MORNY, CHARLES AUGUSTE LOUIS JOSEPH, Duc DE (1811-1865), French statesman, was the natural son of Hortense Beauharnais (wife of Louis Bonaparte, and queen of Holland) and Charles Joseph, comte de Flahaut (q.v.), and therefore half-brother of Napoleon III. He was born in Paris on Oct. 21, 1811, and was registered as the legitimate son of Auguste Jean Hyacinthe Demorny, described (inaccurately) as a land owner of St. Domingo. The comte de Morny, as he was called by a polite fiction, passed through the staff college, and served in Algeria in 1834-35 as aide-de-camp to General Trezel, whose life he saved under the walls of Constantine. In 1838 he established a beetroot-sugar industry at Clermont in Auvergne. Soon there were few great commercial enterprises in Paris in which he had not an interest. He sat in the Chamber as deputy for Clermont Ferrand from 1842 onwards, and was heard with respect on industrial and financial questions. He was admitted to the inti
mate circle of Louis Napoleon, and he helped to engineer the coup d'etat of Dec. 2, 1851. After six months of office as minister of the interior, he resigned. He now resumed his financial specu lations, and when in 1854 he became president of the Corps Legislatif, he used his official rank to assist his schemes.
In 1856 Morny was sent as special envoy to the coronation of Alexander II. of Russia; he there married Princess Sophie Troubetzkoi. In 1862 Morny was created a duke. Morny's influ ence with the emperor was very great, and his liberal traditions gave him influence with the leaders of the opposition. He died in Paris on March io, 1865.
See F. Loliee, Le Duc de Morny et la societe du second empire (1909) and his Extraits des memoires de Morny: Une Ambassade en Russia 1856 (1892).