Books: Napoleon No. 3

ANOTHER CAESAR—Alfred Neumann—Knopf ($3).

Louis Napoleon, nephew of the great Napoleon, spent some 35 years attempting to become Emperor of the French. He finally succeeded. But according to Historian Philip Guedalla he should have died on the day of his coronation. For the story which Guedalla told in his The Second Empire is one of anticlimax, of a nouveau riche court, a theme for irony and wisecracks, the Napoleonic legend reduced to farce. "The gaslit tragedy of the Second Empire," Guedalla contemptuously called the regime which was born in intrigue in the early...