Louis Bonaparte was legitimately popular during his reign. He crushed the opposition in the 1848 election vote to become President of the Second Republic, and the referendum on his coup d’etat in December 1851 garnered 7,145,000 votes in favor and only 592,000 opposed. According to the historian François Furet, these were not rigged results. Even at a low-point in 1863, votes for the Legislative Assembly (the Empire’s rubber-stamp parliament) were 5,300,000 in favor of government candidates against 2,000,000 for the opposition, which represented a trebling of the opposition vote, but still showed that the public was genuinely in favor of the regime.
And yet when the emperor abdicated after his disastrous defeat to the Prussians at Sedan in 1870, nobody mourned his loss. The French elected a republican government and got on with the war, almost like the Emperor had never existed. Even in the unsteady early days of the Third Republic, the political question was over whether France would be a monarchy or a republic. The Empire went away with Louis. In short, the Second Empire enjoyed the support of popular opinion for decades, then disappeared in days without protest. Why?
Why was Napoleon III Popular?
The Bonapartist regime was popular because it was tied to the defense of public order and property, while at the same time it garnered legitimacy through its reliance on direct consultation with the French people through referendums. It was both conservative and popular, as Furet writes. It defended the values of the French Revolution against reaction, but it specifically defended the bourgeois values of 1789, not the radical Jacobin values of 1793. Bonaparte stood for civil liberty, not social equality, for property rights, not the right to earn. France in 1848 had endured two bad monarchies since 1815, and just before the elections it had witnessed the June Days, a Parisian workers’ uprising that had been put down with lots of bloodshed. The parliamentarians of the Second Republic did not look capable of maintaining order, and after all, a republican system of government did not really have any pedigree in France. Meanwhile, people had a lot more stake in law and order than they in the previous decades. The middle class had become very wealthy since the Revolution, and the peasantry had also done well from the sale of confiscated aristocratic and Church land. People wanted to protect their gains more than they wanted a representative government. Ironically, by granting universal suffrage, the Second Republic signed its own death notice and handed power to Louis Bonaparte, who seemed to be able to combine defense of property with democracy by governing directly through the people rather than through a parliamentary republic.
Another thing Napoleon III had going for him was the simple fact of name recognition. The name Bonaparte represented competence, splendor and military glory to a nation that had been sorely lacking all three since 1814. Marx blamed the uneducated, conservative peasantry for Louis-Bonaparte’s election. His triumph presented a major problem to Marx’s theory of history, which Marx was more or less trying to sweep aside by blaming an “uprising of the peasants,” but he was not wrong to characterize the countryside as the chief source of the Prince-President’s support. The simple fact of his name was a major reason for his election in 1848 and his continued success after that point. France’s peasants lacked political education, and indeed did not have much education at all, so when presented with a Bonaparte and a bunch of no-names on their candidate lists, it’s no surprise they sprung for the name they recognized – I have even heard it hypothesized that many peasants may have believed they were voting for the first Napoleon himself. True or not, it wasn’t only conservative peasants who plumped for the Bonaparte name, in any case. Napoleon’s name in France had become something of a stand-in (deservedly or not) for liberal values like anti-royalism, secularism, and support for meritocracy. We know that there was a hefty trade in Napoleonic memorabilia in mid-19th century France. Bonaparte’s name itself had appeal compared to the untried Republicans and the discredited monarchists, and there were many people on both sides of the political spectrum who throught of Napoleon fondly or looked back with pride at their time in la Grande Armée, and saw their vote as a way of restoring that legacy.
Why was there Minimal Opposition?
Upheld by public opinion, there was not much strong opposition to the regime. The main reason was disunity. The monarchists remained divided between the Legitimists, who supported the Bourbon family which had been driven from the throne in 1830, and Orleanists who supported the “bourgeois king” Louis-Phillipe. Unable to unify in opposition, the monarchists retreated to their chateaux, or ended up supporting morally conservative Bonapartist politics, especially as the Emperor tactically aligned himself with the Catholic Church. The Republican opposition, on the other hand, was just driven into exile. Following mass arrests after Louis Bonaparte’s election in 1848, most of his critics from the Left headed to Switzerland or Britain, where they splintered between socialists and liberals. The author Victor Hugo was the loudest voice of criticism during the Second Empire, writing condemnations and mockeries of “Napoleon le Pétit” from his refuges in Brussels and Kent. Interestingly, the strongest opposition to Napoleon III probably came not from the political class but from the same peasants that Marx blamed for electing him. The only part of France to furnish much opposition to the Prince-President’s coup were the south-western countryside and the barren Massif Central, where about 15,000 people, mostly peasants, bravely rose up in defense of the Republic.
So, while the Second Empire might appear to have been running against the tide of history, it was in fact rather stable and supported. It had its disasters, like the Mexican Intervention, and there was a much livelier liberal opposition movement by the 1860s. However, when the Empire went to war with Prussia in 1870 it seemed to be healthier than ever, having just put through a plebiscite which restored some form of legitimate legislative power to elected representatives, which the electorate widely supported. In Paris the crowd cheered the troops marching off to war with Prussia.
How Did a Popular Regime Disappear So Quickly?
The Emperor was a sort of political chimera, who ruled by blending the political traditions of both left and right. There was not really anything to Bonapartist politics except support of Bonaparte. There was no ideological loyalty to his dynasty, like that which the monarchists displayed to their candidates, or the republicans to democracy. Napoleon III governed because he seemed to be the man able to wield power effectively. As Furet writes, he was a banner which people rallied behind to support their own interests, because he defended property, or because he represented French glory. The second he ceased to do any of that, he ceased to have support. Bonapartism never put down deep roots. The only true legitimacy to Bonapartism, for both Napoleon I and Napoleon III, was victory and success. Unfortunately for Louis, his uncle’s military and political skill were not hereditary. His humiliating defeat in 1870 spelled the end of his reign.
I think Marx best saw through Louis Napoleon for what he really was: a pale imitation of his uncle, a personified manifestation of déja-vu without any of the skill or glory. Marx wrote that the Emperor would go the second a crisis revealed his true colors: “He duplicates in Paris in the cult of the Napoleonic imperial mantle. But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendôme Column.” He was right. In March 1871, as the Emperor headed off to exile in England, the Communards toppled the imperial column in the Place Vendôme.
TL;DR
Napoleon III seemed like the best of both political worlds to many French, someone who could safeguard property rights for the people who had been enriched by the Revolution, while at the same time defending their civic rights through his commitment to universal suffrage and his opposition to royalism. Much like his uncle, Napoleon III appeared to be a savior of the nation from Republican incompetence and royalist scheming, safeguarding the Revolution of 1789 from its enemies on the Left and the Right. But there was no deep roots to this political support, which was opportunistic and behind the Emperor as long as he guaranteed prosperity, safety, and glory. The second he ceased to do so, he was finished. As the historian François Furet writes: "When it came to the test, the Empire found no defenders anywhere, because the Bonaparte dynasty had no supporters."
Sources:
Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
----------------------, The Republic in the Village: The People of Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770-1880, Blackwell: Oxford, 1988.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon, London: Granta, 2004.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852