‘All this frivolity did not prevent the new sovereigns from cherishing the very highest ideals’, admits the austere Pierre de la Gorce. ‘One of the Second Empire’s oddest features was the way in which it combined charity of the most imaginative sort with dissipation, serious thought with utterly trivial pursuits. Amid the demands of her constant entertaining, the empress never forgot the social duties that went with her rank … she always showed a real desire to help the poor and suffering.’
Visiting the poor – ‘poor peopling’, as the Victorian English sometimes called it – was a normal enough activity for nineteenth-century ladies. What made Eugénie’s visiting different was that she spent so much money on it. Napoleon allowed her 1,200,000 francs a year, of which 100,000 went on her wardrobe, the rest on presents, pensions for retired servants and, above all, charity. ‘I am frequently laughed at for wasting time in trying to make myself popular with the working classes’, the emperor complained more than once. ‘I don’t think that it’s a waste of either time or effort – and I’m sure Queen Victoria would agree with me.’ Eugénie was not just attempting to please her husband but putting into practice her own extremely practical form of Christianity.
The poverty that existed in mid-nineteenth-century Paris was as marked as anything in Dickensian London. The capital described by Privat d’Anglemont in Paris Inconnu (1861) could be nightmarish, a city of alcoholism, disease and starvation, of brutal exploitation. Women in particular received pitiful wages. A tiny minority, such as the expert sewing girls who made the empress’s dresses (‘never costing more than 1,500 francs’), might perhaps earn as much as ten francs a day, but those working in most dressmakers’ sweatshops were lucky if they got two and a half. A toiling laundress was only paid two. The wages of their menfolk were often not much more, and there was no provision for unemployment, illness or old age.
Acutely aware of this grinding hardship and misery, Eugénie was anxious that her son should learn what poverty really meant. ‘He probably thinks the poor are people who don’t own carriages’, she told his tutor when the boy was eleven. ‘It is essential that he understands and realises what it is, for him to listen to what these wretched folk have to say. No doubt a good deal of it is lies, but most of it is true. He must see for himself their ghastly homes, without any air or food, where happiness is an impossibility. He isn’t fit to reign until he’s done it.’
Whenever Eugénie was in Paris, a nondescript dark blue landau, without any coat of arms or other form of identification and driven by a coachman in a plain livery, might be seen leaving a side door of the Tuileries at least a once a week, usually in the mornings. Sometimes the landau went out more than once a week, especially in the winter during cold spells. It had small, curtained windows in order that no one could see from the street that inside was the empress, accompanied by a single lady-in-waiting, both of them so muffled in cloaks and veils that they were quite unrecognisable. The landau was setting off to visit a hospital, an orphanage, a school for poor children, a shelter for the destitute, a home for foundlings or just some family starving in an attic.
Eugénie kept an entire staff at the Tuileries whose job it was to let her know of any cases of hardship or of welfare institutions that urgently needed financial help or to inform her of requests for assistance from charities, even from individual men and women in distress. It was the indispensable Pepa’s job to keep the accounts and make a note of donations.
The empress’s first large-scale charity was paid for with the 600,000 francs that the municipality of Paris had offered her as a wedding present. Instead of spending the money on a diamond necklace as they suggested, she used it to found and endow an orphanage for girls in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a notoriously poverty-stricken district, where 300 poor girls were given a sensible education that would enable them to earn a decent living. As its patron, she visited it regularly until the very end of the Second Empire. In addition, she contributed large sums, generally anonymously and always with a minimum of fuss or ostentation, for homes and relief agencies all over France. Among these were convalescent homes for children at Falaise and Epernay, a convalescent home and lying-in hospital at Lyons, a hospital for scrofulous children at Berck-sur-Mer, and a relief scheme for old sailors at Dieppe. In and around Paris, besides her orphanage she helped to found a hospital for terminally ill young girls, a hospital for sick boys and a scheme to provide foster-parents, as well as convalescent homes for adults.
Her personal visiting never flagged. Shortly after Augustin Filon took up his post as tutor in 1867 he saw ‘an old lady’ in spectacles, with a large hat and a heavy veil, alighting from a carriage in the courtyard of the Tuileries. Raising her veil and removing her glasses, she laughed at him. It was the empress, returning from ‘poor peopling’.
Even Ferdinand Loliée, Eugénie’s most subtly disparaging biographer, could not fault her behaviour during the cholera scares of the 1860s. In September 1865, when she was at Biarritz in bed with a bad bout of ’flu, news arrived that the dreaded cholera (the nineteenth-century equivalent of the plague) had broken out in Paris and that people were dying every day. Parisians were fleeing from their city in terror. Napoleon rushed back, the empress following as soon as she could. Ordering her lady-in-waiting to stay in the landau, she visited the Beaujon, Lariboisière and Saint-Antoine hospitals, personally shaking each of the patients by the hand and telling them they were going to get better. Smallpox had broken out too, so in addition she insisted on visiting the smallpox ward at Saint-Antoine hospital, although this time she did not shake hands. Her visits reassured patients and staff, and did a good deal to halt the panic that was sweeping through the capital.
Next summer cholera broke out at Amiens, where public health was not so well organised as in the capital. The news reached Paris on 4 July, just when France was learning that Prussia had defeated Austria at Königgrätz the previous day. Ignoring the political crisis, Eugénie immediately took a train north and drove straight to the Hôtel Dieu, the city’s main hospital. When Marshal Vaillant, who was escorting her, warned the empress to be careful, she replied, ‘Marshal, this is how we women behave when we’re under fire.’ She toured every ward in the Hôtel Dieu, stopping at each bed and shaking every hand. Then she issued detailed instructions for sanitary precautions to be enforced throughout Amiens, supplied all hospitals with funds for extra food and medicine, gave money to people whom illness prevented from working, and arranged for the adoption of two small children orphaned by the epidemic. The bishop was alarmed at her disregard for her own safety. ‘Do take special care of your health, Monseigneur’, she told him drily on leaving. The municipality of Amiens described her courage as ‘heroic’.
Eugénie’s charity was invariably practical. During a tour of Brittany in 1855 a young lady, the daughter of a naval officer and grand-daughter of an admiral, was presented to her. Good looking and intelligent, she made a pleasant impression. When the empress heard, six years later, that Mlle Bouvet’s father had died and that she and her mother were living in poverty, she wrote inviting the girl to become a lady-in-waiting and then gave her the post of reader. The future Mme Carette – she made a good marriage – always remained devoted to Eugénie, as may be seen from her memoirs.