FIVE
‘The public judge by externals and thought I was only interested in smart parties and fashion, dresses and jewellery’, Eugénie recalled. ‘I was blamed for being frivolous…. If only they could have seen my notebooks.’ Nevertheless, when Napoleon left for a tour of Algeria on 29 April 1865 he again appointed her Regent. As in 1859 she was given complete power. During this second regency we catch glimpses of what would now be called her feminism.
Once again it was not only Frenchmen who were taken aback by the very idea of somebody of her sex running the country. Cowley reported that ‘The Queen of Holland tells me … the poor foolish woman can’t conceal her joy at being Régente’. After the regency was over, he commented patronisingly:
it has raised her in the opinion of those who had to deal with her, all admitting (even those who do not like her) that she showed remarkable tact and good sense in dealing with the business which she had to superintend. She always yielded her own opinions to those of the majority of her Council and was always to be found on the side of moderation and conciliation. She rather liked the display of power, and doing ‘Madame la Regente’, but that is pardonable in a woman.
Yet she played a much more positive role than appears from Cowley’s reports.
Eugénie showed that she could work with people who held different opinions from her own, notably with Victor Duruy. The son of a Gobelins tapestry weaver, with Michelet and Guizot he was one of nineteenth-century France’s great popular historians as well as a distinguished academic. He was also a natural republican and an anticlerical. ‘Let us improve the intellectual aristocracy of a people who want no other sort of aristocracy,’ he once declared. However, he helped Napoleon with his life of Julius Caesar and was made Minister for Education in 1863.
Eugénie saw Duruy’s ideas as a chance for Bonapartism to identify itself with educational reform, which she regarded as vital for France. As soon as she became regent, she asked him to explain his programme to her, supporting his bill for more primary education by lay teachers when it came before the Council. He wrote to thank her for her decisive intervention after it became law in May. Her support astonished not only Duruy but Catholics, who regarded education as the priests’ business.
She continued to support Duruy after her regency was over. What particularly caught her imagination was his programme of further education for girls. Most Frenchmen, and not merely Catholic traditionalists, thought female education a waste of money – the Socialist Proudhon estimated women’s intellectual and moral powers as at best one-third those of men – while only villages with over 800 inhabitants had a primary school for girls. When in 1867 Duruy proposed that fifty lycées should be founded for girls between sixteen and eighteen, he caused outrage, especially as they would have to be taught by men. Yet, as he said, he was merely proposing that girls should receive the same education as their brothers. The clergy, including even the liberal Bishop Dupanloup, claimed he was contradicting God’s law and promoting social revolution by ‘new and unheard of innovations … which would bring down what was left of the social order’. (Heaven knows what Viel Castel would have said, but by then the great chronicler had died.)
With the empress’s support, Duruy succeeded in establishing his lycées. Even so, the Sorbonne refused to allow women to attend its lectures for another quarter of a century – although they had to tolerate the presence of Paca’s daughters, sent by their aunt.
However, Eugénie’s interest in women’s education dated from before meeting Victor Duruy. When in 1862 a young schoolmistress, Julie-Victoire Daubié (author of La Femme pauvre au XIXe siècle, par une femme pauvre), tried to obtain a baccalauréat and the minister for public instruction refused because of her sex, Eugénie sent a message to the Council of Ministers to overrule him.
As regent she was able to do much more for women. Eager to widen their job opportunities, in the face of bitter opposition she forced the French postal service to employ women. Her most remarkable innovation, however, was to make a woman a member of the Légion d’honneur. Despite trying and failing to establish a new order for women that would be its female equivalent, she remained determined that female achievements should be acknowledged.
The painter Rosa Bonheur had been well known since the Salon of 1853, when her picture of a horse fair had won two gold medals. A lesbian who lived in the forest of Fontainebleau with a friend (and a lion, a yak and a gazelle), she cropped her head so that, as Mérimée observed, even if she wore a skirt it was hard to tell her sex. When she submitted a canvas to the Salon of 1855 the police warned the committee that the artist was a woman who dressed as a man. Rosa records in her pleasant, unpretentious memoirs how one spring morning in 1864 the empress called on her at her little château of By in the woods without warning, so that she barely had time to put on a dress. They discussed at considerable length her latest paintings and then the equality of men and women, Rosa being a passionate advocate of equality between the sexes. When they said goodbye, the artist kissed Eugénie’s hand, and was embraced in return.
There had been talk of making Rosa a member of the Légion d’honneur, but the authorities had refused because she was a woman, compromising by giving the Légion to her brother, an embarrassingly mediocre painter. The empress was outraged, and in June 1865 it was announced amid general astonishment that ‘Mlle Bonheur’ had been appointed a member of the Légion. After signing the decree the regent went to By, pinning the cross on Rosa’s lapel, kissing her and telling her how proud she was that it had at last been given to a woman.
Rosa was a friend of George Sand, one of her pictures inspiring Sand’s famous pastoral novel, La Mare au diable. Another ‘rebel against convention’, Sand too had often dressed as a man, but was not really a feminist. Despite her republicanism and anticlericalism, the empress tried unsuccessfully to coax the Académie Française into admitting her as its first woman member – earning precious little gratitude from the novelist, who after sending fawning letters to the Tuileries caricatured her as the Spanish adventuress Mlle d’Ortosa in Malgrétout, set on marrying ‘an emperor or a king’. Eugénie always ignored gossip about Sand’s private life although Mérimée could have enlightened her. ‘She is coldly debauched, out of curiosity and not by temperament’, he told Viel Castel, who lists a dozen of her lovers (including Mérimée himself and Marie d’Agoult, a former rival). But the empress was no more concerned with Sand’s private life than with Rosa’s – she simply wished to honour the achievements of two great women. Another artist whom she encouraged was the young sculptor Adèle d’Affry, who used a man’s name (Marcello) when exhibiting, to disarm prejudice.
Eugénie was equally keen on opening up the professions. When Miss Elizabeth Garrett found it impossible to study to become a doctor in England, she went to Paris where the empress persuaded the University of Paris to let her qualify. Aided by Victor Duruy – no longer minister for education but still a highly influential senator – Eugénie even founded an Ecole libre pour l’instruction médical des femmes (an institute for the medical education of women), to be staffed entirely by women professors. The idea had come to her on learning that doctors in Algeria were never allowed to visit harems. Authorised on 8 July 1870, it should have opened its doors the following October, but was overtaken by events.
During her regency the empress wooed opposition deputies in the Corps Législatif, inviting them to dine at Saint-Cloud and discuss questions they were raising in the Chamber. She was carrying on the work of her late brother-in-law Morny, who as president had been trying to turn them into a ‘loyal opposition’ on the English model, ready for France’s transformation into a constitutional monarchy – even if she fervently hoped that it was not going to happen while she and her husband were still on the throne. Morny, who had died in March (from an overdose of aphrodisiac pills, it was unkindly rumoured), was the one statesman who might have ensured the Second Empire’s long-term survival. ‘He had it in him, if he had been honest, to have become a very great man’, was Lord Cowley’s verdict. ‘People may say what they please, but Morny is a great loss to the emperor and the latter is much cut up.’ The regent was only too ready to give permission for a statue of Morny to be erected at Deauville.
The republican ‘irreconcilable’ Emile Ollivier was among those whom Eugénie wooed when regent, warmly supporting his projects for penal reform. Hearing that La Roquette prison in Paris had a bad name, she paid an unexpected visit and was shocked to discover 500 children in solitary confinement, locked in cells day and night. She adopted Ollivier’s solution with enthusiasm – camps from where the children could work on farms and go to school – siding with him against the ‘experts’. When the emperor returned, she persuaded him to set up a commission with herself and Ollivier as members, to put the scheme into practice. She also spent an entire day in the Saint-Lazare penitentiary for women, talking to the prisoners, listening to their grievances to see if there was any better way of dealing with female crime.
In L’Empire Libéral Ollivier records his impressions of her as regent. ‘I was struck by her ability to understand and discuss everything, by an intelligence that always saw the point, by sparkling conversation enlivened by an amusing wit and by sometimes passionate eloquence.’ Sadly, Ollivier and Eugénie would later become bitter enemies.
The empress showed surprising restraint with Plon-Plon. When he made a speech in Corsica attacking the pope as the source of all reaction, she ignored demands by ministers for a public rebuke, merely ordering that his speech be censored and that he should be told to keep quiet. The emperor was so angry, however, that he sent a telegram from Algiers, ordering his cousin to resign at once as vice-president of the Council.
Her handling of the press was impeccable. She protested immediately at serious criticism of government policy, but did so as mildly as possible, without too strict an interpretation of the censorship laws. ‘The empress-Regent is visible every day, looking very well, and apparently not much disturbed by the cares of office’, noted the obviously somewhat surprised correspondent of the Daily Telegraph on 7 May, although he realised she must be very busy, as he told his readers. ‘She has daily “audiences”, and almost daily Councils, besides the ordinary routine of State business – no slight business in itself.’ President Lincoln had just been assassinated, and among ‘diplomatists who have sought an audience is his Excellency Mr Bigelow [the United States minister to Paris.] The empress expressed to him her “profound emotion” on learning of the recent events in Washington, and added that she had written a private letter to Mrs Lincoln expressive of her deep sympathy.’
Napoleon returned from North Africa on 8 June, in time to accompany Eugénie to the Grand Prix de Longchamps three days later, the most important fixture in the French racing calendar and always the great social event of the summer.
Eugénie’s second regency had come to an end after only six weeks, yet it shows how much she enjoyed power. ‘The ministers never once quarrelled among themselves and I have kept them so well under control that I almost regret surrendering the reins’, she observed complacently to Prince Metternich, who reported the conversation to Vienna. ‘I shall tell the emperor I am handing over a firm and united government.’ Mérimée had the distinct impression that from now on she intended to be an empress in the fullest sense of the word. Next year she began attending all important meetings of the Imperial Council as a matter of course, and presided in the absence of her husband.