TWO
When Eugénie (no longer Eugenia) married Napoleon III in 1853, he was the most powerful ruler in the world. No other country in western Europe possessed such a large population as France. If England was richer, her army was tiny, and in any case her ruler was a constitutional monarch. There were other absolute rulers, but their countries were not so prosperous or so centralised – the Austrian Empire was a ramshackle collection of peoples, the Russian barbarous and inefficient.
From the very beginning, Eugénie was determined to help her husband, a contribution that became more and more throughout the reign until she began to influence policy-making. To appreciate her increasingly important role in the Second Empire, one has to understand both the political system and the emperor himself.
In marrying Napoleon III, she had of course married Bonapartism incarnate. This was never easy to define as a political creed, even at the time, and historians are still unable to agree on precisely what it meant under Napoleon III. Most of them disapprove of it for being authoritarian and undemocratic and for eventually ending in disaster. Only in recent years has there been a fairer reassessment of the Second Empire. What makes it so baffling is that it gradually became liberal instead of absolutist.
Essentially Bonapartism was inspired by the dynamic personality and ideas of Napoleon I, who, as Thiers put it, was ‘the man who made France feel the deepest emotions she ever experienced’. The Bonapartist programme was to combine strong and efficient government with the achievements of the French Revolution, reconciling monarchical and Catholic traditions with the new egalitarian ideas. In addition, it promised to give France a glorious place in world history – past, present and to come. ‘I once held, and still hold, a deep personal belief that for France the Empire is the only real democracy,’ declared Baron Haussmann as late as 1890. ‘Our country is the most single-minded in the world and has to have a single-minded government – it must be ruled by one man alone.’
The French Empire established by the first Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804 had been an absolutist, militarist state which recreated France after the chaos that had followed the Revolution, while at the same time conquering Europe. The constitution he granted in 1815, in a bid to gain popular support during the Hundred Days, was an aberration. In exile on his remote Atlantic island the brooding ex-emperor forged the myth contained in his political testament, the Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, which had captured the young Eugénie’s imagination. ‘I saved the Revolution as it lay dying,’ he claimed. ‘I have given France and Europe new ideas which will never be forgotten.’ His wars had been a campaign of liberation and not of conquest, he insisted, waged only to create European unity.
As has been seen, Eugénie had derived from her father, Stendhal, Mérimée and the Mémorial, a belief in a ‘tyrant of genius’, who by applying the great emperor’s ideas would bring prosperity and happiness. If never under the illusion that her husband was ‘a tyrant of genius’ or even a particularly strong character, she recognised that he was a highly intelligent, well-meaning and fundamentally honest man, with deeply held convictions. Above all, she believed that he offered the best, indeed the only chance of putting Napoleonic ideas into practice, which was why he fascinated her. In these early days she was impressed by his seemingly unfailing political judgement and by the magical way in which he would use his sphinx-like charm to win over the most stubborn opponents. She was certain that he could give France authority, glory and social reform.
The Orleanist constitutional monarchy of King Louis-Philippe had signally failed to give France any of these things. Elected by an electorate of less than a quarter of a million well-to-do male voters (out of a population of 30 million), its corrupt governments had been uninspiring, to put it mildly; the leaders had squabbled constantly with each other, while being at the same time undermined by the king’s intrigues. Orleanist foreign policy had been chicken-hearted, determined to avoid at all costs the hazards of war with other European powers – when not conquering Algeria, the army’s job was to hold down the working class. Although a period of economic and industrial expansion, the Orleanist years had been the sordid age of Les Misérables, and in the end the Orleanists had lost touch with the French people as a whole. If the revolution of 1848, the ‘revolution of contempt’ as Lamartine called it, was a confrontation between workers exploited beyond endurance and a ruthless bourgeoisie, most of France had become bored by a régime that possessed so little panache.
Despite being a reaction against Orleanism, the Bonapartism of 1853 was as far removed from the warlike empire of 1804 as from the ‘constitutional’ empire of the Hundred Days. ‘The Empire means peace’, Napoleon III insisted, even if he hoped to undo the European settlement of 1815. He claimed that his was a more democratic system than parliamentary government; only he could save the poverty-stricken majority of the people from the bourgeoisie, who would otherwise use a parliament to enslave them, while any really important decision would be referred to the nation in a referendum. This was what Bonapartism meant when Eugénie married him, and she became one of its most enthusiastic exponents.
The Second Empire coincided with an economic boom, and soon the French equated Bonapartism with prosperity. Napoleon hoped also to introduce social reform, since there was a genuinely socialist element in his thinking, and, encouraged by Eugénie, he did a great deal to help industrial workers. In the little country towns his Préfets installed pro-government mayors, who undermined the tyranny of the big landowners and built roads, making sure that the peasants voted the right way in referendums.
The elected Corps Législatif of 260 members, which replaced the National Assembly, met for only three months a year and could not initiate bills, although it was allowed to suggest amendments – its sole function was to approve laws and the budget. The Senate was nominated by the emperor. As for being a police state, Paris had no more policemen than London, and when Napoleon III needed to employ force he relied on the army, although he rarely used it. He was a very moderate despot.
The empress took care to make friends with her husband’s ministers. She had no trouble with Achille Fould, the President of the Council of State and the emperor’s chief minister, an amiable Jew who liked most people – and a financial wizard who ran the day-to-day government of France. The emperor’s bastard half-brother, Auguste de Morny, Queen Hortense’s son by the Comte de Flahaut (and Talleyrand’s grandson) was even more important. Although a speculator and man of pleasure whose salon was generally full of financial sharks and ‘actresses’, he gave unfailingly sound advice to Napoleon, who made him first a count and then a duke. Princesse Mathilde disliked him, partly because he was a former Orleanist, sneering that if anything went wrong under Morny’s arrangement, then ‘Louis-Philippe would feel himself avenged’. Yet he ran the Corps Légistlatif brilliantly, preparing the way for a constitutional régime. Patronising if affectionate, at times he all but dominated his brother, who was a little frightened of him. Always sensitive about their relationship, the emperor was horrified to learn that Morny had hung a portrait of their mother in his drawing-room. Early in 1853 he sent Eugénie to ask him to remove it. ‘The less you boast about your parentage, the more you’ll be treated as a brother,’ she advised him, and they remained friends for the rest of his life.
Drouyn de Lhuys thought that his days as foreign minister were numbered after his opposition to the empress’s marriage and his wife’s rudeness. When the engagement was announced, he called on her before resigning. ‘Thank you for the advice you gave the emperor about marrying,’ she told him. ‘It was the advice I would have given him myself.’ He withdrew his resignation. (Drouyn had an odd taste in practical jokes – when the British embassy advertised for a wet-nurse, he called in a bonnet and a dress padded out with cushions, completely taking in poor Lady Cowley, who was horrified when she realised that the ‘nourrice’ was France’s minister for foreign affairs.)
Eugénie did not get on so well with the Duc de Persigny. Another adventurer, a former bankrupt and an ex-cavalry sergeant with a bogus title, he had been created a duke after the coup. Viel Castel says he ‘looked as much like a nobleman as chicory does coffee’. However, he had won Napoleon’s gratitude by his support during the seemingly hopeless 1840s. Slightly unbalanced if frenziedly loyal, Persigny was trying to build up a hard-line Bonapartist party, which was the last thing wanted by the subtle emperor. ‘From the day of my marriage I was honoured with his hatred, a venomous, slandering hatred,’ Eugénie recalled. ‘Sometimes he could not stop himself calling me “The Spanish Woman” or “The Foreigner”. He wanted nobody between the emperor and him – the emperor and the Empire were his sole property…. Imagine a boiler perpetually blowing up.’ A compliment she forgot to pay herself was that Persigny regarded her as his ultimate political rival.
For the time being the empress could help her husband best in creating a splendid new court. It was a vital aspect of the empire, a key element of Bonapartist ‘glory’. Napoleon III could have found no better partner.