ABSTRACT
In the winter of 1852, after years of derision in the popular press, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself Emperor of the French. There was, in a sense, nothing particularly new about this, for he had done so publicly at least twice before, at the debacles of Strasbourg (1836) and Boulogne (1840); but on those occasions his claims had been summarily dismissed. Discounted as an illegitimate heir to the throne and as a lackluster and presumptuous counterfeit of his imperial uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis had suffered repeated exiles and imprisonments. On December 2, however, a year after dissolving the National Assembly, and fortyseven years to the day after his uncle’s famous victory at Austerlitz, he made the claim stick. The Second Empire was launched.
