Napoleon III (20 April 1808 – 9 January 1873), Charles-Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte , was the first President of the French Republic and the last monarch of France. He was also the nephew of Napoleon I. Made President by popular vote in 1848, he undertook a coup in 1851, becoming dictator before ascending to the throne as Napoleon III on 2 December 1852, the forty-eighth anniversary of Napoleon I's coronation. He ruled as Emperor of the French until September 1870, when he was captured in the Franco-Prussian War. He holds the unusual distinction of being both the first titular president and the last monarch of France.
Early life
Napoleon III generally known as"Louis Napoléon" before he became Emperor, was the nephew of Napoleon I by his brother Louis Bonaparte, who married Hortense de Beauharnais, the daughter by the first marriage of Napoleon's wife Josephine de Beauharnais. The Empress Josephine proposed the marriage as a way to produce an heir for the Emperor, who agreed, as Josephine was by then infertile. Louis's paternity has been brought into question ( see Ancestry ). Louis Bonaparte also harboured a lifelong suspicion about his legitimacy, although most historians have concluded that he was conceived by Louis Bonaparte and Hortense.
During Napoleon I's reign, Louis-Napoléon's parents had been made king and queen of a French puppet state, the Kingdom of Holland. After Napoleon I's military defeats and deposition in 1815 and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France, all members of the Bonaparte dynasty were forced into exile. The little Louis-Napoléon was brought up in Switzerland, living with his mother in Arenenberg Castle in the canton of Thurgau, and in Germany, receiving his education at the gymnasium school at Augsburg, Bavaria. As a young man he settled in Italy, where he and his elder brother Napoléon Louis espoused liberal politics and became involved with the Carbonari, an organization fighting Austria's domination of northern Italy. On March 17, 1831, while attempting to flee Italy due to a crackdown on revolutionary activity by Papal and Austrian troops, Louis-Napoléon's brother, suffering from measles, died in his arms. His experiences in Italy later had a profound effect on his foreign policy.
France was under both the Bourbon and then the Orleanist monarchies, the latter a Bonapartist movement that wanted to restore a Bonaparte to the throne. According to the law of succession Napoleon I had made when he was Emperor, the claim passed first to his son, the Duke of Reichstadt, known by Bonapartists as Napoleon II, or as "the King of Rome", the title his father had given him before the collapse of the Empire, a sickly youth living under virtual imprisonment at the court of Vienna. Next in line was Napoleon I's eldest brother Joseph Bonaparte, followed by Louis Bonaparte and his sons. Since Joseph had no male children, and because Louis-Napoléon's own elder brother had died in 1831, the death of the Duke of Reichstadt in 1832 made Louis-Napoléon the Bonaparte heir in the next generation. His uncle and father, relatively old men by then, left to him the active leadership of the Bonapartist cause.
Thus he secretly returned to France in October 1836, for the first time since his childhood, to try to lead a Bonapartist coup at Strasbourg. Louis-Philippe had established the July Monarchy in 1830, and was confronted with opposition from the Legitimists, the Independents and the Bonapartists. The coup failed and Louis-Napoléon returned to Switzerland. When Louis-Philippe demanded his extradition, the Swiss refused to hand over a man who was a citizen and a member of their armed forces. In order to avoid a war, Louis-Napoléon left Switzerland of his own accord.
Louis-Napoléon stayed at No. 6 Clarendon Square, Royal Leamington Spa, between 1838-1839. The building is now called Napoleon House and has a 'Blue plaque' put up by the local council.
He was quietly exiled to the United States of America, and spent four years in New York. He also sailed to Central America. He secretly returned to France and attempted yet another coup in August 1840, sailing with some hired soldiers into Boulogne. This time, he was caught and sentenced to life imprisonment, albeit in relative comfort, in the fortress of the town of Ham in the Department of the Somme. While in the Ham fortress, his eyesight reportedly became poor. During his years of imprisonment, he wrote essays and pamphlets that combined his claim to be emperor with progressive, mildly socialist economic proposals, which he came to define as Bonapartism. In 1844, his uncle Joseph died, making him the heir apparent to the Bonaparte claim. He finally escaped to Southport, England in May 1846 by changing clothes with a mason working at the fortress. His enemies would later derisively nickname him "Badinguet", the name of the mason whose identity he assumed. A month later, his father Louis died, making Louis-Napoléon the clear Bonapartist candidate to rule France.
Return to France
Louis-Napoléon lived within the borders of the United Kingdom until the revolution of February 1848 in France deposed Louis-Philippe and established a Republic. He was now free to return to France, which he immediately did. However, he found himself being asked to leave by the provisional government, which felt that he was an unnecessary distraction. Back in England, he volunteered to be a special constable in the event of Chartist rioting. In the same month, April, he ran for, and won, a seat in the assembly elected to draft a new constitution. He did not make a great contribution and, as a mediocre public orator, failed to impress his fellow members. Some even thought that, having lived outside of France almost all his life, he spoke French with a slight German accent. His temporary exile in 1848 proved to be a blessing in disguise for the December presidential election, as it meant he played no part in the June Days, and was able to enhance his image as "all things to all men" against his main opponent, Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, who had led the repression against the working-class of Paris.
President of the French Republic
When the constitution of the Second Republic was finally promulgated and direct elections for the presidency were held on 10 December 1848, Louis-Napoléon won a surprising landslide victory, with 5,587,759 votes (around 75% of the total); his closest rival, Cavaignac, received only 1,474,687 votes. Louis-Napoléon had no long political career behind him and was able to depict himself as "all things to all men". The Monarchist right (supporters of either the Bourbon or Orléanist royal households) and much of the upper class supported him as the "least bad" candidate, as a man who would restore order, end the instability in France which had continued since the overthrow of the monarchy in February, and prevent a proto-communist revolution (in the vein of Friedrich Engels). A good proportion of the industrial working class, on the other hand, were won over by Louis-Napoléon's vague indications of progressive economic views. His overwhelming victory was above all due to the support of the non-politicized rural masses, to whom the name of Bonaparte meant something, as opposed to the other, little-known contenders. Louis-Napoléon's platform was the restoration of order after months of political turmoil, strong government, social consolidation, and national greatness, to which he appealed with all the credit of his name, that of France's national hero, Napoleon I, who in popular memory was credited with raising the nation to its pinnacle of military greatness and establishing social stability after the turmoil of the French Revolution. During his term as President, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte styled himself the Prince-President ( Le Prince-Président ).
Despite his landslide victory, Louis-Napoléon was faced with a Parliament dominated by monarchists, who saw his government only as a temporary bridge to a restoration of either the House of Bourbon or of Orléans. Louis-Napoléon governed cautiously during his first years in office, choosing his ministers from among the more "centre-right" Orleanist Parti de l'Ordre monarchists, and generally avoiding conflict with the conservative assembly. He courted Catholic support by assisting in the restoration of the Pope's temporal rule in Rome, although he tried to please secularist conservative opinion at the same time by combining this with peremptory demands that the Pope introduce liberal changes to the government of the Papal States, including appointing a liberal government and establishing the Code Napoleon there, which angered the Catholic majority in the assembly. He soon made another attempt to gain Catholic support, however, by approving the Loi Falloux in 1851, which restored a greater role for the Church in the French educational system.
In the third year of his four-year mandate, President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte asked the National Assembly for a revision of the constitution to enable the president to run for re-election, arguing that four years were not enough to implement his political and economic program fully. The Constitution of the Second Republic stated that the Presidency of the Republic was to be held for a single term of four years, with no possibility of re-election, a restriction written in the Constitution for fear that a President would abuse his po
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