Behind the Bastards - Part Four: Napoleon III: The Worst Bonaparte

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

Robert is joined by Matt Lieb for the final part of series on  Napoleon III.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh yes, gaze upon me and know me, for I am a Russian-trained astronaut. For I am the Christ child of podcasting. Yes, you shall die for the sins of all podcasters. Future and past. I will be reborn and sit at the right hand of my father, the Pod Save America guys. The Johns, the Baptists. This is behind the bastards, the only podcast hosted by the man that Vulture magazine called

the Jesus Christ of podcasting. That's right. Look it up. Look it up, it's there. It's there, somewhere, probably. Maybe if enough people look it up and harass the reporters over email, they'll have to report on it in a story. And then I can take an excerpt out of that article and make it look like they called me the Jesus Christ of podcasting,

which would be worth it. Yeah, I mean that's how you play, you know, beat the media at their own game. If you get them to quote other people's complaints and then you take that complaint, you say, hey. Look, we all learned a lot from Donald J. Trump. Yes, we did. Yes, we did. Can we not do this weird bit you're doing? Sophie, it's not a bit, it's my life.

It is my life. Anyway. Matt Leib is here. Hey, I'm back. Hey, Matt Leib. So glad to be here. Love being on this pod. Love talking to you guys.

Love, you know, just plugging my podcasts and just begging your listeners to just check it out. Pod yourself the wire. The world's only the wire podcast. And pod yourself a gun. The world's only the Sopranos podcast. Yeah, check out pod yourself the wire and check out pod yourself a gun. I didn't pause for a second because I just saw the worst thing I've ever seen on Twitter. Oh, no.

What is it? So Chrissy Yamaguchi main, aka at Waffle House on Twitter, who's a fan of our show, posted a picture of a a decal on somebody's car that says messy buns and loaded guns. And then it's a picture of the American flag. Hell yeah. And then says raising lions not sheep. Yeah. Oh, that's a person who has threatened to murder a barista.

That's who that is. That is a person who has pulled a firearm on a Starbucks employee. I just thought I needed to share that with my friends here. That's amazing. Beautiful. That is a person who has unlawfully detained black people for riding a bike and asked them, whose bike is that? Yeah, that is a person who has pulled a Glock on a FedEx driver who is not as white as they.

Speaking of which, you know who would have definitely pulled a Glock on a FedEx driver? Who? Napoleon III. Actually, probably not. That was not super a problem that he had. But he had a shot one in the mouth. He would have shot one in the mouth. I'll tell you that much, this guy.

I'll tell you one thing about this Napoleon guy. He loves some mouth shooting. Real mouth shooter, Napoleon III. He loves to shoot straight into the mouth. My favorite meme again, the shaking hands meme with Napoleon III and suburban Americans shooting people who absolutely shouldn't be shot. Shooting innocent people in the mouth in a panic. In a panic.

Yeah. Yes, there's another hand holding. It's a third one. It's just the cops. Yeah. Look. We can have a lot of debates about gun control, but Napoleon III is definitely a man who's gun needed more control.

A little bit. Just a tiny bit more. Disarm all bonaparts. He has a right to bear arms, but not a right to tear mouths. That's right. That's right. Anyway, you're doing good. So anyway, Napoleon III.

In the space of about a decade, the first 10 years or so he's in power, Napoleon III takes France from being one of the sick men of Europe. It was seen as kind of an ailing power like the Ottomans and a pariah and turns it into what is probably the dominant political and military force on the European continent. Right. After the Crimean War, he's got sort of what's seen as like the largest, most cohesive and effective ground army. He's expanded like over the course of the first like decade and change of his reign,

he doubles the population of France because he's conquered all of Indochina. He's conquered effectively now parts of Algeria, Western Africa. He had millions of people to French Dominion. Oh, I thought people just liked the new empire so much that they were fucking a lot. They were just fucking making a lot more babies. No. Yeah, a lot more menage-e-toise, you know what I mean? No, menage way more than trois for this guy because Louis Napoleon, horny motherfucker.

Yeah, that's why they called Napoleon the trois. First, I did want to talk a little bit about a fun fact I found about him, about how he used his newfound wealth and prestige to lord his position over everyone else, right? And that's normal for emperors. You wouldn't be an emperor if you weren't going to do some of that. But due to a quirk of metallurgy and history, he wound up doing this in a very funny way. When the emperor would host other world leaders for lavish balls and high society events, he would have his servants bring out gold-plated dinnerware for them, right?

And this was not to honor them. This was specifically to contrast them from him because he had a much nicer set of dinnerware. And all of his plates and bowls and cups and spoons were made from what was at the time one of the most valuable materials on earth, aluminum. Hell yeah. I love it. Whippin' out his aluminum cups so they- Oh man, I'm eating out of this can.

How gauche. Oh, enjoy your gold poppers. I am just going to crack open this cold beer. This cold beer of precious aluminum. Watch me crash it. I'm going to crunch it right on my head. Just shotgunning mead. So the general public didn't start to become aware of aluminum until the end of the 1800s.

The metal exists all throughout the earth, right? It's been around forever. We've been using it forever. But due to realities of geology, this silver from clay, as it was called, was generally mixed up with other shit, and we just didn't have the ability to, like, separate it and gather it in significant quantity. For an example of how valuable aluminum was during the reign of Louis Napoleon, the United States put a six-pound aluminum cap on the top of the Washington Monument,

and this was like a big flex. This was the US being like, yeah, motherfuckers, we got six pounds of aluminum, bitches. What do you got? You got nothing. We're going to wrap this whole thing in foil. It was the largest piece of the metal ever used at that time. Louis Napoleon actually granted a scientist named Henri de Ville a massive public subsidy to study how to gather larger quantities of aluminum.

He ordered military standards to be made from aluminum poles for his troops to carry because he was so enchanted by the sight of aluminum. None of this worked very well, but that hardly mattered. The Royal Family wore aluminum jewelry. Louis's son had a baby rattle made of aluminum. It was a wild time for what is today the most boring metal on earth. They've got, like, he's giving his relatives, like, aluminum rings. They're throwing their gold in the trash.

Fuck this shit. He's got an aluminum fucking... I love aluminum. A little aluminum carriage that just keeps folding. God damn it. Can we make this stronger? Napoleon III was also notorious for his... Can we say coxmanship?

His coxmanship. Yeah, he's a fuck guy. Yeah, he's a fuck guy. Now, his wife, who he married shortly after taking power and is pretty controversial herself and sucks, is the Empress Eugenie. She is a huge prude. Some biographers write that she hated sex. So this is going to be particularly a problem because Louis Napoleon really likes sex.

That's his favorite thing. He does... The way he threads this needle is by cheating on her constantly. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. See where this is going, you know? That's what he's got to do. So, because things aren't working out great for Eugenie,

and because after a while, this is not... There's no romance in their relationship. Louis Napoleon has to increasingly go further afield in search of love, and this is where we get the story of the Countess of Castiglione. Louis Napoleon, Virginia, Elizabeta, Luisa, Carlotta, Antonietta, Teresa, Maria, Oldoini. Jesus. Lot of names. Nobody needs a name that long.

Yeah, that's like every name in Mambo number five. Exactly. Yeah, this bitch is her own Mambo number five. Her parents were Tuscan nobles who saw the fact that she's hot as hell, right? So they decide that since she's so gorgeous, they're going to solve... This is a problem, right? You don't really want to have a daughter who's famously beautiful when you're a high society

because she's going to get up to some stuff. So the only thing... Her parents are just like, we got to deal with this hot daughter problem. We got to marry her off as soon as we can. And so they hitch her off at age 17 to a 29-year-old. This is not a happy union. They have actually a famously disastrous marriage,

and she basically leaves him immediately to move to Paris and become the mistress of the Emperor of France. This leads to a lot of drama, particularly when she wore a dress covered in hearts with no corset. She's famous for this, just... Just let him hang. Letting it hang. And she goes, like, shows up at this fancy ball in this heart-covered dress with no corset.

Well, she's on Louis Napoleon's arm, and Empress Eugenie is there. She's like sitting in the ballroom as the Emperor comes in with this chick on his arm, which is like, you know, people expect an Emperor to sleep around, but that's still kind of like Jesus. That stings a little bit, especially when she's not wearing a corset. She's breathing normal. She's breathing normal, not wheezing, yeah.

Everyone's like, this is a little mean. Yeah. So we don't know why the two stopped dating, which happened in around 1860, but they did break up suddenly. Now, all of this is mostly interesting because the Countess is widely considered to be the first supermodel due to her habit of taking and publicizing lurid photos of herself often wearing things that were, like, considered pornographic in the day.

So she would put out pictures of herself in sandals. Oh, shit. With an ankle visible. Yeah, she's showing off them toes. Oh, we're seeing those little toesies. And she's got this access to photographers, in part because she's dating the Emperor. And as a result, if you look at the way she's posing,

she kind of invents the selfie. Like, she's the first person who has the ability to do this, to, like, dress up in the morning and be like, I look cute, I'm gonna take a picture, I'm gonna send it out to everybody, right? Like, she has turned the world media into Instagram. She invented the duck face, Dan. Yeah, yeah, she kind of figured all that out. So that's fun.

Anyway, it's probably time to stop talking about court life and get back to everybody's favorite topic, blood-drenched imperialism. Yeah. Oh, God. Isn't it good? You just like to rub it all up in yourself, get it all in your crevices.

A nice warm blanket of blood. Yeah, the bloodiest crevice in the French Empire at this point in time is Algeria. Now, in March of 1864, again, in, like, 1858, they had, quote, unquote, pacified it, right? Right. In March of 1864, tribesmen in the mountains of pacified Algeria launched yet another insurrection.

Napoleon III was forced to send 25,000 more soldiers to the colony, just as he was planning to take his first royal trip there to embark on a new phase of investments in the area. All of this came at a bad time. His brother-in-law, a valued advisor, had just died. At age 57, Louis Napoleon is himself in pretty poor shape. I'm going to give you a little list of all the different ailments this man has.

Oh, fun. Rheumatism, gout, hemorrhoids, a terrible cough from decades of smoking, and a heart condition. So he's just falling the fuck apart. Yeah. But he decides, still, I'm going to go to fucking Algeria, and I'm going to fix things up personally in this troubled imperial possession

that, you know, my predecessors took on. Yeah. Now, one of the things that's interesting about him, he's a liberal, right? He's a monarchist, but he's a liberal. Yeah. An enlightened despot. As a liberal, he doesn't think that, like, he's not,

he doesn't talk about France's imperial possession the way that, like, you get a lot of British empire guys talking about. He talks about, like, he talks about it from this position of, like, we're going to, you know, I want this to be an Arab nation, and we just want to help them, you know? Right.

We're here to, like, fix things up for them. We're not trying to take money out of them, and we're not trying to, we're just trying to, like, make them a little bit better so they can stand on their own. Right. We're just trying to spread democracy in the Middle East. Yeah, exactly. He's trying to spread democracy in the Middle East.

Now, I want to read a quote from the Shadow Emperor that kind of makes it clear the way in which he saw himself here. The Turks had governed Algeria as a province of the Ottoman Empire until 1830 and had done nothing for them, according to Louis Napoleon's lights. Apart from collecting taxes,

Algerians had let them run their own lives, leaving traditional tribal affairs and customs unchanged. They had not encouraged them to abandon tribal life, acquire private property, or try to produce agricultural surplus beyond their own tribal needs for overseas sales. All of this was wrong in the eyes of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. The Algerians needed guidance

in entering the modern world of European civilization. Everything had to change. But it must be done patiently and respectfully. It must be given equal rights, the same rights as the French population. Such an idea, of course, had never even occurred to the most enlightened Algerian. Tribal councils, popularly elected

and chosen throughout the centuries, should now be disbanded, and along with them, tribal chiefs. Dismantle the tribe and its administration and become like France, he insisted. And yet, Louis Napoleon specifically forbade the creation of cantonments or reservations. His knowledge of the whole-scale transportation

and relocation of the American Indians, he said, had cautioned him enough to not repeat that experiment. I find that really interesting. That's what he learned from us? Yeah, don't do reservations. Now, absolutely end their way of life and destroy their culture so they can participate in specifically so that they can participate

in global capitalism. The problem is, and again, he sees this as like the Ottomans being foolish. The Ottomans knew how to run an empire, which is that all we needed out of Algeria was Algiers as a training area. And we don't really care what other people do, as long as they don't fuck with trade.

And you know what's easy? Just letting them live their lives. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. You could just collect a little bit of tax and fucking move on. This goes reasonably well for the Ottomans. But it's like, it's going to be this fucking nightmare for France.

And it all comes out of this idea that like, well, their culture is a failure because they're not part of the global capitalist system. They're not producing a surplus to sell. Now, the Algerians would say, we have enough food. Yeah, we don't really need this. What do we want money for?

We've got our own thing going on. We're okay, we don't need money. I can buy stuff. What are you talking about? What do I need global capitalism for when there's a market right down the street? I have food and animal skins and all the things that I need, you know?

Napoleon III is like horrified by this. And the fact that he, like while he's trying to figure out, how do I dismantle and destroy this tribal structure? The fact that he won't do reservations is part of a fun trend in European history in the late 1800s. We talk about this a little bit at the start

of this series of Behind the Bastards when we did Karl May, who was this German author who wrote cowboy books that Hitler just loved. But there's this trend in European culture in the late 1800s where indigenous Americans are glorified and idolized in European popular society,

particularly in fiction. And there are a number of reasons for this. Some of it is just that like, yeah, man, it was a real bad genocide that was fucked up of what was done. And it's still being done. Objectively tragic figures. Yeah, objectively a tragic thing that happened.

But a lot of it also is that there's this growing anti-American sentiment, right? Some of it's because of, you know, the United States doing manifest destiny shit. But a lot of it's also just like, you know, they're new on the scene and they're kind of like gross upstarts, right? So there's that aspect of it.

And they get to avoid like all of the hundreds of years of European conflicts, you know, they get to just be over there. Yeah. And it's interesting because they, while there's this aspect of kind of idolization of indigenous Americans, it doesn't come with any real respect

for their cultures. And in fact, it's often based entirely on fantasy presentations of these cultures. And that brings us back to Napoleon III. Louis Napoleon was adamant that he wanted the Algerians to rule themselves. And he would claim that his administration was simply a way to help raise them up

to a point where they could exist as a modern nation. But in practice, this was an incredibly bloody process. See, people don't like having their way of life demolished by strangers at gunpoint. Right. So early in 1864,

a tribal chief massacred four dozen French soldiers. And the Emperor's men responded by burning villages and rendering a huge chunk of the Oran province uninhabitable, right? This is the process of bringing them democracy. Yeah.

They killed some of our armed men trying to destroy their tribes. And so we must burn villages. Hey, the Tree of Liberty's got to be, you know, watered by blood yada yada, right? By the blood of the people you're freeing. Yes. Exactly, bro.

In his writings on the colony, Louis sketched out grand dreams of democratic rights and institutions for Algerians patterned off the French system. And a lot of this has to do with like, I want this, you know, enlightened electorate, and I want this education system and all this. And most Algerians couldn't read or write,

right? Because that's just not a part of their lives. A lot of their culture is passed on in an oral tradition, all that stuff. And as it happens, the system they already lived under was super democratic. It was, in fact, more democratic than either France or the United States at the time.

Tribal councils, all of each of these different tribes, was kind of governed by tribal councils that were made up of adult men who reached consensus on major decisions. This was a stateless system. These are not nations. And it's, you know, let's say that it wasn't

like, again, it's all men, but so is the United States electorate. So is the French electorate at this point. It's not like anybody's good on that stuff. And it is consensus driven. Rather than like, we have these elections and one party takes power. It's these councils representing all of

the families in the tribe, figure out what to do and vote, kind of select representatives of the oldest, wisest men in order to help make calls about things like, you know, when we go to fight against another tribe or like if somebody encroaches on our grazing lands or what to do if there's a drought.

Yeah, but Robert, they're not wearing wigs. Yeah, they're not wearing wigs while they do it. So it's non-democratic. Like, I don't see how this is, this seems worse because like, how are you going to make democratic decisions without

like, old white men. Real fucking big ass wigs, exactly. They've got to be huge and weird. Fucking massive wigs. Exactly, dude. This is a, again, one of the things I find interesting because this is a stateless system and it was one that, for a long

time, Algerians had been relatively peaceful and avoided starving, right? The system like this, you can call these things like primitive if you want like, and people that the fucking French sure do, but like this works for a lot of people for a very long time in a pretty tough part

of the world. Geographically, Algeria is a complicated place to stay alive in. Yeah. It works pretty well. And by all accounts, life was relatively decent there before the French took over. Napoleon's attempts to impose a different

way on life and the people who had never seen themselves as part of the same entity was always destined for failure. They didn't see themselves as Algerians because they weren't. They were just like some tribes living in an area. Yeah.

They just, someone just gave them labels and they were just like, no, that's not what are you talking about? I think this is another area where like the things he'd been reading about Native American color, his opinion, because he saw the Algerians as a race in decline, which is definitely how the

Europeans looked at indigenous Americans, even though there was no evidence that they'd been in any kind of trouble under the Ottomans, right? They were not like having serious problems. It was again, you know, it's not a perfect, I'm not trying to paint this as like a

fucking paradise, but like there was no evidence that they were having any particular kind of issues. He's going to fix all that. He's going to give them some serious goddamn problems and we're going to talk about that. But first, Matt.

What? You know what Napoleon would love? Me to use my sound board right now? That's right, baby. Sorry. No, what? What would you like?

You should get a sound board from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Stick a Napoleon bone apart on in there. Oh shit. Fuck. Okay. Do it in post. Yeah.

Just remember one of the classic lines from that movie, all of which I have forgotten at this point. Yeah. The guitar sound when they're excited. George Carlin. It's also the sound they make when they come. Yeah.

That's right. Think about Keanu Reeves coming and then buy some products. That's the way it sounds, baby. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time,

and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

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But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're just thinking about how it sounds when Keanu Reeves comes. Sounds cool. Like a normal person. Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. Excellent. One day I'll meet him and I'll ask. What it sounds like when he comes? Yeah, what does it sound like when you come, Keanu Reeves? I'm sure he'd answer.

He seems cool. I'm sure he would have an answer. I'm not sure he'd appreciate that specific question. Oh, yeah, certainly wouldn't appreciate it, but he would have something for it. So, Napoleon III's whole goal

is to take the Algerian people out of the place they had been living, out of their ancestral homelands, to pup make. So basically, no one owned land in Algeria, right? You had like this. This is our hunting ground. This is where we graze our sheep

and if a tribe comes in, maybe there would be a conflict over it, but it was not, nobody, people didn't have like... He's a paper that said this short land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He basically is going to, over the course of his time in power,

take away all of the lands owned by tribes, because there's initially this sense of like, well, what if we give the tribes some land and some of it becomes France's? He's gonna get rid of all of that over time, because his goal is to force all of these people who are, again, perfectly happy, living in the fucking hills and mountains

and whatnot of Algeria, and force them to move into modern cities with wide French-style boulevards, electric power, and parliamentary democracy. That'll work out. That'll work out. It doesn't. There's a fucking insurrection.

And the first thing Napoleon does when this insurrection happens is he appoints a new leader, a non-military leader, because he's like, well, maybe they killed those soldiers because the military was being too aggressive. You know what I'll do?

I'm gonna put my best guy in charge of things. You know who that's gonna be? Greg Napoleon? Yeah, old Prince Jerome, the guy who had fucking fled the field in Crimea. Old Greg's bag. That is me.

Yeah. It's me. Jerry Nepley Paulians. So he puts gutless bone apart in charge, replacing the old military leader of the colony. And, again, the military, their solution to problems was massacring villages. So I'm not saying, like,

he should have let those guys stay in power. But Prince Jerome is, like, a high society liberal, and he brings with him to Algiers, a coterie of Parisian high society liberals. And he's going to attempt to democratize Algeria. And I'm gonna read again from the Shadow Emperor here. Quote,

The brooding plan plan, that's his other nickname, personally knew nothing about Algeria, its history or its people, and had no plans to learn by touring the country, or indeed, even to leaving the capital of Algiers. He was only interested in introducing his personal theoretical liberal reforms.

But when, for instance, on February 16th, 1859, he announced from France, where he had returned in December of 1858, that the natives would be free to sell or acquire land, including tribal land, all sides were up in arms. Strictly defined lands could no longer easily be confiscated by the state.

The result? The tribes would eventually break up, disintegrate, and disappear. As the totality of their tribes, literally constituted Algeria, this meant the entire social structure protecting the members of each tribe would no longer exist, resulting in a veritable diaspora of tribesmen.

And today, one of the big social problems France has, is that there's this constant wave of people fleeing Algeria, which has caused a lot of particularly racist in France, racist in France, have a lot of issues with that. This is where that all starts, right? This is like why they come over to France, because the French emperor destroys the entire social structure.

Exactly. And suddenly people have like nowhere to be. Yeah. Turns out that's a bad idea. I just wanted them to wear wigs and have papers that say, this is my house. That's all. Yeah.

And then they came to France and all of the racists were angry about it for forever. Yep. So when this uprising starts in 1864, it's clear that Plonplon has failed. And when he visits Algeria, the emperor brings with him an authoritarian regime to replace Plonplon's liberal one,

which was going to use terrible force to bring peace. He appoints a military officer, Patrice de MacMahon, who goes on a spree of massacres. Despite this, Algeria's vast size and diffuse population proved difficult to control. The population migrations caused by land reform policies and waves of refugees from the fighting ran up against a horrible drought

that hit in 1867 and 1868, devastating local agriculture. Next came a series of earthquakes and then cholera and typhoid epidemics. These disasters had all occurred in the past and had been handled by Algerians through mutual aid, right? These tribes had ways of... This is the same thing you see in India

when the East India Company takes over. They destroy all these different trading agreements within villages because people had always dealt with bad times and when one village doesn't produce enough food, other villages didn't tend to let them starve to death. Tribes in Algeria work the same way, right? We take care of each other when things are really bad because that's just better for everybody.

Napoleon III has destroyed all of these structures that used to protect people, that used to deal with this kind of shit, in addition to killing a shitload of them. So the chaos of the upheaval of Napoleon meant that there was nothing in place to protect these people. More than 300,000 Algerians die in a four-year period. This is from disease,

along with 350,000 who are killed by the military in an ethnic cleansing. This amounts to one-third of the Algerian population pre-Louis Napoleon. Yeah, this is like pretty bad genocide. Yeah. You know, that's... If you're wondering why Algeria has had a rough time of it

in the last century or so. There's a little history to it. Yeah. Might be a little bit of history there. Might be a little bit of context you're missing out on. Might be a super obvi... Might be entirely France's fault, right? Oh, well, the name broke.

Fix it. They're not winning wigs. Yeah, yeah. Well, now they are. So, at around the same time, while all this is going on in Algeria, Louis Napoleon is fucking around in a weirdly similar way in a completely different part of the world. Mexico. Now, as I'd said, he's spent years,

most of the early 1860s, trying to convince Maximilian Habsburg to become the emperor of Mexico. They're talking about this for years. Now, Maximilian is an interesting dude. Again, he's the younger brother to Franz Joseph, the emperor of Austria-Hungary, who Louis had recently bested in a war,

and Max had kind of a fraught relationship with his brother. They were closest kids, but as they get older, his brother thinks that he's gunning for the throne, and so keeps trying to foist him off on these do-nothing jobs. Maximilian is kind of running Austria and Italy for a while before he gets overthrown, basically. And when he's kind of running Austria and Italy, he's trying to be like this liberal, right?

Where he's like, well, maybe they'll like being ruled by Austria if I introduce reforms. And that never works because people don't like to be ruled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's like, no, but you can have some speech. Yeah, not against the Austrian dynasty. No, no, no, no, that's not going to get crazy here. Yeah, anyway, it doesn't work great.

He gets run out of town on the fucking rails. And yeah, Louis, you know, he's got this, his older brother kind of wants him away. And so the fact, the idea, like, Franz Joseph actually winds up backing Napoleon's plan to make him the emperor of Mexico for a while. Send him across the sea. Well, in part because he can make him sign a contract

saying I give up my right to inherit the Habsburg throne. Because you can't, you know, be the king of the emperor of Mexico and be the emperor, you know, in line for the empire of Austria-Hungary. Sorry, arbitrary rules are arbitrary rules. Yeah, and Maximilian is a very similar kind of guy to Plan Plan. He's this idealistic naive, arrogant liberal who wants to reform things and be seen as a reformer but also wants to be the guy running things

and wants it all to be done his way. And he does, he wants to reform Mexican society in what you might call vaguely center-left directions. And doing this means, though, defeating the already pretty, for the time, left-wing legitimate government of Mexico, which is a republic currently governed by the elected leader who was an indigenous Mexican man named Benito Juarez. Like he said, he's got indigenous ancestry.

Juarez is a fascinating, fascinating man, a tough son of a bitch. Cool ass dude. Cool ass dude. He had been elected president after finishing a vicious civil war, beating the conservatives who sought an autocratic, dictatorial form of government different from Juarez's republic. So Maximilian, he wants kind of a broadly similar social structure to what the Mexican republicans are pushing.

He just wants to run it. It's not like Mexico had this horrible dictatorship. They had just fought a war and a republic had been elected. Kind of along the lines that Maximilian thought was good, he just wanted to kill them and then do it himself. Yeah, yeah. He's like, okay, but you guys got this Mexican doing the job. This is the problem.

They've come here to take in our president jobs. I'm a Habsburg. Look at my chin. It's funny. This guy isn't even in bread. What the fuck? People will make Habsburg chin jokes at Edward Habsburg on Twitter and he'll always respond by like, oh, get another joke, guys.

It's like, well, that's the joke because your family ruled the world while constantly fucking each other and producing kids who couldn't functionally rule the countries they were born to inherit and it led to millions of deaths, millions and millions of deaths. Yeah. That's the joke, Edward. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what makes it funny.

Oh, yeah. Do another joke about my genocidal fucking bloodline. Fucking Habsburgs. God, you are never wrong in shit talking a Habsburg. Always go after him. Always go after Habsburgs. So, you know who learned that lesson? Well, Gafferlo Princep.

Oh, hell yeah. Oh, yes, you do. Oh, God, we love a Habsburg dropping king. We love a good dead France for the man joke. Yeah, good stuff. So anyway, Maximilian, he has all these political theories that he wants to test out. He's thinking about, if you like, again,

and I really do, the book The Last Emperor of Mexico by Edward Chakras, fucking good book, incredibly readable. I finished it in just a couple of days because I couldn't put the thing down. Really, really well-written book. One of the points that he makes is that, or at least the way in which I interpret Maximilian as being, based on the way he portrays him in the book,

is a guy who has all these little fun theories about how he might want to run a country, and he almost approaches being the emperor of Mexico as like playing a game of civilization. Yeah, right, yeah. He's excited to try a new thing out in his game. But he does, he draws a hard line with Louis Napoleon, which is that he won't agree to go to Mexico

and try to be the emperor, unless the Mexican people themselves acclaim their desire to be governed by him. Now, this was never going to happen. For one thing, Mexico is very large, and most of the people living there have absolutely no connection to like, a centralized authority.

Yeah, exactly. Like, go to somebody in the fucking Chihuahua, and be like, hey, do you want a Habsburg Emperor? Like, dude, what the fuck, man? Like, I got stuff going on. Yeah. What are you talking about? The idea that these guys would be able to rule a land mass

based on borders that they just kind of invented is great. I love it, go for it. I mean, to be honest, it's never worked out well for the Mexican government. Yeah, no, it's so worse. No one has ever been good at governing Mexico. Yeah, yeah. No one can figure it out.

Yeah. So basically what happens is that Napoleon III works with a cadre of defeated, conservative Mexican officers to trick Max into thinking that his reign is supported, and then he sends a French army into Mexico to conquer it from the legitimate government. Now, this first army gets its ass kicked, because Benito Juarez, pretty good military commander.

But also, again, the Mexican state has just finished several civil wars. It's battered. They don't have a super functional military compared to the French military, which a lot of people will say is the best in the world in this period of time, or at least one of them. So Louis Napoleon sends a much larger army next,

which succeeds in smashing all resistance and conquering Mexico. But it conquers Mexico the same way the US conquers Afghanistan. They conquer a bunch of cities leading to the capital and kind of control the roads, right? But that's all they have, because they only send like 50,000 men, I think,

at the height, which is, again, Mexico's quite big. Yeah, yeah, it's a big, big place. Sizable, sizable nation. Yeah, lots of land. So they're able to, and the French can beat, because they've got a modern army, modern guns, and the Mexican military doesn't really have

a lot of that stuff, they can beat any field army that will raise itself against their main force. But that main force can only be in like one area at a time, and they can't, splitting the army up, number one, sometimes you're going to lose groups of the army, right? Because you can beat 100 French soldiers or something. And then the other problem is that, like, you can't hold anything but the cities and the roads.

Now, they do try to build up a Mexican army, like an imperial army. There's an imperial Mexican army. It is of debatable competence. Again, think of Afghanistan. This is actually very similar to fucking Afghanistan. And costs very quickly skyrocket. Now, Napoleon III,

basically his business plan here had been, well, we'll conquer Mexico, we'll stick this guy on the throne, you know, pretty soon, he'll be able to, he'll just take over the Mexican army, and they'll keep the peace. And then France will get to basically, to get its pick of all of the resources in Mexico. Yeah, get all that silver, dude.

There's a lot of good shit in Mexico, and he's like, this will be, this will work out. We need a couple years of costs, and then it'll be worth it. He is as good a businessman as Elon Musk. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It works. He's gonna spend $44 billion, and he's gonna go, now everyone gets a blue check tomorrow.

Yeah, the Mexican people here are Twitter, and they're about to do what Twitter did when Musk took over, which is start a massive grassroots rebellion against the empire. Everyone just has fake accounts saying they're a Habsburg, just made fun of them, Tony. Just a shitload of Habsburg accounts. So, Maximilian enjoys fairly little popular support.

He is handicapped by the fact that, again, he's a liberal, so he keeps pushing through these liberal reforms and announcing these very liberal laws, but his entire base of support are ghoulish right-wingers. So, the people who he is trusting to back him hate the way he wants to run the country, and when he does things that Benito Juarez's supporters probably would have liked in a different circumstance,

his primary backers desert him, and so he has to crack down on the people of Mexico in order to get their support back, which fuels the rebellion. It's just a doomed situation. Yeah, it's threading an unthreadable needle here. Yeah, it's not even a needle. He's just sticking a string into a solid nail.

Yeah. Why won't it go through? Can't get anything through this fucking needle. This is bullshit, dude. This shouldn't be this hard. So, the fuckery reaches its peak under what becomes called the Black Decree, or Bando Negro of 1865,

in which all captured Republican soldiers are to be executed without trial. Now, hey, do you think this lowers the tensions? Yeah, I think it definitely just completely equalizes it. Everyone's like, oh, man, fuck, I guess we won't do this no more. So, what happens, what this actually results in, is the Republicans are like,

well, then whenever we capture French soldiers and Mexican imperial soldiers or government officials, we will kill them without trial. And of course, this leads to the slaughter of thousands and thousands and thousands of people. Just nightmarish bloodletting. When Max had headed over to take command of the government, Louis Napoleon had promised him that all the resources

of the French state would be dedicated to seeing the success of his imperial project. But costs quickly outstripped what Louis had been willing to pay. And since the imperial government didn't control much actual territory, exploiting Mexican resources for French profit proved impossible. In 1866, all of this came to a head for several reasons.

One, the U.S. Civil War ended. The reason why Louis Napoleon had timed sending Maximilian over there was that the U.S. was fighting a civil war. And he was like, this will keep him occupied for a while. They won't be able to get involved. His plan was to make a firebreak for U.S. power, right? While they were busy fighting themselves, I will establish control over Mexico using Maximilian.

And then by the time they finish, this will just be done and they won't be able to stop it. Now, so the U.S. Civil War ends. And now the U.S. is no longer distracted. The Union starts sending weapons across the river to Benito Juarez because we're like, well, we don't really like this at all. And there are constant worries. It's a legitimate worry that the Americans might just invade

and attack the French army in Mexico, which we could have done and it would have been the only time U.S. troops entered Mexico for a reason that wasn't fucked up. Yeah, for a cool one. We almost invaded Mexico for a good reason. Don't worry, we didn't. We continued our streak of only fucking over Mexico. A proud and time-honored American tradition.

A proud heritage of Americans fucking with Mexico, stealing land and destroying entire political structures. Yeah, this is kind of the one time in which we were almost nice to Mexico. Oh, man, so close. And we will talk about what happens next. But first, you know who is nice to Mexico? Me.

That's right. Matt Leib, our primary sponsor. Why do you don't know this? This whole podcast is paid for by Matt Leib. That's right. He just keeps getting credit cards. I just, listen, I am in a lot of debt right now, but if people can get their bastards content,

I'm willing to pay. So, buy my product, Matt Leib, by me. Just send him money so he can keep financing this debt. Help. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys,

we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23,

I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted

before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So, at the same time that Maximilian's Mexican Empire is collapsing, shit in Europe starts to go wrong with the Prussian Autobahn Bismarck launching a war against Austria.

Napoleon, in a secret meeting with Bismarck, agrees not to defend Austria's Franz Josef. Bismarck is like, hey, man, I'm going to go to war with Austria. You don't really like this guy. You fought him in a war. Just let me do it once. I'm going to take some shit. And you know what? You'll get some territory, right? So this territory is kind of like on the border of Italy and France and all this stuff.

You'll get some of that. It'll work out great for you. You know, you just got to let me deal with him and I'll give it to you. Like, trust me, you know, it'll be good. Trust me, I'm Otto von Bismarck. I'm Otto von Bismarck, most trustworthy man in Europe. So, Bismarck, like, Napoleon decides to do this because number one, I'm going to get some land out of it. That'll be good. And number two, this is going to be years, right?

Austria and Germany fight each other. They're basically equal. They'll be locked into this brutal war. We can both of them and then France will be even stronger. There's no way this will get done quickly. Like, seven weeks, say. It is over almost immediately because what Otto von Bismarck has done is invent Germany. And if you know one thing about Germany, pretty good at war.

Pretty good at war in Western Europe. Yeah, like the way ours is baseball, theirs is doing war. Yeah, in Western Europe. Once they go east, it gets a lot messier for them. Oh, yeah. No one can figure that out. They got that. Yeah. So, as you said, they basically win this war against Prussia immediately. And then as soon as they do, Napoleon's like, so how about that territory that you guys said I could get?

And the fucking Bismarck's like, what was that? Huh? What was that? Oh, you didn't, I was, I said, psych afterwards. If you're not here when I say psych. And going into this, prior to the start of that war with Austria, the kind of assumption everyone else would have made is that like France was the premier land power in Europe. But part of what Napoleon III and everyone else realized

when Prussia goes to war with Austria is that like, they got like 700,000 guys they can call up. And they're like, they're pretty good at this. Right, yeah. This is actually a very frightening situation. I've just realized and tens of thousands of my best soldiers are in Mexico. Yeah. Oops.

Yes, fuck. I didn't realize that you guys would get like really good at this. This is all gone terribly for me. Yeah. So, so he, Napoleon, Louis Napoleon is suddenly much less interested pouring men and resources into Mexico. He begins pressuring Maximilian to abdicate. But Max doesn't want to leave his empire.

He's dedicated to it. And the brave men fighting for him. He's very delusional is what's actually happening. I learned Spanish and everything. Like, do you want me to leave now? I have a castle and everything. I have a Hacienda and I habla espanol. I don't understand why I have to leave now.

Love me. It is very funny because he like tries to eat a Mexican meal as soon as he arrives and he gets sick because it's too hot. Like, man, you can't eat fucking chilies and you think you're going to be the emperor of Mexico. My God. Sweating his ass off like he's on hot ones. Yeah.

What a bitch. Yeah. So, Louis Napoleon, yeah, is about to abandon him. I'm going to quote from the emperor of Mexico, the last emperor of Mexico again here. In August, Napoleon III tried to claim the territories that Bismarck had promised, but the Prussian chancellor responded with a diplomatic equivalent of laughing in the French emperor's faces, pointing out that the Prussian army was already mobilized. Now it was war not only on the other side of the Atlantic that Napoleon III had to worry

about now, but across the Rhine where Bismarck marshaled the forces of German nationalism behind a militaristic regime. France was in a state of feverish crisis and attacks on Napoleon III's policy towards pressure were rife. Napoleon III's wife Eugenie berated him for being outwitted by Bismarck. The last thing the French emperor wanted was an unpleasant reminder of another unpopular foreign policy disaster. He tried to delay meeting with Carlotta, pleading illness he urged her to visit her brother

in Brussels first, but Carlotta had already telegrammed the courts at Brussels in Vienna, informing them that she would not be visiting because of the refusal to send more volunteers. Ignoring the French emperor's excuses, she proceeded to Paris. So, Napoleon III has Eugenie try to stop Carlotta from meeting with him, but she will not be dissuaded. And she eventually gets her audience with Napoleon III and she's been over in Mexico for a while. And while she's been over, things have gone a lot worse for him and he's gotten sick

and old. So, she sees this guy that all of her and her husband's hopes lay on continued French support. They cannot hold on to their empire without France. She suddenly realizes that he's fucked, that he's old and broken, and she loses her mind. She spends like the rest of her husband's reign locked in a castle and completely out of her mind. She had been so invested in the idea of being the empress and as soon as it becomes clear

we're doomed, she can't function anymore. It's very funny. Like fuck her and fuck him. Maximilian, meanwhile, being equally deranged, tries to continue the fight as French troops began to withdraw. And I will give him credit for this. Unlike Plan Plan, he kind of ends on a courageous note. He leads his army into a disastrous battle where they're under siege in the city for

weeks. They win a couple of battles where they push out against the Mexican army and he stays there until the bitter end in this really nasty situation. So, there's a degree of at least physical courage he has while still being completely deranged. He gets captured and executed. They fucking shoot his ass. They firing squad.

And they, Benito Juarez, again, the whole world, all of the governments of the world start like begging Mexico, start sending people to Benito Juarez saying please don't kill him, don't kill him. He's a Habsburg, you know. Habsburg. The American presidents like, guy, don't do this, don't do this. But Benito Juarez being rad as shit is like, look man, he was the emperor. He passed the black decree.

All captured soldiers get executed. I'm not gonna hold him do a different standard than the tens of thousands of men he had killed. Like fuck him. Hell yeah. Benito Juarez, kind of sick. The coolest. Just the fucking coolest. The coolest.

The goat. Maximilian died cursing Napoleon III for failing to come to his aid. Very funny. The second French intervention in Mexico lasted five and a half years and caused as many as 70,000 deaths, all of which happened at the instigation of Napoleon III. Yeah. So, by 1870, Louis Napoleon is a sick man in steep decline. This is still powerful and in fact wealthier than ever, but its military is geared toward

the kind of colonial wars they've been fighting in Mexico. Think about how the US military specialized for Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a small professional force capable of besting insurgents and holding cities. The problem was, Russia had focused on becoming a land power. Yeah. With a massive base of, the French military on paper, they can maybe get 400,000 troops together and that's gonna be hard for them. It's gonna take them some time to get everybody in the same place.

The Prussian military can, in the space of like a week or two, have 700,000 men armed and marching. Like, they are very, very good at this sort of thing. They figured out this war thing. They figured out this war thing. And Otto von Bismarck makes it his goal during the late 1860s. I want to have a war with France. Number one, we lost a couple against Napoleon and that still rankles us.

And number two, I want some of this territory that's like currently France, but that's right on the edge of Germany. I want to take that shit and I'm gonna make a Germany. So Bismarck starts jinking and pushing to like make it, kind of find a way in which to justify having a war with France. He needs a pretext. He's looking for one. He needs a pretext.

And specifically, he wants France to start the war. Yes. Right? That's the thing that he wants most. So, in 1867, the same year Maximilian gets shot to death in Mexico, Prussia forms the North German Confederation, the immediate precursor to the nation of Germany. Now, everything comes to a head over the question of who will be the next king of Spain. For a brief period of time, the king of Prussia, Bismarck works for the king of Prussia, right?

Germany's not a thing yet. The thing is Germany becomes a thing based around the scaffolding of Prussia or scaffolded around the core that is Prussia. The Prussian king puts forward a German prince to be the king of Spain and is like, hey, maybe this guy could do it. And the emperor of France is terrified by this, right? Louis Napoleon is like, well, if that happens, then France is going to be surrounded on both sides by states led by German emperors.

I'm not going to let that happen. And the Prussian king, who also doesn't really want war, Bismarck is orchestrating this, is like, okay, hey, hey, you know, just an idea, just an idea, just a picture. Yeah, just throw it out there. Just throw in a picture out here, man. Chill out. You know, there are no bad suggestions or no bad ideas. So this gets rescinded, which should have been a big win for Napoleon III.

But he's still really worried that the Prussians are going to try something. So he sends out his foreign minister and this guy, Count Benedetti, is the same as everyone else that Napoleon III picks for a job, shit-eatingly incompetent, right? If we know one thing about the man, he is not good at picking people. Yeah. It's just all of his drinking buddies. Yeah. It's just like, hey, better dummy, you do it.

Yeah. He's like, okay. Yeah, you get in there, Benny. Yeah, you got it. You got it, Benny. You got it. It's easy. Yeah.

So he sends Count Benedetti over to the king of Prussia, who's like at a fucking bath, you know, he's doing like a big spa day, to ask him to promise not ever to put a German prince on the throne. And the conversation goes pretty well. Obviously, the king of Prussia doesn't want to war with France over this. But Otto von Bismarck decides to do a little bit of fake news and spin this up as a diplomatic incident in which the French ambassador had been kicked out of the king's presence, never allowed, never to be allowed back again.

This was not true. Yeah. But Bismarck knows like all the matters is getting this bad news out there. Quote. By July 14th, the news is on the newspaper's desk all over Europe. As soon as the news of this supposed diplomatic incident is published, the streets of the French capital are taken over by demonstrations against the Germans. The windows of the Prussian embassy are smashed by rioters.

Meanwhile in Germany, Bismarck fans the flames of nationalism by distributing for free copies of newspaper, copies of newspapers with his own version of the event in order to make it look like Benedetti was pestering the king with haughty demands. By the 15th of July, the French government is in turmoil and must compose with the allies clamoring for war and the suspicion of the opposition. There was a last attempt to ask clarifications from the count Benedetti, but the telegram arrives too late and the careful examination of the diplomatic papers asked by the opposition is refused.

And so basically there's this, you know, Bismarck puts out this fake news that, you know, they insulted our national honor. Yeah, and this is called the IM's dispatch. This like this, this dip, like diplomatic cable that goes out that like Bismarck fucking fucks with. You gotta be real confident to be like, I'm gonna make this country clamor for war with us. And it works.

The French people do. And Louis Napoleon, he is old and he is sick and he does not think this is a good idea. But all of these generals, the same ones who'd convinced him, you know, to invade Indochina say it's a good idea. And most importantly, his wife, Eugenie is like, if you don't do this, you're fucking coward. Yeah, this is how I come. Yeah, this is, I don't want to fuck you, but I want you to go to war against fucking

pressure. I don't have sex. This is how I do it. They have a son at this point. She's like, your son will have nothing to inherit if you don't go to war against Germany right now. You know, what, what, what kind of example are you putting for your son if you don't start a pointless war against the new great land power in Europe?

So Louis Napoleon, being fundamentally a coward in a lot of ways, declares war on Germany. Smart. This goes pretty bad. So for one thing, on paper, he's supposed to be able to get about 400,000 dudes together, which even though the Prussians outnumber that, you're on the defense, you've got castles and fortresses, you can, you can win a war, a defensive war that way, especially if that's just kind of your first wave. But he actually has trouble getting more than like a quarter of a million dudes together.

The other problem is that so you know how he forgot to bring artillery to the Crimean War? Yeah, yeah. I remember that. Never learns that lesson. So I knew I forgot something. The artillery that the French bring into the Franco-Prussian War is the same artillery in some case, literally the same guns that Napoleon had brought into battle in 1812.

Oh boy. Yeah. Meanwhile, the Prussians have, have breach loading steel cannons with modern artillery. Yeah. They got shells and stuff. They're not just firing balls at 30 miles per hour. Yeah. They're not just shooting heavy balls real fast.

Basically the French cannons are like hucking a Mazda Miata, like pretty fast. And the German cannons are actual cannons. Yeah. The other thing that's approach, so the French aren't entirely like, it's not like they're entirely like behind the curve militarily. They've just been optimizing for these little, these little brush fire wars. So one thing they have on their side, the French regular forces, these colonial troops have the best rifle in the world at the time.

Just the Germans are astonished at how well this fucking gun works. It's a great, great infantry rifle. Very few of their soldiers actually have it, right? The actual territorial French army just has old ass muskets. So anyway, he goes and he goes with this army to command it in the field. Because again, Eugenie like basically tells him that he's a fucking cuck if he doesn't go lead his army in battle. And he is, he is, he is dying of hemorrhoids, right?

No. His fucking gallbladders exploding. He's got gout and hemorrhoids. Yeah. He can't sit, he can't stand. Yeah. Certainly he can command the field. He can barely move.

He's got his like teenage boy with him. And they have, they have this one little battle where like they move into Prussian territory and like kill 60 guys and he has, he gets his air close enough that like a bullet whizzes over his head. He's like, there you go. You did it. You've been blooded in combat. Yes.

And then they, then they try to do a battle in a place called Sedan. And this is not a military history podcast, but it doesn't go well. In short, they get their asses absolutely handed to them. For all of military history since the age of Hannibal, one of the things that like generals will talk to about is, is doing a canine, right? Canine is this famous battle where there's this 100,000 man Roman army and Hannibal surrounds it completely and then just spends a day butchering everyone slowly to death and incite it. It's one of the most famous victories in all of military history.

The Germans do a canine at Sedan. They surround the entire French military and kill quite a few of them. And this is actually kind of one of the last acts of heroism of, of Lewis and Napoleon. Maybe the only one I guess would probably be to say is that his generals are like, no, no, no, we've got to fight until relief comes. We've got to keep it going. He looks out at what's happening. It's like, there's 90,000 men here and the, the Prussians will kill them all.

Like if we keep fighting, they will kill everyone here unless I personally surrender. Yeah. Now, this isn't the first thing he does. In fact, he attempts to get himself killed by Prussian fire multiple times before he does this. He does. He does go for suicide again. That is our boy.

I don't know how many times he fails at getting shot. He cannot kill himself. He does get his, his aide to camp gets killed and like two of them get wounded when he just kind of like stands in front of these Prussians guns, but he doesn't get hurt at all. So he, he tries to kill himself. He accidentally shoots two more people. He shoots another French soldier right in the fucking throat. Very funny.

So yeah, he, he eventually goes to the Germans and is like, Hey, you know, the emperor of France and they're like, yeah, and he's like, he's me and they're like, seriously? Yeah. They have no idea that he's there. They don't know that he, so this is a real dub for the Germans. Oh, sure. Yeah. Oh, sure.

We capture the emperor. And he like, when he surrenders the, the like basically one of the conditions he does under is that he is surrendering his army. He's not surrendering for the nation of France and very quickly after that, the French respond by having a revolution while they're fighting and losing this war. And he is no longer the emperor of France. He spends some time in, in custody of the Prussians. They lock him up, but like rich guy style, you know, he's in, he's in like some sort

of castle. Yeah. Nice, nice prison. He's writing stuff. He's fucking, you know, he's living his worst life. Yeah. He's living his worst life. And his, his family has to deal with the fact that they are no longer running France.

France kind of falls apart. The Germans lay siege to Paris. Oh yeah. People are eating rats. People are eating rats. It is ugly. And it does not leave the people of France very well induced towards Napoleon the third. Although he never gives up hope of proclaiming another empire.

Like he, because he flies, he goes back to exile in England and he spends the last couple of his years. He is actively working on another plan to return the France and take over the monarchy yet again. But then he dies in 1873. Just before he can try his fourth coup attempt. Oh man. That would have been, honestly, I think, I think that time he'd have gotten it right.

I think he would have gotten it right that time. I think it would have worked out, everything would have been good. France could have been saved. One of the sad things is he gets attacked a lot by the French and by even particularly conservatives in France for surrendering at Sedan. His last words are, we weren't cowards at Sedan, were we? Which is like, no dude, that was the only thing you did that wasn't craven. The only thing you did that was actually putting other people's lives before you were your

own. Yeah. That was the first time like that empathy bone that your dad tried desperately to instill into you. That really, really gave everything he could while still being an absent father to push it to you. I mean, you know, hey, at that time that was, that's the best kind of fathering you can have.

He is, Louis Bonaparte is the best father we've talked about on this show. 100%. I feel confident saying that. Yes. Just based on those like letters alone, you're just like, oh yeah, you know, he's sure he wasn't there and was like, I don't love you and I think you're dumb to his face. And you know, I think, what did he say? Read your book, hated it.

Hated it. Hated it. Stupid book. How dare you think you could write this? Still best dad, world's best dad so far on the show. Yeah. Well, Matt, that's the podcast. Well that is a wonderful story of a great, great fail son and the fail list of sons.

The fail list of sons, I mean, you've got to hand it to him. He was able to actually achieve just enough to fail spectacularly, you know, getting captured is just chef's kiss. Yeah, that's a beautiful way to end your empire being captured and giving everyone Germany. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, hey, how's that going to go for the future? You know, I actually stopped reading my German history textbook in August 1st, 1914, but it's going well. Yeah. So far so good.

Yeah. I would love to meet whoever the current Kaiser is over there. Yeah. I'm sure he's cool and has been in power and stability and peace. That sounds like the Germany I probably know. Oh, God. You know, this was a fun one. Yes, it was a fun one.

It was about Nazis, but it was about proto fascism and I love that. It is cool. It's cool and good. Matt, can people find you anywhere? You can find me on the world's only the wire rewatch podcast, pod yourself the wire or the world's only Sopranos podcast, pod yourself a gun. And once again, we're doing a live show at SF sketch fest Saturday, January 28th at 10 PM over at the piano fight theater, go to SF sketch fest dot com and please buy tickets

because it would be embarrassing if no one came. It would be embarrassing. Go go there. Go now. Find Matt Leib at SF sketch fest. You can see me in person. You can assassinate me. Yeah.

Sell your possessions, fly to San Francisco, live on the streets in the weeks leading up to the event. You know, you should and then kill me, murder him, murder me, please. And uh, and also, yeah, give us five stars in review. That's really all I want. Um, you know, there's enough listeners out there on this podcast that I should be able to break a thousand. Come on.

There we go. All right. Yeah. Those are my plugs, guys. I love you. I love you too. I love you more than my five week old daughter. Yeah.

I don't. I don't think that's true. It's not true, but I want you to think it's true. Yeah. There you go. Gaslight me. Yeah. Yeah.

Gaslight me, daddy. Uh, we have a behind the bastards live stream event coming up with Margaret Kiljoy on December 8th at 6 p.m. Pacific. You can get tickets. Wow. Moment house.co. Slashbtb. Heroic.

Erotic. Yep. Check it out. Yep. I'll be there watching on the live stream. You don't, you don't have to do that. I'm gonna, and I'm going to be in the comment section going, kill me, kill me, kill me, do it.

Do it. Do it. And no one will be able to do it. I'm like Napoleon the third in that way. And we are done. Boom. Shakalaka. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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