Louis Bonaparte (2 September 1778-25 July 1846) was King of Holland from 5 June 1806 to 1 July 1810, preceding Napoleon Louis Bonaparte. The brother of Napoleon I, he was briefly propped up as ruler of Holland during the Napoleonic Wars, but he was deposed due to his trade agreement with the United Kingdom.
Biography[]
Louis Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio, Corsica on 2 September 1778, the younger brother of Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lucien Bonaparte, and Elisa Bonaparte and the older brother of Pauline Bonaparte, Caroline Bonaparte, and Jerome Bonaparte. Bonaparte served in the French Revolutionary Army during the Egyptian Campaign of the French Revolutionary Wars and became a general by the time he was 25 in 1803. In 1806, Napoleon ended the independence of the Batavian Republic in the Netherlands and made Louis the king of Holland, a new puppet state of the First French Empire. Louis was not meant to be an independent ruler, but merely a pawn of his brother, who forced Louis to abdicate in 1810 after he declared that trade with the United Kingdom was vital to Holland's survival. French troops occupied and annexed Holland, and Louis was offered asylum in the Austrian Empire by Franz I of Austria. Bonaparte turned to writing and poetry in Graz, and he was met with cheers from the Dutch people when King Willem II of the Netherlands allowed him to visit his adoptive country in 1840. Bonaparte died in Livorno, Tuscany, Italy on 25 July 1846, and his son Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte would later become Emperor of the Second French Empire.