Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (45 page)

In December 1872 Napoleon received a German journalist from Cassel, Mels Cohen, who had interviewed him during his time at Wilhelmshöhe and had been impressed by his forecasting the Commune – ‘horrible things will happen in France after the peace’.
This time he told Cohen that the republic was a disease that must be eradicated. ‘The Empire will be re-established, that is certain,’ he prophesied confidently. ‘M. Thiers knows that at a single word from me the flag of the Empire would be raised in fifty places at once, from one end of France to another, and the Army would recall as if by magic its ancient battle-cry at Malakoff and Solferino.’ He then added, as if to deny any intention of a coup, ‘M. Thiers knows also that I will never speak that word.’

Napoleon carefully concealed his intentions. Although Dr Evans was convinced that the empire was going to be restored, he was naively sure that the emperor would do nothing to hasten the process. ‘Those persons who imagine that the emperor was at this time conspiring to overthrow the French Republic, and intriguing to recover his throne, are greatly mistaken,’ Evans stated sternly in his memoirs.

Dr Evans never knew of Napoleon’s worries about staying on a horse when he rode into Paris at the head of his troops, or that he practised every day on a wooden horse, commissioned by Eugénie from a sculptor and smuggled into Camden Place.

Although the emperor began to suffer from the gallstone again in September 1872, he insisted that he was going to go on with the coup when Plon-Plon saw him in early December. ‘The worst that can happen to me is being shot like poor Emperor Maximilian,’ he said. ‘Better than dying in bed, in exile’. Shortly afterwards, as a test of his fitness, he tried to ride over to the Woolwich Military Academy, a few miles away, which the Prince Imperial had just entered as a cadet. The pain was so dreadful, however, that he had to dismount after less than a mile. The jolting carriage in which he came home made it worse and he spent three days in bed with a fever, in agony. Reluctantly, he summoned specialists from London. Evans commented, ‘he was at last compelled to give up all exercise, rarely leaving the house’.

Filon confirms that after the loss of their throne Eugénie had given back to her husband all her old affection, especially when she learned how bravely the man branded as a coward by his enemies had behaved at Sedan. He explains that she had completely forgotten her terrible outburst on receiving his telegram after the battle, just as a man forgets a fit of madness. ‘It is my duty to say that during those last hours of married life, perfect sympathy existed between the emperor and empress.’

‘I have been worried to death about the emperor,’ Eugénie –
who had never seen Professor Sée’s report – wrote to her mother on 30 December. ‘He has at last agreed to be examined and the examination showed that he has a stone. He will have a first operation the day after tomorrow, and I profoundly hope that having undergone so much awful pain he will get better and eventually be completely cured. I am praying for this and am sick with worry.’

There were two excruciating operations, which Napoleon bore with his usual patience. A third was to be performed on 9 January, but at 10.25 a.m. that day it was realised that he was deteriorating fast and a priest was summoned to give him the last Sacraments. He died twenty minutes later – after muttering to Dr Conneau, ‘We weren’t cowards at Sedan, were we, Conneau?’ Eugénie whispered, ‘
C’est impossible!
’ again and again. Then she flung herself across the bed, weeping.

In Napoleon’s will he had told his son to ‘make himself thoroughly familiar with the writings of the Prisoner of St Helena, and study the emperor’s decrees and letters … the spirit of my glorious uncle has always inspired and sustained me’. As for his wife, ‘I hope that my memory will be dear to her and that when I am dead she will forgive me whatever sorrows I may have caused her.’ It was a belated apology for his unfaithfulness.

Eugénie was too overcome to attend the funeral at the little Catholic church in Chislehurst, when the Prince Imperial walked behind the hearse at the head of the cortège. There was a crowd estimated at 17,000 while the mourners included all the famous names of the Second Empire – among them Plon-Plon, Fleury, Rouher, Haussmann, Palikao, Bourbaki, the duc de Gramont and Marie-Anne Walewska. There were two marshals of France, seventeen generals and twenty-seven ex-ministers, together with a hundred who had been senators or deputies during the reign. Lord Cowley was there, while Queen Victoria was represented by the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh. Marshal MacMahon was absent, however, and so was Princesse Mathilde.

The emperor might not have succeeded in launching his last coup, yet even so his son was greeted with shouts of ‘
Vive L’Empéreur! Vive Napoléon IV!
’ as he left the church.

The crowd, as well as Eugénie, knew that the Second Empire was not dead yet.

‘N
APOLEON
IV’?

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 régime
came 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 a
coup 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.’