Napoleon III Dies in Exile: Second Empire Ends

He was captured at Sedan on September 2, 1870, and never governed France again. Napoleon III, born Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in Paris in 1808, was the nephew of Napoleon I and spent his early life in exile, plotting to restore the Bonaparte dynasty. He staged two failed coups before the revolution of 1848 gave him an opening: he was elected president of the Second French Republic with seventy-four percent of the vote, leveraging the Bonaparte name in a country nostalgic for imperial glory. When the constitution prevented him from seeking a second term, he staged a coup d'etat in December 1851 and declared himself Emperor of the French a year later. His eighteen-year reign modernized France in ways that survive to this day. He commissioned Georges-Eugene Haussmann to rebuild Paris, creating the wide boulevards, grand facades, uniform building heights, and modern sewer system that define the city's character. The Paris that tourists photograph is Napoleon III's Paris, not Napoleon I's. He expanded the French colonial empire, supported Italian unification, and built the Suez Canal through the entrepreneurship of Ferdinand de Lesseps. But his foreign policy overreach destroyed him. He blundered into a war with Prussia in July 1870 that the French Army was unprepared to fight. The defeat at Sedan, where he was captured alongside 100,000 troops, ended the Second Empire overnight. He was exiled to Chislehurst in Kent, England, where he died on January 9, 1873, at sixty-four, following surgery for kidney stones. His legacy is the city of Paris itself, which remains his monument.