Read Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire Online
Authors: Desmond Seward
Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (29 page)
On 3 July, brilliantly coordinated by Helmuth von Moltke, the Prussians smashed the Austrians at Sadowa (Königgrätz) in Bohemia, inflicting ghastly casualties. That evening the Austrian foreign minister, Count von Rechberg, telegraphed Metternich in Paris – ‘only French armed intervention stands in the way of Prussia gaining exclusive domination over Germany’. Bismarck thought so too. Later he admitted he had never understood why the French did not cross the Rhine while the Prussians were still held up in Bohemia. Even 15,000 men would have been enough. ‘The mere sight of your red trousers in the Duchy of Baden and the Palatinate would have raised all south Germany against Prussia…. I am not even sure that we could have defended Berlin.’
‘The consternation here at the successes of Prussia continues to be very great’, reported Cowley that night. ‘I speak of high quarters.’ Clearly he had been surprised by Napoleon’s neutrality. ‘The emperor is getting alarmed at his Frankenstein, and is turning his mind a little too late to the problem of how Austria is to be saved.’
On 10 July a Prussian envoy, Prince Reuss, received a veiled warning from Eugénie, who told him that the prospect of Prussian hegemony over Germany was making Napoleon very uneasy. ‘With such a nation for a neighbour, we should run the risk of finding you one day in front of Paris before we had ever suspected it…. I shall go to bed French and wake up Prussian.’ She told him that Prussia owed a lot to French neutrality and must not exploit her victory too much. France, she lied, ‘desired nothing but peace’.
In reality Eugénie had been doing her best to make the emperor declare war. The fullest account of a crucial meeting of the Council at Saint-Cloud on 5 July is that which she gave to Paléologue in January 1905. When Drouyn de Lhuys, once again foreign minister, had insisted the only possible option was war, Eugénie broke in to ask Marshal Randon, minister for war, if the army was ready to invade across the Rhine. Without hesitation he replied that 80,000 troops could be concentrated immediately – 250,000 more within three weeks. At this, she demanded that the army should march at once. ‘I felt that the fate of France and our dynasty’s future were at stake’, she recalled bitterly. She was supported by Drouyn and Randon.
Napoleon then asked other ministers for their opinion. Underlining the obvious, the Marquis de la Valette, minister for the interior, argued that opposing Prussia meant allying with Austria and therefore abandoning Italy. He was quite certain, he added inanely, that France could obtain any territory she wanted ‘through friendly negotiations with Berlin’. His views were shared by Rouher, minister of state, and Baroche, minister of justice.
‘When the Prussian armies are no longer kept busy in Bohemia and are able to turn and give us their undivided attention, Bismarck will merely laugh at our claims’, Eugenie responded angrily. ‘Prussia had no scruples about stopping you after Solferino’, she reminded Napoleon. ‘Why worry about doing the same to her after Königgrätz? We gave way in 1859 because we could not find the 50,000 troops needed to bar the road to Paris, but today the road to Berlin lies open.’ Again, both Drouyn and Randon warmly supported her.
The Council took three decisions. First, the Senate and Corps Législatif should be summoned urgently to vote the money needed for general mobilisation. Second, 50,000 troops should be concentrated on the Rhine immediately. Third, a stern note should be sent to Berlin, warning that France would not tolerate territorial alterations to which she had not given her consent. These decisions were to be announced next day in the
Moniteur
(the official gazette).
Although Randon was over-optimistic, the French could certainly have massed 50,000 troops on the Rhine very quickly, which would have brought the South German States into the war on Austria’s side. Their sovereigns had no wish to be gobbled up by Prussia, even if a small and vociferous group in each little country wanted unification. While Württemberg had only 22,000 troops and Baden a mere 16,000, the Bavarian army was genuinely formidable with 190,000. The western areas of Prussia (Westphalia and the Rhineland) could have been invaded with ease, causing panic in Berlin. Moreover, the Austrians were regrouping, waiting for reinforcements from the Italian front.
War was the one way to stop Prussia overrunning all Germany. If she did, then it was merely a question of time before she attacked the Second Empire. A few days after Königgrätz, Victor Duruy warned the emperor that in order to consolidate her gains Prussia would ‘humiliate France, just as she has humiliated Austria’. Rouher, France’s nearest thing to a prime minister, did not agree, however. A subtle Auvergnat, in the words of Professor William Smith, he ‘knew how to play on that weakness for intellectual speculation which so often hampered the Imperial will’. During the night after the Council he showed Napoleon reports chosen by La Valette and Baroche to give the false impression that war with Prussia would be very unpopular with the French.
The following morning the announcements did not appear in the
Moniteur
. At the next Council on 10 July Eugénie, Drouyn and Randon tried frantically to revive intervention, but failed. In a despairing letter Eugénie told Metternich, ‘They are exaggerating today’s danger to make us forget tomorrow’s.’ She ended, ‘If only you could give those Prussians a really good thrashing.’
Her opponents in the Council dismissed what she wanted as ‘a policy of adventure’, but very soon Napoleon admitted to her that he had made a mistake. ‘By then it was too late to retrieve it, since the chance had been lost’, she remembered. ‘At the time he seemed
so utterly crushed that I trembled for our future.’ On 23 July she told Metternich, ‘He can no longer walk, no longer sleep, scarcely eat.’ She had advised him to abdicate in favour of the Prince Imperial with herself as regent. Yet she never stopped trying to make Napoleon declare war, telling Metternich on 25 July that she was certain he would do so, when he visited the camp at Chalons in the autumn. (The French army was eager to cross the Rhine.) For the moment he was at Vichy, seeing no one except her ally Drouyn whom she had sent there. Meanwhile she was working on other ministers. Metternich was amazed at her determination. Eventually Napoleon agreed to move as soon as the Prussians advanced on Vienna, but on 26 July – the day Metternich wrote his dispatch – Prussia and Austria began negotiations for peace.
‘The empress told Goltz that she looked upon the present state of things as
le commencement de la fin de la dynastie
’, Cowley reported early in August, quoting the Prussian ambassador. ‘This is exaggeration. What with Mexico, what with Italy, what with his late mediation, the emperor has no doubt fallen in prestige, but as yet there are no signs of public discontent.’ A few days later, however, Cowley was saying that Napoleon would have to get some sort of compensation from Prussia to calm public opinion. But Eugénie was worried about more than prestige, telling Goltz on 20 August that Prussia’s army was ‘twice as strong as the French and asserting in jest that France had to guard against a Prussian invasion for the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine’.
Drouyn resigned in despair. His successor as foreign minister was the Marquis de Moustier. Lord Cowley had a low opinion of the marquis, writing, ‘He hates business, it seems, and prefers the society of ballet-dancers to all others … he has made every place he has been in too hot to hold him.’ This was at a time when Napoleon needed clear-headed advisers.
On 23 August Prussia and Austria signed the Peace of Prague, Prussia annexing Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, Schleswig-Holstein and the free city of Frankfurt (whose mayor hanged himself). A North German Confederation was formed with the Prussian king as president, the South German States agreeing to a programme of military and economic cooperation. Emperor Franz-Joseph was so weakened within his own lands that he was forced to grant the Magyars autonomy, creating the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.
Regaining their equilibrium, Napoleon and Eugénie tried hard to give the impression that nonetheless all was well with the Second Empire. When Felix Whitehurst went to a ball at the Tuileries in January 1867, he found a scene of the utmost tranquillity. ‘Good music pervaded the atmosphere, and when, to the “Belle Hélène”, some twenty couples waltzed before the emperor and empress in the splendid Throne-room, the effect was very striking’, he told readers of the
Daily Telegraph
. ‘The emperor, who had been skating all day, looked very well; the empress, who was very simply dressed in white trimmed with white roses and ivy, reminded one of the empress of twelve years ago.’
Behind the scenes, however, the couple were desperately worried. France, indisputably Europe’s greatest military power for the last seventy years, was now being challenged by what until recently had been only a minor power. As Cowley predicted, a ‘policy of compensation’ ensued after the Peace of Prague, Count Benedetti, the French ambassador at Berlin, informing Bismarck that his emperor would offer no opposition to Prussia taking over South Germany so long as France was given Belgium or Luxembourg. (Unwisely, he submitted the offer in writing.)
Realising Belgium was beyond his reach, Napoleon hoped to obtain Luxembourg, whose capital was then the strongest fortress in Europe. Its Grand Duke, King William III of Holland, was ready enough to sell it since it did not go through the female line and he had no sons. If the Luxembourgeois could not stay independent, they preferred union with France to absorption by Prussia, which had seemed more than likely after Königgrätz. In negotiations that he took care to keep secret from his Council – and, above all, from the staunchly pro-Austrian Eugénie – Napoleon offered Prussia an alliance against Austria in return.
Bismarck brusquely rejected the offer. He also revealed the emperor’s designs on the Grand Duchy to the German press, which was outraged, furiously trumpeting that ‘Luxembourg is a German country.’ In Berlin and Paris there was serious talk of war. ‘Nothing could be more agreeable to us than a war, which in any case cannot be avoided’, purred General von Moltke. ‘France fears that Alsace-Lorraine will be wrenched from her’ was how Count von der Goltz in Paris explained the French attitude – devoted to Eugénie, he genuinely wanted peace. (Napoleon then confused the ambassador by confiding that France and Prussia ‘were like two
friends in a café who feel they ought to have a fight but who cannot think why.’) Prince Metternich informed Vienna that the empress was complaining ‘they were very much annoyed with Prussia’, and adding that large-scale military preparations were in hand which should be completed by the end of the year.
The situation grew increasingly tense throughout the early months of 1867 – for a few nerve-racking days in the spring many well-informed observers in both Berlin and Paris thought that war was inevitable. ‘All Friday things were in a terrible way, and the declaration of war against Prussia by France was in the mouth of everybody’, an obviously very alarmed Mr Whitehurst, normally an optimist, told his
Daily Telegraph
readers in England on Sunday 21 April. ‘The Bourse has been in a panic, the tone of society uneasy and the general feeling feverish.’
The crisis had passed by the end of the month. France was not ready to fight and Bismarck did not want to have a war – not just yet. A settlement was reached, Luxembourg ceased to be a member of the German Confederation while the Prussian garrison that had occupied its capital since 1815 was withdrawn, after dismantling the fortifications. However, the Grand Duchy became a neutral state instead of being handed over to Napoleon, who failed to get his ‘compensation’.
During the exceptionally tortuous and distrustful negotiations over Luxembourg the French foreign minister, Moustier, made the remarkable statement that ‘M. de Bismarck does not always act in bad faith.’ Even so, the French had been completely outwitted, and it was another bitter humiliation for their emperor. Putting matters in perspective, with only too much justification Adolphe Thiers had reminded a sombre Corps Législatif in March 1867 that Prussia’s victory at Königgrätz had been the worst disaster to befall France since the Allied invasion of 1814.
It was also a further triumph for the Prussian minister-president, giving Eugénie still more reason to fear him. Yet, despite everything – including what was to come – she could never bring herself to dislike the man. Forty years later, asked who were among ‘the most
fascinating
personalities’ she had ever met, she mentioned Bismarck first. ‘When it was worth his while,’ she said with a peculiar smile, ‘no one could be a more adroit courtier.’ The questioner suddenly realised that instead of boring the empress, as had so many other men, by telling her how beautiful she was, he had complimented her on her flair for politics.
In 1854, Winterhalter painted the empress in a garden at Versailles, in an eighteenth-century dress of pale gold taffeta and with powdered hair. Only the year before Hübner had watched the ninety-year-old Isabey picking up her fan – if Isabey, who had painted Marie-Antoinette, saw Eugénie dressed like this, he may well have thought that he was seeing a ghost. Princesse Mathilde told the Goncourt brothers it was ridiculous for the empress to compare herself with the queen, yet the two women had much in common. Disliked as foreigners, criticised for their clothes, jewels and parties, both were on insecure thrones and had a vulnerable child.
When Napoleon III asked Eugénie to marry him, he warned of the dangers and reminded her of Marie-Antoinette’s fate, which frightened even Doña Maria Manuela. During her honeymoon the empress visited the Petit Trianon where the queen had played at being a milkmaid, and later installed a copy of the dairy in a small country house near Saint-Cloud. In future years she would warmly encourage the Petit Trianon’s restoration, visiting it regularly – as if hoping to commune with the spirit of her predecessor. Sometimes the great antiquary Count Nieuwerkerker expounded learnedly on how the little palace must have looked in Marie-Antoinette’s day, the empress listening with rapt attention.