Klopstock, Johann Fichte, Joseph Görres, Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Forster, hardly populists, saw the uprising as the Enlightenment transformed from theory into practice. ‘It is glorious,’ wrote Forster, ‘to see what philosophy has ripened in the brain and realized in the state.’ Britt Petersen described propaganda pamphlets, articles, poetry, songs and drawings in praise of the revolution that circulated throughout Germany and quoted a German woman who wrote: ‘I do not know where to turn, for the papers contain such great and splendid news that I am hot from reading’; and also Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who dis-missed it all as simply ‘newspaper fever ... a bad case of an infectious disease.’Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich SchillerEnthusiasm faded when the revolution turned extreme. ‘I am simply nauseated by the mindless brutality of those scoundrels,’ was Friedrich Schiller’s response to the ‘September Massacre’ in Paris, the trial and execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the ‘Reign of Terror’ which followed. Germans leaned toward constitutional monarchy over populist Republicanism, and supported an imperial ban on Republican propaganda. Ernst Posselt’s book on the revolution was in Latin, in order to prevent ‘any principles [being] circulated among the common people that could kindle the flames of revolution.’ And there were conspiracy theorists, who argued that German Freemasons and the Illuminati were behind the French Revolution.
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