Most of the French did not take too seriously a war that was beginning in such gloriously sunny weather and with such catchy tunes. In any case, they believed their army was invincible. They thought they were only fighting Prussia, which, despite Königgrätz, they still insisted on seeing as a second-rate power, and that the minor German states would join in on their side: they did not foresee that, contrary to expectation, every German would be against them, just as in 1813.
Paris was in holiday mood – and when the troops marched past they were cheered to the echo by men in shirt sleeves whose wives carried picnic baskets and whose children blew tin trumpets. Despite being banned as revolutionary, the ‘Marseillaise’ was sung on every street corner, while all the musc halls and bars rang with the chorus of some new patriotic song.
One of these choruses from the back streets, to an anti-Prussian song which for a time became almost as popular as the ‘Marseillaise’, ran:
Oh Wilhelm, Oh you gross papa,
We’ll rub your nose in your own caca!
The Parisians were clearly in no doubt about who was going to win.
Yet it seems as if Eugénie very soon had second thoughts. Mrs Moulton had been asked to dine at Saint-Cloud on 17 July. When she and her husband arrived at the château, they were told by a chamberlain that the party had been cancelled but that all the same the empress would like them to stay for dinner. ‘And stay we did,’ says Lillie, ‘and I never regretted anything so much in my life.’
The two Americans were the only guests other than members of the household. Lillie had never seen Napoleon III look so ill and tired. ‘The emperor never uttered a word; the empress sat with her eyes fixed on the emperor, and did not speak to a single person. No one spoke. The emperor would receive telegram upon telegram; the gentleman sitting next to him opened the telegrams and put them before his Majesty. Every now and again the emperor would look across the table to the empress with such a distressed look it made me think that something terrible was happening.’
War with Prussia was officially declared on 19 July, although in reality France had been at war since the chambers had authorised the money for it four days earlier. When the Senate and Corps Législatif came out to Saint-Cloud to offer a loyal address on 18 July, in striking contrast to the euphoric optimism in the press and in the streets Napoleon emphasised in his speech of thanks that ‘We are entering upon a long and arduous war.’
Apparently the emperor’s misgivings frightened Eugénie. ‘A great country like France, so tranquil and prosperous, has embarked on a struggle which, even if it goes well, is bound to bring enormous destruction and misery,’ she confided to a courtier at Saint-Cloud. ‘France is fighting for her honour, but what a cataclysm there will be if the war goes against us. We have only a few cards to play. If we don’t win, France will not only be humiliated and plundered, but will suffer the worst revolution that the world has ever seen.’
On 20 July Princesse Mathilde went to see Napoleon at Saint-Cloud. He greeted her in his study, his face ashen, his eyelids puffy, his eyes dead, his legs shaky and his shoulders hunched. ‘Is it true you are taking command of the army?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘But you aren’t in a fit state to command anything!’ Mathilde burst out. ‘You can’t sit astride a horse, you can’t even bear being shaken up in a carriage. How are you going to manage during the fighting?’
The emperor answered ‘in a muffled voice’ that she was exaggerating, and ‘waved his hand in a gesture of resigned fatalism’.
Both he and the empress had decided that he had no other option than to lead the armies of France into battle. On 11 July, during a lucid interval from the stone and his laudanum, he had ordered that all three armies in any forthcoming German campaign must be under his personal command. After all, he was a Bonaparte. This was asking for trouble. ‘The campaign of 1859 had shown his total incapacity for generalship even when in good health,’ comments Sir Michael Howard.
On 26 July Eugénie was appointed regent for the third time. Two days later, accompanied by the fourteen-year-old Prince Imperial, Napoleon set out for the front. Much to the Parisians’ surprise, he did not ride out from his capital at the head of the Imperial Guard, as he had in 1859, but instead took the train to his headquarters at Metz. Very few people were allowed to know of his illness.
Augustin Filon was among the small group of courtiers who saw the emperor and the prince off from the little railway station at Saint-Cloud. He watched Eugénie drive past with Princess Clothilde on their way back to the château. Both women were in tears, although the empress had managed to remain dry-eyed while making the sign of the cross on her son’s forehead and telling him to do his duty. Another courtier, de Parieu, informed the tutor how when he had said to her that he thought the French would be wrong not to accept an offer of English mediation, if it materialised, she had replied, ‘I think so too.’ Clearly she was in a different mood from when she had discussed Prussian ‘guarantees’ with Gramont a fortnight before.
Filon became an extra private secretary to the empress, in charge of letters and telegrams in cypher. Although she was regent in name only, and did not attend Council meetings, he was struck by the determined way in which she worked at trying to persuade members of the opposition parties to support the war and also to gain allies among the European powers, even if Bismarck made this an unpromising task by publishing the emperor’s demand for Belgium in 1866 in return for letting Prussia have a free hand in South Germany.
The new private secretary was surprised at how Ollivier and his ministers seldom if ever bothered to inform the regent of their decisions. In their eyes her job was awarding the Légion d’honneur. Throughout the war Eugénie was almost totally dependent on Napoleon’s letters for news from the front; ironically this meant that she was better informed than any minister.
The French strategy was to invade Germany as quickly as possible with overwhelming superiority in numbers, striking either east across the Rhine or north into the Palatinate, and to win a crushing victory while the Prussian armies were still assembling. French generals were convinced that a spectacular success of this sort would immediately bring Austria into the conflict on their side – for weeks they refused to abandon their fantasies about Austrian intervention – and win over the South German states. Everyone, including even von Moltke, expected the campaign to be on German soil. Ollivier warned that French soldiers should not count on being given too warm a welcome by the Germans.
The chaos of French mobilisation and the incompetence of French staff work made such a plan out of the question. When the emperor’s train deposited him at Metz, he found just over 200,000 troops instead of the 385,000 he had been promised. ‘There was nothing anywhere but muddle, incoherence, delays, quarrels and confusion.’ The railway system could not cope while not only were there insufficient troops, but inadequate food and ammunition.
‘Nothing is ready here,’ a horrified Napoleon wrote to Eugénie two days after his arrival. ‘We don’t have enough troops so I think we have lost our chance of invading.’ His letter left her shattered, ‘just as if my arms and legs had been broken’. A new chaplain who arrived at Saint-Cloud next day, the Abbé Pujol, saw the empress still deeply upset, weeping openly at dinner and drying her tears with a napkin. ‘I’m good for nothing’, she told him. ‘A bad dispatch reaches me and I completely collapse. I am more of a wife and a mother than a regent, yet at the same time I long to give everything for France – I only want the good of France.’ Some historians interpret this outburst as a symptom of mental breakdown, but it was probably due to frustration at being excluded from any useful role in government.
On 2 August an offensive was at last launched, 60,000 French troops occupying the hills overlooking Saarbrücken, two miles across the frontier, where they met with resistance from a mere handful of the enemy. Napoleon wrote to Eugénie how the Prince Imperial had picked up a spent bullet. ‘He might have been strolling along the Bois de Boulogne,’ wrote his father. ‘Some men wept at seeing him so calm.’ For most of the time the boy had been in the carriage from which the emperor ‘directed’ operations – any attempt by Napoleon to mount a horse caused the poor man agony.
The French press magnified the ‘promenade militaire’ of Saarbrücken into a major advance during which the entire town had been burned to the ground after the annihilation of three Prussian divisions. Parisians were ecstatic at this first – and last – victory bulletin. Far from arousing admiration, however, Ollivier’s publication of Napoleon’s letter made the Prince Imperial a laughing stock in the republican papers, as ‘l’enfant de la balle’ inanely frolicking on the battlefield.
The Prussian army, with their Bavarian and Württemberger allies were by now ready to attack. Superior railways enabled them to outnumber the French, while their officers, although no braver, were certainly much better trained. Above all, they had Helmuth von Moltke, whose roaming general staff acted as ‘a nervous system’ that enabled him to control and direct enormous bodies of men.
On 4 August the emperor was informed that the enemy had crossed the frontier into Alsace and seized the town of Wissembourg. On 6 August Crown Prince Frederick-William overwhelmed the French at Froeschwiller (Worth), capturing 4,000 prisoners with thirty cannon. If General von Steinmetz was not quite so successful at Spicheren on the same day, he forced General Frossard into withdrawing. The Germans had secured the initiative, cutting off Marshal Bazaine’s troops from those of Marshal MacMahon.
These defeats were not catastrophic, but they put an end to any dreams of invading Germany or of acquiring allies. Franz-Joseph ordered the Austrian army to cease preparing for mobilisation. So did Victor-Emmanuel. ‘Aha, the poor emperor!’ commented the gentleman king (Il re galantuomo), ‘I’ve had a lucky escape.’