Louis-Napoléon: A Tragedy of Good Intentions

History is not just what we remember, but what we choose to remember. Accordingly, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte may be accounted a failure, not only because his regime ended in defeat and disgrace, but because he has failed to attract the sympathy of historians, who do the world’s remembering. At best loosely characterized as enigmatic, he has become the victim of an indifference which has been translated by most writers about him into terms of contempt.

Why has the Second Empire been regarded as so complete a failure? It is not enough to answer that it came to pieces in military disaster; other regimes have suffered similar catastrophes without, in addition, earning contempt. The truth is that Sedan has incurred more odium than Waterloo, not merely for military reasons, but because Louis-Napoléon’s reign was less “glorious” than his uncle’s, and his mistakes have therefore seemed the less excusable. What is worse, the errors of his lifetime have since been aggravated by identifying him with certain unsavoury systems and personalities of the twentieth century, and in particular with Mussolini and with Italian Fascism.