This bust depicts Napoleon III as middle aged with a long goatee and mustache.
The museum placard indicates that the 1873 marble work is by Jean-Baptists Carpeaux. Carpeaux was summoned to England to capture the exiled and dying Napoleon's likeness. It was commissioned by his widow, Empress Eugenie and iis a cope of an original plaster cast now in the Louvre.
Wikipedia (
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"Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (20 April 1808 – 9 January 1873) was the first President of the French Second Republic and, as Napoleon III, the Emperor of the Second French Empire. He was the nephew and heir of Napoleon I. He was the first President of France to be elected by a direct popular vote. However, when he was blocked by the Constitution and Parliament from running for a second term, he organized a coup d'état in 1851, and then took the throne as Napoleon III on 2 December 1852, the forty-eighth anniversary of Napoleon I's coronation.
During the first years of the Empire, his government imposed censorship and harsh repressive measures against his opponents. Some six thousand persons were imprisoned or sent to penal colonies Cayenne or Algeria until they were amnestied in 1859. Thousands more, including Victor Hugo, went into voluntary exile abroad. Beginning in 1862, Napoleon loosened the censorship and lifted many of the repressive measures, and gave the legislature more power, in what was known as the "Liberal Empire." Many of his opponents returned to France and became members of the National Assembly.
Napoleon III is best known today for his reconstruction of Paris, carried out by his prefect of the Seine Baron Haussmann. He created many of the grand boulevards and squares of central Paris, established the Bois de Boulogne, Bois de Vincennes and other famous Paris parks, and built the Palais Garnier for the Paris Opera. He launched similar public works projects in Marseille, Lyon and other French cities.
Napoleon III modernized the French banking system, encouraged the creation of savings and investment banks, greatly expanded and consolidated the French railroad system, and made the French merchant marine the second largest in the world. He promoted the building of the Suez Canal, and established modern agricultural schools and experimental farms, which ended famines in France and made France an agricultural exporter. He negotiated the first free trade agreement with Britain, which was followed by similar agreements with France's other European trading partners.
Napoleon III also accomplished important social reforms, including giving French workers the right to strike and the right to organize. Under Napoleon III, women were allowed to take the baccalauréat examination, the first women were admitted to the Sorbonne, and public schools for girls were opened in all the communes of France with more than five hundred inhabitants. He also made history and geography required subjects in public schools, and introduced the first public school courses in modern languages, art, music, and gymnastics."