Napoléon, Prince Impérial, the only son of Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie, is identified by his own signature at the base of this carte de visite, reading simply “Napoléon,” the form he adopted in place of “Louis-Napoléon” after his father’s death in January 1873. No photographer’s imprint appears on the mount.

He is shown half length, seated, one gloved hand resting at his hip and the other at his side, dressed in a dark, close-fitting military tunic with elaborate looped braid fastenings and a standing collar trimmed in cord, in the style of a cavalry or hussar regiment. His dark hair is parted and combed close to the head, and a neatly waxed mustache is his only facial hair, his gaze directed steadily at the camera.

Raised in exile in England following the fall of the Second Empire, the Prince Imperial trained at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and became a popular figure among supporters of a Bonapartist restoration during the 1870s. He died at twenty-three while serving as a volunteer with British forces during the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879, killed in an ambush in Zululand, an event that effectively ended Bonapartist hopes for the French throne.

The reverse carries only the pencilled query “Napoleon III ?” along with the archival notations “DOLBZ,” “11/12/06,” and “Misc.” The recto’s signature, reading “Napoléon” rather than “Louis-Napoléon,” corresponds to the style the Prince Imperial adopted only after 1873, identifying the sitter as the Prince rather than the Emperor, whose own cartes de visite from this period show an older, bearded man.