Wednesday, July 8, 2015
S2 (28 rue des Saints-Pères)
‘It is in the home of the people that the Empire was born.’ The words of Persigny, minister of the Interior in 1863, reveal the particular nature of the French Second Empire (1852-1870): a hereditary monarchy based on the consent of the many. The emperor Napeoleon III is ‘a man of the masses’, embodying the national will, who presents itself as the guide towards democracy. As one official stated in 1869: ‘The power both of the Empire and of democracy is their close union, which is time and again confirmed by the vote of the nation’. But the imperial regime cannot be reduced to plebiscitary approval alone. Napoleon III was afraid to become dependent on the judgment of a volatile multitude. The logic of adhesion also included petitions, the building of triumphal arches, eulogies and other means to express the mind of the nation. Yet the emperor could not disregard the plebeian origin of his authority. In return, the delegation of popular power functioned as an actual consecration and gave him miraculous qualities: ‘While you have been elected, elected by God himself/ Elected by a free people’. The lines of this poem from 1853 reveal the complexity of this imperial democracy: his election gives the throne of Napoleon the stamp of divinity, while the restoration of dynastic power eludes the principle of election.
