As a student of the UC Berkeley school of historiography, I am interested in hard historical facts and getting at their sources. I am not interested in myth, the suppression or distortion of historical truth in order to support “national glory,” or the reputations of alleged heroes currently in vogue. And as my late friend and colleague Eugen Weber also took great pains to point out, “nothing is more real and concrete than history, and nothing less interested in theories and abstractions.” He had no patience for myths and falsifications, as his distinguished published works attest.
Nor has Berkeley been the only influence on my approach to writing history. Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was much concerned with the cause and effect of historical events and the individuals who created them. In the eighteenth century when he introduced this vigorous analytical history, the world was shocked, and many dismayed. Gibbon strove for the truth in order to better understand events, regardless of the cost. Barbaric invasions swept away corrupt imperial government and organizations, he acknowledged with a strategic view to history. The early church, which he so much admired, was replaced by a new church introducing superstition, polytheism, paganism, venality, and simony. He was immediately denounced by Christians from Canterbury to the Vatican. Gibbon was interested in fact, not superstition, or in gaining the approval of powerful elite organizations. How can one possibly understand history, our past, existence itself, when closing one’s eyes to disagreeable truths? he asked.
When I wrote my history of the initial stages of the U.S. naval operations in the South Pacific during World War II, Eagle and the Rising Sun, two retired flag officers contacted me to inform me of their disapproval of my rejection of their particular heroes and version of events as taught at Annapolis. I must alter my professional findings, they insisted, removing the names of some of the real leaders, e.g., Admirals Mitscher and Turner, of whom they did not approve, while reinstating Admiral Husban Kimmel. I reminded these gentlemen that my statements and conclusions were based entirely on documentary evidence submitted by noted military historians and the U.S. government during various subsequent official investigations. (And I was pleased that a neutral party, the late Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach, RN, for one, fully concurred in all respects with my evaluations and conclusions.)
When I wrote my biography of Napoléon I, I was denounced by what my late friend and fellow historian David Chandler (Sandhurst) referred to as the “Napoleonic clientele.” In France, too, there are those, including well-known historians, willing to dismiss and suppress well-documented historical facts, in order to appeal to mass public opinion, however hysterical or ill-founded. In my biography Napoleon Bonaparte, I pointed out that as his career attested, that celebrated soldier lived for war, and could not justify his existence without one military campaign after another, right down to the blood-drenched fields of Waterloo. I further pointed out, over the objections of the current school of French historians—though they could hardly deny it—that Napoléon’s serial invasions terrorized the whole of Europe, which included the destruction of hundreds of towns and villages, resulting in the creation of hundreds of thousands of war refugees left homeless and displaced, three million men dead, and tens of thousands of women and girls raped and forgotten during Napoléon’s glorious rule of France. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, dismissed Bonaparte as “destructive” and “a tyrant.”
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The Shadow Emperor is, I believe, the first major biography of Louis Napoléon to be written in the United States. Largely dismissed by French historians for more than a century after the death of Napoléon I, it has been only in the past few decades that serious research in this field has begun in earnest. The French government is also finally showing interest in having the remains of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte transferred from England to France. Important biographies of key participants of the Second Empire are beginning to appear as well, including those of Napoléon III, Auguste de Morny, and Georges Haussmann. It is to be hoped that many more badly needed serious studies will follow, such as of Eugénie, Achille Fould, Eugène Rouher, Eugène Schneider, Gabriel Delessert, Charles de Flahaut, Léopold Le Hon, Prince [Napoléon] Jérôme Bonaparte, his sister Mathilde, and most important, Louis Napoléon’s closest friend and daily companion, Henri Conneau; the list is long.
As a biographer-historian, I am interested in the personalities and their interrelationships, those individuals who create or are involved with, if only indirectly, the events that shape “the outcome of history.” My biography of Napoléon I was a composite of just such biographical sketches and the resultant interplay of those individuals.
In the case of Napoléon III, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the historian is dealing with a totally different personality from that of Napoléon I. Although carefully groomed in the long shadow of his uncle, indeed he worshipped the great man’s name and achievements, Louis Napoléon had his own youthful hopes of emerging one day as a new, very different Bonaparte, a leader worthy in his own right. Ironically, what Louis Napoléon never admitted to himself, however, was his rejection of almost everything his uncle stood for, beginning with the military. Napoléon I was a war-lover, a brilliant military officer who felt adrift, lost, in peacetime. While praising the military, his nephew Louis Napoléon was himself an incompetent military officer, rather thriving instead on peace, in rebuilding, modernizing France, its economy, commerce, and industry, its education, science, urban redevelopment, and agriculture. Over and over again he proclaimed, “The Empire stands for Peace.” There would be no “Napoleonic Wars” during his watch. Nevertheless wars and international blunders followed. He committed a militarily unprepared France to the unnecessary Crimean War, which in the end accomplished very little, and the even more senseless invasion of Mexico (against his own better judgment). At the same time, his successful military support of Victor Emmanuel’s forces against the Austrians did have the positive result of freeing the country of the Austrian occupation and in creating the modern independent state of Italy. In the final analysis, if Napoléon I wished to be remembered for his great victories on the battlefield, Louis Napoléon wanted to be appreciated and remembered for the sweeping peacetime transformation and projects he planned and achieved for the country.
Napoléon I cut down the nation’s forests to build forts and warships, Louis Napoléon reforested the country in order to build homes and commerce. Napoléon I regimented all schools in a rigid, military-run state system to meet his manpower needs for the military and the nation’s administration. Louis Napoléon removed this regimentation and greatly expanded the curricula to meet the needs of the modern new world he was creating, stressing the study of recent history and modern science. Napoléon I virtually drove France into bankruptcy, emptying the treasury and all but destroying the nation’s banks and commerce in order to fund his military campaigns (even selling the “Louisiana Purchase” to finance his failed invasion of England). Louis Napoléon instead encouraged the vast expansion of commerce and industry, aided and abetted by the opening of public and private coffers, and new banking systems and credit facilities made available to the wider public. Napoléon I had little interest in agriculture, apart from introducing the sugar beet to replace the regular source cut off from the West Indies by his self-inflicted wars against England. Older breeds of cattle, sheep, and horses were dying out, a process dramatically reversed thanks to intensive programs drafted by Napoléon III. Louis Napoléon introduced recent agricultural methods, creating numerous model farms, and supported Louis Pasteur and other scientists in their research. He also supported the creation of public and private sector banking credit facilities for the advancement and expansion of agriculture. Millions of acres of wasteland and swamp were reclaimed on his orders and turned into agricultural production, this at a time when there was neither public environmental interest in, nor demand for, such government programs. As a result of his determination, corn and wheat production soared, as did the nation’s wine output. The living and working conditions of the working class—totally ignored by Napoléon I—became a lifelong preoccupation with Napoléon III. Crowded medieval tenements, contaminated drinking water, and the lack of sanitary facilities and sewage disposal resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in Paris alone every year. Louis Napoléon razed perhaps one-third of Paris, encouraging modern, airy new buildings with clean drinking water and sanitary facilities, although little was done in the way of replacing housing for the working-class families displaced by this transformation of Paris. At the same time, the vast rebuilding of the capital put many tens of thousands of the unemployed to work. Louis Napoléon also introduced farsighted job-creation and old-age pension schemes for the working class, not to mention mandatory education at the primary school level. The physical and chemical sciences were also greatly encouraged with fresh funding and prizes, and new specialist hospitals were built throughout the country.
Louis Napoléon launched an impressive shipbuilding program, introducing the country’s first steam-powered ironclad navy, second only to the Royal Navy in strength, while surpassing the British in modern gunnery. He introduced the first nationwide electric telegraph communications. Simultaneously, he enthusiastically supported and encouraged the rapid development of the nation’s first comprehensive rail network, linking Paris with the capitals of the rest of Europe not to mention the country’s Channel and Mediterranean ports. This in turn supported the launching of the first international French steamship lines providing regular service to America, North Africa, the Middle East, and the burgeoning French colonies in Asia, including Indochina and New Caledonia, at once hastening and expanding the French colonial developments so praised in the nineteenth century. Napoléon I’s wars had obliterated most international commerce; Napoléon III instead now gave it his full support, including free-trade pacts with England and his continental neighbors. Although Algeria became the focus of his colonial “dreams,” it was to prove a long-term disaster for the Algerians and France, draining its wealth and youth, as a despondent Louis Napoléon followed the continuing monthly casualty reports to the very end. Little did he realize that his standing army of 60,000 men in Algeria would one day be increased to more than half a million, and eventually lead to the complete withdrawal of the French from the whole of North Africa.
Louis Napoléon’s misjudgment of international affairs unwittingly brought him into confrontation with England on several occasions, and deliberately with Prussia, whose growing power he feared, and which would ultimately bring down his own empire. And here one encounters another final irony, for the summer of 1870 was the last time when Bismarck was in a position to launch his long-anticipated invasion of France, which depended on the close cooperation of three men—Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon. Without all three such a war could not have taken place, but as Bismarck pointed out in a letter to his son, Herbert, Field Marshal Roon was very weak and ill even now, barely able to get to Berlin to attend their last war council in July 1870 when the decision was made to attack France. These circumstances coincided with a complacent Kaiser Wilhelm playing a passive, hapless role, surrendering to Bismarck’s incessant bullying, while also accepting his editorial finagling of the “Ems Telegram,” and of course the kaiser alone had the authority to declare war on France. This then was the last time when all the basic elements were in place enabling Bismarck to act. If the Prussian army had to stand down and demobilize now, there would not be another “propitious moment” for at least another year, by which time “old Roon” would have been too weak and feeble to play his critical role as war minister. Bismarck for his part could not have hoped for history conveniently repeating itself, providing another precisely similar set of circumstances, another opportunity, with the kaiser in a continuing compliant mood, and Napoléon III badgered by Foreign Minister Gramont, and foolish and weak enough to play into Bismarck’s hands. One year later the situation would inevitably have been quite different and “a justified war” and the invasion of France would most likely have been quite impossible. For a most desperate Otto von Bismarck, July 1870 was the last time to strike. It was now or never, and without this war he could never have united all the German states in creating the Prussian Empire. Without this Germany could never have declared war and invaded France in 1914. Individual actions count and History is relentless.
A very dynamic and demanding Napoléon I had dominated the empire he created, while a far less vigorous and egotistical Louis Napoléon happily remained in the shadows of the very empire he in turn created. And yet despite some errors of judgment, obvious lack of organizational skills, and sometimes maddening indecision, beneath that quiet, good-humored exterior, Louis Napoléon achieved vastly much more in the long run for France than did the brilliant, swaggering soldier Napoléon I. His Second Empire now left France one of the most prosperous, modern, and progressive states in Europe. Rarely in the history of any country does it fall to one head of state to so completely alter the face and future of his civilization, to bring one’s country and its infrastructure out of an older traditional century into a thriving modern age. This most unlikely Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was just such a man.