NAPOLEON III, EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH. — Louis N., b. in Paris on 20 Apr. 1808, the third son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of the Empress Josephine by her first marriage. After the Napoleonic collapse he followed his mother to Arenenberg on Lake Constance, where he was educated in the cult of revolutionary ideas by Le Bas. As a young man he visited Italy repeatedly; he returned there with his mother in 1830. Together with his elder brother he took part in the Carbonari movement that was to break out in Rome. Expelled from Rome, he went to Florence and then to Romagna, but the Carbonari did not welcome him warmly. After the death of his elder brother in 1831 and of the Duke of Reichstadt (Napoleon II) in 1832, he became the representative of Bonapartism.
In 1836 he attempted to incite a regiment to rebel at Strasbourg, but was arrested and expelled. In 1840 he landed at Boulogne, was arrested, tried for high treason, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Only in 1846 did he succeed in escaping, disguised as a mason, from the Château of Ham. The general discontent with the Orléans government drew public attention to the Napoleonic prince. He reappeared in Paris from London in 1848 after the fall of Louis-Philippe; elected deputy, in December 1848 a plebiscite made him President of the Republic.
The expedition to Rome against the Mazzinian Republic won him the sympathy of the whole Church in France. The coup d’état of 2 Dec. 1851 gave him the legal powers to reorganize the government: the plebiscite of 14 Dec. (seven and a half million votes against 600,000) approved his actions. The new Constitution of 15 Jan. 1852 established that the President was responsible to the people and held office for ten years. A senatus consultum of 4 Nov. decided on the restoration of the Empire, and the plebiscite of 21 Nov. sanctioned it (7,839,000 votes against 253,000). On 2 Dec. 1852 N. III, as he chose to style himself in recognition of the legitimacy of the Duke of Reichstadt’s rights, took up residence in the Tuileries. To found a dynasty, on 30 Jan. 1853 he married the Spanish noblewoman Eugénie de Montijo, Countess of Teba, by whom he had a son, the Prince Imperial Eugène Napoléon, born 16 Mar. 1856.
Though arising from a plebiscitary base, the new Empire had to link itself with the absolutist traditions of the First Empire. N. III first set about breaking up the republican opposition and every liberal tendency, including Catholics of the Montalembert and Lacordaire type: many were exiled to Algeria, many, including Victor Hugo, fled. Various laws gave the Emperor full powers even in the economic and financial sphere; the press was gagged and censorship organized. There followed a period of lively economic revival, accompanied by the organization of railways, the activity of great banks, and the initiative of industrialists.
Napoleon I, Emperor of the French — Portrait of Marie Louise and the King of Rome. Painting by F. Gérard — Château de Versailles.
In foreign policy, N. III pursued a policy of equilibrium between the two great powers, Prussia and Austria, hoping that the two rivals would give him time to intervene as arbiter; but the war was decided at Sadowa before N. III could mobilize and act. Prussia’s triumph was a humiliation for France. The intervention in Mexico also failed, the Emperor having had to withdraw the expeditionary corps in the face of American protests; Maximilian of Austria, who had accepted the throne of Mexico counting on French support, soon became his victim.
N. III sought to establish his prestige by negotiating with the Prussian government for territorial compensation (Luxembourg); the project failed, and he turned to the idea of a European coalition against Prussia, now seen as threatening. But Russia had become an enemy because of N. III’s imprudent show of support for the Poles; King Victor Emmanuel of Italy made his adhesion conditional on French consent for the occupation of Rome; Austria waited to see the outcome of Franco-Italian negotiations. Thus N. III’s policy continued to suffer the sad consequences of the equivocal and nebulous positions he had taken since 1849. His relations with the papacy on the one hand and with the Kingdom of Italy on the other embarrassed him: he had tried to extricate himself with the September Convention of 1864 (v.) with the Italian government, but it had soon been maliciously violated; very soon Garibaldi’s attempt against Rome in 1867 (v. MANA, BATTLE OF) forced him to resume his role as official defender of the temporal power, alienating Italian liberals. After the failure in 1866 of negotiations for an Austro-Franco-Italian alliance against Prussia, N. III contented himself with a moral understanding with Francis Joseph and Victor Emmanuel II, hoping for a possible military alliance.
The failures of foreign policy gradually strengthened the opposition. After 1860 N. III began to make concessions to liberals on the domestic front: he tried to diminish the influence of the clergy in national life; he granted a broad amnesty to political prisoners, several of whom, however, rejected the concession. Entering upon the path of constitutional reform, he granted the Senate and the Legislative Body the right to debate government policy. Opposition grew in numbers: from 5 opposition deputies they rose to three hundred. The elections of 1869 gave the opposition 3 million votes against 4 million for the government. The party of conciliation, led by the Marseillais Ollivier, demanded the establishment of a true parliamentary regime with a responsible ministry. N. III accepted, and entrusted Ollivier with forming the new government (2 Jan. 1870); the plebiscite of 8 May approved the constitutional reform with 7 million votes against one and a half million. The Emperor had returned to the principles of the Orléanist parliamentary monarchy.
Suddenly the collapse came, and responsibility fell on the responsible parliamentary government of Ollivier. The Spanish question was its cause: the fear that Prussian influence might succeed in displacing Franco-Italian influence in Madrid led the French government to ask the Prussian government to secure the renunciation by the Hohenzollern prince, to whom the Spanish throne had been offered, of his candidature. Not content with Prussia’s assent to the request, the Ollivier government wished to impose an engagement for the future that would represent a public diplomatic victory for the Napoleonic Empire. The refusal of the Berlin government determined the rupture between the two countries. N. III was unable to oppose the errors of a government for which he was no longer responsible, nor to conclude an agreement with Italy and Austria. The Franco-Prussian War had a rapid decision at Sedan, where N. III, surrounded, had to capitulate with 80,000 men (2 Sept. 1870). Two days later, the revolution (v. PARIS) broke out in Paris, and N. III was declared by the Chamber to be deposed along with his family. Released after the Peace of Frankfurt, N. III retired to England; but at Chislehurst on 9 Jan. 1873 he died and was buried there.