Second French Empire

State · 1853–1870 CE · at its largest around 1863 CE

The empire of Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon I, marked by modernisation such as Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris, which fell in the Franco-Prussian War.

On its lands while it lasted

Middle Passage (c. 1526–1866 CE): The forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas. Of about 12.5 million people embarked between the 16th and 19th centuries, some 1.8 million died on the crossing.
Ashanti Empire (1701–1901 CE): Akan state founded by Osei Tutu with its capital at Kumasi, which grew wealthy on gold and trade and resisted British expansion in a series of wars.
Victor Hugo (1802 CE – 1885 CE): French poet, novelist and dramatist of the Romantic movement, author of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), who spent nearly twenty years in exile as an opponent of Napoleon III.
Abraham Lincoln (1809 CE – 1865 CE): 16th President of the United States, who led the Union through the Civil War, issued the Emancipation Proclamation and was assassinated in 1865.
Louis Pasteur (1822 CE – 1895 CE): French chemist and microbiologist in Paris who developed pasteurisation, supported germ theory and created vaccines against anthrax and rabies.
Claude Monet (1840 CE – 1926 CE): French painter whose Impression, Sunrise gave Impressionism its name. From 1883 he lived at Giverny, where he painted his water garden again and again for the rest of his life.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 CE – 1900 CE): German philosopher and classical philologist whose works, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, attacked traditional morality and religion and introduced ideas such as the will to power.
Thomas Edison (1847 CE – 1931 CE): Prolific American inventor and businessman behind the phonograph, practical electric lighting and early motion pictures, working at Menlo Park and West Orange.
American Civil War (1861–1865 CE): War between the Union and the Confederacy of southern slave states; the Union victory preserved the United States and ended slavery.
Proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy (1861 CE): The first Italian parliament in Turin proclaimed Victor Emmanuel II King of Italy in March 1861. Unification was completed with Venice in 1866 and Rome in 1870.
Battle of Gettysburg (1863 CE): Three-day battle in Pennsylvania that ended Lee's invasion of the North, with the highest casualties of the Civil War.
Emancipation Proclamation (1863 CE): Lincoln's executive order of 1 January 1863 declared enslaved people in Confederate-held areas free and allowed Black men to enlist in the Union army.
Gettysburg Address (1863 CE): Abraham Lincoln’s short speech of 19 November 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, framing the Civil War as a struggle for equality and government by the people.
Henry Ford (1863 CE – 1947 CE): American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1903 and used the moving assembly line to mass-produce the affordable Model T.
Wilbur and Orville Wright (1867 CE – 1948 CE): American aviation pioneers from Dayton, Ohio, who built and flew the first successful powered, controlled airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903. Wilbur died in 1912 and Orville in 1948.