Napoleon determined that he, like all the Bonapartist rulers, should act merely as a Napoleonic satrap. They were to be to him what the counts of the marches were to Charlemagne, warlike feudatories defending the empire or overawing its prospective foes.
His elder son, Comte Henri Georges Boulay De La Meurthe (1797-1858), was a constant Bonapartist, and after the election of Louis Napoleon to the presidency, was named (January 1849) vice-president of the republic. He zealously promoted popular education, and became in 1842 president of the society for elementary instruction.
He was naturally inactive, but he was influenced by his mother on the one hand, and by the Bonapartist leaders in France on the other.
Freycinet's cabinet, he erased the name of the duc d'Aumale from the army list, as part of the republican campaign against the Orleanist and Bonapartist princes.
He began his journalistic career as dramatic critic of the Bonapartist paper, L'Ordre.