The World полностью

The prince had seen Napoleon only once – at a parade in the weeks before Waterloo – and for twenty years his escapades had been a European joke. But he possessed invincible self-belief. ‘From time to time,’ he wrote, ‘men are created into whose hands the fate of their country is entrusted. I am such a man.’ His rise illustrates that mysterious process of politics, momentous inevitability, by which the preposterously impossible becomes plausible, then – as alternatives are rejected and other routes closed – likely, and finally, imminent. Yet Louis Napoleon was a herald of the modern world: he helped create new mass politics and founded the last version of French empire.

His mother Hortense, Josephine’s daughter, ‘an exquisite blonde with amethyst eyes’ and a talented songstress who wrote ‘Partant pour la Syrie’, the Bonapartist anthem, had always treated him as a man of destiny, while his mean-spirited father Louis never quite trusted that the prince was his real son. Educated in Switzerland and trained as a gunner at military school, he was shy and taciturn, brown-eyed, big-nosed and full-lipped, with a big head and torso on stubby legs in an age when tight breeches made the male leg essential for masculine beauty. Yet he possessed a romantic mystique appealing to women. ‘It’s usually the man who attacks,’ he boasted. ‘As for me, I defend myself, and I often capitulate.’

As soon as his cousin the duke of Reichstadt – Napoleon II – had died in 1832, he became the Bonapartist pretender. At twenty-five, he published his manifesto Rêveries politiques, gathering a crew of motley adventurers who always included a devoted female patroness, a few officers and his manservant Thélin. They were joined early by Jean Fialin, the soi-disant vicomte de Persigny, a seedy ex-soldier, part-time journalist and political promoter of genius, one of the first of the spin doctors who would become the spirits of modern democracy. In 1836, Louis Napoleon had tried to seize power from Louis Philippe in Strasbourg, hoping to lead a march on Paris, but instead he was humiliated, arrested and expelled from France. Europe laughed, and his father and uncles, who had given up on Bonapartism, desperate to receive pensions from Louis Philippe, were furious.

Yet Louis Napoleon never gave up, embarking on years of exile in London and New York. When Louis Philippe brought Napoleon’s body back to France, Louis Napoleon considered doing a Ptolemy – hijacking the body. Instead, he launched his second coup attempt, which ended with him sentenced to ‘perpetual imprisonment’ in the Fortress of Ham near the Somme. ‘In France,’ he joked, ‘is anything perpetual?’

At what he called Ham University (not the last prisoner to use prison as an academy), he read books and pursued love affairs (fathering two sons with a clog dancer), then escaped with the aid of Thélin. In London, he inherited his father’s fortune, embarking on a further series of love affairs. Once his money was gone, he hooked up with a courtesan-actress performing under the name Harriet Howard; she had run off with a jockey, then settled down with a nabob who left her a fortune. She fell in love with the prince, and, believing in his destiny, backed him all the way.

As Louis Napoleon arrived in revolutionary Paris, the Viennese were rebelling against their bewildered emperor: Ferdinand, aged forty-two, child of double first cousins, had been born with encephalitis and epilepsy and was glad to leave politics to his antique chancellor, Metternich. Ferdinand had failed to consummate his marriage due to a wedding night interspersed with fits, and lived for his beloved apricot dumplings – shouting when told they were out of season, ‘I am the emperor, and I want dumplings!’ He was mentally stable but incapable of ruling. Now, when Metternich told him about the revolution, he asked, ‘Is that allowed?’ It was not, but that is the thing about revolutions: Hungarians and Italians and even the Viennese turned on the Habsburgs, who tried to protect Metternich, then, as troops shot demonstrators, sacrificed him. The Coachman of Europe faced the reality that the monarchy was galloping out of control. ‘I’m no longer anybody,’ he said after thirty-nine years in power. Dressed as a woman, he escaped to London with his young wife and family: ‘I’ve nothing more to do, nothing more to discuss.’