Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (46 page)

As a devout Catholic, in 1876 the prince visited Rome where he saw the pope, old Pius IX, who told him he hoped that he would soon be restored to the French throne, for the sake of both France and the Church. When he visited Sweden two years later, he was treated as a reigning sovereign. He spent much of his leave in Switzerland at Arenenberg, once Queen Hortense’s château, with his mother, and brother officers from his regiment.

He was eager to see some fighting and in 1878 was advised by Baron Stoffel to join the army of Austria-Hungary, then preparing to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina. Eugénie disagreed. ‘You’ll spend all your time in an Austrian garrison, playing billiards and making love to an Italian singer,’ she warned. ‘If there’s a war, you’ll find yourself fighting the poor Turks, who are France’s allies. And politics in the Balkans change so fast and unexpectedly that it might even mean your fighting against the Russians, whose Tsar spoke to you like a father at Woolwich four years ago.’ However, when the prince applied to the Austrian authorities, Franz-Joseph politely refused his request.

The empress watched French politics, closely. She understood why Marshal MacMahon was so inadequate as president, ‘standing for nothing, supported by nobody’, prophesying his outmanoeuvring and downfall. She also saw that the key republican was Gambetta and, unlike most observers, she appreciated that what he wanted was power to build his sort of France. In her opinion he was her son’s greatest rival.

Eugénie had no time for romantic conservatives, blinkered by tradition. ‘Your view of the world is straight out of the Middle Ages,’ she wrote to Doña Maria Manuela in 1876. ‘Someone of real ability has to have on his side what you call the Popular Hydra, because no one can resist it any longer. The kings, princes and nobles have weakened each other too much down the centuries so that even when they ally it is no use. We have to deal with new forces.’

Nor was Eugénie surprised when during the following year North America had to call in troops to break strikes. ‘I see that you are worried about what is happening in the United States,’ she remarked to her mother. ‘The railroad strikes and the accompanying violence are certainly very serious, but they do not surprise me, and I’m sure they will find imitators in Europe. The more civilisation progresses, the hollower it becomes and the easier to destroy, and – don’t let us deceive ourselves – today’s problems are much more social than political.’ Like her late husband, she
knew that western society’s greatest challenge lay in satisfying its working classes.

The prince derived his political views from his mother, although he was already much more cynical. Noting the far from revolutionary programme of the republicans who took over from Marshal MacMahon, he told a friend, ‘After ten years of a régime like this, France will be ruled like the United States, by a clique of politicians who have failed in other careers, whose game lies in exploiting their popularity.’

In 1879 war broke out with the Zulus. The prince’s regiment stayed at Aldershot, but he was determined to see active service at the front. ‘I’m always being reminded that the Orleans princes have seen plenty of fighting while I’ve seen none,’ he told Eugénie when she tried to dissuade him. Those who did the reminding were republican and royalist papers in Paris, who sneered that he had deserted the French army before Sedan and had grown into a colourless imitation of an Englishman. Threatening to resign his commission and enlist as a private, he pestered the queen and the Duke of Cambridge as commander-in-chief, so eloquently that in the end he was allowed to go out as an observer attached to the staff.

He sailed from Southampton on 27 February 1879. Eugénie had travelled down with him, on a special train supplied by the queen, to say goodbye at the boat. Joining General Lord Chelmsford’s army at Durban, he was under Chelmsford’s quarter-master, Colonel Harrison, with orders that he was to be treated like any other young staff officer except that he must always have an escort. He enjoyed sleeping under the stars and skirmishing, charging a party of Zulus sword in hand. He also helped to capture a kraal. The enemy, ferocious opponents, had just wiped out a British force at Isandhlwana.

‘I should hate to be killed in an obscure skirmish,’ he told a French journalist. ‘Dying in a big battle would be all right, the hand of providence. But not in a mere skirmish.’ The journalist, Paul Deléage, was amazed at how different he was from the caricatures in the French press. ‘This was not some little princeling, but an impressive and commanding personality gifted with enormous charm, and a complete Frenchman.’

All the odds were on the young man coming home safe and sound, but his mother’s intuition gave her no peace. ‘I’ve lost all confidence and expect only bad news,’ she lamented to Maria
Manuela on 9 April. A month later she declared, ‘I shall end up mad if this awful uneasiness goes on torturing me.’

On 1 June Harrison encamped at Itelezi Ridge, sending out a scout party of six troopers under a Lieutenant Carey. The prince rode with them. There was no sign of the enemy and about noon they halted at a deserted kraal, dismounting for a brief rest. Suddenly shots rang out and over forty Zulus appeared from the long grass a few yards away. Remounting in panic, the party rode for their lives, two being killed by Zulu bullets. As the prince remounted a strap broke and he fell to the ground, his horse bolting.

A trooper who had hidden in the rocks nearby watched what took place. The prince got up and made a run for it, but after a quarter of mile realised he had no chance. Turning, he drew his revolver and advanced to meet the Zulus, who threw assegais at him. Moving his revolver to his left hand and picking up an assegai with his right, he continued to walk towards them. In a moment he fell dead beneath a hail of assegais – when found, he had seventeen wounds, all in front. Later the Zulus said, ‘he died like a lion’.

The news did not reach England until 19 June. Informed by the telegraph office, Queen Victoria sent Lord Sydney to break it to the empress before she learned from the newspapers. She did not cry, but sat down staring into space. For over a month she sat in a darkened bedroom, refusing even to go into the garden. When the body came home, she rushed down the stairs and embraced the coffin, staying with it until dawn without a word or a tear.

The Queen, who visited Camden Place almost weekly, wanted a monument to the Prince placed in Westminster Abbey. When the idea was rejected by the House of Commons, she had a fine funeral effigy set up in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. (A statue erected at Woolwich is now at Sandhurst.) She attended the requiem at the Catholic church at Chislehurst, together with the Princess of Wales and Princess Beatrice, while the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Connaught and the Duke of Cambridge were among the pallbearers. The prince was given full military honours, officers marching with sabres reversed to the beat of muffled drums. The crowd was estimated at 40,000. But Eugénie stayed in her darkened room, where Victoria visited her.

In his will the Prince Imperial excluded Plon-Plon from the succession – ‘when I am dead, the work of Napoleon I and Napoleon III falls on the eldest son of Prince Napoleon’. Eugénie
tried to stop the will becoming widely known, aware that it would split the party irretrievably. Rouher published the will, however, and from now on there were two Bonapartist parties, those of Plon-Plon and Prince Victor Napoleon – a father and son who hated each other. Although Eugénie treated Victor Napoleon as emperor of the French, and for a time did not altogether despair of a restoration, she realised that now there was very little hope for Bonapartism.

Eugénie had prayed so long and fervently for her son’s return that for a moment she questioned if there was any point in praying for anything. In the end, however, she decided that his death might have been providential. ‘But I often say to myself, rather he is dead than think of him as an emperor,’ she confided to a friend. ‘To think of
his
perhaps going through it all –
de passer par là où j’ai du passer … ah!
’ She wished she had never given birth to him, telling Victoria that his parentage was fatal. ‘Because of my race, I bestowed the quixotic gift, that readiness to sacrifice everything for an ideal, while the emperor bequeathed the traditions of his family. And in the mid-nineteenth century when materialism is engulfing us!’

She wore black for the rest of her long life and would sometimes say, ‘I died in 1879.’

A L
ONG
T
WILIGHT

‘I am alone now,’ Eugénie wrote to her blind old mother at Madrid early in September 1879, ‘in a country where I am forced to live and die.’ She described herself as ‘truly crushed’. For the moment the English were sorry for her, she said but their sympathy would soon fade. One day there would be an obituary in
The Times
, then it would all be over. ‘Not a single friend to pray at my tomb,’ she prophesied. ‘Alone in life – alone in death.’ Within two months Doña Maria Manuela, too, was dead, leaving the bulk of her considerable fortune to her daughter.

In March 1880 the empress went on what she called ‘a pilgrimage’ to South Africa, to retrace her son’s last weeks. On Queen Victoria’s instructions a British general accompanied her, Sir Evelyn Wood, together with two of the prince’s closest brother officers, Lieutenants Bigge and Slade of the Royal Artillery, while at Capetown she was the guest of the governor, Sir Bartle Frere. Even so, the journey meant a trek of several weeks through the veldt by
wagon, sleeping in tents that were nearly blown away by storms. She spent the night of the anniversary of Louis’s death kneeling in prayer by the cross placed where he had fallen in the little valley – when her candle flickered, she believed that he was there with her.

On the way back the party passed by the battlefield of Isandhlwana, which was still littered with British bones, and at Eugénie’s suggestion they spent a day burying them, shovelling earth over as many as they could, she herself wielding a spade. After the trip Evelyn Wood remained a friend for life while she took a personal interest in the career of Arthur Bigge, whom she considered to be exceptionally able, and on her recommendation the queen made him her assistant private secretary. Her judgement did not fail her – Bigge ended as private secretary to King George V, who created him Lord Stamfordham.

In September 1881 the empress moved into a new and much larger house in Hampshire, Farnborough Hill, which had been built in the 1860s for Longman the publisher, on a knoll overlooking the minute but fast-growing town of that name near Aldershot. She made it even bigger, so that eventually it needed more than twenty servants to run it. (Nikolaus Pevsner described it as ‘an outrageously oversized chalet with an entrance tower and a lot of bargeboarding’). This was to be her final home.

One of the main reasons why Eugénie moved to Farnborough was her wish to create a worthy resting place for the emperor and the Prince Imperial. During his reign Napoleon had prepared a tomb for himself in the crypt of the abbey of Saint-Denis with the kings of France, and until 1879 she had confidently assumed that he would be reinterred there, after her son’s restoration. The little Catholic parish church at Chislehurst was obviously quite inadequate, and if the British had honoured the prince by placing a monument to him in St George’s Chapel, then in her view the French must do as well. Moreover, as a Spaniard, she set a particularly high value on praying for the dead.

Unable to enlarge the mortuary chapel at Chislehurst, she had found a site at Farnborough where she could build a great church dedicated to St Michael, patron saint of France, with a crypt in which their bodies and her own would lie. There would also be an abbey of monks to pray for their souls. The site was on another knoll, opposite Farnborough Hill, separated by the London to Southampton railway line. She would have liked Viollet-le-Duc as
architect but, anxious not to upset his new republican masters, he declined. Instead she employed another Frenchman, Gabriel Destailleur, who had remodelled the château de Mouchy for Anna Murat and designed Waddesdon for the Rothschilds. There is a story that she showed him just what she wanted by tracing the church’s outline on the turf with her walking-stick.

Destailleur proved an inspired choice, producing a most beautiful building, admired even by Pevsner, which Ronald Knox described as ‘France transplanted into England’. It is late French Gothic,
flamboyant
, with swirling tracery, ogee arches, flying buttresses and soaring gargoyles, crowned by a small Baroque dome that is a copy of the dome over the Invalides. Bonaparte eagles and bees abound, even in the Romanesque crypt where there is royal as well as imperial symbolism, with a high altar dedicated to St Louis, to proclaim the Bonapartes’ claim to be the ‘fourth dynasty’ and the legitimate successors of the Bourbons as rulers of France. The two bodies were moved here from Chislehurst in 1888 and placed in red granite sarcophagi, a present from Queen Victoria. Four White Canons (Premonstratensians) were installed in the abbey next door. Often curiously ill at ease with priests, Eugénie soon fell out with the canons, who seem to have been a boorish and uncouth group and whose prior was in any case a republican. Eventually they left, leaving the abbey in a state of squalor.

The empress was on far better terms with their successors. These were a community of scholarly Benedictine monks led by Dom Cabrol, former prior of Solesmes, who had been forced to leave their native land by a growing climate of anticlericalism. They brought with them a tradition of superb Gregorian chant and liturgy that made services in the church worthy of an imperial foundation. As well as a roll of priceless silk that had been presented to her by Sultan Abdul Aziz Eugénie gave them her wedding dress, with which to make vestments. (They are still preserved at the abbey.) Nonetheless, although she attended a monthly requiem Mass in the church, besides the great requiems on each anniversary, normally she preferred to hear Mass in the private chapel at Farnborough Hill.

In 1881 the French authorities allowed her to travel through France so that she could attend the inauguration of a monument to Napoleon III in Milan. On the way back she stayed discreetly in Paris with the Duchesse de Mouchy (Anna Murat) and went to Fontainebleau where, despite an ecstatic greeting from the staff, she wept on seeing again the rooms which had been her son’s. She was almost as upset when she saw what the Prussians had done to her beloved Saint-Cloud.