Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (33 page)

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.

O
PENING THE
S
UEZ
C
ANAL

The empress was to represent France at the official opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869. The idea for a canal through the isthmus of Suez, first conceived by General Bonaparte in the 1790s, had been revived in 1854 by the dynamic Ferdinand de Lesseps, whose success in raising the money to dig it owed a lot to the imperial couple. (Lesseps was Eugénie’s cousin, his Grivégnée mother being Doña Maria Manuela’s aunt.)

Eugénie badly needed a holiday. She knew that she was increasingly unpopular. What she did not know, however, was just how much she was hated by someone close to her, who pretended to be among her dearest friends. Princesse Mathilde told the Goncourts in August:

The last time that I went to Saint-Cloud, she showed me her dresses for the trip to Suez. The whole journey means nothing more to her than a chance to make eyes at some Oriental potentate from her steamer – she has to have men round her the entire time, paying court … the heartless trollop. As you know, Spanish women have no idea of modesty. When she was ill with skin trouble – she’s been of no use to the emperor for years because of her trouble, yes, she’s got it there – the way she was prepared to show people, lifting up her skirts in front of everybody, was quite amazing. She’s never been able to inspire affection in anybody, never shows the least sign of warmth, never even kisses her son…. You should hear what her ladies-in-waiting say about her … The woman just isn’t French and doesn’t like France or the French. The only time I’ve known her to be polite is when she’s with foreign sovereigns. You ought to have seen her with the emperor of Austria!

Mathilde sneered at Eugénie’s cult of Marie-Antoinette. ‘Have you ever heard of anything so inane or so ridiculous or in such bad taste?’ she asked the brothers. ‘Do you know what she has in her bedroom? First, a portrait of her sister whom she hated and to whom she used to send insulting telegrams, so the emperor tells me. Then a portrait of Mérimée, one of Mme Metternich, a Sèvres bust of Marie-Antoinette, and a portrait of the little Dauphin. On her bedside table there’s a copy of some book about Marie-Antoinette which she’s never read because she never reads. She’s not interested in anything.’

All too many of the French were prepared to believe lies of the sort spread by Princesse Mathilde. They help one understand why the ‘Spaniard’ was so much looking forward to her Eastern adventure.

In 1901 the empress told Maurice Paléologue of the ‘frightful nightmare which I took with me from Paris’, in a way that reveals her sense of near despair in 1869. (This is another instance where Paléologue’s account carries conviction.) It was a gloomy but realistic assessment:

Abroad, a menacing Prussia and an ungrateful Italy, with all the other great powers resentful or ill-disposed towards us. At home, discontent and disaffection – a contemptible Press, thoroughly insolent and dishonest, unending strikes and violent demonstrations, the régime’s foundations being undermined everywhere. Even the people who had the biggest stake in the dynasty’s survival gleefully read Rochefort’s
La Lanterne
each week, because a wind of insanity was blowing throughout France. What made matters even worse was that the emperor himself was ill, depressed and discouraged, and unable to see anything good in the future – there were only bad omens.

Eugénie set out for Venice from Saint-Cloud on 30 September, accompanied by forty ladies, gentlemen and servants, among whom were Paca’s daughters, the dentist Dr Evans and the Abbé Bauer. She took her state papers with her, arranging to be kept informed daily, by special messenger and telegram, of what the Council had discussed. En route she visited Magenta, praying by moonlight on the battlefield for all those killed there in 1859.

Venice gave her a dazzling welcome, its palaces brilliantly illuminated, its canals lit by fireworks and gondolas with coloured lanterns. She was serenaded by waterborne orchestras, and cheered by a huge crowd in Piazza San Marco. Unfortunately, Cavaliere Nigra had warned Victor-Emmanuel that she was likely to raise important issues in casual conversation, even at dinner, so whenever she tried to discuss Rome the king changed the subject, going into ecstasies about her beauty. This added insult to injury since Eugénie was well aware that she was losing her figure and growing fatter in the face.

Then she boarded the imperial yacht,
L’Aigle
,
^*
to sail for Athens, where King George I proclaimed a public holiday and took her on a tour. Afterwards she told her entourage that she did not care for what she knew of the ancient Greeks: ‘windbags living in a permanent state of civil war, revolution and intrigue, an impossible people to govern’. She may also have had in mind the modern Greeks, who had recently deposed King Otto.

Off Constantinople, after
L’Aigle
had failed to rendezvous in Besika Bay with the Turkish warship that carried the Grand Vizier and the French ambassador sailing past her in a dark night, next morning an entire fleet decked with bunting came out to welcome the empress. Enormous crowds thronged both sides of the Bosphorus. When the
L’Aigle
dropped anchor in front of the Beyler-Bey Palace on the Asiatic shore, which had been placed at her disposal, a magnificent barge rowed out to meet her. On the barge, seated on a red velvet dais, was the Sultan Abdul Aziz himself.

He had reason to be pleased to see her. Not only was she the wife of the man whom he saw as his most powerful ally, but she was Napoleon’s special envoy. He knew that the Russians were furious at her visit – later, she commented, ‘Now I’ve seen the Bosphorus I can see why the Russians want it so much.’ Merely by coming to Constantinople before going on to Cairo he asserted his authority over the sultan’s viceroy the khedive. He tried to kiss Eugénie’s hand, but she refused – clearly, he was an alarming host, a man of many moods. (One day he would kill himself with a pair of scissors.)