NEVER had the fact that all governmental power in France was centralized in Paris reacted more decidedly, and on the whole more unfortunately, upon the nation, than in February, 1848. The departments had had almost no part in the new revolution: they certainly had little sympathy with the extreme radicals who had fought the movement through to physical success. The average peasant, or bourgeois in the small towns, was only very mildly interested in politics. He wanted assured conditions for his farm or business, light taxes, personal liberty, and a government at Paris which appeared to be reasonably progressive and which would maintain for France a leadership among the nations. The country was frankly disgusted with the policy of absolute prudence (Americans would say of "safety first") in foreign affairs which seemed to make France cringe to outsiders, especially to England, lest by any show of resolution the financiers in Paris should see their bonds go down in value during foreign complications. But as for constitutional details the provincial Frenchman cared next to nothing. It is a damning indictment of the Guizot-Louis-Philippe rulers that notwithstanding this state of political quiescence, they were unable to keep their hold upon the Government. It is true, it was radical Paris which expelled them. It is also true that nowhere in the departments was there the slightest hope of any material action to prevent their expulsion.
And so France found a "republic" thrust upon her overnight. This result was accepted with reasonable submission if with very little enthusiasm. But any acute student of public opinion would have said that to make the republic succeed, it must be a very orderly, reasonable, moderate republic, carefully respecting the rights of property, and not endeavoring to produce Utopias too rapidly. This is precisely what the "Second Republic" did not do. The result was a reaction to dictatorship and then to open imperialism, on the ground that Cæsarism was far better than anarchy. The violence of the Paris Socialists in 1848 was the best argument for the founding and for the existence of the "Second Empire."
On account of its experiment with part of the programme of socialism, the Second Republic presents great interest to students of economic theory and sociology. As historical students, however, the episodes of 1848 need not detain us very long. Their main importance was: (1) to disgust the French nation with half-baked experiments of radicalism; (2) to hasten thereby the coming to power of Napoleon III, as the champion of "order."
The Republicans who overthrew Louis-Philippe were themselves seriously divided. The moderate Republicans, whereof the eloquent Lamartine was a typical leader, aimed for a democratic republic with the beloved tricolor flag. The radical Republicans, led notably by Louis Blanc, desired asocialistic republic with the red flag of extreme revolution. The moderates and the radicals at first worked together. They both wished some kind, at least, of a republic. The moderates had on the whole the upper hand in the new provisional government, but they had to make heavy concessions to the radicals who struck while the iron was hot. In March, 1848, "all citizens" were to be enrolled in the National Guard. It ceased to be merely a bourgeois affair. Soon in Paris it contained 190,000 instead of 56,000 members – most of the reinforcements coming from the industrialists. Political clubs, often controlled by the most violent type of agitators, sprang up like mushrooms. There were repeated armed demonstrations before the City Hall, where the provisional government had its seat; and the terrified administrators were driven to one concession after another. On February 25, following such a demonstration, Louis Blanc carried the decree, "The Government of the French Republic undertakes to guarantee the existence of the working-man by labor, and to provide labor for all citizens." This was soon followed by a decree ordaining "national workshops."
On February 28, following a second demonstration, the administrators created a "government committee on the laboring class with the express mission of looking after their interests." Blanc and Albert as heads of this committee took their seats in the Luxembourg. They were able to issue some useful and highly proper orders: for example, reducing the normal working day to ten hours in Paris and eleven hours in the departments. All sorts of excellent schemes were mooted. The employers, however, sullenly resisted the committee. The radicals demanded that it should produce instantaneous results. The committee (with very little power to enforce its mandates) wasted its time in futile conferences, while both sides, of course, grew distrustful and angry.
Finally, on April 26, the radicals attempted to coerce the Government again. The working-men's clubs paraded en masse to the City Hall to demand "the abolition of the exploitation of one man by another, and for the organization of labor by association." Just what was implied by this demand was not wholly clear. Seventy-five years later the world would have called it "Bolshevism" – perhaps unjustly. But the moderate Republicans were taking fright. The east of Paris might rage for socialism, but to submit to it would be about the surest way to send the rest of France back to monarchy. Ledru-Rollin, one of the most prominent leaders in the anti-Orléanist movement, called out various reliable companies of the National Guard, which met the working-men before the City Hall with the counter-cry of "Down with the Communists!" For the instant the radicals quailed and dispersed.
So all the socialistic schemes seemed to have fizzled out, save only the "National Workshops." Even these institutions were conducted, it would seem, by men who secretly desired that they should fail, although in fair truth it must be said that any such project would obviously require the most careful introduction and the working-out of details to have any hope of success; and the Socialists were demanding that the new organizations should spring up like mushrooms and function overnight. The disturbances in Paris produced an abundance of unemployed labor. There were 6000 "national" working-men early in March, 1848. There were soon 25,000; and there were over 100,000 in May. Obviously great factories could not be provided at once for all of these, without wholesale expropriations from which the Government shrank. The men were therefore employed in building fortifications around Paris at two francs (forty cents) per day. Presently to save money (the treasury was in a most sorry condition) these laborers were kept busy only two days of the week. For the other four they were left idle on only one franc (twenty cents) per day. Paris was thus full of disgruntled and often ignorant men, with all too much time on their hands and very ready to listen to extremist orators with their catalogues of grievances.
Meantime the provisional government was trying desperately to get its young republic really started. The finances were in confusion. Loans could not be floated. The only expedient was to increase the direct taxes about forty-five per cent – a proceeding which naturally made the peasants and bourgeois very angry. Under this unpleasant condition the elections were held for the Constituent Assembly which was to arrange the permanent government of France. The balloting was by universal suffrage, and 900 members were chosen from the various departments. The Assembly was to administer the government, until it completed its labors, by means of an executive committee of five. Under the circumstances the expected happened. The old Bourbons had few friends; the Orléanists were for the moment utterly discredited; the Bonapartists had had no time to organize and to lift their heads. The great majority of the Convention therefore professed to desire a republic. But very few Socialist deputies were elected, and a considerable number of delegates represented the great landowners and the clergy – elements still very powerful. The radicals would obviously get little comfort from such an Assembly.
It did not take long for the Paris Socialists to discover the facts of the case, and to determine that "there's no receipt like pike and drum for mending constitutions." Not to be thwarted now had they fought behind the barricades in February. On May 15 armed bands thrust themselves into the Assembly Hall, and were in the very act of declaring that the whole body was dissolved and that a new "Provisional Government" was set up, when a sudden rally of the National Guard chased them out. There was no bloodshed. But the Assembly was rendered justly fearful. It made arrests, closed the political clubs, and decided to strike at the heart of the matter by winding up the "national workshops." They were costing 150,000 francs per day, and were accomplishing little save to "tear up the paving, and to remove earth uselessly" at the Champ de Mars. Doubtless Louis Blanc's enemies were bringing this to pass in order to discredit his whole set of liberal and not wholly impractical proposals. But in any case the situation was intolerable. On the 21st of June, 1848, the Assembly ordered the national workshops closed. The younger workmen could enlist in the army; the older would be given jobs on the public works in the departments.
The Assembly thus flung down the gauntlet. The Socialists promptly took it up. They had now an elaborate organization and plenty of muskets, though they were short of artillery. All the east of Paris, from the Pantheon clear to the Boulevard Saint-Martin, was turned into an entrenched camp with over 400 barricades, often built scientifically and elaborately, with moats and battlements sometimes rising higher than the first stories of the houses. Behind these were at least 50,000 insurgents. The Government had for the moment only 40,000 troops, regulars and reliable National Guards, to send against them; but it was now a case of the working quarters of Paris against nearly all the rest of France. The bourgeois National Guards from the suburbs, and later from the out-lying cities and communities in a wide circuit, came gradually swarming in "all eager to exterminate the Socialists." The Assembly gave General Cavaignac, an old Republican agitator but no Socialist, dictatorial powers to crush the radicals. Four days long the desperate struggle lasted, bloody to the last degree. The streets of Paris were raked with artillery. The Archbishop was shot down while trying to interpose between the raging combatants. On June 26 the last entrenchments of the "Reds" were stormed in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. How many thousands perished in these bloody "Days of June" can never be safely guessed. Eleven thousand prisoners were taken by the Government troops, and of these 3000 were exiled to Algeria without trial, by a simple decree of the Assembly.
This explosion had very important consequences. The industrial classes were crushed and beaten for the moment, but their hatred toward the bourgeois and the peasants (who had clearly sided with the bourgeois) was intense and lasting. It was to mark an evil schism in France. On the other hand, the bourgeois themselves were terrified and threatened in fortune. The national bonds had sold for 116 in February. They were worth only 50 in April; the June commotions did nothing to restore their value! Many worthy merchants and small manufacturers were utterly ruined by the existing business prostration. What but evil had this much-vaunted Republic brought them? Was it not better to have' a "strong government" well able to assure "order." As for the peasants they found that the changed régime had merely brought forty-five per cent higher taxes, and they were led to believe (perhaps unjustly) that the execrated "Reds" intended to begin a wholesale division of farm lands. They, like the bourgeois, sighed for a government that would permit none of these things.
The Assembly, however, had been elected before this revulsion of popular feeling. It continued to be mildly Republican. With much labor a new constitution was drafted which it was hoped would avoid the evils of the brave efforts of 1791 and 1795. The United States had by this time been in existence long enough to present some pretty clear examples of how to get along without monarchy. Unfortunately, however, the Assembly failed to borrow many excellent points in the American Constitution, and it woefully failed to recognize the essential difference between many things in America and in France. Briefly speaking the "Constitution of 1848" set up a President, elected for a term of four years by direct universal suffrage. He was clothed with very large executive powers, but was not eligible for reëlection immediately upon retirement. Over against him was set a single Legislative Assembly of 750 members also chosen by universal suffrage. The means for securing reconciliation between President and Assembly in case of friction were, to say the least, very scanty and imperfect. It had been proposed that the Assembly should choose the President, but Lamartine, the silver-tongued orator of the year, the historian of the Girondists and himself partaking of their Utopian spirit, had cried magnificently, "Let God and the nation speak – something must be left to Providence!" And so "God and the nation" were allowed to choose "Napoleon the Little."
"Thus," says a penetrating French historian (Seignobos), "was the American mechanism transported from a federal government, without an army and without a functionary class, into a centralized government, provided with an irresistible army and a body of office-holders accustomed to ruling." What wonder the life of the Second Republic was a short and unhappy one!
By December, 1848, the new Constitution had been proclaimed, and France was in the throes of a presidential election. Instantly there came on the scene a man who was destined to stand in the center of the politics of Europe for two and twenty years, then to disappear amid a great national catastrophe.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, born in 1808, was the son of Louis, the brother of Napoleon I, who from 1806 to 1810 had been King of Holland. He, with the rest of the Bonaparte family, following 1814, had spent his life in various forms of exile. His branch of the family had had a decent private fortune, and young Louis Napoleon was brought up partly in Switzerland and partly in South Germany. There, it is said, he acquired a slight German accent which he never wholly lost. His ambitious mother did not cease to fill him with the consciousness that he was the heir to a great potential heritage. "With your name," she would say, "you will always count for something, whether in the Old World of Europe or in the New."
In 1832 there died in Austria the unfortunate Duke of Reichstadt, "Napoleon II," son of Napoleon I and Maria Louisa. The passing of this poor youth, "the Eaglet," left Louis Napoleon the best claimant in the family to the Bonapartist heritage. Henceforth he began to take himself very seriously, to gather up the loose threads of old Bonapartist plots and conspiracies, and to begin a literary progapanda in favor of a new "Empire" as the true solution for the political ills of France. He appeared to be a hopeless visionary, and the July Monarchists did not regard him as in any way dangerous, until suddenly he appeared in Strasbourg in 1836 and made a desperate attempt to seduce the garrison. He was arrested, placed on a ship bound for America, and released in New York in April (A1837); but in August he slipped back to Switzerland. Later he spent much time in London. The disgust already developing against Louis- Philippe's régime prevented this pretender's claims from perishing under sheer ridicule. He gathered a certain number of ardent friends. "Would you believe it," the bluff old Duke of Wellington wrote of him, "this young man will not have it said he is not going to be Emperor of the French! 'His chief thoughts are of what he will do 'when he comes to the throne.'" In 1839 he published a book, "Napoleonic Ideas," to justify his hopes and propaganda. This book "a curious mixture of Bonapartism, socialism, and pacifism," represented Napoleon I absurdly enough as the supreme champion of French liberty, having been entrusted by the people with the task of protecting their freedom against reactionaries.
In 1840 Louis Napoleon strove once again to seize the throne. His attempt this time was by means of a small "filibustering" expedition across the Channel to Boulogne. The attempt failed even more abjectly than the one at Strasbourg. Its leader was held prisoner in the fortress of Ham, but in 1846 he escaped thence in a somewhat cheap-novel manner, and got back to London. There he remained two years more, still in good countenance, dreaming dreams and seeing visions. "Though fortune has twice betrayed me," he would say, "yet my destiny will none the less surely be fulfilled.I wait." In 1848 he waited no longer.
After the fall of the July Monarchy he promptly turned up in France. He had influence enough, thanks to the awakening of Bonapartist memories, to get elected to the new Constituent Assembly. But he would not take his seat at first. He realized that the Assembly was likely to make mistakes and he did not wish to share the blame for them. He had thus no part in the notorious Days of June. However, in September he took a seat. When in October a law was proposed intended to make it impossible for him to run for the presidency, he made so poor a speech defending his position, that Thouret, who had made the hostile motion, contemptuously withdrew it on the ground that such a proviso was wholly unnecessary. Hardly two months later, however, this "pretender," whom shrewd politicians treated as little better than a dreamy fool, suddenly became a most formidable candidate for the presidency.
He had powerful backing. The great Church element, which had been under disfavor in Louis-Philippe's day, believed it saw in him a candidate who would put the Clericals once more into at least part of their power. The peasants were scared and angry at all that the Republican leaders had done or produced since February. The memories of the glories of the Empire had become increasingly gilded by distance. The peasants knew that above all things Napoleon I had stood for "law and order." They hated Cavaignac the "Democratic" candidate, and Ledru-Rollin the "Socialist" candidate. The Royalists of both persuasions resolved to vote Bonapartist: the pretender, they argued, would probably make a quick failure, then the Monarchists could return. The result was that nearly all the departments of France"went heavily," as Americans would say, for this obscure idealist and petty conspirator. Over 5,430,000 Frenchmen voted for Louis Napoleon; 1,450,000 for Cavaignac; only about 370,000 for Ledru-Rollin.
The new President promptly seized the reins of power. He took oath "to remain faithful to the democratic Republic . . . and to regard as enemies all who may attempt to change the form of the government." He then promptly showed his hand by naming ministers who were mostly ex-Orléanists and Catholics. The Republic was to find in him a peculiar "guardian" indeed.
From the moment Louis Napoleon took over the presidency (December 20, 1848) to the moment he overthrew the Constitution which he had sworn to defend, it was perfectly safe to predict that he would make some effort to harden into permanent power. Considering his Bonapartist blood and theories to ask anything else of him was unreasonable. The change, however, might have come less violently. It might also have been entirely thwarted had there been a sane and united opposition. As it was, almost everything played straight into the adroit adventurer's hands.
In May, 1849, the new "Legislative Assembly" had been elected. Anti-Republican reaction was in full swing. Over 500 of the 750 members were of one stripe or another of Monarchists. The Republican minority was not itself united; some were moderates, some "Reds." France thus faced this bizarre situation: the legal government was a Republic, but the President desired to transform the government into one form of monarchy; the majority of the deputies into still another form of monarchy. It was easy for the President and the majority to work together to make a return to radicalism impossible. The rub came when they attempted a constructive programme for the future. The policy of Louis Napoleon from 1849 to 1851 was extraordinarily clever. He confirmed himself in the good graces of the Clericals by sending an army to Rome to overthrow the revolutionaries there, and to renew the temporal power of Pope Pius IX. He sat back while the Legislative Assembly, on its own initiative, passed laws gagging the press, suspending the right of public meeting, and finally, in May, 1850, ordering that hereafter three years' residence in a district was necessary in order to be a voter. This struck off the list over three million migratory workmen and laborers. The law was very unpopular, but the Assembly reaped all the blame. "I cannot understand how you, the offspring of universal suffrage," said a friend to Louis Napoleon, "can defend the restricted suffrage?" "You do not understand," replied the President; "I am preparing the ruin of the Assembly." "But you will perish with it," was the suggestion. "On the contrary," Louis Napoleon declared, "when the Assembly is hanging over the precipice I shall cut the rope!" Very soon it became evident that the President's chief public asset was the fact that he had had a very famous uncle. "The name of Napoleon," he said in an address, "is itself a programme. It stands for order, authority, religion, and the welfare of the people in internal affairs; and in foreign affairs for the national dignity." Great reviews were held of the army, likewise public festivals, at which loud-voiced individuals (possibly not without monetary inspiration) would cry, "Long live Napoleon!" or even, "Long live the Emperor!" A general who ordered his men not to do this was cashiered. Around the President was soon gathering a group of short-pedigreed, bold, adroit, political and military adventurers, who saw every kind of personal profit in lifting a fellow adventurer into permanent power. The ministers and most of the public officials were completely controlled by the President. A change in the presidency would pretty plainly imply a change in all their well-paid comfortable offices. As Americans would assert, a great political "machine" was speedily in the making.
The immediate object of this machine was to insure Louis Napoleon's reëflection as President. His term would run out late in 1852. The Constitution forbade his reëflection. But the Assembly could change this arrangement by a two-thirds vote. The change was requested and was denied in a very untactful manner (July 19, 1851). The President could say that he had been chosen by the wills of the vast majority of all Frenchmen: very likely this same majority wished to reëlect him. Was the mere letter of a constitution, hastily drafted and wholly untested by experience, to set aside the deliberate will of the nation? When a political leader once abandons himself to such questionings all the rest is easy.
From 1848 to 1851 Louis Napoleon was thus taking every possible measure to transform his presidential chair into a throne. At his palace, the Elysée, he appealed to all kinds of interests. He enjoyed being called '"Prince," "Highness," and "Monseigneur," but listened calmly when styled plain "Citizen." He flattered the clergy at every turn, distributed sausages and cigars to soldiers, chattered to sedate bourgeois about the need of "order in the streets," and then went out on tours in the provinces and was all friendliness and benignity to the peasants. But while the President thus pursued a course of wise modesty, his friends were acting for him. The men who erected the Second Empire were neither elegant noblemen, wild-eyed radicals, nor sword-clattering soldiers. They were men who might have felt in congenial company around a gambling table or manipulating unstable bonds and stocks. One of the President's prime counselors and men of action was his illegitimate half-brother, De Morny, "well fitted to keep secrets, to conduct plots, and to do the cruelest things in a jocund, offhand way." Another adventurer was a De Persigny who had changed his name, probably for good reasons, from Fialin. Another was Saint-Arnaud, a headlong, courageous soldier who had won a considerable fame in Algeria, where daredevil leadership counted for more against the Arabs than did textbook strategy. He also had changed his name, having once been Le Roy, and then again Florival, while he had been an actor in a small Paris theater. Saint-Arnaud was counted "an excellent administrator, a cultivated and agreeable companion, perfectly unscrupulous, and ready to assist in any scheme of what he considered necessary cruelty." There were other satellites of the President – De Maupas, Rouher, Magnan, etc. – all of about the same dusky character. To make Louis Napoleon autocrat meant for them, of course, incalculable personal gain.
The Constitution of 1848 had made it possible for a gang of greedy adventurers like these to conspire with the President to subvert the nation. The divisions and the utter political ineptitude of the Legislative Assembly made it possible for this conspiracy to proceed with very reasonable hopes of success.
By December, 1851, all was ready for springing the plot. The conspirators were satisfied (1) that public opinion in France would acquiesce in the overthrow of the Assembly; (2) that the Republican movement was for the time being nearly dead; (3) that the army (carefully flattered and manipulated) could be relied upon to obey orders from "Napoleon."
To handle the army, on whose action in the last analysis everything depended, Saint-Arnaud was put in as Minister of War. Men realized something was coming. A prominent deputy declared, "When you see Saint-Arnaud a minister, say, 'Here is the coup d'état.'" Another congenial spirit was De Maupas, appointed now as prefect of the Paris police, a most ticklish office in the crisis. The President said to him, "Here I am on the edge of a ditch full of water. On the other side I see safety for the country. Will you be one of the men to help me across?" De Maupas was charmed at the responsibility.
However, up to the very last, Louis Napoleon hesitated to take the leap or the plunge: halting "between the desire to establish himself firmly in power without risking anything, and the fear of losing that power if he risked nothing." It was De Morny and the rest who at last overbore his doubtings, and forced him to take action. On the evening of December 1, 1851, the President was greeting casual guests at his reception at the Élysée. When the last visitor had departed, the chief magistrate of the Republic went into his smoking-room with De Morny, Saint-Arnaud, and a few others. Orders then flew fast, and everything moved like clock-work. A time schedule had been drawn up, adjusted down to minutes: at such a fixed time certain obnoxious generals were to be arrested; at such a time troops were to assume given positions; at such a time every printing-office in Paris was to be surrounded. The plan, in short, involved the arrest of practically every man in Paris prominent in politics since February, 1848, saving only the President's sworn myrmidons.
The execution of the coup was a masterpiece. Gendarmes seized the Government printing-office. Proclamations were set up, but the copy for each split into such short sections that no compositor could get an idea of the entire document. When dawn broke on December 2, the Parisians found the soldiers patrolling the streets and the walls placarded with the President's manifestoes. The Assembly was declared dissolved, universal suffrage was restored, and a plebiscite was ordered to be held very shortly to determine the future constitution. Two regiments of regulars held the "Legislative Palace," and soon the news spread that practically all the leaders of the deputies, Royalists, Republicans, and "Reds" alike, were safe in the Mazas Prison. A wholesale arrest of journalists and unofficial agitators was going on. The President's aim was of course to deprive all the elements that might resist the coup of any possible leaders.
However, it was impossible to seize all the deputies. About two hundred of them made their way to the "Mairie" of the Tenth Arrondissement of Paris. Here they hastily organized, declared the President deposed for treason, and announced that the Assembly was still in lawful session. But theirs was merely so much empty thunder. De Maupas sent General Forney to break up the gathering, and the end of this despairing session was the departure of these last supporters of the Constitution marching away to prison between two lines of soldiers.
There was one last recourse. Victor Hugo, the famous author, Jules Favre, and other prominent Liberals tried it. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine was still the hotbed of radicalism. At the summons of the Liberals a number of the old radical fighters took up arms. Barricades rose on the evening of the 3d; but not until the 4th was there any serious bloodshed. Then Saint- Arnaud drove his troops over the barricades, and used grapeshot pitilessly even upon unarmed spectators. The resistance, that had been too much for Charles X and Louis-Philippe, and which had almost baffled Cavaignac in 1848, had been snuffed out now by the regulars. Paris was firmly in the hands of the nephew of the Corsican.
Paris was won: but Paris was not the whole of France. As the news of the Coup d'État spread, there were serious uprisings in several centers of democratic sympathies; especially in the South Country and around Marseilles there was resistance which taxed the local gendarmerie. De Morny, who had been appointed Minister of the Interior the moment his half-brother seized Paris, crushed these demonstrations with an iron hand. The Bonapartists exaggerated the amount of disturbance in order to pose before the bourgeois and well-to-do peasants as "saviors of the country" from general upheaval and ruin. De Morny authorized his departmental prefects to replace all mayors, schoolmasters, and local justices, who were in any sense unreliable. Suspected persons were to be arrested instantly. On December 6 he ordered that no newspaper could appear unless one of his trusted prefects had first seen the proofs. "The Administration," De Morny proclaimed, "needed all its moral force to accomplish its work of regeneration and salvation." And on the 8th, he ordered wholesale arrests, as convicts and criminals at common law, of "all those rascally members of secret societies and unrecognized political associations."
Under these circumstances, bewildered, fed only with absolutely censored, and often with deliberately perverted, information, with all free agencies of opinion enchained, or at least intimidated by the military, what possible chance was there for a proper expression of national judgment when the plebiscite was held on December 20, 1851? There was martial law in 32 departments, while 26,642 persons had been arrested, and these victims were being tried by special tribunals acting without a jury. The people were asked whether they were willing to allow Louis Napoleon to draw up a new constitution. No alternative was presented. If a majority had been registered against the President, he ought logically to have retired from office and resigned the administration to sheer anarchy. De Morny used all the machinery of the Government to "insure the free and sincere expression of the will of the nation," and to insure that it expressed itself in one particular way. Every kind of expedient was to be used by the public officials "in the smallest hamlets" to get a favorable vote. "Liberty of conscience" was granted, De Morny wrote to the departmental prefects, "but the resolute and consistent use of every allowable means of influence and persuasion is what I expect of you."
Such eminently practical methods produced results. Choosing between Louis Napoleon and anarchy, the French nation chose Louis Napoleon. There were cast in his favor 7,481,000 votes: 647,000 against him. He promptly proclaimed himself "President for ten years," with almost autocratic powers and with a legislature entirely at his mercy. Few were greatly interested in this last phase of the "Republic" and of its "Prince President." All knew what was speedily to come.
To clear the way for the final step, De Morny, who never flinched from "dirty work," hastened the judicial forces in which prominent radicals were hurried before rigid tribunals and finally before a special Court of Justice – a kind of reversed Revolutionary Tribunal to deal summarily with political offenders. "The number of guilty persons and the fear of public strife," said De Morny in a circular, "did not admit of acting otherwise." All in all, well over 20,000 such cases found their way into these special courts. There was little to fear from the old conservatives: they were soon released. With the Republicans and even with moderate Liberals it was different. Of these 3000 were imprisoned in France, about 10,000 were exiled to Algeria, and about 6000 were allowed to live at home under police "supervision." But a very great number more, including some of the most distinguished men in the nation, were in exile in England, Belgium, or Switzerland. As George Sand wrote in 1852, "When you go into the provinces and see how crushed is the spirit, you must bear in mind all the force [of public opinion] lay in a few men – now in prison, dead, or banished."
On March 29, 1852, the Prince-President solemnly proclaimed the new Constitution, announcing grandiloquently, "The dictatorship entrusted to me by the people terminates to-day." It might well terminate. A higher title than "Dictator" was awaiting him. When he toured through France he was received literally with royal honors. He made speeches clearly indicating he was soon to be a monarch, and promising how excellent would be his rule. Many conservatives had feared he would imitate his uncle and plunge France into dangerous wars. He strove hard to reassure them. At Bordeaux he made his famous statement, "The Empire means peace." Then came the climax. The "Senate," newly created by the new Constitution, proceeded to pass a decree to the effect that France was an Empire and that "Napoleon III was Emperor of the French." Again there was the inevitable plebiscite (November 21, 1852). The radicals were crushed and without heart. There was no organized opposition: 7,824,000 Frenchmen voted "Yes" to the question of the enthronement of the Bonapartist; 253,000 were allowed to be counted for "No." On December 2, l852, the anniversary of Austerlitz and of the Coup d'État, "Napoleon III" became hereditary Emperor, and took to himself all the splendid trappings of French autocracy. And so the circle from monarchy to monarchy was closed.
Thus was completed one of the most remarkable personal successes in history. A man who a very few years earlier had been (to quote Queen Victoria's own words) "in exile, poor and unthought of," was now practically the autocrat of what was then counted the most wealthy and powerful country in Continental Europe. Louis Napoleon was, during the next ten years, to become the most commanding figure in Europe, filling men's thoughts and imaginations to an extent the present age can hardly realize. But all through his days of greatness the memory of the treachery and brutality of the Coup d'État was to cling to him and from their exile implacable enemies were to brand him as "Napoleon the Little" and "the Pinchbeck Napoleon." In 1870 the world was to learn that these names were justified.