Second French Empire
French Empire Empire français | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1852–1870 | |||||||||||||||
| Anthem: "Partant pour la Syrie" (de facto) "Departing for Syria" | |||||||||||||||
.png) Map of The Second French Empire with colonies | |||||||||||||||
| Capital | Paris, France | ||||||||||||||
| Official languages | French | ||||||||||||||
| Demonym(s) | French | ||||||||||||||
| Government | Constitutional Monarchy | ||||||||||||||
| Napoléon III | |||||||||||||||
| Establishment | |||||||||||||||
• Coronation of Napoléon III | 2 December 1852 | ||||||||||||||
• Fall of the Empire | 4 September 1870 | ||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
| Today part of |  France Algeria Senegal Djibouti Cambodia Vietnam | ||||||||||||||
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The time from about 1852 to 1870 is known as Second Empire in French history. Napoléon III was the emperor. First he had an authoritarian style of ruling, but there was a lot of opposition. Like with many other countries, industrialization (and the industrial revolution) started during his reign. France also became one of the most powerful counties in Europe. It collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-1871 during the Unification of Germany by Otto von Bismarck to create the German Empire in 1871 .
Internationally, Napoleon III tried to emulate his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte, engaging in numerous imperial ventures around the world as well as several wars in Europe. He began his reign with French victories in Crimea and in Italy, gaining Savoy and Nice, and very briefly, Venetia (before in turn ceding to Italy). Using very harsh methods, he built up the French Empire in North Africa, in East Africa and in French Indochina. 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. He mishandled the Prussian threat, and by the end of his reign, the French emperor found himself without allies in the face of overwhelming German forces.
Memorialisation
The Empress Eugenie created a memorial to the Second Empire in England in the 1880s. Exiled in Farnborough, Hampshire, she turned her house at Farnborough Hill into a Bonapartist shrine, filling the interior with the remnants of the imperial collection (returned to her in early 1881) and reconstructing elements of the display at the imperial palaces before 1870.
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. The imperial crypt at Farnborough remains the only official monument to Napoleon III and the Second Empire.
- ↑ White, Richard Grant (1861). National Hymns. How They are Written and how They are Not Written: A Lyric and National Study for the Times. New York City, New York: Rudd & Carleton. p. 59.
- ↑ Sousa, John Philip (1890). National, Patriotic and Typical: Airs of All Lands. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: H. Coleman. pp. vii, 100.
- ↑ Martens, Frederick H. (1930). "Music Mirrors of the Second Empire: Part 1". The Musical Quarterly. 16 (3): 426. doi:10.1093/mq/XVI.3.415. JSTOR 738378.