“Give up … what are referred to as the great affairs of the world.” 1
—LOUIS BONAPARTE TO HIS SON, 1837
“Switzerland has done her duty … and now I must do mine.” 2
—LOUIS NAPOLÉON, LEAVING SWITZERLAND FOR THE LAST TIME, OCTOBER 1838
After sailing from New York (on an American passport and false name) on the twelfth of June, 1837, Louis Napoléon finally reached Switzerland and his dying mother on the fourth of August. Louis Philippe’s government, fully aware of his return to Europe, turned a blind eye for the moment, out of respect for the prince’s wish to be with his failing mother. In spite of the morphine administered by Henri Conneau, Hortense was by now in excruciating pain from the cancer that was killing her. Louis Napoléon spent every day at her bedside. “My mother died in my arms at five o’clock [in the morning] today,” he wrote his father on the fifth of October.3
Three days later, the funeral service took place in the nearby church of Ermatingen before the casket was taken temporarily to Arenenberg’s own small chapel. Louis Napoléon’s world had collapsed around him. Nor was he permitted by Louis Philippe to accompany the casket to France for its final interment just a few miles from Malmaison in the small church of Saint Paul Saint Pierre in the village of Reuil. Among the mourners were the queen’s two ladies-in-waiting, Valérie Masuyer and Madame Salvage de Faverolles; a few old soldiers, including Marshal Nicholas Oudinot and General Rémi Exelmans; and of course members of the family, Hortense’s twenty-six-year-old son, Auguste de Morny, and his father, Charles Count de Flahaut de la Billarderies, accompanied by Fanny Le Hon.4 “My uncles Joseph and Lucien sent their condolences,” the prince informed his equally absent father Louis in Florence. “Uncle Jérôme, alone, has not deigned to do so.”5 The turbulent Jérôme Bonaparte was never known for either his elementary good manners or common decency. As for the mourning twenty-nine-year-old Louis Napoléon, his was a grief that would never disappear.
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Given these circumstances, ex-king Louis’s letters to his son now were mellowing, if continuing to offer gratuitous advice, in particular about his son’s plans, counseling him not to go into politics “and what are referred to as the great affairs of the world.” Instead, he continued, “let us enjoy some real pleasure during this brief existence of ours.”6
Ever since their installation at Arenenberg, the French government had everyone there under police surveillance, and then following the death of Hortense in October 1837, Louis Philippe began putting enormous pressure on the Swiss to expel Louis Napoléon permanently. Out of patience with the uncooperative Swiss, on the first of August 1838, the French ambassador handed the Swiss foreign secretary an official ultimatum: if Bern did not expel Prince Louis Napoléon forthwith, the ambassador would be obliged “to ask for the return of his passport” and close the French embassy. Paris could not “allow Louis Bonaparte to remain on her territory … where he openly dares to resume his criminal intrigues [against the French government].” Louis Philippe “has the right and duty to demand that Switzerland cease to tolerate his presence on Swiss soil,” since the prince had never renounced his French citizenship.7 A defiant Swiss government replied that they would consider the matter in a few weeks, and the French army dispatched twenty thousand men to the Swiss frontier.
“DOES THIS MEAN WAR?” the official Journal des Débâts responded, threatening the use of force, “if that is what is called for.”8 By exiling Louis Napoléon, “what do you achieve,” Le Siècle countered, “in rendering a war inevitable as a result of your folly?” Moreover, thanks to all this publicity, “no one in France can ever again forget [Louis Napoléon’s] name” and he will be even “more dangerous than he was before the Strasbourg affair.”9
Although he had become a naturalized Swiss citizen in 1832, a now very anxious Louis Napoléon did not want his adopted country to suffer on his account. “Switzerland has done her duty,” he informed Bern, “and now I must do mine,” and on the fourteenth of October he left for England, never to return.10 “Now what have you accomplished,” La Gazette de France in turn asked, “by having Prince Louis in England instead of Switzerland? After all London is closer to Paris than Arenenberg.”11
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“One thing remains to be seen. Are they [the French] now going to threaten Great Britain as they did the Swiss cantons?”12 London’s Morning Chronicle asked, tongue-in-cheek, upon the safe arrival of Louis Napoléon in London in mid-October 1838. What a public relations hash Louis Philippe’s government had made of this affair, surrounding Switzerland with twenty thousands troops, making Paris the laughingstock of Europe. France had got herself into a corner. She had threatened a tiny country but could hardly menace Great Britain. She had simply moved Louis Napoléon out of one country into another.
In any event, Downing Street gave Louis Napoléon permission to come to England, and the great houses of the capital opened their doors to offer him a warm welcome once again. The foreign office followed this up by providing visas for his entire Arenenberg entourage, more than twenty in all, including Henri Conneau, who served not only as the prince’s physician but more importantly as his chief of staff and principal secretary; Gilbert Persigny, the prince’s general factotum; Count Giuseppi Orsi, the young Florentine banker and financier; Lieutenant Viscount Henri de Querelles; General Count Tristan de Montholon; Alfred d’Alembert, Louis Napoléon’s private secretary. Charles Denis Parquin and Colonel Vaudrey, of Strasbourg fame, were also among them, as well as Louis Napoléon’s chef and his two assistants, the faithful Thélin and the rest of the household.13
The number of army officers was extraordinary by any definition and did not escape the notice of English authorities, who undoubtedly kept the prince under loose surveillance throughout his sojourn, at a time of considerable international political tension between London and Paris. Foreign Secretary Palmerston disliked King Louis Philippe as much as Prince Louis Napoléon himself did, and he distrusted that king’s hostile foreign policy from the Near East to the English Channel.
Moving the entire household was a costly logistical effort for Louis Napoléon, including their salaries and wages, not to mention room and board. Hereafter he was going to be facing one financial crisis after another. The Strasbourg Affair had cost a few hundred thousand francs in bribes, pensions, and legal costs, and as Hortense had left a total estate of only three and a half million francs, before legacies for friends and staff, and a large undisclosed sum for her illegitimate son, Auguste de Morny, that inheritance was quickly dwindling, although ex-king Louis had sent his son another 600,000 francs. In addition, the prince was preparing to support two Parisian newspapers, Le Commerce and Le Capitol, the latter alone receiving 140,000 francs directly out of Louis Napoléon’s pocket, to propagate pro-Napoleonic political views and favorable public relations.14 Publishing cost money, editors cost money. Hence the prince’s decision to recruit the banker Count Orsi.
The prince settled in at the spacious and fashionable 17 Carlton House Terrace, Pall Mall, overlooking St. James’s Park.15 There were servants’ quarters for half of his staff, a carriage house for his two elegant French landaus, and stabling for his nine horses. His years of modest living, of which Persigny boasted, were clearly a thing of the past, though Louis Napoléon could comfortably live in just a simple room with a table and chair, as he had done in his youth and would soon be doing again in France.
The prince’s second and last principal residence was at nearby 1 Carlton Gardens, a large, handsome, white two-story corner house, now the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, then owned by the wealthy and influential Frederick John Robinson, the Earl of Ripon. Lord Ripon would open many doors to Mayfair society for Louis Napoléon, who would thereafter be seen at the Palmerstons’—this was a most important contact, especially after the creation of the Second French Empire—at Lansdowne’s elegant residence in nearby Berkeley Square, at the Liverpools’, at Lord Buckinghamshire’s, but most frequently at Lord Malmesbury’s, and Comte d’Orsay’s and Lady Blessington’s Gore House in Kensington, the center of arts and letters, and where Louis Napoléon first met a thirty-six-year-old member of Parliament, Benjamin Disraeli.
It was ironic that this future French head of state was to meet and know many more key English political leaders now than he himself yet knew in Paris. Palmerston was England’s longest serving foreign secretary in the nineteenth century, and then, as prime minister as well throughout most of Louis Napoléon’s reign as emperor, he was to be the most important political figure with whom he came into contact now. Palmerston, well traveled in both Italy and France and a fluent speaker of both languages, shared some common continental interests with the prince. For Palmerston, France was always the linchpin of his foreign policy.
As for his landlord, Lord Ripon, they did share a common interest in public education and the development of the British Museum and its new extension for printed books. As one of the most famous keepers of books at the new wing of what was to become the British Library, Antonio Panizzi, like Louis Napoléon, was a regular visitor at Ripon’s, Lansdowne’s (where he met Auguste de Morny), Palmerston’s, and Brougham’s. The prince was soon a regular visitor at the library when doing research for his political tracts, for which Panizzi gave him a private office in which to work.
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Louis Napoléon’s final choice of residence at 1 Carlton Gardens turned out to be a happy one. The rooms were filled with the usual Napoleona—Isabey’s portraits of Hortense, Napoléon, and Marie Louise, and another of Marie Louise and the king of Rome, Napoléon’s infant son, and one of Josephine, Canova’s marble bust of Napoléon, the emperor’s jewels, coronation ring, and the tricolor sash he reputedly wore at the Battle of the Pyramids. There was even one of Charlemagne’s relics containing a splinter of the true cross. There were books, pamphlets, and the inevitable sword.
Gilbert Persigny, in one of his initial famous public relations publications, Letters from London, describes the twenty-seven-year-old Louis Napoléon’s typical day in the capital of the British Empire.16 “The prince is an industrious hard-working man.” He was up and at work in his study from six in the morning until noon when he stopped for a bite to eat. “Following this meal, which never takes more than ten minutes [he returns to his study where he] reads the newspapers from which he [takes] notes.… At two o’clock he receives visitors; at four he goes out; at five he goes riding [in the park]; at seven he dines; and then as a rule he goes back to his study to work for several hours in the evening.… There are no luxuries in his life.… He spends all his money on beneficial projects, in founding and supporting schools and centers of refuge for the poor, in studying and expanding his knowledge and on the publication of his political and military works.” Persigny is generally considered the manager of Louis Napoléon’s political career, whereas in reality he was more responsible for the physical fieldwork of preparing events. The manager was in fact Henri Conneau, who met with Louis Napoléon daily in long consultations, which Persigny omitted from his Letters from London, for personal pique.
Clearly Persigny’s sketch of Louis Napoléon was an idealized public relations gesture, preparatory to the prince’s anticipated return to his political fight in France. And with that in mind, Persigny’s Letters was produced along with Louis Napoléon’s Napoleonic Ideas. There was always much activity, not only in the prince’s study, but in the offices of Persigny and Conneau, resulting in a constant flow of manuscripts to the printers.
Nor did the young man ignore the pleasures of life, receiving endless invitations to dinners and balls, including receptions in his honor. Although the French have never had clubs on as large a scale as the English, and never replicating the ambiance and purpose of English clubs, Louis Napoléon himself was a natural “club man” and a frequent visitor to the Athenaeum, Brookes’s, and especially the Army and Navy Club. Although an habitué of the theater, he had absolutely no interest in classical music or opera or in serious theater, preferring comedy and lighter pieces, and above all “light opera” and his scantily dressed “actresses.”
Although brought up in strongly anti-British surroundings, the prince gradually came to be very fond of the British. Always a close and serious observer of his surroundings, in 1839 he was greatly impressed by the English obsession with foreign travel and exotic places. It was in that year, of course, that Britain seized Hong Kong, while the East India Company occupied and claimed Aden as a future coaling station. Louis Napoléon also closely followed Britain’s foreign wars, including the development of the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1839 and of course their First Opium War in China. There was nothing like this British passion for foreign places and adventures to be found in France, apart from the Algerian war, which at this early stage hardly offered attraction either to commerce or even archaeologists. He studied the reports of foreign correspondents about the Eyre expedition now setting out to explore the interior of South Australia, and the James Clark Ross expedition sailing to explore the Antarctic. Indian deserts and Antarctic ice: the English seemed to be hypnotized by the bleakest corners of the world. The prince was disturbed, on the nineteenth of April, to learn of the signing of the long delayed Treaty of London, announcing the official recognition of an independent Kingdom of Belgium, under Leopold I, a piece of real estate over which Louis Philippe had very much hoped to hoist the tricolor, with which Louis Napoléon commiserated.
After his own early interest in scientific studies, in 1839 the prince purchased Michael Faraday’s new work, Experimental Researches in Electricity, and Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited During the Voyage of HMS Beagle.
Naturally, the announcement of the launching of the first oceangoing military ironclad steamer, Nemesis, in November of 1839, caught the prince’s attention, resulting in the creation of a file on that subject. This was just one of several that he kept for the time of his rule as emperor of France, when one of the first things he would do was to establish a new Naval Development Office to oversee the large-scale building of steam-driven ironclad ships for his new, modern French Imperial Navy.
The prince planned to go on a tour of the Midlands, beginning with Birmingham on July 4, 1839, to visit steam engine manufactures and armaments firms, but he was obliged to cancel due to the Bull Ring riots and the Chartist uprising in that city by thousands of working-class men demanding sweeping electoral reform, including the right to vote for any man at least twenty-one years of age, and a secret ballot. This, too, Louis Napoléon took note of and worried about, despite all his conflicting protestations to the contrary about Louis Philippe’s suppression of French voting rights. “I wanted to establish a new government, one elected by a full popular vote [of the people],” he had told the public prosecutor after his arrest at Strasbourg on October 30, 1836. But writing in 1840, he revised his views. “The fundamental vice (which is eating away at France today) … is the exaggerated interpretation of the rights of the individual, of his scorn for authority.”17 This was the real Louis Napoléon speaking. The people were already too independent now. Yes, there should be popular elections, but the people must vote as they were directed. And that is precisely how he intended to run his future empire: give the masses the vote, but all voting would be dictated by the leader of the country, à la Bonaparte. Napoléon I had, of course, completely manipulated his national plebiscites without apologies—that system worked.18
But at least the Chartists could not prevent the publication of George Bradshaw’s first Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables in 1839. England already had enough railways to warrant printing train schedules for them, while France didn’t have ten miles of line in the whole of a country twice as large as Britain. That was something else Louis Napoléon took note of for the day in the future when he would be in a position of power to facilitate the rapid development of French national rail networks. France was still living in the eighteenth century, with an eighteenth-century economy and banking–financial system, and industrial development at the same level, not to mention a stagecoach transport unchanged since the days of the Ancien Régime, and all this disturbed, nay deeply humiliated, Louis Napoléon. Often lightly dismissed as a hapless, even comical individual, as indeed he appeared in some political matters, including his attempted coups d’état, in reality he was a very perspicacious, diligent, and determined gentleman who was today quietly, carefully preparing files for his day in the sun. France had been held back a whole century by blind, incompetent political leaders, and that had to be changed.
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The key to Louis Napoléon’s private and public life was a modest gentleman rarely mentioned by historians, but whose real role was fundamental to everything. Although Gilbert Persigny is generally considered the managing architect of the prince’s career, and is certainly better known as a result of his many publications and self-promotion, it was Henri Conneau whose life and achievements would be inextricably woven with those of Louis Napoléon till the very end of the empire and who remained closest to him and his principal advisor.
Enrico François Alexandre—better known as Henri—Conneau was born in Milan in 1803, the son of a senior French-born Napoleonic receiver of taxes for that region. Conneau’s early years were spent in Milan, before he undertook his medical studies in Florence, during which time he worked as a part-time private secretary to ex-king Louis Bonaparte, and where he first met Louis Napoléon, three years his junior. On achieving his doctorate in surgery, Conneau moved to Rome to practice medicine.
In any event, by 1830 both Bonaparte brothers had met Henri Conneau as fellow Carbonari members. And of course Conneau already knew Louis Napoléon’s Milanese friend, Francesco Arese. In 1831 they all had to flee the Austrians and Italy, Arese eventually arriving at Arenenberg late in 1831 followed then by Conneau. But unlike Arese, Conneau gradually became a part of the Bonaparte family and remained, first in his capacity as physician to Hortense and the household, and then as a permanent member of the family. Only five years Louis Napoléon’s senior—they became very close, and their mutual friendship with Arese helped form a special bond among all three. But for Louis Napoléon and Henri, it was different, because they remained together the rest of their lives.
Now in London, Conneau’s position had changed. Earlier, the health of Hortense had been his principal concern, but now he had become Louis Napoléon’s combined principal secretary and chief of staff. At 1 Carlton Gardens, they conferred daily as colleagues and friends and appeared together socially. It was a natural friendship of absolute trust and shared interests, French, Italian, and as fellow Carbonari. Though Arese later returned to Milan to continue in the struggle to chase the Austrians out and to create a united, independent Italy, Conneau’s focus concentrated entirely on France and its political future, although the three of them continued to correspond regularly, and occasionally meet, the rest of their lives. And it was now Chief of Staff Conneau who, with Louis Napoléon, formed the decision to plot for the next coup, while Persigny, as his field man, arranged things on the ground, actually contacting and organizing the individuals to comprise this commando raid. From now on, to the very end, Henri Conneau was to remain Louis Napoléon’s closest friend and confidant.19