“One finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality,
that … reduces men to preferring equality in servitude
to inequality in freedom.” 1
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
“The more I see of the representatives of the people,
the more I love my dogs.” 2
—FORMER FRENCH FOREIGN MINISTER ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
“I do not know what to tell you about the president,” Auguste de Morny wrote his sister, Emily, Lady Shelburne, in London. “Some say that he is a mediocrity, others that he is weak or stubborn, still others that he is a good, loyal chap. What do I believe? He certainly made mistakes at the beginning of his career. He could easily have been classified as a moderate. He neither knows the important people in Paris, nor is familiar with the French political scene. The legitimists [royalists] are flocking to him. What do they have in mind, I simply do not know. As for me, I have not yet met him, though he might at least have indicated an interest in having the pleasure of making my acquaintance.”3
Moving into the Élysée Palace on the twentieth of December 1848, President of the Republic Bonaparte had everything to do. This eighteenth-century residence, formerly the home of Madame Pompadour and later bought by Napoléon I in 1808, today saw another Bonaparte moving in. Having no real organized political party in place behind him, everything was thrown together rapidly on an ad hoc basis. Literally everyone had to be appointed and everything created. Louis Napoléon began with the fifty-seven-year-old Jean François Mocquard, who was placed in complete charge of the Élysée and its administration.
Mocquard, a native of Bordeaux, was the scion of, and heir to, a highly successful colonial shipping company trading with the Caribbean. A dynamic leader and brilliant scholar, Mocquard had completed his legal studies in Paris and had then served in a diplomatic post under Napoléon I. With the fall of the First Empire, he practiced law in Paris as a barrister, and finally served as a deputy prefect under Louis Philippe until 1839. He met ex-queen Hortense back in 1817, who appointed him her financial advisor, and as a regular visitor to Arenenberg he had known Louis Napoléon as a schoolboy. In 1840 Mocquard joined the prince then in exile in London. Following the Boulogne fiasco, Mocquard published the Bonapartist newspaper Commerce in Paris and visited the convicted Louis Napoléon in Ham every month. Thus, now at the end of December 1848, it was a great relief for President Bonaparte to have this capable, well-tried, trusted, and loyal gentleman in charge of the Élysée Palace, and he was later to reward him with a life senatorship and the Legion of Honor.
The loyal balding Henri Conneau now finally returned to medicine after his years in Ham. Louis Napoléon would later have him organize and direct the imperial medical service. Gilbert Persigny at long last found himself in his first official post, responsible for relations between the Élysée and the nation’s elected representatives at the National Assembly. In addition he was responsible for coordinating the activities of Bonapartist political clubs and public relations, including the French press. Louis Napoléon’s first cousin, Felix Baciocchi, a native of Corsica and son of Elise Bonaparte Baciocchi, was charged with organizing state dinners, balls, and Louis Napoléon’s discreet nightly entertainment. Colonel Claude Nicolas Vaudrey, who had been with the prince at Strasbourg and had spent years in prison for his role there, was shortly to be rewarded with a prefecture and security for the rest of his life. In brief, Louis Napoléon could count on the loyalty and devotion of his Élysée staff.
Colonel Émile Fleury was also attached to the palace staff, briefly working for Persigny. Having squandered his family’s inheritance in his twenties, he had joined the army, serving under King Louis Philippe as a cavalry officer commanding Spahis, an Algerian unit, until 1848. Fleury had first met Persigny and Louis Napoléon while in exile in London when he attached himself to the Bonaparte cause. Although the newcomer here, he would command a brigade during the coup d’état on December 2, 1851, and would rise to the rank of major general. Later serving as Napoleon III’s Grand Écuyer at the Tuileries, he was named Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. This was a soldier Louis Napoléon could absolutely count on in a crisis.
If Uncle Jérôme Bonaparte had proven generally less dependable, and inevitably in debt, and despite some acts of blatant disloyalty, nevertheless Louis Napoléon was to play the respectful nephew by heaping honors and considerable wealth on him. In the final analysis, Uncle Jérôme was Emperor Napoléon’s brother, and that he would never forget. Three days after being sworn in as president of the Republic, Louis Napoléon appointed Jérôme Bonaparte governor of the Invalides, with a handsome salary and splendid adjoining apartments. In spite of Jérôme’s lamentable military record, in January 1850 his nephew would promote him to marshal of France, and then president of the new Senate, each position accompanied by a handsome state salary. Jérôme Bonaparte, a notorious deceiver, reprobate, and backbiter, would finally have to stop criticizing his nephew, at least in public.
On the other hand, Jérôme’s only daughter, Mathilde, whose marriage plans to Louis Napoléon had been aborted in 1836, proved a surprisingly stable, loyal supporter of her older cousin and was now to serve as his official hostess at Élysée until the time of his marriage to Eugénie. At the age of twenty-nine and in her prime, the lovely brunette also held regular receptions for him at her mansion at 10 rue de Courcelles, with her lover, Alfred, Count de Nieuwerkerke. Her father, Jérôme Bonaparte, remained excluded from her home and her life.
* * *
The heady, ebullient atmosphere in the Élysée following the electoral landslide would have convinced any mortal man of his great power and prestige in a land that had so dramatically swept him into office. In reality, the president’s position was altogether different. For the first and perhaps only time in modern French history, a head of state had arrived without any sort of coherent functioning party, institution, or group behind him. “I am absolutely isolated,” the prince frankly admitted to his sympathetic friend in London, Lord Malmesbury. “Those supporting me and my views still do not know me, nor in fact do I even know who they are, who is with me … I am completely alone.”4 How could he be expected to make reliable appointments? His acceptance of General Cavaignac’s recommendation of Major General Nicolas Changarnier as the new military governor of Paris and commander of the national guard was not only a case in point, it was to prove the key case in point.
Changarnier was not only a mistake, he was an affliction, according to the author and traveler Maxime Du Camp, who had met him years before in Algeria. In that colony he had demonstrated “tenacity” and “decision” on the battlefield. But socially, “I have never met such a coarse man.” Short, his face pockmarked, wearing a soiled wig, he was “precious in his gestures, and pretentious in his bearing.” But his language was so utterly filthy as to upset even his own ADCs (aides-de-camp) and fellow ordnance officers. Moreover, Du Camp found him “inconsiderate of others and lacking in moderation.” There was only one point of view, his. He was “disparaging of everyone including his senior officers (behind their back).” As for Changarnier the politician, he was “a poor specimen,” lower even than Cavaignac or Lamoricière, and his speeches were “as pompous as they were vacuous.”5 Alexis de Tocqueville, who had also met that general when touring Algeria, found him to be “crude” and “brutal.” Even Gilbert Persigny, who at first thought he could work with Changarnier, soon changed his mind.
Auguste de Morny, who had served under fire with Changarnier in Algeria, was even more concerned about Changarnier’s appointment as military governor of Paris, as that general quickly revealed his true colors, speaking openly of the necessity of removing President Bonaparte, and of “locking him up in [the fortress of] Vincennes.”
* * *
Of far more critical importance to the president now and to the future development of the Second Empire, however, was the one individual in Paris Louis Napoléon had long dreaded meeting. Auguste de Morny did indeed eventually receive an inevitable, if discreet, invitation to meet his half brother privately. Arriving at the Élysée unobserved through a side entrance as requested at ten o’clock on the evening of the twenty-third of January, 1849, Morny was closeted alone in the presidential apartments with Louis Napoléon, where they discussed the whole gamut of questions concerning the current situation in France. “My initial feeling was that we did not like each other,” Morny recollected. “Nevertheless such a relationship could prove mutually beneficial and I felt obliged to work with him.”6 He later slipped out of the palace at two o’clock in the morning on the twenty-fourth. The two half brothers had crossed a threshold that was to change the entire course of modern French history. There may never have been any deep affection between them, but both men were realists and understood the necessity of working together.
“Were it left to me I would never have returned there [to the Élysée],” Morny later wrote. “I found him [his brother] imbued with prejudices, false conceptions of things, and smugly right in all matters,” the product of “a type of sentimental liberalism.” His views and opinions were hardly the stuff of measures with which to execute the very real practical business of government. As for the men with whom President Bonaparte now surrounded himself, Morny dismissed most of them as “a pack of dunderheads [Persigny in particular] … hardly qualified to advise the prince on the direction of his government to follow.” On the other hand, he pointed out, “I had always considered myself a Bonapartist, and my conservative views were well known to all…” And therefore in spite of everything, in the long run “it was more natural and convenient for him and me to get on together.”7
After hearing his brother speak in the assembly back in October, and assessing this first meeting now, Morny—in the view of the shrewd Prosper Mérimée, a surprisingly most astute politician—the temptation to be well out of it was great. Beyond just basic tactical ability, and unlike most generals, Morny was a master strategist. The country was at its most important crossroads since July of 1830. Morny found himself in a curious, certainly unique, position. Taking advantage of Louis Napoléon, as a “host” administrator, Morny could provide the input required to develop and guide the government in the right direction. Indeed in some respects Louis Napoléon was to prove the ideal “host emperor”; much as the Arab Caliphates of the Umayyads and Abbasids had proven “host civilizations,” importing the culture, education, science, and art gleaned from scholars of the outside world.
“It is quite impossible for me to drop him now, especially after the position I have already taken at his side, and the confidence that I seem to have inspired in the prince,” Morny confided to his father’s Scottish wife a few months later. “I see him every day, more often than not twice daily. He freely discusses everything with me. In all decency can I abandon him at this critical time?”8 Without his brother’s knowledge of the men and the background to the current events, Louis Napoléon was lost, indeed was already drowning. Morny for his part needed a brother whom he could invisibly guide to return France to stability and to provide the legislation and the officials required to render a stable, prosperous state. Without this, neither France nor Louis Napoléon could survive and prosper. They would be a team of necessity.
Adolphe Thiers, as the head of the Law and Order Party’s Rue de Poitiers Committee (legitimist and Orleanist), with its headquarters in the seventh arrondissement near the École Militaire and the Academy of Medicine, was Louis Napoléon’s first choice as prime minister. Thiers, although having voted for him for president of the Republic, admitted that in fact Bonaparte was hardly his favorite candidate, he being “the lesser of two evils.” In private he referred to the prince as “this cretan.”9
Louis Napoléon then turned to the well-known lawyer and orator, also a leader of the Rue de Poitiers Committee, the difficult Odilon Barrot (brother of Ferdinand Barrot, one of the lawyers who had defended him and his colleagues following the failed Boulogne coup). Although Barrot had been instrumental in bringing down Louis Philippe, this prime minister–cum–justice minister did not prove to be the best choice for Napoléon III, and their relationship would not be an easy one. As for Foreign Affairs, President Bonaparte selected Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys and the dogmatic editor of the Courrier Français, Léon Faucher, for the Interior portfolio.
Initially President Bonaparte and the Assembly appeared to be working in harmony, at least on Italian affairs, and the delicate question of Rome in particular. In 1830 the French government had dispatched troops to protect the pope and Rome from Austrian and republican control. In December 1848, the scene was even more complex and violent, with Giuseppe Mazzini’s nationalist troops battling the Vatican’s forces. On February 9, 1849, a victorious Mazzini proclaimed his new Roman Republic, forcing Pius IX to flee. To complicate matters, the Austrian rulers of northern Italy were marching troops down to oust Mazzini and his Roman Republic, while restoring papal authority. Responding to the pope’s appeal, the Second French Republic under Louis Napoléon dispatched its first three brigades in April 1849, some twelve thousand men commanded by General Nicolas Oudinot. Their objective: to cleanse Rome of Mazzini’s patriots and to restore Pius IX to his rightful place.10
Emerging from the National Assembly on December 20, 1848, as the Second Republic’s first (and only) president, Louis Napoléon had found himself caught up in the midst of this Roman affair, and anything “Italian” was always of special interest to him. Unlike his uncle, Emperor Napoléon, Louis Napoléon was a lifelong practicing Catholic and supporter of the papacy, but only in its role as a temporal authority. As seen earlier, in his youth he and his brother had fought with the Carbonari against the Austrian-backed papal forces in Rome in 1830–1831. With Oudinot’s troops meeting stiff resistance by the end of April 1849, Louis Napoléon ordered in reinforcements. “We must bring in the heavy artillery and put an end to this unfortunate Roman business,” he confided to Narcisse Vieillard. “I deplore it, but I have no choice.”11 General Oudinot duly crushed Mazzini’s Roman Republic and restored Pius IX to the Vatican on July 13, 1849.
Louis Napoléon’s first presidential act, supporting the expedition to Rome, proved popular both with the assembly and the French people, but not with his own family. The ever-unpredictable son of Jérôme Bonaparte, Prince [Napoléon] Jérôme, or “Plon-Plon,” who had just taken up his post as ambassador to Madrid in April 1849, on learning of the French expedition to Rome, rushed back to Paris barely one week after arriving in Madrid. Storming into the Élysée where the president was entertaining Mathilde and Auguste de Morny, Plon-Plon accused a bewildered Louis Napoléon of having made a terrible error in authorizing the attack against Rome to save the pope. It was only thanks to his sister Mathilde’s and Morny’s intervention that the hysterical prince was calmed down and finally left. It was a frightening experience.12
The spokesman of the “red faction” in the National Assembly, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, a forty-two-year-old hothead as violent and mentally unstable as Plon-Plon, declared on June 11 that the president of the Republic should be arraigned for having violated the Constitution. Speaking from the tribune, he threatened “red riots” in the streets of Paris and “to take up arms” against the government. Blood must flow. For once Louis Napoléon acted quickly, ordering General Changarnier to secure the streets of the city with his troops. Even as these orders were being issued, a President Bonaparte still largely unknown to the French people warned Ledru-Rollin’s followers: “Your agitation causes mistrust and problems in the country. It must cease! Now it’s the turn for the troublemakers to start worrying!” On Morny’s advice thirty-one leftist deputies were arrested, and the dreaded riots expected on the thirteenth of June fizzled.13 Ledru-Rollins fled the country.
From the elaborately courteous President Bonaparte there emerged a bold, resourceful commander, if one reinforced by the presence of his half brother, quite astonishing his opponents. Throughout his various writings about Emperor Napoléon and the new France, Louis Napoléon had repeatedly spoken of the necessity for “Authority” in order to maintain “a productive and free country,” and now he was that executive Authority—or almost.
When his cousin, General Edgar Ney, serving with the French Expeditionary Force at Rome, also criticized his support of the pope, Louis Napoléon wrote to him, calmly pointing out the situation. “The French Republic did not send an army to Rome in order to stifle Italian liberty, but quite the contrary, to preserve it against its own excesses, and to give it a solid foundation by restoring the pontifical throne.” Summing up the situation, Louis Napoléon declared, “I represent the re-establishment of the Pope’s temporal power: a general amnesty, the establishment of the new administration, the Code Napoléon, and liberal government.” Not only did the pope fail to thank President Bonaparte for restoring him to the Vatican, but he carried out a series of brutal reprisals against the republicans and the old Carbonari. For once outraged, Louis Napoléon publicly denounced Pius IX’s “tyranny,” “brutality,” and “feudalistic repression.”14 This was just the beginning of a long “war” between Paris and Rome.
Louis Napoléon’s fascination with Italy and her welfare was to be a veritable obsession with him over the years to come. But as a result of this Roman expedition, Count Falloux, a strong supporter of Pius IX, immediately resigned in protest as Bonaparte’s minister of culture and religion. As for Pius IX, he refused to halt his retaliation against his republican opponents, while nevertheless admitting the necessity of the presence of French troops to maintain order and to prevent Austrian forces from seizing the city. With the exception of one brief period, French troops were in fact destined to occupy Rome continuously over the next two decades until the fall of Napoléon III in 1870.
* * *
Meanwhile, Louis Napoléon had not forgotten the celebrated “Miss Howard,” her son, and his own two children by the laundress of Ham, all of whom he now installed in a house in the Rue du Cirque, just across from the Élysée Palace. Louis Napoléon was a daily visitor, and made no effort to conceal this situation. He was often seen in the afternoon strolling with them in the park grounds of the Élysée, or driving along the Champs-Élysées in the calèche bearing the Bonaparte arms. Harriet frequently attended his weekly Monday receptions at the presidential palace, where she would meet members of his inner circle, including cousin Mathilde, though the two ladies never got on at all well. As for the prince and Harriet Howard, they were genuinely fond of each other, and the president appeared to dote on his little family. But when it came to constant sentiment and loyalty, there was to be only one woman to whom Louis Napoléon could ever be blindly devoted, and she lay buried forever in Rueil. No woman could compete with a ghost.