“Vous avez beau faire venir tous ces noms à l’esprit.” Reading Verlaine’s “César Borgia” and “La Mort de Philippe II”

If critics still refuse to see Napoleon III evoked in the figures of César Borgia and Philippe II in Verlaine’s eponymous verses in his Poëmes saturniens, it is fundamentally due to the fact that Victor Hugo does not indicate the resemblance between Louis Bonaparte and these two despots in his anti-Bonapartist collection Châtiments. This article argues that the dual comparison is, on the other hand, very evident in his pamphlet Napoléon le Petit.