Birth of the King of Rome

Labour began during the night of 19-20 March 1811 and went badly: the child lay transverse. The accoucheur Dubois, pale, warned the Emperor, who ordered him to act "as if she were a shopkeeper's wife in the Rue Saint-Denis" and to save the mother first. Forceps were used; the child was born lifeless and only breathed after seven minutes.

Paris counted the salvoes: twenty-one for a girl, one hundred and one for a boy. At the twenty-second shot the city burst into cheering. Styled King of Rome from birth, under the decree of 1810 that made Rome the Empire's second city, the child was baptised on 9 June at Notre-Dame with his grandfather Francis I as godfather — represented by proxy, the Emperor of Austria not having come.

The dynasty seemed secure, and the regime proclaimed it everywhere: portraits, medals, a silver cradle presented by the City of Paris. Three years later everything collapsed. Napoleon abdicated in his favour on 6 April 1814, then again on 22 June 1815 — twice proclaimed Napoleon II, never reigning a single day.

Taken to Vienna by his mother, made Duke of Reichstadt, raised as an Austrian prince and kept away from all politics, he died of tuberculosis at Schönbrunn on 22 July 1832, aged twenty-one.