Napoleon III, originally Charles Louis Napol�on Bonaparte 1808-73
President of the second French Republic and Emperor of France

Born in Paris, he was the third son of Louis Bonaparte, and a nephew of Napoleon I. His mother was Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Napoleon's first wife, Jos�phine. Brought up in Switzerland, he assisted the Romagna in Italy in its revolt against pontifical rule in 1831. On the death of the Duke of Reichstadt, (Napoleon II), in 1832, he considered himself the head of the Napoleonic dynasty. Between 1832 and 1836 he published his R�veries politiques, Projet de constitution, and Consid�rations politiques et militaires sur la Suisse. Following an unsuccessful action against the French at Strasbourg in 1836 he went to the USA, returning to Europe after his mother's death (1837), and at the insistence of the French government he settled in London. In 1838 he published his Id�es napol�oniennes. In 1840 he made a second and equally abortive attempt on the throne of France at Boulogne, and was imprisoned for life in the fortress of Ham, near Amiens. He continued his Bonapartist propaganda and helped to edit the Dictionnaire de la conversation. He escaped to England in 1846. The revolution of February 1848 was a victory for the workers and he hurried back to France as a virtual nominee of the Fourth Estate, or working-classes. Elected Deputy for Paris and three other departments, he took his seat in the Constituent Assembly on 13 June 1848. Two days later he resigned and left France. His quintuple election recalled him in September, and he won a huge victory over General Louis Cavaignac, his genuinely Republican competitor. On 20 December he took the oath of allegiance to the Republic as President, but at the beginning of 1849 a struggle emerged between the President and the majority of the Assembly. He took command of the army and established his supporters in posts of influence. Hampered by the National Assembly in his efforts to make his power perpetual, he threw off the mask of a constitutional president and on 2 December 1851, with the help of the military, he dissolved the Constitution and imprisoned or deported those who rebelled. France appeared to acquiesce, for when the vote was taken in December, he was re-elected for 10 years by seven million votes. He assumed the title Emperor of France in 1852, a year after the coup d'�tat, in accordance with another plebiscite. Political parties were either demoralized or broken, he gagged the press, awed the bourgeoisie, and courted the clergy to win the peasantry. In 1853 he married Eug�nie de Montijo (1826-1920), a Spanish countess, born in Granada. The emperor now proclaimed the right of peoples to choose their own masters, helping his own cause with the annexation of Savoy and Nice to France (1860), his Mexican intervention through Maximilian of Austria, and in his handling of the Italian question. He regulated the price of bread, encouraged public works for the enrichment of the working-class and peasantry, and prompted the complete remodelling of Paris under the direction of Baron Georges Haussmann. International exhibitions and treaties of commerce were a further inducement to internal peace. His foreign policies flourished with the Crimean War (1854-56), the campaign in Lombardy against Austria (1859), and the expeditions to China (1857-60). He monitored changing public opinion and when his Vie de C�sar, written to extol his own methods of government, met with loud protests he reorganized his army, set himself up more proudly as an arbiter in Europe, and took a more conciliatory attitude to liberalism. In 1869 his Prime Minister Eug�ne Rouher, an advocate of absolutism, was dismissed, and new men were called into power to liberalize the Constitution. By another plebiscite the new parliamentary scheme was sanctioned by seven million votes (May 1870) but when 50,000 dissentient votes given by the army revealed an unsuspected source of danger he contrived a distraction by declaring war against Prussia (July 1870). By the end of July, Prussia had almost double the number of men in the field as the French had and the campaign ended in defeat for Napoleon, who surrendered on 2 September. On 4 September the Second Empire was ended. Until the conclusion of peace he was confined at Wilhelmsh�le. In 1871 he joined the ex-empress at Chislehurst, Kent, and resided there in exile until his death.

Bibliography: F A Simpson, The Rise of Louis Napoleon (3rd edn, 1950)