Cast Behind Thy Back: Bahá'u'lláh's Second Tablet to Napoleon III

In The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, Adib Taherzadeh devotes a chapter to the two Tablets that Bahá’u’lláh, prisoner in the fortress of ‘Akká, addressed to Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.

The first Tablet had been revealed in Adrianople in 1868. It had taken the form of a courteous summons. It addressed Napoleon as the most powerful sovereign in Europe. It urged him to use his power for the welfare of the peoples and to recognise the One Whose appearance was the sign of the new age. It tested him with a single direct question: If thou be sincere in thy claim, why dost thou not refuse to bear arms against the followers of Christ in the East?

The Tablet was conveyed by hand to Paris through the agency of believers and diplomats sympathetic to the Bahá’í cause. It was placed in the Emperor’s hand. The Emperor, the chronicle records, glanced at it and tossed it aside with a remark of disdain. If this man is God, he said, I am two gods.

The remark was reported back to Bahá’u’lláh in ‘Akká.

The second Tablet was revealed within months. Its tone is entirely different. It is no longer an invitation. It is a prophecy.

Taherzadeh recounts the central declaration of the Tablet. Bahá’u’lláh, having noted the Emperor’s refusal of the first Tablet, pronounces the consequence:

For what thou hast done, thy kingdom shall be thrown into confusion, and thine empire shall pass from thine hands, as a punishment for that which thou hast wrought.

The Tablet specifies further that the loss will come by failure of arms; that the people of France will rise against their Emperor; that the dynasty he had restored will not be restored again. The Tablet was sent on. There is no record that the Emperor read this one either.

The reader of the Dawn-Breakers and of the Revelation volumes will know what followed. In the summer of 1870 — well within a year of the second Tablet’s arrival in Paris — Napoleon III declared war on Prussia under the encouragement of his ministers. The campaign that followed was the worst managed in French military history. Within seven weeks the French army had been encircled at Sedan. The Emperor himself was taken prisoner. The Second Empire fell with him; a Republic was proclaimed in Paris.

Napoleon never returned to France. He was exiled, after the Prussian peace, to England, where he died at Chislehurst in 1873. The Bonapartist dynasty was not restored. The Tablet’s specific predictions — thy kingdom shall be thrown into confusion, thine empire shall pass from thine hands — were fulfilled in every particular.

Taherzadeh observes, in concluding the chapter, that the Tablet to Napoleon III is the supreme example in the corpus of the Tablets to the Kings of a prophecy delivered to a specific named individual and fulfilled, within his own lifetime and in the manner specified, in his own person. It is the proof case for the predictive authority of the Tablets, and it has been read as such by every subsequent Bahá’í generation.

Paraphrased from The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Vol. 3 — 'Akká, the Early Years (Adib Taherzadeh, George Ronald, 1983); see original for full text.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1983). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Vol. 3 — 'Akká, the Early Years)*. George Ronald.