The Death of the Prince Imperial in the Anglo-Zulu War, 1879

On June 1, 1879, Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, the Prince Imperial, only child of Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie de Montijo, and the last serious hope of restoring the Bonaparte dynasty to the French throne, was killed by Zulu warriors during the Anglo-Zulu War. He was 23 years old.

Exiled with his family in England after the fall of the Second French Empire in 1870, the prince had trained at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and lobbied hard for permission to accompany British forces to Zululand, where Lord Chelmsford’s column was fighting King Cetshwayo kaMpande’s army. He held no formal command and was attached to the campaign as an observer, but he insisted on joining active reconnaissance patrols.

On the day of his death, the prince rode out with a small patrol under Lieutenant Jahleel Brenton Carey to scout the area between the Ityotyosi River and an abandoned Zulu homestead (kraal). Despite a warning from their Zulu guide that the site showed signs of recent occupation, the party dismounted to rest without posting sentries or searching the surrounding long grass. Roughly forty Zulu warriors, concealed nearby, opened fire and rushed the group. In the panic, the prince’s horse bolted before he could fully mount; he was dragged briefly by a holster strap, fell, and found himself alone and on foot. He returned fire with his revolver, though accounts agree he got off at most two or three shots, all missing, before being overwhelmed. Two troopers of the Natal Native Horse who had stayed to fight, along with the Zulu guide, died alongside him. Carey and the surviving escort retreated without engaging.

A subsequent medical examination by surgeon-major F.B. Scott counted the wounds inflicted on the prince’s body; sources differ on the exact figure, with counts of seventeen and eighteen assegai (spear) wounds both cited in modern accounts. Zulu testimony gathered afterward suggested only a handful of those wounds (as few as eight, by some reconstructions) were inflicted while he was still alive, with the rest added to the corpse, a practice tied to Zulu ritual treatment of a fallen enemy. Notably, every wound was on the front of his body, taken as evidence he died facing his attackers rather than fleeing.

The prince’s death was a sensation in Europe. Lieutenant Carey was court-martialed for abandoning his charge, though the conviction was later overturned on technical grounds. Queen Victoria, who had grown fond of the exiled imperial family, ordered a memorial cross erected near the spot where he fell. With no direct heir, his death effectively ended serious Bonapartist ambitions to reclaim the French throne, and it briefly turned public opinion in Britain and France against the Zulu campaign as a reckless colonial adventure.