Her much-loved son (very briefly known as Napoleon II) became a sad footnote in royal history – a source of embarrassment but also potential danger to the Habsburgs until his death aged twenty-one from tuberculosis. His extraordinary gold crib in the Habsburg Treasury is a strange reminder of a future that never happened: Napoleon as the founder of a dynasty that ruled a united European super-state. In a peculiar piece of tidying up after the defeat of France, Hitler had Napoleon II’s body transferred from Vienna to Les Invalides to be buried near his father. No attempt was made to get hold of
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