Napoleon III: A Life

Say what you will about this strange little man, but he had taste and he remade Paris into what it is today. His accention to the throne of France is nothing short of incredible, but this man had amazing chuzpa and he willed it so. He had nothing in common with his illustrious, some say infamous uncle Napoleon, except a name. I liked how he loved pomp and he could really get his cult of peronality out there. He was a despot yes, but fairly enlightened, I mean compare him to the dour idiot Victoria and he was not all bad, granted England did much better under her ministers..(not her, she was shut up at Balmoral or the Isle of Wight, mourning her German stud, Albert)..ask someone what a prince albert is and you get idea of his..uh devotion to a nice pant line), but France under Napoleon III had style and it was he who ushered it in..certainly not the fool Louis Phillip who preceded him. This is good book, with a nice history lesson, that's not too painful.

Napoleon III has always been an enigma, both during his own time and remaining so today. This book refreshingly spares us the ho-hum political, military, and economic details of Nap III's reign and concentrates instead on the man and how events and people influenced him and made him what he was -- a rather tragic, confused, and vain little man trying to fill the shoes and name of an illustrious predecessor. The author for the most part is sympathetic to his subject and uses a variety of published material and private research to support his observations of Nap III and why he reacted to circumstances and events as he did. The author writes with a very readable style and presents a complete yet not dull life of his subject. Of particular interest are the many affairs that Nap III carried on before and after marriage and his relationship with his wife and Empress Eugenie. I would highly recommend this book as a fine overview of Nap III's life and conduct.

It is interesting to read a biography of the Napoleon III after one on the First for the tales are really the same tale of prempted republics and celebrity families with their predations of revolutionary changes, as the ghost of hybrid reactionaries stalks the legacy of the new bourgeoisie. The result here is a sort of hors d'oeuvre for Marx's classic Eighteen Brumaire, "Hegel observes somewhere that all great incidents, and individuals of history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce". Napoleon Louis' takeover of the republican hopes of 1848 was, however, a species of sly cleverness that shows no dunce even as the outcome, as the second Empire, is barren of result (although a kind of rancid liberalism and never fulfilled sympathy with the goals of revolution is characteristic of all the Napoleons, if only as a celebrity mystique). A strange sort of daydream, the disguised persistence of the ancient regime in Mayr's phrase of his book by that name, one that simples wakes up to reality in a matter of weeks, as the Franco-Prussian War sweeps the fantasy into the dustbin.

Lifelessness is a defect of far too many biographies - and works of historical fiction. Fenton Bresler's "Napoleon III" succeeds admirably in avoiding it.Before Napoleon III there was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, and he is a vivid, living presence on every page of this work. Less a political biography than a personal one, the book cuts through the gilded pomp of the Second Empire to give us Louis, the man. Hotblooded, stubborn, flirtatious, fickle... More than half the book is devoted to his life before he became Emperor. Yet the book is also good in analyzing Louis as an ideologue. It has been conveniently forgotten that prior to becoming emperor, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte wrote a number of books laying down the basis for the new ideology which Karl Marx, in attacking, baptized as Bonapartism. An accomplished schemer, Louis was blessed with talents better suited to the coming age of politics than to the warrior times of his uncle. In the end, though, his lack of military skill became the Achilles Heel responsible for his downfall. He would have been better suited for the age of the sound bite than that of the sword.De Morny and Persigny, Lizzie Howard and La Castiglione... the men and women of Bonapartist Paris are skillfully introduced to us on every page. Eugenie fans will not be pleased with the more critical assessment of her in this book: she is portrayed as a meddling political spouse to a degree that makes Hillary Clinton seem apolitical. A boring marriage to a wife who hated sex may havbe hastened Louis' ultimate detachment from the court he'd created.Many a competent professional is overshadowed by an ancestral predecessor; from young doctors to aspiring actors, many a young person finds that over time the example which inspired them ultimately becomes their bitterest rival. This has been the fate of Napoleon III, forever remembered as the "other" Napoleon. Bresler's biography introduces us to a talented and clever man who could have excelled in many different callings, yet chose for himself the Herculean task of equalling the most successful leader of the preceding five hundred years. Measured by any yardstick other than the Napoleonic one which he himself chose, the accomplishments of his career would be impressive. In an almost conversational style which shares the data without letting it dominate the narrative, Bresler reminds us why Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was popular enough to become Napoleon III in the first place.

Patience, cunning and cold-blooded manipulation underlay the forty-year quest for power by Louis Napoleon, son of the short-term King of Holland, brother of Napoleon I and of the emperor's step-daughter Hortense Beauharnais. These years were marked by intrigues and exile in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Britain and the United States and by failed coups and imprisonment in France. The key-notes of these efforts were persistence and a single-minded conviction that, against all odds, the French people would in the end somehow accept him as a reincarnation of his uncle. On the way Louis Napoleon flirted with socialism and other progressive creeds, perhaps even with a degree of sincerity, but his final assumption of supreme power was to see a quick abandonment of anything but a semblance of support for any such measures. The irony of the whole story is that by the time Lois Napoleon was finally established firmly as Emperor, complete with a domineering and self-important wife and a much-desired son and heir, he seemed to lose interest in the entire enterprise. There were significant advances and gains in many areas during the Second Empire but its later years of his reign were marked by Louis Napoleon's moral deterioration (a relative term considering what he was to start with), increasing inertia and willingness to be let others, make the running. The disastrous consequence of all this was France's precipitation into the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, a conflict that the Emperor did not seem to believe in, but which, at the same time, he took no effective measures to prevent. There are strong points of similarity in both the characters and careers of both Louis Napoleon and Charles II of England, each personally courageous and highly intelligent, but cynical, manipulative and cold-hearted, each patiently enduring the disappointments of exile with confidence in final success, each finding poor satisfaction in that success, each possibly killed, too young, by their own doctors. The ultimate indictment of Louis Napoleon may well be that, as Mr.Bresler seeks to prove in this fine biography, he had a comfortable bolt-hole prepared in England long before he finally needed it. Mr.Bresler tells a fascinating story with pace and elegance and knows how to bring the past alive with quite fascinating vignettes, particularly of Louis's life in England at various times. One delights in the examples of Louis rowing with the Disraelis and getting the boat stranded on a mud-bank, or of him serving as a special constable in Trafalgar Square during the Chartist Crisis. The best of all must however be of Louis, a darling of smart London society in the late 1830's, dismissed with a caution from Bow Street Magistrate's Court for attempted duelling, and thereafter attending Covent Garden Opera House flanked by his uncles Joseph and Jerome, the erstwhile Kings of Spain and Westphalia, brothers of the late emperor. One wonders how