Excerpt from Louis Napoleon and the Recovery of France, 1848-1856 The extraordinary concentration of historic interest which the dominating figure of Napoleon has drawn to the First Empire has had for accompaniment - and possibly in part for consequence - a hardly less extraordinary neglect of the Second. The personal appeal of the first Napoleon sufficed to secure the prompt investigation as it became available of every kind of documentary evidence bearing upon his reign 1 and his imperious sway has kept historians toiling indefatigably upon his domain long after the Law of Diminishing Returns was beginning to illustrate itself in the results of their labours. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.