Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (32 page)

Unlike the unfortunate Hyrvoix, Augustin Filon was a member of the imperial household and knew the empress at close quarters. He became so devoted to her that eventually he would follow her into exile. His assessment of her marriage in the 1860s is probably fairly near the truth, if sometimes a little fanciful. ‘I think she lived in a kind of fairy tale, fascinated by her extraordinary destiny,’ he says:

Nearly twenty years separated the couple, and such a gulf is not easily bridged even by women who seem designed by nature to love men older than themselves. I don’t believe that the empress was a woman of this sort. Her feelings for the emperor had never been passionate, although they were much stronger than mere friendship and had grown steadily deeper until the day when she discovered his infidelities.

Yet, despite his betrayal, like many women she continued to respond to certain aspects of Napoleon’s personality, such as his kindness, gaiety and sense of fun, his oddly gentle voice and manner – all so surprising in an autocrat. Once he had caught her imagination as Bonapartism incarnate, and she never ceased to reverence him as emperor, never calling him ‘Louis’ or ‘
tu
’ in public. Ultimately she saw him as ‘a great, honest man who wanted to do good, even if often he
pursued his aims crookedly’. In Filon’s view, Eugénie found her role in supporting and encouraging her husband.

As for the emperor’s attitude towards Eugénie, instead of the beautiful, alluring woman whom he had first ‘loved for her moods of impatience, her nervousness and her foibles’, he now loved her character and high standards. ‘He regarded her as his second conscience,’ claims Filon. Undoubtedly he consulted her more and more. She was his only confidante, although he still preferred to keep a good deal secret about his real aims.

In November 1868 the emperor contributed (under the name of A. Grenier) a curious article on Eugénie, written as if he were her father rather than her husband, to a new journal, the
Dix-Decembre
. ‘Women’s welfare is one of her main interests,’ he wrote. ‘She wants to improve conditions for them and has obtained recognition for Rosa Bonheur in the form of a decoration… No economic or financial question is beyond her grasp, and it is pleasing to hear her discuss these recondite problems with experts’, he continued patronisingly. ‘If her way of expressing herself is occasionally faulty, it is invariably colourful and lively, and she is remarkably precise in talking of business matters.’

One can dismiss Maxime Ducamp’s claims that Eugénie ‘had her camarilla, her court, her partisans’, since he was a journalist notorious for his venom, but Filon, who unlike Ducamp knew the world of the Tuileries, has to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, when he suggests that the emperor pretended that Eugénie led a reactionary court party so that he could blame her for policies which the liberals disliked, one must reject the idea as nonsense: Napoleon did not want to harm his image by making his wife still more unpopular.

On the other hand, Eugénie undoubtedly opposed her husband on certain issues. Filon argues that ‘the thought of setting herself up in opposition to the emperor, from whom she had taken all her political ideas and whose judgement she trusted absolutely, would never have occurred to her,’ yet we know that she often disagreed with him – on war with Prussia in 1866, on defending the Papal States and on liberalising. Inclined to see things in black and white, she did not always share the outlook of a husband who thought in the finer shades of grey. Filon was not present at Council meetings and it seems unlikely that the empress would have described them to her son’s tutor.

At the same time, Filon – who had a very good mind himself according to Victor Duruy – showed the utmost respect for Eugénie’s intelligence. Here he is totally at odds with Pierre de La Gorce. ‘Far sighted enough yet only intermittently, she was prone to violent fits of uneasiness and, increasingly disillusioned with her husband’s judgement, as a mother she wanted to safeguard her son’s inheritance’, declared la Gorce. ‘No doubt a woman of strong spirit, she was restless rather than resourceful, nervous, far too impressionable, simultaneously resolute and changeable, and when involved in policy-making caused as much damage by ill-judged enthusiasm as she did by her maternal intuition.’

It should be said that La Gorce did not attend Council meetings and had never even met the empress. Yet this Orleanist sympathiser’s assessment has influenced all too many French historians.

Napoleon and Eugénie needed all the support they could find in the political climate that emerged after the Exposition Universelle, but the empress’s foreign origins made her even more of a scapegoat – more than ever disliked as ‘L’Espagnole’.

SEVEN

The Storm

R
EVOLUTION
?

A
dmiral Jurien de La Gravière had joined the navy as a midshipman in 1828 when the Bourbons were still on the throne, but unlike most naval officers, who tended to be Legitimists, he had become a staunch Bonapartist. Napoleon used this shrewd Breton for difficult missions, such as ensuring that French and British warships cooperated during the Crimean War. (Queen Victoria says he was ‘a quiet, gentlemanlike man who had always helped to keep matters straight between the two navies’.) He had nearly averted the Mexican adventure, by negotiating with Juarez.

By 1867 Jurien de La Gravière was seriously worried about the political situation in France. In November he wrote to the empress, insisting that she was the Second Empire’s biggest asset and ought to play a key role in its government. ‘You have no right to stand back when you could do so much to help,’ the Admiral told her. ‘We are in danger and you cannot be so remiss as to neglect us. The political experience that you have gained during a long apprenticeship of more than a dozen years must be used on behalf of us all.’ That someone of Jurien’s calibre should write like this shows just how much men at the centre of affairs respected Eugénie’s capabilities.

Nor was the admiral exaggerating when he said there was danger. In January 1868 Lord Lyons, who had recently replaced Cowley as ambassador, reported, ‘The discontent is great and the distress among the working classes severe’ – there had been a bad harvest. He added ominously, ‘the French have been a good many years without the excitement of a change’.

Republicanism had grown menacing, with constant demonstrations
that turned into riots. Everyone knew that Napoleon was not well. The constitution loaded him with responsibilities, but made no allowance for his ill health or death, while his ministers were mediocre – there was no one to replace Morny or Walewski. The rise of extremism was particularly alarming, a return to the revolutionary and atheist Jacobinism of 1793, Robespierre and Hébert being openly venerated in the wilder political clubs. There was also a threat from the royalist right. Early in 1867 Napoleon had grumbled bitterly to Lord Clarendon about Orleanist intrigues. ‘The Duc d’Aumale [the Orleanist Pretender’s uncle] is devoured by ambition and the spirit of revenge, and he is quite capable of accepting a republican ladder for climbing to power, of course with the intention of kicking it down as soon as he arrived there.’

When Lord Cowley paid a private visit to Napoleon at Fontainebleau, the emperor told the former ambassador that the countryside still supported the régime, but ‘all the towns were against him’. In the spring of 1868 there were riots at Bordeaux, Toulouse and Montauban. ‘Aged and much depressed’ in Cowley’s opinion, little by little the emperor gave ground. Censorship became less rigorous while socialist meetings were tolerated – they could be held in specified dancehalls so long as a policeman was present. Perceived as weakness, the concessions merely resulted in even worse riots.

Meanwhile, Henri de Rochefort was making the imperial family a laughing stock in his paper
La Lanterne
, whose title evoked the lampposts on which aristocrats had been lynched during the Revolution. Not even the Prince Imperial’s dog Nero escaped his mockery, while he alleged that the empress used plaster-of-Paris for make-up. As Mme des Garets reminds us, Eugénie always took politics personally and could be deeply hurt by a sneering reference to her in a debate or in a hostile article.
La Lanterne
drew blood.

Among ‘the infamous gibes with which Rochefort harried me’, the one that upset her most appeared during the summer of 1868. Nearly forty years later, she still remembered it with resentment: ‘Her Majesty the empress of the French presided yesterday at the Council of Ministers’, wrote Rochefort. ‘How surprised I should be if I learned that Mme Pereire had presided at the administrative council of the Crédit Mobilier’ (her husband was the bank’s chairman). The insinuation that she was incapable of taking part in the country’s government because she was a woman infuriated Eugénie.

The empress was even attacked by Bonapartists, or at any rate by Persigny. There had already been angry exchanges at Council meetings. (Once, when he remained grimly silent after a fierce argument, she observed, ‘M. de Persigny, you aren’t saying anything.’ ‘No, Madame.’ ‘Then you ought to stay at home instead of coming here and getting on my nerves.’) She knew very well that behind her back he was always grumbling about ‘the Spanish woman’. In November 1867 she had intercepted a letter from him to the emperor in which, after various blatantly insincere compliments – ‘nobility of the Empress’s mind’, etc. – he complained of her presence at the Council of Ministers and of the ‘detestable ideas’ that she was constantly urging on them.

Losing her temper, Eugénie told her husband excitedly that she would never set foot in the Council again if she was going to be exposed to insults of this sort. ‘Calm yourself,’ said Napoleon in his usual quiet and gentle way. ‘This new foolishness of Persigny is unimportant. It is my view that you should attend the Council of Ministers, and you will not cease to sit there. It is I who am master.’ Although the empress was reassured, she nonetheless sat down and wrote ‘a pretty strong letter’ to Persigny, who prudently stopped coming to court.

The ‘detestable ideas’ included her conviction that, for the moment at least, a constitutional monarchy could not possibly work in France. Always more realistic than her husband, as well as more pessimistic, she saw only too clearly that the left had never forgiven Napoleon for shooting them down in 1851 and that it would never do so under any circumstances. His coup had erected a permanent ‘barrier of blood’. In her opinion, his best solution would be for him to wait for the Prince Imperial to come of age in 1874, grant a constitution and then abdicate immediately. (By now both he and Eugénie were ready to contemplate abdicating in a few years time, even with eagerness, so long as the dynasty could be saved, which shows the extent of their weariness.) A new emperor with an unstained reputation might be able to attract the support essential for a viable constitutional monarchy.

‘I was always opposed to the emperor proceeding any further with liberal reforms’, she told Augustin Filon in 1903. ‘In my opinion my husband ought to have stayed exactly where he was – political freedom should have been granted when his son succeeded to the throne.’ When Filon asked what she thought was likely to
have happened under so young and inexperienced a ruler, she replied, ‘I would have relied with confidence on the innate generosity of the French nation.’

Nor did Eugénie fancy losing control of foreign policy at such a dangerous time, a prospect she dreaded, French chauvinism was not to be trusted, as could be seen only too easily from the luridly anti-Prussian articles that were appearing in the popular and now uncensored press. Among left and right alike, fashionable patriotism verged on xenophobia.

There was also a possibility, one which Eugénie found intolerable, that the ministers of a constitutional monarchy might abandon Rome and the embattled Pope Pius. Napoleon had withdrawn the French garrison at the end of 1866, but on the firm understanding that the Italian government would respect the city’s independence. Early in October 1867, however, it was learned that Garibaldi had raised a band of volunteers with whom he intended to seize the city. Every French Catholic was outraged at the news, including Eugénie. ‘Rome or death’ was Garibaldi’s melodramatic slogan – on hearing of it, she retorted, ‘Death if they really want it, but certainly not Rome.’

The Council of Ministers, urged on by the empress, decided to send a relief expeditionary force to Rome without delay. On 3 October General Failly reached Mentana outside the city, where a hard fought battle was taking place between the Papal army (mainly French Catholics) and the Garibaldisti. His men arrived just in time to save the pope’s troops from defeat, mowing down the poorly armed enemy with their new, long-range
chassepot
rifles. Many regarded the victory as a personal triumph for Eugénie.

In France, all the anticlericals, who included every socialist, were angered. The emperor Franz-Joseph’s visit to Paris, to see the last days of the Exposition Universelle, coincided with the Roman crisis, and on his arrival at the Hôtel de Ville with Napoleon and Eugénie the three were greeted by booing, the air ringing with yells of ‘
Vive Garibaldi!
’ to the horror of the poor Metternichs. Fortunately, it was the only unpleasant incident in an otherwise successful visit.

From 1866 onwards the cost of living soared, and by 1868 many workers in Paris and other big cities were living on the edge of starvation. Inevitably they turned against the government, the opposition going from strength to strength. At the end of 1867 a well-organised confrontation with the police took place at the grave
of Dr Baudin (whose sole distinction was to have been shot down on the barricades in 1851), ending in sixty-two arrests. A new socialist newspaper,
Le Reveil
, was founded in 1868 by Delescluze, an old enemy of Napoleon who had returned from serving a prison sentence in Guyana. Preaching the Jacobin gospel of 1792, it was far more dangerous than Rochefort’s light-hearted
La Lanterne
, which was banned in the autumn – to resume publication in Brussels. At by-elections opposition deputies were returned with hugely increased majorities; among them was Leon Gambetta.