Read Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire Online
Authors: Desmond Seward
Marshal MacMahon’s army plodded resentfully north-east beneath drenching rain, along roads that were seas of mud, sleeping in the sodden fields, and urged on all the time by Palikao’s telegrams from Paris. Food, wine and coffee were in very short supply. The troops lived as best they could off the country, robbing and looting any village they passed through on the march. Understandably, they resented bitterly the spectacle of Napoleon and his household riding by in snugly hooded carriages driven by powdered flunkeys, followed by a train of wagons that carried not only a field kitchen but silver plate and champagne. Although the emperor was closely escorted by watchful Cent Gardes, one enraged soldier had to be forcibly restrained from taking a potshot at him.
The emperor was not quite so comfortable as his troops imagined. An eyewitness told Paléologue many years later:
Growths on his eyelids sealed his eyes. His face was ashen, his back bent double. The least jolting by his carriage made him groan. He could only sit a horse at the cost of agonising stabs of pain. On one occasion he was seen to leave his carriage to lean his head against a tree, so terribly was he being tortured by the spasms of his bladder. During meals his ADCs saw him suddenly shaken by intense shivering, tears running down his hollow cheeks. Every morning when he rose, every evening when he arrived at the camping ground, his surgeon tormented him with a catheter.
His suffering was so intense that at times he thought he must be dying. In a state of physical, mental and moral collapse, he was aware that he had turned into a mere encumbrance.
For a short time the enemy lost sight of the army of Chalons, and General von Moltke was convinced that it must be withdrawing to the capital. Then, on 25 August the Prussian staff read
Le Temps
of two days before. Purchased by their spies in Paris, the paper obligingly informed them, ‘At this very moment the army of MacMahon is going north to help Bazaine’. The cautious MacMahon, who had heard nothing further about Bazaine’s promised break-out from Metz, was beginning to suspect that he was marching into a trap, but Palikao refused to let him change direction and go north instead of north-east. ‘Should you abandon Bazaine’, answered Palikao in response to his plea to do so, ‘revolution will break out in Paris.’
Even Napoleon III had enough military knowledge to query the wisdom of going on to Metz, but by now no one bothered to listen to him. Later he wrote, ‘Our march was the height of imprudence and very badly carried out.’ On 27 August he sent the Prince Imperial north, with three aides-de-camp and a troop of Cent Gardes. He did not want him to learn any more about war – the fourteen-year-old had already seen three officers blown to shreds by
Prussian shellfire, within yards of where he was having breakfast.
What remained of the Second Empire was embodied in the regent. ‘I regard the Salic Law as a mistake,’ Filon told Eugénie. ‘Men will do much more for you than they would for the emperor.’ Whatever she might say about the dynasty being doomed, she still hoped to save the throne for her son, refusing to despair or to leave Paris, as some ministers were urging. She read state papers or wandered through the empty Tuileries, sometimes changing her black for a beige woollen dress. The highlights of her day were the two Council meetings. Each time there was news of a defeat she sent one of her ladies to pray at the church of Notre Dame des Victoires. Few Parisians were aware of her courage. She was too realistic to expect them to accept ‘the Spanish Woman’ as another Joan of Arc, living as much in fear of the mob as she did of Prussians.
The histrionics of General Trochu, the new military governor of Paris responsible for Eugénie’s safety, were a constant irritation. ‘What would you do if the Regent was attacked?’ he was asked. ‘I should lay down my life on the steps of the throne,’ was his reply. He also declaimed, ‘That woman is a Roman.’ When he harangued the Council on how to meet death, she broke in, ‘
Mon dieu
, General, one dies as best as one can!’ Yet his posturing made this squint-eyed Breton the idol of Paris. But Eugénie distrusted him from the moment he arrived in the capital. Not only had he been appointed on Plon-Plon’s recommendation but he was in touch with republican leaders such as Jules Favre and Jules Ferry. Sensing that the empire was tottering, they hoped for a constitutional take-over to avoid a revolution that might provoke a monarchist backlash. When the Corps Législatif rejected their demand for Palikao’s replacement, they courted Trochu, who like many Orleanists had considerable sympathy with republicanism.
As late as 26 August Eugénie had written to her nieces in Madrid, ‘it looks as if the Prussians will appear before Paris in the next few days, and if this really is the case then the siege will begin. Probably you will only be able to hear of me in the newspapers.’ She added, ‘I do not fear the crisis and still have hope.’
Nonetheless, walking in the Tuileries gardens one evening she remarked in terror that the red glow of the setting sun was making it seem as if the palace was on fire. She was eating almost nothing, taking only an occasional spoonful of soup, and would wake up looking even paler than usual, a ghastly, livid white, and shaking
with cold from the effects of the chloral on which she had become dependent for a very few hours of sleep.
On 28 August she wrote to her nieces again. ‘I can still write to you because it seems the Prussians have stopped advancing on Paris in order to attack the emperor’s army in even greater numbers. You can imagine my state of mind. I am very uneasy and worried because there will be a big battle in a day or so…. Pray for us, children. God alone can give us strength to bear this dreadful ordeal.’
Eugénie waited anxiously for confirmation that MacMahon had relieved Bazaine. It was hoped that this would happen by 28 August at the latest, when there were rumours he had actually done so. But on 30 August the French suffered a fresh defeat at Beaumont, General de Failly’s corps being almost wiped out after the Prussians took the French right wing by surprise. Many of the survivors mutinied. The news caused uproar and, already blamed for his failure at Froeschwiller, the wretched Failly was reviled in the press as a traitor. The empress sent a cable telling Napoleon to sack him – she did not realise that he no longer had the power.
Outmanoeuvred, Marshal MacMahon took his army to Sedan, a little town overlooking the River Meuse and ringed by hills, that was less than 10 miles from the Belgian border. He saw it as a natural stronghold where his men could rest briefly and then regroup. Moltke saw it differently. ‘We’ve got them in a mouse-trap,’ he told King William. The trap was sprung by nightfall on 31 August, the army of Chalons finding itself surrounded by two enemy armies, General Ducrot commenting famously, ‘
Nous sommes dans un pot de chambre et nous y serons enmerdés
.’ Just over 100,000 bewildered French troops were encircled by a quarter of a million confident and superbly commanded Germans. Realising that disaster was imminent, the marshal advised Napoleon to escape while there was still time; but the emperor refused.
The Bavarians attacked over the Meuse at 4.00 a.m. before first light, on 1 September. The French objective was to try to hold off the enemy while as many of their troops as possible broke out of the encirclement. They were not helped by confusion over who was in command. MacMahon, badly wounded in the thigh early in the morning, was replaced by Ducrot, who in turn was replaced by General de Wimpffen.
The army of Chalons fought with the utmost gallantry, but by midday its encirclement was complete. From every hilltop massed batteries of the breech-loading Krupp howitzers were able to shell it with complete impunity, outranging and knocking out its artillery, setting fire to its munitions wagons which one after another began to explode, and decimating its troops. This time there was no need for wasteful infantry attacks against the
chassepots
.
In desperation and as a last resort, General Ducrot sent in his cavalry, with orders to hack a way out through the Prussian infantry, but the needle-guns were quite sufficient to mow down horsemen armed with sabres. When General the Marquis de Gallifet returned with the survivors of the death-ride, having left the ground in front of the Prussians piled high with his dead or dying comrades and their horses, Ducrot asked him to charge again. ‘
Tant que vous voudrez, mon general! Tant qu’il en restera un!
’ Gallifet answered him unhesitatingly. (‘As many times as you like, general! While a single one of us remains!’) He then led two more magnificent but suicidal charges. Watching them from a hilltop the old Prussian king cried, ‘
Ah! les braves gens!
’
Finally, Gallifet – that ornament of the Tuileries and Compiègne – was beaten back a third and last time. As he rode away with the bare handful of his troopers who were still in the saddle, several Prussian officers ordered their men to cease firing and then saluted him with their swords.
For five hours Napoleon III did his best to get himself killed, riding to wherever he thought the fighting looked most dangerous, going as close to the front line as his staff would let him. His grey hair was freshly dyed, his moustaches were newly waxed and his face was rouged to disguise its pallor. His red képi gleamed with the gold braid of a marshal and he wore the grand star of the Légion d’honneur – he wanted to make as easy a target as possible for the Prussians. Afterwards a doctor commented that it must have needed almost superhuman self-control for him to stay on his horse for so long while he was in such dreadful pain.
Considerate as ever, he persuaded most of his staff to take cover behind a stone wall when he and three officers who refused to leave him rode into a particularly murderous artillery barrage. Amid the blinding smoke and the showers of earth, according to his aide-de-camp General Pajol
*
he remained motionless, waiting for a shell to hit him.
Smoking cigarette after cigarette, the emperor rode calmly into lethal barrages of this sort again and again, dismounting only once, when he got down to help fire a
mitrailleuse
. One of the three officers with him was killed by a direct hit, while the other two were both wounded by shell fragments, yet Napoleon himself remained unscathed. The enemy, who did not realise that ‘the old fox’ was present on the battlefield, unwittingly declined to give him a hero’s death. ‘That was a day when I was unlucky,’ he later told Pajol.
Between 3.00 and 5.00 p.m. the army of Chalons disintegrated beneath the bombardment. ‘I could never have imagined so frightful a disaster,’ was how Napoleon later described it to Eugénie. ‘Our troops began to run and tried to get back into the town. Since the gates were shut, they climbed over them. As a result the town was densely packed, jammed with vehicles of every description, while shells rained down on people’s heads, killing men in the streets, ripping roofs off houses and setting the houses ablaze.’
Although General de Wimpffen wanted to fight on with the few troops still in formation, eventually the emperor ordered that a white flag be hoisted. He then sent an officer on his staff to the Prussian king with a short letter:
Monsieur mon frère
,
Not being able to die among my troops, it only remains for me to surrender my sword into your Majesty’s hands. I am your Majesty’s good brother.
Napoleon
King William accepted the surrender in a courteous reply. Taken to William’s headquarters, the emperor insisted that he was surrendering as a combatant, and as a prisoner of war was no longer the head of France’s government.
He sent a telegram to the regent: ‘
L’armée est défaite et captive. Moi-même je suis captif
’ (‘The army has been defeated and is in captivity. I myself am a prisoner’). Then he wrote to her, explaining:
We went on a march that defied all principles of war and common sense. It was bound to end in disaster, and it did. I would far rather have died than witness such a shameful surrender, but in the circumstances it was the one way of saving 60,000 men from being massacred. If only that was the end of
my torment! I am thinking of you, of our son, of our unhappy country. May God protect her. What will happen in Paris?
On 3 September Napoleon III was driven off to captivity in Germany, Bismarck observing, ‘There goes a dynasty on its way out.’
Rumours of a great disaster reached Paris on 2 September, but Eugénie refused to believe them. ‘The situation has changed a good deal,’ she wrote to Paca’s children that evening. ‘I’ve heard nothing from the emperor for three days but I know there has been fighting during this time. Yesterday I did not even hear from Louis [the Prince Imperial]. There is no need for me to tell you my state of mind. If the silence continues, I don’t see how I can go on.’ Even so, she told them, ‘We are preparing for the siege, determined to hold out for as long as we can and, if the city gives in, we shall continue fighting from somewhere else, because we must keep on till the end while there is still a single Prussian on French soil.’ Always a Catholic fatalist, she added, ‘I feel that what I am suffering at the moment may be to give me the strength that I shall need for even worse trials and to go on fighting.’
At about 5.00 p.m. the following day, the minister for the interior, Henri Chevreau, came into her drawing-room at the Tuileries, asking to speak to her alone. Then he told her Napoleon was a prisoner, producing the telegram. She fainted. ‘You will lose your throne before the day is over,’ he warned her when she regained consciousness. ‘The governor of Paris is the one man who can save you. You must beg him to help you – let me give him the emperor’s telegram.’ Eugénie asked Chevreau to leave, telling him to do whatever he liked. For a moment she could not credit the telegram.