The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III

The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III

Jonathan Keates at Literary Review: Of all the dominant actors on the mid-19th-century scene, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was the most charismatic and divisive. Admittedly he had nothing of that physique du rôle which a nation traditionally demands of its leaders. ‘The Emperor is extremely short’, noted Queen Victoria after their first meeting at Windsor Castle, ‘but with a head and a bust which ought to belong to a much taller man.’ Yet though Pri…

Napoleon III: Europe’s First Populist

For Karl Marx, Napoleon III was a “grotesque mediocrity”; Victor Hugo lambasted him as “Napoleon the little”; Alexis de Tocqueville, in what was not the famed political theorist’s most sophisticated analysis, dismissed him as a “dwarf”. Yet these men underestimated Napoleon III, France’s first directly elected president and, later, as emperor, its last reigning sovereign. Driven, calculating and with the political instincts of a populist, he out…