“He's Not Dead!”

This chapter sets forth the malleability and tenacity of the Napoleonic legend in the face of the emperor’s defeat, exile, and death. It opens by contrasting the glamorizing of Napoleon in the heyday of his vitality and power with the vilification that followed his fall. Having examined messianic and Catholic writing about Napoleon in the aftermath of the ceremonial return of his remains to Paris in 1840, the chapter concludes with the resurgent triumph of Bonapartism through the coup d’état of the imperial nephew, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.