Lincoln in the World (37 page)

Louis was exiled to America. He spent two and a half months in the United States soaking up the culture. The future French emperor ensconced himself in the Washington Hotel in New York and mingled with the city’s social elite. Gotham in the 1830s was a small metropolis of three hundred thousand—“only a child,” Louis wrote home to a friend. Still, he took note of the young country’s “immense material forces.” The nation was clearly in the throes of a revolutionary transformation. “Every day,” he wrote, “the transition continues: the caterpillar is shedding its cocoon and taking wing.” And yet he believed American expansion could not avoid some growing pains. By the time he arrived, a financial panic was gripping the city. “I do not think,” he wrote, “the transition will be completed without crises and convulsions.”
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After learning that his mother was ill, Louis left America and made his way back to Switzerland. French authorities continued to harass him, however, and after her death he ultimately left for Britain. The future French emperor was captivated by the changes wrought by the industrial and market revolutions. He toured Britain’s industrial heartland, taking notes as he wandered through the impoverished region. With his Savile Row suits and giant ruby thunderbolt
pendant, he would not have blended in. He was probably more comfortable in London, socializing with dignitaries like Charles Dickens and future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. Once, when he was out rowing on the Thames with the Disraelis, his boat got stuck on an embankment. “You should not undertake things which you cannot accomplish,” Disraeli’s wife, Mary Anne, chided Louis. “You are always, sir, too adventurous.”
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The future emperor embarked on his next adventure in the summer of 1840, when he once again attempted to seize the French throne. Louis chartered a steamship, piled it high with guns and ammunition, and attempted a landing in Boulogne, on France’s northern coast, accompanied by “a motley throng” of a few dozen “malcontents and adventurers.” At one point a crew member bought a vulture that looked like an eagle. Louis’s enemies later claimed that the would-be emperor placed a piece of bacon under his hat, hoping to keep the bird circling around his head like a portent. Ultimately, Louis’s second coup attempt proved as disastrous as his first. After landing in France, the conspirators once again met resistance from skeptical loyalists. Louis’s gun accidentally discharged, wounding a soldier and further raising tensions. Finally the plotters were chased back to the seashore. Louis’s escape boat capsized, and the emperor-to-be had to be fished out of the water.
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French authorities locked up the hapless plotter in the dank, fifteenth-century Château de Ham, which had once held Joan of Arc. Louis spent the next five and a half years in captivity. He complained to a friend that prison was like “a death in life.” Actually, it was not all that bad. Louis had abundant time to study and write, and his guards allowed him occasional horseback rides. He even took a mistress—the prison’s twenty-two-year-old chambermaid, whom he eventually impregnated (twice).
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As the years passed, however, he began to plot once again. He memorized the prison floor plan. Then he smuggled in a workman’s clothing and shaved off his trademark moustache. He donned a wig and threw a wooden
plank over his shoulder. Finally he slipped past the prison guards—eventually escaping to London.
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Louis did not return to France until 1848, when the liberal revolutions erupted across the continent. Even after King Louis Philippe fled in February, French internecine politics remained ruthless. Socialists bickered with more conservative factions for control of the government. Louis’s supporters concocted a pithy campaign slogan (“
HIM
!”) and plastered the country with posters. Still, French authorities continued to dangle the threat of arrest. Not until autumn did the French exile run for—and win—an empty seat in the National Assembly. When Louis’s English landlord went to check on his tenant in the wake of the victory, he discovered that the future emperor had already set out for France—absentmindedly leaving his marble bathtub full of water in his haste.
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The former exile immediately captured the attention of Parisians. Charles A. Dana, Marx’s editor at the
Tribune
, covered Napoleon’s first appearance in the Assembly. Dressed all in black, Bonaparte’s nephew looked surprisingly small and weak, Dana reported, and the ladies in the gallery sniped that he wore “a bad-looking moustache.” And yet the former exile became “instantly the sole object of attention of every person in the House.” Only three months later, Frenchmen elected Louis Napoleon president of the republic. There was no doubt in Dana’s mind that “he would much rather be emperor than president.”
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Dana was right. Louis assiduously courted key players in French society as he worked toward his goal. He plied military officers with champagne and cigars. He hired organ grinders to sing Bonapartist songs. Marx, frustrated by Napoleon’s outmaneuvering of the socialists, complained that the president was “an adventurer blown in from abroad, elevated on the shield by a drunken soldiery, which he has bought with liquor and sausages, and which he must continually ply with sausage anew.” Victor Hugo derided the president as “Napoleon the Little.”

Still, ordinary Frenchmen embraced their renowned conqueror’s nephew. On December 2, 1851, the anniversary of his uncle’s coronation, Louis Napoleon led one final coup attempt. He gave the operation the codename Rubicon and ordered mass arrests of his political enemies. This time the power grab was successful. Louis proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III. Americans marveled at the news. Mary’s old friend Cassius Marcellus Clay had once considered the hapless plotter a joke. “Who,” Clay wrote to one acquaintance, “thought that Louis Napoleon at one time would ever have been the emperor of the grand nation!”
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Napoleon III’s reign, in some sense, heralded the birth of modern France. He came to power just as the industrial and market revolutions were beginning to transform societies throughout the world. The new emperor supported the establishment of large banking houses, which in turn funneled capital into French businesses. As the country’s wealth grew, the emperor enlisted his aide Baron Haussmann in a series of plans to make over Paris. Napoleon and his adviser reshaped the Parisian landscape, carving wide boulevards out of the city’s tangle of alleyways. The innovations were designed partly to make the streets harder to barricade. They ended up giving Paris the unique character we know today.
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By the time Napoleon seized the French throne, he had earned a well-deserved reputation as a womanizer. In London he had taken up with an English actress and courtesan with whom he fathered two illegitimate children. When he returned to Paris in 1848, he brought his mistress with him, moving her into a house near the Elysée Palace. Still, such arrangements did not prevent the emperor from making awkward advances at whomever struck his fancy. “Each new woman is brought to the Tuileries in a cab,” reported one Parisian diarist, “undressed in an ante-room, and taken naked into the room where the Emperor, likewise naked, is waiting for her.” Then a chamberlain would announce: “You may kiss His Majesty anywhere except on the face.” European statesman quickly homed in on the emperor’s fondness for the flesh. Count Camillo Cavour, the Piedmontese prime
minister, once dispatched his voluptuous eighteen-year-old cousin, Virginia di Castiglione, to the Tuileries with the instructions “to flirt with and if necessary seduce the Emperor.” The teenage bombshell did manage to seduce him, although historians doubt whether the affair influenced his Italian policy. “If we did for ourselves what we do for our country,” Cavour remarked as a postscript, “what rascals we should be.”
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Louis Napoleon spent the first forty-five years of his life as a bachelor. In January 1853, however, Napoleon finally married Eugenia de Montijo—the Spanish beauty who would become the influential Empress Eugénie. The wedding, at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, was lit by fifteen thousand candles. Eugénie, with her penetrating blue eyes, elegantly braided red hair, and perfect figure, had enchanted the emperor. European statesmen, however, immediately panned the match. Disraeli mocked the empress’s “Chinese eyes” and “perpetual smile or simper which I detest.” Britain’s Lord John Russell—Palmerston’s future foreign minister—dubbed her an “
intrigante
.” Even the French stock exchange plunged. On one visit to Paris, the Austrian archduke Maximilian described the emperor’s bride as “essentially lacking in the august quality of an empress.” The whole imperial scene, Maximilian wrote home, left the impression of “a make-believe court, the various offices of which are occupied by amateurs who are not very sure of their parts.” The emperor himself—with “his shuffling gait, his ugly hands, the sly inquiring glance of his lusterless eyes”—disgusted Maximilian, at least at first. The Austrian archduke noted that Napoleon often cast “reproving glances” at his free-spirited wife.
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Eugénie is often portrayed as a femme fatale, a powerful behind-the-scenes power broker who managed to roll her weak and distracted husband. That picture is exaggerated, although the French empress was both influential and strong-willed. As a girl, Eugénie was so talkative that she found it difficult to remain silent at the dinner table with adults. If she drew disdainful glances, she would sometimes banish herself to a corner of the room and continue the
conversation alone. As she grew into womanhood, an acquaintance described the future empress as “short-tempered and bossy.” She once plunged a dagger into her arm to prove her toughness—or so the story is told. As an adult, she scandalized polite society with her affection for bullfights. The empress—an essentially conservative aristocrat raised in a Roman Catholic country—had no love for the increasingly powerful United States. “Sooner or later,” she told European diplomats, “we shall have to declare war on America.”
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An Impassable Barrier

Both Napoleon and Eugénie had long dreamed of reviving France’s role in the New World. The future emperor had begun imagining such a scheme while still imprisoned in the Château de Ham. As the Civil War loomed, Napoleon was also looking for excuses to strengthen France’s relationship with Austria, which had been strained by Napoleon’s past support for Italian nationalists. Installing a Hapsburg monarch on the Mexican throne was one potential way to tighten those ties. Eugénie maintained her own relationships with prominent Mexican diplomats. One childhood acquaintance, Don José Manuel Hidalgo, had grown up to become one of the most forceful advocates of European intervention in Mexico. As the sectional crisis in North America intensified, the suave, handsome Mexican pressed his case once again with the French imperial couple.
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Mexico had been mired in political and economic chaos for decades. Local factions were battling for control of the country. Yet by the 1850s, Mexico was not much of a prize. The nation had fallen deep into debt. Meanwhile, American filibusters had been slipping across the border, establishing a foothold south of the Rio Grande. During one meeting at the imperial palace in Compiègne in 1858, as Napoleon sipped a glass of wine, Hidalgo warned the emperor that the Americans were already plundering Mexican silver mines. The
emperor insisted that he would like to get involved, but added that he could not take any action on American questions without England’s blessing. “I wish I could,” he told the Mexican diplomat on another occasion, “but how?”

Then, in the summer of 1861, Mexico suspended payments on its debts to the European powers. Hidalgo thought he saw his opportunity to reengage the imperial couple. When the Mexican diplomat got the news, he was visiting Napoleon and Eugénie at their villa on the beach in Biarritz—a pleasant spot with a trail leading down to a cluster of bungalows by the water. After dinner, Hidalgo approached the empress. “Your Majesty,” he said quietly, sitting down on a stool next to her, “I have just received some very interesting letters; events are moving in our direction, and I believe that the idea of intervention and of an empire may be realized.” Eugénie agreed and brought the Mexican diplomat into Napoleon’s study. “Tell the Emperor what you just told me,” she said. Napoleon lit a cigarette as Hidalgo related the latest developments. The Mexican suggested that the time was finally ripe for French intervention. The United States, caught up in its own war, would find it impossible to challenge the move—particularly if France could enlist Britain and Spain to go along with the plan.
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Napoleon, who had been considering such a scheme on his own, was intrigued. With Hidalgo, the imperial couple brainstormed a list of European princes whom they might be able to install on the Mexican throne. At first, all three agreed that Austria’s Maximilian—the archduke who had earlier found Napoleon’s court so distasteful—would probably refuse. Then, however, the empress suddenly tapped herself on her chest with her fan. Eugénie could be superstitious. Like many of her nineteenth-century contemporaries, she believed in palm readers and psychics, and would listen intently to the prophesies of gypsy fortune-tellers. Now, in her seaside villa with the emperor and Hildago, Eugénie explained that she had a “presentiment” that the Austrian archduke would accept an offer.
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Napoleon began lobbying European heads of state to support a
Mexican venture. In October he wrote a family friend asking him to make the case to Palmerston. Europeans had a “common interest” in seeing Mexico stabilized, the emperor insisted. Mexican guerrillas had been raiding British and French convoys in the country, making off with millions of dollars’ worth of European silver. An invasion could help secure key trade routes. Napoleon also offered a geopolitical rationale for his scheme. A joint invasion would establish “an impassable barrier” to American southward expansion, Napoleon argued. “The American war,” the emperor concluded, “has made it impossible for the United States to interfere in the matter, and, what is more, the outrages committed by the Mexican Government have provided England, Spain and France with a legitimate motive for interference in Mexico.” The emperor made sure to send a copy of the letter to Maximilian in Austria.
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