The Second  Empire  was schizoid  when  it came to morals.  The truth about the Emperor's sex-life, and that  of many members  of Society was  never  known to  the  people.  There   was  no  tabloid press in nineteenth-century France.  The  Emperor, his wife and their son  often used to pose in pseudo middle-class domestic bliss for official photographs; the reality,  however, was very different. Louis was  not  alone.  For  many  people  in authority, adultery was a of life, but  the  Church and  the  bourgeoisie remained grimly and  puritanical.

It was because  of this that,  in January 1857,  an ambitious state  prosecutor named  Pierre Ernest  Pinard  charged Gustave Flaubert and his publishers with 'outrage to public morality' in Madame Bovary. Nowadays this  story of a provincial adulterous life and eventual suicide  is considered one of the finest in nineteenth-century French literature but its serialisation in a popular magazine, La Revue  de Hans, had sparked public outrage, from the provincial middle classes scandalised by the book's sub-title: 'Provincial Morals'. The  judges  acquitted the defendants but not without commenting that  the novel 'deserved severe censure'.

One  wonders what  Louis [Napoleon III]  thought of  the affair. The best indication is that some years later he invited  Flaubert to [his palace at] Compiègne and  made  him Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

The zealous  Pinard was not deterred  by his defeat.  A few months later  he  returned to the attack  on 'obscenity' with a prosecution against arguably the greatest French  poet of the century, Baudelaire, for his volume of  poetry, Les  Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers  of Evil).  Pinard alleged that  six of the poems, which sang of the 'joyous flesh' of women's bodies and described love-making and  women's beauty in considerable, if overtly poetic, detail, 'outraged  public  decency'. This  time the defendant was convicted and the six poems were expurgated from his book; almost unbelievably, they were not restored until 1949. Baudelaire was also fined 300 francs  (the equivalent of about £600  today, quite a lot for a penniless poet),  but  he wrote  to  Eugenie  asking her to intercede on his behalf with  the  Minister of Justice because the amount of the fine 'exceeded the proverbial poverty  of poets'.  Despite  her deep Catholocism, she showed that, like her husband, she was no prude and at her request the fine was reduced to 50 francs.