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The People's Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III
'Rigorously researched, endlessly illuminating. The People's Emperor is a real page-turner'
ED CONWAY
'This is a book written to be it's a gripping, fascinating biography'
SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
'Bold, brilliant and often bonkers, The People's Emperor is a thunderously good read'
JUSTIN MAROZZI
Born into imperial splendour, Louis-Napoléon - the nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte - grew up far from power after the defeat at Waterloo. In exile, he repeatedly plotted, unsuccessfully, to restore his uncle's empire. Few took him seriously.
But what followed is one of the most astonishing, impossible stories in history. Aged 40, Louis-Napoléon would be elected president of France. Three years later, he seized power to become emperor.
Napoleon III's story is one of self-belief, political skill and radical innovation - the first person to master mass democratic politics and populism. Yet, despite being one of the most important trailblazers of the nineteenth century, he is largely misunderstood today, if not totally forgotten.
His strange rise and catastrophic fall is a story of both tragedy and farce, set during some of France's most tumultuous decades.
ED CONWAY
'This is a book written to be it's a gripping, fascinating biography'
SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
'Bold, brilliant and often bonkers, The People's Emperor is a thunderously good read'
JUSTIN MAROZZI
Born into imperial splendour, Louis-Napoléon - the nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte - grew up far from power after the defeat at Waterloo. In exile, he repeatedly plotted, unsuccessfully, to restore his uncle's empire. Few took him seriously.
But what followed is one of the most astonishing, impossible stories in history. Aged 40, Louis-Napoléon would be elected president of France. Three years later, he seized power to become emperor.
Napoleon III's story is one of self-belief, political skill and radical innovation - the first person to master mass democratic politics and populism. Yet, despite being one of the most important trailblazers of the nineteenth century, he is largely misunderstood today, if not totally forgotten.
His strange rise and catastrophic fall is a story of both tragedy and farce, set during some of France's most tumultuous decades.
714 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 2, 2026
About the author
Edward Shawcross
3 books45 followersEdward Shawcross is a historian and teacher, who earned his PhD in history from University College London.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 21, 2026
I loved Edward Shawcross’ previous book on Maximilian, the last Emperor of Mexico, so I had high expectations for this one. It didn’t disappoint.
Napoleon III is one of those figures I’d somehow never properly got to grips with, and this book filled a gap in my knowledge that I didn’t even realise was there. It bridges the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the upheavals of the twentieth century, making sense of an era that often gets skipped over.
Shawcross has a knack for keeping history engaging. He peppers the narrative with moments of dry humour and the occasional absurdity of imperial court life, which stops the detail from ever feeling heavy. Despite covering complex politics and diplomacy, it often reads more like a political thriller than a conventional history.
If you enjoy narrative history that is both accessible and deeply researched, I’d thoroughly recommend it.
Napoleon III is one of those figures I’d somehow never properly got to grips with, and this book filled a gap in my knowledge that I didn’t even realise was there. It bridges the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the upheavals of the twentieth century, making sense of an era that often gets skipped over.
Shawcross has a knack for keeping history engaging. He peppers the narrative with moments of dry humour and the occasional absurdity of imperial court life, which stops the detail from ever feeling heavy. Despite covering complex politics and diplomacy, it often reads more like a political thriller than a conventional history.
If you enjoy narrative history that is both accessible and deeply researched, I’d thoroughly recommend it.
July 29, 2026
Shawcross could write 450 pages about the history of the stapler and I would devour it. No one is better at painting the most vibrant, decadent scenes of 19th century court life, in both his previous book and this one, while contrasting them with the harsh realities of running an empire. I’ll be talking about this book for a long time to come and I’m excited to buy whatever he publishes next.
September 20, 2026
A great read on the lesser known Napoleon III.
July 15, 2026
Over the years, there have been many English-language, popular narrative biographies of the Emperor Napoleon III (for example, Jasper Ridley, Fenton Bresler). This biography starts off in a similar way as it recounts Louis Napoleon's dramatic and unusual rise to power. However, when it gets to Louis Napoleon as French ruler (President and Emperor), the book hits its stride and discusses the events and strengths and weaknesses of Louis Napoleon in a vivid and interesting way. I like the wit with which Edward Shawcross looks at what happens, and the concluding summation is well judged.
I would have liked more about Louis Napoleon's political philosophy. Shawcross is rather dismissive of this but there is a lot there which puts the Emperor into context. But overall, this is a fair and balanced book.
Just one niggle. I do wish the author had found space for a bibliography - even a select one - as there is a lot written about aspects of Louis Napoleon's life and domestic and foreign policies to which the reader could be directed.
A. J. P. Taylor sums up Napoleon III as the "man of December". That does explain why he remains entombed in a quiet abbey church in a suburban Hampshire village rather than in glory in Paris. Edward Shawcross's book expands on this and is therefore warmly recommended.
I would have liked more about Louis Napoleon's political philosophy. Shawcross is rather dismissive of this but there is a lot there which puts the Emperor into context. But overall, this is a fair and balanced book.
Just one niggle. I do wish the author had found space for a bibliography - even a select one - as there is a lot written about aspects of Louis Napoleon's life and domestic and foreign policies to which the reader could be directed.
A. J. P. Taylor sums up Napoleon III as the "man of December". That does explain why he remains entombed in a quiet abbey church in a suburban Hampshire village rather than in glory in Paris. Edward Shawcross's book expands on this and is therefore warmly recommended.
August 1, 2026
Back in 2018 'The Shadow Emperor: A Biography of Napoleon III 'by Alan Strauss-Schom provided a comprehensive study using deep primary source research to details Napoleon III massive economic, financial, and infrastructural transformations (railways, banking, and the rebuilding of Paris). Now Edward Shawcross has written another sparkling biography (in 2021 he published the best biography of the soi distant 'emperor' of Mexico 'The Last Emperor of Mexico: The Dramatic Story of the Habsburg Archduke Who Created a Kingdom in the New World') of Napoleon III which focuses on his path as the first directly elected French head of state and explores how he pioneered mass democratic politics and populism. Shawcross reassesses Napoleon's attempts to rebuild French global standing despite his final military defeat.
Shawcross also reveals Napoleon III not as the joke Marx made about history repeating itself as farce but as a man of some admiral qualities - once he saw the brutal deaths and injuries of ordinary soldiers he loathed it and unlike his uncle he never ran away when defeat - in fact he refused to leave his soldiers after the debacle before Sedan because he was determined to surrender to save their lives - I think that is pretty admirable. Shawcross paints a portrait of Napoleon III who was flawed but also ahead of his time.
Please read the following review from the London Literary Review:
Of all the dominant actors on the mid-19th-century scene, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was the most charismatic and divisive. Admittedly he had nothing of that physique du rôle which a nation traditionally demands of its leaders. ‘The Emperor is extremely short’, noted Queen Victoria after their first meeting at Windsor Castle, ‘but with a head and a bust which ought to belong to a much taller man.’ Yet though Prince Albert dismissed him as merely ‘a walking lie’, she herself was won over quickly enough by her guest’s deep-layered charm, with its touch of flirtatiousness. ‘His love-making’, noted the foreign secretary Lord Clarendon, ‘was of a character to flatter her vanity without alarming her virtue.’
Whatever Albert’s cynical verdict, Napoleon III had not exactly risen from nowhere. As the son of the first Napoleon’s brother Louis and stepdaughter Hortense de Beauharnais, he would carry the burden, after Waterloo, of unappeased Bonapartist hankerings. ‘I am much through my name, nothing through myself,’ he acknowledged. A sequence of botched coups d’état ending with imprisonment in a fortress in Picardy seemed to draw a line under Louis-Napoleon’s career. In a few years, however, he contrived an escape to London, where, between dancing at Fulham garden parties and conducting a high-profile affair with the stellar actress Rachel Félix, he could remodel himself as France’s saviour.
The moment juste arrived with the collapse of Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy and the birth of a Second Republic. Posing as the people’s champion made it easier for Louis-Napoleon to appear as a source of order and stability to a world muddled by demagogues, orators and polemicists. In this robust, no-nonsense biography, Edward Shawcross guides us with expert coolness around the zigzags that led first to the returning Bonaparte’s appointment as president of the new administration, then to the armed showdown on Paris streets that clinched his hold on the nation and at last to a carefully manipulated plebiscite leading to his proclamation, on 2 December 1852, as Emperor of the French. A disgruntled Victor Hugo, initially his supporter, blasted the self-made sovereign as a vulgar chancer, ‘Napoleon the Little’, before sloping off to morose exile in the Channel Islands. To Queen Victoria, on the other hand, the whole episode looked ‘wonderful … like a story in a book or a play’.
Already the father of bastard children and furnished with a long-term lover in the shape of Harriet Howard, a Brighton bootmaker’s daughter who specialised in high-end liaisons, the Emperor needed a respectable consort. Nobody could raise objections to the physique du rôle of Eugenia de Palafox y Kirkpatrick, a Spanish nobleman’s daughter schooled by Stendhal in the mysteries and protocols of Bonapartism, killing in a crinoline and perfectly fashioned to lead a court ball or welcome an ambassador. Sex she found tiresome – ‘After the first night it doesn’t matter whether a man is good looking or ugly’ – but this was no obstacle to the production of an heir to the dynasty in the shape of the Prince Imperial.
Following the baby’s baptism at Notre-Dame, three hundred balloons showered bonbons on a jubilant crowd, symbolising the Second Empire’s sugar-coated promises to a France eager to reclaim its prestige as a world power. Although none of the campaigns in the Crimea, Italy and the Far East managed to replicate the authentic gloire of the Grande Armée with the little Corsican at its head, their outcomes too often clouded by his nephew’s penchant for compromise, the nation’s role as a major player in Europe’s affairs was once more unquestioned. A performative element, as Napoleon III perceived, became essential to the regime’s survival. Not for nothing had at least three of his mistresses earned their crust on the stage.
Flaws in the imperial act started showing with the disastrous Mexican adventure of 1862, when France, hungry for mineral wealth, persuaded Austrian Archduke Maximilian to seize Mexico City and declare himself emperor. When pressure from the United States prompted a swift withdrawal of French support, the new-made sovereign surrendered to his republican enemies, who promptly put him to death. In Paris, meanwhile, the show went on with an Exposition Universelle of world-beating grandeur. Visitors making their first encounter with such technological marvels as reinforced concrete and hydraulic elevators included Mark Twain, for whom Napoleon III was the most fascinating exhibit of all. ‘Surrounded by shouting thousands … and companioned by kings and princes – this is the man who was sneered at and reviled,’ enthused the American. ‘Who talks of the marvels of fiction? Who speaks of the wonders of romance?’
Probably not Otto von Bismarck, there in attendance on the King of Prussia and already at work on the strategy of political encirclement and shameless news control which led to the Second Empire’s extinction. Shawcross’s masterly handling of the Franco-Prussian War spares us nothing of its hideousness but at the same time lends blighted glamour to Napoleon and his wife as casualties of the debacle. For the former, defeat at Sedan became the more agonising for those chronic haemorrhoids that made it difficult for him to mount a horse and lead the army. As for the Empress, her sheer pluck never faltered even as the Paris mob, howling, ‘Down with the Spanish woman!’, prepared to loot and burn the Tuileries.
Eugénie (she had Gallicised her name upon her marriage) fled to a bolt-hole in Chislehurst with the help of her American dentist. She was followed, after a year’s arrest in Germany, by her husband, racked with the bladder stones that soon killed him. Les Anglais, having heaped opprobrium on the Emperor at the start of the war, began cherishing Louis-Napoleon as a romantic failure and genuinely mourned his son the Prince Imperial, speared to death in a Zulu ambush.
For France, on the other hand, the Second Empire was all too easily transmogrified into an age of embarrassment, with Napoleon III as the ultimate has-been. Shawcross, thank goodness, is having none of this. Freely acknowledging the Emperor’s weaknesses, personal and political, he demonstrates in a resounding epilogue just how much the modern French owe to Napoleon the Little. He genuinely desired his nation’s greatness, nurturing its finer impulses towards social and economic progress. Redesigning Paris with the help of Baron Haussmann, he fixed the template for capital cities across the globe. He foresaw the dangers of both a militarised Germany and a United States as the unfettered buccaneer of world markets. ‘Just how radically new Louis-Napoleon’s system was has been forgotten’, says Shawcross, ‘because it was copied so much that it became commonplace.’ This thoroughgoing reassessment of the man as less of a bounder and a charlatan than something of a doomed visionary, wise before his time, shows an impressive command of its sources and matches the imperial style at its dashing best. The French don’t care much for biography but they ought to read this one.
Shawcross also reveals Napoleon III not as the joke Marx made about history repeating itself as farce but as a man of some admiral qualities - once he saw the brutal deaths and injuries of ordinary soldiers he loathed it and unlike his uncle he never ran away when defeat - in fact he refused to leave his soldiers after the debacle before Sedan because he was determined to surrender to save their lives - I think that is pretty admirable. Shawcross paints a portrait of Napoleon III who was flawed but also ahead of his time.
Please read the following review from the London Literary Review:
Of all the dominant actors on the mid-19th-century scene, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was the most charismatic and divisive. Admittedly he had nothing of that physique du rôle which a nation traditionally demands of its leaders. ‘The Emperor is extremely short’, noted Queen Victoria after their first meeting at Windsor Castle, ‘but with a head and a bust which ought to belong to a much taller man.’ Yet though Prince Albert dismissed him as merely ‘a walking lie’, she herself was won over quickly enough by her guest’s deep-layered charm, with its touch of flirtatiousness. ‘His love-making’, noted the foreign secretary Lord Clarendon, ‘was of a character to flatter her vanity without alarming her virtue.’
Whatever Albert’s cynical verdict, Napoleon III had not exactly risen from nowhere. As the son of the first Napoleon’s brother Louis and stepdaughter Hortense de Beauharnais, he would carry the burden, after Waterloo, of unappeased Bonapartist hankerings. ‘I am much through my name, nothing through myself,’ he acknowledged. A sequence of botched coups d’état ending with imprisonment in a fortress in Picardy seemed to draw a line under Louis-Napoleon’s career. In a few years, however, he contrived an escape to London, where, between dancing at Fulham garden parties and conducting a high-profile affair with the stellar actress Rachel Félix, he could remodel himself as France’s saviour.
The moment juste arrived with the collapse of Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy and the birth of a Second Republic. Posing as the people’s champion made it easier for Louis-Napoleon to appear as a source of order and stability to a world muddled by demagogues, orators and polemicists. In this robust, no-nonsense biography, Edward Shawcross guides us with expert coolness around the zigzags that led first to the returning Bonaparte’s appointment as president of the new administration, then to the armed showdown on Paris streets that clinched his hold on the nation and at last to a carefully manipulated plebiscite leading to his proclamation, on 2 December 1852, as Emperor of the French. A disgruntled Victor Hugo, initially his supporter, blasted the self-made sovereign as a vulgar chancer, ‘Napoleon the Little’, before sloping off to morose exile in the Channel Islands. To Queen Victoria, on the other hand, the whole episode looked ‘wonderful … like a story in a book or a play’.
Already the father of bastard children and furnished with a long-term lover in the shape of Harriet Howard, a Brighton bootmaker’s daughter who specialised in high-end liaisons, the Emperor needed a respectable consort. Nobody could raise objections to the physique du rôle of Eugenia de Palafox y Kirkpatrick, a Spanish nobleman’s daughter schooled by Stendhal in the mysteries and protocols of Bonapartism, killing in a crinoline and perfectly fashioned to lead a court ball or welcome an ambassador. Sex she found tiresome – ‘After the first night it doesn’t matter whether a man is good looking or ugly’ – but this was no obstacle to the production of an heir to the dynasty in the shape of the Prince Imperial.
Following the baby’s baptism at Notre-Dame, three hundred balloons showered bonbons on a jubilant crowd, symbolising the Second Empire’s sugar-coated promises to a France eager to reclaim its prestige as a world power. Although none of the campaigns in the Crimea, Italy and the Far East managed to replicate the authentic gloire of the Grande Armée with the little Corsican at its head, their outcomes too often clouded by his nephew’s penchant for compromise, the nation’s role as a major player in Europe’s affairs was once more unquestioned. A performative element, as Napoleon III perceived, became essential to the regime’s survival. Not for nothing had at least three of his mistresses earned their crust on the stage.
Flaws in the imperial act started showing with the disastrous Mexican adventure of 1862, when France, hungry for mineral wealth, persuaded Austrian Archduke Maximilian to seize Mexico City and declare himself emperor. When pressure from the United States prompted a swift withdrawal of French support, the new-made sovereign surrendered to his republican enemies, who promptly put him to death. In Paris, meanwhile, the show went on with an Exposition Universelle of world-beating grandeur. Visitors making their first encounter with such technological marvels as reinforced concrete and hydraulic elevators included Mark Twain, for whom Napoleon III was the most fascinating exhibit of all. ‘Surrounded by shouting thousands … and companioned by kings and princes – this is the man who was sneered at and reviled,’ enthused the American. ‘Who talks of the marvels of fiction? Who speaks of the wonders of romance?’
Probably not Otto von Bismarck, there in attendance on the King of Prussia and already at work on the strategy of political encirclement and shameless news control which led to the Second Empire’s extinction. Shawcross’s masterly handling of the Franco-Prussian War spares us nothing of its hideousness but at the same time lends blighted glamour to Napoleon and his wife as casualties of the debacle. For the former, defeat at Sedan became the more agonising for those chronic haemorrhoids that made it difficult for him to mount a horse and lead the army. As for the Empress, her sheer pluck never faltered even as the Paris mob, howling, ‘Down with the Spanish woman!’, prepared to loot and burn the Tuileries.
Eugénie (she had Gallicised her name upon her marriage) fled to a bolt-hole in Chislehurst with the help of her American dentist. She was followed, after a year’s arrest in Germany, by her husband, racked with the bladder stones that soon killed him. Les Anglais, having heaped opprobrium on the Emperor at the start of the war, began cherishing Louis-Napoleon as a romantic failure and genuinely mourned his son the Prince Imperial, speared to death in a Zulu ambush.
For France, on the other hand, the Second Empire was all too easily transmogrified into an age of embarrassment, with Napoleon III as the ultimate has-been. Shawcross, thank goodness, is having none of this. Freely acknowledging the Emperor’s weaknesses, personal and political, he demonstrates in a resounding epilogue just how much the modern French owe to Napoleon the Little. He genuinely desired his nation’s greatness, nurturing its finer impulses towards social and economic progress. Redesigning Paris with the help of Baron Haussmann, he fixed the template for capital cities across the globe. He foresaw the dangers of both a militarised Germany and a United States as the unfettered buccaneer of world markets. ‘Just how radically new Louis-Napoleon’s system was has been forgotten’, says Shawcross, ‘because it was copied so much that it became commonplace.’ This thoroughgoing reassessment of the man as less of a bounder and a charlatan than something of a doomed visionary, wise before his time, shows an impressive command of its sources and matches the imperial style at its dashing best. The French don’t care much for biography but they ought to read this one.
July 24, 2026
One of Britain’s finest historians, Ed Shawcross has turned his attention to the lesser-known Napoleon: Napoleon III. Most British readers probably know next to nothing about the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, even though he ruled France for longer than his famous uncle.
Shawcross presents a sympathetic and fascinating figure charting his life from the cradle to the grave. Napoleon III’s life was full of extraordinary twists, scandals, romances and improbable escapes that there is barely a dull page in the book. There is plenty here about sex, ambition and human folly, but Shawcross also excels at explaining the complex political backdrop to his subject’s astonishing rise and eventual downfall.
By the end, I felt a major blind spot in my understanding of European history had been filled and found myself genuinely attached to this forgotten emperor. Shawcross is clear eyed on his faults, but there is a noticeable warmth towards his subject, and he makes a compelling case that Napoleon III was, in many respects, ahead of his time. His political achievements, often against seemingly impossible odds, were remarkable. As Shawcross notes, had he died just two years earlier, he might well be remembered as one of France’s greatest rulers.
Shawcross has done readers a real service in producing what is, as far as I am aware, the first major biography of Napoleon III written for a general audience. Better yet, he has made it a genuine page-turner.
Shawcross presents a sympathetic and fascinating figure charting his life from the cradle to the grave. Napoleon III’s life was full of extraordinary twists, scandals, romances and improbable escapes that there is barely a dull page in the book. There is plenty here about sex, ambition and human folly, but Shawcross also excels at explaining the complex political backdrop to his subject’s astonishing rise and eventual downfall.
By the end, I felt a major blind spot in my understanding of European history had been filled and found myself genuinely attached to this forgotten emperor. Shawcross is clear eyed on his faults, but there is a noticeable warmth towards his subject, and he makes a compelling case that Napoleon III was, in many respects, ahead of his time. His political achievements, often against seemingly impossible odds, were remarkable. As Shawcross notes, had he died just two years earlier, he might well be remembered as one of France’s greatest rulers.
Shawcross has done readers a real service in producing what is, as far as I am aware, the first major biography of Napoleon III written for a general audience. Better yet, he has made it a genuine page-turner.
September 14, 2026
The People’s Emperor is a fascinating portrait of a man who seemed almost destined to fail—until he didn’t.
What I enjoyed most was watching Napoleon III’s unlikely rise from exile to president, then emperor, and ultimately his spectacular downfall. Shawcross brings out the ambition, political instinct, contradictions, and sheer unpredictability of his character.
A captivating reminder that history is often stranger than fiction.
What I enjoyed most was watching Napoleon III’s unlikely rise from exile to president, then emperor, and ultimately his spectacular downfall. Shawcross brings out the ambition, political instinct, contradictions, and sheer unpredictability of his character.
A captivating reminder that history is often stranger than fiction.
August 10, 2026
Definitely worth reading.
August 11, 2026
A wonderfully written story.
August 11, 2026
Such a captivating read.
October 18, 2026
Book of the year
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews