His early death caused an international sensation and sent shockwaves throughout Europe, as he was the last serious dynastic hope for the restoration of the House of Bonaparte to the throne of France.

His godmother was Eugène de Beauharnais's daughter, Josephine, the Queen of Sweden, who was represented by Grand Duchess Stéphanie of Baden.

[2] His education, after a false start under the academic historian Francis Monnier, was from 1867 supervised by General Frossard as governor, assisted by Augustin Filon as a tutor.

[8] The prince remained a devout Catholic, and he retained hopes that the Bonapartist cause might eventually triumph if the secularising Third Republic failed.

[6] With the outbreak of the Zulu War in 1879, the prince, with the rank of lieutenant, forced the hand of the British military to allow him to take part in the conflict, despite the objections of Rouher and other Bonapartists.

[citation needed] He was only allowed to go to Africa by the special pleading of his mother, Empress Eugénie, and by the intervention of Queen Victoria herself.

He left England on 27 February 1879 with letters of introduction from the Duke of Cambridge, the British commander-in-chief, in the hope he might be allowed to follow the movements of the troops.

[1] Once he arrived at Durban, he joined the General's Head-Quarters and met Frederic Thesiger, 2nd Baron Chelmsford, the commander in South Africa, on 9 April and was nominally placed on his staff.

Keen to see action and full of enthusiasm, he was warned by Lieutenant Arthur Brigge, a close friend, "not to do anything rash and to avoid running unnecessary risks.

"[9] Chelmsford, mindful of his duty, attached the prince to the staff of Colonel Richard Harrison of the Royal Engineers, where it was felt he could be active but safe.

Despite this, on the evening of 31 May 1879, Harrison agreed to allow the prince to scout in a forward party scheduled to leave in the morning, mistakenly believing that the path ahead was free of Zulu skirmishers.

After giving the prince's clothes to another Zulu man named Dabayane to hold onto, Klabawathunga explained that he personally performed a slight incision on the prince's naked abdomen in order to observe the customary Zulu qaqa ritual, which was customarily performed on the corpses of slain foes for the purposes of removing a perceived contagious ritual pollution that followed homicide, called umnyama in isiZulu (meaning 'dark contagion').

[18][19] This was the traditional Zulu explanation for the observable swelling of the body which occurs in corpses due to the fermentation of butyric acid in the gut.

[20] The prince's bloodstained clothes had meanwhile been removed in order for Klabawathunga to observe the customary Zulu ritual of zila, where a killer was required to wear their victim's clothes (polluted by the harmful influences of his blood) while observing customary ritual abstentions in order to cleanse themself of the crime of homicide.

[25] In one account, Queen Victoria was accused of arranging the whole thing, a theory that was later dramatised by Maurice Rostand in his play Napoleon IV.

[25] Eugénie later made a pilgrimage to Sobuza's kraal, where her son had died, and where the Prince Imperial Memorial, paid for by Queen Victoria, had been erected.

[28] On 9 January 1888, his body was transferred to a special mausoleum constructed by his mother as the Imperial Crypt at St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough, next to his father.

[32] In the R. F. Delderfield novel Long Summer Day (the first of the A Horseman Riding By trilogy), Boer War veteran Paul Craddock buys a farm in 1900 or 1901.

The contemporary Italian poet Giosuè Carducci composed a poem in Alcaic stanzas in his memory in 1879 (later in his Odi Barbare), in which he described the Prince's death as follows (vv.

1 - 4) "Questo la inconscia zagaglia barbara / prostrò, spegnendo li occhi di fulgida / vita sorrisi da i fantasmi / fluttuanti ne l'azzurro immenso".

("The unconscious barbarous assegai / prostrated him and extinguished his eyes / of radiant life, at which smiled the ghosts / floating in the immense blue").

In the play Napoleon IV by Maurice Rostand, the prince is killed in a carefully planned ambush arranged with the connivance of Queen Victoria.

[33] In a 1943 Southern Daily Echo article, former Sapper George Harding (2nd Company Royal Engineers) recalled being ordered to take a horse ambulance and find the prince's body and bring it back to the column.

[34]The Prince Imperial is a minor character in Donald Serrell Thomas's Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel Death on a Pale Horse (2013).