‘For everyone who grew to manhood towards the end of the Empire, the year of 1867 must stay firmly among recollections that can never be forgotten’, wrote Pierre de La Gorce, born in 1846. ‘A picture lingers on of a vast, cosmopolitan party given by France for the entire world.’ He tells us, however, that those who saw it ‘remember two feelings, a feeling of dazzling brilliance and a feeling of fear…. Never have people enjoyed themselves more frenziedly or more uneasily.’ If it was the year of La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein, it was also the year when Prussia consolidated the gains won at Königgrätz, and when the Mexican adventure ended in tragedy.
Augustin Filon, who took up his appointment as the Prince Imperial’s tutor in the year of the Exposition Universelle, in September, was surprised by Eugénie’s simple manner and way of speaking – noticeably more natural than that of her ladies. Her looks were beginning to go, her face already lined and her complexion a little faded, but her only make-up was a line of kohl under her eyelids. Filon was struck by her advanced views on education and the approval with which she spoke of Victor Duruy. ‘What she said impressed me deeply, completely changing my idea of her as some haughty beauty reigning theatrically like a fairy queen in splendour’, he wrote. ‘Here was a woman with both brains and heart, who filled me with passionate loyalty.’
One of the best descriptions of the World Trade Exhibition in Paris is that of La Gorce. He tells us that the centre was the park known as the Champ de Mars, in which stood the Palais de l’Exposition, the principal showroom, ringed by galleries that displayed the latest marvels of industry and art, together with Egyptian temples, Greek porticos, Chinese pagodas, English and Dutch cottages, Tyrolean huts, Swedish log cabins and Turkish kiosks. (Among England’s exhibits were a Bible stall and an Anglican church.) If some of the buildings were shoddy, the overall impression was one of astonishing colour and variety. There were restaurants, photographers’ studios, dance halls, boutiques and casinos, police turning a blind eye to ‘waitresses’ in exciting versions of Bavarian, Dutch or Spanish folkdress.
The capital’s streets had never been more frequented. The carnival went on and on, lasting for six months. In La Gorce’s words, ‘Paris became the abode of princes and meeting place of kings.’ They included the Russian and Austrian emperors and the Turkish sultan, the kings of Prussia, Sweden, Portugal, Holland, Belgium and Greece, the shah of Persia and the khedive of Egypt. Among the heirs to thrones were the prince of Wales, the crown princes of Prussia and Italy and the hereditary prince of Sweden.
Clearly, Lillie Moulton had no reservations when she called the exhibition ‘magnificent’, and spent 100 francs on a season ticket which contained her photograph and her signature. She reported that the main building on the Champ de Mars was circular, a segment of the circle being devoted to the exhibits of each country. Outside were cafés that served the food of every nation represented. ‘We go almost every day, and it is always a delight’, wrote Lillie enthusiastically. ‘The villa of the Bey of Tunis, a Buddhist temple, a Viennese bakery, where people flock to taste the delicious rolls hot from the oven, and where Hungarian bands of highly coloured handsome zitherists play from morning till night, and a hundred other attractions, make the Exposition a complete success. You pass from one lovely thing to the other. The gardens are laid through avenues of trees and shrubs where fountains play.’
On 17 May the Cowleys gave a ball for 2,000 guests at the British embassy in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, was there with his brother the Duke of Edinburgh and many other royalties. ‘Waldteufel played his wonderful music’, wrote Whitehurst, ‘and if any lady or gentleman thinks that Paris society does not like American drinks, that lady or gentleman is very much deceived.’ The emperor and Eugénie came, Whitehurst reporting ‘there was the prettiest picture – a Winterhalter it should have been – which I have ever seen in a ballroom. At the end, before a glass, and in a bower of flowers, sat the empress surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting and some of the best specimens of London and Paris beauties.’ The Princess of Wales, the lovely Alexandra, had been left in England – still in his twenties, the future Edward VII meant to enjoy the Parisian fleshpots to the full.
The most august of the visiting sovereigns, Alexander II, emperor of Russia, arrived in Paris on 1 June, handsome, stately and coldly polite, exuding a Byzantine aura of divine right. He and his two tall sons, the Tsarevitch Alexander and Grand Duke Vladimir, were installed at the Elysée. The king of Prussia, William I, who came with Queen Augusta and Crown Prince Frederick William four days later, was not so daunting, a fine old soldier, who had unusually pleasant and kindly manners. Despite remarking with a certain lack of tact that Paris was looking even more beautiful than when he had seen it during the allied occupation of 1814, the septuagenarian monarch charmed his hosts, particularly Eugénie.
The even more amiable and much younger King Charles XV of Sweden was unaffectedly made welcome in Second Empire Paris, as a ruler belonging to a dynasty no less parvenu than the Bonapartes. In any case, he was also a kinsman, related to them through both the Bernardottes and the Beauharnais. His brother and heir, Prince Oscar, was equally welcome, flitting up and down the Seine on a private bateau-mouche and singing duets with Mrs Moulton. (The emperor was godfather to Oscar’s little son.)
Count von Bismarck had decided to escort his king, much to Napoleon’s irritation. Apparently quite indifferent to the stares of the fascinated French, the Prussian chancellor cut a striking figure in the dazzling white uniform and black thigh-boots of a major of Cuirassiers, the scabbard of his sabre clanking noisily along the pavement. He looked even more colossal when he wore his eagle-topped steel helmet. As a piece of subtle mockery that had been inspired by Princess Metternich, the fashionable colour this year for the ladies’ new straight dresses was brown often set off by coral jewellery, a brown called ‘la couleur Bismarck’. (During the Königgrätz campaign, the brown-coated Austrian artillerymen had inflicted substantial casualties on the Prussian army.)
The real world broke in suddenly and unpleasantly upon the autocrat of all the Russias when he paid a formal visit to the Palais de Justice, where there were yells of ‘Vive la Pologne!’ and ‘À la porte!’ (‘Get out!’) from several of the younger advocates, who had not forgotten how the Russians were behaving in Poland.
La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein had been running since mid-April, attracting enormous audiences who laughed and applauded rapturously, and afterwards sang its cheerful, catchy tunes in the streets of Paris. Its fame had spread to every European capital. An imperial gala performance was arranged for the visiting sovereigns. In the imperial box, next to Napoleon and Eugénie, the Russian emperor and the king of Prussia sat side by side with Don Francisco de Assisi, king consort of Spain, King Louis and Queen Maria Pia of Portugal, Queen Sophia of Holland, the ex-King Ludwig I of Bavaria and his melancholy grandson Ludwig II, and the khedive, Ismail of Egypt. Behind them, but not seated, were the Tsarevich Alexander of Russia and his brother Grand Duke Vladimir, with Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, Crown Prince Albert of Saxony and Crown Prince Umberto of Italy.
At the far end of the box, which was arranged as a drawing-room, stood a group of ambassadors, ministers and generals with their ladies – among them were Prince and Princess Metternich, Count von Bismarck in his white uniform, the aged Russian chancellor Prince Gortchakov, the Prussian ambassador Count von der Goltz, and those two faithful old warhorses Marshal Canrobert and General Fleury.
The empress, wearing rose-coloured silk with her shoulders bare, her throat adorned by a superb collar of pearls, seemed to glow with all the brilliance of her heyday. She had certainly come a long way from 1853, when not a single foreign royalty had attended her wedding.
Bismarck was seen to bellow with laughter, again and again, at the way in which the operetta mocked the tiny armies of the minor German states, so much so that it seemed almost as if he were laughing at some private joke. ‘That’s it! That’s exactly it!’ he said afterwards when, accompanied by General von Moltke, he paid a perfectly respectable, if for him unusually frivolous, visit to the leading lady, Mme Hortense Schneider. ‘We are going to get rid of the Gerolsteins and very soon none of them will be left. I am grateful to you Parisian artistes for showing the world just how ridiculous they were.’
Unfortunately, and no doubt just as Bismarck hoped, most of the audience left the Théâtre des Variétés totally convinced that all German troops were no less laughable and ineffectual than those of General Boum-Boum and the Grand Duchy of Gerolstein.
If the empress found the libretto of La Grande Duchesse marginally less distressing than usual, one can only hope that she did not hear about the excessively patriotic behaviour of the operetta’s leading lady, whose hospitable welcome for foreign royalty earned her the cruel name of ‘les passages des princes’ and convulsed Paris with laughter. Hortense slept with a good few princes, including it seems the Prince of Wales. One of her numerous discarded lovers equipped himself with the flag of every nation and took the house opposite, hoisting and floodlighting the appropriate flag during each royal visit.
On the evening before the performance of La Grande Duchesse Eugénie invited her royal guests to a fête at Versailles, of such splendour that those who were there believed it could not possibly have been rivalled in any preceding age, not even in the days of Louis XIV. There were elaborate water pageants in the park that surrounded the great palace, which was illuminated by torches and flares, pageants accompanied by music from concealed orchestras of violins, together with a fleet of gondolas for the guests on the Grand Canal, then an epicurean supper for 600 in the Hall of Mirrors, and finally a brilliant firework display that reached its climax when 100,000 rockets lit up the night sky over Versailles.
In the small hours Princess Metternich encountered her friend the empress, creator of the feast, wandering happily by herself through the park, a white, gold-embroidered burnous thrown over her shoulders – ‘admiring murmurs following in her wake like a trail of lighted gunpowder’. Yet, typically, the Princess reminds us, Eugénie was simply not interested in polite compliments about her appearance or her clothes – what she really wanted was to be congratulated on giving a good party. ‘What do you think of my fête?’ she asked Pauline, who replied sincerely enough, ‘Worthy of Your Majesty.’
The ‘révue de Longchamps’ was always the climax of the French military calendar, a mixture of parade, picnic and national celebration, when the Parisians flocked out to Longchamps racecourse to applaud the red-trousered army that was France’s glory. This year the review was even more spectacular than usual, 60,000 men taking part in an attempt to impress the visiting sovereigns and their staffs – in particular the Prussians.
On 6 June 1867 tens of thousands of spectators cheered when Eugénie’s carriage arrived at the saluting base, the empress smiling and bowing. She was followed by Napoleon III and his fellow monarchs on horseback, together with a host of crown princes and lesser potentates. Quick-stepping to the raucous military music of France, the infantry marched past. Then, to the staccato, braying fanfares of their mounted trumpeters came the cavalry in tunics and dolmans of dark blue, light blue or green. Among them were the empress’s own personal regiments – her cuirassiers, carbineers, lancers and dragoons.
‘When squadron on squadron charged with drawn swords upon their sovereigns and their escorts, and halted but a few paces from them with the cry of “Vive l’Empereur!” the thrill was magical’, said Roger Sencourt, who, writing in the 1920s, could well have spoken to survivors who had watched the legendary review. ‘At that moment there swept through the people and the army a conviction that French power was irresistible.’
Unlike the handful of keen-eyed Prussian officers and their king, very few among the spectators appear to have realised that, despite all the magnificent uniforms, the army’s artillery was out of date. Even those rare French experts who did notice remarked proudly that these guns were the cannon that had triumphantly smashed the way into the fort at the Malakhoff in the Crimea, and had won the victories of Magenta and Solferino in 1859.
While the cavalcade of visiting sovereigns and princes was riding back from Longchamps, led by Napoleon III, a twenty-year-old Polish refugee called Berezowski fired a single pistol shot at the Russian emperor, but missed, the bullet passing through a horse’s nostril and covering the tsarevitch with the animal’s blood, and wounding a lady in the crowd. The young man was seized by the police before he could shoot again. ‘Sire, we have been under fire together, which means that now we are brothers-in-arms,’ said Napoleon smoothly. ‘Our lives are in the hands of Providence,’ replied the angry tsar in tones of ice. He had not forgotten how his host had encouraged the Poles to hope for independence.
On 10 June, the day before Alexander was due to leave France, when he was about to join a shooting party at Fontainebleau, the police discovered that there was a Polish conspiracy to ambush and kill him in the woods. In order to avoid further embarrassment by revealing yet another plot on his life, Eugénie engaged the tsar in conversation, dragging it out until it was too late for him to reach the party.
The only major European sovereigns not to visit the Exposition Universelle were Queen Victoria, by now the reclusive ‘Widow of Windsor’, and Queen Isabella of Spain who was about to lose her throne. Even the sultan of Turkey came. Deliberately, the pleasure-loving, ineffectual Abdul Aziz arrived late, after the tsar had gone, blazing with diamonds when he attended the exhibition’s prize-giving on 1 July.
Just as Napoleon and Eugénie were about to leave the Tuileries for the prize-giving, they were told that Emperor Maximilian had been executed by a Juarist firing squad on 19 June. The news underlined France’s humiliation by Prussia and made Franz-Joseph still less inclined to ally with a man who was ultimately responsible for the death of his brother – noisily derided as ‘The Archdupe’ by the French opposition.
‘The glitter of the Exposition Universelle hid our country’s discontent at home and its danger abroad’, said La Gorce. ‘But for how long? Napoleon III can seldom have felt more isolated than when he rode at the head of his cavalcade of kings. Everything was going wrong.’