by Mike Rapport
Armed with his usefully nebulous concept of Bonapartism, Louis-Napoleon made two botched attempts to provoke an uprising against the July Monarchy among French army garrisons - in 1836 at Strasbourg and in 1840 at Boulogne. After the first attempt, he was exiled to the United States but he soon returned to Europe. The second effort was the stuff of farce. Louis-Napoleon appeared in Boulogne with a paddle-steamer named (of all things) The Edinburgh Castle. Since the insurgents had no imperial eagle as a symbol, they made do with a tame vulture: the bemused bird was chained to the mast. As a result of Boulogne, Louis-Napoleon was sentenced to life imprisonment, serving his sentence in the fortress of Ham in northern France. There, he penned The Extinction of Poverty in 1844, in which he confronted the ‘social question’. He criticised the free market economy, proposing instead a radical programme of state intervention to ease the plight of the poor. His ideas were far from socialist, but they allowed him later to appeal to the workers as their friend - and certainly some Parisian artisans had paid notice. Two years after writing this tract, he escaped from the prison when, during some restoration work, he dressed as a builder, nonchalantly picked up a plank of wood and walked out through the gates. In less than a day he had reached London.136
With the revolution in 1848, Louis-Napoleon travelled to Paris, but the provisional government, suspicious if not a little alarmed, rejected the offer of his services, and by early March he was back in London. There, he enrolled as a special constable against the Chartists on 10 April. In France this marked him out as a friend of order against the ‘red’ menace.137 However, he remained inscrutably mysterious in the precise direction of his politics, although his name helped.
While he was still in London, Louis-Napoleon was entered as a candidate for the French by-elections that were held on 4 June. He was returned in four separate constituencies, including Paris. This success unleashed a political storm. On the one hand, groups of Parisians cheered the election of the man with the electrifying name: ‘Bonaparte’. Workers gathered on the boulevards mixing democratic-socialist slogans with cries of ‘Long live Poleon! We’ll have Poleon!’ They conflated in Louis-Napoleon the patriotic pride in the glorious days of his uncle with their aspirations for social reform. This magnetic appeal was precisely what alarmed the republicans. Proudhon warned in his newspaper that, ‘eight days ago, Citizen Bonaparte was nothing but a black dot in a fiery sky; the day before yesterday, he was still only a smoke-filled ball; today he is a cloud carrying storm and tempest in its flanks’.138 When the alarmed démoc-soc Club of the Revolution of 1793 debated its response to Louis-Napoleon’s success, one speaker argued that it could be explained by their own failure not to have ‘carried the banner of democracy widely enough’.139 On 12 June in the National Assembly, Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin presented a bill barring Bonaparte from his seat, arguing that a ‘pretender’ who had twice tried to seize power illegally could not be a deputy. ‘We will never allow . . . the republic to be sold, under any name, into the hands of a few fanatics!’ proclaimed Lamartine.140 Louis-Napoleon’s supporters gathered on the Place de la Concorde, among them unemployed workers from the National Workshops. The cry ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ resounded across the great square and carried over the river to the National Assembly, which, though protected by troops and National Guards, rejected the bill: ‘one of its rare weaknesses’, wrote Lamartine. D’Agoult explained this strange decision by the fact that, frightening though Bonaparte was, the republicans were more worried by their Legitimist and Orléanist opponents, who had a powerful presence in the Assembly.141 None the less, Bonaparte himself defused the situation by resigning his seat on 16 June, insisting that he now stood for legality: ‘I desire order and support a Republic which is wise, great and intelligent, but since I have been involuntarily the cause of disorder, I place my resignation in your hands, with my deep regrets.’142
It was a shrewd move. D’Agoult’s judgement was as perceptive as ever:
His moderation made him rise in public esteem, without stopping him from representing the very principle of national sovereignty which the representatives themselves seemed to mistrust . . . He incorporated . . . that ideal of revolutionary dictatorship which a still uncultured, turbulent, irrational and passionate democracy prefers to liberal government.143
The resignation was also a fortuitous masterstroke, for it meant that Louis-Napoleon was still in London when the June days erupted. He had no part in the vote to close the National Workshops and he missed having to make the tough political choice between sympathising with the insurgents and supporting the forces of order. His popularity and the sparkle of his name therefore remained undiminished. In the Yonne, one of the departments that had originally elected him, the public prosecutor was told to keep an eye on Bonapartist activity. On 2 July, the lawyer duly reported that he had discovered very little, but this did not mean that Louis-Napoleon’s electoral success was a flash in the pan. Everywhere, people were saying things like:
Louis-Napoleon is the only one who can save France from the financial crisis under which she is suffering. He is extremely rich: he will put his millions at the disposal of the country: no more 45 centimes! Exemption for the countryside from all taxation for two years! To obtain these benefits, to ensure that agriculture, industry and commerce are set to work all at the same time, it is necessary to appoint Louis-Napoleon, first of all as a deputy, then as President of the Republic, then Emperor!144
During the elections, there were posters everywhere with the slogan, ‘Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte - Emperor!’
The lawyer’s concerns seemed fully justified in the autumn. When he contested thirteen different seats during further by-elections in September, Louis-Napoleon was re-elected in five. In Paris, he came top of the list of deputies, but he carefully chose to represent the outlying department of the Yonne, arriving in the capital on 24 September. He took his place as the Assembly was hammering out the Second Republic’s constitution (which was eventually ratified on 4 November). Louis-Napoleon’s luck once again served him well, since the new constitution created a presidency, against the advice of those who feared that this would concentrate too much power in one pair of hands. Louis Blanc had even advised the Assembly that the simplest way of preventing Louis-Napoleon from becoming president was not to have a presidency.145 Yet the parliamentary commission responsible for drafting the constitution did not argue about whether such an office should exist, but merely over how the president would be elected. Tocqueville, who was a member of the commission, argued that in a nation such as the United States, where executive power was weak, there was no harm in having the president elected by popular vote, because he would always be subject to the will of a strong legislature. Yet, he continued prophetically, in a country such as France, which had powerful monarchist currents and where political authority was traditionally very centralised, a popularly elected president would become dangerously powerful. The office, he warned, could serve only those who wanted to transform it into a throne. The great historian and political philosopher had delivered this argument on the day after the first election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte - and no one doubted whom he had in mind.146 The alternative was to have the president elected by the National Assembly, which would virtually ensure that Bonaparte stood no chance in any contest for the office.
In the end, though, popular election won the day, with Cavaignac notably urging the commission to make the presidency elected by the people, not by parliament. Still riding high on the wave of conservative popularity in wake of the June days, Cavaignac was placing his own political future in the hands of a grateful electorate. Moreover, the republicans could see that the strong monarchist presence in the Assembly made election by parliament rather problematic from their perspective. On 7 October, when it appeared that the conservative majority was about to secure presidential election by the legislature, Lamartine rose and argued successfully for the popular vote, dismissing the Bonapartist danger as he did so. For a new dictatorship to arise,
Lamartine claimed, would require the shocks of Terror and a charismatic military leader. And France had neither in 1848.147 That day, the Assembly voted to have a president elected by universal male suffrage for a four-year term, after which he would be ineligible to stand for a second. On 9 October, taking no chances, an amendment was tabled by the moderate republican Antoine Thouret which barred members of former ruling dynasties from standing for the presidency. Louis-Napoleon rose to challenge this, but he spoke so poorly - and in a German accent acquired in his long years of exile - that he seemed to be a buffoon. ‘What an idiot!’ scoffed Ledru-Rollin gleefully. ‘He is ruined.’148 Thouret contemptuously withdrew his amendment.
In any case the vast majority of deputies believed that the republican hero of law and order, Cavaignac, would cruise home in the first presidential election, which was set for 10 December. Nevertheless, Louis-Napoleon announced his candidacy on 26 October. The contest, d’Agoult remarked, was one between ‘authority’, represented by the general, and ‘dictatorship’ in the shape of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.149 The re-election of Louis-Napoleon in September had shown that, no matter how much contempt the political elites may have had for him, he was popular among the people. Those who voted for him in the by-elections in Paris and the suburbs came from the working-class districts. Even more importantly, his name would work its magic among the peasantry. The ‘great’ Napoleon remained, in popular memory, the ‘people’s emperor’ who championed their interests: in Alsace, peasants remembered fondly that there was no Forest Code restricting access to woodlands during the empire. Moreover, as the peasants already had a poor opinion of the Second Republic, casting one’s ballot for Louis-Napoleon was effectively a protest vote against both the regime and the rich, while also avoiding the pitfalls of socialism. So when Louis-Napoleon stood for president, he was a genuine contender against Cavaignac. Once it became clear that this was essentially a two-horse race, the left-wing radicals were willing to support Louis-Napoleon to prevent the ‘butcher’ of June from winning. Meanwhile, conservatives deserted their first hero and, albeit often grudgingly, supported Bonaparte. For them, the Napoleonic tradition meant strong, authoritarian government. Even monarchists were willing to back Louis-Napoleon in the hope that he would crush the left and then become a mere figurehead, a curtain behind which, ultimately, the way could be cleared for a restoration of the monarchy. Adolphe Thiers, a leading Orléanist, described Bonaparte as ‘a cretin’, but he appreciated his political uses and supported his candidacy. Cavaignac, by contrast, was too strong a character - and too republican - to be pliable.
Louis-Napoleon, then, offered many contradictory things to a wide variety of people. In the event, he won the election by a landslide, polling 5,400,000 votes against Cavaignac’s 1,400,000. The heroes of the republican left, Ledru-Rollin and Raspail, did not even come close to offering a serious challenge, with 400,000 and 37,000 votes, respectively; Lamartine, to the poet’s own shock and disgust, could muster only 8,000 votes. The latter could not face the Assembly when the results were announced, which was just as well, for when his derisory poll was declared, there was mocking laughter from the right-wing benches. The candidate of the Legitimists, General Changarnier, attracted the support of fewer than a thousand people.150
President Bonaparte took his oath of office on 20 December. When he swore to uphold the constitution, some of the parliamentary deputies present squirmed: was this, they wondered, a sincere conversion to the republic or were they witnessing perjury? One of Bonaparte’s first acts was to appoint as his prime minister an Orléanist, Odilon Barrot. The message was clear: this was to be an undeniably anti-republican cabinet. The royalist Changarnier, who had performed so dismally as a politician, was given the consolation prize of command of the armed forces in Paris. The Second Republic was now set on a reactionary course.
6
1849: THE INDIAN SUMMER OF THE REVOLUTION
The crushing defeats of 1848 did not mean that the revolutionary momentum had entirely expired. The reaction had not triumphed equally everywhere and even when conservatives were back in control, they did not feel sufficiently strong to raze the new liberal institutions entirely to the ground: most governments, for example, still at the very least paid lip-service to the notion of having a constitution. Liberals may now have been less optimistic about applying their more libertarian ideals, but they were still determined to defend what was left of their achievements. European radicals, meanwhile, made renewed efforts either to push forward their democratic and social programmes or to make a belated defence of the liberal order. It was only when this second wave of revolutionary activity had been suppressed that the mid-century revolutions came to an end.
The German revolutionary experience in 1849 was driven by the democrats who (rather ironically) fought in support of the liberal constitution produced by the remnants of the united German parliament. In Italy and in Hungary the revolution was radicalised because of a military crisis. In France radicals took the fight from the cities, where in 1848 they had been comprehensively beaten, into the provinces and the countryside. The démoc-socs worked feverishly among the grass roots in rural France, converting grievances into votes and making enough electoral gains so that, by 1851, monarchists and moderate republicans alike were thoroughly alarmed by their new-found confidence.
I
In the New Year the German parliament was confronted with the uncomfortable fact that neither of the two great powers, Austria and Prussia, now paid it much heed. Without their cooperation, German unification would be a castle in the sand. The smaller German states still saw some use for the parliament and the government: as they were weak when they stood alone, they had always sheltered under a wider, pan-German political umbrella. So the parliamentarians forged on with the constitution. At the end of December 1848 they had published the Basic Rights (Grundrechte), which could not be infringed by subsequent legislation, be it federal or state. The Grundrechte guaranteed personal liberty, equality before the law and habeas corpus. Titles of nobility and all aristocratic privileges were abolished, including the manorial jurisdiction and the police powers of landlords over their peasants. There was to be no return to serfdom, but there was to be freedom of religion, education, opinion and the press. The death penalty, corporal punishment and the pillory were all to end. The secular ideals of the parliament emerged in the clause on marriage, which made the civil ceremony the legally binding act, and in the issue of education, which was removed from clerical hands. The separation of powers was guaranteed in that the judiciary was to be free from political influence. The national minorities were promised ‘their national development, especially equality of the rights of their languages’ in religion, education, law and local government. Other than upholding property rights, however, there were no social rights: the liberals firmly believed that free trade and open competition would ease the economic distress of the struggling poor. For this reason, all German citizens were to enjoy the full freedom to travel and live where they liked, to acquire property and to engage in any form of occupation. It was, in other words, a classically liberal document in every political sense of the word.
The Grundrechte were not universally accepted by all the German states. Some, like Württemberg, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt, declared their immediate recognition of the Grundrechte, but others, like Prussia, Austria and Bavaria, refused to do so. Expressing startlingly modern-sounding anxieties, some governments objected that the freedom to travel would simply allow ‘communists’ to settle in their states, while others feared that armies of unemployed workers would roam across the country, with some complaining that ‘all the efforts of every state and every community will be fruitlessly expended in providing work and necessary support in cases of want’. The guilds forcefully rejected freedom in choice of occupation, because that meant they would lose control over who entered their trade.1
The political arrangements for the German Empire included a two-chamber Reichstag. Half of the upper house
, the House of States, was to be chosen by the parliaments of the separate German states and half was to be appointed by the governments. Thus, the constitution entrenched the federal principle. Moreover, all German states would be obliged to have a popularly elected assembly of their own, with ministers responsible to it. The lower chamber, the House of the People, was to be elected by popular vote. The extent of the franchise was a thorny issue: the left, of course, wanted universal male suffrage, while the liberals hoped to restrict it to those who were economically independent, excluding apprentices, factory workers, journeymen, farm labourers and domestic servants. Yet, with the definitive Austrian rejection of German unity, the liberals had to secure left-wing support for the Kleindeutsch solution, with the Prussian King as hereditary Emperor. The compromise was sealed and the Reich electoral law declared that ‘every German of good repute who has completed his twenty-fifth year has the vote’. The secret ballot ‘by voting paper without signature’ was carried, though only with a wafer-thin majority. While this electoral law was never implemented because of the counter-revolution, it would live on thanks to an unlikely figure, Bismarck, who used it as the basis of the constitution of the unified German Reich in 1871.2
The constitution was adopted on 27 March 1849, and the following day King Frederick William IV of Prussia was elected hereditary Emperor, with the power to delay legislation with a suspensive veto. He now had to be persuaded to accept the crown, but he dithered for a month: not all his advisers were hostile to the idea of Prussian leadership in Germany, calculating that in return for Prussian agreement to the constitution they could secure some major revisions, including restrictions on the franchise. Meanwhile, the liberal governments of twenty-eight German states accepted the constitution, but it was a bad sign that the larger of the German middle states - Hanover, Bavaria and Saxony - all refused to do so. Nevertheless, the viability of the new political order depended, ultimately, on a positive Prussian response. Aware of this, in mid-April the twenty-eight signatory governments sent a joint note to Berlin, urging the Prussian government to follow their lead, although Frederick William suspected that their own acquiescence was far from willing. Meanwhile, the Frankfurt parliament had anxiously sent a thirty-two-man delegation led by Eduard Simson to meet the King. They had arrived on 2 April. Frederick William promised that they could always rely on ‘the Prussian shield and sword’ to defend German honour against foreign and (pointedly) domestic enemies, but he made no other promises. The Kreuzzeitung circle was closing around Frederick William and it was most definitely Prussian in outlook. Its members were deeply suspicious of blurring that identity in a less predictable German frame: Bismarck later wrote that his own hostility towards the imperial crown was driven primarily by an ‘instinctive distrust’ of the 1848 revolutions, but also by his sensitivity for ‘the prestige of the Prussian crown and its wearer’.3 The King hated the idea of being ‘Emperor of the German People’ - the formal imperial title, which suggested that he would owe his position not to God but to the unwashed multitudes. He joked with his courtiers, calling the imperial crown a ‘sausage sandwich’ and a gift from ‘Master Butcher and Baker’.4 In darker moments he scowled that the crown was ‘the dog-collar with which people want to chain me to the 1848 revolution’, a ‘pig’s crown’ and a ‘crown from the gutter’. Moreover, there was a diplomatic reason to reject the constitution: how would Russia react to a united Germany dominated by Prussia? The last straw came on 21 April, when both chambers of the new Prussian parliament accepted the German constitution and the lower house urged the King to do the same. Frederick William’s reaction was immediate: he dissolved both chambers and, a week later, issued his formal rejection of the German crown. Ominously, he also promised military help to any government that chose to repudiate the constitution.