Robert Browning, _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society_

 I'VE BEEN READING Jonathan Beecher's Writers and Revolution, an engaging account of the effects of the revolution of 1848 on various writers (e.g., Marx and Flaubert), and in consequence occasionally thinking of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, or Napoleon III. His election as President in December 1848 was a thumping anti-climax to most of the high hopes of that year, and his coup d'etat of three years later killed off whatever lingered. 

He has his defenders, no doubt, but I get the impression he is mainly remembered as a hypocritical opportunist whose main appeal was his association with his uncle, the Napoleon who conquered Europe. His main electoral appeal, back before he cancelled the new constitution and made himself emperor, was to make France great again. He was president for four years then emperor for another eighteen.

Thinking of Napoleon III led me back to this (which I first read in 1987 or so)--a 2,155 line dramatic monologue about a deposed monarch who finds himself exiled in England and sits down with some attractive young woman to explain what happened. It was published as a book in 1871, by which time Napoleon III had, indeed, been deposed and driven into exile in England after France's defeat in the grande debâcle of the Franco-Prussion War. 

Turns out, though, that Browning wrote at least some of the poem in 1859 or so, before things ended so badly. At that time, his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning was still alive, and she was one of Napoleon III's more vocal English defenders. Browning was sometimes a defender, too, though not so keen a one. It may be significant that he did not publish the poem until after Elizabeth died.

So...is the portrait sympathetic or satirical? Readers disagree. I would say satirical--the speaker is engaged in a long and complicated self-justification, a bit like Browning's versions of Andrea del Sarto and Bishop Blougram, and his case for hewing to the middle-of-the-road, being neither this nor that, often sounds like an apologia for mediocrity. It sounds exactly like a hypocritical opportunist's defense of his hypocritical opportunism. 

But the beauty of the dramatic monologue is that the whole performance sounds credible, at points. Hohenstiel-Schwangau ("high-stick swan-place," apparently) has heard all the criticisms of his rule and has a point-by-point  rebuttal ready. All he was trying to do was save society.

Hard to imagine this poem ever finding a wide audience, but it really is a fascinating study of a certain kind of political "leadership."