Arriving in Marseille in 1863 while touring France’s southern provinces, Hippolyte Taine recorded his impressions of the recent building projects that had begun to transfigure the landscape of the port city significantly. The new monumental and sculpted houses lining the streets appeared, he claimed, “even more vast and magnificent than in Paris,” outfitting the Mediterranean trading hub with a palatial affluence. Marseille exemplified the sudden boom in public prosperity stimulated by Emperor Napoleon III’s Bonapartist government brought to power in 1851. While certainly not a Bonapartist sympathizer and commonly professing an indifference to politics, Taine was inclined to see the new Napoleon as a progressive and modern leader in light of the transformations occurring throughout the country at midcentury. “The emperor understands France and his century better than any of his predecessors,” he candidly admitted.1
Such an impression derived, in part, from the rigorous self-fashioning of Bonapartist ideologues and propagandists who persistently drew attention to the regime’s patently “modern” orientation in their public speeches and writings. Coming to power through an illegal coup d’état that overthrew the Second Republic, the Second Empire did not enjoy the security bestowed by popular legitimacy. From the start, the government was compelled to silence opponents and craft an identity for itself that might compensate for its questionable legality. National referendums carried out under universal manhood suffrage and ardent appeals to patriotism were employed to provide the regime with a semblance of legitimacy. However, it was Napoleon III’s commitment to modernizing and rejuvenating French society that would remain a centerpiece of his government’s political identity over the next two decades, providing a distinct discourse and rhetoric that was as attractive to elites as it was to the masses.
At its most elemental level, politics is a langue that seeks to mobilize ideas and construct a certain interpretation of reality, and Bonapartist modernity was no different in this respect.2 Inheriting a country destabilized by chronic partisan divisions and social antagonisms, the architects of the Second Empire sought to assuage fears over France’s political future by drawing the nation’s fractious political elite and apprehensive business classes to a moderate government devoted to national prosperity and order. Although Bonapartist rhetoric at times exhibited a brazenly populist and nationalist nature, this populism never precluded cooperation with elites whose support was deemed essential to the regime’s success. During the years of the Second Empire, modernity figured prominently in the new tenor set by Bonapartist spokesmen with terms like “modern society” and “modern civilization” saturating French public and political discourse. This common vocabulary and language conformed to the egalitarian impulses of post-1848 French political culture, offering a vision of society that was both universal and utilitarian. Yet it was also consistent with specific elite interests and power relations. In selling their vision of a modern French society to the public, Napoleon III and his supporters devised a means of representing and actively promoting particular social and economic interests in a political culture that celebrated equality and popular sovereignty.
Consolidating this identity entailed closely associating the actions of the government with its alleged modern character, obliging Bonapartists to represent and justify state policies as acts of “modernization.” The July Monarchy had initiated a modicum of industrial and economic programs during the 1840s that catalyzed the boom years of the 1850s.3 However, it was the Second Empire that received credit for many of these achievements as imperial spokesmen hailed the government’s modernizing initiative as an unprecedented break with the past. Under Bonapartist rule, the advent of steam power, the adoption of new technologies in the manufacturing industries, and the laying of some thirteen thousand kilometers of operational rail line provided the impetus for systemic economic growth throughout the 1850s.4 The state played a decisive role in this achievement by providing subsidies for manufacturers and railroad companies, carrying out large-scale public works, furnishing favorable terms for the acquisition of credit and contracting good relations with industrialists and major financial houses.5 Through these policies, the government balanced elite interests with “the moral improvement and material well-being of the greatest number,” as the emperor boasted.6 Improvements in infrastructure and public utilities figured prominently in the modernizing and civilizing goals enunciated by the regime, illustrating the dynamic interplay between rhetoric, ideology, and policy that characterized imperial politics.
The building projects that Taine found so astonishing marked the most dramatic and controversial endeavor to instantiate this modernizing narrative. Over the nearly two decades that spanned the life of the Second Empire, statesmen employed a variety of forums and symbolic gestures in demonstrating the empire’s supposed modern orientation. Building projects, exhibitions at industrial fairs, peons to the state’s rail-building projects, and support for industrial development in the countryside all played an integral role in cultivating the modern and civilizing identity desired by the government. The talk of “civilizing” and “developing” that had characterized the liberal imperialism of the 1840s was being turned back on the French metropole, and this correlation between national and colonial objectives was made evident as the state’s modernizing agenda progressed. Although the Second Empire demonstrated a preference for European trade and growth over colonial trade, France’s new North African territory was also subject to industrial and urban development during the same period.7 Presenting itself as a patron of French industry, the imperial government embraced the industrial ethos of the mid-nineteenth century and proudly flaunted its efforts to bring the material benefits of modern civilization to both France and its Algerian possession separated by a body of water increasingly considered nothing more than a “French lake.” As one colon journalist optimistically professed shortly after the new imperial regime was declared, “the time of monumental things has come for Algeria.” 8
For a government vesting its authority and power in the promise of a new and modern France, state policies became the concrete expression of this supposed modernity, equating the state’s social and economic objectives with a process of modernization. From the act of modernizing sprang the raison d’être of the imperial regime and the authoritarian state apparatus over which it presided. In its objectives and scope, Bonapartist modernity constituted a national-imperial program and ideology that aimed to dazzle and entice just as much as transform the nation. The Second Empire presented itself as a forward-looking regime with an ambitious vision for the nation. Under the circumstances, modernity could be nothing short of monumental.
A perceptive observer of nineteenth-century politics and society, the statesman Alexis de Tocqueville had few illusions when it came to diagnosing the ills of his country. The tensions generated by the French Revolution had never been adequately resolved. Revolts, coups, and civil strife persisted, leaving the nation acutely “coupé en deux,” as he claimed. “Shall we ever attain a more complete and far-reaching social transformation than our fathers foresaw and desired . . . or are we not destined to simply end in a condition of intermittent anarchy, the well-known chronic and incurable complaint of old people?”9 Tocqueville’s question was an incisive one. Between 1789 and 1848 France had been governed by no fewer than six different political regimes, each promising to bring stability to the country in vain.10 The Bourbon monarchy, restored in 1814 at the behest of the European powers, was toppled in 1830; the liberal Orléanist regime followed suit in 1848. Worker revolts sporadically plagued Paris during the 1830s and 1840s, culminating in the violence of the June Days. “All our political establishments, republic, empire, or monarchy, are provisional,” Taine remarked, “like great sets of painted scenery that turn and turn about, filling the stage only to vanish or reappear as the occasion warrants.”11 Revolution had irrevocably shaken the foundations of French society. In its aftermath, the essential task, as Guizot noted, was not to “perpetuate society” but rather “reconstitute it” along new lines.12
Beset by social convulsions, political crises, and colonial wars, the Orléanists had neither effectively secured peace within the national domain nor promoted a conception of sovereignty that could unite the country. Consequently, this task would now fall to a Bonaparte. The collapse of the July Monarchy, the unpopularity of the provisional government’s social programs and the subsequent June Days uprising all provided favorable circumstances for a Bonapartist revival in 1848. The myth of Napoleon—child of the French Revolution, champion of nationalism, and securer of French glory—retained a strong influence and popular appeal in the country.13 Calls of “Vive Napoléon!” had been heard in 1830 following the overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty. Louis Philippe himself attempted to capitalize on these sentiments a decade later when he ordered the former emperor’s ashes returned to France as a symbolic gesture of his dedication to the nation’s revolutionary heritage. As the crisis of 1848 unfolded, the moment seemed ripe for a Bonaparte pretender and who better than his proud and progressive nephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte? “I am going to Paris,” Louis wrote to his cousin from exile in London upon hearing of the outbreak of revolution. “The Republic has been proclaimed and I must be its master.”14
Exploiting fears of proletarian violence and socialist radicalism, Louis announced his candidacy for the presidential elections schedule that December, presenting himself as a leader capable of restoring order and prosperity to a divided nation. The self-proclaimed “homme d’ordre” drew a wide array of support as his campaign gained momentum that winter. Conservatives saw him as an assurance against socialism. Moderate republicans associated the name Bonaparte with the ideals of the Revolution and national glory. The rural peasants, however, gave Louis Napoleon his widest base of support, believing Bonaparte to be a guarantee against the restoration of the ancien régime and a protector of the little land acquired since 1789. When all votes were cast, Louis polled nearly 75 percent of the total electorate, a sensational victory by any standard.15
Louis’s commitment to moral and social order was first made apparent upon his assumption of the presidency as he assembled a ministry composed of monarchical notables, conservatives, and loyal Bonapartists. Licking their wounds after defeat in 1848, radical republicans and social democrats greeted the new government with contempt, making known their intention of seeking victory in the next presidential election four years later and establishing a “true” republic. Electoral gains in 1849 and 1850 gave substance to these aims, resurrecting the threat of the invidious spectre rouge that persistently haunted conservatives and moderates. With Louis’s presidential term set to expire in 1852 and divisions between Legitimists and Orléanists preventing unified support for a conservative candidate, the revival of the “reds” appeared plausible. In 1851 conservatives attempted to amend the constitution and eliminate the article preventing consecutive presidential terms. The motion was defeated, however, when the National Assembly failed to attain the required three-quarters majority necessary to pass such a law. With few options remaining and a victory for the left a potential reality, Louis Napoleon followed in the footsteps of his uncle. On the eve of 2 December 1851, police were ordered to round up all suspected opponents in Paris as Louis and his inner circle staged a coup d’état in the name of public order. With the capital secured, the Bonapartists proceeded to use military force in suppressing republican strongholds in the provinces. In the years immediately following the coup, some ten thousand opponents would be forcibly resettled in Algeria, which was restored once again to military rule, putting an end to the civilian government created under the Second Republic.
Conservatives and moderates supported the illegal action, convinced that the promise of a strong government in the midst of a hostile socialism justified the infraction. The following year, Louis and his supporters held a national referendum asking the French people to affirm the official creation of a Second Napoleonic Empire. With political opponents either exiled or imprisoned and conservatives warning of the dire consequences that a vote against the proposed government would hold for the future of France, the motion passed. Louis Napoleon was declared Emperor Napoleon III. The new constitution established an authoritarian regime consisting of a national parliament, the Corps législatif, elected through universal suffrage, a senate appointed directly by the emperor, and a strong executive invested with the power to appeal directly to the French people through national referendums. Over the next decade, this combination of democratic politics and centralized authority, consisting of censorship, official appointments, and electoral engineering through officially sponsored candidates, would be used to consolidate the government’s hold on power throughout the country.
The Bonapartist clan that seized control of the state in 1851 comprised a motley group, and Napoleon III was the first to recognize the diversity of opinion found among those in his inner circle.16 A romantic disposed to progressive socialist theories in his youth, Louis had kept alive what he considered the “Napoleonic idea,” which was not “an idea of war, but a social, industrial, and commercial idea—an idea of humanity,” he contended.17 Two disastrous coup attempts against the July Monarchy, a prison sentence, and exile may have tempered his former idealism but hardly his ambition. Although he spoke French with an awkward German accent from his years spent abroad in Switzerland, and his thin frame and refined appearance bore only a sparse resemblance to the squat, yet regal image of the famed French emperor, Louis never doubted the “destiny” that his birth presaged.18 Much like his uncle, Napoleon III intended to close the great political rift that the Revolution of 1789 had opened and rally the nation to a moderate government with nationalist and liberal aims. Industry and trade were to be encouraged, drawing the middle classes and business community closer to the government and combating the severe economic conditions that stimulated the appeal of radical socialism.
Yet garnering support for the new government required convincing notables of the good intentions and orientation of the Second Empire, and Napoleon III’s status as a parvenu estranged him from many of the influential social and political circles of Parisian society. The task of selling the empire to French elites fell to his half brother, Auguste de Morny, a former deputy under the July Monarchy and entrepreneur with close relations to the world of finances. “Raised in the upper echelons of Paris, having ties to all the eminent men of politics, literature, and art,” Morny once boasted, “I, more than anyone else, was to give [the emperor] the precious education and council he required.”19 As Napoleon III’s liaison to the world of French finances and politics, Morny believed himself indispensable to the emperor. Such expectations were, however, often bitterly disillusioned as his Orléanist sympathies and liberal convictions came into conflict with the policies touted by his half brother and men of his entourage. Morny did, however, remain faithful to the Second Empire in spite of the ideological quarrels that sprang up from time to time, and his active role in the government’s financial policies buoyed confidence among French investors and entrepreneurs who came to equate the phrase “Morny est dans l’affaire” with a clear guarantee of profit.20
Morny’s social grace and politesse stood in stark contrast to the gravity and insistence of Jean-Gilbert-Victor Fialin, the duc de Persigny. A former journalist and loyal devotee of the emperor, Persigny equated his dedication to the Bonaparte dynasty to a deep religious sentiment. Never modest, he considered himself the “Loyola of the Empire,” a man invested with a sacred mission to spread the Napoleonic idea throughout France and the world.21 “I have wanted all my life to marry the principles of the French Revolution to the ideas of grandeur and strength in the country,” Persigny confessed to Louis Napoleon in 1848.22 As one of Napoleon III’s closest confidants, he was a committed Bonapartist who in various administrative positions throughout the 1850s and early 1860s worked to transform the Bonapartist cause into a national one that pledged to restore peace to the country and reaffirm French power abroad. According to the emperor, Persigny was the only true Bonapartist among those of his inner circle. “But,” he added with some amusement, “he is [also] crazy.”23
This mix of practicality, idealism, and patriotism found among the Bonapartist leadership never managed, however, to expunge memories of the coup or the government’s questionable legal origins, leaving serious doubts as to the long-term viability of the Second Empire. Despite the popular mandate given to the regime by the national referendum of 1852, republicans and exiles were committed to keeping the memory of the ill-fated Second Republic and the “crime” of Deux-Décembre alive. From the start, the regime was confronted with a search for legitimacy. Evoking the glories associated with the Bonapartist dynasty and capitalizing on the popular Napoleonic myth offered a solution to the problem, albeit a limited one. Persigny, sensitive to the political significance associated with the Bonapartist name, urged prefects to exploit it whenever possible. Officials were instructed to “seek out the places where an old soldier of the empire or men who cultivate memories of the past may be found [and] address yourself to the Napoleonic sentiment of the people.”24 Public festivities commonly featured imperial eagles and large letter Ns adorning buildings. In 1852, Napoleon I’s birthday was even made an official fête nationale in hopes of replacing the collective memory of the Revolution with that of the First Empire and the Bonaparte dynasty.25
Homage to Napoleon was, however, often complicated by competing efforts to build a broad consensus across political lines, an objective that frequently resulted in incoherent or contradictory policies. Government spokesmen discouraged a strictly political interpretation of the movement to distance it from the factionalism and political infighting associated with the July Monarchy. “The Napoleonic idea,” as Louis Napoleon explained, “means to reconstitute French society, overthrown by fifty years of revolution, to conciliate order and liberty, the rights of the people, and the principles of law. . . . As it builds on a solid foundation, it rests its system on the principles of eternal justice, and treads under-foot the reactionary theories brought about by party excesses.”26 These were lofty principles, but also vague ones. Political historians have often struggled with Bonapartism’s enigmatic quality when attempting to define its specific ideological character and import.27 Officially, there existed no Bonapartist party. Supporters often classified Bonapartism as a national revivalist movement that transcended ideological divisions. Auguste de Morny did nothing to clarify this position when declaring before the general council of Puy-de-Dôme in 1862: “The Napoleonic sentiment is not an opinion. It is a religion.”28 Although the memory of Napoleon I and the Bonapartist name were powerful national symbols, Bonapartism itself had few dedicated adherents and lacked a solid ideological base to which the government might appeal.
In spite of this semblance of “permanent ambiguity,” the Bonapartist leadership did work to organize the movement around certain concepts and perspectives that were more or less consistent, and in doing so furnish an identity for the new regime.29 If Morny was reluctant to associate the movement with a political orientation, he was, nevertheless, insistent that the government was embarking on a “politique nouvelle” in 1851.30 Hippolyte Fourtoul, who served Napoleon III faithfully as minister of education throughout the 1850s, agreed, claiming that the emperor had “opened a new era for France” that promised to transform the institutions, ideas, and habits of the country.31 Officials may have been encouraged to appeal to a Napoleonic heritage, but the Second Empire was intended to be a quintessentially “modern” government, conforming to “the law of modern times,” as the proimperial pamphleteer Charles Piel de Troismonts professed.32 The self-proclaimed novelty embodied in the spirit and intentions of the imperial regime became a hallmark of imperial rhetoric. It furnished an ideological framework and script that would rationalize Bonapartist power and authority over the coming years as well as provide a measure of cohesion for a movement intent on rallying a broad array of support and political opinion. According to Persigny, the imperial government exemplified “the ideas, sentiments, instincts, and . . . even the passions of a new society” and was inspired by the “spirit [and] conscience” of the times to bring this social vision to fruition.33
Modernity figured prominently in the rhetoric and portrayals of the Second Empire as it worked to obtain support among liberals and moderates suspicious of a Napoleonic usurper. To alleviate these uncertainties, the Bonapartists leadership underscored the message that the “new society” it advertised would be compatible with expectations of stability and social order. Napoleon III reiterated his commitment to stimulating economic revival and national industries, abiding by his old maxim “to create prosperity is to assure order.”34 Yet the imperial program aspired to be more than just an economic policy. The revolutionary upheavals of the past had consistently threatened not only the financial interests of the upper classes but also their social primacy. Staunching the anarchic tide of socialism required social policies aimed at naturalizing the power relations and value systems that order required. The emperor did not conceal his intentions of instilling certain morals and codes of behavior in the French people, asserting it was imperative to “create new habits in accordance with new principles” if a durable society was to be founded in France.35 Committed to modernizing both country and people, the Bonapartists coaxed support from elite social groups by ensuring that their vision of a modern France was consistent with elite interests and values. Under the Second Empire, Napoleon III assured, France would be “of its epoch” as the “the march of civilization” replaced the revolutionary disorder of the past.36
References to civilisation were a staple of Napoleonic rhetoric, and Bonapartist spokesmen emphatically stressed that to modernize France would correspondingly entail civilizing its people and taming the disorderly “passions” that consistently bred unrest. Enervated by over a half century of political upheaval and economic decline, France knew neither the security nor the prosperity promised by the fruits of modern civilization, they argued. The nation confronted turbulent political and social violence at home and a savage war of civilization in North Africa. Government, according to the new emperor, had to encourage “the necessary means . . . for advancing civilization,” and this approach was as true of France proper as it was of its North African colony.37 The Second Empire, Napoleon III famously declared, meant “peace,” and peace meant curbing political extremism as well as indigène resistance. Napoleon III and his entourage saw themselves as both reformers and peacekeepers. Despite the division and odium incurred by years of political and social rivalry, the emperor never wavered in his certainty that the French people could transcend their differences and form a single, harmonious community. “If France is not completely homogeneous in its nature—it is unanimous in its sentiments,” he declared before an audience in 1858.38 In no uncertain terms, Napoleon III intended to pacify the French territory through the promotion of “progress, humanity, and civilization.”39 The dictates implicit in this pax Napoléon constituted the germ of a trans-Mediterranean civilizing mission.
The imperial leadership’s reluctance to associate the Second Empire with any single political ideology or faction did not preclude the potential for unity. Modernization and remaking France in the image of a modern society were intended to form a common middle ground that was sensitive to elite concerns yet progressive and forward looking. Branding this social vision as civilisation incarnate furnished a moral basis for imposing it on others. Whether carried out pacifically or forcefully, civilizing the country amounted to a “moral conquest.” “Civilization, although having for its aim the moral improvement and material well-being of the greatest number, progresses . . . like an army,” Napoleon III explained. “Its victories are not obtained without sacrifices and victims.” 40 The Bonapartist leadership fashioned itself crusaders committed to vanquishing the moral barbarism and savagery that impeded modernity’s development. They were men endowed with a mission to modernize and civilize, a claim that effectively rationalized the use of force and violence against opponents as they tenaciously consolidated this “moral conquest.” “Let’s not forget,” Napoleon III reminded in 1858, “the development of all new power is a long struggle.” 41 As the bearers of modern civilization, however, the Bonapartists believed they were on the offensive in this struggle. As César Vimercati, an Italian nationalist and close friend of the emperor, stated in 1858, “In our day it is no longer the barbarian but rather civilization that has come to be an invading force.” 42
Giving a speech in Bordeaux in 1852 shortly after the promulgation of the Second Empire, Louis Napoleon candidly stated his objective of realizing a vigorous policy of economic renovation throughout the country. “We have an immense amount of uncultivated land to clear, roads to build, ports to dig out, rivers to make navigable, canals to finish, and our network of railroads to complete.” These undertakings, he assured his audience, were how he “understood the Empire.” 43 For the Bonapartists, the economic decline and slow pace of French industrial development during the first half of the nineteenth century had left France to flounder while other nations, particularly Great Britain, advanced. “Today steam and railroads are producing numerous marvels,” Persigny insisted during a speech delivered in Roanne. “So as to ensure that we profit from all the benefits of these glorious inventions, so that we do not allow ourselves to be outpaced by the other nations of Europe, it is essential that not a single corner of French soil be bereft of these grand currents of richness and prosperity. In a word, French civilization is still incomplete; it is necessary to bring it to fruition.” 44
By the mid-nineteenth century, France was still a primarily rural country. The neoteric landscape of cities, factories, and railroads conjured by urban idealists was far removed from life in la France profonde. Farming methods and equipment remained traditional in most cases, with peasants suspicious or ignorant of new mechanized machinery and scientific advances in agronomy.45 French cities and agricultural centers still proved susceptible to natural disasters, a fact made evident to all in 1856 when the Rhône, Loire, and Cher Rivers overflowed their banks. Crops in the region were devastated, while areas around the cities of Lyon and Tours were temporarily transformed into swamps. Large-scale crop failures only came to an end in France after the 1840s, culminating in the most devastating failures of 1846 and 1847, which caused widespread hunger in the country and fueled the discontent leading up to the revolution the following year. Epidemics also persisted to threaten the country, the most severe outbreaks occurring in the early 1830s and again in late 1848 when Asiatic cholera claimed more than nineteen thousand victims and provoked civil unrest in the capital.46 Disease was particularly rampant in urban areas that were mephitic and unsanitary. In contrast, parts of “savage” Africa could be more salubrious. Visiting the Algerian village of Boufarik in 1860, Thierry-Mieg was staggered to discover that “the state of sanitation here is better than that generally found in France.” 47
Natural disasters, epidemics, and crop failures demonstrated that modernity’s material benefits had yet to penetrate vast parts of the country. The “incomplete” nature of French civilization noted by Persigny was all too evident to urban observers and proved to be the norm rather than the exception. Coupled with political instability and social disorder, the problems facing France often paralleled those facing African societies where a disorderly “tribalism,” outdated agricultural methods, and traditional forms of industry were commonly held up as indicators of the uncivilized and backward nature of Oriental life. At its core, the Bonapartist program prescribed a veritable civilizing mission for France proper, promising the order and prosperity befitting a modern people. In the opinion of the influential Algerian policymaker Ismael Urbain, “peace and work” were the means through which social and material improvement would be achieved, and this work was primarily the responsibility of the government.48
Urbain’s conviction bore the marks of the Saint-Simonian philosophy to which he subscribed. He was one of many Saint-Simonians who associated themselves with the Bonapartist government after the coup. Henri de Saint-Simon, a political and economic theorist writing in the early nineteenth century, had professed a strong faith in Europe’s new industrial civilization, which he believed to be the final and ultimate stage in man’s progressive development. Society was to be a “truly organized machine,” for it was only this type of society that would be able to establish an organic unity between industrial labor and the exploitative demands of modern capitalism.49 An early forerunner of utopian socialism, Saint-Simon envisaged his system based upon scientific advancement and industry as the surest means of remedying many of the social ills afflicting Europe. “There exists only one common interest for all men,” as he wrote in 1803, “that of the progress of science.”50 The task at hand was to harness the potential of the nineteenth century and forge “a great society of industry.”51
The Saint-Simonians comprised a diverse group of individuals dedicated to the philosopher’s theories of technocratic social organization. The emphasis on competent planning and bureaucratic regulation never amounted to a strict doctrine or belief system so much as a set of general principles and guidelines for the effective management of industrial society. As such, it proved highly adaptable to various schools of political thought and ideology, whether authoritarian, liberal, or republican in nature. The movement’s appeal lay in its broad conception of a technologically advanced world administered and governed by savants, and it was, therefore, hardly astonishing that a generation of entrepreneurs and social critics enthusiastically took up Saint-Simon’s gospel. Enthusiasts motivated by his vision of a society transformed through industry and rigorous social engineering rallied to the Second Empire, obtaining key positions in the military and civil administration as well as the French financial world.52
The nominal leader of the Saint-Simonian cult was Prosper Enfantin, a polytechnician and aspiring political economist whose stringent demeanor and aversion to liberalism often clashed with the socialist and revolutionary opinions of his cohorts. Upon Saint-Simon’s death in 1825, Enfantin convoked a meeting of his followers in Ménilmontant, a rural suburb on the outskirts of Paris where his family owned a large house surrounded by pastures and farmland. There, the Saint-Simonians formed an isolated community practicing a daily regimen that bordered on the monastic. An eccentric disposed toward mysticism and unorthodox Christian beliefs, Enfantin cultivated an identity for himself as a quasi-holy man, taking the title of “father” to convey his new spiritual authority. During his time at Ménilmontant, père Enfantin used religious spectacle and impassioned speeches to inspire loyalty among his followers. As he consolidated his position at the head of the movement, he liberally reinterpreted the teachings of his former master in the process.53
Like many of his contemporaries, Enfantin contended that the French Revolution had eroded the foundations of European society. Advancements in industry and science over the course of the century offered the kernel of the new society to come, a society with little precedent in past models that demanded new forms of social and economic organization. “[The older generation] has only seen the past restored or demolished while the current generation has need of founding and constructing a new edifice,” he wrote to a friend in 1840.54 The architects of this new society were to be the cadre of savants and engineers who adhered to the Saint-Simonian philosophy: technocratic elites who, unlike elected politicians, possessed the knowledge and impartiality to govern in the interest of society.55 “I am by necessity and by taste, I will say nearly by passion,” Enfantin admitted, “a man of power rather than of liberty.”56 His authoritarian ideology sought nothing short of “constructing the future” through the management of industry and the moral reeducation of individuals, investing scientists and engineers with the power to reform society and place it on a rational foundation.57 Building a new social edifice required “a very intelligent, vigorous, unitary, and even despotic power” capable of carrying out the “preparatory work” of reconstruction.58 Likening parliamentary government to “a sepulcher filled with worm-eaten cadavers,” Enfantin foresaw a strong and well-administered state as the only means of bringing forth the dynamic type of society he and his followers envisaged.59 “To begin the organization of industry,” he avowed, “it is necessary that the government give the example.” 60
Napoleon III was no stranger to the ideas of the Saint-Simonians, having been introduced to Enfantin’s works during the 1840s.61 Often styled as “Saint-Simon on horseback,” the emperor adopted many of Saint-Simonianism’s core tenets, taking to heart its insistence on the primacy of economics within politics, the importance of enlightened individuals in leading the work of social development, and the necessity of state intervention in initiating and implementing social and economic policies.62 Governments alone possessed the resources and authority to bring about far-reaching and extensive social transformation, making them “the primary agent of all social organization.” 63 In the purview of Bonapartist ideology, the state was not only envisioned as a constraint against disorder; it was a powerful instrument capable of shaping the contours of society and guiding progress. Outside of the state’s administrative hierarchy, as Persigny was keen to note, there was “nothing but grains of sand without cohesion or common purpose.” 64
A resolute étatiste and principal apologist for Bonapartist authoritarianism, Persigny saw state-driven economic growth as the only feasible means of modernizing France. Perpetual instability since 1789 had undermined confidence in national finances and discouraged entrepreneurs and investors from engaging in large-scale industrial and commercial enterprises. “It is hardly surprising that in a country that has been subject to revolutions, emotions continue to be troubled by memories of the past,” he remarked.65 If individual initiative could not be counted upon, the state would have to assume responsibility for developing the national economy lest France be reduced to a second-rate power. “Modern societies” relied upon what Persigny considered the “intelligent organization” (organisation savant) of resources and labor.66 Only through the application of “modern economic tools” could a people perfect “the instruments of pacific conquest,” making their society competitive, robust, and, above all, dominant.67 “The degree of a country’s civilization,” the emperor reminded, “is revealed by the progress of industry as well as its sciences and arts.” 68 Work and productivity constituted the essential components of a civilization, and this conviction conformed to a vision of modernity read in terms of industrial and economic capacity.
In executing the practical work of modernization, the government ordered numerous surveys aimed at evaluating the industrial and agricultural capacities of the country throughout the 1850s. Officials were instructed to inspect dams and irrigation networks in agricultural centers vital to the national economy and suggest means for obviating flooding and other natural disasters detrimental to farming. Statistics on existing mineralogical resources were compiled to appraise regional mining and industrial capabilities while the real and potential agricultural production of departments was reassessed and reliable demographic statistics gathered.69 The data were intended to give the government an informed idea of “the material situation of the state,” as well as suggest possible ways of exploiting these resources and calculating the revenues expected from state-sponsored public works.70 The bold initiative spearheaded by the government could, at times, even extend down to the local level. In the late 1860s, the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works encouraged prefects to write up reports and make observations on regional and municipal expositions showcasing recent inventions and manufacturing techniques. These exhibitions, the minister Adolphe Forcade de la Roquette insisted, “serve the general interest and progress by contributing to the perfection of production, encouraging exchanges, and disseminating knowledge and well-being.”71 In the sweeping assessment of French industrial and commercial capabilities ordered by the imperial regime, no corner of the country was to be disregarded as officials scoured the cities and countryside to construct an accurate picture of France’s economic and industrial potential.
In January 1860, Napoleon III publicly laid out an ambitious economic project for the country. Based on the statistical data gathered, the plan called for allocating funds for drainage and irrigation, providing credit to generate agricultural and industrial ventures, and, most important, continuing the construction of railroads and transportation routes that encouraged commercial exchange and production.72 Rail construction constituted a centerpiece of the state’s modernizing program. “If you want to form an idea quickly of the degree of advancement in a people’s industry,” the senator and former Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier claimed, “don’t look to gold or money, but to iron.”73 Indeed, iron rails were symbols of a new type of industry and economy, “that great industry of transports, which exercises a very decisive influence on the general prosperity,” as one economist described it in 1866.74 While the July Monarchy had given modest support to numerous small-scale and independent rail companies during the 1840s, the Second Empire envisioned a far grander scheme of interconnected transport networks stretching across the country.75 As Persigny accurately remarked in 1861 when presenting his annual report to the Corps législatif, “the progressive development of our rail lines is today one of our most lively preoccupations and, it is necessary to say, one of the most legitimate for the populations of the Empire.”76
While the government fused the array of small rail companies operating in France into six large companies and offered concessions to encourage construction and boost confidence in the new ventures, it also recognized the need for private investment and access to credit in financing railroads.77 Thus, in 1853 Napoleon III authorized the creation of the Crédit Mobilier, an investment bank that purchased railway stocks and underwrote many of the major lines built during the 1850s. The bank was the brainchild of Émile and Isaac Pereire, brothers born of Portuguese immigrants who became leading entrepreneurs in France by midcentury. Having flirted with Saint-Simonianism during the years of the July Monarchy, the Pereires enjoyed access to many exclusive financial and political circles within the country and never hesitated to call upon former cohorts from their days as Saint-Simonians who might be in positions of power and influence. Profiting from these ties, the brothers gained the support of top government officials for the proposed bank, and within its first year the Crédit Mobilier financed the construction of three principal rail lines—the Midi Railroad, the Grand Central Railroad, and the French Eastern Railroad. The Pereires were not, however, the only entrepreneurs to capitalize on their Saint-Simonian connections. Edouard and Paulin Talabot, rivals of the Pereires, also obtained support from within the imperial government and in 1857 their Compagnie du chemin de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée was commissioned to build a line running along the major trade artery between the capital and the ports on the southern coast.78
If competition for state contracts was sometimes fierce on the continent, the same could not be said of Algeria. With the conquest of Kabylia in 1857, French authority was consolidated throughout the Tell Atlas region and native resistance temporarily quelled. The end of major combat operations offered France a chance to proceed with the “pacific conquest” of its North African territory. “The affairs of Algeria have thankfully entered a new period as the trials of war become rarer and have less importance than in the past,” the military commander Ferdinand Hugonnet claimed in 1860. “The moment has come to preoccupy ourselves especially with pacific enterprises and the means of assuring the prosperity of the colony.”79 Plans for the development of a colonial economy were considered by the Algerian administration, and the necessity of rail lines occupied a central concern in a country with very few roads or navigable rivers. As the primary owner of Algeria’s rich iron mines, Paulin Talabot expressed a marked interest in the project, envisioning a network of African rails transporting ore to the coastal ports and, subsequently, to France where it would fuel his growing industrial empire.80 In 1860, the Talabots won the commission to build three initial rail lines in the colony and, by 1863, enjoyed a state-sponsored monopoly over Algerian rail construction, making their Compagnie des chemins de fer algériens the sole holder of all North African rail networks.81 Although the initial rail lines proved to be short and slow, their creation nonetheless stood as a symbol of France’s civilizing influence in Africa. Attending the inaugural ceremony of the Algiers–Blida railroad in 1862, Théophile Gautier clearly foresaw “an approaching future filled with promise opening for French Africa.” 82
The opening of new railroads always presented an occasion for pomp and ceremony with state-appointed officials lauding the achievements of the regime and blandishing the emperor. When delivering a speech at the inauguration of a new rail line running from Nantes to Lorient in 1862, the prefect of the Morbihan left little doubt as to who was responsible for the modernizing feats transforming the country. “It is to the Emperor, to his generous and patriotic plans, to his ardent love for all which can be useful to the country that we owe this complete network crossing Brittany in every direction.” 83 As a potent symbol of modernization, rail construction epitomized the modernizing thrust endorsed by the imperial state. More important, it testified to an underlying logic that ran through the various projects spearheaded by the regime. It was through such “ameliorative practices” that the “chimeras” of radical and revolutionary transformation would be dispelled, Louis Napoleon had argued.84 Unlike previous regimes, the Second Empire was attending to the hard and practical work of economic and material development. For government supporters, legitimate public authority could derive from practical efforts and sage policies favorable to progress and the public good. Modernization not only exposed the errors of foolhardy radicals and violent social change; it provided the Bonapartist government with a much needed source of legitimacy. As the emperor once insisted, the “best government” adapted “to the desires of the period” and modeled itself “on the existing state of society.” 85 In publicizing its modernizing agenda, the Bonapartist clan intended to show itself as both pragmatic and of its time, offering a powerful rationale for Napoleonic leadership in the process.
Public addresses and ceremonies highlighting the accomplishments of the Second Empire constituted only one means of brandishing the modern and civilizing image coveted by the regime. Exhibitions organized by the state similarly offered an alluring theater in which to display to France and the world the work nurtured by the government. In an effort to emulate Britain’s Great Exhibition staged in 1851, Napoleon III held his own International Exhibition on the Champs-Élysées in 1855, complete with displays of French industry and manufacturing housed in the newly built Palais de l’Industrie. More than a decade later, a second international exhibition—the Exposition Universelle—was staged in Paris to show “the complete representation of modern society in all its modes of activity,” according to Victor Duruy, one of the exhibition’s chief organizers.86 Attending the exposition, Raimond de Miravals could not deny that France had been subject to an impressive transformation under the new Bonaparte. “After having exhausted itself on the glories of war and the glories of the past [France] has sought to inaugurate a new era built upon the glories of peace and the splendors of the future.” 87 Busts of Napoleon III naturally adorned architectural designs in the exposition halls while the gold medals presented to the exhibition winners were embossed with the emperor’s likeness. The Second Empire, these symbolic gestures proclaimed, stood for progress, industry, science, and prosperity.88
If exhibitions were fast becoming one of “the great rituals for celebrating the industrial world” in the nineteenth century, they were equally theaters in which to showcase the nation’s “civilizing” influence abroad.89 During the years of the Second Empire, the colonies attained greater public visibility alongside national representations of economic progress and innovation. Imperial officials consciously used expositions for the purpose of mobilizing interest in France’s growing colonial empire, targeting both economic elites and the general public. Products from the colonies were put on display at exhibition stalls while placards reporting on state-sponsored public works and colonial economic projects aimed to attract investors and familiarize French audiences with the overseas territories. More dramatic exhibitions—such as the one staged at the Exposition Universelle of 1867, which regaled spectators with North African craft workers, African dancers, and Sudanese jewelers working their trade—attempted to create a mise-en-scène of the French colonial world, bringing what was far away close and demonstrating the achievements of French civilization in spectacular fashion.90 Expositions, as Jules Duval observed in 1867, were a “magnificent spectacle” and a form of “popular education” that were coming to play an important role in nineteenth-century French national and colonial culture.91
At the international exhibitions hosted by the state, Bonapartist modernity was put on display for all to see. Yet one did not necessarily have to pay the admission fee at the Palais d’Industrie to comprehend the changes taking place in the country. Accompanying the economic transformation wrought by the regime was an extensive urbanization initiative aimed at drastically altering and revitalizing French cities. In 1853 Persigny selected the bordelaise prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann to serve in Paris and direct the emperor’s plans for renovating the capital. Prior regimes had overseen urbanization projects in the past, but they had typically been conducted in piecemeal fashion. Napoleon III envisaged a far more comprehensive project, one intended to beautify and enrich the capital of his modern empire. The imperious Haussmann was an ideal candidate for the job. As prefect of the Seine, he used the highly centralized Bonapartist state to restructure the city in accordance with the emperor’s designs, opening up avenues to commerce, improving infrastructure, constructing a new sewer system, and remodeling entire neighborhoods. Old slums conducive to crime and disease were torn down and replaced with expansive boulevards and handsome buildings housing upscale residents and department stores (grands magasins). The cost of this massive project was estimated at an astronomical 2.5 billion francs, an unprecedented sum at the time.92
Imperial public works actively constructed and built the modern metropolis, and spectators were encouraged to view the new city as such.93 It was primarily due to the efforts of the imperial regime that the cleric Antoine Arbousse-Bastide could extol Paris as the “capital of the modern world” during his trip in 1857.94 As the principal locus of French industry and the depository of the major cultural and political institutions of the nation, Paris possessed “all the splendors and attractions of civilization,” the economist Charles Lavollée boasted in 1865, echoing sentiments found in standard guide books of the day.95 The demolitions and public works symbolic of the “new era” promised by the Bonapartist government became a familiar aspect of the modern experience remarked upon by writers and intellectuals. Laments over the demise of “old Paris” were mixed with reflections on the bewildering crowds and new style of public life encouraged by Haussmann’s designs.96 Parisians watched as familiar streets and neighborhoods were transformed into a sprawling construction site. “Everywhere houses in ruin, demolitions commenced, unfinished constructions, wooden gates, fences of dirty and disjointed planks, scaffolding blocking views, masonry and carpentry tools lying about,” one critic complained.97 Outside of Paris, urban modernization projects elicited the same perplexity. During his provincial travels, Taine was clearly impressed by the new Marseille with its seven-story apartment buildings, boulevards, wide streets, and stores. “It grows every day,” he claimed, “building, demolition, stretching out to the hillsides and new ports. I saw it four years ago and it is now unrecognizable. . . . I have seen nothing like it except in London.”98
Paradoxically, what urbanites might find unfamiliar in the new streets and buildings being erected in France often possessed an element of familiarity in French North Africa. Building projects in Algiers and other Maghrebi cities brought a discernible French character to urban areas as the old Moorish and Ottoman landscape began to disappear. The Marine Quarter of Algiers that housed the government offices looked like “a little rue de Rivoli,” the painter and traveler writer Eugène Fromentin claimed in 1852. All the buildings reflected a noticeably Parisian style while on the streets a tourist could find cafés and French stores.99 In the city of Bône to the west, Charles Thierry-Mieg discovered a similar phenomenon taking place by the early 1860s. “There are a few Arab streets, narrow, dirty, and lined with Moorish houses,” he observed. “The others have all been enlarged with beautiful and looming European houses constructed on them.”100 Winding avenues bordered by Arab markets and Oriental facades could still be found in the city but they were increasingly relegated to small enclaves that French urbanization had yet to penetrate. “The Oriental has little by little been transformed into a modern city and the civilization of France has come to implant itself heroically in the heart of barbarism,” declared the journalist Augustin Marquand in 1869 when assessing the government’s building projects in Algiers.101
As Marquand stressed, imparting a French character to the cities of North Africa constituted an important aspect of France’s civilizing mission. Employing teams of French architects and civil engineers, the imperial government worked to transform Algiers into a modern metropolis structured around investment and commercial exchanges that would, in time, nurture France’s new imperial territory. In 1854, a Commission des Plans was created to consider proposals and organize the practical work of urban renovation. Under the engineer Charles Frédéric Chassériau, Algiers was transformed into the capital of France’s new North African empire with promenades lining the bay, wide boulevards replacing the old, torturous streets and Parisian-inspired edifices supplanting the indigenous architecture.102 Evaluating the plans for France’s new colony in the late 1850s, Prince Jérôme Napoleon boasted that Algeria would stand as “the most beautiful conquest of the Second Empire” and “give the new government a great deal of prestige” as its efforts to bring the benefits of civilization to North Africa matured and bore fruit.103 Inaugurating the new Boulevard de l’Impératrice completed in 1864, a spokesman for Morton Peto, the British firm contracted to carry out the work, praised the thoroughfare as a symbol of the imperial regime’s commitment to North African development. “From these initial works,” the representative proclaimed before a crowd of colonists and government officials, “it is obvious that the commerce of Algiers and the public in general will receive an immense advantage derived from the ease of communication between the port and the city and the sales that the stores on the boulevard will offer.” The new city materializing on the Algerian coast epitomized the emperor’s “ardent interest in the well-being and prosperity” of the colonial city.104
While the new urban landscapes brought investment and created cities reflecting the modern and capitalist ethos that the new regime claimed to embody, they also promised a measure of public order in a country agitated by years of social and political instability.105 The narrow, medieval streets and working-class quarters of Paris that had consistently provided strongholds for urban insurrectionists were destroyed and replaced by wide public spaces easily accessible to troops and the gendarmerie.106 Napoleon III was no stranger to the temperament of the French working classes that had risen up in 1848. As a self-proclaimed homme d’ordre he understood that the success of his regime depended upon neutralizing the threat of sporadic civil strife.107 Building projects not only discouraged labor militancy by giving employment to workers in the construction trades; they equally relocated the more unruly elements of the population—namely, day laborers and the urban poor—to the urban periphery.108 With the gentrification of Paris’s center came new middle-class and upscale residents who could afford the higher rents of the newly constructed buildings. According to Victor Fournel, a writer critical of the government’s urbanization initiative, Paris had been remade in the image of the conservative and empire-supporting bourgeois. “Today, when M. Prudhomme—proprietor, elector, expert juror, and captain of the garde nationale—climbs to the summit of the Vendôme column,” he chided in 1865, “he looks majestically on Paris [and] sees . . . a city as august and majestic as himself. ”109
Attempts to relegate a “savage” working class to the margins of French cities were consistent with the more aggressive social engineering in Algeria where newly arriving colonists supplanted the native inhabitants of Maghrebi cities.110 Visiting Algiers in the 1850s, Fromentin could already recognize the segregation that would become a common feature of colonial society. “Not being able to do away with the Algerians we’ve left them with only just enough space to live in up on the belvedere of the old pirates.”111 The destruction of Moorish and Arab architecture and the dislocation experienced by many Algerians brought significant changes to the “profound and mysterious Orient that civilization must fatally invade in a very short time,” as Gautier claimed.112 The street bazaars had disappeared along with the Arabs who had once attended them; whole sections of Algiers existed now in name and memory alone; religious customs and cultural traditions were giving way to modern habits brought by the Europeans. “Proceeding by the principle of tabula rasa, civilization has begun by tearing down everything not in accordance with its tastes,” Fromentin wrote cynically.113 For the dramatist Ernest Feydeau, the results of colonization were disheartening as the exotic character of the Orient became eclipsed by a banal and unremarkable European landscape. “The Orient is disappearing,” he lamented in 1860, “disputing the terrain step by step, but it is disappearing with its exquisite forms.”114
Through the building projects undertaken by the Bonapartists, “modern civilization” acquired a geographic and spatial dimension within French territories that served to dramatically symbolize the extensive modernization promised by imperial statesmen. The English travel writer Henry Blackburn could not ignore the transformations evident in Rouen as he walked the city streets in the late 1860s. Provincial houses and medieval cathedrals indicative of the “old Rouen” were now lost in the midst of factories belching smoke, industrial cranes, and screeching locomotives. The quaint, provincial city Blackburn had visited on numerous occasions in the past was, he conceded, “disappearing like a dissolving view” before the new urban landscape erected by the disciplined army of administrators and civil engineers employed by the state.115 The sense of transition that these new urban vistas inspired similarly extended to smaller towns where building projects and rail construction, while perhaps more modest than the large-scale urbanization taking place in major cities, were no less impressive. “Everywhere our villages are being transformed,” a resident in the town of Bourges claimed in 1863. “Thatch is giving way to slate, walls are being raised, doors and windows are being enlarged [and] tiled floors are replacing mud.”116
Although urbanization offered the most striking examples of Bonapartist modernization, it remained only one policy among many aimed at consolidating the modern identity communicated by imperial statesmen. Much like the building projects commissioned by the state, the development of national and colonial industries, the inaugural festivities celebrating newly laid rail lines and state-organized industrial exhibitions all attempted to convey and symbolize the “modern” spirit and orientation of Napoleon III’s government. The pomp and pageantry associated with these events became regular facets of the “spectacular politics” habitually used by the emperor and his entourage to legitimate and boost support for the regime in an era of mass democracy.117 As Napoleon III informed his cousin, Prince Jérôme, in 1852, “It is through small measures that one wins over individuals in the same way that it is only through grand measures that one attaches the masses to them.”118
Yet the symbolism and panoply surrounding these events transcended mere public spectacle. The Bonapartist leadership used orations and state policies to highlight the government’s self-proclaimed modern qualities. The discourse and rhetoric employed by the regime prefigured the context in which these actions and gestures were to be understood, endowing them with a quintessentially “modern” import and connotation. For a regime priding itself on its modern character, state policies logically translated into acts of modernization that subsequently validated the government’s orientation and identity. Rather than a process, modernization offered a discursive framework for representing and legitimating certain types of political and social action. It was the act of modernizing that authenticated the rigorous self-fashioning of Bonapartist ideologues and, subsequently, furnished the rationale for the highly centralized and interventionist imperial state.
While historians assessing the democratic and national style of politics that came of age in France after 1848 have often spoken of the emergence of a “modern” political culture at midcentury, the political discourse that underpinned much of the Second Empire’s policies suggests a slightly different conclusion.119 Modernity and “modern society” were themes embedded in and elaborated through the political language of the period, exhibiting a political culture of modernity rather than an inherently “modern” political culture. Through the rhetorical devices used by politicians and corresponding acts of “modernization” carried out by the state, French politics rendered the modern social imaginary incarnate and palpable as the modernizing process came to insert itself directly into the daily life and experience of the nation. Rather than the unrolling of a universal process, modernization was the essential means of conjuring the modern, linking discourse with practice, and ideology with reality.