French presidential election: Having won the popular vote in a landslide, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte is inaugurated in the chamber of the National Assembly as the first (and only) president of the French Second Republic.

Presidential elections were held for the first time in France on 10 and 11 December 1848, electing the first and only president of the Second Republic. This election marked the birth of the Second Republic and the dramatic end of the July Monarchy, a transformation born of the February Revolution's…