Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (21 page)

Hostile historians have sometimes called his régime a ‘carnival empire’, implying that it was based on nothing more substantial than the
cancan
. No doubt it may often have seemed frivolous, but behind the parades and the masked balls there was solid economic muscle, industrial and financial. ‘Bonapartism, in its most simple interpretation, meant prosperity’, is Theodore Zeldin’s definition.

Napoleon’s entire reign was a time of full employment with steadily rising wages, in contrast to the lack of work during the miserable 1840s. This transformation was of course largely due to the gathering pace of the industrial revolution that was sweeping the western world, but it owed a good deal to the contribution made by the emperor. He was obsessed with a healthy economy. The World Exhibition at Paris in 1855 was one of his ideas, a gigantic trade fair where France’s booming new industries could display their products.

He encouraged a programme of railway building that accelerated France’s industrialisation – from 1,800 in 1848, by 1870 the rail network had increased to 17,000 kilometres of track. Manufacturing and mining were assisted by generous government concessions (even if some of them went to commercially minded courtiers). Communications were revolutionised, so that by the end of the reign there were 1,500 telegraph stations compared to seventeen in 1852. New-style banks, persuading ordinary people to invest their savings, helped to provide the money to finance this rapid progress.

Since the railways opened up formerly inaccessible markets, agriculture also benefited. At the same time chambers of agriculture were founded to introduce better farming methods, which were even taught in village schools. These were accompanied by schemes for land clearance, afforestation and drainage, the emperor being personally responsible for draining wide areas of Champagne, the Sologne and Gascony. Local taxes that had previously hampered the movement and the sale of crops were abolished. New roads were built throughout the country.

Carried by new steam trains – and steam ships – France’s exports rose by 400 per cent. Napoleon, an enthusiastic apostle of free trade, had smoothed the way by signing treaties with most of the countries of western Europe, including England, which either abolished or lowered customs duties. Some romantics suggest with a certain exaggeration that in doing so he anticipated the European Community.

Looking back, Eugénie could claim that her husband had, as she put it, ‘given France long years of prosperity’. If not directly involved, she discussed commercial and financial problems with him, aware of the close relationship between secure employment and support for the Second Empire. She also performed a decorative but valuable role in opening trade fairs and factories.

In August 1860 the empress visited Lyons, a socialist city with a record of violence and even of armed insurrection, whose main industry was silk manufacture. From the police reports she had read during her regency she knew that its silk-workers remained hostile. Carrying out a lengthy tour of the city’s major silk factories needed real courage; using all her charm she received a surprisingly friendly welcome, however, and was cheered for her skill at operating a shuttle-loom. Besides contributing to charities, she began to wear regularly the heavy Lyonnais brocades, until then unfashionable, in a determined effective bid to popularise them.

From genuine compassion as well as politics, Eugénie always encouraged Napoleon III in his unending efforts to improve conditions for the working classes. He fostered plans for mutual-aid societies and day nurseries, for legal and medical assistance, for old age pensions and accident insurance, founded orphanages and free nursing homes, and demolished slums, rehousing their occupants in ‘industrial dwellings’ that were bleak but healthy. He abolished
the infamous
livret
without which a man could not be lawfully employed (a certificate signed by his previous employer stating that he did not owe him money). In 1864 he withdrew the ban on workers’ associations and legalised the right to strike – nor did he reinstate it despite the ensuing wave of industrial action.

At the empress’s suggestion, Napoleon, who genuinely believed in the ‘dignity of labour’, set up a species of
Invalides
for workers injured in the factories, rather than soldiers wounded in battle, just outside Paris. He insisted on a cheerful atmosphere and every man having his own room. The Asile de Vincennes had 430 bedrooms, treating at least 10,000 patients a year. Shocked at so many of the poor being discharged from hospitals before they had fully recovered and still unable to work, it was Eugénie’s idea that there were proper facilities for convalescence and aftercare. At the same time, she saw that a similar hospital for women workers was established at Vesinet.

By the end of the reign the number of free hospitals in France had grown from 9,332 in 1852 to 13,278, of lying-in hospitals from 44 to 1,860 and of infant schools from 1,735 to 3,633. This increase owed much to imperial initiative, and often to imperial funding as well. The empress played a key role in providing a network of free dispensaries, public baths and communal cooking stoves.

‘The work-people believe that the rich are their enemies and that the emperor is their friend, and that he would join them in an attempt to get their fair share, that is, an equal share of the property of the country’, Mme de Tocqueville (the historian’s widow) told an English economist in 1861, adding, ‘I am not sure that they are mistaken.’ Yet despite his efforts, until long after the Second Empire, working conditions continued to be dictated by supply and demand, the conditions of the brutalised men and women who are portrayed in Zola’s novels – toiling for twelve hours a day, numbing their misery in drink or promiscuity.

The emperor and empress met with complete indifference from employers. During the American Civil War, when textile workers were laid off at Lyons because of the cotton shortage, Eugénie offered to set up a government fund to make good losses incurred by factory owners who kept them on, even if there was no work. Her proposal was rejected by the owners, because it meant state intervention. All she could do was to give the charities at Lyons
money to buy and equip a château as a convalescent home for workers. Nonetheless, Napoleon and Eugénie did more to help the working classes than any previous rulers of France.

A N
EW
P
ARIS

Although their Palace of the Tuileries may have vanished, if Napoleon III and Eugénie returned today they would find no difficulty in recognising their capital. Until 1853, despite its elegant mansions and imposing public buildings, Paris remained a medieval city. According to an English guidebook of 1864, it had been ‘a dense mass of old, lofty houses, only accessible by narrow and crooked streets, impervious to light and air’. As Balzac and Victor Hugo made clear, it was certainly very picturesque, especially the Gothic alleys of the Ile de la Cité or around the Châtelet, but at the same time dangerous and horribly unhealthy. The streets were a paradise for muggers, while filthy open drains ran down the middle of each thoroughfare. There was no proper water supply, everyone drinking from dubious wells: thousands died in the cholera epidemics of the 1830s.

While Louis-Philippe completed the Arc de Triomphe and the Madeleine, repaired some of the public buildings, widened a few streets and improved the paving, the Louvre remained unrestored, the Place de la Carrousel was obscured by shoddy houses and shops, and the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Elysées were still muddy, unpaved ground.

The emperor’s chosen instrument for rebuilding Paris was a career civil servant, Georges Eugène Haussmann. An arrogant, overbearing man, most people disliked him. ‘He is very tall, bulky, and has an authoritative way of walking ahead and dragging his partner after him, which makes one feel as if one was a small tug being swept on by a man-of-war’, wrote Lillie Moulton after being taken into dinner by him at Compiègne. He behaved like this with opponents, ruthlessly forcing through demolition and reconstruction. But behind Haussmann stood Napoleon, who inspired the major projects. It was his idea to provide easy access between the new railway stations and the centre of Paris – for the sake of both business and pleasure – to clear away the warrens that hid the city’s great monuments and, not least, to install modern drainage. ‘It was the emperor who planned it all’, said Haussmann, with a certain exaggeration. ‘I have merely been his collaborator.’ It was Napoleon who insisted that Les Halles should be made of iron.

When Haussmann was appointed prefect of the Seine, six months after Eugénie’s wedding, he was summoned to an audience at Saint-Cloud where the emperor gave him his first, staggering briefing. It was a map marked with coloured lines, red, blue, green and yellow. They traced the new Parisian boulevards that Napoleon was determined to build – wide, well paved, tree-lined and gas-lit avenues that would replace the cobbled alleys.

First, Haussmann completed the rue de Rivoli, then he constructed the avenue Napoleon III (now avenue de l’Opéra), linking it with the Place de l’Opéra. Then came the ‘
grands boulevards
’, radiating out from great squares, flanked by peripheral boulevards. Not content with boulevards, the emperor redesigned the whole of central Paris, and Hippolyte Taine did not exaggerate when he wrote that town planning on this scale had not been seen in France since Roman times. Among the tall, white buildings that went up were the huge markets of Les Halles, the Polytechnique, the Ecole des Beaux Arts and such government offices as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsai. The Louvre was completed, the Bibliothèque Nationale rebuilt and a new opera house begun. Two vast parks were laid out at each end of the city, the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes. Paris also acquired its first department store, the Bon Marché, which opened in 1853.

Within months of Haussmann taking office 50,000 buildings had been demolished, a process that went on almost until the end of the Second Empire. Slums vanished, the stench of former times disappearing with the oozing walls and the cesspits. Unavoidably, hundreds of thousands of Parisians were displaced. Up to now it had been normal for working men and clerks to live in the garrets or basements of bourgeois houses, but the rents in Haussmann’s new mansions and apartments were so high that they were forced to move into the slums on the far side of the city. Tradesmen were ruined by losing their shops, and had to compete for any sort of work with labour coming in from the provinces on the railways – the population doubled before the reign was over. The emperor tried to help by providing special housing at low rents and free medical treatment, but on much too small a scale. Nothing earned him more hatred than rebuilding Paris, not even the coup of 1851.

Not only the poor were upset. Many mourned the loss of medieval Paris, the insensitive destruction of the old streets. Others were angered by the lack of compensation and by the enormous price of the new housing. Some very unpleasant rumours began to circulate about Haussmann’s finances.

Even so, France soon realised that her capital had been transformed into one of the glories of Europe. Napoleon III had succeeded brilliantly in creating his dream city. By the 1860s he and Eugénie could drive through a gleaming Paris that had become, as they planned, ‘the capital of capitals’.

P
RINCESS
M
ETTERNICH
: A N
EW
F
RIENDSHIP

After the Prince Imperial’s birth the court became more austere, but this changed in 1859 with the arrival in Paris of Pauline Metternich. Two years younger than the empress, she was the wife of the Austrian ambassador, a small, slight woman with wavy chestnut hair, simian features and a sallow complexion. If far from beautiful, she had a lively, amusing face lit by huge, dark eyes, shoulders that were admired by Winterhalter and a pretty bosom. (Asked why she had had her bust sculpted by Carpeaux, she replied ‘I may be ugly, but I’ve got nice details.’) What made her so attractive was an extraordinary dynamism, inherited from her half-insane Hungarian father Count Sandor. She was also totally Parisian in her attitude, despite her lack of French blood.

Pauline’s husband, who was also her uncle, was the great chancellor’s son. Only thirty, a handsome, amiable grand seigneur without his father’s genius, a lover of music who was on friendly terms with Verdi and Wagner, he had been given the job of restoring good relations between France and Austria after the Italian war. His success owed a good deal to his wife.

The princess, whom Mérimée thought looked ‘half great lady and half tart’, soon became known as ‘the prettiest
belle laide
in Paris’ and acquired the odd nickname of ‘Cocomacaque’ (‘Cocoa Monkey’). Her dress sense made her a leader of fashion, while her eccentricity amused most people, if not perhaps everybody. Known to turn cartwheels in her crinoline, she founded a smokers’ club where she and her friends could enjoy cigars. She also played the piano, singing some extremely vulgar Parisian songs.

Long after first seeing Eugénie at Biarritz in September 1859 one recalled that impression: the empress was wearing her red shirt and the black skirt looped up for walking in the country that showed her ankles. (Old dowagers grumbled that she dressed ‘like the dancers at the Opéra’.) Pauline was struck by her beauty and an easy charm that made you feel you had known her for years. She was also impressed by Napoleon III’s pleasant manners and lack of self-consciousness.

‘Madame la princesse de M… who affects the mannerisms and tone of the inferior type of prostitute, has become a great favourite of the empress, who now invites her to all her parties’, sniffed Horace de Viel Castel. ‘She drinks, she smokes, she swears, she’s ugly enough to frighten you, and she tells dirty stories.’ Whatever the count may have said, in Mme Carette’s opinion Pauline was ‘a great lady to her finger-tips’.

One may perhaps wonder what endeared someone like this to a woman who disapproved quite so strongly of Offenbach. Yet Pauline Metternich had a good deal in common with Eugénie, coming from an aristocratic background instead of the steps of a throne, while as a girl she too had liked hard exercise and been a superb horsewoman and reckless driver. For all her oddity, she was highly intelligent and very amusing. Above all, she knew how to make the empress enjoy herself.