had been disregarded, even after 1830. He was condemned to detention for life in a fortress, his friend Aladenize being deported, and Montholon, Parquin, Lombard and Fialin being each condemned to detention for twenty years. On the 15th of December, the very day that Napoleon’s ashes were deposited at the Invalides, he was taken to the fortress of Ham. The country seemed to forget him; Lamartine alone foretold that the honours paid to Napoleon I. would shed lustre on his nephew. His prison at Ham was unhealthy, and physical inactivity was painful to the prince, but on the whole the régime imposed upon him was mild, and his captivity was lightened by Alexandrine Vergeot, “la belle sabotière,” or Mdlle Badinguet (he was later nicknamed Badinguet by the republicans). His more intellectual friends, such as Mme Cornu, also came to visit him and assisted him in his studies. He corresponded with Louis Blanc, George Sand and Proudhon, and collaborated with the journalists of the Left, Degeorge, Peauger and Souplet. For six years he worked very hard “at this University of Ham,” as he said. He wrote some Fragments historiques, studies on the sugar-question, on the construction of a canal through Nicaragua, and on the recruiting of the army, and finally, in the Progrès du Pas-de-Calais, a series of articles on social questions which were later embodied in his Extinction du paupérisme (1844). But the same persistent idea underlay all his efforts. “The more closely the body is confined,” he wrote, “the more the mind is disposed to indulge in flights of imagination, and to consider the possibility of executing projects of which a more active existence would never perhaps have left it the leisure to think.” On the 25th of May 1846 he escaped to London, giving as the reason for his decision the dangerous illness of his father. On the 27th of July his father died, before he could accomplish a journey undertaken in spite of the refusal of a passport by the representative of Tuscany.
He was again well received in London, and he “made up for his six years of isolation by a furious pursuit of pleasure.” The duke of Brunswick and the banker Ferrère interested themselves in his future, and gave him money, as did also Miss Howard, whom he later made comtesse de Beauregard, after restoring to her several millions. He was still full of plans and new ideas, always with the same end in view; and for this reason, in spite of his various enterprises, which were sometimes ridiculous, sometimes unpleasant in their consequences, and his unscrupulousness as to the men and means he employed, he always had a kind of greatness. He always retained his faith in his star. “They will come to me without any effort of my own,” he said to Taglioni the dancer; and again to Lady Douglas, who was counselling resignation, he replied, “Though fortune has twice betrayed me, yet my destiny will none the less surely be fulfilled. I wait.” He was not to wait much longer.
As he well perceived, the popularity of his name, the vague “legend” of a Napoleon who was at once a democrat, a soldier and a revolutionary hero, was his only strength. But by his abortive efforts he had not yet been able to win over this immense force of tradition and turn it to his own purposes. The events which occurred from 1848 to 1852 enabled him to do so. He behaved with extraordinary skill, displaying in the heat of the conflict all the abilities of an experienced conspirator, knowing, “like the snail, how to draw in his horns as soon as he met with an obstacle” (Thiers), but supple, resourceful and unscrupulous as to the choice of men and means in his obstinate struggle for power.
At the first symptoms of revolutionary disturbance he returned to France; on the 25th of February he offered his services to the Provisional Government, but, on being requested by it to depart at once, resigned himself to this course. But Persigny, Mocquard and all his friends devoted themselves to an energetic propaganda in the press, by pictures and by songs. After the 15th of May had already shaken the strength of the young republic, he was elected in June 1848 by four departments, Seine, Yonne, Charente-Inférieure and Corsica. In spite of the opposition of the executive committee, the Assembly ratified his election. But he had learnt to wait. He sent in his resignation from London, merely hazarding this appeal: “If the people impose duties on me, I shall know how to fulfil them.” This time events worked in his favour; the industrial insurrection of June made the middle classes and the mass of the rural population look for a saviour, while it turned the industrial population towards Bonapartism, out of hatred for the republican bourgeois. The Legitimists seemed impossible, and the people turned instinctively towards a Bonaparte.
On the 26th of September he was re-elected by the same departments; on the 11th of October the law decreeing the banishment of the Bonapartes was abrogated; on the 26th he made a speech in the Assembly defending his position as a pretender, and cut such a sorry figure that Antony Thouret contemptuously withdrew the amendment by which he had intended to bar him from rising to the presidency. Thus he was able to be a candidate for this formidable power, which had just been defined by the Constituent Assembly and entrusted to the choice of the people, “to Providence,” as Lamartine said. In contrast to Cavaignac he was the candidate of the advanced parties, but also of the monarchists, who reckoned on doing what they liked with him, and of the Catholics, who gave him their votes on condition of his restoring the temporal power to Rome and handing over education to the Church. The former rebel of the Romagna, the Liberal Carbonaro, was henceforth to be the tool of the priests. In his very triumph appeared the ultimate cause of his downfall. On the 10th of December he was elected president of the Republic by 5,434,226 votes against 1,448,107 given to Cavaignac. On the 20th of December he took the oath “to remain faithful to the democratic Republic . . . to regard as enemies of the nation all those who may attempt by illegal means to change the form of the established government.” From this time onward his history is inseparable from that of France. But, having attained to power, he still endeavoured to realize his cherished project. All his efforts, from the 10th of December 1848 to the 2nd of December 1852 tended towards the acquisition of absolute authority, which he wished to obtain, in appearance, at any rate, from the people.
It was with this end in view that he co-operated with the party of order in the expedition to Rome for the destruction of the Roman republic and the restoration of the pope (March 31, 1849), and afterwards in all the reactionary measures against the press and the clubs, and for the destruction of the Reds. But in opposition to the party of order, he defined his own personal policy, as in his letter to Edgard Ney (August 16, 1849), which was not deliberated upon at the council of ministers, and asserted his intention “of not stifling Italian liberty,” or by the change of ministry on the 31st of October 1849, when, “in order to dominate all parties,” he substituted for the men coming from the Assembly, such as Odilon Barrot, creatures of his own, such as Rouher and de Parieu, the Auvergne avocats, and Achille Fould, the banker. “The name of Napoleon,” he said on this occasion, “is in 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.”
In spite of this alarming assertion of his personal policy, he still remained in harmony with the Assembly (the Legislative Assembly, elected on the 28th of May 1849) in order to carry out “a Roman expedition at home,” i.e. to clear the administration of all republicans, put down the press, suspend the right of holding meetings and, above all, to hand over education to the Church (law of the 15th of March 1850). But the machiavellian pretender, daily growing more skilful at manœuvring between different classes and parties, knew where to stop and how to keep up a show of democracy. When the Assembly, by the law of the 31st of May 1850, restricted universal suffrage and reduced the number of the electors from 9 to 6 millions, he was able to throw upon it the whole responsibility for this coup d’état bourgeois. “I cannot understand how you, the offspring of universal suffrage, can defend the restricted suffrage,” said his friend Mme Cornu. “You do not understand,” he replied, “I am preparing the ruin of the Assembly.” “But you will perish with it,” she answered. “On the contrary, when the Assembly is hanging over the precipice, I shall cut the rope.”
