Read Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire Online
Authors: Desmond Seward
Napoleon returned from North Africa on 8 June, in time to accompany Eugénie to the Grand Prix de Longchamps three days
later, the most important fixture in the French racing calendar and always the great social event of the summer.
Eugénie’s second regency had come to an end after only six weeks, yet it shows how much she enjoyed power. ‘The ministers never once quarrelled among themselves and I have kept them so well under control that I almost regret surrendering the reins’, she observed complacently to Prince Metternich, who reported the conversation to Vienna. ‘I shall tell the emperor I am handing over a firm and united government.’ Mérimée had the distinct impression that from now on she intended to be an empress in the fullest sense of the word. Next year she began attending all important meetings of the Imperial Council as a matter of course, and presided in the absence of her husband.
Every Sunday at twelve o’clock the imperial family and their household heard High Mass in the Tuileries chapel, Napoleon III genuflecting and crossing himself. His faith may have been lukewarm, but he never forgot that most Frenchmen were Catholics. In 1849, when still Prince President, he had sent the French army to Rome, to put an end to Garibaldi’s Roman republic and restore Pope Pius IX.
‘I am Catholic to the roots of my being’, Eugénie told Paléologue, but she was in no way a bigot, as her enemies alleged. ‘Never in my time did the Tuileries see that ceaseless coming and going of cassocks that used to be seen under Charles X’s reign’, she insisted. ‘In my day there was no clericalism at the Tuileries.’
The Legitimists claimed that their pretender, the Comte de Chambord, was the only man who could embody Catholic France. They accused Bonapartists of being anticlerical, not altogether without justice. Both Plon-Plon and Persigny were bitter enemies of Catholicism, the former becoming Grand Master of the French freemasons. (Garibaldi was Master of the masons in Italy,) The empress’s obvious piety was therefore of considerable value to Napoleon.
There were two sorts of French Catholic. Ultramontanes wanted a declaration of papal infallibility and a return to the ‘purer’ beliefs of the Middle Ages in order to fight modern materialism. Men of
this stamp, such as the journalist Louis Veuillot, thought it a tragedy that Luther had not been burned and welcomed Pius IX’s
Syllabus of Errors
, which condemned practically everything in nineteenth century thought.
In contrast, the Gallicans wanted more independence from Rome, did not wish for a declaration of infallibility and tried to live with the intellectual climate of the day – even if one of their leaders, the Comte de Montalembert, proclaimed, ‘We are the sons of the Crusaders and will never surrender to the sons of Voltaire.’ Liberal Catholics of this sort, who included the spell-binding Dominican preacher Lacordaire, were often Orleanists. Nevertheless, Gallicans such as Mgr Darboy, archbishop of Paris, and Mgr Dupanloup, bishop of Orleans, cooperated happily enough with the Second Empire. (Darboy was the empire’s Grand Almoner, ‘our prinipal chaplain’ as Eugénie called him.) They tried desperately to interpret the
Syllabus of Errors
in a less obscurantist sense.
‘I was something of a Gallican’, the empress remembered. ‘At least, I was certainly not shocked by Gallicanism.’ She favoured the ideas of Darboy whom, as she constantly reminded people after his murder by the Communards in 1871, ‘Pius IX never deigned to make a Cardinal’. She ignored the
Syllabus of Errors
and supported the freethinker Victor Duruy’s educational reforms, disregarding papal fulminations about his ‘impious designs’. It was on Duruy’s advice that instead of accepting the standard abbé recommended by bishops, she appointed Filon as the Prince Imperial’s tutor. She was shocked when Franz-Joseph signed a concordat giving the Church control of Austrian education and told Hubner that the concordat belonged to the Middle Ages.
Possibly her attitude owed something to Spanish Jansenism, inherited from her father, which was not so much the predestinarian creed of Port Royal as a conviction that the Church was badly in need of reform. (Don Cipriano’s mother, the countess of Montijo, had been a Spanish Jansenist, harried and humiliated because of her views.) Like the Gallicans, Jansenists wanted a national Church, with most of the pope’s powers transferred to the country’s bishops and Mass in the vernacular.
Yet Eugénie believed it was vital to preserve the Papal States if the pope was to perform his mission as God’s instrument on earth without interference. Only a French garrison saved what was left of them, the area around Rome, from being occupied by Victor-Emmanuel’s
troops. Withdrawing it would outrage every French Catholic and might even cause a Legitimist uprising.
At the same time Napoleon needed Italy as an ally and had to conciliate French anticlericals. Anticipating today’s Vatican State, he suggested that the pope should stay in Rome but cease to rule, a plan which Eugénie rejected as impractical. She made such ferocious scenes that Lord John Russell joked that there would be a divorce citing the pope as co-respondent. When in May 1862 the Italian ambassador Cavaliere Nigra asked her to persuade the emperor to remove his troops, she shouted that Victor-Emmanuel was a bandit who had stolen the kingdom of Naples and that if Garibaldi took over Italy and ‘strung him up’, France would not lift a finger to save him. Reporting in June that for the moment Napoleon had abandoned all idea of withdrawing them, Metternich commented, ‘I regard it as a triumph for the empress.’ ‘The emperor will seize upon any excuse or pretext to remain in Rome’, wrote Lord Cowley in October, ‘because he dreads the family discord and the effect upon public opinion.’
In January 1865 Eugénie told Cowley of her plan for all ‘Christian princesses’ to join in replacing the buildings over the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by two churches side by side – one for Catholics, the other for Orthodox – with a central building between for other denominations. The Foreign Office quickly warned him, ‘The Queen won’t have the Holy Sepulchre at any price.’ Nor would the pope. When Eugénie’s friend Count von der Goltz made discreet enquiries through the Nuncio in Paris, he was told that Pius IX would never approve such a plan because the Holy Sepulchre rightly belonged to the Catholic Church alone. The tsar would have been equally hostile. If impractical, the plan shows that, ecumenically, Eugénie was years before her time.
Nothing weakened Eugénie’s commitment to the temporal power. ‘I am afraid the empress is [hell] bent on going to Rome’, Lord Cowley reported from Compiègne in December 1866, commenting he could not see what she hoped to achieve. Yet it is easy enough to guess. Despite her opposition, Napoleon had by now withdrawn the French garrison, and she wanted to reassure French Catholics that, even so, he remained determined to preserve the Papal States. She abandoned the idea on realising that it would infuriate King Victor-Emmanuel’s government.
Eugénie had no favourite priests, although for a time the Abbé
Bauer preached so eloquently that he held a near monopoly of the Tuileries’ pulpit. A rich Hungarian and a convert from Judaism, small, gaunt and hollow-eyed, he had been recommended by the Rothschilds. But success went to his head and he irritated the empress by wearing dandified cassocks with purple buttons like a monsignor which, according to rumour, were made for him by Worth. (After the fall of the empire he was caught sleeping with one of his penitents, defrocked and took up a new career on the stage.)
‘An artless young Gascon maiden has had visions of a lady in white hard by a fountain – a sort of White Lady of Avenel tale’, reported
The Times
sardonically at the end of August 1858. ‘The fountain is only said to have spouted forth since the White Lady sprouted out from among the bushes at the entrance of the cavern. The young girl sees the vision and falls into ecstasies, while surrounding crowds can discern nothing.’ The paper added that Louis Veuillot of
L’Univers
had written five columns on whether ‘the Virgin Mary has once more descended upon earth, and, like Moses, has caused water to flow where none was seen before.’ It commented that the visions would be credited by nobody ‘superior to a profoundly ignorant peasant who is not a fit inmate for Charenton’ – the madhouse. The Gascon maiden was Bernadette Soubirous and the cavern was at Lourdes, a small Pyrenean town not far from where Eugénie liked to climb. Soon the water was credited with healing powers and the Lourdais began to pray there, so the local authorities, anticlericals who shared the view of
The Times
, obtained an order to fence the grotto off from public access.
When the imperial couple arrived at Biarritz (to see a
corrida
at Bayonne in Eugénie’s honour, with Spanish bulls) the archbishop of Auch asked Napoleon to withdraw the ban. The Prince Imperial’s governess Mme Bruat and then the master of the empress’s household visited Lourdes, and when the emperor sent Achille Fould – ironically, a staunch Jew – to withdraw the order, people suspected that Eugénie had intervened. If there is no firm evidence, it certainly looks as if the ban’s lifting owed something to her prompting.
*
The empress described herself to Filon as ‘pious but not a fanatic’. Even so, she heard Mass on weekdays as well as on Sundays, spent long hours in prayer and helped the poor. Her most prized possession was the Charlemagne Talisman, a pearl and sapphire pendant holding a relic of the True Cross, that had been sent to Charlemagne by Haroun al-Rashid. Napoleon I gave it to Josephine and Eugénie found it among her wedding presents. She kept it by her bed when giving birth to the Prince Imperial – beyond question she believed in miracles.
At the same time she believed passionately in freedom of conscience. ‘It is more against
unbelief
that we should fight rather than differences in belief’, she told her mother. Horrified that the Spanish government should contemplate legislation against non-Catholics, she recalled how Louis XIV had expelled the Huguenots from France. ‘The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was a terrible mistake. Are we going to repeat it in the middle of the nineteenth century? I hope not, precisely because I am a Catholic to the very depths of my soul.’ She gave generously to Jewish charities after consulting the Grand Rabbi of France, and, if Ethel Smyth can be credited, while in England was almost shocked when Anglicans converted to Catholicism – although this may have been wishful thinking on Dame Ethel’s part. Even so, she was convinced that most people could find salvation in the creed into which they had been born. ‘There is but one justice before God’, she told Dr Evans. ‘And it belongs to all men alike, rich or poor, black or white, Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile’. However, under no circumstances would she tolerate divorce.
Her occasional criticism of both pope and priests stemmed from being a genuinely liberal Catholic. Had she been born a century later, she would have approved of the modernisation of the Church set in motion by the Second Vatican Council, although no doubt deploring the ensuing chaos and the vulgar, undignified new liturgy. In later years her faith became so unostentatious that Ethel thought it a mere matter of form, before realising that, on the contrary, it was an ‘inward need and a source of consolation and strength’.
Very Spanish, her creed was a bleak one. She expected suffering instead of joy, accepting whatever God might send, reserving her hope only for the life to come. It is likely that she rather than her son composed a prayer found on his body after his death:
Do not take away the obstacles in my path but give me strength to overcome them, do not disarm my enemies but help me conquer myself…. If retribution must fall, then let it fall on me…. Only in putting the past behind me can I find happiness…. Make me feel certain that those I love who are dead are watching what I do.’
The prayer contains a characteristic phrase of hers – ‘how sad is the thought that makes us say, “Time effaces all.”’
Her reputation for bigotry, stemmed from the smears circulated by anticlericals, who were angry at her support for the pope’s temporal power. In reality, no one could have been a more tolerant Christian.
‘All this frivolity did not prevent the new sovereigns from cherishing the very highest ideals’, admits the austere Pierre de la Gorce. ‘One of the Second Empire’s oddest features was the way in which it combined charity of the most imaginative sort with dissipation, serious thought with utterly trivial pursuits. Amid the demands of her constant entertaining, the empress never forgot the social duties that went with her rank … she always showed a real desire to help the poor and suffering.’
Visiting the poor – ‘poor peopling’, as the Victorian English sometimes called it – was a normal enough activity for nineteenth-century ladies. What made Eugénie’s visiting different was that she spent so much money on it. Napoleon allowed her 1,200,000 francs a year, of which 100,000 went on her wardrobe, the rest on presents, pensions for retired servants and, above all, charity. ‘I am frequently laughed at for wasting time in trying to make myself popular with the working classes’, the emperor complained more than once. ‘I don’t think that it’s a waste of either time or effort – and I’m sure Queen Victoria would agree with me.’ Eugénie was not just attempting to please her husband but putting into practice her own extremely practical form of Christianity.
The poverty that existed in mid-nineteenth-century Paris was as marked as anything in Dickensian London. The capital described by Privat d’Anglemont in
Paris Inconnu
(1861) could be nightmarish, a city of alcoholism, disease and starvation, of brutal exploitation. Women in particular received pitiful wages. A tiny minority, such as
the expert sewing girls who made the empress’s dresses (‘never costing more than 1,500 francs’), might perhaps earn as much as ten francs a day, but those working in most dressmakers’ sweatshops were lucky if they got two and a half. A toiling laundress was only paid two. The wages of their menfolk were often not much more, and there was no provision for unemployment, illness or old age.