July-August Miscellany 2026: Minting Imperials

An Empire in Waiting, an Empire in Exile, an Empire of Story Tellers, and an Empire Ended.

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What is your impression of Napoleon III? Marx's 1851 conclusion is inevitably going to be mentioned:

Hegel says somewhere that all great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: "Once as tragedy, and again as farce." Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the "Mountain" of 1848-51 for the "Mountain" of 1793-95, the Nephew for the Uncle. 

This extends to appearances, with the vigorous and slightly beaky Napoleon I of David's paintings (or anything earlier) contrasting with the fussy moustache and goatee of Napoleon III, even where the pose is quite similar.

By Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1853

Napoleon III was vaguely on my radar - I could have told you he went from President to Emperor, but not much more. I elected to remedy this, starting with Fenton Bresler's Napoleon III: A Life supplemented with a few other sources. This is a biography I can recommend as a starting point, though at times you really can tell that it was written by a barrister; it is sometimes breaks things down in a manner seemingly calculated to appeal to a jury.

First: Napoleon III is nephew to Napoleon I. His mother was the daughter of Josephine Bonaparte by her first husband (Alexandre de Beauharnais); his father Louis Bonaparte (younger brother of Napoleon,  later King of Holland for a time). Bresler does consider the question that Napoleon I may have been his father, and discards it; it is enough that Napoleon I was around Napoleon III in his youth and rose as high as he did, taking the Bonapartes and Beauharnaises with him. 

You know what happens to Napoleon I; if not, Ridley Scott is keen to tell you. What happens to the many Bonapartes who got made crowned heads of several bits of Europe or who made advantageous marriages? Hefty pensions and exiles from France, which suits most of them pretty well. This means that Napoleon III gets a thorough education in a variety of settings, and can later move at the heights of society. More to the point, the elder generation - who saw the rise and fall of the First Empire - are sort of content to either live out their days in luxury or raise their children. The money keeps them subdued, but it doesn't really work with the restless young - and actively means that they can eventually launch themselves out on adventures; a young Napoleon III will get involved with Italian revolutionaries and has escape the Austrians.  Later, he will use that money to print pamphlets, support himself while writing and launch a few coup attempts (first in Strasbourg, then in Boulogne; Bresler notes that no-one in either place cares to remember this).

There's a lot of 'X was imprisoned / under house arrest for six months, then via an impassioned plea by relative Y or ambassador Z, is released / is given exceptionally lenient treatment'. This is slightly frustrating, from one point of view, and I find myself asking how this happened. There's some cases of it with French generals in WWII, who are released via Vichy intervention and then go and join de Gaulle. 'X intervened' is efficient for a biography, but it does make me wonder about the mechanics of it. There's also a sort of aristocratic liberality to this, both in the relative ranks of those involved and in the sense of generosity and freedom offered. That it persists (in certain cases) past WWI and into an age of totalitarian ideology and total war is something I need to tease out. I dare say there's a Marxist analysis of class or caste loyalty.

It helps that while there is an anti-Republic/Napoleon reaction in France, it doesn't really stick, because Napoleon's reforms and ability to marshal all of France against Europe seem to have actually worked (or at least, enough people were convinced they did). Thus you get the government of Louis Phillipe, the Citizen King, repatriating his remains to be buried at Les Invalides and the completion of the Arc de Triomphe. Which makes bringing down the hammer on his heir awkward.

So, while Napoleon III gets monitored and tracked an awful lot, he gets treated pretty leniently. Even when he's imprisoned after the second coup attempt, he gets the opportunity to write essays and pamphlets and articles for newspapers and do scientific experiments. Also, his prison guard at the Chateau of Ham (near the river Somme, blown up by the Germans in 1917) made sure he got a mistress while he was there. Napoleon III has lots of mistresses.

Anyway, Napoleon III escapes the Chateau of Ham in disguise, then returns to France in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848. His coups aren't exactly held against him by this point, though he lets some other Bonapartes run for elected office before he tries himself. The fact that he has had to build his reputation by the press is useful at this point - he's not a decent public speaker (for all that he can apparently charm his way through High Society). 

By this point Bonapartism has to have a theoretical basis rather than just being Napoleon I's supporters. 

It looks like a combination of elements: 

• Appeal to revolutionary sentiment while avoiding any Reign of Terror -Political and national unity 
• A sort of radical (as in, back to the radix, the root) monarchism that has the monarch as keenly aware of the popular need and will 
• Jobs all round - one popular pamphlet in 1844 is L'extinction du pauperisme 
• Military strength, though Napoleon III does at one point stress that there's a carefully separate set of civil posts/honours/etc in the Napoleonic Code rather than a sprawling aristocratic mishmash. It's not government by soldiers.   

Bresler quotes Alfred Cobban's History of Modern France.  'Napoleon III never forgot that he had been brought to power by the masses of the people. His authority had not been created by, nor did it depend on, the army. There was no great party machine*, as in modern fascist and communist dictatorships, to hold the people down. His was a personal and plebiscitary dictatorship and what the people had given the people might take away.'

*Though see Zeldin's Political System of Napoleon III, which indicates that there are quite a few trails of influence and patronage out to provincial France in order to provide, shape or vet candidates. And come the 3rd Republic, there is still a Bonapartist Party.

So, what does this self-promoter and trickster do when he's elected with a startling majority? Well, he chooses the title 'Prince-President', faces a divides National Assembly - and the occasional revolutionary attempt. Then eventually he imitates his Uncle and there's a coup - who could have foreseen it? - and there's a Second Empire, a new constitution, a plebiscite and a wave of swift repression (which lessens fairly promptly, but never precisely wanes).

And then? Intervention in the cause of Italian unification - which does help Cavour and the House of Savoy get the ball rolling. In return, Nice and Savoy itself become part of France. Napoleon III will later fight to keep Rome and the Pope independent of a unified Italy

There's more playing the Great Power game through joining the British in the Crimean War (the Sardinians get involved too), intervention in Lebanon, the construction of the Suez Canal, the defence of French missionaries in Indochina - which will eventually produce a French Vietnam, and wider consequences than the bánh mì. He also helps set up Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico, which goes poorly. 

All this taken with defeat (and personal defeat in battle, at that; Bresler concludes that he was really quite ill, and should have stayed at home) in the Franco-Prussian War doesn't exactly paint a picture of Napoleon III as a ruler you'd want - though it's difficult to deny the vigour of his early years, when he could have become a mere playboy. He at least seems to have had higher aims than many a caudillo. Those eighteen years of secure personal rule and a stable government were probably quite useful for France in the wake of a revolution. 

It's a story that could do with telling more widely, I suspect. Three and half years ago I wanted a dynastic radio series on the Bonapartes - and nothing I've read in the course of this little spree changes that.

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De Gaulle: L'Âge de fer (2026)

First as tragedy, then as farce then as...Quixotism?

Released in English-speaking markets as De Gaulle: Resistance but the titles still clearly show 'Age of Iron'. (Not De Gaulle: Iron Age - which is a piece of time-slip fan-fiction I am not worthy to write). This is the first half of a two-parter, with the second half still to come. It's the story of Charles de Gaulle, 1939-1944. You likely know some of it, but this is a pretty decent rendition of things. 

The bulk of the plot is the formation of the Free French as a meaningful force. De Gaulle has a dubious authority, limited resources, truculent comrades, infirm allies and an enormous task in the shape of the liberation of France. Scenes in France - either German-occupied or Vichy - round out the story, and we sometimes drop into the perspective of the Free French forces on the ground - as at Bir Hakeim. 

The great contrast and clash of wills is (of course) not de Gaulle and (say) Rommel, but de Gaulle and Churchill. Both are thoroughly obstinate and awkward types - but Churchill is the face of a kingdom at war. British decisions are made to keep fighting, to deny the enemy, to garner American support - they are, however flamboyant Churchill may be personally*, the practical decisions of a nation in arms with all the capacities and qualities of a state bureaucracy**. De Gaulle is without all these things - and still insists on himself as France (a subtle contrast with Churchill, who is Prime Minister and not monarch). His small personal following is made smaller as he is cut out of decisions - learning about the attack on the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kébir only after the fact - or as he interferes with vital decisions - as at Dakar. I make no claims for the accuracy of the film.

Yet he remains stubborn, and (with a certain amount of nerve and daring) his forces manage to gain a foothold in the backwaters of France's empire - the latter is on full display, with multiple segments in Chad involving Félix Éboué. The Free French Brigade that finally fights at Bir Hakeim is clearly international - all in contrast to the polished presentation of Vichy Forces. Allied victory is - with, as ever, hindsight - inevitable, so de Gaulle is also contrasted with French admiral François Darlan. Darlan worked with the Vichy Government (until he didn't) and would have been a fairly plausible choice as a leader for Free French Forces.

Anyway, this isn't (necessarily) a very interesting film as a film. But it will probably get you to go out and look up a dozen of the people and place involved, so well done Pathé.

As for the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, the Knight of the Lantern Jaws, the most admirable Don Quixote of La Mancha....the comparison is made explicitly by characters in the film. But the comparison with Napoleon III is inevitable under the circumstances of this post. It probably doesn't go terribly far, but that image of driven rulers of France in exile launching doomed operations goes a certain way. More broadly, that France had rebuilt itself from exile before - with two empires, three republics and numerous other circumstances en route - does connect the two again. No Napoleon III, no de Gaulle? A little stronger than I'd put it.

*Though rewatching a trailer or two for this post, Churchill (played by Simon Russell Beale) is made to sound more callous than his portrayal necessarily ends up being.

**The French being more plucky and obstinate than a Churchillian wartime image of British pluck and obstinacy is slightly funny, in a vaguely meta way.

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Kalpa Imperial, Angélica Gorodischer (1983) tr. by Ursula K LeGuin (2003)

Not a new book, or a new translation, but Penguin have recently done a new edition. 

This is used as the cover art - Ad Minoliti “Carrier Bag Theory - after Ursula K. Le Guin”, (2025). 

 

'In city squares and glittering palaces, a series of storytellers recount the many deaths and rebirths of the greatest empire that never was; a history in which beggars rise to the Golden Throne, mad emperors raise cities and murderous empresses plot against their own children.'

The blurb's description of 'The greatest empire that never was' together with the mention of Italo Calvino in the acknowledgements probably makes one think of something like 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'; that Borges and Gorodischer were both Argentines doubtless helps. But there's never that Borgesian sense of making a world (at least, I didn't get it) only of shaping one .... give or take some of the reframing elements in the last story. 

The story feel very LeGuin, surprisingly enough. The themes and elements are repeated so often that you could probably make a pastiche quite readily; that's not a mark against Kalpa Imperial per se, but it does have a very clear niche.* I also have to wonder how much of what I've read is LeGuin and how much Gorodischer, which is the trouble with such a famous author as your translator, especially where fields overlap.

These stories are worth reading, if you've an interest in the sort of world that can be conjured from overlapping snapshots of a fictional history, or accounts of scattered locations in a far-off empire - and if you're on a blog of this kind, you likely do.

*And any parody of it would get tired PDQ. I've often thought that a mirror image parody of Mills's Slaine would be hilarious - maybe an ultraviolet female hero of a developed civilisation creating and defending elaborate hierarchies in honour of the Sun God, roundly beating and humiliating all her enemies, accompanied by a loyal, stoic and chaste giantess - but it could probably only last thirty pages or so. The heroine will be called Elnaise.

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After London, Richard Jefferies (1885) 

What if William Morris's News from Nowhere was also a coming-of-age story? And really depressing? And what if the new world were brought about not by a revolt, but by a strange astral body?

We don't quite know how it happened, but the Britain of the 1880s collapsed, after a 'dark body' in space passed by, causing torrential rain and (perhaps) some strange influence on the minds of men, possibly related to biomagnetism. A century later and cities have collapsed; the state is no more, replaced by dozens of petty kingdoms. The south of England has become dominated by a great lake, with an entrance to the sea at the former Bristol and a dividing strait formed of the Chilterns. 'What was once Oxford and is now Sypolis' is a major port. A marsh sits at the eastern end of the lake:

At the eastern extremity the Lake narrows, and finally is lost in the vast marshes which cover the site of the ancient London......

Thus the low-lying parts of the mighty city of London became swamps, and the higher grounds were clad with bushes. The very largest of the buildings fell in, and there was nothing visible but trees and hawthorns on the upper lands, and willows, flags, reeds, and rushes on the lower. These crumbling ruins still more choked the stream, and almost, if not quite, turned it back. If any water ooze past, it is not perceptible, and there is no channel through to the salt ocean. It is a vast stagnant swamp, which no man dare enter, since death would be his inevitable fate.

There exhales from this oozy mass so fatal a vapour that no animal can endure it. The black water bears a greenish-brown floating scum, which for ever bubbles up from the putrid mud of the bottom. When the wind collects the miasma, and, as it were, presses it together, it becomes visible as a low cloud which hangs over the place. The cloud does not advance beyond the limit of the marsh, seeming to stay there by some constant attraction; and well it is for us that it does not, since at such times when the vapour is thickest, the very wildfowl leave the reeds, and fly from the poison. There are no fishes, neither can eels exist in the mud, nor even newts. It is dead.

The flags and reeds are coated with slime and noisome to the touch; there is one place where even these do not grow, and where there is nothing but an oily liquid, green and rank. It is plain there are no fishes in the water, for herons do not go thither, nor the kingfishers, not one of which approaches the spot. They say the sun is sometimes hidden by the vapour when it is thickest, but I do not see how any can tell this, since they could not enter the cloud, as to breathe it when collected by the wind is immediately fatal. For all the rottenness of a thousand years and of many hundred millions of human beings is there festering under the stagnant water, which has sunk down into and penetrated the earth, and floated up to the surface the contents of the buried cloacæ.

Many scores of men have, I fear, perished in the attempt to enter this fearful place, carried on by their desire of gain. For it can scarcely be disputed that untold treasures lie hidden therein, but guarded by terrors greater than fiery serpents. These have usually made their endeavours to enter in severe and continued frost, or in the height of a drought. Frost diminishes the power of the vapour, and the marshes can then, too, be partially traversed, for there is no channel for a boat. But the moment anything be moved, whether it be a bush, or a willow, even a flag, if the ice be broken, the pestilence rises yet stronger. Besides which, there are portions which never freeze, and which may be approached unawares, or a turn of the wind may drift the gas towards the explorer.

So far, so Mordor. There are later more even nightmarish descriptions of it than that. 

England has become, as said, a great many petty kingdoms and republics - prone to squabbling and raiding one another. Slavery is commonplace, under a thin veil of debt bondage. The Welsh and the Irish mount sea-borne raids on all these in revenge for past wrongs (the Scots are too far off to care.) From the limited view of the narrative, being either an in-universe document from Southern England or from the point of view of a resident Wales and Ireland appear united, or united enough to be capable of playing Viking; goodness knows why they didn't collapse into petty kingdoms - and let's not ask what happened in Ulster.

New breeds of beast stalk the renewed forests: black wood-dogs, the thorn-hog, the white hog, the hill-hog However, men maintain some domesticated beasts - draft horses or hill-ponies; 'The poodle is extinct, the Maltese terrier, the Pomeranian, the Italian greyhound, and, it is believed, great numbers of crosses and mongrels have utterly disappeared....We still have, among tame dogs, the mastiff, terrier, spaniel, deerhound, and greyhound, all of which are as faithful to man as ever.'

Also in the woods lurk Bushmen (apparently descended from tramps); seemingly vicious, squalid and secretive. The southern plains are populated by 'gipsies, those who are now often called Romany and Zingari' - nomads, raiders and prone to vendettas, if more willing to parley than the Bushmen.

All this is laid out in the first section of After London in an in-univese text. The second section details a young man moving through it: the eldest son of a Baron, a sensitive and educated youth - but still trained in arms. Our hero is Felix Aquila, who (through a variety of circumstances, including an upset in the course of love) travels the great lake in a canoe. It is through his eyes that we see the world, knowing just enough of the past to see what was lost, being young and idealistic enough to feel the sting of present woes. 

For the collapse of London - a London spoken of in terms of 'the rottenness of a thousand years and of many hundred millions of human beings' - has not led to a gentler, kinder land. Scarcity, close-mindedness and competition reign and stifle regrowth. It is, on the whole, a dispiriting vision. I found a second-hand edition with an introduction by John Fowles:

Particularly pertinent to After London is what Jefferies often called 'villadom' in the Notebooks (and Butler Ygrundism, Grundyism in Erewhon); conformity, apathy, smug narrowmindedness. It is associated with London there; yet it continues to infest the survivors of the annihilation of London in the novel, and plainly in Jefferies' view it would not die with the urban, or suburban, society that especially fostered it. It is the unthinkingness, or rather the unfeelingness, of ordinary mankind, both town and country, both middle and lower class that appals him - the inability to build one's own boat, however home-made, and sail for something better....

 If this sound very favourable to the intellectual and free-thinker, it isn't. We are told that after the passing of the celestial body the 'richer and upper classes made use of their money to escape. Those left behind were mainly the lower and most ignorant, so far as the arts were concerned, those that dwelt in distant and outlying places; and those who lived by agriculture'. 

All this is illustrated by Felix moving through the world - contemplating the culture of the time, such as it is, and the perils of the time, including war, social jostling, envy and the hazards of the material world.

After London is short, neatly crafted and freely available over at Project Gutenberg. Give it a look, see if there's anything you'd care to draw from this melancholy tale of the human quest.