Napoleon III determined the fate of France and all of Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century. His personality reflects the contradictions and conflicts, fresh departures and upheavals of an entire epoch. Napoleon III was a putschist, the backward-looking founder of a dynasty and executor of the last testament of his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte. He cherished ambitious sociopolitical plans that were far ahead of his time, paving the way for processes of democratization and parliamentarization, but he failed in his foreign policy and also militarily against his German opponent, Bismarck. This volume describes the complex and sometimes dazzling figure of the last French Emperor and provides a historical outline of nineteenth-century France of the nineteenth century, which was politically, economically and culturally one of the leading European powers, on the threshold of today=s modern age.