Napoleon III., by name CHARLES LOUIS NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, the second emperor of the French, was born at Paris on the 20th of April 1808. His father was Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland, brother of the first emperor, and his mother Hortense Beauharnais, Napoleon I.'s step-daughter (see BONAPARTE). Louis Napoleon and his elder brothers were heirs-presumptive to the imperial throne till the birth of a son to the emperor cast them into a secondary position, whence Louis Napoleon, the only survivor, was drawn in 1832, at the death of Napoleon's only son, to become head of the House of Napoleon. That house, astoundingly risen from the nursery of a Corsican lawyer's wife to imperial and royal thrones, thrust back into private life after a complete mastery in Europe, was again raised to imperial dignity in the person of Napoleon III., only to return to obscurity in the midst of appalling disasters; and it failed to present one of the most truly tragic dramas of all time through the want of real grandeur in both Napoleons and in almost all their blood. Had the nephew been born a scion of the Bourbon house, the part of Louis-Philippe might have been his. But brought up by his mother from the year 1815, precluded by exile and imprisonment till he was far advanced in the years of manhood from learning practical politics, he became a theorist in statecraft and a brooder on the Napoleonic legend which was his only claim to the attention of the nation. He received his early education at his mother's residence, the castle of Arenenberg, in Switzerland, on the borders of Lake Constance. Sent to the gymnasium at Augsburg, he not only acquired there, as well as from the prolonged German surroundings of his private life, a marked German accent, but also developed those features in his individual character which were most akin to the sluggishness of his temperament—uncertainty and indefiniteness of thought, philosophic dreaminess laining every conviction, ambition touched with fatalism firing a morally indifferent soul.
Switzerland was the real foster-mother of the brighter and healthier side of his nature. Had he been practical and a man of rectitude, he could have extracted from his political and social experience of that country principles sufficiently clear and wise to prove themselves the palladium of his later reign. There he developed his aptitude for military science: he followed the courses of instruction given to the Swiss militia officers. Fairly competent in artillery, in engineering, in the exact sciences, in history, and in athletic exercises, he wrote and published at Zurich (1836) a Manuel d'Artillerie. He hastened with his elder brother Louis into Italy in 1830 to assist the province of Romagna in its revolt against pontifical rule, an expedition in which Louis perished of fever, and he was himself severely stricken, but was nursed out of danger by his tender mother. This expedition, though proving that he could act with energy in the discharge of Bonapartist responsibility, was a mere episode in that Swiss period of his life, extending from 1824 to 1836, in which he was exclusively a student and a writer. When at the death of the Duke of Reichstadt he became the head of that rootless growth, the Napoleonic dynasty, he sought as a pretender to lean less on any concrete historical claim to the throne of France than on the partiality of the French to a vainglorious rule, and on the intellectual interest with which he, as a man of letters, could invest the so-called Napoleonic ideas. For sixteen years he sued for the hand of France and the attention of the world, interrupting twice the method of literary courtship to make personal raids upon the kingdom of Louis-Philippe. He had indeed a fair chance. Outside of France, nationalities whose emancipation had been planned by Napoleon I., such as Poland, looked to him to effect their long-deferred liberty (1831). In France he was an outlaw, because a formidable rival to Legitimacy; in the struggle between the junior branch of the Bourbon dynasty and the forces at work since the Revolution, the Bonapartists had a permanent power of intervention and might enlist as their own partisans the masses of Frenchmen who were lukewarm politicians. Moreover, Napoleon I.'s utter failure as an international politician had in no wise shaken the organisation he had given to France; his home legislation had become part and parcel of the nation; French law, French public education, French military institutions, the joint restoration of state and church stood forth as his lasting work.
Almost a stranger to France in nurture of thought and tone of mind, an adventurer rather than a pretender, a philosopher rather than a man of action, taciturn, speculative, driven from within by a set motive rooted in a fixed idea, absorbed with German mysticism and Italian wiliness in a career so fateful to his mind that moral bridling could not avail at its turning-point, a philanthropist in some of his dreams, an idealist in some of his deeds, the heir of the French Cæsar drifted to his destiny, not without some vigour and brightness, a victim to the alleged mission of his race, to which he was enslaved as by hypnotic suggestion. He published in 1832-36 his Réveries politiques, Projet de Constitution, and Considérations politiques et Militaires sur la Suisse. In 1836, speculating on the instability of Louis-Philippe's throne, the disaffection of some of the middle classes, the general favour of his semi-socialistic theories with the advanced parties, and the unspent prestige of Napoleon I., he put his chances to a premature test by appearing among the military at Strasburg, hoping to bribe them into his service by the prospect of their resuming the paramount position which soldiers could not but occupy in a Napoleonic state. The rash young man was easily overpowered and conveyed to America, without being brought to trial. Being under no pledge to stay in America, Louis Napoleon returned to Europe on hearing of his mother's illness. He found her dying; two months later he received her last sighs (3d October 1837). Although the affair of Strasburg had naturally enough caused many people to doubt the talent and the judgment of Louis Napoleon, still Louis-Philippe, who was politically an extremely timid monarch, dreaded some new conspiracy; the French government demanded of Switzerland the expulsion of the obnoxious prince, M. Molé actually enjoining the French ambassador to demand his passports, in case of a refusal. Switzerland had neither the right nor the wish to expel, and was on the point of going to war for the distinguished refugee (who was, in fact, a Swiss citizen) when he resolved to prevent a rupture by leaving his adopted country. He now proceeded to England, and settled in London. With certain members of the British aristocracy he came to live on a footing of considerable intimacy, and he was also an object of languid wonder and interest to the community generally, but he impressed nobody with a belief in his future and his genius; nay, Englishmen erred so far as to suppose that the 'silent man' was merely 'dull.' In 1838 he published in London his Idées Napoléoniennes, which, read in the light of subsequent events, are very significant. Europe generally regarded them as idle dreams; but in France the book went through numerous editions. In 1839 Louis Napoleon was in Scotland, and took part in the celebrated Eglinton tournament. Next year (1840) he made his second attempt on the throne of France at Boulogne. It was as grotesque a failure as the one at Strasburg. Captured on the shore, while endeavouring to make his escape to the vessel that had brought him from England, Louis Napoleon was now brought to trial, and condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the fortress of Ham. Here he continued his Bonapartist propaganda by writing Aux Mânes de l'Empereur, Fragments Historiques, Analyse de la Question de la Suisse, Réponse à M. de Lamartine, Extinction du Pauvérisme, &c.; and actually took part in editing the Dictionnaire de la Conversation, a valuable French encyclopædia. After an imprisonment of more than five years, spent in patient meditation, he made his escape (25th May 1846), by the help of Dr Conneau, in the disguise of a workman, and gained the Belgian frontier, whence he returned to England.
The revolution of February (1848) was a victory of the working-men to whom some of his political theories were especially addressed; he hurried back to France as a virtual nominee of the Fourth Estate, or working-classes in town and country—an embarrassing position, from the obligations of which the smashing up of the Parisian socialists by the forces of General Cavaignac released the future emperor. Being elected deputy for Paris and three other departments, he took his seat in the Constituent Assembly, 13th June 1848. On the 15th he resigned his seat and left France. Recalled in the following September by a quintuple election, he once more appeared in the Assembly and commenced his candidature for the presidency. The direct election of the head of the state by the people, intended as a republican institution, proved itself to be a stepping-stone to Cæsarism, as Louis Napoleon's peculiar conception of a modern imperial democracy is called; in the constitutional history of the second empire such appeals to universal suffrage bear the name of plébiscites. Out of seven and a half million of votes 5,562,834 were recorded for Prince Louis Napoleon; General Cavaignac, his genuine republican competitor, obtaining only 1,469,166.
On the 20th December he took the oath of allegiance to the Republic. For a few days concord seemed established between the different political parties in the Assembly; but the beginning of the year 1849 witnessed the commencement of a series of struggles between the president and his friends on the one side and the majority of the Assembly on the other—the latter being justly penetrated with the conviction that Louis Napoleon was not devoted to the interests of the Republic, but to his own. He became practically a traitor to his republican oath when, in league with monarchical Austria, and the king of Naples, he put down the republican movement in Rome. Then he committed the command of the army to hands devoted to him, he established his personal supporters in posts of honour and influence, he gained by frequent visits the favour of the provincial towns, and by acts of liberality and clemency kept that of the people. He paraded as a protector of popular rights and of national prosperity, laying to the door of the Assembly the deficiencies in his government. Resolved to transform his tenure of power by periodical election into a life-long one, he was hampered by the National Assembly; and, with the example of his uncle's coup d'état (18th Brumaire 1799) before him, he deliberately threw off the mask of a constitutional president, forswore his formal oath, and became a traitor to all society. From that moment a perpetual misunderstanding, badly cloaked by material prosperity and military glory, underlay Napoleon's relation to the French and to Europe generally. His methods of government belonged to no acknowledged régime.
He whom Victor Hugo has satirically called Napoleon-le-Petit fatuously chose the anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz and of Napoleon I.'s coronation to rid himself by arms of the National Assembly, to make himself absolute ruler with the help of the military, and to muzzle all parliamentary opposition (2d December 1851). Imprisonment, banishment, deportation, the bloody repression of popular rebellion marked this black day's work, in which the president was assisted by Morny, Maupas, and St Arnauld. France, whether wearied of the incompetent Democrats, or (as Kinglake supposes) 'cowed' by the terrible audacity of the president, appeared to acquiesce in his act; for when the vote was taken upon it on the 20th and 21st of the same month, he was re-elected for ten years, with all the powers he demanded, by more than 7,000,000 suffrages. The imperial title was assumed exactly a year after the coup d'état, in accordance with another plebiscitary expression of the people's will.
An unlawful empire was now legally established. Men of astuteness and mediocrity took the helm of the state. The parliamentary trappings of the first empire were brought out. Resting on such artificial props as the army and police, Napoleon III. boasted that he was the upholder of law and order. Political parties were either demoralised or broken. He gagged the press, awed the bourgeoisie, and courted the clergy to win the peasantry. Liberals accepted him for fear of the Socialists; the Socialists applauded his plunder of the Orleans family; his duly-rewarded parasitic supporters, such as Jean Fialin, made Vicomte de Persigny, clung to him as to the fount of all honour and profit; foreign monarchies accepted him as a welcome ally in the struggle against liberalism. But unlike his uncle he did not seek matrimonial alliance with the old royal houses. He liked to profess himself the Cæsar of the people, and led to the altar Eugénie de Montijo, a Spanish countess of ordinary blue blood. He endeavoured to gain international acceptance for the just, but in his mouth sophistical, doctrine as to the right of peoples to choose their own masters, availing himself of it in the annexation of Savoy and Nice to France, in his Mexican intervention, and in his handling of the Italian question. At home he kept the people well in hand by an active economic policy. The price of bread was regulated, public works occupied and enriched the working-men in towns, while others were undertaken to protect and enhance in value the property of the peasantry. The complete remodelling of Paris under the direction of Baron Haussmann raised considerably the value of house-property, and by the opening of a network of thoroughfares suitable for the manoeuvres of artillery and cavalry reduced to a minimum the risk arising from insurrectionary movements. The holding of international exhibitions and the signing of treaties of commerce with foreign states acted as a further inducement to internal peace; but the formation of unscrupulous financial, court, and clergy cliques was an ugly blot on this picture of a purely material prosperity.
To the blandishments of work and wealth at home Napoleon III. added the charm of a brilliant foreign policy. We need not dwell on the Crimean war, the campaign in Lombardy against Austria, to which Napoleon was somewhat paradoxically encouraged by the murderous attack of Orsini on his person, the expeditions to Mexico and to China. In all those undertakings Napoleon enjoyed the support if not always the actual co-operation of Great Britain. To Prussia his relations were of a very different kind, a mixture of jealousy and patronage which boded ill for France in the event of an actual conflict.
At the death of Morny in 1865 the soothing effect of Napoleon's measures and also his power to control the nation were well-nigh spent. Again the spirit of France stirred abroad. Napoleon's book, La Vie de César, which he wrote to extol his own methods of government under the guise of honouring Cæsar, met with loud protests. Forewarned, Napoleon reorganised his army, set himself up more proudly as an arbiter in Europe in order to flatter his subjects, and took a more conciliatory attitude to liberalism. His concessions at home were taken advantage of to set up a regular journalistic and parliamentary opposition. In 1869 the Liberal deputy Ollivier was granted a personal interview that he might explain to the emperor the wishes of the people, and Rouher, Napoleon's prime-minister, an advocate of absolutism, was dismissed from office. New men were called into power with Ollivier to liberalise the constitution. Some wrong-headed Bonapartists suggested another coup d'état against the Legislative Assembly, now leavened with opposition. Napoleon was firm enough to resist such nefarious counsels, and appears to have been fairly sincere in his latter-day liberalism. That it was not yet too late to stem the tide of discontent was shown by the result of another plebiscite (the fourth), by which Napoleon's new parliamentary scheme was sanctioned by 7½ million votes (8th May 1870). But burdened as he was by a new policy at home, by financial embarrassments and worries in his own family, in ignorance of the corruption that existed in his ministry of war, he sought in foreign affairs a diversion to his troubles, and thus brought himself all of a sudden to the edge of the abyss. For the Franco-German war, see FRANCE (Vol. IV. p. 782).
Napoleon III. surrendered himself a prisoner at Sedan in September. Till the conclusion of peace he was confined at Wilhelmshöhe. In March 1871 he joined the empress at Chiselhurst, Kent, and resided there till his death on 9th January 1873.—His son, Eugène Louis Jean Joseph, Prince Imperial of France, was born 16th March 1856. He was in the field with his father in 1870, but after the fall of Sedan escaped to England, where he entered the Woolwich Military Academy, and in 1875 completed with distinction a regular course of study. Volunteering to serve with the English artillery in the Zulu campaign of 1879, he was killed on 1st June, when reconnoitring, by a party of Zulus in ambush.
See the apologetic Life by Blanchard Jerrold (3 vols. 1874-77), and that by Archibald Forbes (1898); Delord, Histoire du Second Empire (6 vols. Paris, 1869-75); Simson, Die Beziehungen Napoleon III. zu Preussen (1882); C. E. de Maupas, Story of the Coup d'État (Eng. trans. 2 vols. 1884); Hugo's Hist. d'un Crime (1877); E. Barlees, Life of the Prince Imperial (1880); and the Memoirs of the Duke of Coburg, vols. iii. and iv. (1890).