The Second Empire is credited with renovating Paris with broad boulevards, striking public buildings, and elegant residential districts for wealthier Parisians.

Napoleon III also launched an intervention in Mexico seeking to erect the Second Mexican Empire and bring it into the French orbit, but this ended in a fiasco.

[7] The Second Empire came to an end during the Franco-Prussian War, following Napoleon III's capture at the Battle of Sedan and the proclamation of the Third French Republic on 4 September 1870.

On 2 December 1851, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who had been elected President of the Republic in 1848, staged a coup d'état by dissolving the National Assembly without having the constitutional right to do so.

[11] Napoleon, in order to restore the prestige of the Empire before the newly awakened hostility of public opinion, tried to gain the support from the Left that he had lost from the Right.

The idea of Italian unification, which would inevitably end the temporal power of the popes, outraged French Catholics, who had been the leading supporters of the Empire.

The pamphlet campaign led by Mgr Gaston de Ségur, at the height of the Italian question in February 1860, made the most of the freedom of expression enjoyed by the Catholic Church in France.

A major result of the Catholic ultramontane campaign was to trigger reforms in the cultural sphere, which also granted freedoms to their political enemies the Republicans and freethinkers.

The state dealt with the small Protestant community of Calvinist and Lutheran churches, whose members included many prominent businessmen who supported the regime.

However, whether through jealousy of or distrust for the higher classes, few working-class families took advantage of education or wished to see their sons move up and out: very few sought admission to the 'grandes écoles.'

In spite of the government's warning against the "red terror", the conciliatory candidate Ollivier was rejected by Paris, while 40 irreconcilables and 116 members of the Third Party were elected.

The killing of the journalist Victor Noir by Pierre Bonaparte, a member of the imperial family, gave the revolutionaries their long desired opportunity (10 January).

The commercial treaty with Great Britain in 1860 ratified the free trade policy of Richard Cobden and Michel Chevalier, had brought upon French industry the sudden shock of foreign competition.

By 1863, French military intervention in Mexico to set up a Second Mexican Empire headed by Emperor Maximilian, brother of Franz Joseph I of Austria, was a complete fiasco.

The Mexicans fought back and after defeating the Confederacy the U.S. demanded the French withdraw from Mexico—sending 50,000 veteran combat troops to the border to ram the point home.

The conquest was bloody but successful, and supported by large numbers of French soldiers, missionaries and businessmen, as well as the local Chinese entrepreneurial element.

He was again unsuccessful: Great Britain refused even to admit the principle of a congress, while Austria, Prussia and Russia gave their adhesion only on conditions which rendered it futile, i.e. they reserved the vital questions of Venetia and Poland.

The visit of Tsar Alexander II of Russia to Paris ended in near-disaster[citation needed] when he was twice attacked by Polish assassins, but escaped.

It was in vain that after the parliamentary revolution of 2 January 1870, Comte Daru revived, through Lord Clarendon, Count Beust's plan of disarmament after the Battle of Königgrätz.

He joined Britain in sending an army to China during the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion (1860), but French ventures failed to establish influence in Japan (1867) and Korea (1866).

To carry out his new overseas projects, Napoleon III created a new Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, and appointed an energetic minister, Prosper, Marquis of Chasseloup-Laubat, to head it.

He also created a new force of colonial troops, including elite units of naval infantry, Zouaves, the Chasseurs d'Afrique, and Algerian sharpshooters, and he expanded the Foreign Legion, which had been founded in 1831 and fought well in the Crimea, Italy and Mexico.

He himself drew power and legitimacy from his role as representative of the great Napoleon I of France, "who had sprung armed from the French Revolution like Minerva from the head of Jove".

He was to nominate the members of the council of state, whose duty it was to prepare the laws, and of the senate, a body permanently established as a constituent part of the empire.

[12] The Legislative Body was not allowed to elect its own president or to regulate its own procedure, or to propose a law or an amendment, or to vote on the budget in detail, or to make its deliberations public.

Similarly, universal suffrage was supervised and controlled by means of official candidature, by forbidding free speech and action in electoral matters to the Opposition, and by a gerrymandering in such a way as to overwhelm the liberal vote in the mass of the rural population.

The press was subjected to a system of cautionnements ("caution money", deposited as a guarantee of good behaviour) and avertissements (requests by the authorities to cease publication of certain articles), under sanction of suspension or suppression.

Felice Orsini's attack on the emperor in 1858, though purely Italian in its motive, served as a pretext for increasing the severity of this régime by the law of general security (sûreté générale) which authorised the internment, exile or deportation of any suspect without trial.

The royalists waited inactive after the new and unsuccessful attempt made at Frohsdorf in 1853, by a combination of the legitimists and Orléanists, to re-create a living monarchy out of the ruin of two royal families.

On an adjacent hill she created a spectacular Mausoleum, today St Michael's Abbey, where the bodies of Napoleon III and the Prince Imperial were interred in 1888.