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> Louis Napoleon, son of Brother Louis, was the second and last of the Bonaparte emperors (L'Aiglon was proclaimed Emperor in 1815, but he never actually ruled). In Stacton's opinion, he was merely "a paper demagogue" who wrote lively pamphlets and had "the dignity of a toy lion." Carried into office on a flood tide of Bonapartism, he soon made it clear that his resemblance to Napoleon was merely nominal. He became a sort of Gallic Coolidge decorated with Continental charm, and he presided over an era of prosperous inanition that collapsed in the debacle of the Franco-Prussian war. Surrounded at Sedan, Napoleon III lost his army but preserved his charm. "I seem," he said, "to have abdicated."
After that, the Bonapartes seem to have disappeared. In all branches of the family, almost all the children came up girls. The last of the American line, a descendant of Fifi and Betsy Patterson named Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, achieved some prominence as a Man of Distinction in the Calvert whisky ads, but he died in 1945 of injuries sustained in Central Park, where he tripped over the leash of his wife's dog. The only male Bonapartes alive today are a 16-year-old boy (Charles Napoleon Bonaparte) and his 52-year-old father (Napoleon Louis Jerome Victor Bonaparte), a prosperous Parisian who drives expensive sports cars—scarcely a Napoleonic occupation, but (as one of the conqueror's nieces remarked) it beats "selling oranges on the quayside at Ajaccio."