“I am the emperor of the Arabs as well as Emperor of the French.” 1
—NAPOLÉON III
“The Emperor does not wish to trouble or upset the natives.” 2
—A SARCASTIC DUKE DE MORNY TO BARON JÉRÔME DAVID
This was not how he had planned it, a far cry from that triumphant return anticipated back in September 1860. Instead, today, on this first day of May 1865, Louis Napoléon found himself once again aboard the two-thousand-ton, 295-foot Aigle. Flanked by a squadron of recently launched ironclad frigates of the French Imperial Navy, her powerful Mazeline engines drove the luxurious yacht at a top speed of fifteen knots across the Mediterranean on a southerly course. Algeria, the crown of his hopes and dreams for this new empire, was on fire, and a desperate Napoléon III was coming to put it out.
* * *
Little had he realized, when news had reached him in March 1864 of a fresh insurrection by tribesmen in the mountainous Kabyle region of eastern Algeria, that one year later this rebellion would continue unchecked, requiring fresh reinforcements from France. Due to the unanticipated call for French troops overseas in Indochina, China, West Africa, and Mexico, the remaining 60,000-man army in Algeria now had to be strengthened to 85,000. Month after month, dozens of steamers and new naval transports were now ferrying military supplies and troops from Toulon and Marseille to North Africa, returning with the dead and wounded. The former governor general of Algeria, Marshal Pélissier, the hero of Malakoff, who had died in May of 1864, was finally succeeded in September by the younger and much more determined Marshal Patrice de MacMahon.
In fact nothing had gone right for Louis Napoléon since 1864, ending in December with the death of his faithful Jean-François Mocquard, who had managed his office since the Second Republic. A loyal, intimate friend and daily presence, he was greatly missed. Moreover, international affairs were becoming much more complex, a veritable game of three-dimensional chess, and in the end it was not on his foreign ministers that Louis Napoléon relied, or Persigny, and certainly not on that erratic Bonaparte cousin, Prince Jérôme, but on his half brother, Auguste de Morny. On occasion Morny would call at the Tuileries to discuss legislative problems or to solicit a favor. More frequently, however, it was Morny who received an urgent summons to the Tuileries or the Palace of St. Cloud.
At these conferences the two brothers would closet themselves, just the two of them, to solve the problems of the moment. As president of the Legislative Body for more than a decade, Morny was the one man who could be relied upon for keeping his head, never panicking, never giving in to the howls of the masses or outraged deputies—except briefly during the anti-English outcry following the annexation of Savoy and Nice. Highly intelligent, objective, and certainly one of the best informed private individuals in the country regarding foreign affairs, Morny could always be counted on for a straightforward answer to Louis Napoléon’s questions and problems; his answers were not always appreciated, perhaps, but usually right and always honest. Morny had no patience for the usual political games. There was not another man like him for integrity unless it was the ailing Achille Fould.
Despite the thirty advisors and staff members he now brought with him aboard the Aigle, Louis Napoléon, always a very private man, remained in his cabin, lost in his thoughts as to the course of action he would take on reaching Algiers. But one thing was clear, the situation had to be stabilized and quickly. And yet he was more alone at this moment than at any other time in his life, ever since two months earlier when on Monday the tenth of March he had received a message that his fifty-three-year-old half brother, Auguste de Morny, had died in bed at the Hôtel de Lassay at 7:55 that morning.3 Eugénie, deeply attached to Auguste, perhaps her closest confidant, who had stood by her from the very first hour, broke down. A stunned Louis Napoléon took to his bed and did not leave it for twenty-four hours. Despite their sometimes great differences, and occasional considerable rows—he was the only person with whom Louis Napoléon had ever lost his temper—they shared the same family blood, the same mother, and the same loyalty to France.
The increasing number of this fifty-seven-year-old Louis Napoléon’s own health problems was alarming. Crippling bouts of rheumatism, stabbing attacks of gout, hemorrhoids, headaches, a hacking cough resulting from his chain-smoking, not to mention a heart attack in 1864—all were becoming a growing concern in court and political circles, as Ambassador Cowley reported back to an equally concerned British government.4 The emperor’s unrelenting debilitating trysts, especially with the indefatigable young beauty Marguerite Bellanger, certainly did not help matters. And then recently his surgeon, Dr. Larrey, the son of Napoléon’s army doctor, diagnosed a new persistent, sometimes agonizing, lower abdominal pain, believing it to be a gallstone. His recommendation: an operation to remove it before it grew any bigger. More and more frequently it even prevented Louis Napoléon from taking his daily ride in the Bois. Another day, he said, understandably postponing a painful and dangerous operation.
But now even Morny was gone, with Auguste’s distraught elderly father, Charles de Flahaut, left to mourn the son to whom he was so attached. Indeed they had been almost like brothers. And thus they had all followed the enormous funeral cortège to Père Lachaise Cemetery on March 13, 1865. There had always been something very special about Morny, despite his execrable failure to feel shame for his philandering and the pain that had caused Fanny, and later his wife, Sophie, or any remorse for his flagrant dishonesty in financial matters, which he openly joked about. For those who knew him and worked with him daily, however, especially his legislative secretary at the assembly, Ludovic Halévy (Offenbach’s favorite librettist), there was quite another Morny: charming, loyal, and humorous, and they like so many in Morny’s inner circle were almost fanatically devoted to him. It did not go without comment that many were Jews or, like Offenbach, Jewish converts.
Meanwhile, now in May 1865, Louis Napoléon was leaving Eugénie behind to rule in his stead as imperial regent, under the guidance of his privy council and the mercurial Sans-Plomb, whom she positively loathed, and whom Louis Napoléon had never trusted. The faithful Mocquard was no longer there to keep an eye on the situation in his absence or to protect the interests of the empress.
* * *
The Algeria that had so fascinated Louis Napoléon during his first visit five years earlier had since become a colonial nightmare. Obviously the people of Algeria did not know how to administer their own country and their own lives, at least as the enlightened Louis Napoléon saw it. They did not share his values and French Christian views as to how a traditional Algerian Muslim tribal society should live and be governed. He was intent, therefore, on changing the entire country, although of course he had never seriously studied Algerian history or Islam, and of course did not speak Arabic or any of the Berber dialects (the indigenous languages of North Africa except for Egypt). The Turks had governed Algeria as a province of the Ottoman Empire until 1830 and had done nothing for them, according to Louis Napoléon’s lights. Apart from collecting taxes, the Turks had let them run their own lives, leaving traditional tribal affairs and customs unchanged. They had not encouraged them to abandon tribal life, acquire private property, or try to produce agricultural surplus beyond their own tribal needs, for overseas sales. All this was wrong in the eyes of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte.
The Algerians needed “guidance” in entering the modern world of European civilization. Everything had to change, but it must be done patiently and respectfully. They must be given equal rights, the same rights as the French population; such an idea, of course, had never even occurred even to the most enlightened Algerian. Tribal councils, popularly elected and chosen throughout the centuries, should now be disbanded, and along with them tribal chiefs. Dismantle the tribe and its administration and become like France, he insisted. And yet Louis Napoléon specifically forbade the creation of cantonnements, or “reservations.”5 His knowledge of the wholesale transportation and relocation of the American Indians, he said, had cautioned him enough not to repeat that experiment. Louis Napoléon had his own elaborate plans for the 362 Algerians tribes. This long sea voyage gave him much time for contemplation.
* * *
It was a very somber, much preoccupied Louis Napoléon who reached Algeria in the early morning hours of May 2, 1865, even as the continuing rebellion was spreading to other tribes in Titteri, Dahra, and the Flehas. He and his staff, under General Fleury’s direction, had prepared an extensive agenda, including a series of meetings with French colonists and senior military officers, and Algerian leaders throughout the country. He was sure that through an extensive investigative tour of the colony he could come to a better understanding of the problems causing the revolts, and in so doing find solutions for the outstanding problems. But what indeed had gone wrong to produce this present state of affairs? In March 1864 tribal chief Si Sliman6 had rebelled against the French presence and then massacred four dozen French troops sent to subdue them.
Since then, reinforcements were continuing to arrive to restore order, including strong measures to discourage future rebellions. Villages were torched and rendered uninhabitable in Oran Province, the south, and in the west along the ill-defined Moroccan frontier.7 And yet heavy resistance to the French was continuing. Louis Napoléon’s idea for civilian administration of the colony, including the extension of democratic rights and institutions for the Algerian people as well—most of whom could neither read nor write—seemed to have failed in a most calamitous manner. Crisis gripped the colony.
* * *
As early as June 1858, Louis Napoléon had decided to reduce the influence and role of the French military in Algeria. He created a special ministry for that colony and appointed none other than his ineffable cousin Prince Jérôme as both its minister and civil governor. Succeeding Marshal Randon, he had arrived with his Parisian hangers-on and an impressive agenda of liberal, “democratic” reforms to improve the lot of both the Algerians and the colonists in the summer of 1858. This Plon-Plon, or Sans-Plomb (“gutless”)—he was still referred to by both sobriquets—cousin Jérôme may frequently have been highly unpredictable in speech and actions, but he was a consistent political liberal, wishing to democratize the entire world through his “idealism.” And that idée fixe was perhaps his one saving grace in the eyes of the long-suffering Louis Napoléon. Plon-Plon had an identical blueprint ready to apply to every French colony in Africa and Asia.
As Algeria’s first civil governor under the newly constituted Ministry of Algeria, Jérôme had called for much greater colonization of the country’s “vast vacant spaces,” as Marshal Randon referred to confiscated tribal land. His plans also called for a political merging of Algeria with metropolitan France. Civilians would replace army officers as prefects and in daily administration, and colonists would send deputies to the Legislative Body in Paris. General—as he still was in 1858—Patrice MacMahon and all senior army officers had most vigorously opposed Plon-Plon and these revolutionary actions. Without the army there would be no order or security in this still largely unconquered land. Civilian officials from Paris did not possess the extensive local knowledge or the trained police required to replace seasoned soldiers, they had argued. Moreover, Jérôme also intended to reorganize the judicial system of the colony. The French military were no longer allowed to accuse, try, punish, or imprison Algerian Muslims, who now had to be tried instead under Qu’ranic law or in tribal courts. A storm of indignation directed by MacMahon obliged Louis Napoléon to retreat, allowing some military participation when Muslims were involved. The government’s “Arab Bureaux,” comprised of army officers,8 at least knew the land, the people, the customs and languages, unlike the French civilian judges and officials freshly off the boat from France. In brief, without the French army in control, the army argued, Algeria would revert to chaos, and France might even lose the colony.
On the other hand, the brooding Plon-Plon personally knew nothing about Algeria, its history, or its people, and had no plans to learn by touring the country or, indeed, even to leaving the capital of Algiers. He was only interested in introducing his personal theoretical liberal reforms. But when for instance on February 16, 1859, he announced from France (where he had returned in December 1858) that “the natives” would be free to sell or acquire land, including tribal land, all sides were up in arms. Strictly defined lands could no longer be easily confiscated by the state.9 The result: tribes would eventually break up, disintegrate, and disappear. As the totality of their tribes literally constituted Algeria, this meant the entire social structure protecting the members of each tribe would no longer exist, resulting in a veritable diaspora of tribesmen. It also meant that the government’s “Arab Bureaux” would lose hands-on control of the tribes. An angry MacMahon and the army brass bullied, ranted, and threatened mass resignations, and yet again Louis Napoléon gave way, abrogating the law, for the moment.10
One of Plon-Plon’s final liberal acts as governor was to reduce the severe editorial restrictions muzzling the independent French press in Algeria, which was so opposed to the untouchable, high-handed rule of the country by an arrogant military like those found in all French colonies. Unshackled highly critical editorials immediately flooded the colony, even resulting in two duels by army officers challenging publishers. In any event, safe and far away from the chaos he had left back in Algeria, in January 1859 Governor Prince Jérôme had duly married Princess Clothilde, the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel, and on March 21, 1859, resigned his dual post as governor and colonial minister of Algeria. He never again visited Algeria, or even mentioned that colony, like his abortive (one week) Spanish embassy and his abandoned troops in the Crimea.
* * *
Clearly Louis Napoléon had made more mistakes, for Algeria had not yet been ready for a civil administration, a “resident general” as governor, and in July 1864 he officially suppressed that post, that colony returning to the Ministry of the Marine in the Place de la Concorde. So much for Louis Napoléon’s desire for a liberal, more progressive Algeria. What the colony needed now was a forceful authoritarian restoration of peace and order, and in September 1864 he appointed the old Algerian hand Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, destined to rule Algeria with an iron hand until July 1870.
* * *
Patrice de MacMahon was born in the family chateau of Sully in Burgundy on June 13, 1808, the sixteenth child of a redoubtable aristocratic mother. Like his father, he intended to be a soldier. Educated at the Collège Saint Louis in Paris, Patrice de MacMahon then began his military studies, emerging with a commission from the École Militaire de Saint Cyr in 1827. Serving in Algeria under Charles X and then King Louis Philippe, he was among the first to capture the capital, Algiers, in 1830. Continuing in that colony under Louis Philippe through 1837, he participated in the siege of Constantine, when he probably met Auguste de Morny for the first time. As a major, MacMahon commanded a battalion fighting Algeria’s most famous leader, Abd el-Kader, in 1841. In 1849 he was appointed General Pélissier’s chief of staff in western Oran Province.
A politically savvy officer, the shrewd MacMahon supported Louis Napoléon’s coup of December 1851 and was immediately promoted to major general. In his forties he finally married the very wealthy Elisabeth de La Croix de Castries, placing him at once in the most influential court circles. During the Crimean War of 1855, MacMahon had gained fame by taking Sebastopol, for which he was rewarded by Louis Napoléon with a senatorial seat. Declining the supreme command of the French metropolitan army, the by now very wealthy MacMahon chose to return to Algeria, where he put down a new rebellion in the ever turbulent Kabyle region. In the 1859 Italian War of Independence against the Austrians, he was instrumental in winning the battle of Magenta, for which he was rewarded with a marshal’s baton and the title of Duke of Magenta.
Up to this point Louis Napoléon had greatly admired MacMahon the soldier, a man of his own age, and unlike so many senior officers, a gentleman of the old school, at least superficially. He had full confidence in his restoring order in Algeria, and in a civilized manner, but had long before learned to look the other way when an ugly price had to be paid to achieve a necessary goal.
* * *
As governor general, MacMahon certainly did not flinch from vigorous and even brutal military action, including massacres of entire villages. Algeria, however, was a vast land, its nearly three million people scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles, and not an easy land “to pacify,” a favorite term of the French. On the other hand, the long-term solutions sought for this colony were political, not military. Emperor Napoléon had ruled France and Europe with the bayonet. His nephew preferred the rule of law, common sense, and an understanding of the people’s needs if at all possible. On the twenty-third of April, 1863, Louis Napoléon signed a new decree stamped with the approval of the Senate that shook the establishment in Algeria, the military, and the colonists alike.
The colony was to be surveyed, for the first time in history, something even their predecessors, the Turks, had never attempted. Paris would now “protect” the property rights of the tribes. In Algeria the country—with the exception of some urban commercial real estate, Muslim waqfs (large charitable institutions), and official government property—was largely communal, as it had been for centuries. Each tribe had its unfenced, but legally recognized, boundaries. Once surveyed, all this would change. Ironically, this also meant that the military was no longer permitted to seize entire swathes of “vacant land.”
* * *
These Hamitic tribes were efficient, time-tested democratic communities. A group of respected men, usually elders, ruled each tribe, and they in turn selected their tribal chieftain. All matters concerning the tribe as a whole were dealt with by them through the tribal council. When water was scarce, or the flocks had to be moved seasonally to the greener uplands, it was the council that made the decision for the entire tribe. If a tribe were attacked by a neighbor, the tribal council decided on a collective defense. The council made the decisions on its “foreign policy,” for there was neither a ruling king nor any sense or concept of nationhood. Indeed, the average Algerian had no idea what a country called “Algeria” meant. He never called himself “Algerian,” only by his tribal name. Indeed, he did not know that there was such an entity as “a country.” Everything began and ended with his tribe and its immediate neighbors. At the same time no one went hungry in the tribe, for the well-being of the people was the overall responsibility of the tribe, their community. Depending on the traditions of each tribe, families were free to raise sheep, goats, and camels. Dishonesty was not tolerated, and when a crime was committed, the tribal council and its chief dealt with it. As there were no tribal prisons, all legal matters had to be decided and dispatched on the spot. A thief would lose a hand, or a crime would be resolved by “financial” compensation, e.g., by so many animals awarded to the injured party, or in extreme cases an offender could be outlawed, “deported,” rendered homeless and “stateless.” That was the worst penalty for an Algerian. These people were not urban dwellers, they were shepherds and farmers who transformed themselves into warriors when threatened. There were few towns or cities, or “madinas,” and those were inhabited and run by Christians, Jews, or foreign merchants. Daily existence was essentially simple, and safe, and tribal life, while never luxurious or even very comfortable, met the needs and aspirations of the people. Everyone was safe, protected, and well fed, and above all everyone belonged to his tribal community. The tribe was their anchor. All was well in the world, and this, tragically, was something that Louis Napoléon simply could never begin to fathom or appreciate.
* * *
The emperor girded with Saint-Simeon ideology, Christian charity, and his superior French civilization, while finding these “Arab customs” colorful, also considered the Algerians “a race in decline,” as he put it. In fact there had been no “decline,” it was just a very different society, living under very different rules, values, and customs, which had remained unchanged from time immemorial. All that was wrong, however, and Louis Napoléon was determined to rescue them from their “decline,” remaking them in his own image, complete with modern cities, paved streets, gas lighting, neat houses with running water, railways, and French-style “parliamentary democracy.” In effect they could still keep their camels, but as pets.
“Today we must do more to convince the Arabs that we have not come to Algeria to oppress and despoil them, but rather to bring them the benefits of [French] civilization,” Louis Napoléon had instructed Marshal Pélissier in 1863, after having personally invited five Algerian tribal leaders as his guests the previous year to see modern Paris for themselves, including a weekend of shooting at Compiègne. “We must endeavor to seek every possible means at our disposal to bring about a reconciliation with this proud and intelligent race of warriors and farmers … The natives therefore, like the colonists, have an equal right to my protection. I am after all as much the Emperor of the Arabs as I am Emperor of the French.”11
Despite his poor state of health, aggravated by the sweltering North African heat, Louis Napoléon insisted on carrying out a long, detailed tour of Algeria in May and June. Both the colonists and the Algerian tribes received him with enthusiasm, an appreciation not shared, however, by the army. Following four most intensive weeks in the colony, on the seventh of June, 1865, Louis Napoléon was escorted by General MacMahon back to the port of Algiers. After a formal farewell ceremony, complete with the military band and an imperial gun salute from the ancient walls of the fort, the Aigle set sail for France that same day.12
* * *
Never before had any French head of state, or even any governor general, carried out such a comprehensive inspection of this colony, resulting in the hundreds of pages of notes and reports, maps and photos with which a conscientious Louis Napoléon was now returning to France. He had taken a risk in absenting himself from Paris for so long, not to mention the dangers incurred while touring areas still under live fire by defiant tribesmen. But he hoped he could bring the revolts in Algeria under control.
This was not the end of it, however, for once back in Paris Louis Napoléon sat down with his staff to prepare a program and analysis for General MacMahon, resulting in an eighty-eight-page document. “This country is at once an Arab kingdom, a European colony as well as a French military camp,” he began, and it was therefore essential to administer it equally “in the interests of the natives, the colonists and the military.… This intelligent people of warriors merits our understanding and support. Humanity and our interests require our participation in this endeavor.… And ultimately the manner in which we treat a conquered people will be regarded by the Arabs everywhere as an intervention ‘ordered by Providence itself,’” we having been sent here with “a mission of resurrecting this race” from the low state into which they have fallen.13
Louis Napoléon then closed his instructions to the governor general that twentieth of June, 1865, by defining the new role of colonization in Algeria. For the past seventeen years such plans had been erratic, ending in failure. He now proposed limiting all European colonization to the coastal regions of the Mediterranean, reserving the remainder of the country for the Algerians, completely rejecting Pélissier’s (and MacMahon’s) land-grabbing plans. This new overall program would then “appease the passions and satisfy the interests of all parties.” And in so doing “Algeria will no longer remain a heavy burden for us, but will be transformed, becoming a whole new source of strength. Once reconciled to the French the Arabs will provide us with troops and a colony that will flourish.… resulting in highly successful commercial relations with Metropolitan France.” Such was Louis Napoléon’s Algerian Testament, his dream.14
* * *
A furious MacMahon and the army rejected outright Napoléon III’s views and plans for Algeria. Everything Louis Napoléon now did and said throughout the 1860s resulted in hostile protests from the military and colonists alike, and frequently from the Algerians as well. Largely dismissing this criticism following his June “letter” to MacMahon, on Bastille Day, July 14, 1865, a defiant Louis Napoléon issued a new decree that left the entire colonial and military community simply dazed: French citizenship was offered to the Algerians—Muslims and Jews alike! “Why, we are offering the natives rights and a French citizenship that they had never even dreamt of asking for themselves!” Pélissier had earlier protested. And although the fine print clearly stipulated that no French passports would be issued to any Algerians until they first converted to Christianity, the entire French community damned their emperor, this madman and his blasted Saint-Simeon liberalism. It was difficult to say who outraged the French military and colonists more, Muslims or Jews. In any event, by 1870, only two hundred Algerian Muslims and 151 Jews had accepted Christianity and naturalization, out of a total population of more than two million.15 But it was a very important first step that would open the floodgates in the twentieth century to mass naturalization.
Not content with that little bombshell, on that same July day Louis Napoléon then managed to fan the flames with another ill-timed political act by welcoming the former Algerian “rebel” leader, Abd el-Kader, to the Tuileries for a special ceremony, presenting him with the Grande Croix of the Legion of Honor. French officers worked their entire careers for such an honor, and they were now sharing it with “an Arab!”16
Following the revolts of hundreds of thousands of Algerians, the colony was next swept by misfortunes of veritable Biblical proportions in 1867 and 1868: a calamitous, unrelieved drought, the worst in living memory, was followed by vast swarms of grasshoppers blackening the sky and destroying crops and every living plant, olive tree, and orange grove, which combined with the drought decimated millions of goats, sheep, camels, and horses. And then, just for good measure, devastating earthquakes leveled villages and destroyed many of the new buildings, bridges, roads, and irrigation canals Marshal Randon had begun, and this was followed by cholera and typhus epidemics. Louis Napoléon came to dread the next dispatch from General Headquarters in Algiers.
And then there was the human toll, some 300,000 “Arabs” alone having perished through starvation and pestilence within a four-year period. An appalled and ailing Louis Napoléon had no more suggestions, no more plans, to offer Governor General MacMahon. For the first time in his career he was beaten, while Eugénie offered prayers and lit candles for the Algerians. In addition there was the matter of another 350,000 dead, Algerians most likely killed since 1861 by the French army in battle or through ethnic cleansing, reports of which had been largely concealed from the emperor of the French.17
* * *
What had Louis Napoléon achieved? The additional 25,000 troops rushed to Algeria helped quell the rebellion for a while, but as a result of the subsequent grief and misery resulting from the natural disasters, angry new rebel leaders were soon stoking the fires of revolt again. What good had the French brought them? Algerians asked. Their richest agricultural land confiscated, Algerian tribal power and authority usurped, and a railway that no “Arab” ever rode, as well as drought and devastation that no French science or army could prevent or alleviate. Louis Napoléon took this very personally, depressed by the failure of his well-meant decisions and acts and the promises he could never keep. Years of dreaming and planning dashed.
Nevertheless, his survey of the country, or at least the first stage, was executed. Twenty million acres of it would be completed by 1870. All tribal land was now fixed on a map, some three and a half million acres registered as private property, and another two and a half million acres held as public domain for the state.18 Tribes were broken up administratively, and the title of much of their best land transferred privately to the government, colonists, and powerful Paris-based financial interests. With the removal of this communal land, a new historical phenomenon occurred: suddenly penniless, homeless Algerians, completely self-sufficient before the French had arrived, began their long trek to the cities along the coast, where there was neither food, nor housing, nor work for them, a relentless human movement that has since spilled over into France. All this because the French government considered it their God-given right to break up a society, sanctioned by the arrival of Louis Napoléon, he the catalyst instrumental in hastening this humanitarian tragedy, one still exploding today—five million North Africans in the suburbs of Paris, Lyon, Orléans, Clermont, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and Nice.
Back in Algeria, some 200,000 colonists had arrived by the late 1860s, perhaps half of them French, and most of them ended up in the coastal cities. And the government finally stopped giving away free agricultural land to attract them. On the other hand, one could not help but commiserate with a most bewildered Louis Napoléon. Prior to the arrival of the French, the Algerians had controlled nearly thirty million acres; by 1870 the French had reduced tribal holdings to three and a half million acres. Their policy of tribal deracination was in full swing, a veritable crime against humanity.
Upon his return to France in 1865, Louis Napoléon was already preoccupied with fresh distractions. That October the president of the United States ordered him to withdraw all French troops from Mexico. France, he was informed, was in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. And then that same month, while vacationing at Eugénie’s seaside villa in Biarritz, Louis Napoléon received a most unwelcome visitor, the minister-president of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck. With all his wealth and all the imperial palaces and châteaux at his disposal across France, the emperor of the French could no longer find peace anywhere. “Black clouds are gathering on the horizon,” he now warned the French nation in a public address.19