38. Elegy for an Emperor

0.     Lady Cowley to Queen Victoria, January, 1873, Ivor Guest, Napoleon III in England (London: BT&G Press, 1952), p. 198.

0.     The London Times, Thursday, January 16, 1873, p. 9, one of the two best accounts of the funeral, and which I shall be referring to throughout this chapter.

0.     Special correspondent of Ireland’s Freeman’s Journal, Thursday, January 16, 1873, pp. 2–3.

0.     Blanchard Jerrold, Napoleon III (London: Longmans, Green, 1982), vol. IV, Appendix XII, p. 575.

0.     Pius IX, angered by the withdrawal of French troops protecting Rome, and because of Louis Napoléon’s recommendation to abandon the Papal States. This pope [Count Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti], who had recently declared himself “infallible,” had forbidden any senior Roman Catholic ecclesiatic—English or foreign—from performing the rites for the funeral of Napoléon III or from attending those services.

0.     According to the custom of the day, only men participated in the funeral cortège, while the women went ahead to the church.

0.     Freemans Journal, op. cit., p. 3.

0.     Ivor Guest, op. cit., p. 198. Alexandra, the Princess of Wales, to Lady Cowley, Sandringham, January 11, 1873, Henry R. C. Wellesley, Earl Cowley, The Paris Embassy During the Second Empire (London: Thorton, Butterworth, 1928), p. 330: “I should think France now would feel some remorse for the ingratitude which embittered the last days of one who had devoted the best years of his life to make her great and glorious.”

0.     Until this date, official French textbooks dispose of Napoléon III and his reign in just a few paragraphs and even then with disdain and ridicule. Fortunately, a new mature generation of historians is now beginning to produce more honest, objective, and professional studies. But even at the exhibit on “The Second Empire” held at the Musée d’Orsay, in 2016, the Exhibit’s coordinator denied well-documented historical facts, again presenting Louis Napoléon with derision as a shallow, frivolous, indeed ludicrous man.

0.   In 1881 Eugénie built St. Michael’s Abbey in Farnborough, Hampshire, as a mausoleum, where she had the remains of Napoléon III and their son transferred from Chislehurst. (Although it is not generally known, Prince Louis had outstanding natural artistic talents, both in drawing and sculpting.) Upon her death in 1920, Eugénie joined them.