One of the Second Empire’s greatest historians is the royalist, Pierre de la Gorce, even if wrong in believing that it was doomed from the start. His description of France in the days immediately after Eugénie’s marriage cannot be bettered:
This is the state of the country in spring 1853. Too many festivities, as tiring as hard work; important reforms on the way to fruition; a remarkable growth of public wealth; a future sure enough to allow for long-term planning; a frivolous but well-meaning society; no liberty but not so as to miss it very much; extremist politicians powerless or cowed; fine minds alienated or ignored, but no general awareness of so much lost talent; an all-powerful government, sufficiently moderate to limit itself and not be tyrannical.
The new, Bonapartist France seemed a rich, contented land. The economic misery of the 1840s had vanished, together with the spectre of a return to the upheavals of sixty years before. ‘Nobody can deny that the Emperor is a most extraordinary man, and that he has raised France to a position in Europe which she had long since ceased to occupy’, Lord Cowley would comment in 1856.
Yet, in Pierre de la Gorce’s words, ‘there were seeds of decline and misjudgement, although so deeply buried that no-one could possibly foresee they would ever ripen’. Beneath the surface Legitimists and Orleanists were resentful, and republicans simmering – everyone recalled how the last two régimes had been toppled by revolution. And the Bonapartists lacked able leaders, Alexis de Tocqueville sneering that the Second Empire was ‘a paradise for the envious and mediocre’. The biggest danger, however, lay in Napoleon III’s foreign policy. He wanted to show the world that France was the power in Europe by helping Italy and Poland win their freedom.
England had headed every European coalition against France, so Napoleon was eager to secure her goodwill. His opportunity came in July 1853 when Tsar Nicholas I occupied the Danubian principalities (Romania) and assembled a fleet at Sevastopol in the Crimea, obviously planning to seize Constantinople (‘that object of eternal Muscovite desire’ as one of Napoleon’s ministers put it). England was outraged. Here was the emperor’s chance of an Anglo-French alliance. In any case, war against Russia would please all those who pitied the Poles and who hated Russian tyranny, while saving the Holy Places in Palestine from Russian domination would please Catholics. Hostilities became inevitable in November when the Russians blew the Turkish navy out of the sea, although France and England did not declare war until February 1854.
So far Eugénie had had little influence on foreign affairs, but we know that Napoleon showed her ambassadors’ dispatches, explaining his policy. From the first he used her to sound out foreign envoys and argue his point of view, as is clear from Hübner’s reports, and sometimes Cowley’s. She was opposed to the war – a defeat might bring down the Second Empire – even if she disliked the idea of the Holy Places being ruled by Russian Orthodox, referring to what she called ‘the antagonism between the Greek cross and the Latin cross’.
During the summer of 1854, 70,000 troops assembled at Boulogne (from where, half a century ago, the great Napoleon had hoped to invade England), marching, counter-marching, firing volley upon volley of blanks, in manoeuvres before the emperor and on one occasion the Prince Consort, who crossed over from England. Napoleon personally inspected the French expeditionary force, 25,000 strong, accompanied by the empress who, riding in front of the forest of red képis, wore instead of a bonnet a broad-brimmed Spanish hat with a white plume. Roars of ‘Vive l’Impératrice!’ showed that the army knew a beautiful woman when it saw one. They knew, too, how she had given a humble infantryman a lift in her carriage when he was cut off from his unit.
In September the French landed in the Crimea, to be joined by 25,000 British troops. They had a fine commander in Marshal Saint-Arnaud. Within days, the allied army had driven back the Russians at the Alma and were able to invest Sevastopol, but Saint-Arnaud died of a heart attack. The siege dragged on, the allies barely surviving the Russian winter which had destroyed the Grande Armée in 1812, in disease-ridden dugouts.
In its early stages the war earned the Second Empire some badly needed popularity. Displacing countless families during the rebuilding of Paris, together with a bad harvest and soaring food prices had caused widespread unrest by the end of 1853, but now Napoleon was cheered to the echo. Republicans applauded a war against tyranny, while L’Univers, the main Catholic newspaper (most Catholics were Legitimists) welcomed a ‘crusade’ against the Orthodox. The empress helped to exploit this popularity, suggesting that, besides being given a hero’s funeral, Saint-Arnaud should have a street and a bridge named after him.
But Sevastopol refused to surrender, false rumours of its capture causing bitter disappointment. By early 1855 the emperor was unpopular again, Lord Cowley noting that a professor had been hissed for praising him during a lecture, that the empress was rumoured to be buying property with stolen public money. He also reported that Napoleon was desperate to ‘get out of the scrape in which we are in the Crimea’.
The Legitimists now hoped for a defeat in the Crimea that would bring Napoleon III crashing down. His best organised and most dangerous enemies, they had never accepted the Revolution of 1789 and were united in believing that France was embodied by the exiled Comte de Chambord. They ran secret royalist clubs all over the country, even infiltrating freemasons’ lodges, besides owning over fifty newspapers that were fuelled by press releases from a centralised news agency. Although Chambord was one of those Bourbons who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, so many army officers supported him that his party never ceased to be a threat.
Far less dangerous, the Orleanists supported the rival pretender, the Comte de Paris. Liberals who accepted the Revolution and wanted an English-style parliamentary democracy, they had an eloquent if treacherous spokesman in Adolphe Thiers and a few genuine idealists such as the Comte de Montalembert. Their opponents accused them of being cynical trimmers, unpatriotic Anglophiles who were planning to rob the poor.
Throughout the reign republicanism grew among intellectuals and the urban working class under some extremely capable leaders – Ledru-Rollin, Jules Favre, Jules Ferry and, in the final years, Gambetta. The noisiest republican was Victor Hugo (well described by the late Professor Richard Cobb as ‘France’s national bore’), ex-Legitimist, ex-Orleanist and ex-Bonapartist, who ranted from his refuge in the Channel Islands. He denounced the emperor in Napoleon le petit as a bloodstained tyrant who had massacred the Parisians during his coup, ‘cheered on from the money-market by Fould the Jew, from the Church by Montalembert the Catholic; cherished by women eager to become whores, by men hoping to be made prefets.’
The emperor tried hard to win over as many Legitimists as possible, presenting Bonapartism as an alternative to royalism. He joked that the empress was really a Legitimist – had she married a Frenchman from the old nobility, she might easily have become a passionate supporter of ‘Henri V’. As a good Catholic, she managed to persuade at least some of her co-religionists to vote for her husband.
Politicians rather than idealists, a fair number of Orleanists came over to Napoleon. He also succeeded in converting several leading republicans, men such as Victor Duruy, whom he appointed inspector of schools and later minister for education. Another convert from republicanism was Emile Ollivier, once a savage critic of the régime, who ended up as its first minister.
Since Eugénie did not have a son until 1856, strictly speaking the emperor’s heir was the aged ex-King Jerome, a deplorable old rake who by now was on his last legs. An unmitigated disaster as ruler of Westphalia during the First Empire, his one moment of glory had been at Waterloo where he advised his brother to die on the battlefield, offering to die with him. Between Waterloo and the Second Empire he had lived off women. Created a marshal of France, President of the Senate and Governor of the Invalides, Jerome was given a huge pension and the Palais Royal, the former home of the Orleans family, with twenty-four drawing-rooms.
The obvious heir, however, was Jerome’s son Prince Napoleon – Plon-Plon. Born in 1822, physically he was the image of his glorious uncle but like him in no other way. Intelligent, often charming, the friend of Georges Sand and Flaubert, he was crippled by a lack of realism and an insane temper. He had developed a curious republican Bonapartism of his own, hoping to succeed his cousin as First Consul like the Bonaparte of 1799, not as emperor, but his radical policies and extreme anticlericalism would have torn the Bonapartist party in half. ‘If ever he comes to the throne, which God forbid, then France will have a bad time of it’, observed Viel Castel in July 1854.
Hübner called Plon-Plon ‘the scourge of the Imperial family’ and he certainly had a very odd relationship with his cousin. Anna Bicknell, a governess at the Tuileries, tells us, ‘He was jealous of the emperor’s pre-eminent position, as of something stolen from himself; but, though in a state of chronic rebellion, he never hesitated to accept all the worldly advantages which the title of “cousin” could obtain for him.’ She adds that ‘his temper was violent and brutal; his tastes were cynically gross, his language coarse beyond what could be imagined….’ More than a few contemporaries confirm her description. ‘He hated the emperor’, Eugénie said of Plon-Plon. ‘He never forgave him for embodying the Napoleonic legend and restoring the Empire.’ He loathed the empress too, because, according to his secretary, he lusted after her and knew he could never get her. Returning his hatred, and probably sensing the reason for it, she invariably treated him with a cold, maddening politeness.
Yet Napoleon forgave Plon-Plon again and again, because he had declined an offer by a group of Bonapartists to make him leader in 1848. Anna Bicknell said he ‘felt a sort of indulgent affection for Prince Napoleon’.
Although Plon-Plon had never seen a shot fired in anger (and had even run away from his military academy as a boy), when the Crimean War broke out he demanded to be made commander-in-chief of the allied forces. The emperor declined, but let him accompany the reserves as a general. As soon as he landed, he wrote telling his father to have a steamer waiting. ‘Should the emperor be assassinated, it would be essential for me to return as quickly as possible.’ The emperor was furious when he heard. The prince speedily earned a reputation for cowardice, his name ‘Plon-Plon’ being changed by the troops to ‘Craint-Plomb’ (frightened of bullets). ‘The miserable creature may be a prince but he certainly isn’t a Frenchman’, commented Viel Castel.
The ablest Bonaparte was King Jerome’s daughter, Princesse Mathilde, charming, insincere and tough, who lived unhappily with her Dutch lover, ‘Handsome Emilien’, the self-styled Comte de Nieuwerkerker, ignoring his chronic infidelity. A failed sculptor (despite a fine portrait medallion of Eugénie), Nieuwerkerker was made director of the Louvre and superintendent of museums, becoming an important figure in artistic circles. Mathilde’s salon, in the rue de Berry or at her château of Saint-Gratien near Enghien, was genuinely distinguished, including Rossini, Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Pasteur and the Goncourts among its regular guests, impressing even Mérimée. Because of her literary friendships she has been portrayed far too sympathetically. ‘You can’t imagine how beautiful she was in the early days of the Empire’, Eugénie is supposed (by Paléologue) to have said of her. ‘She had the profile of a medallion, eyes that really sparkled and shoulders that looked like sculptured marble.’ But photographs of the 1860s show a heavy-jowled, thickset little woman, resembling Plon-Plon in skirts. Mathilde was jealous of Eugénie for taking the position that might have been hers. Despite some fierce arguments she concealed her hatred, while tirelessly slandering and abusing the empress behind her back. Some of her more venomous remarks were recorded with relish by the Goncourt brothers, who were royalists.
There were dozens of imperial relations living in France, each one paid a handsome civil list pension: Bonapartes, Murats, Bacciochis and Primolis. A few were respectable, such as Cardinal Bonaparte, the philologist Prince Lucien Bonaparte (an expert on Basque) or the blue-stocking Comtesse Primoli. Most were worthless, however. After numerous scandals the bullying, duelling and womanising Prince Pierre Bonaparte, popularly known as the ‘Corsican Wild Boar’ was commissioned as a colonel in the Foreign Legion to keep him out of the country, yet somehow he managed to get himself spectacularly cashiered despite his name, and returned to Paris where he married a prostitute.
Several others were almost as embarrassing as Pierre, especially the grandchildren of Caroline Murat and Elisa Bacciochi. Ten Murats were receiving pensions, having rushed back from North America where they had established themselves during the lean years, the biggest nuisance among them being the head of the family, Prince Lucien Murat. More than one diplomatic row was caused by his publicly insisting that he was rightful king of Naples and, untruthfully, that the imperial government supported him – when crippled by gout, the grotesquely fat Lucien had himself carried in a chair to the Folies-Bergère every night. Count Camerata, Elisa’s grandson, lost a fortune gambling on the stock exchange and asked Jerome to help him – the avaricious old king refused, so Camerata shot himself.
Relations like these did serious harm to Napoleon III’s image, and emphasised that the Second Empire depended on his survival. There was an attempt on his life practically every year, although the royalist pretenders had forbidden their supporters to kill him, while few republicans cared to risk ending under the guillotine. The would-be assassins were nearly always Italian ‘patriots’, enraged by his sending troops to defend the Papal States. Hübner saw him in 1855 just after Pianori had shot at him when he was riding down the Champs Elysées. ‘They need a knife if they’re going to hit their mark’, laughed the emperor, but Eugénie was sobbing hysterically.
By February 1855 Napoleon was in despair over the Crimea. Plon-Plon was spreading rumours that Sevastopol was impregnable and that the Anglo-French expedition had failed, while Morny and Fould were urging him to make peace. He was also growing nervous about Austria’s attitude. By March he was seriously thinking of taking command in the Crimea, hoping to win some sort of victory and then ship his army back to France to deal with any crisis that might threaten – he would rely on a naval blockade to bring Sevastopol to its knees.
Eugénie was horrified. What if he should be defeated in the Crimea? She was delighted when, to dissuade him, the British government invited the emperor and empress to visit England in April as guests of Queen Victoria.