Napoleon III and the French Second Empire

by Roger D. Price

  administration in communal affairs bred resentment. Repression drove remaining démoc-soc militants underground, forcing them to use traditional forms of popular sociability such as cafés and private drinking clubs as cover. This radicalisation of the démoc-soc movement further heightened official anxiety about plots by secret societies to seize power by force.

  The impact of repression was also weakened by the tension which continued to exist between the various monarchist factions, in spite of their shared fear of social revolution. Memories of past conflicts, ideological divisions, personal rivalries and suspicion of the Prince-President’s ambitions ensured that the Party of Order remained divided. Bonapartism, although enjoying considerable popular support, gained little sympathy among the political elites. Yet, as the prospect of a démoc-17

  soc electoral victory in 1852 drew closer, as the ‘red spectre’ became ever more real and rumours of socialist plots were given greater credence, the willingness of notables to accept more extreme measures to preserve ‘order’ became increasingly pronounced. In this anxious and economically depressed climate more and more people looked to the President of the Republic for a solution. As head of state, Louis-Napoléon controlled the government machine and the army which was,

  before the creation of a modern police, the essential means of securing internal order. His position was reinforced by the inability of Legitimists and Orleanists, as in 1848, to agree on an alternative candidate for the 1852 presidential elections.

  Bonaparte’s problem was that provisions of the constitution barred him from standing for a second successive term in office and there were a sufficient number of republicans in the Assembly to prevent constitutional revision by the necessary two-thirds majority. His utter determination to retain power left him with little choice but to attempt a third coup d’état and, on this occasion, from a position of strength.

  The Presidential coup d’état

  The coup, which took place on 2 December 1851, was directed against both the republicans and the monarchist groups represented in parliament. The fact that only the former offered armed resistance, and that conservatives tended to

  welcome the President’s seizure of power, gave it an overwhelmingly anti-

  republican character. Thus, it might be seen as the culmination of a long period of political repression, with the extension of martial law to the entire country facilitating the final destruction of the démoc-soc movement. Mounting the coup proved to be relatively easy for the head of government of a centralised state in which army officers and officials were committed to passive obedience. It had been carefully planned by the President and his closest advisors. Trusted personnel had been moved into key positions, notably the President’s half-brother, the Comte de Morny, to the Interior Ministry and General Saint-Arnaud to the War Ministry. In implementing the coup, the semaphore telegraph system, reserved for official use, allowed the government a considerable time advantage for the despatch of

  instructions and receipt of information. Preventative arrests of monarchist leaders like Adolphe Thiers, the Generals Changarnier, Bedeau and Lamoricière, and

  republicans who might be tempted to organise resistance, had been carefully planned. On 30 November a practice alert had even allowed a military rehearsal.

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  The tactic was to concentrate troops in the major urban centres and garrison towns and, once their security had been assured, to deploy mobile columns into the countryside. The practical disadvantage of this plan was that it would allow time for insurrections to develop in some disaffected and under-policed small towns as well as in surrounding rural areas.

  In Paris there was only very limited resistance to the coup. This was because of obvious military preparations and partly due to preventative arrests. Conservative deputies vied with each other for the privilege of being arrested and absolved of any further responsibility in the affair. There were appeals to rally to the defence of republican institutions launched by a small group of republican deputies including such luminaries as Victor Hugo, Hippolyte Carnot, Jules Favre, Michel de Bourges and Victor Schoelcher, and additionally by Jules Leroux and August Desmoulins on behalf of workers associated with a comité central des corporations. None the less, few workers were prepared to risk a repetition of the slaughter which had followed the June insurrection, particularly in defence of the sovereignty of a parliament dominated by monarchists who had deprived many of them of the right to vote. Moreover, the President still enjoyed the personal prestige of his Bonapartist inheritance and, in the proclamation which justified the coup,

  promised the immediate restoration of manhood suffrage. Nevertheless, on 3 and 4 December, demonstrations (mainly involving workers) occurred and some 70

  barricades were constructed in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine and in the old centres of popular revolution in the streets adjoining the rues Saint-Denis, Rambuteau and Transnonain. The army did not repeat the mistakes of February 1848 and again, as in June, deployed large, concentrated formations, well supplied with provisions and ammunition. Around 30, 000 troops faced some 1,200

  insurgents. This unequal struggle was inevitably short lived. Subsequently, the official newspaper, the Moniteur universel announced that 27 soldiers and 380

  civilians had been killed, although the second figure was inflated by the casualties caused when panicking soldiers fired volleys at peaceful, and mainly middle-class, spectators along the boulevards Bonne-Nouvelle, Poissonnière, Montmartre and des Italiens.

  Short-lived demonstrations also occurred in many other towns. In Lille, the republican newspaper Messager du Nord on 3 December launched a call for resistance and, in the evening, workers gathered on the grande-place. They were easily dispersed. News of the failure of resistance in Paris discouraged further action. To take another example, in eastern France, Dijon, a crowd of 400–500

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  people gathered outside the railway station in the afternoon of 3 December to wait for news from Paris. The local démoc-soc leadership was, however, mostly arrested while waiting at a printer’s for leaflets calling for resistance to be printed. Militants in Dijon itself and in Beaune and other small towns in the region who habitually followed their lead remained inactive. Their hesitancy was in marked contrast with the obvious determination of the authorities. From the government’s point of view, the situation was, unexpectedly, to become far more serious in the provinces than in the large towns. Some 100, 000 men from around 900 communes were involved in various forms of protest; as many as 70, 000 from at least 775 communes actually took up arms and over 27, 000 participated in acts of violence (Margadant 1979).

  Insurrections occurred where démoc-soc militants had succeeded in appealing to popular conceptions of justice, linking their political programme to widespread practical grievances and, above all, where organisational structures centred on small towns and market villages had survived repression. Risings occurred in the centre (Allier, Nièvre); south-west (Lot-et-Garonne, Gers) and especially the south-east (Drôme, Ardèche, Basses-Alpes, Hérault, Var) – i.e. in a minority of rural areas south of a line Biarritz–Pithiviers (Loiret)–Strasbourg. These were regions in which small-scale peasant farming predominated and which were

  experiencing the effects of growing population pressure on the land. The difficult situation within them was made all the worse by the persistent difficulties of market-orientated activities like vine and silk cultivation, forestry and rural manufacture. To the north and west of this line, in the departments of western France, the north, north-east and most of the Paris region, there was little disorder.

  These were mostly either areas of larger-scale commercial farming in which more advanced industrial development did something to relieve population pressure, or zones in the west characterised by economic backwardness and intense poverty.

  They were regions in which traditional elites, generally enjoying the support of the church, retained considerable influence.

  The insurr
ections provided further justification for a settling of accounts. Over 26, 000 démoc-soc militants were arrested throughout France, rather than simply where insurrections had occurred. The authorities were anxious to eliminate the radical republican leadership, irrespective of whether individuals had been involved in resistance to the coup or not. The official statistics on those arrested revealed that 10.6 per cent belonged to the middle-class professions (including 1, 570 rentiers, 325 doctors and 225 lawyers) and that the largest group were artisans and workers in the traditional trades (builders, shoemakers, tailors, etc.), followed by peasants (5, 423 cultivateurs, 1, 850 journaliers, etc.), although peasants made 20

  up a far higher proportion of the rank-and-file (Price 1972: 289). The coup allowed the authorities to complete the work of repression without paying too much

  attention to the rule of law. The fright they had received, their bitter hatred of the left and their inability to comprehend its motives is evident from the insulting phraseology contained in the interrogation records. The insurrection was explained by the authorities in terms of the poor and ignorant being led astray by the greedy, envious and perverted. That many of the démoc-soc leaders were educated and comparatively well-off bourgeois, were in effect class traitors, was almost beyond comprehension. Throughout France republican leaders were arrested, exiled or discredited. Their followers, if they had been arrested, were usually soon released, but most had been frightened into political quiescence, throwing themselves on the mercy of the authorities as the only means of protecting themselves from

  retribution, and the terrifying arbitrariness of police and military action. The contrast between this situation and their dreams of the social and democratic republic which was to have been established following electoral victory in 1852

  were only too marked. Nevertheless, it was during the Second Republic, and in spite of the early onset of repression, that the idea of the Republic gained precision and mass support. Although substantial differences had appeared within the

  republican movement, between moderates and démoc-socs, to an important degree they still shared the universalistic ideals of the revolutionary years of 1789 to 1794.

  The insurrection of 1851, which in some respects had much in common with the archaic, ‘primitive’ traditions of popular protest, was inspired nevertheless by political ideology. La République démocratique et sociale had been presented, with some success, as the means of alleviating misery and insecurity and of creating a more just and egalitarian society. More broadly, the Second Republic represented an important stage in the process of mass politicisation. Historians have frequently associated politicisation with a vote for the left and against traditional social elites, but whether they voted for republican or conservative candidates large numbers of people, previously excluded from political activity, were now persuaded of its relevance to their daily lives. The introduction of manhood suffrage had stimulated political organisation and mobilisation. Doubtless, many soon relapsed into apathy, but others would continue to take at least an episodic interest in affairs outside their own communities. During the Second Empire the accelerating

  development of education, communications, urban reconstruction, regular (even if stage-managed) electoral campaigns, and the growing governmental intervention within communities which all this required, would reinforce these trends.

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  Towards an imperial restoration

  Most of the population even in those regions in which resistance did occur had responded to news of the coup with indifference or delight. Among notables, initial reservations about the replacement of a liberal parliamentary regime by a

  Bonapartist military dictatorship were short lived. The acts of resistance to the coup were taken to confirm its necessity as a means of preventing a future socialist revolution. According to Morny (quoted in Dansett 1961: 366), the insurrections were clear evidence of the ‘social war which would have broken out in 1852’.

  Grossly exaggerated accounts of démoc-soc atrocities (the murder and mutilation of gendarmes, pillage and rape) and presentation of the insurrections as a form of mindless violence ( jacquerie) were used to heighten conservative fears. After long years of economic crisis and political instability, the promise of strong government proved to be attractive to many people. Whatever their political principles, monarchist notables rallied to the cause of social order (or at least remained silent).

  The Church gave thanks for deliverance with solemn Te Deums. Salvation, in the short term at least, clearly lay in the hands of the police state. Even after the martial law which had been imposed in 32 departments ended on 27 March 1852, a

  complex of old and new laws facilitated administrative repression and effectively deterred political opposition. Lists of potential opponents were maintained in each department to facilitate further arrests should these be judged to be necessary.

  Detailed military contingency plans were prepared to deal with any future mass insurrections in Paris and Lyon. Censorship of the press and the surveillance of former militants and their likely meeting places continued. Control of the press was a major pre-occupation for the authorities, who blamed much of the disorder of the Second Republic on its corrupting influence. The new press law of 17 February 1852 codified the repressive legislation introduced since 1814 – prior authorisation preceding publication, the deposit of caution money to pay fines, stamp duty to increase the cost of newspapers, suspension, etc. – and increased the discretionary powers of the administration. Editors were obliged to engage in rigorous self-censorship if their newspapers were to survive. However, it proved to be easier to suppress opposition newspapers than to create a popular pro-government press. It should be noted, additionally, that respect for legal forms, an ethical code, lack of policemen and sheer inefficiency restricted the activities of the repressive apparatus. The police state of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, as brutal as it could be on occasion, was to be nothing like the twentieth-century totalitarian state.

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  However, to an important degree, its origins in a military coup would determine attitudes towards the restored imperial regime and its subsequent evolution.

  On 20 December 1851, a plebiscite was held on the question of extending the authority of the President of the Republic. This procedure was to be a characteristic of the new regime. Louis-Napoléon was determined to secure a large and positive majority. It was made clear to officials at all levels, from the prefect to the village mayor and road repair man that their continued employment depended upon

  enthusiastic campaigning. The essential theme was the choice between

  ‘civilisation and barbarism, social order and chaos’. The promise was an end to the long mid-century crisis and the inauguration of an era of order, peace and

  prosperity. At the same time, every effort was made to intimidate opponents and to prevent them from campaigning. The result was predictable. A substantial positive majority was obtained, due in part to coercion but, primarily, because many voters were genuinely frightened at the prospect of further revolution, and large numbers were attracted by the prospect of a strong and active Bonapartist regime. About 7, 500, 000 voted ‘yes’; 640, 000 ‘no’; and 1, 500, 000 abstained. A large negative vote was characteristic of all the major cities with 80, 000 ‘no’ votes and 75, 000

  abstentions countering only 132, 000 ‘yes’ votes in Paris. In the Nord, significant opposition was expressed in Lille with its socio-professionally mixed population, but in the mining and metallurgical centres of Anzin and Denain, 79 per cent and 84 per cent respectively of the overwhelmingly working class electorate voted

  ‘yes’. Two forms of opposition manifested themselves. A negative vote was

  returned, especially among the urban professional and lower middle classes, and skilled and literate workers in areas of republican strength in the north, east and south-east. Paradoxically, the exceptions in these areas were places in which insurrections had occurred. There, terrified conser
vatives voted ‘yes’ in gratitude to Bonaparte while republican sympathisers did the same to escape further

  repression. The other form of opposition was abstention, particularly evident in parts of the west and in Provence, where popular Legitimism and clericalism remained strong. Even then most Legitimists voted ‘yes’ (as did many former moderate republicans) and largely out ora concern for social order. The

  conservative newspaper, L’Union bourguignonne (16 December 1851), warned that ‘those who vote NO declare themselves accomplices in the crimes of the demagogues’.

  In symbolic promise of things to come, the plebiscite was followed by the

  replacement of the image of the Republic on coins and postage stamps by that of 23

  ‘His Imperial Highness the Prince-President’ as he was now to be officially designated. On 1 January 1852 at a solemn service of thanksgiving in Notre Dame, the Archbishop of Paris called for God’s blessing on the regime using language which made it seem as if the Empire already existed and on 10 May new flags bearing the imperial eagle were distributed to the army. Relieved of their terror, the upper classes celebrated the carnival in 1852 with renewed enthusiasm. Within a year, following a similar, orchestrated campaign, a second plebiscite was held in far less dramatic circumstances (on 21–22 November 1852) with voters asked to approve the re-establishment of the hereditary empire. During a tour of the south in October, the future Emperor promised peace, order and prosperity. These themes, together with that of reconciliation, were taken up successfully by officials throughout the country. Again, open opposition was not tolerated. While 7, 824, 000 voters supported the proposed constitutional change, only 253, 000 voted against and 1, 500, 000 abstained – as before, mainly in the towns, in some ‘red’