The Role of Propaganda Before and After the Election of 1848

Abstract

Long before Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected President of the Second Republic in December 1848, the Bonapartes had used propaganda. For example, the personal control of the press by Napoleon I enhanced his universal popularity in France prior to the disaster in Russia. Fully aware of the magnetic power of glittering honorifics, he had named his son the King of Rome at his birth ; the additional title of Duke of Reichstadt, though politically ineffective, further illustrates the Bonaparte awareness of the power of title. In 1839, Louis Napoleon wrote Napoleonic Ideas to celebrate the philosophy and career of his illustrious uncle; and in 1844 he published The Extinction of Poverty, which, though vague and groping in its genuine idealism, established him clearly as a liberal thinker.