What comes to mind when you hear the words “Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France”? We’re guessing it’s a certain petit corporal in a bicorne hat, rearing up majestically on a horse as he conquers half of Europe. But what if we told you there was another Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte?
A Bonaparte who not only managed to rule France for longer than his famous predecessor, but basically created modern Paris. Well, meet that man. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, aka Napoleon III, was the nephew of actual Napoleon.
As a child, he was forced to watch as the French Empire collapsed and his family was driven into hiding. As an adult, he single handedly returned the empire from ruin, and then ruled it for 22 years. The man who created modern Paris, the politician who made France great again, and the general who led his nation into a ruinous war… Napoleon III was all these things and many more.
This is the story of history’s forgotten Bonaparte. The Boy Who Would be Emperor On March 20, 1811, cannons boomed out across Paris. Revelers gathered outside the Tuileries Palace.
It was official: Emperor Napoleon had a son! Had he been old enough to understand the news, 3-year old Charles Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte may have felt sadness. Born on April 20, 1808, the boy was the younger son of Louis Bonaparte, brother of the Emperor, and Queen Hortense of Holland who, just to gross you out a little, was also Louis Bonaparte’s niece.
More important than his parents’ creepy relationship, though, was that Louis-Napoleon was a potential heir to the imperial crown, alongside his older brother, Napoleon-Louis. Yep, Louis-Napoleon, star of our story, had an older brother called Napoleon-Louis. Like there aren’t already too many French guys running around with the name Napoleon here.
Or maybe we should say he had been an heir. Prior to that March day in 1811, Emperor Napoleon had no legitimate son to inherit the crown. Now, though, he no longer had any need of his nephews.
This was tragic, not just from the perspective of Louis-Napoleon not being emperor, but also because producing new Bonapartes was the only reason his parents were married. Louis and Hortense hated one another. By 1810, they couldn’t even live in the same country.
Hortense had taken the boys to Paris, while Louis remained in Holland. Not that young Louis-Napoleon saw much of his famous uncle in the French capital. No longer a likely heir, he spent the early 1810s simply hanging around, waiting for his newborn cousin to supplant him as the future emperor.
He didn’t have to wait very long. In 1812, Emperor Napoleon made the really stupid mistake of invading Russia. Barely 18 months later the French empire was in ruins and Paris under allied occupation.
Realizing the jig was up, desperate to save his dynasty, Napoleon abdicated and made his three year old son Emperor Napoleon II on April 4, 1814. The occupying allies said “pfft, yeah right,” and forced the entire Bonaparte line to abdicate two days later on April 6, before handing young Napoleon II over to Austria. If you responded to this video of Napoleon III with “dudes, what about Napoleon II?
You missed out a whole regnal number! ” that’s why. In the aftermath of Waterloo, the entire Bonaparte clan was forced into exile.
Louis-Napoleon and his family resettled in Switzerland, where they could do nothing but watch as France abolished its empire and restored the monarchy. It could have been a crushing psychological blow, were it not for Queen Hortense. From the moment they reached exile, Hortense started grooming Louis-Napoleon and his brother to become future emperors.
It was a patently absurd thing to do. It would also turn out to be right. On May 5, 1821, Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on St.
Helena. Back in Europe, the news made all the great powers suddenly super nervous about young Napoleon II. So worried were they about this child prisoner taking his father’s mantle that they completely overlooked Louis-Napoleon.
No one noticed as he and his brother moved to Italy’s Papal states in 1826. No one noticed as they joined a Carbonari lodge and training in revolutionary warfare. Like an audience watching a magic trick, Europe’s great powers were too busy looking at the wrong Napoleon.
By the time they realized their mistake, it was too late. On July 22, 1832, Napoleon II caught pneumonia in Austria and died, aged 21. When the news hit, all surviving members of the Bonaparte line were quick to renounce their claims to the imperial crown.
With one exception. The year before, in 1831, Louis-Napoleon’s older brother, Napoleon-Louis, had been carried off by an outbreak of measles. That meant that the chance to become Napoleon III passed straight on to Louis-Napoleon.
His mother’s prediction had come true. He was heir to the French Empire. 1832-1848: The Clown So, here’s the thing about suddenly declaring yourself emperor of France: it doesn’t actually make you emperor of France.
Trust us, we’ve tried. That’s not to say Louis-Napoleon’s claim was empty. There was still a large contingency of Bonapartists in France, looking to revive the empire.
France itself was unstable. In July 1830, the Three Glorious Days had toppled the restored Bourbons and put the July Monarchy on the throne; while June 1832 had seen another attempted revolution against the July Monarchy, this time involving a lot more showtunes. (That’s a Les Misérables reference there, kids!
) It wasn’t impossible, therefore, to imagine some charismatic leader with the Bonaparte name rallying the people of France to his side and overthrowing the government. Sadly, Louis-Napoleon was not that man. Napoleon III was one weird looking guy.
A member of his entourage once described him as “a small man, with a long, fat face, broad drooping shoulders, a fat torso, and very short legs. He walked slowly, with his feet pointing out, and his body tilted to the left side. ” He was puffed up and pompous, prone to prancing around in military regalia.
Although he was said to be charming in private, Europe at large regarded Louis-Napoleon as a clown. The thing is, he kinda was. Take the Strasbourg coup.
On October 30, 1836, Louis-Napoleon tried to seize control of France by walking into a military garrison in Strasbourg and rallying the men to his cause. Instead, the garrison commander had all the mutineers arrested and Louis-Napoleon was deported to America. Not that the exile lasted long.
In August 1837, Queen Hortense fell seriously ill. Louis-Napoleon caught the first boat back to Europe to be at her side when she passed away on October 5. Rather than return to America in the wake of his mother’s death, Louis-Napoleon instead went to London.
It was while in the British capital that he cooked up boneheaded coup attempt number two. By 1840, the July Monarchy was unpopular. Looking to prop up his support, King Louis Philippe arranged to have Napoleon Bonaparte’s remains reinterred in Paris’s Les Invalides.
Across the channel, Louis-Napoleon mistook the celebrations for a sign the French were crying out for another Emperor Bonaparte. So, on August 5, 1840, he rounded up a gang of 56 mercenaries and staged a landing at Boulogne-sur-Mer. The plan was that the sight of Louis-Napoleon would inspire the population of France to revolt, overthrow the July Monarchy, hoist Louis-Napoleon up on their shoulders and declare him Emperor of the French!
Instead, the emperor was once again promptly arrested. The coup of 1840 was so flagrantly incompetent that it probably saved Louis-Napoleon’s life. Le Journal des Débats wrote, "one doesn't kill crazy people, one just locks them up.
" The July Monarchy agreed. Rather than death, Louis-Napoleon was condemned to life imprisonment in Ham fortress near Reims. Despite his insurrectionary past, Louis-Napoleon’s imprisonment was kinda comfortable.
He had a large library and was allowed to read and write at leisure. He wound up learning so much that he took to calling his prison “the university of Ham. ” He even managed to write and publish a book, L'extinction du pauperism (the Extinction of Poverty) which was almost Marxist in its treatment of the poor.
The book became a surprise bestseller in France, and earned Louis-Napoleon a strong base of support among the workers. By 1846, though, Louis-Napoleon had grown tired of Ham University. On May 25, he escaped by dressing as a laborer and simply walking out the front door.
He resurfaced in London a few days later, and went back to his impotent coup plotting. By now, the self-proclaimed Napoleon III was now almost 40, and had nothing but two failed coups to his name. It would take a spectacular turnaround for Louis-Napoleon to fulfil his mother’s dreams and become emperor.
The entire social order of France would have to be exploded like a volcano had just erupted underneath it. Little did anyone realize that, as the 1840s drew to a close, a volcano was exactly what France was sitting on. 1848: Vive la (autre) Révolution!
Remember how, back in 1830, the July Monarchy came to power in France on the back of a revolution? Well, in 1848, it exited in exactly the same way. On February 22, 1848, a government ban on people meeting for banquets somehow span off into violent street protests.
This in turn somehow led to King Louis Philippe abdicating, the monarchy being abolished, and the Second French Republic being declared on February 26. This was the moment Louis Napoleon had been dreaming of. Not two days later, on February 28, he arrived in Paris and offered the revolutionary Provisional Government his help.
The Provisional Government promptly sent him back into exile. Yep, France may have revolted, but it was not a revolt aimed at putting a Bonaparte in power. The new republican government wanted liberal reform, not some bumbling clown pretending to be his famous uncle.
But Louis-Napoleon wasn’t as stupid as his enemies thought. Back in England, he settled down to watch events unfold, biding his time. He didn’t have to wait long.
On June 23, 1848, the workers of Paris revolted against the Provisional Government, who they felt had betrayed the revolution. The result was the June Days, a three day massacre which saw 1,500 Parisians killed. When it was over, the Second Republic still stood.
But those connected to it were now even less popular than the July Monarchy had been. All of which put Louis-Napoleon in an excellent position. On September 17-18, 1848, France held elections for the Constituent Assembly.
Louis-Napoleon got on the ticket and won five departments. The Assembly was forced to lift his exile. Now legally back in France, Louis-Napoleon began campaigning energetically for the upcoming presidential elections.
He ran as an outsider populist, promising L'extinction du pauperism to the poor, military discipline to Bonapartists, and a president untainted by the June Days to everyone else. The results, on December 10, 1848, were a landslide. Louis-Napoleon romped home with 74% of the vote.
Elites were left gasping in his dust. This clown was now president? Still, his opponents comforted themselves with the knowledge that the new constitution only allowed Presidents one four year term.
By 1852, President Louis-Napoleon would be gone. After all, it’s not like he had a habit of launching coups or anything. Louis-Napoleon’s motivations revealed themselves slowly.
The self-styled “Prince-President” at first worked with the National Assembly, supporting populist moves like sending the military to Rome to protect the Pope from revolutionaries. In fact, things went so slowly that nobody even seemed to notice the way Louis-Napoleon was stuffing all the key posts in government and the army with loyalists. Y’know, just like someone plotting a coup might do.
In 1851, Louis-Napoleon finally came into the open with his ambitions. He asked the National Assembly to amend the constitution to let him run again. They said “no”.
So the Prince-President got rid of them. December 2 is a special day for Bonapartists. It’s the day Napoleon was coronated in 1804.
It’s also the day he defeated the Third Coalition at the Battle of Austerlitz. In 1851, it also became the day that Louis-Napoleon finally did a coup right. Overnight, 30,000 army loyalists occupied Paris.
People awoke to posters announcing the National Assembly had been dissolved. Although some die hard Republicans manned the barricades, it wasn’t enough. On December 4, 1851, Paris fell.
President Bonaparte announced the effective dissolution of the Second Republic, then held a referendum just to check that this was all cool with everyone. He won by an enormous margin. Ten months later, in November 1852, he held another referendum on restoring the French empire and giving himself near-unlimited power.
He won that, too. On December 2, 1852, the first anniversary of his coup, Louis-Napoleon was officially crowned Napoleon III, Emperor of the Second French Empire. This is actually what Karl Marx’s famous quote refers to, about history repeating itself “first as tragedy then as farce.
” But what did Louis-Napoleon care? He’d finally done it. He’d achieved that impossible dream his mother had set for him, back when they were both living as exiles.
The world had laughed at him, and he’d won. Now it was time to show them just how wrong they were. The Authoritarian Empire (1852-1860) What does a guy who’s been lusting after power for basically his entire life do when he finally gets it?
In the case of Napoleon III, the answer is: everything at once. The period of 1852-1860 is known as the Authoritarian Empire, and it’s the period when Napoleon III ruled like a mad cross between a total despot, a liberal utopian, and a kid on a sugar rush running around trying to do a bazillion things at once. His biggest project was Paris.
At the time, the City of Lights was more like the City of Horrible Smells and Oh My God What’s that Floating in the Seine, Seriously You Guys! The French capital was dirty. Cholera outbreaks were common.
The streets were crowded slums. Everything you’re picturing as Paris is exactly what the city wasn’t in 1852. One of Emperor Napoleon III’s first acts was to call architect Baron Haussmann into his office and tell him “go forth and bring in air, light and cleanliness.
” Together, the two men wrote the Paris street plan of today. They knocked down slums, built parks, improved sanitation, gave every worker a home, created the sweeping boulevards Paris is famous for. Those elegant buildings that pop into your head whenever you hear “Paris”?
This is when they first appear. It’s also when Paris first gets its nickname. Haussmann installed so many gas streetlights that the capital was christened the City of Lights.
Still, Napoleon III’s reign wasn’t just construction work. He made education free and compulsory, lifted the ban on women gaining higher education, instituted public pensions, and ushered in agricultural reforms that wiped out famines in France permanently. He also made the state invest heavily in railway and steamship building, and opened lines of guaranteed credit to small businessowners.
It was almost like a New Deal of the 1850s, an Old New Deal, if you like. And it worked. By 1870, the economy was growing at 5% a year, while industrial output had boomed by 75%.
In short, the clown turned out to be not such a clown after all. Napoleon III even managed to grab France some choice colonies like New Caledonia (acquired 1853), Vietnam (acquired 1858), and Cambodia (acquired 1863). Not that we should gloss over his authoritarian side.
While France boomed economically, socially it transformed into a police state. There was censorship, restrictions on association and free speech, and spies everywhere. And then there was the sticky topic of war.
The period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until the rise of the Second French Empire hadn’t seen a single conflict between Europe’s Great Powers. Barely was Napoleon III’s throne warm from his imperial backside than the Crimean War erupted in 1853. Now, the Crimean War is super complicated, and it would be unfair to blame it all on Napoleon III.
But he was itching for a fight, and he pressed forward where maybe others would have backed down. The result was a conflict that killed nearly a million people, but left France and her ally Britain newly victorious on the European stage. This confidence boost led in turn to Napoleon III getting involved with Italy’s Second War of Unification in 1859.
Given Italian nationalists had tried to assassinate him the year before – throwing a bomb at his carriage that killed 14 of his entourage – you might have expected Napoleon III to fight against unification, but no. He sent the French army to help the Kingdom of Sardinia kick the Austrians out of their Italian colonies. They won that war, too, which is why Nice and Savoy are currently part of France.
By 1860, Louis-Napoleon was riding high. As Napoleon III he really had made France great again. He’d also convinced himself that he was a tactical military genius, on a par with his legendary uncle.
He’d even found time to marry countess Eugénie de Montijo. But you know what they say about pride. It always comes before a fall.
And Louis-Napoleon was a legendary fool. The Liberal Empire (1860 – 1870) Historians of the Second French Empire often call the period after 1860 the “Liberal Empire”. Why?
Well, it’s the period when Napoleon III pivoted from being a nasty despot to a slightly more cuddly one. The transformation came in 1860. To head off a political crisis over the huge loans his projects were racking up, Louis-Napoleon offered his Senate new powers and eased censorship.
The changes were enough to keep him in power, and led to more liberalization down the line. Yet all this is really just a sideshow to the two major events of 1862. The first was something of a private problem.
Louis-Napoleon’s reign had been partially held together by his boundless energy but in 1862, he developed exceedingly painful bladder stones that sapped his energy and left him reliant on those around him. The second was far more consequential for world history. The rise of Otto von Bismarck.
We already have a Biographics video in the works about Bismarck, so we won’t get too sidetracked with him here, but to give you a very quick overview: Bismarck was the Minister President of Prussia, a Germanic country roughly analogous to modern Eastern Germany and northern Poland with its capital in Berlin. Bismarck was a firm believer in both the strategic use of warfare and the unification of all the many German statelets into a single “Germany”. He was also a political genius who didn’t take fools lightly.
Big problem for Louis-Napoleon. Not that tiny Prussia appeared much of threat to France in 1862. When Bismarck went to war against the Danes in 1864, Napoleon III barely noticed.
In October 1865, Louis-Napoleon even promised the Iron Chancellor that France wouldn’t intervene if Prussia went to war with Austria. Less than a year later, the Seven Weeks War ended with Vienna beaten. Louis-Napoleon actually mediated the peace talks, which oversaw the creation of a sort of half-unified Germany: the Northern German Confederation.
This was a problem, because by now it was clear that this thing called Germany was becoming extremely big and extremely powerful in an extremely short space of time. But Napoleon III was simply too arrogant, or too deluded to realize the threat Germany posed. He still thought he was the senior partner in his relationship with Bismarck.
It wasn’t until Bismarck blocked the French annexation of Luxembourg by threatening war that Louis-Napoleon realized he was in way over his head. The trouble was, everyone else realized it, too. When France backed off on Luxembourg, Bismarck was able to see just how weak the Empire was.
The French public turned on their emperor. In the 1869 elections, the government nearly lost control of the senate. By the end of 1869, Napoleon III was forced to fully liberalize the Empire just to keep power, turning it into a kind of constitutional monarchy.
Unfortunately, the change meant listening more than ever to what the public wanted. And what the public wanted was war with Prussia. The Death of an Emperor Even by the standards of the 19th Century, the causes of the Franco-Prussian War are ridiculous beyond belief.
In Spain, Queen Isabella abdicated the throne, and a Prussian prince offered to take her place. France said no, and sent their ambassador to tell the Prussian King to back off. The ambassador met the king on a walk, shouted at him for a minute and stormed off.
And so the Franco-Prussian War started. OK, it was slightly more complicated than that. The real trigger was the Ems Dispatch, which contained an account of the meeting between the king and ambassador that was perfectly calibrated to make both sides think they’d been grievously insulted.
It was edited by Bismarck, who by now had decided a quick war with the French would be the perfect bonding exercise to seal German unification. He got his wish. On July 19, 1870, France declared war on Prussia.
The French army’s 280,000 troops were mobilized. Despite being shockingly ill by this stage, Napoleon III rode out to personally lead the troops. Amusingly, his staff were so sure they’d soon be conquering German territory that they forgot to pack any maps of their own country.
The first engagement came on August 4, 1870. It was a massacre. The well-trained Prussians made mincemeat out of Louis-Napoleon’s shambolic army for two whole days.
After a staggering retreat, the French fought again on August 16. Again, they were wiped out. Getting desperate, Louis-Napoleon tried to summon the spirit of his dead uncle.
He gathered all remaining French soldiers for an attack on the Prussian troops besieging Metz. It was exactly the sort of foolhardy gamble his uncle would have made. The difference is, his uncle would have pulled it off.
On September 1, 1870, the French and Prussians fought the Battle of Sedan, which could just as well be called The Defeat of Sedan. The French were pulverized. The Prussians managed to encircle and capture their entire army.
Among those arrested was Louis-Napoleon. When the news of their emperor’s capture reached Paris on September 4, the government was so outraged that it voted then and there to abolish the Second French Empire along with its useless emperor. France immediately became the Third Republic.
It wasn’t the end of the war. That dragged on through the grueling Siege of Paris. But, for Louis-Napoleon, it was all over.
Louis-Napoleon was kept prisoner until a peace treaty was signed and the unification of Germany declared on January 18, 1871. Finally, in March, the now-former emperor was released back to exile in England. But the humiliations weren’t over yet.
In the wake of France’s epic defeat, Paris was seized by a radical revolutionary group that became known as the Paris Commune. The Communards ruled for two months before putting Paris to the torch when the French army retook the city. The new Paris Louis-Napoleon had spent so long building was burned to the ground.
Although it would be rebuilt to his designs, he wouldn’t live to see it. Over in England, Louis-Napoleon had settled in the village of Chislehurst with his wife Eugénie and their son, still hopefully called the Prince-Imperial. It was a short, painful retirement.
Louis-Napoleon’s health got worse until, on January 9, 1873, he went to hospital for a last ditch operation to cure his bladder stones. He died under the knife, aged 65. All those times he’d listened to his mother as a young exile and dreamed of being emperor, he could never have dreamed it’d end like this.
In 1879, Louis-Napoleon’s heir, the Prince Imperial, also died, extinguishing their family’s line. Two years later, Eugénie had both of them reburied in Farnborough, a pleasantly boring town some 30 miles from London. Although the tomb that holds Napoleon III remains a tourist attraction, it’s hardly Les Invalides.
So what, in the end, did Louis-Napoleon accomplish? Well, he ruled France for longer than his uncle did, and he undoubtedly oversaw an industrial boom that modernized the French economy. He founded colonies, like New Caledonia, that are still departments of France today, and he promoted workers’ and women’s rights at a time when it was deeply unfashionable.
On the other hand, he took France from a peaceful state back to one of dangerous warfare and paid a catastrophically high price. The peace settlement after the Franco-Prussian war crippled France all the way up until WWI. But perhaps the biggest thing the other Emperor Bonaparte accomplished was becoming the other Emperor Bonaparte.
This was a man who as a child was banned from his home country, forced to live in exile, and derided as a clown. Yet through sheer dogged determination, he managed to conquer the very system that had locked him out – if only for a time. Was he an clown, a tyrant, or a visionary leader let down by one disastrous lapse in judgement?
The jury’s still out on that one. But there’s one thing we cannot deny Louis-Napoleon. He was, and forever will be, Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.
