After his "Soldiers" (1848) he began "A Day in June", which was never finished, and exhibited "A Smoker" (1849) and "Bravos" ("Les Bravi", 1852). In 1855 he touched the highest mark of his achievement with "The Gamblers" and "The Quarrel" ("La Rixe"), which was presented by Napoleon III to the English Court. His triumph was sustained at the Salon of 1857, when he exhibited nine pictures, and drawings; among them the "Young Man of the Time of the Regency", "The Painter", "The Shoeing Smith", "The Musician", and "A Reading at Diderot's". When, in the summer of 1859, Emperor Napoleon III, together with Victor Emmanuel II King of Piedmont and Sardinia, tried to oust the Habsburgs from their territories in northern Italy, Meissonier received a government commission to illustrate scenes from the campaign. "The Emperor Napoleon III at Solferino" took Meissonier more than three years to complete. The work, a battle scene, represented something of a departure for the painter of "bonshommes" and musketeers though Meissonier had already painted scenes of violence and massacre, such as "Remembrance of Civil War", and in 1848 had indeed seen active service as a captain in the National Guard, when he fought on the side of the republican government during the "June Days". In autumn 1861 he was elected to a chair in the Institut de France when the members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts voted for him to join their number. To the Salon of 1861 he sent "A Shoeing Smith", "A Musician", "A Painter", and "M. Louis Fould"; to that of 1864 "The Emperor at Solferino", and "1814". He subsequently exhibited "A Gamblers' Quarrel" (1865) and "Desaix and the Army of the Rhine" (1867).