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  • France and the American Civil War: A Diplomatic History by Stève Sainlaude
  • Erika Pani
France and the American Civil War: A Diplomatic History. Stève Sainlaude. Translated by Jessica Edwards. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4696-4994-8. 304 pp., cloth, $45.00.

This book brings together, in a leaner, more forceful English version, Stève Sainlaude’s in-depth, carefully crafted two-volume study of France’s diplomacy toward a North America turned on its head by war and revolutionary politics (Paris’s L’Harmattan published both of the individual volumes in 2011: La France et la Confédération Sudiste, [1861–1865]. La question de la reconnaissance diplomatique pendant la guerre de Sécession and Le gouvernement impérial et la guerre de Sécession [1861–1865]. L’action diplomatique). France and the American Civil War is, in many ways, an old fashioned diplomatic history, concerned with norms and declarations of status—diplomatic recognition, neutrality, belligerency, mediation, and arbitration—treaties; conferences; and alliances. But Sainlaude is particularly adept at showing how these formal categories, circuits, and negotiations were marshaled and manipulated to keep communications and sea lanes open and national prestige intact and to guarantee as much order as possible in the uncertain world of international relations made more dangerous by war. His meticulous dissection of the factors that shaped the French Empire’s foreign policy during the American Civil War—its architects, their priorities and perceptions, the reach and limits of public opinion—upturns what we think we know about French sympathies toward the Confederacy.

Sainlaude shows that the challenges posed by the American Civil War were but a small part of France’s wide-ranging, intricate game of diplomatic chess, which involved tense relations with Great Britain, marked by both rivalry and cooperation; colonial expansion in Southeast Asia; and the contradictory demands generated by Napoleon III’s ambitions as the self-proclaimed protector of Catholicism, of national unification and of the “Latin Race”—embodied by the emperor’s Mexican adventure. Even slavery, the most consequential issue at stake in the US Civil War, did not figure prominently among French statesmen’s concerns, both because enslavement, although deemed incompatible with “civilization,” was marginal to [End Page 61] their diplomatic calculations, and because they did not see the war as a “quarrel” over slavery (101–2). Louis Napoleon’s project for a French-sponsored monarchical regime in Mexico held “the key to [French] policy toward the South,” but not in the ways the Confederacy’s advocates and later historians expected it to (111). The consolidation of the South’s independence was not seen as auspicious to the emperor’s Grand Design. Instead of guaranteeing a stable political equilibrium on the continent, as Confederate agents argued, French diplomats were sure that a genetically expansionist, independent South would “spread unhindered, provoking a situation more dangerous for the entire continent—and to Maximilian’s empire in first instance—than the American Union” (119–21).

This book’s most illuminating contribution is perhaps its analysis of the men who made French diplomacy during the Civil War. It forces us to rethink both the nature of the imperial regime and the ways foreign policy comes together. For all of the Second Empire’s authoritarian character, and despite Napoleon III’s inclinations and irresponsible personal diplomacy, France’s ministers of foreign affairs—Edouard Thouvenel and Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys—steered a prudent course that prevented France getting mired in the North American conflict. They relied on strict adherence to international and maritime law, to the point of thwarting the emperor’s and some of their fellow cabinet members’ schemes to support the Confederate navy. They also paid close attention to the extensive information relayed by France’s men on the ground: the minister plenipotentiary in Washington and the eight consuls stationed in American cities, three of them in the South, including the Confederate capital.

Their reports exposed the hollowness of the South’s charm offensive, dismantled the myths on which Confederates hoped to build an alliance (of a shared aristocratic worldview, of Southern benevolence toward Maximilian’s empire), and allowed the Quai d’Orsay to...

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