won in Guadeloupe and was again elected for that department in 1850. He introduced a bill for the abolition of the death penalty, which was to be discussed on the day on which President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seized power with a coup d'état, on 2 December 1851, dissolving the National Assembly. The next day Schœlcher, alongside Jean-Baptiste Baudin, was one of the few deputies present at the barricades in Paris to resist the coup. Schœlcher was then exiled by the new regime. He lived briefly in Belgium before moving to London, where he settled in 1852. In the following years he became an specialist in the work of Georg Friedrich Handel, writing a biography of him in 1857. At the same time he published multiple writings criticizing Napoleon III, formerly president of France and now monarch of the Second French Empire, in works such as Dangers to England of the alliance with the men of the Coup d'Etat, which Schœlcher wrote in English and published in 1854. During this period he became a friend of fellow republican exile Victor Hugo. Refusing to take advantage of the amnesty of 1859, Schœlcher only returned to France in late August 1870, after the declaration of war with Prussia. He was appointed staff colonel of the National Guard on 4 September, the day of the deposition of Napoleon III and the proclamation of the Third Republic. Organizing a legion of artillery, he took part in the defence of Paris. In 1871 he was again elected by Martinique for the National Assembly in Bordeaux, where he voted against the peace treaty. During the subsequent Paris Commune insurrection, Schœlcher tried unsuccessfully to mediate peace talks between the insurgents and the French government, and was briefly imprisoned by the communards. Afterwards he continued to serve in the National Assembly as a member of the Republican Union, and was elected senator for life in December 1875. In 1875, Schœlcher became a member of the Societé pour l'amélioration du sort de la femme ("Society for the improvement of women's condition"), and in July 1876 he renewed his proposal for the abolition of capital punishment. In 1882 he co-founded, with Gaston Gerville-Réache, the newspaper Le Moniteur des Colonies. Schœlcher published his last work in 1889, a biography of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture (Vie de Tousaint Louverture). He died on 25 December 1893 in his house in Houilles, near Paris, aged