Maintaining leadership for 22 years, he was the longest-reigning French head of state since the fall of the Ancien Régime, although his reign would ultimately end upon his surrender to Otto von Bismarck and Wilhelm I on 2 September 1870.

In the summer of 1840 he bought weapons and uniforms and had proclamations printed, gathered a contingent of about sixty armed men, hired a ship called the Edinburgh-Castle, and on 6 August 1840, sailed across the Channel to the port of Boulogne.

[32] The new constitution of the Second Republic, drafted by a commission including Alexis de Tocqueville, called for a strong executive and a president elected by popular vote through universal male suffrage, rather than chosen by the National Assembly.

Louis Napoleon won the support of all segments of the population: the peasants unhappy with rising prices and high taxes; unemployed workers; small businessmen who wanted prosperity and order; and intellectuals such as Victor Hugo.

Instead the force was secretly ordered to do the opposite, namely to enter Rome to help restore the temporal authority of Pope Pius IX, who had been overthrown by Italian republicans including Mazzini and Garibaldi.

[41] Elections were held for the National Assembly on 13–14 May 1849, only a few months after Louis Napoleon had become president, and were largely won by a coalition of conservative republicans—which Catholics and monarchists called "The Party of Order"—led by Thiers.

Napoleon III began his regime by launching a series of enormous public works projects in Paris, hiring tens of thousands of workers to improve the sanitation, water supply and traffic circulation of the city.

To accommodate the growing population and those who would be forced from the center by the construction of new boulevards and squares, Napoleon issued a decree in 1860 to annex eleven communes (municipalities) on the outskirts of Paris and increase the number of arrondissements (city boroughs) from twelve to twenty.

His hydraulic chief engineer, Eugène Belgrand, built a new aqueduct to bring clean water from the Vanne River in the Champagne region, and a new huge reservoir near the future Parc Montsouris.

He completed Les Halles, the great cast iron and glass pavilioned produce market in the center of the city, and built a new municipal hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, in the place of crumbling medieval buildings on the Ile de la Cité.

As the siege dragged on, the French and British armies were reinforced and troops from the Kingdom of Sardinia joined them, reaching a total of 140,000 soldiers, but they suffered terribly from epidemics of typhus, dysentery, and cholera.

Count Cavour, the Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, came to Paris with the King and employed an unusual emissary in his efforts to win the support of Napoleon III: his young cousin, Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione (1837–1899).

It was long and bloody, and the French center was exhausted and nearly broken, but the battle was finally won by a timely attack on the Austrian flank by the soldiers of General Patrice de MacMahon.

The Emperor's health declined; he gained weight, he began to dye his hair to cover the gray, he walked slowly because of gout, and in 1864, at the military camp of Châlons-en-Champagne, he suffered the first medical crisis from his gallstones, the ailment that killed him nine years later.

Napoleon III had conservative and traditional taste in art: his favourite painters were Alexandre Cabanel and Franz Xaver Winterhalter, who received major commissions, and whose work was purchased for state museums.

In 1863, the jury of the Paris Salon, the famous annual showcase of French painting, headed by the ultra-conservative director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Count Émilien de Nieuwerkerke, refused all submissions by avant-garde artists, including those by Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and Johan Jongkind.

'[114][page needed] The journalist Émile Zola reported that visitors pushed to get into the crowded galleries where the refused paintings were hung, and the rooms were full of the laughter and mocking comments of many of the spectators.

Convinced he was right, he sent his chief economic advisor, Michel Chevalier, to London to begin discussions, and secretly negotiated a new commercial agreement with Britain, calling for the gradual lowering of tariffs in both countries.

Napoleon III saw this as a referendum on his rule as Emperor: "By voting yes," he wrote, "you will chase away the threat of revolution; you will place the nation on a solid base of order and liberty, and you will make it easier to pass on the Crown to my son."

One newspaper, the Courrier de la Vienne, was warned by the censors to stop publishing articles which had "a clear and malicious intent to spread, contrary to the truth, alarms about the health of the Emperor".

His foreign minister, Drouyn, asked Bismarck for the Palatinate region on the Rhine, which belonged to Bavaria, and for the demilitarization of Luxembourg, which was the site of a formidable fortress staffed by a strong Prussian garrison in accordance with international treaties.

Bismarck swiftly intervened and showed the British ambassador a copy of Napoleon's demands; as a result, he put pressure on William III to refuse to sell Luxembourg to France.

[148] While Napoleon III was having no success finding allies, Bismarck signed secret military treaties with the southern German states, who promised to provide troops in the event of a war between Prussia and France.

"Bismarck had bought Tsar Alexander II's complicity by promising to help restore his naval access to the Black Sea and Mediterranean (cut off by the treaties ending the Crimean War), other powers were less biddable".

The decisive weapon was the new German Krupp six pound field gun, which was breech-loading, had a steel barrel, longer range, a higher rate of fire, and was more accurate than the bronze muzzle-loading French cannons.

On 4 September, a group of republican deputies, led by Léon Gambetta, gathered at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris and proclaimed the return of the Republic and the creation of a Government of National Defence.

[175] On 27 November, Napoleon composed a memorandum to Bismarck that raised the possibility that the Prussian king might urge the French people to recall him as Emperor after a peace treaty was signed and Paris surrendered.

Napoleon, Eugénie, their son and their entourage, including the American Colonel Zebulon Howell Benton, settled at Camden Place,[178] a large three-storey country house in the village of Chislehurst in Kent, a half-hour by train from London.

With Eugène Viollet-le-Duc acting as chief architect, many buildings were saved, including some of the most famous in France: Notre Dame Cathedral, Mont Saint-Michel, Carcassonne, Vézelay Abbey, Pierrefonds, and Roquetaillade castle.

In France, such arch-opposition from the age's central literary figure, whose attacks on Napoleon III were obsessive and powerful, made it impossible for a very long time to assess his reign objectively.