Napoleon III Takes
Power
That year revolutions ignited by economic distress swept
Europe. Paris, that powder keg of revolutionary passions, erupted in February.
King Louis-Philippe, despised for his cautious and inglorious foreign policy,
abdicated and fled to England. The Second Republic was proclaimed by Paris
radicals, but France became embroiled in internal troubles. Such was the need
felt in the country for a man of order that the presidential election held on
10 December produced a result undreamt of by the revolutionaries of February
when they introduced universal male suffrage: a Bonaparte was restored to power
in France.
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was elected President of France by
5.5 million votes: far ahead of his nearest rival. Born in 1808, he was the
nephew of the great Emperor, on whose knee he had been dandled as a child and
whose legend he revered. After Waterloo Louis had lived in exile in Switzerland
with his mother Hortense Beauharnais, and spoke French with a German accent.
During disturbances in Italy in 1831 he had sided with the revolutionaries
against the Austrian regime there. After both his elder brother and his cousin,
‘Napoleon II’, died in 1831–2, Louis assumed the role of Bonapartist pretender
to the French throne. His pamphlets, notably Napoleonic Ideas (1839), promoted
the myth Napoleon had woven around himself in exile on St Helena: of Napoleon
the Liberal, Napoleon the friend of nationalities working for a united Europe,
who had been thwarted by the reactionary monarchies. However, his first
attempts to exploit his uncle’s legend against King Louis-Philippe ended in
farce. An attempted military rising at Strasbourg in 1836 was a debacle and
earned him a sentence of exile. A second attempt, a landing at Boulogne in 1840
with a boatload of volunteers and mercenaries who had joined him in London, was
quickly overpowered by royal troops. This time Louis was imprisoned in the damp
northern fortress of Ham. He escaped disguised as a workman in 1846 and fled to
London where, supplied with money by his rich friends and English mistress, he
was well placed to take advantage of events unfolding in 1848.
In the presidential campaign his supporters adeptly promoted
the power of the Bonaparte name, using images that appealed to classes who had
never before had the vote. Not for the last time, bourgeois professional
politicians underestimated the powers of this unimpressive figure, whose
tendency to stoutness, drooping eyelids, and hesitant, heavily accented
delivery belied his political skills and determination. As Prince-President, he
swore to defend the Republic and toured the country, promoting himself as the
only man who could defend both liberty and order and reconcile internal
divisions that lately had made France seem ungovernable. Continuing radical
disturbances rallied conservatives to him as a man of order. Catholics approved
of a new education law favouring religious schools, and of the despatch of an
expeditionary force to protect the Pope from revolutionaries at Rome.
Louis-Napoleon’s championship of universal male suffrage against the bourgeois
politicians of the National Assembly who tried to restrict it made him appear a
defender of democracy.
His appeal to many groups, combined with shrewd appointments
of supporters to key posts, put him in a strong position to extend his
presidency, which was due to end in 1852. The National Assembly, however,
blocked his attempt to achieve this legally. Louis, with careful planning by
his inner circle and the support of reliable generals and his police chief,
staged a coup d’état on the night of 2 December 1851, the anniversary of his
uncle’s victory at Austerlitz. The Assembly was locked out; its leading
politicians were arrested and imprisoned.
‘Operation Rubicon’ did not go as smoothly as planned,
however. On 3 December a Deputy of the National Assembly, Dr Baudin, was killed
on a Paris barricade. Next day over a thousand protestors manned barricades in
the city. Troops opened fire and killed dozens of them and bystanders too. In
the provinces over 26,000 people were arrested, half of whom were deported,
banished or imprisoned. Throughout the nineteen years of his rule, the ‘crime
of 2 December’ blighted Louis-Napoleon’s attempts to win over a hard core of
opponents to accept the legitimacy of his regime. Nevertheless, the great
majority of French voters supported him when he sought popular endorsement of
his coup. He had brought something new to European politics; a dictatorship
resting on popular approval, but supported by strict censorship, police
surveillance and electoral manipulation. Pressing his advantage, in November
1852 he sought approval for restoration of the Empire and got it by 8 million
votes to 250,000, with 2 million abstentions. With effect from 2 December 1852
he declared himself Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, and shortly
promulgated a constitution that preserved the forms but not the substance of
parliamentary government.
To calm fears at home and abroad that the return of the
Empire meant war, he declared at Bordeaux in October 1852 that ‘The Empire
means peace’, and that his focus would be on internal improvements like
building roads, railways, dockyards and canals. He was careful to cultivate his
uncle’s old nemesis, Great Britain. Despite his peaceful professions, he
cultivated the army, recreated an elite Imperial Guard, and frequently appeared
in military uniform, in deliberate contrast to the black-coated dullness of
Louis-Philippe’s court. Like all French governments since Waterloo, he nurtured
hopes of burying the 1815 treaties. Unlike the Bourbon monarchs, but like the
republicans of 1848, he sympathized with the cause of nationalities in Europe.
He might be expected to act in their favour where opportunities arose.
A Franco-German
Crisis, 1859
A shift in Great Power relations came sooner than anyone
foresaw, as a result of the Crimean War of 1854–6, in which Britain and France
combined to defeat Russia’s attack on the ailing Turkish Empire. The defeat her
army suffered at allied hands at the long siege of Sebastopol exposed Russia’s
weaknesses and discouraged her from active intervention in European politics
for two decades while she undertook internal and military reforms.
The war had another important consequence for European and
German politics: it isolated Austria. Like Prussia, Austria had wished to stay
neutral, but Russian forces at the mouth of the Danube intruded on her vital
interests. Her long resistance to joining the western camp won her no friends;
yet her eventual signature of an ultimatum to Russia weighed heavily in
Russia’s decision to accept peace terms. Russia regarded Austria’s action as
rank ingratitude for the military help she had received in 1849, and an
intolerable betrayal by a fellow conservative power. In future Austria could
expect no Russian help if she needed it; indeed, Russian court circles desired
to see her punished. Prussia, which had not intervened against Russia and had a
common interest in keeping the Poles suppressed, was on the contrary seen as
Russia’s only friend in Europe.
If Russia and Austria were losers, victorious France gained
prestige. Napoleon III’s army had acquitted itself well, albeit at the cost of
95,615 French lives. It had made up the majority of allied land forces and had
shown itself less incompetent than any other in the field; even if the latest
communications technology, the electric telegraph, had proved a mixed blessing.
One French commander-in-chief in the Crimea, Canrobert, had resigned in despair
over orders wired direct from the Emperor in Paris. The 1856 peace conference
was held in Paris, where Napoleon invited the delegates to banquet and waltz at
the Tuileries Palace and savoured his moment as arbiter of Europe. His chances
of founding a stable dynasty improved when the Empress Eugénie gave birth to a
healthy male son, Louis, the Prince Imperial.
In 1858 Napoleon exploited his diplomatic and military
advantages in the hope of ‘doing something for Italy’. Having long desired to
help the Liberal and national cause there, he secretly agreed with the Kingdom
of Piedmont to drive the Austrians out of the parts of Italy they had occupied
since 1815. Napoleon was mixing idealism with opportunism, for he had the
chance to achieve military success, weaken reactionary Austria while she was
isolated, create client states in northern Italy, and regain Nice and Savoy as
the price of his support. Yet, as conflict became imminent, his resolve
faltered, even once he was sure of Russia’s neutrality. Napoleon was finally
pulled over the brink only when, provoked by Piedmontese military preparations,
Austria obligingly declared war in April 1859.
The Italian campaign showed how much warfare had changed
since Waterloo. The French army was transported by railway and steamship,
debouching over the Alps and to the port of Genoa in three weeks. At close hand
there was much that was chaotic about French supply arrangements: Napoleon
lamented privately to his War Minister that ‘What grieves me about the
organization of the army is that we seem always to be … like children who have
never made war … Please understand that I am not reproaching you personally;
rather the general system whereby in France we are never ready for war.’ Yet to
outside observers it seemed that the French army was again proving itself the
best in the world. With no interference from the sluggish Austrians it
completed its concentration, outmanoeuvred the enemy and marched across the
north Italian plain, winning bloody battles at Magenta and Solferino in June.
If little tactical brilliance was on display, French troops showed the superior
élan and willingness to get to close quarters that made them so formidable.
Their senior commanders, driven by the instinct that getting close to the enemy
was the path to honours and promotion, included men who would command armies in
1870. The courtly aristocrat Maurice MacMahon, already distinguished for his
successful assault on the formidable defences of Sebastopol in the Crimea, won
his marshal’s baton and the title of Duke for his performance as a corps
commander at Magenta.
Decorations, promotions, and victory parades in Milan and
Paris were one side of French success in Italy, but another shocked European
opinion. Solferino, a savage battle involving 300,000 men, produced 36,000
casualties by the time a thunderstorm of extraordinary violence put an end to
fighting. With none of his uncle’s ruthless indifference to high casualties,
Napoleon III was sickened by what he saw and smelled on the battlefield next
day. In a famous pamphlet, the Swiss traveller Henry Dunant described the
horrors of the battlefield. The army medical services were overwhelmed.
Dunant’s lurid description rallied widespread support for the initiative of a
group of Swiss philanthropists, who in 1863 founded the International Society
for Aid to the Wounded, later known as the International Red Cross. The
Society’s efforts gave birth to the Geneva Convention of 1864, which laid down
an international code for the humane treatment of wounded enemies and prisoners
of war, and conferred neutral status on medical personnel. Prussia was among
the first and most enthusiastic states to sign the Convention. France signed
too at the Emperor’s behest, despite the reservations of military men who had
no wish to see hordes of civilian volunteers working in the battle zone.
This was for the future. In the wake of Solferino Napoleon
decided to end the war. He and Emperor Franz Josef of Austria met and agreed
peace terms at Villafranca on 11 July. It was not simply that Napoleon had
little stomach for further battles. Typhus was spreading in his badly fed army,
camped under the torrid Italian sun. He had conquered Lombardy for Piedmont,
but if he wanted to force the Austrians out of Venetia he faced a long and
difficult war for which there would be diminishing support in France.
Revolutionary support for Italian unification in central Italy was getting out
of hand, threatening the Papal territories around Rome and alarming French
Catholics. Worryingly, too, Prussia was mobilizing her army.
In the German states, Napoleon’s war in Italy was execrated
as naked aggression against Austria. Fear that Napoleon’s next goal would be
the Rhine revived enthusiasm for and debate about German unity as nothing else
could. Newspaper and pamphlet denunciation of French ambitions was as virulent
as in the crisis of 1840, and much slower to subside. Yet popular sentiment did
not produce cooperation between Prussia and Austria. As she had in the Crimean
War, Prussia obstructed proposals for the German Confederation to mobilize
forces to support Austria. Finally, in mid-June, Prussia mobilized six of her
nine army corps, but as the price of her support sought command of
Confederation forces on the Rhine front. The suggestion made sense while
Austria was under attack in Italy, but her mistrust of Prussian ambitions in
Germany was such that she refused to yield precedence on this point. For the
Austrians too, Prussian mobilization provided an incentive to make peace
rapidly.
Even without an ultimatum, Prussia’s show of strength was
sufficient to cause Napoleon alarm for his eastern frontier. He feared that the
Prussians could put 400,000 men on the Rhine in a fortnight. This expectation
was slightly exaggerated. Helmuth von Moltke, the studious and methodical
Prussian Chief of General Staff, worried that in the present state of the
German railway network – much of which was still single-tracked – it would take
at least six weeks to move a quarter of a million men to the frontier. At all
events, Napoleon concluded that he was in no position to fight the Prussians
while continuing his campaign against Austria. Peace was concluded. The
Prussians demobilized from 25 July, and the French eventually withdrew all
their forces from Italy save for a garrison to protect the Papal territory of
Rome, which Catholic opinion at home demanded. As his price for accepting the
transfer of the central Italian states to Piedmont, Napoleon received Nice and
Savoy following plebiscites in all the affected areas. The recovery of these
two territories on France’s south-eastern border was his first reversal of a
loss France had suffered in 1815: a gain which boosted the popularity of his
regime at home. The other powers, and particularly the German states, were
greatly alarmed that it might not be his last. After his Italian adventure it
was hardly surprising that Napoleon III was feared as the ruler most likely to
disturb the peace of Europe.
