bibliography of Napoleon's life and works reference may be made to the article "Napoleon," in the new edition of the Biographie Générale.—F. E.
NAPOLEON, Duc de Reichstadt, the only child of the first Napoleon and of the Archduchess Maria Louisa of Austria, was born at the palace of the Tuileries on the 20th of March, 1811, and baptized Napoleon François-Charles-Joseph. At his first appearance in the world he was styled by his father King of Rome, and was little more than a year old when his father set out on his disastrous Russian expedition. Before the first restoration of the Bourbons, Napoleon in abdicating vainly sought to secure the throne to the boy, whom he called Napoleon II.; and when he was relegated to Elba, the company of his wife and child was refused him. Mother and son were sent to Vienna and Schönbrunn. After Waterloo, and a second failure in procuring the recognition of his supposed rights, the child was brought up at Vienna, while his mother withdrew to her duchy of Parma, of his prior hereditary claim to which he was divested in 1817 by the allied powers. The Duc de Reichstadt bore a strong likeness to his father. He was taller, however, than the first Napoleon, fair-haired, and pale, with an ample forehead and animated eyes. He died at Schönbrunn, of pulmonary disease, on the 22nd of July, 1832.—F. E.
NAPOLEON III. (Charles-Louis-Napoleon-Bonaparte), ex-Emperor of the French, was born at Paris, in the palace of the Tuileries, on the 20th April, 1808. He was the second surviving son—his eldest brother. Napoleon Charles, had died in 1807—of Louis, king of Holland, and of Hortense Beauharnais, daughter of Josephine, Napoleon's first wife. Napoleon's only elder brother, Joseph, was like himself without children; and the eldest of his younger brothers, Lucien, was in disgrace, when the emperor virtually fixed the succession to the throne in the sons of the second eldest of his younger brothers, Louis. Louis Napoleon was carefully educated by private tutors, and attended the college of Augsburg; he also acquired a military training as an artillery officer in the federal army of Switzerland. In 1830 the revolution of the Three Days seemed to open to the exiled Bonapartes a return to France; but Louis Philippe met their applications with a refusal. The French revolution, however, produced a rising in Italy; and the sons of Hortense, eager for distinction, joined the Italian insurgents. While active in the insurrection the elder of the brothers. Napoleon Louis, died suddenly at Forli. Austrian intervention crushed the Italian movement, and with the reputation of an ardent republican and a skilful soldier, Louis Napoleon, in the company of his mother, took flight; and the two, though proscribed in France, made their way to Paris. Louis Philippe still persisted in refusing them permission to settle in France. The exiles went to London, where, at a house in Holles Street, the prince was reduced to a dangerous slate of prostration by gastric fever. As soon as removal was possible, mother and son returned to Switzerland. The death of "Napoleon II." the Duc de Reichstadt, 22nd July, 1832, following that of his elder brother, left Louis Napoleon the representative of the Bonapartist interest. Personally little known in France and Europe, he now began to aim at establishing a reputation through the printing-press. Between 1832 and 1836 he published several works, political and military—the "Rêvéries Politiques," "Considérations Politiques et Militaires sur la Suisse," and the "Manuel d'Artillerie "—the last professedly for the use of the artillery officers of the Helvetic republic. The object of his political disquisitions was partly to effect a coalition between the Bonapartists and the republicans, whom Louis Philippe had disappointed; nor was he altogether unsuccessful. But he estimated too highly the value of the eulogies which his works received from a portion of the democratic press of Paris, as well as the support promised him by some officers of the garrison of Strasbourg, whom he met at the watering-places of Baden. On the evening of the 28th of October, 1836, he arrived secretly in Strasbourg, where he had gained over at least one colonel of a regiment. Early on the morning of the 30th he appeared in the streets of Strasbourg; the regiment of his friend shouted "Vive l'Empéreur," but the rest were staunch; the would-be emperor was easily overpowered and thrown into prison. Transmitted to Paris, he was placed at once by Louis Philippe on board a French ship, which (21st November, 1836) sailed with him to America; and after touching at Rio landed him at New York. He did not long remain in the United States, but after attending his mother's deathbed, went to England in 1838. In 1840 the French were excited and irritated by the isolation in which France was left on the Eastern question; and Louis Philippe was accused of truckling to England. In the May of the same year the memory of the great Napoleon had been revived with enthusiasm by the decree of the chambers for the transfer of his remains from St. Helena to Paris. On the morning of the 6th of August, 1840, Louis Napoleon, with some fifty followers and a tame eagle, landed near Boulogne from a steamer which they had hired in London; and they made the streets of that peaceful town vocal with the cry of "Vive l'Empéreur." They were not joined by the soldiery; the national guard turned out to repel them; and finally Louis Napoleon was captured on the beach as he was endeavouring to escape to the steamer. This time he was brought to trial before the chamber of peers, and in spite of Berryer's eloquent defence, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. The prison selected was the fortress of Ham in Picardy, on the banks and among the marshes of the Somme. After an imprisonment of nearly six years he escaped from Ham in the disguise of a workman, on the 25th of May, 1846. During his imprisonment he had written much—a curious work on one of his favourite themes, the history and theory of artillery; newspaper articles, in which English freedom was contrasted with the repressive system of Louis Philippe; a project for a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; and last, not least, an essay on "the extinction of pauperism," by settling the unemployed, with a peculiar organization, on the waste or little-cultivated lands of France. From Ham Louis Napoleon returned to London, where he watched the decline and fall of the government of Louis Philippe. After the revolution of February he at last reached Paris, and in December, 1848, was elected president of the French republic by five million five hundred and sixty-two thousand eight hundred and thirty-four votes, while only one million four hundred and sixty-nine thousand one hundred and sixty-six were given to his closest competitor, General Cavaignac. Then commenced a struggle of three years between the president and the legislature of the republic. Louis Napoleon exhausted every possible ministerial combination. He had against him all the leading parties in the assembly—the Orleanists and the legitimists, who even attempted a "dynastic fusion," the moderate republicans, and the Reds. With the beginning of 1851 it was evident that a life and death conflict between the president and the assembly was impending. The friends of the old dynasty rested their hopes on General Changarnier, the commander of the army of Paris, and whom they intended to play the part of a French Monk in a new restoration. In January, 1851, Changarnier was dismissed. The assembly retaliated by cutting down the president's civil list, and by refusing his demand for the repeal of the law of the 31st of May, 1850, which had disfranchised some three millions of electors of the class on which he leaned for support. The contest between the two chief powers of the state went on deepening through the summer and autumn of 1851. A proposal had even been made, 16th November, 1851, to place the army under the direct control of the assembly, with what object was not concealed. The president now resolved to strike the long-expected blow. On the 2nd of December, 1851, the anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, appeared the proclamation dissolving the assembly, restoring universal suffrage, and appealing to the people. Early in the morning the parliamentary leaders were arrested. The insurrectionary movement which followed in Paris was quelled. By a national vote—according to the official statement, seven million five hundred and seventy-two thousand three hundred and twenty-nine, against six hundred and forty-six thousand seven hundred and thirty-seven—Louis Napoleon was made president for ten years, with power to form a new constitution. By the senate of his own creation the imperial crown was pressed on him; a national vote, 25th November, 1852, confirmed the proposal; and on the first anniversary of the coup d'état, 2nd December, 1852, the prince-president of the French republic became Napoleon III., emperor of the French. In the following month, January 29, 1853, he married Eugenie Marie de Guzman, comtesse de Téba, a lady with Scotch blood in her veins, and then in her twenty-seventh year. Thus enthroned and domesticated. Napoleon III. sought to strengthen his position by close alliances and a foreign war. England, in the person of Lord Palmerston, had been in haste to acknowledge the new empire, and England and Sardinia were chosen to be the faithful allies of France in the war with Russia, so graphically described in
