Read Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire Online
Authors: Desmond Seward
Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (8 page)
The Comte de Morny was among the party and so were the Comtesse de Teba and her daughter Mlle de Montijo. The emperor always spends a lot of time with this young woman, who is elegant, likeable, intelligent and amusing. For over an hour the two were absorbed in a private conversation that nobody dared to interrupt. The emperor had obviously enjoyed himself when he left the ball at two o’clock in the morning. Mlle de Montijo responds to his attentions with grace and decorum; her mother and she are hoping for a marriage, using the most skilful tactics. Everybody pays court to Mlle de Montijo, asks to be remembered to her, begs her to intervene with the emperor. Ministers succumb to her charm, she is seen at all the receptions, and has quite obviously become the rising star.
The ‘most skilful tactics’ owed a lot to Prosper Mérimée, whose advice they relied on, however much he disapproved of the marriage. It was rumoured that he drafted Eugenia’s letters to Napoleon – he may well have written her letter of November 1851 in which she declared undying loyalty to the Bonapartist cause. They could not have been so cheerful at Princesse Mathilde’s party
if they had not felt reasonably confident. Yet the emperor was certainly taking a very long time to propose. It was impossible to know what he was really thinking – he was not called ‘The Sphinx of the Tuileries’ for nothing. Even now, he might still change his mind. An exasperated Mérimée advised them to tell everyone they were about to leave for Italy.
Many people at the highest level were still convinced that the marriage would never happen. At a ball at the Tuileries on 12 January when Maria Manuela and Eugenia sat on a bench reserved for ministers’ wives, Mme Drouyn de Lhuys hissed in Eugenia’s ear that ‘foreign adventuresses have no right to sit there’. (No one heard Mme Drouyn’s exact words.) Both stood up in confusion. But the emperor hurried over, inviting them to join the imperial family on the dais, leaving Mme Drouyn to be reduced to tears by the spiteful smiles of other ministerial wives. When he danced with Eugenia later in the evening, remembering Mérimée’s advice, she told him that she was leaving for Italy. ‘I am not going to stay here and be insulted.’
‘One can say that the ball had the effect of announcing the marriage’, recorded Hübner. Yet even two days later we find Hübner bothering to note down a rumour that it would take place, and when he saw Eugenia at a dinner party that evening she was looking pale and tense – still waiting for a formal proposal.
Only on 15 January did the minister of the imperial household, Achille Fould, call in person at Doña Maria Manuela’s flat in the Place Vendôme to deliver a letter from the emperor:
Madame la Comtesse, a long time has passed since I fell in love with your daughter, and ever since then I have wanted to make her my wife. So today I have come to ask you for her hand, because no one could make me more happy or is more worthy to wear a crown. I beg, however, that should you give your consent, then you will not allow this project to become widely known before we have completed all our arrangements.
Doña Eugenia’s reaction to this unambiguous proposal from Louis-Napoleon, which she had supposedly been seeking all these months, is doubly revealing. It shows that she had been far from sure he was going to propose, while at the same time it confirms beyond any doubt that she had been in love with the Marqués de Alcañisez. For she at once wrote to Don Pepe, asking him what he thought
she ought to do. The Second Empire, it has to be remembered, was after all a police state and when the censors intercepted the letter, after removing the wax seal so that it could be opened, they immediately forwarded the letter to the emperor who, however, ordered them to replace the seal and to let the letter reach its destination. In reply, Alcañisez coolly sent his congratulations – obviously he had never been in love with her.
Mérimée shrewdly obtained from the Spanish heralds a certificate of Doña Eugenia’s impeccably noble birth on her father’s side. His object was to make her background look as imposing as possible in the official announcement of her marriage. The French people would learn that their ruler was to marry the daughter of someone who had been not just an obscure Napoleonic officer on half-pay, but one of Spain’s great feudal magnates: ‘Don Cipriano Guzmán y Palafox Fernandez de Cordoba, Layos y la Cerda, Viscount of la Calzada, of Palencia de la Valduerna; Count of Teba, of Banos, of Mora, of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, of Fuentiduena, of Ablitas, of San Esteban de Gormas and of Casarubios del Monte; Marquis of Moya, of Ardales, of Osera, of Barcarotta, of la Algaba, of la Baneza, of Villanueva del Fresno, of Valdunquillo, of Mirallo and of Valderrabano; and Duke of Peñaranda.’ The certificate stressed that the late Don Cipriano had been three times a Grandee of Spain of the First Class, and the hereditary Grand Marshal of Castile. Irrelevant as this string of archaic titles might seem today, they meant a surprising amount in romantic, mid-nineteenth-century France, to the innumerable readers of Alexandre Dumas’s novels, with their thirst for a chivalrous past. They inspired respect even among the Legitimist and Orleanist noblemen whom the emperor hoped to win over.
Meanwhile, a pornographic smear campaign was mounted against the bride to be, of the sort once launched at Marie-Antoinette. Cowley mentions rumours ‘it would be impossible to put to paper’. Eugenia ‘has played her game with him so well, that he can get her in no other way but marriage, and it is to gratify his passions that he marries her,’ says the ambassador. ‘People are already speculating on their divorce.’
The day before the civil wedding the Senate, Council of State and Assembly were summoned to the Tuileries, to hear a speech by Napoleon III, copies of which were distributed throughout France. He explained that as ‘a parvenu’ among monarchs – ‘a glorious
title when bestowed by the votes of a great nation’ – he preferred to marry ‘a woman whom I love and respect’ rather than some unknown princess. His future wife, he told them, was of high birth, French by education and a devout Catholic. He promised she would bring back ‘the virtues’ of his grandmother, Empress Josephine. Many foreign ambassadors were alarmed, nervous of anything that might weaken this brittle new régime. Even if they distrusted the emperor, they recognised his achievement in taming the revolution of 1848, which had undermined almost every European government. Should he fall, it would break out again, spreading through the continent. ‘News of the marriage has had a bad effect in the
départements
’, Hübner reported nervously to Vienna, despite his high opinion of Eugenia. ‘However democratic people may be, they would have preferred a princess.’
On the day Napoleon made his speech, Cowley informed London that the emperor ‘has been captured by an adventuress’. The few Bonapartists who approved of the marriage, ‘wish to keep the Court in a degraded state because they profit by it’ – implying that Eugenia could corrupt it further. The foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, wrote back, ‘A marriage to a well-behaved young Frenchwoman would, I think, have been very politic, but to put this “intrigante” on the throne is a lowering of the Imperial dignity with a vengeance.’ ‘The emperor’s foolish marriage has done him an infinity of harm in the country’, Cowley claimed soon after. ‘It was, of course, ill received at Paris, even by the emperor’s friends, and it has set all the women against him. Clergy and army disapprove.’ ‘The emperor’s selection of a private individual to share his throne has caused, in the female portion of society, a degree of jealousy it is really difficult to conceive’, reported the
Illustrated London News
, ‘and, alas for the gallantry of Frenchmen of the nineteenth century, they find nothing better to do than repeat the scandals originating in the
boudoirs
of the fairer part of creation.’
We know how Eugenia felt from a letter she wrote to Paca. ‘Soon I shall be alone here, without any friends,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s fate has a sad side: for example, I who used to be so obsessed with my liberty am in chains for the rest of my life: never by myself, never free, amid all that court etiquette, of which I’m going to be the principal victim.’ She continued, ‘Two things will save me, I hope, my faith in God and my desire to help the unlucky classes who are deprived of everything, even work. If the hand of Providence has
given me such a high place, then it must be so that I can bring together the sufferers and those who could aid them.’ She recalled how once, when they had been discussing politics long ago, their old maid Pepa had said, ‘Women are born to knit stockings.’ ‘But I always knew I wasn’t born for that and felt I had a proper role in life. I had a presentiment I might be of some use to my country; if I am half French now, I can’t forget the land of my birth, where my poor father lies buried.’
She tried to explain her feelings about her future husband, ‘a man of irresistible strength of will, yet without obstinacy, capable of the biggest and the smallest sacrifices; he’ll go and look for a wild flower in a wood on a winter’s night, crawling back to a fire to dry, just to please the whim of a woman he loves. Tomorrow he will risk his crown rather than not share it with me; he doesn’t count the cost of what he does; he is always ready to hazard his future on the throw of a card, which is why he always wins.’
The civil marriage took place in the Tuileries on the evening of 29 January, Doña Eugenia wearing a dress of rose-coloured satin trimmed with lace, her gold and diamond tiara set off by a wreath of jasmine. She wrote to Paca that she was as pale as the jasmine, and felt she was acting in a play when people addressed her as ‘Your Majesty’. For three-quarters of an hour they filed past her, cardinals, generals and ministers bowing, ladies curtseying – the Bonapartes barely concealing their fury. She did not tell Paca that she had been booed on her way to the Tuileries. Even so, she pleased the Parisians by declining the municipality’s present of a diamond necklace worth 600,000 francs, asking for the money to be used to endow an orphanage for girls. Next day she is said to have pleased them again by curtseying to the crowd and smiling when she alighted from the coach on her arrival at Notre Dame for the wedding. According to the
Illustrated London News
, however, ‘pale and trembling from deep emotion, she passed, bowing, with a mixture of timidity and dignity, to the assembled multitudes; yet all failed signally to waken any demonstration of heartfelt welcome or applause’.
While the church was packed with French dignitaries, embarrassingly there were no foreign royalties, partly because the emperor had changed the date from 10 February on account of so much opposition to the marriage. If she sensed the congregation’s hostility, she showed no sign whatever of being cowed. In white velvet, ablaze with diamonds and enveloped in ‘a sort of cloud or mist of transparent lace’, she was both graceful and dignified according to a British spectator, Lady Augusta Bruce. The service was conducted by the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Sibour, who had tried to brighten up his soot-blackened cathedral. Hübner was unimpressed. ‘Walls, pillars and vaulting were covered with garishly coloured pasteboard’, he reported. ‘There was a profusion of flowers and candles, plenty of flags, and very little taste.’ He thought the march from Meyerbeer’s
Prophète
most unsuitable. Worse still, ‘not a single cheer greeted Napoleon and his future partner. One can only explain this indifference, not to say contempt, by supposing that the most egalitarian nation in the world feels humiliated by the ruler of France making a marriage that is less than royal.’ If Hübner too admired Doña Eugenia’s dignity, he also commented on her pallor. Next day he added, ‘We now know that on the route taken by their Imperial Majesties’ coaches, coming and going, the public remained cold. No cheers, no boos.’
Among the many Spanish spectators on the balconies of hotels along the route was a lady who had been at the civil ceremony and had noticed the priceless pearl necklace worn by Eugenia. She quoted an old Spanish proverb, ‘The pearls women wear on their wedding day symbolise the tears that they are going to shed.’ Some romantic historians see these words as only too prophetic of what Eugenia would suffer as empress of the French.
W
hen 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.’
