Napoleon III

Napoleon III: The Sphinx Who Built Modern Paris

In a damp cell at the fortress of Ham, a convicted coup plotter serving a life sentence spent his days writing about poverty. The resulting pamphlet, *L'extinction du paupérisme*, proposed credit systems and agricultural colonies for the French working class, and it circulated far beyond the prison walls. Six years later its author escaped disguised as a labourer. Two years after that, the men who had dismissed him as a comic pretender watched him win the French presidency with 74.2 per cent of the vote.

The Nephew Nobody Took Seriously

Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was born on 20 April 1808 in the Tuileries Palace, the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and Hortense de Beauharnais — and the nephew of the man whose shadow defined every choice he made. Historians have long questioned even that paternity; genetic studies have raised the possibility of non-Bonaparte lineage, though the matter remains contested. Hortense's programme for her son was never in doubt: she inculcated in him, as the Fondation Napoléon puts it, "the spirit of the Empire."

Napoleon I's defeat in 1815 scattered the family into exile, and the boy grew up moving between Switzerland, Germany and Italy. He was schooled at the Augsburg gymnasium and tutored by Philippe Le Bas, a man who steered him toward radical politics. At fifteen, in Rome, he joined the Carbonari revolutionary underground alongside his elder brother Napoléon-Louis, who died of measles in 1831 — a death that moved Louis-Napoleon several rungs up the Bonapartist ladder of succession.

Two Farces and a Fortress

His first two attempts to claim that inheritance were humiliations. At Strasbourg in 1836 he talked a regiment into mutiny, then fled when loyal troops surrounded it. At Boulogne in 1840 customs agents and the garrison declined to join him; he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The six years at Ham (1840–1846) were the making of him. Cut off from conspiracy, he read and wrote — analysing the economics of the sugar industry, and producing *L'extinction du pauperisme* in 1844, whose practical proposals for working-class credit gave a Bonapartist adventurer something no Bonapartist adventurer had possessed: a social programme. During earlier exile in Britain he had toured factories and railways, studying industrial modernity at close range. The escape came on 25 May 1846, in a labourer's clothes.

The Landslide and the Coup

The February Revolution of 1848 toppled Louis-Philippe and opened a door. Returning from British exile, Louis-Napoleon presented himself as a moderate republican and ran a campaign of studied ambiguity — reassuring conservatives on religion, family and property while speaking to workers about welfare. The December 1848 result was not close.

The constitution barred a second term. Unable to amend it, he simply took what it withheld: on the night of 1–2 December 1851, troops occupied the key points of Paris, the National Assembly was dissolved and universal suffrage restored by decree. Roughly 26,000 opponents were arrested and press censorship clamped down. A plebiscite returned 92.1 per cent approval, though 1.7 million voters abstained. Exactly one year later, on 2 December 1852, a second plebiscite — 97 per cent in favour, its fairness disputed then and since — made him Emperor of the French. In January 1853 he married the Spanish noblewoman Eugénie de Montijo at the Tuileries; their son, the Prince Imperial, was born in 1856.

The Machine of Prosperity

What the Second Empire lacked in legitimacy it made up for in construction. Napoleon III encouraged investment banks — Crédit Mobilier in 1852 chief among them — to channel capital into infrastructure at a scale French finance had never attempted. The railway network grew from 3,500 kilometres in 1851 to 20,000 by 1870, with state guarantees consolidating eighteen companies into six. Port works at Marseille and Le Havre tripled the number of steamships; France acquired the world's second-largest merchant fleet. He backed Ferdinand de Lesseps's Suez Canal, funded by shares floated on the Paris market and completed in 1869, and opened French markets to British free trade.

The social record was more substantial than his critics allowed. He created pensions for civil servants, favoured mutual aid societies and social housing, expanded education sharply, and in 1864 legalised the right to strike.

Rebuilding Paris

His most visible monument was a city. Appointing Georges-Eugène Haussmann prefect of the Seine with extraordinary powers, the Emperor turned Paris into what contemporaries called an enormous construction site. Medieval quarters came down; long boulevards of uniform cream stone went up. Daily water capacity rose from 87,000 to 400,000 cubic metres. Sewers were rebuilt and gas lighting installed. Four great parks were laid out at the compass points — the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, the Buttes-Chaumont and Montsouris. The Gare du Nord, the Gare de Lyon, Les Halles and the Opera date from this push, as do the city's modern boundaries, fixed by the annexation of 1860.

The Sphinx Abroad

Foreign policy was where the ledger turned. The Crimean War (1854–1856) allied France with Britain against Russian expansion and cost 95,000 French casualties, 75,000 of them from disease; the Paris peace conference of 1856 was the regime's diplomatic summit. In 1859, honouring the Plombières agreement with Cavour, French arms carried Piedmont to victory at Magenta on 4 June, then to a slaughter at Solferino on 24 June that left some 40,000 casualties and so appalled the Emperor that he broke off and made an armistice. Lombardy was freed, Italian unification accelerated, France took Savoy and Nice — and, to placate Empress Eugénie and French Catholics, 8,000 French troops garrisoned Rome to keep the Pope's city out of Italian hands until 1870.

Mexico was unambiguous disaster. The attempt from 1862 to install Archduke Maximilian as a French-aligned monarch collapsed under American pressure once the Civil War ended; Maximilian was executed. Then came Bismarck. Under public pressure the Emperor declared war on Prussia in July 1870 with an army his own foundation's historians call poorly prepared. It was destroyed in weeks. He was captured at Sedan on 2 September 1870, deposed, and sent into English exile.

Why Louis-Napoleon Is Called a Genius

The honest verdict is that his gifts were political and developmental rather than intellectual, and that his own foreign minister said so to his face in effect. Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys observed that "the Emperor has immense desires and limited abilities." Contemporaries reached for the word *sphinx* — enigmatic, unreadable, and possibly hiding less than the mask implied.

But something in him was genuinely unusual. Alone among nineteenth-century French claimants, he grasped that a mass electorate could be assembled from contradictory constituencies, and he built one: a campaign that promised order to the propertied and credit to the poor, and won three-quarters of the vote from a country that had laughed at him twice. He also understood, from factory floors in Britain and a prison cell's reading, that a state could deliberately manufacture prosperity — that banks, rails, ports and boulevards were instruments of rule. Haussmann's Paris and 20,000 kilometres of track are not accidents of a lucky name.

The counter-case is severe and should not be softened. He took power by force, jailed 26,000 people, censored the press, and ratified himself by plebiscites whose numbers nobody should read straight. His strategic judgement was poor, culminating in Mexico and Sedan. He was a formidable operator and a serious social thinker, not a great mind — and calling him a genius requires naming precisely which faculty is meant.

Legacy

He reigned twenty-two years, the longest tenure of any French head of state since the collapse of the ancien régime, and died in England on 9 January 1873. He left France an industrial power with a modern financial system and a capital that became Europe's architectural model — and a republic, born of his defeat, that outlasted every regime he had tried to imitate.

Achievements

• President of the French Republic (1848–1852)
• Emperor of the French (1852–1870)
• member of the French National Assembly
• head of government of France (1851–1870)
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour
• Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece
• Knight of the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky
• Order of Saint Anna, 1st class
• Educated at Waffenplatz Thun