The First French Empire, officially the French Empire, was the empire of Napoleon Bonaparte of France and the dominant power in much of continental Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. Although France had already established an overseas colonial empire beginning in the 17th century, the French state had remained a kingdom under the Bourbons and a republic after the Revolution. Historians refer to Napoleon's regime as the First Empire to distinguish it from the restorationist Second Empire (1852–1870) ruled by his nephew as Napoleon III.
A political faction is a group of individuals within a larger entity, such as a political party, a trade union or other group, or simply a political climate, united by a particular common political purpose that differs in some respect to the rest of the entity. A faction or political party may include fragmented sub-factions, "parties within a party," which may be referred to as power blocs, or voting blocs. Members of factions band together as a way of achieving these goals and advancing their agenda and position within an organisation.
The House of Bonaparte was an imperial and royal European dynasty of Italian origin. It was founded in 1804 by Napoleon I, the son of Genoese nobleman Carlo Buonaparte. Napoleon was a French military leader who had risen to power during the French Revolution and who in 1804 transformed the First French Republic into the First French Empire, five years after his coup d'état of November 1799. Napoleon turned the Grande Armée against every major European power and dominated continental Europe through a series of military victories during the Napoleonic Wars. He installed members of his family on the thrones of client states, extending the power of the dynasty.
Corsica is an island in the Mediterranean Sea and one of the 18 regions of France. It is located southeast of the French mainland and west of the Italian Peninsula, with the nearest land mass being the Italian island of Sardinia to the immediate south. A single chain of mountains makes up two-thirds of the island.
The honey bee, revived as a prominent political symbol in the empire of Napoleon I to represent the virtues of the Bonapartist bureaucratic and political system, was also adopted by the Bonapartistes.
A honey bee is a eusocial, flying insect within the genus Apis of the bee clade. They are known for construction of perennial, colonial nests from wax, for the large size of their colonies, and for their surplus production and storage of honey, distinguishing their hives as a prized foraging target of many animals, including honey badgers, bears and human hunter-gatherers. In the early 21st century, only seven species of honey bee are recognized, with a total of 44 subspecies, though historically seven to eleven species are recognized. The best known honey bee is the Western honey bee which has been domesticated for honey production and crop pollination; modern humans also value the wax for candlemaking and other crafts. Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees. Some other types of related bees produce and store honey and have been kept by humans for that purpose, including the stingless honey bees, but only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees. The study of bees, which includes the study of honey bees, is known as melittology.
Bonapartism is the political ideology of Napoleon Bonaparte and his followers and successors. It was later used to refer to people who hoped to restore the House of Bonaparte and its style of government. After Napoleon, the term was applied to the French politicians who seized power in the coup of 18 Brumaire, ruling in the French Consulate and subsequently in the First and Second French Empires under the House of Bonaparte. The term was used more generally for a political movement that advocated a dictatorship or authoritarian centralized state, with a strongman charismatic leader based on anti-elitist rhetoric, army support, and conservatism.
History
Eugène Rouher (1814–1884), French politician and President of the Senate during the Second French Empire, was the leader of the Bonapartiste faction after 1871
Bonapartism had its followers from 1815 forward among those who never accepted the defeat of Napoleon and France at Waterloo or the Congress of Vienna. With Napoleon I's death in exile on Saint Helena in 1821, many of these persons transferred their allegiance to other members of his family. After the death of Napoleon's son, the Duke of Reichstadt (known to Bonapartists as Napoleon II), Bonapartist hopes were distributed among several different members of the family.
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815 near Waterloo in Belgium, part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands at the time. A French army under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition: a British-led allied army under the command of the Duke of Wellington, and a Prussian army under the command of Field Marshal Blücher. The battle marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
The Congress of Vienna, also called Vienna Congress, was a meeting of ambassadors of European states chaired by Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, and held in Vienna from November 1814 to June 1815, though the delegates had arrived and were already negotiating by late September 1814. The objective of the Congress was to provide a long-term peace plan for Europe by settling critical issues arising from the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. The goal was not simply to restore old boundaries but to resize the main powers so they could balance each other and remain at peace. The leaders were conservatives with little use for republicanism or revolution, both of which threatened to upset the status quo in Europe. France lost all its recent conquests while Prussia, Austria and Russia made major territorial gains. Prussia added smaller German states in the west, Swedish Pomerania and 60% of the Kingdom of Saxony; Austria gained Venice and much of northern Italy. Russia gained parts of Poland. The new Kingdom of the Netherlands had been created just months before, and included formerly Austrian territory that in 1830 became Belgium.
Saint Helena is a volcanic tropical island in the South Atlantic Ocean, 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi) east of Rio de Janeiro and 1,950 kilometres (1,210 mi) west of the mouth of the Cunene River, which marks the border between Namibia and Angola in southwestern Africa. It is part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha. Saint Helena measures about 16 by 8 kilometres and has a population of 4,534. It was named after Saint Helena of Constantinople.
The disturbances of 1848 encouraged this group. Bonapartists played an essential role in the election of Napoleon I's nephew Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as President of the Second Republic. They gave him the necessary political support when he discarded the constitution in 1852 and proclaimed the Second Empire. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte assumed the title Napoleon III, thereby acknowledging the brief reign of Napoleon's son Napoleon II in 1815 at the end of the Hundred Days.
The Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations, People's Spring, Springtime of the Peoples, or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history.
Napoleon III was the first elected President of France from 1848 to 1852. When he could not constitutionally be re-elected, he seized power in 1851 and became the Emperor of the French from 1852 to 1870. He founded the Second French Empire and was its only emperor until the defeat of the French army and his capture by Prussia and its allies in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. He worked to modernize the French economy, rebuilt the center of Paris, expanded the overseas empire, and engaged in the Crimean War and the war for Italian unification. After his defeat and downfall he went into exile and died in England in 1873.
The French Second Republic was a short-lived republican government of France under President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. It lasted from the 1848 Revolution to the 1851 coup by which the president made himself Emperor Napoleon III and initiated the Second Empire. It officially adopted the motto of the First Republic, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. The Second Republic witnessed the tension between the "Social and Democratic Republic" and a liberal form of republicanism, which exploded during the June Days uprising of 1848.
In 1870, Napoleon III led France to a disastrous defeat by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War and he subsequently abdicated. Afterwards, Bonapartists continued to agitate for another member of the family to be placed on the throne of France. However, from 1871 forward they competed with monarchist groups that favoured the restoration of the family of Louis-Philippe, King of the French (1830–1848) (the Orléanists) and also with those who favoured the restoration of the House of Bourbon, the traditional French royal family (Legitimists). The three monarchist factions combined were likely stronger than the Republicans of the era, but they could never unite on supporting one candidate as monarch. Monarchist fervor eventually waned and the French Republic became accepted as part of French life. Bonapartism gradually became a kind of civic faith of a few romantics rather than any sort of practical political philosophy. When Eugene Bonaparte, the only son of Napoleon III, was killed in action while serving as a British Army officer in Zululand in 1879, Bonapartism ceased to be a political force.
Prussia was a historically prominent German state that originated in 1525 with a duchy centred on the region of Prussia on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. It was de facto dissolved by an emergency decree transferring powers of the Prussian government to German Chancellor Franz von Papen in 1932 and de jure by an Allied decree in 1947. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organised and effective army. Prussia, with its capital in Königsberg and from 1701 in Berlin, decisively shaped the history of Germany.
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the War of 1870, was a conflict between the Second French Empire and later the Third French Republic, and the German states of the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia. Lasting from 19 July 1870 to 28 January 1871, the conflict was caused by Prussian ambitions to extend German unification and French fears of the shift in the European balance of power that would result if the Prussians succeeded. Some historians argue that the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck deliberately provoked the French into declaring war on Prussia in order to draw the independent southern German states—Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt—into an alliance with the North German Confederation dominated by Prussia, while others contend that Bismarck did not plan anything and merely exploited the circumstances as they unfolded. None, however, dispute the fact that Bismarck must have recognized the potential for new German alliances, given the situation as a whole.
Monarchism is the advocacy of a monarch or monarchical rule. A monarchist is an individual who supports this form of government, independent of any specific monarch; one who espouses a particular monarch is a royalist. Conversely, the opposition to monarchical rule is sometimes referred to as republicanism.
The current head of the family is Prince Napoleon (Charles Marie Jérôme Victor Napoléon Bonaparte, born 1950), great-great-grandson of Napoleon I's brother Jérôme Bonaparte by his second marriage. He has a son named Jean (born 1986) and a brother called Jérôme (born 1957). There are no remaining descendants in the male line from any other of Napoleon's brothers and no serious political movement exists with the goal of restoring any of these men to the imperial throne of France.
The Law of Succession that Napoleon I established on becoming Emperor in 1804 provided that the Bonapartist claim to the throne should pass firstly to Napoleon's own legitimate male descendants through the male line. At that time, he had no legitimate sons and it seemed unlikely he would have any due to the age of his wife Joséphine. To Catholic eyes, his eventual response was unacceptable since he engineered a dubious annulment without papal approval of his marriage to Josephine, undertaking a second marriage to the younger Marie Louise, with whom he had one son. The law of succession provided that if Napoleon's own direct line died out, the claim passed first to his older brother Joseph and his legitimate male descendants through the male line then to his younger brother Louis and his legitimate male descendants through the male line. His other brothers Lucien and Jérôme and their descendants were omitted from the succession (even though Lucien was older than Louis) because they had politically opposed the Emperor or because he disapproved of their marriages. Napoleon had one son with Marie Louise, in whose favour he abdicated after his final defeat in 1815. Although the Bonapartes were now deposed and the old Bourbon monarchy was restored, Bonapartists recognized this child as Napoleon II. However, he was sickly, virtually imprisoned in Austria and died young and unmarried, so there were no further direct descendants of Napoleon I. When the Bonaparte Empire was restored to power in France in 1852, the Emperor was Napoleon III, Louis Bonaparte's only living legitimate son (Joseph having died in 1844 without having had a legitimate son, only daughters).
In 1852, Napoleon III, having restored the Bonapartes to power in France, enacted a new decree on the succession. The claim first went to his own male legitimate descendants in the male line (though at that time he had none, he would later have one legitimate son Eugene Bonaparte, who would be recognized by Bonapartists as Napoleon IV before dying young and unmarried). If his own line died out, the new decree allowed the claim to pass to Jérôme, Napoleon's youngest brother, who had previously been excluded and his male descendants by Princess Catharina of Württemberg in the male line, but not his descendants by his original marriage to the American commoner Elizabeth Patterson, of whom Napoleon I had greatly disapproved. The only remaining Bonapartist claimants since 1879 have been the descendants of Jérôme and Catherine of Württemberg in the male line.
List of Bonapartist claimants to the French throne since 1814
Napoleon, Duke of Reichstadt, son of Napoleon I, styled Napoleon II by Bonapartists. Briefly reigned as Emperor in France for a fortnight in June–July 1815 after his father's abdication following the defeat at Waterloo. After the deposition and exile of the Bonaparte family in July 1815, or at least from Napoleon I's death in 1821, he was Bonapartist claimant to the throne until 1832. He died in 1832 unmarried and with no children.
Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon I's oldest brother, former King of Spain and claimant from 1832 to 1844. He died in 1844 with two daughters, but no legitimate male children.
Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon I's second youngest brother, former King of Holland and claimant from 1844 to 1846. He died in 1846.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the only living legitimate child of Louis Bonaparte (though some have questioned whether he was Louis' biological son—his mother Hortense was notorious for her infidelity). He was President of France from 1849 to 1852 and under the name Napoleon III ruled as Emperor from 1852 to 1870. He was claimant from 1846 to 1873. when he died,
Napoléon Eugène, Prince Imperial, the only legitimate child of Napoleon III. He was claimant from 1873 to 1879. Styled Napoleon IV by his supporters, he died in 1879 unmarried and with no children.
Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte, nicknamed Plon-plon, the only male child of Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon I's youngest brother, with Catharina of Württemberg (though Jerome had had another son earlier with Elizabeth Patterson). He was claimant from 1879 to 1891, but Eugene Bonaparte's will excluded him from the succession in favour of his son Napoleron Victor, leading to fierce disputes among the increasingly irrelevant Bonapartist circle. He died in 1891.
Napoléon Victor Jérôme Frédéric Bonaparte, eldest son of Plon-plon and claimant from 1879 to 1926 (though many Bonapartists preferred his younger brother Louis). Until his father's death in 1891, he and his father both claimed the throne. He died in 1926.
Karl Marx was a student of Jacobinism and the French Revolution as well as a contemporary critic of the Second Republic and Second Empire. He used the term Bonapartism to refer to a situation in which counterrevolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries and then use selective reformism to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes. In the process, Marx argued, Bonapartists preserve and mask the power of a narrow ruling class. He saw Napoleon I and Napoleon III as having both corrupted revolutions in France in this way. Marx offered this definition of and analysis of Bonapartism in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, written in 1852. In this document, he drew attention to what he called the phenomenon's repetitive history with one of his most quoted lines: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce".[2]
For Marx, a Bonapartist regime appears to have great power, but only because there is no class with enough confidence or power to firmly establish its authority in its own name, so a leader who appears to stand above the struggle can take the mantle of power. It is an inherently unstable situation, where the apparently all-powerful leader is swept aside once the struggle is resolved one way or the other.
Some modern-day Trotskyists and others on the left use the phrase left Bonapartist more loosely to describe those like Stalin and Mao Zedong who control left-wing or populist authoritarian regimes.
Bonapartism and the French right
According to historian René Rémond's 1954 book Les Droites en France, Bonapartism constitutes one of the three French right-wing families or political groupings. It is the latest one and developed after Legitimism and Orléanist. According to him, both Boulangisme and Gaullism are considered to be forms of Bonapartism. However, this has been consistently disputed by Bonapartists and by many other historians. Notable examples of the latter include Vincent Cronin, who referred to Napoleonic government as "middle-of-the-road",[3]André Castelot in his Bonaparte, for whom being above and outside of party struggles was the founding principle of Bonapartism[4] and Louis Madelin, who describes Napoleon's role in French history as being the great reconciler after the divides and wounds of the French Revolution (conclusion to Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire).
In their own time, both Napoleon I and Napoleon III refused to be classed as either leftist or rightist, arguing that to claim to govern a country in the name of a faction meant acting against the national interest and one day succumbing to its influence. In Des Idées Napoléoniennes (On Napoleonic Ideas), published in 1839, the future Napoleon III quoted his uncle's words to the Council of State on this subject, ending with the following explanation:
"You see, this is why I have composed my Council of State of constituants who were called Moderates or Feuillants, like Defermon, Roederer, Regnier, Regnault; of royalists like Devaines and Dufresnes ; lastly of jacobins like Brune, Réal and Berlier. I like honest people of all parties". Prompt to reward recent services, as to shed luster all the great memories, Napoleon has placed in the Hôtel des Invalides, next to the statues of Hoche, of Joubert, of Marceau, of Dugommier, of Dampierre, the statue of Condé, the ashes of Turenne, and the heart of Vauban. He revives, in Orleans, the memory of Joan of Arc, in Beauvais that of Jeanne Hachette [...] Always faithful to principles of conciliation, the Emperor, during the course of his reign, gives a pension to the sister of Robespierre, as he does to the mother of the Duke of Orleans.
—Chapter III, p. 31
Today, an official Mouvement Bonapartiste based in France exists, headed by Paul-Napoléon Calland with an unknown number of members around the world. Its official mission statement is as follows:
[T]o defend, make known and to spread the principles and values of Bonapartism. [The movement] is based on popular support for a policy of recovery combining the efforts of individuals, associations and State services. The movement defends the Bonapartist principles on which it is founded, and which govern its internal organisation. It also defends the memory of Napoleon the Great, as well as those of Napoleon III and their sons, Napoleon II and Napoleon IV. It recognises Napoleon IV as having reigned without governing, by virtue of the plebiscite of May 1870. The movement recognises no emperor after 1879, because of the absence of a plebiscite. Republican, it gives priority to the happiness, interest and glory of peoples, and envisages the restoration of the Empire only if the foundations of the regime are republican and approved by referendum.
Other Bonapartists
In 1976, when the dictator Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a great admirer of Napoleon, made himself Emperor Bokassa I of Central Africa, he declared that the ideology of his regime was Bonapartism and added golden bees to his imperial standard.
Raymond Hinnebusch has characterized Hafez al-Assad's regime in Syria as Bonapartist.
Related Research Articles
Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was a younger brother of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French. He was a monarch in his own right from 1806 to 1810, ruling over the Kingdom of Holland. In that capacity he was known as Louis I.
Jérôme-Napoléon Bonaparte was the youngest brother of Napoleon I and reigned as Jerome I, King of Westphalia, between 1807 and 1813. From 1816 onward, he bore the title of Prince of Montfort. After 1848, when his nephew, Louis Napoleon, became President of the French Second Republic, he served in several official roles, including Marshal of France from 1850 onward, and President of the Senate in 1852.
Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte, Prince Français, Count de Meudon, Count di Moncalieri ad personam, 3rd Prince von Montfort was the second son of Jérôme Bonaparte, king of Westphalia, by his wife Princess Catherine of Württemberg. He soon rendered himself popular by playing on his family ties to Napoleon I. After the French revolution of 1848 he was elected to the National Assembly of France as a representative of Corsica.
Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte II was a French-American military officer who served in the United States Army and later in the French Army. He was the son of Jérôme Napoléon Bonaparte and Susan May Williams.
Jean-Gilbert Victor Fialin, Duc de Persigny was a statesman of the Second French Empire.
The Orléanists were a French political faction supporting a constitutional monarchy for France led by the House of Orléans as opposed to Legitimists who supported the main line of the House of Bourbon. The Orléanist faction governed France from 1830 to 1848 in the July Monarchy of King Louis Philippe I. The faction took its name from the Orléans branch of the House of Bourbon. The faction comprised many liberals and intellectuals who wanted to restore the monarchy as a constitutional monarchy with limited powers for the king and most power in the hands of parliament.
Emperor of the French was the monarch of the First French Empire and the Second French Empire.
Victor, Prince Napoléon, titular 4th Prince of Montfort, was the Bonapartist pretender to the French throne from 1879 until his death in 1926. He was known as Napoléon V by his supporters.
Napoléon-Louis Bonaparte, also known as Louis II of Holland, was the middle son of Louis I of Holland and Hortense de Beauharnais. His father was the younger brother of Napoléon I and reigned as King of Holland from 1806 to 1810, while his mother was the daughter of Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoléon's first wife. He was the older brother of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, future Emperor Napoleon III.
Charles, Prince Napoléon is a French politician, and is recognised by some Bonapartists as the head of the Imperial House of France and as heir to the rights and legacy established by his great-great-grand-uncle, Emperor Napoléon I. Other Bonapartists consider his son, Jean-Christophe, to be the current head of the house and heir.
Jean-Christophe, Prince Napoléon is, in the views of some Bonapartists, head of the former Imperial House of France and the heir of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Princes of Canino and Musignano formed the genealogically senior line of the Bonaparte family following the death of Joseph Bonaparte in 1844. The line was founded by one of Emperor Napoleon's younger brothers, Lucien Bonaparte. It became extinct in the male line in 1924. The dynastic Bonapartist pretenders descend in the male line from Prince Jérôme Napoléon, Napoleon's youngest brother.
The line of succession to the throne of the French Empire was vested in the descendants and relations of Napoleon Bonaparte until the abolition of the French Empire in 1870.
This is a simplified family tree of all Frankish and French monarchs, from Chlodio to Napoleon III.
Jérôme Napoléon Charles Bonaparte, Prince of Montfort was the son of Jérôme Bonaparte and a nephew of Napoleon I, Emperor of France, and a soldier in service of the German kingdom of Württemberg.
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