The Second Empire had lost its way. Napoleon III was failing spectacularly to win the ‘glory abroad’ that was a vital part of Bonapartism – Russia had crushed Poland, Prussia had become a menacing rival and now Mexico had shot his protégé Emperor Maximilian. France felt humiliated. Throughout history the French have always looked for a scapegoat and, already inclined to dislike Eugénie as a foreigner, they had no need to look further than the ‘Spanish Woman’.
She was too intelligent to be unaware of their hostility, while she knew very well that she had stayed Spanish in temperament and outlook – when she spoke, her intonation if not her accent remained Spanish and she retained a deep Spanish bark of a laugh. Meeting the empress in her mid-seventies, Lucien Daudet realised at once that he was talking to a Spaniard.
On the morning after Napoleon had been informed of the Emperor Maximilian’s death he summoned the chief of the Empire’s secret police, Hyrvoix, to the Tuileries. How, he asked him, were Parisians reacting to the news?
‘If you really want to know, Sire, it is not just Parisians but the whole nation who are thoroughly indignant and upset by the way this unlucky war has ended’, answered the policeman. ‘Everywhere you’ll find that everybody is saying the same thing. They say it’s the fault of …’
The emperor broke in quickly, ‘Whose fault?’
‘Just as they used to say in Louis XVI’s time, “It’s the Austrian’s fault”, now under Napoleon III they’re saying, “It’s the Spaniard’s fault”.’
No sooner had he spoken than Eugénie burst into the room – looking like ‘one of the furies’ in a white wrapper, her hair loose over her shoulders, her face red with anger, her eyes blazing, recalled the wretched Hyrvoix.
‘Repeat what you’ve just said,’ she demanded.
‘All right, Madame, since it’s my job to report the facts, but I hope Your Majesty will forgive me,’ said the unfortunate policeman. ‘I was telling the emperor that today’s Parisians talk of the “Spanish Woman” just as, seventy or eighty years ago, they used to talk of the “Austrian Woman”.’
‘The Spanish woman, the Spanish woman!’ shouted the by now infuriated empress. ‘I’ve become French, but, if I need to, then I’ll show my enemies that I know how to be Spanish.’ Then she rushed out of the room, slamming the door.
‘I am a ruined man,’ exclaimed the terrified Hyrvoix.
‘Oh no, you only did your duty.’ Napoleon assured him.
Within a week, however, poor Hyrvoix found himself transferred from Paris to a post in a remote area of eastern France, in the Jura. Yet the policeman had merely been quoting from his agents’ reports, which were accurate enough. More and more of the French were blaming ‘the Spaniard’ for anything that went wrong, just as they had Marie-Antoinette.
The story of Eugénie and Hyrvoix comes from An Englishman in Paris by Albert Vandam, a journalist who had developed an intense dislike of the empress, and should be treated with caution. Yet the incident is in character and undoubtedly reflects popular feeling in Paris at the time. Writing in 1905 the historian Jean Guétary had heard a similar story from ‘a high functionary at the Tuileries’. ‘Answer me frankly, Monsieur Hyrvoix’, Eugénie asked the policeman. ‘Am I popular?’ Hesitating for a moment, Hyrvoix replied. ‘Yes, Madame…. especially in the provinces.’ Guétary says she never forgave him.
If that alarming burst of ferocity in response to Hyrvoix’s unpalatable warning may give one the illusion that Eugénie was a virago, she left a more pleasing impression on most people who encountered her. Sixty-five years afterwards, the English historian Sir Charles Oman, who had watched her at a ceremony in the Tuileries gardens during the summer of 1868, remembered (in Things I Have Seen) ‘a splendid figure, straight as a dart, and to my young eyes the most beautiful thing I had ever seen’. (She was wearing ‘a zebra-striped black and white silk dress with very full skirts, and a black and white bonnet’.) He recalled how Napoleon III made a dismal contrast. ‘On a bench overlooking the scene sat a very tired old gentleman, rather hunched together, and looking decidedly ill. I do not think I should have recognised him but for his spiky moustache. He was anything but terrifying in a tall hat and a rather loosely fitting frock coat.’
Significantly, Oman informed us that the empress ‘was a commanding figure and dominated the whole group on the terrace while the emperor, huddled in his seat, was a very minor show’. The ‘old gentleman’ had only just reached his sixtieth birthday, but clearly to Oman he appeared to be almost senile. Although he sometimes revived for brief periods, and if the agonising attacks of pain resulting from the stone in his bladder were intermittent, he was very tired indeed. He had lost his once insatiable sexual appetite – there were to be no more ‘little distractions’.
Unlike the unfortunate Hyrvoix, Augustin Filon was a member of the imperial household and knew the empress at close quarters. He became so devoted to her that eventually he would follow her into exile. His assessment of her marriage in the 1860s is probably fairly near the truth, if sometimes a little fanciful. ‘I think she lived in a kind of fairy tale, fascinated by her extraordinary destiny,’ he says:
Nearly twenty years separated the couple, and such a gulf is not easily bridged even by women who seem designed by nature to love men older than themselves. I don’t believe that the empress was a woman of this sort. Her feelings for the emperor had never been passionate, although they were much stronger than mere friendship and had grown steadily deeper until the day when she discovered his infidelities.
Yet, despite his betrayal, like many women she continued to respond to certain aspects of Napoleon’s personality, such as his kindness, gaiety and sense of fun, his oddly gentle voice and manner – all so surprising in an autocrat. Once he had caught her imagination as Bonapartism incarnate, and she never ceased to reverence him as emperor, never calling him ‘Louis’ or ‘tu’ in public. Ultimately she saw him as ‘a great, honest man who wanted to do good, even if often he pursued his aims crookedly’. In Filon’s view, Eugénie found her role in supporting and encouraging her husband.
As for the emperor’s attitude towards Eugénie, instead of the beautiful, alluring woman whom he had first ‘loved for her moods of impatience, her nervousness and her foibles’, he now loved her character and high standards. ‘He regarded her as his second conscience,’ claims Filon. Undoubtedly he consulted her more and more. She was his only confidante, although he still preferred to keep a good deal secret about his real aims.
In November 1868 the emperor contributed (under the name of A. Grenier) a curious article on Eugénie, written as if he were her father rather than her husband, to a new journal, the Dix-Decembre. ‘Women’s welfare is one of her main interests,’ he wrote. ‘She wants to improve conditions for them and has obtained recognition for Rosa Bonheur in the form of a decoration… No economic or financial question is beyond her grasp, and it is pleasing to hear her discuss these recondite problems with experts’, he continued patronisingly. ‘If her way of expressing herself is occasionally faulty, it is invariably colourful and lively, and she is remarkably precise in talking of business matters.’
One can dismiss Maxime Ducamp’s claims that Eugénie ‘had her camarilla, her court, her partisans’, since he was a journalist notorious for his venom, but Filon, who unlike Ducamp knew the world of the Tuileries, has to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, when he suggests that the emperor pretended that Eugénie led a reactionary court party so that he could blame her for policies which the liberals disliked, one must reject the idea as nonsense: Napoleon did not want to harm his image by making his wife still more unpopular.
On the other hand, Eugénie undoubtedly opposed her husband on certain issues. Filon argues that ‘the thought of setting herself up in opposition to the emperor, from whom she had taken all her political ideas and whose judgement she trusted absolutely, would never have occurred to her,’ yet we know that she often disagreed with him – on war with Prussia in 1866, on defending the Papal States and on liberalising. Inclined to see things in black and white, she did not always share the outlook of a husband who thought in the finer shades of grey. Filon was not present at Council meetings and it seems unlikely that the empress would have described them to her son’s tutor.
At the same time, Filon – who had a very good mind himself according to Victor Duruy – showed the utmost respect for Eugénie’s intelligence. Here he is totally at odds with Pierre de La Gorce. ‘Far sighted enough yet only intermittently, she was prone to violent fits of uneasiness and, increasingly disillusioned with her husband’s judgement, as a mother she wanted to safeguard her son’s inheritance’, declared la Gorce. ‘No doubt a woman of strong spirit, she was restless rather than resourceful, nervous, far too impressionable, simultaneously resolute and changeable, and when involved in policy-making caused as much damage by ill-judged enthusiasm as she did by her maternal intuition.’
It should be said that La Gorce did not attend Council meetings and had never even met the empress. Yet this Orleanist sympathiser’s assessment has influenced all too many French historians.
Napoleon and Eugénie needed all the support they could find in the political climate that emerged after the Exposition Universelle, but the empress’s foreign origins made her even more of a scapegoat – more than ever disliked as ‘L’Espagnole’.