SEVEN
Admiral Jurien de La Gravière had joined the navy as a midshipman in 1828 when the Bourbons were still on the throne, but unlike most naval officers, who tended to be Legitimists, he had become a staunch Bonapartist. Napoleon used this shrewd Breton for difficult missions, such as ensuring that French and British warships cooperated during the Crimean War. (Queen Victoria says he was ‘a quiet, gentlemanlike man who had always helped to keep matters straight between the two navies’.) He had nearly averted the Mexican adventure, by negotiating with Juarez.
By 1867 Jurien de La Gravière was seriously worried about the political situation in France. In November he wrote to the empress, insisting that she was the Second Empire’s biggest asset and ought to play a key role in its government. ‘You have no right to stand back when you could do so much to help,’ the Admiral told her. ‘We are in danger and you cannot be so remiss as to neglect us. The political experience that you have gained during a long apprenticeship of more than a dozen years must be used on behalf of us all.’ That someone of Jurien’s calibre should write like this shows just how much men at the centre of affairs respected Eugénie’s capabilities.
Nor was the admiral exaggerating when he said there was danger. In January 1868 Lord Lyons, who had recently replaced Cowley as ambassador, reported, ‘The discontent is great and the distress among the working classes severe’ – there had been a bad harvest. He added ominously, ‘the French have been a good many years without the excitement of a change’.
Republicanism had grown menacing, with constant demonstrations that turned into riots. Everyone knew that Napoleon was not well. The constitution loaded him with responsibilities, but made no allowance for his ill health or death, while his ministers were mediocre – there was no one to replace Morny or Walewski. The rise of extremism was particularly alarming, a return to the revolutionary and atheist Jacobinism of 1793, Robespierre and Hébert being openly venerated in the wilder political clubs. There was also a threat from the royalist right. Early in 1867 Napoleon had grumbled bitterly to Lord Clarendon about Orleanist intrigues. ‘The Duc d’Aumale [the Orleanist Pretender’s uncle] is devoured by ambition and the spirit of revenge, and he is quite capable of accepting a republican ladder for climbing to power, of course with the intention of kicking it down as soon as he arrived there.’
When Lord Cowley paid a private visit to Napoleon at Fontainebleau, the emperor told the former ambassador that the countryside still supported the régime, but ‘all the towns were against him’. In the spring of 1868 there were riots at Bordeaux, Toulouse and Montauban. ‘Aged and much depressed’ in Cowley’s opinion, little by little the emperor gave ground. Censorship became less rigorous while socialist meetings were tolerated – they could be held in specified dancehalls so long as a policeman was present. Perceived as weakness, the concessions merely resulted in even worse riots.
Meanwhile, Henri de Rochefort was making the imperial family a laughing stock in his paper La Lanterne, whose title evoked the lampposts on which aristocrats had been lynched during the Revolution. Not even the Prince Imperial’s dog Nero escaped his mockery, while he alleged that the empress used plaster-of-Paris for make-up. As Mme des Garets reminds us, Eugénie always took politics personally and could be deeply hurt by a sneering reference to her in a debate or in a hostile article. La Lanterne drew blood.
Among ‘the infamous gibes with which Rochefort harried me’, the one that upset her most appeared during the summer of 1868. Nearly forty years later, she still remembered it with resentment: ‘Her Majesty the empress of the French presided yesterday at the Council of Ministers’, wrote Rochefort. ‘How surprised I should be if I learned that Mme Pereire had presided at the administrative council of the Crédit Mobilier’ (her husband was the bank’s chairman). The insinuation that she was incapable of taking part in the country’s government because she was a woman infuriated Eugénie.
The empress was even attacked by Bonapartists, or at any rate by Persigny. There had already been angry exchanges at Council meetings. (Once, when he remained grimly silent after a fierce argument, she observed, ‘M. de Persigny, you aren’t saying anything.’ ‘No, Madame.’ ‘Then you ought to stay at home instead of coming here and getting on my nerves.’) She knew very well that behind her back he was always grumbling about ‘the Spanish woman’. In November 1867 she had intercepted a letter from him to the emperor in which, after various blatantly insincere compliments – ‘nobility of the Empress’s mind’, etc. – he complained of her presence at the Council of Ministers and of the ‘detestable ideas’ that she was constantly urging on them.
Losing her temper, Eugénie told her husband excitedly that she would never set foot in the Council again if she was going to be exposed to insults of this sort. ‘Calm yourself,’ said Napoleon in his usual quiet and gentle way. ‘This new foolishness of Persigny is unimportant. It is my view that you should attend the Council of Ministers, and you will not cease to sit there. It is I who am master.’ Although the empress was reassured, she nonetheless sat down and wrote ‘a pretty strong letter’ to Persigny, who prudently stopped coming to court.
The ‘detestable ideas’ included her conviction that, for the moment at least, a constitutional monarchy could not possibly work in France. Always more realistic than her husband, as well as more pessimistic, she saw only too clearly that the left had never forgiven Napoleon for shooting them down in 1851 and that it would never do so under any circumstances. His coup had erected a permanent ‘barrier of blood’. In her opinion, his best solution would be for him to wait for the Prince Imperial to come of age in 1874, grant a constitution and then abdicate immediately. (By now both he and Eugénie were ready to contemplate abdicating in a few years time, even with eagerness, so long as the dynasty could be saved, which shows the extent of their weariness.) A new emperor with an unstained reputation might be able to attract the support essential for a viable constitutional monarchy.
‘I was always opposed to the emperor proceeding any further with liberal reforms’, she told Augustin Filon in 1903. ‘In my opinion my husband ought to have stayed exactly where he was – political freedom should have been granted when his son succeeded to the throne.’ When Filon asked what she thought was likely to have happened under so young and inexperienced a ruler, she replied, ‘I would have relied with confidence on the innate generosity of the French nation.’
Nor did Eugénie fancy losing control of foreign policy at such a dangerous time, a prospect she dreaded, French chauvinism was not to be trusted, as could be seen only too easily from the luridly anti-Prussian articles that were appearing in the popular and now uncensored press. Among left and right alike, fashionable patriotism verged on xenophobia.
There was also a possibility, one which Eugénie found intolerable, that the ministers of a constitutional monarchy might abandon Rome and the embattled Pope Pius. Napoleon had withdrawn the French garrison at the end of 1866, but on the firm understanding that the Italian government would respect the city’s independence. Early in October 1867, however, it was learned that Garibaldi had raised a band of volunteers with whom he intended to seize the city. Every French Catholic was outraged at the news, including Eugénie. ‘Rome or death’ was Garibaldi’s melodramatic slogan – on hearing of it, she retorted, ‘Death if they really want it, but certainly not Rome.’
The Council of Ministers, urged on by the empress, decided to send a relief expeditionary force to Rome without delay. On 3 October General Failly reached Mentana outside the city, where a hard fought battle was taking place between the Papal army (mainly French Catholics) and the Garibaldisti. His men arrived just in time to save the pope’s troops from defeat, mowing down the poorly armed enemy with their new, long-range chassepot rifles. Many regarded the victory as a personal triumph for Eugénie.
In France, all the anticlericals, who included every socialist, were angered. The emperor Franz-Joseph’s visit to Paris, to see the last days of the Exposition Universelle, coincided with the Roman crisis, and on his arrival at the Hôtel de Ville with Napoleon and Eugénie the three were greeted by booing, the air ringing with yells of ‘Vive Garibaldi!’ to the horror of the poor Metternichs. Fortunately, it was the only unpleasant incident in an otherwise successful visit.
From 1866 onwards the cost of living soared, and by 1868 many workers in Paris and other big cities were living on the edge of starvation. Inevitably they turned against the government, the opposition going from strength to strength. At the end of 1867 a well-organised confrontation with the police took place at the grave of Dr Baudin (whose sole distinction was to have been shot down on the barricades in 1851), ending in sixty-two arrests. A new socialist newspaper, Le Reveil, was founded in 1868 by Delescluze, an old enemy of Napoleon who had returned from serving a prison sentence in Guyana. Preaching the Jacobin gospel of 1792, it was far more dangerous than Rochefort’s light-hearted La Lanterne, which was banned in the autumn – to resume publication in Brussels. At by-elections opposition deputies were returned with hugely increased majorities; among them was Leon Gambetta.
Napoleon III appeared to be losing control, although no one underestimated his resourcefulness. He was well aware that even if he managed to persuade the army to try and mount another coup d’état like that of 1851, it would almost certainly fail. Every aspect of their régime was under attack. When the news broke in 1868 that because of Baron Haussmann’s megalomaniac management the finances of Paris were teetering on the brink of total bankruptcy, the opposition gleefully exploited the scandal, publishing a pamphlet which bore the inspired title of Les Comptes fantastiques d’Haussmann. Parisians had neither forgotten nor forgiven the way that they had been evicted from their houses during the capital’s rebuilding.
During the prize-giving at the Lycée Bonaparte in August 1868, when the twelve-year-old Prince Imperial distributed the prizes, the son of General Cavaignac (a republican leader who had been arrested in 1851) refused to go up to the dais and accept his prize from the Prince. A few boyish shouts of ‘Vive la République!’ rang out. The Prince was driven back to Fontainebleau in tears, where the court was in residence. His father was unconcerned. ‘In any case Louis would one day have had to learn that there is such a thing as an opposition’, he replied philosophically when Eugénie demanded the punishment of those involved. After dinner, when Octave Feuillet was sitting at a window he heard strange laughter which made him shudder. It was the empress. The ‘terrible laugh’ stopped, but then he heard it again. About an hour later, she joined those sitting in the garden, sniffing a large bottle of ether and muttering, ‘My poor little boy!’ Such fits of hysteria were rare – in Feuillet’s letters she is usually calm personified – and it shows that she was on the verge of a breakdown.
On the whole, however, Eugénie appeared to be astonishingly self-controlled, and as handsome as always. If photographs reveal that she was ageing, she still cast a spell. Feuillet had written a few weeks earlier that none of the great beauties of French history had walked through the drawing-rooms of Fontainebleau ‘with so graceful, so buoyant and so pleasing an air’. He added, ‘She seemed twenty!’
The trouble was not confined to Paris. There was strike after strike in the industrial areas of France, always politically inspired. Frequently troops had to be sent in to restore order. As in the capital, demonstrators marched through the streets of provincial cities, shouting for a revolution and roaring out the banned Marseillaise – not from patriotism but because of its association with 1793.
Napoleon’s tactics were to give the socialists their head until they terrified the bourgeoisie into rallying to him. But the tactics did not work. When a general election was finally held in 1869 the government candidates received four and a half million votes and the opposition parties five and a half million – although barely a million were for extremists. The main stream left polled two million and a half, the new ‘third party’ of former government supporters just over a million, ‘Night after night large numbers would be arrested as rioters and revolutionists, and locked up in the prison of Mazas, or sent to the casemates of Fort Bicêtre’, Elihu Washbourne, America’s newly arrived minister, recalled. The atmosphere grew more and more explosive – the emperor could only pray that bourgeois France would turn to him in time.
Rioting in Paris was nearly out of control and The Times warned readers to expect another French Revolution at any moment. There were rumours that risings would take place all over Paris, so troops were billeted in the Tuileries. One evening Napoleon suggested to Eugénie that they ought to visit them. She refused, objecting, ‘It will remind everybody of that dinner of October 1789, when Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were at the bodyguards’ dinner party.’ But she changed her mind and went to see them the next day.
‘Everybody here is frightened without knowing why’, Mérimée wrote to Doña Maria Manuela at about this time. ‘It is a little like the feeling one has when the Commendatore [in Don Giovanni] is about to appear.’ And in retrospect the more plain-spoken Alfred Verly, whose father commanded the Cent Gardes, wrote ‘As if by instinct, one sensed that an explosion was coming. Everywhere there was indefinable menace.’
Filon conveys vividly the tense atmosphere at a gala evening in the Tuileries in 1869 with a riot going on outside. On this occasion a state dinner was followed by a play, a ball and then supper, in honour of Queen Sophie of Holland and Grand Duchess Marie of Russia.
During the play telegram after telegram is delivered to the emperor, who does not open any of them, but continues to applaud the actors as if he does not have a care in the world. Everybody else is anxious and horribly ill at ease – many cannot help glancing at the windows that look on to the Place du Carrousel over which an infuriated mob is swarming. Waldteufel’s orchestra is playing its most enchanting waltzes and five or six couples have ventured on to the dance floor – tonight, waltzing is an act of loyalty to the Empire. When the music stops we can hear the yells of the mob outside as they are charged by the police. There are many empty tables. Staying to supper is a sign of real courage.
Filon added, ‘Every evening was more or less like this, over a period of many weeks. And all the time one could not help thinking of the scenes that had taken place in this same palace eighty years before, of another sovereign who had suffered the same agony of mind.’ Eugénie’s courtiers were remembering how the Swiss Guard had been massacred during the storming of the Tuileries in 1792, and what had happened to Marie-Antoinette.
The most violent of the riots occurred on the four evenings of 7–11 June, when it was not only the Tuileries that was under threat. Despite the detachments of cavalry that were patrolling the streets, many shops and houses in the more affluent areas of Paris had their windows broken, and well-dressed people were molested and robbed. Foreigners began to leave the city in droves. Just as Napoleon had foreseen, many of those Frenchmen who had voted against his government in the election now began to see him as France’s only hope.
On the afternoon of 12 June, accompanied by Eugénie, the emperor deliberately drove from Saint-Cloud into Paris in an open landau, with no escort other than a single outrider. They went down the rue de Rivoli and the boulevard de Sevastopol towards the great boulevards which, as they knew, were packed with demonstrators – they might easily have been driving to their deaths. The crowd in the boulevards was so dense that the landau was forced to a snail’s pace and at times had to stop altogether. When the couple were recognised by the mob, instead of lynching them on the spot it saluted their courage by giving cheer after cheer for the emperor and empress.
The rioting started to die down. For the moment it looked as if Napoleon had at last succeeded in re-establishing his authority. Troops ceased to patrol the Paris streets. ‘After the quiet of the last two or three evenings, we may fairly conclude that the election riots of 1869 are over’, Whitehurst reported on 14 June. However, he warned his readers that the ‘affair … is only adjourned till the day when the Chamber is to open’. A fortnight later he wrote, ‘The empress presided over a Cabinet Council yesterday. Nobody works harder than the empress, nobody has read much more, and nobody perhaps is now so interested in the politics of France.’
Then in August the emperor suddenly became alarmingly ill from his bladder complaint, so ill that he suffered attacks of delirium. Once again, the bourgeoisie lived in fear of revolution and, when there were rumours at the end of the month that he was dying, the bourse fell dramatically. Nobody believed the bland official statements that he was in no danger or that he was merely indisposed by a bout of rheumatism. He made a speedy recovery at the beginning of September, however, making very carefully judged public appearances.
The ‘Sphinx of the Tuileries’ decided that it was time to play his last hand. Aware that Eugénie would disapprove, he sent her out of France, as far away as possible.