On 27 August 1864 a dying Horace de Viel Castel wrote his last journal entry. As a malicious connoisseur of scandal, what he said has always to be treated with caution, especially on ‘the foul arena of politics’, yet often he was shrewd. He tells us that, distrusted by Russia, Prussia and Austria, above all by England, France is totally isolated. ‘She has let Denmark be defeated in the recent war, having been ‘tricked by Mons. de Bismarck.’ He ends, ‘We are hastening towards our decline. Everything that was young about the emperor has grown old and what was not yet decayed even four years ago is now entirely so.’ Although we can now see that Viel Castel’s forebodings were justified, few would have agreed with him in the summer of 1864. Among the exceptions was Eugénie.
On 4 October 1865 the Prussian minister-president arrived at Biarritz. Despite being well over fifty, bald and walrus-moustached, he was a magnificent-looking man, built on the lines of a Wagnerian hero, who spoke excellent French in a deep, musical voice and had a keen sense of humour. Women liked him. The empress herself admired him, even if she recognised an enemy when she saw one. He was going to destroy Bonapartist France and his name was Count von Bismarck-Schoenhausen.
Napoleon and Eugénie had met Bismarck before. He had been presented to them as a member of the Prussian delegation to the Congress of Paris, while in 1862 he had spent several months in France as his country’s ambassador. This time the gigantic Prussian charmed everyone at the Villa Eugénie, even Mérimée enjoying his conversation. He flirted with one of the ladies, the beautiful Comtesse de la Bedoyère, who took such a fancy to him that (according to Dr Barthez) Mérimée painted Bismarck’s face on a piece of cardboard and put it on her pillow – going up to her bedroom after dinner, she rushed out, screaming, ‘My God, there’s a man in my bed’.
Otto von Bismarck treated the empress not just politely but with genuine respect. When he was ambassador he had described her as ‘the only man in Paris’, a surprising tribute from someone who did not usually accept women as equals. For all his charm, Eugénie knew that this was the most dangerous man in Europe. Having seen how ruthlessly he had behaved towards the Poles, she watched with alarm his outmanoeuvring of Austria.
The reason Bismarck had come to Biarritz was to find out what the emperor would do in the event of war between Prussia and Austria, the two men spending several days in secret discussion. He suspected that Napoleon hoped to avoid being caught up in hostilities and wanted the two German powers to fight themselves to a standstill, after which he could annex some territory. But the minister-president had to make sure. In strict confidence he explained that he meant to drive Austria out of northern Germany and, in addition, force her to surrender Venetia to Italy – Prussia was going to ally with the Italians. And he promised to give France either Belgium or Luxembourg.
Bismarck had guessed right. With his best troops away in Mexico, Napoleon had no wish to join in the fighting and was not going to commit himself, as he had done so disastrously to Cavour at Plombières in 1858. Unlike Cavour, however, Bismarck asked him to do nothing, while it would certainly be most gratifying if Venetia were to be given to Italy.
The minister-president went back to Berlin in a very good mood, merely saying that he had met ‘two remarkable women’, by whom he meant Eugénie and the lovely, but hare-brained, Comtesse de la Bedoyère.
An unadventurous foreign policy suited the emperor very well, partly because his health was starting to crack. Exhausted by a sexual appetite verging on satyriasis, he was also debilitated by chainsmoking – not cigars, unusually for the period, but cigarettes. Ominously, he was beginning to suffer from mysterious pains in the bladder.
The empress did not share her husband’s optimism and dreaded the prospect of a victorious Prussia. Realising that the Second Empire’s one hope of survival lay in an Austrian alliance, she begged Metternich to persuade Franz-Joseph to surrender Venetia. It would have a magic effect on French opinion. Convinced that in the end she would bring Napoleon round to her way of thinking, she assured Metternich that Austria could go to war knowing that France would quickly join in on her side – ‘Yes, yes, the emperor is committed to neutrality, but only until the first shot has been fired.’ She told him this again and again throughout March, April and May 1866, when on paper Austria was still Prussia’s ally.
By now Eugénie was terrified of Bismarck. A baffling mixture of Lutheran piety and cynicism, a Prussian nobleman rather than a German nationalist, he was determined to serve his king by extending Prussian rule over all the states of Protestant north Germany, and eventually over those of the Catholic south as well. To do so, he had to end Austrian domination of the Germanic Confederation, which meant war. If Prussia won, then France would be menaced by a power far more dangerous than Austria. Eugénie understood this at once, unlike the tired, self-deluding emperor.
When Austria ended her treaty with Prussia on 12 June, Metternich signed a secret pact with France the same day, by which Austria agreed to surrender Venetia and France promised to restrain Italy. But although war was imminent, Napoleon refused to abandon his neutrality.
Hostilities broke out on 18 June, Austria supported by the tiny armies of Saxony, Hanover, Hesse-Cassel and Nassau. Remembering the Italian campaign, everyone in France, including Eugénie, admired Austrian troops with their excellent artillery and were not surprised when they routed the Italians at Custozza a week later. The French were quite sure they would defeat the Prussians just as easily, contemptuous of its reservists and landwehr. Yet General Bourbaki, who had recently visited Berlin, warned them, ‘Be as rude as you like about this army of lawyers and occulists but it will march into Vienna whenever it wants.’
While the emperor waited for a suitable moment to intervene, Eugénie tried to help the Austrians, giving Metternich the names of French firms that held large stores of lint and bandages. Above all she urged the necessity of sprinkling hospital beds with carbolic acid, ‘which numerous experiments here have proved to be a preventative against typhus and fevers’.
On 3 July, brilliantly coordinated by Helmuth von Moltke, the Prussians smashed the Austrians at Sadowa (Königgrätz) in Bohemia, inflicting ghastly casualties. That evening the Austrian foreign minister, Count von Rechberg, telegraphed Metternich in Paris – ‘only French armed intervention stands in the way of Prussia gaining exclusive domination over Germany’. Bismarck thought so too. Later he admitted he had never understood why the French did not cross the Rhine while the Prussians were still held up in Bohemia. Even 15,000 men would have been enough. ‘The mere sight of your red trousers in the Duchy of Baden and the Palatinate would have raised all south Germany against Prussia…. I am not even sure that we could have defended Berlin.’
‘The consternation here at the successes of Prussia continues to be very great’, reported Cowley that night. ‘I speak of high quarters.’ Clearly he had been surprised by Napoleon’s neutrality. ‘The emperor is getting alarmed at his Frankenstein, and is turning his mind a little too late to the problem of how Austria is to be saved.’
On 10 July a Prussian envoy, Prince Reuss, received a veiled warning from Eugénie, who told him that the prospect of Prussian hegemony over Germany was making Napoleon very uneasy. ‘With such a nation for a neighbour, we should run the risk of finding you one day in front of Paris before we had ever suspected it…. I shall go to bed French and wake up Prussian.’ She told him that Prussia owed a lot to French neutrality and must not exploit her victory too much. France, she lied, ‘desired nothing but peace’.
In reality Eugénie had been doing her best to make the emperor declare war. The fullest account of a crucial meeting of the Council at Saint-Cloud on 5 July is that which she gave to Paléologue in January 1905. When Drouyn de Lhuys, once again foreign minister, had insisted the only possible option was war, Eugénie broke in to ask Marshal Randon, minister for war, if the army was ready to invade across the Rhine. Without hesitation he replied that 80,000 troops could be concentrated immediately – 250,000 more within three weeks. At this, she demanded that the army should march at once. ‘I felt that the fate of France and our dynasty’s future were at stake’, she recalled bitterly. She was supported by Drouyn and Randon.
Napoleon then asked other ministers for their opinion. Underlining the obvious, the Marquis de la Valette, minister for the interior, argued that opposing Prussia meant allying with Austria and therefore abandoning Italy. He was quite certain, he added inanely, that France could obtain any territory she wanted ‘through friendly negotiations with Berlin’. His views were shared by Rouher, minister of state, and Baroche, minister of justice.
‘When the Prussian armies are no longer kept busy in Bohemia and are able to turn and give us their undivided attention, Bismarck will merely laugh at our claims’, Eugenie responded angrily. ‘Prussia had no scruples about stopping you after Solferino’, she reminded Napoleon. ‘Why worry about doing the same to her after Königgrätz? We gave way in 1859 because we could not find the 50,000 troops needed to bar the road to Paris, but today the road to Berlin lies open.’ Again, both Drouyn and Randon warmly supported her.
The Council took three decisions. First, the Senate and Corps Législatif should be summoned urgently to vote the money needed for general mobilisation. Second, 50,000 troops should be concentrated on the Rhine immediately. Third, a stern note should be sent to Berlin, warning that France would not tolerate territorial alterations to which she had not given her consent. These decisions were to be announced next day in the Moniteur (the official gazette).
Although Randon was over-optimistic, the French could certainly have massed 50,000 troops on the Rhine very quickly, which would have brought the South German States into the war on Austria’s side. Their sovereigns had no wish to be gobbled up by Prussia, even if a small and vociferous group in each little country wanted unification. While Württemberg had only 22,000 troops and Baden a mere 16,000, the Bavarian army was genuinely formidable with 190,000. The western areas of Prussia (Westphalia and the Rhineland) could have been invaded with ease, causing panic in Berlin. Moreover, the Austrians were regrouping, waiting for reinforcements from the Italian front.
War was the one way to stop Prussia overrunning all Germany. If she did, then it was merely a question of time before she attacked the Second Empire. A few days after Königgrätz, Victor Duruy warned the emperor that in order to consolidate her gains Prussia would ‘humiliate France, just as she has humiliated Austria’. Rouher, France’s nearest thing to a prime minister, did not agree, however. A subtle Auvergnat, in the words of Professor William Smith, he ‘knew how to play on that weakness for intellectual speculation which so often hampered the Imperial will’. During the night after the Council he showed Napoleon reports chosen by La Valette and Baroche to give the false impression that war with Prussia would be very unpopular with the French.
The following morning the announcements did not appear in the Moniteur. At the next Council on 10 July Eugénie, Drouyn and Randon tried frantically to revive intervention, but failed. In a despairing letter Eugénie told Metternich, ‘They are exaggerating today’s danger to make us forget tomorrow’s.’ She ended, ‘If only you could give those Prussians a really good thrashing.’
Her opponents in the Council dismissed what she wanted as ‘a policy of adventure’, but very soon Napoleon admitted to her that he had made a mistake. ‘By then it was too late to retrieve it, since the chance had been lost’, she remembered. ‘At the time he seemed so utterly crushed that I trembled for our future.’ On 23 July she told Metternich, ‘He can no longer walk, no longer sleep, scarcely eat.’ She had advised him to abdicate in favour of the Prince Imperial with herself as regent. Yet she never stopped trying to make Napoleon declare war, telling Metternich on 25 July that she was certain he would do so, when he visited the camp at Chalons in the autumn. (The French army was eager to cross the Rhine.) For the moment he was at Vichy, seeing no one except her ally Drouyn whom she had sent there. Meanwhile she was working on other ministers. Metternich was amazed at her determination. Eventually Napoleon agreed to move as soon as the Prussians advanced on Vienna, but on 26 July – the day Metternich wrote his dispatch – Prussia and Austria began negotiations for peace.
‘The empress told Goltz that she looked upon the present state of things as le commencement de la fin de la dynastie’, Cowley reported early in August, quoting the Prussian ambassador. ‘This is exaggeration. What with Mexico, what with Italy, what with his late mediation, the emperor has no doubt fallen in prestige, but as yet there are no signs of public discontent.’ A few days later, however, Cowley was saying that Napoleon would have to get some sort of compensation from Prussia to calm public opinion. But Eugénie was worried about more than prestige, telling Goltz on 20 August that Prussia’s army was ‘twice as strong as the French and asserting in jest that France had to guard against a Prussian invasion for the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine’.
Drouyn resigned in despair. His successor as foreign minister was the Marquis de Moustier. Lord Cowley had a low opinion of the marquis, writing, ‘He hates business, it seems, and prefers the society of ballet-dancers to all others … he has made every place he has been in too hot to hold him.’ This was at a time when Napoleon needed clear-headed advisers.
On 23 August Prussia and Austria signed the Peace of Prague, Prussia annexing Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, Schleswig-Holstein and the free city of Frankfurt (whose mayor hanged himself). A North German Confederation was formed with the Prussian king as president, the South German States agreeing to a programme of military and economic cooperation. Emperor Franz-Joseph was so weakened within his own lands that he was forced to grant the Magyars autonomy, creating the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.
Regaining their equilibrium, Napoleon and Eugénie tried hard to give the impression that nonetheless all was well with the Second Empire. When Felix Whitehurst went to a ball at the Tuileries in January 1867, he found a scene of the utmost tranquillity. ‘Good music pervaded the atmosphere, and when, to the “Belle Hélène”, some twenty couples waltzed before the emperor and empress in the splendid Throne-room, the effect was very striking’, he told readers of the Daily Telegraph. ‘The emperor, who had been skating all day, looked very well; the empress, who was very simply dressed in white trimmed with white roses and ivy, reminded one of the empress of twelve years ago.’
Behind the scenes, however, the couple were desperately worried. France, indisputably Europe’s greatest military power for the last seventy years, was now being challenged by what until recently had been only a minor power. As Cowley predicted, a ‘policy of compensation’ ensued after the Peace of Prague, Count Benedetti, the French ambassador at Berlin, informing Bismarck that his emperor would offer no opposition to Prussia taking over South Germany so long as France was given Belgium or Luxembourg. (Unwisely, he submitted the offer in writing.)
Realising Belgium was beyond his reach, Napoleon hoped to obtain Luxembourg, whose capital was then the strongest fortress in Europe. Its Grand Duke, King William III of Holland, was ready enough to sell it since it did not go through the female line and he had no sons. If the Luxembourgeois could not stay independent, they preferred union with France to absorption by Prussia, which had seemed more than likely after Königgrätz. In negotiations that he took care to keep secret from his Council – and, above all, from the staunchly pro-Austrian Eugénie – Napoleon offered Prussia an alliance against Austria in return.
Bismarck brusquely rejected the offer. He also revealed the emperor’s designs on the Grand Duchy to the German press, which was outraged, furiously trumpeting that ‘Luxembourg is a German country.’ In Berlin and Paris there was serious talk of war. ‘Nothing could be more agreeable to us than a war, which in any case cannot be avoided’, purred General von Moltke. ‘France fears that Alsace-Lorraine will be wrenched from her’ was how Count von der Goltz in Paris explained the French attitude – devoted to Eugénie, he genuinely wanted peace. (Napoleon then confused the ambassador by confiding that France and Prussia ‘were like two friends in a café who feel they ought to have a fight but who cannot think why.’) Prince Metternich informed Vienna that the empress was complaining ‘they were very much annoyed with Prussia’, and adding that large-scale military preparations were in hand which should be completed by the end of the year.
The situation grew increasingly tense throughout the early months of 1867 – for a few nerve-racking days in the spring many well-informed observers in both Berlin and Paris thought that war was inevitable. ‘All Friday things were in a terrible way, and the declaration of war against Prussia by France was in the mouth of everybody’, an obviously very alarmed Mr Whitehurst, normally an optimist, told his Daily Telegraph readers in England on Sunday 21 April. ‘The Bourse has been in a panic, the tone of society uneasy and the general feeling feverish.’
The crisis had passed by the end of the month. France was not ready to fight and Bismarck did not want to have a war – not just yet. A settlement was reached, Luxembourg ceased to be a member of the German Confederation while the Prussian garrison that had occupied its capital since 1815 was withdrawn, after dismantling the fortifications. However, the Grand Duchy became a neutral state instead of being handed over to Napoleon, who failed to get his ‘compensation’.
During the exceptionally tortuous and distrustful negotiations over Luxembourg the French foreign minister, Moustier, made the remarkable statement that ‘M. de Bismarck does not always act in bad faith.’ Even so, the French had been completely outwitted, and it was another bitter humiliation for their emperor. Putting matters in perspective, with only too much justification Adolphe Thiers had reminded a sombre Corps Législatif in March 1867 that Prussia’s victory at Königgrätz had been the worst disaster to befall France since the Allied invasion of 1814.
It was also a further triumph for the Prussian minister-president, giving Eugénie still more reason to fear him. Yet, despite everything – including what was to come – she could never bring herself to dislike the man. Forty years later, asked who were among ‘the most fascinating personalities’ she had ever met, she mentioned Bismarck first. ‘When it was worth his while,’ she said with a peculiar smile, ‘no one could be a more adroit courtier.’ The questioner suddenly realised that instead of boring the empress, as had so many other men, by telling her how beautiful she was, he had complimented her on her flair for politics.