Often dismissed as inept, the Emperor of the French transformed the nation through economic modernisation and urban renewal, before defeat in the Franco-Prussian War brought his reign to a dramatic end.
For Karl Marx, Napoleon III was a “grotesque mediocrity”; Victor Hugo lambasted him as “Napoleon the little”; Alexis de Tocqueville, in what was not the famed political theorist’s most sophisticated analysis, dismissed him as a “dwarf”. Yet these men underestimated...