01:360:401 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Vincenzo Gioberti, Kingdom Of Sardinia, Hereditary Monarchy
21 May 2018
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Chapter 25: The Age of Nationalism
1. Napoleon III in France
1. The Second Republic and Louis Napoleon
1. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory in the December 1848
elections against General Cavaignac of June Days fame was
probably due to the Napoleonic legend; another explanation
stressed the fears of middle-class and peasant property owners in
the face of the socialist challenge of urban workers (classes
wanted protection)
2. In 1848 Louis Napoleon had a positive program for France,
which guided him throughout most of his long reign (Napoleonic
Ideas and The Elimination of Poverty)
1. Louis Napoleon believed government should represent the
people (economically)
2. When politicians ran a parliamentary government, they stirred
up class hatred because they were not interested in helping
the poor and Louis believed that the answer was a strong,
authoritarian, national leader, who would serve the people
3. The leader would be linked by direct democracy and universal
male suffrage
4. These ideas accompanied his vision of national unity and
social progress
3. Elected to a four-year term, President Louis Napoleon had to
share power with a conservative National Assembly; Louis also
signed a bill to increase greatly the role of the Catholic church in
primary and secondary education
4. Louis also signed another law depriving many poor people of the
right to vote because he wanted the Assembly to vote funds to
pay his personal debts and he wanted it to change the constitution
so he could run for a second term
5. In 1851 Louis Napoleon began to organize a conspiracy and on
December 2, 1851, he illegally dismissed the Assembly and
seized power in a coup d’etat
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6. Restoring universal male suffrage Louis Napoleon called on the
French people to legalize his actions (92 %) and a year later, 97
% agreed in a national plebiscite to make him hereditary emperor
and Louis Napoleon was elected to lead France
2.
3. Napoleon III’s Second Empire
1. Emperor Napoleon III experienced both success and failure
between 1852 and 1870
2. His greatest success was with the economy, particularly in the
1850s
1. His government encouraged the new investment banks and
massive railroad construction that were at the heart of the
Industrial Revolution on the Continent
2. The government fostered general economic expansion
through a program of public works, which included the
rebuilding of Paris to improve the environment
3. Napoleon III’s regulation of pawnshops and his support of credit
unions and better housing for the working class showed why he
had support and in the 1860s, he granted workers the right to form
unions and the right to strike (denied earlier)
4. Political power remained in the hands of the emperor; Napoleon III
chose his ministers and restricted but did not abolish the
Assembly and members were elected by universal male suffrage
every six years (parliamentary elections handled seriously)
5. Government used its officials and appointed mayors to spread the
word that the election of the government’s candidates was the key
to roads, schools, and tax rebates
6. In 1857 and in 1863, Louis Napoleon’s system worked brilliantly;
he won electoral victories but in the 1860s, France’s problems in
Italy and the rising power of Prussia led to increasing criticism
from Catholic and nationalist supporters back home
7. The middle-class liberals wanted a less authoritarian regime
(denounced his rule)
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8. In the 1860s, he progressively liberalized his empire by giving the
Assembly greater powers and the opposition candidates greater
freedom and in 1870, Louis Napoleon granted France a new
constitution, which combined a basically parliamentary regime
with a hereditary emperor as chief of state
9. In a final plebiscite on the eve of a disastrous war with Prussia,
7.5 million Frenchmen voted in favor of the new constitution and
only 1.5 million opposed it
2. Nation Building in Italy and Germany
1. Italy to 1850
1. The Italian peninsula was divided in the Middle Ages into
competing city-state, which led the commercial and cultural revival
of the West with amazing creativity
2. Sought after 1494, Italy was reorganized in the 1815 at the
Congress of Vienna
3. Between 1815 and 1848, the goal of a unified Italian nation
captured the imaginations of increasing numbers of Italians and
there were three approaches
1. The radical program of the idealistic Guiseepe Mazzini stated
that Italy become a centralized democratic republic based on
universal suffrage and will of the people
2. Vincenzo Gioberti, a Catholic priest, called for a federation of
existing states under the presidency of a progressive pope
3. The third was the program of those who looked for leadership
toward the autocratic kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, as
Germans looked toward Prussia
4. The third alternative was strengthened by the failures of 1848,
when Austria smashed and discredited Mazzini’s republicanism
and Sardinia’s monarch, Victor Emmanuel, retained the liberal
constitution granted under duress in March 1848
5. The constitution provided for a fair degree of civil liberties and real
parliamentary government complete with elections and
parliamentary control of taxes
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