Louis-Napoléon prisonnier. Du Fort de Ham aux ors des Tuileries (in French)

 
In 1840, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, in exile since his uncle Napoleon I was chased from the French throne, attempted a night-time landing on the beaches of Boulogne. His goal: to march on Paris. Alas, the attempt was to fail miserably: captured with ease, the prince became the laughing stock of France and was sentenced to life imprisonment, locked away in the Château de Ham, in the Somme département.
 
But this punishment, far from casting him out of mind, proved the basis for Louis-Napoleon's unexpected political rebirth: on the back of impassioned pamphlets denouncing the government and meetings with the major players of the Republican movement, he forged his new identity, and in the process thrust himself back into the political arena. Peering out from behind his bars, this London dandy transformed himself into a hero of the popular movement, a spokesman for the oppressed: behind this Napoleon of the people, the future emperor of the French was already beginning to take shape.
 
From napoleon.org:
Juliette Glikman, part of the young generation of historians working on the Napoleonic periods, picks apart – with no little humour – this important episode in the life of Emperor Napoleon III, analysis of which in the past has all too frequently approached it like a work of fiction.