President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte moves carefully, avoiding conflict…

President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte moves carefully, avoiding conflict with the monarchist assembly.

He pleases Roman Catholics by restoring the pope to his temporal throne in Rome, from which Roman republicans had driven him.

Domestically, he accepts without protest a series of conservative measures adopted by the assembly: these laws deprive one-third of all Frenchmen of the right to vote, restrict the press and public assemblage, and give the church a firm grip on public as well as private education.

Louis-Napoleon may not really have welcomed this trend toward conservatism, however; his writings of the 1840s had been marked by a kind of technocratic outlook, in the tradition of Saint-Simonian socialism.

His effort to please the assembly probably derives from his hope that the assembly will reciprocate: he wants funds from the treasury to pay his personal debts and run his household, along with a constitutional amendment that will allow him to run for a second term.