Part Four: Napoleon III: The Worst Bonaparte

it up, it's there somewhere. Probably. Um, maybe if enough people look it up and harass their reporters over email, they'll have to report on it in a story, and then I can take an excerpt out of that article and make it look like they called me that Jesus Christ of podcasting, which would be worth it. Yeah. I mean that's how you play, you know, the beat the

media at their own game. If you get them to quote other people's complaints, and then you take that complaint you say, hey, we all learned a lot from Donald J. Trump. Yes we did, Yes, we did. Can we not do this weird bit you're doing? So it's not a bit, it's my life. It is my life. Um. Anyway, Matt Lee was here. Hey, I'm back, Met Lee. So glad to be here. Love being on this this pod, Love

talking to you guys. Love you know, just plugging my podcasts and just begging your listeners to just check it out. Not Yourself the Wire the only the World's Only The Wire podcast, and pod Yourself a Gun the World's Only the Sopranos podcast. Yeah, check out pod Yourself the Wire and check out Yourself a Gun. Um, And I pause for a second because I just saw the worst thing I've ever seen on Twitter. Oh no, what is it? Uh?

Christi yamagucci main a k at wobble House on Twitter who's a fan of our show posted a picture of a decale on somebody's car that says messy buns and loaded guns and then it's a picture of the American flag and then and then says raising lions not sheep. Yeah, that's a that's a that's a person who was threatened to murder a barista. That is the first city who was pulled a firearm on a Starbucks with my friends here, beautiful. That's a person who is unlawfully detained black people for

riding a bike and asked them whose bike is that? Yeah? That that is a person who has pulled a glock on a FedEx driver who was not as white as they, uh, speaking of which you know, who would have definitely pulled a clock on a FedEx driver. Poleon the Third actually probably not, that was not super a problem that he had um, but he had a shot one in the mouth. He would have showered in the mouth, I'll tell you that much. This guy. One thing about this Napoleon guy

loves the mouth shooting, real mouth shooter. Napoleon the third straight we can my favorite meme again, the shaking hands meme with Napoleon the Third and suburban Americans shooting people who absolutely shouldn't be shot, shooting innocent people in the mouth in a panic and a panic. Yeah, yes, there's there's another hand holding. It's a third one. It's just the cops. Yeah. We can have a lot of debates about gun control, but Napoleon the Third is definitely a

man whose gun needed more controlled, a little bit more. Bonapartes. He has a right to bear arms, but not a tear mouths. That's right, that's right. Anyway, Yeah, you're doing good.

So anyway, Uh, Napoleon the third um. In the space of about a decade, the first ten years or so he's in power, Napoleon the Third takes France from being one of the sick men of Europe it was seen as kind of an ailing power like the ottomans Uh and a pariah, and turns it into what is probably the dominant political and military force on the European continent. Right after the Crimean War. He's got sort of what's seen is like the largest, most cohesive and effective ground army.

He's expanded like like over the course of the first like decade and change of his reign, he doubles the population of France by because he's conquered all of Indo China, He's conquered effectively now parts of Algeria, Western Africa. Like he he had something like like millions of people to French dominion. I thought people just like the new Empire so much that they were they were just fucking making

a lot more babies. Yeah, you know, Managa, way more than for this guy, because Louis Napoleon horny motherfucker Napoleon the TI. But first I did want to talk a little bit about a fun fact I found about him, about how he used his new found wealth and prestige to laun his position over everyone else. Right, and that's normal for emperors. You know that you wouldn't be an emperor if you weren't going to do some of that. But due to a quirk of metallurgy and history, he

wound up doing this in a very funny way. When the emperor would host other world leaders for lavish balls and high society events, he would have his servants bring out gold plate at dinnerware for them, right, you know. And this was not to honor them. This was specifically to contrast them too from him, because he had a much nicer set of dinner ware, and all of his plates and bowls and cups and spoons were made from what was at the time one of the most valuable

materials on earth. Aluminum. Yeah, with it out is aluminum cups. Enjoy your gold poppers. Yeah, I'm just gonna crack open this cold beer, this cold beer of precious aluminum. Watch me crash it. I'm gonna crunch it right on my head, shotgunning mead. So, the general public didn't start to become aware of aluminium till the end of the eighteen hundreds. Um. The metal exists all throughout the earth, right, It's been

around forever, We've been using it forever. But due to realities of geology, this silver from clay, as it was called, was generally mixed up with other ship and we just didn't have the ability to like separate it and gather

it in significant quantity. For an example of how valuable aluminium was, during the reign of Louis Napoleon, the United States put a six pound aluminum cap on the top of the Washington Monument and this was like a big flex This was the US being like, yeah, motherfucker's we had six pounds of aluminum, bitches, would you got you got nothing? It was, We're gonna wrap this whole thing and foil It was the largest piece of the metal

ever used at that time. Most Napoleon actually granted a scientist named Henri de Ville a massive public subsidy to study how to gather larger quantities of aluminum. He ordered military standards to be made from aluminum poles for his troops to carry, because he was so enchanted by the site of aluminum. None of this worked very well, but that hardly mattered the Royal family wore aluminum jewelry. Um Lewis's son had a baby rattle made of aluminum. It was a wild time for what is today the most

boring metal on earth. They've got like he's giving us, He's given us relatives like aluminum rings, throwing their gold in the trash. This ship, it's got an aluminium aluminum allum aluminium carriage that just keeps folding. God damn it. Can we make this stronger? Napoleon the third was also notorious for his his can we say oxmanship, his coxsmanship? Um, yeah, he is. He's a he's a he's a he's a he's a funk guy. You know, he's a fun guy.

He's a funk guy. Now, his wife, who he married shortly after taking power and is pretty controversial herself and sucks, is the Impress Eugenie. Um. She is a huge prude. Some biographers right that she hated sex. Um. So this is going to be particularly a problem because Louis Napoleon really likes sex. Another thing he does the way he threads this needle is by cheating on her constantly. Yeah that makes sense, Yeah, yeah, it makes see where this is going. You know, that's what he's gonna do so

because things aren't working out great for Eugenie. Um and because after a while this is not there's no romance in their relationship, Louis Napoleon has to increasingly go further afield in search of love. And this is where we get the story of the Countess of Castiglion born Virginia Elizabetta Luisa Carlotta Antonietta Teresa Maria Oldoini. Which is nobody needs a name that long, you know, three in mambo number five exactly, Yeah, this bitch is her own Mamo

number five. Her parents were Tuscan nobles who saw the fact that she's hot as hell, right, Um, So they decide that since she's so gorgeous, they're going to solve like, this is a problem. Right, you don't really want to have a daughter who's like famously beautiful when you're high society, because like she's gonna get up to some stuff. So the only thing her parents are just like, we gotta get we gotta deal with this hot daughter problem. We

gotta marry her off as soon as we can. Um. And so they hit her off at age seventeen to a nine year old. Um. This is not a happy union. They have actually a famously disastrous marriage, and she basically leaves him immediately to move to Paris and become the mistress of the Emperor of France. This leads to a lot of drama, particularly when she wore a dress covered in hearts with no corset. She's famous for this just just just let them let him, like but letting it

hang um while. And she she goes like shows up at this fancy ball in this heartcover dress with no corset. Well, she's on Lewis Napoleon's arm and Empress Eugenie is there. She's like sitting in the ballroom as the emperor comes in with his chick on his arm, which is like, you know, people expect an emperor to sleep around, but that's still kind of like a little bit. She's not

wearing a corset. She's breathing normal. She's breathing normal, not weason. Yeah, Everyone's like this is yeah, So we don't know why the two stopped dating, which happened in around eighteen sixty, but they did break up suddenly. Now all of this is mostly interesting because the Countess is widely considered to be the first supermodel due to her habit of taking and publicizing lurid photos of herself, often wearing things that were like considered pornographic in the day, so she would

put out pictures of herself and sandals visible. Yeah, she's showing off them toes little and she's she's got this access to photographers in part because she's dating the emperor, and as a result, if you look at the way she's posing, she kind of invents the selfie, like this is the She's the first person who has the ability to do this, to like dress up in the morning and be like, I look cute, I'm gonna take a picture, I'm gonna send it out to everybody, right like she

she she has turned the world media into Instagram. She invented the duck face. Yeah, yeah, she kind of figured all that out. So that's fun. Anyway, it's probably time to stop talking about court life and get back to everybody's favorite topic. Blood drenched imperialism. Yea, oh god, isn't it good? You just like to rub it all up into yourself, get it all in your crevice. Is nice, warm blanket of blood. Yeah, the bloodiest crevice in the

French Empire at this point in time, is Algeria. Now in March of eighteen sixty four, again, in like eighteen fifty eight, they had quote unquote pacified it. Right in March of eighteen sixty four, tribesmen in the mountains of pacified Algeria launched yet another insurrection. Napoleon a third was forced to send twenty more soldiers to the colony, just as he was planning to take his first royal trip there to embark on a new phase of investments in the area. All of this came at a bad time.

His brother in law, a valued adviser, had just died, and at age fifty seven, Louis Napoleon is himself in pretty poor shape. Um, I'm gonna give you a little list of all the different ailments. This man has rheumatism, gout, hemorrhoids, a terrible cough from decades of smoking, and a heart condition. So he's just falling the funk apart. But he decides still, I'm gonna go to fucking Algeria and I'm going to fix things up personally. And this troubled imperial possession that

you know, my predecessors took on. Now, one of the things that's interesting about him he's a liberal, right, he's a monarchist, but he's a liberal, and as a liberal, he doesn't think that like he's not. He doesn't talk about France's imperial possession the way that like you get

a lot of British Empire guys talking about. Um. He talks about like he he talks about from this position of like we're going to you know, I want this to be an Arab nation and we just want to help them, you know, like we're here, We're here to like fix things up for them. We're not trying to take money out of them, and we're not trying to We're just trying to make them a little bit better so they can stand on their own. We're just trying

to spread democracy. Yeah, exactly, He's trying to spread democracy in the Middle East. Um. Now, I want to read a quote from the Shadow Emperor that kind of makes it clear the way in which he saw himself here. The Turks had governed Algeria as a province of the Ottoman Empire until eighteen thirty and had done nothing for them, according to Louis Napoleon's Lights. Apart from collecting taxes, the Turks had let them run their own lives, leaving traditional

tribal affairs and customs unchanged. They had not encouraged them to abandon tribal tribal life, acquire private property, or try to produce agricultural surplus beyond their own tribal needs for overseas sales. All of this was wrong in the eyes of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. The Algerians needed guidance and entering the modern world European civilization, everything had to change, but

it must be done patiently and respectfully. You must be given equal rights, the same rights as the French population. Such an idea, of course, had never even occurred to the most enlightened Algerian Tribal councils popularly elected and chosen throughout the centuries, should now be disbanded, and along with them tribal chiefs, dismantled the tribe and its administration, and become like France, he insisted. And yet Louis Napoleon specifically

forbade the creation of cantonments or reservations. His knowledge of the whole scale popular transportation and relocation of the American Indians, he said, had cautioned him enough to not repeat that experiment, and that's part I find that really interesting. Um, this is part of what that's what he learned from us. Yeah, don't don't do reservations now, absolutely end their way of life and destroy their cultures so they can participate in

specifically so that they can participate in global capitalism. You know. The problem is and again he sees this as like the Ottomans being foolish. Now, the Ottomans knew how to run an empire, which is that like, yeah, all we needed out of Algeria was Algiers as a training area, and we don't really care what other people do as long as they don't funk with trade and you know what's easy just letting them lift their lives. Yeah, yeah, we just collect a little bit of tax and fucking

move on. This goes reasonably well for the Ottomans, um, but it's like it's going to be this fucking nightmare for France. And it all comes out of this idea that like, well, their their culture is a failure because they're not part of the global capitalist system. They're not producing a surplus to sell. Now, the Algerians would say, because we have enough food, Yeah, yeah, we don't. We don't we don't really need this. What do we want money for? We've got our own thing going on. We're okay,

we don't need money. We're doing what I can buy stuff. What are you talking about? What? What do I need global capitalism for? When there's a market right down the street. I have grown animal skins and all the all the

things that I need, you know. Um, Napoleon the third is like horrified by this and the fact that he the fact that he like while he's trying to figure out how do I dismantle and destroy this tribal structure, the fact that he won't do reservations is part of a fun trend in European history in the late eighteen hundreds. We talked about this a little bit at the start of this series. Um, you know of Behind the Bastards when we did Karl May, who is this German author

who wrote cowboy books that Hitler just loved. But there's this trend in in European culture in the late eighteen hundreds where indigenous Americans are glorified and idolized in European popular society, particularly in fiction. And there are a number of reasons for this. Some of it is just that like, yeah, man, it's it's a real bad genocide that that was fucked up. What was done, um, and what it was, you know, it is still being done into that objectively tragic figures

exam objectively a tragic thing that happened. But a lot of it also is that there's this growing anti American sentiment. Right. Some of it's because of you know, the United States doing Manifest Destiny ship, but a lot of it's also just like you know, they're they're new on the scene, and they're kind of like gross upstarts, right, So there's that asked act of it, and they to avoid like all of the the hundreds of years of European conflicts,

you know, they get to just be over there. Yeah. Um. And it's interesting because they while they there's this aspect of kind of idolization of Indigenous Americans, it doesn't come with any real respect for their cultures, and in fact is often based entirely on fantasy presentations of these cultures. And it brings us back to Napoleon the Third Louis.

Napoleon was adamant that he wanted the Algerians to rule themselves, and he would claim that his administration was simply a way to help raise them up to a point where they could exist as a modern nation. But in practice this was an incredibly bloody process. See, people don't like having their way of life demolished by strangers at gunpoint.

So early in eighteen sixty four, a tribal chief massacred four dozen French soldiers, and the Emperor's men responded by burning villages and rendering a huge junk of the ore in province uninhabitable. Right, this is this is the process of bringing them democracy. They killed some of our armed men trying to destroy their try and so we must burn villages. Hey, the tree of liberty has gotta be, you know, watered by blood YadA, YadA, by the blood

of the people you're freeing, Yes, exactly. In his writings on the Colony, Louis sketched out grand dreams of democratic rights and institutions for Algerians patterned off the French system. And a lot of this has to do with like, I want this, you know, enlightened electorate, and I want this education system all this. But but most Algerians couldn't read or write, right, um, because that's just not a part of their lives. A lot of their culture has

passed on in an oral tradition, all that stuff. Um. And as it happens, the system they already lived under was super democratic. It was in fact more democratic than either France or the United States at the time. Tribal councils. All of each of these different tribes was kind of governed by tribal councils that were made up of adult men who reached consensus on major decisions. Um. This was

a stateless system. These are not nations, and it's you know, not to say that it wasn't like again, it's all men, but so is the United States actorate. So it is the French electorate at this point. It's not like anybody's good on that stuff. And it's it is consensus driven rather than like we have these elections in one party

takes power. It's these councils representing all of the families and the tribe figure out what to do and vote kind of select representatives of the oldest, wisest men in order to help make calls about things like you know, when we go to fight against another tribe, or like if if somebody encroaches on our grazing lands, or what to do if there's a drought, is Robert, they're not wearing wigs. Yeah, they're not wearing wigs while they do it. It's not democratic, Like, I don't see how this is.

This seems worse because like, how are you going to make democratic decisions without like old real fucking big gass whigs exactly huge and weird, fucking massive wigs. This is a again one of the things I find this interesting because this is a stateless system, and it was one that for a long time Algerians had been relatively peaceful and avoided starving. Right the system like this, you can you can call these things like primitive if you want,

like and people that the fucking French should do. But like this works for a lot of people for a very long time and a pretty tough part of the world geographically, Algeria is a complicated place to stay alive in um it works pretty well, uh, and by all accounts, life was relatively decent there before the French took over. Napoleon's attempts to impose a different way on life, and the people who had never seen themselves as part of the same entity was always destined for failure. They didn't

see themselves as Algerians because they weren't. They were just like some tribes living in an area they just get someone just gave them labels, and they were just like, no, that's not I think this is another area where like the things he'd been reading about Native Americans had colored his opinion because he saw the Algerians as a race in decline, which is definitely how the Europeans looked at Indigenous Americans, even though there was no evidence that they've

been in any kind of trouble under the Ottomans, right, Um, they were not like having serious problems. It was again, you know, this is not a perfect I'm not trying to paint this as like a fucking paradise, but like there was no evidence that they were having any particular kind of issues. Um, but Napoleon's gonna fix all that. He's gonna give them some serious goddamn problems and we're gonna talk about that. But first, Matt, what you know what Napoleon would love, um me to use my soundboard

right now? That's right, baby? Sorry, No, what what would be like? You should get a soundboard from from Bill and Ted's excellent adventure Stick a Stick Napoleon Bonaparte on and that shit too late for that. But hey, yeah, you just remember one of the classic lines from that movie, all of which I have forgotten at this point. Yeah, the guitar sound when they're excited, George, Yeah, that's right. Think about Keanu Reeves coming and then buy some products.

That's the way it sounds. Baby. We're back and we're just thinking about how it sounds when Kiana Reeves comes. Um like a normal person. Yeah, I think so. I think one day I'll meet him and I'll ask what it sounds like, what does it sound like when you come, Kiana Reeves. I'm sure he'd answer. He seems cool. I'm sure he would have an answer. I'm not sure he'd appreciate that specific question appreciate it, but he would have

something for it. So Napoleon the Third's whole goal is to take the Algerian people out of the place they had been living, out of the their ancestral homelands, to pub make so basically no one owned land in Algeria, right, You had like, these is our hunting ground, this is where we graze our sheep, and if a tribe comes in, maybe there will be a conflict over it, but it

was not nobody. People didn't have like yeah, yeah. He basically is going to, over the course of his time in power, take away all of the lands owned by tribes because there's initially this sense of like, well, what if we give the tribes some land and some of it becomes frances He's going to get rid of all of that over time because his goal is to force all of these people who are again perfectly happy being living in the fucking hills and mountains and whatnot of

Algeria um and force them to move into modern cities with wide French style boulevards, electric power, and parliamentary democracy. Now that will work out. It doesn't. There's a fucking insurrection, and the first thing Napoleon does when this insurrection happens is he appoints a new leader, and a non military leader, because he's like, well, maybe they kill those soldiers because the military is being too aggressive. You know what I'll do. I'm gonna put my best guy in charge of things.

You know who that's gonna be, Greg Napoleon. Yeah, old Prince Jerome, the guy who had fucking fled the field in crimea old. It's Jeri Nipoli po. So he puts gutless Bonaparte in charge, replacing the old military leader of the colony. And again the military their solution to problems was massacring villages. So I'm not saying like he should have let those guys stay in power. But but Prince Jerome is like a high society liberal, and he brings

with him to Algiers a coterie of Parisian high society liberals. Um, and he's going to attempt to democratize Algeria. And I'm gonna read again from the Shadow Whimper here quote the Brooding Plan. Plan that's his his other nickname. Personally knew nothing about Algeria, its history, or its people, and had no plans to learn by touring the country or indeed even to leaving the capital of Algiers. He was only

interested in introducing his personal theoretical liberal reforms. But when, for instance, on February eighteen fifty nine, he announced from France, where he had returned in December of eighteen fifty eight, but the natives would be free to sell or acquire land, including tribal land, all sides were up in arms. Strictly defined lands could no longer easily be confiscated by the state. The result the tribes would eventually break up, disintegrate, and disappear,

as the totality of their tribes literally constituted Algeria. This meant the entire social structure protecting the members of each tribeould no longer exist, resulting in a veritable das for a tribesmen. And today one of the big social problems France has is that there's this constant wave of people fleeing Algeria, which has caused a lot of particularly racist in France. Racist in France had a lot of issues

with that. This is where that all starts, right, This is like why they come over to France because the French emperor destroys the entire social structure exactly, and suddenly people have like no where to be. Yeah, it turns out that's a bad idea. I just wanted them wear wigs and have papers that say this my house. That's all. Yeah, And then they came to France and all of the racists were angry about it for forever um. So when this uprising starts in eighteen sixty four, it's clear that

plant plant has failed. And when he visits Algeria. The emperor brings with him an authoritarian regime to replace plan plants liberal one which was going to use terrible force to bring peace. He appoints a military officer, Patrice Diy McMahon, who goes on a spree of massacres. Despite this, Algeria's vast size and diffuse population proved difficult to control. The population.

Migrations caused by land reform policies and waves of refugees from the fighting ran up against a horrible drought that hit in eighteen sixty seven and eighteen sixty eight, devastating local agriculture. Next came a series of earthquakes and then cholera and typhoid epidemics. These disasters had all occurred in the past and had been handled by Algerians through mutual aid. Right, These tribes had ways of This is the same thing you see in India when the East India Company takes

over destroy all these different trading agreements within villages. Because people had always dealt with like bad times, and when one village doesn't produce enough food, other villages didn't tend to let them starve to death. Tribes and Alderia work the same way, right, we take care of each other when things are really bad, because that's just better for everybody.

Napoleon the Third has destroyed all of these structures that used to protect people, that used to allow folks to deal with this kind of ship, in addition to killing a shipload of them. So the chaos of the upheaval of Napoleon meant that there was nothing in place to protect these people. More than three hundred thousand Algerians die in a four year period. This is from disease, along with three d and fifty thousand who are killed by the military and an ethnic cleansing. This amounts to one

third of the Algerian population pre lowis Napoleon ship. Yeah, this is like pretty bad genocide. Um, so you know that's uh. If you're wondering why Algeria has had a rough time of it in the last century or so, little history do it. Yeah, might be a little bit of history. There might might be a super might be

entirely Francis fault right broke the Yeah. Yeah, well now they are so at around the same time, while all this is going on in Algeria, Louis Napoleon is fucking around in a weirdly similar way in a completely different part of the world Mexico. Now, as I had said, he's spent years, most of the early eighteen sixties trying to convince Maximilian Habsburg to become the emperor of Mexico. They're talking about this for years now. Maximilian is an

interesting dude. Again. He's the younger brother to Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria Hungary, who Lewis had recently bested in a war, and max had kind of a fraud relationship with his brother. They were close as kids, but as they get older, his brother thinks that he's gunning for the throne and so keeps trying to foist him

off on these do nothing jobs. Maximilian is kind of running Austrian Italy for a while before he gets overthrown basically um, and he's when he's kind of running Austrian he's trying to be like this liberal right where he's like, well, maybe they'll like being ruled Austria if if I introduced reforms and like that never works because people don't like to be ruled anyway. Like, no, but you can have some speech, yeah, not against the Austrian. Yeah, anyway, it

doesn't work great. Uh he gets run out of town on the fucking rails and yeah, Louis, uh you know, he's he's got this. His older brother kind of wants

him away. And so the fact, the idea, like the Franz Joseph, actually winds up backing Napoleon's plan to make him the Emperor of Mexico for a while because sign him across and well, in part because he can make him sign a contract saying I give up my right to inherit the Habsburg throne because you can't, you know, be the king of the Emperor of Mexico and be the emperor you know, in line for the Empire of

Austria Hungary. Arbitrary rules are arbitrary rules. Yeah. And Maximilian is a very similar kind of guy to plan Plan. He's this idealistic, night eve, arrogant liberal who wants to reform things and be seen as a reformer, but also wants to be the guy running things and wants it all to be done his way. Um, and he does. He wants to reform Mexican society in what you might

call vaguely center left directions. Um, and doing this means, though, defeating the already pretty for the time left wing legitimate government of Mexico, which is a republic currently governed by the elected leader who was an indigenous Mexican man named Benito Warez. Like he said, he's got indigenous ancestry, and he's Warez is a fascinating, fascinating man, a tough son

of a bitch. Cool asked dude. He had been elected president after finishing a vicious civil war, um beating the Conservatives, who sought an autocratic, dictatorial form of government different from war as his republic. So Maximilian, he wants kind of a broadly similar social structure to what the Mexican Republicans are pushing. He just wants to run it. Which is when it's not like he's it's not like Mexico would

had this like horrible dictatorship. They had just fought a war and a republic had been elected kind of along the lines that Maximilian thought was good. He just wanted to kill them and do it himself. Yeah yeah, He's like, Okay, but what you guys got this Mexican doing the job. This is the problem they come taking our look at my chin it's funny. This guy, this guy isn't even in bread. What the fuck? People will make a Hapsburg chin jokes at Edward Habsburg on Twitter and will always

respond by, like, get another joke, guys. It's like, well, that's the joke. Because your family ruled the world while like constantly fucking each other and producing kids who like, didn't like, couldn't functionally rule the countries they were born to inherit, and it lent the millions of deaths, millions and millions of deaths. That's the joke, Edward. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's what makes it funny. That's what another joke

about my genoidal, fucking bloodline. Fucking Habsburg's. God, you are never wrong in ship talking a Hapsburg always always go after Hapsburg's. So you know, you know who learned that lesson? Well, Gaffrolo, princep O. God, we love we love a Hapsburg dropping king. Um, we we love a good dead Fralls joke. Yeah, good stuff. So um. Anyway, Maximilian he has all these political theories

that he wants to test out. He's thinking about, if you like again and I really do the book The Last Emperor of Mexico by Edward Shawk Cross fucking good book, incredibly readable. I had I finished it in just a couple of days because I couldn't put the thing down.

Really really well written book. Um. It's one of the points that he makes is that, or at least the way in which I inter britten Maximilian as being based on the way he portrays him in the book, is a guy who has all these little fun theories about how he might want to run a country, and he almost approaches being the Emperor of Mexico is like playing a game of civilization. He's excited to try a new

thing out in his game. Um, but he does. He makes a He draws a hard line with Louis Napoleon, which is that he won't agree to go to Mexico and try to be the emperor unless the Mexican people themselves acclaim their desire to be governed by him. Now, this was never going to happen. From one thing, Mexico is very large and most of the people living there have absolutely no connection to like centralized Yeah, exactly, Like go to somebody in the fucking Chihuahbo and be like, hey,

do you want a Hapsburg emper? Like dude, what the funk man? I like, I got stuff going on? Um, what are you talking about there? The idea that these guys would be able to rule a land mask based on borders that they just kind of invented is it's great, To be honest, It's never worked out well for the Mexican government. Someone has ever been good at governing Mexico.

No one can figure it out. Yeah. Um, So basically what happens is that Napoleon the Third works with achadra of defeated conservative Mexican officers to trick Max into thinking that his reign is supported, and then he sends a French army into Mexico to conquer it from the legitimate government. Now, this first army gets its ass kicked because Benito Airez pretty good military commander. But also again, the Mexican state

has just finished several civil wars. It's battered. They don't have a super functional military compared to the French military, which a lot of people will say is the best in the world in this period of time, or at least one of them. So Louis Napoleon sends a much larger army next, which succeeds in smashing all resistance and conquering Mexico. But it conquers Mexico the same way the

US conquers Afghanistan. They conquer a bunch of cities leading to the capital and kind of control the roads, right, But that's all they have because they only send like fifty men I think at the height, which is again Mexico is quite big, yeah, a big place, sizeable, sizable nation. So they're able to and the French can beat because they've got a modern army, modern guns. The Mexican military

doesn't really have a lot of that stuff. They can beat any field army that will raise itself against their main force, but that main force can only be in like one area at a time, and they can't with splitting the army up. Number one, sometimes you're gonna lose groups of the army, right because you can beat a hundred French soldiers or something. And then the other problem is that, like you can't hold anything but the cities in the roads. Now, they do try to build up

a Mexican army like an imperial army. There's an imperial Mexican army. It is of debatable competence. Again, think of Afghanistan. This is actually very similar to fucking Afghanistan um and it costs very quickly. Skyrocket. Now, Napoleon the Third, basically his business plan here had been, will conquer Mexico, will

stick this guy on the throne. You know, pretty soon he'll be able to He'll just take over the Mexican army and they'll keep the peace, and then France will get to basically to get its pick of all of the resources in Mexico, get all that silver. There's a lot of good ship in Mexico, and it's like this will be this will work out a couple of years of costs and then it'll be worth it. He is as good a businessman as Elon Musk. Yes, that's how this ship works. Dollars is going to go now everyone

gets a blue check mark. The Mexican people here are Twitter, and they're about to do what Twitter did when Musk took over, which is start a massive grassroots rebellion against the empire. Just has fake accounts saying they're Habsburg. Just a shipload of Habsburg accounts. Um So, Maximilian enjoys fairly little popular support. He is handicapped by the fact that, again he's a liberal so he keeps pushing through these liberal reforms and announcing these very liberal laws, but his

entire base of support are like ghoulish right wingers. So the people who he is trusting to back him hate the way he wants to run the country. And when he does things that like Benito Uarez's supporters probably would have liked in a different circumstance, his primary backers desert him um. And so he has to like crack down on the people of Mexico in order to like get their support back, which fuels the rebellion. It's just a doomed situation. Threading an un Yeah, it's not even a needle.

He's just like sticking a string into a solid nail. Why wouldn't you go through? Can't get anything through this fucking needle. This is bullshit. This shouldn't be as hard. So the fucor he reaches its peak under what becomes called the Black Decree or Bondo Negro of eighteen sixty five, and which all captured Republican soldiers are to be executed without aisle um. Now do you think this lowers the tensions? Yeah?

I think it definitely just completely equalizes that everyone's like oh, man, funk, I guess we won't do this no more. So what happens that, what this actually results in is the Republicans are like, well, then whenever we capture French soldiers and Mexican imperial soldiers or government officials, we will kill them without trial. And of course this leads to the slaughter of thousands and thousands and thousands of people, just nightmarish

blood letting. When max had headed over to take command of the government, Louis Napoleon had promised him that all the resources of the French state would be dedicated to seeing the success of his imperial project. But costs quickly outstripped what Louis had been willing to pay, and since the Imperial government didn't control much actual territory, exploiting Mexican resources for Frenche profit proved impossible. In eighteen sixty six, all of this came to a head for several reasons. One,

the US Civil War ended. The reason why Louis Napoleon had timed sending Maximilian over there was that the US was fighting a civil war, and he was like, this will keep occupied for a while, they won't be able to get involved. His plan was to make a firebreak for US power. Right while they're busy fighting themselves. I will establish control over Mexico using Maximilian and then by the time they finished, this will just be done and they won't be able to stop it. Um. Now, so

the US Civil War ends, um. And you know, now the US is no longer distracted. The Union starts sending weapons across the river to Benito Uarez because we're like, well, we don't really like this at all, um uh. And there are constant worries, it's legitimate worried that the Americans might just invade and attack the French army in Mexico. Um, which we could have done, and it would have been the only time US troops centered Mexico for a reason

that wasn't fucked up. Yeah, we almost invaded Mexico for a good reason. Don't worry. We didn't. We didn't. We continued our streak of only fucking over Mexico, a proud and time honored American American fucking with Mexico, stealing land and destroying entire political structures. This is kind of the one time in which we were almost nice to Mexico. Man. Uh. And we will talk about what happens next. But first, you know who is nice to Mexico Me, that's right,

Matt leeb Our primary sponsor. Why do you don't know this? This whole podcast is paid for by Matt leeb He just keeps getting credit cards. I just listen. I am in a lot of debt right now. But is people. People can get their bastards content. I'm willing to pay so by my product, Matt leeby mean, just send him money so he can he can keep financing this debt. Hell,

we're back. So at the same time that his Maximilian's Mexican Empire is collapsing, ship in Europe starts to go wrong, with the Prussian otto von Bismarck launching a war against Austria. Uh Napoleon in a secret meeting with Bismarck, agrees not to defend Austria's France Joseph, and part of it was like, so Bismarck is like, hey, man, I gotta go to war with Austria. You don't really like this guy, you fought him an a war. Just let me do it once.

I'm gonna take some ship, and you know what, you'll get some territory. Right. So this territory it's kind of like on the border of like Italy and France and all this stuff we'll get. You'll get some of that you know will work out great for you all. You know, you just gotta let me deal with him and I'll give it to you. Like trust me. You know it'll be good. Trust me. I'm Otto von Bismarck, most trustworthy

man in Europe. So Bismarck, like Napoleon, decides to do this because number one, I'm gonna get some land out of it. That'll be good. At number two, this is gonna be years. Right, Austrian Germany fight at each other. They're basically equal, you know they'll be They'll be locked into this brutal it will weaken both of them and then France will be even stronger. There's no way those will get done quickly. Seven weeks it is. It is over almost immediately because what Otto von Bismarck has done

is invent Germany. And if you know one thing about Germany, pretty good at war, pretty good at war in Western Europe, like the way ours is baseball. There's is doing war. Yeah, in Western year once they go east, it gets a lot messier for them solid and Western Europe. So, as you said, they basically win this war against Prussia immediately um and then as soon as they do, Napoleon's like, so, how about that territory that you guys said I could

get and the fucking Bismark's like, what was that? What was that all? You didn't I said psych afterwards and going into this prior to the start of that war with Austria, the kind of assumption everyone else would have made is that, like France was the premier land power in Europe. But part of what Napoleon the Third and everyone else realized when he when Prussia goes to war with Austria is that like they got like seven thousand guys they can call up and they're like, they're pretty

good at this. This is actually a very frightening situation. I've just realized. And tens of thousands of my best soldiers are in Mexico. Yeah oops, yes, uh fuck. I didn't realize that you guys would get like really good at this. This has all gone terribly for me. So so he uh, Napoleon, Louis Napoleon is suddenly much less interested pouring men and resources into Mexico. He begins pressuring Maximilian to abdicate, but max doesn't want to leave his empire.

He's dedicated to it and the brave men fighting for him. He's very delusional, is what's actually in Spanish and everything? Like leave now? I have a castle and everything. Yeahcienda and Spaniel. Yeah, I don't understand why I have to leave now? People love me. It is very funny because he like tries to eat a Mexican meal as soon as he arrives, and he gets sick because it's too hot, Like, man, you can't eat fucking chilies. And you think you're going

to be the Emperor of Mexico. My god. Yeah, yeah, so Louis Napoleon, Yeah, it's about to abandon him. I'm gonna quote from the Emperor of Mexico, the last Emperor of Mexico again here. In August, Napoleon the Third tried to claim the territories that Bismarck had promised, but the Prussian Chancellor responded with a diplomatic equivalent of laughing in the French Emperor's faces, pointing out that the Prussian army

was already mobilized. Now it was war, not only on the other side of the Atlantic that Napoleon the Third had to worry about now. But across the Rhine, where Bismarck marshaled the forces of German nationalism behind a militaristic regime, France was in an was in a state of feverish crisis, and attacks on Napoleon the third policy towards Prussia were rife. Even Napoleon the Third's wife, Eugenie, berated him for being

outwitted by Bismarck. The last thing the French emperor wanted was an unpleasant reminder of another unpopular foreign policy disaster. He tried to delay meeting with Carlotta, pleading illness. He urged her to visit her brother in Brussels first, but Carlotta had already telegrammed the courts at Brussels in Vienna informing them that she would not be visiting because of the refusal to send more volunteers. Ignoring the French empruce excuses,

she proceeded to Paris. So Napoleon the Third has Eugenie try to stop Carlotta from meeting with him, but she will not be dissuaded, and she eventually gets her audience with Napoleon the third, and she's been over in Mexico for a while, and while she's been over, things have gone a lot worse for him, and he's gotten sick and old. So she she sees this guy that all of her and her husband's hopes layon continued French support.

They cannot hold onto their empire without France. She suddenly realizes that he's he's fucked like he's he's old and broken, and she loses her mind. She spends like the rest of her husband's reigned, locked into castle and completely out of her mind. Um. She had been so invested in the idea of being the Empress um and as soon as it becomes clear weird doomed, she just she can't

function anymore. It's very funny like her and fuck him um. Maximilian, meanwhile, being equally deranged, tries to continue the fight as French troops began to withdraw. And I will give him credit for this. Unlike plant Plant, he kind of ends on a courageous note. Like. He leads his army into a

disastrous battle where they're under siege in this city for weeks. Um. They win a couple of like battles where they like push out against the Mexican army and he like stays there until the bitter end in this really nasty situation. So there's a degree of at least physical courage he has while still being completely deranged. Um, he gets captured and executed. They fucking shoot his ass, they firing squad, and they Benito Warez again. The whole world, all of

the governments of the world start like begging. Mexico starts sending people to Benito Ware's saying, please, don't kill him. Don't kill him. He's a habsburg. You know. The American presidents like, guy, don't do this, don't do this. But Benito Warez, being Radish ship is like, look, man, he was the emperor, he passed the Black Decree. All captured soldiers get executed. I'm not going to hold him do a different standard than the tens of thousands of men

he had killed. Like fuck him. The NATO RS kind of sick um, the goat um. Maximilian died cursing Napoleon the Third for failing to come to his aid. Very funny. The second French intervention in Mexico lasted five and a half years and caused as many as seventy thousand deaths, all of which happened at the instigation of Napoleon the Third. So by eighteen seventy Louis Napoleon is a sick man

and steep decline. France is still powerful and in fact wealthier than ever, but it's military is geared towards the kind of colonial wars they've been fighting in Mexico. Think about how the US military specialized for Iraq and Afghanistan. It's it's a small, professional force capable of besting insurgents and holding cities. The problem was Russia. Prussia had focused on becoming a land power with a massive base. Of

the French military. On paper, they can maybe get four thousand troops together, and that's gonna be hard for them. It's gonna take them some time to get everybody. Like in the same place, the Prussian military can in the space like a week or two, have seven hundred thousand men armed in marching like they are very very good at this. Figure it out, this war thing. They figured out this war thing, and otto On Bismarck makes it his goals during the late eighteen sixties, I'm want to

have a war with France. Number one, we lost a couple against Napoleon and that still rankles us. And number two, I want some of this territory that's like currently France, but that's right on the edge of Germany. I want to take that ship and I'm gonna make a Germany. So Bismarck starts jinking and pushing to like make it kind of find a way in which to justify having a war with He needs a pretext. He needs a pretext, and specifically he wants France to start the war. Right,

that's the thing that he wants most. So In eighteen sixty seven, the same year Maximilian gets shot to death in Mexico, Prussia forms the North German Confederation, the immediate precursor to the nation of Germany. Now everything comes to a head over the question of who will be the next King of Spain. For a brief period of time, the King of Prussia. Who's who Bismarck works for the King of Prussia. Right, Germany is not a thing yet the thing that Germany becomes a thing based around the

scaffolding of Prussia. Um or is scaffold it around the core that is Prussia. The Prussian king puts forward a German prince to be the King of Spain, and it's like, hey, maybe this guy could do it. And the Emperor of France is terrified by this, right Louis Napoleon is like, well, if that happens, then France is going to be surrounded on both sides by states led by German emperors. I'm

not going to let that happen. And the Prussian king, who also doesn't really want war, Bismarck, is orchestrating this is like okay, hey, hey, you know, just an idea, just an idea, just psioned out. You know, there are no bad suggestions. So this this gets this gets rescinded, which should have been a big win for Napoleon the Third um but he's still really worried that the Prussians are going to try something, so he sends out his foreign minister, and this guy, Count Benedetti, is the same

as everyone else. Napoleon the Third picks for a job shit eatingly incompetent. Right, if we know one thing about the man, he he is not good at pickings people. Yeah, it's just it's just all of his drinking buddies and it's just like, hey, better, dummy, you do it. He's like, yeah, you get in there, Benny, Yeah you got it. You got it, Benny, you got it out Yeah. So um

he had. He sends Count Benedetti over to the King of Prussia, who's like at a fucking bath, you know, he's doing like a big spad um to ask him to promise not ever to put a German prince on

the throne, and the conversation goes pretty well. Obviously, the King of Prussia doesn't want to war with France over this, but outivon Bismarck decides to do a little bit of fake news and spin this up as a diplomatic incident in which the French ambassador had been kicked out of the King's presence, never allowed, never to be allowed back again. This was not true, but Bismark knows, like all the

matters is getting this bad news out there. Quote. By July fourteenth, the news is on the newspaper's desk all over Europe. As soon as the news of this supposed diplomatic incident is published, the streets of the French capital are taken over by demonstrations against the Germans. The windows

of the Prussian embassy are smashed by rioters. Meanwhile, in Germany, Bismarck fans the flames of nationalism by distributing for free copies of newspaper of copies of newspapers with his own version of the event, in order to make it look like Benedetti was pestering the king with haughty demands. By the fifteenth of July, the French government is in turmoil and must compose with the allies clamoring for war and

the suspicion of the opposition. There was a last attempt to ask clarifications from the Count Benedetti, but the telegram law arrives too late, and the careful examination of the diplomatic papers asked for by the opposition is refused. And so basically there's this, you know, Bismarck puts out this fake news that you know, they they insulted our, our national honor. Yeah, and this is called the m's dispatch.

Um this like this, this like diplomatic cable that goes out that like Bismarck, uh fucking fox with real confidence to be like, I'm gonna make this country clamor for war with us. And it it works. The French people do and Louis Napoleon. He is old, and he is sick, and he does not think this is a good idea. But all of these generals, the same ones who'd convinced him, you know, to invade into China, say it's a good idea. And most importantly, his wife Eugenie is like, if you

don't do this, you're fucking coward. This is how I come. Yeah, this is I don't want to fuck you, but I want you to go to war against fucking Prussia. I don't have sex. This is how I do it. They have a son. At this point, she's like, your son will have nothing to inherit if you don't go to war against Germany. Right now, you know what, what what kind of example are you putting for your son if you don't start a pointless war against the new great

land power in Europe. Um. So, Louis Napoleon, being fundamentally a coward in a lot of ways, declares war on Germany. Smart. Um, this goes pretty bad. So for one thing, on paper, he's supposed people to get about four thousand dudes together, which, even though the Prussians outnumber that, you're on the defense. You've got castles and fortresses. You can. You can win a war, a defensive war that way, especially if it's

just kind of your first wave. But he actually has trouble getting more than like a quarter of a million dudes together. The other problem is that, so you know how he forgot to bring artillery to the Crimean war. Yeah, yeah, I remember that, never learns that lesson. So the artillery that the French bring into the Franco Prussian War is the same artillery in some case literally the same guns that Napoleon had brought into battle in eighteen twelve. Yeah. Meanwhile,

the Prussians have have breech loading steel cannons with modern artillery. Yeah, they got the shelves and stuff. They're not just firing balls, but they're shooting heavy balls real fast. Basically, the French cannons are like hucking a Mazda Miata like pretty fast,

and the German can and their actual canons um. The other thing that's so the French aren't entirely like it's not like they're entirely like, uh, behind the curve militarily, they've just been optimizing for these little, these little brush fire wars. So one thing they have on their side the French regular forces. These colonial troops have the best rifle in the world at the time. Just the Germans are astonished and how well this fucking gun works. It's

a great, great infantry rifle. Very few of their soldiers actually have it, right, the actual territorial French army just has old as musket. So anyway, he goes and he goes with this army to command in the field because again you Jenny like basically tells him that he's a fucking cuck if he doesn't go in the battle. And he is. He is, he is dying of him a roids rights. He can't sit, he can't stand, certainly he can command the field. He can barely move. He's got

his like teenage boy with him. Um. And they have they have this one little battle where like um, they move into Prussian territory and like kill sixty guys and his he has he gets his air close enough that like a bullet whizzes over his head. He's like, there you go, you did it. You've been blooded in combat. Um. And then they then they try to do a battle in a place called Sedan. And this is not a military history podcast, but it doesn't go well. Um. In short,

they get their asses absolutely handed to them. Um. For all of military history since the age of Hannibal, one of the things that like generals will talked about is is doing a can i. Right. Can I is this famous battle where there's this hundred thousand man Roman army and Hannibal surrounds it completely and then just spends a day butchering everyone slowly to death inside. It's one of the most famous victories and all of military history. The

Germans do a can i at Sedan. They surround the entire French military and kill quite a few of them. And this is actually kind of one of the last acts of roism of Louis Napoleon. The maybe the only one, I guess would probably be to say is that his generals are like, no, no, no, We've got a fight until relief comes. We've got to keep it going. He looks out at what's happening. It's like, there's ninety thousand

men here and the Prussians will kill them all. Like, if we keep fighting, they will kill everyone here unless I personally surrender. Um. Now, this isn't the first thing he does. In fact, he attempts to get himself killed by Prussian fire multiple times before he does this. He does, he does go for suicide again, that is our boy, um, and he cannot kill himself. He does get his his aid to camp gets killed and like two of them get wounded when he just kind of like stands in

front of these Prussians guns. But he doesn't get hurt at all. So he tries to kill himself. He accidentally he shoots another French soldier right in the fucking throat. Uh. Very funny. Um. So yeah, he eventually uh goes to the Germans and it's like, hey, you know the Emperor of France and they're like yeah, and he's like he's me and they're like seriously, they have no idea that he's there. They don't know that he So this is

a real dub for the Germans. And he like when he surrenders the like basically one of the conditions he doesn't is that he is surrendering his army. He's not surrendering for the nation of France. And very quickly after that, the French respond by having a revolution while they're fighting and losing this war, um, and he is no longer the Emperor of France. Um. He spends some time in in custody of the Prussians. They lock him up, but like rich guy style, you know, he's he's in like

some sort of castle. Yeah, nice, nice prison. He's writing stuff. He's fucking you know, he's living his worst life. Yeah, he's living his worth worst life. His his family has to deal with the fact that they are no longer running France. France kind of falls apart. The Germans lay

siege to Paris. People are eating rats. It is ugly and it does not leave the people of France very well induced towards Napoleon the Third, although he never gives up hope of proclaiming another empire like he because he flat He goes back to exile in England, and he spends the last couple of his years he is actively working on another plan to return the France and take over the monarchy yet again. But then he dies in eighteen seventy three, just before he can try his fourth

coup attempt um. That would have been Honestly, I think I think that time he'd have gotten it right. I think he would have gotten it right that time. I think it would have worked out everything that one of the sad things because he gets like attacked a lot by the French and by like even particularly conservatives in France. For um surrendering at Sedan. His last words are we

weren't cow words at Saddan, were we? Which is like, no, dude, that was like the only thing you did that, the only thing you did that was actually putting other people's lives before you your own. Yeah, that was like the first time like that empathy bone that your dad tried desperately to instill into you really really gave everything he could still being an absent father. Uh to push it to you, I mean you know, hey, at the at that time, that was that's the best kind of father

and you can have. This is he is. Louis Bonaparte is the best father we've talked about on this show. Saying that, yes, just based on those like letters alone, you're just like, oh, yeah, you know, he's sure. He wasn't there and was like I don't love you and I think you're dumb and to his face and uh, you know, I think, what did he say, read your book? Hated it, hated it, hated it? Stupid book? How dare you think you could write this? Still? Best dad, best

best dads so far on the show. Yeah, well, Matt, that's the podcast. Well that is a that is a wonderful story of a great, great failed son and uh, the failest of sons, the failest of sons. I mean, you've got to hand it to him. He was able to actually achieve just enough to fail spectacularly. You know, getting captured is just chef's kiss. Yeah. That's a beautiful way to end your empire, being captured and giving everyone Germany.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, inventing modern Germany. Yeah yeah, that's uh, hey, how's that going to go for the future? Thin? You know. I actually stopped reading my German history textbook in August first, nineteen fourteen, but it's going well yeah, so good. Yeah. I would love to meet whoever the current Kaiser is over there. Yeah. I'm sure he's cool and has been in power and stability and peace. That sounds like Germany. I probably know. God, you know, this

was a fun one. It wasn't about Nazis, but it was about proto fascism. Yeah. I love that. It is cool. It's cool and good. Can people find you anywhere? You can find me on the world's only the wire rewatch podcast, Pod Yourself the Wire or the World's Only Sopranos podcast, Pod Yourself a Gun and once again, Um, we're doing a live show at s F Sketch Fest Saturday, janu pm over at the Piano Fight Theater. Go to s F sketch Fest dot com and please buy tickets because

it would be embarrassing if no one came. It would be embarrassing. Go go there, go now, find Matt Leeb at s F Sketch Fest. You can see me in person. You can assassinate me. Ya, sell your possessions, fly to San Francisco live on the streets in the weeks leading up to the event. You know should and then murder him murder me please and uh and also yeah, give us five stars a review. That's really all I want. Um, you know, there's enough listeners out there on this podcast

that I should be able to break a thousand. Come there we go? All right, Yeah, that's those are my plugs. Guys. I love you. I love you too. I love you more than my my five week old daughter. Yeah. I don't think that's true, but I want you to think it's true. There you go, gaslight me, gas light me. Daddy. We have a Behind the Bastard's live stream event coming up with Margaret Kiljoy on December eight at six pm Pacific. You can get tickets moment house dot com, slash bTB,

Heroic eroticick it out. I'll be there watching on the live stream. You don't you don't have to do that. I'm gonna and I'm going to be in the comments section going kill me, kill me, do it, and no one will be able to do it. I'm like Napoleon the Third in that way, and we are dumb boomsaka Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.

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