Russian Secret - 3:the practice of scanning the future, or how to avoid danger? (book 1)

The classic example is intubating a patient. This is a demanding, time-critical procedure.

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The longer it takes, the more pressurized the clinician is to complete the procedure. Sometimes the patient will get into problems, and a tracheotomy is needed — urgently. Sometimes the clinician is so focused on the intubation that the warning signs are missed, with disastrous consequences. Here, technology can help by using monitoring technologies.

I can see you have about ten seconds before you need to stop Experience with such technologies has been positive, especially if careful steps are taken to avoid a them and us division between the clinicians doing the work and the clinicians monitoring them. Usually a staff rotation is used, so everyone experiences both sides of the camera. Manufacturers can use better design processes, such as those outlined in standards such as ISO Here we can mention three useful ideas:. Discovering use errors takes a long time, and this conflicts with rapid entry to market. The solution may be to design systems so that they can be improved in the field.

This is actually easy — firmware is routinely upgraded for bug fixes anyway. What needs doing is logging device use in sufficient detail so that the manufacturer gets a good insight into how the device is being used or is failing to be used. Currently, this information rarely gets back to manufacturers in a useful form.

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Many use errors follow predictable patterns. So-called post-completion errors are common and hard to eliminate just by improving human procedures. The nurse moves on to the next patient, and then puts the blood glucometer in a docking station to upload all readings. This is a post-completion error: The solution is to redesign the technology, and there are many options here. Why delete uploaded data, for instance? Why not have a reminder in the device to confirm the nurse has recorded data before taking another reading? Why record manually on paper patient notes anyway?

This is an example of how the standard operating procedures combined with built-in technological assumptions induce errors which in this case are unprofessional, and perhaps disciplinary offences , but more thoughtful design can avoid them.

The huge leverage computer technology brings, because it is virtual and can do anything with information and hence the same piece of technology can be mass produced for a huge market that has not be preconceived , has a down side. The problem can be illustrated very simply. In the old days books where physical objects, and they looked and felt different. A well-read book would look worn, and an unread book would look new. You would recognize bookmarks sticking out of books, you could write annotations in the margins, you would know how much you have got left to read before you finish it.

You could put a book by the front door of your house to remind you to pick it up in the morning; you could leave a book by your bed so it was ready for next time you wanted to read yourself to sleep. Now, with electronic readers, all books and documents look the same — like the general-purpose computer they are on. Of course, the computer can create colourful covers and images, but the physical object is always the same: In the old days a patient would go to their doctor and get a paper prescription. They would then go round to the pharmacist and get their medicines.

One problem with this process was that paper prescriptions were notoriously hard to read, and there was a danger of incorrect dispensing. Today, this process has been computerized. The doctor sends the prescription electronically to the pharmacy, and the pharmacy can dispense the drugs almost immediately. Unfortunately, the patient has lost the physical prescription in this process. There is nothing to remind them to go to the pharmacy to pick up the drugs. Indeed, pharmacies are now having to dispose of drugs that were efficiently dispensed as soon as they were prescribed but were never collected by the patient.

Just as electronic books are a gift to book publishers — because the expensive paper book is replaced with a cheap electronic book, free to reproduce once just one copy has been prepared — increasing use of computers in healthcare is irresistible. X-ray photographs no longer need to be developed, put in folders, held up against viewing screens.

They can be emailed. But what they have gained, they have lost in physicality. Unfortunately physicality is in direct conflict with the driving economics. Pieces of paper are very familiar and we understand exactly how they work, but computer screens are cost-effective precisely because they can display lots of information repeatedly without addition costs. Yet from a safety perspective, the screens all look so similar they may be confused. One solution to this is skeuomorphism: The example here would be to improve the display so that the paper information being displayed looks more like actual paper — perhaps with torn edges, discolouring if frequently used, and so on.

A second solution is affordance: For example, a cup with a handle has the affordance that encourages you to pick it up by its handle. Particularly in emergencies, people need to know what to do intuitively — and affordance is a key part of design. Thirdly, we can make computers disappear — what is left is a physical object which happens to do something complicated, but it has been made invisible to the user.

RFID tags and smart chips can be embedded inside objects so that they can do things and interact with each other, but the object appears to be normal. A nice example is the hotel key card; so far as a hotel guest is concerned they behave just like room keys, but inside some sophisticated cryptography creates a host of benefits — for example, unlike losing a physical key it is not a problem if you lose a key card, and the locks do not need to be replaced.

When patients routinely have ID tags embedded in them, many of the current problems of patient barcodes will disappear — no doubt to be replaced by different problems! This article is not the place for a deep discussion on design, 12 but it is important to point out that looking up skeuomorphism or affordance on the internet reveals a huge variety of conflicting opinions.

In other words, these ideas are ways to argue about design, not ways to design. One still has to do detailed work to make future technologies successful, regardless of their supposed affordances. Despite having nice words to talk about good design, no future will be an inevitable success. Although we have said that human factors will remain a constant for the foreseeable future, there is nothing to stop technology enhancing people.

Technology will not be used just to monitor and help make people well, but will be used to make them better — better as sportsmen, as healthcare professionals, or whatever. We already have augmented reality, where surgeons can see an enhanced view of the insides of patients. If patients can have brain implants to enhance their lives to manage Parkinson, for instance surgeons will have implants to improve their skills, using robotics to reduce tremor or computers to reduce error.

After all, the core of the humble calculator — which reduces drug dose calculation errors — has already shrunk in size from table-top clockwork of 50 years ago to something so small it could be swallowed. Thinking about the future is science fiction. If the market has developed profitable technologies, it follows that we you and me want those technologies. This truism needs emphasizing. Industry stays in business making what we want to buy. Industry is adept at adapting to make what we find irresistible: The manufacturers who are better at seducing us survive and grow.

As a consumer, I love iPads at least I did in , but that does not mean that iPads can do much good in a professional healthcare environment. Should we fill hospitals with iPads?

Introduction

One part of me, the private consumer, says yes, they are wonderful! It is interesting how Blackberries were driven by employers, but iPhones and iPads are being driven by consumers; increasingly the employee is dictating what technology the organization they work for uses. But the other part of me, the clinician, the scientist, the technician, asks for evidence that they will truly improve healthcare. If I am in healthcare procurement, I have to think very carefully to distinguish what I covet as a consumer from what will actually improve the organization I work for.

It is certain that getting evidence, doing experiments RCTs? Healthcare is complex, and just throwing technology at it will not in itself change anything usefully, other than costing us a lot of money which is exactly what the market wants us to do. As we approach the future, we need to learn how to plan our resources much more carefully and experimentally.

The subtle cost-benefits of X-rays were not apparent immediately, and they rather ruined the original magical story. People trying to sell us the future will certainly latch into our acquisitive consumer natures — this is who we are as individuals. They are less likely to latch into us as patients or clinicians, and thus — while being an engrossing story — they may miss the point and sell us on technological ideas that do not really improve the world so much as satisfy our consumerist urges.

One of the important things science fiction teaches us is that the future will not be populated only by sensible solutions. While we hope for a happy ending, there will be problems and even wicked plans, evil empires and natural disasters to overcome along the way. The future of healthcare is about the patient or stopping people becoming patients , but patients are not the main stakeholders in healthcare.

Insurance companies, big pharma, doctors, managers, suppliers, builders, governments and many other forces will influence the future. Will innovation help patients or will it be partly to help monitor clinicians delivering healthcare? It is interesting that since hospitals started introducing computers that the ratio of managers to clinicians has steadily increased; it is not totally clear that computers have made delivering healthcare more efficient or safer, but they have certainly increased the volume and turnover of the business.

Moreover, now patient records are computerized, with the obvious benefits, there are also problems. To get problems fixed, upgrades have to be purchased, and this can be very expensive. Patient records were once on paper; now they are in proprietary formats, and the manufacturer can lock in the user to their particular system, so buying upgrades — perpetuating the lock in — seems cheaper than moving over to an alternative system.

The market will surely figure out a way to make money, and technology will advance in miraculous ways. In my view the key thing is to think clearly. Initiatives like the UK Royal College of Physicians Future Hospital Commission, where thought-leaders — patients and healthcare professionals — have sat down and worked out what sort of future hospital they need are to be commended; 3 more importantly, they have articulated principles, not just specific solutions. Such principles are or should be timeless; we should not plan the future by being technology-driven e. Articulating the principles of the futures we want should be a continual process, not a one-off activity; every day there is a new future to plan, and new discoveries that will change our minds about what is possible and likely.

Future planning should be as much a routine part of healthcare as responsive care is.

Information Technology and Moral Values

Are we making the healthcare future we want? If people from the past suddenly materialized in front of us, we would want to be able to convince them the world is the better place they had hoped for. What stories would they take back to help direct their technological trends and developments? The author acknowledges the very stimulating and encouraging comments most especially from Annegret Hannawa, Ross Koppel, Don Norman, Ben Shneiderman and the anonymous referees. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U.

J Public Health Res. Published online Dec 1. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Received Nov 1; Accepted Nov 1. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract Healthcare changes dramatically because of technological developments, from anesthetics and antibiotics to magnetic resonance imaging scanners and radiotherapy. Significance for public health. Introduction Pluck a nurse and surgeon out of the nineteenth century and transport them into a modern 21 st century hospital and it would be a thoroughly recognizable place, with the same hierarchies and strict cultures.

Science fiction Our time-travelling fiction is a small example of the power of using science fiction to help envisage and plan our future. Key points about futures for healthcare Patients are the reason for healthcare and they should be at the centre of it. Technical factors Healthcare is just a market for technology where consumers such as hospitals are happy to pay enormous amounts of money, particularly for prestige equipment, such as PET and MRI scanners and linear accelerators. Accelerated cost savings Technology automates and extends things that previously had to be done by people.

Personal healthcare Already, the assumptions of mass production are changing. Big data Patients generate huge amounts of information — patient records — from X-rays to blood test results. Social media, patient power, mobile health and education Stopping people going to hospital in the first place and empowering people to care for themselves and their families is something computers are already doing well.

Dramatic, transformational integration of technologies There is not space here to fully explore the vast range of likely and significant technological breakthroughs. Security, privacy and monitoring In a world beset with major security concerns like terrorism it is inevitable that all technologies, even in those healthcare, will be aligned with national priorities. Hacking and open health Healthcare sensors can be readily bought off the internet, and it is easy for technically-minded people today to build sophisticated equipment to hack to collect and analyse any personal or clinical data using their own computers.

Technology is diverse and surprising These are some of some powerful technological drivers, and it is hard to draw a line under the discussion. Safety, security and regulation In the future there will remain an enduring distinction between safety and security. Solving the right problems Conventional patient records are paper records in folders in cabinets.

Unfortunately this obvious solution creates new problems. Open in a separate window. Human factors The nature of human expertise is that it makes errors likely, 11 and clinicians are highly-skilled experts. How can technology help? How can technology be designed better? Here we can mention three useful ideas: Clearly, earlier theories of privacy that assumed the inviolability of physical walls no longer apply but as Nissenbaum argues, personal autonomy and intimacy require us to protect privacy nonetheless Nissenbaum If you load all the photographs of your life to a service like Flickr and they were to somehow lose or delete them, this would be a tragic mistake that might not be impossible to repair.

Information technology has forced us to rethink earlier notions of privacy that were based on print technologies, such as letters, notes, books, pamphlets, newspapers, etc. The moral values that coalesced around these earlier technologies have been sorely stretched by the easy way that information can be shared and altered using digital information technologies and this has required the rapid development of new moral theories that recognize both the benefits and risks of communicating all manner of information using modern information technologies.

The primary moral values that seem to be under pressure from these changes are privacy, confidentiality, ownership, trust, and the veracity of the information being communicated in these new ways. Who has the final say whether or not some information about a user is communicated or not? Who is allowed to sell your medical records, your financial records, your email, your browser history, etc.? If you do not have control over this process, then how can you enforce your own moral right to privacy? It follows that if we care about privacy, then we should give all the control of access to personal information to the individual.

Most corporate entities resist this notion for the simple reason that information about users has become a primary commodity in the digital world boosting the vast fortunes of corporations like Google or Facebook. Indeed, there is a great deal of utility each of us gains from the services provided by internet search companies like Google and social networks such as Facebook. It might be argued that it is actually a fair exchange we receive since they provide search results and other applications for free and they offset the cost of creating those valuable serviced by collecting data from individual user behavior that can be monetized in various lucrative ways.

A major component of the profit model for these companies is based on directed advertising where the information collected on the user is used to help identify advertising that will be most effective on a particular user based on his or her search history and other online behaviors. Simply by using the free applications offered, each user tacitly agrees to give up some amount of privacy that varies with the applications they are using.

Even if we were to agree that there is some utility to the services users receive in this exchange, there are still many potential moral problems with this arrangement. If we follow the argument raised by Westin earlier that privacy is equivalent to information control ibid. There is a counterargument to this. Herman Tavani and James Moor argue that in some cases giving the user more control of their information may actually result in greater loss of privacy. Their primary argument is that no one can actually control all of the information about oneself that is produced every day by our activities.

If we focus only on the fraction of it that we can control, we lose sight of the vast mountains of data we cannot Tavani and Moor, Tavani and Moor argue that privacy must be recognized by the third parties that do control your information and only if those parties have a commitment to protecting user privacy, will we actually acquire any privacy worth having. Towards this end, they suggest that we think in terms of restricted access to information rather than strict personal control of information ibid.

Information security is another important moral value that impacts the communication and access of user information. If we grant the control of our information to third parties in exchange for the services they provide, then these entities must also be responsible for restricting the access to that information by others who might use it to harm us See Epstein ; Magnani ; Tavani This type of crime has grown rapidly since the advent of digital information technologies.

The victims of these crimes can have their lives ruined as they try to rebuild such things as their credit rating and bank accounts. This has led to the design of computer systems that are more difficult to access and the growth of a new industry dedicated to securing computer systems. Even with these efforts the economic and social impact of cybercrime is growing at a staggering rate. The difficulty in obtaining complete digital security rests on the fact that the moral value of security can be in conflict with the moral values of sharing and openness, and it is these later values that guided many of the early builders of information technology.

So it seems that information technology has a strong dissonance created in the competing values of security and openness that is worked right into the design of these technologies and this is all based on the competing moral values held by the various people who designed the technologies themselves. This conflict in values has been debated by philosophers. While many of the hackers interviewed by Levy argue that hacking is not as dangerous as it seems and that it is mostly about gaining access to hidden knowledge of how information technology systems work, Eugene Spafford counters that no computer break-in is entirely harmless and that the harm precludes the possibility of ethical hacking except in the most extreme cases Spafford Mark Manion and Abby Goodrum agree that hacktivism could be a special case of ethical hacking but warn that it should proceed in accordance to the moral norms set by the acts of civil disobedience that marked the twentieth century or risk being classified as online terrorism Manion and Goodrum What information technology adds to these long standing moral debates is the nearly effortless access to information that others might want to control such as intellectual property, dangerous information and pornography Floridi , as well as providing technological anonymity for both the user and those providing access to the information in question Nissenbaum ; Sullins For example, even though cases of bullying and stalking occur regularly, the anonymous and remote actions of cyber-bullying and cyberstalking make these behaviors much easier and the perpetrator less likely to be caught.

Given that information technologies can make these unethical behaviors more likely, then it can be argued that the design of cyberspace itself tacitly promotes unethical behavior Adams ; Grodzinsky and Tavani Since the very design capabilities of information technology influence the lives of their users, the moral commitments of the designers of these technologies may dictate the course society will take and our commitments to certain moral values will then be determined by technologists Brey ; Bynum ; Ess ; Johnson ; Magnani ; Moor ; Spinello ; Sullins Assuming we are justified in granting access to some store of information that we may be in control of, there is a duty to ensure that that information is truthful, accurate, and useful.

A simple experiment will show that information technologies might have some deep problems in this regard. Load a number of different search engines and then type the same search terms in each of them, each will present different results and some of these searches will vary widely from one another. This shows that each of these services uses a different proprietary algorithm for presenting the user with results from their search.

It follows then that not all searches are equal and the truthfulness, accuracy, and usefulness of the results will depend greatly on which search provider you are using and how much user information is shared with this provider. All searches are filtered by various algorithms in order to ensure that the information the search provider believes is most important to the user is listed first. Since these algorithms are not made public and are closely held trade secrets, users are placing a great deal of trust in this filtering process. The hope is that these filtering decisions are morally justifiable but it is difficult to know.

Again the anonymity and ease of use that information technology provides can facilitate deceitful practices such as clickjacking. Pettit suggests that this should cause us to reevaluate the role that moral values such as trust and reliance play in a world of information technology. This is a significant problem and will be discussed in section 2. Lastly in this section we must address the impact that the access to information has on social justice.

Information technology was largely developed in the Western industrial societies during the twentieth century. But even today the benefits of this technology have not spread evenly around the world and to all socioeconomic demographics. Certain societies and social classes have little to no access to the information easily available to those in more well off and in developed nations, and some of those who have some access have that access heavily censored by their own governments.

It is worth noting that as the cost of smart phones decreases these technologies are giving some access to the global internet to communities that have been shut out before Poushter John Weckert also notes that cultural differences in giving and taking offence play a role in the design of more egalitarian information technologies Weckert In addition to storing and communicating information, many information technologies automate the organizing of information as well as synthesizing or mechanically authoring or acting on new information.

Norbert Wiener first developed a theory of automated information synthesis which he called Cybernetics Wiener []. Wiener realized that a machine could be designed to gather information about the world, derive logical conclusions about that information which would imply certain actions, which the machine could then implement, all without any direct input form a human agent. Wiener quickly saw that if his vision of cybernetics was realized, there would be tremendous moral concerns raised by such machines and he outlined some of them in his book the Human Use of Human Beings Wiener Wiener argued that, while this sort of technology could have drastic moral impacts, it was still possible to be proactive and guide the technology in ways that would increase the moral reasoning capabilities of both humans and machines Bynum Machines make decisions that have moral impacts.

One of the authors left on a vacation and when he arrived overseas his credit card stopped working, perplexed, he called the bank and learned that an automatic anti-theft program had decided that there was a high probability that the charges he was trying to make were from someone stealing his card and that in order to protect him the machine had denied his credit card transactions. Here we have a situation where a piece of information technology was making decisions about the probability of nefarious activity happening that resulted in a small amount of harm to the person that it was trying to help.

Increasingly, machines make important life changing financial decisions about people without much oversight from human agents. Whether or not you will be given a credit card, mortgage loan, the price you will have to pay for insurance, etc. For instance if you apply for a credit card, the machine will look for certain data points, like your salary, your credit record, the economic condition of the area you reside in, etc.

That probability will either pass a threshold of acceptance or not and determine whether or not you are given the card. The machine can typically learn to make better judgments given the results of earlier decisions it has made. This kind of machine learning and prediction is based on complex logic and mathematics see for example, Russell and Norvig , this complexity may result in slightly humorous examples of mistaken predictions as told in the anecdote above, or it might be more eventful. It all depends on the design of the learning and prediction algorithm, something that is typically kept secret, so that it is hard to justify the veracity of the prediction.

Several of the issues raised above result from the moral paradox of Information technologies. Many users want information to be quickly accessible and easy to use and desire that it should come at as low a cost as possible, preferably free. But users also want important and sensitive information to be secure, stable and reliable.

Maximizing our value of quick and low cost minimizes our ability to provide secure and high quality information and the reverse is true also. Thus the designers of information technologies are constantly faced with making uncomfortable compromises. The early web pioneer Stewart Brand sums this up well in his famous quote:.

The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. Since these competing moral values are essentially impossible to reconcile, they are likely to continue to be at the heart of moral debates in the use and design of information technologies for the foreseeable future. In the section above, the focus was on the moral impacts of information technologies on the individual user.

In this section, the focus will be on how these technologies shape the moral landscape at the societal level. This change has meant that a growing number of people have begun to spend significant portions of their lives online with other users experiencing a new unprecedented lifestyle. Vast numbers of people congregate on sites like Facebook and interact with friends old and new, real and virtual. The Internet offers the immersive experience of interacting with others in virtual worlds where environments are constructed entirely out of information.

Just now, emerging onto the scene are technologies that will allow us to merge the real and the virtual. Each of these technologies comes with their own suite of new moral challenges some of which will be discussed below. There are a number of moral values that these sites call into question. Shannon Vallor , has reflected on how sites like Facebook change or even challenge our notion of friendship. Aristotle argued that humans realize a good and true life though virtuous friendships.

Here is a more complete discussion of Aristotelian friendship. Thus these media cannot fully support the Aristotelian notion of complete and virtuous friendship by themselves Vallor Vallor also has a similar analysis of other Aristotelian virtues such as patience, honesty, and empathy and their problematic application in social media Vallor Privacy issues abound in the use of social media. In this way a social network provider can try to maintain the moral value of privacy for its users while still profiting off of linking them with advertisers.

The first moral impact one encounters when contemplating online games is the tendency for these games to portray violence, sexism, and sexual violence. There are many news stories that claim a cause and effect relationship between violence in computer games and real violence. The claim that violence in video games has a causal connection to actual violence has been strongly critiqued by the social scientist Christopher J.

But Coeckelbergh goes on to claim that computer games could be designed to facilitate virtues like empathy and cosmopolitan moral development, thus he is not arguing against all games just those where the violence inhibits moral growth Coeckelbergh Marcus Schulzke defends the depiction of violence in video games.

Thus virtual violence is very different from real violence, a distinction that gamers are comfortable with Schulzke While virtual violence may seem palatable to some, Morgan Luck seeks a moral theory that might be able to allow the acceptance of virtual murder but that will not extend to other immoral acts such as pedophilia.

Christopher Bartel is less worried about the distinction Luck attempts to draw; Bartel argues that virtual pedophilia is real child pornography, which is already morally reprehensible and illegal across the globe. While violence is easy to see in online games, there is a much more substantial moral value at play and that is the politics of virtual worlds.

Ludlow and Wallace chronicle how the players in massive online worlds have begun to form groups and guilds that often confound the designers of the game and are at times in conflict with those that make the game. Their contention is that designers rarely realize that they are creating a space where people intended to live large portions of their lives and engage in real economic and social activity and thus the designers have the moral duties somewhat equivalent to those who may write a political constitution Ludlow and Wallace According to Purcell , there is little commitment to democracy or egalitarianism by those who create and own online games and this needs to be discussed, if more and more of us are going to spend time living in these virtual societies.

A persistent concern about the use of computers and especially computer games is that this could result in anti-social behavior and isolation. Yet studies might not support these hypotheses Gibba, et al. With the advent of massively multiplayer games as well as video games designed for families the social isolation hypothesis is even harder to believe. These games do, however, raise gender equality issues. James Ivory used online reviews of games to complete a study that shows that male characters outnumber female characters in games and those female images that are in games tend to be overly sexualized Ivory Soukup suggests that gameplay in these virtual worlds is most often based on gameplay that is oriented to masculine styles of play thus potentially alienating women players.

And those women that do participate in game play at the highest level play roles in gaming culture that are very different from those the largely heterosexual white male gamers, often leveraging their sexuality to gain acceptance Taylor et al. McMahon and Ronnie Cohen have studied how gender plays a role in the making of ethical decisions in the virtual online world, with women more likely to judge a questionable act as unethical then men Marcus Johansson suggests that we may be able to mitigate virtual immorality by punishing virtual crimes with virtual penalties in order to foster more ethical virtual communities Johansson The media has raised moral concerns about the way that childhood has been altered by the use of information technology see for example Jones Many applications are now designed specifically for babies and toddlers with educational applications or just entertainment to help keep the children occupied while their parents are busy.

This encourages children to interact with computers from as early an age as possible. Since children may be susceptible to media manipulation such as advertising we have to ask if this practice is morally acceptable or not.

Academic Tools

Depending on the particular application being used, it may encourage solitary play that may lead to isolation but others are more engaging with both the parents and the children playing Siraj-Blatchford It should also be noted that pediatricians have advised that there are no known benefits to early media use amongst young children but there potential risks Christakis Studies have shown that from to , sedentary lifestyles amongst children in England have resulted in the first measured decline in strength since World War Two Cohen et al.

It is not clear if this decline is directly attributable to information technology use but it may be a contributing factor. In the American Academy of Pediatrics released some simple guidelines for parents who may be trying to set realistic limits on this activity Children and Media Tips from the American Academy of Pediatrics. One may wonder why social media services tend to be free to use, but none the less, often make fabulous profits for the private companies that offer these services.

It is no deep secret that the way these companies make profit is through the selling of information that the users are uploading to the system as they interact with it. The more users, and the more information that they provide, the greater the value that aggregating that information becomes. Mark Zuckerberg stated his philosophical commitment to the social value of this in his letter to shareholders from February 1, People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others.

We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives. By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. The social value of perusing this is debatable, but the economic value has been undeniable. At the time this was written, Mark Zuckerberg has been constantly listed in the top ten richest billionaires by Forbes Magazine where he is typically in the top five of that rarefied group.

An achievement built on providing a free service to the world. What companies like Facebook do charge for are services, such as directed advertising, which allow third party companies to access information that users have provided to the social media applications. The result is that ads bought on an application such as Facebook are more likely to be seen as useful to viewers who are much more likely to click on these ads and buy the advertised products.

The more detailed and personal the information shared, the more valuable it will be to the companies that it is shared with. This radical transparency of sharing deeply personal information with companies like Facebook is encouraged. Those who do use social networking technologies do receive value as evidenced by the rapid growth of this technology. Statista reports that in there will be 2. Even before companies like Facebook were making huge profits, there were those warning of the dangers of the cult of transparency with warning such as:. If we want to restore trust we need to reduce deception and lies, rather than secrecy.

In the case of Facebook we can see that some of the warnings of the critics were prescient. In April of , Mark Zuckerberg was called before congress where he apologized for the actions of his corporation in a scandal that involved divulging a treasure trove of information about his users to an independent researcher, who then sold it to Cambridge Analytica, which was a company involved in political data analysis.

This data was then used to target political ads to the users of Facebook. Many of which were fake ads created by Russian intelligence to disrupt the US election in Au-Yeung, She notes that those in favor of developing technologies to promote radically transparent societies, do so under the premise that this openness will increase accountability and democratic ideals. But the paradox is that this cult of transparency often achieves just the opposite with large unaccountable organizations that are not democratically chosen holding information that can be used to weaken democratic societies.

This is due to the asymmetrical relationship between the user and the companies with whom she shares all the data of her life. The user is, indeed radically open and transparent to the company, but the algorithms used to mine the data and the 3rd parties that this data is shared with is opaque and not subject to accountability. We, the users of these technologies, are forced to be transparent but the companies profiting off our information are not required to be equally transparent.

Malware and computer virus threats continue to grow at an astonishing rate. Of eight million eligible voters, 5,, votes went to the official candidates, and , to opposition candidates. About one third of the eligible voters abstained. The new assembly included a small number of opponents of Louis-Napoleon, including 17 monarchists, 18 conservatives, two liberal democrats, three republicans and 72 independents. Despite now holding all governing power in the nation, Louis-Napoleon was not content with being an authoritarian president. The ink had barely dried on the new, severely authoritarian constitution when he set about making himself emperor.

Following the election, the Prince-President went on a triumphal national tour. In Marseille, he laid the cornerstone of a new cathedral, a new stock exchange, and a chamber of commerce. In Bordeaux, on 9 October , he gave his principal speech:. I say the Empire is peace. Like the Emperor I have many conquests to make… Like him I wish … to draw into the stream of the great popular river those hostile side-currents which lose themselves without profit to anyone.

We have immense unplowed territories to cultivate; roads to open; ports to dig; rivers to be made navigable; canals to finish, a railway network to complete. We have, in front of Marseille, a vast kingdom to assimilate into France. We have all the great ports of the west to connect with the American continent by modern communications, which we still lack.

We have ruins to repair, false gods to tear down, truths which we need to make triumph. This is how I see the Empire, if the Empire is re-established. These are the conquests I am considering, and you around me, who, like me, want the good of our country, you are my soldiers. When he returned to Paris at the end of his tour, the city was decorated with large arches, with banners proclaiming "To Napoleon III, emperor".

In response to officially inspired requests for the return of the empire, the Senate scheduled another referendum for 21—22 November on whether to make Napoleon emperor. After an implausible 97 percent voted in favour 7,, votes for and , against, with two million abstentions , on 2 December —exactly one year after the coup—the Second Republic was officially ended, replaced by the Second French Empire. His regnal name treats Napoleon II , who never actually ruled, as a true Emperor he had been briefly recognized as emperor from 22 June to 7 July The constitution was retained; it concentrated so much power in Napoleon's hands that the only substantive change was to replace the word "president" with the word "emperor.

One of the first priorities of Napoleon III was the modernization of the French economy, which had fallen far behind that of the United Kingdom and some of the German states. Political economics had long been a passion of the Emperor: While in Britain he had visited factories and railway yards, and in prison he had studied and written about the sugar industry and policies to reduce poverty.

He wanted the government to play an active, not a passive, role in the economy. In , he had written: Instead, the government took a very active role in building the infrastructure for economic growth; stimulating the stock market and investment banks to provide credit; building railways, ports, canals and roads; and providing training and education. He also opened up French markets to foreign goods, such as railway tracks from England, forcing French industry to become more efficient and more competitive.

The period was favorable for industrial expansion. The gold rushes in California and Australia increased the European money supply. In the early years of the Empire, the economy also benefited from the coming of age of those born during the baby boom of the Restoration period. These banks provided the funding for Napoleon III's major projects, from railway and canals to the rebuilding of Paris. In France had only 3, kilometers of railway, compared with 10, kilometers in England and kilometers in Belgium, a country one-twentieth the size of France.

The government provided guarantees for loans to build new lines, and urged railway companies to consolidate. There were 18 railway companies in , and six at the end of the Empire. By , France had 20, kilometers of railway, linked to the French ports and to the railway systems of the neighbouring countries, which carried over million passengers a year and transported the products of France's new steel mills, mines and factories. During the Empire the number of steamships tripled, and by France possessed, after England, the second-largest maritime fleet in the world.

Napoleon III - Wikipedia

The canal was funded by shares on the Paris stock market , and led by a former French diplomat, Ferdinand de Lesseps. The rebuilding of central Paris also encouraged commercial expansion and innovation. Its founder, Aristide Boucicaut , commissioned a new glass and iron building, designed by Louis-Charles Boileau and Gustave Eiffel and opened in , which became the model for the modern department store. Other department stores quickly appeared: Au Printemps in and La Samaritaine in They were soon imitated around the world.

Napoleon III's program also included reclaiming farmland and reforestation. One such project in the Gironde department drained and reforested 10, square kilometers 3, square miles of moorland, creating the Landes forest , the largest maritime pine forest in Europe.

Napoleon III began his regime by launching a series of enormous public works projects in Paris, hiring tens of thousands of workers to improve the sanitation, water supply and traffic circulation of the city. He installed a large map of Paris in a central position in his office, and he and Haussmann planned the new Paris.

The population of Paris had doubled since , with neither an increase in its area nor a development of its structure of very narrow medieval streets and alleys. To accommodate the growing population and those who would be forced from the center by the new boulevards and squares Napoleon III planned to build, he issued in a decree annexing eleven surrounding communes municipalities , and increasing the number of arrondissements city boroughs from twelve to twenty, enlarging Paris to its modern boundaries with the exception of the two major city parks Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes which only became part of the French capital in For the nearly two decades of Napoleon III's reign, and for a decade afterwards, most of Paris was an enormous construction site.

These two works increased the water supply of Paris from 87, to , cubic meters of water a day. He completely rebuilt the Paris sewers , and installed miles of pipes to distribute gas for thousands of new streetlights along the Paris streets. Beginning in , In the center of the city, Haussmann's workers tore down hundreds of old buildings and cut new avenues, connecting the central points of the city.

Buildings along these avenues were required to be the same height and in a similar style, and to be faced with cream-coloured stone, creating the signature look of Paris boulevards. Napoleon III built two new railway stations: The signature architectural landmark was the Paris Opera , the largest theater in the world, designed by Charles Garnier , crowning the center of Napoleon III's new Paris.

Napoleon III also wanted to build new parks and gardens for the recreation and relaxation of the Parisians, particularly those in the new neighbourhoods of the expanding city. Napoleon III's new parks were inspired by his memories of the parks in London, especially Hyde Park , where he had strolled and promenaded in a carriage while in exile; but he wanted to build on a much larger scale.

Working with Haussmann and Jean-Charles Alphand , the engineer who headed the new Service of Promenades and Plantations, he laid out a plan for four major parks at the cardinal points of the compass around the city. Thousands of workers and gardeners began to dig lakes, build cascades, plant lawns, flowerbeds and trees. He also created some twenty small parks and gardens in the neighbourhoods, as miniature versions of his large parks. Alphand termed these small parks "Green and flowering salons.

The parks were an immediate success with all classes of Parisians. The annexation increased the size of the city from twelve to the present twenty arrondissements. The architect, Charles Garnier , described the style simply as "Napoleon the Third. The Bois de Boulogne , transformed by Napoleon III between and , was designed to give a place for relaxation and recreation to all the classes of Paris. He quietly sent a diplomatic delegation to approach the family of princess Carola of Vasa , the granddaughter of deposed king Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden.

They declined because of his Catholic religion and the political uncertainty about his future, as did the family of Princess Adelheid of Hohenlohe-Langenburg , a niece of Queen Victoria. Finally Louis-Napoleon announced that he found the right woman: Her maternal grandfather, William Kirkpatrick of Closeburn, was a Scottish wine merchant [ citation needed ]. She received much of her education in Paris. The civil ceremony took place at Tuileries Palace on 22 January , and a much grander ceremony was held a few days later at Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris.

Safe with an heir, Napoleon III resumed his "petites distractions" with other women. She traveled to Egypt to open the Suez Canal and officially represented him whenever he traveled outside France. Though a fervent Catholic and conservative on many other issues, she strongly advocated equality for women. French troops assisted Italian unification by fighting on the side of the Kingdom of Sardinia.

In return, in France received Savoy and the county of Nice. Later, however, to appease fervent French Catholics, he sent soldiers to defend the residual Papal States against annexation by Italy. In a speech at Bordeaux shortly after becoming Emperor, Napoleon III proclaimed that "The Empire means peace" " L'Empire, c'est la paix " , reassuring foreign governments that he would not attack other European powers in order to extend the French Empire. He was, however, determined to follow a strong foreign policy to extend France's influence, and warned that he would not stand by and allow another European power to threaten its neighbour.

In all of his foreign policy ventures, he put the interests of France first. Lord Palmerston as Britain's foreign minister and prime minister had close personal ties with leading French statesmen, notably Napoleon III himself. Palmerston's goal was to arrange peaceful relations with France in order to free Britain's diplomatic hand elsewhere in the world. After a brief threat of an invasion of Britain in , France and Britain cooperated in the s, with an alliance in the Crimean War, and a major trade treaty in Nevertheless war scares were consistently worked up by the press.

The first purpose-built steam-powered battleship worryingly christened after Napoleon was launched in and the fortification of Cherbourg was strengthened.

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This led to the extension of the breakwater of Alderney and the construction of Fort Clonque. He had lived there while in exile and saw Britain as a natural partner in the projects he wished to accomplish. An opportunity soon presented itself: In early , Tsar Nicholas I of Russia put pressure on the weak Ottoman government, demanding that the Ottoman Empire give Russia a protectorate over the Christian countries of the Balkans as well as control over Constantinople and the Dardanelles.

When Russia refused to leave the Romanian territories it had occupied, Britain and France declared war on March 27, It took France and Britain six months to organize a full-scale military expedition to the Black Sea. The Anglo-French fleet landed thirty thousand French and twenty thousand British soldiers in the Crimea on 14 September, and began to lay siege to the major Russian port of Sevastopol.

As the siege dragged on, the French and British armies were reinforced and troops from the Kingdom of Sardinia joined them, reaching a total of , soldiers, but they suffered terribly from epidemics of typhus , dysentery , and cholera. During the days of the siege, the French lost 95, soldiers, including 75, due to disease. The suffering of the army in the Crimea was carefully concealed from the French public by press censorship. In September, after a massive bombardment, the Anglo-French army of fifty thousand men stormed the Russian positions, and the Russians were forced to evacuate Sevastopol.

Alexander II sought a political solution, and negotiations were held in Paris in the new building of the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d'Orsay , from February 25 to April 8, The Crimean War added three new place names to Paris: Alma, named for the first French victory on the river of that name; Sevastopol; and Malakoff, named for a tower in the center of the Russian line captured by the French.

The war had two important diplomatic consequences: The defeat of Russia and the alliance with Britain gave France increased authority and prestige in Europe. This was the first war between European powers since the close of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna , marking a breakdown of the alliance system that had maintained peace for nearly half a century. The war also effectively ended the Concert of Europe and the Quadruple Alliance , or "Waterloo Coalition," that the other four powers had established. The Paris Peace Conference of represented a high-water mark for the regime in foreign affairs.

On the evening of 14 January , he and the Empress escaped an assassination attempt unharmed. A group of conspirators threw three bombs at the royal carriage as it made its way to the opera. Eight members of the escort and bystanders were killed and over one hundred people injured. The culprits were quickly arrested.

They believed that, if Napoleon III were killed, a republican revolt would immediately follow in France, and the new republican government would help all Italian states win independence from Austria and achieve national unification. Bernard was in London, where, since he was a political exile, the British government refused to extradite him, but Orsini was tried, convicted and executed on 13 March Part of Italy, particularly the kingdom of Piedmont - Sardinia officially "Kingdom of Sardinia" , was independent, but Central Italy was still ruled by the Pope and Lombardy, Venice and much of the north was ruled by Austria.

Other states were de jure independent e. Napoleon III had fought with the Italian patriots against the Austrians when he was young, and his sympathy was with them, but the Empress, most of his government and the Catholic Church in France supported the Pope and the existing governments. The British Government was also hostile to the idea of promoting nationalism in Italy. Despite the opposition in his government and in his own palace, Napoleon III did all that he could to support the cause of Piedmont-Sardinia.

He brought his beautiful young cousin, Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione —99 , to Paris to meet the Emperor. As Cavour had hoped, she caught his eye and became his mistress. Between and , she used the opportunity to pass messages and to plead the Italian cause. In July , Napoleon arranged a secret visit by Count Cavour. They agreed to join forces and drive the Austrians from Italy. Cavour protested that Nice was Italian, but Napoleon responded that "these are secondary questions.

There will be time later to discuss them. Napoleon III looked for diplomatic support. Still facing strong opposition within his own government, In the spring of Napoleon III offered to negotiate a diplomatic solution with the twenty-eight-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria , but the Austrians demanded the disarmament of Piedmont-Sardinia first, and sent a fleet with thirty thousand soldiers to reinforce their garrisons in Italy.

Napoleon promised to send two hundred thousand soldiers to help one hundred thousand soldiers from Piedmont-Sardinia to force the Austrians out of northern Italy; in return France would receive the county of Nice and Savoy provided that their populations would agree in a referendum. It was the Emperor Franz Joseph, growing impatient, who finally unleashed the war. On 23 April he sent an ultimatum to the government of Piedmont-Sardinia demanding that they stop their military preparations and disband their army.

Napoleon III, though he had very little military experience, decided to lead the French army in Italy himself. Part of the French army crossed over the Alps, while the other part, with the Emperor, landed in Genoa on 18 May Fortunately for Napoleon and the Piedmontese, the commander of the Austrians, General Giulay, was not very aggressive. His forces greatly outnumbered the Piedmontese army at Turin, but he hesitated, allowing the French and Piedmontese to unite their forces. Napoleon III wisely left the fighting to his professional generals.

The first great battle of the war, on 4 June , was fought at the town of Magenta. It was long and bloody, and the French center was exhausted and nearly broken, but the battle was finally won by a timely attack on the Austrian flank by the soldiers of General MacMahon. The Austrians had seven thousand men killed and five thousand captured, while the French forces had four thousand men killed.

The battle was largely remembered because, soon after it was fought, patriotic chemists in France gave the name of the battle to their newly discovered bright purple chemical dye; the dye and the colour took the name magenta. They were greeted by huge, jubilant crowds waving Italian and French flags. The Austrians had been driven from Lombardy, but the army of General Giulay remained in the region of Venice. His army had been reinforced and numbered , men, roughly the same as the French and Piedmontese, though the Austrians were superior in artillery.

On 24 June, the second and decisive battle was fought at Solferino. This battle was even longer and bloodier than Magenta. In confused and often ill-directed fighting, there were approximately forty thousand casualties, including 11, French. Napoleon III was horrified by the thousands of dead and wounded on the battlefield.

He proposed an armistice to the Austrians, which was accepted on 8 July. A formal treaty ending the war was signed on 11 July Count Cavour and the Piedmontese were bitterly disappointed by the abrupt end of the war. Lombardy had been freed, but Venetia the Venice region was still controlled by the Austrians, and the Pope was still the ruler of Rome and Central Italy. Cavour angrily resigned his post. Napoleon III celebrated the day by granting a general amnesty to the political prisoners and exiles he had chased from France.

There were uprisings in central Italy and the Papal states, and Italian patriots, led by Garibaldi, invaded and took over Sicily, which would lead to the collapse of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Napoleon III wrote to the Pope and suggested that he "make the sacrifice of your provinces in revolt and confide them to Victor-Emmanuel. As Cavour had promised, Savoy and the county of Nice were annexed by France in after referendums; although it is disputed how fair they were. In Nice, 25, voted for union with France, just against, but Italians still called for its return into the 20th century.

Count Cavour died a few weeks later, declaring that "Italy is made. To win over the French Catholics and his wife, he agreed to guarantee that Rome would remain under the Pope and independent from the rest of Italy, and agreed to keep French troops there. The capital of Italy became Turin in then Florence in , not Rome. However, in , Garibaldi gathered an army to march on Rome, under the slogan, "Rome or death". Napoleon III sought but was unable to find a diplomatic solution that would allow him to withdraw French troops from Rome, while guaranteeing that the city would remain under Papal control.

Garibaldi made another attempt to capture Rome in November but was defeated by the French and Papal troops near the town of Mentana on 3 November The garrison of eight thousand French troops remained in Rome until August , when they were recalled at the start of the Franco-Prussian War. In September , Garibaldi's soldiers finally entered Rome and made it the capital of Italy. After the successful conclusion of the Italian campaign, and the annexation of Savoy and Nice to the territory of France, the Continental foreign policy of Napoleon III entered a calmer period.

Expeditions to distant corners of the world and the expansion of the Empire replaced major changes in the map of Europe. He was less engaged in governing and less attentive to detail, but still sought opportunities to increase French commerce and prestige globally. It sent 50, troops under General Philip H. Sheridan to the U. Napoleon was stretched very thin; he had committed 40, troops to Mexico, 20, to Rome to guard the Pope against the Italians, and another 80, in restive Algeria.

Furthermore, Prussia, having just defeated Austria, was an imminent threat. Napoleon realized his predicament and withdrew his troops from Mexico in Maximilian was overthrown and executed. He took over Cochinchina the southernmost part of modern Vietnam, including Saigon in , as well as a protectorate over Cambodia in Additionally, France had a sphere of influence during the 19th century and early 20th century in southern China, including a naval base at Kuangchow Bay Guangzhouwan.

Following the model of the Kings of France and of his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III moved his official residence to the Tuileries Palace , where he had a suite of rooms on the ground floor of the south wing between the Seine and the "Pavillon de l'Horloge" Clock pavilion , facing the garden. The word Tuilerie , plural Tuileries, means Brickworks or Tile-making works.

The Palace was given that name because the neighbourhood in which it had been built in was previously known for its numerous mason and tiler businesses. Napoleon III's bedroom was decorated with a talisman from Charlemagne , a symbol of good luck for the Bonaparte family, while his office featured a portrait of Julius Caesar by Ingres , and a large map of Paris, which he used to show his ideas for the reconstruction of Paris to his prefect of the Seine department, Baron Haussmann. The Emperor's rooms were overheated and were filled with smoke, as he smoked cigarette after cigarette.

The Empress occupied a suite of rooms just above his, highly decorated in the style of Louis XVI with a pink salon, a green salon and a blue salon. The court moved with the Emperor and Empress from palace to palace each year following a regular calendar. In June and July, they moved with selected guests to the Palace of Fontainebleau , for walks in the forest, and boating on the lake.

Beginning in , the Emperor and Empress spent each September in Biarritz in the Villa Eugenie, a large villa overlooking the sea. At the end of the year the Emperor and Court returned to the Tuileries Palace, and gave a series of formal receptions, and three or four grand balls, with six hundred guests, early in the new year. Visiting dignitaries and monarchs were frequent guests.

During carnival there were a series of very elaborate costume balls, on the themes of different countries and different historical periods, for which guests sometimes spent small fortunes on their costumes. Napoleon III had conservative and traditional taste in art: At the same time, he followed public opinion, and he made an important contribution to the French avant-garde.

The artists and their friends complained, and the complaints reached Napoleon III. His office issued a statement: His Majesty, wishing to let the public judge the legitimacy of these complaints, has decided that the works of art which were refused should be displayed in another part of the Palace of Industry. While the paintings were ridiculed by many critics and visitors, the work of the avant-garde became known for the first time to the French public, and it took its place alongside the more traditional style of painting.

In he completed the restoration, begun in , of the stained glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle , and in he declared it a national historical monument. In , he approved and provided funding for Viollet-le-Duc's restoration of the medieval town of Carcassonne. From the beginning of his reign Napoleon III launched a series of social reforms aimed at improving the life of the working class. He began with small projects, such as opening up two clinics in Paris for sick and injured workers, a program of legal assistance to those unable to afford it, and subsidies to companies which built low-cost housing for their workers.

He outlawed the practice of employers taking possession of or making comments in the work document that every employee was required to carry; negative comments meant that workers were unable to get other jobs. In , he encouraged the creation of a state insurance fund to help workers or peasants who became disabled, and to help their widows and families. His most important social reform was the law which gave French workers the right to strike, which had been forbidden since In he added to this an "Edict of Tolerance," which gave factory workers the right to organize.

He issued a decree regulating the treatment of apprentices, limited working hours on Sundays and holidays, and removed from the Napoleonic Code the infamous article , which said that the declaration of the employer, even without proof, would be given more weight by the court than the word of the employee. In , he made Victor Duruy , the son of a factory worker and a respected historian, his new Minister of Public Education. Duruy greatly accelerated the pace of the reforms, often coming into conflict with the Catholic church, which wanted the leading role in education.

Despite the opposition of the church, Duruy opened schools for girls in each commune with more than five hundred residents, a total of eight hundred new schools. Between and , Duruy created scholastic libraries for fifteen thousand schools, and required that primary schools offer courses in history and geography. Secondary schools began to teach philosophy, which had been banned by the previous regime at the request of the Catholic church.

For the first time public schools in France began to teach contemporary history, modern languages, art, gymnastics and music. The results of the school reforms were dramatic: By , the number had dropped to 25 percent. The rate of illiteracy among both girls and boys dropped to 32 percent. At the university level, Napoleon III founded new faculties in Marseille , Douai , Nancy , Clermont-Ferrand and Poitiers , and founded a network of research institutes of higher studies in the sciences, history, and economics. These also were criticized by the Catholic Church.

One of the centerpieces of the economic policy of Napoleon III was the lowering of tariffs and the opening of French markets to imported goods. He had been in Britain in when Prime Minister Robert Peel had lowered tariffs on imported grains, and he had seen the benefits to British consumers and the British economy.

However, he faced bitter opposition from many French industrialists and farmers, who feared British competition. Convinced he was right, he sent his chief economic advisor, Michel Chevalier , to London to begin discussions, and secretly negotiated a new commercial agreement with Britain, calling for the gradual lowering of tariffs in both countries.

He signed the treaty, without consulting with the Assembly, on 23 January Four hundred of the top industrialists in France came to Paris to protest, but he refused to yield. Industrial tariffs on such products as steel rails for railways were lowered first; tariffs on grains were not lowered until June Similar agreements were negotiated with the Netherlands, Italy, and France's other neighbors.

France's industries were forced to modernize and become more efficient to compete with the British, as Napoleon III had intended. Commerce between the countries surged. By the s, the huge state investment in railways, infrastructure and fiscal policies of Napoleon III had brought dramatic changes to the French economy and French society.

French people travelled in greater numbers, more often and farther than they had ever travelled before. The opening of the first public school libraries by Napoleon III and the opening by Louis Hachette of the first bookstores in Napoleon's new train stations led to the wider circulation of books around France. During the Empire industrial production increased by 73 percent, growing twice as rapidly as that of the United Kingdom, though its total output remained lower. From to , the French economy grew at a pace of five percent a year, and exports grew by sixty percent between and French agricultural production increased by sixty percent, spurred by new farming techniques taught at the agricultural schools started in each Department by Napoleon III, and new markets opened by the railways.

The threat of famine, which for centuries had haunted the French countryside, receded. The last recorded famine in France was in During the Empire, the migration of the rural population to the cities increased. The portion of the population active in agriculture dropped from 61 percent in to 54 percent in The average salary of French workers grew by 45 percent during the Second Empire, but only kept up with price inflation.

On the other hand, more French people than ever were able to save money; the number of bank accounts grew from , in to 2,, in The republicans on the left had always opposed him, believing he had usurped power and suppressed the Republic. The conservative Catholics were increasingly unhappy, because he had taken away most of the Papal States from the Pope, and because he had built up the public education system, which was a rival to the Catholic system. Many businessmen, particularly in the metallurgical and textile industries, were unhappy, because he had reduced the tariffs on British products, putting the British products in direct competition with their own.

The members of Parliament were particularly unhappy with him for dealing with them only when he needed money. When he had liberalized trade with England, he had not even consulted them. Napoleon's large-scale program of public works, and his expensive foreign policy, had created rapidly mounting government debts; the annual deficit was about million gold-francs, and the cumulative debt had reached nearly 1, million gold-francs 1 billion in US readings. The Emperor needed to restore the confidence of the business world, and to involve the legislature and have them share responsibility.

On 24 December , Napoleon III, against the opposition of his own ministers, issued a decree announcing that the legislature would have greater powers. The Senate and the assembly could, for the first time, give a response to the Emperor's program, ministers were obliged to defend their programs before the assembly, and the right of Deputies to amend the programs was enlarged.

On 1 February , further reforms were announced: Deputies could speak from the tribune, not just from their seats, and a stenographic record would be made and published of each session. Another even more important reform was announced on 31 December He did retain the right to change the budget estimates section by section. In the legislative elections of 31 May , the pro-government candidates received 5,, votes, while the opposition received 1,, votes, three times more than in the previous elections.

The rural departments still voted for Napoleon III's candidates, but in Paris 63 percent of the votes went to anti-government republican candidates, with similar numbers in all the large cities. The new assembly contained a large opposition block ranging from Catholics outraged by the Papal policies to Legitimists, Orleanists, protectionists and republicans, armed with new powers given to them by the Emperor himself. Despite the opposition in the legislature, Napoleon III's reforms remained popular in the rest of the country.

A new plebiscite was held in , on the text: The final vote was 7,, votes yes, 1,, votes no, and 1,, abstentions.