Full name Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. He won a seat in the French National Assembly and was elected president of the Second Republic in 1848. However, he wanted more power and staged a coup on December 2, 1851, to become ruler of France as Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. Karl Marx entitled his famous book about the event The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a reference to the date in the French Revolutionary calendar in 1799 on which Napoleon I overthrew the Directory. After France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III and his wife Empress Eugénie fled to England.
