Louis napoleon iii biography books

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'Louis Napoleon's story is certainly remarkable. Alan Strauss-Schom tells it with brio in The Shadow Emperor... This is a boldly revisionist biography... For all the corruption and repression that marked his reign, Louis Napoleon may have done more for France than his famous uncle.' (Alan Massie, Wall Street Journal) This is the definitive biography, and the first in twenty years, of Louis-Napoleon III, whose controversial achievements have notoriously divided historians. Here, pre-eminent Napoleon Bonaparte expert and Pulitzer Prize-nominated historian Alan Strauss-Schom focuses on his successor Louis-Napoleon, overshadowed for too long by his more romanticized forebear. Strauss-Schom employs years of primary source research to explore the massive cultural, social, economical, financial, international, and military impact of France's most polarizing emperor. Louis-Napoleon completely revolutionized the state and the economy, but amid gross financial scandals. His expansion of the French Empire was praised by the French military and resisted by the socialists. He expanded the railways to rival England's; created new transoceanic steamship lines and a modern navy; introduced a new banking sector supported by seemingly unlimited venture capital; and even oversaw the creation of the first large department stores. Napoleon III wanted to surpass the legacy of his famous uncle, Napoleon I. In The Shadow Emperor, Alan StraussSchom sets out his true legacy.

Alan Strauss-Schom is a critically acclaimed author and historian. He has received Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominations for One Hundred Days: Napoleon's Road to Waterloo, Trafalgar, Countdown to Battle, 1803-1805, and Napoleon Bonaparte which took second place in the Los Angeles Times Best Biography of the Year category, 1997. It was also one of Library Journal's top five biographies of that year and

We have selected here for you a list of books (all currently available) which we consider key works on the life and works of Napoleon III and the Second Empire in general.

INDISPENSABLE

• Dictionnaire du Second Empire, ed. Jean Tulard, Paris: Fayard, 1995, 1347 p.
  In French, but worth the effort.

ON NAPOLEON III

• Smith, W.H.C., Napoleon III: the Pursuit of Prestige, London: Collins and Brown, 1991, 144 p.
  Brief but very useful – the only work in English by the Irish specialist on all things Second Empire – his biography of Napoleon III (in French, Hachette, 1983) is the standard work.
• McMillan, J.F., Napoleon III, London: Longman (Profiles in Power), 1991, 208 p.
• Guest, I., Napoleon III in England, London: British Technical and General Press, 1951

ON THE EMPRESS EUGÉNIE

• Kurtz, H., The Empress Eugénie, 1826-1920, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964, 407 p.
  A useful biography – see also that by William Smith (in French, Bartillat, 1998).

THE PRINCE IMPERIAL

• Tisdall, E.E.P., The Prince Imperial: a study of his life among the British, [London]: Jarrolds, [1959]
  The most recent monograph.

BEFORE THE SECOND EMPIRE

• Mansel, P., Paris between the empires, 1814-1852, London: John Murray, 2001, 559 p.

ON THE SECOND EMPIRE

• Smith, W.H.C., Second Empire and Commune: France 1848-1871, London: Longman, 1985

ON THE PRUSSIAN CRISIS AND THE WAR OF 1870

• Bonnin, G. (trans. I.M. Massey), Bismark and the Hohenzollern Candidature, London: Chatto and Windus, 1957, 312 p.
• Case, L., French opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954, 339 p.
• Howard, M., The Franco-Prussian War: the German invasion of France, 1870-1871, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1960, 512 p.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

• Mainardi, P., Art and Politics of the Second Empire. The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867, London and New Haven: Yale