" The Emperor believed that these tyrannical methods had been necessary in order to forge the thriving, modern nation that France had finally become. He was so proud of his various accomplishments that he had even taken notes for a novel that he planned to write about a grocer named Benoit who returns to France after many years in America to discover the jaw-dropping wonders and Utopian delights of the Second Empire. Expecting to find misery and poverty, Benoit is thrilled and impressed by France's universal suffrage, by its cheap consumer products, its telegraph and railway systems, its well-paid soldiers, convalescent homes, pensions for disabled priests, and by any number of other enlightened social policies overseen by the Emperor."11 "

― Ross King , The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism