Bonapartist, any of the 19th-century supporters of Napoleon I and Napoleon III and of their political theories and policies. The Bonapartist party advanced the claims of the Bonaparte family throughout the century and, though never completely united, believed in an autocratic government run with the presumed consent of the people.
After Napoleon I’s abdication (1814), many of his followers turned to his son, Napoleon II, named as his successor; and after Napoleon I’s exile to St. Helena (1815) and death (1821), they tried vainly to rally around Napoleon II (by then duke of Reichstadt), who, however, was being held virtual prisoner by the Austrian Habsburgs and was in ill health (he died in 1832). The Bonapartists, in any case, were poorly organized; and the memories of Napoleon’s failures were too recent for them to secure power.
Nevertheless, a cult began to surround Napoleon Bonaparte after his death, and within a few years he was being promoted as the saviour of the common man and a political genius of the first order. Napoleon I’s tyranny was being forgotten or glossed over as the memory of it grew dimmer, and instead his “glory,” which contrasted so strikingly with the timidity and dullness of the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe, was lauded nostalgically. This sentiment left the way open for his nephew, Louis-Napoléon, an able propagandist, who gave all his energies to winning the throne of France. The failure of the Orléanists under Louis-Philippe and of the republicans under the Second Republic to satisfy the needs and demands of the French people gave Louis-Napoléon the opening he needed, and in December 1848 the Bonapartists garnered enough votes to elect him president. Within three years he was able to dissolve the parliament, arrest his enemies, and have himself voted dictatorial powers. In November 1852 he was elected emperor of the French.
Bonapartism differed somewhat under Louis-Napoléon (Napoleon III from Dec. 2, 1852), who sought to establish a liberal empire and avoid war. (He nevertheless got the nation involved in a series of foreign adventures—the Crimean War, the wars of Italian independence, the Mexican empire, and the fateful Franco-German War that led to his downfall in 1870.) During this period of Napoleonic power, the Bonapartists split into two factions. First, there were the conservatives surrounding Napoleon III, who encouraged the participation of the Catholic Church in education and rural organization, a laissez-faire attitude toward business and investment, and a strong central government working through approval of policy by plebiscite and an ostensibly independent system of local government. Second, there were the radicals, anticlericals all, who held to the republican ideals of universal suffrage, with real power exerted through the leadership of the Bonapartes.
The death (1873) of Napoleon III after his overthrow and the early death of his son, Louis, the prince imperial (1879), left the party split even worse under Napoléon-Jérôme Bonaparte (Napoleon III’s first cousin) and the latter’s elder son Napoléon-Victor—respectively leaders of the radicals and the conservatives. They continued to elect representatives but slowly lost members to the emerging parties of the Third Republic. When Napoléon-Jérôme died in 1891, the Bonapartist party effectively ceased to exist.