The success of imperial prosperity rested on a certain number of elements (festivities, development of capitalism, etc.) in order to avoid any resurrection of the revolutionary specter. Thus, Napoleon III sought the support of the clergy, the great financiers, the industrial magnates and the landowners.
He revived on his own account the "Let's get rich" of 1840. Under the influence of Saint-Simonians and businessmen, large credit institutions were set up and major projects were launched:Crédit Foncier de France, the Credit Mobilier, the conversion of the railroad into six large companies between 1852 and 1857. The passion for speculation was reinforced by the arrival of Californian and Australian gold and consumption was supported by a general fall in prices between 1856 and 1860, due to the economic revolution which quickly overcame tariff barriers, as had already happened in the United Kingdom. Thus French activity was flourishing between 1852 and 1857 and was only temporarily affected by the crisis of 1857.
The Universal Exhibition (1855) was its high point. The great enthusiasm for the romantic period was over; philosophy became skeptical and literature entertaining. The Court festivities at Compiègne defined the fashion for the bourgeoisie, satisfied by this energetic government which preserved their financial balances so well.
If the Empire was strong, the Emperor was weak. Strong-headed and a dreamer, he was full of plans. Plans that his irresolution often prevented from succeeding. For him, the artificial work of the Congress of Vienna, which consecrated the downfall of his family and of France, had to be destroyed, and Europe should be organized into a set of great industrial states, united by communities of interest and linked together by commercial treaties, and expressing their links by periodic congresses presided over by himself, and by universal exhibitions. In this way he could reconcile the revolutionary principles of the supremacy of the people with historical tradition, something that neither the Restoration nor the July Monarchy nor the Second Republic was able to do. Universal male suffrage, the organization of the nations of Rumania, Italy and Germany, and freedom of commerce, these were to be the work of the Revolution.