In 1870 the Prince Imperial had to flee from France with the Imperial Family and settled in England at Chislehurst, Kent. On his father's death the Bonapartists proclaimed him Napoleon IV. During the 1870s there was some talk of a marriage between him and Queen Victoria's youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice.
He served as an officer in the British Army and volunteered to join the British expedition to Zululand. While out on reconnaissance he was surprised by Zulus and speared to death at Ulundi. His death sent shock waves throughout Europe as he was the last dynastic hope for the restoration of the Bonapartes to the throne of France.
His body was brought back to England and buried in a special mausoleum constructed by his mother as the Imperial Crypt at Saint Michael's Abbey, Farnborough, Hampshire, England, next to his father.
The asteroid moon Petit-Prince was named after the Prince Imperial in 1998, because it orbits an asteroid named after his mother (45 Eugenia).
External links
The South African Military History Society The Prince Imperial (http://www.rapidttp.com/milhist/vol032aw.html)
Napoleon Bonaparte (or Buonaparte, as he almost always spelt the name down the year 1796) was born at Ajaccio in Corsica on the i 5th of August 1769.
Napoleon's ideas on the education of girls may be judged by this extract from his speech at the Council of State on the 1st of March 1806: "I do not think that we need trouble ourselves with any plan of instruction for young females: they cannot be better brought up than by their mothers.
Napoleon was surprised by the news of Prussia's mobilization; he had come to regard her as a negligible quantity, and now he found that her unexpected sensitiveness on points of honour was about to revivify the Third Coalition against France.
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