During the 1860s European politics were bewilderingly complex, but an account of them cannot be omitted if one is to understand Eugénie. As she herself insisted, what really interested her were foreign affairs, and we know that from the very earliest days of hermarriage, Napoleon III had been in the habit of discussing policy with her – although he did not always tell her everything that was in his mind. Gradually she became obsessed with international relations in Europe, far more than with the problems of Mexico. At the same time, when her husband’s health began to deteriorate he grew much readier to listen to her views and take her advice. Even if she was wrong about the Mexican empire, generally her instincts were excellent. No other woman of the nineteenth century possessed influence of this sort, on such a scale.
After the Crimean War was over, the emperor had tried, at first with reasonable success, to build closer relations with Russia, while attempting to keep on as good terms as he could with England. The new Russian emperor, Alexander II (the future liberator of the serfs), who was certainly a more imaginative and flexible man than his father Nicholas I had been, welcomed Napoleon’s overtures. During the Italian war of 1859 he alerted France to the danger of Prussian intervention, sending his personal aide-de-camp, Prince Schuvalov, to Paris to warn the emperor, and to some extent Prussia was deterred from attacking across the Rhine by nervousness about Russian intentions.
As has been seen, however, Eugénie’s dislike of the upheavals caused by the 1859 war, and her deepening friendship with the Metternichs, made her more and more inclined to see Austria and not Russia as France’s natural ally. This was by no means a new approach – it had always been the policy of King Louis-Philippe’s government and, during the Second Empire’s early years, of the foreign minister, Drouyn de Lhuys. Moreover, a fair number of very influential Austrians saw Russia as their greatest enemy.
What finally destroyed any likelihood of a lasting understanding between France and Russia was the sudden re-emergence of the insoluble Polish question. The Kingdom of Poland had disappeared during the infamous ‘partitions’ of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Russia taking the bulk of the country, Austria the southwest and Prussia the north-west, a tripartite occupation that was renewed by the 1815 settlement. A rising by the Poles against the Russians in 1831 had failed, despite arousing sympathy throughout Europe.
From the very beginning, Napoleon III had wanted to help the Poles. They had fought heroically for his uncle, who, if the 1812 campaign had ended differently, would almost certainly have restored their ancient kingdom. He had cursed the craven Louis-Philippe for not even protesting, let alone intervening, during the crushing of the 1831 rising.
By January 1863 when ‘one fine morning the bombshell of the Polish insurrection burst about our heads’, as Eugénie put it, the emperor’s sympathy had grown still deeper, in common with most western Europeans. Not only did liberals feel pity for an enslaved nation but Catholics were angry at the oppression of their co-religionists; in Montalembert’s words, ‘Since the murder of Poland all Europe has been in a state of mortal sin.’ Graphic reports of savage reprisals by the Russians caused widespread revulsion. The unequal struggle lasted for over a year, tens of thousands of Polish patriots being herded off in chains to Siberia.
In 1914 the empress discussed the insurrection with the diplomat Maurice Paléologue. All too often in Entretiens de l’Impératrice Eugénie,* Paléologue put his own opinions and even his own words into Eugénie’s mouth, sometimes altering what she had said to him (especially when it was about Kaiser Wilhelm II). Yet his account of her recollections of what happened in 1863 is convincing. Her mind retained all its clarity.
‘You cannot imagine the magnificent impression made by this people suddenly rising in defence of their religion and their nationhood’, she recalled. ‘Nothing so heroic had been seen since the Spaniards’ revolt against the French occupation … every church was a living centre of patriotism.’ She was thrilled by the way compassion for Poland united the French. ‘From republicans to Legitimists, from free-thinkers to clericals, from Jules Favre to Mgr Dupanloup, from the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, there arose the same cry of admiration for the Poles and of disgust with Russia.’ For the first time she found herself in complete agreement with Plon-Plon – ‘My ferocious enemy, Prince Napoleon’.
France, England and Austria sent notes to St Petersburg, advising Russia to give the Poles a constitution. The emperor assured a Polish leader in Paris, Prince Adam Czartoryski, that he intended to send them guns and then an army – he was prepared to go to war if he could find allies.
A fortnight after the rising broke out, Bismarck (Prussia’s new minister-president) sent General von Alvensleben to sign an agreement with Russia allowing her troops to pursue ‘rebels’ over the Prussian border but declined a proposal by the tsar that Prussia and Russia should immediately declare war on France and Austria. Eugénie said that Bismarck’s motive was ‘separating France and Russia’, yet relations between them had already collapsed. When Napoleon complained to Berlin about its own ill treatment of the Poles the British wrongly suspected he was planning to attack Prussia and seize the Rhineland frontier – the emperor had no wish to fight both Prussia and Russia.
Prince Metternich reported a conversation he had with Eugénie at the Tuileries on 21 February 1863. Producing a map of Europe, she said she would like to fly over it with him so that they could get a bird’s eye view. (‘What a flight, and what a bird’, he joked in his dispatch.) She wanted to redraw the map, she told Metternich. She wished to see Poland restored under the king of Saxony, Russia being compensated at Turkey’s expense. Prussia would get Saxony and Hanover – surely something could be found in America for the Hanoverian king? Austria would cede Galicia to Poland and Venetia to Italy in return for Silesia, part of Germany south of the Main and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Italy would give up the Papal States and Naples. Constantinople would go to Greece. The empress admitted, without any embarrassment, that the scheme meant war with Prussia.
Historians have laughed at ‘this extraordinary incident’. (William Smith comments, ‘While thrones fell, dynasties were transplanted and fundamental problems were resolved by the feminine touch.’) But Eugénie was flying a kite, her basic message being that France wanted an Austrian alliance. Metternich took it seriously enough to go to Vienna, to spend days discussing the plan with emperor Franz-Joseph and the foreign Minister Rechberg. They realised that it had Napoleon’s support, but were too nervous to commit themselves. Meanwhile, Eugénie offered a practical diplomatic objective. Writing on 1 March, Lord Cowley said it was ‘A Poland all but independent under a Grand Duke’, in return for Russia being given a reasonably free hand in Turkey.
The emperor went on trying to save the Poles until the end of 1863, warmly encouraged by Eugénie, who was determined that France should do her best to rescue them. Sadly, apart from some mild diplomatic muttering, England and Austria refused to do anything concrete once they had sent their notes to St Petersburg. Sweden, on the other hand, even suggested a Franco-Swedish war against Russia – but the Swedes’ motive was not so much to help the Poles as to regain Finland for Sweden. At home, Fould and Morny (always pro-Russian) were against military action in any form, insisting that diplomacy was the only way to find a solution.
In November 1863 Napoleon proposed that a European congress should meet urgently, to discuss rearranging the frontiers of the 1815 settlement together with the Polish problem. England and Austria immediately declined, the latter disturbed by Eugénie’s blueprint for the future. In December, without much hope, the emperor repeated his proposal for a congress, to be attended instead by Russia, Prussia and Italy, to redraw the map of Europe on the lines suggested by Eugénie to Metternich. None of the powers involved would accept the invitation. Their refusal meant that all his efforts to save the Poles had been in vain; without obtaining anything for them other than a worthless Russian promise to be ‘merciful’, he had merely succeeded in infuriating the tsar.
At the beginning of 1864 Napoleon failed to take advantage of the crisis over Schleswig-Holstein, until then ruled by the late king of Denmark, which had offered a chance of reforging the French entente with England. Even Lord Palmerston considered going to war when Austria and Prussia attacked Denmark in the spring – for one thing, it was the home of the recently married Princess of Wales – but, with his ingrained paranoia, he did not have enough confidence in the emperor. As it was, another, shrewder British statesman, Lord Clarendon, observed that merely by denouncing Bismarck as a deliberate disturber of the peace, who was using the war for Prussia to ‘lord it over Germany’, Napoleon would be regarded by all Europe as a public benefactor and get every German democrat on his side – without involving France in the conflict. Yet, prejudiced in favour of his Bernadotte cousins, the Emperor hoped that a weakened Denmark might be absorbed into a single Scandinavian state ruled from Stockholm.
Even after the Austrians and Prussians had overwhelmed the Danish army, ‘liberating’ Schleswig-Holstein, Napoleon misread the situation and became alarmed at the prospect of a continuing Austro-Prussian alliance. Eugénie realised, however, that Schleswig-Holstein would soon end up as part of Prussia. Making the best of a bad job, she commented that it was preferable to creating another under-sized German state.
Meanwhile, she was evolving an imaginative and not entirely impractical scheme for rebuilding the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. She hoped that a joint endeavour of this sort would result in a spirit of ecumenism and international cooperation, bringing lasting peace to a divided Europe. In essence, her project involved building two great churches side by side, one Roman Catholic and the other Orthodox, with a central nave which would be available to all the other Christian communions. The scheme was finally abandoned when in March 1865 Pius IX let it be known that only Catholics had the right to rebuild the church of the Holy Sepulchre – although the pope added graciously that he would make no objection should the empress wish to pay for restoring the church’s dome.
Eugénie’s growing determination to share in the shaping of French foreign policy was hampered by Napoleon III’s habitual, bewildering inscrutability. Even to his wife he was always the ‘Sphinx of the Tuileries’, a man who was pathologically obsessed with secrecy. ‘The emperor is not exactly communicative’, Viel Castel had noted a few years earlier:
He remains for whole days, so to speak, without opening his mouth and totally absorbed in his inmost thoughts. Calm and impenetrable, even with the people who are most in his confidence, his soul seems as adamantine as his face. Impressed by no one, no one is allowed to share in what he is thinking. He is like some meticulous craftsman, who has plenty of the highest quality tools, but no assistants. You cannot even hope to judge him by what he does, since its real significance is often missed by the keenest observers.
Nevertheless, Eugénie could often guess what was in the emperor’s mind. At first he had told her no more than a little, so that – as he intended – she could repeat it to the foreign ambassadors, which was an extremely useful means of sounding them out or spreading rumours. Gradually, however, she developed opinions of her own, which were more traditionalist than the emperor’s. This first became apparent over Rome, then over Mexico, then over Poland and finally over Austria. As Napoleon’s health worsened, inevitably the empress’s influence grew, while her ideas became clearer and firmer.
Eugénie had certainly begun to assert her own opinions, and very strongly, as early as 1861. Viel Castel, who obtained most of his information about her from Princesse Mathilde or from those in the princess’s circle, recorded in June that year how she was already attempting to influence imperial policy over Poland. She had secretly contributed an anonymous article to a highly influential newspaper, the Constitutionel, in which she had attacked Russia and praised the Polish extremists. ‘She would like us to support the rebel movement in that country as much as possible, whatever the cost’, explains the diarist, who was writing at least eighteen months before the Polish insurrection of 1863. He adds, ‘She is no less pronounced in her views about the confiscated Italian states.’
At breakfast in the Tuileries with the emperor one morning in May 1861, according to the diarist (or, more probably, to Princesse Mathilde, who was present), Eugénie spoke about nothing except international affairs, criticising French foreign policy so savagely that eventually the normally phlegmatic Napoleon rose to his feet, saying, ‘Really, Eugénie, you seem to forget two things – first, that you are French and, second, that you are married to a Bonaparte.’
‘I have great difficulty in making any sense of this woman’s character at all, nor am I able to discover just what it is that she wants’, the diary continues. ‘Her love for the emperor is to a very large extent conditioned by ambition, her maternal instincts appear to be extremely unsatisfactory, and the way she behaves is more than likely to alienate the French people.’ This is not the voice of Comte Horace de Viel Castel but of his informant, Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, pursuing her unforgiving vendetta against Eugénie. She also supplied the Goncourt brothers with the same sort of vicious gossip. Mathilde’s venomously bitter voice can be heard in the rest of the entry about Eugénie. ‘She carefully makes friends with all the ladies whom the emperor distinguishes with his attention, approves of their relations with her husband, and by exploiting their influence tries to wield still greater power over him.’ Yet, however prejudiced and unreliable Viel Castel or Princesse Mathilde may have been, there is no ground for disbelieving their claim that as early as 1861 Eugénie had been trying to dominate her husband and to put into practice a foreign policy that was sometimes very much her own.