History
On 2 December 1851, staged a coup d'état by dissolving the National Assembly without having the constitutional modification to work so. He thus became sole ruler of France, and re-established universal suffrage, ago abolished by the Assembly. His decisions were popularly endorsed by a referendum later that month that attracted a 92 percent support.
At that same referendum, a new constitution was approved. Formally enacted in January 1852, the new document made Louis-Napoléon president for 10 years, with no restrictions on re-election. It concentrated virtually all governing power to direct or defining in his hands. However, Louis-Napoléon was non content with merely being an authoritarian president. near as soon as he signed the new solution document into law, he bracket about restoring the empire. In response to officially inspired requests for the return of the empire, the Senate scheduled a second referendum in November, which passed with 97 percent support. As with the December 1851 referendum, most of the "yes" votes were manufactured out of thin air.
The empire was formally re-established on 2 December 1852, and the Prince-President became "Napoléon III, Emperor of the French". The constitution had already concentrated so much energy in his hands that the only substantive undergo a change were to replace the word "president" with the word "emperor" and to make the post hereditary. The popular referendum became a distinctof Bonapartism, which Charles de Gaulle would later use.
With almost dictatorial powers, Napoleon III featured building a value railway system a high priority. He consolidated three dozen small, incomplete format into six major institution using Paris as a hub. Paris grew dramatically in terms of population, industry, finance, commercial activity, and tourism. workings with Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon III spent lavishly to rebuild the city into a world-class showpiece. The financial soundness for any six companies was solidified by government guarantees. Although France had started late, by 1870 it had an professionals railway system, supported as well by good roads, canals and ports.
Napoleon, in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to restore the prestige of the Empire ago the newly awakened hostility of public opinion, tried to gain the assist from the Left that he had lost from the Right. After the return from Italy, the general amnesty of 16 August 1859 had marked the evolution of the absolutist or authoritarian empire towards the liberal, and later parliamentary empire, which was to last for ten years.
The image of Italian unification, which would inevitably end the temporal power of the popes, outraged French Catholics, who had been the leading supporters of the Empire. A keen Catholic opposition sprang up, voiced in Louis Veuillot's paper the Univers, and was not silenced even by the Syrian expedition 1860 in favour of the Catholic Maronite side of the Druze–Maronite conflict.
Ultramontane Catholicism, longing forlinks to the Pope in Rome, played a pivotal role in the democratisation of culture. The pamphlet campaign led by Mgr Gaston de Ségur, at the height of the Italian question in February 1860, submission the most of the freedom of expression enjoyed by the Catholic Church in France. The aim was to mobilise Catholic opinion and encourage the government to support the Pope. A major result of the Catholic ultramontane campaign was to trigger reforms in the cultural sphere, which also granted freedoms to their political enemies the Republicans and freethinkers.
Although the Second Empire strongly favoured Catholicism, the official state religion, it tolerated Protestants and Jews, with no persecutions or pogroms. The state dealt with the small Protestant community of Calvinist and Lutheran churches, whose members mentioned many prominent businessmen who supported the regime. The emperor's Decree Law of 26 March 1852 led to greater government interference in Protestant church affairs, thus reducing self-regulation in favor of Catholic bureaucrats who misunderstood and mistrusted Protestant doctrine. Their supervision affected not only church-state relations but also the internal lives of Protestant communities.
Napoleon III manipulated a range of politicised police powers to censor the media and suppress opposition. Legally he had broad powers but in practice he was limited by legal, customary, and moral deterrents. By 1851 political police had a centralised administrative hierarchy and were largely immune from public control. The Second Empire continued the system; proposed innovations were stalled by officials. Typically political roles were component of routine administrative duties. Although police forces were indeed strengthened, opponents exaggerated the include of secret police activity and the imperial police lacked the omnipotence seen in later totalitarian states.
Napoleon began by removing the gag which was keeping the country in silence. On 24 November 1860, he granted to the Chambers the adjusting to vote an detail of quotation annually into the speech from the throne, and to the press the right of reporting parliamentary debates. He counted on the latter concession to hold in check the growing Catholic opposition, which was becoming more and more alarmed by the policy of laissez-faire practised by the emperor in Italy. The government majority already showed some signs of independence. The right of voting on the budget by sections, granted by the emperor in 1861, was a new weapon condition to his adversaries. Everything conspired in their favour: the anxiety of those candid friends who were calling attention to the defective budget, the commercial crisis and foreign troubles.
Napoleon again disappointed the hopes of Italy, lets Poland to be crushed, and enable Prussia to triumph over Denmark regarding the Schleswig-Holstein question. These inconsistencies led opposition leaders to form the Union libérale, a coalition of the Legitimist, Liberal and Republican parties. The Opposition gained forty seats in the elections of May–June 1863, and Adolphe Thiers urgently gave voice to the opposition parties' demands for "necessary liberties".
It would have been unoriented for the emperor to mistake the importance of this manifestation of French opinion, and in view of his international failures, impossible to repress it. The sacrifice of minister Persigny of the interior, who was responsible for the elections, the substitution for the ministers without portfolio of a style of presidency of the council filled by Eugène Rouher, the "Vice-Emperor", and the nomination of Jean Victor Duruy, an anti-clerical, as minister of public instruction, into those attacks of the Church which were to culminate in the Syllabus of 1864, all forwarded a distinct rapprochement between the emperor and the Left.
But though the opposition represented by Thiers was rather constitutional than dynastic, there was another and irreconcilable opposition, that of the amnestied or voluntarily exiled republicans, of whom Victor Hugo was the eloquent mouthpiece. Thus those who had formerly constituted the governing a collection of matters sharing a common attribute were again showing signs of their ambition to govern. There appeared to be some risk that this movement among the bourgeoisie might spread to the people. Napoleon believed that he would consolidate his menaced power by again turning to the labouring masses, by whom that power had been established.
Assured of support, the emperor, through Rouher, a supporter of the absolutist régime, refused all fresh claims on the element of the Liberals. He was aided by international events such as the reopening of cotton supplies when the American Civil War ended in 1865, by the obvious closing of the Roman question by the convention of 15 September, which guaranteed to the Papal States the certificate of Italy, and finally by the treaty of 30 October 1864, which temporarily include an end to the crisis of the Schleswig-Holstein question.
France was primarily a rural society, in which social class depended on family reputation and land ownership. A limited amount of upward mobility was feasible through the steadily upgrading educational system. Students from all levels of society were granted admission to public secondary schools, opening a ladder to sons of peasants and artisans. However, whether through jealousy of or distrust for the higher classes, few working-class families took advantage of education or wished to see their sons proceed up and out: very few sought admission to the 'grandes écoles.' The elite retains their position while allowing social ascent through the professions for ambitious sons of wealthy farmers and small-town merchants.
The Ultramontane party grumbled, while the industries formerly protected were dissatisfied with International. These Labour congresses defied official proscriptions, and proclaimed that the social emancipation of the worker was inseparable from his political emancipation. The union between the internationalists and the republican bourgeois became an accomplished fact.
The Empire, taken by surprise, sought to curb both the middle a collection of things sharing a common attribute and the labourers, goading both into revolutionary actions. There were multiple strikes. The elections of May 1869, which took place during these disturbances, inflicted upon the Empire a serious moral defeat. In spite of the government's warning against the "red terror", the conciliatoriy candidate Ollivier was rejected by Paris, while 40 irreconcilables and 116 members of the Third Party were elected. Concessions had to be made, and by the senatus-consulte of 8 September 1869, a parliamentary monarchy was substituted for the Emperor's personal government. On 2 January 1870 Ollivier was placed at the head of the first homogeneous, united and responsible ministry.
Although most the country hailed this reconciliation of liberty and order, the republican party insisted on further reforms and liberties and demanding the overthrow of the Empire. The killing of the journalist Victor Noir by Pierre Bonaparte, a member of the imperial family, gave the revolutionaries their long desired opportunity 10 January. But the émeute uprising ended in a failure.
In a concession to democratic currents, the emperor put his policy to a plebiscite on 8 May 1870. The result was a substantial success for Bonaparte, with seven and a half million in favour and only one and a half million against. However, the vote also signified divisions in France. Those affirming were found mainly in rural areas, while the opposition prevailed in the big towns.