Although Eugénie was alarmed at the prospect of the Second Empire being transformed into a constitutional monarchy, she decided during her Suez trip that nothing could stop Napoleon III from doing so. In a letter to the emperor, written on 27 October on her way along the Nile to Aswân, she explained her position to him. ‘The only way forward is to go on with the concessions you have granted … it is essential to show the country that we are following ideas, not expedients.’ She added, ‘I don’t believe in violence and I am convinced that we cannot mount a coup d’état twice in a reign.’
The ‘Liberal Empire’ was not forced upon Napoleon. He had been slowly feeling his way towards it for many years. At the very beginning of his reign, in 1851, he had promised that one day he would grant a constitution, and he had been making concessions since 1860 when, encouraged by Morny, he had issued a decree allowing free discussion in the Senate and Corps Législatif, giving the press permission to publish full reports of the debates. Nor did he surrender his powers in 1869 purely because of pressure from the opposition, and as the only means of saving his throne. Even if he was sorry to part with such faithful ministers as Rouher, as Theodore Zeldin observed, the liberal empire ‘was not the victory of the opposition, but of a new party composed of both opponents and supporters of the old régime’. Nevertheless, the changeover to a constitutional monarchy was going to be a nerve-racking leap in the dark.
Recognising that there had been a complete regrouping of political forces in France, the emperor had waited for the emergence of a liberal majority that would accept his dynasty. He dared not try out a new system until this happened, which explains why the extremists thought they had him on the run and organised so many riots. Yet, far from being a defeat for him as so many observers thought, the 1869 elections had been a relief since they meant a viable solution.
Out of 300 deputies only about thirty red republicans of the Left wanted to overthrow the Second Empire. Most of the other republican deputies, many of whom were in any case conservatives, were prepared to keep Napoleon III as their sovereign. So were a majority of the Orleanist deputies, who in an ideal world might have preferred the Comte de Paris (‘Philippe VII’). Not even Legitimists were ready to bring down the régime if it meant another revolution. Understandably, however, it was going to take months of negotiation between the various groupings before achieving a majority that could form a government.
Although it was widely suspected that Eugénie had deep reservations about a liberal empire, practically nobody except her husband understood what they were. At the same time, most politicians – and certainly the French public at large – overestimated her influence on the emperor. When the left demanded that the chambers should be summoned at the end of October, under the impression they were about to form a government, and Napoleon refused to do so until the end of the following month, many people blamed the empress. They were convinced that the date had been put back so that she could return in time to block the appointment of a liberal administration – perhaps, even, to urge her husband to launch another coup d’état.
In fact, Eugénie did not return until 5 December. Despite fears that there would be a revolution on 26 October and the left’s threat to occupy the Corps Législatif, nothing happened. This was largely because the emperor made carefully judged public appearances to show that he was in control. The opening of the new legislature took place in the Salle des États at the Louvre on 29 November, when Napoleon received an ovation. Yet the atmosphere at the opening was not entirely pleasant. ‘When our big carriage started back along the rue de Rivoli, it was surrounded by a vicious mob, bursting with hate, who hurled jeers and insults at us,’ said Pauline in her memoirs. Obviously the crowd had recognised the Metternichs’ black and yellow carriage as that of the empress’s best friend. Pauline muttered to her husband, ‘the Empire is over’.
On her return to France, Eugénie immediately fell under suspicion of being the leader of the ‘Mamelukes’ (so-called after the first Napoleon’s faithful Egyptian bodyguard), authoritarian Bonapartists like Rouher, who were convinced that the only hope of salvation lay in a return to the 1851 régime – and, by implication, in a coup. Although they still fielded nearly ninety deputies out of the 300, and while she sympathised with their views, she realised that the Mamelukes’ ideas would no longer work in the new political climate. By now, however, the ‘Spanish woman’ was generally considered to be a reactionary of the blackest dye.
There was an interregnum before the Liberals could take power, with the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat as minister-president of the Council, and although he drafted a constitution a ministry still had to be formed. There was also the question of who would lead it since there was a dearth of politicians with any experience of constitutional monarchy – many of the veterans from Orleanist days had been defeated in the recent elections.
The septuagenarian Adolphe Thiers, once Louis-Philippe’s prime minister, was the obvious choice, but although his exclusion would make a dangerously spiteful enemy Napoleon still resented the way in which Thiers had sought to manipulate him in 1849–51, besides despising the old man as ‘a mental, moral and physical coward’.* Certainly, no one in their right mind would have trusted this brilliant, treacherous little intriguer, a mini-Talleyrand. Nominally an Orleanist if by now really a conservative republican, he had only one abiding principle, his own prosperity. (The Musée du Louvre still displays the Collection Thiers, that monument to petit-bourgeois greed.) In any case, he would have tried to reduce the emperor to a cypher.
Emile Ollivier was the man of the moment, a bespectacled lawyer from Marseilles in his forties, conceited, ambitious and glib to the point of oiliness, but who possessed an outstanding intellect and, very unlike Thiers, genuine integrity where money was concerned. He liked to think of himself as a new Mirabeau – the great tragic hero of 1789–90, who had hoped and failed to transform the ancien régime into a modern monarchy. Originally a hard-line republican ‘irreconcilable’, since 1860 he had believed firmly in the viability of a constitutional empire.
After discreet exploratory talks during the summer of 1869, Ollivier was informed by Napoleon that he was going to be the new government’s leader when in October, wearing a false beard and without his spectacles, he paid a secret visit to Compiègne after dark. The Mamelukes laughed at this melodramatic meeting, which they wryly compared to Annas visiting the high priest Caiaphas by night, but the two men quickly established an excellent working relationship. The emperor began sending Ollivier state papers on a regular basis.
On 2 January 1870 it was officially announced that Emile Ollivier was to be the head of the empire’s first elected government. He would scarcely be a prime minister, however, since the emperor would continue to preside over the Council of Ministers. Four of the new administration’s ministers were former Bonapartist deputies, if definitely not Mamelukes, such as the Marquis de Talhouët-Roy, minister for public works, while the other four had been Orleanists, notably Comte Daru, who became foreign minister.
Many former opponents now accepted the Second Empire as the only form of French monarchy that was viable. The opposition’s noisy violence helped them make up their minds. In March 1868 Whitehurst had observed how ‘social fusion’ was increasing. ‘I could point out a dozen of the old Legitimist and Orleanist names which have been announced this year by the servants at the Tuileries.’ Twelve months later he had explained to his readers that ‘Every cry of “Vive la République!” rallies to the reigning dynasty everyone who has saved money, bought Rentes or taken shares.’
The court had changed. Filon tells us that people who had known it ten years earlier did not recognise it. The loose women had gone. He quoted a conversation overheard in the Saint-Cloud smoking-room: ‘Nothing but a boarding-school,’ grumbled a gentleman, to which another replied, ‘You mean a nursery.’ The tutor explained that this was because of all the children in the château – the Prince Imperial, his friend Louis Conneau (the court doctor’s son), the empress’s nieces and Mme Walewska’s two daughters. Even so, receptions at the Tuileries continued, especially for visiting sovereigns.
Reluctantly, Napoleon agreed to Ollivier’s demand that the empress should no longer attend meetings of the Council of Ministers. The reason given to the press was ‘to stop opinions which she does not hold being attributed to her, and so that she will not be suspected of possessing an influence to which she does not aspire’. There was an element of truth in this, but it is more likely that Ollivier was anxious that his government should not share in the ‘Spanish woman’s’ unpopularity. And no doubt he remembered Rochefort’s jibe about a woman being allowed to preside over the Council.
Eugénie had first met Ollivier in 1865, when as a keen supporter of penal reform he had encouraged her to visit the La Roquette prison. He had been so impressed by her intellect that he compared her to ‘a heroine from Corneille’, soon revised his judgement. At the end of December in the same year he had discussed the empress with Dr Libreicht, Doña Maria Manuela’s occulist. ‘We shared our impressions, which are very similar,’ he noted in his journal. ‘A passionate but not an affectionate nature, intelligent but without finesse, courageous, noble, but in a theatrical way and a bit of a Don Quixote – keener on doing good for the effect it produces than for any pleasure in it. Fickle, needs excitement.’
By 1870 he thoroughly disliked her, and not only because she was a political enemy: he realised her low opinion of him. If Paléologue can be believed, she thought he was nothing more than ‘a clumsy Utopian, a pretentious wind-bag’. Although she had told him before her departure for Suez that she would no longer take an active part in politics and restrict her public activities to good works, he knew it did not stop her from criticising him in private to the Mamelukes and to her husband. Nor was he soothed by her pleasure at seeing him badly bitten by a pet monkey she had brought back from Egypt.
Meanwhile, the ‘windbag’ was full of bland reassurance about the political future. ‘We are going to give the emperor a happy old age’, Ollivier promised confidently. At first he and his administration seemed popular enough. His dismissal of Baron Haussmann as Prefect of the Seine was applauded, Haussmann’s mismanagement of the capital’s finances having provided the perfect excuse. He was even elected a member of the Académie Française, which until now had always been a bastion of opposition to the Second Empire and anybody connected with it.
Yet not all was well with the new régime. Although Ollivier was the government’s leader, officially he was not even premier but merely minister of justice. When savaged in the Corps Législatif by Thiers, he cut an embarrassingly ineffectual figure. Strikes continued throughout the winter, some of them very serious indeed, troops shooting down strikers in self-defence more than once.
The Orleanist and the conservative republican deputies were horrified when Ollivier announced in April that, at the emperor’s insistence, a plebiscite would be held to approve the constitutional reforms. The first plebiscite since 1852, this was a piece of old-fashioned, authoritarian Bonapartism and, adding insult to injury, was known to be the brain-child of Rouher, leader of the Mamelukes. Talhouët-Roy and Daru promptly resigned in protest. Extremist republicans did not object, however, since they were convinced that voters would reject the liberal empire.
There could have been no worse choice for Daru’s successor as foreign minister than the arrogant and incompetent Alfred-Agénor, Duc de Gramont, who was appointed early in May. When a very young man he had been lured away from Legitimism by the emperor for decorative purposes at the Tuileries, and his career as ambassador at Rome and Vienna had begun as a reward for deigning to ornament the imperial court, in the hope that other Legitimists would follow suit. Almost excessively pro-Austrian, he had become the sworn foe of Bismarck, who despised him.
The impossible Bonaparte relations had caused yet another embarrassing scandal. This time it was not Plon-Plon but the even more dreadful Pierre Bonaparte, who was the culprit. On 10 January the ‘Corsican wild boar’, already credited with several murders in various foreign countries, shot in cold blood and at point-blank range an unfortunate journalist named Victor Noir, who had called on him to arrange a duel with Rochefort. ‘Could anything more resemble a “rowdy” quarrel in a Far West drinking bar, than this deadly interchange of blows and shots in the salon of a Prince of the Imperial Family?’ commented Felix Whitehurst. Noir’s funeral at Neuilly was attended by 50,000 angry mourners and the army had to patrol the streets. Arrested, Pierre Bonaparte was tried in March at Tours, to avoid further disturbances in the capital. He was found not guilty, after a travesty of a trial. Although the emperor had not intervened to secure his acquittal, the whole episode brought discredit on the dynasty and the régime.
The plebiscite, which was held on 8 May 1870, asked every adult male in France to vote for or against the following resolution, phrased with deliberate ambiguity: ‘The people approve the liberal reforms to the Constitution introduced since 1860 by the emperor with the cooperation of the great bodies of the State and ratify the Senate’s decree of 20 April 1870.’ Shortly before voting took place, the police discovered a plot to kill Napoleon at the Tuileries with explosives. Hundreds of socialists, all save a few of them innocent, were placed under arrest.
Even the emperor and Ollivier were astounded by the result of their referendum which resulted in over four times as many votes being cast in favour of the liberal empire as those against it – over 7 million compared with 1½ million. The socialists were confounded, leaders such as Gambetta thrown into despair. It was also a personal victory for the delighted Ollivier, who modestly hailed it as a French Königgrätz.
Had Napoleon III died at this moment of victory, he would have gone down in history as one of France’s great hero-rulers, ranking with his uncle, with Louis XIV and with Henri IV in the national Pantheon.
‘Sire, the country is behind you,’ the president of the Senate assured him warmly at a triumphant ceremony at the Louvre. ‘France has entrusted her liberty to your protection and to that of your dynasty.’ Replying, the emperor told the assembly that he hoped to rally the honest men of all parties round the new constitution, to dispel any threat of revolution, to enlist everybody into the task of making France great and prosperous, and to see that education was available to all. ‘We must, at the present time more than ever, look fearlessly forward to the future.’ Whitehurst, who was present, tells us, ‘Then his Majesty bowed, and there arose such a cheer as is seldom heard in Paris.’
When he returned to the Tuileries, Napoleon embraced the Prince Imperial, telling him, ‘This has guaranteed your coronation – now we can look forward to the future, without fear.’ ‘Everything appeared to be reborn again,’ is how Princess Metternich described the atmosphere.
‘The ball of the plébiscite was the most splendid thing I ever saw,’ said Mrs Moulton, who extolled the festoons of lanterns and coloured lamps that illuminated the Tuileries gardens, the hundreds of orange trees in tubs, adding ‘there were about six thousand people invited, they said. It seemed as if all Paris was there.’ ‘After the quadrille d’honneur their Majesties circulated freely’, Lillie tells us. ‘Everyone was eager to offer congratulations to the emperor. Was it not the greatest triumph of his reign to have the unanimous vote of all France – this overwhelming proof of his popularity? As he stood there smiling, with a gracious acknowledgment of the many compliments, he looked radiantly happy…. As the emperor passed near me I added my congratulations, to which he replied, “Merci, je suis bien heureux.”’
On 1 June Whitehurst went to one of the smaller receptions given by Eugénie to celebrate her husband’s triumph. ‘The party was small, so not above eight or ten rooms were opened, and I should say that there were not more than five hundred people present,’ he said. ‘It was like going into the garden with Maud – there were so many flowers, the music was excellent, and when one heard the first valse echo through that glorious ball-room old times came back.’ He did not know that it was to be the very last of her receptions.
Amid all the rejoicing, Eugénie remained uneasy. The strain of recent years had played havoc with her nerves so that her temper, never her strong point, was less under control than ever. Yet her judgement remained cool enough and, always more realistic than Napoleon if not so calm, she did not forget the barrier raised by the 1852 coup. Despite liberalisation, she knew that the republicans would try to bring him down should they see an opportunity. Ollivier, vain and incapable of taking advice, was not a man to inspire her with confidence, nor was the conceited, dandified Gramont. It might almost be said that if the French did not trust the empress, neither did she trust the French – although she would never have admitted it.
For the moment, however, what was worrying her much more than the political situation inside France was the threat from abroad.