Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire

W
hen I was a small boy my grandmother would tell me what a wonderful time the Second Empire had been for France. Her mother and her aunts were educated in Paris during this period, at the convent of the Sacré Coeur where the Empress Eugénie had been a pupil, and when older they were presented to the empress at the Tuileries. They tried to copy her clothes, despite having seen a dogfight take place beneath a crinoline, even if their widowed mother was unable to afford Mr Worth’s prices. One of the aunts married a soldier called Claude de Beausire-Seyssel, a trooper in the Cent Gardes (Napoleon III’s bodyguard), who was very distantly related to the Bonapartes, and my grandmother would proudly relate how the emperor always addressed her Uncle Claude as ‘
mon cousin
’ even when he was on duty. My great-grandmother collected sepia carte-de-visite photographs of the imperial family that I still possess, some of which have been used as illustrations for this book. Because of these faded family memories I like to feel that, however faint and tenuous, I have a personal interest in writing about the empress.

Among the many people who have helped me with advice or encouragement, or both, I would especially like to thank Jacques Perot, director of the château de Compiègne – and also of the Musée de l’Impératrice and of the Musée du Second Empire – who has welcomed me to the château on more than one occasion and who told me of the recently published memoirs of his forebear Léon Chevreau, a guest of Eugénie at Compiègne; Vincent Droguet, keeper of the château de Fontainebleau, who let me see Eugénie’s remarkable study, currently being restored; Dom Cuthbert Brogan, prior of Farnborough Abbey – where Eugénie’s presence can still almost be felt – who memorably showed me the imperial tombs, besides providing valuable information; Professor Aileen Ribeiro of the Courtauld Institute who vetted the chapters on Eugénie’s clothes and on the
couturier
Worth; Professor Andrew Ciechanowiecki who told me of the Polish attitude towards Eugénie; my cousin Chantal Hoppenot who obtained publications that were not easy to find outside France; André Dzierzynski who drew my attention to Eugénie’s link with Lourdes; Susan Mountgarret who checked the proofs and compiled the index; my agent, Andrew Lownie; my very patient editor, Elizabeth Stone; Sara Ayad, who found most of the pictures; and Anna Somers Cocks who suggested that I write the book.

I owe a special debt to Dudley Heathcote for allowing me to reproduce a hitherto unpublished photograph of Eugénie in about 1905, which was given to him by his aunt, her lady-in-waiting Emilie d’Allonville (later Marquise Dusmet de Smours).

I am also grateful to Anne Lesage of the Agence Photographique of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, and to the staffs of the British Library, the Cambridge University Library and the London Library.

Prologue: The Wedding of 1853

P
aris, 30 January: the congregation is startled when, for a wedding march, the orchestra strikes up a swaggering tune from Meyerbeer’s
Prophète
as the imperial couple enter Notre Dame. It is too theatrical, like much else in the vast, rather dirty cathedral – a sham Gothic porch over the main door, plaster statues of the first Napoleon against the columns, and blue imperial banners hanging everywhere. At the right of the two prie-dieux in front of the altar sits ex-King Jerome of Westphalia, a rouged old wreck with dyed hair, flanked by his sneering son and daughter; at the left sit a large group of Bonapartes and Murats, who until recently have been living in near poverty. They are the only royal personages, since the marriage has taken place in too much haste to invite guests from other countries. But there are six cardinals in scarlet, together with resplendent ambassadors, officers in brightly coloured uniforms and ministers in the new imperial court dress.

A small, thickset man in his late forties with short legs, a goatee beard and waxed moustaches, not particularly impressive even when glimpsed from a distance, the Emperor Napoleon III wears a lieutenant-general’s uniform (dark blue tunic and red trousers) with the sash of the Légion d’honneur. The Golden Fleece at his neck is presumably worn in tribute to the Spanish lady, eighteen years younger than himself, whom he has married the day before, in a civil ceremony at the Tuileries.

The congregation at Notre Dame stares curiously at the dignified bride coming up the aisle on her husband’s arm. Until yesterday Doña Eugenia de Montijo, Countess of Teba, she is in white velvet sewn with diamonds; her full, three-layered skirt is trimmed with priceless old English lace, her tight bodice is sewn with sapphires and orange blossom, and round her waist is Empress Marie-Louise’s sapphire girdle – her three-quarter length sleeves reveal long, jewel-studded gloves. Her red hair has been arranged by the famous coiffeur Félix, curls flowing down the neck from the chignon to which her veil is fastened, and she wears the diamond and sapphire tiara that Empress Josephine had worn at her coronation in 1804. Yet the new empress’s face is even whiter than usual. The ladies of her household are watching her with obvious anxiety.

The service is taken by the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Sibour, the choir singing Cherubini’s Coronation Mass, with a
Sanctus
by Adolphe Adam – better known for his ballet music. When the pair leave Notre Dame there are shouts of ‘
Vive l’Empéreur!
’, ‘
Vive I’lmpératrice
!’, and during the winter night that follows the sky over Paris will be lit up by fireworks.

Despite the crowds, the cheering is confined to a few areas around the cathedral and the Tuileries. The Parisians have come to watch out of curiosity, not from loyalty. Just how long can this new Second Empire last? Only recently established after a brutal
coup d’état
, it is opposed by royalists and republicans, distrusted by the Great Powers. The British ambassador, Lord Cowley, thinks that Napoleon III’s régime will soon collapse, reporting that ‘the impression becomes stronger every day, that all inside is rotten and that, with few exceptions, we are living in a society of adventurers’.

As for the beautiful new empress, well-informed French observers mutter that she is just an adventuress – what today we would call a gold-digger. If her father is supposed to have been some sort of Spanish grandee, her mother (about whose private life there are lurid rumours) is not even faintly aristocratic but the daughter of a bankrupt Scottish fruit and wine merchant in Malaga. The entire fashionable world knows that for years Eugénie and her mother have been trawling the capitals of Europe in search of a rich husband. The emperor’s inner circle is horrified: his foreign minister is threatening to resign.

During the wedding Lady Cowley has sketched the new empress inside her prayer book. Kneeling at a prie-dieu, Eugénie’s chin rests pensively on her hand. Has it dawned on her that by marrying a crowned dictator she will become the most powerful woman in the world?

The Second Empire belonged as much to her as it did to him. Until very recently this period was considered an aberration in French history, Lord Cowley’s ‘society of adventurers’, dismissed by one historian as ‘little more than a military parade flitting in front of a masked ball’. Nobody could forgive the emperor for his defeat by the Prussians in 1870, for France’s humiliation and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. But a new view has emerged, that the empire was in reality the French version of England’s high Victorian age, a period of prosperity, of economic and social progress, and that Napoleon III was a man who was in advance of his time, an earlier de Gaulle, even an earlier Mitterrand.

Eugénie, too, deserves a reassessment. The last woman to reign over France (and the only one to reign over the Paris we know today), she personified the allure of the Second Empire that one glimpses in Winterhalter’s portraits and the music of Jacques Offenbach. ‘Eighteen years of self-indulgence, folly and wild gaiety, of love affairs and unbelievable elegance’, a survivor recalled wistfully. ‘For a short time, too short a time, it seemed as if we were glittering ghosts from the spendours of the eighteenth century.’ In many ways the Second Empire was a final flicker of the
ancien régime
.

When she first became empress her role was that of ‘
la reine Crinoline
’, presiding over the great balls at the Tuileries (the ‘
fétes impériales
’), that were attended by thousands of guests, when her clothes and jewellery, her taste in furniture, began to be copied all over the world. But later she grew more concerned with influencing her husband’s policies, then with making them. No woman had wielded such power in France since the sixteenth century. She gave style to the pressure for women’s emancipation, which was increasing imperceptibly everywhere.

A natural feminist, she admired other women’s achievements in a male world, trying to persuade the Académie Française to admit a female writer besides appointing the first female member of the Légion d’honneur. ‘Nothing used to anger me more than to hear I had no political sense simply because I was a woman. I wanted to shout back, “So women have no political sense, do they? What about Queen Elizabeth? Maria Theresa? Catherine the Great?”’ As will be seen, she undoubtedly played a crucial role in shaping her husband’s foreign policy.

Since most French writers of her time were republicans or royalists, and because of the Second Empire’s overthrow at Sedan in 1870, the empress has been given a bad name by the majority of French historians as ‘
une femme néfaste
’ – a baneful woman. They tend to agree with her long-standing enemy Thiers, that she ‘began as a futile woman and ended as a fatal woman’, while until the new feminist climate they damned her as a woman who dared to interfere in politics.

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