‘The Napoleonic idea is not an idea of war, but a social, industrial, commercial and humanitarian idea’, Napoleon III had argued passionately, even before he achieved power, and he meant every word. He succeeded in ruling France for twenty-one years, longer than has any other man in the country’s modern history.
Hostile historians have sometimes called his régime a ‘carnival empire’, implying that it was based on nothing more substantial than the cancan. No doubt it may often have seemed frivolous, but behind the parades and the masked balls there was solid economic muscle, industrial and financial. ‘Bonapartism, in its most simple interpretation, meant prosperity’, is Theodore Zeldin’s definition.
Napoleon’s entire reign was a time of full employment with steadily rising wages, in contrast to the lack of work during the miserable 1840s. This transformation was of course largely due to the gathering pace of the industrial revolution that was sweeping the western world, but it owed a good deal to the contribution made by the emperor. He was obsessed with a healthy economy. The World Exhibition at Paris in 1855 was one of his ideas, a gigantic trade fair where France’s booming new industries could display their products.
He encouraged a programme of railway building that accelerated France’s industrialisation – from 1,800 in 1848, by 1870 the rail network had increased to 17,000 kilometres of track. Manufacturing and mining were assisted by generous government concessions (even if some of them went to commercially minded courtiers). Communications were revolutionised, so that by the end of the reign there were 1,500 telegraph stations compared to seventeen in 1852. New-style banks, persuading ordinary people toinvest their savings, helped to provide the money to finance this rapid progress.
Since the railways opened up formerly inaccessible markets, agriculture also benefited. At the same time chambers of agriculture were founded to introduce better farming methods, which were even taught in village schools. These were accompanied by schemes for land clearance, afforestation and drainage, the emperor being personally responsible for draining wide areas of Champagne, the Sologne and Gascony. Local taxes that had previously hampered the movement and the sale of crops were abolished. New roads were built throughout the country.
Carried by new steam trains – and steam ships – France’s exports rose by 400 per cent. Napoleon, an enthusiastic apostle of free trade, had smoothed the way by signing treaties with most of the countries of western Europe, including England, which either abolished or lowered customs duties. Some romantics suggest with a certain exaggeration that in doing so he anticipated the European Community.
Looking back, Eugénie could claim that her husband had, as she put it, ‘given France long years of prosperity’. If not directly involved, she discussed commercial and financial problems with him, aware of the close relationship between secure employment and support for the Second Empire. She also performed a decorative but valuable role in opening trade fairs and factories.
In August 1860 the empress visited Lyons, a socialist city with a record of violence and even of armed insurrection, whose main industry was silk manufacture. From the police reports she had read during her regency she knew that its silk-workers remained hostile. Carrying out a lengthy tour of the city’s major silk factories needed real courage; using all her charm she received a surprisingly friendly welcome, however, and was cheered for her skill at operating a shuttle-loom. Besides contributing to charities, she began to wear regularly the heavy Lyonnais brocades, until then unfashionable, in a determined effective bid to popularise them.
From genuine compassion as well as politics, Eugénie always encouraged Napoleon III in his unending efforts to improve conditions for the working classes. He fostered plans for mutual-aid societies and day nurseries, for legal and medical assistance, for old age pensions and accident insurance, founded orphanages and free nursing homes, and demolished slums, rehousing their occupants in ‘industrial dwellings’ that were bleak but healthy. He abolished the infamous livret without which a man could not be lawfully employed (a certificate signed by his previous employer stating that he did not owe him money). In 1864 he withdrew the ban on workers’ associations and legalised the right to strike – nor did he reinstate it despite the ensuing wave of industrial action.
At the empress’s suggestion, Napoleon, who genuinely believed in the ‘dignity of labour’, set up a species of Invalides for workers injured in the factories, rather than soldiers wounded in battle, just outside Paris. He insisted on a cheerful atmosphere and every man having his own room. The Asile de Vincennes had 430 bedrooms, treating at least 10,000 patients a year. Shocked at so many of the poor being discharged from hospitals before they had fully recovered and still unable to work, it was Eugénie’s idea that there were proper facilities for convalescence and aftercare. At the same time, she saw that a similar hospital for women workers was established at Vesinet.
By the end of the reign the number of free hospitals in France had grown from 9,332 in 1852 to 13,278, of lying-in hospitals from 44 to 1,860 and of infant schools from 1,735 to 3,633. This increase owed much to imperial initiative, and often to imperial funding as well. The empress played a key role in providing a network of free dispensaries, public baths and communal cooking stoves.
‘The work-people believe that the rich are their enemies and that the emperor is their friend, and that he would join them in an attempt to get their fair share, that is, an equal share of the property of the country’, Mme de Tocqueville (the historian’s widow) told an English economist in 1861, adding, ‘I am not sure that they are mistaken.’ Yet despite his efforts, until long after the Second Empire, working conditions continued to be dictated by supply and demand, the conditions of the brutalised men and women who are portrayed in Zola’s novels – toiling for twelve hours a day, numbing their misery in drink or promiscuity.
The emperor and empress met with complete indifference from employers. During the American Civil War, when textile workers were laid off at Lyons because of the cotton shortage, Eugénie offered to set up a government fund to make good losses incurred by factory owners who kept them on, even if there was no work. Her proposal was rejected by the owners, because it meant state intervention. All she could do was to give the charities at Lyons money to buy and equip a château as a convalescent home for workers. Nonetheless, Napoleon and Eugénie did more to help the working classes than any previous rulers of France.