Napoleon III: A Life

Rating:
Summary: First as tragedy, then as farce
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The essential biography of the man who became Emperor.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A lightweight take on a lightweight emperor
Review: The influence of Napoleon III on nineteenth-century French history and culture is inestimable: his unlikely rise to power after the 1848 Paris revolutions cemented twenty years' worth of extravagance and folly, resulting in the splendors of the Haussmann re-development of the capital city and the horrors of the Mexican debacle and the Franco-Prussian War. There was probably never a less-likely "man of destiny" than this emperor, who managed to come to power (and hold on to it) mostly through dumb luck, and if this biography by Fenton Bresler focuses too strongly on the private life of the Second Empire's court it may be suitable for a man who seemed much more interested in managing his mistresses than his empire.

Bresler's account is immesely readable and clear, which should be the first requirement of all popular biographies, and you do emerge from it with a strong sense of the personalities of the major figures in Napoleon's life: his amazingly resourceful (and lucky) mother, Queen Hortense of Holland; his sybaritic grandmother Josephine; his fascinating and iron-willed wife the Empress Eugenie; and his manipulative and adoring ministers and cronies. It is true that the lack of political and historical synthesis sometimes seriously mars this work: what may be worse is that Bresler's desire to say at least something that the emperor's other biographers haven't uncovered leads him to point out his newer discoveries (such as that the imperial couple had likely already prepared an escape route to Chislehurst years before the Franco-Prussian War) at overextreme length. Also his reliance on Napoleon's and Eugenie's near-contemporary biographers--whom later historians have dismissed as too fawning and inaccurate--seems a real mistake.