Napoleon III and the Second Empire

Roger D. Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134734689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

In Napoleon III and the Second Empire, Roger D. Price considers the mid-century crisis which provided Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte with the opportunity to gain elective office as President. The author outlines the objectives of Napoleon III and provides:
* A historiographical review of the ruler and his regime
* Details of changing historical attitudes to the period
* A survey of Napoleon III's economic, social and political impact
* An outline of the man's reign and his achievements

1

Introduction

On 10 December 1848 the nephew of the great Emperor Napoléon was elected President of the French Republic, gaining a massive majority under the system of universal manhood suffrage introduced following the Revolution of the previous February. The origins of the Second Empire have to be searched for in the ruins of the first. The creation of a dynasty and foundation of a legend were two of the achievements of Napoléon I. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's major asset was undoubtedly his name, associating him with a Napoleonic cult kept alive throughout the intervening years by an outpouring of almanacs, pamphlets and lithographs promoting a legend of prosperity and glory. It had especial appeal in the countryside in which, it ought to be remembered, over 70 per cent of the population still lived. National pride had been incarnated in the historical memory of Napoléon. The July Monarchy (1830–48) had attempted to benefit by association. In 1833, the statue of the great Emperor had been replaced on top of the Vendôme column in the centre of Paris. In 1836, the Arc de Triomphe, celebrating the glorious achievements of the imperial armies, had finally been completed. The culminating event was undoubtedly the return, in 1840, of the remains of Napoléon I from Saint Helena to their final resting place in the Invalides. Vast crowds had turned out to watch the procession. Louis-Napoléon made every effort to take advantage of this powerful legend, deliberately conceived by the first Napoléon, diffused by the veterans of the Imperial armies, manufactured by printers, publishers and the producers of all manner of commemorative objects, and given respectability by the government of Louis-Philippe. At Strasbourg in 1836 and then Boulogne in 1840, Louis-Napoléon had attempted to seize power. He had appeared in uniform, behind a tricolour capped by an imperial eagle and sought to raise the local garrisons. Although pathetic failures in themselves, these adventures had at least helped to establish him in the public mind as the Bonapartist pretender. For much of the population, the Imperial years stood in marked contrast to the impoverishment and political strife which seemed to have accompanied its successor regimes. The misery of interminable war during the First Empire appeared largely to have been forgotten. Louis-Napoléon's electoral victory was evidence of the importance of historical myth but in the particular circumstances created by the long mid-century crisis, a complex series of inter-related economic and political crises with devastating social consequences. It was this situation which made it possible for Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, previously known for his two adventurous but essentially mad-cap attempts to seize power through military coups, to finally succeed.

Varying approaches to the period

Historians have usually presented the Second Empire as a political drama in two acts. Their focus has primarily been on high politics and the character of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. The regime's ignoble origins in a coup d'état and the tragedy of its final humiliating collapse in the war of 1870 have loomed large. As ever, the approach taken by historians has been shaped by the concerns of their own time. At first, the dominant trend — as republicans struggled to secure the Third Republic (1870–1940) — was marked by bitter hostility. The combination of a carefully researched political narrative with moral indignation was exemplified by the journalist Eugène Ténot in two works on the coup d'état, published even before the Empire had disappeared. At its height in the 1930s and 1940s it identified Napoléon III as a precursor of Fascism. More positive assessments were also beginning to appear. Thus, from the inter-war years of the twentieth century and during the period of reconstruction following the devastation of World War II, historians' interests shifted to reflect a widespread concern about French ‘backwardness’ and ‘stagnation’. They looked for lessons from what were judged to be the regime's constructive ‘technocratic’ achievements and, particularly, the reconstruction of Paris, the creation of a ‘modern’ transportation infrastructure and, more broadly, the establishment of the conditions for rapid economic growth. More recently, our knowledge of the period has been enlarged considerably by social historians working at community or regional level. The traditional ‘top down’ approach to history with its focus on ‘high’ politics has beenneatly supplemented by a ‘bottom up’ perspective much more concerned with the experience of the urban and rural masses.

State and society

The study of political leadership is undoubtedly of crucial importance; so too are questions about the nature of social and political systems. Their structures, both formal and informal, regulate the ways in which political authority can be exercised and provide environments for the creation of more diffuse political cultures. If the objectives political leaders set for themselves need to be identified, so too does the context within which they operate. The factors serving to reinforce or to restrict their authority are of obvious importance. It should be borne in mind also that governments are far from being unitary enterprises, but are frequently riven by internal rivalries and marked by a practical incapacity to achieve their objectives fully. Effectiveness depends in part on institutional design, but additionally on economic and social circumstances and frequently on the impact of largely uncontrollable external events. Thus, France during the Second Empire might be seen as a society in transition, undergoing (as so many parts of the contemporary developing world) an accelerating process of industrialisation and urbanisation, as part of which farming was increasingly commercialised and the rural world integrated into the national society. This might be described, without too much exaggeration, as the result of a communications' revolution, the product of the ongoing improvement of transport, of rising literacy levels and the development of the mass media. As a result, politics was not concerned simply with state-society relationships, but with the efforts of members of old and new elites to reach a compromise over the share of political power, as the vital means of securing their control over arapidly changing, if still predominantly rural, world.

This pamphlet will attempt to build on the work of other historians and, most notably, that of Alain Corbin, Louis Girard, Vincent Wright and Theodore Zeldin (see Bibliography). While concentrating on a particular period and regime, the essential approach will remain problem orientated, although in the limited space available many crucially important questions will simply be noted rather than resolved. It will focus on the machinery of state, on the personnel involved (see also Price 1990: 27f), on policy formulation and upon its impact. Its initial emphasis, in this introductory chapter, will be on state-society relations viewed from the perspective of the state. Its subject matter will include some of the central issues of socio-political history, including the identity of those individuals and social groups enjoying privileged access to the state apparatus. Obviously, ‘the action of the state as an institution depends … on the people who direct it’ (Birnbaum). These included the ‘dictator’ himself, Napoléon III, who enjoyed considerable personal power, as well as leading figures in the bureaucracy and military and influential members of the wider social elite from which they were recruited. Relationships between the Emperor and political elites as well as the internal dynamics of these groups will be one of our central concerns. The freedom of action of the head of state would vary considerably over time along with the willingness of these elites to accept his dominant position. Efforts to reinforce his authority and appeal over the heads of elites to the ‘sovereign people’ (employing such devices as the plebiscite together with electoral manipulation) enjoyed only limited success. As aresult, some degree of agreement with (as well as substantial cohesion within) this political elite would appear to be a pre-requisite for effective state action. Other relevant questions include: What were the means by which its agents sought to legitimise their authority and how effective were they in penetrating society and in achieving their goals? How were the activities of state agencies perceived by the ruled and how did they respond as individuals and also as members of different social and regional groups? This process of interaction, both with the state and each other, occurred within a society which remained profoundly inegalitarian. Inevitably, the capacity for political mobilisation varied considerably. Moreover, overt and straightforward class conflict was only episodic and offers only a very imperfect guide to analysis. As a result, a wide range of additional questions suggest themselves. The list that follows is far from inclusive. It needs, however, to include at least the following: What were the effects of government policy and a concurrently accelerating process of industrialisation on a social system combining ‘archaisme et modernité’ (Corbin 1975)? How did the perceived need to promote economic development affect the regime's agenda? To what extent did economic ‘modernisation’ and most obviously the revolution in communications affect the government machine and particularly its capacity to penetrate society? Conversely, how did social change and a widespread (although very unequal improvement) in living standards influence political attitudes? What was the impact of the establishment of an authoritarian and repressive political regime followed, after a decade, by liberalisation, the easing of restrictions on political activity, and (re-)politicisation? To what extent did politics involve competition between elite groups for access to political power and patronage and to what extent did it represent a challenge, from below, to the established social order? Lastly, how did internal and external politics interact?

Similar questions might be asked of any political system. Every regime is responsible, primarily, for the maintenance of order, although definitions of what constitutes ‘order’ and the systems constructed and methods employed to achieve this objective will vary both between regimes and, in the case of the same regime, over time as situations and personnel change. Political repression can be regarded as a ‘normal’ feature of governmental activity, but its intensity varies with perceptions of danger and the capacity of the administration to conduct ‘police’ measures. Thus, the establishment of the Second Empire or, for that matter, Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany might in part be seen as responses to particularly intense general crises and widespread social fear. Repression, however, carries the risk of alienating much of the subject population. The Second Empire can be distinguished from the two twentieth-century dictatorships because, by means of liberalisation and the institutionalisation of protest through elections, it sought a method of moderating opposition and of more effectively ensuring long-term stability. In this context, the criteria employed for defining potential threats and ensuing policy decisions — as between repression or concession — tell us a great deal about a regime and its relationships with the wider society. It is probably true that most regimes would prefer to rule through forms of social control which encourage consensus and possess a clearly defined moral and legal basis for the exercise of power, rather than resort to violence. This explains the importance of securing cultural domination through religious or educational institutions which provide means of instruction designed to induce conformity to socially and politically conservative norms of behaviour.

The debate on the nature of the state and, indeed, on the character of the Second Empire continues to be informed by the contribution of Karl Marx. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), he contended that ‘the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. The forms taken by a state were the product of class rule at a particular stage of social development. His stress on the repressive role of the state was supplemented by an insistence on the state's employment of religion and patriotism and on its recourse to war, as a means of reinforcing its position — an emphasis foreshadowing the Italian Marxist Gramsci's notion of hegemony. However, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's seizure of power caused problems for Marx. It represented an apparent renunciation of power by the ‘ruling classes’ and a step back from bourgeois liberalism to absolute monarchy, to a situation in which ‘the executive power with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half a million, [an] appalling parasitic body… enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores’ (Marx 1848: 284–5). The state had achieved apparent autonomy. This seeming contradiction could be resolved only by insisting that the state continued to favour the interests of some social groups rather than others. It remained the guarantor of the established social order. Marx assumed that, in the longer term, state policy had to remain compatible with the interests of economically and socially powerful interest groups, particularly those from which ministers, bureaucrats and army officers were recruited (Marx 1962: 340–1). Awareness of context is all important. The rulers of a nineteenth-century authoritarian state could deal harshly with opponents, but were neither willing nor able to engage in the forms of extreme and sustained brutality which have been employed to ensure compliance during the twentieth century. While the elites which had shared political power during the Restoration (1814–30) and July Monarchy (1830–48) might be prepared to accept a temporary dictatorship at a time of extreme crisis (in the fashion of the ancient Roman Republic with which these classically educated elites were so familiar), in the longer term they would favour a return to a ‘normal’ and renewed fragmentation of political power. In effect, the boundaries to state action were defined partly by power centres — social groups, political alliances, institutional bodies — capable of political organisation. Stability depended upon accommodating their special interests. As a result of the introduction of manhood suffrage following the revolution in February 1848, greater attention would also be given to the concerns of socially subordinate groups: to the small businessmen, professionals, peasants and workers all increasingly anxious to influence state policy. Indeed, one of the central questions to be considered in this essay will be the degree to which these various groups might have lost or benefited from changes in the (unequal) balance of power. Another concern will be the ways in which state power impinged upon the various groups and how they perceived its activities — as class oppression or as the benign exercise of authority. How would they react, not only to governmental activity, but also to social change on a previously unimagined scale? While continuities with the past will frequently need to be stressed, contemporaries could hardly fail to be aware of the tearing down and reconstruction of city centres, of railway lines and telegraph wires extending their tentacles across the landscape and creating new opportunities for enrichment, but within a far more competitive environment. More than ever before, people were on the move in search of a better life. What were the relationships between economic and social change, the ‘formal’ establishment of manhood suffrage, and the evolution of local and national political cultures? Certainly, historically-based expectations conditioned individual political behaviour to a large degree. The Second Empire is of particular interest, however, because in a relatively short time radical changes in economic structures and political institutions forced people to adapt their life strategies.

Sources

The sources for this study are many and varied, and all of them have their shortcomings. In preparation for a much more substantial volume on the Second Empire currently being written, an effort has been made to consult as wide a range of sources as possible, including private papers, memoirs, administrative reports, official and private economic and social enquiries, and the newspaper press. As always, the directly expressed views of the masses are greatly under-represented. Much of the surviving information on them is derived from the observations of members of other social groups and is inevitably distorted by their particular concerns and prejudices. Reporters from the social elites tended to focus in particular on novelty and whatever appeared to be threatening to their interests. Government officials frequently told their superiors what it was presumed they wanted to hear in the hope of enhancing their career prospects. Newspaper reports were rarely unbiased. The quality of reporting obviously varied according to individual skills and commitment. A massive amount of information was gathered by more or less zealous and competent officials operating within the various established administrative hierarchies (especially those reporting to the Ministers of the Interior, Justice and War) to be interpreted, passed upwards and incorporated in ever more general situation reports. Complaints about the quality of reports were frequent, especially about the unwillingness of those at the bottom of the hierarchy — mayors, justices of the peace and gendarmes — to spare the time and effort. Experience suggests that the recruitment, training and professional concerns of the judicial administration (particularly the state prosecutors — the procureurs généraux) resulted in more objective and frequently more comprehensive reports than those emanating from the parallel prefectoral hierarchy. Election results distorted by governmental and also elite social pressures are similarly difficult to interpret, particularly in the absence of formal organised parties. ‘Parties’ were little more than informal associations of individuals with shared aspirations and ideas. Voting decisions were informed by the competing influence of government officials, local notables and the clergy, as well as by shifting mass perceptions of what was at issue and the relevance of particular policies to their own needs. The candidates for election wer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• IN THE SAME SERIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, President of the Second Republic
• 3 The authoritarian Empire
• 4 Liberalisation
• 5 Defeat and collapse
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography