PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC BONAPARTE
“He will never be content with being merely Emperor of the Republic.” 1
—LÉON FAUCHER
“He lacks so many of the qualities usually to be found in a man of merit—sound judgment, knowledge [of men and the country],
the ability to express himself, and political experience.” 2
—CHARLES DE RÉMUSAT
With the fall of Louis Philippe’s July monarchy, Louis Napoléon came to Paris on a flying visit to consult Vieillard and Persigny. In May, elections were held for a new assembly and on the fourth of June Louis Napoléon was elected in his absence as deputy from three different constituencies. In a panic convening on the tenth of June an emergency meeting of the Executive Commission, now ruling the provisional government, the ministers announced that irrespective of the election results, the law of 1832 forbidding Louis Napoléon, as a Bonaparte, from living in France remained in full force, thereby forbidding his taking his rightful seat in the Palais Bourbon. The Bonapartists, well stirred up by Persigny’s public relations blitz, were caught up in fighting and bloodshed, and although the commission’s order was rescinded, permitting the prince to remain, on the sixteenth of June he sent a message to the assembly that, rather than be the cause “of deplorable troubles,” he was resigning. “I am ready to sacrifice everything for the happiness of France,” he declared and promptly returned to England.3 The deep differences dividing the country were not merely political, but also stemmed from traditional class differences. However, poverty was a major underlining factor for the vast majority of the French, little having changed since 1789.
Then in the last week of June, between the twenty-third and twenty-sixth, the situation exploded with violent clashes between the authorities and the more than 100,000 unemployed men who were forced into the streets of Paris after having been evicted from their state-subsidized work in the National Workshops, which the government was now closing down. Once again the barricades went up and shots were fired and General Cavaignac was called in with the army and national guards to put down the unrest. Batteries of artillery soon cleared the streets but at a terrible price: more than three thousand killed, hundreds summarily executed in the streets, and thousands imprisoned or deported.4 Even today the exact number killed remains unknown. Louis Napoléon on the other side of the channel was one of the few politicians to escape any complicity with the bloodshed of “the June Days.” As for the good General Cavaignac, he was rewarded by a grateful assembly with the task of maintaining order in Paris while suppressing political clubs and hostile newspapers.
Supplementary national elections were called for, on September 17–18, when Louis Napoléon was again returned as a deputy, elected this time by five different constituencies, including Corsica and Paris, and on September 24 he returned to France permanently, taking up his new quarters in the Hôtel du Rhin in the Place Vendôme.5 Victor Hugo could not praise Louis Napoléon enough, along with thousands of other Bonapartists. The next day the prince duly took his place in the hemicycle of the National Assembly, where he later addressed his colleagues. “After thirty-two years of proscription and exile, I finally reclaim my country and all my rights as a French citizen.”6 On the fourth of November the newly launched Second Republic’s Constitution—proclaiming freedom, equality, and fraternity—was based on the principles of “Family, Work, Property and Public Order.” That same day the call went out for presidential elections.7 The results announced on the twelfth of December took everyone by surprise, as Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was declared the winner of the new republic, with 5.5 million of the nearly 7.5 million votes cast, General Cavaignac coming in a poor second place with 1.5 million, and Lamartine with less than 18,000.8
“This is no mere election,” the astonished publisher Émile de Girardin declared in La Presse, “it is a veritable National Acclamation!”9 “A puzzle … a caprice … a [national] affliction,” the Journal des Débats had called Louis Napoléon’s earlier election to the assembly, and now it reiterated its disgust, while Thiers’s Réunion de la Rue de Poitiers saw that France had “solemnly demonstrated her great need for peace and for the return of law and order.”10 In England a shocked Morning Advertiser described the outcome as “the height of folly!” while The Times reported that shares had already shot up 8 percent, and that Paris had returned “to a state of long unaccustomed joy.”11 As for Louis Napoléon’s equally bewildered arch political detractor, Charles de Rémusat, he tried to understand this electoral phenomenon as best he could. “He who in foisting his imagination up the affairs of the world and consequently succeeds in actually producing or altering these events as a result of his fantasy, possesses I don’t quite know what special gift of extraordinary persistence, that immediately separates him from the masses and raises him to a place among our most famous historical figures.” Louis Napoléon has, he declared “virtually altered the course of French history.”12
* * *
Parisians awoke on Thursday, December 20, 1848, to find the Champs-Élysées lined with cavalry and infantry units, and troops on the other side of the Place de la Concorde as well, while beyond the gardens, the imposing iron gates of the Tuileries were closed. Across the Seine the Palais Bourbon, too, was well secured by the military, who were taking no chances, not this time. Unlike the angry outbursts by the thousands of members of radical political clubs and the National Workshops who had invaded this legislative palace back on May 15, 1848, just eight months earlier, and nearly succeeded in an attempt to close down the government, today security was extremely tight.
On this wintry inaugural afternoon, there were no violent crowds anywhere in sight. Like the Bourse, the Stock Exchange, the atmosphere in the Assembly itself was subdued, with little business being transacted, everyone still stunned by the outcome of the national presidential elections.
Anxious or just curious, everyone was now awaiting the principal event of the day, the swearing-in ceremony of Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte as the nation’s first president of this newly launched Second Republic. No one had been prepared for the results, least of all the prince. His successful nomination for the presidency and the magnitude of his electoral victory had left even the coolest calculating politicians staggered and the political pundits for once stymied and silent.
* * *
President-elect Bonaparte entered the hemicycle of the Bourbon Palace almost unnoticed. The president of the Constituent Assembly, Armand Marrast, was standing at the tribune, not far from the outgoing prime minister, Cavaignac, to be replaced today by Louis Napoléon’s new premier, Odilon Barrot, and just concluding the reading of some minor reports at four thirty p.m. as Louis Napoléon made his way to his assigned seat. Dressed impeccably in white tie and black evening wear, with the rosette as deputy in his lapel, and the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on his breast, he bowed to those greeting him just as “the servants, attired as footmen” were turning up the gas lamps in the dim wintry light. Not far away, but unseen by the prince, his half brother, Auguste de Morny, watched most attentively.
When they finally noticed him seated among the other deputies, there was a growing murmur as they pointed to the prince, the noise becoming so great that Monsieur Marrast was obliged to strike his gavel repeatedly as he called out “Silence!” as the reporter representing La Presse duly jotted down notes for his article. “It’s him! shhhh! He had entered incognito, without trumpets blaring and drums rolling drums,” the reporter noted. He displayed no emotion, “his face was kindly and he carried himself in a dignified manner, but physically bore no resemblance whatsoever to the emperor,” the journalist remarked, when Louis Napoléon was called up to the tribune to be sworn in as the first president of this Second Republic.
“All eyes were on him, and very few had a friendly expression.”13 Bonaparte, in his first official act, walked slowly over to the tribute to address the Constituent Assembly. “A slight, slow dignified figure,” he stood before Armand Marrast, who read the oath: “In the presence of God, and before the French people as represented by the National Assembly, I swear to remain faithful to the Democratic Republic, one and indivisible, and to fulfill all the duties imposed upon me by the Constitution.”
And Louis Napoléon replied, “I do so swear.” A profound silence followed. Now alone at the tribune facing the audience in the vast amphitheater, he bowed slightly and, taking a piece of paper from his pocket, began to read slowly in his low monotone voice, with a German accent.
“Citizen Representatives. To the electorate of the nation, to whom I have just sworn this oath, and who command my future conduct and direct my duties.
“I shall regard as enemies to the country all who may endeavor by illegal means to change the form of government,” he continued in this awkwardly prepared speech.
“Like you, I desire to establish society on a true foundation.… This Government [his own] will be neither utopian nor reactionary,” he assured the deputies. “We will make the well-being of the country our top priority and we hope that with God’s blessing, even if we do not accomplish everything we set out to do, at least we shall have endeavored our best to do so.” Following this brief acceptance speech the assembly rose to their feet, shouting, “Long Live the Republic!” Leaving the tribune, Louis Napoléon, who had been sitting on the dais with his prime minister designate, Odilon Barrot, went over to shake hands with a grim, reluctant Cavaignac.
Auguste de Morny, though present, apparently had not left a record of the day’s events, possibly because, like most attendees, he could not even hear the speech clearly in this vast chamber filled to capacity with many hundreds of people. However, Morny had earlier heard his brother’s maiden speech before the Assembly back in October. “He was shy and his voice weak, and the impression he gave, as to his competence—was most unfavorable, but as a future president of the country, he’s rather promising. Barring unforeseen circumstances, then, it seems obvious to me that he will indeed be elected president of the Republic.”14
“Prince, do not start making innovations here. Practice moderation and order,” Adolphe Thiers gratuitously advised. “Accept the support of the moderate political party [i.e., Thiers’s], which in turn will support your administration.”15 Little did Thiers understand this sphinx and what bombshells the fastidiously courteous, soft-spoken incumbent prince-president had in store for France. But now escorted by three questors, Louis Napoléon drove the short distance across the Seine from the National Assembly to install himself in the Élysées Palace, where he was to be responsible for directing the 400,000 state officials and employees, while not forgetting the largest standing army in Western Europe, nearly half a million strong.16 In five days’ time the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral would be ringing in Christmas across a weary history-battered French capital, and the calmest one in many a year.