Revolutions - 8.1- The Second French Empire

Episode Date: May 6, 2018

First as tragedy, then as farce.  Fundraiser: revolutionspodcastfundraiser.com Sponsor: casper.com/revolutions 

and welcome to revolutions. Episode 8.1, the second French Empire. Hello, and welcome to our eighth series together. This one will be focused on the Paris Commune. As I mentioned in our final episode on the Revolutions of 1848, this will be an eight-episode series because in July, my family and I are moving to Paris so I can write the Lafayette book. Now, would it have been perfect if this series were being written while I was already

in Paris, since it's focused on one of the most famous and traumatic events in the history of the city. Well, sure. But things don't always work out like that. So to set this series up properly, we don't need to do a whole lot because we've kind of got the wins at our back coming out of 1848. The forces that combined to create the Paris commune are going to be pretty familiar. We have the political question and the social question, the impact of emerging industrial capitalism, the rise of nationalism, and the interplay of 19th century European War and Diplomacy. We've already talked about most of that stuff. So what we're going to do here in episode one is do a short history of the second French empire to take us from 1848 to 1870.

Then next week we will discuss the all-important Franco-Prussian war, and then we'll zoom in for a detailed look on two revolutionary months in 1871 that still haunt Paris to this day. Okay, so in the revolutions of 1848, we talked about Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte being elected president of France in December of 1848. In that first Democratic presidential election in French history, Bonaparte won more than 75% of the vote. Now, it's true that part of this was just name recognition. But it was also because by the end of 1848, nobody was super impressed with the men running the Second Republic. And a vote for Bonaparte was in many ways a protest. vote against that whole crowd. It was taken for granted among educated observers that nobody was

voting for Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. He was greeted by said commentators everywhere, with eye-rolling and snide remarks dripping with scorn. And he did cut a ridiculous figure. He was short, he had a weird head, he had ridiculous facial hair, he was a poor public speaker, and this was to say nothing of the fact that his career so far had been defined by two delusional attempted coups, and he now arrived in Paris from London, bearing a reputation as a philandering dilettante. Marx's well-known quote that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, well, he wrote that in the coup of 18 Brumere, to specifically mock this pygmy Bonaparte. When he took office, Bonaparte was advised to adopt the tone and dress of a Republican,

but instead he went with full military regalia and decided to live in luxurious grandeur. He was intentionally trying to copy the style of his more famous uncle, but it looked a lot like a kid playing dress-up. But Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was quite a bit craftier than his opponents gave him credit for, and he had certainly not missed what they all seemed to be missing, that he was quite a bit more popular than all of them put together. In forming his ministry, the new Prince President made it pretty clear. clear that the moderate Republicans who had triumphed in the spring of 1848 had a lot to be

worried about. For a prime minister, he appointed Odilion Barro, now making his comeback after being run over by events in the spring of 1848. Remember, Barro, he was the leader of the dynastic left, a liberal, yes, but also a staunch monarchist. Of the other appointed ministers, only one could be considered an actual Republican. Things only got worse for the moderate Republicans in the months to come. The next assembly election was held in May of 1849, and of the 750 seats, the moderate Republicans who had just recently been in the majority, were reduced to holding to 70 or 80 seats. Left-wing radicals did much better, garnering about 200 seats, but the vast majority went to a group that coalesced into what is called the Party of Order, almost all of

whom had been on the wrong side of 1848. They were opposed to the very existence of the Republic, and we're probably about to be up to something. We're talking about Orleanus, like Adolf Thierre, unconstructed bourbon legitimate Catholics who wanted God and the king. Already feeling like the walls were closing in. The true Democratic Republicans of 1848 watched in horror as Prince President Bonaparte launched an expedition to Italy to destroy the Roman Republic on behalf of the Pope. All of this culminated in June of 1849,

with a very brief attempt at an armed insurrection that was quickly strangled by the forces of order. With the Republicans mostly nullified, you kind of get the feeling like it was just a matter of time before the second Republic transformed into something else. The question was, who would define the next incarnation of the French state, the Assembly, or the President? Adolf Thier certainly thought that the party of order would be in the driver's seat. Utterly dismissive of Prince President Bonaparte, Tierre called him a Cretan, whom we will lead around by the nose. To begin the reconsolidation of the closed plutocracy that had dominated France since the restoration, the Assembly passed a law in 1850, putting a three-year residency requirement on voters,

knocking out in one fell swoop fully one-third of the electorate, most of whom were lower-class voters who had moved looking for jobs, a population that just so happened to be quite supportive of President Bonaparte. But far from being led around by the nose, the Prince President took to the road to rally a defense of universal suffrage, and he was now able to plausibly claim that he represented the will of the people, while the Assembly represented the will of a tiny click of corrupt plutocrats, now locked in a real political battle that they had not quite expected. The strategy of the party of order became, let's just wait him out.

The Constitution forbid a president to serve consecutive terms. so all they had to do was stall until Bonaparte's term expired in 1852, at which point the Pygmy Napoleon could be dispensed with. Believing that this was contrary to the will of the people, and being an imperial-minded authoritarian, duh, Bonaparte spent most of 1851 trying to secure an amendment to the Constitution that would allow him to run for re-election. In July 1851, the Assembly took a vote, and though the amendment actually secured a majority of the votes, it fell short of the two-thirds required to amend the Constitution. So having failed to amend the Constitution, a group of supporters around the President turned to their only recourse.

No, not just accepting the constitutional term limits. Don't be silly. They started planning a coup. Now, even though Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was hot to copy his uncle in every single way, he did not want it to play out like this. He wanted to remain in power indefinitely. Sure, of course he did. but by legal and constitutional means. He did, however, absolutely believe that the will of the people was being stymied by a minority

clique. So, in October of 1851, the president asked the Assembly to reconsider their curtailing of universal suffrage. The Assembly refused. In mid-November, he asked them to reconsider the amendment that would allow him to run for re-election. The Assembly refused that, too. So these constitutional appeals shut down. The Prince, president decided to appeal to a higher authority than the Constitution. Brute force. So while Bonaparte attempted these final negotiations with the Assembly, his supporters were busy making sure key positions in the administration and the military were held by men of

unwavering loyalty. They also put out feelers to ensure that the officer corps wouldn't flinch at all this. And of course they wouldn't. The Second Republic was in some deeply entrenched institution, and with a Bonaparte at the helm of France again, their years of miserable inactivity would likely be over. The French armies might be able to cover themselves in glory again. So the date of the coup was set for the auspicious date of December the 2nd, the anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz and Napoleon's coronation as emperor.

Then, to not exactly avoid the charge that they were just cost playing at Empire, they codenamed this operation Rubicon. Real subtle, guys. On the morning of December the 2nd, 1851, Paris woke up to find 30,000 regular troops had been deployed to strategic points throughout the city. Placards had also gone up everywhere, declaring the following. The assembly is dissolved. Universal suffrage is restored. A new constitution will be drafted.

Paris is under a state of siege. The coup appeared to catch everyone off guard, and probably the opposition leaders in the assembly couldn't quite believe that Bonaparte actually had the guts to pull it off. A rump of about 250 assembly members gathered in the north of Paris to try to muster a constitutional opposition to this illegal coup, but in the rock-paper-cississors of politics, force beats Constitution every time. Soldiers arrested the deputies, along with every other identified troublemaker, from lists that had been drawn up in advance. Now, this is Paris, so a brief insurgency started up, led by among others, the writer Victor Hugo, and the next two days saw a few barricades

thrown up and some running street battles. But here's the thing. Most of the lower classes were with the president. It's not like the streets are going to rise up in favor of an assembly, primed to close off the right to vote, and probably eventually recall either an or Leon or a bourbon to power. Outside Paris, there were a few isolated revolts, and all told, historians estimate about 100,000 people engaged in some kind of armed resistance in the weeks that followed. But the military apparatus was firmly with the president, as was most of the lower classes. The revolts were squashed. Now, to immediately frame the coup as a defense of the nation by its popularly elected president,

a national plebiscite was held on December the 20th and 21st, 1851, with the vote going, 7 million in favor of the president's actions, and 600,000 against. And get this, some people think those totals might not be entirely on the level. Okay, so with the coup of success, a handful of the president's closest advisors got together and drafted a new constitution for the republic. This constitution would be an expression of Bonapartist ideology, an ideology that Louis Napoleon had himself been further developing his whole life. Bonapartism embraced the revolutionary principle that the nation, not God, was the true sovereign, that power came up from the people, not down from the Almighty. But the other core tenant of Bonapartism was the necessity of a strong central executive

who would be able to rule on behalf of the people. One man, preferably an emperor, but a president can do in a pinch, could and must represent the will of the people. The alternative was either the illegitimate claims of divine right monarchists or the corrupt and chaotic gridlock of democratic assemblies. So politically speaking, Bonapartism is a brand of popular autocracy or bottom-up absolutism, that once the people have vested their sovereignty in a single leader, it was up to him to rule the nation on their behalf without any further interference. So breaking down the Constitution of 1852, which was promulgated on January the 14th, 1852, is pretty easy. All power is vested in the executive branch.

The right to make all laws, execute all laws, the right to offer amnesty, punish people, war, peace, taxation, everything. The president also had broad powers to control the press, to curtail freedom of expression and assembly, and to basically limit civil rights whenever, wherever he felt like it. The president's term would also be now 10 years long, and he could be re-elected indefinitely. Now, there was a two-house parliament that went along with all this, a lower legislative body and an upper house called the Senate, and they had no power. Elections to the lower house were held on the basis of universal suffrage, but candidate lists were tightly controlled and districts heavily gerrymandered. And besides, once a delegate was elected, he had no power anyway. If you look up window dressing in the dictionary, there's a picture of the legislative body and the Senate of the Constitution of 1852.

So this Bonapartist constitution was a pure expression of popular autocracy and clearly was laying the groundwork for turning the Second French Republic into the Second French Empire. For the next 11 months, though, Louis-Naparte continued to rule as Prince President Bonaparte. He did enjoy a legitimate popular mandate, but his support was rural and outside of Paris. The capital itself would always be a worry. So he immediately reorganized the National Guard, well aware of its revolutionary potential. Now, back in 1848, the National Guard had placed themselves under the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of the Interior now answered solely to the President. So the Guard was reorganized to ensure maximum central control,

The principal idea being, let's never call out the National Guard. The president also rolled out restrictive new press laws and kept a close eye on the universities and professors and students who always leaned radical left. As for the window dressing, a new assembly election was held in February of 1852, with candidates approved by the president getting 5.2 million votes, while the limited and controlled opposition was able to muster only 800,000. But one third of the voters just sat out the election completely, which does speak to the fact that this wasn't quite as popular as Bonaparte would have you believe. During his year, as an autocratic president, Bonaparte got started on many of the projects and initiatives that we'll talk about here in a second. But really, the coup of 1851 is the beginning of his imperial reign. But just to complete the transformation, everyone could see coming from a mile away, in November of 1851, 1852, there was a plebiscite asking the French electorate to approve the transition from

Republic to Empire. The reported vote was 7.8 million yes, 253,000 no. A hilarious thing is that the Constitution of 1852 was already so explicitly autocratic that all they had to do was change the word president to emperor and keep everything else in place. On December the 2nd, 1852, The anniversary of Austerlitz, his uncle's coronation, and his own coup d'etat, Prince President Bonaparte, became Napoleon III Emperor of the French. So what we'll do now is run through some of the highlights of the Second Empire. And we can't cover any one thing in too much detail. But hopefully by the time you walk out of today's episode,

you'll have a pretty decent grounding on what went on in France between 1852 and about 1866. So, as we just discussed, on the political front, Bonapartism meant popular autocracy. On the economic front, Bonapartism meant active intervention by the state to promote economic progress. Remember, the now-Napolian III had spent most of his life studying political economy. Well, he had emerged from those studies convinced that an enlightened executive could use the combination of state funds and legal authority to act as the engine of economic growth. Now, the new emperor 100% believed in private enterprise. He didn't want the state like making hats or running restaurants,

but he did believe that the state should invest in the national infrastructure that would allow those private enterprises to flourish. And in the 1850s, those national infrastructure projects meant railroads, telegraphs, steamships, canals, and bridges. It meant opening lines of credit to underwrite large-scale projects that would have positive reverberations throughout the economy. Now given the chance to wield executive power, Napoleon III was of that visionary imperialist mindset where you just plow through all barriers, physical, political, moral, human, whatever, to remake the world, holding fast to the idea that in the end it would all be better for everyone.

Now, the emperor was also committed to free trade. He believed it was critical to France's economic growth. He wanted to tear down tariffs and remove all protectionist barriers, both internally and externally. More than anything, he wanted free trade with the British. Remember, Napoleon had lived in London for years and had come away very impressed with their achievements. He believed that by bringing British imports into France and sending French exports to Britain, that France's economy would boom, both because they would be able to utilize cheaper versions of key industrial products like steel rails, but also that French companies would have to improve

themselves in order to compete equally with the British. This was naturally opposed by most of the industrialists and artisans in France, but luckily the Emperor's autocratic constitution meant that he didn't have to listen to any of them. After secret talks with the British in the 1850s, France and Britain signed the Cobden-C Chevalier Free Trade Treaty in December of 1860, which, though not universal in scope, began to open true free trade between the two countries for the first time. And Napoleon's vision for a free global market extended to completing his uncle's dream of building a canal that would link the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, so he fully backed the creation of the Suez Company that had received permission from Egypt to start that project in 1859, and which would

10 years later, create the Suez Canal, massively reducing shipping time and costs from Europe to India and Asia. Nowhere were the state-driven Bonapartis infrastructure projects, more visionary, more costly, and more permanently visible, than in Paris itself. Paris in 1850 was in many ways an overgrown, overstuffed medieval city. There had never been any kind of central planning. it was a rabbit's warrant of narrow streets surrounded by haphazard buildings aimlessly constructed. The city was dark, unhealthy, unsanitary, with daint clusters of inhospitable slums and virtually no green spaces. Now, the problem of Paris was a well-known concern going all the way back to the days of the Revolution of 1789. The First French Republic had drawn up plans to drag Paris out of its medieval torpor, the same way they were dragging the French state out of its medieval medieval.

evil torpor. But events got in the way. Then Napoleon I had ambitious plans that were interrupted by, you know, getting defeated at Waterloo. The dream of redesigning Paris then languished for 35 years until Emperor Napoleon III came along. He had great big plans for Paris. He not only wanted to improve the city, he wanted Paris to become the preeminent city of Europe and to inspire awe, jealousy and respect from everyone who visited. To help him realize this ambition, the emperor brought in a man capable of executing big plans and not being bothered by barriers, physical, political, moral, human, or otherwise. This man's name was George Eugène Ossman.

Ossman had spent his career bouncing around the hierarchy of the departmental prefectures, earning a reputation as an energetic and near-geny, level administrator. In June of 1853, Napoleon elevated him to prefect up the Sen and ordered Osman to go forth and bring in air, light and cleanliness, to a city that was defined by stinking, dark, filthiness. He was to bring fluid mobility and direct lines of transportation into a city composed of a clogged rat's nest of alleyways. He was to tear down the old haphazard structures and erect grand new buildings, according to a central plan. Inspired by his time in Hyde Park, the emperor also wanted to clear out park space in every neighborhood.

To combat the cholera and other epidemic diseases, the emperor wanted improved sanitation, aqueducts to bring in clean water, expanded sewer systems to carry away waste. These marching orders in hand, Oussman went forth and started leveling everything that got in his way. He knocked down whole neighborhoods to make the Grand Boulevard that are all but synonymous with Paris today. The building facades along these new boulevards had to conform to specified colors, textures, and materials. The new boulevards also had gas lamps planted every 20 feet, and though the central city of Paris had had streetlights before, this is when the city truly becomes the city of light. The Isles de la Cite, the island in the Sen where Notre Dame is located, had turned into little more than a slum,

so it was just raised to the ground and new buildings erected. Now, I can't cover everything that was done to Paris during Ossman's renovations during the Second Empire, but basically, for the next 20 years the city was one giant construction project, and it was the origin of the Paris we know today. But before we move on from this, I should mention one thing in particular. As much as the emperor liked to say that the grand new boulevards were about his desire to bring light and air into the city and to eliminate congestion. Let's not kid ourselves.

One of the main reasons he built all these big sweeping open boulevards was what? That's right, to cut down on all the damn barricades. By eliminating all those alleyways and replacing them with wide, well-lit streets, that was all about ensuring that the army would have barricade-free lines of movement between all the key points in Paris. The width of the new boulevards were carefully measured to be the width of a cavalry company and designed to ensure maximum mobility for artillery pieces, should it come to that. And it would come to that.

The cost and benefits of this single-minded revolutionary drive to make France into a modern industrial economy are still being added up. But between 1850 and 1870, industrial output rose 75%. The economy grew about 5% a year. Exports increased 60%. The expansion of France's railroads were a particular importance, and within days of the coup of 1851, Bonaparte ordered an ambitious project of railroad expansion. In 1851, France had just over 2,000 miles of railroad. By 1870, it would be over 12,000. New industrial farming techniques were also introduced to boost the output and productivity of French land, and they did achieve one major lasting achievement. The last recorded famine in France was in 1855, which is a hell of a thing when you think about how much famine has played a role in our past French revolutions. Now, critics of the empire point obviously to the fact that the man who wrote the abolition of poverty made no real effort to abolish poverty. And rather than

manage the dislocative transitions that the working classes had to endure, the emperor was mostly with the bankers and the big businessman. And then finally, it's really hard to say how much credit to assign the emperor and his plans. The boom times of the second industrial revolution coincide with the second French empire. So a lot of this is just about the general sweep of European economic history as much as Emperor Napoleon's own policies. But you can say that he saw the wind of economic history blowing and he went with it. Okay, so we know what Bonapartism means politically, popular autocracy. And we know what it means economically, state-sponsored industrial capitalism.

So what does Bonapartism mean in terms of France's place in the world? Well, this should be obvious. It means a robust French presence everywhere in the world. As we talked our way through the restoration and the July monarchy, remember that one of the persistent complaints of the French people was the timidity of France on the world stage. The Bourbon and the Orleans had both shied away from international adventurism, and they had left French honor suffocating from a lack of oxygen.

This continued affront to French national pride is one of the things that kept Bonapartism alive as an ideological force, even after all of its original adherents had passed away. And this is partly what led Prince President Bonaparte, shortly after his initial election, to send troops to Italy in defense of the Pope in 1849. Yes, it was to shore up support with his Catholic base, but it was also a statement to the rest of Europe that, well, France was back. Now, do you remember when we talked about the specter of the French Revolution and how for the rest of Europe the French Revolution was synonymous with war? Well, now you've got a Bonaparte in power, and the rest of Europe was probably like, geez, you see, this is what we're talking about. If the French Revolution means war, a Bonaparte means war. But like Lamartin in the early days of the Second Republic, the new Emperor Napoleon III, to huge lengths to assure everyone that in one crucial respect, he would not be emulating his

uncle. He said, the empire means peace. Now, it is true that Napoleon III did not try to emulate the raw military conquests of Napoleon I. But despite his promise that the empire meant peace, the empire hardly meant peace. And the arrival of the Second Empire coincided with a general return to Great Power Warfare, Great Power Warfare that had gone dormant after the horrors of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. So say what you want about Metternich and the Holy Alliance, the timidity of the French, the cautious self-interest of the British, the period from 1815 to 1848, saw no direct wars between the Great Powers. Even in the chaotic heat of 1848, 1849, the great powers refused to allow a general conflagration to break out, not over Hungary,

not over Poland, not over Italy, and certainly not over Schleiswig effin Holstein. But after 1848, we see the return of a willingness for the great powers to fight each other directly. The 1850s and 1860s were marked by a series of great power conflicts, almost all of which France was right in the middle of. So, for example, the Crimean War. Now, the Crimean War is, oh, I don't know, a 12-episode series all on its own, but to crunch it down to a single paragraph, it was about post-1848 Russia expanding its influence at the expense of the Ottoman Empire.

This worried both the French and the British. British policy was to not let Russia gain control of the Dardanelles, meanwhile in Napoleon III, wanted to supplant the Russians as the defenders of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, basically the interest of growing Catholic power at the expense of Orthodox power. I am massively oversimplifying this. But like his previous intervention in Italy, Napoleon saw standing up to Russia as a good marriage of domestic politics and the further expansion of French international power. So in 1853, the British and French combined to send armies to the Crimea to check the Russians. When they arrived, they got stuck in a pretty horrendous,

disease-ridden siege of the Russian naval port of Sevastopol. Something like 100,000 French soldiers died over the next two and a half years, 75% of them from typhus, dysentery, and cholera. Press reports back from the front lines by Telegraph, the Crimean War was the birth of the real-time war correspondent, turned the incompetent running of the war into a scandal in Britain and toppled the government. But in France, Napoleon's control of the press meant that the public was more or less prevented from ever finding out what was going on. Eventually, the Allies stormed Sevastopol, the Russians decided to back down, and there was a peace conference hosted by Napoleon in Paris in April of 1856. And again, this is a massive oversimplification. Please don't at me. For our purposes here,

though, the key upshot of the Crimean War was how it relates to the Second War of Italian Independence. You ready for this? Cool. Here we go. When the British and French were getting ready to go, into the Crimea. Prime Minister Kavur of the Kingdom of Piedmont Sardinia volunteered to join them. Now, we introduced Kavur back in episode 7.9. He was a reformist liberal, a constitutional monarchist, and a staunch Italian nationalist. Though the revolutions of 1848 had failed to unify Italy, Kavur still believed it was possible, and he still believed that the end result would be the Kingdom of Piedmont annexing its way into becoming the United Kingdom of Italy. He advised King Victor Emmanuel, remember he took over for his father, King Charles Albert, to join the Crimean War with the

long-term goal of securing support from the British and French for the inevitable war against Austria. Kavur began his lobbying in earnest at the post-Krimian War peace talks in Paris. The British were typically non-committal, but Napoleon III was sympathetic. Remember, way back in the 1830s, he had actually been inducted into a Carbonari Lodge, and he had fought alongside revolutionary Italians. But even still, he was wary about direct conflict with Austria. His mind was changed, however, in 1858, when he was nearly assassinated by an Italian patriot convinced that if the emperor was dead, a new French republic would support Resorgimento. So though the assassin failed, he actually succeeded in his object. Napoleon got spooked and decided he was going to endure

more of this if he didn't help the Italians out. Plus, helping the Italians did jive with his plan to make France not Austria, the hegemon of southern Italy and protector of the Pope. So, in July of 1858, the emperor made a secret handshake agreement with Kavur that if Piedmont was threatened by Austria, that France would help them out. Since the the emperor refused to join in an offensive war of conquest, the two men then settled down to figure out exactly how they would provoke the Austrians into threatening Piedmont. So the Second War of Italian Independence began in April of 1859 after Piedmont successfully provoked the Austrians into declaring war. When they did, France poured 170,000 troops through

the Alps, fully half of its standing army. Piedmont itself had an army 70,000 strong, while the Austrians fielded 250,000 men. So this is a half million soldiers involved in this campaign. This is not a small thing. It was certainly important enough that Napoleon III came down personally to lead the campaign. And then when the war started going badly for Austrian, they found themselves pushed out of Lumberty, Emperor Franz Josef came down to lead the Austrian army. So now it's dueling emperor's time. By July of 1859, the war was not going great for Austria, but Prussia was mobilizing on behalf of the Hapsburgs, so Napoleon took the opportunity to cut a deal. In a private meeting with Franz Yosef, who I'm sure started the meeting by saying,

dude, I thought you said the empire meant peace. Napoleon secured the transfer of Lombardy to the kingdom of Piedmont. This is the moment that Lumberty is permanently detached from the Hapsburgs. But much to Kavur's theory, Piedmont was not allowed to go further to take Venetia and finish the job. But to make up for this, after Napoleon promised the Austrians that he would not allow Piedmont to annex the nominally independent territories of central Italy, we're talking about Tuscany and Modena and the papal states, Napoleon allowed Piedmont to do just that. Austria, not wanting to risk going back to war, let it go.

These new acquisitions in hand, the kingdom of Piedmont Sardinia, formerly rebranded itself, the kingdom of Italy. And in exchange for their help, the French got Savoy and Nice, all of which was settled in 1860. This then was the peak of the Second Empire. After 1860, the Second French Empire began to decline. Napoleon III had accomplished a great deal, but he had pissed off a lot of people to get there, and future decisions would only further erode imperial prestige.

By now, an eclectic opposition had formed inside of France. Republicans and liberals had never forgiven him for turning the second republic into the second empire. A lot of Catholics were now angry at his support of the Pope's enemies in Italy. And for all his promotion of industrial capitalism, his free market policies, particularly the Cobden-C Chevalier Treaty, which was just then being signed, ticked off the business owners who now had to compete directly with British imports. Now probably, this opposition could have remained shoved in the closet, Napoleon had shoved them into back after the coup of 1851, but for one little problem. Money. Over the past

decade, Napoleon had taken out a lot of loans for his various projects. Waging wars and rebuilding an entire country from the ground up ain't cheap. The deficits were growing, the state debt was piling up. And as we saw way, way back with Charles I, and then later with Louis XVIth, and most recently with Frederick the 4th of Prussia, the banking community hinted that there had to be some kind of popular guarantee for the repayment of all these loans. Without that, credit was going to start drying up real quick. And the point here is that taxes and revenue secured by the consent of those who are being taxed creates a very predictable and reliable guarantee that the state will pay their bills

on time. So to head off a financial crisis and possibly a political crisis, Napoleon started to loosen up on his political authoritarianism. And so the first phase of the empire that lasted until 1860 is the era of true personal autocracy, while the period after 1860 was an era of parliamentary autocracy, which sounds like a contradiction, but it's when the window dressing gets a bit more elaborate. The government started easing up on rules about freedom of the press. Then in December of 1860, over the advice of his ministers, the emperor said, that he would allow the legislative body and the Senate to openly debate and respond to government

programs. These programs would also now have to be presented by the ministers in question to the assemblies. Then a few months later, the emperor allowed those debates to be printed and distributed. Then in December of 1861, he approved a measure that would allow the legislatures to debate ministerial budgets one by one instead of as a total package. He also agreed that the government would not draw emergency funds unless these legislative bodies were sitting. Now again, all real power still lay with the emperor, but he had to open up a space for the opposition to challenge the government on financial matters. Those who possess wealth and education and leisure time want a say in how a country is run, especially on financial matters.

And once these signals started going out from the emperor, the opposition started to rally. In the elections of 1862, the vote for approved candidates was the same as it had been in 1852, 5.2 million. But opposition candidates jumped from 800,000 to almost 2 million. Major resistance was found most especially in the big cities, like Paris, which went 6337 against the emperor. But the opposition was a mixed bag. It was left-wing Republicans and conservative Catholics, early honest, legitimists. They didn't agree on much. except a shared loathing of the emperor. This then gets us into a run of events in the mid to late 1860s that started to erode the prestige of the empire, and specifically two major

foreign entanglements that we will deal with at a later date. The first was Napoleon's grandiose ambitions in Mexico, allegedly undertaken in the interest of securing repayment of Mexican debt to foreign creditors and ensuring European access to Mexican markets, but which was mostly an excuse for Napoleon to try to set up a client empire in North America. We'll talk all about that in a few months when we get going on the Mexican Revolution. Long story short, though, it was kind of a disaster for France, and they were forced to abandon the whole adventure in 1867. This Mexican boondoggle reflected poorly on all that power Napoleon was trying to gather up and project for France. But the other foreign entanglement

is of much more immediate importance to our story, and so when I say we'll address it at a later date, I mean next week. That's the small matter of the Germans. With liberal speeches and constitutional debates having failed to create a unified Germany, the project of German unification was now taken up by the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. So next week, we will talk about the shift in the balance of power in Central Europe, the critical year of 1866, and how all of that led directly to the disastrous empire-ending Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Until then, please do check out Revolutionspodcastfundraiser.com to help show your support for the podcast and its imminent relocation to Paris.

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