The Shadow Emperor: A Biography of Napoleon III by Alan Schom

This brand new book about the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte covers a lot of ground as I wind down my study of the 19th century.  This prominent French leader of the mid to late 1800s had his fingers in a lot of pies.

For one, he played a major role in the unification of Italy.  He met secretly with Cavour to plan the attack on Austrian forces that expelled them from Italy.  And he later negotiated the surrender of Venice, largely freeing the peninsula from outside rule.  

I found it interesting that the plan he and Cavour developed was to culminate in a "loose confederation" with the Pope at its helm.  Not exactly a free, unified state.  Apparently that wasn't even discussed.  The end result was probably a more independent, powerful neighbor to France's south than Louis Napoleon had actually intended.

He also forged the city that is modern Paris.  He recruited Georges Haussmann and empowered him to transform the city - largely an urban ghetto or slum up until that time.  Under Louis Napoleon's tutelage, Haussmann razed the city and build it anew, complete with wide avenues, underground plumbing and gas street lights.  Over the course of 15 years during Louis' rule, the city first became the City of Lights.

Louis Napoleon was perhaps the first French ruler to strategically align with England.  After centuries of brutal warfare, Napoleon visited Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and they visited him, a number of times during the French Emperor's reign.  They aligned to push back Russia from encroaching on the Ottoman Empire and Europe in the Crimean War.  And although the alliance wasn't perfect, it represented a watershed moment in European diplomacy.

He blundered in Algeria - to the death and misery of countless - and he lost badly in the Franco-Prussian War, capping Bismarck's (and Germany's) rise to the top of the world stage.  But that would have happened with or without poor Louis.

He was a democratically elected president of France.  Of course he staged a coup that made him Emperor just a few years later.  But he did bring about quite a few democratic reforms, and compared to most European leaders of the time, he generally sought peace and progress.

A complicated figure in a complicated time, Louis Napoleon represented a key stepping-stone towards a more modern France and Europe.