“I never had any wish to undertake anything that he was not part of.” 1
—LOUIS NAPOLÉON ON THE DEATH OF HIS BROTHER, NAPOLÉON LOUIS
“Don’t you realize the revival of the Empire is at hand!” 2
—GILBERT FIALIN
On his return to Arenenberg in August 1831, Louis Napoléon found a crate sent by his father, including his brother Napoléon Louis’s gold watch, his portrait, and another of his favorite horse. There was also a letter from his father discussing the details of his brother’s testamentary dispositions, a subject Louis Napoléon found most distressing. “Alas! Since it is necessary to deal with such a sad subject as my brother’s estate, I can tell you quite simply that you have handled it very well,” he wrote, adding that he wanted nothing for himself, apart from some personal mementos of no real value. “As for me, I have no interest whatsoever in any money that comes from such a source.”3 “I have lost the one person I loved the most in the world,” he confided now to his widowed sister-in-law, Charlotte Bonaparte, the daughter of Uncle Joseph. “I never had any wish to undertake anything that he was not a part of.”4
After returning to the schloss, a restless Prince Louis Napoléon rejoined his regiment at Thun while Hortense proceeded to visit her cousin Stéphanie, the Grand Duchess of Baden, at Mannheim, where she received a letter postmarked Milan and just forwarded from Arenenberg. In it she learned from Antoinette Arese that her son, Francesco, was, like Louis Napoléon earlier, still a fugitive from the Austrian rulers of northern Italy, and was probably en route to Switzerland. Would Hortense be so kind as to provide him with a refuge at Arenenberg?
“I can well appreciate better than anyone a mother’s distress under such circumstances,” she replied, “and I shall be only too happy to allay such worries by taking care of your son and seeing to all his needs.” As she pointed out, knowing only too well from personal experience that such young men of his age “are filled with all sorts of extravagant ideas, I shall do my best to calm him down.” She had had some success, she felt, in the case of Louis Napoléon, “in persuading him that it is necessary to resign oneself to the fact that there is no such thing as perfection in life, and that one must settle for peace of mind in lieu of wild pipe dreams.” She was instructing the staff at Arenenberg “to welcome your son.” Louis Napoléon was frequently away at the Thun military school, or at his late uncle Eugène de Beauharnais’s neighboring estate of Schloss Eugensberg (inherited by his daughter, Princess Eugène Hortense, after her father’s premature death in 1824). “My son will be more than delighted to have a good companion with him during the [forthcoming] hunting season. And I hope that our peaceful solitude will permit him to forget some of his problems.”5
Coming at this time with the household in full mourning over the loss of his brother, nevertheless Louis Napoléon warmly welcomed Francesco, a young man of his own age and background who had also been a friend of his late brother. Shared experiences and death brought the two young men quickly together, and Arese soon became Louis Napoléon’s surrogate brother. They hunted and rode together, and later went to London on a brief journey. Hortense was as good as her word and treated him like a member of the family and was later to leave a small memento in her testament to the cheerful, outgoing Count Arese, who had become “like a son to me.”6
But when Louis Napoléon’s apparently jealous father discovered the presence of Arese at Arenenberg, he grew furious, finding him “unsuitable,” and demanded his immediate departure; the prince was simply staggered. “It is truly most painful to find you like this yet again. No matter what I do you are angry.… Count Arese comes from one of the finest families of Milan. He is very quiet, very reliable and, what is more, he is very attached to me, and I in return like him very much. You seem to forget, Father, that I am twenty-five years old and no longer a child.”7
As for the two young men, they had their differences, but differences they mutually respected. Unlike Arese, Louis Napoléon was both a lifelong Mason and a staunch supporter of the Catholic Church. The count was to dedicate his life to fighting for only one cause: the creation of an independent kingdom of Italy, freed of the Austrians and the Vatican’s control of the Papal States. Although coming from a strongly pro-French family, Francesco Arese refused to get personally involved in any aspect of French politics and later avoided any participation in or support of Louis Napoléon’s plots to overthrow the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe. But Arese remained rigorously faithful to Louis Napoléon, a veritable brother, as future events were to prove. Arese was to stay at Arenenberg until 1835.
* * *
Life resumed its usual pace at Arenenberg in 1832, but there were now signs that Louis Napoléon was gaining some international attention. Juliette Récamier, first Joséphine’s friend and now Hortense’s, arrived one day with none other than the celebrated statesman, diplomat, and literary figure of the day, François Auguste René de Chateaubriand. After an unusually long afternoon at Arenenberg, he described his young host: “Prince Louis is a studious, educated young man. He is solemn and is governed by a sense of honor.” Juliette Récamier found him “polished, distinguished looking and taciturn.”8
A delegation of Polish aristocrats arrived at the schloss to offer the crown of their troubled country, which he gratefully declined. On the thirtieth of April 1832, Louis Napoléon was made a naturalized citizen at Thun, while beginning to champ at the bit to return “to my own country, France.”
Then his life was changed in a flash with the startling news of the death in Vienna on the twenty-second of July of Napoléon I’s blond, nearly six foot, twenty-one-year-old son, Napoléon II—Napoléon François Joseph Charles, the king of Rome and Duke of Reichstadt. The official alleged cause of this suspicious death was tuberculosis. A bewildered Louis Napoléon now found himself next in the line of succession to claim the largely symbolic Napoleonic crown. (Both brothers Joseph and Louis had renounced their rights to that dignity, and of course Lucien had been excluded by Napoléon himself.) In consequence, Prince Louis Napoléon received an invitation in the autumn of that year, 1832, from Uncle Joseph Bonaparte, then in London, to visit him. He was accompanied by Francesco Arese. The meeting did not pass off well and he never met his uncle again.
“I fully realize that I owe a great deal to my present position because my name is Bonaparte,” he confided to a friend, “but up to this point nothing to my own achievements. Aristocrat by birth, democrat by heart and belief, I owe everything to hereditary election.” He was now bent on acting decisively in his own right so, as he put it, he might be “touched by one of the last dying rays of the sun emanating from St. Helena.”9
And so the days passed, 1833 much like the previous year, with the exception of the publication of Louis Napoléon’s first books, Political Thoughts and Political and Military Considerations on Switzerland, intended to express his personal philosophy while also praising Napoléon I’s rule and his father’s, King Louis’s, administration of Holland. Proudly sending the first copy to his father, he looked forward to his reply, only to receive a stinging rebuke: “Ought the political policies of the head of your family, of a man such as the Emperor, be superficially judged by a mere young man of twenty-four!” He further denounced “the many falsehoods you have published on the perceived reasons behind my personal conduct of State Affairs [while king of Holland].”10 Louis Napoléon was simply shattered.
Battered but not defeated, in the following year Louis Napoléon published his Artillery Manual, for which the Swiss army congratulated him with promotion from lieutenant to captain. Delighted, Louis Napoléon sent a copy of the book with the good news to his father who, as a general officer in his own right, he felt would heartily approve. “We are going to have to come to some sort of understanding, if we are to remain good friends [author’s italics],” read another drubbing from Tuscany. “I am very happy to learn that you merit the estime and consideration of the Swiss.… but for the rest … I must ask you to heed my words, and I cannot say this often enough,” he harangued Captain Bonaparte. “Under no circumstances … must one serve in the army of a foreign country. To be sure the military profession is the finest and most honorable.… so long as one is defending one’s own country; otherwise … it is the most contemptible of all.” He knew his son no doubt was tired of these incessant criticisms; he added, “nevertheless I cannot but repeat yet again what I believe to be my duty to point out to you.”11
So bitterly stung this time was Louis Napoléon that he ceased all correspondence for the next six months, only replying in 1835.12 “Mon cher Papa, I receive your harsh words so very often that I should be quite used to them by now,” he wrote. “Regardless, every new reproach by you does indeed wound me, and as painfully as on the very first occasion.” His father had also criticized him for donating funds for the construction of a local village school, for donating a cannon to the Swiss army, and then for his poor handwriting. The growing frequency and brutality of these senseless, humiliating, wounding onslaughts was just too much for Louis Napoléon, as the ex-king attempted to continue to dominate a son who was feverishly struggling to escape his grasp. And then a stranger knocked on the door who would prove the means for hastening this escape.
* * *
In July 1835, a young man arrived at Arenenberg with a letter of introduction from Uncle Joseph Bonaparte, whom he had recently met in London. His name was Jean Gilbert Victor Fialin. Slender, dapper, with his sandy hairy falling over his brow, a neat, well-trimmed military mustache, and refined features, Fialin was presentable and spoke surprisingly well given his modest background. But it would have taken a veritable soothsayer to predict that this otherwise unprepossessing chap, the son of a provincial tax collector from Limoges, would one day become Emperor Napoléon III’s public relations and party manager. Now at the age of twenty-seven, after serving as a non-commissioned officer in the army of Charles X, his transition to Louis Philippe’s command had not been a success and he was cashiered for his outspoken “republicanism.” Fialin had then taken up journalism, where he showed a real flair for writing in the popular press. With an inordinately strong ego and a determined drive to succeed, the ex-sergeant thus entered Arenenberg, and Louis Napoléon’s life, permanently.
Fialin was a recently converted “Bonapartist,” a fanatic dedicated to the resurrection of the Napoleonic legacy of the magnificent First Empire. “Don’t you realize that the revival of the Empire is at hand, that it is imminent and even inevitable!”13 Fialin argued in the press and wherever he could find an audience, with all the fervor of a reborn Christian at a fundamentalist revival. Fialin, or Persigny, as he affected to be called, had several qualities that appealed to Prince Louis Napoléon, despite Hortense’s strong personal objections to the man. He was subservient and knew his place before the aristocracy—the prince appreciated that; he had compelling drive and fire when preaching the Napoleonic cause; he understood the military world and military discipline; and he was capable of undying loyalty to a superior and a cause he wanted to believe in. Furthermore, his newspaper articles established his possibilities as a most effective public relations officer … and finally—with no other source of revenue in sight—he was eager to start work for this holy cause forthwith.
For Louis Napoléon, alone at Arenenberg throughout 1835 and 1836, with neither his late brother nor Francesco Arese (now back in Milan) on hand, Gilbert Persigny—as he will be called hereafter—by his diligence and daily presence now filled a formal place in his new political quest and daily existence. Hereafter he was the prince’s inseparable shadow every step of the way, determined to change things in France and above all to alter the prince’s life beyond all his dreams.14