Napoleon III

Biography

Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Paris in 1808, the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and a nephew of Napoleon I. After the fall of the First Empire he grew up in exile, mainly in Switzerland, and from 1832 he was the effective heir of the Bonapartist cause. He set out his political ideas, a blend of popular sovereignty and strong government, in books such as Les Idees napoleoniennes.

He twice tried to overthrow King Louis-Philippe, at Strasbourg in 1836 and at Boulogne in 1840. The second attempt led to imprisonment in the fortress of Ham, from which he escaped to England in 1846. After the February Revolution of 1848 he was elected to the National Assembly and, in December, won the first French presidential election by a landslide. Barred from a second term, he dissolved the Assembly in the coup of 2 December 1851 and a year later made himself Emperor of the French.

The Second Empire saw fast industrial growth, railway building, banking reform and Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris, and in the 1860s a gradual liberalisation of the regime. Abroad he fought Russia alongside Britain in the Crimean War, helped Italian unification against Austria and gained Savoy and Nice, and enlarged the colonial empire, but his intervention in Mexico ended in failure.

In July 1870 he declared war on Prussia. He was captured with his army at Sedan and deposed when the Third Republic was proclaimed. After his release he went into exile in England and died at Chislehurst in 1873.