“I have never plotted in the usual sense of the word, for the men whom I count on are not tied to me by mere personal oaths of loyalty, but rather by something far more enduring, by a mutual love [of France]…” 1
—PRINCE LOUIS NAPOLÉON
“He absolutely believed himself to be the man of Destiny …
upon whom France utterly depended.” 2
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
Queen Hortense was without doubt the most influential person in Louis Napoléon’s life, inculcating his moral and spiritual values, strengthening his ego, and enforcing his determination to achieve supreme power. He was also a prisoner of her love. “Take good care of yourself, mon enfant, if only to ensure my peace of mind, your love is the sole consolation of my existence,” Hortense was to write time and again to her sheltered son even when he was in his twenties and thirties. One side of Hortense wanted to see him in a powerful political position, the other wanted only to keep him with her, devoting himself to her as the center of his existence. He had, she pointed out, “courage” and “the necessary dedication” combined with “a generous nature and noble character,” she continued. “I should have admired him even if I weren’t his mother.” She regretted only her “inability to soften existence [financially] for him.… to sooth his sad and difficult destiny.… He deserves the truly fine things in life; he is worthy of that.”3 Fed on honeyed pap and smothered in cotton wool by an emotional, overly protective, unhealthily possessive doting mother … her son’s future did not look hopeful. No one could even begin to understand the Napoléon III who later evolved without this knowledge of the gentle but pervasive domination and controlling role of his mother in his life. Only his surprisingly strong character and personal will to achieve something worthy of his name, the chalice of empire, to be recognized and respected by the outside world, drove him on with force enough eventually to break away from this strangling silk web.
As for Hortense, there was another side to her character, a separate world of grievances that she also shared with her son. It was a bitterly disappointed Duchess de Saint-Leu who acknowledged the profound disappointment she continued to find in people, in society. “Learn to judge men, to really know them, and in some cases when it is necessary to keep them out of your life altogether,” she advised her son, “for most of them are not worthy [of your trust and respect].” Live simply, “make a comfortable private life for yourself, and avoid all politics.”4 She was full of contradictions. It was pretty grim stuff for such a young man, so full of life, ready to prepare a career of his own, and even risk his life for his country. One minute Hortense encouraged him as heir to the Napoleonic legacy to fulfill the imperial ambition, and the next to abandon people and politics. But for all this, life went on, and the young man continued to dream in a world of his own.
* * *
Hortense and Louis Napoléon had been vacationing in Italy every year since settling in Augsburg and Arenenberg, which included visits with the beautiful Antoinette, the Countess Arese (née the Marchioness Fagnini) and her son, Francesco, in Milan, before continuing down to Rome.5
The Areses, a very old, distinguished aristocratic Milanese family, and Hortense had gradually become close friends, meeting frequently over the years in Milan and Rome. Francesco’s father Count Marc Arese had been a senior officer in the Italian corps serving in Napoléon’s army, with an enduring attachment to France. With the fall of Napoléon in 1815, Austrian troops had reoccupied northern Italy, extending from Milan in Lombardy right across to Venice and the Adriatic. Ever since, Marc Arese and his fellow ex-army officers had been plotting through secret organizations, including the Carbonari, which they, along with other influential masons, largely directed with the aim of wresting their homeland from Habsburg rule.
It was during the annual visits of their two families, the Bonapartes and Areses, including those in Rome at Hortense’s Palazzo Rusconi, that their two sons became truly fast friends. And it was now that Louis Napoléon took up a new cause and became an ardent supporter of Francesco’s patriotic dream to end the Austrian occupation of northern Italy, and to end the Vatican’s secular administration of the medieval Papal States, covering nearly one-third of Italy. Thereafter the two boys would correspond often and almost always on one subject, plots and rebellion.
In the meantime, anti-Austrian sentiment continued to simmer dangerously in the Duchies of Parma and Modena, and of course the ever-turbulent Bologna. “My Dear Count Arese,” Louis Napoléon, then visiting his older brother, Napoléon Louis, wrote from Florence on November 7, 1830. “I should very much like you to come to Rome again this winter. If that is acceptable to you I could rent a small apartment for you near the Corso [and Hortense’s Palazzo Rusconi] and you could dine with us every day.” Closing, he assured Francesco that he would endeavor “to render your sojourn there as pleasant as possible.”6
Louis Philippe’s seizure of France in July of 1830 had sent revolutionary shock waves reaching throughout Europe, and Italy in particular. Louis Napoléon naturally found this infectious, and given his recent disappointment in failing to join the Russian army battling the Turks, his pent-up excitement in meeting Francesco Arese (whose father was a major figure in the revolutionary Carbonari) in Rome now was hardly surprising. But the real ringleader was his recently married brother, Napoléon Louis, the only one of the three to have actually signed an oath to support the Carbonari. In addition to rendezvous with light “seductive women,” as Hortense referred to them, the young men regularly visited the Palazzo Rinuccini to see Grandmother Letizia—who had finally come round to accepting Hortense. Secretly, however, Louis Napoléon was receiving Carbonari friends at the Palazzo Rusconi (when Hortense was out), which also became a communications center for the Carbonari, sending and receiving messages. Instructions to their first cousin, Napoléon’s son, the Duke of Reichstadt in Vienna—whom they hoped to place on the throne of Italy—were hand delivered by members of the family only.
The time was ripe for revolution, encouraged by the overthrow of the Bourbons in France and the recent death of Pope Pius VIII, who had not yet been replaced by the College of Cardinals. Nevertheless it proved impossible for the Duke of Reichstadt—Napoléon II—to escape from Vienna, where he was under close surveillance. Moreover, in Rome, the Vatican police also had some two dozen young rebel patrician patriots under close observation. Then, to aggravate matters, a flippant Louis Napoléon took it into his head to ride madly through the streets of Rome carrying a French revolutionary tricolor from his saddle—this at a time when disturbing reports of conspiracies and demonstrations against the Austrian occupation force in Bologna and Modena were reaching the Roman authorities.
That was the last straw for an exasperated Monseigneur Capelletti, the governor of Rome, who now gave the green light to act. Early on December 11, 1830, some four dozen armed Vatican police surrounded the Palazzo Rusconi, arresting among others the exuberant equestrian Louis Napoléon. A few days later, more than twenty of these “Carbonari,” including Louis Napoléon (and Uncle Jérôme and his entire family), were forcefully expelled from Rome, as Francesco Arese slipped out of the scene.7
No sooner had he reached Florence than he was put into contact with the conspirators in that city through one of their leaders, Colonel Pier Damiano Armandi, who just happened to have been Napoléon Louis’s tutor a few years earlier. Armandi in turn introduced Louis Napoléon to the principal rebel chief there, General Ciro Menotti (of Modena), who wanted to put to immediate good use the two nephews of Emperor Napoléon.
They had gone to join these Italian patriots, Louis Napoléon now informed his disconsolate mother after the deed was done, because “the name we bear obliges us to come to the aid of the unhappy people who seek our help.”8 At the age of twenty-three he should have known better, but he was carried away with the excitement of the moment. The two Bonaparte brothers remained with the Carbonari throughout February 1831. “The enthusiasm one finds here is simply grand,” Louis Napoléon wrote in continued exhilaration to his father. “This army of patriots is now marching on Rome,” he continued, expecting that city to fall to them in a week’s time. “For Heaven’s sake don’t worry about us, look to the future and you will see the peoples of Europe demanding the recovery of their lost rights.”9 Louis Napoléon was ready to fight the new pope, Gregory XVI, who had just called for Austrian reinforcements. Although knowing that “two Bonapartes” were now advancing with the Carbonari caused panic in senior circles, Louis Philippe declined to help the pope against the republican rebels.
By now, however, both Uncles Jérôme and Louis, alarmed at the spiraling violence, called on the newly promoted General Armandi—now serving as minister of war in the rebel republican army—to send Louis Napoléon and Napoléon Louis back to Florence. Although they did not stop immediately, the two firebrands finally buckled under, and by the third of March General Armandi could assure Hortense “[t]he young princes are here and perfectly fit … You should be prouder than ever, Madame, to have such courageous children.”10
Fresh major forces of the Austrian army were everywhere crushing the republican rebel patriots in fierce fighting, however, including at Bologna, where the two Bonaparte brothers were last reported to have been seen. An undaunted, terribly anxious Hortense determined to extricate her uncooperative sons and, with the faithful Valérie Masuyer at her side, set out across Italy on March 12, 1831, with two English passports in hand (provided by the British Minister, Lord Seymour). Meanwhile, cut off by the advancing Austrians, Louis Napoléon and his brother reached Forlí on March 9, only to discover the city in the midst of a measles epidemic.11
Nothing could stop the valiant, diminutive Queen Hortense, whose carriage was literally crossing veritable battlefields under live fire, heading for Ancona. Unknown to her, however, Napoléon Louis had contracted measles on the eleventh of March and had died at Forlí on the seventeenth. With the epidemic raging and the Austrians closing in, Louis Napoléon, himself now also infected, fled with the others to Pesaro, where Hortense found him very ill in bed at a palazzo of Eugène de Beauharnais’s son, the Duke de Leuchtenberg. On the twenty-third of March they all set out from Pesaro, once again in the direction of Ancona and the Adriatic coast. Reaching Austrian-occupied Ancona, they hid until the third of April, when disguised as servants they escaped, traveling rapidly westward via Siena, Lucca, Genoa, and the appalling coastal road to the last Italian city, Nice. Then, crossing the River Var, they entered France on the fourteenth of April. It was a harrowing tale worthy of Stendhal himself.12 Meanwhile behind them the Carbonari rebels in Italy had been crushed by the Austrians, General Ciro Menotti hanged, and Francesco Arese left a fugitive in hiding in his native Milan.
* * *
On the twenty-third of April, Hortense’s heavy mud-splattered Berlin traveling carriage reached Paris and finally came to a halt in the Rue de la Paix before the Hôtel de Hollande.13 Physically and mentally exhausted after plunging through a hell usually reserved for men, the ex-queen, a still weak Louis Napoléon, and their loyal Countess Masuyer felt truly safe.
Nevertheless they were here illegally, Louis Philippe’s law of 1832 having banished all the Bonapartes permanently from French soil. Undaunted, a few hours later, this determined lady dragged herself back into her coach and had herself driven over to the long, distinctive, rectangular, column-lined residence of the Orléans, the Palais Royal. The Palais was surrounded by hundreds of troops because of the violent unrest in the country and the assassination attempts on the life of the king, and Hortense scarcely recognized the place where she had once danced so gaily in her youth. But the king refused to receive her, and she returned to the Rue de la Paix.
Following the visit and an interrogation by a distinctly hostile Prime Minister Auguste Casimir-Perier about the circumstances that had brought them to Paris, Hortense Bonaparte was finally invited to a more welcoming Palais Royal. On the evening of April 26 she was shown into Louis Philippe’s austere “little chamber,” where he, his wife, the shy sympathetic Queen Marie Amélie, and his sister, Adélaïde, greeted her. As warm as the reception was, the ever-cautious Louis Philippe promised nothing, apart from giving Hortense and Louis Napoléon permission to remain in Paris briefly, if incognito. The last thing the king wanted now were spontaneous pro-Bonaparte street demonstrations. Nevertheless, the king did promise to look into her request to have her property and valuable estates, which had been seized first by the Bourbons and then kept by the Orléans, including 700,000 francs (more than nine million dollars today) in back revenue, returned to her, though nothing ever came of this. Nor was a brief letter Louis Napoléon had drafted to the king asking for permission to return to France “as a simple citizen.… as a simple soldier … happy to be permitted to die for my country,”14 in the long run ever submitted.
Alas, Louis Napoléon, ignoring their most fragile, tentative situation in Paris and the cautious goodwill thus far demonstrated by the king, now jeopardized everything. If he did not gallop through the streets carrying a revolutionary banner as he had done earlier in Rome, he did commit an even more egregious transgression now, allegedly “secretly” visiting leaders of the political opposition. He simply could not stop meddling. Prime Minister Casimir-Perier immediately informed the king, who felt deceived and humiliated by the lovely Hortense (who in fact had known nothing of her son’s activities). Prior to this, Louis Philippe had in fact softened, offering Louis Napoléon the option of remaining in France, if he agreed to give up the name of Bonaparte, and be known legally as “the Duke of Saint-Leu.” His reaction was not unexpected: “I should prefer to be laid out with my brother in his coffin first!”15 But instead, once again he had burned his bridges, and the order by a betrayed Louis Philippe quickly followed—to leave the country forthwith. On the sixth of May their Berlin headed toward the English Channel and London.
They established themselves in Mayfair to bide their time. It was not until the end of March 1831 that Louis Napoléon had received a first communication from his father asking about his brother’s death. Fearful of Habsburg reprisals and being expelled from Austrian-occupied Florence, Louis’s letter was devoid of all sentiment and brutally businesslike, not even asking after his health. “I require information about two things: All the details possible about your fatal [Italian] escapade; 2. Idem., about the final moments of your brother’s life. Did he really have measles? Are you quite sure that someone had not deliberately caused his death?… Did he die in your arms? Adieu, mon ami, have courage and bear up. Now is the time to demonstrate it, for yourself and your mother’s sake.”16 Louis did not even ask if his son had suffered, or if Louis Napoléon was coping. “Your suspicions about someone having deliberately killed him are entirely unfounded,” the prince replied. “Believe me that if such a frightful crime had been committed, I should have found the culprit personally and avenged his death then and there.… Oh! Mon cher Papa, how cruel life is!”17
Provided with fresh travel documents by French Ambassador Talleyrand, Hortense, Louis Napoléon, and Valerie Masuyer sailed from Dover on August 6, 1831, reaching the Schloss in the last week of the month.18