Cranberry glass (or 'Gold Ruby' glass as it is known in Europe, or 'Rubino Oro' as it is known by glass workers) is a red glass made by adding gold(III) oxide to molten glass. Tin, in the form of stannous chloride, is sometimes added in tiny amounts as a reducing agent. The glass is used primarily in expensive decorations.

Cranberry glass is made in craft production rather than in large quantities, due to the high cost of the gold and the delicate mixing process required. The gold chloride is made by dissolving gold in a solution of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid (aqua regia). The glass is typically hand blown or molded. The finished, hardened glass is a type of colloid, a solid phase (gold) dispersed inside another solid phase (glass).

The origins of cranberry glass making are murky. Some historians believe a form of this glass was first made in the late Roman Empire. The craft was then lost and rediscovered in the 17th century by either Johann Kunckel in Potsdam or by the Florentine glassmaker Antonio Neri in Italy. But neither of them knew the mechanism which yielded the colour. Chemist and winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Richard Adolf Zsigmondy was able to understand and explain that small colloids of gold were responsible for the red colour.

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (20 April 1808 – 9 January 1873) was the President of the French Second Republic and as Napoleon III, the emperor of the Second French Empire. He was the nephew and heir of Napoleon I, christened as Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. Elected President by popular vote in 1848, he initiated a coup d'état in 1851, before ascending the throne as Napoleon III on 2 December 1852, the forty-eighth anniversary of Napoleon I's coronation. He ruled as Emperor of the French until 4 September 1870. He holds the unusual distinction of being both the first titular president and the last monarch of France.

Napoleon III is primarily remembered for an energetic foreign policy which aimed to jettison the limitations imposed on France since 1815 by the Concert of Europe and reassert French influence in Europe and abroad. A brief war against Austria in 1859 largely brought an end to the process of Italian unification. In the Near East, Napoleon III spearheaded allied action against Russia in the Crimean War and restored French presence in the Levant, claiming for France the role of protector of the Maronite Christians. A French garrison in Rome likewise secured the Papal States against annexation by Italy, defeating the Italians at Mentana and winning the support of French Catholics for Napoleon's regime.