“All the pomp and ceremonies of Notre-Dame Cathedral could not have begun to compare with the scene in the little church of St. Mary.” 1
—LADY COWLEY TO QUEEN VICTORIA, JANUARY 1873
It was a mild day under a thin wintry sun at eleven o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, the fifteenth of January, 1873, as the coffin of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was placed in the hearse outside the entrance to Camden Place. “There must have been 20,000 persons [including two thousand French visitors] at Chislehurst” attending the funeral, the London Times reported.2 “The early morning trains from London brought down their thousands, and in addition special trains were laid on,” while still others brought French mourners arriving from Dover. “The lodge gates were in a state of siege, and the entrance was imperatively refused to all but those who had received special permits.”3 Anticipating the large numbers now arriving and possible disruptions or even an assassination attempt on the late emperor’s son and heir, on special orders from the Home Office, Scotland Yard’s Superintendent Mott had dispatched 800 constables from London to maintain order. After the scandal of the Orsini plot traced back to England years earlier, the last thing Her Majesty’s Government desired to see was an attempt on the life of another Bonaparte, this time on English soil.
Meanwhile Eugénie, who had been at Louis Napoléon’s side night and day during his illness, had then prayed next to his embalmed body where he lay in state in the uniform of a lieutenant general in the chambre ardente, with his sword on one side, his hat at his feet, next to a bouquet of yellow immortelles, the favorite flowers of his mother, Hortense. His hands were crossed on his chest, on which were placed a crucifix, the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor, the Médaille Militaire, and other decorations. He wore both his own wedding ring and that of Napoléon I’s on his left hand. Photographs of Eugénie and his son were placed next to him.4 Prostrate from emotion and exhaustion the empress was unable to attend the funeral today, while the other ladies were being escorted separately to the small Catholic church of St Mary’s.
Beyond Camden Place, the entire half-mile country route to the church was lined on both sides by those coming to pay their respects as the funeral cortège proceeded from the heavily guarded lodge gates across the heath. The emperor’s son and heir, the sixteen-year-old Prince Imperial [Napoléon] Louis, tall, slender, outwardly in “quiet self-possession [of his emotions] … his face pale, his carriage, unfaltering and dignified,” bareheaded in a long black mourning cloak, led the procession on foot followed by his cousins, Princes Jérôme, Charles, and Lucien Bonaparte, and Princes Joachim and Achille Murat, former prime minister Eugène Rouher, Marshals Canrobert and LeBreton—Marshal MacMahon, who had led the French army to defeat at Sedan having declined the honor—along with Queen Victoria’s personal representative Viscount Sidney, and Lord Suffield, representing the Prince of Wales, Lord Cowley, Lord Buckhurst, the physicians Sir Henry Thompson and Sir William Gull, the pallbearers, and the French and English priests “chanting the offices for the dead.”5
The French government had refused to give any state recognition to this funeral and sent no official representatives—thereby preventing the English government or Queen Victoria and the royal family from participating. This did not hinder more than two thousand French citizens, however. They were followed by a delegation of thirty-four French workers, clad in their smocks and trooping the tricolor, and some six hundred official mourners six abreast. Separately the Lord Mayor and the high sheriff of London, former high French imperial officials—including General Fleury, the Princes de la Moskowa and Poniatowski, the Dukes de Bassano, Cambacérès, Gramont, and de Tarente, seven admirals, fifteen generals, eight ambassadors [but not of France], twenty-seven former ministers, forty prefects led by Baron Haussmann, and 190 former or present senators, deputies, and high officials—all in official uniforms or black mourning attire, were followed by a delegation of four senior Italian army officers in blue, silver, green, and gold, representing King Victor Emmanuel.6 Ignoring Paris, the Austrians also sent their ambassador. Among those notably absent today were Prosper Mérimée, who had died in September 1870, and Victor Fialin de Persigny, who died in January 1872.
The glass-enclosed hearse drawn by eight black, richly caparisoned horses “led by mutes carrying rings of yellow immortelles on their arms” drew up the end of the procession. The hearse, its sides swept by a purple velvet pall emblazoned with the golden imperial arms, and its roof covered with wreaths of violets and white roses, slowly wound its way through the heath and the straggling village of Chislehurst.
The long black procession reached the small Catholic church of St. Mary’s at half past eleven, when “the coffin, preceded by the [Rev. Dr. Daniels] Bishop of Southwark, Monseigneur Bauer, Abbé Goddard and other ecclesiastics, was borne into the Chapel,” and placed on pedestals, with tall candles at either end. The ladies, including Madame Le Breton, the Vicomtesse d’Aguado, Princess Mathilde, Princess Clothilde, the Duchesse de Malakoff, the Duchess de Montmorency, the Comtesse Clary, the Comtesse Walewski, Comtesse Fleury, Madame de Saint-Arnaud, the Marquise de La Valette, Madame de Canrobert, and the Duchess de Mouchy, among others, had arrived earlier, and were already seated on the left side of the church. The men then filed into the right side, 184 in all, as the small organ played the De Profundis. “While the bishop was robing the Miserere was sung [by the Southwark boys’ choir], of which the Missa de Profundis by a plain chant. The whole Mass, followed by the Libera and the Benedictus [accompanied by the organ], was rendered with great solemnity,”
After absolution was pronounced, the wreaths of flowers on the coffin were replaced by the purple velvet pall embroidered with a gold cross, a crown, and the initial “N.” Prince Louis knelt before his father’s coffin, followed in turn by Prince Jérôme and the other princes, sprinkling holy water and making the sign of the cross. “The congregation then silently awaited the departure of the Prince Imperial before attempting to leave the chapel,” an Irish correspondent noted. “All bowed low as he passed down the double line of sympathisers with himself and friends of the Imperial dynasty.” And then as he “emerged from the edifice, the French spectators, to the number of five or six hundred in the churchyard, raised a loud and unanimous shout of “Vive l’Empereur! Vive Napoléon IV!”7
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“The interment was the most touching scene I have ever witnessed,” Lady Cowley acknowledged to Queen Victoria. “In the Church everyone was sobbing … even the dignitaries carrying the coffin … All the pomp and ceremonies of Notre-Dame Cathedral could not have begun to compare with the scene in the little church of St Mary.” The Royal Standard at Windsor was lowered to half-mast as Queen Victoria and the Royal Court went into mourning for fifteen days, as did the Italian and Austrian royal families. “I should think France would now feel some remorse,” Princess Alexandra wrote Lady Cowley from Sandringham.8 But of course there was no official remorse, as immense heaps of rubble continued to smolder where the Tuileries Palace once stood. The French government did not mourn Louis Napoléon’s death; no flags were lowered at half-mast before the National Assembly, the Luxembourg Palace, the Invalides, or at the Élysée. The new French Republic would literally remove Napoléon III and the Second Empire from the nation’s history books, and Marshal Patrice MacMahon, in return for surrendering the entire French army to Bismarck in 1870, would be elected president of the Republic.9
Later the remains of Louis Napoléon were placed in a handsome sarcophagus donated by Queen Victoria, and the Royal Banner from Windsor Castle was suspended over his tomb. Six years later the twenty-three-year-old Prince Louis, Napoléon IV, a serving officer in the English army in South Africa, was killed in a Zulu ambush. His coffin was brought back to Chislehurst and placed next to his father’s.10