Read Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire Online
Authors: Desmond Seward
On 20 July Princesse Mathilde went to see Napoleon at Saint-Cloud. He greeted her in his study, his face ashen, his eyelids puffy, his eyes dead, his legs shaky and his shoulders hunched. ‘Is it true you are taking command of the army?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘But you aren’t in a fit state to command anything!’ Mathilde burst out. ‘You can’t sit astride a horse, you can’t even bear being shaken up in a carriage. How are you going to manage during the fighting?’
The emperor answered ‘in a muffled voice’ that she was exaggerating, and ‘waved his hand in a gesture of resigned fatalism’.
Both he and the empress had decided that he had no other option than to lead the armies of France into battle. On 11 July, during a lucid interval from the stone and his laudanum, he had ordered that all three armies in any forthcoming German campaign must be under his personal command. After all, he was a Bonaparte. This was asking for trouble. ‘The campaign of 1859 had shown his total incapacity for generalship even when in good health,’ comments Sir Michael Howard.
On 26 July Eugénie was appointed regent for the third time. Two days later, accompanied by the fourteen-year-old Prince Imperial, Napoleon set out for the front. Much to the Parisians’ surprise, he did not ride out from his capital at the head of the Imperial Guard, as he had in 1859, but instead took the train to his headquarters at Metz. Very few people were allowed to know of his illness.
Augustin Filon was among the small group of courtiers who saw the emperor and the prince off from the little railway station at Saint-Cloud. He watched Eugénie drive past with Princess Clothilde on their way back to the château. Both women were in tears, although the empress had managed to remain dry-eyed while making the sign of the cross on her son’s forehead and telling him to do his duty. Another courtier, de Parieu, informed the tutor how when he had said to her that he thought the French would be wrong not to accept an offer of English mediation, if it materialised, she had replied, ‘I think so too.’ Clearly she was in a different mood from when she had discussed Prussian ‘guarantees’ with Gramont a fortnight before.
Filon became an extra private secretary to the empress, in charge of letters and telegrams in cypher. Although she was regent in name only, and did not attend Council meetings, he was struck by the determined way in which she worked at trying to persuade members of the opposition parties to support the war and also to gain allies among the European powers, even if Bismarck made this an unpromising task by publishing the emperor’s demand for Belgium in 1866 in return for letting Prussia have a free hand in South Germany.
The new private secretary was surprised at how Ollivier and his ministers seldom if ever bothered to inform the regent of their decisions. In their eyes her job was awarding the Légion d’honneur. Throughout the war Eugénie was almost totally dependent on Napoleon’s letters for news from the front; ironically this meant that she was better informed than any minister.
The French strategy was to invade Germany as quickly as
possible with overwhelming superiority in numbers, striking either east across the Rhine or north into the Palatinate, and to win a crushing victory while the Prussian armies were still assembling. French generals were convinced that a spectacular success of this sort would immediately bring Austria into the conflict on their side – for weeks they refused to abandon their fantasies about Austrian intervention – and win over the South German states. Everyone, including even von Moltke, expected the campaign to be on German soil. Ollivier warned that French soldiers should not count on being given too warm a welcome by the Germans.
The chaos of French mobilisation and the incompetence of French staff work made such a plan out of the question. When the emperor’s train deposited him at Metz, he found just over 200,000 troops instead of the 385,000 he had been promised. ‘There was nothing anywhere but muddle, incoherence, delays, quarrels and confusion.’ The railway system could not cope while not only were there insufficient troops, but inadequate food and ammunition.
‘Nothing is ready here,’ a horrified Napoleon wrote to Eugénie two days after his arrival. ‘We don’t have enough troops so I think we have lost our chance of invading.’ His letter left her shattered, ‘just as if my arms and legs had been broken’. A new chaplain who arrived at Saint-Cloud next day, the Abbé Pujol, saw the empress still deeply upset, weeping openly at dinner and drying her tears with a napkin. ‘I’m good for nothing’, she told him. ‘A bad dispatch reaches me and I completely collapse. I am more of a wife and a mother than a regent, yet at the same time I long to give everything for France – I only want the good of France.’ Some historians interpret this outburst as a symptom of mental breakdown, but it was probably due to frustration at being excluded from any useful role in government.
On 2 August an offensive was at last launched, 60,000 French troops occupying the hills overlooking Saarbrücken, two miles across the frontier, where they met with resistance from a mere handful of the enemy. Napoleon wrote to Eugénie how the Prince Imperial had picked up a spent bullet. ‘He might have been strolling along the Bois de Boulogne,’ wrote his father. ‘Some men wept at seeing him so calm.’ For most of the time the boy had been in the carriage from which the emperor ‘directed’ operations – any attempt by Napoleon to mount a horse caused the poor man agony.
The French press magnified the ‘
promenade militaire
’ of
Saarbrücken into a major advance during which the entire town had been burned to the ground after the annihilation of three Prussian divisions. Parisians were ecstatic at this first – and last – victory bulletin. Far from arousing admiration, however, Ollivier’s publication of Napoleon’s letter made the Prince Imperial a laughing stock in the republican papers, as ‘
l’enfant de la balle
’ inanely frolicking on the battlefield.
The Prussian army, with their Bavarian and Württemberger allies were by now ready to attack. Superior railways enabled them to outnumber the French, while their officers, although no braver, were certainly much better trained. Above all, they had Helmuth von Moltke, whose roaming general staff acted as ‘a nervous system’ that enabled him to control and direct enormous bodies of men.
On 4 August the emperor was informed that the enemy had crossed the frontier into Alsace and seized the town of Wissembourg. On 6 August Crown Prince Frederick-William overwhelmed the French at Froeschwiller (Worth), capturing 4,000 prisoners with thirty cannon. If General von Steinmetz was not quite so successful at Spicheren on the same day, he forced General Frossard into withdrawing. The Germans had secured the initiative, cutting off Marshal Bazaine’s troops from those of Marshal MacMahon.
These defeats were not catastrophic, but they put an end to any dreams of invading Germany or of acquiring allies. Franz-Joseph ordered the Austrian army to cease preparing for mobilisation. So did Victor-Emmanuel. ‘Aha, the poor emperor!’ commented the gentleman king (
Il re galantuomo
), ‘I’ve had a lucky escape.’
‘Towards noon on 6 August news of a great victory won by MacMahon spread like a train of gunpowder and central Paris gave itself up to an orgy of joy,’ Filon recalled. It was said that 120,000 Prussians had been routed by 70,000 Frenchmen, who had taken 25,000 prisoners including the crown prince. Before the report was found to be a cruel trick by speculators to hoax the Bourse, the mobs sang the ‘Marseillaise’. Even so, the crowd was in an ugly mood. ‘We’re in for a warm time tonight,’ Pietri, the chief of police, told Filon.
If a little imprecise with dates, Filon’s recollections are invaluable about what happened during the next four weeks, since he was at the empress’s side the entire time. As soon as he returned to Saint-Cloud at 9.30 that evening, her equerry General Lepic brought a message from Ollivier that a revolution appeared to be imminent. ‘Yes,’ observed Eugénie. ‘A conspiracy like Malet’s’ – referring to a republican plot to overthrow Napoleon I when he was away on campaign in 1810.
Lepic asked her to sign a decree drawn up by Ollivier, placing the capital under martial law. In addition, Ollivier implored her to ‘return to Paris immediately with all the troops at her disposal’. Although Lepic warned her that the only men available were 160 men at the Guards Light Infantry Depot, she signed the decree and sent word to Ollivier that she would move back into the Tuileries next day. Then she went to bed.
Filon had hardly sat down when an urgent telegram that had just arrived from General Headquarters was brought in for him to decipher. ‘Our troops are in full retreat,’ he read, ‘We must concentrate on defending the capital.’ Almost as soon as he had deciphered it, another telegram arrived, announcing the defeats at Froeschwiller and Spicheren. It ended, ‘All may yet be regained.’ By now it was 11.30 p.m. The Marquis de Piennes agreed to tell the empress. ‘Do you know what she said?’ Piennes told Filon when he returned, looking pale. ‘The dynasty is lost. We must think only of France.’
Within a quarter of an hour, fully dressed but without make-up, Eugénie came down to the drawing-room, where her ladies and gentlemen joined her. The Princess d’Essling burst into tears and cried, ‘Oh, Madame!’ The empress stopped her. ‘No emotion, please. I’m going to need all my courage.’ Jurien de La Gravière was more reassuring, saying, ‘Well, after all, it might have been much worse.’
She left immediately for the Tuileries where she summoned a Council for 3.30 a.m., presiding as in the old days. Among those present were Ollivier, Eugène Schneider (president of the Corps Législatif) and the ‘Mameluke’ Rouher (president of the Senate). She told them of the two defeats, of the invasion of Alsace and Lorraine, of the threat to the capital.
Panic-stricken, Ollivier proposed a coup, arresting all left-wing deputies and banning every opposition newspaper. The empress refused. She also refused his demand that the emperor should return to Paris – in her view a commander-in-chief could not come home ‘with the shadow of defeat hanging over him’. She refused, too, his request for General Trochu to be made minister of war, after hearing the hastily summoned general declare he would publicly attack the handling of the campaign. Nothing could be done until she had got rid of Ollivier. But she had asserted her authority as regent.
‘When I reached the Tuileries at about one o’clock in the morning I was a completely different woman, no longer agonised, no longer weak,’ Eugénie remembered. ‘I felt calm and strong. I was lucid and resolved. And I was straining every nerve throughout that tragic night to revive confidence and courage in those around me.’
Filon lay down to sleep on a sofa. The palace furniture was covered with dust-sheets, which the regent would not let her staff remove. ‘For the next month we led a totally Bohemian life,’ he said. ‘We ate and slept wherever, whenever and however we could, working on any table that happened to be free. In other words, we were camping in the Tuileries.’ Mme Lebreton-Bourbaki, the empress’s reader (and sister of the general commanding the Imperial Guard) made up a bed for herself next to Eugénie’s dressing-room so that she could be called at once in case of an emergency.
‘She was wonderful,’ Ollivier commented after the regent had presided over the early morning Council. ‘We were all deeply impressed.’ It was an odd tribute from a man once so keen to ban her from meetings. That evening he sent a telegram to Napoleon, telling him France was loyal to the Second Empire: ‘One or two wretches who shouted “
Vive la République!
” have been arrested by the people themselves.’ Curiously, he did not mention the impending revolution of which he had warned Eugénie only the day before. ‘We are all united and discuss policy in the Council in complete agreement,’ he continued. ‘The empress is in excellent health. She shows us a magnificent example of strength, courage and nobility of soul.’ He may have been toadying, however, in order to save his government.
Pierre de La Gorce was not present during the dramatic scenes at Saint-Cloud and the Tuileries, and his asssessment of Eugénie’s motives is more brutal, even if he uses polite phrases when referring to her, such as ‘
l’auguste infortunée
’: ‘Thoughts were running through the empress’s head, which she did not altogether admit to herself,’ he suggested:
She blamed the emperor for three failings in particular; he had grown old, he had turned into a liberal and he had been defeated. Since his position at home had been gravely weakened by his concessions, since he had been humiliated on the battlefield by his defeats, and since he was at the same time broken by the premature collapse of his health, what else should he do but disappear? In contrast, she was young, she was ambitious and she was a mother. She was also legally the regent. Thus was born her secret plan for France’s future, for the empire’s and for her son’s, which had no place for the emperor who largely as a result of his own faults would be obliged to sacrifice himself.
This is no more than saying that Eugénie believed it might soon be time for Napoleon to abdicate in favour of the Prince Imperial – we know she had been thinking on these lines since 1866. What is intriguing is La Gorce’s conviction that by now she was definitely planning to rule France herself, and in her own way.
On the evening of the day after her return to the Tuileries, she was sufficiently relaxed to write a confident letter to Paca’s two daughters, whom she had sent home to Madrid as soon as bad news began to arrive from the front:
Everything remains quiet here although we can’t be sure it’s going to continue. A state of siege has been declared, all the dispatches have been published and the chambers have been recalled. Stay calm! For the time being that really is the most important thing we must do. The news from the troops is that we are still fighting. If we win a battle, then everything will be transformed. Be brave and don’t worry about us. I’m in no way downcast despite the unpleasant moments I’ve been through since last night.