“I have done so little as yet for my country…” 1
—PRESIDENT BONAPARTE, AMIENS, JULY 7, 1849
“There is no excuse for coups d’êtat.” 2
—PRESIDENT BONAPARTE, TOURS, 1849
Life in Paris tends to slow to a more languid pace after the National Assembly breaks up for its annual parliamentary recess in July, but President Bonaparte had special plans for the summer of 1849, to travel across the country to become acquainted with the land, its cities, and in particular its people. Beginning at Chartres, he celebrated the opening of the new railway linking it with the capital. The president went on to Amiens on the sixth of July to present the National Guard of the Somme with their new colors. Here where the 1803–1805 Anglo-French Truce, “the Peace of Amiens,” had been concluded prior to the resumption of hostilities beginning in October 1805 with the Trafalgar campaign and the appearance of the newly created Grand Army at Austerlitz, the prince-president was warmly received.
“Although I have done so little as yet for my country,” he addressed the mayor in top hat and tricolor sash, the guard in their resplendent uniforms, and the people of this city, before the Hôtel de Ville where that truce had been signed, “I am at once proud and embarrassed by this warm ovation which I attribute to my name rather than to myself.… Today you desire not just peace—but a glorious peace—one fertile in real benefits at home and in influence abroad.” Throughout these initial early years in France, time and again Louis Napoléon was to stress that this latest Bonaparte was a man of peace, whose aim was to bring prosperity to the nation, not war.3
With his companion Henri Conneau at his side, the party drove southeast down to Ham where on the twenty-first of July he was warmly received at a banquet prepared by the villagers. “In this place where I suffered, I propose to you a toast in honor of the men who have resolved … to respect the institutions of their country.” Touring the prison he and Conneau found in his former “cell” another state prisoner, the Algerian leader Bu Maza, who had been captured during the recent fighting “to pacify” the colony of Algeria. This was the first Algerian Louis Napoléon had ever met, and it would spark an awareness of that colony that would soon develop into a veritable lifelong passion. If at Chartres the prince-president had celebrated the progress of technology and the arrival of the railways, at Ham he fêted a peace-loving, magnanimous republic, and on a whim ordered the astonished governor of the prison to free the former “rebel”Algerian.4
This was just the beginning of a series of tours across the country over the next three years, a deliberate long-term campaign strategy to introduce himself to the people. On another occasion he traveled to Rouen, the capital of Upper Normandy, near the mouth of the Seine, where he spoke of trade, commerce, and prosperity. Then from Nantes the presidential party proceeded to Saumur and up the Loire to Angers.5 In the heart of the Loire Valley, they made a major stopover at the Bourbon stronghold of Tours with its splendid hôtels particuliers, ancient university, and cathedral. “I cannot do for you all that the Emperor did,” he told the receptive Tourangeaux. “I have neither his genius nor his power, but you applaud today because I represent that policy of moderation and conciliation inaugurated by the [Second] Republic.” Comparing France to a mighty ship that had been battered over the years by terrible storms and had finally dropped anchor in a sheltered roadstead, he continued, “therefore it is now up to us to rebuild that ship enabling her to resume her historic journey. Trust then to the future, and forget the coups d’état and insurrections of the past. There is no longer any excuse for coups d’état.… [Author’s italics] Instead put your faith in the National Assembly and your own First Magistrate [the president] … and above all rely on the protection of the Supreme Being who looks over France.”6
If Louis Napoléon returned to Paris satisfied with the results of the summer’s work, a surprised Auguste de Morny was even more so. “The president’s journey could not have been more successful,” he informed his father in Scotland, “his language and bearing were well measured and admired by everyone.” Rare praise indeed coming from his oft critical half brother. Morny was especially impressed by his ability to bring up “untouchable subjects,” the genuine anxieties of the people, their fears of insurrections, of 18 Brumaires, of coups d’état, associated with the name of Bonaparte, and for him to speak of them so openly, as probably no other politician could have managed so convincingly. Louis Napoléon was beginning to learn his new profession.7
The following year he would continue with his “whistle-stop” campaigning, literally by train when possible, though the railways were still very limited, usually short runs of ten to twenty miles. The crowds were not always warm or even reasonably civilized, and he had to get accustomed to “the hustings,” to this reality. If a visit to the “Red City,” Lyon, went well—not so at Besançon. Here President Bonaparte was physically jostled by crowds of angry, violent men, so that he had to be rescued by Colonels Vaudrey and Beville and the police. The Alsatian capital of Strasbourg, on the other hand, was in contrast peaceful if wary. In the end the French people were largely touched and won over by Louis Napoléon’s unpretentious simplicity and sincerity, and his “ambition of being known as an honorable man.”8
* * *
Returning to Paris always inevitably meant bracing himself for new problems, and the autumn of 1849 was no exception. From the outset, the new military governor of the French capital, the aggressively politically ambitious General Nicolas Changarnier, was testing his strength. Taking Persigny aside, the general insisted, “Let the prince put an end to these constitutional charades and seize complete dictatorial powers of the country!” On receiving this message, Louis Napoléon responded with an adamant, “No!”9
That summer of 1849, while Louis Napoléon was politicking in the countryside, Auguste de Morny was in England, ostensibly to visit his sister, Emily, Lady Shelburne, and to sell another large shipment of paintings on whose profits he depended year after year. More important, he met with Emily’s father-in-law, Lord Lansdowne, and then discreetly with Prime Minister Lord John Russell’s foreign secretary, Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, at Carlton Gardens. His purpose was to sound them out as to their reaction should Louis Napoléon decide “to expand his powers.”
On returning to Paris on the twenty-fifth of October, Morny proceeded directly to the Place Beavau (as he usually referred to the Élysée, that is, the small square opposite the entrance to the Élysée) to confer with his half brother. Neither 10 Downing Street nor Whitehall (the foreign office) would interfere, should Louis Napoléon carry out a coups d’état, Morny assured him. To be sure, the well-entrenched British ambassador, the fifty-four-year-old Constantine Phipps, the Marquess of Normanby—fully supported by Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Lord John Russell—as a friend of Louis Philippe, would of course still object. But professionally the ambassador was still obliged to take his instructions from the highly influential Foreign Secretary Palmerston and would follow orders, for the moment.
Lord Palmerston had in fact declared himself for Louis Napoléon even as early as 1848. “Before the summer is over.… I should not be sorry if it [the changes in the French government] ended in Louis Napoléon being made Emperor,” he confided to his brother William Temple, “& thus [also] ridding us of both brands of the Bourbons [represented by the Comte de Chambord and the Comte de Paris].”10 In the long run without British support of neutrality, any coup d’état would have encountered grave long-term difficulties.
More eager than his brother to follow through on the possibilities of a coup at this time, Morny, accompanied by his father, Count de Flahaut, went to see Adolphe Thiers four days after his return to France. Would Thiers, with his influential Poitiers Street Committee behind him, be willing to participate in such a coup? “The little man,” as Flahaut referred to him, never known for the refinements of civilization, including elementary courtesy, arrogantly showed them to the door. Thiers would only be interested in such a coup if Thiers were made president. Everything had changed. There was no longer any place for Louis Napoléon in Thiers’s France.11
Stymied by his inability to form a “neutral” coalition, upset with the account Morny gave him of their brusque encounter with Thiers, but emboldened by the knowledge of Palmerston’s support, Louis Napoléon summoned his cabinet for an emergency meeting on the thirtieth of October. “Present circumstances leave me no choice but to place myself in a position ‘to be able to dominate,’ to control the country while remaining above all parties,” he informed his ministers. “France is unsettled because the country lacks any sense of direction. She seeks a steady hand at the helm to direct the affairs of state,” and the presidential elections of December 10, 1848, have “duly elected me as their choice to lead the country,” he submitted. He then asked for their resignations.12
The next day, October 31, 1849, President Bonaparte addressed a special session of the National Assembly: “Time and again for nearly a year I have given proof of my self-abnegation to avoid any misunderstanding as to my motives. I have allowed men of the most opposing views to take portfolios in my cabinet, but with nothing to show for the effort.… I was blamed for my own weakness.… But there’s an end to that now! Let us therefore re-establish the government’s authority without reducing our fundamental rights. Let us finally calm men’s fears by resolutely ridding ourselves of the [political] evil-doers.… Only then will we be in a position to save the country.”13
For the first time Auguste de Morny was now in a position to help advise on the formation of a government, beginning with the selection of his trusted friend, neighbor, and fellow deputy from Auvergne, Eugène Rouher, as prime minister and minister of justice. The highly respected jurist Alexis de Tocqueville (whose works and ideas greatly impressed Bonaparte) reluctantly agreed to accept the foreign ministry while, more importantly, Achille Fould would now take the finance ministry, General Alphonse d’Hautpoul the war office, and Ferdinand Barrot would take over the critical portfolio as minister of the interior, although his brother Odilon was already beginning to abandon the Bonapartes.14 Finally, Alfred Pierre, Count de Falloux du Coudray, accepted the curious ministry of public instruction and religion.
* * *
The dapper, balding, thirty-seven-year-old Alfred Pierre, Count de Falloux du Coudray, was a royalist and devout Catholic. Despite biographies he was to write of Pope Pius V and the Bishop d’Orléans, he was later to prove a strong opponent of the ultramontane Catholic extremists led by the abrasive, ever dogmatic Louis Veuillot.15 Nominated to this ministerial post in December 1849, he was to resign ten months later over Louis Napoléon’s support of the occupation of Rome, just as he was later to oppose the creation of the Second Empire. Were it not for the law he as a deputy had proposed, and which was passed on March 15, 1850, his name no doubt would have been quickly forgotten. What surprised so many, however, was the support given to this pro-Catholic education legislation by the nephew of the excommunicated Emperor Napoléon, who had sacked the Vatican, and kidnapped and imprisoned Pius VII.
“The Falloux Law,” as it is still referred to, basically ended the monopoly of public, secular, state-run education—from the university level down to the village primary schools that had produced “those awful little Reds,” as Falloux referred to them. This fitted in nicely with that minister’s celebrated formula for running the universe: “God in education. The Pope as head of the Church. The Church as the leader of civilization.”16 Louis Napoléon supported it because it gained the Catholic vote, while reintroducing a certain order in society, and a basic set of those moral values that had been guillotined along with Louis XVI during the Revolution of 1789. And as Morny’s father appreciated, “The president seems resolved on undertaking any measures required to re-establish Order [in France].”17
The growing opposition by Thiers to Bonaparte remaining in office, under any guise, was building in the assembly, which was now bent on ousting him as head of the French government. The introduction and swift passage of the “Electoral Law” at the end of May 1850 was a jolt not even he could ignore, reducing the eligible electorate by 2,900,000. With the stroke of a pen President Bonaparte had lost the electoral base that had put him in office.
Once again, as in the case of the Falloux Law, Louis Napoléon astonished even his closest friends by voting for the passage of this bill. Appalled, Morny argued with him, and Hortense Cornu sharply criticized this move. “You simply don’t understand a thing. One day this will encourage the Assembly to overstep themselves.… and when they do, I shall strike,” he argued. A coup executed under those circumstances would then be welcomed by the public.18
Auguste de Morny later claimed that he had been right in opposing the Electoral Law, which, thanks to the newly reformed Assembly, permitted General Nicolas Changarnier to come out in the open now and, almost successfully, overthrow President Bonaparte. Before resuming his electioneering that summer, Louis Napoléon signed a special decree transferring the prefect of the Var, one Georges Haussmann, to the prefecture of the anti-Bonaparte Yonne, and then again to Bordeaux and the royalist stronghold of the Gironde, a move with far-reaching consequences.
* * *
While touring the country that summer, Bonaparte received dramatic news. His old bête noire, seventy-six-year-old King Louis Philippe, had died at Claremont, his estate in Surrey, on August 26, 1850. Although Foreign Secretary Palmerston was overjoyed by the news—this death “delivers me from my most artful and inveterate enemy”—Louis Napoléon and Morny saw it in quite a different light.19
As head of his family, an ailing elderly Louis Philippe had been no immediate threat and could never head a coup or personally reoccupy the French throne, but with him gone the younger generation was now free to act with vigor. Henri d’Artois, better known as the Comte de Chambord,20 was the immediate Bourbon heir to the throne of France, in good health and only thirty-one years old, but with no male heirs to succeed him. Exiled permanently at his Austrian castle of Frohsdorf, and completely cut off from France, apart from a few die-hard royalist followers in the Assembly, Chambord had no real military or political support. Next in the Orléans line of succession was the late Duke of Orléans’s thirteen-year-old son—and grandson of Louis Philippe—Philippe d’Orléans, the Comte de Paris. His three uncles—the Prince de Joinville and the Dukes de Nemours and d’Aumale—were vying with the Comte de Chambord to be head of state. Like Chambord, however, they too expected no support within France. Later they would discuss supporting Chambord, on condition that he name them his legal successors.
Adolphe Thiers, of course, was still actively promoting himself, preparatory to replacing Louis Napoléon as president of the Republic, either in coordination with the Orléans, or on his own behalf. Either way he, too, would need the army, and his co-conspirator, General Changarnier. The pot was boiling, and as the president’s two-year term of office would terminate in May 1852, the pressure to act was building up.
* * *
Both brothers, Louis Napoléon and Morny, felt this new sudden surge of tension, as they faced the one very real threat, a combined Thiers-Changarnier political ticket. General Bonaparte had been able to overthrow the government (the Directory) in November 1799 thanks to his command of several thousand troops. Changarnier, as combined military governor of Paris and commander of the national guard, was now even more powerful, with these 80,000 men under his orders. There was only one solution, and Morny urgently sought the immediate removal of Changarnier from both commands.
Changarnier, with his booming voice and commanding manner, openly ridiculed and mocked the president of the Republic—that “melancholy parrot”—behind his back. Marshal Victor de Castellane complained before the assembly that the general was “freely letting his new power go to his head,” and finding “his bad comments about the president all the more unfortunate for having been made in public” and even boasted of his intention of replacing the president at the next elections. Still Louis Napoléon remained silent, but not Morny, knowing what it meant not to face down an insulting soldier. Inaction was “the greatest possible mistake you could make,” Auguste warned. “Either you dismiss General Changarnier, or you will be reduced to a mere figurehead.” Still Louis Napoléon’s only response was the dismissal of his latest cabinet, but not Changarnier.21
At long last, after many weeks of dithering, on January 9, 1851, President Bonaparte duly signed the decree stripping the bumptious Major General Nicolas Changarnier of all military commands. Never again would the president make the mistake of combining the commands of the military division of Paris and that of the national guards, hereafter to remain two separate posts.
Although now removed from his army post, Changarnier still retained the full support of Adolphe Thiers. The Legislative Assembly followed Thiers’s lead in seeking to avenge the dismissal of their man Changarnier, and in the summer of 1851 retaliated by refusing to increase the president’s civil list that funded the annual pensions for the entire Bonaparte clan. More important, they opposed Louis Napoléon’s attempt to extend his term of office through a modification of the Constitution. When on July 6, 1851, Bonaparte asked his brother what the chances were of ever changing the Constitution, Auguste replied with a blunt: “In my opinion none whatsoever.” And on July 19 the legislators formally rejected the president’s attempted revision. The countdown to his inevitable coup had begun, almost malgré lui.22
Louis Napoléon convened a very select secret war council at St. Cloud on the twentieth of August of 1851. There Morny, Persigny, Conneau, Colonel Émile Fleury, and Paris police prefect Pierre Carlier agreed to launch Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état. Meanwhile, five days earlier, the newly promoted Général de Division (Major General) Arnaud Leroy, better known as Leroy Saint-Arnaud, had arrived from Algeria—“one of those Africans,” Flahaut dismissively called him. Summoned to France by Louis Napoléon on the recommendation of Fleury, it was the president’s intention of appointing him the new minister of war on condition that he agree to participate in the anticipated coup.23
General Saint-Arnaud was certainly the most curious, if not the most bewildering, choice for this post as commander of all the armies of the land. Having been a commercial traveler, then a soldier of fortune in the Greek insurrection for independence against the Turks, followed by a stint as a greengrocer, before going on stage as a “vaudeville type” comic-singer, while spending his time in between performances at the gaming tables, where his staggering losses drove him back into the safe arms of the army of occupation in Algeria—he hardly seemed a sound, reliable candidate either for the war office or as a responsible member of a clique preparing to overthrow a government.
The next conseil de guerre (Louis Napoléon, Morny, Eugene Rouher—at Morny’s insistence—Persigny, and Carlier) was held at the Élysée one week later, on the twenty-seventh of August. After reading the draft of a plan submitted by Police Prefect Carlier for the proposed coup, Morny turned to him and did not mince his words. “Mon pauvre Carlier … I must tell you that I find your plan positively perverse.” Meanwhile General Saint-Arnaud, who had personally agreed to the intended coup, suddenly changed his mind in the first week of September, in fact holding out for an additional cash inducement.24
What neither Morny nor Louis Napoléon knew, however, was that Prefect Carlier was secretly meeting with the disgraced Changarnier, revealing to him both the plans and the decisions taken at these meetings. With that information in hand, the general boasted to the prefect that when the right moment came he, Changarnier, would put Louis Napoléon in a “panier à salade” (slang for a police wagon) and personally drive him “in chains” to the prison fortress of Vincennes.25
* * *
Fanny Le Hon was having breakfast at Auguste de Morny’s pavilion (adjacent to her much larger sumptuous mansion) at number 15 Champs-Élysées on the twelfth of September when Gilbert Persigny arrived unannounced with a most urgent message from the Élysée. A by now desperate Louis Napoléon had decided to place the planning and execution of the coup d’état entirely in the hands of his half brother. He was to be responsible for drafting a complete set of fresh plans and then for personally directing the operations as well. Auguste de Morny, who had long been debating whether or not to commit himself irrevocably to Louis Napoléon, now had to make his fateful decision. “Tell him that he can count on me,” he informed Persigny.26 Always ruthlessly honest about political situations, Morny knew his own worth.
“In the first place I am always in complete control of myself, never allowing emotions to interfere with my decisions. And if I take no nonsense, no abuse from others, I in turn always treat others fairly and respectfully. When on the rare occasion I do personally agree to undertake a project, I am most demanding of myself and most thorough down to the last detail in its preparations. Once I fully believe in something, I continue relentlessly until the objective has been achieved.”27 Fanny Le Hon, who had been very close to Louis Philippe and his wife, argued fiercely with Morny against throwing in his lot with Louis Napoléon. Morny was adamant, however, as he afterward confided to Countess Masuyer, Hortense’s former lady-in-waiting and confidante. “I knew at once what I had to do and did not hesitate for a moment in accepting. It was a relief and made me very happy to know that I would be contributing in saving the country, and what is more I personally would be in charge of everything.”28 There would be no more Strasbourgs or Boulognes. Louis Napoléon would have no say in the matter.
* * *
The decision now made, time was of the essence. Bonaparte had called for another war council (without Carlier) at the Élysée at two o’clock that very afternoon, the twelfth of September. Louis Napoléon had finally had to acknowledge that he personally lacked the leadership and ability required, while at the same time recognizing those very qualities in his own hardly much loved half brother. As for the no-nonsense Auguste de Morny, no one had ever called him a dilettante, a dreamer, no one had ever challenged his ability to accomplish anything he had ever set his mind to do. Had he not been there to denounce the faults in Prefect Carlier’s earlier plan, there would have been no Second Empire and Louis Napoléon would have found himself once again, like Louis Philippe’s family, yet another political refugee in England. Instead, with Morny in charge, this was to be a meticulous military operation.
On the twenty-seventh of October, he again shuffled his cabinet, naming General Saint-Arnaud his minister of war, as promised, while placing an obscure René François de Thorigny at the ministry of the interior, and replacing Carlier with the more reliable Émile de Maupas at the prefecture of police. With the firm major general Bernard Magnan as military governor of Paris now in command of the powerful garrison there, Louis Napoléon’s team was nearly complete.
* * *
November 1851 proved to be as grim as it was tense for the gentlemen at the Élysée. On the fourth of the month Louis Napoléon, in spite of the advanced preparations now under way, still wishing to avoid force and a coup, made one last attempt to abrogate the Electoral Law of May 31, 1850, that had slashed the number of the electorate. However, his new bill, which sought to revise the Constitution of 1848 by extending the presidential term of office from four to ten years, was narrowly defeated by the Assembly, 353 to 347. “A disgusting set of rogues,” a dismissive Charles de Flahaut called the members of that assembly.29 The Electoral Law of May 31 stood and with it the loss of nearly three million voters … and the near impossibility of the president ever being reelected.
On November 17, 1851, the desperate “intriguants” in the Bourbon Palace, now intent on ridding themselves of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte once and for all, boldly threw down the gauntlet, introducing a new bill before the Chamber of Deputies that would permit the assembly—no longer the president—to call up the army in the event of a national emergency, even against the president of the Republic himself. Once again every seat in the hemicycle was taken and the mood sober. Bonaparte’s new war minister, a clearly uncomfortable Saint-Arnaud, faced intensive questioning by the opposition and hurriedly left the assembly immediately afterward. Auguste de Morny, as a deputy for the Auvergne, was also present, studying the situation closely, and like the general left early, while Deputy Eugène Rouher remained for the counting of votes, witnessing the defeat of that measure. The army narrowly remained under Louis Napoléon’s command … but for how long?
Leaving the Palais Bourbon, Eugène Rouher then joined Morny, Saint-Arnaud, Persigny, and the president at the Place Beauvau—the Élysée. The assembly may have lost its bid to assume control of the army, but their intention was clear as a bell, of calling for “a coup … against the Executive Power of the Republic,” as a frustrated Lamartine put it. “There is no other word for it,” he insisted, “unless it is ‘suicide.’ Thereafter I considered the Republic as lost.”30
Writing from his recently acquired mansion, the Hôtel de Massa, General de Flahaut brought his Scottish wife (in London) up to date, informing her that Thiers and Changarnier, who had been counting on the easy passage of the army bill, were left in a state of shock, having to rethink their plans. Not so his son, Flahaut pointed out, the businesslike Auguste de Morny, who now instructed war minister Saint-Arnaud to put the sixty-thousand-man army garrison on a standby alert. When at the insistence of Louis Napoléon Morny met with Pierre-Antoin Berryer in an eleventh-hour attempt to win him over to his side, the offer was rejected. “We can do all that is required with you, without you, or if needs be in spite of you,” Morny snapped.31
By the last week of November 1851, there was a very visible tension in the faces at the Palais Bourbon, and panic was spreading like cholera across the capital. Another second of December was approaching—the double-anniversary of Napoléon’s coronation and great victory at Austerlitz—and the Bonapartes were notoriously superstitious about such things. And yet said Le Siècle, “We ask ourselves how it is possible in this day and age to still find those naïve enough to believe in a Coup d’État?”32 Reality took many forms, and everyone recognized the old familiar pall of whispers and caution in abbreviated conversations, the anxious looks and nervous bons mots.
As matters stood, the assembly, unsure of the immediate future, could no longer carry on with business as usual and was in “a state of dissolution,” Flahaut reported to his wife. “The fact is, things are getting too hot not to catch fire.… [and] very soon indeed,” and he postponed his return to England.33