Adolphe Thiers
The Second Empire

Thiers went to Brussels, where he learned that Louis-Napoleon had organized a national referendum on his rule; more than seven million voters approved the coup, while 646,000 disapproved it. Only in Paris was the coup unpopular; only 133,000 of 300,000 voters approved the coup. Special tribunals were set up to judge the republican opponents of the new regime; 5,000 were confined to house arrest, almost ten thousand were deported to prison camps in Algeria, and 240 were sent to camps in Guyana. 71 Republican deputies of the Assembly were, like Thiers, expelled from France. Thiers was bored in Brussels, so he moved to London, where his wife and mother-in-law joined him. He was received by the Duke of Wellington and Benjamin Disraeli, but as a native of Provence, he could not endure the British climate and soon departed for long travels in Germany and Italy. In the summer of 1852, Louis-Napoleon decided that he was no longer a threat, and on 20 August 1852 he was allowed to return to Paris. He stayed out of politics. He resumed his friendship with the painter Delacroix and with the sculptor François Rude, whom he had commissioned to make sculptural decoration for the Arc-de-Triomphe. For the next ten years, he devoted his attention to writing his history of the Consulate and Empire, publishing two volumes a year. The 19th and final 20th volume were published in 1862. The series was an immense public success; he sold fifty thousand subscriptions to the entire series, for a total of a million volumes. In addition to the advance of 500,000 francs he received for writing the work, he received author's royalties, which added to his already substantial fortune from mining stock and the inheritance from his father-in-law.

In 1863, the now Emperor Napoleon III began to loosen some of the restrictions on political opposition. Thiers was encouraged to re-enter political life by his friends, and by a new acquaintance, the Prussian ambassador to Paris, Otto von Bismarck. Thiers decided to run for election to the Assembly. On 31 May 1863, at the age of sixty-six, he was elected as a deputy for Paris. He returned to the Assembly on 6 November 1863 and took his seat, but found that under Napoleon III the protocol had changed. Instead of speaking from the tribune, members were only allowed to speak from their seats. Thiers was uncomfortable with this way of speaking, and his first few speeches were failures, but he soon mastered the form. On 11 January 1864 he delivered a blistering attack on Napoleon's government, and listed the "necessary liberties" he said were lacking in France: "Security of the citizen against violence from individuals or from the arbitrary use of power; liberty, but not impunity, for the press; free elections; freedom of the people's representatives; and public opinion expressed by the majority guiding the steps of the government. These are the liberties that the people are asking for today; tomorrow, in a tone very different, they may be demanding them." The speech made him again a leading figure of the opposition; he was cheered by a crowd outside his house when he returned home.

In the months that followed, Thiers criticized the Emperor's costly and doomed expedition to conquer Mexico. He also condemned the Emperor's principle of nationalities, as applied in Italy, of supporting the unification into one country of small states whose populations spoke a common language. "This principle will lead," Thiers said, "one day or the other, to a policy of race which will generate future wars." On 3 May 1866, when war seemed likely between Prussia and Austria over the Prussian annexation of Holstein, Thiers told the assembly: "If Prussia is successful, we will see the creation of a new German Empire; the Empire of Charles V which once resided in Vienna, will now reside in Berlin; an Empire which will press against our borders..." After the crushing defeat of Austria by Prussia at the Battle of Sadowa, Thiers declared, "It was France which was defeated at Sadowa." On 14 March 1867, he told the Assembly: "France has no more allies in Europe. Austria is defeated, Italy is looking for adventure, England wants to avoid the Continent, Russia is occupied with its own interests, and as far as Spain is concerned, never have the Pyrenees been so high. We have to secure an alliance with England, and rally the small states. This is a modest policy but confirms with good sense. We cannot afford to commit another error."

On economic policy, he was relentlessly conservative; he called for protectionism to defend French industry, and condemned the high cost of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann 's rebuilding of Paris, which had reached 461 million francs. Under pressure from the Assembly, Napoleon III was forced to dismiss Haussmann. Thiers faced opposition from both the left and right. In the elections of 1869, he was defeated in the election for his seat in Marseille by the republican Gambetta, but, against a candidate backed by Napoleon III, he retained his seat in Paris. A national referendum on Napoleon's policies on 8 May 1870, confirmed the Emperor's popularity in the provinces of France by a vote of 7,386,000 yes, 1,560,000 no, and 1,894,000 abstentions. It also confirmed his unpopularity in Paris, which voted 184,000 no and 138,000 yes.
detectable_content:postscript, combination:repeat_prompt, keywords:forbidden_words