Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (36 page)

Six doctors met in secret on 2 July to discuss Sée’s diagnosis. At first a Dr Fauvel argued eloquently that the cause was not a stone but in fact an abscess in the patient’s bladder, while Dr Conneau was very much inclined to think that it was probably no more than a severe internal chill. In the end, however, all agreed with the professor’s diagnosis. Sée insisted that an operation to remove the stone must take place urgently, adding that it ought to have been performed six months earlier. But Dr Nélaton, the most distinguished surgeon in France, disagreed, saying that they should wait until September and then reassess the situation. Since a majority of the doctors supported Nélaton, all that Professor Sée could do was give his report to Dr Conneau and ask him to present it to the emperor.

Later, a slanderous story was put about by Plon-Plon or by one of his allies, that Eugénie had not only intercepted and suppressed the report but that she had also withheld from Napoleon the doctors’ unanimous opinion that the stone had made him incapable of riding a horse or of bearing the slightest physical fatigue. Her motive, claimed the slander, was to make certain that he either collapsed or died, so that she could be regent until her son came of age. In reality, she did not see the report or know that her husband was suffering from a gallstone until long after, while the doctors had never given any such opinion. Meanwhile, in early July, Napoleon suffered a particularly severe attack which almost totally incapacitated him for several days. He could not have fallen ill at a worse moment.

EIGHT

Downfall

A P
RUSSIAN
S
PAIN
?

A
surprising number of distinguished men worshipped the empress. Among them were the imperial librarian, Octave Feuillet, the Austrian chancellor, Count von Beust, the Italian ambassador Cavaliere Nigra – even if Eugénie ranted at him more than once about Italy’s designs on Rome – and Jacques Offenbach, although this may have been one of the maestro’s jokes. The loyal Filon claimed romantically that Count Bacciochi shot himself ‘to escape from the consuming tortures of a wild passion’ for Eugénie, but he had really done so because of ruining himself on the stock exchange.

The most improbable of all was the Prussian ambassador, Count von der Goltz, who wrote the empress wistful letters of the utmost propriety. She kept them for the rest of her life, calling him, ‘
mon pauvre Goltz
’. In August 1866 Goltz tried in vain to persuade Bismarck of the benefits of a French alliance, but torn between his affections and his patriotism, while foreseeing war he tried, only once, to warn the empress. This was after visiting Berlin in 1868 when he wrote to her that German journalists in Paris were sending home reports which placed Napoleon III in the worst possible light and that the chauvinist tone of the French press was arousing hostility across the Rhine. A bit later the emperor grumbled to Cowley about rumours in the German press that he was preparing for a war and that when he lost it he would have to ‘restore’ Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, rumours that ‘were doing incredible mischief’.

When Goltz became incurably ill in 1869 Eugénie had him installed in a pavilion in the park at Fontainebleau so that she
could see he was properly nursed. ‘One summer’s evening we were sitting by the lake in front of the Chinese Drawing Room when a shadow – a shadow, not a man, appeared,’ recalled Filon. It was Goltz who, unable to speak, looked at the empress with ‘the dumb devotion of a faithful dog’. He died shortly after.

In old age Prince Bismarck boasted that he deliberately provoked a war with France, to make the South German States unite with the North. In fact he blundered into one through tactless diplomacy. Even so, without Bismarck there would never have been a Franco-Prussian War.

Although Napoleon III was scarcely a great soldier, at least he tried to be a realist. ‘He said that it was the superior military organisation of Prussia that had counted in the late war,’ Cowley reported in December 1866. ‘Austria, in fact, had been in the same position as he found himself during the war in Italy with a formidable army on paper, which dwindled to nothing when put to the test of activity.’

He had been seriously alarmed by reports from the French military attaché at Berlin, Baron Stoffel, who warned that highly trained officers and ultra-modern equipment gave the Prussian army overwhelming superiority. Already shocked by the Prussian performance at Königgrätz, the emperor welcomed the sweeping programme of military reform proposed by Marshal Niel, minister for war. Secret discussions during the annual staff conferences at Compiègne alarmed him still more. Niel, who died in 1869, always insisted that by itself even a stronger army was not enough and agreed with Eugénie on the need for an Austrian alliance – only a war on two fronts could defeat the Prussians.

Unfortunately, despite Königgrätz the new liberal France could see no reason for paying more taxes to improve an army that might be wasted on another Mexican adventure. Nevertheless, the army began to modernise early in 1868. It was equipped with a fine new breech-loading rifle, the
chassepot
, which was better than the Prussian ‘needle-gun’, and the first mass-produced machine-gun, the
mitrailleuse
(firing 150 rounds a minute), although the Corps Législatif refused to pay for artillery that would match breech-loading Krupp howitzers. Even so, having seen a demonstration of the rapid firepower of what he called ‘the deadly Chassepots’, Whitehurst was convinced that ‘no infantry or cavalry could advance in the face of such a permanent and perpetual discharge of death’. By 1870
France was certainly much readier for war than it had been in 1859 – for war against an army of the same sort as itself.

As Napoleon realised very well, the daunting superiority of the Prussian army lay not only in its numbers, training and equipment, but also in its organisation. Its General Staff could supply commanders with information and advice throughout a battle, while it had learned how to use railways to rush men to the front. And as its commander-in-chief, in all but name, it had Moltke, who had been planning an invasion of France for the last ten years.

‘Six railway lines were now available to bring the forces of the North German Confederation to the Rhineland – a total, in three weeks, of 300,000 men,’ writes Sir Michael Howard. If Austria stayed put and the South German States fulfilled their treaty obligations, the total would be nearer half a million. ‘Railway timetables were drawn up, so that every unit knew the exact day and hour that it would leave its barracks and reach its concentration area. Mobilisation and deployment would follow one another in a single smooth and exactly calculated operation. By July 1870 Moltke knew that he had under his hand one of the greatest engines of war the world had ever known; and he was openly impatient to use it.’

France’s generals put their trust in their troops, now that they were armed with the
chassepot
. (General du Barail admitted in his memoirs that he told Marshal Canrobert, ‘We beat Russia in the Crimea, Austria in Italy, and I most sincerely believe that these two campaigns have assured our supremacy in Europe.’) They also hoped to find allies among the South German States, who had no wish to be absorbed by Prussia – the Grand Duke of Hesse informed General Ducrot that even a small victory by France would make all the South Germans go over to her side. Encouragingly, the Bavarians elected an anti-Prussian ‘Patriot’ government in the spring of 1870.

There was even a faint possibility the Austrians might help. During a visit to Paris in February 1870 Archduke Albrecht, their best general, proposed an alliance between Austria, France and Italy, but Franz-Joseph, who dared not risk losing a third war, would only say vaguely that if the French invaded South Germany ‘as liberators rather than enemies’ he might come in on their side. Some French generals thought an alliance of this sort had small chance of success, arguing that the Prussians could mobilise too quickly and that South Germans hated Frenchmen more than they did the Protestant Northerners.

The French did not appreciate that since the Dual Monarch’s establishment in 1867 Franz-Joseph had become the prisoner of the Hungarians, who did not want him to become too powerful for them, as he undoubtedly would be if he defeated the Prussians. Budapest would never let him go to war with Berlin.

However, all this talk of a Franco-Prussian war seemed mere theorising in the weeks that followed the plebiscite. Even if the French and the Prussians disliked each other, there was no reason for war. ‘The government has no cause for concern whatever’, Emile Ollivier told the Corps Législatif when discussing foreign affairs. ‘At no period has the maintenance of peace seemed more assured.’ This was on 30 June. Three days later the French ambassador at Madrid telegraphed the Quai d’Orsai: ‘A deputation has offered the throne of Spain to a Hohenzollern prince, who has accepted.’ The prince was Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. He was not even a Prussian, only a remote kinsman of the Prussian king (they shared a mutual thirteenth-century ancestor) and in fact a close cousin of Napoleon III through the Beauharnais, but it made no difference to the French, who were convinced that Prussia was encircling France. The press erupted in hysteria.

Suddenly, in the words of the
académicien
L.-A. Prévost-Paradol, ‘France and Prussia were hurtling towards each other like two locomotives on the same track.’

On 6 July the Duc de Gramont promised the Corps Législatif that France would not tolerate a Hohenzollern prince or any other Prussian prince on the Spanish throne: ‘We shall know how to do our duty, without the slightest hesitation or weakness.’ The emperor had asked Gramont to speak gently, but Ollivier told him to be as forceful as he liked. Privately the duke informed the Council that Leopold’s accession ‘means war.’

Gramont had made his statement after consulting the minister for war, General Leboeuf, who assured him that the French army was ready for hostilities. It was Ollivier who supplied the phrase, ‘We shall know how to do our duty’. ‘We have had enough of the humiliations that Prussia wants to inflict on us,’ he informed the Austrian ambassador. ‘La Valette and Rouher are no longer running French policy.’ Undoubtedly he had judged the nation’s mood correctly, and in the chamber Gramont’s speech was greeted with cries of ‘
Vive la France! Vive l’Empéreur!
’ even of ‘
A Berlin!
’ Everyone agreed, on the left as well as on the right, including Gambetta. ‘Rarely have we seen so much unanimity in the newspapers of all the various parties,’ noted the
Figaro
.

Reading the foreign minister’s statement to the Corps Législatif, Bismarck commented, ‘this certainly looks like war’. Yet the Prussian chancellor had never intended to set a trap for Napoleon III, as many historians have suggested – and, indeed, as he himself would hint afterwards. Isabella II had abdicated in 1868 and for the last year Bismarck had been trying, in secret negotiations with the Spanish dictator Marshal Prim, to replace her by a Hohenzollern. However unwelcome a German king of Spain might be to the French, if they were presented with a fait accompli he saw no reason why they should go to war once Leopold had been safely installed by the Cortès. It was only by accident that news of the negotiations leaked out before the Cortès was able to give its approval.

The revelation that Bismarck had been intriguing in Spain outraged opinion throughout Europe. In London
The Times
called his scheme ‘a vulgar and impudent
coup d’état
in total contradiction to accepted diplomatic practice in handling such matters’. It looked as if Prussia would have to back down, suffering considerable humiliation, while few, if any, observers expected there would be war.

On 7 July the Duc de Gramont sent a telegram to Count Benedetti at the French embassy in Berlin, instructing him to extract a promise at once from King William that he would arrange for Leopold to withdraw his candidature immediately. ‘We have to know whether it is to be peace or a refusal which means war,’ said the duke. ‘If you can persuade the king to prevent the prince from accepting, it will be a great triumph and a great service. On his own initiative, the king will have guaranteed the peace of Europe. But if this does not happen, then there is going to be war.’

‘The speech made by the Duke de Gramont in the Chamber stirred up the whole country into a war-fever which the feeble government of M. Ollivier could not control,’ the Austrian diplomat Baron Vitzthum recalled later. Napoleon was the one man in Paris who kept his head and guessed at Prussia’s military potential. He can scarcely have been reassured by the war minister Marshal Leboeuf, who on behalf of the French army claimed fatuously that in the event of a war lasting for a year, ‘We won’t need to buy a single gaiter-button.’

‘If Prussia doesn’t want to fight, then we shall have to give her a good kick up the backside, by going over the Rhine again and clearing the left bank [of Germans]’, wrote Emile de Girardin in
La Presse
– and Girardin was no mere hack but one of the most influential journalists in France. The empress shared the general mood. When Prevost-Paradol, minister designate to the United States, came to Saint-Cloud for a farewell audience she gave him a warm welcome, knowing he had always said that a Franco-Prussian war was inevitable. ‘We’ve got to go ahead,’ Eugénie told him. ‘France is on the verge of losing her place in the world – she has to fight or go under.’

On 7 July Gramont instructed Benedetti to obtain a categorical statement from the Prussian king, to the effect that he had ordered Prince Leopold to stand down. William, who had never liked the idea of the candidature, and who in any case did not want a war, politely declined. It was nothing to do with him, said the king – he did not object to Leopold withdrawing just as he had not objected to his accepting. Gramont’s reaction, in a telegram on 9 July, was, ‘If the King won’t order the Prince of Hohenzollern to refuse, then it will be immediate war and within a few days we shall cross the Rhine.’ On 11 July, in yet another frantic telegram, he told the ambassador that the ministry might fall because of popular excitement over the issue – however he did it, Benedetti must obtain William’s formal undertaking.