Napoleon VII

Napoleon VII, born Charles Bonaparte at Nantes on 19 October 1950, is Emperor of the French and Duke of Brittany. He succeeded his father, Napoleon VI, on the day of his death in 1997, and had been an officer of the navy and then a working economist for the whole of his adult life until that morning.

He is the first Emperor born under the constitution of 1946, and for thirty years he was the apolitical symbol it describes: a plain, dry, unpompous man who read the papers of state, kept the audiences, opened the sessions, visited the hospitals and said nothing that could be reported as politics. He became, by a long way, more popular than his father had been.

In 2027 he refused his assent to a statute, the first substantive use of the power in the Empire’s history, over an exclusively French submarine enclave at Cherbourg in the Duchy of Normandy to which the duchy had not consented. The ministry that had sponsored the statute sought a vote of confidence and lost it. No ministry has been formed since, there is no mechanism in the constitution to overturn what he did, and the question of whether he saved the settlement of 1945 or broke it is the argument France is now having.

Name and titles

He was born plain Charles Bonaparte, in a country that had been an empire for four years and a republic for the century and a half before that. His father was Emperor-elect and had not yet acceded, so the child was not born to a reigning house. He became Prince Imperial on his father’s accession in 1960, a style he used rarely and never at work.

On his accession in 1997 he took the regnal name Napoleon VII, the number following the family’s own count, which treats the Prince Imperial who died in 1879 and Prince Victor as Napoleon IV and V. He is Emperor of the French, not Emperor of France, the distinction Napoleon I made and the constitution keeps: the office is over a people and not over a territory.

He is separately Duke of Brittany, in a Crown capacity legally distinct from the French one. French ministers advise him as Emperor, Breton ministers advise him as Duke, and the two offices do not meet. The Napoleon numbering is expected to stop with him: the heir is his daughter, and the settled expectation is that she will reign under her own name.

Early life

Nantes

He was born and raised at Nantes, where his father was Duke of Brittany and where the ducal household kept its ceremonial offices. His mother was a Breton, of a family that had been in the resistance in the years when his father commanded the Breton formations, and she was the reason her sons grew up with the language.

He therefore speaks Breton fluently and learned it as a child rather than as a duty, which distinguishes him from his father, who learned it late and swore his oath in it as an act of will. Brittany claims him warmly and has always done so. He has been careful never to trade on it. France regards the Breton claim on its Emperor as faintly comic and says so, which Brittany enjoys.

A younger brother

His brother Jérôme, three years younger, went into shipping and has kept entirely clear of public life, a discipline the family has treated as ordinary rather than remarkable. Under the male-line succession that governed the house until the 2010s, Jérôme stood behind his brother only until a son was born.

The household was not grand. The family lived in a rented house in the city, the ducal offices being somewhere else entirely, and the boys went to an ordinary lycée where the other pupils called them by their surname. Napoleon VI had accepted a constitution that gave him nothing and ran his household on the same principle.

His mother made the ducal charities her work, and ran a long campaign for Breton-language schooling that outlasted her, which is the other reason the language came to her sons as ordinary speech rather than as a duty. Their father was frequently in Paris, and the absence mattered: the son who succeeded him has spoken of a man he admired at a distance and knew chiefly through other people’s accounts of him.

The story everybody in Brittany tells is of the summer he spent working a fishing boat out of the Breton coast at sixteen, and was seasick for the whole of it, which did not prevent him going to sea for a living six years later.

The grande école

He read economics, took a place at one of the grandes écoles, and emerged with the training that has marked everything he has done since: a habit of defining the question before answering it, an intolerance of rounded figures, and a dislike of arguments that depend on how they are phrased.

The navy

He served six years as an officer of the French navy, longer than his conscription required. He went to sea in a frigate in the Mediterranean and then to the submarine tender at Cherbourg, in the Duchy of Normandy, which is to say that he has worked inside the yard whose expansion he refused a law for forty years later, and knows what the jetties look like from the water.

He left because he wanted to study economics and said so, which the service found an eccentric reason and accepted.

The detail that has mattered since is that the navy of those years was learning the submarine again, after a generation in which France was forbidden to have one. The submarine question is not an abstraction to him, and when the Cherbourg enclave came to him in 2027 he was the only person in the room who had served in the arm the statute was for. His critics say that this made him worse placed to judge it rather than better, because a man who knows a subject tends to think he is entitled to an opinion about it.

The economist

He left the navy in his late twenties and went to work.

He spent his first years in a French bank and then, for two decades, in an international institution, working on currency stabilisation: the unglamorous business of keeping small currencies attached to large ones without the attachment breaking. He was based in Paris and travelled out, and used his surname, which is a common one, and was mostly not recognised. Colleagues who learned who he was afterwards have described a man who took notes in meetings and asked the third question rather than the first.

The file that matters now is the Norman one. When the Norman livre came under pressure in the 1990s and France extended the credit line that carries it still, Kelly’s counterpart in that negotiation was a French official, and the future Emperor was on the institution’s side of the table, reading the Norman government’s books. He has never discussed it in public. Both governments know he did it, and both have found it convenient not to say so since 2027.

He published one book, on industrial decline in the French interior, the emptying diagonal of high pasture and shrinking market towns that runs from the Ardennes to the Landes. It sold moderately. He has said since that it is the only thing he has written that he would still defend in full, and the towns in it are the ones he has spent his reign visiting.

Marriage and family

He married in the 1970s. He met Marie-Hélène at a friend’s wedding in Brittany; she is a Frenchwoman of no rank, and they remain married. No rule required anybody’s consent to the marriage, the constitution of 1946 having declined to write one, and the imperial household complained anyway that it had not been asked, which is the last occasion on which the household attempted to behave like a court.

She is Empress of the French and has a full public role of her own, principally in hospitals and in the care of the very old, which she has built rather than inherited.

They have two children.

Clotilde, born in the early 1980s, is a hospital physician and still practises. Since the succession reform of the 2010s she is heir to both Crowns and is styled Princess Imperial. She is married, has children, and is more popular than her father, which he has said in public is the correct order of things. She has said nothing whatever about the refusal.

Victor, the younger, is a doctor in general practice. When the reform was proposed he was the person it displaced, and he supported it publicly, which ended the argument. He has kept out of public life since.

The family’s own money is modest, separate from the civil list, and published: the fascist state confiscated what the Bonapartes had, and what was restored after 1945 was a fraction of it. They keep a house at Ajaccio in Corsica, where the family came from. Corsica makes a great deal more of him than he does of Corsica.

Accession, 1997

Napoleon VI died in 1997, after thirty-seven years as Emperor and fifty-five as Duke of Brittany. His son was forty-seven, at his desk. He was told by telephone, finished the memorandum he was writing before he left the building, and has never been able to explain why, except that it was nearly done. He resigned his post and was home within the week.

He swore the civic oath before the Estates-General in the Chamber of Deputies, and attended the ceremony at Les Invalides beside the tomb of Napoleon I: no crown, no church, no anointing. Within the month he went to Nantes and took the Breton oath in Breton, in a duchy that had known him since he was a child.

His first speech as Emperor was four minutes long. He said that his father had shown the office was safe in the hands of a man who declined to use it, that he intended to be equally invisible, and that the country would judge whether he had managed it. The line that survives is the other one: that he had spent his life being told the family’s story and intended to be a footnote in it. The same year, France ended conscription, which the newspapers noted as a coincidence and the navy did not find funny.

The imperial office

The office he took is defined narrowly by the constitution of 1946 and by the practice of his father.

The Emperor does not govern. He appoints as President of the Council the person who can command the Chamber of Deputies; he dissolves the Chamber on that person’s advice; he may refer a law to the Constitutional Council before giving assent; he gives assent; and he is nominal commander of the armed forces. The imperial household is funded by a civil list voted every year by the Estates-General, which the republicans vote against every year. He lives and works at the Élysée, which was the house of the Presidents of the Republic and was given to the restored Empire in 1945 for exactly that reason.

Napoleon VI never used the assent power or any reserved discretion in thirty-seven years, and it is the completeness of that restraint that made his son’s act in 2027 legible as a breach. The two men differ on what the restraint was for. The father held that a restored dynasty earns its place by declining the powers that made dynasties dangerous. The son, who has never criticised his father in public and has been careful not to be quoted on the point, evidently regards restraint as a means to an end rather than as the whole of the office.

Emperor, 1997 to 2027

The invisible years

For most of three decades he did what the constitution describes and no more. He read the papers of state in the morning and annotated them in pencil, commenting rarely. He swims. He has kept up an economics reading group with former colleagues for thirty years, which meets in the evening and has never leaked.

He has had seven or eight Presidents of the Council, and the one he is known to have liked best was a reformist republican who disagreed with his existence and said so pleasantly, which he has described as the most comfortable professional relationship of his reign. The weekly audience runs forty minutes, with no officials present and no note taken, and his questions are about numbers rather than about politics, which ministers have variously found reassuring and unnerving.

He makes two or three engagements most days. He will not open a factory that has announced redundancies, a rule of his own that has embarrassed two ministries and that the household now checks for in advance.

He was, by wide agreement, better at the job than his father, because he was better with people. He is dry and precise in public and warmer in private, and the public warmth that his father never had came to him late and without effort: the Emperor who had worked in a bank, who quoted the satirical cartoon of himself as a bank manager in a sash and said it was the best likeness anybody had managed.

The referrals

Once or twice a decade he referred a law to the Constitutional Council before assenting to it, which is a power the constitution gives the Emperor and which his father never used.

The referrals were: a security law after the May Day Bombings of 2006; an immigration and nationality bill in the 2010s; a press law; a bill touching the competences of the duchies; and a retrospective tax.

The 2006 referral is the one that is taught. The Council struck out two provisions: detention without charge beyond a fixed period, and a power to close a newspaper by administrative order. The ministry’s public reaction was cold and its private reaction was relief, because the two clauses had been forced on it by its own majority and the Council’s judgement let it drop them without a retreat. That is the pattern of all five: no ministry welcomed a referral and none treated one as an attack, and several were quietly grateful.

They are the reason the refusal of 2027 was not the first time he had acted. He had a settled practice of putting a doubtful law to the court rather than to the country, and the obvious question about Cherbourg is why he did not do it again.

Presence

The reign’s public character was built on being where something had happened. He went into the suburbs after the riots of 2005, repeatedly, which ministers resented and did not say so on the record. He was at the chemical works in the Rhône corridor the day after the explosion. He was at Notre-Dame the night of the fire in 2019, standing in the street with everybody else.

He goes to the Day of Remembrance ceremony every year and does not lead it, because the genocide was the work of the French state and the President of the Council answers for the state. He was the first Emperor to attend at all.

The addresses

He speaks to the country once a year, on 14 July, before the parade, for about ten minutes, and he writes it himself. The addresses are the only place in French public life where the head of state says something that has not been cleared by a ministry, and their habit is to name the thing everybody has agreed not to mention.

The genocide and its French officials have been his subject more often than any other; the emptying interior comes second. The address of 2027, given weeks before the Cherbourg statute reached him, was about the crown itself.

The succession

The reform of the succession to absolute primogeniture in the 2010s was the work of the ministry of the day. The Emperor said nothing publicly about it, as he says nothing publicly about legislation, and the household has never confirmed what he thought.

It was argued over at length because the heir under the old rule was his son and the heir under the new one was his daughter. Victor supported it publicly, which ended the argument faster than any imperial intervention could have. Clotilde became Princess Imperial and heir to both Crowns, and the expectation that the Napoleon numbering will end with her father dates from then.

The attempt

Early in the reign a man of the Nationaux nostalgia, the criminal and near-invisible remnant that the constitution’s ban keeps that way, attempted his life. The attempt failed, the man was tried, and the Emperor kept the day’s remaining engagements. He has never referred to it in public. The household has confirmed only that he declined to change his routine.

Abroad

The Emperor has no role in foreign policy, which belongs to ministers, and his part in the treaties of 2027 was to sign the instruments put before him, including the renunciation of nuclear weapons and the Treaty of Straßburg.

He has made state visits to Germany, early in the reign and difficult, to Britain several times, and to the United Kingdom of America in 2027.

The German visit is the one that is remembered. He laid a wreath at a camp memorial on German soil, for French victims, and said one sentence, which both countries quote: that the crime had been done in French, by Frenchmen, to people the French state had declared not to be French, and that Germany’s hospitality to the memorial did not transfer any part of it. The ministry had not seen the sentence in advance.

The American visit, in connection with the memorandum for a successor to Concorde, was the first by a French head of state since the war. It was a working visit, ministerial by design, and he was received by the Governor-General, Michelle Lujan Grisham, and by the Prime Minister, Ana Valdez.

He and Ernest V, who was King of the United Kingdom of America and, separately, Duke of Normandy until his abdication on 31 October 2028, met privately and regularly for years, without officials, an arrangement both governments disliked and neither found a way to stop. Two constitutional monarchs of the same generation, each holding several crowns that must not be allowed to merge, had a good deal to compare, and both have described the subject matter in the same terms: succession, staff, and how to say nothing in public for forty years. Neither will go further than that. They have not spoken since the refusal, by mutual decision, and both have said so.

Duke of Brittany

In Brittany he is the Duke, advised by Breton ministers, and his ducal acts are recorded separately from his French ones.

Ducal assent is automatic: the Duke of Brittany cannot veto, delay or refer a Breton bill, and he never has. He appoints the First Minister whom the Estates elect, opens sessions of the Estates of Brittany, confers the Order of the Ermine on Breton advice, and speaks Breton at ceremonies and in the oath. He visits several times a year and stays at Nantes, where the ducal household keeps its offices, and he lives in France.

In 2027 the French caretaker ministry granted a concession for a floating wind field and a high-voltage corridor off Brest without Breton approval, and the dispute went to the Breton courts. He issued two procedural statements, one in each capacity: as Emperor acknowledging the concession and the limits of his own role, and as Duke affirming the pending Breton judicial process. He endorsed no outcome and brokered nothing.

The statements were exactly what the two-Crown doctrine requires and were read in Brittany as quiet support, which France noticed. It is the clearest demonstration available of how little room there is between holding two Crowns honestly and appearing to use one against the other.

The Cherbourg refusal

The statute

France has no deep-water Channel port under its ordinary administration: the coast east of the Seine is Belgian and the coast west of it is Norman. Its Channel submarines therefore work out of the joint yard at Cherbourg, in the Duchy of Normandy, under arrangements in which Norman law applies except to defined service matters.

The ministry of Isabelle Fournier proposed to change that: an exclusively French enclave for nuclear-powered, conventionally armed attack submarines, exempt from Norman labour, environmental, planning, policing and ordinary criminal law. The statute required the Norman government to be consulted and did not require its consent. Normandy objected formally. The Estates-General passed it.

Eleven days

The constitution allowed him eleven days, and he used all of them.

He spent them reading. He read the whole of the Norman case, in the Norman French of the duchy’s own pleadings and in the French translation, which nobody had asked him to do and which took four evenings. He asked the household’s lawyers for a history of the assent power, and was told there was not one to give him: the power had been exercised as a formality for eighty years, there were no precedents, no textbook chapter and no guidance, and the last serious discussion of it was in the drafting papers of 1946. And he kept every public engagement in the diary, including two school visits and a hospital, which the press noticed afterwards and read as calm.

Twice, in writing, he asked the ministry to seek Norman consent before the statute reached him. The letters were short, formal and unmistakable, and the ministry did not act on them. They were published afterwards by the household, not by the ministry.

Isabelle Fournier came to the Élysée twice during the eleven days. The second time she brought the Defence Minister, General Vaillant, which the Emperor took as pressure and said so afterwards, in the only public remark he has made about her conduct.

He considered referring the statute to the Constitutional Council, which had been his practice for thirty years, and rejected the course. The Council judges French law; the question at Cherbourg was whether France could set aside the terms of a settlement with a duchy that has its own courts, and the Council could not have reached it. He decided that a referral would have been a way of appearing to act while doing nothing.

He decided alone. He told his private secretary, Bernard Ollivier, a career official who had served three imperial households, what he intended, and asked nobody’s opinion, in Normandy or anywhere else. He wrote the paragraph himself, in one draft.

The refusal

He wrote the paragraph by hand. He signed nothing, gave the sheet to his private secretary, Bernard Ollivier, and went to the opening of a school in the eastern suburbs, where he was photographed being shown a ventilation system.

The household had expected a referral to the Constitutional Council and had drafted one; the drafts survive and are the reason we know what the staff thought would happen. The statute went back to the Chamber unsigned with the paragraph attached, and the household published it the same hour.

The ministry falls

Fournier was correct in public and furious in private. She called a vote of confidence within two days and lost it, and has remained President of the Council in a caretaker capacity since.

The Estates-General met in emergency debate. A member of the reformist republicans read the Emperor’s paragraph aloud from the despatch box, and the chamber heard it in silence, which those present describe as the moment everybody understood that the argument would not be settled that week or that year.

Her Defence Minister, General Pierre Vaillant, has kept preparatory work going under an executive order the Cabinet approved before the fall, which the Norman law officers say cannot authorise anything on Norman soil. Nothing has been built.

Nobody has been able to form a ministry since. The reformist republicans will not serve while the assent power exists and say it must be removed first. The nationalist right, which holds the balance, will support no ministry that abandons the enclave and calls the refusal an unelected veto over the defence of France. The abolitionist republicans say the episode proves the Empire must go; the Orléanists say a Bonaparte has behaved like a Bourbon; the Greens and the socialists support him on the merits; and the imperial centre-right has said as little as it can.

In Normandy, President Mathieu Hébert expressed his government’s gratitude openly. Abroad, Britain and Germany said nothing and watched. The United Kingdom of America said nothing at all, because its own King is the Duke in question.

No remedy

There is no mechanism to overturn a refusal of assent. The constitution of 1946 assumed that assent was a formality and provided nothing for the case where it is not. Removing the power would take a constitutional amendment, and an amendment takes a ministry, and no ministry can be formed.

Three things have been tried. Three names have been put to him for the premiership, and none could command the Chamber. A government of officials was proposed and the parties refused it, on the ground that a chamber which cannot agree on a politician has no business handing the country to civil servants. And an early dissolution has been urged on all sides, which is the trap: the Emperor may dissolve only on the advice of a President of the Council, the only President of the Council available is a caretaker who lost the confidence of the House, and he will not ask her to advise it. His stated reason is that a dissolution advised by a ministry the Chamber has dismissed, at the request of an Emperor the Chamber is arguing about, would be the second unprecedented act of the same year and the more dangerous of the two.

The constitutional lawyers are divided three ways, and the division is now the standard examination question in every French faculty of law. That a power written in the text is a power, and that disuse does not repeal it. That convention had converted assent into a duty, so that the text survived only because nobody used it, and he has broken something real. And that the settlement with the duchies stands above ordinary statute, so that he was not exercising a discretion at all but enforcing a higher instrument, which is the argument his own paragraph implies and which he has never made in those words.

The Constitutional Council has not been asked and cannot easily be. A reference would have to come from an authority with standing, and the caretaker ministry will not make one, because nobody in French public life is confident enough of the answer to want it.

Critics have demanded his abdication or some formal discipline. Neither is available either: the constitution is silent on abdication, which is why the demands go nowhere. He answered them once, in a sentence.

He has offered the only way out he has: seek Norman consent and he will assent, and he has said so plainly, which his critics call proof that the refusal was policy and not principle. He has also let it be known that he would accept an amendment stripping the assent power from his successors, which nobody can pass.

Where it stands

Nothing has been settled. The statute is unassented; the enclave is unbuilt; the caretaker ministry governs; the courts of Normandy have not reached the merits; and the Emperor performs his ordinary duties, unchanged, in a country where most of the public approves of what he did and most of the political class does not.

The family has held the line. Clotilde went on working her hospital shifts throughout, which the press made a great deal of and which she has refused to discuss. Jérôme, his brother, said nothing, as he always has. The Empress made the only royal remark of the crisis, at a hospital, when somebody asked how her husband was: she said that she was proud of him, and the papers ran it for a week.

Both duchies are grateful, and say so through their governments rather than through their courts. And the one regret he is known to have expressed, privately and at second hand, is that he did not publish the two warnings at the time he sent them, because a country that had read them in advance would have understood the refusal differently.

If a ministry can be formed, he will appoint whoever commands the Chamber, including a premier pledged to strip the assent power from the Crown, and he has said so. If he were to die during the deadlock, Clotilde would succeed to both Crowns and inherit the same unanswerable question, which is the argument the abolitionists make most effectively.

Character

He is slower than he was. He uses a stick, his engagements have been shortened, and no illness has been named; he was seventy-seven at the time of the refusal and looked it, which sharpens every argument about the act, because the man who made it may not be there for its consequences.

He speaks French, Breton, English from the international years, Italian from Corsica and the family, and German, which he set out to learn after the Concert was founded and does not pretend to speak well. He reads economic history and naval history, and is agreed by everybody who has sat next to him at dinner to be dull about both.

The family keeps a small house at Ajaccio, not the birthplace museum, and he goes in August. Corsica treats the visit as a state occasion whatever the household says, which is the one place in the Empire where the Bonaparte name still does that.

He has never worn uniform as Emperor. He stands for the whole of the 14 July parade in a civilian suit, which republicans have noticed approvingly and the nationalist right reads as a snub to a navy he served in for six years.

The household at the Élysée is small by the standards of European courts, is run by a private secretary rather than by a chamberlain, and is staffed with civil servants on secondment who go back to their departments afterwards. He travels with a security detail he has never been able to reduce and by scheduled train wherever the timetable allows, which the detail dislikes. His relations with the press are correct and cool: he gives no interviews, the household answers factual questions the same day, and La Lanterne, which is against the Empire on principle, has more than once said that this is the most republican thing about him. The Orléanist faction attacks the dynasty and not the man, and has said so explicitly, which is the closest thing to a courtesy in French public life. His causes are the memory of the genocide and the way it is taught in schools, which is the subject he returns to most often, and the emptying interior of his one book. He attends the Saint-Napoléon on 15 August briefly and as a duty, and has never disguised that the dynastic holiday embarrasses him.

On the first Napoleon he is studied and cool: he has read the campaigns, admires parts of the administrative work, has never invoked the name in an argument, and has called the personal rule a warning rather than an inheritance. Asked whether his father would have refused the Cherbourg statute, he has declined to answer, which is the only question on the subject he has refused.

Assessment

He is the first Emperor born under the constitution and the first to test it. Every previous holder of the office was a man the settlement had made; he is a man the settlement raised, and he is the first to treat its terms as something he might have to enforce rather than merely embody.

He acted for the settlement against his own ministers, and he may have broken the thing he was protecting. The case for him is that a constitution that gives an office a power gives it for a reason, and that the reason had arrived. The case against him is that a hereditary officer who declines a law has taken a decision away from the people who can be voted out, and that the deadlock which followed is the cost of his having done it. Both cases are stated in the Estates-General every week.

Popularity is not a constitutional power, and he has one and not the other. The public is with him and cannot give him a ministry; the political class is against him and cannot remove him; and the gap between the two is the most dangerous arrangement of opinion the Empire has known.

Two Crowns held honestly is barely possible, and the Brest statements showed it. He did exactly what the doctrine of separate capacities requires, and was read in Brittany as taking a side anyway. The doctrine survives on the assumption that the two offices will never want different things, and 2027 was the year they did.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Napoleon VI, his father, who never used the power he used
• France, the Empire he reigns over
• Duchy of Normandy, whose consent the Cherbourg statute did not seek
• Duchy of Brittany, his other Crown
• Ernest V, King of the United Kingdom of America and Duke of Normandy until 31 October 2028
• George V, his successor in both capacities

Categories

World People · France · Bonapartist · Monarchs · Brittany · Normandy · Twenty-First Century