Being a fan of Napoleon III can be frustrating. Friends and relatives confuse the glorious victor of Marengo, the Pyramids, and Austerlitz with his nephew who was sickened by the sight of blood at the battles of Solferino and Magenta in 1859. They confuse the vendor of Louisiana for the instigator of the Mexican adventure. “Their” Napoleon wanted to invade England from the French port of Boulogne; “your” Napoleon actually invaded Boulogne from England. The prints and books and portraits of the first Napoleon given to you as presents collect dust on upper shelves, while your prized miniature bust of Napoleon III elicits the surprised remark, “I didn’t know you were a Stalinist!”

Fenton Bresler’s Napoleon III: A Life should help clear up some of the confusion. The subtitle is accurate; this is most definitely a book concerned with the personal life of the last monarch of France, while “his times” are related only incidentally. Colorful events, like the emperor’s masterminding of the quixotic Mexican empire of Maximilian and Carlotta, get a few pages; parliamentary elections and the like get only a few lines. As Bresler writes, “this book’s primary aim is to present a fascinating man, in all his fullness, to a modern audience.” Accordingly, he concentrates on “the human side” of Napoleon III, relegating events in Europe to the background.

An English lawyer and author of books about Georges Simenon, Lord Goddard, and international crime, Bresler says that he treated this book as a work of investigation. He compares himself to a barrister preparing a case: “by the time he rises to his feet in front of the judge, [an author] has made himself an expert on the subject, sometimes more so than the so-called ‘expert witnesses’ who are to give evidence and who are to be cross-examined.” Bresler also says that this is the book he always wanted to write; so we get not just the personal Napoleon III, but the personal biographer, too. He has visited all the sites where Louis Napoleon ever spent any time, dodging into traffic to get that perfect photograph of the secret garden door at the Elysée palace, through which the prince-president would sneak out to visit his mistress. Bresler paints a portrait of a man who, once he had fulfilled his destiny of acceding to the imperial throne, was at a loss as to what to do next.

Is Napoleon III worth all this attention? Yes, even though Karl Marx and Victor Hugo both mocked him for not being his more famous uncle. (It was of Louis Napoleon that Marx memorably wrote that history repeats itself “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”) The great English essayist Walter Bagehot had a more accurate appreciation of the lesser Napoleon’s complex nature. In 1863, Bagehot described the emperor as possessing “a restless, scheming, brooding, cavernous mind; daring in idea—hesitating when it comes to action; a singular mixture of tenacity and inconsistency” who nonetheless was “unusually farseeing,” thoroughly understanding “his nation, his day, and his position.”

Napoleon III was certainly a despot, but, as Bresler says, he was a despot tinged with humanity. He ruled one of the great powers, first as president, then emperor, for more than twenty years, in a crucial period of the nineteenth century. During his reign, France fully embraced the industrial revolution; played an important role in the affairs of Asia, Africa, and America; and was arguably the arbiter of European diplomacy. A man of great charm, the emperor both inspired and exemplified unwavering loyalty. Although many of his chosen companions were louche in the extreme, he never abandoned them nor they him. His sudden rise was financed by his remarkable and long-suffering mistress, Harriet Howard; his government ministers were illegitimate relatives; one of his legitimate cousins was the court procurer.

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s early life was picaresque. Born in 1808, he was raised in exile by his mother Hortense, daughter of the empress Josephine and wife of Napoleon I’s brother Louis, the puppet king of Holland. Louis Napoleon grew up in Switzerland and Rome, dividing his time between learning how to ride and shoot and chasing anything in skirts. Farm maids, his mother’s aristocratic neighbors, girls he passed in the street—the young prince was interested in them all. In 1830 he and his brother took part in an unsuccessful rebellion against the pope, and had to flee the Papal States. En route his brother died of measles, and he himself came down with the disease. Hortense bravely nursed her remaining child and helped him escape to England. The death in 1832 of the Duke of Reichstadt—Napoleon I’s sole legitimate son—meant that Louis Napoleon became the de facto Bonapartist pretender to the French throne. Neither his father nor any other of Napoleon’s other surviving brothers were interested in risking their comfortable retirements in a reckless attempt to overthrow the current king of France, Louis Philippe.

Prince Louis made two daring efforts at capturing the French throne: at Strasbourg in 1836 and Boulogne in 1840. After the first he was quietly exiled to the United States. After the second he was condemned to “perpetual imprisonment” at the fortress of Ham, in northern France. When the sentence was read out the defendant politely inquired if anything in France was truly “perpetual.” And indeed in 1846 he again escaped to England. But six years in a cold, damp prison had taught him that the wise man waits on events, and, by skillfully maneuvering during the tumultuous revolutionary year of 1848, Louis got himself elected president of the French Second Republic. In 1851, before his term expired, he staged a successful coup, giving himself dictatorial powers and another ten years as president. A year later the senate (he had appointed every member) passed a resolution imploring Louis to become emperor. He accepted, and the people of France, voting in a plebiscite, overwhelmingly confirmed the title.

It is possible to hold that during the Second Empire France was either distracted and stifled for twenty years, or given two precious decades of stability. What is certain is that Napoleon III moved France from the second rank of countries (where it had been since 1815 and Waterloo) to the first. He then saw it crushed and dismembered by the unified Germany he had unwittingly abetted. The emperor was critical in unifying Italy, whose armies would have been overwhelmed by Austria without his aid. But in the end he was remembered only for propping up the pope in his rump state of Rome. With his prefect of Paris, Baron Haussmann, the emperor remade the metropolis, turning it into a city of light —the glittering artistic and sensual capital of Europe. In 1870 Bismarck maneuvered France into war with Prussia. The Prussians crushed the French at Sedan where 100,000 French soldiers and Napoleon III himself were captured. The emperor was deposed by a provisional government in Paris, but the city was besieged and bombarded by the Germans, its inhabitants starved into surrender. Napoleon III’s denouement was not grand. He, his empress Eugénie, and their son ended up in exile at Camden Place, a small country house outside London.

Among the more controversial ideas that Bresler advances is the suggestion that Jean Fialin, the self-styled Comte de Persigny, was not only the future emperor’s earliest true adherent, but also possibly his lover. Bresler says that today  

it would be fashionable to question if there was a homosexual link between them. If so, no evidence of it remains but it is not impossible to conjecture that someone so highly sexually charged as Louis with regard to women would also be capable of feeling sexual attraction for a man.

Well, “not impossible” covers a vast multitude of contingencies, improbable as well as probable.

It is when discussing the emperor’s final illness that Bresler comes into his own. His descriptions of Napoleon’s ailments are perhaps overly graphic but nonetheless fascinating. For years Napoleon had suffered from gallstones (probably caused by a gonorrheal infection brought on by his dissolute habits). The pain came sporadically, but was, according to Bresler, most likely increased by stress. So Napoleon became incapacitated at moments of crisis when his full attention was most necessary. During his last campaign the emperor found it almost unbearable to sit on a horse, but insisted on it when with his troops.

Received wisdom has been that when Napoleon III died on January 9, 1873, it was despite a series of dangerous but necessary medical operations for the removal of a gallstone. Bresler has called on various medical authorities to review the case, including “the doyen of modern British urinological consultants, Sir David Innes Williams.” Dr. Williams and his colleagues have convinced Bresler that Napoleon’s English doctors (including Queen Victoria’s personal physician) rushed to operate too soon after earlier exploratory procedures and that the resulting septicemia did him in. What was the rush? Louis thought the time was ripe for his return, but that it was absolutely necessary that he lead the movement from horseback. When the first operation was unsuccessful, the doctors kept trying until they killed him.

The very fatalistic Louis always assumed it might end badly. He had secretly acquired Camden Place years before his abdication. And one day, while still inhabiting the Tuileries, he lifted his young son and heir from his lap and watched him run off to play; turning to Prosper Mérimée (the author of Carmen), the emperor wondered aloud, “Will he ever reign?”

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