“I only departed from the legal path in order to
return to the spirit of the law.” 1
—LOUIS NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE
“He [Louis Napoléon] put up with my presence very unwillingly,
and my very services were irksome to him.” 2
—AUGUSTE DE MORNY TO CHARLES DE FLAHAUT
Every coup d’état has its victims, in this case, Thiers, Changarnier, and the Orléanists, among others, and then of course there were the unexpected. The one that shocked everyone was Henry Temple, Lord Palmerston. On December 3, 1851, the British foreign secretary wrote a personal letter to French ambassador Alexander Walewski, congratulating the prince on his successful coup, quite unaware of what a chain of events that was about to unleash. Walewski in turn passed it on to French foreign minister Turgot. Instead of forwarding it to Louis Napoléon, however, Louis de Turgot, personally resentful of the influence of Flahaut and Morny, betrayed the president by sending a copy of Palmerston’s confidential letter to the British ambassador, the Marquess of Normanby, who duly passed it on to his old Cambridge chum, Prime Minister Lord John Russell. Russell was much put out that “Pam” had failed to first submit his letter to him for Queen Victoria’s authorization. Summoning Palmerston on the seventeenth of December, the prime minister fired him then and there. “One of the most rash and indiscreet acts I have ever known him to commit,” an incredulous Lady Palmerston in turn related to Margaret de Flahaut.3 Nor was Louis Napoléon any happier at having lost Palmerston at Whitehall, whom he had personally known for more than a dozen years. Normanby had achieved his aim, which was to be rid of Palmerston (a known opponent of the Orléans family).
Lord Palmerston remained unrepentant in his support of Bonaparte’s coup: “If the President had not struck when he did, he would himself have been knocked over,” as he put it. Discussing the situation with Lord Westmorland, he pointed out that as a matter of policy, “we must deal with things as they are, and not as we should wish to have them,”4 and Bonaparte represented the best chance for maintaining European stability, the foundation of Palmerston’s foreign policy. Normanby, a poor chess player, had set off a chain reaction, bringing down his close friend Prime Minister Lord John Russell’s own government a few weeks later in consequence of his dismissal of Palmerston. Ambassador Normanby went next, finding himself replaced at the Paris embassy by a much abler Henry Wellesley, Lord Cowley, while an angry Louis Napoléon in turn then sacked his disloyal foreign minister, Turgot, even as Lord Malmesbury assumed Palmerston’s office at Whitehall.
On January 9, 1852, goaded by Gilbert Persigny and the Normanby betrayal, Louis Napoléon informed Auguste de Morny of his intention to seize and auction off the property of Louis Philippe and the House of Orléans in France (beginning with the Palais Royal and including the estates of the Dowager Queen Marie Amélie). As Louis Napoléon well knew, Morny and Flahaut were very close friends of the Orléans family, and therefore he was hardly surprised when Morny vehemently protested against this decree.
Louis Napoléon then instructed his brother, as minister of the interior, to sign this very government decree, literally stripping the entire Orléans family of their wealth; “a most sordid calculation,” General de Flahaut called it.5 Angered and insulted, Morny flatly refused, and on January 17, Louis Napoléon, still at the prodding of Gilbert Persigny, demanded his resignation as interior minister (a position Persigny badly wanted for himself). For once the normally phlegmatic Morny, who had just prepared an elaborate plan for the complete reorganization of his antiquated ministry, was caught completely off guard and left staggering. Morny alone had put his brother in the winner’s circle, and consequently had been overly confident of his own importance, while not forgetting his unique relationship with the president. The “indispensable” Morny had not counted on the full extent of his brother’s jealousy and resentment, having embarrassingly achieved what Louis Napoléon had failed to do at Strasbourg and Boulogne.
* * *
“He will probably leave the Government tomorrow,” a furious Fanny Le Hon informed Charles de Flahaut on Wednesday, the twenty-first of January. “His resignation has been accepted,” even as Persigny promptly moved into the interior ministry. The main criticism, she pointed out, was Morny’s uncompromising opposition to “the Confiscation project.” But some recent articles in the London Times revealing his parentage also “much disturbed the President,” Fanny thought. However, in the final analysis, she pointed out, “no attempt was made to keep him [Morny in the government].” In fact it was “their undisguised intention to get rid of him … You know … how much jealousy there has been and how loath a certain person [Louis Napoléon] was to accept his decisions or to act on his advice” in the execution of the coup d’état. Once the president was safely in office, his brother could now be disposed of. He was expendable. Fanny found Louis Napoléon to be just another ruthless politician. “His outward sincerity and courtesy simply serve to conceal his real, devious character,” the bitter countess declared, “including his full range of evil propensities.”6
Auguste de Morny also warned his father, Charles de Flahaut, not to be taken in by him, despite Louis Napoléon’s continued invitations to dine at St. Cloud. “He put up with my presence [during the coup] very unwillingly,” Morny confided, “and found my services most irksome. He has never been more unfriendly toward me than he was at that time [December 2–8, 1851, when Morny was running the show].” Summing up his brother’s character, Morny described him as “mistrustful and ungrateful,” liking only “those who slavishly flatter and obey him.”7 By now the situation was clear enough for a thoroughly disgusted General de Flahaut, who in turn was privately making preparations to dispose of his recently acquired mansion, the Hôtel de Massa, on the Champs-Élysées. “If I could wipe out the 2nd of December,” Flahaut confided to his son, “I would willingly do so,” and with that he upped stakes and returned to London.8 So much for any lost illusions about the prince-president.
As an alternative, an apologetic Louis Napoléon first offered Auguste de Morny the powerful presidency of the newly created Corps Legislatif. When a violent Uncle Jérôme Bonaparte strongly objected to this, however, even threatening to resign as president of the Senate if Morny were so appointed, Louis Napoléon obligingly withdrew the offer.9 “He [Louis Napoléon] is not just an ingrate, he is a perjurer [sic: liar],” a disgusted Fanny Le Hon told Flahaut. “Clearly one can never count on an adventurer like that.”10
“I have been quite anxious for some time now,” Louis Napoléon later acknowledged to Morny, “for nothing is more painful than to be torn between one’s affections on the one hand and political necessity on the other, nevertheless…”11 In compensation he offered the ambassadorship to the court of the tsar at St. Petersburg—au bout du monde, more than two thousand kilometers from Paris, far from government and the French capital and well out of harm’s way. Now twice dismissed by Louis Napoléon, and twice deliberately humiliated, and despite Flahaut’s recommendation to accept the embassy, Morny rejected that diplomatic option in 1852 out of hand … at least this time round. Trying to mitigate the brutality of his own act, Louis Napoléon offered seats in the Senate both to Morny and his father. While Morny declined this post as well, his father eventually accepted a place in the Luxembourg Palace, as a political expediency to keep a family foot in the door, if only for his son’s sake. At the end of February of 1852, Persigny condescendingly offered to run Morny as an official electoral candidate for the position of deputy for the newly created legislative body. Auguste would have none of it. Defiantly standing as an independent candidate for Clermont-Ferrand, with no court backing, he won a spectacular victory over the government’s candidate.12
Turning his back on the murky world of palace politics, Morny decided to concentrate his future activities at the center of the nation’s world of commerce, trade, and finance. With Fanny’s blessing he went to Bruxelles to preside over Vieille Montagne, the powerful mining corporation Fanny’s late father had created, with coal, iron, and zinc mines in Belgium and nearby German states.13 For the first time in his life real wealth was pouring in, the type of compensation Morny appreciated.
* * *
Meanwhile, Louis Napoléon, who had been patiently biding his time, was now set on implementing his long-prepared agenda for France. Following his coup, he had taken the first steps to freeing the availability of capital from the traditionally very limited source of private closed banks. Henceforth, new credit institutions would be created to provide the capital required for substantial financial and industrial investments, for mortgages and agriculture. Furthermore, his published national budget for 1852 held several surprises, including the item of 14,000,000 francs set aside for public works, improving the living conditions of the impoverished, and the expansion of roads and canals. As for the nation’s first railway grid, it would be developed entirely by an expanded private sector.
After all his talk about “the empire of peace,” substantial increases in the military budget caught many completely off guard, as he announced setting aside a spectacular 32,000,000 francs (the equivalent of $412,800,000 today) for the crash expansion and modernization of a vast new French navy.14 Long impressed by Britain’s military might, Louis Napoléon sought to match, or at least come close to matching, the Royal Navy, ship for ship, including the use of the latest steam propulsion technology. The design and size of warships, along with an impressive increase of gun power, were to revolutionize the French navy over the next eighteen years. He would more than match Uncle Napoleon’s shipbuilding phenomenon in 1803–1805, as the initial contracts were signed for the laying down of dozens of new steam-powered ironclad warships. The fleet of wooden ships would soon be a thing of the past. There was no limit to what had to be done, and Louis Napoléon was determined to do it. Nor did he forget to offer financial inducements for academics and inventors, for example regarding the practical development of his scientific preoccupations and hopes for the country while a prisoner at Ham.15
On the other hand, Louis Napoléon also demanded sweeping new powers for the police and national security services. Ideas and words were as dangerous as armies, and on February 18, 1852, he confronted the nation’s press head on. No new newspapers could be published without prior government authorization. Major daily French newspapers had first to deposit a 50,000-franc ($645,000) bond with the government, which could be confiscated without appeal in case of violation of strict new press regulations. All unauthorized newspapers appearing would be heavily fined and the publishers imprisoned. Nor could foreign newspapers continue to circulate without government approval—subject to large fines and imprisonment. High stamp taxes on all publishing, including books, remained in place.
All this was just the beginning of tightening state control of the press, to end “this extreme danger facing democracies of seeing crude institutions destroying the State and our rights,” as Louis Napoléon put it. Certain categories of news, including the coverage of trials and the judiciary, had to be submitted for state approval prior to publication. Censorship was alive and well, and the prefects throughout the country were the local watchdogs with full control over the nation’s press, which worried Auguste de Morny very much.
Equally there would be a new Parliament, the Corps Législatif, the Legislative Body, comprised of one elected assembly, “the other [the Senate] appointed by me” for life.16 The old First Empire policy of state scrutiny was again revived, complete with the reintroduction of Uncle Napoléon’s much feared Ministry of Police, directed by Émile de Maupas.
In spite of the enormous new powers Louis Napoléon wielded, following the elections of February 29 for this legislative body, he himself was now hesitant about taking the further step of replacing the revised republic with imperial rule. It was as usual an impatient Persigny who kept nudging him toward the imperial purple.
Meanwhile Louis Napoléon, through his early preemptive act of removing Auguste de Morny from the scene in January, had rejected not only his brother’s sorely needed guidance, but also launched him into the significant new independent role he would play as the future broker-tsar of an entirely new French financial world. What with Morny’s corporate mining interests through Vieille Montagne and his long-term agricultural commitments in the Auvergne, he was now deliberately distancing himself from Louis Napoléon and the Élysée, where his sudden sustained absence was the subject of much conjecture. Nevertheless, Morny as a deputy managed to attend most sessions of the Corps Legislatif when major issues were involved, while in the Auvergne he continued to occupy himself with his sugar beet plantations and the production of céruse (used for the hard red dye required for French army uniforms). This seemingly minor crop was to provide a profitable source of revenue for him, as he held the government monopoly for the entire army. Morny’s purchase of the three-thousand-hectare (7,410-acre) estate of Nades in Basse-Auvergne, north of Vichy, was to be the center of his agricultural activities. Of illegitimate aristocratic birth, with no inherited wealth, once again he had been almost entirely dependent on his chief business partner, Fanny Le Hon, to meet the exorbitant purchase price of 450,000 francs (nearly $6 million) for this isolated property without even a proper residence. Many were misled by Morny’s sometimes notorious reputation as a denizen of Parisian nightlife, whereas in reality, among his other attributes, he was a serious, most knowledgeable farmer, the owner of a new model farm here at Nades, not to mention several highly profitable stud farms. And it was here, thanks to Fanny’s money, that he built the somewhat forbidding Château de Nades, situated miles from his nearest neighbor and many days’ travel from Paris.
* * *
While Louis Napoléon and most of the rational world sought a good night’s sleep, the indefatigable Morny worked. And even then a day did not provide enough hours, and time and again he would have to cancel appointments with Fanny and others because of his demanding business schedule. “I was overburdened with work even before I started for the Vieille Montagne Board of Directors meeting in Belgium,” he typically explained to his father. “If all this comes out well [current zinc negotiations] I shall be profitably established in business once again. I shall owe no man anything [excluding the millions borrowed from Fanny].…17 I am going to be able to repay [the banker] Coutts this very day.” His annual profits from “picture sales,” largely Dutch and Flemish masterpieces currently in vogue, only went to top up the pot.18 This, too, was a side of Auguste de Morny’s existence of which the prince-president remained largely ignorant. Louis Napoléon would constantly publicize and talk about his many accomplishments; Auguste de Morny just got on with it and quietly carried out his agenda in the privacy of his own world.
* * *
In March and April of 1852, the prince-president was greatly preoccupied with his sweeping new programs and expanded constitutional reach, which gave him the power to declare war and peace, not to mention increased access to vast amounts of government funds, including 25 million francs ($328 million), for his much expanded civil list—including the annual pensions for his extended family. Meanwhile he daily edged closer to empire. He had already been granted state royal hunting establishments, his name was printed atop all official documents, civil servants were obliged to swear an oath of loyalty to him, Napoléon’s name was restored to the civil code, and the imperial eagles restored to the regimental standards, and Uncle Napoléon’s birthday—the fifteenth of August—was made a national holiday, even as Louis Napoléon’s image appeared on the coin of the realm.19 Moreover, he had inherited one of the largest permanent standing armies in the whole of Europe, over 450,000 strong—with only those of the Russian and Ottoman Empires exceeding it.20
The French—like the British and Germans—loved nothing better than a display of military bravado, and Gilbert Persigny, late sergeant of King Louis Philippe’s army, intended to give them that in a dazzling public relations performance in support of the country’s emerging imperial status. On May 10, 1852, President Bonaparte appeared on the green expanses of the Champs de Mars (where recently rebelling French insurgents had been executed). Stirring military music played, and trumpets and drums announced the opening of the ceremony, where the prince-president stood in his uniform as a lieutenant general before a quarter of a million approving spectators, excluding the presence of some 60,000 troops, nearly the entire Paris garrison. The pretext for this convocation was the presentation of the golden Napoleonic imperial eagles, taken out of mothballs for the new regimental colors, and in turn blessed by the archbishop of Paris. The prince-president had come here to “restore these [imperial] eagles which so often led our fathers to glory,” and called upon the troops now “to swear to die, if called upon, in defense of them.”21 Every day a new event, a new ceremony, each one a step closer to empire. But despite the military display and rousing music, did the nation really want a return to empire?
* * *
Beginning in July of 1852, Louis Napoléon went on a series of fresh tours of the country in order to test the prospective imperial waters. At the end of 1851, the French people had voted enthusiastically for the extension of his Constitutional powers under the Second Republic. Were they now prepared to abandon this same republic? Once again Persigny strongly urged Bonaparte to take yet another step forward, and this new tour was intended to provide the final boost required.
On September 14, Louis Napoléon and his staff left Paris for the southeast, with Lyon his first stop. Up to this point his reception had been tepid, and unknown to the president, in Lyon Persigny had to hire crowds, the inevitable claque, and pay for the construction of triumphal arches—“spontaneously built” by an enthusiastic people—and to enliven things with a few bribed “Vive l’empereurs,” for the unveiling of an equestrian statue of Napoléon. At Marseille there were a few more cheers, these no longer subsidized, as he spoke of “assimilating … the great kingdom of Algeria” and one day of “connecting our great Western ports with the American continent by steamship lines.” Louis Napoléon offered a golden future.
Bordeaux was to be the final major stopover before returning to the capital. Here the energetic prefect Georges Haussmann kept the promise he had given to Morny at the interior ministry on the second of December and loyally provided welcoming crowds. Was it genuine? Louis Napoléon apparently thought so as he addressed the people of Bordeaux on the ninth of October: “France seems to be calling for a return to the Empire. There are those out there who say that Empire means war. But I tell you that the Empire I envisage means only one thing, peace,” he repeated from an earlier speech. The empire he envisaged for 1852 was not to be confused with the empire of 1815, he pointed out. This was to be no mere continuation, but instead an entirely new beginning. But on his way back to Paris via Montpellier and Orléans, he found the crowds thinner and the cheers weaker.22
* * *
Upon his return to the capital, it was perhaps as a result of his own nagging doubts about the wisdom of launching the empire at this time, enforced by his less than successful tour of the south, that his thoughts returned to his brother. For once completely disregarding Persigny’s advice, Louis Napoléon swallowed his monumental pride and on the nineteenth of October finally reached out to Auguste de Morny for help.
“Grand times are coming soon,” he wrote in a thinly disguised bonhomie. “And I hope to find you by my side in the course of achieving them.”23 It was about as close as he could bring himself to admit that his shabby dismissal of Morny back in January had been a grave error of judgment. He did need him now, and he did not think he could succeed without his support. “You know perfectly well that you can always count on me,” Morny replied in his usual forthright manner, reminding him of his earlier assurances made in 1851 that he was always ready “to risk even my life for your cause.” To be sure “some disagreeable incidents”—of his own doing—had led Louis Napoléon to think that Morny had withdrawn his support. “There is nothing to that,” Morny added dismissively, “and I shall fully demonstrate it when the appropriate circumstances allow.”24 One could almost hear Louis Napoléon sigh with relief, and he in turn responded immediately on the twentieth of October—“Mon cher Morny,… I was really sorry not to have seen any more of you [these past several months],” and invited him to the Élysée. “Come tomorrow at three o’clock,” when he would be happy “to take up where we had left off.”25 After a most unpleasant standoff for nearly ten months, the great rift had been closed. It was as close as he could bring himself to “apologizing,” if that is the word, and it proved to be one of the most important acts of his career.
There was also an unexpected personal link reaffirming their relations. On the evening of October 22, 1852, the two brothers met “by chance” at the Théâtre Français, where the exotic actress Rachel was performing a reading of Arsène Houssaye’s ode, L’Empire c’est la paix, The Empire Means Peace. Also attending this performance were his bejeweled Harriet Howard, who had contributed 200,000 francs (nearly $2.6 million) toward Louis Napoléon’s coup of the second of December, while in another loge with her mother sat the lovely twenty-six-year-old redheaded beauty, the Countess de Teba, Eugénie de Montijo, whom both Morny and his brother had already known for quite some time. Morny, who personally liked the young Spanish countess, knowing of the attraction that Louis Napoléon felt to her, encouraged the couple. It was to prove the last curtain on Louis Napoléon’s liaison with the unfortunate Miss Howard, whom he was shortly to remove from Paris, albeit with a 6-million-franc ($77 million) adieu, followed by a peerage as the Countess de Beauregard, complete with a handsome château by the same name, situated just a stone’s throw from the Palais de Saint-Cloud. Although Miss Howard finally remarried, they would continued to meet thereafter, if most discreetly.
With Morny working behind the scenes once more, events developed quickly. On the fifth of November the prince at long last declared publicly his willingness to accept the imperial crown if offered to him. Two days later the Senate voted almost unanimously for the reestablishment of the hereditary empire. (The one negative vote was that of Louis Napoléon’s former family retainer from Arnenenberg, and now senator, Thélin.) On November 21–22, a national plebiscite was held, solidly endorsing the new Second Empire, 7,824,199 votes in favor against 253,645 opposed (but with a significant two million abstentions).26
* * *
On Wednesday evening, December 1, 1852, an unending procession of nearly two hundred elegant carriages made its way from the Champs-Élysées in the dense wintry fog, preceded by postillions and outriders carrying torches via a dark road crossing the meadows and woodland comprising what would later become the Bois de Boulogne, forty minutes later reaching the banks of the Seine and the sprawling 918-acre park of the Château de Saint-Cloud, where Louis Napoléon was now residing.27
Reaching St. Cloud, the senators in their long blue velour cloaks, culottes, and black felt caps complete with sleek white feathers, led by their president, were convened amid great pomp in the 147-foot-long gold-and-white Apollo Gallery, lined with dozens of footmen in pale blue and white. It was a detailed repetition of the ceremony carried out in this very hall on May 18, 1804, when a delegation of the Senate had come to Napoléon I to proclaim the creation of the First Empire.28 Louis Napoléon, attired in the uniform of a general officer, surrounded by his uncle, Marshal Jérôme Bonaparte, and his son, Prince Jérôme, took his place on the red velvet throne.
“This new reign which you inaugurate today,” the new emperor began, “has not, like so many in history, been founded through violence, conquest or conspiracy,” but rather as “the legal result of the will of the entire people.… Help me one and all to establish in this land, troubled by so many past revolutions, a stable Government, based upon religion, justice, probity, and care for the suffering classes.” And he closed with the accession to power—“I assume from today, with the crown, the name of Napoléon III.”29 The Second Empire was born.
The following morning the procession set out on its return journey, led by Emperor Napoléon III and his three newly created marshals—Saint-Arnaud, Magnan, and Castellane—and announced by trumpets as they passed under the Arc de Triomphe and up the Champs-Élysées, on to the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries as hundreds of cannon roared, tambours rolled, and endless church bells pealed from every arrondissement of the capital. And with that Emperor Napoléon III moved into the Tuileries, the former residence of Uncle Napoléon Bonaparte.
The staff included his new grand marshal of the palace, Marshal Vaillant, with Marshal Saint-Arnaud as grand equerry, the Duke de Bassano as the grand chamberlain, Cambacères as grand master of the ceremonies, General Fleury as the first equerry of the palace, and of course the faithful Thélin (who had voted against the creation of this very empire) as treasurer of the privy purse. Nor had Auguste de Morny been forgotten; he was there, wearing his newly awarded Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur. And thus it was on yet another second of December, in 1852, that the forty-three-year-old Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoléon III—“the Sphinx of the Tuileries,” as the press were to dub him—spent his first night in Uncle Napoléon’s bedroom.… his childhood dream fulfilled at last. Hortense would have been proud.