Napoleon III (Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte)
Napoleon III was elected president of France, made himself emperor, rebuilt Paris, and lost the empire in six weeks. Born in 1808 as Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of the first emperor, he grew up in exile and spent his youth on conspiracies. He attempted two farcical coups — at Strasbourg in 1836 and Boulogne in 1840, the second with a tame eagle — and was sentenced to life imprisonment, escaping in 1846 disguised as a workman. The revolution of 1848 made the name an asset. He was elected president of the Second Republic in December with about three-quarters of the vote, from a peasantry that remembered his uncle. Barred by the constitution from a second term, he seized power in a coup on 2 December 1851 and declared the empire a year later. The domestic record is substantial. Haussmann rebuilt Paris with boulevards, sewers, parks and railway stations; the Crédit Mobilier financed industry; the rail network quadrupled; and an 1860 treaty with Britain opened trade. He liberalised the regime steadily in the 1860s. Abroad he was consistently ambitious and inconsistently competent. He won in the Crimea, fought Austria for Italy in 1859 and stopped halfway at Villafranca, and installed Maximilian as emperor of Mexico, who was shot. Bismarck manoeuvred him into declaring war in 1870 over the Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne. He surrendered with his army at Sedan on 2 September 1870 and died in exile in Kent in 1873. The Paris he built is the Paris that exists, which is more than most of his projects can claim.
- Lived: 1808 CE – 1873 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: president_of_france, emperor_of_the_french
