Hey /r/AskHistorians,
The question might seem a little off, but I was talking with a French friend of mine from Montpellier and he mentioned that he was taught in school that the clergy-controlled uneducated French voters from the rural areas voted for Napoleon III due to some sort of confusion that he was his famous uncle.
Can anybody familiar with the time period expand on this or prove it wrong? It'd be greatly appreciated.
I am pretty familiar with long nineteenth-century French history (doctorate on liberalism and Orientalism) and haven't run across any evidence to that effect. Napoleon III wasn't elected until 1848, at which point Napoleon I would have been close to 80 (had he not died almost 30 years earlier).
A good, friendly resource to consult might be Graham Robb's The Discovery of France. Based on what Robb has to say about the fractured state of the French rural peasantry during that period, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of voter manipulation. On the other hand, Louis Napoléon handily won his place in the Assemblée Nationale and won the presidency by a landslide (nearly 3/4 of votes cast) . . . I can see maybe leveraging Bonapartist sentiment, but probably not confusing one Napoleon for the other altogether.