Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (35 page)

Many former opponents now accepted the Second Empire as the only form of French monarchy that was viable. The opposition’s noisy violence helped them make up their minds. In March 1868 Whitehurst had observed how ‘social fusion’ was increasing. ‘I could point out a dozen of the old Legitimist and Orleanist names which have been announced this year by the servants at the Tuileries.’ Twelve months later he had explained to his readers that ‘Every cry of “Vive la République!” rallies to the reigning dynasty everyone who has saved money, bought Rentes or taken shares.’

The court had changed. Filon tells us that people who had known it ten years earlier did not recognise it. The loose women had gone. He quoted a conversation overheard in the Saint-Cloud smoking-room: ‘Nothing but a boarding-school,’ grumbled a gentleman, to which another replied, ‘You mean a nursery.’ The tutor explained that this was because of all the children in the château – the Prince Imperial, his friend Louis Conneau (the court doctor’s son), the empress’s nieces and Mme Walewska’s two daughters. Even so, receptions at the Tuileries continued, especially for visiting sovereigns.

Reluctantly, Napoleon agreed to Ollivier’s demand that the empress should no longer attend meetings of the Council of Ministers. The reason given to the press was ‘to stop opinions which she does not hold being attributed to her, and so that she will not be suspected of possessing an influence to which she does not aspire’. There was an element of truth in this, but it is more likely that Ollivier was anxious that his government should not share in the ‘Spanish woman’s’ unpopularity. And no doubt he remembered Rochefort’s jibe about a woman being allowed to preside over the Council.

Eugénie had first met Ollivier in 1865, when as a keen supporter of penal reform he had encouraged her to visit the La Roquette prison. He had been so impressed by her intellect that he compared her to ‘a heroine from Corneille’, soon revised his judgement. At the end of December in the same year he had discussed the empress with Dr Libreicht, Doña Maria Manuela’s occulist. ‘We shared our impressions, which are very similar,’ he noted in his journal. ‘A passionate but not an affectionate nature, intelligent but without finesse, courageous, noble, but in a theatrical way and a bit of a Don Quixote – keener on doing good for the effect it produces than for any pleasure in it. Fickle, needs excitement.’

By 1870 he thoroughly disliked her, and not only because she was a political enemy: he realised her low opinion of him. If Paléologue can be believed, she thought he was nothing more than ‘a clumsy Utopian, a pretentious wind-bag’. Although she had told him before her departure for Suez that she would no longer take an active part in politics and restrict her public activities to good works, he knew it did not stop her from criticising him in private to the Mamelukes and to her husband. Nor was he soothed by her pleasure at seeing him badly bitten by a pet monkey she had brought back from Egypt.

Meanwhile, the ‘windbag’ was full of bland reassurance about the political future. ‘We are going to give the emperor a happy old age’, Ollivier promised confidently. At first he and his administration seemed popular enough. His dismissal of Baron Haussmann as Prefect of the Seine was applauded, Haussmann’s mismanagement of the capital’s finances having provided the perfect excuse. He was even elected a member of the Académie Française, which until now
had always been a bastion of opposition to the Second Empire and anybody connected with it.

Yet not all was well with the new régime. Although Ollivier was the government’s leader, officially he was not even premier but merely minister of justice. When savaged in the Corps Législatif by Thiers, he cut an embarrassingly ineffectual figure. Strikes continued throughout the winter, some of them very serious indeed, troops shooting down strikers in self-defence more than once.

The Orleanist and the conservative republican deputies were horrified when Ollivier announced in April that, at the emperor’s insistence, a plebiscite would be held to approve the constitutional reforms. The first plebiscite since 1852, this was a piece of old-fashioned, authoritarian Bonapartism and, adding insult to injury, was known to be the brain-child of Rouher, leader of the Mamelukes. Talhouët-Roy and Daru promptly resigned in protest. Extremist republicans did not object, however, since they were convinced that voters would reject the liberal empire.

There could have been no worse choice for Daru’s successor as foreign minister than the arrogant and incompetent Alfred-Agénor, Duc de Gramont, who was appointed early in May. When a very young man he had been lured away from Legitimism by the emperor for decorative purposes at the Tuileries, and his career as ambassador at Rome and Vienna had begun as a reward for deigning to ornament the imperial court, in the hope that other Legitimists would follow suit. Almost excessively pro-Austrian, he had become the sworn foe of Bismarck, who despised him.

The impossible Bonaparte relations had caused yet another embarrassing scandal. This time it was not Plon-Plon but the even more dreadful Pierre Bonaparte, who was the culprit. On 10 January the ‘Corsican wild boar’, already credited with several murders in various foreign countries, shot in cold blood and at point-blank range an unfortunate journalist named Victor Noir, who had called on him to arrange a duel with Rochefort. ‘Could anything more resemble a “rowdy” quarrel in a Far West drinking bar, than this deadly interchange of blows and shots in the salon of a Prince of the Imperial Family?’ commented Felix Whitehurst. Noir’s funeral at Neuilly was attended by 50,000 angry mourners and the army had to patrol the streets. Arrested, Pierre Bonaparte was tried in March at Tours, to avoid further disturbances in the capital. He was found not guilty, after a travesty of a trial. Although the emperor had not intervened to secure his acquittal, the whole episode brought discredit on the dynasty and the régime.

The plebiscite, which was held on 8 May 1870, asked every adult male in France to vote for or against the following resolution, phrased with deliberate ambiguity: ‘The people approve the liberal reforms to the Constitution introduced since 1860 by the emperor with the cooperation of the great bodies of the State and ratify the Senate’s decree of 20 April 1870.’ Shortly before voting took place, the police discovered a plot to kill Napoleon at the Tuileries with explosives. Hundreds of socialists, all save a few of them innocent, were placed under arrest.

Even the emperor and Ollivier were astounded by the result of their referendum which resulted in over four times as many votes being cast in favour of the liberal empire as those against it – over 7 million compared with 1½ million. The socialists were confounded, leaders such as Gambetta thrown into despair. It was also a personal victory for the delighted Ollivier, who modestly hailed it as a French Königgrätz.

Had Napoleon III died at this moment of victory, he would have gone down in history as one of France’s great hero-rulers, ranking with his uncle, with Louis XIV and with Henri IV in the national Pantheon.

‘Sire, the country is behind you,’ the president of the Senate assured him warmly at a triumphant ceremony at the Louvre. ‘France has entrusted her liberty to your protection and to that of your dynasty.’ Replying, the emperor told the assembly that he hoped to rally the honest men of all parties round the new constitution, to dispel any threat of revolution, to enlist everybody into the task of making France great and prosperous, and to see that education was available to all. ‘We must, at the present time more than ever, look fearlessly forward to the future.’ Whitehurst, who was present, tells us, ‘Then his Majesty bowed, and there arose such a cheer as is seldom heard in Paris.’

When he returned to the Tuileries, Napoleon embraced the Prince Imperial, telling him, ‘This has guaranteed your coronation – now we can look forward to the future, without fear.’ ‘Everything appeared to be reborn again,’ is how Princess Metternich described the atmosphere.

‘The ball of the
plébiscite
was the most splendid thing I ever saw,’ said Mrs Moulton, who extolled the festoons of lanterns and
coloured lamps that illuminated the Tuileries gardens, the hundreds of orange trees in tubs, adding ‘there were about six thousand people invited, they said. It seemed as if all Paris was there.’ ‘After the
quadrille d’honneur
their Majesties circulated freely’, Lillie tells us. ‘Everyone was eager to offer congratulations to the emperor. Was it not the greatest triumph of his reign to have the unanimous vote of all France – this overwhelming proof of his popularity? As he stood there smiling, with a gracious acknowledgment of the many compliments, he looked radiantly happy…. As the emperor passed near me I added my congratulations, to which he replied, “
Merci, je suis bien heureux
.”’

On 1 June Whitehurst went to one of the smaller receptions given by Eugénie to celebrate her husband’s triumph. ‘The party was small, so not above eight or ten rooms were opened, and I should say that there were not more than five hundred people present,’ he said. ‘It was like going into the garden with Maud – there were so many flowers, the music was excellent, and when one heard the first valse echo through that glorious ball-room old times came back.’ He did not know that it was to be the very last of her receptions.

Amid all the rejoicing, Eugénie remained uneasy. The strain of recent years had played havoc with her nerves so that her temper, never her strong point, was less under control than ever. Yet her judgement remained cool enough and, always more realistic than Napoleon if not so calm, she did not forget the barrier raised by the 1852 coup. Despite liberalisation, she knew that the republicans would try to bring him down should they see an opportunity. Ollivier, vain and incapable of taking advice, was not a man to inspire her with confidence, nor was the conceited, dandified Gramont. It might almost be said that if the French did not trust the empress, neither did she trust the French – although she would never have admitted it.

For the moment, however, what was worrying her much more than the political situation inside France was the threat from abroad.

T
HE ‘SICK MAN OF EUROPE’

During the late nineteenth century, the ‘sick man of Europe’ was a phrase generally applied to the moribund Turkish Empire, whose decline sometimes threatened the peace between the great
powers, but suited the Emperor Napoleon III. Only a handful of people realised that intermittently he became very ill indeed, although his courtiers were aware that he seemed to be ageing earlier than most men and suffered from occasional bouts of a mysterious disease, which he tried unsuccessfully to conceal from his wife. His health made Eugénie still more uneasy about the new liberal empire’s viability.

She did not conceal her dislike of Emile Ollivier, ‘Look at him,’ she had said in February to Félix, the chief usher at the imperial court. ‘Don’t you have the impression that he thinks he’s saved us?’ During the same month she had grumbled bitterly, ‘I do not understand what spell M. Ollivier is casting – the emperor seems to be in love with him.’ Her disapproval was due to far more than resentment at the minister’s attempt to exclude her from politics. She genuinely suspected that he was not the right man for a crisis, if one should occur, although he might be able to cope if Napoleon was there to take the real decisions.

Because of the alarming state of France’s relations with Prussia, the senior generals, who had learned about the mysterious disease from court gossip, were beginning to worry about the possibility of the emperor being incapacitated if war broke out. In the Napoleonic state it was essential for the emperor to command his troops at the front – his absence would be unthinkable. What worried Eugénie even more was the thought of his being disabled during a crisis in foreign affairs.

Napoleon had first suffered from the illness in the autumn of 1864, when he had been at Chalons with the army for the annual manoeuvres. One night he had suddenly woken with acute pains in the abdomen, which were so agonising that he thought he must be dying. Baron Larrey, the imperial army’s senior medical officer, identified what seemed to be a gallstone that was blocking the mouth of the urethra and causing an infection. Instead of removing the stone, Larrey merely dislodged it and the infection cleared. Napoleon ordered him to tell no one about the attack, not even the empress.

There were other attacks since then, almost annually. They usually began with a fluctuating fever and a severe headache, and culminated with excruciating pains. On each occasion the emperor was given Larrey’s treatment (which consisted of little more than drinking vast quantities of water) and they had cleared fairly quickly, which meant that at one moment he would seem to be at death’s door and a few days later would appear to be in normal health. Unfortunately the attacks became increasingly painful, so that he was forced to take either laudanum (‘tincture of opium’) or the recently patented chloral, or both – in those days they were the only effective painkillers – which inevitably left him comatose and incapable of concentration.

Eugénie did her best to discover precisely what was causing the attacks. One of the court medical team, Dr Conneau, who was a devoted and long standing personal friend of the emperor, could only think of such possibilities as rheumatism or cystitis. Other medical men suggested that it might be a heart condition, or diabetes. Eugénie learned to look out for such symptoms as blood in her husband’s urine, spasms of the bladder and shooting pains. He himself could not tell her what it was, simply because he did not know; admittedly, if he had known, he would probably have kept it a secret.

When General de Montebello’s wife, a close friend of the empress, fell ill in January 1870, the general suddenly noticed that Eugénie was carefully timing her visits to coincide with those of Mme de Montebello’s physician, Augustin Nélaton, who was also one of the emperor’s physicians. With a shock, Montebello realised that she was doing so in order to question Dr Nélaton about Napoleon’s health.

In June, sensing that he was about to undergo yet another attack, the emperor decided that he wanted a fresh opinion on his malady. Accordingly, Germain Sée, a young professor of medical pathology at the University of Paris who was an expert on diseases of the bladder, came to examine him at Saint-Cloud on 19 June. Professor Sée found that he had a huge gallstone.