Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (44 page)

For thirty years their friendship was to grow closer and closer, always unclouded. Yet no two women could have been more different. Filon, who compares them in his memoirs, said that as time went by the contrast grew even more striking. Since he knew her better, his comparison sheds more light on Eugénie than on Victoria:

The Queen was hard-working and methodical, keen to store facts in her brain and arrange them neatly; impulsive like all her race, the empress was incapable of keeping to a regular routine, quick at seeing truths that might escape more experienced eyes, yet then losing sight of them after much reflection and discussion: one woman was very reserved, the other highly indiscreet, but both were incapable of deceit; they had reached an age when one values sincerity more than anything else.

Meanwhile, the Prussians routed the last makeshift armies of France, plundering and burning. Among the casualties was the lovely château of Saint-Cloud, which went up in flames. On 18 January King William of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor William I of Germany by his fellow rulers in the hall of mirrors at Versailles – the new Germans were unaware they had set out on a road which was going to end in two world wars. Napoleon realised it immediately, however, prophesying that eventually Europe would have to crush Prussia.

After an armistice between France and Germany was signed in February 1871 a general election was held in order to produce a National Assembly that would ratify the peace terms. These were draconian, having been designed by Bismarck to crush France for the next hundred years. All of Alsace and most of Lorraine were to be handed over to Germany while a war indemnity of 5,000 million francs would have to be paid to Berlin. Out of 650 deputies elected to the new National Assembly, only 30 were Bonapartists while nearly 400 were Legitimists or Orleanists and, when it met at Bordeaux on 1 March, besides endorsing the peace terms the Assembly formally confirmed the deposition of Napoleon III.

Starved in a terrible siege, humiliated by the Prussian army’s triumphant ceremonial entry into the city and infuriated at the election of so many monarchist deputies, on 18 March Paris erupted in the revolution which Napoleon and Eugénie had so much feared during the last years of their reign, proclaiming itself an independent republic, the Commune: a fatal mistake had been made in allowing National Guardsmen to keep their rifles, since they now became a citizen army.

Flying the red flag, the Commune was a conscious attempt to repeat the Jacobin Revolution of 1792, reviving the revolutionary calendar and replacing ‘
monsieur
,’ with ‘
citoyen
’. Right-wing newspapers were shut down, churches and rich men’s houses pillaged, and banks and insurance companies forced to contribute to the régime. Hundreds of innocent people were thrown into prison, merely on suspicion of being enemies of the revolution.

From Versailles, Thiers, now President of France, ordered a second siege of Paris which lasted from 2 April until 21 May. The
communards
shot their hostages in batches, among them a group of seventy who included the archbishop of Paris, besides murdering dozens of monks and priests. A detachment billeted themselves in Eugénie’s orphanage, raping the children and leaving many of the girls pregnant. When government troops stormed in, during the ensuing ‘Bloody Week’ fire-bombers (often women called ‘
pétroleuses
’) destroyed the Tuileries, the Palais Royal and the Hôtel de Ville – the Louvre was saved only just in time. Led by General de Gallifet, Thiers’s men shot over 17,000
communards
in seven days, 40,000 more being tried and either shot or transported.

Among those transported was that scourge of the Second Empire, Henri de Rochefort, who had been one of the Commune’s leaders but he soon escaped from his prison settlement in New Caledonia. Always unbalanced, he then became not only an extreme Legitimist but a fanatical anti-Semite.

Released from captivity, Napoleon III landed at Dover on 20 March 1871, two days after the revolution had broken out in Paris. In tears, Eugénie met him on the quay while the English crowd cheered. He quickly settled down to life at Camden Place, and despite the sadness of exile this was the most serene period of his marriage. The empress’s jewels (sold to the Rothschilds for over £150,000), together with her money in Spain provided an adequate income, and she was an excellent manager. He may have also had secret funds.

Queen Victoria came to see the ex-emperor soon after his arrival, admiring the way in which ‘he bore his terrible misfortunes with meekness, dignity and patience’. She says he had ‘grown very stout and grey and his moustaches are no longer curled or waxed as formerly, but otherwise there was the same pleasing, gentle and gracious manner’. (One wonders if the Prince Consort, had he lived, would have been quite so welcoming.) Eugénie told Paléologue how much she owed to the queen: ‘You would never believe all the delicate attentions she lavished upon us in those first cruel days of our exile. She always treated us as sovereigns, just as
in the days when we were allies of England; one day she said to me: “you no longer have the sovereignty of power; but you have a still higher sovereignty, that of misfortune”. Her visits to Chislehurst did us so much good.’

Another visitor to Chislehurst was Dr Evans, who found Napoleon more worried about the miseries of France than his own misfortunes. He was also impressed by the ‘kindly way’ the emperor spoke of the men who were running France. Evans did not realise that he was already planning to win them over when he regained his throne.

Germany was now the leading European power in Europe, while France was becoming second-rate. Plenty of Frenchmen resented the prospect. Moreover, France was not just Paris and many people had been horrified by both the Commune and its repression. At the same time, a majority of deputies in the Assembly felt there was something undignified about a republic. While most of them were monarchists, their candidates handicapped them. The Comte de Chambord was a charismatic and unmistakably regal personality, but as a romantic who lived in the Middle Ages he was incapable of making the compromises that were needed. If highly intelligent, his rival the Comte de Paris was dull and uninspiring. In any case there was a long-standing vendetta between Legitimists and Orleanists.

Even the republicans were divided into left and right, conservatives fearful of revolution such as Thiers, or radical firebrands like Gambetta. Meanwhile the government was dominated by Orleanist aristocrats, who were unable to restore their pretender. Nobody was satisfied with the situation.

Crushed by war and the indemnity, the French were beginning to miss the prosperity they had known under Napoleon III. While the army blamed the emperor for failing to prepare adequately for hostilities in 1870 and for appointing commanders such as Bazaine, they recognised his bravery on the battlefield, dismissing smear stories about ‘the Coward of Sedan’.

The British ambassador Lord Lyons was convinced that the emperor still enjoyed widespread support. His assessment was borne out by an agent of the Rothschild family in Paris, known only by his initials ‘C. de B.’, who in October 1871 reported that a group of senior French bureaucrats had secretly carried out a political survey. They estimated that if France had the opportunity of choosing its rulers, 1 million would vote for the Comte de Paris, 2 million would vote for a republic, 2 million would vote for the Comte de Chambord – and 3 million for the emperor.

No doubt this may have been wishful thinking by the bureaucrats, who were probably closet Bonapartists – the administration was full of them – yet C. de B., a self-confessed Orleanist, reluctantly put Napoleon’s chances even higher, and believed that he could secure 5 or even 6 million votes in a plebiscite. C. de B. also claimed that in the capital’s salons, ‘the possibility of a Bonapartist restoration is the one topic of conversation’.

Eugène Rouher, the old ‘Mameluke’ and former president of the Imperial Council of State, was elected to the Assembly for a Corsican constituency in February 1872, leading a small but vigorous group of about thirty Bonapartist deputies. He had already founded
La Situation
, one of several newspapers that supported Napoleon III. A network of Bonapartist clubs busily distributed large quantities of leaflets and photographs.

Among the propaganda photographs was a carte-de-visite-sized re-enactment of Eugénie escaping from the Louvre. About to enter the
fiacre
outside the main entrance, she is shown with Mme Lebreton and flanked by Prince Metternich and Cavaliere Nigra, as she graciously says goodbye to Conti and Lieutenant Conneau, who are seen kissing her hand; a fifth man holds open the cab door. (In reality, as we now know, she had already made Conti and Conneau leave her, while there was no fifth man.) The photograph is of course a montage, the faces having been superimposed over those of the actors who replayed the scene. It was produced by ‘M. le Cte Aguado’ – Olympe Aguado, once the imperial court’s photographer.

The emperor had been plotting his return to France ever since his surrender at Sedan. His light had been seen burning all night throughout his enforced stay at Wilhelmshöhe, and there were even rumours that he had been in touch with Regnier during the abortive negotiations for an armistice at Metz. He was undoubtedly in close contact with his leading supporters in France, not merely with Rouher and his friends, but with senior army officers who might help him launch a coup. Bonapartist agents were constantly slipping in and out of the Channel ports.

Just how seriously M. Thiers’s government regarded the possibility of a Bonapartist restoration could be seen from the large number of French spies who swarmed around Camden Place, much to the locals’ amusement. One of them installed himself with a telescope in the windmill on Chislehurst Common while others actually climbed trees overlooking the house. Frenzied attempts were made to identify every visitor, lists of names being sent regularly to Paris. A valet was bribed lavishly to steal important-looking papers from Napoleon’s desk.

When Eugénie went to Spain in September 1871 to stay with Doña Maria Manuela, quite innocently the emperor and the Prince Imperial travelled down together to Torquay for a holiday. To their surprise, they frequently found themselves being cheered in the streets, with shouts of ‘
Vive L’Empéreur!
’ a reception that was zealously noted by republican spies. Did the people of Torquay know something that they did not, they wondered? In France, newspapers began to talk of an imminent attempt by Napoleon, who was said to be about to sail from Torquay with an expeditionary force, his destination being the sea port of Rochefort, where troops and police were put on full alert. Secret agents were urgently dispatched from Paris to Spain with orders to shadow the empress wherever she went, since she was clearly involved in what the press was by now calling the ‘descent from Torquay’ – obviously she was about to launch a simultaneous rising across the Pyrenees, from an as yet unidentified base in the Basque country.

Republican hysteria over the ‘descent from Torquay’ delighted the emperor, encouraging him to spread rumours of other imaginary risings. At the same time, however, he was hatching a real and very formidable plot. He wanted to re-establish the throne for the sake of his son, and he was confident he would succeed, telling the boy, ‘If the Empire has lost fifty per cent of its prestige, it still has the other half.’

During the autumn of 1872 the watcher in the windmill on Chislehurst Common must often have had the thrill of sighting Plon-Plon through his telescope. The self-proclaimed republican was enthusiastically helping to plan the restoration of the Second Empire. By the end of the year a detailed programme for a coup had been decided, which can to some extent be reconstructed. Timed for 20 March 1873, it was full of striking and no doubt deliberate echoes of Napoleon I’s return from Elba in 1815.

Like his uncle, the emperor would discreetly slip away from exile, in a yacht from Cowes where he was going to convalesce after an operation. Crossing to Belgium, he would join Plon-Plon in Switzerland. They would then enter France across Lake Annecy, making for Lyons, where General Bourbaki was the garrison commander. From here, acclaimed by Bourbaki’s troops, the emperor intended to march to Paris, where Marshal MacMahon would already have won over the key officers in the army. Any deputies opposed to the restoration – which meant most of them – were to be removed at bayonet point from the National Assembly, forced on to a train and incarcerated in the Saint-Cloud tunnel during the coup’s consolidation.

Since both the Tuileries and Saint-Cloud had been burned down, the emperor and empress would use the Louvre as their principal palace. Rouher’s new administration was to include the Comte de Kératry (minister for the interior), MacMahon (minister for war) and Fleury (governor of Paris). Foreign governments, who had been secretly sounded out, made no objections.

The plan had serious weaknesses. Far too much depended on Bourbaki and MacMahon. Although brave enough and a fine leader, the general was notoriously stupid, while if the marshal was a monarchist he was more inclined to favour Legitimism, and in any case he was an unimaginative man, too fond of army regulations, who did not care for political gambles. The most obvious weakness, however, was Napoleon’s poor health.

Everybody felt that Chislehurst was bad for him. ‘These fogs are the cause of all my discomfort,’ he told a German visitor. ‘A fortnight of brilliant sunshine such as we enjoyed at Wilhelmshöhe, and I should be cured.’ Eugénie disliked it just as much. ‘In this foggy weather I feel like a fish in an aquarium,’ she wrote to Maria Manuela in November. ‘At any rate, that’s how it seems when I look out of the window; everything looks as if it is yellow, just like the water in which we put some miserable fish….’ Nor did it help matters that while she loved fresh air, the emperor loved central heating, as hot as possible. Yet nothing disturbed the serenity of these last years together. ‘If you could have seen him at Chislehurst,’ she recalled. ‘Never a word of complaint or blame or recrimination.’ He was helped by his stoicism and his humour. When a dissenting minister invited him to a lecture proving he was the Antichrist he sent Filon, listening to his report with wry amusement.