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

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Robert is joined by Matt Lieb for part three of our 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?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Wow. Jesus, gosh, I can't believe Sophie just said that about the entire nation of Paraguay. Wow. It's strange. Wow. Is this how I feel like I say that like once a week? People are going to be angry when they hear this episode.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's just like, first of all, Montevideo's in Uruguay. I know, right? Like immediately, obvious problem. But second of all, I just don't, I've never heard that particular stereotype, and I'm shocked and appalled. It's incredible. I mean, like I said, I say this every week.

How are you not picking up on it? Wow. Anyway, this is behind the bastards. Chief Bastard being our producer, Sophie Lichterman, and her. If you didn't know that by now. I don't know enough about Paraguay to fill this joke out anyway. Yeah, I had to dig into Uruguay to get something out of it. That's how little-known Paraguay is to the staff of this podcast.

Yeah, I know it's one of the greatest. Yeah, there's a second Guay. Let's lean on that one. I feel like it's a landlocked Guay. I feel like all the Guays are landlocked, right? Uruguay, I feel like isn't landlocked. Is that okay? No, I think Uruguay is pretty landlocked.

Oh, well. There's no way to answer this question with, for example, the devices we're all using to record this podcast. I did Google what are major stereotypes people have about Paraguay and to what extent are they true? And the first answer is, the short answer, there really isn't anything special in quotes about it. There's little-known, so... I think they really like Lady Gaga. Oh, wow. Yeah, you can't get them shutting up about Lady Gaga.

Yeah, I think that's true. I don't know. Monsters, did she call them monsters? Something like that? Yeah. I've forgotten most of the things about Lady Gaga. Yeah. Why?

What did she do? I don't know. Nothing. I just don't remember. So much has happened since Lady Gaga was in the news. Yeah. It's like... Literally.

Yeah. What do you remember about Aston Kutcher? Very little. Extremely little. I remember that his name's not Aston. His name is Aston. Aston. See?

That's how little I remember. I forgot his name. That's how I told you. I don't remember much about the man. Here's my one interaction with him. He was at a coffee shop. He was ahead of me in line. He forgot his wallet and went back to his car to pay for his $2 coffee.

Instead of being an asshole celebrity, that was like, well, I'm Aston Kutcher, so I'm just going to take this. Dude, I've offered to pay for it. And then when I got up there, I'd be like, psych, you just got punked. And then I would have waited for him to see if I was joking or not. And then I would just stay there silent. I wasn't coughing enough to be clever, so...

Clever? That's very generous for this bit I'm doing. Anyways, this podcast is not about Aston or Aston Kutcher. This is... No, this is a podcast where I don't know... No, this is a Sopranos podcast. Oh, okay. Sopranos podcast.

Sorry. Where we talk about, I don't know, Sopranos character, Book of De Beppo. That's right, man. You got to learn names, man. You got to know one of them's name is Soprano. It is Tony, right? Tony, yeah, you got it.

Yeah, I got it. I got it. You remember that? I remember that, and I remember a lot about Napoleon III, who we are talking about. Now, when we left off with our hero, he has just tried to take over France, failed, shot a man in the face for no reason,

and then repeatedly attempted to commit suicide as he was taken to jail. Yeah. So, not a great coup. Yeah, yeah. One of the worst, but I respect the attempt. I always respect a good coup attempt. I always respect a good coup attempt, right?

This is, I think, you know, it's debatable. Is this a worse coup attempt than Hitler's, you know? Hitler's ended with him and all of his men getting machine gunned in the street. Right. And then he did try to kill himself. But there's something about the impotence of shooting an unarmed man in the face

for no reason whatsoever. In the mouth. Yeah, in the mouth. Like, come on, man. Yeah. He was just standing there. It's a weird panic button, you know what I mean? Where you're just like, I'm panicking.

Oh, where's the nearest mouth? Where's the nearest mouth? They can put a fucking musket ball in. Good lord. Yeah, that's what you do when you panic. Some people, you know, some people play better when they're panicking, not him. Not him.

No, he did not, he did not rise to the moment. No, he didn't. No, he did. The opposite of Michael Jordan's flu game. Yes. This was if Michael Jordan had the flu during game four of the NBA finals and then shot Scotty Pippen in the mouth.

Why did you say game four? Because I forget which game was the flu game. It might have been a game two. And was it game five when he had the flu? I believe it was game six. Game, so he won an NBA final with the flu? That's crazy. Let's find out.

Let's fact check. That Michael Jordan. Pretty amazing basketball play. Yeah, a lot of people call him the Napoleon the third of basketball. Of the 1997 NBA finals. Against the jazz. Oh, God, I hate the jazz.

Anyways, so Napoleon. So the reaction in the media, and the reaction in general from like the government to coup two was very different from coup number one. One newspaper proposed that Napoleon the third might have dementia. The government of Louis Philippe, who's the king, described the attack as a vain and vicious attempt

to overthrow the government during which an unarmed soldier had nearly been murdered, which was accurate. So this is, you know, the first time Louis Philippe kind of just wants to usher him out. Like they have a court case, but he doesn't want him in the country. He doesn't really want to like punish it too harshly. Two is, I don't know, very mild credit.

Louis Philippe reacts more stringently to this one. And it's interesting, because his Louis Napoleon's dad, Louis Bonaparte, has mostly been very much against all the things his son has tried to do and was against this coup attempt. But the invective against his son and like the public media and from the French government forces Louis Bonaparte to actually finally stand up in his son's defense.

Well, okay, okay, in my son's defense, he's really bad at everything. And he didn't succeed. And so what, you know, it was win-win. We had fun, we had fun, everyone had fun. It's interesting. That's actually not that far from what he does. So obviously being the guy that he is

and being a principled man, he can't defend his son's attempt to overthrow the government, nor can he defend like shooting a man in the face. So instead of doing that, he writes a letter to be published in the Italian press, which complains that his son is, quote, the victim of an infamous conspiracy, seduced by flatterers, false friends,

and perhaps from insidious advice. Dude, you gotta watch out for fake friends. He was, he was like, it's like a cult thing, right? Like he got, he got wrapped up in by some bad people, but he's not a bad kid. He just got given some bad advice, you know? That is not completely wrong because that's part of what happened, right?

Louis Napoleon is not a very smart guy and he's very vulnerable to the people around him if they're nice to him. This is going to continue to be a factor in his life through his entire reign. And I think some of this is that actually Louis Bonaparte kind of understands his son, but he also, he's a little blinded too

because he can't believe that his son was really a driving force behind the attempt, writing that quote, it is quite impossible that a man surely not lacking the financial means and common sense should have, with his eyes wide open, willingly thrown himself over such a political precipice. Basically like, look, if he did,

if he was a driving factor behind this, he would have had to be an idiot, and I know he's not an idiot. Right, yeah. You are his dad, I can't blame you. Yeah, yeah, he's your special little boy, we all got that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Louis Napoleon goes to court, this time he's actually in country for it and it does not go well for him law-wise. Again, he's gotten kind of like, he got off the hook basically last time. Yeah, he got $200,000. Yeah, and acquitted. He's not going to get acquitted this time,

but it actually kind of goes better for him because Louis Napoleon is dumb in a lot of ways, but he understands some things about politics and the new mass media that no one has figured out yet. And as Hitler is going to learn about 80 years later, if you're on trial for trying to overthrow the government, you can do pretty well by firing off a populist rant that makes the case for your reign.

Yeah. Yeah, and here's the speech that he gives, or an excerpt from the speech that he gives in court. For the first time in my life, I've been permitted to speak in France and to speak freely before the French people. In spite of the guards on either side of me, in spite of all the accusations I have just heard,

I find myself here within the walls of the Senate that I had first visited as a child with Napoleon. In your midst, you whom I know gentlemen, I do not believe that I have to justify myself, nor that you could be my judges. A solemn occasion has offered me here to explain to my fellow citizens my conduct, my intentions, my projects,

what I think and what I desire. The nation has never revoked the grand act of sovereignty, the one that had established Napoleon Bonaparte's kingdom. And as the emperor himself said, everything done without adhering to it is illegal, and that includes this trial. And two, do not think for a moment that I might have wanted to attempt any imperial restoration in France

without the backing of the people of this country through a plebiscite. As for my undertaking of Bologne, I had no other accomplices. I alone am responsible. I represent before you a principle, a cause and a defeat, one principle, the sovereignty of the people,

the cause, that of our empire, and a defeat, Waterloo. So he's saying like, you know, the government that my uncle established is still legitimate. This court has no right to hold me for anything. But also, I never wanted to become the emperor without a plebiscite. I was only trying to do what I think the people wanted me to do.

Right. I was just going to do a coup. Yeah. And then see if people were cool with that. You know? That's why it's called a coup. Are you guys cool with this? And it's not really a coup because like

Napoleon's constitution is still valid. Right. Clearly. Right. If you guys are the ones who originally did the coup. Exactly. Back when you did the Bourbon Restoration. Who coup?

Who coup? Who coup's line is it anyway? You know what I mean? Coup's line is it any coup? So dumb. Whatever. So this goes really well for him actually. Because again, Louis Philippe is a terrible king.

Right? We're laughing at Louis Napoleon, but Louis Philippe is not a good king. And his monarchy is kind of a shit show. People are very unhappy. And they hear this guy, he's hearkening back to this defeat, which still wounds the French soul Waterloo

and the victories of Napoleon before it. And he's saying like, look, we never stopped being those guys who could win. We just let guys like this. Tell us that we weren't that anymore. And if we get them, we can make France great again. Right?

We're gonna make France great again. Yeah. That's what he's saying. And it works really well. And the fact that this speech goes so well for Louis Napoleon does not at all mitigate the king's desire to see him lock the fuck away. Right?

Louis Philippe decides, I got to keep this dude in the fucking cage. And on October 6th, Louis Napoleon is sentenced to life in prison, which is honestly not an entirely unfair sentence for shooting an unarmed man in the face for absolutely no reason. Yeah, yeah.

But just beyond the even attempted coup part. Just doing that. Yeah, just shooting a guy in the face. Look, I'm not a carceral guy, but of the things you might lock someone up for, randomly shooting a man in the face is not a bad one. Right, yeah. I mean, we're talking like, you know,

the 1840s France. Yeah. Are you locking people away for far less? Yes, exactly. Exactly. So broadly speaking, and again, his prison, this is not a hard prison, right? He has not locked away in the fucking best deal.

This isn't some like Lim Mizzarab shit where he's breaking rocks or whatever while Javert sings at him. He's got like a suite of rooms in what is effectively a castle. He lives, he has all of the books that he wants. He gets regularly visited. He gets invited to dinner by the warden.

He is a celebrity prisoner. He lives better than a lot of people do today. He's doing interviews. He is, in fact, writing a book, yes. So, and part of the, you know, obviously, he shot a man in the face and tried to overthrow the government. France has killed people for less.

They were still guillotining dudes. Oh, yeah. That would not have been out of the, you could, again, as the leader of the country, you can easily make a case for doing that. But Louis Philippe, sorry, God, there's too many fucking Louises in this fucking series. King Louis Philippe can't do that

because there's unrest building all throughout the country. And right around the time that Louis Napoleon is on trial, he has finally agreed and carried out this massive logistical hurdle to bring the corpse of Napoleon Bonaparte back to France a decade after his death.

So, while all this is going on, the French government and military are preparing for this massive ceremony where Napoleon's corpse is being carried through the country and put up. Oh, this is an actual thing? Yes. They're actually going to exhum his corpse?

Yeah, yeah. They're going to take it and bury it in a crypt. Yeah, in France, back on his home soil. Hell yeah, dude. Well, not his home soil, because he was coarse again, but whatever. Right. Yeah, so this is, it's a dangerous time.

You don't want to be executing his nephew while everyone is like weeping as his coffin is taken through the streets, right? Because people still love Napoleon. The crowds to see Napoleon's casket numbered half a million men, many of them veterans. So again, this is particularly a crowd

of people you don't want to piss off. Like there's half a million men in the street who have been under musket fire together. They stood for hours to watch his, you know, the whatever, the thing with the coffin pass, even though it was so half a million people standing for like a lot of them, eight to 12 hours to watch this procession

when it is negative 22 degrees Fahrenheit outside. That's how much people love Napoleon. They really like this guy. They really like Napoleon. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it says also a lot about how much, you know, the, the Bourbons are fucking up all the time, you know,

because they didn't like him at the end. Louis Philippe is a... He's a, he's the Duke d'Orléans. Yeah, he's an Orléans, Orléans. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, I mean, he is part of that family. He was just like the cousin. Yeah, they're all related.

Yeah, yeah, they're all related. Except for the bone. Well, now the bone apart too. Well, not the bone. Yeah, but it just shows how much they fucked up in that. Like at the end of like Napoleon's reign, everyone's like, can we get this guy out? Because he keeps trying to do invasions and stuff.

We just kind of retired of it. And at this point, everyone's like, hey, remember when shit was cool? Yeah. Back when like Napoleon was around. We were just kicking those fucking Austrians asses. Yeah, just like kicking everyone's ass. Just like, oh dude, shit was so sick.

Yeah. And also there was order and people love remembering order. God, people do love order as noted by the documentary, whichever Star Wars movie was the most recent one. Law and order. That's right. Actually, a Star Wars themed law and order could be a pretty fucking fun show. You could do a lot with that premise.

You know what's going to happen. Disney Plus is nothing but IP. You could make that work. You could make that work very well. Yeah. Anyway. You watch it. We're going to have to skip ahead a bit through the next piece of history,

because I have to tell you, this guy does so much in his fucking life. He's involved in so much shit. Anyway, to summarize the next part of his story, what happens after he gets thrown in prison, I'm going to turn to yet another book, The Last Emperor of Mexico by Edward Shaw Cross. Quote, Undeterred six years later while the prison was undergoing construction,

Louis Napoleon dressed in the clothes of a workman, picked up a wooden plank, put it over his shoulder, and walked out the front gate before fleeing to London. He was so easy to break out of prisons. He didn't even have to get like a Rita Hayworth poster and like a tiny little pickaxe. Sacre bleu, he walked out. Yeah, he's just like, excuse me,

I'm just going to move this wooden plank. This was before the invention of the door, so people really had no way to keep someone in something. All prisons had worked on the honor system previously. Right, exactly. It was like, hey, where are you going? He's like, oh no, he's a workman. He's the most famous workman in the prison.

He's fine, he has wood on his shoulder. Yeah, that can't be him. He would never hold wood. The emperor would never hold wood. He has not been Shapiro. At La Home Depot. Yeah, he's just holding a piece of wood in the Home Depot bag. It is funny.

Excuse me. I'm 150 years apart with the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte and rich guy Ben Shapiro need to pretend to be a common man. They both picked the same tactic. I'm going to get some wood, hold it up for my shelter. It's the number one thing that rich people think working class people do.

Always just wood everywhere. What do the poor do again? I think they just hold wood and they go, ugh. That's what they do. That's what they do, just hold pieces of wood. Hold pieces of wood and say, oh, my brow has beads of water on it. Such sweat upon it.

All right, I'm going to continue that quote. And there it would have ended had it not been for the providential moment Louis Napoleon had been waiting for, the European Revolutions of 1848. After the abdication of the French king, a republic was hastily proclaimed and elections announced. Despite no experience of democratic politics or a political party to support him,

Louis Napoleon grandiosly told a cousin, I'm going to Paris, a republic has been proclaimed. I must be its master. His cousin responded, you are dreaming as usual. And yet this is the wild thing. He's completely right. He wins this election in a fucking landslide. Obviously the fact that he's a Napoleon

is most of what a lot of the voters need to hear. And also that he had been very visibly in opposition to the hated king who had just been overthrown. But he's also, he is particularly unpopular with the people who had been the political elite and the only people who were able to vote previously to the proclamation of the republic. Alexis de Tocqueville,

who was a political smart guy thinker, he was there fucking, I don't know, what's a terrible political columnist, right? Are you talking about Barry Wise? Bill Crystal, he's there Bill Crystal. Yeah, he's there Barry Wise. Yeah, yeah. No, he's not.

I'm sorry. People are going to be so angry at me. All the de Tocqueville scholars in the audience. But he does not like Louis Napoleon. He compares him to a dwarf who quote, on the summit of a great wave is able to scale a high cliff which a giant placed on dry ground would not be able to climb. Which is actually a really accurate summary of what's happened, right?

It's not his own personal character because he has not accomplished a single thing in his life other than shooting that guy in the face. But there's this wave and he expertly, the thing that he actually is good at is number one, he does have this degree of understanding of the French populace and he knows where to place himself to take advantage of this wave.

I guess my only disagreement with de Tocqueville there is that that is actually a skill. It's a really dangerous skill, but it is a skill. Most people can't be able to do that. It's a high political IQ thing. It's the same type of critique that people have of Trump where you're just like, he's stupid. And it's like, yeah, he's an idiot.

He's dumb in a thousand ways, but he is very good at manipulating people and he has a high political IQ. You would hope that like the thing we would get out of Trump and also guys like Dr. Oz and guys like, what's the other fucking expert, Ben Carson, is that like intelligence isn't a thing. People are good at things and they are bad at things,

but nobody is smart, right? Like that's not the way brains work. Yes, exactly, exactly. Like I'm really good at geography, but I'm an idiot. So me being good at geography doesn't make me a smart guy. It just means I'm good at one thing. No, and Elon Musk being a competent engineer in some specific things clearly does not make him smart

in other ways. Yes, yes, very clearly. Like knowing why a blue checkmark is a thing. It's good. So I'm going to continue that quote. Writer and politician Victor Hugo penned a series of vitriolic attacks on Louis Napoleon, one titled Napoleon Le Petit,

exhorting the French to look at this hog wallowing in his own slime on a lion's skin. Even Adolf Terres, leader of the conservative politicians in France who supported Louis Napoleon, bought him an idiot who could be easily controlled. Certainly, Louis Napoleon did not seem to have his uncle's drive, except when it came to women. Indeed, his mistress at this time, and financial backer,

was a notorious English courtesan and failed actress, a combination too much even for French politics. To the relief of many, the Constitution of the Republic limited the presidency to one four-year term. Louis Napoleon, however, was not going to allow a constitution he had sworn to uphold to get in the way of destiny. So obviously, when he comes to power here, 1848, this is a year of massive left-wing revolutions,

a lot of which fall just kind of a little short of actually, you know, it's this kind of failed revolution year in a lot of ways, not everywhere, but in a lot of ways. And prior to Napoleon III, most people who'd supported the return to monarchy anywhere were staunchly anti-democratic, right? There was a wide understanding that democratic governments inevitably led to radical left-wing policies that would undermine and threaten elites.

Napoleon III's great innovation, and the thing that actually is kind of genius from him, is that he saw that this was bullshit, right? The masses would be perfectly happy endorsing hereditary authoritarian rule if you sold it to them the right way. And in fact, that would make your rule more stable. More than this, he saw that royalist coups

and crackdowns against democratic policies were fundamentally doomed. But if you could put a monarch on the throne through democratic acclaim, that would act to legitimate the regime using the ballot box. This is exactly what Napoleon did, holding two plebiscites in which he got voters

to first back a coup against the Republic and then declare him emperor. He won both with, at least one of them was more than 90% of the electorate, right? And this is the thing, every dictator who follows after him, is kind of the start of the wave of like, now if you're a dictator, you don't just say,

I'm the dictator and I'm in charge, you say I'm the president or the premier or whatever, and I've been elected. We do an election every couple of years, and I get 98% of the vote, you know? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now it's like you always have the guys of, I am a democratically elected president

or prime minister or any of that stuff. Just make it up. The elections can be fake as long as it looks like you're democratic and you do lip service, that's all that matters. Yeah, and it's, I mean, yeah, that's interesting. This write-up by History Today provides more context as to why he was able to get so much,

get so far with the electorate. He was a fresh figure on the scene, which was a great advantage. He had total faith in his destiny, which was another, and he could parade as a person above party politics. Karl Marx sourly remarked that because Louis Napoleon was nothing, he could appear to be everything. His opponents attempted ridicule,

caricaturing him writing a goose he was trying to transform into an imperial eagle, merely rebounded to his advantage by reminding people of his Napoleonic connection. He wooed the electorate with promises to restore France's lost glory and assurances of prosperity, advancement, and a happy future for every group and social class in the country.

As one of his biographers commented, he came down impartially on all sides. Yeah, he was everything to everybody. You could kind of just put your own politics into him. You know that Marx quote, history comes first as a tragedy and second as a farce? He writes that about Louis Napoleon, right? Napoleon Bonaparte is the tragedy because millions die

and Louis Napoleon is the farce. Right, because he's literally a parody. He's literally a parody of his uncle. Our vision of Napoleon that we have now is actually just Louis Napoleon. He's very, very tiny, weird mustache, like bad goatee, looks like a clown. That's the parody of his uncle.

Yeah, it's pretty fucking cool. And you know what's a parody of bad products? What? The good products that support our podcast. Ooh, I love that. That's right. I love it. Love that, love that for us.

I'm just going to say it, hot as shit. Robert, I sent the entire team the Columbus seat. 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 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 and 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 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. Oh, boy, howdy. I tell you what, we're back. And I have never, I have never, never once. So we're talking about Napoleon III

and how he got himself into the good books of the French electorate and won election and then became the emperor. And the strategy he makes of like being like, I'm going to restore our lost glory. Everything is going to get better for everybody. It works really well with like particularly the peasants, the country folks, who in fact,

a big way in which they show there when kind of like these plebiscites are going on, one of the ways in which Napoleon's strongest supporters show they love him is by marching around the streets, shooting guns in the air, and getting wasted. Oh, yeah. That sounds right. Yeah, that sounds about right.

That's how we celebrate everything. You know, if that's the modern way of celebrating, it was created by Louis Napoleon. Yeah, I get it. I get why that would be the way that would happen. Yeah, if you've ever seen, you know, any team from Philadelphia win a championship in sports of some sort,

you'll understand that this is how we celebrate. They also eat duty off the street, but... Yeah, that's probably going on here too. A lot of vets who had fought with his uncle, put on their uniforms and would march around. They are funnily enough as they like march to the polls, they're shouting shit like death to the rich and aristos and users to the guillotine,

which again, he is literally the nephew of the emperor. But he does very well. Quote, And yeah, it's interesting to me, I don't think this history is widely known outside of France, certainly not outside of Europe, but it's fucking fascinating to me that France has two democratic governments in a row

ended by members of the same family. Yeah. It's like if Hitler had come along in the 1970s, like another one and ended German democracy again, like you said another Hitler, everybody's like, yeah, let's give him another shot! Listen, Greg Hitler is different than his uncle Adolf, okay? We can trust Greg.

A different kind of Hitler. Different kind of Hitler for a modern era. A modern Hitler for modern Germany. Shows him like arm in arm with a rabbi. Yeah, exactly. Things are cool now between the Hitler's and the Jews. Yeah, it's gonna be different this time. And he did what?

God damn it, he invaded Poland again. He did it again, that son of a bitch! I should have known. Fool me once. Yeah, it is kind of insane that like, how quickly he went from like being president, you know, Louis Napoleon, to just immediately being going like,

what are we doing here? We all know I'm gonna be emperor, and then boom, Napoleon III, just like that. You know? Yeah, it's cool. So on December 2nd, 1852, Louis Napoleon became emperor Napoleon Bonaparte III. And technically, it was wrong every time before this

when I called him Napoleon III. But it's fine, he's Napoleon III. Edward Shawcross notes that he, quote, aimed to plow a middle way between liberalism and conservatism, much like Bill Clinton. In this, he built the example of the recently overthrown King Louis Philippe, lover of the centrist Just Milieu.

But Napoleon III was willing to go further and based his regime on direct democracy, is expressed through universal male suffrage. As one of his aphorisms supposedly went, do not fear the people, they are more conservative than you. And this is why I want to talk about this guy, because he is kind of, not kind of, he absolutely is the model

of all future authoritarian populists in democratic societies. I find him fascinating for that reason. It's weird because his instincts were dead on and remain true to this day. Yes, he absolutely was not wrong about any of this stuff in terms of like how to get elected and shit. I mean, he's a clown and he does all this

like stupid shit shooting the guy in the mouth. He's, you know, just a couple failed coups. So you're kind of just like, this is like, what the ultimate fail son, right? Or failed nephew. But yeah, no, his instincts were 100% right on when it came to re-establishing the French empire. Yeah, it works very well.

So the early days, as we said, the early days of his domestic policies are a staggering success. The French economy recovers from its long slump. The nation begins to industrialize rapidly and just as critically, Louis Napoleon turns France into a major player on the European stage again, right? The couple of decades after Napoleon,

France is a bit of a pariah state, right? Kind of the same way the Germans were, where everyone's like, I don't know if we can trust these guys given, you know, history, everything that happens repeatedly. Which is, again, not an unreasonable thing to think. But this is where that all turns around. He brings France back into kind of the standing of a responsible nation state, right?

You can call that bullshit or not. But like that's, he effectively changes the way people think about France in a big way by changing the way France acts as a power. And the major way he does this, the first kind of big thing he does to turn around, you know, France's political position in Europe, is to ally with Great Britain for the Crimean War in 1853.

This is right after he, so basically one of the first things he does is l'impereur. Now, the Crimean War is often considered the first modern military conflict and it is one of the two wars, the other being the 1870 war between Prussia and France that we'll talk about at the end of these episodes. That sets up the preconditions for World War I.

And the gist of this war is that Russia and Turkey, they've been fighting for each other for centuries, right? Like you got your Ottoman Empire and they're keep trying to push into Europe and they got the Balkans and the Russians are seen by a lot of Europe for a decent chunk of time. The Russians, Russia is seen as like the great barrier to the Ottomans, right, to the Muslim hordes.

And these periodic military conflicts are ever complicated by the political situation over in the Holy Land, which at the time is under Ottoman control, but the English are involved in like mediating things. And you've got, it's not, you know, today we think about like religious conflicts in the Holy Land and it's like, oh, well you got your Muslims and Jews and Christians and whatnot.

Back in that day, one of the big conflicts is between Greek Orthodox and Catholic monks who are rioting. There are times where they'll kill each other. There will be like riots over these like holy spaces where people are beating each other to death. It fucking rules, it's super funny. Anyway, the Tsars see themselves as protectors of Orthodoxy.

And since the Ottomans are in charge of the Balkans at this period, so the Ottoman Empire is still ruling what we would call a decent chunk of Eastern Europe today. There are about 12 million Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule. And Russia wants to take that area away from the Muslims and also add it to Russia. And while, you know, you might expect all of the other

Christian nations to back them, but everybody's scared of Russia. They're considered a dangerous power. And so for the most part, like while they'll pay lip service to like, oh yeah, we got to free those Christians from the evil Muslims, most of the other states in this period are like, yeah, we don't want Russia to have the whole Balkans. That's not a good idea.

They're also scary. Yeah, they're also very scary. Both of these people are hordes people. I don't want to deal with hordes. You don't like hordes that much anymore. Yeah, just like could you thin out numbers, a little less hordes, more just couple fewer hordes. So for a lot of the 1800s,

the British try to keep some sort of balance. They're often brought in as kind of the mediators here. And they, you know, they've got, again, another part of this is that like the British have massive financial interests inside the Ottoman Empire. So they're like, because the Ottomans are kind of falling apart in this period, right? They're being called the sick man of Europe.

And so the Russians are like, well, we actually, we could take them right now, you know, we might be able to actually fucking push them out of here. And the British are like, well, but that's not, that's actually not going to work out great for us. We have a lot of it. It works out really, we don't want to control, we don't want to take over the Ottoman Empire.

That sounds like a giant pain in the ass. That's just going to be expensive. But right now their government will basically do whatever the fuck we say. And so we can make a shitload of money, you know, not doing anything. It's cool. So there, you know, this goes on for years,

for most of the 1800s, in fact, and kind of massive conflicts are just barely avoided here and there. But then in July of 1853, the Tsar invades Moldova and Wallachia, which is like modern day Romania. Now, Louis Napoleon had no desire to start off his reign with another land war in Europe. He'd campaigned on the premise that, quote,

there stands for peace. But the connections he'd built with the English prior to his rise for power, remember that's where he's hanging out the whole time as he's like in between coups, means that he can't just sit back if they choose to get involved. This is further complicated by the fact

that a lot of French people hated the English. So they didn't really want to be on their side, but they hated the Russians too, which I think helped a little bit. Ultimately, Louis tells the French assembly sending his army, some 300,000 men east, to help England defend the Sultan against Russian aggression. And this war effectively brings France back

to the world stage as a major player. And it is the, this is why, if you've ever wondered, given all of the centuries they were fighting each other, well, why do France and England wind up on the same side in World War I and II? Well, it starts here, right? This is kind of the first time where they wind up wrapped together in a major war.

Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's a big deal. Special relationship now, you know? Yeah, this is the start of that. And this is often like in kind of the high-level summaries of like what happens in the Crimean War. You'll hear it described as like, well, this is the first modern war.

You know, the French and the British had better rail lines and better transit, and like the Russians were so, just like fuckups and stuff. But also, the French and British militaries are also disasters in this war. This war is a terrible, terrible war for everybody involved. And it's a shit show because the military that France has built since Napoleon

isn't really good at fighting in conventional wars. They've become a colonial policing force built to like lockdown Algeria and West Africa, and Lewis is calling upon them to like fight these human wave attacks. The logistical hurdles are made worse by the fact that Lewis picks his cousin Jerome Bonaparte as the divisional general who's running the military.

Now, Jerome gets the job because his cousin, also named Jerome, had fought alongside Napoleon Bonaparte. I know, it's so fucking stupid. Now there's two jerrys. Pick new names, you assholes. Oh, that's incredible. Like God, I hate you.

There's Louis and there's Jerry. Yeah, there's only two kinds of names a person can have. Fucking, call him Mitch. Have a Mitch Napoleon Bonaparte. Honestly, Derek. Yeah, Derek Bonaparte. God almighty. Fucking A.

So Jerome gets this job because his uncle had fought with Napoleon, but the thing his uncle was famous for was abandoning Napoleon Bonaparte during the march to Russia in 1812 and like fleeing the empire. Because he did. Which is not bad, look, not bad judgment.

Like not bad judgment. But also that might be a red flag and sure enough, the instant cousin Jerome sees gunfire, he goes home. He flees back to Paris. It's in the blood. It's in the blood. He learned the thing his dad learned about war,

which is nah, nah, nah. I don't want to be anywhere near that shit, yeah? So this earns him the nickname Sans Plume or Gutless Bonaparte. That's what they call him now, is Gutless Bonaparte. Which is quite a nickname. And I'm going to quote next from the book, The Shadow Emperor. It was a grim beginning

for what was to prove a very grim campaign under sweltering summer temperatures as dysentery, typhus, typhoid, and a most deadly cholera epidemic ravaged the ranks. On the 15th of October, they fought and narrowly won the indecisive victory of Balaklava, where the 7th Earl, the Mad General, Black Bottle Lord Cardigan,

Louis Napoleon's landlord during his youthful exile in London, led his historic 661-man cavalry in the charge of the Light Brigade, of which only 414 young men, along with some 300 horses, survived. So the charge of the Light Brigade guy is his former landlord.

He hires his landlord? Well, he does not charge of the British army. This was followed by the Allied victory of Inkerman on November 5th, 1854, and then began the unanticipated 11th-month siege against the Russian Marshal Minshikov's 50-70,000 men, and their stately defended port fortress of Sebastopol.

There, the French, who had failed to bring heavy artillery for this war, were obliged to strip their navy of most of their guns to form 13 batteries of 30- and 50-pound cannon. So again, he sends the... The nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, an artilleryman, sends his army to war without heavy artillery.

And they take it from the boats. They have to take it from the boats? Not like there's any water near Crimea. No, it's very funny. And again, they win because... This is also, look, the Ukrainian military has gotten praised a lot for its stick-to-itiveness. If you spend time talking to people who are there,

talking to people who have been over there, it's still a bit of a shit show. It's a messy military, right? But again, as is the case here, the Russians are just so much messier, right? That you can afford to fuck up some when the Russians are your enemy because they're gonna make a lot of mistakes.

The Tsar is not going to be planning this very well. You only need to be just a little bit more organized than Russia. Just have your shit more together than the Russians. But like barely. That is the case of everyone who wins a war against Russia. Yeah, right. So in the end, the Allies won. And the Crimean War was broadly good for Louis' new regime.

But much of this was due to luck and great Russian incompetence. Again, rather than good decisions by the Emperor, he sends 300,000 men into the Crimea, and 95,000 of them die, mostly from disease due to cholera outbreaks because he doesn't have anyone in his army who can manage sanitation very well. So, you know, some people will say

he's kind of traumatized by this. Just because like... That Louis Napoleon... Yeah, he feels like bad about this. He was the one who gets to make the decision, right? He was the one man who sent them into war, and 95,000 of them didn't come back. And that does kind of fuck him up.

This is what your dad has been telling you for forever. This is literally what your dad was warning you about. That's all he was saying over and over again. War's pretty bad. War's bad, and you're going to feel bad. You don't do it, and then he does it, and he's like, damn, dude, I didn't know he was going to feel that bad, though. His dad is passed on by this point.

His dad dies while he's in prison. So, he doesn't ever get to be like, oh, yeah, I get what you were saying about war being bad. Yeah, yeah. RIP to a real one. Yeah, but this is literally the exact thing you were told. Anyway, he finally gets it. After Crimea, Louis reiterates his dedication to peace,

and then he sends soldiers to Italy to crush an independence movement against the Pope. This is basically identical to the independence movement he had fought for as a younger man, and his brother had died for. But now that he was king, you know, the church is kind of an important ally for him. Now, to be fair, he kind of makes up for this in 1859

when he goes to war with Austria and defeats the Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, who's a big old prick in battle, for an idea of like Franz Joseph, massive piece of shit. He loses a war in 1859 that like leads to the end of Austrian domination of Italy, right? 1859, Franz Joseph loses that war against Napoleon III.

Guess who the emperor of Austria-Hungary is when World War One starts? Same guy. Franz Joseph. Same guy. What, really? Yeah, 54 years later, five years later. Same guy, emperor fuck.

He is in charge of Austria-Hungary for fucking ever. It is ludicrous how long this guy is running that fucking country, that fucking train wreck of a country. It's nice to have that job security, though. Yeah, Franz Joseph like never dies. It sucks so bad because he's terrible. He's still around. Yeah, he's still alive right now.

He's still running Austria. Go over there, you'll see him. Yeah, he's trying to get hungry to come back. Yeah, I saw that there's that picture going around of that like one monk somewhere in Southeast Asia who looks like a skeleton because he's so old. Oh, yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, that's Franz Joseph.

It's just fucking Skeletor on the throne. God damn it. He's just on fight pressure. So Algeria gets officially conquered in 1858. And again, they've said this a couple of times, but they basically crack down on the worst of the uprisings again in 1858. And after this point with like kind of Algeria temporarily pacified, French power begins to expand rapidly across Southeast Asia.

During the time that Napoleon's like early to mid rain, the French military will conquer Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos created. Oh, yeah. What eventually becomes known as French Indochina. This is a nasty thing. There are a lot. Tens of thousands die and eventually millions are going to die because of this. Napoleon III lets it happen.

He is not a driving force behind it. The people who orchestrate this and push this are his generals and admirals. The French Navy is a big driving force with this. And the primary thing that you could you should blame Lewis Napoleon for is that again, they kind of sit down and talk nice to him and he just agrees to let them do whatever they want. Right. Yeah. And yeah, it's it that he doesn't resist and he he lets this thing happen in part

because like people said nice things about him. And he's kind of that's that's basically his big vulnerability. He loves compliments. He loves when, you know, it's like Trump with the Saudis. They let him hold the globe, you know, the glowing orb. And then he's like, all right, here, have some more planes. You give a man an orb and he'll have an orb for a day. You teach a man to find his own orbs. Yeah.

Teach a man to orb. The new book by Robert Evans. Teach a man to orb funded by Peter Teal. Finally going to get that Palantir money for something appropriate. Palantir. Speaking of Palantir, you know who sponsors this podcast? Palantir. Palantir.

So go spy on somebody. You know, Palantir's new everybody's spy program. Just record someone, anybody, anybody who doesn't know you're recording them and then mail that in an envelope to Peter Teal. He'll stick it up on a drop box somewhere. Don't worry about what happens to it. 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 this hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. He's a good and badass 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. 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 and 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. Boy, howdy, I sure love recording people without their express consent.

Me too, it's my favorite thing to do. That's why I enjoy the services of Palantir. Palantir, if you touch it, you'll see Sauron's great eye. It is so fucked up that a guy named a company that. It's insane, it's so on the nose. People talk about, I wonder what Tolkien would have felt about the Lord of the Rings movies and stuff like, no, I want to know what he would have felt about that shit,

that there's like, let someone literally built a Palantir. It's named it Palantir? That's fucking ridiculous. It's a bit on the nose. Yeah, a little bit on the nose. I don't know if that's an Oxford Dawn accent, whatever. Whatever, dude. It's a crikey fuck, I say. It's me down on the beach. These are the two accents I can do.

It would be funny to do a movie on JR or Tolkien, but like hire somebody with one of them. Like a cockney accent to play him. Alright, it's me, JR or Tolkien, yeah. I'm going to speak to you in Elfish, or I am. Yeah, that's right. So Palantir is like a little English, yeah. Dead brilli.

So it's probably fair to say, anyway, whatever. They conquer Asia. This is going to be a problem for tens of millions of people in the future. And it all happens at least without any resistance by Napoleon III. Back in Europe, the negotiations at the end of the Crimean War had made Napoleon III into one of the central diplomats of European power politics. Italian unification would eventually owe a great deal to his lobbying and fighting with Austria.

He began to look overseas to the Americas, where Louis Napoleon was greatly concerned with the expansion of the United States. He had admired a lot of aspects of American or technologically driven culture while he was there. But he was canny enough to see like, well, they kind of like murdered their way into control of most of the world's resources. They have like a dozen Europe's worth of country that they just own now. And it kind of seems like they might become the preeminent power in the world and I should do something to stop that because I would like that to be France.

Yeah, yeah, that's supposed to be me. That's supposed to be me. So in the late 1850s, he begins courting Maximilian Habsburg, who's the brother of the Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph, and trying to convince him to become the emperor of Mexico. So first off, brilliant plan, incredible. No notes. Very, very funny.

It's a beautiful plan. Hey, you know how Mexico's there? Well, it needs an emperor. What if, yeah, you know what the solution to all of Mexico's problems are? A German speaking guy. Yeah, a German emperor. Yeah. I think it's a great idea, dude.

Fucking walking around Juarez right now. You know, you guys got a lot of problems with cartels and not enough water, all this good stuff. What if a German was in charge? Yeah. You think that'll help? So first, I want to say hola como estas. Estas bien.

Great. Yeah. So I am going to be, how you say el jefe, right? El jefe. And you people are just going to, you're going to be my amigos. Do you, uh, comprende? It's very hard to do it. You have basically gotten all of it right, though.

That is this guy fucking Maximilian Habsburg, just an out. So one of the things that I do for fun is I will troll Edward Habsburg, who was the current heir to the Habsburg family and a monarchist piece of shit. And like some weird liaison to the Catholic church. He's a fucking asshole. He loves anime though, weirdly enough. Anyway, I will troll him and I will troll him specifically about the fact that Maximilian von Habsburg is eventually executed by a firing squad.

And every time I do, I get fucking royalists in my mentions being like, well, he was actually a great leader. And if Mexico had fallen, no, he wasn't. They shot him to death. That doesn't happen to you if you're a great leader. Sometimes great leaders get assassinated by a lone guy with a gunshot. We've all seen that happen. Great leaders do not get executed by the mass acclaim of the populace.

Right, exactly. And then completely wiped from like the general history. Yeah, exactly. Like I'd like to think I know a little bit about Mexican history and I totally forgot. They don't celebrate this guy. Yeah. So I know about like the whole like the perforato regime that happened

during that time and whatnot. That all comes out of this, right? Perforo Diaz, I think is his name is one of the generals, one of the generals who fights Maximilian. Yeah. So anyway, we're getting ahead of ourselves. So the way that Napoleon III proceeds with cooking this shit up is he gets a handful of Mexican academics and politicians,

most of whom are living in Europe and have been like, because Mexico, tons of civil wars, right? So you have a bunch of like diaspora guys who are like in Europe trying to like raise money and support for some kind of revolution or another. He gets a bunch of these guys back to back the idea that like the regular Mexican people are just like clamoring for a European emperor, just like the big countries, right? Yeah, yeah, please.

There is zero evidence of this. There is absolutely no evidence of this. And in fact, so the... You like tuba music? We like tuba music. For an idea of like how little the Mexican people wanted an emperor. So there's this, you know, there's this like, Mexico gets its independence in like 1821 from Spain.

And the guy who like leads the independence movement is this dude, Augustin Iturbide, who then declares himself the emperor of Mexico. And do you know what the Mexican people do to Iturbide? They fucking murder him. They fucking kill him. Because they don't like having an emperor. Yeah, they're like, no, we don't, we're not with that.

Yeah, which you might take as evidence that Mexicans don't want to have an emperor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems to be historically true. Napoleon III assumes this has to just be some like, like fluke of history. And he keeps on plotting. And while he's playing power politics, Napoleon III also presides over the creation of modern power.

The city as we know it today, with its wide boulevards and iconic architecture, was largely created during Louis Napoleon's reign. And I want to quote now from a write-up in the conversation by Samuel Raybone. Quote, Louis Napoleon inherited a cramped crumbling and crime-ridden capital. Paris's one million inhabitants lived cheek by jowl in a vast tangle of densely packed buildings. There was even a slum in the courtyard of the Louvre.

Modernizing Paris promised more than practical benefits. I want to be a second Augustus, wrote Louis Napoleon in 1842, because Augustus made Rome a city of marble. It meant glory, so he hired a ruthlessly efficient administrator, Baron Hausmann, to knock down the old slums. The city became a building site. Charles Marvel's photographs record the squalor of the slums, the chaos of their transformation, and the spectacle of their rebirth.

Thousands of men were drafted into an army of construction, battling away on this new field of honor for the glory of the nation and its increasingly power-hungry leader. Now, the downside of using populist rhetoric to get people to endorse your dictatorial regime is that you really can't afford to piss your base off too much, right? Because that's how you've justified your power. And Louis had taken power, promising to renew France

and bring hope for the working class. One commenter noted that, quote, a week's interruption of the building trade would terrify the government. Everything rode on continued mass public employment, so he's giving people jobs to do all this rebuilding, and the perception of continuous progress. To ensure that people believed this, Napoleon III turned to the still very new silence of photography,

which had only come about in the 1840s. He commissioned the best photographers of the day to document the renovation of the Louvre, the construction of new bridges, and an opera house. These photos were published widely, building on an international image of Paris as a city being renewed. Other photographers at the time noted that the pictures Napoleon III commissioned focus on the titanic scale

of the new public works projects and the clean lines of new construction. The workers erecting it, by contrast, were always tiny, quote, trapped in the labyrinth of scaffolding, as one commenter put it. The mighty Innes for Napoleon, stamped on every new project, dwarfed the humans who made them. Raybone continues, As Napoleon III's interior minister knew,

industry has its injured like war, and the rebuilding of Paris too had its glorious war wounded. In 1855, Napoleon III ordered the construction of a convalescent asylum to care for workers injured during the building works. Charles Negra visited the asylum around 1858 to photograph its buildings, patients, and staff. To get paid, Negra knew he had to tow the party line, yet the body season he encountered had been wounded in the war

for Napoleon III's self-aggrandizement, giving the lie to his image of populist benevolence. Negra's challenge was to celebrate Napoleon III's care for their suffering without revealing his culpability for it. So Negra, and this hasn't happened before. Photographs have not been used in this way, and you can't use paintings and shit like this, right? There are ways to use them for propaganda, sure,

but not the way that photographs. There's a sense that a photograph is a depiction of reality in a way that is not the case. Everyone even always understood, like, yeah, the emperor puts up these fucking statues and these reliefs, but like, they're carvings in stone. It's not like literal photograph, that's reality. And so Napoleon is the first world leader

to really comprehensively use photographs in order to, like, craft an alternate vision of reality in his propaganda. Yeah, it's, you know, it's like, as soon as we invent, like, a new mass media technology, we're like, how can I use this for political propaganda? Yeah. Negra positioned patients and medical staff

angled towards a marble bust of Napoleon III. His face clear, and there's indistinct, individually meaningless. Patients could only be shown eating, playing, and reading. Actual medical procedures were forbidden to be shown, as was evidence of permanent disability or injury. Generations of authoritarians would build on the work Napoleon did to turn his photography into part of his cult of personality,

but it all started here. It just, it sucks so much because it's, you realize that, like, a lot of these people, like you said, this empire's populist empire is built on, like, making sure the population is, like, loves you and stays in line. And I think another big part of, like, the complete renovation of Paris and, like,

basically these people were employed to destroy their own homes and build newer, different homes and wider boulevards that made it much, much harder to do a popular revolution. That is also a big part of why they're redesigning Paris this way. It's like, we keep having governments get overthrown by the people. Right, because, like, it's... I want to make that harder. I want to make it easier to shoot a lot of people very quickly.

Right, right. They're like, they built it, I think, I remember it's something like, they built it to be just the size of a whole regiment of, like, cavalry or some shit. Like, yeah, this is, this is him basically making it all those, like, cool barricades from the past, like, not possible. And that sucks, because there's so much institutional history of them building them barricades, dude.

Like, what are people going to do with that knowledge? Yeah, now you're never going to get the sequel to Les Miserables. Yeah, that sucks, dude. That's the tragedy. There's not going to be another role for Russell Crowe to sing in. Yeah, fucking, what's Russell Crowe going to do with his career? Yeah, did anyone think about Russell Crowe before they expanded the boulevard once?

Think about Russell Crowe. I don't think so. Not once, not a single time. It's fucking bullshit. And is that his greatest crime? Greater than conquering Indochina, greater than killing all of those people in the rebuilding projects, you know, greater.

Yeah, 100%. 100%. We're all in agreement. Yeah. Anyway, I love Russell Crowe. He's a great actor, man. You know, he's just like... How did we get on Russell Crowe talk?

I'm going to say it, Sophie. He's the only actor. That's not true. He's the only actor. No one else is an actor. What about Pedro? I know you love Pedro. Yeah, that's not acting.

Not like Russell Crowe can. I'd love to see Pedro Pascal badly sing all of the tunes in Miserables. Exactly. He couldn't memorize all those numbers. Did you actually watch that? It was... Look, there's some good parts to that visually, but man, Russell Crowe is not a singer.

That movie was paid for. He was in that band. Like, it's something however many feet of grunts. Yeah, I'm sure he's doing a lot of music. That's what I think of. I mean, it's not... I will say this. The La Miserable adaptation with Russell Crowe is not nearly as bad

as the adaptation of Sweeney Todd with fucking Johnny Depp. Yeah. It's heartbreaking because I love Sweeney Todd. It's a great musical. It's a great musical. Fucking Alan Rickman, incredible. His voice, very wonderful. Beautiful.

The kid they get to play Toby. Perfect voice. Beautiful voice. And then you've got fucking Sweeney Todd played by Johnny Depp outside of all of the other things that are wrong with Johnny Depp. Yeah. Not a strong singer. And for fucking Sweeney Todd, you have to be a strong goddamn singer.

That's the lead. Yes, that is the lead. The lead in a Broadway, Sondheim musical. Get a good singer. God almighty. Someone like Russell Crowe. Get Russell Crowe. Make him be Sweeney Todd, yes.

They should have done it, dude. That's the solution. That's the solution. I'm glad we figured all this out. Matt Leib. Got any pluggables to plug before we roll out for the day? So much to plug. Follow me on Instagram at Matt Leib jokes.

But I do a podcast, I do a couple of podcasts that are TV rewatch podcasts and Pod Yourself a Gun is a Sopranos podcast. And I'm going to be doing a live show of Pod Yourself a Gun at San Francisco Sketch Fest Saturday, January 28th at 10 p.m. Piano Fight Mainstage. Please, if you like the Sopranos or the wire, because now we do the wire podcast, check that out. Go to SFsketchfest.com.

Look up Pod Yourself a Gun and buy tickets, please, because that would be sick. Support Matt. Support Matt. Also, Robert and I have a couple of events coming up, don't we, Robert? That seems like a lie. Okay. One of them is a live virtual event that we are doing with Moment House and featuring Margaret Kiljoy, it's a behind the bastards live stream show

that will be happening on December 8th at 6 p.m. Pacific. And if you can't make it, we'll be on demand for up to a week. And you can get tickets at momenthouse.co. And it should be splattered all over socials. Is that how you say that splattered? I'm going with it. Splattered all over. Splooged all over social media.

And if I remember, I will link it in the description. And Robert and I will also be at SFsketchfest. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. We will. So, you know, what if we went on strike at Sketchfest, you know, Matt? What if we struck for more... What do I remember about Sketchfest?

They gave us a bunch of those waters that are like in big beer cans. The liquid. Let's strike for more of those. Yeah, let's strike for more of that shit. More liquid death. And I think also, I forget, I don't know if Audible is a sponsor again this year, but if they are, I say we strike for more free credit codes and gift cards. Yeah.

Because I like audiobooks and I don't like having to pay. I love audiobooks and I hate paying for things. So, help Matt and I strike against the good people at SFsketchfest who have invited us to perform. But definitely buy tickets. But also... But definitely buy tickets. But also support our strike against their evil not giving me...

Like right now, I would like one of those liquid death cans. Me too. And I don't have it and I'm furious, man. Yeah. They make caffeinated ones. Anyways, I believe behind the bastards will be there on January 20th. I don't have any more information when we're recording this, but I'm sure you'll see more in the future.

Also buy Robert's book after the revolution. Yes. Did I do it? Did I do the plugs? Yeah. Alright, episode fucking over. But bye. God damn right.

Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or, check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.