The World полностью

In December 1848, after the Assembly cut the franchise, Napoleon won 5.5 million votes to Cavaignac’s 1.1 million. The prince-president, moving into the Élysée Palace, behaved as if he was constantly running for office, travelling by railway around the country, declaring that ‘The name Napoleon is a complete programme in itself. At home it means order, authority, religion and the welfare of the people; abroad, the dignity of the nation,’ and promising to represent the ordinary man against the Red Menace of socialism. He was just awaiting the chance to show his Napoleonic acumen. First, he sent troops into Italy to rescue Pope Pius IX from Italian nationalists, brandishing his Napoleonic, conservative and Catholic credentials.

The next step was led by men but partly organized and funded by women: on 1 December 1851, after attending the theatre and then the Jockey Club, Morny launched a Napoleonic coup, Operation Rubicon, funded by Napoleon’s paramour Harriet Howard and his own, the Belgian ambassador’s wife. Friendly generals arrested 26,000, shot 400, deported 9,000 to Algeria and overthrew the constitution. After he had restored universal suffrage, 7.5 million voters approved Louis Napoleon’s dictatorship for ten years. ‘It seems France desires a return to empire,’ he declared, adding, in order to reassure Europe, ‘The empire means peace.’ In December 1852, approved again by 7.5 million, he was proclaimed Emperor Napoleon III.^*

The revolution was over but it had changed everything. Marx escaped to London. Now sporting the beard of a biblical prophet, struggling to survive in dingy Soho digs, short of money, boozing heavily, cursed by boils and headaches, he survived on Engels’s gifts and meagre earnings from journalism for the New-York Daily Tribune, grumbling bitterly about ‘the wretchedness of existence’. But he also neglected his long-suffering wife, got his housekeeper pregnant and persuaded Engels to take responsibility for his lovechild, who was given away to foster-parents.^*

Yet in the British Museum’s reading room Marx was devising an all-embracing ideology in a masterwork, Das Kapital: capitalism was doomed by its own internal contradictions because history was ruled by dialectical materialism, a progression towards, first, the rule of the proletariat and, then, a stateless, classless communism of total equality. In the certainty of his scientific research, Marxism offered an orthodoxy that would replace religion for the many excluded from the spoils of capital at home and empire abroad. A small band of radicals started to follow him. When the working class voted for order and liberty instead of revolution, Marx denounced them as Lumpenproletariat whose views displayed ‘false consciousness’.

Napoleon gloried in the creation of a new empire but, like his uncle, the Nephew required an heir.^* The erotomane emperor picked up women at Élysée balls or ordered his cousin-chamberlain, Felix Baciocchi, to procure them. At the palace, they were instructed to await the emperor naked with the words, ‘You may kiss His Majesty anywhere except his face.’ His mistresses attested to his brazen dexterity, his selfishness as a lover and the melting of his waxed moustaches. One girl recalled that she ‘didn’t even have time to make a token protest before he laid hold of me in an intimate place’. After failing to marry a German princess, Napoleon encountered Eugénie de Montijo, countess of Teba, an icily elegant Spanish redhead. Instructed by her mother,^* Eugénie resisted until he was in love.

‘How can I reach you, mesdames?’ Napoleon jokingly called up at her when he saw Eugénie and her mother on a balcony at a ball.

‘Through the chapel, Sire,’ answered Eugénie.

The Bonapartes disapproved. ‘Louis,’ said Uncle Jérôme, ‘will marry the first woman to refuse him.’ But Morny approved and Baron James de Rothschild spotted her early. In January 1853, Eugénie turned up on Rothschild’s arm for a ball during which she told the vacillating emperor that if he did not propose she would leave for London. ‘Madame la Comtesse,’ he wrote to her mother, ‘for a long time I have been in love with Mademoiselle your daughter …’ After his patroness Harriet Howard had been paid off, Napoleon married Eugénie, who turned out to hate the sex that he relished – ‘Really, why do men never think of anything but that?’ she mused – but she was pregnant.

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On 16 March 1856, after an agonizing labour, in which Napoleon begged the doctors to use ‘any sedative modern science has devised’, Empress Eugénie gave birth to the heir, the prince imperial.