Third son of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Beauharnais, the future emperor was born in Paris on Wednesday 20 April 1808 at one o’clock in the morning, eleven months after the death of his elder brother Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. They are, with the king of Rome, the only princes of the family who were born in the imperial regime, so they were the only two that were at birth military honors. Salvos of artillery announced the birth of Prince Louis Napoleon across the vast expanse of the Empire. His uncle Napoleon was absent, it is named the child after June 2.
The Act of 1 January 1816, banning all Bonaparte of France, forced the Queen Hortense of Holland, divorced in exile in Switzerland, where she bought in 1817 Arenenberg Castle, overlooking Lake Constance. It settles there with her two surviving son.
Without worry of a material, Louis-Napoleon was raised by his mother in Switzerland and Rome. There he met his grandmother Laetitia Bonaparte. While claiming to have retained little memory of his uncle, he, however, was only a child.
He is raised in the cult of Napoleon I and the certainty of his dynastic calling. He receives constant education from many teachers, especially by Philippe Bas, the son of a conventional Jacobin. A former officer of his uncle Napoleon, he teaches, moreover, the art of war.
Near the charbonnerie, he tried with his elder brother Louis, in a conspiracy in Rome in 1830 to promote the cause of Italian unity: they plan to prisoners when the Cardinals, to deprive the Pope of his secular power. After their expulsion in Switzerland, his brother returned to Italy at the central dukedoms uprising in 1831, during which he was killed, in Forlì. Hortense brings his youngest son, ill, to Paris, where she won by Louis Philippe of safe conduct to Switzerland.
After the death of the Duke of Reichstadt on 22 July 1832, and since his older brother died in 1831, Louis-Napoleon considers itself the heir to the imperial crown, after meeting with his uncle Joseph Bonaparte. It organizes its networks in France, and prepares its seizure of power.
On 30 October 1836, Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, with a handful of accomplices, makes an attempt to lift Strasbourg. He hopes to raise the garrison and then march on Paris and overthrow the monarchy of July. His plan is to gather in its wake the troops and people, along the lines of the return from Elba in 1815. Strasbourg, an important military site is easily accessible from Germany and, especially, is a city on the left and patriot.
On site, the soul of the conspiracy is Colonel Vaudrey, who commands the 4th artillery regiment, in which Napoleon Bonaparte was in Toulon in 1793, and who feels badly treated by the July Monarchy.
The operation was initiated on 30 October 1836 in the morning. It runs short almost immediately. The prince and his accomplices were arrested. King Louis and uncles of the young prince immediately condemn the operation. Queen Hortense wrote to Louis-Philippe to suggest to let his son leave France. King persuaded his government, without any legal procedure, is driving the prince in Lorient, where, with a sum of money, he is on board the Andromeda on 21 November 1836 in the United States of America, where he was landed on 30 March 1837.
Meanwhile, his accomplices are on trial in Strasbourg before the Assize Court, and acquitted by the jury, under the cheers of the public on 18 January 1837. If the attempt was a complete failure, gave Prince Louis Napoleon in France and has identified the cause Bonapartist.
Volunteer in the Swiss Army since 1830, Louis-Napoleon reached the rank of captain of artillery in 1834. He obtained citizenship in the Swiss canton Thurgau, in 1832, making some historians say that Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was “the only Swiss to rule in France.”
Works Cited:
De la Gorce, Histoire du second empire, (four volumes, Paris, 1885-98)
Taxile Delord, Histoire du second empire, (six volumes, Paris, 1869-76
Thirra, Napoléon III avant l’empire, (Paris, 1895)
T. W. Evans, Memoirs of the Second French Empire, (New York, 1905)
Fenton Bresler, Napoleon III: A Life, (London, 1999)
A. L. Imbert de Saint-Amand, Napoleon III at the Height of his Power, (New York, 1900)
