Throne-Makers. William Roscoe Thayer
an adventurer who had fastened on Louis Napoleon fifteen years before; Fleury, a major most active and efficient, without qualm, for he foresaw a marshal’s bâton; and Maupas, one of those easy villains who, never having been suspected of honesty, are spared the fatigue of pretending to be better than they are. If we assume that all these gentlemen were Imperialists for revenue only, we shall do them no injustice.
Their first move was to send Fleury to Algiers to secure a general to act as minister of war. He had not to search long; for Saint Arnaud, one of the Algerian officers, guessing Fleury’s purpose, offered his services forthwith. But Saint Arnaud stood only fifty-third in the line of promotion among French generals; some excuse must be found for passing by his fifty-two seniors. In a few weeks the French press and official gazette announced an outbreak of great violence among the Kabyles in Algeria; a little later they reported that the insurrection had been subdued by the energy of General Saint Arnaud; then, another proper interval elapsing, Saint Arnaud had come to Paris as minister of war.
It took less trouble to dismiss the Prefect of the Seine, and to substitute Maupas for him. Magnan, who commanded the troops, had already been corrupted. Half-brother Morny, at the critical moment, would appear in the Ministry of the Interior. The National Guard and the Public Printer could both be counted on—the latter required for the prompt issuing of manifestoes. Everything being ready, the President, after some brief delays, set December 2—the anniversary of Austerlitz, and of the coronation of the great Napoleon—for committing the crime.
On the evening of December 1, he held his weekly reception at the Elysée; moved with his habitual courtesy among the guests; seemed less stiff than usual—as if relieved of a burden; then went to his study for a last conference with his fellow-conspirators. The next morning Paris learned that two hundred leading citizens, military and political, including many deputies, had been arrested and taken to Vincennes. Placards declared that the President, having had news of a plot against the state, had stolen a march on the plotters, dissolved the Assembly, proclaimed universal suffrage, and called for a plebiscite to accept or reject the constitution he would frame. At first, the stupefied Parisians knew not what to do. Then the deputies who had escaped arrest met and voted to depose the President; but his gendarmes quickly broke up the meeting, and lodged the deputies in prison. Thanks to the system of centralization which France had long boasted of, Morny, from the Ministry of the Interior, controlled every prefect in France by telegraph. The provinces were informed that Paris had accepted the coup d’état almost before Paris had collected her dazed senses on the morning of the 2d of December.
The chief politicians and other leaders being caged, there was no one left, except among the workingmen, to direct a resistance. They did revolt, and Napoleon and Saint Arnaud gave them free play to raise barricades, to arm and gather. Then the eighty thousand soldiers in Paris surrounded them, stormed their barricades, and made no prisoners. Accompanying this suppression of the mob was the bloodthirsty massacre of a multitude of defenseless men, women, and children who had collected on the boulevards to see the troops move against the barricaders. They were shot down in cold blood, the soldiers (according to general report) having been rendered ferocious by drink. Thus was achieved the crime of the coup d’état.
By this crime Napoleon had demonstrated that he had the necessary force to put down the lawless, and that he did not hesitate to use it; by massacring the innocent throng, he made the army his accomplices, against any risk of their fraternizing with the populace. A fortnight later, 7,439,000 Frenchmen ratified his crime and elected him president for ten years: only 646,000 voted against him. Napoleon the Great, by the coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire, had suppressed the Directory; his imitative nephew could now point to an equally successful 2d of December.
France acquiesced all the more readily because she was put under martial law. One hundred thousand suspects were arrested, and more than ten thousand, were deported to Cayenne and Algeria. Police inquisitions, military commissions, and the other usual devices of tyranny quickly smothered resistance. Under the pretense of suppressing anarchy—an anarchist meaning any one who did not submit to Louis Napoleon—persecution supplanted law and justice. Had you asked to see most of the Frenchmen whose names were the most widely known, you would have been told that they were in exile.
Like his uncle, Louis Napoleon waited a little before putting on the purple. Only on December 2, 1852, the anniversary of his crime, did he have himself proclaimed emperor. The mockery of a plebiscite had preceded, and he had assured France and Europe that the “Empire means peace.”
Having reached the throne, he made the following arrangements for staying on it. He organized a Senate and a Council of State, whose members he appointed. The public were allowed to elect members to the Corps Législatif, or Legislature; but as his minions controlled the polls, only such candidates as he preferred were likely to be chosen. He suffered a few opponents to be elected, in order to have it appear that he encouraged discussion. Otherwise, he scarcely took pains to varnish his autocracy. As a deft Chinese carver incloses a tiny figure in a nest of ivory boxes, so did Bonaparte imprison the simulacrum of Liberty in the innermost compartment of the political cage in which he held France captive.
What must the condition of the French people have been that they submitted! How much antecedent incapacity for government, how much cherishing of unworthy ideals, were implied by the success of such an adventurer! And what could patriotism mean, when the French fatherland meant the land of Louis Napoleon, Morny, Maupas, Persigny, and their unspeakable underlings? The new Empire gave France what is called a strong government, by which commercially she throve. Tradesmen, seeing business improve and their hoards grow, chafed less at the loss of political freedom. The working classes were propitiated by public works—the favorite nostrum of socialists and tyrants—organized on a vast scale. Pensions were showered on old soldiers, or their widows. Taxes ran high; the public debt had constantly to be increased: but an air of opulence pervaded France.
Established at home, Napoleon now looked abroad for gloire. Before his elevation, some one had warned him that he would find the French a very hard people to govern. “Not at all,” he replied; “all that they need is a war every four years.” Europe had formally recognized him—no country being more ready than England to condone his great crime. Queen Victoria, the typical British matron, exchanging visits with the Imperial adventurer made an edifying spectacle! Presently the land-greed of England and the gloire-thirst of France brought the sons of the Britons who had whipped the great Napoleon at Waterloo into an alliance with the sons of the Frenchmen who had there been whipped; and in the summer of 1854 British and French fleets swept through the Bosphorus and across the Black Sea, and landed two armies near Sebastopol. Of the Crimean war which ensued, we need say no more than that it was immoral in conception, blundering in execution, and ineffectual in results. Nevertheless, it supplied Napoleon III with just what he had sought. He extracted from it large quantities of gloire. Marshal’s bâtons and military promotions, the parade of returning troops, the assembling at Paris of the European envoys who were to agree on a treaty of peace—what did all this show but that Europe had accepted Napoleon III at his own valuation? In Russia’s wilderness of snow the great Napoleon had been ruined; now his nephew posed as the humbler of Russia. The great Napoleon had been finally crushed by England: now his nephew had enticed good, pious England into an alliance, and thereby he had surely avenged his uncle. The last European compact, humiliating to France, had been signed at Vienna: the new compact, signed at Paris, bore witness to the supremacy of France.
That year 1856 marks the acme of Napoleon the Third’s career. It saw him the recognized arbiter of Europe. The world, which worships success, forgot that the suave, impassive master of the Tuileries had been Louis the Ridiculed, a political vagabond and hapless pretender, only ten years before. Now, as arbiter, he would meddle when he chose, and the world should not gainsay him. Moreover, he believed his power so secure that he was willing to forgive those whom he had injured. He had gained what he wanted: why, therefore, should they reject his amnesty?
Unscrupulously selfish till he had attained his ends, Napoleon III had, nevertheless, curious streaks of disinterestedness in his nature. What but Quixotism impelled him to promise to free Italy from her bondage to Austria? He might add thereby to his personal renown, but the French people, who must pay the bills and furnish