Napoleon III

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the first Napoleon, was France's first elected president, in 1848, and then, after seizing power in a coup, its last monarch, ruling as Emperor Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870. His reign brought railways, banks and a rebuilt Paris, but also press censorship and repression of opponents. A series of foreign adventures ended in disaster when he was captured by the Prussians at Sedan, and he died in exile in England.

He was born in Paris on 20 April 1808, the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and Hortense de Beauharnais, stepdaughter of Napoleon. After Waterloo the family was banished, and he grew up mainly in Switzerland and Germany. As a young man he joined Italian revolutionaries against Austria. From 1832 he regarded himself as heir to the Bonapartist cause and wrote books arguing that a strong ruler could carry out the will of the people.

In October 1836 he tried to raise the garrison of Strasbourg against King Louis-Philippe, and in August 1840 he landed at Boulogne with about sixty armed men. Both attempts collapsed. After the second a court condemned him to life in the fortress of Ham, where he wrote a widely read pamphlet on ending poverty among workers. In May 1846 he walked out disguised as a labourer and escaped to England.

The Revolutions of 1848 overthrew Louis-Philippe and created the Second Republic. Louis Napoleon was elected to the National Assembly and, in December 1848, won the presidency with 74.2 per cent of the vote. Barred by the constitution from a second term, he staged a coup on 2 December 1851: the Assembly was dissolved, resistance in Paris was crushed with perhaps 300 to 400 killed, and about 26,000 people were arrested. Plebiscites, held under heavy official pressure, approved the coup and then, in November 1852, the restoration of the empire. He took the title Napoleon III on 2 December 1852 and married Eugénie de Montijo the following January.

The Second Empire saw the railway network grow from about 3,500 kilometres in 1851 to 20,000 by 1870, new investment banks, expanding industry and the Suez Canal, built by a French-led company and opened in 1869. Baron Haussmann rebuilt central Paris with broad boulevards, parks, sewers and water supplies. A free-trade treaty with Britain was signed in 1860. Workers gained the right to strike in 1864, and girls' schooling expanded. From the 1860s the regime gradually allowed more political freedom.

Allied with Britain, France fought Russia in the Crimean War, and the peace was negotiated in Paris in 1856. In 1859 Napoleon III led an army into Italy against Austria, winning at Magenta and Solferino and helping start the unification of Italy; France received Savoy and Nice in 1860. French forces took Cochinchina and made Cambodia a protectorate. His attempt to install the Austrian archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico failed against the resistance of Benito Juárez; French troops left, and Maximilian was shot in 1867.

As Prussia under Otto von Bismarck grew stronger, Napoleon III failed to find allies or to enlarge the army. In July 1870, after Bismarck's edited Ems telegram inflamed French opinion, France declared war, beginning the Franco-Prussian War. The French were defeated in a series of battles, and on 2 September, at Sedan, the sick emperor surrendered with his army. Two days later a republic was proclaimed in Paris. Released in March 1871, he settled at Chislehurst in Kent, where he died on 9 January 1873 after operations for bladder stones.

Victor Hugo mocked him as "Napoleon the Small", and his foreign policy is generally judged harshly. Historians are kinder to his economic record, his railways and the rebuilding of Paris, which still shape the city today.

Our 1815 map shows France just after his uncle's fall, and the 1878 map shows France after the war of 1870, without Alsace and Lorraine and beside the new German Empire.