Titans of History

NAPOLEON III

1808–1873

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Karl Marx on Napoleon III

Napoleon III’s reign ended in disaster but for twenty years he enjoyed astonishing success, restoring order in France and then restoring France’s position in Europe, winning the Crimean War in alliance with Britain, defeating Austria, helping to unite Italy, rebuilding Paris. Described by Bismarck as a “sphinx without a riddle” and by Victor Hugo as “Napoleon the Little” in comparison to his uncle Napoleon the Great, he was nonetheless a statesman of talent, and along with his nemesis Bismarck, one of the pioneers of modern politics and electioneering—the quest for the support of the middle classes and the center.

His career was based on the fame of his uncle, Napoleon I. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was the son of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Beauharnais, king and queen of Holland, his father being a younger brother of the emperor, his mother a daughter of the Empress Josephine. On the death of the emperor in 1821, his heir was his son, the king of Rome, known as Napoleon II to Bonapartists or the duke of Reichstadt to everyone else, but he died young and never reigned. During the 1820s, Louis-Napoleon became the Bonapartist pretender, a romantic drifting figure whose quixotic attempts to seize power in France, invariably funded by his mistresses and backed by a crew of desperate and inept adventurers, ended in comical disaster. It was probably the comedy that saved his life, for he avoided severe penalties and was instead imprisoned for a while in the fortress of Ham—from which he famously escaped. Even early in his career, the young man showed drive and courage however unsuccessful he may have been.

His prospects remained hopeless until 1848 when the revolutions that shook Europe overthrew the July Monarchy of King Louis Philippe of France. Suddenly Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, a romantic if inscrutable figure and bearer of the magical name, was on everyone’s lips. When presidential elections were held, Louis-Napoleon, who was still relatively unknown in France, was able to appear to be all things to all people and played the election campaign with considerable skill and shrewdness, winning a landslide to become the first president of France. But he wanted more, calling himself the Prince-president. In a coup d’état in December 1851, he ruthlessly seized power, arresting his enemies and shooting down opposition, to become effective dictator of France. A year later, promising that the empire meant peace, he was crowned Emperor Napoleon III.

For his first decade in power, he ruled with authoritarian flamboyance, crushing any dissent but enjoying considerable success in his plans to restore France to a position of pre-eminence amongst the powers of Europe and to secure his own empire. He used tensions over the holy sites in Jerusalem to push the Ottoman sultan for more French influence in competition with Nicholas I of Russia. When the tsar used military force to invade Ottoman territory with a view to overthrowing the Sultanate, Napoleon allied with Britain to declare war: the Crimean War revealed both French and British military incompetence on a vast scale but ended in victory for the allies—and the acceptance of Napoleon III as a legitimate monarch by Queen Victoria, who hosted the emperor at Windsor and found him charming.

Napoleon married a Spanish aristocrat named Eugenie de Montejo who gave him a legitimate heir, the prince imperial. He backed Italian independence and unity, defeating Austria at the Battle of Solferino, thereby helping to expel the Habsburgs from Italy. During the 1860s, he changed his policies at home, fostering the liberal empire, a more constitutional monarchy that allowed greater parliamentary debate. France enjoyed a raging stock market boom, an orgy of new consumerism and ostentatious spending while Napoleon ordered the rebuilding of a glorious new Paris by Baron Haussman.

But the urban poor were discontented by rising prices, and the difference between rich and poor as well as uninhibited corruption, personified by the new property millionaires and the rise of sexual celebrities, the grande horizontales, courtesans. In many ways, the modern world—stock market and property boom and bust, consumerism, celebrity, electioneering, tycoons—started with Napoleon III.

Napoleon himself was notorious for his womanizing: his early career had been funded by an English courtesan called Harriet Howard and he remained an enthusiastic keeper of mistresses: indeed members of his cabinet traveling on the imperial train were once treated to the sight of the emperor in flagrante when his apartment door slid open. His affair with the gorgeous Contessa di Castaglione, a spy-temptress-adventuress who was the cousin of the Italian leader Cavour, was said to have encouraged his embrace of Italian liberation. But he was already committed to Italian freedom—her perfect figure displayed beneath her notorious see-through dresses was irresistible in its own right. For all his fame and flamboyance, Napoleon remained strangely unknowable and mysterious. With his waxed mustache and short legs he was hardly a heroic figure—power exhausted him and ill health undermined his decision-making. His lack of judgment in 1869 allowed him to be manipulated by Bismarck into a declaration of war that proved catastrophic.

The ailing emperor was out of his depth as warlord or even war leader. Defeat at Sedan led to his abdication and exile in England: France’s last monarch died abroad. His son the prince imperial was killed serving in British forces against the Zulus.

The downfall of his glittering, pleasure-loving, modern empire in the defeat, revolution and massacre of the Paris Commune, was best described by Emile Zola in his novel Nana in which the empire is symbolized by a shallow, greedy, wanton courtesan who dies in her hotel room as the crowds overthrow the regime, her beautiful body consumed by worms. Marx described how history repeated itself in the Napoleons: Napoleon I as a “tragedy,” Napoleon III as a “farce.”