Bonapartist

Bonapartist, French Bonapartiste, any of the 19th-century supporters of

Napoleon I and Napoleon III and of their political theories and policies. The
Bonapartist party advanced the claims of the Bonaparte family throughout the
century and, though never completely united, believed in an autocratic government
run with the presumed consent of the people.

After Napoleon I’s abdication (1814), many of his followers turned to his son,
Napoleon II, named as his successor; and after Napoleon I’s exile to St. Helena
(1815) and death (1821), they tried vainly to rally around Napoleon II (by then duke
of Reichstadt), who, however, was being held virtual prisoner by the Austrian
Habsburgs and was in ill health (he died in 1832). The Bonapartists, in any case,
were poorly organized; and the memories of Napoleon’s failures were too recent for
them to secure power.

Nevertheless, a cult began to surround Napoleon Bonaparte after his death,

and within a few years he was being promoted as the saviour of the common man
and a political genius of the first order. Napoleon I’s tyranny was being forgotten or
glossed over as the memory of it grew dimmer, and instead his “glory,” which
contrasted so strikingly with the timidity and dullness of the bourgeois monarchy of
Louis-Philippe, was lauded nostalgically. This sentiment left the way open for his
nephew, Louis-Napoléon, an able propagandist, who gave all his energies to winning
the throne of France. The failure of the Orléanists under Louis-Philippe and of the
republicans under the Second Republic to satisfy the needs and demands of the
French people gave Louis-Napoléon the opening he needed, and in December 1848
the Bonapartists garnered enough votes to elect him president. Within three years he
was able to dissolve the parliament, arrest his enemies, and have himself voted
dictatorial powers. In November 1852 he was elected emperor of the French.

Bonapartism differed somewhat under Louis-Napoléon (Napoleon III from

Dec. 2, 1852), who sought to establish a liberal empire and avoid war. (He
nevertheless got the nation involved in a series of foreign adventures—the Crimean
War, the wars of Italian independence, the Mexican empire, and the fateful Franco-
German War that led to his downfall in 1870.) During this period of Napoleonic
power, the Bonapartists split into two factions. First, there were the conservatives
surrounding Napoleon III, who encouraged the participation of the Catholic Church
in education and rural organization, a laissez-faire attitude toward business and
investment, and a strong central government working through approval of policy by
plebiscite and an ostensibly independent system of local government. Second, there
were the radicals, anticlerical all, who held to the republican ideals of universal
suffrage, with real power exerted through the leadership of the Bonaparte.

The death (1873) of Napoleon III after his overthrow and the early death of
his son, Louis, the prince imperial (1879), left the party split even worse under
Napoléon-Jérôme Bonaparte (Napoleon III’s first cousin) and the latter’s elder son
Napoléon-Victor—respectively leaders of the radicals and the conservatives. They
continued to elect representatives but slowly lost members to the emerging parties
of the Third Republic. When Napoléon-Jérôme died in 1891, the Bonapartist party
effectively ceased to exist.