Jonathan Keates at 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.
more here.
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