Napoléon III (1808 - 1873)

Napoléon III (1808 - 1873)
Paris, France / Chislehurst, London, England

Wikipedia: Napoléon III, also known as Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (full name Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte) (20 April 1808 – 9 January 1873) was the first President of the French Republic and the only emperor of the Second French Empire. He holds the unusual distinction of being both the first titular president and the last monarch of France.

Napoléon III (generally known as "Louis Napoleon" before he became Emperor) was the son of Louis Bonaparte, the brother of Napoléon I, and Hortense de Beauharnais, the daughter of Napoléon I's wife Josephine de Beauharnais by her first marriage. During Napoléon I's reign, Louis-Napoléon's parents had been made king and queen of a French puppet state, the Kingdom of Holland. After Napoléon I's final defeat and deposition in 1815 and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France, all members of the Bonaparte dynasty were forced into exile. The child Louis-Napoléon was brought up in Switzerland (living with his mother in Arenenberg Castle in the canton of Thurgau) and Germany (receiving his education at the gymnasium school at Augsburg in Bavaria). As a young man he settled in Italy, where he and his elder brother Napoléon Louis espoused liberal politics and became involved with the Carbonari, a resistance organization fighting Austria's domination of Northern Italy. This would later have an effect on his foreign policy.

There remained in France, under both the Bourbon and then the Orleanist monarchy, a Bonapartist movement that wanted to restore a Bonaparte to the throne. According to the law of succession Napoléon I had made when he was Emperor, the claim passed first to his son, the Duke of Reichstadt, known by...