“Sire, do not reject the words of a patriot … Free Italy!” 1
—FELICE ORSINI TO NAPOLÉON III JUST BEFORE HIS EXECUTION ON MARCH 13, 1858
“The French are bent on finding accomplices in this crime
everywhere and I find it hard to resist all the extreme measures
people call on me to take.” 2
—LOUIS NAPOLÉON TO QUEEN VICTORIA FOLLOWING THE ATTEMPT ON HIS LIFE, JANUARY 14, 1858
“ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE THE EMPEROR NAPOLEON,” read the news in The Times of London under the “Latest Intelligence” received from Paris on Friday, January 15, 1858:
The emperor was fired at this evening [Thursday, January 14] at half-past 9 o’clock as he was entering the Italian Opera in the Rue le Peletier. Some persons in the street were wounded.3
And thus began one of the strangest episodes of the Second Empire, beginning with an assassination attempt, and nearly ending in hostilities between two staunch friends and allies, Louis Napoléon’s France and Victoria’s England, and in so doing unexpectedly bringing Prime Minister Palmerston’s government crashing down in its wake.
* * *
The triumphant if tumultuous year of peace and birth for Napoleon III and France, after a relatively calming summer’s respite at Biarritz, had drifted into a calmer 1857, the highlight of which included a visit by Louis Napoléon and Eugénie to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at their summer retreat of Osborne, on the Isle of Wight. The results of the Crimean War, concluded back in March 1856, were discussed during that visit, along with French hopes for a revision of the peace terms of 1815 and of a Europe with new horizons. The visit also afforded the two royal families an opportunity to deepen their friendship, especially between Victoria and Eugénie. This included discussion of the preparations of the forthcoming marriage of the queen’s eldest daughter, Victoria, with Crown Prince Friedrich, the son of the Prussian king of the same name and, indirectly, its effect on Franco-Prussian politics in the future. When the two ruling families separated later in August, the relations between England and France were warmer and closer than at any time in centuries. A great historical gap had been bridged; the future looked most auspicious. Then came the events of January 1858, again standing the world on its head and shaking the Anglo-French relationship to its limits, leaving this new bridge dangling over the channel.
* * *
On Thursday January 14, 1858, Louis Napoléon, Eugénie, and their party left the Tuileries in three carriages for a gala charity evening at the Italian Opera in the Rue le Peletier. Neither the emperor nor the empress liked opera or classical music of any kind, and Eugénie, who was tone deaf, found most music acutely “painful,” except for Spanish folk dances. The emperor, who as a rule disdained security details, including the presence of bodyguards, did agree to a strong police presence for public occasions such as a night at the opera. In addition, the imperial carriage was escorted by twenty-four mounted lancers of the elite Imperial Guard. Tonight’s program included arias and acts from a variety of pieces, including Gioachino Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, the popular Daniel Auber’s Gustave III, and Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda. It was afterward pointed out that Rossini’s work dealt with insurrection, Auber’s with the assassination of a Swedish monarch, and Donizetti’s with the execution of the queen of Scotland. It was almost as if the dramatic tragedy about to unfold had been choreographed by the audacious Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini himself.
The imperial calèche carrying Louis Napoléon, Empress Eugénie, and aide-de-camp General Roguet turned into the narrow Rue le Peletier leading to the Italian Opera. “Last evening [the fourteenth of January], at half-past 8 o’clock just as their Majesties … arrived at the Opera-house, three explosions were heard which proceeded from hollow projectiles,” the Times reported. The usual large number of sightseers had crowded around the portico of the theater lit up by “gas stands,” to catch a glimpse of the beautiful empress in her diamonds and of course the popular Napoléon III in black cape and silk top hat. The police and the Paris municipal guard had considerable difficulty in keeping the crowd away from the carriage.
The first grenade was thrown under the horses as the carriage approached the theater; when “the coachman immediately tried to whip up the horses, one … fell to the ground,” and the other one was badly wounded. A second grenade exploded, and then a third “thrown with more precision, falling beneath the carriage itself and burst with tremendous force, smashing part of it in pieces,” hurtling it against the wall of the building. A piece of shrapnel hit General Roguet, who was sitting across from the emperor, in the nape of the neck, his blood splattering onto Eugénie’s white crinoline gown. “The Emperor’s hat was perforated by a projectile … [and he] received a slight cut on the side of the nose by a piece of glass from the carriage window. Another piece struck the Empress in the corner of the left eye.” Police Superintendent Hébert was dashing to the coach to warn the emperor just as the third bomb ignited, shrapnel hitting him in the head and throwing him down.4
“All the under part of and front of the carriage had the appearance of being blown to pieces.… A man was seen rushing to the carriage window with a dagger and revolver,” but was tackled by a sergent de ville, who was stabbed by the assailant. “For some minutes all was confusion,” and then “a squadron of mounted Paris guards from the Minime Barracks in the Place Royale came up at a gallop. Several of the Lancers of the escort who were nearest the carriage were seriously wounded and one or two … killed,” read the initial report.5
Fifty-six pieces of shrapnel had struck the carriage. Louis Napoléon once again escaped with his life. The shrapnel tearing through his hat narrowly missed taking off the back of his head, while Eugénie barely escaped blindness or glass in her brain, so forceful was the blast. Nineteen of the twenty-four lancers were wounded, and one killed, and twenty of their horses were killed or wounded, kicking in all directions and crying out, adding to the noise and mayhem. “Two of the three footmen [standing behind the carriage] were [also] wounded,” as were “a considerable number of people assembled before the doors of the theatre.” The windows of the adjoining houses “were blown out up to the fourth story.… and the gas pipes running along the façade of the Opera were blown off by the explosion,” as were all the street lamps. “It was dark and cold,” the only light now coming from within the theater. “The canopy over the entrance was torn, and the pavement … covered with blood.… Of the six doors, five are completely broken.”
Louis Napoléon and Eugénie may have been shaken and in shock, but they did not show it as they passed through the fragmented doors of the Opera. “You should have witnessed the burst of enthusiasm which greeted them on their appearance in the Imperial box—an enthusiasm that rose to the most intense pitch when the Empress advanced to salute the assembly, her dress and cheek stained with blood.” The orchestra struck up the unofficial anthem of the First Empire written by Louis Napoléon’s mother, Hortense, “Partant Pour la Syrie” (Departing for Syria), accompanied by rousing applause.6
* * *
Afterward it was discovered that “five minutes prior to the explosions, [Superintendent] Hébert … had recognized an Italian named [Colonel] Pieri [an escaped prisoner] who had lately returned to Paris with a false passport … and arrested him” just before the theater. He was carrying “a six-barrelled revolver, a long dagger and a bomb.”7 The inspector had then rushed back to warn Louis Napoléon when the first grenade exploded. In fact Hébert had been here that evening because of a series of strong warnings received by the police prefecture over the past several weeks about some sort of assassination attempt to be made by Mazzini’s men.
“It is considered very extraordinary how, with police agents so often searching [suspicious persons], that heavy projectiles of the kind could be safely carried about, and how the [well armed] assassins … could arrive [undetected] so very near the execution of their designs,” the Times reporter pointed out. This was a question Louis Napoléon himself put to a flustered Prefect of Police Piétri. The men turned out to be four Italian “republicans,” some wearing disguises and using false names: Pieri—a former senior army officer and personal ADC to Garibaldi—Ruddio, Gomez, and Orsini. Felice Orsini, their leader, meticulously attired in a smart frock coat and white gloves, had been the former right-hand man in Giuseppe Mazzini’s violent secret revolutionary society, Young Italy. They had all arrived from London on the eighth of January and were lodging in two different hotels just up the street. In their rooms a stash of pistols and knives was discovered, along with “270 francs in gold.” The bombs brought from London were “four inches in diameter … made of cast iron in the shape of a pear.” Their contents: hundreds of nails, iron fragments, bullets, and gunpowder.8
Following the performance, Louis Napoléon and Eugénie returned under heavy cavalry escort to the Tuileries. They went to their young son’s bed, Lord Cowley informed Lord Malmesbury, and kneeling down “at the poor child’s side … burst into tears, the emperor crying most bitterly.” Meanwhile, back in the Rue le Peletier, seven surgeons were working throughout the night in a makeshift surgery at a nearby apothecary’s. “The Emperor went this morning at 8 o’clock to the Hôpital Lariboisière, accompanied by an aide-de-camp, to visit the wounded,” the Times noted on Friday the fifteenth.9 That afternoon Louis Napoléon and Eugénie drove along the Champs-Élysées, attended by only one officer and no military escort whatsoever. As the later police prefect Maupas put it, Louis Napoléon’s “personal courage and … sense of fatalism rendered him quite immune to any fear for his life,” as indeed he was to prove time and again.
The captured men were brought to the recently completed Mazas prison and later to the Conciergerie. Justice Minister Napoléon Boyer appointed Chaix d’Estange, the public prosecutor, to take charge, while Examining Magistrate Treilhard interrogated the four men. The trial was then set for the Assize Court in the first fortnight of February. The Times correspondent denounced this “infamous attempt to assassinate the Emperor,” as did Le Journal des Débats, La Presse, L’Univers, and every other newspaper in France, reflecting national outrage and grief. “It is believed that the investigation into the affair will be promptly terminated.” The London paper reminded its readers of a similarly bloody attack by an “infernal machine” against First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte at the Opéra [then in the Place Louvois] back in December 1800. The final police report recorded eight killed outright and 156 wounded, including men, women, children, police, and lancers. “In the annals of crime, there is no deed blacker than that which was perpetrated on Thursday [January 14] in front of the Italian Opera,” the English editorial concluded.10
* * *
Prefect of Police Pierre Piétri’s very intensive investigation was efficient and conclusive, and the accused, defended by Jules Favre and others, were duly tried on February 25–26, 1858, found guilty, and moved to La Roquette Prison, on the other side of the Place de la Bastille. Orsini and Pieri alone were condemned to be executed by the guillotine, the other two given life sentences.
The whole conspiracy had been concocted and directed by the handsome, bearded, meticulously attired thirty-eight-year-old Felice Orsini, a native of the Romagna near Forli, where Louis Napoléon’s elder brother had died while serving as a member of the Carbonari to free a united Italy. After reading law briefly at the University of Bologna, Orsini had participated in an insurrection against the Austrian army of occupation. Captured in the fighting and arrested by the Austrians, he was released two years later, only to join Mazzini and his forces in 1848. In early 1849, Orsini had fought in Rome against papal forces until their brief new republic was suppressed by the French. In 1855, he was again imprisoned by the Austrians, escaping in 1856 and fleeing to London to resume his terrorist activities. There in 1857 he met a former French naval surgeon, Simon Bernard, who was assisted by an English chemist (who later fled the country). Together they manufactured four heavy “contact” grenades or bombs. Orsini also recruited the other Italian “patriots” to assist him in executing his plan to assassinate Louis Napoléon. Though heavily armed, they had passed through both English and French customs unchallenged and undetected, reaching Paris on January 8, 1858.11
* * *
On the revelation that this was not only another Italian attack—after the Pianori attempt three years earlier—but that the assassins had just come from London, where they had been fully armed, the French public exploded with age-old hatred for England. They let this happen! For Louis Napoléon, on the other hand, it was almost an insult; the culprits were Italians, the very people whose cause he and his brother had loyally supported against the Austrians in his youth. In public, however, he lashed out at the English for having protected the culprits and then permitted them to travel to France to carry out their dastardly attack. “Does one offer hospitality to assassins?” Anglophobe foreign minister Walewski chided Ambassador Persigny in London. “Should English legislation be allowed to favour such conspiracies … these flagrant acts!” “We had a gloomy Cabinet meeting to-day thinking of the universally dreadful consequences [of] this crime,” Clarendon explained just before handing over the Foreign Office to Malmesbury. “I can see but one feeling predominant here [in France],” Lord Cowley answered, “and that is hatred of England.”12 “Irritation against England is at fever pitch,” Count de Viel-Castel echoed. Meanwhile in London’s Hyde Park, violent counter-demonstrators were denouncing France and calling for French blood.13
Caught in the middle, disturbed and under great pressure from all sides, Louis Napoléon addressed an angry Senate on Tuesday the second of February, reflecting his frustration with England, while following it privately with a most conciliatory letter to Queen Victoria.14 Meanwhile, his half brother, Auguste de Morny, convening the Corps Legislatif, joined the mob demanding English blood. Louis Napoléon immediately created a Privy Council, empowered to form as a Regency Council, “should events require it.” The next attempt on his life might be more successful.15 While, unusually, Morny was demanding vengeance against England, Persigny just as unusually was pleading loudly for moderation and the necessity of avoiding insults and hostilities with London. Nor did Louis Napoléon’s recent orders for dozens of powerful new armored steam-driven warships, exclusive of a crash order for seventy-five steam-powered troop transports capable of landing 40,000 men, help reduce fears of a rumored French invasion. (The transports were in fact intended for the sole purpose of transferring reinforcements for the current campaign in Algeria. It had not occurred to Louis Napoléon that Victoria or Palmerston would seriously think he was intending to land the French army on English shores.) The bridge of friendship with Queen Victoria so laboriously constructed over the channel had been smashed with the first grenade.
* * *
For once Ambassador Persigny, in the English capital, was aware, however, that there was much more to the world than France and French anxieties. What the French government and press seemed to forget at this moment in 1858 was that England was much more preoccupied with, indeed still reeling from, the continuing great Indian Mutiny that had broken out in May 1857 as the war office and navy were expediting all available military units to Bombay and Calcutta. Thousands of British troops, civilians, women, children, and even babies had been butchered or wounded by rampaging Indians, and some 100,000 mutinying Indian troops and civilians were in turn eventually killed by British troops. Most of the London press coverage throughout 1858, therefore, was understandably preoccupied with the immensity of the tragedy in India and the very real possible loss of that crown colony itself, where some 40,000 British troops were attempting to regain control of 300,000 armed sepoys. And should India fall, the repercussions in the City and entire British economy were incalculable. This was something the fulminating Walewski chose to ignore altogether. France had not been England’s only concern in the early months of 1858.16
The French doctor providing the bomb and funds for Orsini was tried that April at the Old Bailey and completely exonerated by the criminal court. Everyone was dismayed and shocked, and no one more so than an increduous Queen Victoria, declaring that the verdict left her “with indescribable stupefaction.” “This acquittal of Dr. Bernard is a very painful business … [and] a disgrace to our country,” Lord Malmesbury, Clarendon’s successor at the foreign office, agreed. But as the veteran statesman Lord Clarendon pointed out, “Let it be remembered also that a large number of desperate Italians now in this country have been deported here [in the first place] by the French Government [including Pieri and Orsini],” where they had been obliged to seek refuge.17
The tension in France grew throughout February and March when Orsini wrote personally appealing to Louis Napoléon on behalf of his cause. “Sire, do not reject the words of a patriot.… Free Italy and the benediction of twenty-five million people will accompany your name to posterity!”18 “Fancy the Emperor telling me yesterday that he felt the great sympathy for Orsini,” an appalled Cowley recounted to Clarendon, “and the empress [Eugénie] is even begging him to pardon him!”19
A furious Morny went over to the Tuileries and read the riot act, telling his brother to get a grip on himself. The public demanded vengeance, justice, and if the emperor did not act decisively now, he would lose an enormous amount of respect and prestige in the country. A most anxious Ambassador Cowley finally intervened. “I told him … what I believe to be the truth, that any weakness in dealing with Orsini would have the very worst effect.” Undeterred, assassins would continue to come. And then on Sunday March 14, 1858, Viel-Castel recorded: “Orsini and Pieri were executed [by guillotine] yesterday.” It was over and no one was more remorseful than Louis Napoléon, or as Cowley put it, he was “regularly bitten by his miscreant.”20
* * *
But there had also been another victim of the Orsini plot. Reacting to it and the criticism that England had harbored and aided the four Italian assassins, Prime Minister Palmerston had taken immediate action by introducing the Conspiracy to Murder Act, with the full blessing of Queen Victoria. England must not be used as a base for terrorists. This bill presented to Parliament allowed for the prosecution of any individual conspiring in England to kill someone in another country. At the last minute Lord John Russell and others unexpectedly swung against Palmerston, however, defeating the bill by just a few votes.
Back in France Louis Napoléon demanded a new General Security Act to reinforce an 1848 law to permit the expulsion of dangerous foreigners. But for all their outrage with the English, it took all Morny’s arm-twisting to get this new “aliens bill” through Parliament (even General MacMahon voted against it). Although narrowly passing, it was never applied, which of course did not prevent these same French politicians from weighing into the outrageous English for doing precisely the same thing.
That very day, February 19, 1858, Viscount Palmerston paid the price for failing to pass his Conspiracy to Murder Act and was obliged to resign, returning the seals of office to Queen Victoria. For the second time in his career he had been forced out of office as a direct result of actions related to Louis Napoléon and his Second Empire. The Orsini conspiracy added a whole new dimension to this latest tumultuous ongoing Italian opera.
* * *
Whether Napoléon III would acknowledge it or not, the Orsini plot served as a powerful catalyst in pushing France into another dramatic act of foreign intervention. The various different Italian states, duchies, and principalities wanted independence, some from papal political interference and most from the Austrian occupation of the northern half of the country. As for Mazzini, he would continue to send out his assassins against Napoleon III until all foreigners, including the French troops occupying Rome and protecting the pope, were out of the country. As Ambassador Cowley had remarked with some anxiety throughout the late spring and early summer of 1858, Louis Napoléon looked physically and emotionally shattered as a result of the pressure on him from the peace talks, the constant military demands, and the unrelenting monthly arrival of casualties from Algeria and the Kabyle.
But above all, ever since the recent plots against him uncovered by Police Prefect Piétri, it was the unresolved vexing problem of Italy that most preoccupied Louis Napoléon. It was not just the constant possibility of terrorist violence, physical threats against himself and Eugénie, which he simply shrugged off with almost a sense of philosophical inevitability, but the threat against his long-awaited heir and with him the very continuation of his empire, that was tormenting him and now focusing his resolution. No one could deny his undisguised lifelong love and singular attachment to Italy and its people. He too wanted to rid that country of the Austrians. It was the Orsini attempt, or rather the slaughter and dramatic fright it had created in the heart of the French capital, and curiously enough the guillotining of Orsini himself, that had hardened his resolve and commitment to act.
In the third week of July, Louis Napoléon dispatched his closest friend and confidant, Henri Conneau, officially in charge of the entire medical service of the imperial household, on a delicate, top-secret, spur-of-the-moment mission to Turin—unknown either to Persigny or his foreign minister—to meet with King Victor Emmanuel and Prime Minister Cavour. Louis Napoléon summoned Cavour to meet with him urgently, alone, in less than a week’s time. The place designated was the isolated spa of Plombières south of Épinal in the heart of the Vosges Mountains, where they were to draft their tentative plans for a new Italy. Louis Napoléon had had long talks with Cavour during earlier visits to France, and the two men had got on surprisingly well together. They held the same views about the role of the church and the pope, and shared the same overriding desire to see Italy freed of the Austrian occupation once and for all. Curiously enough, however, there appeared to be no interest in or even discussion of the possibility of creating a unified kingdom of Italy. Their sole aim was to establish “a country” composed of different states and regions, all under the loose “presidency” of the pope. Moreover, this pope would have reduced territorial claims and powers.
* * *
Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, was the son of an old aristocratic family of Turin, his father one of the leaders of the new “Risorgimento”—resurrection or revival of Italy.21 Unusual in that Roman Catholic country, his mother came from a Protestant family of Geneva. The short, stout, bespectacled Cavour was privately tutored, spoiled, undisciplined, and a lazy student. Preferring hunting to books and without any strong guiding interests, at the age of fourteen he was placed as a cadet with the army and later served with the engineers of the Sardinian army. Frustrated with military life, at the age of twenty-one Cavour resigned his commission. Restless, still without aim or interests, at the age of twenty-four he began traveling, spending more than two months in Paris meeting pro-Bourbon political leaders and attending parliamentary sessions, then going on to England, a country that had long fascinated him. His basic intelligence and curiosity were finally focusing and maturing as his interests narrowed to national politics and administration. Cavour met with leaders of Westminster and “the City” and made extensive visits to hospitals, prisons, the clubs of Pall Mall, the House of Commons, and manufacturing centers as far as the Midlands. All the while he had an uninterrupted series of mistresses, but was destined never to marry. Returning to France, he studied at the Sorbonne for a while and met many of the famous literary giants of the time, including Alexandre Dumas, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Prosper Mérimée, Théophile Gautier, and politicians including Adolphe Thiers, Louis-Mathieu Molé, Auguste de Morny (at the Palais Bourbon), and Morny’s father, General de Flahaut. Cavour also visited Belgium, various Germanic states, and Switzerland. His family having always been officially associated with the French ever since Napoléon I, Cavour remained strongly pro-French the rest of his life. Politically, he was drawn to the activists demanding Italian independence from Austria and he joined Mazzini’s secret society, Young Italy, for a while, though later broke away from it because of its violence. He preferred negotiation and political process to assassination and bombs. After 1848, Cavour began an intensive political career associated with the young king of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II (1820–1878).22
Taking office in Turin as prime minister of Sardinia (joining mainland Piedmont and Savoy with Sardinia), an office he held from 1852 to 1859, he supported the Risorgimento, and the abolition of the privileges of the clergy. He openly confronted the expansive power and privilege of the Vatican, while arresting the archbishop of Turin. Like Louis Napoléon in France, Cavour desired to bring Piedmont out of the eighteenth century, encouraging the construction of its first railways (including the Mont Cenis railway tunnel) and the introduction of a modern steam-powered navy. He also successfully negotiated commercial treaties or customs unions with Belgium, Greece, the German states, and Austria. During an official visit to London in 1852, he met with Cobden, Disraeli, and Gladstone, as well as with Lords Clarendon, Lansdowne, and Palmerston, thereby extending his political contacts at the highest levels.
Appointed foreign minister as well in January 1855, he concluded new alliances with England and France, while of course representing Sardinia at the Paris peace conference on March 30, 1856, that ended the Crimean War. And such was the situation when in July 1858 he found himself suddenly summoned to France by Louis Napoléon. His king, Victor Emmanuel, ten years his junior, was a close family friend, but also largely a dolt. Towering over Cavour with his powerful physique, of which he was inordinately vain, and boasting a long, thick, upturned mustache of royal proportions, that king of Sardinia was more interested in the latest conquest to his bed than politics, and for the most part he rubber-stamped Cavour’s political aims.
* * *
Ostensibly the French emperor went to the thermal spa of Plombières in the heart of the Vosges Mountains to escape the heat of the French capital. But unknown to anyone in Paris (except Henri Conneau), there on the twenty-first of July Louis Napoléon secretly met with a very determined prime minister Cavour. The result of this intense nearly five-hour conference was an agreement for war. In brief, Louis Napoléon would commit upward of 200,000 French troops in support of the much smaller Sardinian army to oust the Austrians from the whole of northern Italy, from Milan and Lombardy to Venice and the Adriatic Sea. In return, the French would be rewarded with the miniature mountain kingdom of Savoy, just below Geneva. There was also vague allusion to Nice as well, but nothing conclusive. With the Austrians out, they would agree to make the pope some sort of figurehead president, over a loosely formed Italian confederation. There was neither interest in nor mention of a unified Italy. On the other hand, Victor Emmanuel was to do everything in his power to prevent Mazzini from exporting his terrorists to France. This Plombières accord would be sealed by the marriage of Louis Napoléon’s first cousin, Prince Jérôme, to Victor Emmanuel’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Clotilde, immediately after the signing of a formal defense pact between France and Sardinia. No time frame was stipulated for the eventual signing of that military pact.
In any event, in this Plombières agreement, Louis Napoléon committed his country to another war, unless Austria could be persuaded to make a peaceful withdrawal from Italy. After all, this was the only reason Victor Emmanuel had sent troops to support the French in the Crimean War, for a quid pro quo in Italy. Moreover, the ex-Carbonaro Louis Napoléon was finally coming to grips with his lifelong obsession, shared earlier with Hortense, of one day seeing “a free Italy,” and his brother’s tragic death would be avenged at long last. Meanwhile, the final casualties from the Crimea continued to reach Toulon. As for the stream of dead and wounded arriving at that port from the shores of Algeria, where their own war of colonial conquest was still raging, such news would be suppressed altogether in the French press. France was no democracy, and Louis Napoléon, despite his genial smile and warmhearted sentiments, remained the most powerful autocratic ruler of any European country, apart from the Russian tsar. As for the endless war in Algeria begun back in 1830, it was no more popular than that in the Crimea had been.
Despite his repeated peaceful protests in public that, unlike Uncle Napoleon, he had no interest in conquest or war, Louis Napoléon was secretly committing the uninformed French people to just that, another war, enormous new drains on the French treasury, the inevitable new war taxes, and of course more French corpses on yet another foreign battlefield. Moreover, this time he promised Cavour personally to lead a French army of 200,000 men into battle.23