In March 1874 the Prince Imperial celebrated his eighteenth birthday. Had the Second Empire survived, this would have been the moment when his father abdicated to make way for ‘Napoleon IV’. He possessed all the right qualities and his mother can scarcely be blamed for believing that one day her son might go home in triumph.
A royalist challenge which at the time appeared extremely serious, causing considerable alarm at Chislehurst, had receded. In the previous autumn the Legitimist pretender, the childless Comte de Chambord had recognised the Orleanist pretender, the Comte de Paris, as his successor; in October the president of the National Assembly had promised its overwhelmingly royalist majority that the Bourbon monarchy would be restored within three weeks.
‘Henri V’ would only return on his own terms, however. A man of inflexible principles who seemed to have stepped straight out of a novel by Sir Walter Scott, he embodied the old France and refused to return unless the white standard of the ancien régimecame with him and replaced the tricolore. This single issue prevented an otherwise certain restoration – the pope commenting, ‘Whoever heard of a man giving up a throne for a napkin?’ In any case, the royalists’ peasant supporters were deserting them, even in the Vendée, alarmed by rumours that a king might bring back feudal dues and clerical tithes.
French royalism should not be dismissed too lightly. It enjoyed a large following among intellectuals, especially historians, until the Second World War. During the late 1870s, however, after Chambord’s political suicide, the only possible form of monarchy for France was Bonapartism. It was quite clear that many royalists could be won over, just as they had been under the Second Empire – anything was better, in their eyes, than a republic.
A large number of the French people thought the new republican régime too undignified for a great European nation with a long, glorious history. It lacked the still potent magic of monarchy. Even on the left many found themselves sympathising with the gibe, ‘Que la république était beau sous l’empire’ (‘How beautiful the Republic was under the Empire’). Despite being blamed for the suffering and humiliation it had brought upon France in 1870–1, Bonapartism remained a viable political creed, so long as it possessed a really able leader. It stood for the reconciliation of the old France and the new, unlike royalism or republicanism. At the same time, in a harsher economic climate, the Second Empire’s prosperity was recalled with nostalgia. Should the Third Republic fail, then the empire was the only possible alternative.
‘If the people wanted to bring back a dynasty, that is the one dynasty they would choose,’ admitted Adolphe Thiers who prided himself on his realism, even if he thought the republic was likely to last for a long time. He added, ‘The Napoleons are genuine democrats’.
When the Prince Imperial (who called himself the ‘Comte de Pierrefonds’) had left the church after his father’s funeral the crowd had cried, ‘Vive Napoléon IV!’, but he had told them to cry ‘Vive la France!’ instead. On his eighteenth birthday 6,000 people came to Chislehurst to cheer him. Among them were fourteen deputies from the National Assembly, sixty-five former imperial prefects and a large number of retired army officers – there should have been plenty of serving officers too, but the republican government had promised them they would be cashiered if they crossed the Channel. Still more significant, was a large group of Parisian workmen. Again, there were cries of ‘Vive Napoléon IV!’, and again he showed restraint.
After this triumphant demonstration many observers began to think that the Prince Imperial’s restoration was only a matter of time. However, he himself had recently assured a French journalist that under no circumstances would he contemplate mounting acoup d’état, quoting his father as saying that his own coup had always been a millstone round his neck. Only when France was threatened by ‘anarchy’ (or revolution) and needed him, was he going to return. He owed at least some of his realism to his mother, who knew just how much the world had changed in the last thirty years.
The empress had very mixed feelings about a restoration. ‘I have to admit that the thought of making any move towards regaining the crown of France, a crown of thorns, leaves me cold,’ she confided to Doña Maria Manuela in March 1876. ‘I think that France is quite ungovernable unless her vanity and self-love are satisfied.’
Meanwhile, Plon-Plon’s behaviour was more deplorable than ever. As soon as Napoleon III died, he demanded that Eugénie should hand the boy over to him for his education, infuriating both mother and son. In the election of 1876 he stood against Rouher, splitting the Bonapartists into conservatives and semi-republicans. The prince was bitterly opposed to Plon-Plon’s peculiar version of Bonapartism, telling his supporters that ‘Prince Napoleon stands as a candidate… against my wishes.’ In any case he loathed the man.
He was well aware that the bulk of the vote in favour of the liberal empire had come from the peasants, who on the whole were conservative and Catholic, even if they did not always trust their priests. It had never come from free-thinking intellectuals. He remembered the advice in his father’s will, to familiarise himself with the writings of the prisoner of St Helena, ‘so that when the time comes he will not forget that the ordinary people’s cause is France’s cause’. Most of these ‘ordinary people’ were peasants.
Always a realist, Eugénie was horrified by the rift between her son and his cousin. She realised that it was a feud which might alienate valuable supporters. Plon-Plon was ageing but his followers included one or two brilliant young men (notably the future historian Frédéric Lemasson) and their loss could seriously damage her son’s cause. But in this instance Louis refused to take her advice.
In 1872 the prince had entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. ‘The Shop’, as cadets called it, was in Kent and in those days just outside London, a place where they were trained for entry into the artillery or the engineers. He desperately wanted to become a gunner in the footsteps of the first Bonaparte. Cheerfully accepting the inevitable horseplay and ragging, he got on well with his fellow cadets and made several good friends.
The Duke of Cambridge, the commander-in-chief, was present at his ‘passing out’ at Woolwich in February 1875 and was impressed by the cadets’ drill. ‘The Prince Imperial drilled them remarkably well when called upon,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The Empress Eugénie was present throughout the day…. The Prince Imperial took the 7th place in the List, a most excellent position for a Cadet 11 months younger than the greater portion of his class, and who had to study in a foreign language.’ The duke also noted that he took first place in riding and fencing.
Although ‘Louis’ was an only child, Eugénie was a surprisingly unpossessive mother. (Admittedly this is not the impression that one has from Tissot’s portrait of the two in which, heavily middle-aged and bursting with pride, she stands beside her son in his pillbox cap.) When he discussed politics with key supporters such as Rouher, she kept out of sight and never tried to interfere, while she made him financially independent with a generous settlement.
The British royal family’s friendship was a constant encouragement. Victoria had already written, ‘For the peace of Europe, the Queen thinks that it would be best if the Prince Imperial were ultimately to succeed.’ She had the young man to stay at Osborne where she took a great fancy to him – he was said to be the only person other than John Brown who was not frightened of her. The Prince of Wales invited him to receptions at Marlborough House and took him to his club next door in Pall Mall, the Marlborough. (Until the end of his life the future architect of the ‘Entente Cordiale’ between Britain and France thought that Bonapartism was the form of government best suited to the French.)
Earlier biographers – some of them extremely well informed, such as Roger Sencourt – were convinced that Eugénie and Victoria hoped Louis would marry the queen’s youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, despite the difference in religion. Certainly he met her a good deal, since she accompanied her mother on the latter’s visits to Camden Place, but her son Lord Carisbrooke told Harold Kurtz that there was no truth in the story of an intended marriage and that she had never been in love with the Prince. In any case, he was in no hurry to marry – a wife might hinder his activities as pretender. There were also rumours that he had his eye on a German or Swedish princess, but he told Filon they were untrue.
The French left tried to discredit the former empress with a smear campaign, a socialist newspaper pretending it had seen evidence that Don Cipriano had died three years before she was born so that she must be illegitimate. When Maria Manuela sued the paper in the Paris courts, she won the case but was awarded derisory damages.
There were attempts by the French press to discredit the prince too, with allegations that he was a dismal young man, repressed and joyless. In reality, he was tall, vigorous and strikingly handsome, noticeably cheerful and with a quick, enquiring mind – he even read Karl Marx. Although he concealed it, he was deeply religious, while he had an intimation that he would die violently and drew a strange, haunting sketch of a young hero being received by the Angel of Death. He got on well with his mother, who was understandably proud of him. ‘I don’t know why everybody grumbled about Camden Place,’ she later told Mme Filon. ‘For me it was heaven.’ Filon commented, ‘Those four years, 1875 to 1879, were happy years for her, probably almost the happiest of her entire life.’
As a devout Catholic, in 1876 the prince visited Rome where he saw the pope, old Pius IX, who told him he hoped that he would soon be restored to the French throne, for the sake of both France and the Church. When he visited Sweden two years later, he was treated as a reigning sovereign. He spent much of his leave in Switzerland at Arenenberg, once Queen Hortense’s château, with his mother, and brother officers from his regiment.
He was eager to see some fighting and in 1878 was advised by Baron Stoffel to join the army of Austria-Hungary, then preparing to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina. Eugénie disagreed. ‘You’ll spend all your time in an Austrian garrison, playing billiards and making love to an Italian singer,’ she warned. ‘If there’s a war, you’ll find yourself fighting the poor Turks, who are France’s allies. And politics in the Balkans change so fast and unexpectedly that it might even mean your fighting against the Russians, whose Tsar spoke to you like a father at Woolwich four years ago.’ However, when the prince applied to the Austrian authorities, Franz-Joseph politely refused his request.
The empress watched French politics, closely. She understood why Marshal MacMahon was so inadequate as president, ‘standing for nothing, supported by nobody’, prophesying his outmanoeuvring and downfall. She also saw that the key republican was Gambetta and, unlike most observers, she appreciated that what he wanted was power to build his sort of France. In her opinion he was her son’s greatest rival.
Eugénie had no time for romantic conservatives, blinkered by tradition. ‘Your view of the world is straight out of the Middle Ages,’ she wrote to Doña Maria Manuela in 1876. ‘Someone of real ability has to have on his side what you call the Popular Hydra, because no one can resist it any longer. The kings, princes and nobles have weakened each other too much down the centuries so that even when they ally it is no use. We have to deal with new forces.’
Nor was Eugénie surprised when during the following year North America had to call in troops to break strikes. ‘I see that you are worried about what is happening in the United States,’ she remarked to her mother. ‘The railroad strikes and the accompanying violence are certainly very serious, but they do not surprise me, and I’m sure they will find imitators in Europe. The more civilisation progresses, the hollower it becomes and the easier to destroy, and – don’t let us deceive ourselves – today’s problems are much more social than political.’ Like her late husband, she knew that western society’s greatest challenge lay in satisfying its working classes.
The prince derived his political views from his mother, although he was already much more cynical. Noting the far from revolutionary programme of the republicans who took over from Marshal MacMahon, he told a friend, ‘After ten years of a régime like this, France will be ruled like the United States, by a clique of politicians who have failed in other careers, whose game lies in exploiting their popularity.’
In 1879 war broke out with the Zulus. The prince’s regiment stayed at Aldershot, but he was determined to see active service at the front. ‘I’m always being reminded that the Orleans princes have seen plenty of fighting while I’ve seen none,’ he told Eugénie when she tried to dissuade him. Those who did the reminding were republican and royalist papers in Paris, who sneered that he had deserted the French army before Sedan and had grown into a colourless imitation of an Englishman. Threatening to resign his commission and enlist as a private, he pestered the queen and the Duke of Cambridge as commander-in-chief, so eloquently that in the end he was allowed to go out as an observer attached to the staff.
He sailed from Southampton on 27 February 1879. Eugénie had travelled down with him, on a special train supplied by the queen, to say goodbye at the boat. Joining General Lord Chelmsford’s army at Durban, he was under Chelmsford’s quarter-master, Colonel Harrison, with orders that he was to be treated like any other young staff officer except that he must always have an escort. He enjoyed sleeping under the stars and skirmishing, charging a party of Zulus sword in hand. He also helped to capture a kraal. The enemy, ferocious opponents, had just wiped out a British force at Isandhlwana.
‘I should hate to be killed in an obscure skirmish,’ he told a French journalist. ‘Dying in a big battle would be all right, the hand of providence. But not in a mere skirmish.’ The journalist, Paul Deléage, was amazed at how different he was from the caricatures in the French press. ‘This was not some little princeling, but an impressive and commanding personality gifted with enormous charm, and a complete Frenchman.’
All the odds were on the young man coming home safe and sound, but his mother’s intuition gave her no peace. ‘I’ve lost all confidence and expect only bad news,’ she lamented to Maria Manuela on 9 April. A month later she declared, ‘I shall end up mad if this awful uneasiness goes on torturing me.’
On 1 June Harrison encamped at Itelezi Ridge, sending out a scout party of six troopers under a Lieutenant Carey. The prince rode with them. There was no sign of the enemy and about noon they halted at a deserted kraal, dismounting for a brief rest. Suddenly shots rang out and over forty Zulus appeared from the long grass a few yards away. Remounting in panic, the party rode for their lives, two being killed by Zulu bullets. As the prince remounted a strap broke and he fell to the ground, his horse bolting.
A trooper who had hidden in the rocks nearby watched what took place. The prince got up and made a run for it, but after a quarter of mile realised he had no chance. Turning, he drew his revolver and advanced to meet the Zulus, who threw assegais at him. Moving his revolver to his left hand and picking up an assegai with his right, he continued to walk towards them. In a moment he fell dead beneath a hail of assegais – when found, he had seventeen wounds, all in front. Later the Zulus said, ‘he died like a lion’.
The news did not reach England until 19 June. Informed by the telegraph office, Queen Victoria sent Lord Sydney to break it to the empress before she learned from the newspapers. She did not cry, but sat down staring into space. For over a month she sat in a darkened bedroom, refusing even to go into the garden. When the body came home, she rushed down the stairs and embraced the coffin, staying with it until dawn without a word or a tear.
The Queen, who visited Camden Place almost weekly, wanted a monument to the Prince placed in Westminster Abbey. When the idea was rejected by the House of Commons, she had a fine funeral effigy set up in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. (A statue erected at Woolwich is now at Sandhurst.) She attended the requiem at the Catholic church at Chislehurst, together with the Princess of Wales and Princess Beatrice, while the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Connaught and the Duke of Cambridge were among the pallbearers. The prince was given full military honours, officers marching with sabres reversed to the beat of muffled drums. The crowd was estimated at 40,000. But Eugénie stayed in her darkened room, where Victoria visited her.
In his will the Prince Imperial excluded Plon-Plon from the succession – ‘when I am dead, the work of Napoleon I and Napoleon III falls on the eldest son of Prince Napoleon’. Eugénie tried to stop the will becoming widely known, aware that it would split the party irretrievably. Rouher published the will, however, and from now on there were two Bonapartist parties, those of Plon-Plon and Prince Victor Napoleon – a father and son who hated each other. Although Eugénie treated Victor Napoleon as emperor of the French, and for a time did not altogether despair of a restoration, she realised that now there was very little hope for Bonapartism.
Eugénie had prayed so long and fervently for her son’s return that for a moment she questioned if there was any point in praying for anything. In the end, however, she decided that his death might have been providential. ‘But I often say to myself, rather he is dead than think of him as an emperor,’ she confided to a friend. ‘To think of his perhaps going through it all – de passer par là où j’ai du passer … ah!’ She wished she had never given birth to him, telling Victoria that his parentage was fatal. ‘Because of my race, I bestowed the quixotic gift, that readiness to sacrifice everything for an ideal, while the emperor bequeathed the traditions of his family. And in the mid-nineteenth century when materialism is engulfing us!’
She wore black for the rest of her long life and would sometimes say, ‘I died in 1879.’