Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (2 page)

‘She cannot really be said to have had a character at all, being too much of a woman to have one and, I would suggest, far too prone to the fluctuations of the feminine temperament’, was the considered opinion of one of her best-known historians, Ferdinand Loliée, writing during the early twentieth century in
La vie d’une Impératrice
. ‘She felt and she did not reason. She acted without realising where her actions would take her – and with her she took the emperor of the French.’

Loliée was biased against the empress before he even put pen to paper. Subtly hostile, always ready to admit that she possessed one or two ‘feminine’ good qualities, so as to give the impression of being unprejudiced, his insidiously negative approach and beautiful prose have had a far wider influence – and still have – than is generally appreciated, especially in France. In reality his attitude towards the empress derived from republicanism and the political smears that circulated immediately after the fall of the Second Empire.

This book is an attempt to refute ‘authorities’ such as Ferdinand Loliée. While I cannot claim to have unearthed any important new material – probably nothing significant remains to be found – I have tried to give a different portrait of Eugénie by taking her seriously and by being open-minded. I have concentrated on the historically important years of her life when she was empress and given less time to those of her exile.

For good or ill, she was the most powerful woman of the nineteenth century – even Queen Victoria, as a constitutional monarch, was forced to leave policy to her ministers. All too many Frenchmen resented the empress’s influence because she was a woman, yet Bismarck called her ‘the only man in Paris’.

ONE

How to Become an Empress

G
ROWING
U
P

I
n 1826 Granada was a dusty, untidy place, the Alhambra so ruinous that tourists feared its crumbling red walls and owl-infested towers would vanish within a generation. Yet noblemen lived in the city, including, at 12 Calle de Gracia, a handsome count with red hair and a patch over one eye. If he tended to avoid society, his beautiful wife adored it and would have preferred to live in Madrid, but her husband had been sent to Granada under house arrest.

On 28 May an earthquake shook the city. Taking refuge in the garden, the pregnant countess was stricken with labour pains and gave birth in a tent to her second child, another daughter, who was christened Maria Eugenia Ignacia Augusta. Long after, Eugenia said she was sure that being born during an earthquake had meant that great things lay in store for her.

Her father’s name was Don Cipriano de Guzmán y Palafox y Portocarrero, Count of Teba, and he belonged to one of Spain’s oldest families, the Guzmáns, claiming descent from the Visigoth kings who had reigned over the peninsula before the Moorish conquest. Cipriano’s branch owned vast estates, but as a younger son he had inherited very little. Born in 1786, he served with the Spanish marines at Trafalgar where a British musket ball crippled his left arm. Welcoming the French invasion of 1808 and the Bourbons’ replacement by King Joseph Bonaparte, he joined the French army, fought against the Spanish patriots and the British, became a colonel and lost an eye, leaving Spain with the French when Wellington drove them out. Loyal to Napoleon until the end, he was among the last defenders of Paris in 1814.

Understandably, when he went home to Spain Don Cipriano was distrusted by King Ferdinand VII. To make matters worse, he was a liberal, who told everyone that what the country needed was a constitution. Even so, in 1817 the king behaved with surprising kindness over his marriage, which, because Cipriano was a member of a great family, required royal approval.

The count’s bride, whom he first met in Paris in 1813 when she had just left her finishing school, was not quite so blue-blooded. The story (recently repeated by a French biographer) that the family of her father, William Kirkpatrick (1764–1837), were Jacobites who had gone into exile with the Stuarts before being finally ruined by Prince Charlie’s defeat, is a myth. A penniless Lowland Scot, the seventh of nineteen children, William emigrated to Malaga and joined the firm of a Belgian merchant, M. Grivégnée, who exported fruit and wine, specialising in fine grapes for the table. Turning Catholic and marrying Grivégnée’s daughter, William became a comparatively rich man, sufficiently respected to be appointed United States consul by President Washington on the recommendation of an American business friend, Mr George Cabot of Massachusetts. Later, however, William seems to have gone bankrupt.

If the Jacobite story is untrue, William did at least belong to a distant branch of a family of Dumfriesshire gentry, Kirkpatrick of Closeburn, who had been Scottish feudal barons since 1232 – although a Scots laird was not the same thing as a Spanish baron. He produced a family tree drawn up by the Lord Lyon King of Arms that was accepted by the
reyes de armas
, the Spanish heralds. Ferdinand then gave his assent, writing graciously on Don Cipriano’s petition, ‘Let the noble Teba wed the daughter of Fingal.’

Born at Malaga in 1794, ‘Doña Maria Manuela Kirkpatrick de Closeburn’ was a tall, black-eyed, black-haired beauty, whom most people liked at first sight – not just handsome but strong and practical, intelligent and amusing. She shared Cipriano’s admiration for Napoleon if not Cipriano’s anticlerical views. Unlike her husband, however, she was full of boundless social ambition.

Predictably, Don Cipriano supported the Liberal revolt led by Colonel Riego that broke out at Cadiz in January 1820 and spread throughout Spain, setting up a chaotic constitutional government that was plagued by royalist risings. When it was crushed by a French army three years later, Cipriano was only saved from execution by his wife’s pleas. These must have been amazingly eloquent since most of his friends were hanged, shot or garrotted, sometimes even quartered as well – their bodies hacked in four by the executioner. Fortunate merely to be imprisoned, Cipriano was released at the end of 1823 and permitted to live with his wife and child at Granada near his little estate, under police surveillance.

Soon after Eugenia’s birth the restrictions of house arrest came close to ruining Cipriano. Worn out by vice – and probably syphilis – his elder brother Don Eugenio, Count of Montijo, had married a prostitute, installing her in the Montijo Palace at Madrid, the Casa Ariza in the Plazuela del Angel. The lady then announced she was pregnant. Since Eugenio was by now paralysed, this was clearly a plot to steal his fortune. It was vital for Cipriano or his wife to visit Madrid, but the police refused to allow them.

Hearing that King Ferdinand would be at a ball at Valladolid, Maria Manuela decided to attend, knowing that as the wife of a Spanish grandee she had the right to dance in the same quadrille as the king. Ferdinand asked for the good-looking countess to be presented and she made such an impression that he gave her leave to visit Madrid. Here she found what she had suspected: her sister-in-law had brought a baby boy into Casa Ariza, intending to pass him off as the Count of Montijo’s son. Having thought Maria Manuela was imprisoned in Granada, when confronted by her the woman collapsed, admitting that she had never been pregnant and claiming she had merely wanted to adopt a child.

Liberal politics came into vogue in Spain, however, after Ferdinand’s fourth marriage in 1829 to Maria Cristina of Naples. The king and his new queen hated the heir to the throne, his brother Don Carlos, and when Maria Cristina gave birth to a daughter, the king decided to abolish the Salic Law (introduced from France) that prevented women from succeeding to the throne. As Don Carlos was the white hope of the reactionaries (henceforward known as Carlists), the Liberals warmly supported its abolition and Ferdinand appointed Liberal ministers.

Cipriano was freed from arrest in 1830, moving to a larger house on Granada’s Calle del Sordo and making frequent visits to his estate at Teba nearby. Eugenia and her sister Paca rode with him as soon as they could manage their ponies. They also visited Madrid, staying at Casa Ariza or at Casa de Miranda in the country outside, a much-loved house with beautiful gardens that had belonged to
the Guzmán since the fifteenth century. Maria Manuela began to entertain at the Calle del Sordo. Among her guests was Washington Irving, living in the ruined Alhambra to write his book about the palace, who told stories to her daughters. Another was a young French writer whom Don Cipriano met on the stagecoach between Granada and Madrid, Prosper Mérimée, the future author of
Carmen
, who was fascinated by Spain. Long after, he reminded her of the ‘beautiful tales’ she had told him about Andalusia.

Meanwhile, Cipriano made his children wear the same linen dresses winter and summer, and would not buy them silk stockings for parties. Nor would he keep a carriage, making them go everywhere by pony. It did them no harm – a sketch shows two tough, sturdy little girls. Eugenia adored her father, who shared her colouring (white skin, pale face, red hair and blue eyes) and never forgot her rides with him to Teba. Cipriano talked a good deal to her, especially about his hero Napoleon. He may even have spoken of his pleasure at the news that Charles X of France had been overthrown and replaced by Louis-Philippe.

Ferdinand VII died in 1833, bequeathing Spain a two-year-old Isabella II and civil war. Don Carlos soon raised his standard, supported by every reactionary and true son of the Church – there were risings in the Basque country, Navarre, Catalonia and Valencia. Outside the cities the Carlists made alarming progress, the widowed queen proving a disastrous regent. Don Cipriano strongly supported Isabella’s cause, but Maria Manuela had a sneaking sympathy for ‘Carlos V’ – because at first his troops appeared to be winning.

Cipriano’s brother died the year after, on 16 July. In the Spanish way the house was draped in black with the coffin left open for a last farewell. On seeing her dead uncle’s face, Eugenia tried to jump out of a window, but next day she saw something even more frightening. For some time a Carlist army had been marching on Madrid, preceded by reports of massacre. Worse still, hundreds of men and women were dying from cholera, which killed within twenty-four hours – there were rumours that Franciscan friars, who were Carlist sympathisers, had poisoned the wells. On 17 July shouting was heard in the small square outside Casa Ariza and Eugenia opened one of the closed blinds to see what the noise was about. Screaming and struggling, a brown-robed friar was being dragged out of the church opposite, which had been set on fire – knives flashed, then they were kicking a dead body.

Don Cipriano became Count of Montijo, inheriting great estates. The prostitute countess was pensioned off, Maria Manuela adopting the baby, and the family were free to move into Casa Ariza. Yet Madrid was too unsafe. Eighty priests had been murdered during the riot in which Eugenia saw the friar knifed, while people were still dying from cholera. Cipriano decided that his wife should take the girls to Paris. He himself would stay behind.

It would not be an easy journey. The Saragossa road was blocked by Carlist guerillas while towns on the road up the coast would not admit travellers from Madrid for fear of cholera. But among Maria Manuela’s friends was a famous bullfighter, Francisco Sevilla, who was due to fight at Barcelona. He refused to enter the ring there unless they let the Countess of Montijo pass through the city and helped her reach the frontier. The authorities gave in – postponing Francisco’s
corrida
would mean a riot. She and her children set out on 18 July, without waiting for Don Eugenio’s funeral, travelling in a slow, mule-drawn coach.

During the last two days Eugenia, only eight, had seen a dead man’s face for the first time and another man murdered. She and her sister sensed their mother’s anxiety, but with the bullfighter’s help everything went off smoothly and they reached France on 29 July. She wrote to her father, ‘None of us is dead, which is what really matters.’ After a short stop at Perpignan, they went to Toulouse where they spent several nights, then on to Paris, riding in one of the unwieldy public diligences that trundled along the new, straight, Napoleonic roads, spending each night at an inn.

The Paris at which they arrived was that of Balzac, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, of Chopin and Berlioz, an untidy city of narrow, winding old streets with about a million inhabitants. Many of today’s landmarks were there – the Place de la Concorde, the Madeleine, the Palais de Luxembourg, the Bourse, the rue de Rivoli, the column of melted cannon in the Place Vendôme. Already, buses ran regularly, crowded in the rush hour and stinking of cigar smoke inside, while the main streets were gaslit. As always, it was cheerful, with well-attended theatres and wonderful restaurants.

Yet the Orleanist monarchy, established four years earlier, was undeniably dull. So were the policies of its ministers such as M. Guizot, to whose clarion call, ‘
Enrichissez-vous!
’, fellow bourgeois were responding by creating the hellish world of
Les Misérables
for French workers while making their own fortunes. The régime’s drabness also owed a good deal to King Louis-Philippe, who made a point of walking through Paris in a top hat and with an umbrella, pretending he belonged to the bourgeoisie. He forbade gentlemen to wear court dress or knee-breeches at the Tuileries while,
en bon bourgeois
, he carved a joint of meat when the royal family dined together. The only colourful note was the red of the troops’ trousers and kepis.

Doña Maria Manuela sent her girls to the most fashionable school in Paris, the Convent of the Sacré Coeur in the rue de Varennes, whose pupils came mainly from the aristocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain. Mornings were spent in not too demanding lessons; afternoons in learning the manners of a lady and how to help the poor; evenings in prayer and reading the lives of the saints. It was a very limited education, but at least Eugenia was taught to write proper French while the nuns instilled in her a compassionate Catholicism that stayed with her for the rest of her life.