At this time, in France, the name Napoleon was a golden signboard in its own right. The election results were beyond doubt: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte won by an overwhelming majority.
Napoleon's return to the French political stage immediately put all sides on alert. Lamartine even publicly declared that the greatest enemy of the republic had returned.
But Lamartine no longer enjoyed the same prestige he had at this point in history, and few agreed with him. They thought the Romantic poet was worrying over nothing.
Men like Cavaignac, Roland, and Billefort saw Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III) as their greatest rival.
Calling him a rival might have been flattering. Louis Bonaparte had won the by-election, but the number of votes he received was still less than a tenth of Billefort's.
(Louis Bonaparte was a sarcastic nickname used for him by French politicians at the time, and a common name for him in historical scholarship. The book will use this name for now.)
Louis Bonaparte knew this too, so he quickly unveiled the fruits of his research in prison, The Extinction of Pauperism.
For France at this time, nothing was harder to deal with than the thousands upon thousands of poor people. The public had sunk into poverty so dire it beggared belief.
During the House of Orleans, French workers earned about 750 francs a year, or an average of two francs a day. Now they received only five francs a week, their wages reduced to a third of what they had been.
Meanwhile, the prices of most necessities had risen by more than 300 percent, while sugar and certain seasonings had become more than fifty times as expensive.
On top of that, big merchants controlled the prices and supply channels for raw materials. Small merchants went bankrupt one after another,