Paris, 30 January: the congregation is startled when, for a wedding march, the orchestra strikes up a swaggering tune from Meyerbeer’s Prophète as the imperial couple enter Notre Dame. It is too theatrical, like much else in the vast, rather dirty cathedral – a sham Gothic porch over the main door, plaster statues of the first Napoleon against the columns, and blue imperial banners hanging everywhere. At the right of the two prie-dieux in front of the altar sits ex-King Jerome of Westphalia, a rouged old wreck with dyed hair, flanked by his sneering son and daughter; at the left sit a large group of Bonapartes and Murats, who until recently have been living in near poverty. They are the only royal personages, since the marriage has taken place in too much haste to invite guests from other countries. But there are six cardinals in scarlet, together with resplendent ambassadors, officers in brightly coloured uniforms and ministers in the new imperial court dress.
A small, thickset man in his late forties with short legs, a goatee beard and waxed moustaches, not particularly impressive even when glimpsed from a distance, the Emperor Napoleon III wears a lieutenant-general’s uniform (dark blue tunic and red trousers) with the sash of the Légion d’honneur. The Golden Fleece at his neck is presumably worn in tribute to the Spanish lady, eighteen years younger than himself, whom he has married the day before, in a civil ceremony at the Tuileries.
The congregation at Notre Dame stares curiously at the dignified bride coming up the aisle on her husband’s arm. Until yesterday Doña Eugenia de Montijo, Countess of Teba, she is in white velvet sewn with diamonds; her full, three-layered skirt is trimmed with priceless old English lace, her tight bodice is sewn with sapphires and orange blossom, and round her waist is Empress Marie-Louise’s sapphire girdle – her three-quarter length sleeves reveal long, jewel-studded gloves. Her red hair has been arranged by the famous coiffeur Félix, curls flowing down the neck from the chignon to which her veil is fastened, and she wears the diamond and sapphire tiara that Empress Josephine had worn at her coronation in 1804. Yet the new empress’s face is even whiter than usual. The ladies of her household are watching her with obvious anxiety.
The service is taken by the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Sibour, the choir singing Cherubini’s Coronation Mass, with a Sanctus by Adolphe Adam – better known for his ballet music. When the pair leave Notre Dame there are shouts of ‘Vive l’Empéreur!’, ‘Vive I’lmpératrice!’, and during the winter night that follows the sky over Paris will be lit up by fireworks.
Despite the crowds, the cheering is confined to a few areas around the cathedral and the Tuileries. The Parisians have come to watch out of curiosity, not from loyalty. Just how long can this new Second Empire last? Only recently established after a brutal coup d’état, it is opposed by royalists and republicans, distrusted by the Great Powers. The British ambassador, Lord Cowley, thinks that Napoleon III’s régime will soon collapse, reporting that ‘the impression becomes stronger every day, that all inside is rotten and that, with few exceptions, we are living in a society of adventurers’.
As for the beautiful new empress, well-informed French observers mutter that she is just an adventuress – what today we would call a gold-digger. If her father is supposed to have been some sort of Spanish grandee, her mother (about whose private life there are lurid rumours) is not even faintly aristocratic but the daughter of a bankrupt Scottish fruit and wine merchant in Malaga. The entire fashionable world knows that for years Eugénie and her mother have been trawling the capitals of Europe in search of a rich husband. The emperor’s inner circle is horrified: his foreign minister is threatening to resign.
During the wedding Lady Cowley has sketched the new empress inside her prayer book. Kneeling at a prie-dieu, Eugénie’s chin rests pensively on her hand. Has it dawned on her that by marrying a crowned dictator she will become the most powerful woman in the world?
The Second Empire belonged as much to her as it did to him. Until very recently this period was considered an aberration in French history, Lord Cowley’s ‘society of adventurers’, dismissed by one historian as ‘little more than a military parade flitting in front of a masked ball’. Nobody could forgive the emperor for his defeat by the Prussians in 1870, for France’s humiliation and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. But a new view has emerged, that the empire was in reality the French version of England’s high Victorian age, a period of prosperity, of economic and social progress, and that Napoleon III was a man who was in advance of his time, an earlier de Gaulle, even an earlier Mitterrand.
Eugénie, too, deserves a reassessment. The last woman to reign over France (and the only one to reign over the Paris we know today), she personified the allure of the Second Empire that one glimpses in Winterhalter’s portraits and the music of Jacques Offenbach. ‘Eighteen years of self-indulgence, folly and wild gaiety, of love affairs and unbelievable elegance’, a survivor recalled wistfully. ‘For a short time, too short a time, it seemed as if we were glittering ghosts from the spendours of the eighteenth century.’ In many ways the Second Empire was a final flicker of the ancien régime.
When she first became empress her role was that of ‘la reine Crinoline’, presiding over the great balls at the Tuileries (the ‘fétes impériales’), that were attended by thousands of guests, when her clothes and jewellery, her taste in furniture, began to be copied all over the world. But later she grew more concerned with influencing her husband’s policies, then with making them. No woman had wielded such power in France since the sixteenth century. She gave style to the pressure for women’s emancipation, which was increasing imperceptibly everywhere.
A natural feminist, she admired other women’s achievements in a male world, trying to persuade the Académie Française to admit a female writer besides appointing the first female member of the Légion d’honneur. ‘Nothing used to anger me more than to hear I had no political sense simply because I was a woman. I wanted to shout back, “So women have no political sense, do they? What about Queen Elizabeth? Maria Theresa? Catherine the Great?”’ As will be seen, she undoubtedly played a crucial role in shaping her husband’s foreign policy.
Since most French writers of her time were republicans or royalists, and because of the Second Empire’s overthrow at Sedan in 1870, the empress has been given a bad name by the majority of French historians as ‘une femme néfaste’ – a baneful woman. They tend to agree with her long-standing enemy Thiers, that she ‘began as a futile woman and ended as a fatal woman’, while until the new feminist climate they damned her as a woman who dared to interfere in politics.
‘She cannot really be said to have had a character at all, being too much of a woman to have one and, I would suggest, far too prone to the fluctuations of the feminine temperament’, was the considered opinion of one of her best-known historians, Ferdinand Loliée, writing during the early twentieth century in La vie d’une Impératrice. ‘She felt and she did not reason. She acted without realising where her actions would take her – and with her she took the emperor of the French.’
Loliée was biased against the empress before he even put pen to paper. Subtly hostile, always ready to admit that she possessed one or two ‘feminine’ good qualities, so as to give the impression of being unprejudiced, his insidiously negative approach and beautiful prose have had a far wider influence – and still have – than is generally appreciated, especially in France. In reality his attitude towards the empress derived from republicanism and the political smears that circulated immediately after the fall of the Second Empire.
This book is an attempt to refute ‘authorities’ such as Ferdinand Loliée. While I cannot claim to have unearthed any important new material – probably nothing significant remains to be found – I have tried to give a different portrait of Eugénie by taking her seriously and by being open-minded. I have concentrated on the historically important years of her life when she was empress and given less time to those of her exile.
For good or ill, she was the most powerful woman of the nineteenth century – even Queen Victoria, as a constitutional monarch, was forced to leave policy to her ministers. All too many Frenchmen resented the empress’s influence because she was a woman, yet Bismarck called her ‘the only man in Paris’.