What Happened to France's Imperial Family After the Second French Empire Fell?

Napoleon III's family fled to England in 1870. He set a date to return to France, and neither he nor his son ever went back. In September 1870, after the defeat at Sedan, Empress Eugénie escaped the Tuileries through the galleries of the Louvre and crossed the Channel on a stranger's yacht. Napoleon III joined her at Camden Place in Chislehurst, Kent, and began planning a return to France for 20 March 1873. He died ten weeks before that date. Their only son, the Prince Imperial, trained at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich and was hailed by Bonapartists as Napoleon IV. In 1879 he went to the Zulu War as an observer with the British army, and on 1 June he was killed at a kraal by the Ityotyosi river. This is the story of Napoleon III's family in exile, from Sedan to Zululand. Empress Eugénie lived for another four decades. She built St Michael's Abbey at Farnborough to hold her husband and son, handed the French Republic a letter she had kept since 1870, and died in Madrid in 1920 at the age of 94.