Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (28 page)

Historians have laughed at ‘this extraordinary incident’. (William Smith comments, ‘While thrones fell, dynasties were transplanted and fundamental problems were resolved by the feminine touch.’) But Eugénie was flying a kite, her basic message being that France wanted an Austrian alliance. Metternich took it seriously enough to go to Vienna, to spend days discussing the plan with emperor Franz-Joseph and the foreign Minister Rechberg. They realised that it had Napoleon’s support, but were too nervous to commit themselves. Meanwhile, Eugénie offered a practical diplomatic objective. Writing on 1 March, Lord Cowley said it was ‘A Poland all but independent under a Grand Duke’, in return for Russia being given a reasonably free hand in Turkey.

The emperor went on trying to save the Poles until the end of
1863, warmly encouraged by Eugénie, who was determined that France should do her best to rescue them. Sadly, apart from some mild diplomatic muttering, England and Austria refused to do anything concrete once they had sent their notes to St Petersburg. Sweden, on the other hand, even suggested a Franco-Swedish war against Russia – but the Swedes’ motive was not so much to help the Poles as to regain Finland for Sweden. At home, Fould and Morny (always pro-Russian) were against military action in any form, insisting that diplomacy was the only way to find a solution.

In November 1863 Napoleon proposed that a European congress should meet urgently, to discuss rearranging the frontiers of the 1815 settlement together with the Polish problem. England and Austria immediately declined, the latter disturbed by Eugénie’s blueprint for the future. In December, without much hope, the emperor repeated his proposal for a congress, to be attended instead by Russia, Prussia and Italy, to redraw the map of Europe on the lines suggested by Eugénie to Metternich. None of the powers involved would accept the invitation. Their refusal meant that all his efforts to save the Poles had been in vain; without obtaining anything for them other than a worthless Russian promise to be ‘merciful’, he had merely succeeded in infuriating the tsar.

At the beginning of 1864 Napoleon failed to take advantage of the crisis over Schleswig-Holstein, until then ruled by the late king of Denmark, which had offered a chance of reforging the French
entente
with England. Even Lord Palmerston considered going to war when Austria and Prussia attacked Denmark in the spring – for one thing, it was the home of the recently married Princess of Wales – but, with his ingrained paranoia, he did not have enough confidence in the emperor. As it was, another, shrewder British statesman, Lord Clarendon, observed that merely by denouncing Bismarck as a deliberate disturber of the peace, who was using the war for Prussia to ‘lord it over Germany’, Napoleon would be regarded by all Europe as a public benefactor and get every German democrat on his side – without involving France in the conflict. Yet, prejudiced in favour of his Bernadotte cousins, the Emperor hoped that a weakened Denmark might be absorbed into a single Scandinavian state ruled from Stockholm.

Even after the Austrians and Prussians had overwhelmed the Danish army, ‘liberating’ Schleswig-Holstein, Napoleon misread the situation and became alarmed at the prospect of a continuing Austro-Prussian alliance. Eugénie realised, however, that Schleswig-Holstein would soon end up as part of Prussia. Making the best of a bad job, she commented that it was preferable to creating another under-sized German state.

Meanwhile, she was evolving an imaginative and not entirely impractical scheme for rebuilding the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. She hoped that a joint endeavour of this sort would result in a spirit of ecumenism and international cooperation, bringing lasting peace to a divided Europe. In essence, her project involved building two great churches side by side, one Roman Catholic and the other Orthodox, with a central nave which would be available to all the other Christian communions. The scheme was finally abandoned when in March 1865 Pius IX let it be known that only Catholics had the right to rebuild the church of the Holy Sepulchre – although the pope added graciously that he would make no objection should the empress wish to pay for restoring the church’s dome.

Eugénie’s growing determination to share in the shaping of French foreign policy was hampered by Napoleon III’s habitual, bewildering inscrutability. Even to his wife he was always the ‘Sphinx of the Tuileries’, a man who was pathologically obsessed with secrecy. ‘The emperor is not exactly communicative’, Viel Castel had noted a few years earlier:

He remains for whole days, so to speak, without opening his mouth and totally absorbed in his inmost thoughts. Calm and impenetrable, even with the people who are most in his confidence, his soul seems as adamantine as his face. Impressed by no one, no one is allowed to share in what he is thinking. He is like some meticulous craftsman, who has plenty of the highest quality tools, but no assistants. You cannot even hope to judge him by what he does, since its real significance is often missed by the keenest observers.

Nevertheless, Eugénie could often guess what was in the emperor’s mind. At first he had told her no more than a little, so that – as he intended – she could repeat it to the foreign ambassadors, which was an extremely useful means of sounding them out or spreading rumours. Gradually, however, she developed opinions of her own, which were more traditionalist than the emperor’s. This first became apparent over Rome, then over Mexico,
then over Poland and finally over Austria. As Napoleon’s health worsened, inevitably the empress’s influence grew, while her ideas became clearer and firmer.

Eugénie had certainly begun to assert her own opinions, and very strongly, as early as 1861. Viel Castel, who obtained most of his information about her from Princesse Mathilde or from those in the princess’s circle, recorded in June that year how she was already attempting to influence imperial policy over Poland. She had secretly contributed an anonymous article to a highly influential newspaper, the
Constitutionel
, in which she had attacked Russia and praised the Polish extremists. ‘She would like us to support the rebel movement in that country as much as possible, whatever the cost’, explains the diarist, who was writing at least eighteen months before the Polish insurrection of 1863. He adds, ‘She is no less pronounced in her views about the confiscated Italian states.’

At breakfast in the Tuileries with the emperor one morning in May 1861, according to the diarist (or, more probably, to Princesse Mathilde, who was present), Eugénie spoke about nothing except international affairs, criticising French foreign policy so savagely that eventually the normally phlegmatic Napoleon rose to his feet, saying, ‘Really, Eugénie, you seem to forget two things – first, that you are French and, second, that you are married to a Bonaparte.’

‘I have great difficulty in making any sense of this woman’s character at all, nor am I able to discover just what it is that she wants’, the diary continues. ‘Her love for the emperor is to a very large extent conditioned by ambition, her maternal instincts appear to be extremely unsatisfactory, and the way she behaves is more than likely to alienate the French people.’ This is not the voice of Comte Horace de Viel Castel but of his informant, Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, pursuing her unforgiving vendetta against Eugénie. She also supplied the Goncourt brothers with the same sort of vicious gossip. Mathilde’s venomously bitter voice can be heard in the rest of the entry about Eugénie. ‘She carefully makes friends with all the ladies whom the emperor
distinguishes
with his attention, approves of their relations with her husband, and by exploiting their influence tries to wield still greater power over him.’ Yet, however prejudiced and unreliable Viel Castel or Princesse Mathilde may have been, there is no ground for disbelieving their claim that as early as 1861 Eugénie had been trying to dominate her husband and to put into practice a foreign policy that was sometimes very much her own.

O
TTO VON
B
ISMARCK

On 27 August 1864 a dying Horace de Viel Castel wrote his last journal entry. As a malicious connoisseur of scandal, what he said has always to be treated with caution, especially on ‘the foul arena of politics’, yet often he was shrewd. He tells us that, distrusted by Russia, Prussia and Austria, above all by England, France is totally isolated. ‘She has let Denmark be defeated in the recent war, having been ‘tricked by Mons. de Bismarck.’ He ends, ‘We are hastening towards our decline. Everything that was young about the emperor has grown old and what was not yet decayed even four years ago is now entirely so.’ Although we can now see that Viel Castel’s forebodings were justified, few would have agreed with him in the summer of 1864. Among the exceptions was Eugénie.

On 4 October 1865 the Prussian minister-president arrived at Biarritz. Despite being well over fifty, bald and walrus-moustached, he was a magnificent-looking man, built on the lines of a Wagnerian hero, who spoke excellent French in a deep, musical voice and had a keen sense of humour. Women liked him. The empress herself admired him, even if she recognised an enemy when she saw one. He was going to destroy Bonapartist France and his name was Count von Bismarck-Schoenhausen.

Napoleon and Eugénie had met Bismarck before. He had been presented to them as a member of the Prussian delegation to the Congress of Paris, while in 1862 he had spent several months in France as his country’s ambassador. This time the gigantic Prussian charmed everyone at the Villa Eugénie, even Mérimée enjoying his conversation. He flirted with one of the ladies, the beautiful Comtesse de la Bedoyère, who took such a fancy to him that (according to Dr Barthez) Mérimée painted Bismarck’s face on a piece of cardboard and put it on her pillow – going up to her bedroom after dinner, she rushed out, screaming, ‘My God, there’s a man in my bed’.

Otto von Bismarck treated the empress not just politely but with genuine respect. When he was ambassador he had described her as ‘the only man in Paris’, a surprising tribute from someone who did not usually accept women as equals. For all his charm, Eugénie knew that this was the most dangerous man in Europe. Having seen how ruthlessly he had behaved towards the Poles, she watched with alarm his outmanoeuvring of Austria.

The reason Bismarck had come to Biarritz was to find out what the emperor would do in the event of war between Prussia and Austria, the two men spending several days in secret discussion. He suspected that Napoleon hoped to avoid being caught up in hostilities and wanted the two German powers to fight themselves to a standstill, after which he could annex some territory. But the minister-president had to make sure. In strict confidence he explained that he meant to drive Austria out of northern Germany and, in addition, force her to surrender Venetia to Italy – Prussia was going to ally with the Italians. And he promised to give France either Belgium or Luxembourg.

Bismarck had guessed right. With his best troops away in Mexico, Napoleon had no wish to join in the fighting and was not going to commit himself, as he had done so disastrously to Cavour at Plombières in 1858. Unlike Cavour, however, Bismarck asked him to do nothing, while it would certainly be most gratifying if Venetia were to be given to Italy.

The minister-president went back to Berlin in a very good mood, merely saying that he had met ‘two remarkable women’, by whom he meant Eugénie and the lovely, but hare-brained, Comtesse de la Bedoyère.

An unadventurous foreign policy suited the emperor very well, partly because his health was starting to crack. Exhausted by a sexual appetite verging on satyriasis, he was also debilitated by chainsmoking – not cigars, unusually for the period, but cigarettes. Ominously, he was beginning to suffer from mysterious pains in the bladder.

The empress did not share her husband’s optimism and dreaded the prospect of a victorious Prussia. Realising that the Second Empire’s one hope of survival lay in an Austrian alliance, she begged Metternich to persuade Franz-Joseph to surrender Venetia. It would have a magic effect on French opinion. Convinced that in the end she would bring Napoleon round to her way of thinking, she assured Metternich that Austria could go to war knowing that France would quickly join in on her side – ‘Yes, yes, the emperor is committed to neutrality, but only until the first shot has been fired.’ She told him this again and again throughout March, April and May 1866, when on paper Austria was still Prussia’s ally.

By now Eugénie was terrified of Bismarck. A baffling mixture of Lutheran piety and cynicism, a Prussian nobleman rather than a German nationalist, he was determined to serve his king by extending Prussian rule over all the states of Protestant north Germany, and eventually over those of the Catholic south as well. To do so, he had to end Austrian domination of the Germanic Confederation, which meant war. If Prussia won, then France would be menaced by a power far more dangerous than Austria. Eugénie understood this at once, unlike the tired, self-deluding emperor.

When Austria ended her treaty with Prussia on 12 June, Metternich signed a secret pact with France the same day, by which Austria agreed to surrender Venetia and France promised to restrain Italy. But although war was imminent, Napoleon refused to abandon his neutrality.

Hostilities broke out on 18 June, Austria supported by the tiny armies of Saxony, Hanover, Hesse-Cassel and Nassau. Remembering the Italian campaign, everyone in France, including Eugénie, admired Austrian troops with their excellent artillery and were not surprised when they routed the Italians at Custozza a week later. The French were quite sure they would defeat the Prussians just as easily, contemptuous of its reservists and
landwehr
. Yet General Bourbaki, who had recently visited Berlin, warned them, ‘Be as rude as you like about this army of lawyers and occulists but it will march into Vienna whenever it wants.’

While the emperor waited for a suitable moment to intervene, Eugénie tried to help the Austrians, giving Metternich the names of French firms that held large stores of lint and bandages. Above all she urged the necessity of sprinkling hospital beds with carbolic acid, ‘which numerous experiments here have proved to be a preventative against typhus and fevers’.