NAPOLEON III, Emperor of the French. - Louis N., b. in Paris on 20 April 1808, the third-born son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and of Hortense 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 youth he repeatedly visited Italy; he returned there with his mother in 1830. With his elder brother he took part in the Carbonarist movement that was to break out in Rome. Expelled for this reason from Rome, he went to Florence and then to Romagna, but the Carbonari did not welcome him willingly. With 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 revolt at Strasbourg, but was arrested and expelled. In 1840 he landed at Boulogne, was arrested, tried for high treason and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. Only in 1846 did he succeed in escaping from the Château de Ham disguised as a mason. General discontent with the Orléanist government drew public attention to the Napoleonic prince. He reappeared from London in Paris in 1848 after the fall of Louis Philippe; and, elected deputy, in Dec. 1848 a plebiscitary vote brought him to the presidency of the Republic.
The expedition to Rome against the Mazzinian Republic won him the sympathies of the whole Church of 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 conduct. The new Constitution of 15 Jan. 1852 established that the President was responsible before the people and would remain in office for ten years. A senatus-consultum of 4 Nov. decided 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 wished to be called in recognition of the legitimacy of the rights of the Duke of Reichstadt, installed himself at the Tuileries. And in order to create a dynasty, on 30 Jan. 1853 N. married the noble Spanishwoman Eugénie de Montijo, Countess of Teba, by whom the imperial prince Eugène Napoléon was born on 16 March 1856.
Although it had arisen on a plebiscitary basis, the new Empire was bound to reconnect itself with the absolutist traditions of the First Empire. N. was concerned above all to break up the republican opposition and the liberal opposition of every tendency, including Catholics of the Montalembert, Lacordaire type, etc.: many were exiled to Algeria, many, among them Victor Hugo, fled. Various laws gave the Emperor full powers also in the economic and financial field: the press was shrewdly muzzled and censorship organized. There was a period of lively economic revival, which was accompanied by the organization of the railways, the activity of the great banks, the initiative of the sta-
such great public works. Paris was embellished by the prefect Haussmann, who, however, was also following certain designs of political strategy. The elections to the Legislative Corps, skillfully managed by the prefects, made the opposition almost disappear: after the elections of 1857 it was reduced to five members. The Felice Orsini attack of 1858 gave the police a good pretext to arrest thousands of suspects. N. III had proclaimed that "l'Empire c'est la paix", but he felt the moral obligation to free France from the Treaties of 1815, to destroy the Holy Alliance that had arisen on the ruins of the Napoleonic Empire, and to restore to France that hegemony which Napoleon I had won for her. The Crimean War soon gave N. III the means to come to an understanding with England against Russia, so as to prevent the formation of European coalitions, and then to detach Austria from Russia. Thus the Holy Alliance vanished. The Congress of Paris of 1856 saw all the European diplomats gathered around N. III. But it was an ephemeral success: England soon withdrew from the French alliance, and N. III emerged from the Congress in a rupture with Russia and with Austria. A new phase of his policy now began, offering the protection of France to the small European states that were the most advanced and adventurous from the liberal point of view. Thus he concluded with Piedmont the Agreements of Plombières, which led to the war against Austria of 1859, but after the battle of Solferino he had to allow, by the agreements of Villafranca, that Austria should keep Venetia, while the Italian liberal revolution escaped his control and led to the formation of the unified Kingdom of Italy. From the intervention in Italy N. III acquired Savoy and Nice, but he was harshly reproached for his Italian policy from opposite sides; he sought to placate the Catholics by hardening in defense of the surviving temporal power of the popes against the demands of Italian unitary liberalism, which on the other hand he tried not to alienate: a policy accused of insidious duplicity. He intervened for a moment in Poland, provoking the anger of Russia, which he would have wished to make a friend and ally against Austria. The traditional French distrust of the Empire of Austria led him to view with a certain sympathy the anti-Austrian tendencies of the Prussian government. N. III did not understand in time that Austria, preoccupied by internal struggles and weakened by the defeats in Lombardy, would have been forced to yield before Prussia, supported by formidable armaments and by the sympathies of the entire German nation. The open conflict between Austria and Prussia, in 1866, made
N. III hope that the two enemies would give him time to intervene as arbiter; but the war was decided at Sadowa before N. III could mobilize and act. The triumph of Prussia was a humiliation for France. The intervention in Mexico also failed, since the Emperor had to withdraw the expeditionary corps in the face of the demands of the United States; Maximilian of Austria, who had accepted the throne of Mexico counting on French support, soon became its victim.
N. III sought to establish his prestige by negotiating with the Prussian government for a territorial compensation (Luxembourg); the plan having failed, he turned to the other plan of a European coalition against Prussia, which had by now become threatening. But Russia had become an enemy because of N. III's imprudent declaration in favor of the Poles; the king of Italy Victor Emmanuel subordinated his adherence to France's consent for the occupation of papal Rome; Austria waited to see the outcome of the Franco-Italian negotiations. Thus the policy of N. III continued to suffer the sad consequences of the equivocal and nebulous positions in which he had placed himself since 1849. His relations with the papacy on the one hand and with the Kingdom of Italy on the other embarrassed him: he had sought to escape them with the Convention of September 1864 (v.) with the Italian government, which, however, had very soon been maliciously violated; very soon the Garibaldian attempt against Rome of 1867 (v. MENTANA, BATTAGLIA di) had forced him to resume his place as official defender of the temporal power, alienating the Italian liberals. When therefore in 1869 the negotiations for an Austro-Franco-Italian alliance against Prussia failed, N. III contented himself with a moral understanding with Francis Joseph and with Victor Emmanuel II, hoping for a possible military alliance.
The setbacks of foreign policy had gradually strengthened the opposition. After 1869 N. III began to make concessions to the liberals on the domestic plane: he sought to diminish the influence of the clergy in the life of the country; he granted a broad amnesty to political convicts, several of whom, however, rejected the concession. Having entered the path of constitutional reforms, he granted to the Senate and to the Legislative Corps the right to discuss government policy. The opposition kept growing in number: from 5 the opposition parliamentarians went to thirty-five. The elections of 1869 gave the opposition 3 million votes against the 4 given to the government. The party of conciliation led by the Marseillais Ollivier asked that a true parliamentary regime be established with a responsible ministry. N. III accepted, and entrusted Ollivier with forming the new government (Jan. 2, 1870); the plebiscite of May 8 approved the constitutional reform with 7 million votes against a million and a half. The Emperor had returned to the principles of the Orleanist parliamentary monarchy.
Suddenly the collapse came, and the responsibility weighed on Ollivier's responsible parliamentary government. The Spanish question was its cause: the fear that Prussian influence might succeed in undermining French influence in Madrid led the French government to ask the Prussian government to renounce the Spanish throne on the part of Prince Hohenzollern, to whom it had been offered. Not content with the Prussian adherence to the request, Ollivier's government wanted to impose a commitment for the future that would represent for the Napoleonic Empire a public diplomatic victory. The refusal given by the Berlin government determined the rupture between the two countries. N. III did not succeed in opposing the errors of the government for which he was no longer responsible, nor did he succeed in concluding the 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 (Sept. 2, 1870). Two days later, the revolution (v. COMUNE [LA] DI PARIGI) broke out in Paris, and N. III was declared deposed by the Chamber together with his family. Liberated after the peace of Frankfurt, N. III retired to England: he died at Chislehurst on Jan. 9, 1873, and was buried there.
Bibliography12 works
Francesco Cognasso