Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (41 page)

Filon had already heard. He went into the empress’s study, where he found her secretary, Eugène Conti, who had also heard. Suddenly Eugénie came in. ‘She was pale and terrible, her eyes were hard, gleaming with anger, her face distorted by emotion. She cried out, ‘Do you know what they’re saying? That the emperor has surrendered, that he has capitulated? Surely you don’t believe it?’ Then she broke into ‘a torrent of incoherent and mad words’. Her listeners were appalled. ‘What she said, Conti never repeated to
anyone and like him I shall die without repeating it,’ Filon informs us. Paléologue claimed to know what she said, although it is hard to see how. ‘A Napoleon never surrenders!’, Eugénie screamed, according to his version. ‘He is dead. Do you hear me? I tell you he’s dead, and they’re trying to hide it from me.’ Then, contradicting herself, ‘Why didn’t he kill himself? Why didn’t he have himself buried under the walls of Sedan? Didn’t he realise he was disgracing himself? What a name to leave to his son!’ Even if Paléologue was guessing, this is probably very near the truth. Filon recalled that the empress’s outburst lasted for five minutes, and that she then left the room. ‘We remained there speechless and stunned, like men who had just survived an earthquake.’

A Council was summoned, but broke up at 8.00 p.m., without reaching any decision. Someone said that the emperor’s old enemy, Adolphe Thiers, the wiliest politician in France, might have useful suggestions to make, but he had already refused to help when sounded out by Mérimée a week earlier. Eugénie sent for General Trochu, who said he was too tired, promising to come the following day. She went to bed at nine – there was nothing else she could do. From midnight until two in the morning crowds packed the Place de la Concorde, shouting ‘Deposition!’, and when Filon opened his window in the dark, he could hear the angry yells in the distance.

Next day, a Sunday, the empress heard Mass at 7.30 a.m. in the Tuileries chapel, so distracted that she wore a gold-fringed mauve shawl instead of her usual black. Only half a dozen people were at the service. ‘Madame, nothing can be done in Paris,’ Filon told her imploringly when it was finished. ‘Leave this inferno, move your government to some town on the Loire and summon the Corps Législatif to meet there.’ Eugénie replied dismissively: ‘That means a civil war which would break the back of our fight against the Prussians, and for what purpose? If you don’t have Paris, then you have nothing. No, I shan’t leave.’ She ended, ‘I won’t move, but I won’t allow a shot to be fired.’

That morning, at 8.00 a.m. the regent presided over what was going to be her last Council. Everyone present was aware that on the previous night Jules Favre had proposed the deposition of the emperor in the Corps Législatif. The Bonapartist deputies had managed to resist the proposal and even Thiers, fearful of a revolution, had tried to dissuade Favre. But it was only a momentary respite until the Corps met again at one o’clock.

One minister, Duvernois, suggested launching a pre-emptive coup and declaring martial law. Since the entire French regular army was either in German captivity or bottled up in Metz, and as the garrison of the Tuileries numbered less than 200 men, his suggestion was understandably ignored. Finally it was decided to ask the Corps Législatif to form a new Council of Regency with full powers, but presided over by the empress. They all realised that there was little hope of the plan’s acceptance.

As Henri Chevreau had said – and, as minister for the interior, he knew what Paris thought from the police reports – General Trochu was the one man who could save the situation. The military governor commanded the National Guard, that ‘
levée en masse
’ of armed Parisians with whom he was enormously popular and an appeal by him to unite against the Prussians should have succeeded. Prince Metternich agreed with Chevreau. ‘Had Thiers and Trochu come forward at this moment and supported the regency, they would probably have saved the Empire.’ Thiers was certainly enough of an opportunist to have jumped onto Trochu’s bandwagon.

Unfortunately, Eugénie had never bothered to conceal her dislike of the general. Afterwards, she admitted, ‘I ought to have come to terms with that dangerous Tartuffe.’ She certainly sent for him again on the morning of 4 September and at least one source says that he came, harangued her and then left in a hurry. According to Filon, however – and Filon was in the palace – he never appeared, but merely made the derisory gesture of promising to send an officer of the National Guard ‘in uniform’ to protect the Tuileries. Trochu, it will be remembered, was the man who had sworn he would die on the steps of the throne in the empress’s defence.

In contrast, courtiers flocked to the Tuileries, not just the officers and ladies of the household, but members of the old and new nobility who had been in the habit of coming to court. ‘They were not there to give advice,’ said Filon, ‘but to show their loyalty by being present and sharing the peril.’ They knew very well how many courtiers had been slaughtered at the side of the Swiss Guard during the storming of the Tuileries in 1792.

‘The news that reached us was terrible, our situation becoming worse every hour,’ recalled Filon. ‘By mid-morning the Place de la Concorde was full of National Guardsmen, armed with rifles, and clearly what they had in mind was the reverse of defending the Tuileries.’

At about midday a delegation of deputies arrived from the Palais Bourbon, led by two former ex-Orleanist imperial ministers, Comte Daru and Louis-Joseph Buffet. More reassuringly, it included two genuine Bonapartists, the Marquis de Pierres and the Comte d’Ayguesvives. They asked the regent to abdicate in all but name, by placing all power in the hands of the Corps Législatif, which would then appoint a provisional government – ‘without prejudice to the dynastic question’. This solution, they informed the empress, would avoid an otherwise inevitable revolution. Eugénie told them:

The future of our dynasty no longer matters to me. I think only of France. My one personal concern is to fulfil all the duties imposed on me by my position, and the most obvious of these is not to desert my post…. As for the country’s representatives, their duty is as obvious as my own – they must forget party quarrels and close ranks around me to form a rampart against invasion. The war’s outcome lies in their hands.

However, if the Corps Législatif feels that I am a burden, or that the emperor’s name has become a hindrance rather than a symbol of resistance, then you may declare us both deposed. I shall not complain because I will have quitted my post with honour instead of deserting it….

I am ready to face any danger and follow the Corps Législatif to wherever it chooses as a last bastion from which to continue the war. Should further resistance become impossible, I think I could help to obtain better peace terms. Yesterday the ambassador of a great power offered to arrange mediation by neutral powers, based on two points – first, France’s territorial integrity and, second, the Imperial dynasty’s survival. My answer was that I would accept the first point but refuse even to consider the second. The dynasty’s future is for this country alone to decide and I could never let a foreign power meddle with our internal affairs.

Daru assured the regent that, if she abdicated, ‘Far from deserting your post, you will have shown the greatest courage in sacrificing yourself for everybody’s sake and in saving France from the horrors of a revolution – a revolution when the enemy is at our gates.’

Well aware that Daru was right about the possibility of revolution, Eugénie said that she might abdicate if her ministers agreed with him. ‘I insist on one thing, however,’ she added. ‘A house must be found for me so that I can stay and share our besieged capital’s sufferings until the very end.’

Filon saw the delegation departing with bowed heads and gloomy faces, ‘like mourners who have just thrown the last drops of holy water on a coffin’. As they left, each kissed the empress’s hand. ‘I could not help weeping,’ Buffet, one of their leaders, recalled. ‘I was in the presence of a great and selfless personality.’ A reserved, austere man, who was not given to superlatives, he told Paléologue how much he had admired her strength, her patriotism and her calmness.

Meanwhile, the revolt had broken out, encouraged by General Trochu. Hooting the police, mobs marched along the boulevards to the Palais Bourbon, where the Corps Législatif sat debating the problem of the regency. The general replaced the troops outside by National Guards, who immediately allowed a cheering horde to storm into the chamber. When the deputies sent to Trochu for help, his reply was, ‘General Palikao has tried to break me during these last few days, and he has succeeded – it is too late to ask me.’

‘This is not the right place to proclaim the Republic,’ Jules Favre shouted above the din. ‘It has to be done at the Hôtel de Ville.’ Here, fighting off attempts by extremists like Louis Blanqui to start a socialist revolution, Leon Gambetta proclaimed the Third Republic from a window. Invited to become President, Trochu accepted with alacrity.

During the empress’s meeting with the delegation, frantic messages came from Henri Chevreau, warning her that the situation was deteriorating. Finally the minister arrived in person from the Palais Bourbon, crying ‘All is lost, Madame!’, at which Eugénie inquired acidly, ‘Do you mean that poor General Trochu has been killed?’ He explained what had happened, telling her that regular troops were throwing down their arms. Paris was in the hands of the National Guard, who wanted revolution, and soon there would be an attack on the Tuileries. Telling himself, ‘The end of the drama is not far off,’ Filon ran to his room to get his revolver.

By now it was mid-afternoon, a beautiful sunny day. Inside the gloomy palace with its dust-sheeted furniture everyone begged the empress to escape while there was still time, but she refused. From the windows a vast crowd could be seen, stretching back to the Place de la Concorde, ‘nothing but heads and bayonets’. It knew that
Eugénie was inside because the imperial standard was still flying. The crowd, eventually 200,000 strong, chanted angrily, ‘
Déchéance!’ ‘Déchéance!
’ – ‘Deposition!’ It surged against the palace railings, tearing down the gold eagles, before pushing them over.

General Mellinet, commanding the Tuileries’ garrison, pleaded for permission to open fire – otherwise the mob would break in within minutes. ‘No bloodshed,’ insisted Eugénie. ‘I won’t allow it at any price – I would prefer the dynasty to perish rather than lose a single French life.’ When he asked if his men could merely use their rifle butts, she replied, ‘General, not even rifle butts.’ She did not want the garrison to suffer the fate of the Swiss Guard, butchered for trying to defend Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Yet Eugénie refused to leave the Tuileries. Why? Despite her offers to abdicate and her claims to be no longer interested in ‘the future of the dynasty’, the only possible explanation is that by staying she hoped through some miracle to save the throne for the Prince Imperial. At least she knew he had not been captured at Sedan and was near the Belgian border: she told Filon to send a telegram to the boy’s aide-de-camp – ‘Leave immediately for Belgium.’

At the same time, Eugénie was terrified of suffering an even worse fate than her heroine Marie-Antoinette. ‘I wasn’t frightened of dying,’ she said later. ‘What did frighten me was the thought of falling into the hands of viragos, who would defile my death in some grotesquely revolting way, who would try to humiliate me as they killed me. I could already imagine them lifting up my skirts and hear savage laughter….’ Some people in the crowd outside the Tuileries thought of Marie-Antoinette, too, like Lord Ronald Gower. ‘It seemed as if 1792 had come back,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘Had the empress been found there and then, her life would not have been worth a moment’s purchase.’

Beyond question, the mob’s only motive for storming the palace was to lynch ‘
l’Espagnole
’ – there were even cries of ‘
A la guillotine
’. ‘No one who has not heard it can realise the horror of … the roar of a crowd that has only one desire – to tear you to pieces,’ Eugénie admitted long afterwards.

In the end courtiers managed to convince her that she would fall into the mob’s hands if she stayed and – at best – be made to abdicate. ‘You would sacrifice the rights with which you are entrusted,’ someone argued. ‘But by escaping, wherever you go you will keep them.’

After taking a morsel of bread – she had not eaten since breakfast – and putting on her hat, she said goodbye to her ladies, embracing them. Only her reader, Mme Lebreton-Bourbaki, went with her (eventually giving Filon a full account of their adventures). Ordering General Mellinet to withdraw his troops from the palace immediately everybody else had left, she slipped away through a small passage behind her bedroom. Five men accompanied the two women – Prince Metternich, Cavaliere Nigra, Admiral Jurien de La Gravière, Eugène Conneau and Eugène Conti.

Eugénie had hoped to leave in a small carriage standing at a side entrance, then realised they would be seen. Instead, they decided to go out through the adjoining Louvre, which was closed because of the war. Finding the door locked, however, they thought of leaving through an underground passage that led from the kitchens to the Seine. But by now the mob was breaking in. Jurien de La Gravière rushed off to see if he could delay the pursuit while the little party fled back to the first floor.

In the nick of time a servant appeared with a master-key which opened the door into the Louvre. They hurried through the empty galleries, a museum attendant leading the way. The walls were largely bare, most of the pictures having been taken to Brest for safe-keeping, but Gericault’s
Radeau de la Méduse
was still hanging in the Salle des Sept Cheminées and, glancing briefly at the scene of nightmare shipwreck, Eugénie murmured ‘How strange!’

Halfway through the Louvre, she ordered Conneau to go back and make certain that anyone left in the palace was told to escape, reminding him to take off his elaborate uniform before venturing into the street. He kissed her hand. While descending the massive staircase into the Egyptian gallery, she also ordered Conti to leave her, embracing him.