“I took as my guiding principle to follow only the inspirations of
my heart, my intellect and my conscience.” 1
—PRINCE LOUIS NAPOLÉON
“The Napoleonic concept—l’idée napoléonienne—is not
founded on the principle of war.” 2
—PRINCE LOUIS NAPOLÉON
At six o’clock on Monday, the thirtieth of October, 1836, Swiss army Captain Louis Napoléon Bonaparte—now disguised in the uniform of a French colonel—attended by French “General” Vaudrey and ten officers (including Gilbert Persigny) marched into the Strasbourg garrison and to the barracks of the 46th Infantry Regiment, where “Colonel Bonaparte” appealed to the men to join him. Unfortunately, they completely rejected the young man and the name of “Bonaparte,” much to the astonishment of the prince, and from then on it turned into a shambles. Although they managed to seize the commanding general, Théophile Voirol, in his office, he then escaped through a back door and was saved by his staff officers, joined by Voirol’s hysterical mother-in-law and wife, who then pummeled the bewildered Swiss captain with a barrage of fists. By eight o’clock the coup was over, and “the invaders” were behind locked doors.3
In fact, even if the coup had succeeded, who was Louis Napoléon expecting to find waiting with open arms in the French capital? Unlike Uncle Napoleon’s successful coup of 18–19 Brumaire in November 1799, there was no plan after Strasbourg. The army was not behind him, and there was no newly formed shadow government of politicians in the wings ready to step in and take over the government in his name. Moreover, the prince did not even personally know a single national political leader in Paris. Indeed, he did not have a single seasoned political advisor to consult when planning the adventure.
“Ridiculous,” the London Times summed up the fiasco. “An unbalanced young man,” the Frankfurter Zeitung called Prince Louis Napoléon. “What on earth did he possibly expect to achieve?”4
* * *
Leaving behind an unprecedented early Alsatian snowstorm, his fellow conspirators now in prison, and a firmly loyal Strasbourg garrison still in place, on reaching Paris on Tuesday the first of November, Prince Louis Napoléon was handed over to the recently appointed prefect of Paris, Gabriel Delessert. The choice of this descendant of Swiss Calvinist bankers proved indeed fortunate for prisoner Bonaparte. Although he had served under Emperor Napoléon in a mere fiscal capacity, Delessert’s wife, Valentine, had in her father, Count Alexander de Laborde, unusually strong Bonapartist ties. Awarded the Legion of Honor by Emperor Napoléon himself, this skilled diplomat had not only negotiated Napoléon’s marriage contract with Marie Louise, but was a very close friend of the then-queen Hortense, even co-authoring her Partant pour la Syrie (“Marching Off to Syria”), which was to become the unofficial national anthem under the Second Empire. Now a strong supporter and friend of Louis Philippe as well, Laborde served as both a general of the Paris National Guard and as the king’s ambassador to Madrid. With such unusually strong direct ties both to Emperor Napoléon and King Louis Philippe, the son of Hortense and grandson of Joséphine had a powerful “friend at court,” in the guise of Prefect Gabriel Delessert.
“My dear Mother, You have no doubt been most anxious, having received no news from me,” Louis Napoléon had written on the first of November, “and now your anxiety will be all the greater when you learn what I have attempted, but failed to bring off at Strasbourg.” He then broke the news: “I am in prison here … But you mustn’t cry, for I am the victim of a worthy cause, a truly French cause.… Fortunately,” he added, “not a drop of French blood was spilled … I am most proud to have raised the Imperial Eagle once again, and quite ready to die for my political convictions.”5
And then from Paris on the tenth he broke the news: “They are sending me to America … but under no circumstances are you even to think of joining me there … in my new exile.… Life is of little import when the only thing that counts for me is the honor of France. But do think of the others as well, I beseech you to see that the prisoners in Strasbourg having all they need, and do take special care of Colonel Vaudrey’s two sons.”6
Rushing to Paris in the first week of November to plead with Louis Philippe, Hortense found herself stopped at the Château de Viry on the king’s orders, he refusing to see her. In fact Louis Philippe had a very “hot political potato” on his hands. Holding someone by the name of Bonaparte as a state prisoner was tantamount to holding the lit fuse of a political powder keg. Ever since coming to power, unrest had threatened the Orléans regime. There had been insurrections in Lyons in 1831 and in Lyons again and Paris as recently as 1835. There had been several assassination attempts, including the bloody massacre on July 28, 1835, in the midst of the annual Bastille Day celebration of the French Revolution, when a Corsican, Giuseppe Fieschi, and his two fellow conspirators had detonated a homemade “infernal machine” at the carriage of Louis Philippe and his three sons. Eighteen people were killed outright, including four senior army officers, while another twenty-two were wounded. Although the king was slightly wounded in the head, his sons escaped unscathed, and security had been tight in Paris ever since. Seven and a half months later, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte attacked Strasbourg and attempted to overthrow Louis Philippe. By this point the king and his family were rather on edge.
In all respects the Bonapartes were in fact a very special case for Louis Philippe. During the First Empire, Napoléon had protected members of the House of Orléans, even providing financial assistance for Louis Philippe’s mother and family. Moreover, Auguste de Morny’s father, General Charles de Flahaut, and grandmother, Adélaïde de Souza, had been close to the king, or the Duke of Orléans, as he still was, ever since the 1790s. Further, Louis Philippe and the queen, Marie Amélie, were personally very fond of Hortense Bonaparte, whom they had known since childhood. The problem facing Louis Philippe, therefore, was great, the ramifications greater still, and the unsettling events of Strasbourg now before the public, a veritable nightmare. Moreover the Napoleonic clientele—the families of hundreds of thousands of former soldiers and administrative personnel—remained an explosive political force in itself. The king had to defuse the situation and act with quick, unwonted resolve.
A military court was ruled out and the case was instead handed over to the public prosecutor in Strasbourg for trial. On the other hand, Louis Napoléon, as an aristocrat, could have been tried separately by a court of his peers. Louis Philippe had quickly ruled that out too, as he directed Hortense to leave the country and her son to be deported. The decree of 1832 banishing the entire Bonaparte family remained in full effect. As for all the other Strasbourg co-conspirators, it was decided to have them arraigned by the public prosecutor of Strasbourg. The senior military officers clamoring for a court-martial were to be deprived of their firing squads.
Twenty-four hours after arriving in Paris, on the eleventh of November, 1836, Prince-prisoner Louis Napoléon found himself being handed into a closed carriage in the courtyard of the Conciergerie, bound under heavy escort for the channel coast where the French navy had a warship awaiting his arrival. Regardless of the situation today, like the great Napoléon in the past, nephew Louis Napoléon did not admit fallibility, did not recognize past errors of judgment. In his eyes he was a patriot, a savior of the country. As a gentleman and a Bonaparte, he had had no choice but to act as he had. Even now he would have done it all over again. “Why am I treated as such a pariah, even by my own family?” he asked his father.7 He simply could not understand it.
* * *
Setting out from the Isle de France on the eleventh of November, the prince arrived at Lorient on the fifteenth. Before he embarked, on the personal instructions of Louis Philippe himself, Deputy Prefect Villemain handed the prisoner a purse of 15,000 francs (a little over $193,000 today).8 That same evening the prince was taken to the small harbor where Captain Henri de Villeneuve received him aboard the modern, surprisingly spacious, and powerful fifty-two-gun frigate Andromeda.9 They cast off immediately.
After being held up by contrary winds in the notoriously inhospitable Bay of Biscay for eighteen days, Captain de Villeneuve finally opened the sealed orders prepared by the Naval Ministry. At last prisoner Bonaparte learned his fate, the orders “instructing the captain to take me to Rio de Janeiro, but not to permit me to go ashore. He was also to forbid any sort of communications [with the outside world].”10
Finally reaching the East Coast of the United States after four and a half months at sea within the confined quarters of the Andromeda, Louis Napoléon, a true Bonaparte and never a good seaman, stepped ashore no longer a prisoner, but a free man under the protection of the American flag. Louis Philippe could not threaten him here.11 Due to contrary winds, Captain de Villeneuve had diverted from his charted course to New York, and instead put in to Norfolk, Virginia, on the tenth of April 1837, thereby concluding this exhausting, frequently uncomfortable, and monotonous 8,870-nautical-mile transatlantic odyssey (more than 10,000 land miles).
During those long weeks at sea, Louis Napoléon had been entirely cut off from the world, receiving not a single letter, or a single bit of information from Switzerland, France, or Europe. When he had sailed from Lorient in November 1836, his fellow conspirators were in prison in Strasbourg awaiting trial, and Hortense had just returned to Schloss Arenenberg. This did not prevent mother and son from writing to each other, Louis Napoléon’s thoughts totally preoccupied with the fate of the prisoners, and of course his mother, and public opinion of himself and his actions.
“I am leaving heartbroken in not having been able to share the same fate as my suffering companions,” the prince had written Hortense from Lorient just prior to putting to sea. “My undertaking having failed … I wished to be the sole victim [put on trial],” he insisted, angry at having been separated from them and treated differently, as well as having been denied the opportunity to explain his aims to the press. “As a result, in the eyes of the world I am considered to be a lunatic, an opportunist and a coward.”12
Meanwhile Hortense was sending him news that he would not receive until he had reached New York, and most of it bad. If King Louis in Florence had found his son’s conspiracy quite mad, nevertheless he supported him, calling Louis Philippe’s prosecution of the case “a political plot against the family.” The rest of the Bonaparte clan, however, had to a man turned against Louis Napoléon, openly denouncing him, including Uncle Jérôme, who cancelled the forthcoming marriage plans to Mathilde—“I would rather give my daughter to a peasant than to him!” Jérôme then demanded that Hortense buy back from him the château he had just “purchased” (but had never paid for) as a wedding gift for the couple.13
“The more I dwell on the conduct of your family, the more it dismays me,” Hortense wrote.14 “I have developed such a disgust of mankind and the things of this world,” she continued, “that you will well appreciate my sentiments when I say that I am only too delighted that in the end everything has turned out so badly for you.” Because, as a result, “you are going to be obliged to live quietly, out of harm’s way,” instead of being “caught up in the world of petty political passions.”15
* * *
Now on foreign soil, Louis Napoléon encountered his first “Americans”—he spoke fluent English, but with a German accent—as he traveled from Norfolk to Philadelphia by one of the first steam trains built in that region. There he next boarded a long, narrow steamboat, which continued up the Delaware River. Always interested in anything mechanical, the prince was fascinated by the number of uses of steam power in these still wild, relatively untamed regions. Louis Napoléon was even more impressed, however, by “the width of this beautiful river … and all the steamboats which are truly magnificent!” Years later he had not forgotten these early vivid impressions, and as Emperor Napoléon III, he was to stimulate and greatly facilitate the development and expansion of both France’s first rail network and international steamship lines.16
“I was very surprised and happy to find [Francesco] Arese here to meet me in New York [on April 20],” an unusually buoyant Louis Napoléon wrote his old family friend and tutor, Narcisse Vieillard. “It was a great consolation to have so good a friend near me at this time.”17 In fact no sooner had Arese heard the news of the Strasbourg affair than he had written Hortense for details, and then set out from Milan, to join Louis Napoléon in America. Equally unexpected, though less welcome, was the sight of three of his cousins at the pier: Joachim and Caroline Murat’s two sons, Napoléon and Achille, and Uncle Lucien’s hell-raising libertine son, Pierre Bonaparte. European leaders seemed determined to jettison all their black sheep in America. In any event, the Bonaparte family having always cold-shouldered Hortense in the past, the prince avoided their offspring hereafter.
On reaching his hotel, the prince found a bundle of letters from his mother and cousins. “Here I am on terra firma once again!” he responded immediately to Hortense that same day. “On landing [at New York] I learned the news of the acquittal of my friends [in Strasbourg]. You can well imagine the great joy I felt, after the long nightmare of these past months and dreading to learn of their conviction.”18
Before leaving France, state prisoner Bonaparte had pleaded with Louis Philippe on behalf of his fellow conspirators. “They played no part in the plot,” he had insisted, “the whole idea for the conspiracy was mine and mine alone.”19 In any event, Louis Napoléon had been on the high seas when the trial eventually opened in the Assize Court (Cour d’Assises) of Strasbourg on January 6, 1837.
Of the thirteen initially charged in the public prosecutor’s indictment, only seven eventually appeared in court. The remaining six had “escaped,” including the nimble Gilbert Persigny, now snug in London. Obviously Louis Philippe had no wish to dramatize before the whole country the fact that a dozen of his finest young army officers (and one ex-sergeant) had betrayed him, wishing to overthrow his regime. Alas, having a highly respected national hero with a splendid military record such as the fifty-two-year-old Colonel Vaudrey testifying in an open French court of law proved unavoidable.
The court was filled with the national and international press as the jury filed in for the last time on the morning of January 18, 1837, to present their verdict. The presiding judge asked for it to be read, and it came like a bomb blast: “Not guilty.” As for Prince Louis Napoléon, the publicly acknowledged ringleader, the instigator, and financier behind the attempted coup had not even been charged by Louis Philippe’s government, and as a result, the jury had rightly concluded that it would have hardly been “equitable” to have imprisoned only the underlings.
“The victory bells are ringing” for the political opposition, the Moniteur announced on January 23. The Bourbon establishment and haute-bourgeoisie were dismayed, including Austrian chancellor Clement von Metternich, who declared the mass acquittal “a deplorable, simply detestable” decision.20 If the authorities exonerated these culprits of their acknowledged treasonous acts, it would only encourage more brazen attempts against the government in the future.
* * *
From the moment of his arrival in New York, Louis Napoléon was swept up in a whirlwind of activity such as he had never before known. Francesco Arese took charge of his schedule, which was rapidly filled by invitations from prominent Americans. Meanwhile a fellow passenger Louis Napoléon had met while sailing from Philadelphia, the Reverend C. S. Stewart, acted as their tour guide over the next couple of weeks. The clergyman, like other Americans, found the French gentleman “shy, reserved and well mannered,” while another new acquaintance, the young poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, found him a most pleasant, if “a rather dull man in the order of [George] Washington.”21 Louis Napoléon apparently found both Americans and the bustling scene around him fascinating, and despite his natural reserve he made every attempt to talk to them, even playing billiards with them at his hotel.
Encouraged by the more outgoing Arese, Bonaparte made the ideal tourist. Intelligent, most curious about everything around him, and by nature most observant, he could never see or learn enough. This was in fact a very new Louis Napoléon. He found America to be “a land of merchants” and “speculators,” everyone most industrious, keen on making his way, willing to risk all and gamble their fortunes and lives in order to improve their circumstances—so utterly different from the people and mentality in France and Switzerland. This new world was invigorating. It was also in the streets of New York that he encountered slavery for the first time and found it repugnant, “a bad thing,” as he put it.
Taking advantage of his fluent English, he spoke to people whenever possible, and sometimes came to rather curious conclusions. “This country possesses immense material forces, but it is entirely deficient in moral force,” he summarily concluded without explanation. It was still “a colony,” as he saw it, emerging from the cocoon, and far from mature. “In principle every [American] colony [state] is a real republic. It is an association of men who all, with equal rights, have agreed together to develop the products of their country. It matters little whether they have a governor or president for their chief. They require … only a few police regulations.… Here there is freedom to acquire, but not freedom to enjoy: there is the right to act, but not to think,” he stated, again not developing his reasons for these rather curious assumptions. “The transition [from the colony mentality to that of a mature nation state] is going on daily … But I do not think the transition will be completed without its crises and convulsions.”22
Propelled by his own driving curiosity, Louis Napoléon exhibited an almost limitless energy he had never before displayed. It was the physical, mechanical sights that really fascinated him. Keen on manufacturing, he visited numerous factories. He was also interested in schools and laboratories, where he saw an “electro-magnet” for the first time. He had only praise for the sheer physical and mental industry of the people, their astonishing will to achieve something. He was riveted by this dynamism and was never to forget it.
Nor did he fail to take an interest in some of the nation’s men of letters, including his favorite American author, Washington Irving, whom he was curious to visit at his Dutch-style home overlooking the Hudson at Tarrytown. “I have read his works, and admire him both as a writer and a man,” he recorded in English. He answered as many invitations as he could, introducing himself to New York society. Always known for his appreciation of a pretty face, he attended receptions, dinners, and balls given in his honor by the Bayards, Berkmans, De Pysters, Livingstones, Schuylers, Kents, the Van Nesses, the Dewitts, and the Roosevelts.23 His days were filled from morning to night.
On his arrival at New York he had a sharp exchange of correspondence with Joseph Bonaparte over his harsh criticism of the Strasbourg affair, in the midst of which a defiant Louis Napoléon lashed out—most uncharacteristically—at his uncle: “What! I had the effrontery to undertake such a hardy business … that I dared throw myself into it, risking my life in the process, persuaded that my death was worthy of our cause,” while receiving from him nothing but “scorn and disdain!” Yes, unfortunately, “my venture failed, but at least it announced to France that the family of the Emperor was not yet dead and buried!”24
Nevertheless intrigued by the widespread popularity of his uncle, and the complimentary things he had heard about him in New York society since his arrival, Louis Napoléon planned to visit his estate at Point Breeze, New Jersey, with Arese. First, despite the effort and discomfort of driving along primitive roads through the formidable virgin forests and mountains of upstate New York, a region teeming with bear, moose, deer, wolves, and mountain lions, they drove hundreds of miles to visit the fabled Niagara Falls on the U.S.-Canada border. This was such a success that they next hoped to visit the newly emerging Washington, D.C., and President Andrew Jackson’s recently elected replacement in the White House, Martin Van Buren.25
But back in New York City, barely two months after his arrival, on the sixth of June of 1837, the prince received a long-delayed letter from Henri Conneau, his mother’s physician, informing him that Hortense was dying and that he must return at once before it was too late. Cancelling his forthcoming visit to Washington, D.C., he wrote to Martin Van Buren:
“Mr. President, I cannot leave the United States without expressing to your Excellency the regret I feel in not having been to Washington to make your acquaintance … and I [had also] hoped … to travel through a country which has so excited my sympathy,” but due to his mother’s ill health, “and [with no immediate] political consideration binding me here,” he was obliged to leave. “I beg your Excellency to receive this letter as proof of my respect for the man who occupies the seat of George Washington … Louis Napoléon Bonaparte”26
Alas, his dealings with this country and another president, Abraham Lincoln, decades later were not destined to prove quite so convivial.
* * *
“My dear mother,” Louis Napoléon wrote from London a few weeks later, “The news I received of your health determined me to return to Europe as soon as possible.… You can understand how impatient I am to know how you are. I dare not believe in the happiness of seeing you again soon.… This all seems so unreal, everything that has happened these past few months, like some sort of dream.”27