"A sphinx without a riddle." — Bismarck
"On the summit of a great wave he can reach the top of a cliff that a giant placed on dry ground could not scale." — Tocqueville
"March at the head of the ideas of your age, and then those ideas will follow and support you."
"Usually, it is man who attacks; as for me, I defend myself, and I often capitulate." — on his mistresses.
No ruler in modern history has been insulted by a more distinguished committee. Victor Hugo called him Napoleon le Petit, Marx built the most famous epigram in political literature — history repeating itself, first as tragedy, then as farce — around his person, Tocqueville pronounced him a dwarf lifted by a wave; Bismarck, a sphinx without a riddle. His socionics conflictor Ulysses Grant didn't find much good in him. And yet the dwarf reigned over France longer than his titanic uncle and rebuilt its capital. Louis-Napoléon (1808-1873) was the performer-ideologue of an inherited imperial myth, driving toward the historic role with lifelong energy.
Despite certain IEI-ish dreaminess in personal manner, noticed by contemporaries (the "Sphinx of the Tuileries"), this was not a man who passively waited for destiny. He believed, fatalistically and completely, in his star, but in this, his Ni was far closer to its active-rational creative form, then the contemplative and passive lead one. In Swiss and English exile he made himself the one-man ministry of propaganda for a dynasty that no longer existed: pamphlets, articles, and above all, The Napoleonnic Ideas, (1839), the remarkable book in which he took his uncle's improvised career and systematized it retroactively into a coherent political religion — Bonapartism as doctrine: order plus progress plus glory plus the people, incarnated in a Napoleon. He then tried to enact it in person: armed landings, proclamations, an attempt to raise the garrisons — fiascos both, but fiascos of initiative. In 1848 he converted twenty years of accumulated myth into France's first universal-suffrage presidential landslide, 74 percent. And when the constitution barred his re-election, he seized the state — choosing for his coup, with a demonstrative instinct, the second of December: the anniversary of the first Napoleon's coronation and of Austerlitz.
The third Napoleon, the sources note, was even more demonstrative than his Se-lead uncle: he "revelled in splendour and gleefully reintroduced the imperial regalia", the slogans ("The Empire means peace") deployed with a feel for mass communication. A historiographical assessment of him notes that modern historians reflected upon the ways in which "corruption, censorship, propaganda, populism, plebiscites, demagoguery, neglect for the rule of law, utopianism, romanticism and authoritarianism have all been at the heart of mass democracy from its beginnings in the Second Republic" — not a bad combination of nouns for your typical politician of a fairly "pure" EIE type! Unlike your typical EIE, he was a mediocre speaker, but his theatre simply ran through the written manifesto and the staged spectacle. There were, perhaps, even some LIE traits in him — the railway network multiplied under his patronage, Haussmann's Paris was, among its other meanings, infrastructure for a modern economy, he backed Suez, and the 1860 Anglo-French free trade agreement treaty, which he imposed on a furiously protectionist establishment. But while he was able to follow all this, what he kept in his own hands was the myth and the symbolic presentation: the actual Te-apparatus was delegated to competent executives (Haussmann, the Pereire brothers, Rouher). And the Mexican adventure with Maximilian Habsburg was a pure anti-LIE aggressive ideological fantasy, a Catholic Latin empire conjured across an ocean, pursued to disaster because the idea seemed magnificent to him. At least, his decision to invade Vietnam did gain another overseas possession for France.
Tocqueville's wave is true — the man rode historical currents with uncanny feel — but the wave found someone who already invested in his future with twenty years of self-propaganda. He was indeed performing a script written by his uncle, but it was staged with conviction before a mass audience. If the first Bonaparte seized his crown at sword-point, the third narrated his into existence, by appeal-to-masses ideological pamphlets and gestures, against the sneering of every intellectual in Europe.
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