Behind the Bastards - Part Four: Napoleon III: The Worst Bonaparte
Aired: 2022-12-08
Duration: 01:12:39


=== Math and Magic Intro (01:51) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll Show are geniuses.
[00:00:09]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
[00:00:17]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[00:00:20]  Yes, which by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:00:23]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:00:24]  I got that wrong.
[00:00:25]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[00:00:26]  We're pretty close, though.
[00:00:27]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:34]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:00:43]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:00:50]  Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
[00:00:55]  People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, where it's really like a stone sculpture.
[00:01:02]  You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
[00:01:05]  Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:01:09]  Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:01:16]  It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:01:24]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:01:33]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:01:36]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
[00:01:40]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== Jesus Christ of Podcasting (02:33) ===

[00:01:51]  Oh, yes, gaze upon me and know me, for I am the Christ child of podcasting.
[00:01:59]  Yes, you shall die for the sins of all podcasters.
[00:02:03]  That's right.
[00:02:04]  Future and past.
[00:02:06]  I will reborn, be reborn, and sit at the right hand of my father, the Pod Save America, guys.
[00:02:14]  The Johns.
[00:02:17]  John's the Baptists.
[00:02:19]  This is Behind the Bastards, the only podcast hosted by the man that Vulture magazine called the Jesus Christ of podcasting.
[00:02:27]  That's right.
[00:02:28]  Look it up.
[00:02:29]  Look it up.
[00:02:30]  It's there.
[00:02:30]  Look it up.
[00:02:31]  It's there somewhere, probably.
[00:02:33]  Maybe if enough people look it up and harass their reporters over email, they'll have to report on it in a story.
[00:02:39]  And then I can take an excerpt out of that article and make it look like they called me the Jesus Christ of podcasting, which would be worth it.
[00:02:46]  Yeah, I mean, that's how you play, you know, the beat the media at their own game.
[00:02:51]  You get them to quote other people's complaints, and then you take that complaint and you say, Hey, look, we all learned a lot from Donald J. Trump.
[00:02:58]  Yes, we did.
[00:03:00]  Yes, we did.
[00:03:00]  Can we not do this weird bit you're doing?
[00:03:03]  Sophie, it's not a bit, it's my life.
[00:03:05]  It is my life.
[00:03:08]  Um, anyway, Matt Lee is here.
[00:03:11]  Hell yeah.
[00:03:12]  Hey, I'm back.
[00:03:13]  Hey, Matt Lee.
[00:03:15]  So glad to be here.
[00:03:16]  Love being on this pod.
[00:03:18]  Love talking to you guys.
[00:03:20]  Love, you know, just plugging my podcasts and just begging your listeners to just check it out.
[00:03:28]  Pod Yourself the Wire, the World's Only The Wire podcast.
[00:03:32]  And Pod Yourself a Gun, The World's Only the Sopranos podcast.
[00:03:35]  Yeah.
[00:03:36]  Check out Pod Yourself the Wire and check out Pod Yourself a Gun.
[00:03:42]  I need to pause for a second because I just saw the worst thing I've ever seen on Twitter.
[00:03:47]  Oh, no.
[00:03:47]  What is it?
[00:03:48]  So Chrissy Yamaguchi Main, aka at Wobblehouse on Twitter, who is a fan of our show, posted Posted a picture of a decal on somebody's car that says messy buns and loaded guns, and then it's a picture of the American flag and then says and then says raising lions, not sheep.
[00:04:12]  Yeah, oh, that's a that's a that's a person who has threatened to murder a barista.
[00:04:18]  That's who that is.
[00:04:19]  That is a person who has pulled a firearm on a Starbucks abortion.
[00:04:23]  I'm doing that with my friends here.

=== Pod Yourself a Gun (15:51) ===

[00:04:25]  Oh, that's amazing.
[00:04:27]  That is a person who has unlawfully detained black people for riding a bike and asked them whose bike is that.
[00:04:34]  Yeah, that is a person who has pulled a Glock on a FedEx driver who was not as white as they.
[00:04:43]  Speaking of which, you know who would have definitely pulled a Glock on a FedEx driver?
[00:04:47]  Who?
[00:04:48]  Napoleon III.
[00:04:50]  Actually, probably not.
[00:04:51]  That was not super a problem that he had.
[00:04:55]  But he might have shot one in the mouth.
[00:04:57]  He would have shot one in the mouth.
[00:04:58]  I'll tell you that much.
[00:04:59]  This guy.
[00:04:59]  I'll tell you one thing about this Napoleon guy.
[00:05:02]  Loves some mouth shooting.
[00:05:03]  Real mouth shooter, Napoleon III.
[00:05:06]  Loves to shoot straight into the mouth.
[00:05:09]  My favorite meme again, the shaking hands meme with Napoleon III and suburban Americans shooting people who absolutely shouldn't be shot.
[00:05:19]  Shooting innocent people in the mouth in a panic.
[00:05:23]  In a panic.
[00:05:24]  Yeah.
[00:05:26]  Yes.
[00:05:28]  There's another hand holding.
[00:05:29]  It's a third one.
[00:05:30]  It's just the cops.
[00:05:31]  Yeah.
[00:05:33]  A lot of fun.
[00:05:34]  We can have a lot of debates about gun control, but Napoleon III is definitely a man whose gun needed more control.
[00:05:39]  A little bit, just a tiny bit more.
[00:05:42]  I mean, disarm all Bonapartes.
[00:05:45]  He has a right to bear arms, but not a right to tear mouths.
[00:05:50]  That's right.
[00:05:50]  That's right.
[00:05:51]  Anyway, you're doing good.
[00:05:54]  So anyway, Napoleon III.
[00:06:00]  In the space of about a decade, the first 10 years or so he's in power, Napoleon III takes France from being one of the sick men of Europe.
[00:06:06]  It was seen as kind of an ailing power like the Ottomans and a pariah and turns it into what is probably the dominant political and military force on the European continent, right?
[00:06:17]  After the Crimean War, he's got sort of what's seen as like the largest, most cohesive and effective ground army.
[00:06:23]  He's expanded, like over the course of the first decade and change of his reign, he doubles the population of France by conquering because he's conquered all of Indochina.
[00:06:33]  He's conquered effectively now parts of Algeria, Western Africa.
[00:06:36]  Like he adds millions of people to French dominion.
[00:06:42]  Oh, I thought people just liked the new empire so much that they were fucking all they were just fucking making a lot more babies.
[00:06:47]  No.
[00:06:47]  Yeah, a lot more menage.
[00:06:50]  You know what I mean?
[00:06:51]  Menagia way more than trois for this guy.
[00:06:54]  Because Louis Napoleon, horny motherfucker.
[00:06:57]  Which we're about to call him Napoleon the Trois.
[00:07:00]  But first, I did want to talk a little bit about a fun fact I found about him, about how he used his newfound wealth and prestige to lured his position over everyone else.
[00:07:09]  And that's normal for emperors, you know, that you wouldn't be an emperor if you weren't going to do some of that.
[00:07:13]  But due to a quirk of metallurgy and history, he wound up doing this in a very funny way.
[00:07:18]  When the emperor would host other world leaders for lavish balls and high society events, he would have his servants bring out gold-plated dinnerware for them, right?
[00:07:26]  You know, and this was not to honor them.
[00:07:28]  This was specifically to contrast them from him because he had a much nicer set of dinnerware.
[00:07:34]  And all of his plates and bowls and cups and spoons were made from what was at the time one of the most valuable materials on earth.
[00:07:41]  Aluminum.
[00:07:45]  Hell yeah.
[00:07:46]  Yeah.
[00:07:47]  I love it.
[00:07:48]  Whipping out his aluminum cups so that it's like, I mean, oh, gauche.
[00:07:56]  Enjoy your gold, paupers.
[00:07:59]  I am just going to crack open this cold beer.
[00:08:03]  This cold beer of precious aluminum.
[00:08:05]  Watch me crash it.
[00:08:06]  I'm going to crunch it right on my head.
[00:08:09]  Shotgunning mead.
[00:08:10]  So the general public didn't start to become aware of aluminum until the end of the 1800s.
[00:08:15]  The metal exists all throughout the earth, right?
[00:08:18]  It's been around forever.
[00:08:19]  We've been using it forever.
[00:08:21]  But due to realities of geology, this silver from clay, as it was called, was generally mixed up with other shit.
[00:08:27]  And we just didn't have the ability to like separate it and gather it in significant quantity.
[00:08:32]  For an example of how valuable aluminum was during the reign of Louis Napoleon, the United States put a six-pound aluminum cap on the top of the Washington Monument.
[00:08:41]  And this was like a big flex.
[00:08:42]  This was the U.S. being like, yeah, motherfuckers, we got six pounds of aluminum, bitches.
[00:08:48]  What do you got?
[00:08:49]  You got nothing.
[00:08:50]  It was the largest.
[00:08:51]  We're going to wrap this whole thing in foil.
[00:08:54]  It was the largest piece of the metal ever used at that time.
[00:08:57]  Louis Napoleon actually granted a scientist named Henri de Ville a massive public subsidy to study how to gather larger quantities of aluminum.
[00:09:06]  He ordered military standards to be made from aluminum poles for his troops to carry because he was so enchanted by the sight of aluminum.
[00:09:12]  None of this worked very well, but that hardly mattered.
[00:09:16]  The royal family wore aluminum jewelry.
[00:09:19]  Louis's son had a baby rattle made of aluminum.
[00:09:22]  It was a wild time for what is today the most boring metal on earth.
[00:09:25]  They've got like, he's giving us, he's giving his relatives like aluminum rings.
[00:09:30]  They're throwing their gold in the trash.
[00:09:32]  Fuck this shit.
[00:09:33]  It's got an aluminum.
[00:09:34]  I love aluminum.
[00:09:35]  An aluminum carriage that just keeps folding.
[00:09:38]  God damn it.
[00:09:39]  Can we make this stronger?
[00:09:43]  Napoleon III was also notorious for his, can we say cocksmanship?
[00:09:49]  His cocksmanship.
[00:09:50]  Oh.
[00:09:51]  Yeah, he is, he's a, fuck guy.
[00:09:55]  You know, he's a fuck guy.
[00:09:56]  He's a fuck guy.
[00:09:57]  Uh, now, his wife, who he marries shortly after taking power and is pretty controversial herself and sucks, is the Empress Eugenie.
[00:10:04]  Um, she is a huge prude.
[00:10:06]  Some biographers write that she hated sex.
[00:10:08]  Um, so this is going to be particularly a problem because Louis Napoleon really likes sex.
[00:10:14]  That's his other thing.
[00:10:15]  He does the way he threads this needle is by cheating on her constantly.
[00:10:19]  Yeah, it makes sense.
[00:10:20]  Yeah, it makes sense.
[00:10:21]  See where this is going.
[00:10:22]  You know, it's what he's got to do.
[00:10:25]  So because things aren't working out great for Eugenie, and because after a while, this is not, there's no romance in their relationship, Louis Napoleon has to increasingly go further afield in search of love.
[00:10:36]  And this is where we get the story of the Countess of Castiglione.
[00:10:40]  Born Virginia Elisabetta Luisa Carlotta Antonietta Teresa Maria Oldoini, which is lovely.
[00:10:47]  Nobody needs a name that long.
[00:10:49]  You know, three words.
[00:10:50]  Everything in Mambo number five.
[00:10:53]  Exactly.
[00:10:54]  Yeah.
[00:10:55]  This bitch is her own mambo number five.
[00:11:01]  Her parents were Tuscan nobles who saw the fact that she's hot as hell, right?
[00:11:06]  So they decide that since she's so gorgeous, they're going to solve like this is a problem, right?
[00:11:12]  You don't really want to have a daughter who's like famously beautiful when you're high society because like she's going to get up to some stuff.
[00:11:18]  So the only thing her parents are just like, we got to deal with this hot daughter problem.
[00:11:22]  We got to marry her off as soon as we can.
[00:11:25]  And so they hitch her off at age 17 to a 29-year-old.
[00:11:29]  This is not a happy union.
[00:11:31]  They have actually a famously disastrous marriage.
[00:11:33]  And she basically leaves him immediately to move to Paris and become the mistress of the Emperor of France.
[00:11:38]  This leads to a lot of drama, particularly when she wore a dress covered in hearts with no corset.
[00:11:44]  She's famous for this.
[00:11:46]  Just let him hang.
[00:11:49]  Letting it hang.
[00:11:51]  And she goes, like, shows up at this fancy ball in this heart-covered dress with no corset while she's on Louis Napoleon's arm.
[00:11:58]  And Empress Eugenie is there.
[00:12:00]  She's like sitting in the ballroom as the emperor comes in with this chick on his arm, which is like, you know, people expect an emperor to sleep around, but that's still kind of like things a little bit.
[00:12:11]  Yeah, especially French.
[00:12:13]  She's not wearing a corset.
[00:12:14]  She's breathing normal.
[00:12:16]  She's breathing normal, not wheezing.
[00:12:17]  Yeah.
[00:12:18]  Everyone's like, this is a little mean.
[00:12:20]  Yeah.
[00:12:21]  So we don't know why the two stopped dating, which happened in around 1860, but they did break up suddenly.
[00:12:27]  Now, all of this is mostly interesting because the countess is widely considered to be the first supermodel due to her habit of taking and publicizing lurid photos of herself, often wearing things that were like considered pornographic in the day.
[00:12:40]  So she would put out pictures of herself in sandals.
[00:12:43]  Oh, she's like an ankle visible.
[00:12:45]  Yeah, she's showing off them toes.
[00:12:47]  Oh, we're seeing those little toesies.
[00:12:50]  And she's got this access to photographers in part because she's dating the emperor.
[00:12:54]  And as a result, if you look at the way she's posing, she kind of invents the selfie.
[00:12:58]  Like, this is the, she's the first person who has the ability to do this, to like dress up in the morning and be like, I look cute.
[00:13:03]  I'm going to take a picture.
[00:13:04]  I'm going to send it out to everybody, right?
[00:13:06]  Like, she has turned the world media into Instagram.
[00:13:09]  She invented the duck face.
[00:13:11]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:12]  She kind of figured all that out.
[00:13:13]  So that's fun.
[00:13:14]  Anyway, it's probably time to stop talking about court life and get back to everybody's favorite topic.
[00:13:19]  Blood-drenched imperialism.
[00:13:22]  Yes.
[00:13:22]  Oh, God.
[00:13:23]  Isn't it good?
[00:13:23]  You just like to rub it all up in yourself, get it all in your crevices.
[00:13:28]  A nice warm blanket of blood.
[00:13:30]  Yeah, the bloodiest crevice in the French empire at this point in time is Algeria.
[00:13:36]  Now, in March of 1864, again, in like 1858, they had quote unquote pacified it, right?
[00:13:42]  In March of 1864, tribesmen in the mountains of pacified Algeria launched yet another insurrection.
[00:13:47]  Napoleon III was forced to send 25,000 more soldiers to the colony just as he was planning to take his first royal trip there to embark on a new phase of investments in the area.
[00:13:57]  All of this came at a bad time.
[00:13:59]  His brother-in-law, a valued advisor, had just died.
[00:14:02]  And at age 57, Louis Napoleon is himself in pretty poor shape.
[00:14:07]  I'm going to give you a little list of all the different ailments this man has.
[00:14:11]  Rheumatism, gout, hemorrhoids, a terrible cough from decades of smoking, and a heart condition.
[00:14:16]  So he's just falling the fuck apart.
[00:14:20]  But he decides still, I'm going to go to fucking Algeria and I'm going to fix things up personally in this troubled imperial possession that my predecessors took on.
[00:14:29]  Now, one of the things that's interesting about him, he's a liberal, right?
[00:14:34]  He's a monarchist, but he's a liberal.
[00:14:37]  An enlightened despot.
[00:14:38]  As a liberal, he doesn't think that like he's not, he doesn't talk about France's imperial possession the way that like you get a lot of British Empire guys talking about.
[00:14:48]  He talks about like he talks about from this position of like, we're going to, you know, I want this to be an Arab nation and we just want to help them, you know, like we're here.
[00:14:59]  We're here to like fix things up for them.
[00:15:00]  We're not trying to take money out of them and we're not trying to, we're just trying to like make them a little bit better so they can stand on their own.
[00:15:07]  Right.
[00:15:07]  We're just trying to spread democracy to the Middle East.
[00:15:10]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:15:10]  He's trying to spread democracy in the Middle East.
[00:15:13]  Now, I want to read a quote from the shadow emperor that kind of makes it clear the way in which he saw himself here.
[00:15:20]  The Turks had governed Algeria as a province of the Ottoman Empire until 1830 and had done nothing for them, according to Louis Napoleon's lights.
[00:15:27]  Apart from collecting taxes, the Turks had let them run their own lives, leaving traditional tribal affairs and customs unchanged.
[00:15:33]  They had not encouraged them to abandon tribal life, acquire private property, or try to produce agricultural surplus beyond their own tribal needs for overseas sales.
[00:15:42]  All of this was wrong in the eyes of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte.
[00:15:45]  The Algerians needed guidance in entering the modern world of European civilization.
[00:15:50]  Everything had to change, but it must be done patiently and respectfully.
[00:15:53]  They must be given equal rights, the same rights as the French population.
[00:15:56]  Such an idea, of course, had never even occurred to the most enlightened Algerian.
[00:16:00]  Tribal councils, popularly elected and chosen throughout the centuries, should now be disbanded, and along with them, tribal chiefs, dismantle the tribe and its administration and become like France, he insisted.
[00:16:10]  And yet, Louis Napoleon specifically forbade the creation of cantonments or reservations.
[00:16:15]  His knowledge of the whole-scale transportation and relocation of the American Indians, he said, had cautioned him enough to not repeat that experiment.
[00:16:24]  And that's part, I find that really interesting.
[00:16:27]  This is part of that.
[00:16:28]  That's what he learned from us.
[00:16:30]  Yeah.
[00:16:31]  Don't do reservations.
[00:16:32]  Now, absolutely end their way of life and destroy their culture so they can participate specifically so that they can participate in global capitalism.
[00:16:41]  You know, the problem is, and again, he sees this as like the Ottomans being foolish.
[00:16:45]  No, the Ottomans knew how to run an empire, which is that, like, yeah, all we needed out of Algeria was Algiers as a trading area, and we don't really care what other people do as long as they don't fuck with trade.
[00:16:55]  And you know what's easy?
[00:16:56]  Just letting them live their lives.
[00:16:58]  Right.
[00:16:58]  Yeah.
[00:17:00]  You just collect a little bit of tax and fucking move on.
[00:17:03]  This goes reasonably well for the Ottomans.
[00:17:06]  But it's like, it's going to be this fucking nightmare for France.
[00:17:09]  And it all comes out of this idea that, like, well, their culture is a failure because they're not part of the global capitalist system.
[00:17:16]  They're not producing a surplus to sell.
[00:17:18]  Now, the Algerians would say, well, because we have enough food.
[00:17:21]  Yeah.
[00:17:22]  Yeah.
[00:17:22]  We don't, we don't, we don't really need this.
[00:17:24]  What do we want money for?
[00:17:25]  We've got our own thing going on.
[00:17:26]  We're okay.
[00:17:27]  We don't need money.
[00:17:28]  We're doing, I can buy stuff.
[00:17:30]  What are you talking about?
[00:17:32]  What do I need global capitalism for when there's a market right down the street?
[00:17:35]  I have food and crops, animal skins, and all the things that I need, you know.
[00:17:40]  Napoleon III is like horrified by this.
[00:17:43]  And the fact that he, the fact that he, like, while he's trying to figure out how do I dismantle and destroy this tribal structure, the fact that he won't do reservations is part of a fun trend in European history in the late 1800s.
[00:17:56]  We talk about this a little bit at the start of this series of Behind the Bastards when we did Carl May, who is this German author who wrote cowboy books that Hitler just loved.
[00:18:06]  But there's this trend in European culture in the late 1800s where indigenous Americans are glorified and idolized in European popular society, particularly in fiction.
[00:18:17]  And there are a number of reasons for this.
[00:18:18]  Some of it is just that, like, yeah, man, it's a real bad genocide that was fucked up.
[00:18:24]  What was done and what was it's, you know is still being done, and that objectively tragic figures exactly objectively, a tragic thing that happened but a lot of it also is that there's this growing Anti-American sentiment.
[00:18:36]  Right, some of it's because of, you know, the United States doing manifest destiny shit, but a lot of it's also just like you know they're, they're new on the scene and they're kind of like gross upstarts, right.
[00:18:47]  So there's that aspect of it and they get to avoid, like all of the, the hundreds of years of European conflicts.
[00:18:53]  You know, they get to just be over there yeah um, and it's interesting because they, while they're, there's this aspect of kind of idolization of indigenous, Indigenous Americans, it doesn't come with any real respect for their cultures.
[00:19:05]  And in fact, it is often based entirely on fantasy presentations of these cultures.
[00:19:09]  And that brings us back to Napoleon III.
[00:19:11]  Louis Napoleon was adamant that he wanted the Algerians to rule themselves.
[00:19:15]  And he would claim that his administration was simply a way to help raise them up to a point where they could exist as a modern nation.
[00:19:22]  But in practice, this was an incredibly bloody process.
[00:19:25]  See, people don't like having their way of life demolished by strangers at gunpoint.
[00:19:30]  Right.
[00:19:30]  So, early in 1864, a tribal chief massacred four dozen French soldiers, and the emperor's men responded by burning villages and rendering a huge chunk of the Orin province uninhabitable, right?
[00:19:42]  This is the process of bringing them democracy.
[00:19:45]  They killed some of our armed men trying to destroy their tribes, and so we must burn villages.
[00:19:50]  Hey, the tree of liberty's gotta be, you know, watered by blood, yada yada, right?
[00:19:56]  By the blood of the people you're freeing.
[00:19:57]  Yes.
[00:19:58]  Exactly, bro.
[00:20:00]  In his writings on the colony, Lewis sketched out grand dreams of democratic rights and institutions for Algerians patterned off the French system.
[00:20:08]  And a lot of this has to do with like, I want this, you know, enlightened electorate and I want this education system and all this, but most Algerians couldn't read or write, right?

=== Primitive Tribal Democracy (02:49) ===

[00:20:16]  Because that's just not a part of their lives.
[00:20:18]  A lot of their culture is passed on in an oral tradition, all that stuff.
[00:20:22]  And as it happens, the system they already lived under was super democratic.
[00:20:27]  It was, in fact, more democratic than either France or the United States at the time.
[00:20:31]  Tribal councils, all of each of these different tribes, was kind of governed by tribal councils that were made up of adult men who reached consensus on major decisions.
[00:20:41]  This was a stateless system.
[00:20:42]  These are not nations.
[00:20:44]  And it's, you know, not to say that it wasn't like, again, it's all men, but so is the United States electorate.
[00:20:48]  So is the French electorate at this point.
[00:20:50]  It's not like anybody's good on that stuff.
[00:20:53]  And it is consensus driven rather than like we have these elections and one party takes power.
[00:20:58]  It's these councils representing all of the families in the tribe figure out what to do and vote kind of select representatives of the oldest, wisest men in order to help make calls about things like, you know, when we go to fight against another tribe or like if somebody encroaches on our grazing lands or what to do if there's a drought.
[00:21:16]  But Robert, they're not wearing wigs.
[00:21:18]  Yeah, they're not wearing wigs while they do it.
[00:21:20]  So it's not democratic.
[00:21:22]  Like, I don't see how this is, this seems worse because like, how are you going to make democratic decisions without like old white people?
[00:21:30]  Without real fucking big ass wigs, exactly.
[00:21:32]  You've got to be huge and weird.
[00:21:34]  Fucking massive wigs.
[00:21:36]  Exactly.
[00:21:37]  This is a again, one of the things I find this interesting because this is a stateless system.
[00:21:40]  And it was one that for a long time, Algerians had been relatively peaceful and avoided starving, right?
[00:21:47]  A system like this, you can call these things like primitive if you want, like, and people at the fucking French sure do, but like this works for a lot of people for a very long time in a pretty tough part of the world.
[00:21:59]  Geographically, Algeria is a complicated place to stay alive in.
[00:22:04]  Yeah.
[00:22:05]  It works pretty well.
[00:22:06]  And by all accounts, life was relatively decent there before the French took over.
[00:22:10]  Napoleon's attempts to impose a different way on life on a people who had never seen themselves as part of the same entity was always destined for failure.
[00:22:18]  They didn't see themselves as Algerians because they weren't.
[00:22:21]  They were just like some tribes living in an area.
[00:22:24]  Yeah.
[00:22:25]  They just, someone just gave them labels and they were just like, no, that's not what you're talking about.
[00:22:30]  I think this is another area where like the things he'd been reading about Native Americans had colored his opinion because he saw the Algerians as a race in decline, which is definitely how the Europeans looked at indigenous Americans, even though there was no evidence that they'd been in any kind of trouble under the Ottomans, right?
[00:22:48]  They were not like having serious problems.
[00:22:52]  It was again, you know, this is not a perfect.
[00:22:53]  I'm not trying to paint this as like a fucking paradise, but like there was no evidence that they were having any particular kind of issues.
[00:23:01]  But Napoleon's gonna fix all that.
[00:23:03]  He's gonna give them some serious goddamn problems.

=== Napoleon Creates Problems (03:36) ===

[00:23:06]  And we're gonna talk about that.
[00:23:07]  But first, Matt.
[00:23:08]  What?
[00:23:09]  You know what Napoleon would love?
[00:23:15]  Me to use my soundboard right now.
[00:23:17]  That's right, baby.
[00:23:19]  Sorry.
[00:23:21]  No, what?
[00:23:22]  What would he like?
[00:23:23]  You should get a soundboard from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
[00:23:27]  Stick a Napoleon Bonaparte on in there.
[00:23:28]  Oh, shit.
[00:23:29]  Fuck.
[00:23:30]  Too late for that.
[00:23:31]  But hey, do it in close.
[00:23:33]  Yeah.
[00:23:33]  You should remember one of the classic lines from that movie, all of which I have forgotten at this point.
[00:23:37]  Yeah, the guitar sound when they're excited.
[00:23:41]  George.
[00:23:41]  That's also the sound they make when they come.
[00:23:43]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:23:44]  Think about Keanu Reeves coming and then buy some products.
[00:23:49]  That's the way it sounds, baby.
[00:23:54]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:24:05]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:24:11]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:24:21]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:24:25]  That's great.
[00:24:26]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:24:36]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:24:42]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:24:52]  If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wise of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
[00:24:59]  Accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
[00:25:02]  They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
[00:25:04]  Pinky has financial issues.
[00:25:07]  I like the bougie style of Housewives Show.
[00:25:09]  I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
[00:25:11]  On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the T. Everybody's talking about.
[00:25:25]  As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it.
[00:25:29]  I understand the game.
[00:25:31]  As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this.
[00:25:34]  At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
[00:25:39]  To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:25:48]  Hey, Ernest, what's up?
[00:25:49]  Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
[00:25:54]  On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
[00:26:02]  From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
[00:26:11]  Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
[00:26:16]  But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
[00:26:19]  That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
[00:26:26]  If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
[00:26:33]  Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== Maximilian in Mexico (15:24) ===

[00:26:43]  We're back and we're just thinking about how it sounds when Keanu Reeves comes.
[00:26:48]  Like a normal person.
[00:26:49]  Yeah, I think so.
[00:26:51]  Excellent.
[00:26:52]  One day I'll meet him and I'll ask what it sounds like when he comes.
[00:26:56]  Yeah, what does it sound like when you come, Keanu Reeves?
[00:26:59]  I'm sure he'd answer.
[00:27:00]  He seems cool.
[00:27:01]  I'm sure he would have an answer.
[00:27:03]  I'm not sure he'd appreciate that specific question.
[00:27:05]  No, certainly wouldn't appreciate it, but he would have something for it.
[00:27:10]  So, Napoleon III's whole goal is to take the Algerian people out of the place they had been living, out of their ancestral homelands, to pump make so basically, no one owned land in Algeria, right?
[00:27:23]  You had like this, there's our hunting ground, this is where we graze our sheep, and if a tribe comes in, maybe there would be a conflict over it, but it was not, nobody, people didn't have like a piece of paper that said this your land.
[00:27:33]  Yeah, he basically is going to, over the course of his time in power, take away all of the lands owned by tribes.
[00:27:40]  Because there's initially this sense of like, well, what if we give the tribes some land and some of it becomes France's?
[00:27:44]  He's going to get rid of all of that over time because his goal is to force all of these people who are, again, perfectly happy being living in the fucking hills and mountains and whatnot of Algeria and force them to move into modern cities with wide French-style boulevards, electric power, and parliamentary democracy.
[00:28:03]  That'll work out.
[00:28:04]  That'll work out.
[00:28:05]  It doesn't.
[00:28:05]  There's a fucking insurrection.
[00:28:07]  And the first thing Napoleon does when this insurrection happens is he appoints a new leader, a non-military leader, because he's like, well, maybe they killed those soldiers because the military was being too aggressive.
[00:28:17]  You know what I'll do?
[00:28:18]  I'm going to put my best guy in charge of things.
[00:28:21]  And you know who that's going to be?
[00:28:23]  Greg Napoleon.
[00:28:24]  Yeah.
[00:28:24]  Oh, Prince Jerome, the guy who had fucking fled the field in Crimea.
[00:28:31]  Old Grant's back.
[00:28:33]  Yes, me.
[00:28:34]  It's Majorine Nepoli Pole.
[00:28:37]  So he puts gutless Bonaparte in charge, replacing the old military leader of the colony.
[00:28:43]  And again, the military, their solution to problems was massacring villages.
[00:28:48]  So I'm not saying like he should have let those guys stay in power.
[00:28:52]  But Prince Jerome is like a high society liberal, and he brings with him to Algiers a coterie of Parisian high society liberals.
[00:29:02]  And he's going to attempt to democratize Algeria.
[00:29:05]  And I'm going to read again from the Shadow Emperor here.
[00:29:07]  Quote: The brooding Planplon, that's his other nickname, personally knew nothing about Algeria, its history, or its people, and had no plans to learn by touring the country, or indeed, even to leaving the capital of Algiers.
[00:29:20]  He was only interested in introducing his personal theoretical liberal reforms.
[00:29:24]  But when, for instance, on February 16th, 1859, he announced from France, where he had returned in December of 1858, that the natives would be free to sell or acquire land, including tribal land, all sides were up in arms.
[00:29:36]  Strictly defined lands could no longer easily be confiscated by the state.
[00:29:40]  The result, the tribes would eventually break up, disintegrate, and disappear.
[00:29:43]  As the totality of their tribes literally constituted Algeria, this meant the entire social structure protecting the members of each tribe would no longer exist, resulting in a veritable diaspora of tribesmen.
[00:29:53]  And today, one of the big social problems France has is that there's this constant wave of people fleeing Algeria, which has caused a lot of particularly racist in France.
[00:30:03]  Racists in France have a lot of issues with that.
[00:30:05]  This is where that all starts, right?
[00:30:06]  This is like why they come over to France, because the French emperor destroys the entire social structure.
[00:30:13]  Exactly.
[00:30:14]  And suddenly people have like nowhere to be.
[00:30:17]  Yeah.
[00:30:17]  Turns out that's a bad idea.
[00:30:19]  I just wanted them to wear wigs and have papers that say, this is my house.
[00:30:24]  That's all.
[00:30:25]  Yeah.
[00:30:26]  And then they came to France and all of the racists were angry about it for forever.
[00:30:30]  Yep.
[00:30:32]  So when this uprising starts in 1864, it's clear that Planplan has failed.
[00:30:37]  And when he visits Algeria, the emperor brings with him an authoritarian regime to replace Planplan's liberal one, which was going to use terrible force to bring peace.
[00:30:46]  He appoints a military officer, Patrice de McMahon, who goes on a spree of massacres.
[00:30:51]  Despite this, Algeria's vast size and diffuse population proved difficult to control.
[00:30:56]  The population migrations caused by land reform policies and waves of refugees from the fighting ran up against a horrible drought that hit in 1867 and 1868, devastating local agriculture.
[00:31:08]  Next came a series of earthquakes and then cholera and typhoid epidemics.
[00:31:12]  These disasters had all occurred in the past and had been handled by Algerians through mutual aid, right?
[00:31:18]  These tribes had ways of dealing.
[00:31:19]  This is the same thing you see in India when the East India Company takes over, destroy all these different trading agreements within villages because people had always dealt with like bad times.
[00:31:28]  And when one village doesn't produce enough food, other villages didn't tend to let them starve to death.
[00:31:33]  Right.
[00:31:33]  Tribes in Algeria work the same way, right?
[00:31:35]  We take care of each other when things are really bad because that's just better for everybody.
[00:31:40]  Napoleon III has destroyed all of these structures that used to protect people, that used to allow folks to deal with this kind of shit, in addition to killing a shitload of them.
[00:31:49]  So the chaos of the upheaval of Napoleon meant that there was nothing in place to protect these people.
[00:31:53]  More than 300,000 Algerians die in a four-year period.
[00:31:57]  This is from disease, along with 350,000 who are killed by the military in an ethnic cleansing.
[00:32:03]  This amounts to one-third of the Algerian population pre-Louis Napoleon.
[00:32:07]  Shit.
[00:32:09]  Yeah, this is like pretty bad genocide.
[00:32:14]  So, you know, that's if you're wondering why Algeria has had a rough time of it in the last century or so.
[00:32:22]  There's a little history to it.
[00:32:24]  Yeah.
[00:32:25]  Might be a little bit of history there.
[00:32:26]  Maybe it's a little bit of context.
[00:32:28]  You're missing it.
[00:32:28]  Might be a super obvious.
[00:32:30]  It might be entirely France's fault, right?
[00:32:34]  Oh, well, the name broke.
[00:32:36]  Fix it.
[00:32:36]  They're not wearing wigs.
[00:32:38]  Yeah.
[00:32:38]  Yeah.
[00:32:39]  Well, now they are.
[00:32:40]  So at around the same time, while all this is going on in Algeria, Louis Napoleon is fucking around in a weirdly similar way in a completely different part of the world, Mexico.
[00:32:50]  Now, as I'd said, he spent years, most of the early 1860s, trying to convince Maximilian Habsburg to become the emperor of Mexico.
[00:32:59]  They're talking about this for years.
[00:33:01]  Now, Maximilian is an interesting dude.
[00:33:03]  Again, he's the younger brother to Franz Joseph, the emperor of Austria-Hungary, who Louis had recently bested in a war.
[00:33:10]  And Max had kind of a fraught relationship with his brother.
[00:33:13]  They were close as kids, but as they get older, his brother thinks that he's gunning for the throne and so keeps trying to foist him off on these do-nothing jobs.
[00:33:20]  Maximilian is kind of running Austrian Italy for a while before he gets overthrown, basically.
[00:33:28]  And he's when he's kind of running Austrian Italy, he's trying to be like this liberal, right?
[00:33:32]  Where he's like, well, maybe they'll like being ruled by Austria if I introduce reforms.
[00:33:37]  And like, that never works because people don't like to be ruled.
[00:33:40]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:41]  It's like, no, but you can have some speech.
[00:33:45]  Yeah, not against the Austrian dynasty.
[00:33:48]  Let's not get crazy here.
[00:33:50]  Yeah.
[00:33:51]  Anyway, it doesn't work great.
[00:33:53]  He gets run out of town on the fucking rails.
[00:33:56]  And yeah, Louis, you know, he's got this, his older brother kind of wants him away.
[00:34:03]  And so the fact, the idea, like the Franz Joseph actually winds up backing Napoleon's plan to make him the emperor of Mexico for a while.
[00:34:10]  Send him across the street.
[00:34:12]  Well, in part because he can make him sign a contract saying I give up my right to inherit the Habsburg throne.
[00:34:18]  Because you can't, you know, be the king of the emperor of Mexico and be the emperor, you know, in line for the empire of Austria-Hungary.
[00:34:24]  Oh, sorry, arbitrary rules are arbitrary rules.
[00:34:27]  Yeah.
[00:34:28]  And Maximilian is a very similar kind of guy to Planplon.
[00:34:33]  He's this idealistic, naive, arrogant liberal who wants to reform things and be seen as a reformer, but also wants to be the guy running things and wants it all to be done his way.
[00:34:44]  Yeah.
[00:34:45]  And he does, he wants to reform Mexican society in what you might call vaguely center-left directions.
[00:34:51]  And doing this means, though, defeating the already pretty, for the time, left-wing legitimate government of Mexico, which is a republic currently governed by the elected leader who is an indigenous Mexican man named Benito Juarez.
[00:35:04]  Like he's got indigenous ancestry.
[00:35:06]  And he's Juarez is a fascinating.
[00:35:10]  Fascinating man, a tough son of a bitch.
[00:35:13]  Cool, cool ass dude.
[00:35:14]  Cool ass dude.
[00:35:16]  He had been elected president after finishing a vicious civil war, beating the conservatives who sought an autocratic dictatorial form of government different from Juarez's Republic.
[00:35:26]  So Maximilian, he wants kind of a broadly similar social structure to what the Mexican Republicans are pushing.
[00:35:32]  He just wants to run it, which is one, it's not like he's, it's not like that Mexico had this like horrible dictatorship.
[00:35:37]  They had just fought a war and a republic had been elected, kind of along the lines that Maximilian thought was good.
[00:35:43]  He just wanted to kill them and do it himself.
[00:35:46]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:35:46]  He's like, okay, but you guys got this Mexican doing the job.
[00:35:51]  This is the problem.
[00:35:52]  They come here.
[00:35:53]  They're taking our Habsburg.
[00:35:56]  Look at my chin.
[00:35:59]  It's funny.
[00:36:00]  This guy isn't even inbred.
[00:36:02]  What the fuck?
[00:36:03]  People will make Habsburg chin jokes at Edward Habsburg on Twitter and he'll always respond by like, oh, get another joke, guys.
[00:36:10]  And it's like, well, that's the joke, because your family ruled the world while like, constantly fucking each other and producing kids who like, didn't like, couldn't functionally rule the countries they were born to inherit, and it led to millions of deaths, millions and millions of deaths.
[00:36:25]  Like yeah, that's the joke Edward yeah yeah yeah, that's that's what makes it funny.
[00:36:31]  Oh yeah, another joke about uh, my genocidal bloodline, Habsburgs.
[00:36:39]  God you, you are never wrong in shit talking.
[00:36:42]  A Habsburg, always go after him, always go after Habsburgs.
[00:36:47]  So you know, you know who learned that lesson?
[00:36:50]  Well, Gafferlo Princep, oh hell yeah oh yes, he did.
[00:36:58]  Oh god, we love a, we love a Habsburg dropping king.
[00:37:02]  Um we, we love a good uh dead uh, Franz for the name.
[00:37:07]  Joke yeah, good stuff.
[00:37:10]  So um anyway Maximilian, he has all these political theories that he wants to test out.
[00:37:15]  He's thinking about, if you like again and I really do the book The Last Emperor Of Mexico by Edward Chalkross, fucking good book, incredibly readable I had.
[00:37:23]  I finished it in just a couple of days because I couldn't put the thing down.
[00:37:26]  Really, really well written book.
[00:37:28]  Um it.
[00:37:30]  One of the points that he makes is that, or at least the way in which I interpret Maximilian as being based on the way he portrays him in the book, is a guy who has all these little fun theories about how he might want run a country and he almost approaches being the emperor of Mexico as like playing a game of civilization.
[00:37:47]  Yeah, he's excited to try a new thing out in his game.
[00:37:51]  Um, but he does.
[00:37:52]  He makes a.
[00:37:52]  He draws a hard line with Louis Napoleon, which is that he won't agree to go to Mexico and try to be the emperor unless the Mexican people themselves acclaim their desire to be governed by him.
[00:38:02]  Now, this was never going to happen.
[00:38:04]  For one thing, Mexico is very large, and most of the people living there have absolutely no connection to like centralized.
[00:38:12]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:38:13]  Like, go to somebody in the fucking Chihuahua and be like, hey, do you want a Habsburg emperor?
[00:38:18]  Like, dude, what the fuck, man?
[00:38:20]  Like, I got stuff going on.
[00:38:25]  What are you talking about?
[00:38:27]  The idea that these guys would be able to rule a landmass based on borders that they just kind of invented is great.
[00:38:35]  I mean, to be honest, it's never worked out well for the Mexican government.
[00:38:39]  Yeah, no, it's not.
[00:38:39]  No one has ever been good at governing Mexico.
[00:38:42]  Yeah.
[00:38:43]  No one can figure it out.
[00:38:45]  Yeah.
[00:38:46]  So basically what happens is that Napoleon III works with a cadre of defeated conservative Mexican officers to trick Max into thinking that his reign is supported.
[00:38:56]  And then he sends a French army into Mexico to conquer it from the legitimate government.
[00:39:00]  Now, this first army gets its ass kicked because Benito Juarez, pretty good military commander.
[00:39:07]  But also, again, the Mexican state has just finished several civil wars.
[00:39:12]  It's battered.
[00:39:12]  They don't have a super functional military compared to the French military, which a lot of people will say is the best in the world in this period of time, or at least one of them.
[00:39:21]  So Louis Napoleon sends a much larger army next, which succeeds in smashing all resistance and conquering Mexico.
[00:39:28]  But it conquers Mexico the same way the U.S. conquers Afghanistan.
[00:39:32]  They conquer a bunch of cities leading to the capital and kind of control the roads, right?
[00:39:38]  But that's all they have.
[00:39:40]  Because they only send like 50,000 men, I think, at the height, which is, again, Mexico is quite big.
[00:39:46]  Yeah, yeah, I know.
[00:39:46]  It's a big, big place.
[00:39:48]  Sizable, sizable nation.
[00:39:50]  Lots of land.
[00:39:52]  So they're able to, and the French can beat, because they've got a modern army, modern guns, and the Mexican military doesn't really have a lot of that stuff.
[00:39:59]  They can beat any field army that arrays itself against their main force.
[00:40:03]  But that main force can only be in like one area at a time.
[00:40:07]  And they can't, with splitting the army up, number one, sometimes you're going to lose groups of the army, right?
[00:40:12]  Because you can beat 100 French soldiers or something.
[00:40:15]  And then the other problem is that like you can't hold anything but the cities and the roads.
[00:40:18]  Now, they do try to build up a Mexican army, like an imperial army.
[00:40:21]  There's an imperial Mexican army.
[00:40:24]  It is of debatable competence.
[00:40:26]  Again, think of Afghanistan.
[00:40:27]  This is actually very similar to fucking Afghanistan.
[00:40:32]  And costs very quickly skyrocket.
[00:40:34]  Now, Napoleon III, basically his business plan here had been, well, we'll conquer Mexico.
[00:40:39]  We'll stick this guy on the throne.
[00:40:41]  You know, pretty soon he'll be able to, he'll just take over the Mexican army and they'll keep the peace.
[00:40:46]  And then France will get to basically to get its pick of all of the resources in Mexico.
[00:40:52]  Yeah, get all that silver, dude.
[00:40:54]  There's a lot of good shit in Mexico.
[00:40:55]  And he's like, this will be, this will work out.
[00:40:57]  We get a couple years of costs and then it'll be worth it.
[00:41:00]  He is as good a businessman as Elon Musk.
[00:41:04]  That's how this shit works.
[00:41:05]  He's going to spend $44 billion.
[00:41:07]  He's going to go.
[00:41:08]  Now everyone gets a blue check mark.
[00:41:10]  Yeah, the Mexican people here are Twitter and they're about to do what Twitter did when Musk took over, which is start a massive grassroots rebellion against the empire.
[00:41:20]  Everyone just has fake accounts saying they're a Habsburg.
[00:41:25]  Just a shitload of Habsburg accounts.
[00:41:29]  So Maximilian enjoys fairly little popular support.
[00:41:32]  He is handicapped by the fact that, again, he's a liberal.
[00:41:35]  So he keeps pushing through these liberal reforms and announcing these very liberal laws.
[00:41:39]  But his entire base of support are like ghoulish right-wingers.
[00:41:44]  So the people who he is trusting to back him hate the way he wants to run the country.
[00:41:50]  And when he does things that like Benito Juarez's supporters probably would have liked in a different circumstance, his primary backers desert him.
[00:41:59]  And so he has to like crack down on the people of Mexico in order to like get their support back, which fuels the rebellion.
[00:42:06]  It's just a doomed situation.

=== Liberal Reforms Fail (02:44) ===

[00:42:07]  Yeah, he's threading an unthreadable needle here.
[00:42:11]  Yeah, it's not even a needle.
[00:42:12]  He's just like sticking a string into a solid nail.
[00:42:15]  Why would it go through?
[00:42:17]  Can't get anything through this fucking needle.
[00:42:20]  This is bullshit, dude.
[00:42:22]  This shouldn't be as hard.
[00:42:23]  So the fuckery reaches its peak under what becomes called the Black Decree or Bondo Negro of 1865, in which all captured Republican soldiers are to be executed without trial.
[00:42:36]  Now, do you think this lowers the tensions?
[00:42:39]  Yeah, I think it definitely just completely equalizes it.
[00:42:42]  Everyone's like, oh, man, fuck.
[00:42:44]  I guess we won't do this no more.
[00:42:46]  So what happens, what this actually results in, is the Republicans are like, well, then whenever we capture French soldiers and Mexican imperial soldiers or government officials, we will kill them without trial.
[00:42:56]  And of course, this leads to the slaughter of thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
[00:43:00]  Just nightmarish bloodletting.
[00:43:02]  When Max had headed over to take command of the government, Louis Napoleon had promised him that all the resources of the French state would be dedicated to seeing the success of his imperial project.
[00:43:12]  But costs quickly outstripped what Lewis had been willing to pay.
[00:43:15]  And since the imperial government didn't control much actual territory, exploiting Mexican resources for French profit proved impossible.
[00:43:23]  In 1866, all of this came to a head for several reasons.
[00:43:27]  One, the U.S. Civil War ended.
[00:43:29]  The reason why Louis Napoleon had timed sending Maximilian over there was that the U.S. was fighting a civil war.
[00:43:34]  And he was like, this will keep him occupied for a while.
[00:43:36]  They won't be able to get involved.
[00:43:38]  His plan was to make a firebreak for U.S. power, right?
[00:43:41]  While they're busy fighting themselves, I will establish control over Mexico using Maximilian.
[00:43:47]  And then by the time they finish, this will just be done and they won't be able to stop it.
[00:43:51]  Now, so the U.S. Civil War ends.
[00:43:54]  And, you know, now the U.S. is no longer distracted.
[00:43:58]  The Union starts sending weapons across the river to Benito Juarez because we're like, well, we don't really like this at all.
[00:44:06]  And there are constant worries.
[00:44:07]  It's legitimate worry that the Americans might just invade and attack the French army in Mexico, which we could have done.
[00:44:14]  And it would have been the only time U.S. troops entered Mexico for a reason that wasn't fucked up.
[00:44:18]  Yeah, for a cool one.
[00:44:20]  We almost invaded Mexico for a good reason.
[00:44:23]  Don't worry, we didn't.
[00:44:25]  We didn't.
[00:44:26]  We continued our streak of only fucking over Mexico.
[00:44:30]  A proud and time-honored American.
[00:44:32]  Proud heritage of Americans fucking with Mexico, stealing land and destroying entire political structures.
[00:44:40]  This is kind of the one time in which we were almost nice to Mexico.
[00:44:44]  Oh, man.
[00:44:45]  So close.
[00:44:47]  And we will talk about what happens next.
[00:44:49]  But first, you know who is nice to Mexico?

=== Debt and Credit Cards (02:53) ===

[00:44:52]  Me.
[00:44:53]  That's right.
[00:44:54]  Matt Lieb, our primary sponsor.
[00:44:56]  A lot of you don't know this.
[00:44:57]  This whole podcast is paid for by Matt Lieb.
[00:45:00]  He just keeps getting credit cards.
[00:45:02]  I just, listen, I am in a lot of debt right now.
[00:45:06]  But if people can get their bastards' content, I'm willing to pay.
[00:45:11]  So buy my product, Matt Lieb.
[00:45:14]  Buy me.
[00:45:15]  Just send him money so he can keep financing this debt.
[00:45:19]  Help on a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien.
[00:45:28]  I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:45:34]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:45:41]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
[00:45:50]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:45:54]  That's great.
[00:45:56]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:46:05]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:46:11]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:46:22]  If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wise of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
[00:46:29]  Russia accusing Kelly of sleeping with the Mary Man.
[00:46:31]  They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
[00:46:34]  Pinky has financial issues.
[00:46:36]  I like the bougie style of Housewives Show.
[00:46:39]  I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
[00:46:41]  On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the T. Everybody's talking about.
[00:46:55]  As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it.
[00:46:59]  I understand the game.
[00:47:01]  As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this.
[00:47:04]  At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
[00:47:09]  To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:47:17]  Hey, Ernest, what's up?
[00:47:19]  Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
[00:47:24]  On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
[00:47:32]  From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
[00:47:41]  Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.

=== Bismarck vs Austria (14:45) ===

[00:47:45]  But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
[00:47:49]  That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
[00:47:56]  If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
[00:48:02]  Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:48:13]  Ah, we're back.
[00:48:14]  So at the same time that Maximilian's Mexican Empire is collapsing, shit in Europe starts to go wrong with the Prussian Otto von Bismarck launching a war against Austria.
[00:48:26]  Napoleon, in a secret meeting with Bismarck, agrees not to defend Austria's friends, Joseph.
[00:48:31]  And part of it was like, so Bismarck is like, hey, man, I'm going to go to war with Austria.
[00:48:35]  You don't really like this guy.
[00:48:36]  You fought him in a war.
[00:48:37]  Just let me do it once.
[00:48:38]  I'm going to take some shit.
[00:48:39]  And you know what?
[00:48:40]  You'll get some territory, right?
[00:48:41]  Some of this territory that's kind of like on the border of like Italy and France and all this stuff.
[00:48:45]  You'll get some of that.
[00:48:46]  You know, it'll work out great for you.
[00:48:47]  You know, you just got to let me deal with them and I'll give it to you.
[00:48:50]  Like, trust me, you know, it'll be good.
[00:48:53]  Trust me, I'm Otto von von von.
[00:48:55]  I'm Otto von Bismarck, most trustworthy man in Europe.
[00:49:00]  So Bismarck, like Napoleon decides to do this because number one, I'm going to get some land out of it.
[00:49:06]  That'll be good.
[00:49:06]  And number two, this is going to be years, right?
[00:49:09]  Austria and Germany fighting each other.
[00:49:10]  They're basically equal.
[00:49:11]  You know, they'll be locked into this brutal way.
[00:49:14]  It'll weaken both of them and then France will be even stronger.
[00:49:17]  There's no way this will get done quickly.
[00:49:19]  Yeah.
[00:49:19]  Seven weeks.
[00:49:21]  It is over almost immediately.
[00:49:23]  Because what Otto von Bismarck has done is invent Germany.
[00:49:27]  And if you know one thing about Germany, pretty good at war.
[00:49:31]  Pretty good at war in Western Europe.
[00:49:33]  I like the way ours is baseball.
[00:49:35]  There's doing war.
[00:49:37]  Yeah, in Western Europe.
[00:49:38]  Once they go east, it gets a lot messier for them.
[00:49:40]  I can figure that out.
[00:49:41]  Solid at Western Europe.
[00:49:43]  Yeah.
[00:49:43]  So, as you said, they basically win this war against Prussia immediately.
[00:49:48]  And then, as soon as they do, Napoleon's like, so how about that territory that you guys said I could get?
[00:49:53]  And the fucking Bismarck's like, what was that?
[00:49:55]  Huh?
[00:49:56]  What was that?
[00:49:58]  Oh, you didn't.
[00:49:59]  I said psych afterwards.
[00:50:01]  Did you not hear when I said psych?
[00:50:03]  And going into this, prior to the start of that war with Austria, the kind of assumption everyone else would have made is that like France was the premier land power in Europe.
[00:50:11]  But part of what Napoleon III and everyone else realize when he get when Prussia goes to war with Austria is that like they got like 700,000 guys they can call up.
[00:50:19]  And they're like, they're pretty good at this.
[00:50:22]  Right.
[00:50:22]  Yeah.
[00:50:23]  This is actually a very frightening situation.
[00:50:25]  I've just realized and tens of thousands of my best soldiers are in Mexico.
[00:50:31]  Oops.
[00:50:32]  Yes.
[00:50:33]  Fuck.
[00:50:34]  I didn't realize that you guys would get like really good at this.
[00:50:38]  This has all gone terribly for me.
[00:50:41]  So he, Napoleon, Louis Napoleon is suddenly much less interested pouring men and resources into Mexico.
[00:50:48]  He begins pressuring Maximilian to abdicate.
[00:50:51]  But Max doesn't want to leave his empire.
[00:50:53]  He's dedicated to it.
[00:50:54]  And the brave men fighting for him, he's very delusional, is what's actually happening.
[00:50:57]  I learned Spanish and everything.
[00:50:59]  Like, leave now?
[00:51:01]  I have a castle and everything.
[00:51:02]  Yeah.
[00:51:03]  I have a hacienda and I habla español.
[00:51:06]  I don't understand why I have to leave now.
[00:51:08]  People love me.
[00:51:09]  It is very funny because he like tries to eat a Mexican meal as soon as he arrives and he gets sick because it's too hot.
[00:51:17]  Like, man, you can't eat fucking chilies and you think you're going to be the emperor of Mexico.
[00:51:22]  My God.
[00:51:23]  He's running his ass off like he's on hot ones.
[00:51:26]  Yeah.
[00:51:28]  What a bitch.
[00:51:29]  Yeah.
[00:51:30]  So Louis Napoleon is about to abandon him.
[00:51:33]  I'm going to quote from the Emperor of Mexico, the last Emperor of Mexico again here.
[00:51:37]  In August, Napoleon III tried to claim the territories that Bismarck had promised, but the Prussian chancellor responded with a diplomatic equivalent of laughing in the French emperor's faces, pointing out that the Prussian army was already mobilized.
[00:51:48]  Now it was war not only on the other side of the Atlantic that Napoleon III had to worry about now, but across the Rhine, where Bismarck marshaled the forces of German nationalism behind a militaristic regime.
[00:51:57]  France was in a state of feverish crisis, and attacks on Napoleon III's policy towards Prussia were rife.
[00:52:03]  Even Napoleon III's wife, Eugenie, berated him for being outwitted by Bismarck.
[00:52:07]  The last thing the French emperor wanted was an unpleasant reminder of another unpopular foreign policy disaster.
[00:52:12]  He tried to delay meeting with Carlotta, pleading illness.
[00:52:15]  He urged her to visit her brother in Brussels first, but Carlotta had already telegrammed the courts at Brussels and Vienna, informing them that she would not be visiting because of the refusal to send more volunteers.
[00:52:24]  Ignoring the French emperor's excuses, she proceeded to Paris.
[00:52:28]  So Napoleon III has Eugenie try to stop Carlotta from meeting with him, but she will not be dissuaded.
[00:52:34]  And she eventually gets her audience with Napoleon III.
[00:52:36]  And she's been over in Mexico for a while.
[00:52:38]  And while she's been over, things have gone a lot worse for him.
[00:52:42]  And he's gotten sick and old.
[00:52:43]  So she sees this guy that all of her and her husband's hopes lay on continued French support.
[00:52:49]  They cannot hold on to their empire without France.
[00:52:52]  She suddenly realizes that he's fucked, like he's old and broken, and she loses her mind.
[00:52:59]  She spends like the rest of her husband's reign locked in a castle and completely out of her mind.
[00:53:05]  She had been so invested in the idea of being the empress.
[00:53:09]  And as soon as it becomes clear we're doomed, she just can't function anymore.
[00:53:14]  It's very funny.
[00:53:15]  Like fuck her and fuck him.
[00:53:17]  Maximilian, meanwhile, being equally deranged, tries to continue the fight as French troops began to withdraw.
[00:53:23]  And I will give him credit for this.
[00:53:25]  Unlike Planplon, he kind of ends on a courageous note.
[00:53:28]  Like he leads his army into a disastrous battle where they're under siege in the city for weeks.
[00:53:34]  They win a couple of like battles where they like push out against the Mexican army, and he like stays there until the bitter end in this really nasty situation.
[00:53:42]  So, there's a degree of at least physical courage he has while still being completely deranged.
[00:53:47]  Um, he gets captured and executed, they fucking shoot his ass, they firing squad, and they Benito Juarez, again, the whole world, all of the governments of the world start like begging Mexico, start sending people to Benito Juarez saying, Please don't kill him, don't kill him, he's a Habsburg, you know, Habsburg, the American president's like guy, don't do this, don't do this.
[00:54:06]  But Benito Juarez, being rad as shit, is like, Look, man, he was the emperor, he passed the black decree.
[00:54:13]  All captured soldiers get executed.
[00:54:15]  I'm not going to hold him to a different standard than the tens of thousands of men he had killed.
[00:54:20]  Like, fuck him.
[00:54:21]  Hell Benito Juarez, kind of sick.
[00:54:24]  Just the goat.
[00:54:27]  Um, Maximilian died cursing Napoleon III for failing to come to his aid.
[00:54:33]  Very funny.
[00:54:34]  The second French intervention in Mexico lasted five and a half years and caused as many as 70,000 deaths, all of which happened at the instigation of Napoleon III.
[00:54:44]  So by 1870, Louis Napoleon is a sick man in steep decline.
[00:54:49]  France is still powerful and, in fact, wealthier than ever, but its military is geared toward the kind of colonial wars they've been fighting in Mexico.
[00:54:57]  Think about how the U.S. military specialized for Iraq and Afghanistan.
[00:55:00]  It's a small professional force capable of besting insurgents and holding cities.
[00:55:04]  The problem was Russia, Prussia had focused on becoming a land power with a massive base of the French military on paper.
[00:55:12]  They can maybe get 400,000 troops together, and that's going to be hard for them.
[00:55:16]  It's going to take them some time to get everybody like in the same place.
[00:55:20]  The Prussian military can, in the space of like a week or two, have 700,000 men armed and marching.
[00:55:25]  Like they are very, very good at this.
[00:55:29]  They figured out this war thing.
[00:55:30]  They figured out this war thing.
[00:55:32]  And Otto von Bismarck makes it his goals during the late 1860s: I want to have a war with France.
[00:55:38]  Number one, we lost a couple against Napoleon, and that still rankles us.
[00:55:42]  And number two, I want some of this territory that's like currently France, but that's right on the edge of Germany.
[00:55:47]  I want to take that shit and I'm going to make a Germany.
[00:55:50]  So Bismarck starts jinking and pushing to like make it kind of find a way in which to justify having a war with France.
[00:55:58]  He needs a pretext.
[00:55:59]  He needs a pretext.
[00:56:00]  And specifically, he wants France to start the war.
[00:56:03]  Yes.
[00:56:04]  Right?
[00:56:04]  That's the thing that he wants most.
[00:56:06]  So in 1867, the same year Maximilian gets shot to death in Mexico, Prussia forms the North German Confederation, the immediate precursor to the nation of Germany.
[00:56:17]  Now, everything comes to a head over the question of who will be the next king of Spain.
[00:56:21]  For a brief period of time, the king of Prussia, who's Bismarck, works for the king of Prussia, right?
[00:56:26]  Germany's not a thing yet.
[00:56:28]  Germany becomes a thing based around the scaffolding of Prussia, or is scaffolded around the core that is Prussia.
[00:56:35]  The Prussian king puts forward a German prince to be the king of Spain and is like, hey, maybe this guy could do it.
[00:56:41]  And the emperor of France is terrified by this, right?
[00:56:43]  Louis Napoleon is like, well, if that happens, then France is going to be surrounded on both sides by states led by German emperors.
[00:56:49]  I'm not going to let that happen.
[00:56:50]  And the Prussian king, who also doesn't really want war, Bismarck is orchestrating this.
[00:56:55]  He's like, okay, hey, hey, you know, just an idea, just an idea, just pitching here.
[00:56:59]  Just don't want to pitch out here, man.
[00:57:01]  Chill out.
[00:57:01]  You know, there are no bad suggestions or no bad ideas.
[00:57:05]  So this gets rescinded, which should have been a big win for Napoleon III.
[00:57:11]  But he's still really worried that the Prussians are going to try something.
[00:57:15]  So he sends out his foreign minister.
[00:57:16]  And this guy, Count Benedetti, is the same as everyone else that Napoleon III picks for a job.
[00:57:22]  Shit-eatingly incompetent, right?
[00:57:25]  If we know one thing about the man, he is not good at picking people.
[00:57:30]  Yeah, it's just, it's just all of his drinking buddies.
[00:57:33]  He's just like, uh, hey, better dummy, you do it.
[00:57:36]  Yeah, he's like, Yeah, you get in there, Benny.
[00:57:38]  Yeah, you got it.
[00:57:39]  You got it, Benny.
[00:57:40]  You got it.
[00:57:43]  Yeah, so um, he sends Count Benedetti over to the king of Prussia, who's like at a fucking bath.
[00:57:50]  You know, he's doing like a big spa day, um, to ask him to promise not ever to put a German prince on the throne.
[00:57:56]  And the conversation goes pretty well.
[00:57:57]  Obviously, the king of Prussia doesn't want to war with France over this.
[00:58:00]  But Otto von Bismarck decides to do a little bit of fake news and spin this up as a diplomatic incident in which the French ambassador had been kicked out of the king's presence, never allowed, never to be allowed back again.
[00:58:12]  This was not true, but Bismarck knows like all that matters is getting this bad news out there.
[00:58:17]  Quote: By July 14th, the news is on the newspaper's desk all over Europe.
[00:58:21]  As soon as the news of this supposed diplomatic incident is published, the streets of the French capital are taken over by demonstrations against the Germans.
[00:58:28]  The windows of the Prussian embassy are smashed by rioters.
[00:58:31]  Meanwhile, in Germany, Bismarck fans the flames of nationalism by distributing for free copies of newspaper copies of newspapers with his own version of the event in order to make it look like Benedetti was pestering the king with haughty demands.
[00:58:42]  By the 15th of July, the French government is in turmoil and must compose with the Allies clamoring for war and the suspicion of the opposition.
[00:58:49]  There was a last attempt to ask clarifications from the Count Benedetti, but the telegram arrives too late, and the careful examination of the diplomatic papers asked for by the opposition is refused.
[00:58:59]  And so basically, there's this, you know, Bismarck puts out this fake news that you know they insulted our national honor.
[00:59:08]  Yeah, and this is called the IMS dispatch.
[00:59:11]  This like this dip like diplomatic cable that goes out that like Bismarcks with.
[00:59:19]  You gotta be real confident to be like, I'm gonna make this country clamor for war with us.
[00:59:26]  And it works.
[00:59:27]  The French people do.
[00:59:28]  And Louis Napoleon, he is old and he is sick and he does not think this is a good idea.
[00:59:34]  But all of these generals, the same ones who'd convinced him, you know, to invade Indochina, say it's a good idea.
[00:59:40]  And most importantly, his wife Eugenie is like, if you don't do this, you're a fucking coward.
[00:59:43]  Yeah.
[00:59:44]  This is how I come.
[00:59:45]  Yeah.
[00:59:45]  This is, I don't want to fuck you, but I want you to go to war against fucking Prussia.
[00:59:49]  I don't have sex.
[00:59:51]  This is how I do it.
[00:59:52]  They have a son at this point.
[00:59:53]  She's like, your son will have nothing to inherit if you don't go to war against Germany right now.
[00:59:57]  You know, what kind of example are you putting for your son if you don't start a pointless war against the new great land power in Europe?
[01:00:05]  So Louis Napoleon, being fundamentally a coward in a lot of ways, declares war on Germany.
[01:00:13]  Smart.
[01:00:15]  This goes pretty bad.
[01:00:17]  So, for one thing, on paper, he's supposed to be able to get about 400,000 dudes together, which, even though the Prussians outnumber that, you're on the defense.
[01:00:25]  You've got castles and fortresses.
[01:00:27]  You can win a war, a defensive war that way, especially if that's just kind of your first wave.
[01:00:31]  But he actually has trouble getting more than like a quarter of a million dudes together.
[01:00:34]  The other problem is that.
[01:00:35]  So you know how he forgot to bring artillery to the Crimean War?
[01:00:41]  Yeah, yeah, I remember that.
[01:00:42]  Never learns that lesson.
[01:00:43]  So the artillery that the French bring into the Franco-Prussian War is the same artillery, in some cases, literally the same guns that Napoleon had brought into battle in 1812.
[01:00:56]  Oh boy.
[01:00:57]  Yeah.
[01:00:57]  Meanwhile, the Prussians have breech-loading steel cannons with modern artillery.
[01:01:05]  Yeah, they got shells and stuff.
[01:01:08]  They're not just firing balls at the French.
[01:01:10]  Yeah, they're actually shooting heavy balls real fast.
[01:01:13]  Basically, the French cannons are like hucking a Mazda Miata, like pretty fast.
[01:01:19]  And the German cannons are actual cannons.
[01:01:22]  Yeah.
[01:01:23]  The other thing that's a problem.
[01:01:24]  So the French aren't entirely like, it's not like they're entirely like behind the curve militarily.
[01:01:31]  They've just been optimizing for these little, these little brushfire wars.
[01:01:35]  So, one thing they have on their side, the French regular forces, these colonial troops, have the best rifle in the world at the time.
[01:01:42]  The Germans are astonished at how well this fucking gun works.
[01:01:44]  It's a great, great infantry rifle.
[01:01:47]  Very few of their soldiers actually have it, right?
[01:01:49]  The actual territorial French army just has old-ass muskets.
[01:01:52]  So, anyway, he goes and he goes with this army to command it in the field.
[01:01:56]  Because, again, Eugenie basically tells him that he's a fucking cuck if he doesn't go lead his army into battle.
[01:02:03]  And he is, he is, he is dying of hemorrhoids, right?
[01:02:06]  His fucking gallbladders exploding hemorrhoids.
[01:02:09]  He can't sit, he can't stand.
[01:02:11]  Yeah, certainly, he can command the field.
[01:02:13]  He can barely move.
[01:02:15]  He's got his like teenage boy with him.
[01:02:18]  Um, and they have they have this one little battle where like um they move into Prussian territory and like kill 60 guys.
[01:02:26]  And his, he has, he gets his air close enough that like a bullet whizzes over his head.

=== Hemorrhoids and Surrender (10:08) ===

[01:02:31]  He's like, There you go, you did it.
[01:02:32]  You've been blooded in combat.
[01:02:34]  Um, and then they then they try to do a battle in a place called Sedan.
[01:02:38]  And this is not a military history podcast, but it doesn't go well.
[01:02:42]  Um, in short, they get their asses absolutely handed to them.
[01:02:47]  Um, for all of military history since the age of Hannibal, one of the things that like generals will talk about is doing a can-ai, right?
[01:02:57]  Can I is this famous battle where there's this 100,000-man Roman army, and Hannibal surrounds it completely and then just spends a day butchering everyone slowly to death inside.
[01:03:06]  And it's one of the most famous victories in all of military history.
[01:03:09]  The Germans do a can I at Sedan, they surround the entire French military and kill quite a few of them.
[01:03:16]  And this is actually kind of one of the last acts of heroism of Louis Napoleon.
[01:03:22]  Maybe the only one, I guess, would probably be to say is that his generals are like, No, no, no, we've got to fight until relief comes.
[01:03:28]  We've got to keep it going.
[01:03:30]  He looks out at what's happening.
[01:03:31]  He's like, There's 90,000 men here, and the Prussians will kill them all.
[01:03:35]  Like, if we keep fighting, they will kill everyone here unless I personally surrender.
[01:03:40]  Um, now, this isn't the first thing he does.
[01:03:43]  Uh, in fact, he attempts to get himself killed by Prussian fire multiple times before he does this.
[01:03:48]  He does, he does go for suicide again.
[01:03:50]  That is our boy.
[01:03:52]  Um, and it gets how many times he fails at getting shot.
[01:03:55]  He cannot kill himself.
[01:03:57]  He does get his aide-de-camp gets killed, and like two of them get wounded when he just kind of like stands in front of these Prussians' guns, but he doesn't get hurt at all.
[01:04:06]  So he tries to kill himself.
[01:04:09]  He accidentally shoots two more people in the middle.
[01:04:11]  He shoots another French soldier right in the fucking throat.
[01:04:16]  Very funny.
[01:04:18]  So, yeah, he eventually goes to the Germans and is like, Hey, you know, the Emperor of France?
[01:04:26]  And they're like, Yeah.
[01:04:27]  And he's like, He's me.
[01:04:28]  And they're like, Seriously?
[01:04:29]  They have no idea that he's there.
[01:04:31]  They don't know that he.
[01:04:32]  So this is a real dub for the Germans.
[01:04:35]  Oh, sure.
[01:04:35]  Oh, sure.
[01:04:36]  We capture the Emperor.
[01:04:37]  And he, like, when he surrenders, the, the, like, basically one of the conditions he does under is that he is surrendering his army.
[01:04:44]  He's not surrendering for the nation of France.
[01:04:47]  And very quickly after that, the French respond by having a revolution while they're fighting and losing this war.
[01:04:53]  And he is no longer the emperor of France.
[01:04:56]  He spends some time in custody of the Prussians.
[01:04:59]  They lock him up, but like rich guy style, you know, he's in like some sort of castle.
[01:05:05]  Yeah.
[01:05:05]  Yeah.
[01:05:05]  Nice, nice prison.
[01:05:07]  He's writing stuff.
[01:05:08]  He's fucking, you know, he's living his worst life.
[01:05:10]  Yeah, he's living his worthless worst life.
[01:05:13]  His family has to deal with the fact that they are no longer running France.
[01:05:17]  France kind of falls apart.
[01:05:20]  The Germans lay siege to Paris.
[01:05:22]  Oh, yeah.
[01:05:24]  People are eating rats.
[01:05:25]  It is ugly.
[01:05:26]  And it does not leave the people of France very well induced towards Napoleon III, although he never gives up hope of proclaiming another empire.
[01:05:37]  Like he, because he fly, he goes back to exile in England and he spends the last couple of his years.
[01:05:42]  He is actively working on another plan to return the France and take over the monarchy yet again.
[01:05:49]  But then he dies in 1873, just before he can try his fourth coup attempt.
[01:05:57]  That would have been honestly, I think that time he'd have gotten it right.
[01:06:02]  I think he would have gotten it right that time.
[01:06:04]  I think it would have worked out.
[01:06:05]  Everything would have been good.
[01:06:06]  France could have been saved.
[01:06:09]  One of the sad things is he gets like attacked a lot by the French and by like even particularly conservatives in France for surrendering at Sedan.
[01:06:18]  His last words are, we weren't cowards at Sedan, were we?
[01:06:22]  Which is like, no, dude, that was like the only thing you did that was a good raven.
[01:06:26]  The only thing you did that was actually putting other people's lives before you your own.
[01:06:31]  Yeah, that was like the first time like that empathy bone that your dad tried desperately to instill into you.
[01:06:37]  Yeah.
[01:06:37]  Really, really gave everything he could while still being an absent father to push into you.
[01:06:45]  I mean, you know, hey, at that time, that was the best kind of fathering you can have.
[01:06:51]  He is, this is, he is, Louis Bonaparte is the best father we've talked about on this show.
[01:06:56]  100%.
[01:06:56]  I feel confident saying that.
[01:06:58]  Yes.
[01:06:59]  Just based on those letters alone, you're just like, oh, yeah, you know, he's sure he wasn't there and was like, I don't love you.
[01:07:06]  And I think you're dumb and said it to his face.
[01:07:08]  And, you know, I think, what did he say?
[01:07:11]  Read your book, hated it.
[01:07:13]  Hated it, hated it.
[01:07:14]  Stupid book.
[01:07:15]  How dare you think you could write this?
[01:07:17]  Still, best dad, world's best dad so far on the show.
[01:07:22]  Yeah.
[01:07:22]  Well, Matt, that's the podcast.
[01:07:25]  Well, that is a wonderful story of a great, great fail son.
[01:07:30]  And the failest of sons.
[01:07:33]  The failest of sons.
[01:07:34]  I mean, you've got to hand it to him.
[01:07:36]  He was able to actually achieve just enough to fail spectacularly.
[01:07:41]  Yeah.
[01:07:42]  You know, getting captured is just chef's kiss.
[01:07:46]  Yeah, that's a beautiful way to end your empire, being captured and giving everyone Germany.
[01:07:52]  Yeah, inventing modern Germany.
[01:07:56]  Yeah.
[01:07:56]  Yeah.
[01:07:57]  That's, hey, how's that going to go for the future?
[01:08:02]  You know, I actually stopped reading my German history textbook in August 1st, 1914, but it's going well.
[01:08:09]  Yeah, so far, so good.
[01:08:11]  Yeah, I would love to meet whoever the current Kaiser is over there.
[01:08:14]  Yeah, I'm sure he's cool and has been in power in stability and peace.
[01:08:19]  That sounds like the Germany I probably know.
[01:08:24]  Oh, God.
[01:08:26]  You know, this was a fun one.
[01:08:28]  It wasn't about Nazis, but it was about proto-fascism.
[01:08:32]  Yeah.
[01:08:33]  I love that.
[01:08:34]  It is cool.
[01:08:34]  It's cool and good.
[01:08:35]  Matt, can people find you anywhere?
[01:08:39]  You can find me on the world's only The Wire Rewatch podcast, Pod Yourself The Wire, or the world's only Sopranos podcast, Pod Yourself a Gun.
[01:08:50]  And once again, we're doing a live show at SF Sketchfest Saturday, January 28th at 10 p.m. over at the Piano Fight Theater.
[01:08:59]  Go to sfsketchfest.com and please buy tickets because it would be embarrassing if no one came.
[01:09:05]  It would be embarrassing.
[01:09:07]  Go there.
[01:09:08]  Go now.
[01:09:09]  Find Matt Lieb at SF Sketchfest.
[01:09:11]  You can see me in person.
[01:09:12]  You can assassinate me.
[01:09:14]  Yeah, sell your possessions, fly to San Francisco, live on the streets in the weeks leading up to the event.
[01:09:20]  You should.
[01:09:21]  And then murder him.
[01:09:23]  Murder me, please.
[01:09:26]  And also, yeah, give us five stars in review.
[01:09:29]  That's really all I want.
[01:09:31]  You know, there's enough listeners out there on this podcast that I should be able to break a thousand.
[01:09:36]  Come on.
[01:09:37]  There we go.
[01:09:38]  All right.
[01:09:39]  Yeah, those are my plugs, guys.
[01:09:41]  I love you.
[01:09:42]  I love you too.
[01:09:44]  I love you more than my five-week old daughter.
[01:09:47]  Yeah.
[01:09:47]  I don't think that's true.
[01:09:50]  True, but I want you to think it's true.
[01:09:53]  Yeah.
[01:09:53]  There you go.
[01:09:54]  Gaslight me.
[01:09:57]  Gaslight me, Daddy.
[01:10:00]  We have a Behind the Bastards live stream event coming up with Margaret Killjoy on December 8th at 6 p.m. Pacific.
[01:10:06]  You can get tickets from momenthouse.co slash BTB.
[01:10:11]  Heroic.
[01:10:12]  Erotic.
[01:10:13]  Yep.
[01:10:14]  Check it out.
[01:10:15]  Yep.
[01:10:15]  I'll be there watching on the live stream.
[01:10:19]  You don't have to do that.
[01:10:20]  I'm going to.
[01:10:21]  And I'm going to be in the comment section going, kill me, kill me, kill me.
[01:10:25]  Do it.
[01:10:26]  And no one will be able to do it.
[01:10:28]  I'm like Napoleon III in that way.
[01:10:32]  And we are done.
[01:10:35]  Boom, Shakawaka.
[01:10:39]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:10:42]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:10:52]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll Show are geniuses.
[01:10:57]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
[01:11:04]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[01:11:07]  Yes.
[01:11:08]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[01:11:10]  I actually, I thought it was.
[01:11:12]  I got that wrong.
[01:11:12]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[01:11:14]  We're pretty close, though.
[01:11:15]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:11:22]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[01:11:30]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[01:11:37]  Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
[01:11:42]  People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, where it's really like a stone sculpture.
[01:11:50]  You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
[01:11:52]  Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[01:11:57]  Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:12:03]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[01:12:11]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[01:12:21]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[01:12:24]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
[01:12:28]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:12:36]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:12:38]  Guaranteed human.