Napoleon III Watches
the Rhine
In setting out to coerce Austria out of Germany, Bismarck
knew that the diplomatic situation continued to favour Prussian ambitions.
Neither Russia nor Britain was inclined to an active role in European politics.
France, however, remained a key piece on his chessboard. Before making any
final decision for war he had been at pains to ensure her neutrality. He had
visited the Emperor at the storm-swept resort of Biarritz in south-west France
in October 1865 to reassure him that no anti-French alliance had been made at
Gastein; nor had Prussia guaranteed Austria’s possession of Venetia, in which
the Emperor made clear his close interest. Napoleon listened politely to
Bismarck’s suggestions that an enlarged Prussia would be no threat to France,
significantly raising no objection. Although no definite commitments apparently
were asked for or given on either side, the outcome encouraged Bismarck to
reassure Wilhelm that France would not stand in Prussia’s way.
Napoleon seemed to be in an excellent position as the
quarrel between Austria and Prussia deepened. Military experts thought Austria
the stronger party, but a long war was likely from which France might reap
rewards. If he favoured any side, Napoleon seemed to lean towards Prussia,
which was a force for change and might prove a useful protégé and even ally in
northern Germany. A weakened Austria would enable France to gain influence in
the South German states. It would also allow Napoleon to fulfil his promises
made in 1859 by liberating restless Venetia from Austrian rule, thereby perhaps
restoring his tarnished prestige and influence in Italy. Napoleon encouraged
the Italians to ally with Prussia, so facilitating the war.
Would the Emperor ask any reward for his neutrality other
than Venetia for the Italians? Napoleon dropped hints to the Prussian
ambassador, mentioning the frontiers of 1814 and the Bavarian Palatinate, but
declined to specify what he might demand. ‘I cannot point to an item of
compensation; I can only assure you of my benevolent neutrality: I shall come
to an understanding with your king later,’ he intimated in March 1866. In May
he hinted to the ambassador that the Austrians were making overtures to him and
that: ‘The eyes of my country are turned towards the banks of the Rhine.’ He
appeared to be playing a clever hand, keeping his options open to exploit the
situation whatever the outcome of an Austro-Prussian War.
Although Napoleon’s diplomacy was secret, enough was known
to inform a powerful public attack. Adolphe Thiers, leader of the French
Government in the 1840 crisis, had been imprisoned and exiled briefly by
Louis-Napoleon after the coup d’état of 1851. He had returned to politics in
1863, being elected to the Legislature. On 3 May 1866 he gave a superb
performance in the Chamber, pushing the boundaries of criticism permitted by
the imperial regime. He pointed to the dangers of encouraging Prussia’s
aggressive designs and questioned the wisdom of France promoting a new German
power and Italian unification. Thiers saw no advantage in revising the 1815
settlement of Germany. Stung by the attack and the stir it created, Napoleon
declared at Auxerre three days later that he ‘detested’ the treaties of 1815.
The Emperor’s speech alarmed business circles and the
public. Was he about to embark on some new foreign adventure? There was a run
on the stock exchange. Ever attentive to public opinion, which strongly
favoured peace and neutrality, Napoleon called for a European Congress to
settle current disputes. To Bismarck’s relief, Austria would accept only on
condition that no power should gain territory, effectively killing the
proposal.
In the last days of peace, in June 1866, Napoleon
nevertheless could be confident that his diplomacy would win Venetia for the
Italians however the war turned out. In return for his pledge of neutrality,
the Austrians undertook to surrender Venetia to him if they won. They also
agreed verbally that, if they beat the Prussians, Napoleon could have Belgium,
and the Rhineland would become a buffer state. Thus, as Prussian troops marched
south, it seemed that Napoleon might gain handsomely from the war without
shedding a drop of French blood. The Austrians, in desperation, had already offered
him his price. Bismarck, meanwhile, was taking a double gamble, both on the
military outcome of the war, and on the unspecified reward France might exact
for neutrality.
French Army Reform
In the wake of Sadowa, on 30 August 1866, Napoleon signed a
decree to re-arm his infantry with breech-loading rifles. The weapon adopted
was the Chassepot, named after its inventor Alphonse Chassepot, who for a dozen
years had been developing and improving it with encouragement from the Emperor
and Marshal MacMahon but in the face of resistance from the War Ministry. Tests
of the latest model showed it to be a fine weapon, with a range of 1,200
metres; twice that of the needle gun, to which it was superior in all respects.
It could fire six or seven 11mm rounds per minute, and the ammunition was
sufficiently light to enable the infantryman to carry ninety rounds with him.
It could be fitted with a fearsome-looking sabre-bayonet. Production was put in
hand in French arsenals and by contracts placed abroad, and by mid-1870 the
army had over a million Chassepots. The weapon was tried out against tribesmen
in Algeria, and most spectacularly against Garibaldi’s men at Mentana. ‘The
Chassepot worked wonders,’ wired General de Failly to Paris, to the horror of
Liberals everywhere, but the news seemed to give assurance that French infantry
would be able to meet the Prussians on better than even terms.
Great hopes were placed too on a secret weapon, the
mitrailleuse, a machine gun resembling a cannon with a barrel consisting of
twenty-five rifled tubes. By inserting pre-loaded blocks, fired by a rotating
hand crank, the ‘coffee grinder’ could fire 100 rounds per minute, albeit into
a small area, and had an effective range of 1,500 metres. Napoleon had funded
development himself up to its adoption in 1865, and five years later 215 were
stored ready for use. Beyond a few trained teams, no one knew much about using
the new weapon, and it had yet to be tried in battle; but taken together the
new armaments would surely give great advantages to the tactical defence.
French weaponry might be a source of confidence, but when
Napoleon opened the Legislature in February 1867 he urged that ‘A nation’s
influence depends on the number of men it can put under arms.’ However, in
pressing for a greatly enlarged army, the imperial government faced a dilemma.
If it sounded alarmist about the threat from Prussia it would contradict its
own claims to foreign policy success, and could raise tensions that might
precipitate a war. Its political credit had sunk so low that its programme was
vigorously opposed in the country on the basis of Napoleon’s past record rather
than on any dispassionate assessment of the danger to France.
The French army in the 1860s required a seven-year term of
service. Men reaching the age of 21 were subject to conscription, but a lottery
system gave them a reasonable chance of escaping the obligation to serve. If a
conscript drew a ‘good number’ in the lottery, he was free of any further
obligation. Even if he drew a ‘bad number’ and was drafted into the ‘first
contingent’ of the army, budgetary limitations meant he was unlikely to serve
his full term. For the Legislature jealously guarded its right to fix annually
the size of the contingent required and the military budget. If the conscript
was drafted into the ‘second contingent’ he might have to do only a few weeks’
training in the reserve before being sent home, though he remained subject to
recall in wartime. Or he might be in an exempt occupation, and even if he were
not the system enacted in 1855 allowed those with money to buy themselves out
of the army.
The funds raised from these payments went towards bounties
that encouraged serving soldiers to re-enlist, and towards hiring replacements.
In theory this provided a long-service force of seasoned professionals; in
practice it reinforced a tendency for the army to be the home of ‘old soldiers’
in every sense of the term, supervised by ageing NCOs with some bad ingrained
habits. The 15 per cent of soldiers who were hired replacements were viewed as
a mercenary element that damaged morale and effectiveness. Promotion in the
army was slow, initiative and study were frowned upon, and the stultifying
routine of overcrowded barracks far from home, low pay, hard discipline and
hard drinking scarcely encouraged educated and ambitious young men to enter the
ranks if they could possibly avoid it. Budgetary restraints also kept the army
below strength: 390,000 men in 1866, including non-combatants, compared to half
a million at the time of the Crimean War.
Napoleon, long an advocate of universal military service,
wanted to overhaul the system radically to increase the regular army to 800,000
men, and to form a new territorial army – the Garde Mobile – on the lines of
the Prussian Landwehr, that France could call upon for home defence in wartime.
As War Minister he replaced the ageing Randon, who was unconvinced of the case
for change, with its ablest advocate, Marshal Niel, who tried to steer army
reform through the Legislature during 1867.
The plan to extend military obligations met determined
opposition from many quarters. Republicans saw it as a sinister plot to foment
war by an untrustworthy authoritarian regime. Their faith in the efficacy of
the levée en masse that had saved revolutionary France from invading Prussians
and Austrians in 1792–3 remained deep-rooted. Jules Simon advocated the Swiss
militia system on the premise that the breasts of patriots who kept a rifle
over the hearth would, given a few weeks’ training, be a more than sufficient
bulwark against the conscript hordes of foreign despots. The Peace League,
which had been born from the Luxembourg crisis, pleaded that in the
mid-nineteenth century Europe should be moving towards a brotherhood of
nations, and that there should be no place in a prosperous and progressive
society for anachronistic militarism. Many bourgeois, though enamoured with
histories of France’s military glory, were aghast that they would no longer be
able to buy their sons out of military service, and at the prospect of higher
taxes. Peasants too resented the blood tax that would take them from the
plough. On the right, conservative generals were comfortable with the existing
system and indignant at the suggestion that a long-service professional army,
toughened by combat in Algeria, Italy, Mexico and the Far East, could not see
off double their numbers of enemy conscripts. They found their spokesman in
Thiers, who extolled quality over quantity and ridiculed claims about the
number of men Prussia could put in the field. This supreme confidence in French
military excellence was widely shared, even by those convinced that a war with
Prussia was on the horizon. Government supporters feared that universal
conscription would be so unpopular that they would lose their seats at the next
elections, and Rouher shared their assessment.
Although Niel’s law was finally enacted in February 1868,
concessions had eroded the government’s original proposals. The Legislature’s
right to decide the size of the annual intake, the lottery, the two-tier
contingent system and the right to buy oneself out of the regular army were
retained. Conscripted men in the first contingent would serve a total of nine
years, including four in the reserve. Men in the second contingent would go
straight into the reserve and serve five months. In theory, the obligation to
serve five years in the new Garde Mobile would catch all those who escaped
service in the first contingent: those who had drawn a ‘good number’ in the
lottery, those who hired replacements, those in the second contingent who had
completed their time in the reserve, and some who had been exempted from army
service. The value of the Garde Mobile was vitiated, however, by the
restrictions placed on its training by a Legislature mistrustful of the
regime’s militarist designs. Instead of the twenty-five consecutive days of
annual training sought by Niel, training was limited to a derisory fifteen days
with no overnight stays in barracks.
In his 1869 message Napoleon assured the nation that the
reform had been a great success. An official circular declared that the army
was now so well prepared to meet all eventualities that France could be
‘confident in her strength’. These claims, and the figures published to support
them, may have been intended to mislead the Germans, but they were a delusion.
The Niel law resembled universal military obligation sufficiently to make the
government deeply unpopular, but failed abjectly in its aim of doubling the
number of trained men available for call-up in case of war. The Garde Mobile
soon proved a farce. Attempts to muster it at Paris, Bordeaux and Toulouse led
to serious disorders. After Niel’s death in August 1869 his successor, Edmond
Le Bœuf, did not repeat the experiment, and in July 1870 the Garde Mobile was
formidable on paper only. Little provision had been made even to equip it.
Partly Le Bœuf was governed by budgetary constraints, just as the government
could obtain only a fraction of the funds requested for the programme of
modernizing the eastern fortresses begun after Sadowa. But he also shared the
scepticism of the upper echelons of the military, who had overweening
confidence in the regular army and despised the very idea of a citizen militia.
Indeed, they feared that arming and training one would put guns in the hands of
revolutionaries who might overthrow the regime.
The unpopularity of conscription merged into a wider wave of
discontent that seemed to herald the approaching end of the Second Empire.
Relaxation of laws governing the press and public meetings in 1868 produced a
proliferation of newspapers and a ‘revolution of contempt’ directed at the
regime. Amid this rising tide of criticism and ridicule, the most stinging
attacks appeared in La Lanterne, a pamphlet by the aristocratic vaudeville
satirist Henri Rochefort. His mordant wit made it a runaway best-seller and a
dozen editions were published before the government banned it. In November a
young lawyer from Cahors, Léon Gambetta, made a slashing courtroom attack on
the Empire while defending the revolutionary Charles Delescluze for organizing
a subscription to erect a memorial to Baudin, the half-forgotten deputy who had
been killed during the 1851 coup d’état. The charismatic, passionate and
eloquent Gambetta emerged as foremost among a new generation of republicans
impatient for change to whom the reputation of Napoleon III as the ‘man of
order’ who had saved the country from anarchy after the 1848 revolution meant
nothing.
In 1869 France seemed bound for revolution, and the
government to have lost its grip. It was often a handicap to be identified as a
government candidate in the elections that summer and the big cities voted
heavily against the Empire. The elections were accompanied by riots in the
cities, and by a wave of industrial unrest which saw striking miners shot down
by troops. Although socialists and representatives of the extreme left did not
do well in the elections, the results were an impressive showing for
republicans. Opposition candidates polled 3.3 million votes against 4.4 million
for government candidates. Gambetta was elected for the working-class Paris
district of Belleville, standing on a radical platform that included a
condemnation of standing armies as ‘a cause of financial ruin’ and ‘a source of
hatred between peoples’. However, he opted to represent a Marseilles
constituency where he had also been elected, and at a byelection for Belleville
in November Rochefort, returned from exile in Belgium, was elected in his
place.
Although Napoleon continued to command the political centre
ground, he slowly made concessions in the face of mounting opposition. He
granted the Chamber additional powers. Rouher resigned, though he remained a
confidential adviser and became President of the Senate. In December the
Liberal Émile Ollivier, a former republican, was invited to form a ministry.
This appeared to Napoleon to be the best way of saving his regime, though it
created tensions among its loyal supporters. Those, including the Empress,
Baron Jerome David (another nephew of Napoleon I) and Rouher, who believed that
the imperial government needed more authoritarianism, not less, would await
their opportunity to sabotage what they saw as the dangerous experiment of the
‘Liberal Empire’.
