“I believe I can safely say that the coup d’état would have
never taken place without me.” 1
—AUGUSTE DE MORNY
“It was a tremendous game we played … one which
necessity alone could justify.” 2
—CHARLES DE FLAHAUT TO DAUGHTER, EMILY, LADY SHELBURNE
“In this day and age would it be possible for one man, no matter who, to reshape a great nation … transform it overnight, in just twenty-four hours, and with it the destinies of 35 million [sic, 26 million] people?” the incredulous publisher of Le Siècle asked in October 1851.3 Make that two men, and that is precisely what Louis Napoléon Bonaparte and Auguste de Morny intended to do.
* * *
Many of the usual habitués of the informal Monday evening presidential receptions mingled once again at the Élysée Palace on December 1, 1851. Louis Napoléon’s half brother, Morny, was as usual at the Opéra Comique that night for a performance of the remarkable musketeer-violinist-composer Joseph de Saint Georges’s La Chasse, though, in reality of course, it was to make the rounds of some of the most beautiful ladies of Paris. While at the Élysée his father, the handsome, still slender, sixty-six-year-old Charles, Comte de Flahaut, was on a visit from London to take possession of his newly acquired Parisian mansion, the Hôtel de Massa, but in particular to observe the volatile political situation. He had also come to visit his granddaughter, Louise, the daughter of Fanny Le Hon and his son Auguste. Flahaut was not the only one speaking to Fanny tonight, this witty, highly intelligent Parisian hostess, and wife of the absent former Belgian ambassador. The men swarmed around her, irrespective of the splendid display of her celebrated diamonds; she was reputedly the wealthiest lady in Paris. Flahaut, Morny, and Fanny were more than very close, confidential friends, and partners in several highly lucrative financial investments; they were “family.”
During his sojourn in Paris on this occasion, because of the current political crisis, General Flahaut had been visiting the Élysée with his son every morning, spending hours with Louis Napoléon, and rumors were rife that night about the situation at the Assembly and a possible coup. In addition to the absence of Jérôme Bonaparte, another “Bonaparte,” Napoléon I’s son by his polish mistress, Alexander, Count Walewski, a career diplomat, was across the Channel, where Louis Napoléon had appointed him French ambassador to the Court of St. James.
The diminutive Princess Mathilde, the president’s hostess tonight and at most Élysée functions, was her usual luxuriant, laughing self, displaying her wares in a décolletage that caught many an eye. Since Louis Napoléon’s return to France in 1848, he and his first cousin Mathilde, Jérôme’s daughter, had resumed their old friendship. The only disagreement, unsurprisingly, concerned women, or to be more precise, Louis Napoléon’s English mistress, the beautiful twenty-eight-year-old Harriet Howard—whose inappropriate relationship with the prince-president Odilon Barrot had also criticized. The Élysée was already known as a friendly “foyer” for distinguished British visitors, and tonight Harriet appeared with her friend—and a mutual friend of the prince from his London days—Caroline Norton (née Sheridan), poet, novelist, and feminist leader of her day.4
Whenever anything important was about to happen, one of the most colorful newspapermen in Paris was inevitably to be found there. At the age of fifty-three, Dr. Louis Véron, a most influential pro-Bonapartist journalist and publisher, and a close friend of Morny, was a living legend, a figure worthy of Balzac’s pen. Pockmarked, scrofulous, and of well-rounded symmetrical girth, Véron was a man of many guises. “He dressed like a lackey aping his master,” critic Philarète Chasles claimed, “with the affectations and the mincing step of the salon.” In brief, he was not simply “a character,” but a veritable monument of surprises. An excellent violinist, Louis Véron happily exchanged his stethoscope for a pen, for journalism was his natural profession, while also directing the Paris Opéra. Like his young friend Auguste de Morny, Dr. Véron was an inveterate theater habitué. Already the publisher of La Revue de Paris, he also produced the Bonapartist newspaper, the Constitutionnel, which he was to sell to Morny in 1852.
Also present were the ubiquitous Gilbert Persigny, public prosecutor Paul de Royer, the current foreign minister, the Marquis de Turgot, Interior Minister René François de Thorigny, and the ill-at-ease prefect of police Émile de Maupas. There was also the inevitable contingent of soldiers in dress uniform, including Colonel Vieyra, chief of staff of the 2nd Battalion of the National Guard (the only officer Morny trusted in that organization), Brigadier General François Canrobert (just brought directly over by President Bonaparte from the battlefield in Algeria), Changarnier’s replacement as military governor of Paris, the reliable General Bernard Magnan, and of course the new war minister, Major General Leroy Saint-Arnaud (also brought back from the front in Algeria by the president). A final guest and total stranger appearing here for the first time, Georges Haussmann, the new prefect of the Gironde, was up from Bordeaux at the special invitation of the president of the Republic, and still none the wiser as to why, any more than his puzzled boss, Interior Minister Thorigny.
By ten o’clock, the last of the guests had left, including Mathilde, as Louis Napoléon returned to his office, stopping with his chief of staff Mocquard.“Do you know what is happening out there?” he asked. “They were talking about an imminent coup d’état—that the National Assembly are preparing against me!”5 he said, coming as close to laughing as he ever had. Various members of the team were already assembled there, as Persigny, his ADC, Colonel Fleury, and Jean Mocquard distributed final instructions. Meanwhile President Bonaparte then removed a file labeled “RUBICON” from his safe, containing draft copies of various decrees and proclamations announcing the coup, destined to be plastered on the walls of the city. Louis Napoléon then handed that file to Colonel de Béville, who left immediately for the Imprimérie Nationale, at the Hôtel de Soubise, which on Morny’s orders was to be sealed off by a company of the Gendarmerie Mobile, preventing anyone from entering or leaving until the printing was completed.6
After conferring with the president, War Minister Leroy de Saint-Arnaud and Major General Bernard Magnan set out for their respective headquarters, even as two regiments were posting guards round the Élysée, the Tuileries, the Ministry of the Marine, the Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the École Militaire, and all other important government buildings and offices.
Police Prefect Émile de Maupas, a gentleman not noted for his charm, sense of humor, or strong nerves, had perhaps the most delicate and complicated task of all, to dispatch some eight hundred gendarmes directed by nearly one hundred handpicked commissaries (carefully screened for this purpose in interviews over the previous few weeks). Once the city was quiet and the streets empty in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the second of December, the anniversary of both the Battle of Austerlitz and Napoléon’s coronation, Prefect Maupas would give orders to commence Operation Rubicon, to arrest eighty-seven of the most dangerous individuals, officials, statesmen, and soldiers. Louis Napoléon had personally enjoined Maupas, however, that his men were to be “most courteous when making these political arrests, and that applies to Mr. Thiers as well.” Rudeness to such powerful figures could provoke violent demonstrations by their followers in the Assembly, and Maupas was not known for his light touch. The president added an apologetic “I had hoped to avoid all these arrests, [but] M. de Morny considers them to be essential.”7
If the police had to be careful to avoid unduly antagonizing the politicians, this was not to be confused with the orders to military commanders and their troops who, although avoiding gratuitous bloodshed by senseless fusillades or the use of cannon—were free to use lethal force when under threat.
In fact, Auguste de Morny had not been as anxious about the firmness of the troops as he had been about Louis Napoléon’s noble declarations, wishy-washy indecision, and maddening dithering when it came to giving orders and bearing full responsibility for his actions. Therefore Morny had first had a private tête-à-tête with his half brother where he delivered a down-to-earth sermon. Coup leaders were not forbidden to wear white gloves on a battlefield, Morny began, “but those gloves must not be used as an excuse for not getting a little blood on their hands, when required.” Any kind of a military operation requires firm leaders fully committed to achieving their objective, regardless of the price. It was the old story of having to break eggs in order to make an omelet. Louis Napoléon wanted to seize control of a government without paying the price, without seeing anyone hurt or upset.8
Bonaparte then distributed the last of the cash he had in the safe, half of which he gave to a still wavering Saint-Arnaud, to ensure his commitment, although he was already the recipient of a previous fifty-thousand-franc goodwill inducement. Morny did not want to find himself with another sauve-qui-peut Bernadotte or Jérôme Bonaparte abandoning him in mid-battle. In any event, there was not even a whiff of enthusiasm in the air when the conspirators broke up and left Louis Napoléon, not knowing whether they would find themselves successful or dead or in shackles at this time on the morrow.
* * *
In the early hours of Tuesday the second of December at the appointed hour, Police Prefect Maupas duly gave the order for his gendarmes to carry out this rafale and sweep through Paris to make the initial arrests of the coup, beginning with the bluff General Nicolas Changarnier—who resisted at first with a pistol in each hand—and Deputy Adolphe Thiers, who had been preparing a coup of their own. Most of the warrants were served on men caught fast asleep, including Generals Cavaignac and Lamoricière. They were then brought from various points of the city to the recently opened Mazas prison, named after the street it faced, just opposite the present Gare de Lyon. Intended as a holding center for political prisoners, it was unusual in two respects—it was an immense circular structure that housed twelve hundred cells and, on the recommendation of de Tocqueville, boasted the first individual cells in any French prison. Meanwhile Maupas was executing the next phase of his instructions, arresting the “Reds” named on a second list, whether private citizens or deputies, to be found at all their usual haunts, apartments, political clubs, cafés, and restaurants, which were to be immediately closed. By five a.m. the initial operation had ended, without incident, even as the government proclamations and decrees were going up throughout the French capital.
As for the remarkable forty-year-old Count de Morny, after leaving the ladies at the Opéra Comique, he had gone on to the Jockey Club in the Boulevard des Capucines, where he played whist with Count Paul Daru and others until nearly five in the morning of Tuesday, the second of December. Returning to his pavilion overlooking the Arc de Triomphe just long enough to wash and change his clothes, Morny, who had not slept a wink, walked next door to Fanny Le Hon’s luxurious new mansion, she being the only lady in Paris to be au courant regarding the coup d’état. Morny then left moments later with her nineteen-year-old son, Léopold, in his new capacity as special secretary. Making one more stop to collect Morny’s father, General Charles de Flahaut, at the Hôtel de Massa, all three got into Flahaut’s cabriolet, which took them to the Place de la Concorde, already lined with hundreds of soldiers, and across the Seine to the Ministry of the Interior in the Rue de Grenelle. It was six-thirty in the morning, and Paris was still asleep. Passing through the cavalry squadron guarding the iron grill of the ministry, the carriage pulled into the large stone courtyard and drew up under the apartments of Minister Thorigny who, awakened by the soldiers and the clatter of hooves, threw open the shutters to see what the commotion was about. “Excuse me, monsieur, to inform you in such a brusque manner,” Morny called up to him, “but I have the honor of replacing you. Would you be so kind as to get dressed and leave immediately.” Morny, who had drafted the entire complicated plan for today’s coup, was now personally taking charge.9
The interior ministry now became the general headquarters and command center directing this coup d’état. Thanks to the installation of the new American electric telegraph, messages in Morse code could be sent instantly, no longer depending on the visual problems of the semaphore system that had impaired the government’s communications after the failed Strasbourg coup. Installing Achille Bouchet, the telegrapher seconded from the Bourse (where the count was a prominent figure) to run this technology, Interior Minister Morny was in a position to communicate directly with all the other ministries, including war, as well as the country’s prefects. Thanks to the magic of a telegrapher’s key, he could literally govern the entire country from one small room in this building. Political orders could be given, police operations launched, and units of the army deployed.
Morny, who had campaigned in Algeria, knew only too well how a large organization—military or civil—could complicate, delay, and easily foul up an operation, and he had elected to do without it, reducing his control of Paris and the country to a streamlined structure. He would give the orders; Léopold, Fanny’s unusually mature and able son, and Bouchet would carry out the communications. Three men!10 The old traditional ministry civil servants were no doubt scandalized—a nineteen-year-old secretary-general of the Interior Ministry was now giving them orders!11
The two principal elements for controlling this coup were the police and the army. As minister of the interior, Morny controlled the nation’s police. The Paris prefect of police, Émile de Maupas, like every prefect of every city in the country, took his orders directly from Auguste de Morny, as did, unusually now, the well-bribed war minister, General Leroy Saint-Arnaud, commander in chief of the French army.
* * *
President Bonaparte’s proclamation announcing the dissolution of the assembly had acted like a red flag as dozens and dozens of deputies rushed to the Palais Bourbon while Paris was still dark. “I assure you that when we got up at 5 o’clock [sic] and went past the Assembly, it was being occupied [by deputies], and it was anything but rassurant [reassuring],” General de Flahaut later telegraphed his anxious wife in London from the Interior Ministry. “The Chamber is surrounded with troops, who hate the Assembly,” and admittedly the army was treating the deputies roughly, but the army remained “well disposed toward the President.” What in fact he saw was Gilbert Persigny and Colonel Espinasse and his 42nd Line Regiment in the process of rounding up the indignant legislators. On the way to the Rue de Grenelle they had also passed General Changarnier’s house. “I saw it full of sergents de ville [municipal police] and Gendarmes mobiles [mounted police units] who were arresting him,” Flahaut continued in his awkward English. What is most curious is the fact that Morny had not only permitted this message—and other telegrams to follow—to be dispatched at all, but uncoded, to be delivered by a private company in London.12
Hardly had Morny settled in at the ministry than he received an unexpected visitor, the new prefect of the Gironde, Georges Haussmann, a complete stranger, informing him that President Bonaparte had, without explanation, invited him to call on the minister of the interior today. With orders to dispatch all over the city and the country, Morny was most impatient with this clearly perplexed gentleman. Briefly explaining the situation, he bluntly asked the prefect, “Monsieur Haussmann, are you with us?”
“I am not quite sure what is happening here, Monsieur le Comte, but I am the prince’s man. You can count on me completely,” Haussmann replied. Returning to Bordeaux that same day, he carried with him the minister’s special decree certifying him an “Extraordinary Commissioner of the Ministry of the Interior.” In another year Haussmann would be back in Paris in a very different capacity, involving very close work with Napoléon III.13
In the meantime, with the well over one hundred of the nation’s elected representatives that had been arrested earlier in the National Assembly now en route to jail, another two hundred deputies representing the monarchist and republican parties, having escaped from the Assembly, made their way to the mairie (the district city hall) of the then tenth arrondissement at the junction of the Croix Rouge and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. There they were addressed by Pierre-Antoine Berryer, the celebrated barrister who had defended Louis Napoléon following the Boulogne fiasco eleven years earlier. But a very different Berryer now declared President Bonaparte “an outlaw” and demanded his removal from office and the transfer of all his powers to the assembly. General Oudinot was then instructed to raise an army under the direct control of the assembly.
When two of Prefect Maupas’s special inspectors arrived and ordered the packed hall to disperse, Berryer defied them, invoking Article 68 of the Constitution, declaring Louis Napoléon’s coup to be “illegal.” General Magnan’s troops then entered, arrested all the deputies, and packed them off to the officers’ quarters of the cavalry barracks on the Quai d’Orsay. Meanwhile Count Daru, with whom Morny had been playing whist at the Jockey Club a few hours earlier, was arrested along with some friends at his home in the Rue de Lille. Odilon Barrot, who had also escaped from the Assembly, was next seized with a few ringleaders at his apartment in the Rue de la Ferme, while “Deputy [Adolphe] Crémieux and a small group of ‘reds’ were arrested in the Rue des Petits Augustins.” Still others were found at Ledru-Rollin’s flat,” Léopold Le Hon continued in his running narrative.14 “The assembly is dissolved,” General de Flahaut wrote his wife, Margaret. It was an “eventful and anxious day,” he confessed, “for it is not without regret that one begins by arresting respectable men whose only fault is being political enemies.”15
In fact the city was not as quiet as Léopold Le Hon had indicated, for Colonel Fleury had encountered swelling throngs between Port Saint-Denis and Port Martin being stirred up by agitators. When a shot rang out, a bullet grazing Fleury’s head, his troops opened fire and those taken with arms were seized and a small number executed. The exchange of gunfire was brief, however, and the initial barricades dismantled.
By three-thirty p.m. that same afternoon, a caravan of omnibuses was loading the deputies arrested earlier that morning, taking them to prison. “Approximately 100 deputies [including General Cavaignac] were arrested [at the Assembly],” Léopold wrote … “At 7 o’clock [this evening] they will be sent to Ham.… The reports coming in are still quite good.… the faubourgs [Saint-Denis, Saint-Martin, and Saint-Antoine] are quiet at present.… The Chief [Morny] is going to see you after the meeting at the Élysée” where he was spending the entire afternoon to keep Louis Napoléon apprised of events, and to ensure that he did not interfere. The last thing Morny needed was an impetuous order or act by his half brother, such as had taken place at Boulogne. Léopold’s “Last Bulletin” of the day stated that the news from the rest of the country was “excellent—I shall stay at my desk all night, while the Chief catches up on his sleep [the first in over forty-eight hours].”16
While the police and army were rounding up politicians the morning of the second, President Bonaparte had decided to show the flag and to display personally that all was well and the capital tranquil. “My dear General,” Louis Napoléon wrote Count de Flahaut, “I should be delighted to have your company on horseback this morning…”17 The prince had invited members of his family and some senior officers and their ADCs for this occasion. Later that morning the entire equestrian party set out on horseback from the Place Beauvau and the Élysée Nationale, as that palace was still called. A heavy cavalry escort assured the security of this glittering entourage, everyone in resplendent blue-and-red military uniform. His retinue included General Charles de Flahaut, wearing a chest full of his historic campaign medals from Austerlitz to Moscow, War Minister Saint-Arnaud, Prefect of Police Magnan, Marshal Exelmans, and the newly promoted marshal, Uncle Jérôme Bonaparte, and cousin General Edgar Ney, now back from the Roman expedition—all of them attended by a bevy of aides-de-camp.18 It could have been a Sunday promenade through the Blois.
The idea was to demonstrate to the public that the senior officials of the government were in such complete control of events that they could afford time out for a leisurely morning ride. A fidgeting Jérôme Bonaparte alone kept warning of possible trouble, advising his nephew Louis Napoléon that they were advancing too quickly into the open Place de la Concorde, where they would make clear targets for marksmen. But of course this swaggering bully was in reality a notorious coward when it came to fighting and during the First Empire had abandoned both the capital of his kingdom of Westphalia and Emperor Napoléon on the field of battle during the Wagram and Russian campaigns. Crossing the Seine, they continued up the Quai d’Orsay before returning past the now silent Bourbon Palace, still cordoned off by troops. Four brigades, some thirty-one thousand men, lined the streets, including both banks of the Seine, concentrated largely between the Louvre and the Champs-Élysées, including the presidential palace. It was an intimidating display of military might, announcing Bonaparte’s intention to crush even the slightest sign of defiance or armed rebellion. This equestrian foray had been a success, attended by a presidential appeal to the people for solidarity and support.19
Charles de Flahaut, who had spent the day at the Élysée or with Léopold at the Interior Ministry going over the reports received from the war ministry, the prefecture of police, and from prefects across the country, returned to the Hôtel de Massa to write his wife. “Auguste has been heroic. Nothing can exceed his courage, firmness, good sense, prudence, calm, good humor, gentleness and tact during all that was going on, and at the same time [he remains] so simple, and [there is a] total absence of vanity and conceit [in him].” As for Paris, the first night passed uneventfully.20
* * *
Wednesday the third of December saw dozens of streets barricaded from the Faubourg Saint-Denis in the north to the Temple, the Bastille, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine a focal point, around Les Halles, congested with horses, carts, and crowds, across to the Left Bank through the narrow streets around the Sorbonne and as far as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s tomb in the Pantheon. Here in this maze of ancient, winding streets lined with crowded tenements, there were no cries of “Vive Napoléon.” “The people in the streets do not appear to be supporting us,” the police prefect reported to Morny in a masterpiece of understatement.21
“Most confidential,” Police Prefect Maupas notified Fanny Le Hon. “I do not have enough police to secure the streets … The barricades are beginning to go up in the Fauburg Saint-Antoine.” He advised her to remain at home,22 even as Military Governor Magnan was advising Morny that “the barricades in the Rue Rambuteau and adjacent streets have been taken without firing a shot.… For God’s sake, don’t believe all the tales coming from the Prefecture [of Police], who exaggerate everything, even their own fear.”23 Meanwhile, War Minister Saint-Arnaud was having warnings posted in the streets: “Any individual building or defending a barricade, or caught bearing arms, will be shot on sight.”24
Unusual in a prefect, Maupas was very nervous and did tend “to see double,” as Emperor Napoléon used to say of fainthearted officers, imagining twice as many foes and dangers as actually existed. Morny was in fact getting quite worried about Maupas’s unreliability and barely disguised hostility to both him and Magnan. “The zeal of the police is now so overexcited,” he advised Nadine Baroche, “that I shouldn’t be at all surprised to find myself placed under arrest!”25
On the other hand there was no shortage of rumors circulating throughout the city fueling those fears: Louis Napoléon had been “deposed” and “outlawed,” Victor Hugo claimed in one of his creative handbills. The president had just raided the Banque de France and was distributing “twenty-five million francs” among his generals and cronies. Louis Philippe’s three surviving sons were about to descend upon Lille before leading an army against Paris. Another rumor placed the prince de Joinville, currently at sea, at Cherbourg at the head of troops advancing on the capital from the west. “They say that the 12th regiment of dragoons led by the Comte de Chambord is on its way from Saint-Germain!” the police prefect warned Morny at the interior ministry. “I don’t believe it for a minute,” Morny replied. Chambord was in fact many hundreds of miles away safely ensconced behind the high walls of his Austrian castle at Frohsdorf.26 Other bruits claimed that insurgents had seized control of Lyon, Amiens, Rouen, and other cities—false, of course, as was “news” of General Lamoricière’s miraculous escape from prison, and who was allegedly marching at the head of several regiments about to seize the Élysée. Lamoricière was still in prison, of course, and his regiments entirely nonexistent. “The most important thing at this stage,” Louis Napoléon concluded, “is for you [Morny] to issue news bulletins assuring the people of Paris that all is quiet in the rest of the country.”27 There were no phantom armies at St.-Germain, Lille, or Cherbourg marching on the French capital.
Although new barricades were appearing on Thursday the fourth of December, as late as eight o’clock in the morning Maupas at the prefecture and Brigadier General Levasseur at the Hôtel de Ville were reporting the capital still to be relatively calm. But many hundreds of men and women were arriving from the tenements to man the barricades and “café conspirators in black broadcloth and sporting fashionable yellow gloves” were haranguing them to revolt, to act. Léopold remained optimistic, however, assuring Fanny of the president’s superior forces and of the inevitability of “a complete victory, as we are now in control of the insurrection.”28
In fact the city’s garrison of sixty thousand troops supporting Morny’s operations had now been deployed to deliver the coup de grâce to the network of barricades. From his temporary post near the Carrousel, Military Governor General Mangan was directing the day’s events as the last of his commanders reported that all of the brigades were in their designated positions across the right bank. Unlike Saint-Arnaud, Magnan had not spent years campaigning in Algeria, instead having remained in France (and Belgium), and because of this Morny had complete confidence in him, a dedicated, honest soldier with a sense of humanity (rare in soldiers of the day) and honor. Moreover, Magnan had refused an enormous unsolicited bribe offered by Louis Napoléon prior to Boulogne in 1840, while Saint-Arnaud had just demanded—and received—a very large pot au vin to ensure his serving this same Louis Napoléon. Ever the gambler, the general continued to hedge his bets and ensure his “loyalty.” Morny also shared his father’s prejudice against and contempt for all “those African generals,” several of whom he had personally served under in combat. Bypassing the war minister, Morny had in fact worked directly with Magnan in the preparation of the day’s operations. In any event, every man was now in place. Astride his horse and surrounded by his staff at precisely two o’clock on this wintry afternoon, General Magnan gave the order to commence the most important, and the shortest, campaign of his career as bugles blew and ADCs dashed off to observe the field commands in action.29
Six full brigades began to move: Brigadier Generals Canrobert and Cotte, positioned along the Boulevard des Italiens, coordinated with General Bourgon’s brigade, continuing that line between the Ports of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin. General Dulac with his battery of six cannon held the grounds of L’Église Saint-Eustache, and just to the west along the Rue de la Paix, General Reybelle advanced with his cavalry brigade, while to the east General Courtigis’s infantry had arrived from Vincennes. As for their southern flank, it was protected by the Seine. This massive envelopment-pincer movement—complicated by the meshwork of confining narrow, ancient streets—advanced simultaneously from all points, with the leaderless insurgents from the start hopelessly caught up in this bristling mass of men and guns. And that had been Morny’s and Magnan’s plan, fully endorsed by Flahaut, to deploy overwhelming force and crush the insurgents as quickly as possible with the least loss of life.30
Fighting soon erupted along most points, beginning with the boulevards of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, between Rue Rambeau and the Halles, across the Rue du Temple and into the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine as far east as the Place de la Bastille. The insurgents, facing crack veterans from Algeria, and with few arms and no artillery or cavalry, were foredoomed. Everywhere they were surrounded and their barricades engulfed, like some human tsunami. Meanwhile, additional troops on the Left Bank were sweeping that area clean as Victor Hugo and his followers, who had escaped arrest, were forced into hiding.
There were some fierce firefights, and dozens of barricaded streets resisted the oncoming infantry; six cannons were brought up from Saint-Eustache to blast them open while General Courtigis’s battery of artillery was doing the same from the east. The dead were brought to the city’s morgue, and the wounded to the closest hospital, the Hôtel de Dieu, adjacent to Notre Dame Cathedral on the Isle de la Cité. Some prisoners were shot on the spot, as the war minister had warned, but most were taken to the racecourse on the grass-covered Champs de Mars to await execution, in the shadow of Napoléon’s tomb in the Invalides. A bloodthirsty, spirited young Léopold Le Hon—who had never worn a uniform or seen a battlefield—gave his blessing. “Severe punishment must be meted out as an example to all those who might rise up against us!” he pronounced.31 Morny’s plan was to begin and end this operation as quickly as possible with the least casualties, based on Emperor Napoléon’s old tactics, deploying an overwhelming mass of men and guns converging on their objective.
Magnan fully justified Morny’s faith in him to command today, and the operation was a complete success by Friday morning, the fifth of December, though isolated skirmishes continued, usually from apartments overlooking the streets. Count de Morny and General Magnan were acclaimed great victors by most, and as brutes and traitors by the unforgiving defeated. There had of course also been the inevitable incidents of out-of-control backstreet killings by troops.
Despite Léopold Le Hon’s protestations that the provinces had remained relatively calm, reports reached Morny of “troubles” in thirty-two of the nation’s departments. “Insurgents” opposing a Bonaparte takeover were found from the royalist southwest around Bordeaux to the Var in the southeast, as well as in the central part of the country and elsewhere. But it was the smaller cities and towns in relatively isolated positions that were to prove most alarming, including Digne, seized by Napoléon during his Hundred Days march after arriving from Elba.
In fact the worst hotspot only developed after Paris was secured by the fifth, in the small town of Clamecy, in the “red department” of Nièvre, where drunken mobs of the local peasantry seized and beat priests before tying them to posts and forcing them to watch the lynching of a gendarme on Saturday the sixth. This was followed by the kidnapping of thirty-eight young unmarried girls, who were stripped naked and forced to serve their “banquets,” concluding with two days of gang rape in the town center by hundreds of men, ultimately leading to fifteen hundred arrests—nearly a quarter of the town’s population.32 It was an appalling barbarity worthy of the ancient Gauls or of a Zola novel, vivid echoes of 1793 all over again, of a primitive historical mentality. For Morny, the problems in the provinces meant an emergency search for at least two dozen prefect replacements. “Could you provide us with a list of candidates as prefects and deputy prefects?” A desperate Léopold curiously even asked Fanny if she could suggest a few. “Send them to me immediately.”33
“The insurrection is suppressed in all parts of Paris,” Flahaut jubilantly telegraphed 19 Grosvenor Square at 7:02 p.m. on Friday the fifth. “Tranquillity prevails everywhere and even enthusiasm.” “It’s all over,” Morny, too, assured Margaret de Flahaut [in English], a half hour later. “We are victorious…” “Auguste is heroic. I wish all his colleagues were like him,” General Flahaut wrote; he “has displayed an energy, skill and firmness that simply defies description.… His determination to rid Paris and France of those scoundrels who have caused all the recent revolutions holds firm. For the first time they have been shown up for what they really are, ‘bandits’ and ‘rascals.’”34
Meanwhile an ever glib Prosper Mérimée, pleased with the results of the coup, dismissed any criticism of it. “There was no brutality,” he claimed, and “not even much of a battle.”35 General Bernard Magnan, as a professional soldier in charge of security for the French capital, was for his part also satisfied with the results, having avoided the carnage that would inevitably have ensued had the war minister been left in command. Magnan had been given an order by the president of the Republic and had carried it out. Unlike Saint-Arnaud or Changarnier, however, he took no pleasure in killing, and had done his best to keep casualties to a minimum.
* * *
Astonishingly, despite the heated rhetoric and accusations to the contrary, the death toll was estimated at fewer than four hundred civilians and only thirty soldiers (as compared to some five thousand killed during the June Days of 1848). Morny had planned and executed a remarkably surgical textbook operation in a densely crowded city of more than one million. More than 26,000 people were allegedly arrested across the country—which seems a grossly inaccurate figure when considering the additional isolated rebellions in thirty-two departments. Jules Simon put that figure at one hundred thousand. In any event Louis Napoléon ordered the release of 11,609 prisoners within a matter of days. Nine thousand five hundred men were transported to Algeria—the French had finally found a practical use for that colony—while 250 hard-liners were sent to Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Another 4,500 were released from Parisian prisons and given either full pardons or commuted sentences.36
Of the more than three hundred deputies arrested on the second of December, eighty-four were officially “exiled” by the government “for reasons of national security,” including Adolphe Thiers, François Raspail, Pierre Leroux, and Émile Ollivier. When it was reported to Morny that Thiers was quite ill, Morny personally intervened to have him taken from his prison cell to his home for medical care; he then permitted him to leave for Bruxelles. General Louis Cavaignac, a personal friend, if political foe, who had found himself imprisoned at Ham late on the second of December, the day on which he was to have been married, was released by this interior minister in order to complete that ceremony. Secretly handed a passport with the compliments of Auguste de Morny, he celebrated his honeymoon in Belgium.
There Cavaignac found himself in good company, including Changarnier, who had fled the country in disguise (as “General Bergamote”), General de Lamoricière, General Bedeau, Colonel Charras, Victor Hugo (with his mistress, Juliette Drouet), Victor Schloelcher, Émile Deschanel, François Arago, Armand Barbès, Madier de Montjau, Edgar Quinet, and even Alexandre Dumas, who had been exiled, not by Louis Napoléon, but as usual by assiduous creditors already seizing his property in Paris. Ultimately more than seven thousand French men and women were to seek refuge in Belgium.37
Charles de Flahaut, too, was pleased with the operation, “a tremendous game,” he called it. “The events of 4 December 1851 profoundly shocked me,” Morny afterward reflected, “but I was Minister of the Interior … responsible for order and the disorder.” He had done what he considered absolutely necessary to save the nation from civil war, and accepted full responsibility for his actions.38 “Well done, my dear friend, well done! Persevere with your enlightened dictatorship and you will save France!” Count de Laubespin congratulated a thankful Morny. “Let this splendid phrase of the Prince’s be your motto,” he continued. “‘The time has come for the wicked to start quaking in their boots, and for decent men to be able to start breathing freely once again.’”39
A national plebiscite held on December 20, 1851, on whether or not to accept major changes to the Constitution, including a new ten-year period of office for President Bonaparte, passed overwhelmingly, 7,439,216 votes for, 646,737 against (exclusive of 1,500,000 abstentions). The French people were weary of these prolonged political upheavals and above all the name “Bonaparte” today meant stability, order, and peace after three years of turmoil and uncertainty. As for the prince-president, Louis Napoléon, he had at long last executed a successful coup d’état, or rather his half brother Auguste had … and that he could never quite forgive.