Napoléon III
Louis-Napoléon
Bonaparte was born in 1808, around the middle of the reign of his
uncle Napoléon Bonaparte as emperor of France. His father, Louis-Bonaparte,
Napoléo's brother, was king of Holland; his mother, Hortense
de Beauharnais, was the daughter of the empress Josephine.
From early adulhthood, Louis-Napoléon nursed the delusion that he should ineherit his uncle's imperial throne. In 1836, he launched a coup at Strasbourg. It failed but the reigning monarch Louis-Philippe convinced his outraged government to allow him exile in the USA. Much of the Napoleonic mystique travelled with him.
Louis-Napoléon soon returned to Europe. In 1838, from Switzerland, he financed the publication of 100,000 copies of a pamphlet justifying the 1836 coup. Pressure from France and Austria forced him to settle in England. On the death of his mother, he inherited and ploughed more money into propaganda, including the famous Letters from London, promoting him as sole heir of his uncle’s imperial legacy.
In August 1840 he crossed the Channel hoping to assemble a large enough popular force to take on the French government and ‘avenge Waterloo’. But he and all his collaborators were arrested and Louis-Napoléon sentenced to life imprisonment. This gave him the leisure to develop some startlingly modern ideas on class:
'Today, rule by cast is over. Government can only be achieved with the people.'
Six years later he escaped from prison and fled to England once more, disguised as a painter and decorator. He returned to France during the 1848 uprisings and was elected to parliament and then – remarkably – to the presidency of the new republic itself.
In the following years, the French parliament sent troops to Rome to defend the pope, promoted religious teaching in schools and abolished universal male suffrage, depriving three million workers and artisans of the right to vote. Louis-Napoléon opposed these measures and, more and more, seemed to embody the egalitarian, forward-looking secularism of the Revolution.
In 1851, Louis-Napoléon launched his first successful coup, abolishing the Assemblée Nationale and re-establishing voting rights. Here and there, troops loyal to him crushed opposition. A referendum in December approved his action and his mandate as president was extended to 10 years. By the end of 1852, the fig-leaf of democratic legitimacy was abandoned and he was made emperor, choosing to be known as Napoléon III.
Under Napoléon III, France sided with the Ottomans and their allies, the British, against Russia in the Crimean War. He promoted the ideal of a 'community' or commonwealth of north African nations, all of whom would recognise him as monarch. He encouraged the unification of Italy in order to reduce Austrian power, annexing Savoy and then Nice through referenda and political dexterity. Between 1861 and 1867, his forces waged a doomed campaign to create a Central American empire in Mexico. His strategy of neutrality in the ongoing conflict between Prussia and Austria was financially onerous.
As the years passed, Napoléon III was obliged more and more to govern with the co-operation of parliament. With Hausmann, he undertook the extraordinary reorganisation of Paris, with many new parks and gardens, as well as wide boulevards that couldn't be choked by protestors chucking a couple of bedsteads from a first floor window. Many other French towns and cities benefitted, often gaining an impressive rue Impériale. (After Louis-Napoléon's fall they would almost all be renamed rue de la République.)
Finally, in 1870, a new constitution, extending and reaffirming the rights of parliament was drawn up and voted on by the people of France. In the midst of these changes, disputes between France and Prussia over rights of succession in Spain and other diplomatic slights brought open war. French losses led to the defeat in parliament of Napoléon III's prime minister.
In charge but out of his depth, Louis-Napoléon made haste to his appointment with destiny – the Battle of Sedan.
