Napoleon II

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Napoleon II was Emperor of the French for exactly two days. He never sat on the throne. He never held a scepter. He never gave an order that anyone was bound to obey. And yet his name passed between courts, armies, and conspirators for decades as a kind of phantom hope. Born on the 20th of March 1811 at the Tuileries Palace in Paris, this child inherited the most storied name in Europe before he could walk. He would die at twenty-one in Vienna, having spent most of his life as a gilded prisoner of the very family that was his mother's own. How does an emperor reign without ruling? What does it mean to carry a dynasty's name when that dynasty has collapsed? And what did the Austrians actually do with the boy they called Franz? Those questions run through the story of a young man whom history would remember as l'Aiglon, the Eaglet, a nickname he received only after his death.

• 2. A Prince From Birth

  ›

  Karl Philipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg, the Austrian ambassador to France, was present at the baptism on the 9th of June 1811 inside Notre Dame de Paris. He recorded what he saw: the emperor took the infant from the arms of his mother and raised him up twice to reveal him to the public. It broke with long tradition, much as Napoleon had done when he crowned himself at his own coronation. The crowd applauded. In the ambassador's account, you could read on the monarch's face "the great satisfaction that he took from this solemn moment."

  Before that formal ceremony, the child had already undergone an ondoiement on the day of his birth, a traditional French rite of simple baptism unaccompanied by the usual additional ceremonies, administered by Joseph Fesch. His full name was Napoleon Francois Charles Joseph. His governess, Louise Charlotte Francoise de Montesquiou, was a descendant of the Marquis de Louvois, and she assembled a considerable collection of books intended to ground the infant in religion, philosophy, and military matters. She was described as affectionate and intelligent.

  As the only legitimate son of Napoleon I, the boy was already constitutionally the Prince Imperial and heir apparent. His father also gave him the title King of Rome. The empire was built to last, and the child was its declared future. Then, within three years, that empire collapsed.

• 3. The Abdications

  ›

  Napoleon I saw his wife and son for the last time on the 24th of January 1814. After the Six Days' Campaign and the Battle of Paris, he abdicated on the 4th of April 1814 in favour of his three-year-old son. For a brief moment, the child technically became Emperor of the French under the regnal name Napoleon II. Two days later, on the 6th of April, Napoleon I fully abdicated and renounced his own rights to the throne and those of his descendants as well. The conditional abdication collapsed into an unconditional one.

  The Treaty of Fontainebleau gave the child the right to style himself Prince of Parma, of Piacenza, and of Guastalla, and his mother was styled the Duchess of those same territories. It was a consolation title. The coalition that had defeated Napoleon refused to acknowledge his son as any kind of successor.

  Marie Louise had already left the Tuileries Palace on the 29th of March 1814, accompanied by her entourage and her son. They stopped first at the Chateau de Rambouillet, then moved to the Chateau de Blois as the enemy advanced. On the 13th of April, reduced to a smaller party, mother and son were back in Rambouillet, where they met her father, Emperor Francis I of Austria, and Emperor Alexander I of Russia. On the 23rd of April, escorted by an Austrian regiment, they left France. Neither would return.

  The second abdication came in 1815, after Waterloo. Napoleon I abdicated again in favour of his four-year-old son, a child he had not seen since his exile to Elba. A five-member Commission of Government held power for two weeks but never formally summoned Napoleon II as Emperor and never appointed a regent. When the Allies entered Paris on the 7th of July, whatever slim prospect remained for the young Napoleon evaporated.

• 4. Franz of Vienna

  ›

  From the spring of 1814 onward, the boy was known in Austria as Franz, a German cognate of his second given name, Francois. His grandfather, Emperor Francis, awarded him the title Duke of Reichstadt in 1818. By 1820, he had completed his elementary studies and moved into military training, learning German, Italian, and mathematics alongside advanced physical conditioning. His army career formally began at age twelve, in 1823, when he was made a cadet in the Austrian Army.

  Tutors described him as intelligent, serious, and focused. By the time he was seventeen, he had grown to nearly 1.8 metres tall. His budding military record fascinated European courts and alarmed French leaders, both of whom watched to see whether this Bonaparte heir might one day resurface as a political force.

  He was not allowed to. Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich kept Franz as a bargaining piece with France rather than as a soldier. Metternich even rejected a request for Franz to move to a warmer climate in Italy for his health, and he blocked the young man from joining the army traveling to Italy to suppress a rebellion. The constraint was deliberate: anyone in the Bonaparte family regaining political power was, in Metternich's view, a threat.

  When his stepfather, Adam Albert von Neipperg, died, Franz learned that his mother had borne two illegitimate children to Neipperg before their marriage. He grew distant from his mother after that. To his friend Anton von Prokesch-Osten, he said: "If Josephine had been my mother, my father would not have been buried at Saint Helena, and I should not be at Vienna. My mother is kind but weak; she was not the wife my father deserved."

• 5. Death and What Remained

  ›

  In 1831, Franz was given command of an Austrian battalion. He never got the chance to serve in any meaningful capacity. In 1832 he caught pneumonia and spent several months bedridden. On the 22nd of July 1832, he died of tuberculosis at Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna. He was twenty-one years old. Near the end, he is reported to have said: "My birth and my death will be the only point of remembrance."

  His remains were interred in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna. On the 15th of December 1940, Adolf Hitler ordered those remains transferred to the dome of Les Invalides in Paris, where his father had been returned in December 1840 during the July Monarchy. The transfer was a political gesture, an attempt to associate the Third Reich with Napoleonic prestige. His heart and intestines, however, remained in Vienna, as was traditional for members of the Habsburg family. His heart rests in Urn 42 of the Herzgruft, the Heart Crypt.

  The journalist Henri Rochefort later joked that Napoleon II, having never actually governed, was France's best leader, since he brought no war, no taxes, and no tyranny. It was a sardonic compliment, but it carried a real edge.

• 6. The Eaglet in Art and Rumor

  ›

  Edmond Rostand wrote a play called L'Aiglon in 1900, giving the young Napoleon his best-known nickname: the Eaglet. The play fixed him in the French imagination as a romantic, tragic figure. Serbian composer Petar Stojanovic composed an operetta titled Napoleon II: Herzog von Reichstadt, which premiered in Vienna in the 1920s. Victor Tourjansky directed a French-language film titled L'Aiglon in 1931 and also directed a separate German-language version. In 1937, Arthur Honegger and Jacques Ibert collaborated on an opera also called L'Aiglon.

  Alongside the art came the gossip. Franz was noted for his friendship with Sophie, a Bavarian princess of the House of Wittelsbach. Sophie was described as intelligent, ambitious, and strong-willed, with little in common with her husband Franz Karl, who was the brother of Empress Marie Louise. Rumors circulated of a love affair between Sophie and Franz, and some gossip held that Sophie's second son, Maximilian I of Mexico, born in 1832, was the result of that affair. The rumors were never substantiated, but they persisted long enough to be recorded alongside his legacy.

  The cousin who did rule, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, founded the Second French Empire in 1852 and took the regnal name Napoleon III, deliberately skipping the number two as though acknowledging the ghost of a reign that had lasted two days.