“I fully realize that I owe a great deal to my prominent position
because my name is Bonaparte, and up to this point, nothing to my personal achievements.” 1
—LOUIS NAPOLÉON, JANUARY 1835
“My dear Papa, I receive harsh words from you so often, that I ought to be quite used to them by now.” 2
CAPTAIN LOUIS NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE TO HIS FATHER, —FEBRUARY 7, 1835
When Philippe Lebas, as Prince Louis Napoléon’s new private tutor, arrived at the wooded hilltop estate of Arenenberg overlooking Lake Constance in the 1820s, he was no longer young, having served in the French army for several years and then as a minor civil servant. Coming from a modest family with strong Republican credentials, he had found his pupil soft, spoiled, in a very feminine ménage, and overly coached in all things Napoleonic. It took some time for Lebas to determine that this mild, charming, surprisingly unpretentious, even diffident Bonaparte prince, nearly five foot five in height with auburn hair and bluish-gray eyes, also had an unusually mature sense of will and determination dedicated to a future career as Napoléon’s heir and successor. This his mother, Hortense, the former queen of Holland, had carefully nurtured over the years.
The prince’s Napoleonic heritage, along with his obsessive preoccupation with his father’s approval, largely governed the boy’s thoughts and daily existence. There was always a distracted, distant look in his eyes. He never seemed to relax, to let his guard down. Very few could ever really get close to him. His unflappable, imperturbable attitude, even from his youth, always struck strangers. A boy who never lost his temper was a very rare creature indeed. “The prince is reserved and distant even in day-to-day affairs though always courteous and welcoming,”3 one acquaintance noted. But as his new tutor at Arenenberg was gradually to learn, it was the arrival of those monthly letters from his father, the former king of Holland Louis Bonaparte, that had such a depressive effect on Prince Louis Napoléon and played a powerful, even disturbing role in shaping the character, outlook, life, and development of his pupil.
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“I give you my heartfelt blessings,” his father wrote following his son’s first communion in April 9, 1821. “I pray that God gives you a pure and grateful heart toward Him, He who is the author of all that is good, and that He sheds His light upon you that you may fulfill all your duties to your country [France] and your parents, and that you may understand the differences between right and wrong.”4 This was probably the most benevolent letter his father ever wrote. It was to prove as rare as the snows of the Sahara. At the same time it reveals a Louis Bonaparte generally unknown to the public, deeply devout, and even puritanical and idealistic, in such utter contrast to his elder brother Napoléon, the great scoffer of all such values.
Louis Napoléon’s father took a very real if rigidly controlling interest in the boy’s studies, which included a flowing stream of advice or criticism, offset by sparing praise. The results of what proved to be a rather harrowing lifelong experience had inevitable consequences. Even at the age of nineteen, Louis Napoléon’s insecurity could be witnessed in every letter he wrote his father, constantly attempting to please a man who simply refused to be pleased—“the older I grow, the better I can appreciate my happiness in having such a good father instructing me by his wise counsel.” And thus following Louis’s advice, he continued with his studies, concentrating on mathematics up to calculus, when he stopped “following your recommendations.”5
Clearly still very much the dutiful if intimidated son, at twenty years old, his school reports to his father sounded more like those of a quaking boy half his age. Nearly completing his formal studies in June 1828, he was always diligent and maintained the same long hours, rising at five o’clock every morning and going to bed at ten p.m. “I promise to follow the precise plan that you propose for my studies. Today for instance I duly took the works of Condillac from Maman’s library. Likewise I intend to study chemistry and go hunting once a week, as you suggest.”6
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With his studies behind him, Louis Napoléon was largely preoccupied with politics and his own future. Some three months before his twenty-first birthday, Prince Louis Napoléon took the first step that would lead to the achievement of his political career. On January 19, 1829, he informed his father that he would like to enroll in the Russian army, then campaigning in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828 against the Turks in the Balkans and on the Black Sea. Through British and Prussian pressure, the Ottoman Empire’s Sultan Mahmud I agreed to peace, and the Treaty of Adrianople (Edirne) was signed in September 1829, resulting in, among other things, Ottoman recognition of an independent Serbia and Greece, and the reopening to Russian and the world the maritime commerce of the Straits, the 125-mile passage from the Black Sea at the Bosphorus through the Sea of Marmora to the Dardenelles and the Mediterranean.
Reminding his father how much he loved him, he plunged in: “Mon cher papa … More than anything in the world I wish to join the [military] campaign against the Turks as a volunteer in the Russian Army, for which I now ask your permission. I have already spoken to Maman who feels that it would prove useful for me, and has given her full consent.” Hortense had met Russia’s emperor Alexander I in Paris years earlier and thought he would be amenable to the idea, and Louis Napoléon concluded that “no doubt I would be appointed to the [tsar’s] general staff.” Therefore he would hardly be in a dangerous position, and “Maman would select a retired army officer to accompany me. And then, at long last I could do something worthy of you, by demonstrating the courage I have received from being your son. At the same time it would draw public attention to me [for the first time].” However, in the event his father did not give his consent to this proposal, “I should die of embarrassment.… Adieu, mon cher Papa.”7
Needless to say his father, a talented general officer in his own right who had won his spurs as a youth by Napoléon’s side in Italy and Egypt, was not overly impressed with the idea of his son going to fight for his former enemy, the tsar. Nor was he happy with Hortense’s encouragement of such a scheme. And the last thing the painfully reclusive Louis Bonaparte wanted was publicity that would inevitably affect him personally, and which would most certainly upset the Allied governments already supervising and restricting every move the members of the clan made. Surprisingly, ex-king Louis’s response revealed a calm, mature assessment of the situation. It also revealed an important side of his hitherto unknown views on the role of the military in society and political philosophy.
Fighting “Muslim barbarians [the Turks]” in Greece and the Balkans was perfectly honorable, his father responded, “nevertheless you are intelligent and endowed with so many fine qualities that a little reflection on your part will calm you and will restore your sense of judgment.… To be sure nothing is finer than military glory. To know that everyone is talking about you,” to command great armies in the field, “to be in a position to change the destinies of peoples and nations … all that of course is fine and attractive and cannot but excite a young gentleman’s imagination.… Unfortunately one must also face a very real truth, one quite contrary to that noble view, and that is that all war—apart from that of legitimate self-defense of one’s home and nation, is in fact nothing but the act of a barbarian, which is only distinguished from that of savages and wild beasts, by more satisfactory lies regarding its alleged necessity.” Never forget, his father went on, that “one must only go to war and fight for his own country, and for no others [not for Switzerland, not for Russia]. Anyone who acts otherwise is just a mercenary, acting on contrived motives, or else is quite simply bloody minded.”8
Undoubtedly this was one of the most important letters that Louis Bonaparte ever sent his son, in effect a complete renunciation of his brother Napoléon’s entire legacy of warfare and conquest, indeed of his very raison d’être. Prince Louis Napoléon wrote that same month, abandoning his military plans for the moment: “Adieu, mon cher Papa, your devoted son. As you see I have given you true proof of my devotion by renouncing my plans [for Russia], for had I not loved you so much I should never have been able to resist my great urge to carry it out, and this I now do against my will.”9
Just days before celebrating his twenty-first birthday on April 20, 1829, Louis Napoléon deferred to his father’s wishes on this occasion. On the other hand, he was a red-blooded young man bent on adventure and excitement, and this, combined with an unquenchable idealism, was bound to resurface at the next opportunity.