Napoleon III Emperor of the French (Louis Napoleon Bonaparte) (1808-73). Napoleon III was born Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, son of the great Napoleon's brother Louis, King of Holland, and Josephine's daughter, Hortense Beauharnais. He served in the Swiss artillery, reaching the rank of captain and publishing a textbook on artillery. The deaths of his brother and Napoleon's son left him Bonapartist pretender to the French throne. He tried to subvert the garrisons of Strasbourg in 1836 and Boulogne in 1840. Imprisoned after the latter venture, he escaped in 1846 and returned to France after the 1848 Revolution, being first elected to the Assembly and then, in December, becoming president of the Second Republic.
By cultivating the support of leading officers, whose careers were to profit from the venture, he staged a coup in December 1851. One plebiscite supported increased presidential powers, and another approved the conversion of Second Republic into Second Empire in December 1852. He immediately formed an Imperial Guard and restored the eagle to uniforms. Conviction that he understood military matters was aligned to a dynastic need to show martial prowess, but his attempts to do so by telegraphing instructions to his army in the Crimea were unhelpful.
He married the devoutly Catholic Eugénie de Montijo in 1853, but was to have numerous mistresses. In 1858 he met Cavour, the Piedmontese premier, and agreed to support Piedmont against Austria in the cause of Italian independence (see Italian independence wars). He commanded the army which fought the Italian campaign the following year and won the scrambling victories of Magenta and Solferino. The experience shocked him, and he made peace at Villafranca sooner than the Italians wished, obtaining Nice and Savoy for France.
For the next decade he juggled the conflicting demands of extending liberalism at home with maintaining an ultra-Catholic and forward foreign policy. His Mexican expedition was part of a grand plan to counter ‘Anglo-Saxon’ dominance in the Americas and indeed his concept of a ‘Latin League’ lives on only in the (English) term ‘Latin America’. He was successful in placing his candidate on the throne, less so in pacifying the country, and Union success in the American civil war and the crystallization of the Prussian threat, starkly demonstrated in the Austro-Prussian war, caused him to abandon the enterprise. He supported the introduction of the chassepot breech-loader and used his own money to help develop the mitrailleuse machine gun, but his attempts to reform the French army failed.
On the outbreak of war in 1870 he tinkered with the mobilization plan in order to have a single army to command, for as a Bonaparte he could do little else. However, the war's first battles speedily proved what he already guessed: he was not up to the task, and agonizing kidney stones made clear thought almost impossible. The Bonapartist tradition meant that he had groomed no military successor. Having handed over the Army of the Rhine to Bazaine, he accompanied the Army of Châlons on its journey to Sedan, spent the day courting death, and surrendered, with antique courtesy, to the king of Prussia. His regime collapsed immediately and he died in exile in England. His only son, the plucky Prince Imperial, accompanied British forces to the Zulu war of 1879 and was killed in action.
Napoleon III's reign embodied more good intentions than settled policy, more misjudgement than malice. Yet it was not without considerable economic progress, notably in the 1860s, and saw Paris remodelled to the plans of Baron Haussmann. Part of his tragedy was that he came to believe his own propaganda, and was ensnared by a military tradition he never fully understood.
— Richard Holmes
