Napoléon III: un Saint-Simon à cheval.

At least four biographies and one novel about Napoleon III have so far been published in France to celebrate his bicentenary, which fell in April 2008. It is not too rash to guess that this biography must stand head and shoulders above the many other biographies of Napoleon III that have been published, both now and in the past. Eric Anceau, author of several prosopographical studies of the mid-nineteenth-century political elites, has marshalled fifteen years of research in pinning down this enigmatic figure who has been subject to the extremes of demonization and, more recently, hagiography.

An outsider to many of the events within France during his youth, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Anceau shows, matured his political doctrine during exile and imprisonment; it was refined by his experience of practical politics once he had been elected president in 1848. He never forgave the July Monarchy for cold shouldering him after the July Revolution and not jettisoning the Restoration's banishment of the Bonaparte family: this only fuelled his two attempts to seize power in 1836 and 1840. It was with reluctance that at the end of December 1848 he set up a ministry composed mainly of former Orleanist opposition deputies, headed by Odilon Barrot. Emile Ollivier later called it ‘le ministère de la captivité’ and, Anceau asserts, the president was its chief captive. He felt affinity to republicans, and would have preferred to have given them ministerial power, but most of them preferred opposition after Cavaignac's defeat in the presidential election. Instead, Barrot's ministry was determined to outflank him at every opportunity, pouring cold water on his plans for agricultural colonies and for amnestying the June insurgents. Normally happy to experiment with the governmental systems, as the 1860s showed, he closed his mind to parliamentary government. Anceau implies that his refusal to found a Bonapartist party deprived him later of a potentially useful political constituency. One may speculate that his appointment of Ollivier on 2 January 1870 harked back to the lost political opportunity of December 1848. Indeed, throughout his reign, there were few close political advisers who could gage, and act on, his political desires. The political elites still stemmed from the Orleanist milieu, they made up the majority of the deputies in the Legislative Body throughout the Empire and they often deemed the emperor's more imaginative social schemes to be mere utopias.

The book's subtitle is Adolphe Guéroult's description of Napoleon III, ‘Saint-Simon à cheval’ (rather coyly, this is not on the front cover). Anceau takes seriously Napoleon III's commitment to the organization of credit and the necessity of increasing taxes to reconcile labour and capital for the sake of peace within society, often to the perplexity of his ministers. Believing in the importance of a strong infrastructure, he encouraged the growth of France's railway network. His dirigisme was evident above all in the rebuilding of Paris: if he let Haussmann have more power as prefect of Paris than his ministers, he still directed personally much of the rebuilding (tellingly, Haussmann would wait until the emperor was out of the country before he enacted measures that he know would otherwise be vetoed).

If Anceau's portrait of Napoleon III is sympathetic, he does not, however, let the emperor off as easily as some revisionists have done. The coup of 2 December was not, as some have suggested, on a par with de Gaulle's foundation of the Fifth Republic. Even though it may have pre-empted a possible coup directed by the Assembly, it was still an act of perjury followed by harsh repression. He did not disavow claims that the insurrection in the provinces was a jacquerie and let rumours spread to consolidate his own position. His emotional response to pleas for a general amnesty after the coup had its limits, as George Sand discovered. As political operator, he was unequalled in his cynicism: every man had his price, and he was not above letting wives of ambitious men give him sexual favours in return for a decoration or a sinecure. He must also share the blame for the French army's parlous state on the eve of war in 1870.

Anceau's prosopographical skills place Napoleon III in a proper context. This does not mean that the emperor becomes a vanishing point in a group portrait of notables, far from it: never in modern history has any political leader been more alone in power. Anceau does not yield to the temptation to compare of Napoleon III to twentieth-century European dictators, Latin American populists, Charles de Gaulle or Nicolas Sarkozy. Ultimately Napoleon III was and remains unique (p. 568). This familiar tale is told with erudition and perspicacity. This will be the standard work on Napoleon III for many years. Let us hope it finds a good English translator, and soon.