Napoleon III and the French Second Empire, Roger Price [black books to read .TXT] 📗

authoritarianism towards a more liberal political system.

Recent experience in Eastern Europe has provided some insights into the

difficulties involved. A sense of expectancy builds up which is difficult to satisfy.

Latent tensions once again are openly displayed as pressure from above eases and as social and political groups feel able to compete for power. What had begun as a series of voluntary concessions made possible by the regime’s success against the menace of revolution, very rapidly turned into enforced concessions to pressure from the socio-political elites upon whose collaboration the regime depended.

Moreover, the impact of these reforms was always reduced by the Emperor’s

continued determination to pursue his personal policies at the expense of what 65

important business circles as well as the Church and its clerical supporters saw as their vital interests. Taken together with a succession of foreign policy failures, this ensured widening support for the reinforcement of parliamentary control over the errant monarch. Unable to win over the urban masses and faced with a gradual weakening in the loyalty of the rural population, the Emperor finally conceded a

‘liberal’ constitution which, while retaining much of his personal power especially in matters of defence and foreign policy, substantially reinforced the potential for parliamentary control. In spite of this substantial weakening of Napoléon’s personal power, and the accompanying decline in his prestige, the plebiscite in May 1870 had seemed to mark a new beginning. Even then, if war had been avoided a liberal empire still would have encountered considerable difficulty. However, this is mere speculation. The propensity for war was an integral part of Bonapartism as defined by Napoléon III. But success in waging war depended on military

efficiency and neither the organisation of the French army nor the quality of its leadership made it fit for war against Prussia. If, then, the experience of the Second Empire offers a lesson, it is simply that authoritarian government (while it might appear to offer an attractive solution in a moment of intense social crisis) is, due to the brutality of its origins, more likely to reinforce than reduce social and political divisions and, in the longer term, is likely to prove to be an extremely inefficient and dangerous method of conducting affairs.

66

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