Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers - French History from the Congress of Vienna (1815) till Napoleon III (1808-1873)
100 Days of Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers June 1 - August 31, 2024
Third and final super long installment on the revolutionary century that birthed Alexandre Dumas!!!
The remarkable 70-year peaceful period in recent European history was made possible by three remarkable conferences that happened during and right after WWII – the Teheran Conference (1943), Yalta Conference (1945) and Potsdam Conference (1945) and the subsequent formation of the United Nations (1945). This process of negotiating all involved parties out of armed conflict traces its origins to the end of the Thirty Years’ War (depicted in The Three Musketeers) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) AND the end of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna (1815). Diplomats from over 200 European states, cities and organizations gathered in Vienna between September 1814 and June 1815 to negotiate the secession of all military actions after a 23-year period of continuous European fighting. This was the first time in history when an all-European peace was achieved through negotiations instead of warfare. Europe was devastated by the wars of the Seven Coalitions and the continuous redrawing of borders – but instead of punishing France for the damage, the Congress of Vienna gave a platform for all belligerents to come to the negotiations table. France’s strong position was assured by the greatest diplomat of all times, the remarkable Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (1754-1838) whose diplomatic skills were so incredible, he managed to serve Louis XVI, ALL the Revolutionary governments after 1789, Napoleon I, Louis XVIII during Restoration and Luis-Philippe after the Revolution of 1830!!! His diplomatic skills could not be matched or disregarded – he made sure that France did not lose any territories as a consequence of these peace negotiations and was not forced to pay penalizing reparations. The Congress consisted of both formal talks and informal meetings and salons AND endless balls!!! This Conference did not walk – it danced!!! This was the origin of the world-famous Viennese balls!!! And the outcome of all this dancing?! A continental European peace that was upheld more or less (with the exception of the Crimean War and the Prussian wars with Austria, Denmark, and France – all involving the expansionist ideas of Napoleon III – those Napoleons!!!) till the outbreak of WWI in 1914. How was such a feat accomplished?! The revolutionary concept of Balance of Powers which guaranteed the security of all European states through formal treaties recognized by all European states. This idea was proposed by the Foreign Minister of the Austrian Empire Prince Klemens von Metternich who wined and dined all the Congress negotiators and diplomats in Vienna till everyone emerged content. Vienna and Austria were the big winners of this one place negotiations platform – they hosted and financed the conference for 9 months – and gained the status of a continental power negotiator – plus the provinces of Northern Italy and Venice for their efforts. France was allowed to go back to its pre-revolutionary borders. Prussia gained several German speaking territories such as Pomerania, Saxony and the western parts of the Polish Duchy of Warsaw and Russia gained the eastern parts of the Polish Dutchy of Warsaw. Yes, Italy, Germany and Poland were the big losers at the end of these negotiations – unified Germany and Italy will appear only in 1870 and unified Poland only after WWI. The Great Powers – France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, and the United Kingdom – rearranged the map of Europe to suit their interests – all of them were conservative monarchies that wanted to suppress all Revolutionary and Napoleonic aspirations that were the cause of two decades of warfare. But through the process of balance and compromise they established an all-European peace that lasted for 100 years…
The Congress of Vienna, Entry of the Austrian Emperor Francis I, by Johann Peter Krafft (1780-1856).
With the first abdication of Napoleon at the end of the wars of the Sixth Coalition in 1814, the younger brother of the unfortunate Louis XVI was installed on the French throne and Europe sighed with relief for the first time since 1789. Napoleon’s return from Elba for 100 Days terrified all the rulers of Europe, forcing them to organize a Seventh, and final, Coalition against France and confront Napoleon on the battlefield one last time, near the small Belgian town of Waterloo… After Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, Louis XVIII returned to Paris and ruled till 1824 when the throne went to yet another brother of the beheaded Louis XVI, Charles X, whose reign will end with yet another revolution in 1830 - which constitutes the plot of Les Misérables!!!
With the final exile of Napoleon to the Island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean in 1815, Europe was at peace – AT LAST!!! Louis XVIII did not want to rock too many boats since the situation in France was far from stable and unrest was common through sporadic. Unlike the absolutist rule of his brother and all the Bourbon kings of France before him, Louis XVIII was a constitutional monarch, limited in his power by many of the laws adopted during the time of the Revolution of 1789 and the First Empire – and that were preserved for the sake of national unity. The Catholic church – completely banned during the revolution but reestablished during the time on Napoleon who relied on it for the restoration of the nation’s morals and traditions – started regaining its social and political status (this is the focus of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black!!!) The royalists were free to return to France, but property disputes overshadowed their reintegration into the post-revolutionary society where the middle class and professional classes were not willing to compromise the position they gained since 1789. Plus, a new elite emerged during the time of Empire and the old royalist elite had to compete with this new aristocracy for both power and position in society. Because of two decades of land confiscations and redistributions and wealth transfers first from the aristocrats and the church to the various revolutionary regimes and subsequently to the Napoleonic Empire ruling class, lawsuits characterized the entire period of the Bourbon Restoration and tedious court procedures and daring lawyer pursuits were front page news as well as stuff of legendary back-room dealings!!! Welcome to the world of Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, and Hugo!!! France’s heroic battle victories were over – the chastened nation was enjoying a much longed for period of peace – and was occupied with the most prosaic of pursuits – making money and clawing their way to power by all means possible!!! Welcome to the scandalous world of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo!!!
Louis XVIII (1755-1824), by François Gérard (1770-1837), 1814.
Chaeles X (1757-1836), by François Gérard (1770-1837), 1825.
PS Note the fleur-de-lis ornamentation of the coronation robes - the golden bee that graced the regalia of Napoleon is gone...
Revolution of 1830
1830 was a miraculous year in French culture!!! Delacroix painted his famous Liberty Leading the People, Stendhal published his brilliantly introspective and psychologically thrilling The Red and the Black, Berlioz introduced audiences to the first and only psychedelic symphony, Symphony Fantastic, AND, France was shaken by yet another revolution!!! Good grief, do the French EVER get a break?!?!?!
Charles X, the younger brother of both the beheaded Louis XVI and of Louis XVIII, was a deeply unpopular king. His brief rule (1824-1830) was characterized by continuous rivalry between various monarchist, aristocratic, and political factions. He believed in the divine right of kings and cracked down on the civil liberties that were enshrined in the Charter of 1814 – a document that reconciled the fundamental concepts of the Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic reforms with the Bourbon Restoration at the time of Napoleon’s first abdication. To cover up his domestic failures, he started a disastrous war in Algeria (references to this conflict in The Count of Monte Cristo) while continuing press censorship, opposition to political dissent, and promoting the elevation of the power of the Catholic Church (as depicted in The Red and the Black). Charles X’s appointment of the Prince Jules de Polignac as the prime minister of France was met with widespread opposition – he was defeated in the 1830 French elections. Charles X reacted by closing down the Chamber of Deputies – thus precipitating France into the July Revolution of 1830.
Charles X, the final Bourbon monarch of France, abdicated in 1830. The supporters of the restoration of the Bourbon line are called Legitimists – their organizations are still active in France today, through they receive minimal support. Charles died in exile in the Austrian Empire in the town of Gorizia, which is in Slovenia today and was buried in Franciscan Kostanjevica Monastery, which I visited in the summer of 2022!!!
Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), Liberty Leading the People, 1830, Louvre, Paris.
The most revolutionary painting of the 19th century that captured the spirit of the age!!! No, this is not the revolution of 1789 – but the Revolution of 1830. It will unfold just months after the publication of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and will be depicted in great detail in The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Misérables!!!
Marianne, the personification of France and Liberty, is calling the revolutionaries to storm a barricade soaked with the blood of fallen heroes… She is clutching a rifle with a bayonet in her left hand and the French tricolor, designed by the painter Jacques-Louis David, in the right. The determined men following her are students, workers, members of the bourgeoisie, a boy brandishing two pistols, another clutching a rock – the towers of Notre Dame are visible in the background – the continuum of French history is unfolding in front of us in striking dynamism!!!
Louis-Philippe was the only French king who came to power as a consequence of one revolution - Revolution of 1830 - and was deposed by another - Revolution of 1848. He was the final king of France. Napoleon III will be France’s final emperor and final monarch – but we are getting ahead of ourselves!!!
A dashing and aristocratic member of the House of Orleans, Louis-Philippe greeted the Revolution of 1789 with tremendous enthusiasm and joined one of the most radical revolutionary clubs – the Jacobin Club – along with the future instigator of the Reign of Terror Maximilian Robespierre. Louis-Philippe’s support of the revolution ended with the beheading of Louis XVI – Louis-Philippe fled to Switzerland in 1793 and remained in exile till the start of the Bourbon Restoration in 1814. During his exile he worked as a teacher in a Swiss boarding school for boys. An émigré for 21 years, he came back to a transformed France that was unwilling to accept unlimited monarchic rule. When the unpopular Charles X was deposed, Louis-Philippe seized the moment and catapulted himself into the political spotlight. Nicknamed the Citizen King or the King of the Bourgeoisie, Louis-Philippe was supported by the bankers and industrialists who came to full power during the years of the July Monarchy (as depicted in The Count of Monte Cristo!!!). After centuries of brutal military rivalry with England, Louis-Philippe extended a peace initiative to the young Queen Victoria who visited France with an official visit in 1843!!! After the Revolution of 1848, Louis-Philippe went into exile for the second time, this time to England, where he died in 1850. In 1876 his remains were moved to the Orleans family necropolis in France.
Alexandre Dumas participated in the Revolution of 1830 - he was 28 at the time - THE PERFECT revolutionary age!!! Even though he served as secretary to Louis-Philippe in the 1820s, he opposed the newly reconstituted monarchy. A supporter of the French republic, Dumas created a less than flattering image of Louis XIII in The Three Musketeers precisely because of his antipathy to the king who ruled France at the time of the novel’s composition, Louis-Philippe.
Even though France has been a republic for over a century, supporters of monarchic rule still remain. The supporters of the House of Orlean’s claim to the throne are known as Orleanists, with the Legitimists advocating the return of the House of Bourbon. Naturally, the Bonapartists want a return of a member of Napoleon’s family!!! Ah, France!!! The drama never ends!!!
Louis Philippe, Duke of Chartres, in 1792 by Leon Cogniet.
Louis Philippe, King of the French in 1841, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter.
As Louis-Philippe’s reign was becoming increasingly unpopular, he came up with a spectacular public relations stunt – negotiate with the English, exhume Emperor Napoleon I at his burial place on the distant Atlantic Island of Saint Helena, repatriate his remains with spectacular pomp and circumstance – and burry him with staggering splendor in the most imposing military edifice in Paris – Les Invalides – designed in 1670 on the orders of Louis XIV, the Sun King, as a hospital and retirement home for France’s veterans. A Military Museum today, it is a fitting final resting home for France’s greatest military leader!!! Napoleon’s sarcophagus was placed under the golden cupola of the Dôme des Invalides. Although Les Invalides was designated as Napoleon’s burial site in 1840, the imposing sarcophagus and crypt were not completed till 1861 – during the Second French Empire and the reign of Napoleon’s nephew AND Josephine’s grandson, Emperor Napoleon III!!!
And now a note on the three Napoleons! Napoleon II was the son of Napoleon I from his second marriage to Marie Louise of Austria. He was born in Paris on 20 March 1811 when his father was the ruler of the vast majority Continental Europe and the most powerful monarch in the world! Napoleon I intended to create a contiguous Continental European Empire that would be inherited by Napoleon II – but in 1812 the Russian campaign happened and all hell broke loose! To make the long and complicated story short – Napoleon II lived out his inconsequential life in Vienna and died at the age of 21. He spent his childhood and youth under the vigilant guidance and supervision of his Austrian Habsburg relatives who retained their sprawling empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars under the stipulation that the young prince will NEVER reach Paris and will NEVER claim the throne of France. Today, he is buried next to his father in Paris, under the golden dome of Les Invalides.
Napoleon III (1808-1873), was the nephew of Napoleon I and the grandson of Napoleon’s first wife Josephine! Every time I teach War and Peace, I tell my students that Napoleon III was Josephine’s revenge!!! Napoleon I divorced her because she could not give him an heir, thus the marriage to Marie Louise of Austria, who gave him Napoleon II. Josephine had two children from her first marriage, a boy and a girl (see my earlier notes) – in order to perpetuate the bloodline, Napoleon’s younger brother Louis married Josephine’s daughter from her first marriage Hortense de Beauharnais – and voila – the future Napoleon III was born!!!
The volatility of French politics after 1815 - and especially after the Revolution of 1848 - was utilized by Napoleon III who declared himself emperor in 1852, after the catastrophic failure of the Second French Republic which was constituted in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848. Napoleon III seized power and created the Second French Empire, erected a number of monuments to his uncle Napoleon I in Corsica and throughout France, drastically reshaped and reconstructed Paris with the help of Baron Haussmann, creating all the broad avenues we are familiar with today – and was deposed in 1870 the traditional French way – through a revolution! He was the last monarch of France which to this day remains a republic - see my earlier note on all the Bourbon and Bonaparte rulers of France and the Five French Republics!!!
French intellectuals despised the autocratic ways of Napoleon III - Victor Hugo spent 15 years in exile (1855-1870) on the island of Guernsey off the French cost where he wrote Les Misérables as his personal note of protests against Napoleon III. Hugo returned to Paris only when he found out that Napoleon III was taken prisoner by the Prussians in the course of the Franco-Prussian War which Napoleon III started and which France lost catastrophically. With Napoleon III’s usurpation of power, Alexandre Dumas had to flee to Belgium in 1851 as well - and ended up spending two happy years in Russia (where his books were immensely popular) and writing travel narratives about his visits to Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Tbilisi and Baku!!! Unable to return to France and ever a supporter of national causes and revolutionary movements, Dumas befriended the father of the Italian unification Giuseppe Garibaldi during the three years he spent in Italy. Dumas participated in Italian politics and started a newspaper, The Independent, with advocated liberal causes and supported the liberation of Northern Italy from Austrian rule. He returned to France in 1864 when Napoleon III declared political amnesty.
And this concludes our preliminary history posts!!! Vive la France!!! Back to The Three Musketeers tomorrow!!!
Napoleon II, also known as Franz, Duke of Reichstadt, by Leopold Bucher.
Napoleon III, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter.