ABSTRACT
The experiment of the Second Republic ended in profound disillusionment. The extravagant hopes of the birth of a new society at home and of the liberation of peoples abroad had come to nought. Within a few months there had been civil war in Paris and the economic crisis had been intensified. This crisis had persisted in many branches of the national economy: credit was impaired, the metallurgical, mining, and building industries continued to be depressed, while farmers were now dismayed by harvests so abundant that corn prices were lower than at any time since 1787. More remarkable still, 276,000 people had been driven to emigrate since 1845. Thus for a large section of the community the Republic had come to be synonymous with an instability which was injurious to the economic as well as the political well-being of the nation. The PrincePresident for his part did not scruple to encourage this disenchantment or to diffuse the belief that only by giving him a free hand and by the restoration of the Empire could France recover confidence in the future. So, on Louis Napoleon came to centre many hopes, and the coup d’état together with his assumption a year later, on 2 December 1852, of the Imperial title, with the name of Napoleon III, were generally welcomed. He had won the support of the army and gratified it by a special proclamation on the morrow of the coup d’état: now under a Napoleon it could hope for greater scope and prestige. His accession was accepted by most of the remaining Saint-Simonian economists and by members of the financial aristocracy who had previously supported the July Monarchymen such as Fould, Magne and Billault, ‘Orleanists of the second generation’, as they have been called, were to hold office throughout the greater part of the Second Empire. It was welcomed by the industrialists, business men and shopkeepers, who hoped for economic recovery under a strong government and mistakenly believed that the Emperor was a whole-hearted protectionist. It was hailed by most peasants, who hoped for higher prices, and even by many workers who hoped that the Emperor might yet prove to be the champion of their interests against the employers. It pleased the majority of the Catholics who were now increasingly Ultramontane and looked forward to a new alliance of Throne and Altar although the new ruler was no believer. Napoleon had posed as a saviour of society, and for the most part society accepted him as such. The Empire stood above all for order and social security, and because, after the turmoil of the last years, the majority of Frenchmen now counted these as the chiefest blessings, it was with comparative equanimity that they saw the disappearance of the relatively free institutions which they had enjoyed since 1815. The plebiscite of December 1851 had approved the coup d’état by an overwhelming majority of 7,481,000 to 647,000, and the plebiscite upon the restoration of the Empire was almost as striking a victory for the Emperor. As an English historian has well remarked, ‘For better or for worse the people had made the act their own…. If the coup d’état was a crime France was less its victim than its
accomplice.’ Only for a small minority, the half million or so who voted ‘No’ and the sullen abstainers, did he remain ‘the man of December 2nd’, yet, as the same historian has pointed out, while Louis Napoleon ‘appealed to the French people not as a tyrant, but as a tyrannicide…the fact remains that the Constitution was suppressed by the one man in the world who had sworn to uphold it’.1
