The mid-1850s were years of economic boom, which gave way to a slump at the end of the decade. To maintain railway construction, the ongoing rebuilding of French cities and to counter economic malaise, government spending on public works rose. The regime also sought to stimulate the economy through fiscal reform; a trade treaty with Britain in 1860 formed part of a programme intended to reduce taxes and streamline the state. Affairs abroad, though, complicated this agenda. Profiting from the destabilisation of the international order that followed the Crimean War, France intervened militarily in support of Italian unification, while simultaneously seeking greater prestige through a policy of all-out global interventionism in the Middle and Far East and Mexico. The costs of interventionism abroad, combined with ongoing expenses in Algeria and on public works, eroded the regime’s latitude to lower taxes, straining the legitimacy of the fiscal system. Meanwhile, defeat in Mexico added to this discontent, producing a crisis of the fiscal-military system, which weakened the regime, easing its collapse in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War.

The growth of the state during the 1840s provoked fierce criticism of fiscal irresponsibility from the government’s opponents. Consequently, a series of spending cuts followed the overthrow of the July Monarchy in 1848, focusing most heavily on public works, which were to be delegated to the private sector to a greater degree than under the Orleanists. The expansion of public works continued apace in the 1850s, but with less government investment than in the 1840s. Indeed, the pressure for public amenities was made all the more intense by the advent of universal suffrage in 1848, which increased the need for the government to promote widespread prosperity. At the same time, the government continued to pursue the enhancement of French prestige abroad, participating in the Crimean War in 1854–6. Financing the war relied heavily on credit, prompting an overhaul of government borrowing as the state issued loans by public subscription, realising on a large scale what previous regimes had only envisioned and reshaping the way that the government contracted loans in subsequent years.

In France, throughout the post-revolutionary period, sovereignty was invoked to justify unlimited, absolute and arbitrary exercises of power by the king, parliament and the people. These uses of sovereignty, I maintain, were perceived as politically dangerous by French jurists Jean Denis Lanjuinais, Firmin Laferrière, Felix Berriat Saint Prix and Edouard Laboulaye. On three different occasions, they resorted to constituent power to tame the implications of contemporary appeals to sovereignty. First, during the Restoration it was used to claim that the king could not exercise power unlimitedly, as the constituent power belonged to the people. Second, during the July Monarchy constituent power was used to oppose the Parliament’s claim to be the sovereign and the only legitimate author of the constitution. Last, during the Second Republic, constituent power was used to claim that the power of the republican sovereign amounted to and did not extend beyond authorising the creation of the legal system. Constituent power was thus used to negotiate an understanding of popular power different from that implicit in ideas of sovereignty. While sovereignty allowed for uncontrolled and unlimited exercise of power, pouvoir constituant was used to argue that the supreme authority consisted in the popular institution of the constitutional order.

This chapter examines the work and significance of Offenbach in the field of French operetta. With the rise of Napoleon III in the 1850s, a combination of political optimism, renewed prosperity, an abundance of artistic talent and a cultural obsession with appearances made Paris the perfect environment for a new form of entertainment to appear and thrive – operetta. Pioneered by Hervé, it became an international sensation thanks to the creativity and determination of Jacques Offenbach, whose opéras bouffes remain the musical embodiments of France’s Second Empire. He composed and produced dozens of hits that took comic aim at the foibles of all levels of society, from beggars to the royal court. With France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Parisian public briefly turned against the German-born Offenbach. But he found new success by composing light-hearted spectacles. Composer Charles Lecoq, whose career took off thanks to Offenbach, achieved a major success with La fille de Madame Angot. Lecoq and others continued to compose operettas for Parisian audiences, but none matched the popularity French operetta had enjoyed with Offenbach.