Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (25 page)

Offenbach’s next triumph was not until 1864, with
La Belle Hélène
. Nothing could have shocked Eugénie more. All about sex, its climax was a seduction scene, while for lewd minds the dream duet sung by Paris and Helen, ‘
C’est le ciel qui m’envoie
’, verged on pornography. Helen was played by Hortense Schneider, a well-known courtesan as well as a diva. (She had had a son by the late Duc de Gramont-Caderousse, who once made an aquarium by filling a piano with champagne.) When she sang, ‘Tell me, Venus, why do you enjoy making my virtue come cascading down?’, young men in the boxes would yell, ‘Cascade, Hortense, cascade!’ ‘An immense bacchanal, Venus turning the hellish hurdy-gurdy’, grumbled Agamemnon, ‘Pleasure and sensuality reign supreme’ – everyone knew he meant the imperial court. The ludicrous march of the Greek kings echoed the march by Meyerbeer that had been played at Eugénie’s wedding.

The empress failed to see that when the Greeks sang, ‘It can’t go on much longer, you know, it can’t go on much longer’, meaning the Second Empire, they did so to tease, not from disloyalty. Offenbach and his scriptwriters were not being satirical but merely laughing at the government to add to the fun, which Napoleon III understood very well.

The composer’s combination of levity and immorality disgusted her. He always attended the Bouffes-Parisiens escorted by a troop of pretty actresses and rumour said that he slept with them. Ironically, Offenbach was in love with the empress, worshipping her from afar. On the one occasion he met her, presented after a performance at the Bouffes-Parisiens, he lost his nerve and could only babble that he had been born at Cologne, not at Bonn like Beethoven. No one could have been a more loyal subject.

In 1866
La Vie Parisienne
poked less fun at the régime than usual, apart from describing Paris as ‘the modern Babylon’, and had a less ‘immoral’ libretto – if one ignored the heroine being a
high-class tart or the extra-marital romps of the Swedish baron and his baroness. Had the empress seen it, she would have been outraged by a spectacular revival of
Orphée aux Enfers
in January 1867 in which the most famous
grande horizontale
in Paris, Cora Pearl (born Emma Crutch) appeared in pink tights as Cupid. She could not act, mouthing a few lines, but the men loved her legs, while her cockney accent brought the house down – ‘
Je souis Kioupiddon
’. Everybody in the audience knew that Cora was Plon-Plon’s current mistress and that he had taken an apartment for her next to the theatre.

La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein
came out at the Théâtre des Variétés in April 1867 in time for the Exposition Universelle, the Second Empire’s zenith, and was a dazzling success. ‘Gerolstein’ is a mythical German principality ruled by a lovely, capricious Grand Duchess (Hortense Schneider) who adores soldiers. She falls for a simple fusilier whom she immediately promotes to commander-in-chief, only to demote him when he rejects her advances.

Next year
La Périchole
tried to flatter the empress. It contained a beautiful song with the words ‘He’ll grow up tall because he’s a Spaniard’, alluding to the Prince Imperial’s Spanish mother – but it was sung by Hortense. If the plot was based on a play by Eugénie’s friend Mérimée, its plot about a viceroy who falls in love with a street singer and makes her a marquise reminded rather too many people of their emperor’s private life, as did the ‘
cachot de maris recalcitrants
’ (a prison for uncontrollable husbands).

When Offenbach’s promotion to a senior grade in the Légion d’honneur was suggested during Eugénie’s regency in 1870, she refused, making the thin excuse that he had been born a German. Her disapproval is understandable, however: he genuinely shocked the nineteenth century. In 1876, when he arrived in the United States for a concert tour,
The New York Times
commented that
La Belle Hélène
was ‘simply the sexual instinct expressed in melody…. Priapism is put on a level with music.’

The irony is that the operettas of Jacques Offenbach recapture better than anything else the charm and allure of Eugénie’s empire.

SIX

Clouds

T
HE
M
EXICAN
A
DVENTURE

A
ugustin Filon, the Prince Imperial’s tutor and a man who understood the empress better than most people, said in his memoirs that she took all her political ideas from Napoleon III, ‘in whose political judgment she possessed unquestioning confidence’. The emperor, he added, had unbounded respect for Eugénie’s political intuition, consulting her again and again, although Filon commented that in his own view this high opinion was not quite borne out by events. Yet whatever Filon may have thought, her politics did not always mirror those of her husband, who often teased her for her Legitimist or at any rate conservative sympathies. And it was partly because of these very un-Bonapartist sympathies that Eugénie encouraged him to make one of the Second Empire’s biggest mistakes.

She had been shocked by the fate of Italian sovereigns – banishment and confiscation of their property. For Austria this added insult to injury since the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Duke of Modena were Habsburgs while the King of Naples was Franz-Joseph’s brother-in-law. Something must be done to mollify the Austrian Emperor.

Eugénie always insisted that it was her idea to create a Mexican Empire and that she first suggested it to Napoleon in September 1861 when a young Spanish diplomat, José Manuel Hidalgo (a friend since childhood) was staying at the Villa Eugénie. For some time Hidalgo had been begging her to persuade her husband to send an army and save the Mexican upper classes from the godless revolution that was confiscating their estates. In fact Napoleon had already made up his mind to give Mexico a monarchy – pathologically secretive, he concealed it from Eugénie.

‘But note: there was never a political move over which the Emperor had so long and so deeply brooded – for many years’, the British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, remembered. ‘In 1857 he mentioned to me his wish and willingness to assist in establishing a European dynasty in Mexico…. He looked upon its establishment as of high European importance.’ Disraeli then explained why. ‘It was his custom to say that there were two powers who hated old Europe: Russia and the U.S. of America.’ And we know that Napoleon was far from along in holding such an opinion. ‘Shall America become Europe’s protector and master?’, a French writer asked angrily in 1862.

Naïvely, the emperor believed that a Mexican empire might help to block the rise of the forthcoming transatlantic superstate. He also suffered from the delusion that the Mexican leader Benito Juarez and his ‘radicals’ were a tiny minority. In addition, he hoped that cotton could be grown in Mexico on a large-enough scale to make up for Confederate cotton declining imports which were destroying the French textile industry.

Eugénie told Napoleon and Hidalgo that Archduke Maximilian would make an excellent emperor. Franz-Joseph’s younger brother and a former governor of Lombardy-Venetia, Maximilian was not yet thirty, handsome and dignified. The Italians had liked him, even if he was a bit pompous. On first meeting Eugénie in 1856, he had found her court ‘completely lacking in tone’ and was horrified by her shaking hands with her ladies. There was even a rumour that he was not a Habsburg but a Bonaparte, his real father having been the emperor’s cousin ‘Napoleon II’. Maximilian might have had reservations, but Eugénie was convinced that the gift of a throne could make an ally of Franz-Joseph. Napoleon agreed, hoping it would persuade him to cede Venetia to Italy.

Morny welcomed the idea, for personal reasons. Among the loans on which President Juarez had recently defaulted were Swiss bonds worth 15,000,000 pesos, in which Morny had a 30 per cent interest: unless there was military intervention, the president of the Corps Législatif was going to lose a great deal of money. Neither Napoleon nor Eugénie knew about the ‘Jecker’ bonds, so called after the bank which issued them.

Early in 1862 France, England and Spain sent a joint expeditionary force. At first Palmerston was enthusiastic about ‘the monarchy scheme’, which would ‘stop the North Americans,
whether of the Federal or the Confederate States in their projected absorption of Mexico’, but then London and Madrid changed their minds, pulling out their troops. The French commander, Admiral Jurien de La Gravière, advised Napoleon to do the same. His advice was ignored, leaving a French army of under 3,000 men marching on Mexico City, to be humiliatingly routed en route by Juarez’s guerillas. Declaring that in no circumstances would he negotiate with Juarez, the emperor sent out 30,000 more troops, who occupied the Mexican capital in June 1863, news that was cheered in Paris, although most people could see no need for the war. Napoleon had one sound reason, however – Mexican cotton, even if there was not enough of it.

In July an assembly of ‘notables’ in Mexico City offered the crown to Maximilian, General Bazaine arranging a plebiscite which approved the offer. Yet, understandably, the archduke was still very reluctant to commit himself. The situation was complicated by the Civil War that made French intervention possible. While the emperor refused to recognise the Confederacy, he tried to keep on good terms with both sides. In 1862 the Confederate government had offered him 22,000 tons of raw cotton, but it would have had to go through the Federal blockade on French ships and Napoleon declined, unwilling to risk war with the Union.

One must not forget that most European observers expected the South to win, as it very nearly did at Gettysburg. If this happened, then both the Union and the Confederacy would disintegrate, and none of the successor states would be strong enough to give Juarez sufficient help to overcome French intervention in Mexico, in which case Maximilian would have a reasonable chance of surviving. During the early 1860s the ‘United States’ were scarcely a good advertisement for republicanism, while there was what appeared to be a sound precedent for a monarchy in the New World – few American régimes seemed more solidly established than the prosperous Brazil of Emperor Pedro II, a member of the Portuguese royal family.

The concept of a Catholic monarchy in the New World had captured Eugénie’s imagination – ‘a dictorship that should bring liberty’. In February 1862, through Metternich and the Austrian ambassador in Brussels, she persuaded the Belgian king (Maximilian’s father-in-law) to ask Queen Victoria to tell her cabinet that she had no objection to the scheme. In 1863 Eugénie
visited Madrid to win over Isabella II, who was unhappy at the prospect of a Habsburg reigning over a country that had once belonged to Spain.

In March 1864 the archduke and his wife Charlotte (soon to be Carlotta) came to Paris where they were warmly welcomed. Maximilian, his jutting Habsburg lip hidden by weeping blonde side-whiskers even longer than his brother’s, was impressive and Carlotta made an excellent consort, tall, stately and handsome, with large, expressive brown eyes. Eugénie and Napoleon had met the archduke before, but now they found his ideas more interesting – like them, he genuinely wished to make the world a better place.

After nearly refusing the crown, and reducing Eugénie to tears of frustration, Maximilian finally accepted. He arrived at Vera Cruz in May, having spent the voyage compiling a manual of court etiquette. Given a spectacular welcome, his régime was quickly recognised by almost every European country. However, Washington and Richmond refused to acknowledge him, while attempts to float a loan in Paris or London failed disastrously. He soon found that he ruled only by the grace of French bayonets, most Mexicans staying loyal to Juarez, who was an Indian like themselves. Intent on recovering their estates, the conservatives sneered at his good intentions and liberal ministers, and at a constitution that safeguarded the rights of manual workers.

As soon as the Civil War ended, the Union sent guns and volunteers to Juarez, and North American cotton began reaching France. Bazaine’s men suffered such heavy casualties that in October 1865 he issued an order not to take prisoners. The situation continued to deteriorate. Early in 1866 Napoleon accepted that the adventure had failed, although the last French troops would not withdraw until 1867. Maximilian asked Bazaine to train a Mexican army but the marshal advised him to leave with the French.

Having bombarded Napoleon and Eugénie with letters, in August 1866 Empress Carlotta suddenly appeared in Paris. Eugénie called on her at her hotel, explaining that the emperor was too ill to see her (he was in agony, from a stone in his bladder). Carlotta made such a scene, however, that she gave way, asking her to come to Saint-Cloud the next day. When Carlotta arrived, the Mexican eagle was flying over the château and she was greeted by the little Prince Imperial wearing a Mexican order.

Napoleon told her gently that he could no longer go on helping Maximilian. France had already lost too many men. ‘You’ve condemned us to death’, cried Carlotta. He continued patiently that the Senate and Corps Législatif opposed any further involvement in Mexico, but she demanded that he mount a coup to make them change their minds.