Was Napoleon III the world's first populist leader?

History's Greatest Leaders podcast

0:00What can we learn from history's most powerful people? Join me, Mike Souter, author of NextGen CEO, in History Extra's new podcast series, History's Greatest Leaders, to find out. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Napoleon III's family was, in the words of historian Edward Shawcross, the most cutthroat mafioso soap opera in the world.

0:32Exiled to Switzerland as a boy, and disowned by his own father, he spent years as a laughingstock of French politics, twice arrested trying to seize power. Here, in conversation with Danny Bird for this episode of the History Extra podcast, Edward traces Louis Napoleon's strange path from mocked pretender in exile to emperor of the French. Edward, welcome to the podcast.

The legacy of the Bonapartes

0:55Thank you so much for having me. We're talking today about Napoleon III, a figure who was born into one of the most extraordinary families in European history, but also into a France that seemed incapable of political stability. And before we meet Napoleon, the emperor, could you tell me what sort of country he was born into, and how much did growing up in the shadow of his formidable uncle and namesake, the Napoleon Bonaparte, shape his ambitions? Well, it's absolutely political stability is the question that defines 19th century France. After the revolution, he's born into, as you say, the most cutthroat mafioso soap opera in the world at the time, the Bonapartes.

1:30And he is the nephew of the more famous Napoleon, who everyone would have heard of, who, of course, became dictator of France in 1799. And then emperor in 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte had a problem. He wanted to found a dynasty, but his wife, Josephine, couldn't have children. So luckily for him, Josephine had already had two children by a first marriage, and Napoleon Bonaparte delighted on the innovative solution of marrying his younger brother, Louis Bonaparte, to his stepdaughter, Autence de Beauharnais, thereby promoting her to sister-in-law in a slightly bizarre family relationship. But this is the Bonapartes.

2:01And they have three children. The first dies quite young, aged five, but the last two, they grow up into adulthood. And the youngest there is little Louis Napoleon, who will become Napoleon III. And as you say, it's his uncle's empire that he is completely obsessed with. He's an imperial prince within it. He's, you know, the next generation of Bonapartes, he's high up in the order of succession. But of course, in 1815, for the second time, his uncle's empire is no more. And he grows up in exile with his mother in Switzerland. And that is incredibly formative for his education and his political views and what he wants to do should he ever come to power.

2:35So this is a period of enormous political volatility. And as you mentioned, he was in exile with his mother. It does beg the question, did he actually have any relationship with his famous uncle? Right. Yeah, I mean, a largely imaginary one. So in the first few years, so he's eight years old, or rather seven years old, I think it is, in 1815, where Waterloo finally puts the nail in Napoleon's coffin in terms of his political career. And so he had been really at the center of the empire. He had been at the part of the pageantry, the pomp and the circumstances. But as a seven-year-old, his memories of his uncle are not that vivid.

3:08And in fact, when his uncle dies in 1821, he's devastated because he's brought up to worship his uncle. His mother, Hortense, also worshipped his uncle. But he says that, you know, I only wish that I had got to know him because the memories I have are very faint. So he can't remember what Napoleon Bonaparte was actually like, which is probably just as well, because he developed his own fairly unique interpretation of Napoleon Bonaparte that's going to become essential to his political philosophy. And we will, of course, come on to that a little bit later in this episode. But before we do, could you tell me a bit about his relationship with his mother?

3:39And I'm guessing the family's fortunes were on the backslide after the downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte as well. Absolutely right. So Hortense de Beauhain is a wonderful, kind of fabulous, outgoing, gregarious woman. Unfortunately for her, she was married to Louis Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleon, who was a morose, paranoid, absolutely despicable man. And he had a very interesting approach to parenting, which was he had wanted nothing to do with his younger son, Louis Napoleon, and only wanted to look after his elder son, Napoleon Louis. Confusingly, everyone in this story is called some variation of Louis and Napoleon. I apologize for that.

4:11So Louis Napoleon goes off into exile in Switzerland with his mother. Louis Bonaparte, his father, says, I don't want anything to do with him. You're lucky that you've got the younger one. And so they grow up in this sort of very soporific, secluded part of Switzerland on the Swiss-German border. Now, Hortense, she's an interesting figure in the Napoleonic mafioso so proper because Napoleon Bonaparte hated most of his family, but he loved Hortense. Hortense remembers his stepdaughter promoted to sister-in-law. And Hortense's biological father had been executed, guillotined in the radical phase of the First Revolution, going back to that point of political stability.

4:43What Napoleon Bonaparte had done for Hortense is what he claimed to have done for France, which was to create order after the chaos of revolution. And in her life, she had done that. Of course, he plunges France into further chaos. And that is the royalist backlash, what's known as the white terror. So Hortense and little Louis Napoleon, they've flown from France. There are mobs, vigilante gangs, you know, lynching people who are associated with Bonapartism. His most famous marshals are being court-martialed and executed for treason by the restored Bourbon monarchy. So he goes on this sort of wandering sort of peripatetic life until eventually he finds seclusion with his mother in Switzerland.

5:17And as I said, she adored Napoleon Bonaparte. So she creates the chateau in Arenenberg as a museum to the uncle, to Napoleon Bonaparte. And little Louis Napoleon is sort of taught from an early age to worship Napoleon Bonaparte. And of course, Hortense is a wonderful source of information because she had been front and center of that empire. And so she can regale him with these extraordinary tales of his uncle. So although his own memories of his uncle are, you know, faint, to put it mildly, in his mind, in his imagination, incredibly vivid of this powerful man who's restored France and took it to huge heights of glory.

Political instability in nineteenth century France

5:51And you've hinted at how politically volatile France was at this time. And looking at the full span of 19th century France, it looks like an almost impossibly turbulent place. Everything from revolutions, royal restorations, republics and empires, all in the space of a few decades. Just how unstable was French politics during this period? It is the great question is for stability. And really, there isn't any in 19th century France. It tends to be the Bourbon Restoration, which comes in after Napoleon. So this is in first Louis XVIII, the enormously fat younger brother of Louis XVI, who famously lost his head.

6:25He dies in 1824. His brother comes to power and lasts until 1830. He's overthrown in another revolution. So then we get the July monarchy. And the revolution itself, the famous painting is by Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People. It seems radical and exciting. But Louis-Philippe is actually third in line to the throne, a junior branch of the Bourbon family, the Orlinis. An incredibly jowly man who was very into umbrellas and being extremely bourgeois, despite the fact he was incredibly aristocratic. He makes it 18 years. So that's actually not bad for the 19th century. But then in February 1848, and by the way, he's weathered quite a number of attempts to topple him from power, not least by Louis-Napoleon.

6:59But in 1848, February, he is finally kicked off the throne in revolutions, which starts in Paris, spreads across France, and then across Europe as a whole.

Early attempts to seize power

7:08That does beg the question, why did the Bonaparte name prove so enduring during this time? Right. So Louis-Napoleon, as I say, he's obsessed with his uncle, and he's obsessed with an absolutely absurd idea to restore his uncle's empire. So by the time he's a young man in the 1830s, this is a genuinely ridiculous claim, right? It's a little bit like if I said to your listeners, let's go out there and restore the commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. Of course, people would not be in the streets acclaiming me as their political leader. And so how is an unknown nephew going to become emperor of the French when he's done nothing but write a few pamphlets?

7:42He's going to do what Napoleon Bonaparte did when he came back from exile in Elba, present himself before the French army. They will march on Paris and acclaim him emperor. But of course, it's an incredibly underwhelming denouement when you go before the French army and you say, I am the nephew of the emperor. People don't know who he is. They don't care. And he tries to seize power twice, once in 1836, once in 1840. And he is both times arrested. The first time it's so ridiculous, the French government just sends him into exile. It's like a gap year gone wrong. In 1840, it's very much a case of, you know, once, shame on you, twice, shame on me.

8:13They lock him up and put him in prison forever, right? He's going to spend the rest of his life in prison. And one of the things that often happens to Louis-Napoleon that's so absurd, if you made it up, it would be considered too ridiculous. He dresses up as a workman, puts on a blouse, a fake wig, covers his face in dirt, gets a clay smoking pipe, plank over his shoulder and walks out this medieval fortress in 1846 disguised as a workman. So that's how he finds freedom and ends up in London living the life of a dandy in 1848 when the revolution breaks out. Now, there we've painted him as something as a buffoon, but there is a serious quality to him.

8:45And his serious quality is that he has very thoughtfully and deeply considered this approaching age of mass democratic politics. And we might think of Napoleon Bonaparte as a despot, as a tyrant, but the rhetoric of the first empire was always democratic, if you want to use an anachronism, populist, the idea that he governed in the interests of the people, that Napoleon Bonaparte came from nowhere and turned the old order upside down. Now, Louis Napoleon takes that at face value and he writes about it in pamphlets, newspaper articles from prison and his pamphlet, Napoleon Ideas,

9:17where he sort of reinvents the first empire as this wonderfully liberal and peaceful state. At the same time as he's writing that, so he's creating his political program, there is a growing nostalgia in France. So the Bourbon Restoration and then Louis-Philippe, who looks like a pear, as we said, and so boring that that's referred to as that. There was no grandeur, there was no glory. And it begins to get far away enough from the first empire that people in France can hark back to it as a time when France was at the apex of European power and world affairs.

9:48So you have these two things, the political program that he's building, which is eclectic and quite esoteric in its interpretation of the original Napoleon, but also has lots of interesting radical ideas as well about, you know, kind of social reform, the kind of things you might do to create employment for workers. And part of the reason why Louis-Philippe is toppled is there's an awful agricultural crisis, people are starving in Paris. These ideas are very in vogue. And Louis-Napoleon, when he, you know, enters into 1848, the Second Republic is declared, this is going to be the greatest experiment in human democracy thus far,

10:19because the president is going to be directly elected by the people, universal male suffrage, worth pointing out. But nonetheless, you know, over 9 million people, this program is going to prove very appealing. It's kind of their shtick. So you've got these three different strands, Republicans, Pauliness and Legitimus, and then you've got Bonapartists. But as I say, the Bonapartists, they are something of a one-man band. The other ones are organized political parties, not as we understand them today, but they have got very serious politicians, well-known public figures, intellectuals who are arguing their case, right?

10:50He is seen as a joke, a failed adventurer. He was disowned by his own father for being a conspirator and for tarnishing the Napoleonic brand. You know, he does actually get elected to the Constituent Assembly in September 1848. But this just makes him even more laughable because he does his maiden speech, which he reads out very nervously on a piece of paper. And because he's grown up in exile in the Swiss-German border, he speaks French with a German accent. And if you've ever tried to speak French in Paris, you'll know that it is not a sympathetic audience for people who even have the slightest mispronunciation.

11:21So the next day, the papers are awash with all kinds of vitriol saying that he's so foreign to France, he can barely stutter its language. Another newspaper says we've had to provide a translation of his speech because it wasn't exactly in French that he said it. So listening to this, and of course, they're obsessed with history. They're obsessed with the First Revolution. And if you know your French history, the Republic is ended by the despotism of Napoleon Bonaparte. So people are really worried that he might do the same thing. After they hear him speak, they think, no, this guy doesn't stand a chance. So you've painted a picture of him there as this almost comical, ridiculous figure in French politics after the 1848 revolution.

Becoming president of the Second Republic

11:59That then begs the question, how does he become the president of France's Second Republic? And as we'll come on to, ultimately, its emperor under the Second Empire, as is then constituted. How did he pull that off? Well, he was completely underestimated by those French elites who were laughing at him. Because at the same time, they're laughing at him, the caricatures in the Republican press, you know, the monarchists just think he's absurd. The people in France are absolutely enamoured with this political programme, which I say borrows hip sometimes from this kind of burgeoning socialist ideas. Popular sovereignty and universal male suffrage is at the heart of his programme.

12:31And he can appeal as all things to all men. So if you are sort of, you know, a right, someone who's sort of minded towards the right of politics, he could, you know, bonapartism is, it stands for order and it stands for, you know, ending the revolution. Remember, you've just had appalling street violence in Paris, not so much in the February revolution, which toppled the king, but in the June days, which happens a few months afterwards, where 3,000 Parisians are killed on the barricades. And they're demanding sort of very, what, you know, if you were a solid bourgeois Frenchman would say, very dangerous policies for national workshops and welfare and things like that.

13:03On the other hand, if you are one of those Parisians who's been out fighting for these sort of socialist ideas, you can go into Louis Napoleon's writings and find things like the extinction of pauperism, which today you'd probably translate with the more sexy title of make poverty history. But this is completely impractical, but nonetheless, a quite interesting idea about how you would solve poverty in France. The French peasantry, of course, as I said, there's this nostalgia for the uncle, but also yearning for stability, and Napoleon speaks to that. So he wins by a landslide. He gets 5.5 million votes, more than all of the other presidential candidates put together.

13:37And in fact, as in recorded history, he's the most popular man if you take the popular vote as your metric. It's not until 1892 that there's a U.S. presidential election where somebody gets over 5.5 million votes. So this is seismic, and it's a complete shock to the French elites, who, by and large, still considered him to be a joke. Some of the monarchists do begin to work with him because they think that he might be a better bet than, well, he's definitely a better bet than Republicans, and will be a useful bridge to restoring the monarchy in four years' time. So in a sort of last gasp elite stitch-up to prevent him having too much power,

14:09the Constitution is amended before he becomes president when it looks like he will win. He can't stand for re-election in 1852. So this presents a problem for him, and it triggers a sort of three-way contrast between royalists, Republicans, and Bonapartists about who's going to control France when it gets to 1852. Long story short, and how he becomes emperor is he slightly preempts 1852. To his credit, he tries to have the Constitution legally revised. And what he's very good at is drip-feeding into the political narrative this discourse, that there is an elite conspiracy which is trying to thwart the will of the people,

14:42which he represents as president, the 5.5 million people who voted for him, and, you know, monarchists and indeed Republicans who either want to restore the monarchy or Republicans who want to have a radical revolution. And that narrative is helped by the fact that on both sides there are indeed royalists trying to restore the monarchy, and there are indeed radical Republicans who want the revolution to be far, far, far more socialist than it ever was. So in 1851, 2nd to December, a day steeped in Napoleonic history, so this is the Battle of Austerlitz, and also when the first Napoleon had crowned himself emperor,

15:12he launches a coup d'etat with the not very imaginative code word Operation Rubicon, which I always think one of them had ever discovered that, that wouldn't have kept it a secret. But Parliament is shut down, and he gives himself extraordinary powers to devise a new constitution for France. And what is really innovative and interesting about this is that, although there is political repression both in the streets of Paris, some people rise up and try and stop this, then there is censorship and there's plenty of arrests and deportations. He says in his proclamation, sort of announcing what he's done,

15:44the people need not rise against me. If you disagree with what I have done, you merely need to put a no in the ballot box, because he's going to use mass democracy to legitimise his illegal action of shutting down the Second Republic. You mentioned there that this, of course, unfolded on a very important date in the Napoleonic calendar, as it were. And before we go any further, I was hoping you might be able to define exactly what Bonapartism is and how much Napoleon III himself contributed to defining it. Because was this just deliberately about tapping into the mythos of his illustrious uncle,

16:16or was this about establishing something new? I think it's both. It's an incredibly amorphous political ideology, if that's not too grandiose a word for it. It absolutely is archaic and harks back to a past and largely an imagined past that never existed, this sort of first empire that didn't bring absolute catastrophic ruin to France with the invasion of the Allies, right? And it's Napoleon Bonaparte twice overthrown. So it has that, that sort of nostalgia. But what he brings to it is, as I say, quite a lot of, for the time, radical innovations. And it's this idea that mass democracy can legitimize the regime.

16:49So the will of the people has always been invoked since the revolution, by revolutionaries, by Napoleon Bonaparte. But it can, it never been actually proved. You just say this, well, this is the will of the people, and we'll have a revolution, and it's in Paris, and that is, that's it. What he does is he puts it to the ballot box. So as I say, there's, there's this, this plebiscite. And that, the central core tenet of Bonapartism, as practiced by Napoleon III, is that the emperor represents the indivisible will of the people. And so in that sense, it is democratic, although it's carefully managed.

17:21There's a lot of illiberal elements to it, and the empire begins, certainly, as very authoritarian. The kind of central key part of Bonapartism is that the will of the people is represented in the person of the emperor, which, of course, is, it's the idea that it's governing in the interests of the people. The other thing that he would say that was sort of unique to Bonapartism, both under his uncle, which I suspect wasn't true, but under him, which was true, is that it represents a middle way, if you like, between radical revolution and extreme reaction. You have Bonapartism, which governs in the interests of all classes,

17:54represents all people, and is meritocratic, and the sort of moderate values of 1789 are embedded within Bonapartism. So there is a radical and revolutionary and democratic tradition, but it's tempered with order and stability.

18:10Do you think it's too much of a stretch to say that he's one of history's first populist leaders? Not at all. He's absolutely one of history's first populist leaders. I think we probably have to give Andrew Jackson over in the United States of America the title of the first true populist. But I think the opponent in the third is the first to do it in a much more recognisable way than someone like Jackson. Because, of course, you know, the means to power, he's part of a flourishing democracy, if you will, or he wouldn't have called it a flourishing democracy, but you might call it that, the Second Republic, which he shuts down, seizes power. He's excellent at presenting himself as a man of the people,

18:44going over, you know, the heads of institutions to the people to legitimize his actions. But he's also, in other ways, you know, he kind of prefigures the populist age because he's drawing on all different kinds of intellectual traditions. He brings in lots of interesting social ideas, economic reforms, and so on and so forth. And the idea is that he is governing in the interests of the people. And that's how he ultimately shuts debate down, by saying, you know, I'd represent all of the people. And if you're objecting to it, then you are, in some senses, an enemy of the people.

19:14I'd like to look a little bit into the demographic makeup of this popular base that's supporting him at this time. Could you tell me a little bit about what type of people were supporting Napoleon III? Were they workers, peasants, middle classes? How did all these social classes engage with him as a figure? Right. Well, he would say he represented all classes. And of course, we always think of the imperial symbol of the eagle, but the other one is the bee. And it's the idea that France is a sort of perfectly harmonized hive where everyone is working together. That, of course, is just Bonaparte's nonsense.

19:45His real support comes from the peasantry, as well as the sort of petit bourgeois. So, you know, sort of small business owners, as well as large industrialists, actually, at least some of them. There's quite a big protectionist lobby in France. He himself sympathizes with free trade and indeed brings in the 1860 famous Treaty with Britain, lowering tariffs. So he falls out with some of the more kind of traditional industrialists over that. But petit bourgeois, small businesses do extremely well. They do want stability, right? France has been through tumultuous times. It's bad for business. If you have somebody like Napoleon III who can guarantee stability and order,

20:19he seems to have found that secret sauce that the other rulers had failed to discover. Then these are the people who support him. And as I say, fast sways with the peasantry as well. At the beginning, really, and he probably has the most support, he also gets a lot of support from the Catholic Church and traditional Catholics. That begins to slide over time for reasons that we'll get into. But that really, that's the core constituency. There are plenty of people who will never forgive him for the coup d'etat. So Victor Hugo most famously is seized at the Second Empire as a criminal, illegitimate regime. And that's par for, of course, for pretty much any self-respecting radical Republican.

20:52And, of course, legitimists who see the Bonaparte as outrageous parvenus and arrevis, who are just quite frankly, you know, the last people that you should ever be working with. They'll never be reconciled. But pretty much, he genuinely tries to reach out across class divides, across party divides. That is actually one other aspect of Bonapartisans we didn't talk about, is the idea of fusion and amalgamation. The idea that you can put aside past prejudices, regardless of political persuasion, and work together, bring men of talent from whatever background they might be. Again, the rhetoric is often much more radical than reality.

21:25But he's fairly successful in doing that, in fact, in winning people over to his regime. You mentioned Victor Hugo's very famous opposition to him there. And, of course, some of the greatest minds of the 19th century had very strong opinions about Napoleon III. I'm thinking people like Karl Marx, for example, and even rulers across Europe. How did they regard him at the time? And why do you think their perspective has endured so long? Right. Karl Marx calls him a grotesque mediocrity. Victor Hugo calls him a lot of things, but possibly most famously Napoleon. The little Alexei de Tocqueville calls him a dwarf in, I think, not his most sophisticated political analysis.

22:00These people hated him, and they hated him before it was cool to do so. So we'll get on to how his regime ends. But they despised him before, you know, the really sort of terrible stuff that condemns his historiographical reputation happened. And so it's these, you know, people have heard those are the three of the sort of biggest names in the 19th century. And they spent much of their lives, certainly in Victor Hugo's case, in producing a literary output just to condemn the empire and the emperor and present him as a buffoon, as an idiot. I think for those three men in particular, what you have, I mean, in Karl Marx's case, Napoleon III, this sort of, you know, sort of diminutive, mustachioed man comes along and ruins his theory of revolution.

22:36And I think that just is quite traumatic for him. Tocqueville the same. You know, he is a man of rarefied air, great intellect, incredibly intelligent. And he sees this man swept to power, and he thinks it's, you know, beneath the dignity of France. He's completely incapable. And so I think he looks down on him as someone who just shouldn't be in power. And Victor Hugo, partially the same. He's slightly different in that he was an early adopter of Bonapartism, had an interesting relationship with the first empire. His father had served under it. And initially, he saw Louis-Napoleon as a sort of hope of restoring France, and he bought into the idea that he might be on the more kind of Republican radical side.

23:13But the coup d'etat is somebody he can never forgive. And for him, it becomes almost a kind of religious mission to oust Napoleon III as emperor. So it is, I think it's that historiographical legacy is shaped almost, you know, immediately and fossilized in the early 1850s by these three men. No one's really reading Marx at the time, but Marx, of course, subsequently becomes so just dominant in the historiography. And it's that famous quote, the first time is tragedy, the second time is farce.

The modernization and rebuilding of Paris

23:42If you visit Paris today, you're still walking through Napoleon III's city. How transformative was he as a modernizer? And I wonder if you could go into a little bit about what Paris represented to him in the sense of, you know, rebuilding it, high civilization, things that people may be vaguely aware of, but how integral that was to his regime and his outlook on what France could be after a period of such political instability. It's absolutely key. And actually, again, it's tied to political stability, but there's a lot to get through. So first and foremost, Paris in the 1850s, there are sort of grand monuments and boulevards,

24:15but a lot of it is kind of medieval shacks and insalubrious environments, you know, regular cholera, an awful smell, sort of miasmas wafting up from open sewers and people retching in the street. But it's not imperial capital of modernity. Napoleon III is incredibly interested in, you know, having Paris as a kind of center of technology and modernization. Part of this is, of course, the construction of railways and monumental train stations and wide boulevards, because, you know, a wide boulevard, harder to build a barricade, easier to crush those who rise up against him.

24:47Although, interestingly, they didn't rise up against him when he was in power, unlike the previous regimes, which have been toppled by revolution until his disastrous foreign policy, which we'll get to. And Paris, the rebuilding of Paris, he's actually central to it. He tears through the red tape that has stopped previous regimes doing it, kind of jurisdiction between local and national government. But it's not just, you know, a kind of vanity project to make France look great again and fulfill his promise to make France great again. There is a serious economic idea behind it, which is that, of course, these revolutions that have toppled various governments

25:19have been caused by economic distress. And if you have Paris as a gargantuan building site, you have sort of perpetual employment for Parisians, for people drawn in from the countryside, you have this knock-on effect in all of the industries that you need for construction. And you're going to borrow money, huge sums of money, and this goes against the dominant idea of laissez-faire economic liberalism prevalent in France and Britain at the time. You're going to borrow that money to invest. The property prices go up, rents go up, and so there's a sort of virtuous circle. And this is something that is completely anathema to a kind of orthodox way of economic thinking.

25:53And it's something that only can really be pushed through by a kind of authoritarian regime with a single mind behind it, like Napoleon III at the beginning. So Paris is his monumental legacy, and it's slightly more complicated than having wider boulevards to shoot people. How exactly did they go about reimagining what Paris could be, and what did the process look like? How long did it take to essentially demolish what must have been a medieval city and turn it into this metropolis of 19th century modernity? Yeah, I mean, obviously it takes a long time.

26:23Most of the work is done, you know, the kind of key boulevards and parks and things like that in the 1850s. But for example, you know, the Grand Opera House, which is in this wonderfully bombastic kind of Second Empire legacy, that's not completed until after the Second Empire has fallen. And the process is an incredibly discombobulating one, and particularly for the Parisians who, you know, are being sort of forced out of dwellings that they may have lived in for centuries in some cases. And although the idea is largely a benevolent one, in fact, what happens is a lot of the poorest of Paris

26:56are pushed out from the centre to the Bon Luc, beyond the Prairie Freak, where they're living in conditions which are as bad as they had been in the centre. It's just slightly less visible. So the process, it's long, it's disorientating. But at the same time, you know, for a lot of people, it's very exciting. And people come, tourists come to visit it, right, from London and from other parts of Europe to see this extraordinary recreation of an urban landscape that, as I say, hadn't been attempted on this scale before. In his study, he had a map of Paris and its redevelopment and the various different zones and projects

27:27and alongside a picture of Julius Caesar and his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte. So the three big things in his life were the development of Paris and then those other two figures. So it was something that he obsessed over and took a great interest in. And as I say, it had been key in pushing. And the process was vast, you know, to transform Paris into the city that you can see today. So domestically, he's enjoying, presumably, a rather good press.

Foreign policy fiascos and Mexico

27:50He's achieving most of his ambitions at home. But of course, he is an emperor and this is very consciously leaning into the sense of France as an empire. And to that end, he wanted to make the country into a great global power again. How ambitious was his foreign policy and what limitations did he face in that field? Yes. Well, we should point out he's getting good press in France because he largely controls the press in the 1850s, 1860s. But he's getting still winning. He's still winning landslides at elections. So elections continue. There's a lot of pressure that's brought to bear, but he's still winning large majorities right up until 1869, in fact.

28:25But in terms of foreign policy, yes. So domestically, as we painted him as a proto-populist or perhaps even Europe's first populist, as someone who's got his finger on the pulse with good political instincts, and he stays in power for longer than any ruler since Louis XV, who died in 1774. So domestically, he's doing well. Foreign policy is, to put it bluntly, a shambles. He is staggeringly incompetent. He wants to restore France to greatness. And there is that Napoleonic legacy, which kind of weighs upon his shoulders, that he has to make France a great European and global power.

28:56He also sees himself as a man who's on the right side of history, right? So if you don't know much about Napoleon III, you think he's a dictator, you think it's authoritarian. And there's lots of that. But he doesn't see himself as that. He sees himself as a man of progress. And he's called his famous aphorism, which is, if you march, you know, ahead of the ideas of your century, march alongside them, they'll drag you along. And if you march against them, they'll overthrow you, right? So you anticipate change, which he's done with democracy in France to some extent. What he sees as the great challenge on the international stage is nationalism. But he handles it very badly. Now, it starts well, his foreign policy, because he allies with Britain and defeats Russia in the Crimean War.

29:31And so he has done what his uncle had failed to do, successfully invade Russia and bring them to the negotiating table, which is in Paris in 1856, Peace Conference, which shows France, you know, as the center of diplomatic and military power. All of the powers of Europe that had condemned France to isolation in 1815 are sitting around the table. And what is staring down at them but a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, the uncle. So this is wonderful diplomatic trolling. Unfortunately, that's as good as it gets. In 1859, he invades Italy for very convoluted reasons.

30:02But it backfires spectacularly because Northern Italy is controlled by Austria. And he wants to kick Austria out and help unify Italy. But he takes personal command of the army. And, of course, he had kind of reified warfare into this wonderful, wonderful thing, studying his uncle's campaigns. He feels he has to lead the French army. And to no one's surprise but his, he finds out lots of people die in war. And he's very moved by this. So once, after a couple of battles where he does defeat the Austrians, to kick them completely out of Northern Italy and get out of Venetia would be a very costly, heavy campaign, which he decides he doesn't want to subject himself and his troops to.

30:35So he signs a peace treaty, thereby reneging on the promise he had made to Italy to drive the Austrians out. Then Italy is unified but in a very different way to which he had wanted it. For reasons that are even more complicated, there is a French garrison in Rome which is propping up the Pope. So not only is Venetia not part of Italy, but Rome, the natural capital of Italy, is not part of Italy. So many Italian nationalists see him as enemy number one when he went to be there, sort of create this kind of sympathetic client state. He hasn't got that. And, of course, the big disaster is Prussia.

31:05Yes, and we'll come on to Prussia. But I think another failure that we should address is his intervention in Mexico, which obviously proves disastrous as well. So I wondered if you could perhaps elaborate on what happened there and how he became involved on the other side of the Atlantic. Right, yes. I mean, this just sort of shows that the hubris, I suppose on one level, the grandeur.

The Franco-Prussian War and Sedan

31:25I mean, he is thinking big. I mean, it's complicated and there's a variety of reasons that he ends up invading Mexico. But the simplest is that he is in some ways very prescient. And he realizes that the United States of America is a rising power. And, you know, in 1846, in the U.S.-Mexican War, they've seized California, New Mexico, and the territory has expanded to become a transcontinental power with access to the Pacific. If this continues, you know, he says that the United States of America will one day be able to dictate terms to Europe. But, God forbid, in the 19th century, that would be an astonishing claim, of course,

31:57to think potentially was right about that. But he might have identified the problem. The solution, which is to send 30,000 French troops to Mexico to create a monarchy where he's going to have a Habsburg, so Archie Ferdinand Maximilian, younger brother of Franz Joseph, put on the throne, is, to put it mildly, an unusual one. And it's actually speaking to a different form of U.S. power. So in Mexico, most people thought that Mexico would be absorbed, all of it would be taken by the United States. And, of course, we know that the trajectory of U.S. imperialism goes in different directions, in economic and much more than territorial.

32:28So that's the reason they're there, alongside a few others. But it's extraordinarily hard to explain that to the French people. My favorite joke is it becomes France's Vietnam. But, of course, you know, France has its own Indochine later. The French army is coming home, and you need to abdicate and come back. Maximilian refuses to do so and ends up being captured by the opposite, you know, Republican forces in Mexico, who have him executed. And this is, I mean, this is spectacular. This is a spectacular failure. First of all, for a sort of imperial power, the European imperial power to be defeated outside of Europe.

33:01And when we were talking sort of first Afghan war levels of failure. But more so because Maximilian is a celebrity, and he's been executed by firing squad. It's just shocking, and it happens at the time of the World Fair in Paris as well. So you've got all of the leaders of Europe, including Bismarck and Wilhelm, King of Prussia, and so on and so forth. And the news comes into Paris while they are all there. So this is a humiliation on an extraordinary level. And it's just so misguided and ill-thought-through that this plan could ever work, that it's astonishing that it ever happened.

33:34But if anyone was going to do it, it would be Napoleon III, because as I say, he's not a man who lets reality necessarily stop him. You mentioned, of course, a little while ago that he had control over the press in France during his reign. And of course, as these international fiascos begin to mind, it must have been incredibly difficult to control the message that was getting out to the domestic audience. And I wondered if you could address that, but also talk a little bit about what was happening domestically in the sense of perhaps his relationship with the Catholic Church and all other manner of things.

34:07Right, yes. So it is. And of course, it comes to a great shock to the people of France, this execution, not just because it is shocking, but because the news had been tightly controlled and it's the French army are winning, the throne is consolidated, the French army is coming back because it's mission accomplished. Oh, and now the, you know, sort of a week after you hear that the emperor of Mexico has been executed. So there is a bit of a disjuncture, if you will, between the reality and the messaging. And this is something actually that Zola is one of these kind of key points of his brilliant series of novels that he wrote.

34:37However, it's worth pointing out that in the 1860s, Napoleon III begins to liberalize his regime. So in fact, although they can still control the press in the mid-1860s, much less so, in fact, than the 1850s. So this is also a problem because of his more traditional reactionary supporters are completely against this liberalization. You've given more power to parliament, to the core legislatif, which initially had been this incredibly tame body, but by now has morphed into a, you know, something recognizable to a parliament with real power,

35:07to scrutinize the budget, you know, freedom of speech, and all of it reported in the newspapers. And this is the forum where the message can't be controlled. So the great critics of the regime, so these people like Adolphe Thiers, who will come in later and had been under the July monarchy, the Orlinas monarchy. Jules Fevre, a very famous Republican critic in 1848 and again afterwards. They can stand up in parliament and they can say what they want, and they do say what they want. And they go after him, especially on foreign affairs, which is considered, you know, sort of free game. So the answer to that is actually they are beginning to lose control of the message.

35:39And by 1869, so much so that when they have the elections to the core legislatif, it's a tight election, which under a managed democracy is not what you want. There's about 3.5 million people vote against the government and only 4.5 people vote in favor of government candidates. So it's still, you know, a modern political party today would be delighted with that. But remember, Bonapartism, as a philosophy, represents the indivisible will of the people. And this is beginning to look like very much the divisible will of the people.

36:09There are riots on the streets of Paris in the late 18... well, in 1869. There's been a series of economic downturns, which has led to strikes across the country. This is another interesting part of his regime. He had legalized strikes, given workers the right to strike, which led to a lot more strikes. But at the time, very progressive legislation, forms of trade unions are legalized, again, leading to more strikes. And so in a sense, he's beginning to be captured by his own regime. He feels like he's unable to push through reforms that he wants. He desperately wants to reform the army. He can't do it. And for kind of seasoned hacks, right, British newspaper reporters who send their reports back to the Times and whatever, in 1869, they're saying, well, we've seen this before.

36:47This is the prelude to revolution. French regimes have a shelf life of about 15 to 20 years. And we've reached that point where a revolution is inevitable. It sounds like behind this imperial image, there was quite a surprisingly complex individual. And I wondered, Edward, do we know much about what Napoleon III was like outside the public eye? We do. We do. Yeah. I mean, you know, of course, we have all of his correspondence and the memoirs of ministers and people like that who knew him privately. He was a very affable, very charming man, quite sentimental.

37:18You know, he came of age in the 1820s and 30s. So he's a liberal-minded romantic in some senses. And that was the literature that really spoke to him in his youth. Where he's perhaps more reminiscent of his uncle is that he is a notorious womanizer. And he has all kinds of salacious and scandalous affairs which are reported throughout Paris, at least in high society. But he's also kind of, as I say, quite a thoughtful, studious man. I mean, he takes time out from being emperor to write a best-selling biography of Julius Caesar. So there is a very, you know, sort of complex interland, if you will.

37:50And as I say, you know, he would, in a slightly jokingly, describe himself as a socialist. But he has had an upbringing, which we've discussed, which is very different to most people who are in power in the 19th century, be they elected politicians or certainly reigning sovereigns. You know, this is smoke-filled taverns, conspiring, reading, you know, utopian socialist literature alongside the memoirs of his uncle. And I think that's why you get such a kind of extraordinary regime, which at times can seem kind of fabulously thrilling, you know, and embracing, you know, democracy and technology and the economy.

38:22And other times can seem sort of like chillingly repressive and somewhat archaic. It's this strange mix that reflects his personality in that sense. You mentioned his knack for womanising there as well, but of course he was married. And I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about his consort and also his family that he began. Yes. So he gets married in 1853 to Eugenie. She's a Spanish aristocrat. He'd wanted to marry into one of the royal houses of Europe, but the royal houses of Europe see him as an adventurer, a parvenu and indeed a womaniser. And there's no way they're going to marry their daughter off to him.

38:55So he goes through down, you know, really down in sort of minor nobility, but still royals. So he alights on Eugenie, who is, as I say, incredibly aristocratic, but not of a royal dynasty. And they get married in 1853. They have a tempestuous relationship. She is very strong-willed and does not look kindly when he starts embarking on what he calls his little distractions. And we shall just call his outrageous affairs. They do have a child, the Prince Imperial, also called Louis. We'll call him the Prince Imperial. And he will be Napoleon IV. But after that, she stops sleeping with him because it's an incredibly painful birth.

39:31And she doesn't want to have a second pregnancy. It could be terminal for her. And so let's say he finds his amusement elsewhere through a series of astonishingly scandalous affairs. Now, everything seems to unravel with the Franco-Prussian War, which broke out in the summer of 1870. How did Napoleon III end up being so comprehensively outmanoeuvred by Otto von Bismarck? Well, if we're going to be kind to him, we should say that he, by this period, he is old before his time. So he's only mid-60s, but he has got an awful smorgasbord of outrageously painful medical issues.

40:05So he has got hemorrhoids. He's got, worst of all, bladder stones, which makes urinating absolute agony. And that's affecting his judgment. But still, the signs are there to see. So the rise of Prussia, it's a fairly well-known story. But essentially, Bismarck is going to use Prussian militarism to create a unified Germany, thereby not diluting the importance of the Prussian monarchy. And he's going to do that through three wars. First in 1864 against plucky little Denmark, which he does with Austria. And of course, they win against Denmark. And in 1866, he breaks with Austria and goes to war against Austria.

40:38Now, Napoleon III, of course, knew that Prussia could be an existential danger to France, where it's become too powerful. But what's interesting, as I said, is he sees himself as on the side of progress. And he sees that nationalism is a legitimate concern. And he can't back Austria. He can't bring himself to do it, even though, of course, you know, crushing Prussia in 1866 might well be to France's interest, because he sees Austria as a bastion of conservatism and reactionary and anti-national. It's anti the future. It's anti how he sees it. So he doesn't. He stays neutral, which he's criticized for.

41:10But that actually is a fairly rational decision. Most European neutral observers thought Austria and Prussia would fight out a long war. Both sides are weakened, and France steps in as mediator. What is absolutely beyond belief in its incompetence is the war in 1870. So after Austria is defeated, it's clear that Prussia is going to be a military threat, that it's going to be very hard for France to counter, because the Prussian society is much more militarized. They have a much larger conscription. Everybody serves. They go into the reserve. So Prussia, even without its allies, can call on 750,000 men.

41:42France has got a professional army of about 400,000, 450,000. And with the Franco-Prussian war, what Bismarck wants to do is engineer France into a position where it declares war on Prussia, because the southern German states of places like Bavaria, which are Catholic, have not that much interest in becoming part of a sort of Prussian super state. But the one thing that they can all agree on is that they hate the French. So Bismarck engineers this situation whereby a Hohenzollern, so this is the Prussian royal family, will put a junior member on the vacant kingdom of Spain, right?

42:14There's no one on the Spanish throne. It hasn't been since 1868. This explodes into Paris in the summer of 1870. And there's absolute outrage, both on the streets of Paris, but also amongst politicians, saying we can never allow this, because of course it would mean if France went to war with Prussia, they would have to keep a number of troops back to guard the Pyrenees. Now, process are made. And in fact, King Wilhelm, who is the Prussian king, is less enthusiastic about war. And he has actually talked into getting his cousin, or whatever it is, to drop the candidacy. And so it's a stunning diplomatic triumph.

42:45So France had threatened war, incredibly dangerous. And of course, Prussia would have been well with its rights to refuse to back down, but they do. And so it should end there. They've achieved what they wanted. But as I say, Napoleon III is ill. There's this sort of belief that Prussia needs to be dealt with now, and it'd be better if it was dealt with by Napoleon III, rather than leave this sort of awkward Prussian problem to his son. His wife usually is absolutely convinced that they must go to war. So what they do is they not only demand the withdrawal of the candidacy, they demand that there are guarantees it will never happen again. And this is a godsend of Bismarck, who had sort of seen his plan fail.

43:18He was about to resign. You know, von Moltke, the elder, the military commanding officer, is in despair because his whole life he'd been wanting to invade France. And it looks like his dream is being taken away from him. They get the telegram from the king of Prussia, who has had a meeting with the French ambassador. And Bismarck famously edits it to make it look as though the French ambassador has been insulted, which he hadn't been. And so when this hits the streets of Paris, there is uproar, and there are cries of, to Berlin! And Napoleon III feels that he has to go to war because he's been pushed into it by popular pressure and public opinion. And of course, that's what he's all about, representing the people.

43:51And I wondered if you could now talk us through the final moments of Napoleon III's reign and what happened towards the end of that war. Right. So not only is it a bad decision because they are massively outnumbered, but this staggering incompetence in the military planning is just astonishing because there is no plan, even though from 1866 onwards, they should have been entirely focused on what would happen if Prussia and France went toward French military planners have only a very vague plan. Extraordinary, the proclamation that the emperor issues is, whatever roads we may take, we will see the glorious traces of our ancestors.

44:24So harking back to Napoleon Bonaparte, who had a fairly good reputation against Prussia, but that whatever roads we may take, that subjunctive is not rhetoric. They don't know. They don't have a plan. Best case scenario is that Austria will join the war, but Austria doesn't join the war. So the only plan they really have is predicated on a conditional that doesn't happen. Then they decide that they're going to have a defensive war rather than offensive, so they're not even going to invade Germany. And this goes disastrously. In one battle after another, the French army is defeated. And Napoleon III, who is old, who is ill, feels he has to take command of the French army.

44:54But he is in so much pain that while he's on campaign, he is found with his arms around a tree, his fingernails digging into it, convulsing and writhing with agony, tears rolling down his cheeks. So he is no fit state to command, not least because he is up against the 19th century's most proficient killing machine. The Germans do have a plan, and they've planned it for a long time. They envelop the only professional French army in Metz on the eastern border. Napoleon III does relinquish command, but stays with this second army, which is scraped together from reservists and those people who haven't been called up in time. And it marches out shambolically in the general direction of Belgium,

45:27with the hope of meeting up with the army of the Rhine, which is being surrounded by German armies. That army never breaks out. And the army that Napoleon III is with is surrounded at a small town called Sidon, outnumbered two to one and completely enveloped. And it's a killing field, the Prussian artillery, which can fire much further than the French and more accurately decimates the French army. And the town is under bombardment, on fire, you know, women and children screaming in the streets. This is absolute chaos and catastrophe that Napoleon III has led this army to.

45:58His generals are urging him to fight on, to break out, to go down fighting. And Napoleon III, who rode around for five hours on the battlefield, some say looking for death, finds courage at the end of the day and says, no, we're going to surrender. Because otherwise, tens of thousands more people will die needlessly. So this is incredibly courageous decision, because by the standards of the 19th century, it's incredibly shameful. It is humiliating. It is dishonorable. And in fact, the man who is carrying the white flag is crying tears of shame and screaming that his name will forever be associated with this disaster.

46:30When news of the army is surrendered and that the emperor has been taken prisoner, and this is a sort of famous scene where he sits down with Bismarck after the battle as a prisoner and has a sort of 45-minute conversation. When that news reaches Paris, the revolution does happen. And the mobs storm the French parliament. Eugénie is chased out of the Tuileries with sort of mobs baying for her blood. She finds her way into a taxi and ends up at her American dentist, which I always think is a very pathetic end for an emperor. He manages to get her across the channel to England. And Napoleon III is a prisoner in Germany

47:01until the end of the Franco-Prussian War. So that's what brings the regime down. And Napoleon III dies in exile in Chisselhurst. You know, this is his third exile in Britain, so he's used to it. But he's haunted by Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War. In his final words, on his deathbed, he says to his sort of long-term friend, we were not cowards at Sedan, were we?

Historical reputation and the shadow of fascism

47:21Some historians have obviously looked back on the Second Empire and remember it very much as a period defined by its collapse, its spectacular downfall during the Franco-Prussian War. And others have seen it almost as a precursor to fascism that came in the 20th century. Where does that argument come from? And do you think it's fair? Well, immediately after the Franco-Prussian War and under the Third Republic, it is buried under a black legend of vitriol, right? Because it's a convenient fiction that one man was responsible for the ruin and dismemberment of France. So after the Franco-Prussian War, there's a very harsh treaty imposed on France.

47:53They lose Al-Sazerain. They also have to pay reparations, which, you know, anyone familiar with the First World War, or this will all sound like history, well, I suppose, not repeating itself, but there's the First World War Treaty of Versailles repeating itself. And of course, it massively informs what happens in 1919 with that treaty. And so people like Victor Hugo, right, this is very much the I told you so moment because he had been arguing this for 20-odd years. And he famously said that, you know, the Second Empire began with the black flag of massacre, so that's the coup d'etat, and ended with the white flag of humiliation or shame. I can't remember exactly what he says.

48:23And that's the surrender of Sedan. And you can still see that idea that that surrender was shameful. That wasn't something that he should have done. I think that's completely unfair. As I say, it's a convenient fiction. If the Second Empire is a conspiracy, it goes much wider. I mean, millions of people voted for this regime continually over time. We started talking about France and stability, and it is only the foreign policy that overthrows the empire. You know, if he hasn't declared war on Prussia in 1870, he would have died. He had chronic kidney disease, in fact, and he would have died in 1873 on the 9th of January,

48:56and almost undoubtedly, he dies on his throne. I think had he died, I think he would have died as one of the most successful rulers of France in the 19th century. So that black legend is entirely unfair. He is seen as the precursor of fascism by some historians who are writing in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and sort of see that phenomenon. But actually, I think it's the differences with those kind of totalitarian regimes, Nazis of the Soviet Union. So Napoleon III, I mean, just by temperament, temperament is not especially dictatorial. But if you look structurally at the Second Empire, again, going back to what is Bonapartism,

49:27it's the indivisible will of the people. And that has to be demonstrated by the ballot box. So although there's huge pressure that the government can put on these elections to get the results it wants, the election is not rigged, that you can go and count the votes for the plebiscites. And they are exactly what they are. There is secret ballots. It's not a police state. It's far less militarized than Prussia. And perhaps crucially, most crucially of all, Napoleon III never wanted a Bonapartist party to be created. So it's not a one-party state. It's technically meant to be a no-party state because parties are sort of inherently factional.

49:59Whereas this is like you genuinely go through the ritual of a vaguely free and fair by the 19th century standards elections. And managing that, that mass electorate, I think, speaks much more to populism than it would do to fascism. So just to be clear, you don't see him as a forerunner or a template for Europe's authoritarian future in the 20th century. Is that correct? Absolutely not. No, I mean, you only need to see the fact that he liberalizes his regime. And by 1870, the British ambassador writes to London and says, this regime is more democratic than Britain. So unlike someone who seizes power and ends democracy,

50:33he seizes power, ends democracy, and creates another one. And therefore, that begs the question, is he an anomaly? I think he is. I think he answers, like anyone, and hopefully everyone listening to this podcast, obsessed with history. And as you're kind of sort of daydreaming about history in history lessons as a sort of teenager, and you're studying things like, you know, the Soviet Union or something like that, and you sort of think to yourself, what would a dictatorship with a nice person be like, you know, rather than a kind of paranoid psychopath like Stalin, for example. And I think Napoleon III answers that question, but I suppose it speaks to another danger.

51:04So this is not a story of absolute power corrupting absolutely. As I say, he gives away his power to the point where it's a constitutional monarchy, potentially more democratic than Britain, at the time. But it is, and Georges Saint, this wonderful 19th century novelist, she highlighted, I think, the real danger, which when she said that to entrust the destinies of all to a single person is the most shameful thing that a people can commit. And I think that is the problem, is that he does create a very successful and stable domestic regime that seems to answer to the complex questions that the French people are asking.

51:36However, he's woefully inequipped to be the sole arbiter of French foreign policy. And so I think that is, he is an anomaly in many respects.

51:46That was Edward Shawcross speaking to Danny Bird. Edward's latest book, The People's Emperor, The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III, is out now. Thank you.