[2] His eldest sister Marie Bonaparte-Wyse (1831-1902) led an influential literary salon in Paris in the 1860s and in 1873 married the Piedmontese statesman Urbano Rattazzi.

[3][4] Between 1876 and 1878, the company sent Bonaparte-Wyse together with French naval officer Lt Armand Reclus and Hungarian engineer Béla Gerster on two expeditions to Panama with the task of locating the most suitable route for the canal.

[6] Returning to Paris, Bonaparte-Wyse and Reclus submitted a report to the French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, claiming that a sea-level canal across the Panama isthmus was feasible.

After the collapse of the Compagnie universelle du canal interocéanique de Panama in 1889, the liquidators sent Bonaparte-Wyse back to Bogotá, where he was able to get the Wyse Concession extended.

He married on 14 September 1871, in London, Mary Rose White (Port-au-Prince 1855 - Nice 1875) : He died at Cap Brun in Cannes on 15 June 1909, at the age of 64 years.