The unlikely triumph of Napoleon III

The People’s Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III, Edward Shawcross, Faber & Faber, £25

Few political careers have been more dramatic – or unlikely – than that of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the man who ruled France between 1848 and 1870, first as president and then as emperor. His rise was as stunning as his fall was spectacular. So much so that his life often appears to resemble something taken from the pages of a 19th-century melodrama rather than reality. As the nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte, he was born in 1808 into an imperial family at the height of its powers, the product of a rather unhappy union between Napoléon’s younger brother, Louis, and the emperor’s stepdaughter Hortense de Beauharnais. Following his uncle’s fall from power in 1814-15, the young Louis-Napoléon grew up in solitary exile in a Swiss chateau above the picturesque Lake Constance, surrounded by Napoleonic memorabilia and stories of the emperor’s daring military exploits: a museum of ghosts and faded imperial grandeur.

From an early age, he was inspired by an almost religious devotion to his uncle’s memory. Upon hearing of the death of the great man on St Helena in 1821, the 12-year-old Louis-Napoléon, then at school in Augsburg, wrote home to his mother: ‘This death has caused me, as you can imagine, such great grief… When I do wrong, if I think of this great man, I seem to feel within me his spirit telling me to be worthy of the name Napoléon.’

While he dreamed of a grander destiny than his Swiss seclusion allowed for, Louis-Napoléon soon planned to write his own name into the pages of history. He spent much of his youth scheming to restore the lost Napoleonic empire; he twice tried and failed – in 1836 and 1840 – to overthrow the French July Monarchy, a liberal-leaning Bourbon regime that had come to power following a revolution in 1830. His failure on the second occasion saw him locked up by the French authorities in the Château of Ham, a gilded prison by the River Somme from which he would later stage a daring escape.

Then, after living for 40 years in exile, mostly between Switzerland and London, he finally staged one of the most remarkable political comebacks in history. The nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte rode a wave of popular adulation in the aftermath of France’s 1848 revolution and it took him all the way to the summit of the French state. Most remarkably, this feat (which shocked many high-minded contemporaries) was accomplished not through a coup d’état, but by winning France’s first presidential election conducted under universal male suffrage, vanquishing his opponents with an emphatic 74 per cent of the vote.

Old habits die hard, however, and the ‘prince-president’ soon began conspiring once again, this time to outflank his political opponents. Unwilling to be restricted to a single term in office as president, in 1851-52 Louis-Napoléon broke his constitutional oath and staged a coup that toppled the French Second Republic, proclaiming a restored empire with himself as Napoléon III (the first emperor’s son, Napoléon II, had died in 1832). For the next two decades the Second French Empire seemed to have defied the laws of political gravity by bringing France’s age of revolutions to a close, establishing a regime that married liberty and progress with order and stability. By 1870, before France was crushed by the rising German juggernaut during the Franco-Prussian War, the Second Empire had governed the country for longer than any other regime since 1789. It was a remarkable achievement.

For all that, Louis-Napoléon was often an object of ridicule, lambasted by jealous political opponents and bien pensant intellectuals who saw him at best as a blustering nonentity, and at worst as a rabble-rousing tyrant. The great poet of the age, Victor Hugo, that self-appointed conscience of the nation, dubbed him ‘Napoléon le Petit’ – Napoléon the Little; Karl Marx, in the preface to his 1869 edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, condemned him as ‘a grotesque mediocrity’; the political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville remarked venomously that the emperor was a political ‘dwarf’ who ‘on the summit of a great wave can reach the top of a cliff that a giant placed on dry ground could not scale’. Perhaps most amusing of all were the words of his rival for mastery of Europe, the great Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who dismissed him as ‘a sphinx without a riddle’.

The luminaries of the age mocked Louis-Napoléon for his diminutive stature, vulgar attachment to ‘the people’, and what they saw as his dangerous detachment from reality. Worst of all, he spoke French with a distinctive Swiss German accent, a source of much sneering and national embarrassment (he ended up taking elocution lessons to improve his pronunciation after becoming president in 1848).

After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, Napoléon III’s reputation was much maligned by historians under the French Third Republic. A ‘black legend’ was born. It portrayed the emperor as a Machiavellian mediocrity who had exploited demagogic populism to crush the Second Republic and enshrine a corrupt Bonapartist dictatorship. He was a convenient bête noir for what Robert Tombs has memorably referred to as the ‘Whig-Republican’ narrative of French history, a national story in which France’s post-revolutionary progress reached its apogee and culmination with the establishment of a liberal republican system of government.

The rehabilitation of Napoléon III took place gradually, and then suddenly. An important watershed moment came in 1990, with the French politician and historian Philippe Séguin’s revisionist Louis Napoléon Le Grand  (Louis-Napoléon the Great), the title of which was a pointed reference to Hugo’s derogatory epithet. Séguin, a social Gaullist, asserted that the Second Empire had done more than any other regime to forge contemporary France by presiding over a period of political stability and economic dynamism at home and military glory abroad. His Napoléon III was not the demagogic Caesarist of republican mythology, but a visionary moderniser and saviour of the nation: a General de Gaulle avant la lettre.

It is not necessary to share Séguin’s reverence of the Second Empire or de Gaulle to acknowledge the force of his argument. The trail that he blazed has been followed by others, albeit not uncritically. Many features of his reinterpretation have become a part of a scholarly consensus – in both Britain and France – that is now inclined to look far more kindly upon France’s last emperor. The result has been a far more well-rounded picture of the triumphs and failures of a formative period in modern French history.

Edward Shawcross’ excellent new biography fits squarely within this long reassessment of Napoléon III’s life and legacy. In The People’s Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III, Shawcross sets out similarly to rescue this much-maligned statesman from the polemical taunts of his critics. His Napoléon III is a man ‘underestimated’ by his contemporaries, a ‘precociously skilled political practitioner’ who created ‘the world’s first managed democracy’ and ‘made France great again’.

Ultimately, where this biography succeeds most is not in providing a radically new reinterpretation of the emperor, but in introducing this remarkable and misunderstood French statesman to a new generation of Anglophone readers. It does not try to shift the interpretation of the period so much as approach it from a fresh, and highly personal, perspective. In doing so, it has painted a vivid and intimate portrait of a man who changed the face of France, and Europe, forever.

The People’s Emperor combines shrewd observations with compelling storytelling. Shawcross has a gift for narrative history: he has an eye for picturesque detail, a wonderful taste for irony, and a keen sense of tragedy. The result is a compulsively readable account of Louis-Napoléon and his times – a reminder of the flair and imagination that is so sorely lacking in much of today’s academic history.

For Shawcross, Napoléon III’s great achievement was that he ‘married mass democracy with conservatism in a way that no one else in history had’, thus showing how ‘conservatism could be popular in a world of democratic politics’. The Second Empire was simultaneously ‘an illiberal democracy’ and ‘a populist dictatorship’ in which universal male suffrage was ‘co-opted for elite interests’. Notably, the franchise under the Second Empire was far more democratic than that which existed in Britain at the time.

This balancing act was made possible by a Bonapartist synthesis, which attempted to chart a third way between revolution and reaction, republicanism and royalism, by reconciling France’s revolutionary inheritance with a strong state. Louis-Napoléon had outlined the contours of this synthesis in a series of political pamphlets and essays published during his years of exile and imprisonment, the most notable of which were Des Idées Napoléoniennes  (1839) and L’Extinction du Paupérisme  (1844). In a message delivered to the French legislative assembly in 1849, when he was president, he had declared that ‘the name Napoléon is itself a programme’, one combining ‘order, authority, religion and the welfare of the people’ at home and ‘national dignity’ abroad.

Later, in 1851, he explained his vision further to a packed-out banquet held in the town hall of Dijon: ‘France does not want a return to the old regime under whatever form it may be disguised, nor the attempt of disastrous and unworkable utopias. It is because I am the most natural adversary of both that [France] has placed its confidence in me.’

As emperor, Napoleon III combined the cult of the first Napoleon with a novel political programme, one that sought to cultivate a broad appeal across the political spectrum – and he wasn’t afraid to use innovative methods to do so. At home, Napoléon III championed the notion that the state should play a more active role in engineering economic growth, inspired by Saint-Simonian philosophies. At a grand set-piece speech at Bordeaux in October 1852, widely interpreted as heralding the restoration of the empire, then President Bonaparte had declared that ‘the Empire means peace’. He proclaimed that his mission would be to heal domestic political divides, restore religion, improve living conditions, cultivate the land, open roads, dig canals and build railways. ‘These are the conquests I think about, and all you who surround me who, like me, want the good of our country, you are our soldiers.’ A prosperous France at peace with itself would live in harmony with the rest of Europe.

Politically, the Second Empire was a regime that was capable of pragmatic adaptation and it underwent a gradual, phased liberalisation in the 1860s. The emperor’s insistence on maintaining universal male suffrage in elections to the Corps législatif ensured that the regime remained responsive to a broad political nation. Indeed, those who accused the emperor of demagoguery did not dispense with universal suffrage when building the Third Republic in 1871. At the same time, the Bonapartist system also pioneered a radical new form of ‘plebiscitary democracy’, in which the emperor retained the right to go over the heads of the politicians and consult the country through referendums. The last of these, held in 1870, gave an emphatic endorsement of the empire’s turn towards liberalism in the late 1860s.

There were, of course, downsides to appearing to be ‘all things to all men’. As Éric Anceau has demonstrated, one disadvantage of Napoléon III’s appeal across political divides was that the emperor was never able to institute a coherent and unified Bonapartist political party. The result was a regime that was often politically rootless and a political system that frustrated the emperor’s will at crucial moments. By far the most costly failure in this regard was over the issue of army reform, where Napoléon III’s U-turn in the face of widespread opposition left France woefully unprepared for a military confrontation with Prussia.

Indeed, the Second Empire was finally brought down not by domestic crisis but by the emperor’s mishandling of foreign affairs. With France isolated once more in Europe, in 1870 Napoléon III was lurched into a war with Prussia that he didn’t want, and for which he knew his country was ill-prepared, spurred on by the seemingly ineluctable strength of nationalist sentiment in Paris. One of the Second Empire’s great triumphs had been to wield the conservative instincts of the French countryside to neutralise the radical influence of the capital. Now Napoléon III, too, found his regime at the mercy of the Paris street. On the battlefield of Sedan, following a crushing defeat against united German forces, Louis-Napoléon’s gravity-defying regime came crashing down.

For all these failings, Shawcross’ account also shows Napoléon III, at his best, to have been a statesman of great vision, one whose sheer audacity and breadth of imagination allowed him sometimes to perceive trends of a higher historical significance. He was the first French statesman to reap the benefits of close cooperation with the country’s historical rival, Great Britain. During the Crimean War (1853-56), the emperor succeeded in forging an entente impériale that allowed each power to complement the strengths of the other: France with her large, highly professional land armies and Britain with her naval supremacy. Military and diplomatic ties were supplemented by a free-trade treaty in 1860.

The emperor played up his affinity for Britain and the British with great skill; this was good diplomacy. Yet it would not have been so effective if it were not also sincere. Before returning to France in 1848, Louis-Napoléon had spent long stretches of time living in London, where he took rooms in the fashionable Fenton Hotel on St James’s Street. Indeed, details of Louis-Napoléon’s exploits in the British capital are among the greatest delights and revelations recounted in Shawcross’ book. Here, we discover, he frequented ‘fashionable soirées with prominent Whig families’, bumped into his uncle’s nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, and made the acquaintance of another unorthodox and raffish romantic, Benjamin Disraeli, who later based the protagonist of his novel Endymion on the Bonapartist prince.

On a more profound level, Louis-Napoléon’s time in Britain left him with a deep respect for the power of the British system, and a belief that the country’s mixed constitution ensured a juste milieu between order and liberty. In 1848, during the rising wave of Chartist agitation, the heir to Napoléon Bonaparte even signed up as a British special constable, joining Charles Dickens in the ranks of those defending the country’s established order. His bemused political opponents never stopped pointing out that the man who was soon to become president of France had recently been an English policeman.

Crucially, his affection for Britain was requited. During his official state visit to Britain in 1855, he charmed Queen Victoria and her subjects. The latter indulged in a wave of what Shawcross describes as ‘Bonapartemania’. The Queen wrote in her diary that ‘[Prince] Albert gets on famously with the Empress, and so do I, with the Emperor, who is fascinating’. The real coup de théâtre of the trip came when, in a rather extraordinary turn of events, the French emperor was made a member of the Order of the Garter (an institution founded by the English king Edward III at the height of the Hundred Years War between England and France).

Of equal interest are Shawcross’ judicious interventions into the historiography, which bring both a lightness of touch and sharpness of insight. He is right to draw a contrast between Napoléon III and the populists of today. Not only was the emperor intensely idealistic, he was also a very cultured and humane character, one who was capable, at times, of great moral courage. As Shawcross concludes, ‘Louis-Napoléon was something rare in history: a kind man with genuine beliefs who wielded immense power’. Indeed, even one of his fiercest republican critics, the novelist Émile Zola, was moved to write that the emperor ‘at heart’ was ‘a good man, haunted by generous dreams, incapable of any wicked action’.

It is tempting to draw parallels between Napoléon III and that other French statesman who combined strong executive power with plebiscitary democracy: Charles de Gaulle. Yet Shawcross is right to resist this temptation, and to conclude that ‘Gaullism was not Bonapartism’. Indeed, as the French historian Éric Anceau, the author of a book exploring the similarities between Napoléon III and de Gaulle, has argued, any parallels are not the result of an organic link between the two men but a consequence of the fact that they faced similar challenges. De Gaulle did not take inspiration from Napoléon III but instead saw him and the first Napoléon as a warning. As the General wrote in his Mémoires d’espoir, ‘the two empires, for a time, prevented fragmentation [of the country], but by means of dictatorship’.

If there is a thread that connects the Second Empire to the Fifth Republic, it runs not via de Gaulle, but through the General’s long-time adviser, Michel Debré, who served as the Fifth Republic’s first prime minister. A deeply impressive lawyer of Jewish heritage, Debré was also, like Louis-Napoléon before him, a passionate Anglophile. As Julian Jackson has shown, when Debré began drafting the constitution for a future French Republic during the Second World War, calling for the creation of a ‘republican monarchy’, the model that he had in mind was not a Bonapartist but a British one. For it was in Britain’s constitution, as he interpreted it, that he found ‘a model in balancing the requirements of liberalism and efficiency, liberty and authority’.

Many of France’s post-revolutionary statesmen have sought, in their own ways, to emulate what they see as the virtues of the British model. François Guizot, the leading politician under the July Monarchy, was the author of several works on English history. He hoped that the 1830 revolution would prove to be France’s very own version of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Adolphe Thiers, the great survivor of 19th-century French politics who served as the first president of the Third Republic, had called for France to adopt the British system of constitutional monarchy in 1830. The conservative republic that he crafted in 1871, which attempted to curb excessive executive power in order to preclude a return to Bonapartism, drew on Britain’s parliamentary tradition as well as the checks and balances found in the United States constitution.

Guizot’s historical works found an avid reader in Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who expressed an admiration for the parliament, civil liberties and free press of Great Britain, and hoped that one day his own country’s political institutions would evolve to resemble them. As emperor of France, he saw himself as Montesquieu’s wise legislator, bringing his country to a state of liberty by working patiently within the grain of its peculiar customs. It is no accident that one of Louis-Napoléon’s most widely quoted maxims – ‘March at the head of the ideas of your century, and they will follow you and sustain you. March behind them, and they will drag you along. March against them and they will topple you!’ – was proclaimed as the conclusion to an 1841 essay exploring the lessons of England’s Glorious Revolution.

After falling from power in 1870, Napoléon found refuge in the quiet English country town of Chislehurst, in Kent – ‘the garden of England’. Only his unfortunate death during surgery to remove gallbladder stones in 1873 finally put an end to his hopes of returning to power. There is more than a touch of irony in the fact that the man who bestrode France as emperor for nearly two decades has his final resting place in the crypt of St Michael’s Abbey in Farnborough. His tomb lies, as Shawcross aptly describes it, ‘in a forgotten corner of England’.

Britain today is experiencing a crisis of confidence in its own political system. Yet the degree to which French statesmen have admired, and drawn inspiration from, the British constitution should give those commentators clamouring for ‘Anglo-Gaullism’ pause for thought. If the past is a guide, it suggests that the solution to Britain’s current crisis does not reside over the channel but within the British tradition itself.