Finale

Abstract

Five more meetings of the Congress were held after the signing of the peace treaty, for Louis Napoleon had always wanted it to be more than just a peace conference. The atmosphere was, however, more relaxed and much of the time was taken up with festivities. The Emperor gave a grand banquet of 140 ‘couverts’ on the evening of 12 April, which Clarendon described ‘as the finest thing of the kind I ever assisted at’, but he was less pleased with his conversation with the Emperor whom he sat next to. He found Louis Napoleon too afraid of hurting the Pope, too anxious for a European Congress and inclined to think that in a year or two the French people would tire of the arts of peace and want something more striking for their amusement. This affair was followed on the 14th by an even more lavish dinner and fête at the Hotel de Ville which lasted for seven hours. ‘There is no sovereign in Europe who could give such a fête as the Préfet de la Seine for he had the best singers and all the best dancers of Paris in a locale far more magnificent and commodious than the Tuileries’, Clarendon wrote to Palmerston. ‘Certainly the Plenipotentiaries will carry away with them notions of the boundless wealth and luxury of France.’¹