Thread by @ajcdeane

This is the 10th instalment of #deanehistory. We made it to double figures!

Today we take a look at Napoleon. But not the one you’re thinking about.

Louis-Napoleon was the son of Napoleon III, who was the nephew of Napoleon actual Napoleon Napoleon. (Napoleon II was Napoleon’s son & didn’t live long). All clear?

Napoleon III was the first President of France, & the last Emperor. That way round, too, rather than the reverse, which might seem more natural. He’d been elected, then couldn’t get re-elected, so seized power.

N. III got the Order of the Boot, as he led France to ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, a ten – nil at home beating. Louis-Napoleon & parents settled in Chislehurst, which perhaps isn’t the most obvious place for exiled European royalty.

Idling along, hoping Bonapartism at home would prevail, contemplating suitably grand marriage, Louis-Napoleon- or, after his father’s death, Napoleon IV to some- joined the British Army. He was a martial sort & the French alternative wasn’t really open to him.

It would be a bold General that sent this young Lieutenant into harm’s way, given prospects for the future. Thought a potential suitor for Queen Victoria’s daughter, many in England said Europe would be better off with him as Emperor of France.

But, as some headstrong young men are wont to do, Louis-Napoleon- or the Prince Imperial, if you like- charmed usually more sensible women around him to let him have his way. His mother & Victoria herself intervened to make the army allow him to see action.

Thus, the future Emperor of France set off for excitement in the Zulu Wars in a lowly Lieutenant’s garb, & got himself killed in service to England’s Queen Empress.

We’d assigned him a French speaker- a Guernseyman- to keep him on the straight & narrow & warn him away from danger, but some will not be told. I mean, the Lieutenant had strapped Napoleon I’s sword from Austerlitz to his side. Destiny called.

It was all his own fault. Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon IV, the Prince Imperial, rushed impatiently with a scouting party into disputed territory without waiting for the full complement of men due to be with him. Ostensibly the way was clear…

Ambushed in a kraal, he was assagaied to death by Zulus bound to have had firm views on British troops, & possibly on European royalty, but unlikely to have appreciated what the skirmish in the middle of nowhere meant for the future of a continent.

Indeed, the Zulus sent word that they wouldn’t have killed him if they’d known who he was, which was decent of them as he was there in the service of a country at war with them & wearing their uniform and so on and so forth.

His funeral cortege back to Chiselhurst for burial must have been a dreadfully bleak affair. The Bonaparte household had been struck a mortal blow. His mother was devastated. Victoria herself joined the cortege.

Later on, his mother had his body disinterred & placed alongside his father at St Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough, where they remain to this day in the “Imperial Chapel.” If & when life returns to normal, if you’re at the airshow you might visit.

There were various attempts to bring later Napoleons into play, but with the perspective given by time we now see that the last realistic chance of a return of Bonapartism to France died with Louis-Napoleon in that remote kraal in the summer of 1879.