Still, this was manifestly not to be, though no one seemed to care a straw about Louis Napoleon’s republic, or whether or no he dared to declare himself king or emperor, or whether they should be ruled by Bonapartist, Bourbon, or Orleanist.
These were truly perilous times for France; and, though they did not culminate in disaster until twenty years after, Louis Napoleon availed himself of every opportunity to efface from the Second Republic, of which he was at this time the head, every vestige of the democratic features which it ought to have borne.
At the same time he surrounded himself with imposing state and pomp, so regal in character that it was evidently intended to accustom the public to see in him the object of that homage which is usually reserved for crowned heads alone, and thus gradually and imperceptibly to prepare the nation to witness, without surprise, his assuming, when the favourable occasion offered, the purple and diadem of the empire.
For instance, he took up his residence in the ancient palace of the sovereigns of France, the Tuileries, and gave banquets and balls of regal magnificence; he ordered his effigy to be struck upon the coinage of the nation, surrounded by the words “Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,” without any title, whether as president or otherwise, being affixed. He restored the imperial eagles to the standards of the army; the official organ, the Moniteur, recommended the restoration of the titles and orders of hereditary nobility; the trees of liberty were uprooted everywhere; the Republican motto, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” was erased from the public edifices; the colossal statue of Liberty, surmounted by a Phrygian cap, which stood in the centre of the Place de Bourgogne, behind the Legislative Assembly, was demolished; and the old anti-Republican names of the streets were restored, so that the Palais National again became the Palais Royal; the Théâtre de la Nation, the Théâtre Français; the Rue de la Concorde, the Rue Royal, etc.; and, in short, to all appearances, Louis Napoleon began early in his tenure of office to assiduously pave the way to the throne of the empire as Napoleon III.
PALAIS ROYAL, STREET FRONT
The London Times correspondent of that day related a characteristic exercise of this sweeping instruction of the Minister of the Interior to erase the words “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” from all public buildings. (The three revolutionary watchwords had, in fact, been erased the previous year from the principal entrance to the Elysée, and the words “République Française,” in large letters, were substituted.)
“There is, I believe, only one public monument in Paris—the Ecole de Droit—where the workmen employed in effacing that inscription will have a double duty. They will have to interfere with the ‘Liberalism’ of two generations. Immediately under the coat of yellow paint which covered the façade of the building, and on which time and the inclemency of the seasons have done their work, may still be traced, above the modern device, the following words, inscribed by order of the Commune of Paris during the Reign of Terror: ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, Unité, Indivisibilité de la République Française!’ As the effacing of the inscription of 1848 is not now by means of whitewash or paint, but by erasure, both the inscriptions will disappear at the same moment.”
Among the most important demolitions and renovations of the sixties was the work undertaken on the Louvre at the orders of the ambitious emperor, Napoleon III. The structure was cloven to the foundations, through the slated roof, the gilded and painted ceiling, the parqueted floors; and, where one formerly enjoyed an artistic feast that had taken four centuries to provide, one gazed upon, from the pavement to the roof, a tarpaulin that closed a vista which might otherwise have been a quarter of a mile in length.
Builders toiled day and night to connect the Louvre with the main body of the Palace of the Tuileries, which itself was to disappear within so short a time. Meanwhile so great a displacement of the art treasures was undergone, that habitués knew not which way to turn for favourite pictures, with which the last fifty years had made them so familiar.