Paris Between Empires, 1814-1852

by Philip Mansel

Between 1814 and 1852 Paris was a city of power and pleasure, a magnet for people of all nationalities that exerted an influence far beyond the borders of France. Paris was the stage where the great conflicts of the age, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, revolution and royalism, socialism and capitalism, atheism and Catholicism, were fought out before the audience of Europe. As a contemporary proverb put when Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold. PARIS BETWEEN EMPIRES tells the story of this golden age, from the entry of the allies into Paris on 31 March 1814, after the defeat of Napoleon I, to the proclamation of another Bonaparte, his nephew Louis-Napoleon, as Napoleon III in the Hotel de Ville on 2 December 1852. During those years, Paris, the seat of a new parliamentary government, was a truly cosmopolitan capital, home to Rossini, Heine and Princess Lieven, as well as Berlioz, Chateaubriand and Madame Recamier.

Genres: History, France, European History, Nonfiction

576 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Philip Mansel is a historian of courts and cities, and of France and the Ottoman Empire. He was born in London in 1951 and educated at Eton College, where he was a King’s Scholar, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Modern History and Modern Languages. Following four years’ research into the French court of the period 1814-1830, he was awarded his doctorate at University College, London in 1978.

His first book, Louis XVIII, was published in 1981 and this - together with subsequent works such as The Court of France 1789-1830 (1989), Paris Between Empires 1814-1852 (2001) - established him as an authority on the later French monarchy. Six of his books have been translated into French.

Altogether Philip Mansel has published eleven books of history and biography, mainly relating either to France or the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East: Sultans in Splendour was published in 1988, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire 1453-1924 in 1995 and Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean in 2010.

Over the past 30 years he has contributed reviews and articles to a wide range of newspapers and journals, including History Today, The English Historical Review, The International Herald Tribune, Books and Bookmen, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and Apollo. Currently he writes reviews for The Spectator, Cornucopia, The Art Newspaper and The Times Literary Supplement.

In 1995 Philip Mansel was a founder with David Starkey, Robert Oresko and Simon Thurley of the Society for Court Studies, designed to promote research in the field of court history, and he is the editor of the Society’s journal. The Society has a branch in Munich and is linked to similar societies in Versailles, Madrid, Ferrara and Turin.

He has travelled widely, lecturing in many countries - including the United States, France, Germany, Italy and Turkey - and has made a number of appearances on radio and television, including in the two-part Channel 4 documentary “Harem” and in two BBC2 documentaries on Versailles in 2012. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature, the Institute of Historical Research (University of London) and the Royal Asiatic Society, and is a member of the Conseil Scientifique of the Centre de Recherche du Chateau de Versailles. In 2010 Philip Mansel was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and in 2012 was the recipient of the annual London Library Life in Literature Award.

Philip Mansel wrote the introduction to the 2012 re-issue of Nancy Mitford’s The Sun King and is currently working on his own biography of Louis XIV. His short history of Aleppo: Rise and Fall of a World City is scheduled for publication in April 2016. His book on Napoleon and his court, The Eagle in Splendour, was republished by I. B. Tauris in June 2015.

In 1995 Philip Mansel started a campaign to save Clavell Tower, a ruined folly of 1831 which threatened to fall over the cliff above Kimmeridge Bay. This led, in 2007-8, to the Tower’s deconstruction, relocation, reconstruction, restoration and modernisation by the Landmark Trust. Clavell Tower is now the Trust’s most popular property.

Philip Mansel lives in London, travelling to Paris, Istanbul and elsewhere for research, conferences and lectures. He also runs the family estate at Smedmore, near Wareham in Dorset. For more information on this historic house, visit the web site and read the recent articles published in The World of Interiors and Country Life.

Reviews

[David Montgomery · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough and accessible history of the city of Paris, in between the fall of Napoleon I and the accession of his nephew Napoleon III. Mansel, the biographer of King Louis XVIII and a scholar of the French court, draws on voluminous letters and memoirs from politicians, artists, writers, travelers, salonnières and more to illustrate a recounting of the political and cultural history of the day, as experienced by the denizens of Paris. Only periodically do the city's huge multitudes of impoverished residents enter the story — usually during the great revolutions when they shape events. This is the only real shortcoming of this otherwise excellent book, whose keey strength is Mansel's broad sourcing, which ends up reliant on the written narratives of people famous enough to have them written down and published. With that noted, it's full of both amusing anecdotes and genuinely insightful historical research, while being readable for a general audience.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Mansel looks at French history solely through its capital and largely through the eyes of relatively small national and cosmopolitan elites. The vast mass of the Parisian population barely gets a look in except when they are rioting. The bulk of France may as well not exist.

Nevertheless, it is well worth reading because much of history is in fact about the machinations of elites if only because they tend to be the ones who can record their own doings. The book becomes as much an insight to the moral vaccuum of elite behaviour as it is of its ostensible subject matter.

The period covered is as tightly drawn as the geographical focus. The book is strongest on the period following Napoleon I's first defeat through to the 1830s. The tale becomes a bit more cursory as we move towards the revolution of 1848 and more so still as we reach the coup of Napoleon III.

This does not entirely matter. One does not really want a 430-page book to become a 600-page book just to maintain the momentum nor to see less on the period from 1814 to 1840 just to preserve balance - it is how the French political elite behaves in the detail that matters.

And, I should note, Mansel still tells a good story around Napoleon III's coup and adds some background on the disaster of 1870 which seems to have been written into the script of the 1840s just as much as our Afghan imbroglio was written in retrospect into the script of the 1990s.

I read this following a reading of Schama's 'Citizens', clearly the better book but trying to do something different. What we see in both, however, is a clash of interest and ideologies creating a ferment of ambition within a surprisingly small and yet overlapping network of people.

More so than in the 1780s, each faction of the day owes its origin to some previous struggle. Individuals move between factions with alarming cynicism as they seek advantage or patronage or, more charitably, change their positions as the facts change.

French elites were far from unique in this. It is just that the French Revolution and subsequent events provided so many options (the English revolutionary process until the final settlement of the Hanoverians did much the same) that new careers could be made on adroit shifts of 'perspective'.

There are, to start with, the Bourbon legitimists who could be divided into moderates prepared to accept constitutionalism and Ultras wanting a reversion to an ancien regime that was probably as much imagined as real. The latter were as ideologically 'nutty' as the radicals.

Louis XVIII comes across as a decent sort of chap coping with a family traumatised by its senior members having been murdered in public by revolutionaries but his brother Charles X, with his Ultra advisers, ended up being James II to Louis' Charles II.

The French intellectual elite of the 1810s through to the 1830s was largely European-minded, happy to seek office from foreign as much as Bourbon potentates. The book is, in good part, the story of the struggle between eighteenth century cosmopolitanism and nineteenth century nationalism.

The nationalist tendency had originated with the Jacobinical revolution. There were always a few hard-line radical populist republicans surviving but nationalism was to be expressed as either Bonapartism or a liberal Republicanism that could not shake off its national-militarist aspects.

With the failure of the Bourbons, monarchism (or rather British-style constitutional monarchy) gets another chance with the Orleanism of Louis-Philippe whose strategy appears to have been to secure a broadly cosmopolitan French culture by letting the bourgeoisie get rich.

Naturally this would create class tensions and a basic political laziness and ineptitude would allow both Bonapartism (with its persistent links with the Army) and liberal republicanism to undermine the Orleanist settlement, throw it over and then fight for the spoils.

The 1830 Revolution was supposed to be France's 1688 (consciously so to many moderate liberals) but, instead, its version of 'old corruption' under the Orleanists had led inexorably to yet another face-off over the former's corpse between those still fighting old wars.

The radical republicans (represented by Thiers in opposition to Guizot on the 'fat cat' side) lost (even though they would ultimately win in 1870/71 and preside over the final slaughter of the 'real Paris' beneath the froth of the posh) by playing a game they could not win - national 'gloire'.

Looking back over the forty years of turmoil and the rejection of the British constitutional model as radical Whigs might have imagined it to be, French history of the period now seems to be a struggle over quite a simple set of propositions centred on an interpretation of sovereignty.

France might be a sensible part of the concert of Europe and avoid the expense of war (after all, it was support for the American Revolution that helped bankrupt the Bourbons and set in train the revolutionary process) under a monarch or seek 'to punch above its weight' as an abstract France.

If legitimism was the thesis and national republicanism the antithesis, then the synthesis was imperial nationalism, Bonapartism seems to have simply taken the structure of 'ultra' monarchical rule and applied to the fulfilment of a Jacobinical notion of national destiny.

Oh, Lord preserve us from idealists! While pragmatic monarchists tried to collaborate with other pragmatists in Europe to avoid war, 'idealists' either sought war for the sake of 'gloire' (the Bonapartists) or to spread liberal views against decaying empires such as the Ottoman.

There is a gender aspect to this. Women welcomed the fall of Napoleon and the entry of the Tsar and Wellington into Paris because it meant no more dead young men. As time went by, male 'idealists' (and a few women) actually sought wars.

I was raised to think of the process from 1815 (evil monarchical legitimism) to 1871 (constitutional liberalism albeit with the stain of the massacres of the communards) as some sort of natural progress - a French Whiggery, if you like. Now I am far from sure.

Schama has shown us that the French Revolution itself was very much a split in the ruling order. Those splits subsequently look far from progressive as they unfold over the half century to come - the elites just got to record the narratives that we have taken for granted.

As I have noted, the Legitimist Right rather than the Bonapartist Right or Radical Left tended to want peace and, in the Orleanist iteration, to support the sort of 'bourgeois' values that led to economic progress (although unfortunately this was to decline into 'enrichissez-vous').

What is perhaps more interesting is that, outside the artisanal and working class revolutionaries in the tradition of Blanqui and the Communards, it was the Catholic Church and concerned nobles who seem to have been most concerned with the condition of the people.

It was the Church that drove legislation to limit drastically the use of child labour while the 'liberals' did everything they could to control the masses when they were not exploiting them and treating them as potential cannon fodder.

One interesting tit-bit is that the authorities were later able to exploit social divisions within the mass of the population by hiring younger generation discontented workers as military to crush the risings of older artisanal insurgents. History is always more complicated than we think it may be.

Similarly the country outside Paris (as well perhaps as those who wanted bread before politics) was getting fed up with the behaviour of the Parisians, voted in conservatives when they got the expanded vote and largely welcomed the coup of Napoleon III.

The liberals were as imperialist in intent as the Bonapartists but in different directions. Whereas the Bonapartists would have been perfectly happy to invade Austria and replay Wagram and Austerlitz, the 'liberals' were excited by the colonial war that acquired Algeria.

Perhaps the two came together on the 'liberation' of Italy from the Austrian Empire (which actually meant the end of local states as in Germany under a centralised quasi-constitutional monarchy) but Napoleon III also blundered in helping to create the new German state.

The French obsession with Austria was thoroughly Ancien Regime and the French elite failed to see that, instead of France reaching out to acquire its natural frontier at the Rhine, the new Germany would secure itself by taking Alsace and Lorraine in 1871. Unintended consequences!

I cannot help but compare this liberal blindness to reality with a modern day equivalent - Blairo-Toryism - with its disregard of the working class, concentration on the well-being of the urban middle classes and commitment to ideologically motivated 'forever wars' that backfire.

Although not a particularly sophisticated history, Mansel's 'Paris Between the Empires' is filled with useful detail and not a few amusing anecdotes about one of the most interesting periods in European history that is too often neglected except as a couple of isolated revolutions.

All the usual characters are here in letters, tracts and gossip - Mme de Stael, Talleyrand, the fascinating Russian-Corsican and rival of Bonaparte Pozzo di Borgo, Chateaubriand, Lamartine and so many others. although one suspects the tale is biaised by its sources at times.

Mansel himself appears to have his own, perhaps rather conservative, preference for courts, courtiers and kings but the facts seem to speak for themselves. The 'baddies' turn out not to be quite as bad as the 'goodies' seem to be although no one in this story truly inspires.

Another theme needs mentioning although it merely adds evidence to a proposition that will be evident to anyone who has studied eighteenth century England or Britain in the dark days of 'liberal-conservative' rule from 1997 to 2019 - the moral vacuum of elites by their very nature.

These are witty and interesting people (the petit-bourgeois Blairites being a sad exception to the generality of cynical but entertaining elites). Some do have a basic integrity but most of them are on the take, eminently bribable, shifting masters or associates at the drop of hat.

What will be most remarkable to the modern eye is the way that apparent French patriots (late seventeenth century Britons were no better) could go in and out of foreign service against their own country as it suited their bank balance or position or desperate search for office.

Perhaps things are not so different today when prominent politicians can become millionaires by supporting dodgy financial operations or foreign oligarchs but it is true that even the worst of our current bunch do not actually seek to serve foreign governments directly.

In Britain, this aspect of corruption changes over the eighteenth century as patriotism develops into a reality in men's minds as an idea with consequences. Mansel's book shows the same process of ideological change taking place between the 1830s and 1840s but was this actually an improvement?

To the po-faced liberal, of course it was ... politics was no longer to be a game between ambitious aristocrats but a matter of right conduct and right belief ... but, once again, I am not so sure when I look at the war-mongering and pompous prigs who start to emerge as a result.

There is also much here on the power of the popular French media who were as dangerous to good order as the excitable broadcasters of today. As today, the most dangerous class in society is still made up of hysterical 'intellectuals' engaged in posturing self-expression.

These excitable people scribbled away and fomented violence (and had done since the Ancien Regime) in France, demanding absolute freedom to disrupt society and promote policies to match ideas rather than have ideas that improved policy.

The low point of Western liberalism is probably not the current Afghan crisis but the British Liberal Government sentencing 100,000s of its own young people to die because of a 'matter of honour' in 1914. In fact, that decision was based on a Treaty designed to contain Jacobin designs on Belgium.

This is European liberalism described simply - the control of the narrative by people prepared to die to the last of their own subjects. If I cannot have a peace-loving democratic socialism of true internationalists, I think I might have prefered a Bourbon or a Stuart if they had not been so dim.

All in all, this is a good read about the world of political Paris between two bouts of Bonapartism, first time as megadeath tragedy, second time as flummery and near-comedy (leading, of course, to yet more tragedy). Not a great work of history but a solid one. With reluctance, I say 'vive les rois'.

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really finished- but finished for me. A bit too much of the cultural history for my taste, as i was looking for boring old book history of this time period as i try to move on from the fascinating times of the French revolution and then Napoleon (both of which i have read lots on). Will keep trying, but this isn't the one i was looking for.

[Antonio Nunez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a history of Paris between the two Napoleonic Empires (1814-1852). It starts with Napoleon's initial defeat, the first occupation of Paris, the Hundred Days and the second occupation. It is indeed extraordinary that Paris was not treated by the Russians in 1815 like Berlin was in 1945. Of course, Napoleon was no Hitler and Alexander I was no Stalin (although the French occupation of Russia was also quite violent, if less protracted than the German one), but then again Paris was no Berlin, and one doesn't treat the most beautiful city in the world like any other place (the point was accepted by the illustrious General and Field Marshall Von Choltitz, who chose to betray his führer rather than raze lovely Paris).
The story picks up its pace during the restoration. Building on his successful biography of Louis XVIII, Mansel shows that the familiar dismissal of the Bourbons (who supposedly had neither learnt nor forgotten anything) was unfair, at least during the reign of Louis XVIII, the former Count of Provence and younger brother of the slain Louis XVI. Louis XVIII went out of his way to reconcile the people with the monarchy, and he was genuinely popular during his short reign. It is interesting to see how biographers are attracted to their subjets. Antonia Fraser in her biography of Marie-Antoinette regards the Comte de Provence as a traitor who waited abroad for his brother's family to be slaughter in order to inherit the throne, whereas Mansel's Louis XVIII is a peaceful, clever, if slightly cynical, man.

The author brings to life the verve with which the Parisians enjoyed their lives after nearly thirty years of revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (according to Mansel, the Restoration's most reliable supporters were women, who did not want their children, husbands or lovers to be sent out to war). He recalls the literary, philosophical and political salons, which were not just gathering points for like-minded flaneurs, but essential nerve endings in the city's political life. In many cases, political decisions were made not in government offices, but in the salons themselves.

The murder at the opera of the Duc de Berry, Louis XVIII's nephew is brilliantly described. Mansel conveys the shortsightedness of Charles X (Louis XVIII's brother) and his advisors (including the brilliant poet and diarist, but terrible politician and rather unpleasant person, Chateaubriand) which managed to alienate the Parisians in six short years and led to the mercenary and unloved bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe, who was always suffering attempts on his life (it seems to me that he is unnecessarily beastly to Poiron, as Louis-Philippe was known due to his pear shaped face- Louis-Philippe was a pleasant, apparently decent man, who did much to bring bourgeois propriety to France, and preferred to let people enrich themselves rather than get them involved in international wars- I would much rather be governed by a man like Louis-Philippe, than by an arrogant trouble-maker like his successor, Napoleon the Small). The end, when it came, was swift and epical, as 1848 unfolded, the dress rehearsal for the Commune of 1870.

The book is full of loving detail that only someone with several books about the main people of the era could achieve. I was fascinated to read about the most influential man in Paris during the restoration, Count Pozzo di Borgo, a brilliant and cynical Corsican general who hated Napoleon and threw in his lot with the Russians. It's not the Belle Epoque, but it's not far off. By the way, Pozzo di Borgo ended his days as one of the richest men in France, and his descendants are still around, and still doing very well indeed.

[James Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book by Philip Mansel is about the Bourbon Restoration. The interesting aspect of this book is its approach to the history of the period. The reactionary tenor of the period can be seen in the government’s imposition of an official policy of what was called ‘oubli’, or forgetting, of the past Napoleonic era (this does not seem to be unique to this period - perhaps it is a precursor of twentieth century erasure of history). All relics of the time, like books and uniforms had to be burned. Press censorship was extremely oppressive and history was essentially rewritten to minimise the effects of the prior period’s very real and sweeping social and political changes

[Ed Crutchley · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing and abundantly researched book that covers the difficult metamorphosis of Paris from empire back to monarchy, with a bit of help from their neighbours.