France's first elected president became its last monarch
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte won France's first presidential election in 1848. Barred from a second term, he seized power by force in 1851 and soon declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. He ruled for 22 years, longer than any French head of state since the Ancien Régime, until a Prussian army captured him at Sedan.
Born in the Tuileries Palace in 1808, he was the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of the Empress Joséphine, and so nephew of Napoleon I, who was his godfather. As a boy he watched troops parade from his uncle's window. After Waterloo the family went into exile, settling by a Swiss lake at Arenenberg; schooling in Bavaria left him with a faint German accent for life, and a republican tutor taught him radical politics. Rumours that he was not Louis Bonaparte's son, spread by enemies including Victor Hugo, have never been proved.
Youth was restless. In Italy he and his elder brother joined the Carbonari, secret societies fighting Austrian control, and when the brothers fled the police in 1831, Napoléon-Louis died of measles. Louis Napoleon twice tried to overthrow the July Monarchy and was imprisoned in 1840. The February Revolution of 1848 finally opened the door, and he won the presidency.
As emperor he had Georges-Eugène Haussmann rebuild Paris, expanded the railways, modernised banking and championed the Suez Canal. Agricultural modernisation ended famines and made France an exporter, and the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty with Britain opened trade. Workers gained the right to organise and strike, and women won admission to universities. Abroad he joined Britain to beat Russia in the Crimean War, helped Italian unification against Austria and received Savoy and Nice in return, and doubled the size of the French colonial empire, though his attempt to install a French-protected emperor in Mexico ended in failure.
Prussia's rise under Otto von Bismarck proved his undoing. Pushed by public opinion, he reluctantly declared war in July 1870; the army collapsed within weeks, and he was captured at Sedan. The Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris, and after his release he went into exile in Britain, dying there in 1873.
Source: Napoleon III
