Through four regimes between 1815 and 1870, the French would regularly invent new rationales and purposes for empire. A domestic crisis of legitimization led to the invasion of Algeria in 1830. So began a French settler colony in which barely half the settlers even came from France. The revolutionaries of 1848 annexed the colonies, making them national territory. While chattel slavery was legally abolished throughout the empire, annexation meant different things in different places. Colonial incoherence continued. Missionaries fostered and legitimized imperial expansion, though the imperial state never found them completely reliable. Military entrepreneurs in Senegal and Indochina had their own agendas, and did Emperor Napoleon III, who envisaged an “Arab Kingdom” in Algeria. He also sought to expand the empire indirectly, through a disastrous scheme to place a Habsburg on a Mexican throne. The prison colony provided another brutal avenue of colonial expansion. French imperial capitalism generally prospered, though the French were so outmaneuvered by the British after building the Suez Canal that they overshadowed the French role altogether. By 1870, the whole of the French empire still somehow seemed less than the sum of its parts.

Taking up the cases of America and France in the middle third of the nineteenth century, this chapter demonstrates that long-term changes to the organization of a society – demographic growth, territorial expansion, industrialization, etc. – affect the relative costs and benefits of different political strategies. With America’s expansion west and south in the early nineteenth century, millions of new voters, only weakly attached to existing political parties, were available for mobilization. Andrew Jackson took advantage, combining the use of patronage and populism to become the first outsider to win the presidency. In France, political participation remained highly constrained in the wake of the monarchical restorations of the early nineteenth century. When the Orléanist monarchy was overthrown in 1848, Louis Napoleon used his illustrious name to win elections for the new office of president. With Jackson’s administration, a new, more expansive spoils system was introduced. Allegiance to the Democratic and Whig parties was almost total, rendering direct populist mobilization of the masses an unlikely route to power. The populist strategy in America began instead to be aimed at winning the leadership of a mass party.

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