Nepotism

Louis NAPOLEON AND THE SECOND EMPIRE (342 pp.] -- J. M. Thompson --Noonday Press ($4.50).

A resolute exile named Louis Napoleon, nephew of the great Bonaparte, crossed the Rhine into Strasbourg one day in 1836 and waved one of his uncle's aigles (eagle standards) at the French garrison.

"Soldiers! A new destiny awaits you," he cried. "March with me ... !" A whole regiment obeyed, and Louis (no soldier) marched them stoutly into a blind alley; immediately, loyal officers put the pint-sized pretender in the guardroom. French authorities bundled Louis off to the U.S., with a warning not to behave like a damn fool again. But after four years Louis was back in France, up to his old tricks. This time the authorities sentenced him to life imprisonment in the fortress of Ham.

Louis stuck Ham for almost six years, then walked out, disguised as a carpenter with a plank on his shoulder, and was snug in Britain by next day.

Winning Ways. Now he changed his tactics, decided to win his place "constitutionally." Rightly confident that there was voters' magic in the name Napoleon, Louis ran for the French presidency in 1848, won by comfortable millions. After swearing to uphold the Republic and constitution, he proceeded to ditch both, and in 1852 declared himself Emperor Napoleon III.

The course of French history can only be traced with a seismograph. It is never more in need of one than through the 81 years which began with the French Revolution (1789) and ended, with another revolution, in the unseating of Napoleon III (1870). In the course of those years, France was twice a republic, twice an empire, thrice a kingdom (Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis Philippe). Napoleon III, creator of the Second Empire, spent 18 years trying to impose on France an order resembling that created by his notorious uncle.

Louis' chief handicaps were two: 1) his eyes were in the back of his head, i.e., he dreamed too much of his uncle's example; 2) he had hardly a vestige of his uncle's genius. Of all the Bonapartes, probably none looked so unlike the family hero as Louis, from under whose spiky mustaches the French language emerged in Teutonic gutturals (he was raised in Switzerland).

But his winning ways won the heart of Queen Victoria and strengthened the foundations of the Entente Cordiale. His muddled pursuit of one of his uncle's favorite foreign-policy dreams led to the unification of Italy. He gave France its first legal trade unions and old-age pensions. Above all, his determination to give Paris a Napoleonic splendor resulted in the city's spacious boulevards.

Losing Battle. "Yet he was a man too small for the great things he set out to do," concludes Author Thompson, a British historian-clergyman. More benevolent than tyrannical, Louis became the victim of advisers who encouraged his most futile dreams of glory--with the result that when Louis' armies met Bismarck's at Sedan in 1870, the French suffered their most crushing defeat since Waterloo. Louis himself, sick (gallstones) but fighting doggedly on horseback, was taken prisoner and died two years and four months later. His empress. Eugenie, built a mausoleum to his memory at Farnborough, and survived her husband 47 years. She died in her native Spain in 1920, a belle of the polka era who had managed to stay at the ball until the jazz age.

Napoleon III was Napoleon the Last.* His reforms proved too small to satisfy the demands of workers surging forward on the wave of the Industrial Revolution: Europe's first notable communist regime, the Paris Commune, which followed the debacle at Sedan, held power for ten weeks. Author Thompson's friendly, scholarly biography leaves the reader convinced that, for all his achievements, Louis Napoleon had a streak of mediocrity and a run of bad luck which prevented him from living up to his ambitions. Says Thompson: "At the back of all his twists and turns, all his ups and downs, [was] the will to be great." But while he "had his eyes fixed on a goal, [he] could not find the way to reach it."

* The "second" Napoleon, who never ruled, was the Duke of Reichstadt, Bonaparte's son by Empress Marie Louise; a sickly and weak-willed boy, he died near Vienna in 1832. After Napoleon III, each generation has had its Bonapartist pretender. The current: Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 41. Occupation: chemist.

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