Napoleon III

• 1. Introduction

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  Napoleon III was born in the Tuileries Palace in Paris on the night of the 19th-the 20th of April 1808 - the first Bonaparte prince born after the proclamation of the First French Empire. His godfather was the Emperor Napoleon I himself. His godmother was Empress Marie-Louise. And yet within a few years, the entire Bonaparte family would be driven into exile, and this boy would spend decades as a wandering pretender, twice imprisoned, twice a fugitive, before winning the largest popular mandate any French leader had ever received. He ended up as the longest-reigning French head of state since the collapse of the ancien regime. He would remake Paris from a city of medieval alleys into the wide-boulevarded capital the world still recognizes today. And he would fall, captured on a battlefield in 1870, his empire gone, his health broken, dying in an English exile in 1873. The questions his life raises are still sharp. How does a man imprisoned for life escape to win 74 percent of a presidential election? How does an emperor who called himself a man of peace drag France into wars across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Mexico? And who, precisely, was the real Napoleon III - adventurer, philosopher, modernizer, or autocrat?

• 2. An Exile's Education

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  Hortense de Beauharnais and her young son moved from Aix-les-Bains to Bern to Baden-Baden before settling in a lakeside house at Arenenberg in the Swiss canton of Thurgau. That peripatetic childhood left a lasting mark. Louis Napoleon attended a gymnasium school in Augsburg, Bavaria, which gave him, for the rest of his life, a slight but noticeable German accent when he spoke French. His home tutor was Philippe Le Bas, an ardent republican and the son of a revolutionary who had been a close friend of Robespierre. Le Bas shaped the boy's politics as much as his grammar. When Hortense moved to Rome in 1823, the fifteen-year-old threw himself into learning Italian, exploring ancient ruins, and, as the source notes, mastering the arts of seduction, which he used often in his later life. He befriended the French Ambassador, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, the father of romanticism in French literature. He also reunited with his older brother Napoleon-Louis, and together they joined the Carbonari, the secret revolutionary societies fighting Austria's grip on northern Italy. In the spring of 1831, Austrian and Papal forces launched an offensive against the Carbonari. The two brothers fled. During their escape, Napoleon-Louis contracted measles and died in his brother's arms on the 17th of March 1831. Louis Napoleon and his mother eventually crossed into France traveling under the name "Hamilton", taking a room at the Hotel du Holland on the Place Vendome. They arrived on the 23rd of April 1831. Louis Napoleon offered to serve as an ordinary soldier in the French Army if he could keep his own name. When told he would need to change it, he refused point-blank. He was ordered out of Paris on the 5th of May 1831 - the tenth anniversary of Napoleon I's death - as crowds gathered outside their hotel in a public demonstration of mourning for the Emperor. That moment told him something he would never forget: Bonapartist sentiment was still alive in France.

• 3. The Philosopher Pretender

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  When the Duke of Reichstadt - known among Bonapartists as Napoleon II - died in 1832, Louis Napoleon became the de facto head of the dynasty. He responded not by rallying troops but by picking up his pen. Enrolled in the Swiss Army and training as an artillery officer (a deliberate echo of his uncle's own early career), he published his first political essay, Reveries politiques, in 1833 at the age of 25. The following year came Considerations politiques et militaires sur la Suisse, and in 1839 he published Les Idees napoleoniennes, a compendium of his ideas that eventually appeared in three editions and was translated into six languages. As the early twentieth century English historian H. A. L. Fisher observed, the program of the Empire was not the improvisation of a vulgar adventurer but the product of deep reflection. Louis Napoleon called for what he described as a monarchy which procures the advantages of the Republic without the inconveniences - a regime strong without despotism, free without anarchy, independent without conquest. He grounded everything in two principles: universal suffrage and the primacy of the national interest. His 1844 book L'extinction du pauperisme, written while he was imprisoned, went further still. In it he argued that the working class had nothing and that it was necessary to give them ownership, work, rights, and a future. The book was widely reprinted and circulated across France, and it played a direct part in his future electoral success. These were not the writings of a man who simply wanted to restore his uncle's throne. They were the writings of someone who believed he had a mission, and who expressed it plainly: "I believe that from time to time, men are created whom I call volunteers of providence, in whose hands are placed the destiny of their countries. I believe I am one of those men."

• 4. Two Coups and a Prison

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  On the 29th of October 1836, Louis Napoleon arrived in Strasbourg dressed in the uniform of an artillery officer. He had brought a regiment colonel over to his cause and briefly seized the prefecture, arresting the prefect. The local general escaped, called in a loyal regiment, and the mutineers surrendered within hours. The French newspaper Le Journal des Debats dismissed the whole venture: "this surpasses comedy. One does not kill madmen; one locks them up." King Louis-Philippe demanded his extradition from Switzerland, but the Swiss refused, noting that Louis Napoleon was a Swiss soldier and citizen. Rather than cause a diplomatic incident, Louis Napoleon voluntarily left. He traveled to London, Brazil, and New York City, where he met the writer Washington Irving and the elite of New York society. He hurried back to Switzerland when word came that his mother was dying. He reached Arenenberg in time to be with her when she died on the 5th of August 1837. She was buried in France on the 11th of January 1838, and he could not attend because he was not allowed into the country. Back in London, he inherited a large fortune from her and took a house with seventeen servants. He strolled in Hyde Park and later used it as a model when he created the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. He met Benjamin Disraeli and Michael Faraday. On the 6th of August 1840, he tried again: he hired a ship called the Edinburgh Castle, gathered about sixty armed men, and sailed across the Channel to Boulogne. Customs agents stopped him. The soldiers of the garrison refused to join. One man was killed on the beach and the rest were arrested. This time there was no escape to Switzerland. He was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in the fortress of Ham, in the Somme department. The prison register for the 7th of October 1840 recorded him methodically: thirty-two years old, one meter sixty-six, hair and eyebrows chestnut, eyes gray and small, nose large, complexion pale, back bent. He had arrived to serve a life sentence. He walked out in disguise on the 25th of May 1846, dressed as a laborer carrying lumber, his identity borrowed from a workman named Badinguet - a nickname his enemies would use to mock him for years afterward.

• 5. The Landslide and the Crown

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  Louis Napoleon returned to France in late February 1848, just as the July Monarchy collapsed and the Second Republic was proclaimed. He moved carefully. When the provisional government leader Alphonse de Lamartine asked him to leave Paris and wait for calmer times, he complied, writing that he wanted his presence to cause no pretext for his enemies. His pamphlet on the extinction of pauperism circulated widely in Paris, and his name was cheered alongside those of socialist candidates Barbes and Louis Blanc. In the elections of the 17th-the 18th of September, standing as a candidate in thirteen departments, he was elected in five, receiving 110,000 of the 247,000 votes cast in Paris alone - the highest tally of any candidate. By the time the presidential election of the 10th-the 11th of December 1848 arrived, he was the clear favorite, though the scale of what followed surprised almost everyone. He won 5,572,834 votes - 74.2 percent of all votes cast. His nearest rival, the general who had violently suppressed the June Days uprising, received 1,469,156. Lamartine, the poet-philosopher who had led the provisional government, got only 17,000. He won in all but four of France's departments. The new constitution drafted by a commission that included Alexis de Tocqueville required the president to step down after one term. When Louis Napoleon could not get the two-thirds majority needed to change the law - the vote in July 1851 was 446 to 278 in favor, still short of the threshold - he moved on the night of the 1st-the 2nd of December 1851 to seize power by force. His half-brother Charles, duc de Morny, organized the operation quietly. Soldiers occupied newspaper offices, the national printing house, and the Palais Bourbon. Sixteen members of the National Assembly were arrested in their homes. Victor Hugo tried to organize resistance on the 3rd of December; about a thousand insurgents raised barricades, but the army deployed thirty thousand troops and crushed them, killing an estimated three hundred to four hundred people. A plebiscite held on the 20th-the 21st of December recorded 7,439,216 votes in favor of the coup against 641,737 opposed. On the 2nd of December 1852 - exactly one year after the coup - the Second French Empire was formally proclaimed.

• 6. Remaking France

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  When Louis Napoleon became Napoleon III, France had only 3,500 kilometers of railway, compared with 10,000 in England and 800 in Belgium, a country one-twentieth the size of France. By 1870, France had 20,000 kilometers of track carrying over 100 million passengers a year. The number of railway companies shrank from eighteen in 1848 to six by the end of the Empire. He promoted the creation of new banks: Credit Mobilier, Credit Lyonnais (founded 1863), and Societe Generale (founded 1864) provided the financing for his major projects. Napoleon backed the construction of the Suez Canal between 1859 and 1869, funded by shares on the Paris stock market and led by the former French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps. It was opened by Empress Eugenie with a performance of Verdi's opera Aida. One project in the Gironde department drained and reforested 10,000 square kilometers of moorland, creating the Landes forest, the largest maritime pine forest in Europe. The first department store, Bon Marche, opened in Paris in 1852 in a modest building; its income grew from 450,000 francs a year to 20 million. Its founder, Aristide Boucicaut, later commissioned a landmark building designed by Louis-Charles Boileau and Gustave Eiffel that opened in 1869. Au Printemps followed in 1865 and La Samaritaine in 1870. For the capital itself, Napoleon appointed Georges-Eugene Haussmann as prefect of the Seine and gave him extraordinary powers to remake the city. Napoleon had written in 1842 that he wanted to be a second Augustus, because Augustus made Rome a city of marble. His hydraulic engineer, Eugene Belgrand, built a new aqueduct drawing water from the Vanne River in the Champagne region; the combined works increased Paris's water supply from 87,000 to 400,000 cubic meters per day. Buildings along the new boulevards were required to match in height and style, faced in cream-coloured stone. The emperor built the Gare de Lyon in 1855 and the Gare du Nord in 1865. The Paris Opera, designed by Charles Garnier as the largest theater in the world, was meant to crown the center of the new city. Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand led the Service of Promenades and Plantations; he and Napoleon planned four great parks at the cardinal points of the compass, aiming for one park within a ten-minute walk of every quartier in Paris. Alphand called the smaller neighbourhood parks "green and flowering salons".

• 7. Wars Won and Wars Lost

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  On the evening of the 14th of January 1858, three bombs were thrown at the imperial carriage as Napoleon III and Eugenie were on their way to the opera. Eight members of the escort and bystanders were killed and over one hundred people injured. The leader of the plot, the Italian nationalist Felice Orsini, was tried, convicted, and executed on the 13th of March 1858. The attack paradoxically intensified Napoleon's determination to support Italian unification. He had already agreed in July 1858, in the secret Plombieres Agreement with Count Cavour of Piedmont-Sardinia, to send French forces to drive the Austrians from northern Italy. In exchange, France would receive Savoy and the County of Nice. Napoleon personally led French troops to Italy, landing in Genoa on the 18th of May 1859. At the battle of Magenta on the 4th of June, the French center came close to breaking before General Patrice de MacMahon's flanking attack turned the fight. The Austrians lost seven thousand killed and five thousand captured; the French, four thousand killed. The color magenta - named by French chemists for their newly discovered bright purple dye - was coined in the immediate aftermath of the battle. At Solferino on the 24th of June, approximately forty thousand casualties fell on both sides, including 11,500 French. Napoleon III, horrified, proposed an armistice on the 8th of July. France gained its promised territories, and the war helped trigger Italian unification. The Crimean War, fought between 1853 and 1856 in alliance with Britain, had ended with the defeat of Russia and the peace negotiations held in Paris from the 25th of February to the 8th of April 1856. During the 332 days of the siege of Sevastopol, the French lost 95,000 soldiers - 75,000 of them to disease rather than combat. These victories were followed, however, by the Mexican intervention, which aimed to establish a Second Mexican Empire under French protection, and ended in total failure. From 1866, the mounting power of Prussia and Otto von Bismarck's drive for German unification placed France under mounting pressure. In July 1870, Napoleon reluctantly declared war. The French Army was rapidly defeated, and he was captured at the Battle of Sedan. He was dethroned, the Third Republic was proclaimed, and he went into exile in England, where he died on the 9th of January 1873. He had asked, during his years of political writing, for a regime strong without despotism. In the end, Sedan gave a different answer - and a witness to that unraveling was Victor Hugo, who had supported Louis Napoleon in 1848, then spent two decades in exile after the coup of 1851, refusing every amnesty Napoleon III offered him.