In the golden age of the Second Empire, the France of Napoleon III – nephew of the great Bonaparte – was known as ’the arbiter of Europe’. For twenty tumultuous years Paris was the glittering heart of the continent, a dramatically reinvented city of wide boulevards and grand public gardens. Then the man known to Bismarck as ’the sphinx without a riddle’ lost it all in 1870 in the disastrous Franco-Prussian war.” “In this biography of one of France’s most intriguing rulers, the ‘other’ Napoleon comes to dramatic life – from boyhood exile after his uncle’s defeat at Waterloo, through years of early despair, high adventure and a growing sense of destiny, to two failed coups d’etat, six years in prison followed by an ingenious escape, democratic election in 1848 as President of the Second Republic, and finally (after a brutal show of strength) the emperorship of France.