The Empire is peace … I wish to draw into the stream of the great popular river those hostile side-currents which lost themselves without profit to anyone. We have immense unploughed territories to cultivate; roads to open; ports to excavate; rivers to be made navigable; canals to finish; a railway network to complete … We have ruins to repair, false gods to tear down, truths which we need to make triumph. This is how I see the Empire …
Louis-Napoleon, Bordeaux, 9 October 1852
THE NEXT STEP was to marry: the future of the Napoleonic line must at all costs be assured. (The emperor had already nominated Jerome as his heir, but Jerome was twenty years older than he was and Jerome’s son Prince Louis-Napoleon – universally known as ‘Plon-Plon’ – was a faintly laughable figure who would never make an emperor in a thousand years.) Harriet Howard, the prince’s mistress – ‘Lizzie’, as she was always known – was out of the running. She was, frankly, a courtesan, and courtesans could hardly be empresses. On the other hand, it was no good thinking about the great royal or imperial families of Europe – Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns or Romanovs – nor even about the relatively modest House of Hanover: the British would feel the same as the others, and would anyway never countenance a Catholic. To all of them Napoleon III – as he must now be called – was nothing but a jumped-up adventurer, even worse than his uncle. He would obviously have to lower his sights.
His choice finally fell on a remarkably beautiful Spanish girl: Doña María Eugenia Ignacia Augustina de Palafox y Kirkpatrick, in her own right 15th Marchioness of Ardales and 16th Countess of Teba, daughter of the late Count of Montijo. Not quite the top drawer perhaps, but certainly an upper one and anyway the best he could hope for. And there was another point in her favour: he had fallen passionately in love with her at first sight. His immediate entourage was horrified. ‘We have not made the Empire for the Emperor to marry a flower-girl,’ said his close associate the Duc de Persigny, who actually went so far as to circulate scurrilous pamphlets against her. And Persigny was not alone. ‘To hear the way in which men and women talk of their future Empress is astonishing,’ wrote the British ambassador, Lord Cowley, to the Foreign Office. ‘Things have been repeated to me … which it would be impossible to commit to paper.’ But Napoleon refused to be shaken, and married Eugénie, as she was henceforth to be known, on 29 January 1853 at Notre-Dame. As for Lizzie, she was made Comtesse de Beauregard, given a beautiful château and granted a more than generous pension. In fact her last goodbye to the emperor proved to be nothing of the sort: within a month she was back between the sheets. But not for long. The empress soon heard about it and presented her husband with the time-honoured ultimatum: he must choose one or the other; he could not have both. This time it was final. Lizzie returned to London, then after a brief and unsuccessful marriage she shut herself away in her château and led a life so secluded that she became known as ‘the hermit of Beauregard’. She died in 1864, of cancer. She was forty-two.
Eugénie had won, but she knew that there was a long and probably painful climb ahead of her. She was by no means the adventuress and intrigante that the Parisians liked to imagine; she had, however, grown well accustomed to adversity. The beginning of her life had been unusual enough: she had been born on 5 May 1826 in a tent, in which her family had taken refuge after a severe earthquake in Granada, her home city. Her father, having spent many years under house arrest, had died when she was thirteen; and her highly ambitious mother had trailed her and her sister through all the smartest watering-places of Europe in search of suitable husbands, but without success. By the time she caught the emperor’s eye she was already twenty-six, well past what was generally considered marriageable age; but once she was his wife she was to be empress for the next sixty-seven years.
It is hardly surprising that Eugénie should have modestly welcomed the emperor’s advances; but she made it absolutely clear from the start that there was to be no question of sex until they were married. There was to be little enough of it afterwards: she proved the coldest of cold fishes, making no secret of the fact that she thought the whole process dégoûtant – disgusting. In the summer of 1855, however, she took a deep breath, and the following March presented her husband with a single son. There were no more children – and, quite probably, few attempts to have one.
Fortunately, Napoleon had other interests to pursue. Something, he believed, must be done about the state of his capital, much of which was still as described by Balzac* – winding narrow streets and alleyways and squalid, overcrowded tenements, all deeply insanitary and riddled with vermin. In the summer of 1853 he summoned the Prefect of the Department of the Seine Georges Haussmann, and ordered him to create a new Paris, worthy of the new Empire. He knew just what he wanted: a series of long, broad boulevards, which would enable carriages to pass rapidly from one quartier to the next and would lend the city the dignity and distinction it deserved. It would also, he readily agreed, greatly facilitate the swift movement of troops in the event of a sudden insurrection (in Paris, always a possibility). But such considerations were of secondary importance; the emperor’s main purpose was to create a city of which every Parisian – indeed, every Frenchman – could be proud.
Haussmann, although his family came from Alsace, had been born and brought up in Paris and knew it like the back of his hand. He had originally intended to be a musician, but realising that he was simply not good enough for the concert stage had joined the provincial administration. He was selected as the man for the job by the emperor’s Minister of the Interior, Victor de Persigny, who later remembered:
Strangely, it was not his talents and his remarkable intelligence that appealed to me; it was the defects in his character. I had in front of me one of the most extraordinary men of our time: big, strong, vigorous, energetic, and at the same time devious and resourceful. It seemed to me that he was exactly the man I needed to fight against the ideas and prejudices of a whole school of economics, against equally devious people from the stock market. Whereas a gentleman of straight and noble character would inevitably fail, this athlete, full of audacity and skill, capable of opposing traps with cleverer traps, would surely succeed.
For virtually the whole of the emperor’s reign and for a decade afterwards, Paris was one vast construction site. Hundreds of old buildings were demolished and eighty kilometres of new avenues were cut through to connect the key points of the city. Haussmann and the emperor together transformed the capital. We owe to them the Rue de Rivoli, running from the Place de la Concorde as far as Rue Saint-Antoine; Boulevard Saint-Germain, Avenue de l’Opéra, Avenue Foch, Boulevard de Sébastopol, and (of course) Boulevard Haussmann. Among the new buildings were most of the principal railway stations, the Palais Garnier (then the largest opera house in the world) and the central market of Les Halles. It was also at this time that the first two of Paris’s great department stores sprang up – the Bon Marché in 1852, the Printemps in 1865. And all this is to say nothing of the new parks, gardens and squares – and, last but not least, a complete reconstruction of the sewage system. Napoleon did not quite follow the example of the Emperor Augustus, who boasted that he found his capital stone and left it marble; but he certainly transformed Paris more radically than any other monarch, before or since.
The Crimean War, which broke out in October 1853, was a ridiculous affair which should never have occurred at all. It began with a quarrel between the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholics over their always contentious sharing of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Tsar predictably supported the Orthodox; Napoleon, who for all his peaceful protestations felt he needed a war to consolidate his power and reputation, took an equally strong stand on behalf of the Catholics. The Ottoman Sultan first of all dithered, and then came down on the side of the French; but within six weeks his navy had been utterly destroyed by the Russians, so it hardly mattered. Nobody wanted a Russian presence in the eastern Mediterranean, so the British, Protestant as they were, came in with the French. In March 1854 they declared war and landed in the Crimea.
Meanwhile the emperor had made it clear to Lord Cowley that he would much appreciate an invitation to visit England on a state visit. The British government was largely in favour; the principal drawback was the attitude of Queen Victoria herself. Already in the autumn of 1853 one of the emperor’s ministers had raised the question with Cowley, who had referred it to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon. The queen’s reply had been swift:
The Queen hastens to answer Lord Clarendon’s letter, and wishes him to inform Lord Cowley that there never was the slightest idea of inviting the Emperor of the French and that Lord Cowley should take care that it should be clearly understood that there was and would be no intention of the kind, so that there should be no doubt on the subject. The Queen feels sure that the Emperor has had these reports put in [sic] himself.
Gradually, however, relations improved. The situation in the Crimea having apparently reached a stalemate, in September 1854 Napoleon invited the Prince Consort to visit him at his military camp at Boulogne; and Albert accepted. He found the emperor far more relaxed and intelligent than he had imagined, particularly admiring his excellent German. After his guest’s return Napoleon spoke with rather overdone enthusiasm of the prince, ‘saying’, reported Clarendon to the queen, ‘that in all his experience he had never met with a person possessing such various and profound knowledge … His Majesty added that he had never learned so much in so short a time.’ Such flattery went straight to Victoria’s heart. She immediately felt better about the emperor, and when she heard that Albert himself had spoken of a state visit, her resistance crumbled. But she was not yet ready to be gracious; the emperor, she said, could come if he liked, and she suggested the middle of November. She obviously expected him to leap at the chance, and when he asked for a postponement she did not take it well: ‘The Emperor Napoleon’s answer to Lord Cowley with reference to this visit to England … is almost a refusal now, and has not improved our position. The Queen would wish that no anxiety should be shown to obtain the visit … His reception here ought to be a boon to him and not a boon to us.’
The war was still not going particularly well, and in April of the following year Napoleon announced that he intended to sail personally to the Crimea to assume command of his army. The queen was horrified. The idea of a nephew of Napoleon I leading his troops into battle alongside her own men,* only forty years after Waterloo, shocked her to the core. What if he succeeded in making some grand geste, led his French troops to a brilliant victory, and stole all the British thunder? Clearly this must be prevented at all costs, and Clarendon hurried to France to try to dissuade the emperor from any such plan. He found that Napoleon’s enthusiasm had somewhat cooled, and believed that it would not take very much to induce him to change his mind: a state visit, he thought, might be just the thing. And so the arrangements were made: the visit would take place from 16 to 21 April 1855.
It did, and proved a greater success than anyone could have hoped. There were a few inevitable hitches: the empress’s trunks had been held up somewhere between Dover and Windsor, and for the first crucial night she had to improvise. But this was perhaps the best thing that could have happened: the queen was charmed by her simplicity and lack of ostentation. Eugénie, she realised, was by no means the femme fatale of Lord Cowley’s initial reports; on the contrary, she had an only too well-deserved reputation for chastity, and Victoria was delighted when she learned of the empress’s admiration of the high moral tone of the English court. As for the emperor, she was at first struck by his size. ‘He was extremely short,’ she noted, ‘but with a head and bust which ought to belong to a much taller man.’ But she soon forgot his bust. Napoleon III was famous for his charm, and he turned the full force of it on his hostess; within minutes she was captivated. He must, she immediately decided, be awarded the Garter. ‘Enfin je suis gentilhomme,’* he joked after the ceremony. The queen was more enchanted than ever. On the fifth and last day of the visit she summarised her feelings:
The Emperor is very fascinating; he is so quiet and gentle, and has such a soft pleasant voice. He is besides so simple and plain spoken in all he says, and so devoid of all phrases, and has a good deal of poetry, romance and Schwärmerei [enthusiasm] in his composition, which makes him peculiarly attractive. He is a most extraordinary, mysterious man, whom one feels excessively interested in watching and knowing … All he says is the result of deep reflection; and he sees in trifles and ordinary occurrences meanings and forebodings which no one else would find out … He is evidently possessed of indomitable courage, unflinching firmness of purpose, self-reliance, perseverance and great secrecy;† to this should be added great reliance on what he calls his Star.
The return visit five months later was every bit as successful. The climax was a pilgrimage – in a violent thunderstorm – to Napoleon I’s tomb. ‘It was touching, and pleasing in the extreme, to see the alliance sealed so completely … And to see old enmities wiped out over the tomb of Napoleon I, before whose coffin I stood (by torchlight) at the arm of Louis-Napoleon III, now my nearest and dearest ally.’
In less than two years, she had come a long way.
Perhaps in some measure owing to that state visit – Victoria too could be quite persuasive when she tried – the emperor never went to the Crimea. Nor did he need to. In September 1855, after a seemingly endless siege, the French army under General – soon to be Marshal and later President – Patrice MacMahon stormed the Malakoff fortifications guarding the land approaches to Sebastopol. ‘J’y suis, j’y reste!’* bellowed the general as, at the head of his troops, he clambered over the battlements – an exclamation that has entered the French language, and perhaps the English one too. It was the turning point of the war; in February 1856 the Russians sued for peace, and the subsequent negotiations took place in Paris. For the emperor, this was a triumph in itself; and though the Crimean War had little or no long-term impact on the future of Europe – apart from significantly reducing its population† – he milked it for all the glory he could get. Few Parisians today could in all probability tell us much about Alma, Malakoff or even Sebastopol; but the Place, the Avenue and the Boulevard ensure at least that their names will not be forgotten.
It is not often that an unsuccessful attempt at assassination of a ruler leads to a radical change in foreign policy; but it could at least be argued that Napoleon III was an exception to the rule. The attempt took place on 14 January 1858, when bombs were thrown at his carriage as he and the empress were on their way to the Opéra for a performance of William Tell. Neither was hurt, though there were a number of casualties among their escort and the surrounding bystanders. The leader of the conspirators, Felice Orsini, was a well-known republican who had been implicated in a number of former plots. While in prison awaiting trial he wrote the emperor a letter, which was read aloud in open court and published in both the French and the Piedmontese press. It ended: ‘Remember that, so long as Italy is not independent, the peace of Europe and Your Majesty is but an empty dream … Set my country free, and the blessings of twenty-five million people will follow you everywhere and for ever.’
Although these noble words failed to save Orsini from the firing squad, they seem to have lingered in Napoleon’s mind; and by midsummer 1858 he had come round to the idea of a joint operation to drive the Austrians out of the Italian peninsula once and for all. His motives were not wholly altruistic. He did have a genuine love for Italy and would have been delighted to present himself to the world as her deliverer; but he was also aware that his popularity and prestige were declining. To regain them he desperately needed another victorious war, and Austria was the only potential enemy available. The next step was to discuss the plan with Count Cavour, now Chief Minister of Piedmont; and in July 1858 the two met secretly at the little health resort of Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges. Agreement was quickly reached. Piedmont would engineer a quarrel with the Duke of Modena and would send in troops, ostensibly at the request of the population. Austria would be bound to support the duke and declare war; Piedmont would then appeal for aid to France, which would immediately respond. In return for French help, she would cede to France the county of Savoy and the city of Nice. The latter, being the birthplace of Garibaldi, was a bitter pill for Cavour to swallow, but if it was the price of Austrian defeat, then swallowed it would have to be.
To set the seal on the agreement, the two men agreed on a dynastic marriage: Victor Emmanuel’s eldest daughter, the Princess Maria Clotilde, should be espoused to the emperor’s cousin, Prince Louis-Napoleon. When the engagement was announced there were many – especially in Piedmont – who threw up their hands in horror. The princess was a highly intelligent, pious and attractive girl of fifteen; her fiancé, the mildly ridiculous ‘Plon-Plon’, was a raddled old roué of thirty-seven. Victor Emmanuel, who had apparently not been consulted in advance, made no secret of his displeasure but left the final decision to Maria Clotilde herself. It says much for her sense of duty that she agreed to go through with the marriage – which, to everyone’s surprise, proved to be a not altogether unhappy one.
The wedding ceremony took place at the end of January 1859, while France and Piedmont were actively – and openly – preparing for war. Soon afterwards Napoleon III had second thoughts about the whole affair – to the dismay of Cavour, who knew that his small country could not possibly tackle Prussia alone. He was saved by Austria itself, which sent an ultimatum to Turin on 23 April demanding Piedmontese disarmament within three days. Austria had now declared itself the aggressor; the emperor could no longer hope to wriggle out of his commitments and did not attempt to do so. He ordered the immediate mobilisation of the French army. Of its 120,000 men, one section would enter Italy across the Alps while the rest went by sea to Genoa, which was at that time part of Piedmont.
Cavour was well aware that all this would take time. The Austrians were already on the march; for at least a fortnight, the Piedmontese would have to face them alone. Fortunately he was saved again – this time by torrential rains, together with dissension over strategy among the Austrian general staff. The consequent delay gave the French the time to arrive. They were led by the emperor himself who, landing at Genoa on 12 May 1859, for the first time assumed personal command of his army. It was on 4 June that the first battle took place – at Magenta, a small village fourteen miles west of Milan, where the French army, fighting alone under MacMahon, defeated an Austrian army of 50,000. Casualties were high on both sides, and would have been higher if the Piedmontese, delayed by the indecision of their own commander, had not arrived some time after the battle was over. This misfortune did not however prevent Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel from making a joint triumphal entry into Milan four days later.
After Magenta the French and Piedmontese were joined by Garibaldi, full of all his old ardour and enthusiasm. His death sentence long forgotten, he had now been invited by Victor Emmanuel to assemble a brigade of cacciatori delle Alpi – Alpine hunters – and had won a signal victory over the Austrians some ten days before at Varese. Army and cacciatori then advanced together, to meet the full Austrian army on 24 June 1859 at Solferino, just south of Lake Garda. The ensuing battle – in which well over a quarter of a million men were engaged – was fought on a grander scale than any since Leipzig in 1813. This time Napoleon III was not the only monarch to assume personal command: Victor Emmanuel did the same, as did the twenty-nine-year-old Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. Only the French, however, were able to reveal a hitherto secret weapon: rifled artillery, which dramatically increased both the accuracy and the range of their guns.
The fighting, much of it hand-to-hand, began early in the morning and continued for most of the day. Only towards evening, after losing some 20,000 of his men in heavy rain, did Franz Josef order a withdrawal across the Mincio river. But it was yet another of those pyrrhic victories; the French and Piedmontese lost almost as many men as the Austrians, and the outbreak of fever – probably typhus – that followed the battle accounted for thousands more on both sides. The scenes of carnage made a deep impression on a young Swiss named Henri Dunant, who chanced to be present and organised emergency aid services for the wounded. Five years later, as a direct result of his experience, he was to found the International Red Cross.
Nor was Dunant the only one to be sickened by what he had seen at Solferino. Napoleon III had also been profoundly shocked, and his disgust for war and all the horrors it brought in its train was certainly one of the reasons why, little more than a fortnight after the battle, he made a separate peace with Austria. There were other reasons too. The German Confederation was now mobilising some 350,000 men; were they to attack in support of Austria, the 50,000 French soldiers remaining in France would probably be slaughtered. And then there was the situation in Italy itself. Recent events had persuaded several of the smaller states to think about overthrowing their former rulers and seeking annexation to Piedmont. The result would be a formidable power, immediately across the French border, covering all north-west and central Italy: a nation which might well in time absorb some or all of the Papal States and even the Two Sicilies. Was it really for this that those who fell at Solferino had given their lives?
And so, on 11 July 1859, the emperors of France and Austria met at Villafranca, near Verona; and the future of much of Italy was decided in under an hour. Austria would keep her two fortresses at Mantua and Peschiera; the rest of Lombardy would be surrendered to France, which would pass it on to Piedmont. An Italian confederacy would thus be established under the honorary presidency of the Pope. Venice and the Veneto would be a member of this confederacy, but would remain under Austrian sovereignty.
The reaction of Cavour when he read the details of the Villafranca agreement fortunately falls outside the bounds of this history.
Our scene now shifts, briefly and surprisingly, to Mexico. Until 1821 the country had been, like most of Central and South America, a colony of Spain. In that year, led by a charismatic young army officer named Agustín Iturbide, it had declared its independence, and in 1822 Iturbide had proclaimed himself Emperor Agustín I. He was to remain on his imperial throne for just three years before being executed by a firing squad. For the next forty-odd years Mexico had been ruled by a succession of hopelessly corrupt military presidents, all of whom were of Spanish origin and deeply conservative, who together ran up a vast quantity of debts, principally to France, Spain and Great Britain. According to normal practice in the power politics of the nineteenth century, these three countries decided in October 1861 to despatch a joint naval force to the port of Vera Cruz and to take over the customs administration until they were paid the debts owed to them. They would then return to Europe.
They had failed to understand, however, that a new spirit was abroad. Just a year before, in October 1860 after a three-year civil war, Mexico had been taken over by a dour and incorruptible young lawyer of pure Indian stock named Benito Juárez. The whole allied plan proved unrealistic and unworkable. The British and Spanish troops left empty-handed after a few months, but the French unwisely remained. In May 1862 they were routed by Juárez’s army at Puebla, on the road up to Mexico City. At this point, the only sensible decision would have been to summon the army back to France and call the whole thing off; instead, another 25,000 French troops were landed at Vera Cruz in the autumn.
Why should the French have involved themselves in a distant adventure, which was bound to cost them many times more than the debts they were owed? Largely because of the emperor’s ambition. In September 1861 a certain José Manuel Hidalgo, a Spanish-Mexican childhood friend of Eugénie, had proposed to Napoleon that he should be the founding father of a great Catholic empire, to be established first in Mexico but with the possible prospect of spreading over much of Latin America. The emperor was intrigued, for three reasons. First, because the idea naturally appealed to his ambitious and adventurous spirit; second, because it would prevent the predominantly Protestant United States from becoming too powerful in the region. Normally President Lincoln would have done all he could to prevent the enterprise, citing the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 whereby any attempt by the European powers to extend their influence in the Americas would be regarded as a threat to his nation’s security and dealt with accordingly; but Lincoln was now involved in a hideous civil war of his own, and had more than enough on his hands.
The third reason was unrelated to the other two; it concerned the most obvious candidate for the new empire, the Austrian emperor’s brother Maximilian. Now Maximilian suffered acutely from that complaint all too well known among royal families, the younger brother syndrome. What were younger brothers meant to do? His wife, the Princess Charlotte of Belgium, felt the problem even more strongly. When the idea was first put to them, Maximilian was deeply hesitant; there was clearly a very large degree of risk involved. Charlotte, however, was thrilled. Daughter of one king, Leopold I of the Belgians, and granddaughter of another, our old friend Louis-Philippe, she longed to reign herself; and it was probably her influence – together with steady pressure from Napoleon III – that led her notoriously weak-willed husband eventually to accept the Mexican invitation.
And so, at last, Maximilian allowed himself to be persuaded. In April 1864 he formally renounced his rights to the Austrian throne, and a few days later he and Charlotte boarded the Austrian frigate Novara. The rest of their story can be very briefly told. They both did their best and, given a chance, the Mexican Empire might have been a success; but it was not given a chance. Maximilian made one serious mistake. On 3 October 1865 he signed what was known as the Black Decree, according to which any individual belonging to an armed band existing without legal authority would be court-martialled and, if found guilty, condemned to death by firing squad within twenty-four hours. As a result, Juárez is said to have lost more than 11,000 of his men – and he did not forget it.
Meanwhile, despite his losses, he grew steadily stronger. By the beginning of 1866, for the imperial couple the writing was on the wall. Maximilian seemed not to understand the seriousness of his position and continued to travel cheerfully round the country, carousing with the local peasantry and leaving his governmental responsibilities to Charlotte. She presided at the cabinet meetings, until it finally became clear that without outside help she and her husband were doomed. Thus, in the autumn of that year, she returned alone to Europe to appeal to anyone who would listen. Her first port of call was Paris; it was after all Napoleon III who was responsible for the whole disastrous enterprise. At first his guilty conscience made him reluctant to receive her, but Eugénie insisted. The interview was short, for her hosts quickly realised that under the immense strain she had suffered the young empress had lost her reason. When a footman appeared with a tray of lemonade she swept it out of his hands, declaring the drink to be poisoned. She was quietly removed from the imperial presence and escorted back to her lodgings.
It was much the same story when she appealed to the Pope. According to one account she burst in on Pius IX while he was having breakfast and seized his cup of chocolate with the words: ‘At least this won’t be poisoned!’ This time they succeeded in getting her out of the building only by suggesting that she visit the Vatican orphanage. Always the empress, she accepted at once, and on entering the kitchen, now ravenously hungry, plunged her hand into a cauldron of hot soup and was badly scalded. Fortunately she fainted with the pain, and while still unconscious was put on a stretcher and returned to the Grand Hotel. There she remained for several days – keeping several chickens tied to the chairs in her room and eating only eggs, oranges and nuts, which she could see had not been tampered with – until her brother, summoned from Belgium, arrived to take her home. She never saw her husband again and lived, hopelessly insane, in Belgium for another sixty years, dying in January 1927.
As for Maximilian, he was captured by Juárez’s men on 16 May 1867, court-martialled and sentenced to death. Many European crowned heads and other distinguished figures including Garibaldi and Victor Hugo appealed for clemency, but to no avail: Juárez could not forget the Black Decree, and on 19 June the second and last Emperor of Mexico met his death bravely by firing squad. He was thirty-four.
There is a curious if somewhat hypothetical epilogue to this tragic story. General Maxime Weygand, who distinguished himself in both world wars before unwisely throwing in his lot with the Vichy regime, claimed that he never knew his parentage. He had studied at the French military academy at Saint-Cyr, where he had been financed by the Belgian court; and there is a strong possibility that, born as he was in Brussels on 21 June 1867, he was the son of the Empress Charlotte, not by Maximilian but by Colonel Alfred van der Smissen, who commanded a small Belgian contingent in Mexico. A comparison between portrait photographs of the two men certainly shows a striking resemblance. If this theory is true, it would do much to explain Charlotte’s breakdown; an illegitimate pregnancy was, at that moment, the last thing she needed* and would have added vastly to her anxieties.
For some time Napoleon III had been increasingly worried about the activities of Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor. Bismarck had visited him in October 1865 at Biarritz, and in long walks along the Atlantic shore had sketched out to him what he had in mind. He would find some pretext to declare war against Austria – the last major barrier to German unity – and, having successfully defeated it, would create that unity under the leadership (of course) of Prussia.† He had no doubts that he would be victorious; but Austria was twice the size of Prussia and he had to be sure that France would not take her side.
And the emperor, astonishingly, gave his word. Why he did so we shall never understand. He seems to have forgotten his fears of a huge and potentially threatening new state on his eastern frontier. It did not even occur to him to demand a substantial quid pro quo – which Bismarck would surely have been happy to offer. True, if all went according to plan a defeated Austria would be obliged to surrender Venice and the Veneto, the penultimate missing piece in the Italian jigsaw. This might give Napoleon a good deal of personal satisfaction; but it would be of no conceivable advantage to France.
Bismarck, at any rate, was now free to go ahead, and his strategy worked perfectly. In June 1866 Prussian troops invaded Saxony, bringing the Prussian army to the frontier of the Austrian Empire. The newly formed Kingdom of Italy joined in for obvious reasons, and just six weeks later the whole thing was over. For the Prussians, a single battle was enough. It was fought at Sadowa – to the Germans and Austrians, Königgrätz – some sixty-five miles east of Prague, and it engaged the largest number of troops – a third of a million – ever previously assembled on a European battlefield. (It was also the first battle in which railways and the telegraph were used on a considerable scale.) The Prussian victory was total, and the treaty that followed duly provided for the cession to Italy of Venice and the Veneto. Austria was firmly excluded from Germany and left to fend for herself; the North German Confederation was founded, and was joined by several previously independent states. It adopted King William I of Prussia as its president, and Bismarck as its chancellor.
But why – we must return to the question – was Napoleon so unaccountably weak in his dealings with the chancellor? It has been suggested that his health might have been at least partly to
The state of his health and morale was obvious to everyone, and as the months passed became a matter of general concern. He never recovered from Sadowa, for which he had been, he knew by now all too well, in a large part responsible. The worry brought on a second kidney attack; he was forced to leave Paris and to spend several weeks at Vichy, where the waters afforded some relief. When old Adolphe Thiers commented, ‘It is France who was beaten at Sadowa’, he spoke no more than the truth. A month after the fateful cabinet meeting, Lord Cowley – no longer ambassador but still a friend – called on the emperor at Fontainebleau. He found him ‘aged and much depressed’, and suspected that he might even be considering abdication. His successor, Lord Lyons, agreed. He reported to Lord Stanley, the Foreign Secretary, on 11 August:
It is even asserted that he is weary of the whole thing, disappointed at the contrast between the brilliancy at the beginning of his reign and the present gloom – and inclined, if possible, to retire into private life. This is no doubt a great exaggeration but, if he is really feeling unequal to governing with energy, the dynasty and the country are in great danger.
He was certainly in no state to accompany Eugénie when, in November 1869, she attended the opening by the Khedive Ismail of the Suez Canal. The ceremony was not without a moment of serious embarrassment. The khedive had graciously invited the empress, in the French imperial yacht, the Aigle, to be the first to pass through the canal. On the night before the opening, however, HMS Newport, under Captain George Nares RN, slipped without lights through the mass of waiting ships till it was in front of the Aigle. When dawn broke, the French were horrified to see that the Newport was already in the mouth of the canal and that there was no way it could be removed – so it was the Newport that went through first. Nares became perhaps the only British naval officer simultaneously to receive from the Admiralty an official reprimand and an unofficial note of congratulation on a spectacular piece of seamanship. The Aigle was consequently only the second vessel to sail from Port Said to Suez. She was followed by forty-five more vessels, bearing the khedive, his official guests, foreign ambassadors and other important dignitaries. When, on the morning of the 20th, she emerged in the Red Sea, cannon were fired in salute and her ship’s band struck up with ‘Partant pour la Syrie’.* It was not, perhaps, the most appropriate of titles; but it is unlikely that many people noticed.†
On 30 September 1868, the Spanish army having been defeated by revolutionary forces at the Battle of Alcolea, Queen Isabella II of Spain boarded a train with her children at San Sebastián and trundled off into exile. For two years the country was without a monarch, while various candidates were considered; in 1870 the throne was offered to Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Had the prince rejected the offer at once, there might have been no Franco-Prussian War and Napoleon III might have ended his days still on the throne; alas, he accepted. France was appalled. How possibly could she accept being the sausage in the middle of a German sandwich? Typically, Bismarck – in his determination that France should declare war – published what became known as the ‘Ems telegram’, which claimed to be the report of a recent conversation between King William and the French ambassador. In fact their conversation had been perfectly friendly, but Bismarck had craftily edited the telegram in such a way that each nation felt that it had been insulted and ridiculed by the other, dangerously inflaming popular sentiment on both sides.
On 19 July, France declared war, just as Bismarck had intended that she should. The German states saw her as the aggressor – which technically she was – and rallied to the side of Prussia; France was thus left virtually without an ally. It was no use looking to England for help; relations with Queen Victoria had long since cooled, and Thomas Carlyle was probably reflecting – if perhaps exaggerating – public sentiment when he wrote: ‘That noble, patient, deep, pious and solid Germany should at length be welded into a nation, and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless and oversensitive France, seems to me the hopefullest public fact that has occurred in my time.’
To the emperor, there was no question about it. Despite the fact that he was in constant pain – and occasional agony – from a stone in his bladder ‘as big as a pigeon’s egg’, and that he was almost incapable of mounting a horse or even riding in a jolting carriage, he was determined to take personal command. And so, on 28 July, he and his fourteen-year-old son, the Prince Imperial, climbed into a train drawn up at the small private railway station in the grounds of the palace of Saint-Cloud and steamed off to join their army at Metz.
The Franco-Prussian War was a walkover. Bismarck had by now built up the Prussian army into a superb war machine, and though the combined population of Prussia and the Northern Confederation – some thirty million – was considerably less than that of France, together they were able to raise an army of 1,183,000 within eighteen days of mobilisation. The French army by contrast was undermanned, unprepared and dangerously short of vital equipment. There were no ambulances or baggage carts. The generals found they had plenty of maps of the German side of the frontier but none of their own; in consequence several of them had considerable difficulty in finding the units that they were supposed to command. The German artillery made mincemeat of the French cavalry, demonstrating beyond any doubt that the days of mounted men on the battlefield were over for good. On 27 August Napoleon saw that he could no longer take the risk of his son – on whom the survival of the Empire depended – being killed or captured; regretfully, he sent him back to Paris and thence to England.
The end came – mercifully – on 1 September, near the little town of Sedan. Knowing already that all was lost, the emperor – his cheeks heavily rouged to conceal how ill he was – somehow mounted his horse. Apart from two occasions when he had to relieve himself and another when he was obliged to dismount and fling his arms around a tree in order to deal with the pain, he was in the saddle for five hours. It was only around six o’clock that evening, with the sun already low on the horizon, that the white flag was hoisted and a French officer rode out with a letter from the emperor to King William:
Monsieur mon Frère,
Having been unable to die in the midst of my troops, it remains only for me to place my sword in Your Majesty’s hands. I am Your Majesty’s good brother,
Louis-Napoleon.
Bismarck, after a quick consultation with the king – who was also present on the battlefield – replied:
Monsieur mon Frère,
Regretting the circumstances in which we find ourselves, I accept Your Majesty’s sword, and I beg you to name one of your officers furnished with full powers from you to negotiate the capitulation of the army which has fought so bravely under your orders. For my part, I have designated General Moltke for this purpose. I am Your Majesty’s good brother,
Wilhelm.
That night the emperor wrote to Eugénie: ‘It is impossible for me to say what I have suffered and what I am suffering now … I would have preferred death to so disastrous a capitulation; and yet, in the present circumstances, it was the only way to avoid the butchering of sixty thousand people … I think of you, our son, and our unhappy country.’
He was taken to one of the king’s castles, Wilhelmshöhe, near Kassel, where he spent the next six months in fairly comfortable captivity.*
When the news of the surrender reached Paris, however, the city exploded with rage. Immediately streets were renamed, and all outward signs of the Empire obliterated. Eugénie at first refused to believe that her husband had surrendered, declaring again and again that he was dead. When she finally accepted the truth she buried her head in her hands in shame. Meanwhile the Third Republic was proclaimed at the Hôtel de Ville, and within hours a crowd estimated at some 200,000 had gathered around the Tuileries Palace, where the imperial flag at the masthead showed that the empress was still in residence. Even now she was reluctant to leave. She had no fear of death, she assured those around her; she feared only the dishonour of being stripped or raped. At last she agreed to go, and together with Prince Richard Metternich and the Italian ambassador took the narrow underground passage leading from the Palace to the Louvre, at the far end of which the party hailed a passing cab. They eventually found refuge with the emperor’s old friend, his dentist Dr Thomas Evans. Early the next morning she and Dr Evans left for Deauville, arriving there at three o’clock the following morning. Some hours later Evans went down to the harbour, where he saw a yacht flying a British flag. It proved to belong to an Englishman, Sir John Burgoyne, to whom he explained the situation. Unhesitatingly, Burgoyne put his vessel at the disposal of the empress. It set sail at once, and in the early morning of 8 September landed at Ryde on the Isle of Wight. From there Eugénie went on to Hastings, where, at the Marine Hotel, her son was waiting for her.
The emperor had surrendered; the French had not. The Franco-Prussian War was by no means over, and while it continued Napoleon III remained a prisoner and was confined to Wilhelmshöhe. Meanwhile Eugénie and her son settled at Camden Place, near Chislehurst in Kent, a rambling building reminiscent more of a French château than an English country house, which the emperor had quite possibly acquired – though there is no proof of this – some years before in case he were to need it in a hurry. There, on 20 March 1871, he was eventually able to join them. For some time, freed at last of all the anxieties of recent years, his health notably improved: by the end of the year he was even back again on his horse, riding for pleasure rather than duty; but by the autumn of the following year the pain had returned and as Christmas approached he fell seriously ill. On 2 January 1873 Sir Henry Thompson – the country’s most famous renal surgeon – operated on him at Camden Place. He found a large stone in the bladder, but was able to remove only half of it. Another operation four days later accounted for a good deal more, but there remained a few remnants, and it was accepted that a third operation would be necessary to wash them out once the emperor – if he could still be so described – had recovered his strength.
But he never did. He died suddenly at 10.25 a.m. on Thursday 9 January 1873. His last intelligible words were addressed to another doctor, his old friend Henri Conneau, who had followed him to England: ‘N’est-ce pas, Conneau, que nous n’avons pas été des lâches à Sedan?’* Eugénie, who seems to have grown gradually to love her husband, collapsed in tears by his bedside. He was buried temporarily in the local churchyard; but in 1880 she moved to a huge and hideous house near Farnborough,† a few hundred yards from which she commissioned the French architect Hippolyte Destailleur to build an abbey and monastery dedicated to St Michael. There, in a magnificent marble crypt, the tombs of herself and her husband can still be seen, together with that of their son Louis, the Prince Imperial.
The story of the prince’s death is curious indeed. In 1872 his parents sent him, then sixteen years old, to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, to learn gunnery. (The Bonapartes had always been artillerymen.) He passed out seventh in his class of thirty-four, but was first in horsemanship. Then, in 1879, came the outbreak of the second Zulu War, when the prince saw all his friends and colleagues departing for Africa. He of course was not among those summoned, but was determined to join them anyway. He appealed to his mother, pointing out that he could never regain the throne if he remained just a pretty face; he must show that he possessed the strength and courage worthy of his family, and here was the perfect opportunity to do so. Eugénie had no desire to see her only son risk his life in Africa, but when he insisted she reluctantly promised to discuss the possibility with the queen. Victoria proved no more enthusiastic than she was, but eventually gave in. Yes, she said, the boy could go to Zululand; but he must remain safely behind the lines; on no account was he to be allowed anywhere near the action. She would give instructions to the commander-in-chief, Lord Chelmsford, to that effect.
The first Zulu War had been a disaster; on 22 January 1879 a British army of about 1,800 had been attacked at Isandlwana by a Zulu force of perhaps 20,000. The Zulus were equipped mostly with assegais and cow-hide shields; the British were armed with state-of-the-art Martini-Henry rifles and two 7-pounder field guns, but were disastrously short of ammunition. They were therefore quickly overwhelmed, leaving 1,300 dead on the field. Chelmsford had no choice but to withdraw from Zululand while he repaired his stricken forces. It was during this period of recovery that further detachments arrived from Britain, the Prince Imperial among them. Meanwhile, a new plan of campaign was drawn up: the army would re-enter Zululand on 1 June.
The prince, who had been obliged, much to his disgust, to join the Intelligence Unit, was soon bored. On the evening of 30 May he suggested to his commanding officer that he should go in advance of the main force to reconnoitre the first ten miles – a day’s journey, given that the army relied on ox-carts for transport – and select a suitable place for the first night’s camp. A former scouting party, he pointed out, had already declared the area to be free of Zulus, so there would be no conceivable danger. Almost incredibly, permission was given – on the understanding that he would be accompanied by three or four other junior officers, under the command of Captain Jaheel Brenton Carey. The group rode out early the following morning, and by lunchtime had found the perfect stop, overlooking a small wadi, a dry river bed. Dismounting, they left their horses free to graze and settled down to a cup of coffee and a cigarette when suddenly they heard a fusillade of shots: an impi* of Zulus sprang out of the long grass a few yards away. There could be no question of resistance; their only hope was to grab their horses and spur them to safety. This the rest all managed to do. The prince, who was almost certainly the best horseman of them all and who normally thought nothing of leaping on to his mount as it galloped past him, tried to seize the pommel but caught only the map holster of his cheap African saddle; it came away in his hand. The remainder of the party succeeded in making their getaway, and drew up their horses on a small hillock a few hundred yards distant – only to see the prince’s rider-less horse galloping up to join them. At once they knew that there was no hope; they could only ride back to staff headquarters and report the tragedy.
The reaction of headquarters can well be imagined. The queen herself had given orders that the prince’s life must on no account be put at risk; and there he was, the very first casualty of the new campaign. A search party rode out at once to the wadi; they soon found his body, naked but for one sock, with eighteen wounds, all in front. One thing was clear: for a disaster of this magnitude, a scapegoat must be found; and it was on the luckless Captain Carey that the blow fell. He was accused, most unfairly, of deserting a fellow-officer in time of need, court-martialled and cashiered.†
Queen Victoria was, predictably, furious at the news. Eugénie was heartbroken – she had worshipped her son – but took the blow bravely. He was a soldier, she said, and it was in the nature of soldiers to get killed. On the first anniversary of his death, however, she was herself at the wadi – the difficulties of her journey there can barely be imagined – where she kept an all-night vigil. With her she had brought cuttings from the trees at Farnborough, which she planted as near as possible to the spot where her son had died. That spot was soon to be marked by a small monument in dazzling white marble erected by command of Queen Victoria. It is still there, surrounded by a curious little copse of obviously English trees: a little touch of Hampshire in the veldt.*
* Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is considered by many to be the greatest French novelist of the nineteenth century.
* Relations between the two allies were distinctly chilly, largely owing to the fact that the British commander, Lord Raglan, who had last seen action in the Napoleonic Wars, insisted on referring to the enemy as ‘the French’.
* ‘At last I’m a gentleman.’
† The queen’s underlinings.
* ‘Here I am, here I stay!’
† The siege of Sebastopol alone is thought to have cost the lives of 115,000 allied soldiers. Russian losses were estimated at 250,000.
* During the Second World War my old friend Costa Achillopoulos found himself sharing a tent with Jean Weygand, the general’s son, and asked him one night whether Charlotte was indeed his grandmother. He replied that he had no proof, but that his father had always believed the story to be true.
† Germany needed unity even more than Italy did. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a traveller from Brunswick to Paris would have to pass through twenty-two frontiers – those of six duchies, four independent bishoprics and one free city. The number of these tiny states fluctuated; its maximum was 348. Napoleon I got them down to a couple of dozen, but the Council of Vienna decided to restore a few of the dynasties he had abolished. When Bismarck assumed power there were about forty. blame; though still only fifty-seven, he was clearly not the man he used to be; and he had moreover recently been suffering agonies from a kidney stone. But that had been dealt with by a minor operation a few weeks before; he was no longer in pain and, as we have seen, perfectly capable of taking long walks with his guest. We are left with the conclusion that he was, quite simply, outsmarted. Bismarck, certainly, had been left unimpressed with his intelligence. The emperor, he had declared after his return to Berlin, was ‘a sphinx without a riddle’; Eugénie was ‘the only man in his government’.
* ‘Leaving for Syria’, a popular song with music by Josephine’s daughter Hortense de Beauharnais. The ‘Marseillaise’ was banned during the Second Empire, and this became the unofficial national anthem.
† There is a popular misconception that Giuseppe Verdi wrote Aïda to celebrate the opening of the canal. In fact the historic event seems to have left him cold; he even turned down an invitation to compose an inaugural hymn for the occasion. It was not until early 1870 that he was sent a scenario set in ancient Egypt that appealed to him. He began work at once. It had been agreed that the opera should open in Cairo; unfortunately the scenery and costumes, which were prepared in Paris, were severely delayed by the Franco-Prussian War and the consequent siege of the city. The Cairo opening finally occurred on Christmas Eve 1871. Verdi was not present.
* There is a superb description of these events in Emile Zola’s La Débâcle.
* ‘We weren’t cowards at Sedan, Conneau, were we?’
† It is now a Catholic girls’ school.
* The old-established collective noun for Zulus, applicable, so far as I can gather, to any number. In this case we are probably talking of a hundred or so.
† There was fortunately such an outcry when the news reached England that the queen ordered an enquiry and Carey was reinstated. He died in India in 1883.
* For the centenary in 1979 I made a television documentary of the story for the BBC. It had been fully covered at the time by the Illustrated London News, which had included a series of striking woodcuts made from the photographs taken immediately after the event. In the past hundred years there had been no changes at all in the surroundings, except for the empress’s trees and the queen’s monument. In the wadi itself, one could even identify the individual stones and pebbles that had appeared in the woodcuts a century before.