TO HAM, WITH LOVE, TOSH, AND TOIL
“Of that immense empire that once covered the world, what
now remains, a grave and a prison; a grave to prove that the great
man is dead, and a prison to kill off his cause.” 1
—LOUIS NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE, HAM
“Better to be a prisoner in France than free in a foreign land!” 2
—LOUIS NAPOLÉON TO NARCISSE VIEILLARD, 1843
“I do not want to leave my prison here in Paris without first thanking you once more for all your noble services on my behalf,” Louis Napoléon wrote his leading defense counsel, Maître Pierre Antoine Berryer. “I have no idea what lies in store for me now.”3
State prisoner Bonaparte entered the Château of Ham on October 7, 1846, passing over the same drawbridge and beneath the same portcullis as King Louis XI had in 1475 after concluding the One Hundred Years’ War with England’s Edward IV. Four hundred troops lined the courtyard’s ten-meter-thick stone walls and battlements, effectively sealing this fortress off from the village of Ham and the outside world. Prince Louis Bonaparte would not leave again for years.
“Well, here I am. I have a bed … a table, a commode and six chairs,” he informed Hortense’s former lady-in-waiting, Baroness Louise Salvage de Faverolles. “As you can see, I have everything I require.”4 What he neglected to mention was the stack of legal bills on that table from his lawyers and the courts totaling 31,000 francs, and the more than 75,000 francs ($1,367,000, all inclusive) to repay friends, pensions, and support for the families of those now imprisoned with him.
“I have a sacred duty to fulfill,” he confided to his late brother’s tutor, his friend and advisor from Arenenberg and future senator of the empire, the forty-nine-year-old Narcisse Vieillard, “to support everyone who has so devotedly served me … and I shall do everything in my power to lessen their [financial] burden, while doing what I can to cut back here on my own personal comforts.”5 “The Boulogne enterprise,” as he referred to it, had cost him the 400,000 francs in gold (or $5,160,000, today) seized at that port and at least another 100,000 francs ($1,290,000) out of pocket. The estate of his mother had all but disappeared within three years of her death, and yet he still continued to give money away to any worthy cause—including a local school and any individual with a hard-luck tale to relate. Minister of the Interior Charles de Rémusat offered a single payment of 600 francs ($7,740 today) to help defray the costs of repairing and rendering habitable the prince’s “cell,” in fact a fairly large two-room apartment with regular doors, and iron bars only on the small exterior windows. But nothing could be done about the damp stone walls, which were to take their long-term toll on his health.6
Installed with him was his faithful, good-natured thirty-seven-year-old surgeon and family companion, Henri Conneau, condemned to five years, but who was to insist on remaining with him after completing his sentence; the inimitable fifty-eight-year-old charlatan, Tristan de Montholon, sentenced to twenty years.7 The final prisoner to join them here was the prince’s loyal thirty-nine-year-old family retainer, Charles Thélin, who, although acquitted of all charges at the trial, afterward had also insisted on remaining with Louis Napoléon. Louis Napoléon always attracted this sort of blind devotion from those around him, friends and servants alike. Meanwhile Colonels Voisin and Laborde had been incarcerated for ten years in an insane asylum at Chaillot, and all the others in the ancient citadel of Doullens, north of Amiens (where Parquin—minus his eagle—was destined to die within a few years).
As for his ever resilient “campaign manager,” ex-sergeant Gilbert Persigny, sentenced to twenty years, he managed to have himself transferred to the military hospital at Versailles. Thereafter he was freed but confined within the limits of Versailles, if still cut off from all communications with Louis Napoléon. There he was to write one of the most remarkable books in French history, “proving” that all the learned French, English, and German archaeologists were wrong in declaring the pyramids to have been built as imposing mausoleums for some of the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt. No, Persigny now established that the pyramids had been constructed to prevent the Nile from silting up!8
Ham was a medieval fortress that had undergone many changes over the centuries, and by 1840, its former château long gone, it was reduced to a traditional rectangular fortress, complete with four stout towers, including a massive “keep.” The thirty-foot gates at the entrance led into the vast inner court with a single Liberty Tree dating from 1793; it was otherwise devoid of any structures, while at the end and to the right two large ugly brick barracks had been added. Louis Napoléon’s “apartment” was situated at the far end of the fort.
It was soon filled with furnishings donated by friends, including rugs, curtains, paintings, a sofa, a Voltaire reading chair, and one canapé, not to mention Bonaparte family portraits, busts, books, and bric-à-brac. By the time of his visit later, Louis Blanc described the apartment as being “provided with everything that domestic comfort required.” The prisoner, he claimed, was being “treated very well indeed.” The government’s food allowance for all three men came to a total of twenty francs a day (no provision being made for Thélin, a “voluntary guest”). Louis Napoléon made up for the shortfall, including wine and fresh game. Dinner was prepared in the prison kitchen and was served at five-thirty in the afternoon. In the evening Louis Napoléon, Henri Conneau, and the charming Montholon would play a hand or two of whist over a glass of wine, occasionally joined by Thélin or Major Demarle, the governor of the prison.9
Life settled into a comfortable, if monotonous, routine, thanks to the accommodating new commanding officer, though he was “très correct” and obliged by the interior minister to personally inspect their quarters four times a day. The reins were gradually loosened, however, with the governor and his wife soon inviting the convict to dinners and card games. Every morning Louis Napoléon worked in his “study” on various articles, chapters of books, or translations, including some of German playwright Friedrich Schiller’s works, a favorite author of his. With the addition of shelves for chemicals, he also began carrying out simple “Volta” experiments, resulting in a paper he prepared for the Academy of Sciences on the conduction of electricity.10
He was given permission to buy a horse for exercise within the confines of the courtyard. More frequently he worked in a forty-square-meter garden plot on the ramparts of the fortress, always within sight of the sixty soldiers on duty at all times. “I spend a lot of time gardening,” he related to Vieillard. “I plant flower seeds and shrubs. The pleasure I gain from tilling a few cubic meters of earth leads me to think that we have within us many inner resources and other unknown consolations upon which to draw.”11
Regardless of his Germanic accent in French and English, the prince’s winning Old World courtesy and mild temperament won over everyone, including the guards. Despite his notorious reputation, despite his two failed attempts to overthrow the government of France, despite his having shot an unarmed French soldier, it was simply very difficult to dislike the man.12
* * *
Louis Napoléon’s dramatic arrest and imprisonment had attracted much interest in France, England, and Europe, resulting in a flood of mail—all of it carefully vetted by Major Demarle, including requests for visits from the celebrated and total strangers alike. The ladies at first outnumbered the men, including the Princess Belgiojoso, Baroness de Bossi, Madame de Querelles, Éléonore Gordon (of Strasbourg fame), Hortense Cornu, and Caroline Jane O’Hara, an Irish “adventuress”—Tristan de Montholon’s lastest mistress. Demarle allowed her to be installed with Montholon, while her chambermaid, Éléonore Vergeot-Camus, known as “Alexandrine,” was to be become Louis Napoléon’s mistress and the mother of their two illegitimate prison-born sons (in 1841 and 1845).13
Visitors included newspapermen and publicists, former officers, or the sons of former Napoleonic officers, as well as Lieutenant Armand Laity, the jovial Alexandre Dumas, the somber Chateaubriand, and good-natured James Harris, the third Earl of Malmesbury—the future foreign secretary, probably Louis Napoléon’s closest and most reliable friend in English government circles.
Louis Blanc, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer and celebrated socialist theoretician, was perhaps the most interesting, and the strangest of all Louis Napoléon’s visitors. Launched to instant early fame in 1839 by the publication of his celebrated work, The Organisation of Labour, always remembered for his “National Workshops,” and his formula—“Everyone according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”—Blanc had inherited his Bonapartist credentials from his father, who had served as Joseph Bonaparte’s inspector general of Finances when king of Spain.
Although a Bonapartist, Blanc was against “a Napoleonic restoration,” which he saw as “despotism without glory.” “However my credo,” the prince protested, “is the Empire. Has it not raised France to the height of her glory?… As for me, I am convinced that what the country wants is the return to the Empire.” “When taking my leave … he took me quite by surprise embracing me so warmly as to leave me unable to hide the emotions I felt,” Blanc confessed.14 He later went into exile rather than face life under the Second Empire.
* * *
Discussion of leaving Ham soon cropped up among his fellow inmates. When the prince told his father that he had not even thought of seeking his freedom prior to September 1845, however, that was not true. “In the course of the year 1842 some influential gentlemen from Central America wrote to the prisoner of Ham … entreating him to ask for his liberty,” the prince later recalled in the third person, “that he might leave for America, where he would be received,” they insisted, “with enthusiasm.” Although he was expected to head, or at least give his name to, one of their major commercial projects, in any event Louis Napoléon thought better of it and initially declined. Nevertheless, it started him thinking about Mexico and Central America and its many opportunities that lay before him, including escape from his prison.
Next a French naval officer about to sail for the Pacific visited the prince, explaining what a boon an interoceanic canal linking the Caribbean and the Pacific would be for the French navy and worldwide commercial shipping, lopping off thousands of miles of travel and months of sailing time. In fact the French government had just sent an engineer to Central America to study the feasibility of constructing a canal through the Isthmus of Panama. Intrigued, Louis Napoléon spent several months exploring all aspects of such a canal and in August 1845 produced a long, detailed memorandum on the subject.
Independently, Señor Dr. Francisco Castellon, the new Minister Plenipotentionary of the Republic of Guatamala (encompassing Guatamala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and San Salvador), arrived in Paris to discuss the possibility of French naval protection for their coastal interests in exchange for favorable commercial concessions to the French. Louis Philippe, already bogged down in the first stages of the conquest of Algeria, while challenging an aggressive Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, dismissed the offer out of hand. Castellon had also visited Ham at the end of 1844. Although clearly interested, but going through a period of depression and indecision, Bonaparte also declined, and Castellon went on to Bruxelles, where instead he signed “a treaty” with a Belgian company supported by King Leopold.
They continued to correspond, however, and a year later, in December 1845, Castellon renewed his offer, appealing to Louis Napoléon’s “magnanimity and benevolence” regarding this “great object of paramount importance to my country,” noting his interest in going to that country where he could help initiate an interoceanic canal that would bring “a new era of prosperity to the inhabitants.” But this occurred at a time when the prince was preoccupied with reestablishing contact with his semi-paralyzed father, and gaining a paroled release to visit him in Florence.
The foreign minister of Nicaragua then wrote informing him officially that all the powers required for organizing this enterprise had been conferred on him on January 8, 1846. The name of the projected Canale Napoleone de Nicaragua was of course intended to flatter him. In fact, everything depended on Louis Philippe’s agreeing to release him.
Louis Napoléon now wrote personally to the French king, fully explaining his situation and his ardent desire to be with his father. After residing with his dying father, he assured the king that he would then proceed to Central America for the next few years to create and launch this new canal. Subsequently, with Louis Philippe’s rejection, Louis Napoléon put all travel plans to America aside permanently.15
* * *
His decision to attempt to take Boulogne and overthrow Louis Philippe had been timed for August 1840 because of the French government’s announcement to return the remains of Napoléon I from St. Helena. Hoping to replace Louis Philippe at the Tuileries that August, Louis Napoléon had intended to be in the French capital on the fifteenth of December in his capacity as the newly acclaimed head of state to receive his uncle’s remains on behalf of the French nation. It would have been a politician’s dream, a public relations coup, coinciding with his own enthronement.
Instead of the Tuileries, Louis Napoléon had found himself shackled symbolically in this prison. He not only deeply resented it, but even considered it quite unfair. “The government which has recognized the legitimacy of the head of my family,” the prince wrote Interior Minister Duchâtel in 1844, “is obliged therefore to recognize me as a prince [of that family] … The treatment I endure here is at once unjust, illegal and inhumane!” He was, he reminded the minister, the son of a king and nephew of an emperor, as well as being allied to all the sovereign heads of Europe [sic].”16
Since the prince no longer had secretaries to whom he could dictate and who could prepare his manuscripts, Hortense Cornu, the daughter of Hortense’s Arenenberg chambermaid and his goddaughter, faithfully came to Ham regularly to collect the more important post, to prepare manuscripts for publication, to bring books to him from the Royal Library (authorized by Louis Philippe), and to carry out research elsewhere as the moment required, for example, when preparing his history of artillery. As for the actual writing, early every morning Louis Napoléon closed the door to his “study,” sat down at the table, or stood at his new pulpit desk, and wrote and wrote and wrote, month after month, year after year.
Among his projects was a pamphlet, The Sugar Question, in support of the protected development of commerce and agriculture, including sugar production, in which his new friend and regular visitor, Count Fouqier d’Herouël, was financially involved. (The count was also influential later in raising a large sum facilitating the prince’s escape.) Ironically, unknown to him, his half-brother, Auguste de Morny, was already becoming a major producer of sugar beet, near Clermont Ferrand. But the real thrust of this pamphlet focused on the urgency of the country becoming completely self-sufficent in its production of all the basic food staples and minerals.
“The first priority of a country does not consist in producing cheap manufactured goods, but rather in providing work for the people,” he argued. However, while the consumer demanded lower prices for the food and goods he bought, this obliged the “bosses” to produce the maximum at the lowest possible cost, resulting in a low level of wages. “England has realized the dream of some modern economists: she surpasses all other countries by the cheapness of her manufactured products, but only by maintaining very low wages for her work force.” And as for the production of food and other staples, “a nation is always guilty of leaving itself at the mercy of other countries when relying on them to supply these for them.” To leave a people cut off from their source of wheat, corn, and iron “is to place their destiny in the hands of a foreign country, and that is a type of suicide.” Therefore France must produce all her own wheat, corn, and sugar, coal, iron and copper.17
* * *
As a prisoner of the state, Louis Napoléon was convinced the best way of attracting public attention and sympathy was by writing, the mass medium of the day. In 1839, just before leaving London, he had published his little brochure, The Napoleonic Ideas, or values and concepts. His overall objective was “to rebuild entirely a society disrupted by fifty years of revolution,” while also “reconciling ‘freedom’ with the necessity of ‘order,’ and the rights of the people with ‘the principles of authority’ … all of which based on the principles of eternal justice.” This would replace the old hereditary aristocracies with a new “hierarchical system” based on merit and industry, “while ensuring social equality and guaranteeing public order. It establishes an element of force [state authority] and stability in our democracy because it brings the discipline required to make it function [author’s italics].… And thus in the end The Napoleonic Ideas envisages a new France whose citizens have reconciled all their differences and joined together as brothers.…”18 But it was the key words “order,” “discipline,” and “authority” that ring with strident clarity throughout this tract and that would define the empire he anticipated.
“What then was Napoléon’s supreme objective for the French people?” the prince asked, “Freedom!… Yes, Freedom! And the longer one studies history, the more convincing this truth becomes.…”19 Louis Napoléon’s views: A modern new society must be endowed with the principles of “revolutionary democracy” and voting rights for the masses, but all directed by the selected new enlightened aristocrats ruling the land. Moreover, had Napoléon had more time, his nephew insisted, he would have created a whole “new unified Europe,” all joined by a “European Association [of States]” under a new “European legal code” responsible to a European “high Court of Appeals.” Under this new super state, “the larger overall European interests would dominate those of individual states.”20 A European Union …
* * *
Perhaps the most famous work produced by Louis Napoléon while at Ham was another short pamphlet, The Extinction of Pauperism. It was widely praised for its apparent favorable attitude to a socialist economy, a fairer “redistribution of wealth,” much as Émile Zola was to conceive a couple of decades later in his Rougon-Macquart novels. Favorable to socialism in theory, perhaps, but not in the practical day-to-day world of reality.21
The prince considered the solutions that socialism could offer, such as the creation of major national agricultural cooperatives as a mainstay of the economy. “The working class have nothing, and therefore we must make them property owners,” he argued. “They must be given a place in society by attaching their interests to the land.” To achieve this “agricultural colonies must be created, they offering bread, education, religion, and jobs for everyone out of work,” he added, “and God only knows the number of the unemployed in France is high enough today!”22
France in the 1840s was still largely agricultural and artisanal, and Louis Napoléon wanted every département in France to establish one such agricultural colony, to be financed by the state. He envisaged similar pools created for industrial workers, in effect, “labor exchanges” of men to be drawn upon by captains of industry as needed. “By having all offers of employment being channeled to one center in each department, the unemployed would be far better placed to have access to this information, however poor the pay.” The state would then provide 300 million francs to establish these “colonies.”23 But of course this was never enacted.
“Your preoccupations and writings prove that we shall have a splendid citizen in you,” novelist George Sand wrote, congratulating Louis Napoléon in May 1844. “Now here is a prince … a noble example to all the powerful men in the world,” she recorded in her diary.24
* * *
In fact Louis Napoléon’s preoccupations after September 1845 had nothing to do with fine theoretical political tracts prepared for his future Napoleonic state, nor with the country’s unemployment and poverty, but with himself … and the old nagging problem of his relationship with his father. That shadow suspended over so much of his youth was now transforming and dissipating as alarming reports from the Florentine palazzo announcing the declining health of the perennially hypochondriacal Louis Bonaparte at last proved true, followed by news of a partial paralytic stroke.
At about the same time, Louis Napoléon’s relations with his father, held in a sort of limbo since 1841, started improving dramatically thanks to a most unexpected visit in September 1845 by Silvestre Poggioli, a close friend of Louis Bonaparte, who handed the prince a letter from his father, explaining the long period of silence and about his illness. He wrote back to his father on the nineteenth of that month. “Yesterday I felt the first joy I have known in five years, on receiving your friendly letter … I share your opinion, father … that the only true happiness in this world consists in the reciprocal affection of beings created to love one other. What most touched and stirred me was the desire you express to see me again. This wish is to me a command.” He now learned of the various démarches his father had been undertaking over the past several months, contacting influential friends and high French officials, to arrange for his release. “Thank you most heartily for the steps you have taken on my behalf.”
This response to his father was the warmest and most emotional he was ever to write. “Even as late as yesterday I had decided to do nothing about leaving this prison. But to leave, to go where? To do what? To wander all alone?… Now a new purpose opens itself to me, to go and embrace you with my attention, to care for you … for nothing could ever eradicate the filial piety I feel for you.” In a flash he had finally made up his mind; he would definitely leave this prison, no matter what, and go to his father.25
During this period, however, the British minister, Lord Malmesbury, made a most extraordinary attempt to obtain Louis Napoléon’s freedom through the intervention of Prime Minister Robert Peel with Louis Philippe. But the English prime minister declined to act.26
Meanwhile, when the prince next asked the commandant of Ham to release him temporarily, Major Demarle referred him to Interior Minister Duchâtel. “My father, whose state of health and advanced age demand the care and attention of a son, asked the government that he be permitted to go to him,” he wrote in the third person. These démarches proving fruitless, he finally addressed Louis Philippe himself. “I now appeal, Sire, with confidence in your Majesty’s sentiments of humanity, renewing my request, and submitting it to your high and generous spirit.”27 But the king rejected the prince’s request.
When Odilon Barrot suggested that the prince appeal to the king for clemency, the prisoner refused on the spot, and on the fifteenth of May Louis Napoléon met with Henri Conneau to inform him that, after more than five years’ incarceration, he had had quite enough and intended to flee the prison and France. “I wished to see my father again,” as he afterward related to his publisher friend, Frédéric Degeorge, “and was not prepared to put up with any more nonsense.”28
* * *
Early on May 25, 1846, after shaving off his distinctive mustache and donning a long black wig, a workman’s blue blouse and trousers, wooden sabots, with a clay pipe in his mouth, and carrying a plank over his shoulder, Louis Napoléon sauntered lazily past some of the carpenters carrying out repairs in the fort. Passing over the drawbridge and walking a further two kilometers up the road to the village cemetery, he found “my good and faithful Thélin” waiting with a cabriolet to whisk him the twenty-one kilometers northeast to St. Quentin. After a change of horses they continued north a further sixty kilometers on to the Valenciennes railway station. The four o’clock train then took them across the recently rechristened Belgian frontier. From Bruxelles another train took them to Ostende, where, with an English passport provided earlier by Malmesbury, Louis Napoléon and Thélin crossed the English Channel nearly six years after their last curious odyssey.
Louis Napoléon Bonaparte found himself once again in the capital of the British empire, safe from the French government—if on this occasion without his twenty servants—where a “Count d’Arenenberg” and his man registered at the Brunswick Hotel, on Jermyn Street in the heart of Mayfair. “The desire to see you again led me to attempt something I might otherwise have never undertaken,” the prince wrote his father. “I slipped past 400 soldiers, and have now arrived in London safe and sane.” “I have been very well received here,” he informed Vieillard. “One really must do justice to the English; they have great independence of character.”29
Once again the Union Jack was flying overhead and once again all was well with the world as he applied to various embassies for the visas requisite for travel to Tuscany, but the king of Belgium and the Austrian emperor personally continued to bar the way. Before he could leave London, however, he learned that Louis Bonaparte had died of a stroke on the twenty-fifth of July. There would be no more tortured letters coming from the family palazzo in Florence. The king was dead, long live the prince.