Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (9 page)

The French Empire established by the first Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804 had been an absolutist, militarist state which recreated France after the chaos that had followed the Revolution, while at the same time conquering Europe. The constitution he granted in 1815, in a bid to gain popular support during the Hundred Days, was an aberration. In exile on his remote Atlantic island the brooding ex-emperor forged the myth contained in his political testament, the
Mémorial de Sainte Hélène
, which had captured the young Eugénie’s imagination. ‘I saved the Revolution as it lay dying,’ he claimed. ‘I have given France and Europe new ideas which will never be forgotten.’ His wars had been a campaign of liberation and not of conquest, he insisted, waged only to create European unity.

As has been seen, Eugénie had derived from her father, Stendhal, Mérimée and the
Mémorial
, a belief in a ‘tyrant of genius’, who by applying the great emperor’s ideas would bring prosperity and happiness. If never under the illusion that her husband was ‘a tyrant of genius’ or even a particularly strong character, she recognised that he was a highly intelligent, well-meaning and fundamentally honest man, with deeply held convictions. Above all, she believed that he offered the best, indeed the only chance of putting Napoleonic ideas into practice, which was why he fascinated her. In these early days she was impressed by his seemingly unfailing political judgement and by the magical way in which he would use his sphinx-like charm to win over the most stubborn opponents. She was certain that he could give France authority, glory and social reform.

The Orleanist constitutional monarchy of King Louis-Philippe had signally failed to give France any of these things. Elected by an electorate of less than a quarter of a million well-to-do male voters (out of a population of 30 million), its corrupt governments had been uninspiring, to put it mildly; the leaders had squabbled constantly with each other, while being at the same time undermined by the king’s intrigues. Orleanist foreign policy had been chicken-hearted, determined to avoid at all costs the hazards of war with other
European powers – when not conquering Algeria, the army’s job was to hold down the working class. Although a period of economic and industrial expansion, the Orleanist years had been the sordid age of
Les Misérables
, and in the end the Orleanists had lost touch with the French people as a whole. If the revolution of 1848, the ‘revolution of contempt’ as Lamartine called it, was a confrontation between workers exploited beyond endurance and a ruthless bourgeoisie, most of France had become bored by a régime that possessed so little panache.

Despite being a reaction against Orleanism, the Bonapartism of 1853 was as far removed from the warlike empire of 1804 as from the ‘constitutional’ empire of the Hundred Days. ‘The Empire means peace’, Napoleon III insisted, even if he hoped to undo the European settlement of 1815. He claimed that his was a more democratic system than parliamentary government; only he could save the poverty-stricken majority of the people from the bourgeoisie, who would otherwise use a parliament to enslave them, while any really important decision would be referred to the nation in a referendum. This was what Bonapartism meant when Eugénie married him, and she became one of its most enthusiastic exponents.

The Second Empire coincided with an economic boom, and soon the French equated Bonapartism with prosperity. Napoleon hoped also to introduce social reform, since there was a genuinely socialist element in his thinking, and, encouraged by Eugénie, he did a great deal to help industrial workers. In the little country towns his
Préfets
installed pro-government mayors, who undermined the tyranny of the big landowners and built roads, making sure that the peasants voted the right way in referendums.

The elected Corps Législatif of 260 members, which replaced the National Assembly, met for only three months a year and could not initiate bills, although it was allowed to suggest amendments – its sole function was to approve laws and the budget. The Senate was nominated by the emperor. As for being a police state, Paris had no more policemen than London, and when Napoleon III needed to employ force he relied on the army, although he rarely used it. He was a very moderate despot.

The empress took care to make friends with her husband’s ministers. She had no trouble with Achille Fould, the President of the Council of State and the emperor’s chief minister, an amiable Jew who liked most people – and a financial wizard who ran the
day-to-day government of France. The emperor’s bastard half-brother, Auguste de Morny, Queen Hortense’s son by the Comte de Flahaut (and Talleyrand’s grandson) was even more important. Although a speculator and man of pleasure whose salon was generally full of financial sharks and ‘actresses’, he gave unfailingly sound advice to Napoleon, who made him first a count and then a duke. Princesse Mathilde disliked him, partly because he was a former Orleanist, sneering that if anything went wrong under Morny’s arrangement, then ‘Louis-Philippe would feel himself avenged’. Yet he ran the Corps Légistlatif brilliantly, preparing the way for a constitutional régime. Patronising if affectionate, at times he all but dominated his brother, who was a little frightened of him. Always sensitive about their relationship, the emperor was horrified to learn that Morny had hung a portrait of their mother in his drawing-room. Early in 1853 he sent Eugénie to ask him to remove it. ‘The less you boast about your parentage, the more you’ll be treated as a brother,’ she advised him, and they remained friends for the rest of his life.

Drouyn de Lhuys thought that his days as foreign minister were numbered after his opposition to the empress’s marriage and his wife’s rudeness. When the engagement was announced, he called on her before resigning. ‘Thank you for the advice you gave the emperor about marrying,’ she told him. ‘It was the advice I would have given him myself.’ He withdrew his resignation. (Drouyn had an odd taste in practical jokes – when the British embassy advertised for a wet-nurse, he called in a bonnet and a dress padded out with cushions, completely taking in poor Lady Cowley, who was horrified when she realised that the ‘
nourrice
’ was France’s minister for foreign affairs.)

Eugénie did not get on so well with the Duc de Persigny. Another adventurer, a former bankrupt and an ex-cavalry sergeant with a bogus title, he had been created a duke after the coup. Viel Castel says he ‘looked as much like a nobleman as chicory does coffee’. However, he had won Napoleon’s gratitude by his support during the seemingly hopeless 1840s. Slightly unbalanced if frenziedly loyal, Persigny was trying to build up a hard-line Bonapartist party, which was the last thing wanted by the subtle emperor. ‘From the day of my marriage I was honoured with his hatred, a venomous, slandering hatred,’ Eugénie recalled. ‘Sometimes he could not stop himself calling me “The Spanish Woman” or “The Foreigner”. He wanted nobody between the emperor and him – the emperor and the Empire were his sole property…. Imagine a boiler perpetually blowing up.’ A compliment she forgot to pay herself was that Persigny regarded her as his ultimate political rival.

For the time being the empress could help her husband best in creating a splendid new court. It was a vital aspect of the empire, a key element of Bonapartist ‘glory’. Napoleon III could have found no better partner.

T
HE ‘FÊTES IMPERIALES
’

Among Napoleon and Eugénie’s humbler courtiers was their American dentist, Dr Thomas W. Evans from Philadelphia. Famous throughout Europe for his new, gold-foil fillings and a mercifully light touch on the pedal-drill, he was indispensable, since the emperor had unusually sensitive teeth. ‘Less rigid in its etiquette than most European courts, and at the same time more splendid in its ceremonial forms’, was Evans’s considered opinion of the Tuileries. He was justified in thinking it ‘the mirror of fashion for the whole world’.

There had been no court life since the 1830 revolution. Although Louis-Philippe had lived in the Tuileries, he had been busy being the ‘Citizen King’ – any sort of display would have damaged his image. But Napoleon III believed that the French preferred pomp and ceremony, which in any case were good for the Parisian luxury trade. Together, he and Eugénie recreated the court of the first Napoleon, surpassing even that of the tsar’s in opulence. France was rich and could afford it, while nobody must be allowed to forget that she was a monarchy. Colonel Fleury, the emperor’s aide-de-camp, was responsible for the court’s initial organisation, improved by the emperor and empress throughout the reign.

As soon as the Second Empire was proclaimed, Napoleon moved into the Tuileries, on and off the residence of France’s rulers since 1789. This was a very long, narrow building with an imposing if monotonous façade, at right angles to the rue de Rivoli and joining the wings of the Louvre, the latter already a museum. (Burned down in 1871, all that is left of the Tuileries today are the pavillions at each end and the gardens.) The other imperial palaces were at Saint-Cloud, just outside Paris, Compiègne and
Fontainebleau. Built under the
ancien régime
, they had close links with Napoleon I, as the emperor remembered from his childhood.

The Maison de l’Empéreur, the imperial household, was revived, Napoleon appointing a Grand Almoner, a Grand Chamberlain, a Master of the Horse and a Grand Huntsman, with innumerable chamberlains. He brought back knee-breeches and court dress, which had not been seen since 1830, putting the household into gold-embroidered coats of scarlet, violet, green or pale blue. Even his doctors were clad in gold-laced blue uniforms with white breeches, including the ‘Surgeon dentist to the Emperor’, Dr Evans. Male guests at court were obliged to wear evening dress with black breeches and black or white silk stockings. But only footmen had to powder their hair and, if very different in style, the pomp was no more elaborate than at Buckingham Palace.

The Imperial Guard was revived to form a military household, thirty-seven squadrons of cavalry and thirty-three battalions of infantry, who paraded daily on the Place du Carrousel (the square enclosed by the Tuileries and Louvre), their massed bands playing stirring imperial marches:
Partant pour la Syrie, La Reine Hortense, Le Chant du Depart
or
Veillons au Salut de l’Empire
. Here, like his uncle before him, the emperor reviewed them on horseback, with white-headed old veterans of the Grande Armée at his side.

However, the troops most associated with the régime were the Cents Gardes and the Guides. The former, eventually 150 strong, were gigantic young cavalrymen recruited from the Imperial Guard. One of the sights of Second Empire Paris, armed with carbines they rode beside Napoleon’s carriage in sky-blue tunics, steel breastplates and plumed helmets, mounting guard at his palaces. Commanded by Colonel Fleury and modelled on those of the First Empire, the Regiment of Guides were really hussars, in busbies, green tunics and dolmans, and red trousers, riding grey chargers.

As Dr Evans noted, despite its grandeur the atmosphere at the Tuileries was far less stuffy than at other European courts of the time. It reflected a wish to combine past and present, to mix
ancien régime
noblemen with new men still inspired by the Revolution. There was a place for everybody, for aristocrats of the bluest blood and for the self-made with brand new titles or no titles at all. (Napoleon III created only 52 titles, compared with Louis-Philippe’s 98 and Napoleon I’s 1,145.)

Some people laughed. Everybody knew that the Grand Marshal
of the palace, Marshal Vaillant betrayed his peasant roots by a phobia for the sugar-beet worm, besides having a cousin who was a hatter in the rue de Rivoli. Horace de Viel Castel tells us that the father of the minister for the imperial household, Achille Fould, was bankrupt three times and that
his
father had been a servant, while as for the Grand Huntsman, ‘Marshal Magnan’s father was a porter who sometimes waited on his master’s table with his son’s assistance.’ No doubt Viel Castel’s sneers were echoed in royalist châteaux all over France, but they had little effect. Each of these men was good at his job – even if Vaillant, who pretended to tremble when in the emperor’s presence, was often abominably rude to other courtiers.

As soon as she married, the ‘adventuress’ Eugénie had to fill the role of imperial hostess and did so with astonishing speed. She had no problems about asserting her authority, even if (as Viel Castel noted with relish) more than a few ambitious ladies who wanted to shine at court did not altogether enjoy having to address yesterday’s equal as ‘Your Majesty’. Although she had never even run a house before or entertained on her own account, Eugénie was not Doña Maria Manuela’s daughter for nothing, and, as we have seen, she had had plenty of experience of court life and of court intrigues at Isabella II’s Madrid.

Hübner saw the new empress at a ball at Saint-Cloud in July 1853, blazing with diamonds ‘of fabulous value’ that belonged to the French crown jewels. ‘She looked weary and, if as beautiful as ever, I found her changed …’

She is no longer the young married woman, the new consort whose timidity added to her natural appeal; this is someone who knows that she is the mistress of the house, making it plain by the way in which she carries herself, by how she gives orders to her ladies, by a slightly disdainful air, a bit blasé but always watchful, with which she passes through the drawing-rooms, nothing escaping her eye.

It is only fair to explain that on this particular occasion Eugénie was not feeling well and was certainly not at her best. In contrast, Dr Evans, who knew and understood her far better than Baron Hübner, wrote of ‘the lovely Empress … always with a pleasant word, or a sweet smile, or a bow of recognition for everyone’. Very
highly strung, her good looks were easily affected by ill health or exhaustion, which may explain why the descriptions of her vary. Emile Ollivier, who saw her the same year, found ‘something flat and dull in her face’, but in those days he was a ferocious young republican who had not yet rallied to the empire.