Louis-Napoleon

From F Brown:

on December 2, when Louis-Napoleon, president of the
republic, launched a coup d’état and dissolved the National Assembly.
Prominent opponents were arrested. France’s most famous writer, Victor
Hugo, who served as a peer, might have been jailed along with them had
he not eluded capture and found refuge on the Channel Islands, where he
ultimately spent almost two decades in exile.
Louis—Napoleon’s rise from megalomaniacal nuisance to prince—president
Was the stuff of Romantic drama, or, as Marx saw it, of farce. Having es-
caped the Ham prison fortress by a daring ruse and fled to England, he
marked time there with an entourage of true believers. Only the true could
believe that this cryptic little man dressed in a buttoned-up frock coat,
strapped trousers, and tight shoes (and whose recommendation of a chi-
ropodist named Eisenberg for the removal of painful corns appeared in a
London Times advertisement) might one day wear the imperial crown. He
made his first move on February 27, 1848, entering France incognito and
registering at a Paris hotel. His identity was soon revealed, word spread,
Crowds gathered for a glimpse of him, and overnight, “as if by magic,”
wrote one observer, his portrait, entitled simply “Lui, Went on sale in ,
shopwindows and kiosks. Reluctant to detain him lest it thereby stir the live
embers of Bonapartist sentiment, the provisional government requested
that he leave France at once, and Louis-Napoleon, eager to store up good-
will, acquiesced. “The people . . . are intoxicated with victory and hope,”
he told a conspiratorial friend who had urged him to stay. “All these illu-
sions must perish before a ‘man of order’ can make himself heard.” They
perished soon enough, during four June days at the barricades, when tens
of thousands died in the rebellion against a conservative legislature largely
unsympathetic to republican institutions and the plight of workers. With a
propaganda campaign conducted by his agents, who pictured him as all
things to all men —— as the author of a book entitled L’Extincti0n du pau-
perisme but also as the very symbol of “order, glory, and patriotism” — he
won a seat in the Assembly. Thereafter, everything worked to his advantage,
despite the poor figure he cut on a public rostrum speaking in Swiss-
accented French. The banishment of the Bonaparte family was repealed,
the committee charged with drafting a new constitution recommended that
the French president be elected not by the legislature but by universal suf-
frage, the Constituent Assembly adopted that proposal for fear of alienating
the country at large, and forward on a rising tide of public opinion rode
Napoleon’_s nephew, whom Hugo dubbed “Napoleon le Petit.” Among his
more enthusiastic supporters was Maxime Du Camp’s close friend Louis de
Cormenin, whose lawyer father, a staunch Bonapartist, had chaired the
constitutional committee. In December, voters cast almost four times as’
many ballots for Louis—Napoleon as for Cavaignac, the general with blood, '
on his hands from the ]une 1848 civil war. 1
Seasoned politicians were soon disabused of their assumption that the
new president was a cypher whom they could easily manipulate. Once in
office he exhibited his Napoleonic gene for administration, appointing
loyal prefects who constituted an intelligence network, surrounding himself‘
with henchmen in a kitchen cabinet that included his shrewd, ruthless half
brother, the duc de Morny, and transforming the gendarmerie into a mili-
tary force more reliable than the National Guard. Hand in hand with sabo-
tage went panache; while the sapper busied himself underground, the
showman seemed to transcend party politics. Contemptuous of right and
left, he represented Catholic France when sending troops against Italian re-
publicans who had driven the pope from Rome and spoke for republican
France when directing Pius IX to endorse a general amnesty, a secularized
administration, the Napoleonic Code, and a liberal government. On a tri-
umphant tour of the prison fortress at Ham, he attended a Mass of thanks-
giving in his honor, then liberated the Algerian chief of the Kabyles,
Abd-al—Qadir, from the apartment in which he himself had been impris-
oned for six years. His utopian dream of extinguishing pauperism was glibly
reconciled with his advocacy of a residence requirement calculated to dis-
enfranchise three million workers. “The great events of history are like ‘la
grande cuisine,”’ he confided to the Austrian ambassador. “One must not
look at it too closely, for the details are of no importance; it is the result that
matters.”
During Flaubert’s voyage in the East, events at home had hastened the
implementation of Louis—Napoleon’s grand design. In March 1850, repub-
licans soundly defeated government candidates to gain twenty seats in the
Assembly, provoking a red scare and a widespread flight of capital. More
ominous for Bonapartists was the refusal of a legislature still monarchical in
the majority to amend a constitutional article that barred the president from
serving two consecutive terms. Louis would obligatorily retire after May
1852 unless the republic fell, and plans for its execution, code-named Op-
eration Rubicon, were therefore set in motion. This coup d’état was so
widely anticipated that when George Sand, walking past the Elysee on De-
cember 2 at 1 a.m., saw a darkened palace, she remarked facetiously: “It
won’t be tomorrow, then.” Her mistake should have been borne in on her
later that morning by the tolling of bells and the beating of drums; how-
ever, arrangements had been made to slash the drumheads overnight and
to post guards around belfries. Before dawn, gendarmes fanned out across
the city with warrants of arrest for seventy-eight well-respected men——
journalists, deputies, generals —-whose words might have inspired resist-
ance. The printing presses of opposition papers were closed. The Palais
Bourbon, where the National Assembly met, was surrounded by Louis-
Napoleon’s faithful constabulary. Had National Guardsmen tried to arm
themselves at posts around the capital, they would have found barrels of wet
powder. It was midmorning when France’s new savior, wearing a general’s
uniform, emerged from the Blysée with his uncle Jerome and mounted his
horse. A proclamation from the president of the republic to the people de-
claring that the present situation could not continue any longer had already
been posted in every arrondissement. “Frenchmen!” it began. “With every
passing day the dangers to the country mount. The Assembly, which should
be the backbone of order, has become a center of conspiracy. Instead of
passing laws in the public interest, it is forging weapons for civil war; it is
encouraging all manner of wicked passions; it is destroying the peace of
France. I have dissolved it, and I leave it to the public to judge between it
and me.” To the army, which couldn’t have been more compliant, Louis-
Napoleon portrayed himself as the embodiment of national sovereignity.