From an earlier answer of mine
The general reaction of European policymakers to the ascent of Louis Napoleon and the resurrection of the imperial title was one that paradoxically mixed confusion, opportunism, and alarm.
Although the memory of his uncle's campaigns ran deep, the events of the Revolutions of 1848-49 colored many of the responses to Napoleon III. Although later historical memory would consign the 1848 revolutionary events as ephemeral failures, contemporary observers did not have the benefit of hindsight.The 1851 article "Napoleon's Book of Fate," in the popular British satirical Punch predicted that after genuflecting before his uncle's historical legacy, history would repeat itself:
And then the revolution will begin over again; and there will be more misrule, more insurrections, more fighting, more slaughter, more public theatricals, crying, embracing, blessing, and dances.
Every year there will be a mass, in commemoration of the victims of 1851, as for those of 1848 and 1830; and future years will give occasion for similar services, until, at length, every day in the whole twelve months will be the anniversary of the slain in some émeute or revolution.
Other British commentators took a more balanced approach. The 1852 anonymous pamphlet Letters of "An Englishman" on Louis Napoleon, the empire, and the coup d'état published by the London Times warned that for Louis Napoleon "it is England that he dreads, and on England he must war, if he war at all," but that the nephew lacked the large, experienced army of his predecessor. Furthermore, the author noted that although "steam has done much for France, it has done more for us," and British industry, coupled with its existing navy would make a Nelsonian blockade even more effective.
The German responses to Napoleon III was quite mixed. The German right-liberal satirical magazine Der Kladderadatsch first graphic depiction of Louis Napoleon in November 1851 depicted him as a forlorn fisherman of eels who had hung up his uncle's bicorne while he uses a plebiscite as bait for the imperial crown at the bottom of the pond. The accompanying poem for the cartoon predicted his ultimate failure in that "half [the eels] pulled him in, and half sank him,/ and he was no longer seen in 1852." A 7 December 1851 Kladderadatsch poem "vive l'empereur!" also wrote off Louis Napoleon as a pale imitation of the original. Invoking the image of the sun of Austerlitz, the poem outlines the subtle, but important differences between the ascent of the uncle and his nephew, sarcastically concluding "That was the thunder of the imperial crown/which breaks the small forehead;/ That was the sun of Austerlitz,/that has scorched his small head!"
Not all Germans wrote off Louis Napoleon so easily though. The Prussian conservative camarilla centered around the Gerlach brothers were quite alarmed by another Bonaparte in charge of France. In their pronouncements and private letters, the Gerlachs referred to Louis Napoleon as an "usurper," "red," and "democrat." In a letter to the Gerlachs, the young Turk of Prussian conservationism Otto von Bismarck predicted that the Bonapartist coup would devolve into "a dictatorial wielding of the iron scepter."
But Bismarck's invective towards the new French state should not be taken at face value. In other correspondence, he claimed to be quite thrilled with Louis Napoleon as such a rogue element gave Prussia more room to maneuver in the post-1848 milieu. Prussia's humiliating 1850 Olmütz convention meant that Prussia had to accede to the wishes of Austria in the matters of the German confederation and one of the priorities of Prussian statecraft was to revise this. Bismarck felt that the resurgence of a strong France would goad Austria into reckless behavior and drive the smaller German states back into Prussia's arms. For their part, their Austrian counterparts tended to see the Bonapartist coup as a positive development away from broader political trends favoring constitutionalism and instead as an event that justified a stable autocracy. Vienna largely perceived this as a useful development as it isolated the smaller German states from France and inhibited them from wanting to revise their post-1848 reactionary political order maintained by Austria and Prussia by using France as a patron.
The sense that Napoleon III created a much needed stability in France was not unique. The British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston's support for Louis Napoleon's coup gradually leaked out into public circles and embarrassed the PM Lord Russell and Queen Victoria, who always held a low opinion of Louis Bonaparte as a philander and upstart. The French issue became an object of contention in British politics with conservatives using the death of Wellington and the new war scare with France as an opportunity to attack their Liberal counterparts. All the way in Moscow, Emperor Nicholas I did not relish Napoleon III's return to empire, but then again, the Tsar's arch-reactionary mentality meant he did not accept the July Monarchy as a legitimate European government either. A number of Russian observers in the foreign ministry and the court were also able to look beyond Napoleon III's paeans to French revolutionary tradition and try and learn how a monarch could rally popular support without recourse to elections or other distasteful elements of popular sovereignty.
Louis Napoleon was quite polarizing among European radicals and national activists. Although Marx famously dismissed Napoleon III as "history repeating itself first as tragedy, then farce," a number of radicals saw that Napoleon III could be useful for their projects. Garibaldi recognized that French arms remained the best chance to remove the Austrians from northern Italy and unite the peninsula. This sentiment was not shared by Garibaldi's counterpart Mazzini, who felt that the 1851 coup betrayed liberal ideas and was highly critical both of the coup's betrayal of liberal principles and the bloodshed that accompanied it. Even the 1848ers in the US were divided over Napoleon III. The German democrat Friedrich Hecker denounced Napoleon III's politics, but the southern German emigre did not relish France's defeats in German affairs since that entailed the small German states being swallowed up by another anti-democratic Feind, Prussia.
The polarized response to Louis Napoleon was in no small measure due to the highly circumspect political game he played in the decades before 1851. While in exile, Louis Napoleon portrayed himself as the paladin of many different political causes in addition to Bonapartism; he could alternate in playing the republican demanding a French constitution and elections at one moment, and the next place himself as the champion of order over democracy. His sponsorship of the national principle and other liberal ideas earned him a reputation as a radical, but once in power he increasingly relied upon clerical Catholic support and other anti-liberal forces as one of the cornerstones for his regime. Ultimately, this highly paradoxical nature of Louis Napoleon made it much harder for there to be either a uniform rejection or acceptance of the Second Empire within Europe.
Sources
Dowe, Dieter. Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001.
Mack Smith, Denis. Mazzini. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Price, Roger. The French Second Empire An Anatomy of Political Power. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Steinberg, Jonathan. Bismarck: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.