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Losing Battle. "Yet he was a man too small for the great things he set out to do," concludes Author Thompson, a British historian-clergyman. More benevolent than tyrannical, Louis became the victim of advisers who encouraged his most futile dreams of glory—with the result that when Louis' armies met Bismarck's at Sedan in 1870, the French suffered their most crushing defeat since Waterloo. Louis himself, sick (gallstones) but fighting doggedly on horseback, was taken prisoner and died two years and four months later. His empress. Eugenie, built a mausoleum to his memory at Farnborough, and survived her husband 47 years. She died in her native Spain in 1920, a belle of the polka era who had managed to stay at the ball until the jazz age.
Napoleon III was Napoleon the Last.* His reforms proved too small to satisfy the demands of workers surging forward on the wave of the Industrial Revolution: Europe's first notable communist regime, the Paris Commune, which followed the debacle at Sedan, held power for ten weeks. Author Thompson's friendly, scholarly biography leaves the reader convinced that, for all his achievements, Louis Napoleon had a streak of mediocrity and a run of bad luck which prevented him from living up to his ambitions. Says Thompson: "At the back of all his twists and turns, all his ups and downs, [was] the will to be great." But while he "had his eyes fixed on a goal, [he] could not find the way to reach it."
* The "second" Napoleon, who never ruled, was the Duke of Reichstadt, Bonaparte's son by Empress Marie Louise; a sickly and weak-willed boy, he died near Vienna in 1832. After Napoleon III, each generation has had its Bonapartist pretender. The current: Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 41. Occupation: chemist.