Napoleon III and the French Second Empire (9 page)

constituencies as a result of multiple candidacies), five were successful in Paris (Carnot, Goudchaux, Cavaignac, Ollivier and Darimon) and one in Lyons (Hénon).

The refusal of Carnot to take the oath of allegiance and the death of Cavaignac, were followed by renewed victories in the ensuing by-elections, with the election of Jules Favre and Ernest Picard. Substantial support for the republican cause was also evident in other large cities, in spite of the restrictions placed upon opposition electioneering. For the urban
classes populaires
, the republic clearly remained the ideal form of government. However, these successes also revealed the continued strength of divisions within the republican movement. There was clearly a gulf between the more intransigent who claimed that abstention was the only principled policy and those, frequently representatives of the younger generation, like Ollivier and Darimon who were less rigid in their attitudes. Equally evident was the division which had caused so much strife in 1848 between the moderates, including all the elected deputies who were essentially democratic liberals committed to political change, and the radical and socialist advocates of social reform.

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4

Liberalisation

From 1860 the context for political activity was again to be gradually transformed.

Although, contrary to the periodisation commonly employed by historians, it is difficult to agree that a genuinely ‘liberal’ empire existed before May 1869 when most of the restrictions on the right to hold public meetings as well as on the press were finally lifted, significant steps had already been taken towards the creation of a parliamentary regime. A decree on 24 November 1860 conceded to the
Corps
législatif
the right to discuss the address from the throne outlining government policy at the beginning of each parliamentary session. The Emperor further

announced his attention to nominate ministers without portfolio (initially Magne, Billault and Baroche) and, in 1863, a minister of state (Billault then Rouher) to explain and defend government policy before parliament. Moreover,

parliamentary debates were now to be reproduced in full in the official
Moniteur
and might be reprinted in other newspapers. Publicity would provide the essential stimulus to debate. In December 1861, the Emperor responded to anxiety in

conservative financial circles about the growth of the national debt and the unconventional arrangements made by Haussmann, as Prefect of the department of the Seine, for financing the massive public works programme which was

transforming the capital. He conceded greater parliamentary control over the budget. This would provide the essential means for the extension of parliamentary influence in every sphere of policy. Throughout the decade too, although

repressive legislation remained intact, much greater tolerance was displayed towards the press and public meetings, partly because of the adverse public 39

reaction to the
loi de sûreté générale
. The introduction of more permissive legislation in 1868 would be seen by conservatives as the final opening of the flood gates.

Reasons for liberalisation

Why did this process of liberalisation occur? It seems likely that once social order had been secured, the Emperor had always intended to proceed with measures of reconciliation directed at liberals and republicans. He was encouraged in this, to varying degrees, by his half-brother Morny and by his cousins Walewski – the illegitimate son of Napoléon I – and the Prince Napoléon-Jérôme and he chose to ignore the misgivings of his more authoritarian ministers – Baroche, Fould and Rouher. He was anxious, given his own deteriorating health and the youth of his heir, the Prince-Imperial (born in 1856), to create a regime less dependent upon his own survival. It seems likely that he also realised that authoritarian government was becoming an obstacle to the maintenance of the business confidence so vital to the achievement of the economic and social modernisation he believed were

essential both to internal stabilisation and the retention of France’s great power status. Initially, at least, liberalisation probably represented confidence in the strength and stability of the regime and in its ability to control the process of change. However, the diverse series of ambitious decisions taken from 1859 and affecting both internal and foreign policy had complex and often contradictory effects. These included an amnesty for republicans; alliance with Piedmont-Savoy in support of a ‘Europe of the nationalities’ and as a further stage in the rejection of the humiliating peace imposed on France at Vienna in 1815; a loosening of the alliance between church and state established during the Second Republic in reaction against rampant clericalism; the path-breaking 1860 commercial treaty with Britain and subsequently with other major trading partners which

substantially reduced tariff protection, as a means of intensifying competitive pressures and forcing the pace of modernisation, of opening up new markets, and of improving diplomatic relations with Britain; the growing role accorded to the
Corps législatif
; and the legalisation of strikes in 1864. The sense of grievance aroused by these policies among a wide range of social groups, together with the growing awareness that the regime was unlikely again to resort to brute force against its opponents, encouraged increasingly open and vocal criticism,

especially from those clericals and liberals who were reminded by the Italian and 40

free trade policies that the Emperor was capable of using his prerogative powers to develop personal policies which might damage their own particular interests.

Thus, they were encouraged to demand even greater parliamentary control over policy and a range of political reforms intended to increase their own influence.

The growing vitality of this liberal opposition, and increasingly also of the republicans, soon made it clear that the Emperor had failed to achieve his objective of securing some sort of national reconciliation. In this situation, Napoléon III, unlike his predecessors, was prepared to adapt. Liberalisation became primarily a means of assuring the elites upon whose cooperation the regime inescapably

depended, by means of the restoration of at least some of the political power they had possessed during the July Monarchy. The prolonged and apparently grudging character of the process, however, would ensure that these socially conservative liberals would be less grateful than they might otherwise have been. Management of the process by which an authoritarian regime liberalised itself was fraught with all manner of difficulties. Once expectations had been aroused it would prove increasingly difficult to satisfy them. The Emperor’s motives were always

suspect. Certainly considerable suspicion would be aroused by his openings to the left. These involved conciliatory overtures to workers initiated by a discussion group established in the Palais Royale in Paris in 1861 by the ‘republican’ prince, Napoléon-Jérôme; the dispatch of a workers’ delegation to the 1862 London

International Exposition; the legalisation of strikes in 1864 which was combined with the growing toleration of technically illegal workers’ organisations; and the ending of the inequality enshrined in legislation which had accepted the

employers’ word in preference to the workers’ in case of dispute. Ultimately, this attempt to reduce the regime’s dependence on the old elites failed. It could never have had more than a marginal impact on the conduct of government even if it had succeeded in reinforcing the regime’s electoral strength. In practice, there was little alternative to the continued dependence on the traditional conservative and liberal political elites. In consequence, as support from all quarters declined, liberalisation increasingly came to represent a response to pressure. It constituted a sort of holding action against the apparently unending growth of opposition.

The growth of opposition

This growth was clearly evident in the gradual collapse of the system of official candidature beginning during the 1863 election campaign. The system was

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challenged in the first place by the simple increase in the number of opposition candidates and, consequently, in the scale of electoral agitation, and by the willingness of some former official candidates with powerful local bases to criticise government policy, even if this meant the loss of the administration’s support in elections. Influential figures like the Marquises d’Andelarre and de Gramont, both of them landowners and deputies for the Haute-Saône, together with the textile entrepreneur Kolb-Bernard from the Nord and 45 other clerical and protectionist deputies, expressed their concern about the consequences of the Emperor’s Italian policy for the temporal power and spiritual independence of the Papacy and of his free-trade policies for cereal prices and the viability of the metallurgical and textiles industries. Threateningly, in industrial centres like Reims and Saint-Etienne, it was not the established mercantile elite but the younger up-and-coming generation of businessmen, impatient at their exclusion from political power, who supported the liberal opposition, and who would

provide by 1868–69 the funds required to establish newspapers like the Saint-Etienne
L’Eclaireur
and
L’Indépendence Rémois
. Significantly too, the political outlook of Orleanists of the older generation was evolving during the 1860s towards a liberalism more compatible with the system of manhood suffrage.

As elite commitment to the regime declined, effective electoral management

became increasingly difficult. Reports from prefects and state prosecutors

revealed that resentment of official interference with the ‘dignity’ and

‘independence’ of voters was accumulating. Even by many government

supporters the full range of official pressure was felt to have become outmoded since the threat of revolution seemed to have disappeared. There appeared to be a growing risk that official advice to the electorate might simply be rejected, which inevitably called the whole system into question. In 1863, prefects had already begun to behave with noticeably greater circumspection, particularly in

departments like the Nord in which so many notables already had been alienated by the regime’s economic, foreign and religious policies. The call for the defence of vital local interests was a powerful means of reinforcing the influence of regional elites. In most parts of northern and central France, the majority of textile, metallurgical and mining entrepreneurs opposed the reduction in customs tariffs, exaggerated the likely impact of British competition, and mobilised substantial support through professional organisations, chambers of commerce, elected

councils and the local press. From 1861 these views were represented in the
Corps
législatif
by the influential deputies Kolb-Bernard, Plichon and Brame as well as 42

by Thiers acting as the paid spokesman of the Anzin mining company. They

tended to blame almost every economic ill upon the commercial treaty with

Britain, despite the vagaries of the economic cycle and the disruptive impact of the American Civil War on the textiles and export industries. Additional targets were excessive government expenditure on the army and upon the embellishment of

Paris and other cities, and such overseas adventures as the attempt to create a client state under the rule of the Habsburg Archduke Maximillian in Mexico. In the 1860s, Thiers once again assumed the role of the most effective parliamentary critic of the regime.

The results of the May 1863 elections registered the growth of opposition.

Aware of their continued relative weakness, in some circumstances opposition groups were prepared to collaborate – a factor contributing to the election of eight republicans and Thiers in Paris and to that of the moderate republican Marie together with the eminent Legitimist lawyer Berryer in Marseille. However, such cooperation between extremes was talked about more often than effected. Of

much greater significance was the tendency in constituencies where only one opposition candidate stood for opponents of the regime to concentrate their votes on him. Significantly, once the results were known, Persigny – a symbol of the authoritarian approach and responsible for the conduct of the elections as Minister of the Interior – was dismissed. Another consequence was the formation of an extremely heterogeneous parliamentary opposition which included some of the growing number of Legitimists prepared to ignore the Comte de Chambord’s

injunctions to abstain, irreconcilable Orleanist notables like Rémusat and Auguste Casimir-Perier, independent liberals and moderate republicans. In the short term, the most significant development was to be the emergence of a Third Party (
tiers
parti
) made up of both monarchist and Bonapartist proponents of conservative, liberal reform. Although only 32 advocates of outright opposition to the regime had been successful (including 17 republicans and democratic liberals and 15

independents, i.e. conservative and essentially monarchist liberals and clericals), the fact that most large towns and, above all, Paris, the capital city of the Empire, had supported them was cause for considerable alarm. Moreover, if in most areas republican intervention had been rather tentative, the increasingly open and widespread expression of republican ideals gave considerable encouragement to still hesitant potential supporters.

By 1869, when general elections were again due, even those candidates still prepared to accept the official nomination regarded the most blatant forms of 43

administrative pressure as counter-productive. There seemed to be a clear

incompatibility between the system of official candidature and the liberties accorded to the press and public meetings so recently in 1868. Once again these reforms had decisively transformed the political context. Acts of political opposition had become far less risky than before. Moreover, an expansive

economic and social environment had widened horizons and increased the sense of independence of many voters. Interest in politics was being renewed, ending the widespread indifference and apathy of the previous two decades. There was an immediate and spectacular revival in the number of newspapers and political meetings. The press law was especially important in the provinces where around 150 new newspapers were created in time for the 1869 election, with 120 of them hostile to the government (Zeldin 1958: 95). The maintenance of administrative surveillance and the slowness with which these reforms (promised in January 1867) were implemented as a result of the Emperor’s unwillingness to break with loyal authoritarians like Rouher, Baroche and Persigny, once again made them appear to be a grudging response to pressure. In reaction to this hesitation in Paris and in 46 constituencies, the candidates favoured by the government refused, or were advised by the administration not to accept, the official designation.