“The Map of Europe has to be redrawn. On the Continent there are only two great powers, France and Russia. Allied with England, who rules the sea, our three powers would dominate the world.” 1
—AUGUSTE DE MORNY TO COUNT KISSELEFF, SPRING 1856
“I shall see to it that he is raised with the understanding that
nations must not be isolated entities, that the peace of Europe
depends on our mutual prosperity.” 2
—LOUIS NAPOLÉON SPEAKING OF HIS NEWLY BORN SON, MARCH 1856
“There never was such a mess, and I see no honourable way out of it,” a discouraged fifty-two-year-old Ambassador Lord Cowley, Henry Wellesley, wrote Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon from the Hôtel de Charost, the British embassy, in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré in the third week of January 1856.3 “However, in your hands it is in good keeping, and that is my only consolation.” The opening days of stage negotiations to conclude the war in the Crimea were nearly as difficult as the siege of Sebastopol itself. France wanted to end the war as quickly as possible, whereas the British wished to continue in hope of achieving an even greater victory over the Russians. Count Walewski, the newly promoted French foreign minister, was informed by Persigny, who had replaced him as ambassador to the English court, that it was all the fault of the seventy-one-year-old Prime Minister Henry Temple, Lord Palmerston. “The Emperor’s conviction is that Palmerston will not hear of peace,” and will threaten to carry on the war, all alone if needs be. “I never felt so out of spirits as at this moment,” the British ambassador confessed. “I think that a letter from the Queen to the Emperor would be of immense use,” Cowley suggested to Clarendon.4
“Sire and Dear Brother,” an equally concerned Victoria duly wrote to Louis Napoléon, “I do not doubt for a moment that this very peace that France and England have the right to expect will most certainly be obtained,” despite the great pressure on the French to sign a quick accommodating peace treaty with the Russians. Be reasonable, but stand fast, “Your very affectionate Sister and Friend.”5 While to Prime Minister Palmerston the queen was more blunt, instructing him to say to Russia, “‘You have accepted the ultimatum, pure and simple, and have now again recognised its stipulations … You will, therefore … have to execute them.’”6
On the other hand jingoistic editorials of The Times vigorously opposed a “weak peace,” indeed any negotiations or peace treaty now. Instead that newspaper demanded a hard-pressed final campaign that would completely destroy Russia and her influence once and for all. Great Britain will soon have one hundred warships in Russian waters, and “her army is in perfect condition.” Therefore strike the final blow now and it will be “long before she again disturbs the peace of Europe.”7
* * *
As if Paris were not tense enough with the daily negotiations of the four allies, plus Austria meeting with Count Walewski daily at the Quai d’Orsay, compounded by the time constraints of the armistice due to expire on the thirty-first of March, and attended by the usual series of diplomatic receptions and balls, simultaneously another drama was taking place in the empress’s apartments. This event was even more important to France and more crucial for the survival of the Second Empire: an heir to the throne was about to be born. Eugénie had been in labor for over twenty-two hours, and the palace was issuing periodic bulletins.
“The Emperor, the Princess of Esseling, and Madame de Montijo [Eugénie’s mother] have remained the whole of the day at the empress’s apartment,” The Times reported on Saturday, the fifteenth of March. “The dignitaries of the empire are assembled in the green drawing room, close to the Empress’s chamber.”8 Outside the Tuileries, large crowds had been gathering for news of the long-awaited imperial birth. “At six o’clock [a.m.] the guns [at the Invalides] were fired one hundred and one times,” announcing the birth of a male child, Horace de Viel-Castel recorded, and “the great [tenor] bell of Notre Dame has added its tolling voice to the cannon fire.”9
At eight-thirty the emperor’s brother, Auguste de Morny, as president of the Legislative Body, broke the happy news to the nation’s deputies gathered in the National Assembly.10 “Gentlemen, last night at three fifteen Her Majesty gave birth to an Imperial Prince.” This announcement was greeted by clamors of “Long live the Emperor!” “Long Live the Empress!” “Long live the Prince Imperial!” The name of the new heir:11 Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph.
“The birth of a son … the heir of his crown, seems to complete the measure of the marvelous prosperity which has lately marked the eventful life of the Emperor,” the Paris correspondent of The Times summed up.12
“This evening I am to dine chez Princess Mathilde where I doubt that I will hear any praise of the Empress,” Viel-Castel dutifully noted. “The princess does not like her and makes no pretense to do otherwise. It is unfortunate that division and jealousy separate the members of this family.” Prince Jérôme, who had been next in the succession to the throne was now replaced by a baby boy, and he has “started to sulk and since the birth has not spoken to a soul … his black character now revealed in all its true ugliness,” remarked Viel-Castel.13
“We were in some anxiety about the life of the Empress,” Prince Albert wrote his old friend Baron Stockmar on the eighteenth of March, following daily palace reports that she was “weak” and suffering from “milk fever.” The accouchement had been “a more difficult affair than the public were allowed to be told.” Foreign Secretary Clarendon, who was in Paris for the peace negotiations, confided to Queen Victoria that “the Emperor’s eyes filled with tears when he described the tortures of the Empress.”14
On Tuesday, the eighteenth of March, “Napoléon received the congratulations of the diplomatic corps at 1 o’clock in the Throne Room of the Tuileries.”15 As far as the public celebration of the birth of the new imperial prince was concerned, apparently Count Viel-Castel did not immediately find the same level of joy among the Parisians. “Paris is illuminated, but the public’s enthusiasm is not as great as at the time when Sebastopol was captured [last year],” he pointed out.16
A grateful father, Louis Napoléon next thanked the Senate and the Corps Législatif for their official congratulations. “The Senate have shared my joy on learning that Heaven had given me a son, and you hailing the happy event, the birth of a Child of France.… consecrated in his cradle by the [Crimean] peace treaty we are currently preparing, with the blessing of the Pope … and by the acclamations of the people—this child, I say will be worthy of the destiny now awaiting him.”17
For Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, hardly noted either for long speeches or emotional displays, this was undoubtedly the most momentous and joyful event of his life, to have a son and legal heir to carry on his name and his dynasty. Neither Lord Clarendon nor Ambassador Cowley had ever seen Louis Napoléon express any emotion, and they were as deeply moved as they were almost embarrassed by this most unusual outpouring. Unlike his brutal father, Louis Napoléon was to prove a doting father, spending hours on end with his son. If the loud acclamations by the Senate, the Corps Législatif, the Council of State, and the magistracy of the land were largely most sincere, they also reflected their great relief in knowing that this Second Empire would continue tomorrow, and with it not only their government posts and emoluments, but the continuation of this political stability and surging national prosperity.
Fireworks burst over the Parisian heavens, and illuminations shone from all the public buildings, the theaters, and the Opéra as well as from larger private properties. The emperor announced a general amnesty for thousands of prisoners incarcerated for all crimes, short of murder. The navy and army in turn released those guilty of military offenses. All public government offices and officials offered formal congratulations. Louis Napoléon daily announced promotions to the Legion of Honor, including the awarding of the Grand Croix to Secretary of State Achille Fould and Admiral Ferdinand Hamelin. Generals Randon, Canrobert, and Bosquet were each rewarded for their services in Algeria and the Crimea with a marshal’s baton. Louis Napoléon ordered the nation’s theaters opened free to the public for an entire day, and Jacques Offenbach celebrated the great event by presenting his riotous new musical, Tromb Al-Ca-Zar.
Although Eugénie was still too weak to appear in public, Louis Napoléon gave a sumptuous banquet at the Tuileries for the negotiators of the Treaty of Paris, including Lord Clarendon and Ambassador Cowley, Austria’s Counts Buol and von Hübner, Counts von Manteuffel and von Hatzfeldt representing Prussia, Russia’s Count Orlov and Baron Brünnow, Sardinia’s Counts Cavour and Emmanuel Pes de Villamarina. The inevitable balls for which the Second Empire was already famed were given at the Hôtel de Ville, at the Hôtel de Lassay by Morny, and by all the embassies. Celebrating the great event, Eugénie and Louis Napoléon offered many hundreds of thousands of francs to charities and foundling hospitals, and as pensions to the artists, authors, and composers of the land.
* * *
As usual, the latest numerous rumors spread by Walewski’s unpopular replacement at the French embassy in London, the ubiquitous Persigny, proved to be false. This included his totally false accusation that England’s new prime minister, Palmerston, was resisting every effort to resolve the peace. What Persigny did not state, however, was that Palmerston so detested the very sight of this new French ambassador that he refused even to receive him at 10 Downing Street. Persigny had been Louis Napoléon’s choice for that post for which he was most ill-suited, but even emperors have to reward political favors, while the appointment also kept the perpetually interfering Persigny far away from Paris during these sensitive Crimean peace talks.
“You will not be satisfied with the peace which has been made,” Cowley informed Clarendon at Whitehall later in March. “I confess that I had hoped for better things and although I endeavour to conceal it, I feel deeply the mortification of being dragged through the mud by the French,” and an obstructive pro-Russian foreign minister, Walewski in particular. “So ill do I think that both the emperor and his Ministers have behaved,” Cowley admitted, “that I begged to be relieved from the intolerable burden of carrying on business.” He had hoped for far harsher terms against Tsar Alexander. “However, the deed is now done and we must make the best of it.”18
After returning to London and spending two hours with Victoria explaining the treaty, Clarendon in fact found the queen “in good humour with the Peace [settlement], and admits … that she is now quite reconciled to it, and does not wish that things had turned out otherwise.… Palmerston, wonderful man! Is not only pleased with the Peace but is extremely doubtful whether our army might not have been destroyed by disease if we had attempted another expedition to Asia Minor, and whether we might not have been beaten on our own element [the Royal Navy] at Cronstadt, so there is no discontent, and the Cabinet generally are satisfied.”19 So much for Persigny’s campaign of dissimulation.
“Sire and My Dear Brother,” Queen Victoria wrote to Louis Napoléon, “I highly approve of the final terms [of the treaty].” Everything realistically possible “has been concluded … to ensure as much has been possible the stability of European equibilibrium.”20
* * *
On March 30, 1856, the delegates at the Congress of Paris took their places at the large round green-baize-covered table beneath the massive crystal chandelier in the Ambassadors’ Room of the Quai d’Orsay to affix their signatures under the observant eyes of Winterhalter’s newly painted portraits of Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie: Alexander Walewski for France, Lord Clarendon for England, Cavour for Sardinia’s king Victor Emmanuel, Counts Buol and Hübner for Austria, Hatzfeldt and Manteuffel for Prussia (who crashed the party), Orlov for Russia, and the Grand Vizier Ali Pasha on behalf of the Ottoman Empire.
Following the signing of the Treaty of Paris, officially putting an end to the Crimean War, the delegates, attired in their formal uniforms complete with gold braid and a splendid array of the highest European orders and decorations, were invited into Walewski’s “Elliptical Office,” the large oval office with spacious bow windows overlooking the long formal gardens. It seemed only fitting to have the full-length Gobelins tapisseries “The Seasons of the Gods” looking down on them. Following champagne cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, the gentlemen left by carriage across the Seine to the Tuileries to be received by Napoléon III.
* * *
“CONCLUSION OF PEACE,” The Times announced on the thirty-first of March: “CONGRESS OF PARIS. Peace was signed to-day, at 1 o’clock, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.… The great question that has kept all Europe in suspense for weeks is at last resolved.… The moment the signatures were complete … the cannon from the Esplanade of the Invalides proclaimed the news [even] before the Plenipotentiaries had quitted the hall.”21
“All Paris has gone mad—total strangers have kissed each other in the streets,” Lord Cowley reported to London as the celebrations began. By evening Viel-Castel found the Place du Caroussel “simply filled with humanity, everyone shouting ‘Long Live the Emperor!’”22 “On this date 42 years ago was fought the Battle of Paris, the last act of the great drama of which Europe was the theatre,” a reflective English observer remarked, and “on the following day the [triumphant] Russians entered the capital, and dictated terms of peace” to the French. “What a dramatic historical change since 1815. Today France is able to dictate, in concert with her allies, peace to Russia,” finally avenging the humiliations of the Congress of Vienna. The diplomatic tables had been turned one hundred eighty degrees. “The Emperor must be proud and happy,” Horace de Viel-Castel exclaimed. “France is indeed the great nation once more, the pivot round which Europe now revolves [once again].”23
* * *
Most of the delegations were, to varying degrees, content after weeks of nerve-wracking negotiations and haggling. With their troops daily wasting away in the Crimean, the French and the Sardinians were certainly the happiest with the accelerated conclusion to a war that was degenerating into decline and disaster. The Turks were even more relieved to have turned out the occupying Russians. To be sure, there remained some English almost as upset as the Russians with the early conclusion of hostilities.
By now Lord Clarendon was barely talking to French Foreign Minister Walewski with his obvious pro-Russian agenda, who had vigorously opposed the war from the outset and exerted enormous pressure on England. Fortunately, in fact, the aging Prime Minister Palmerston and Queen Victoria had been eager to end this war. Unlike Prussia, Austria had been allowed to participate in presenting Allied demands to the Russians. Toward the end a muddling Walewski had pressed for close relations with Austria and a favorable outcome for Russia, not to mention a demand for Polish independence. He had his incentives, as well, handsome bribes and rewards he had received. Walewski was always in debt and a notorious gambler not only at the Bourse but at cards, and then of course there were his mistresses. Poland—the land of his birth—presented him with a handsome estate, while the Tsar Alexander, the Grand Vizier Ali Pasha, and Victor Emmanuel offered him millions of francs. Nor were Vienna and Berlin forgetful of their obligations, including the Habsburg emperor’s presentation of the Grand Cordon de St. Étienne and Prussia’s Frederick Wilhelm the Order of the Black Eagle.24
After all those deaths and months of misery in the Crimea, thanks to the insistence of Louis Napoléon, all conquered territory was to be restored to its original owners—at least in theory. That included battle-scarred Kars, a large, important commercial city in northeastern Anatolia, which the Russians reluctantly agreed to exchange for Bolgard, in western Moldavia. Unfortunately, the Treaty of Paris set a precedent, one still troubling diplomatic relations in the twenty-first century, by proclaiming the Ottoman Empire “a European power.”
In a separate treaty, England, France, and Austria agreed for the first time to “respect, defend and guarantee” the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia invaded and occupied by Russia were soon to gain their independence as the new state of Romania. Montenegro and Serbia would also soon follow as autonomous states. The Treaty of Paris also proclaimed the free and unrestricted use of the Danube and a neutralized and demilitarized Black Sea. Apart from small gunboats for customs and policing, all warships were banned. As for the religious sites in the Holy Land, the Ottoman emperor was now alone fully responsible for protecting them and all Christians.25
* * *
Theoretically peace had been restored. Nevertheless, following the signing of all treaties there are inevitably unfinished matters, of course, diplomatic loose ends. The unhappy Poles left Paris empty-handed. Kars was returned to Turkey, the Russians now in turn claiming Bolgrad (earlier promised to them by Louis Napoléon), but England for one did not want a Russian city in the future Romania. By December 1856, however, a restless Tsar Alexander II was once again threatening to take up the sword to defend his rights and Bolgrad, much as the English had feared. Fortunately, France’s newly appointed special ambassador, Auguste de Morny—banished from Paris earlier in 1856 because of his notorious stock market “coup”—interceded. Employing his celebrated “Morny charm,” he was able to convince Alexander to give up Bolgard—that “wretched provincial hole,” as he referred to it, for which “they [the Russians] had almost set Europe on fire once again.” In exchange the tsar accepted some land in Bessarabia. “This will serve as a salutary lesson, and at little cost, a cautionary lesson to all those responsible for the fate of their nations,” a much relieved Morny concluded.26
As for “the Italian Question,” Prime Minister Cavour made a dramatic appeal before the Congress of Paris for the withdrawal of all Austrian troops from his country, and that was an issue that simply would not disappear, as Mazzini’s Italian assassins were soon to remind Napoléon III and the world.
* * *
Clearly Louis Napoléon had raised France to a new position of power, prestige, and international respect, and his own stature as a world leader. He had fought a successful war, with England at his side, and had capped it by bringing senior European leaders, all former enemies forty years earlier, to negotiate a peace treaty in Paris. “Triumph” was the operative world. No leader could have asked for more … and then Louis Napoléon blotted his copybook with “the Castiglione affair.”
* * *
Long before, Louis Napoléon had discovered that Eugénie took no pleasure in intimate marital relations—she called sex “filthy.” For his part, he enjoyed the company of ladies of easy virtue, not to mention the wives of several of his senior officials, including that of Foreign Minister Walewski. The list of his conquests was not only long, it was public, including the companions and ladies-in-waiting of the empress. For all his charms and admitted interest in major social causes, including new hospitals, schools, and housing, Napoléon III was at the same time thick-skinned to the point of deeply wounding and publicly humiliating Eugénie. Harriet Howard and her children and his own prison-born bastards were long out of sight. But then there had been Augustine Brohan, Alice Ozy, Countess Parada, Countess de La Bédoyère, the Countess Walewska, Madame Rimsky-Korsakov, and now La Castiglione; and later, Marguerite Bellanger, Valtesse de la Bigne, and Countess Mercy-Argenteau, without counting “the actresses” and the ladies of the court.27 Louis Napoléon was indeed a womanizer on an imperial scale.
Toward the end of the hostilities in the Crimea, late in 1855, Victor Emmanuel and his prime minister, Count Cavour, had come to Paris without an invitation to meet with Louis Napoléon in the hopes of enlisting his direct military support in forcing the Austrians to remove all their troops from Italy. On returning to Turin, Cavour asked his beautiful twenty-year-old-cousin Virginia Oldoini, Contessa de Castiglione, to “encourage” Louis Napoléon to take up the cause of liberating Italy. Accepting with unanticipated amiability, she hastened to Paris, without her husband, Turin’s new ambassador. “A beautiful countess has enrolled in the Italian diplomatic services,” Cavour confided in his friend Luigi Cibrario. “I have invited her to play the Emperor up.” “You must succeed, dear cousin, by any means you wish, but succeed you must,” Cavour instructed her. Already a friend of Count Walewski’s second, Florentine-born, wife, Maria Anna de Ricci, the raven-haired, green-eyed young Contessa Castiglione was quickly absorbed into the French capital’s aristocratic social circle, where she won over everyone. She is “a veritable Venus descended from Mt. Olympus!,” a dazzled Pauline von Metternich exclaimed. It was at a soirée chez Princess Mathilde that Virginia was introduced to an immediately smitten Louis Napoléon.28
Then, on the twenty-fourth of June, Eugénie personally invited “Venus” to a long weekend at Villeneuve-l’Étang near St. Cloud. There Virginia joined Louis Napoléon on a boat ride. Rowing out to a wooded islet in the middle of the lake, they did not reappear until much later. Tongues wagged as the emperor’s infatuation with this Florentine beauty took flame, the two openly flaunting elementary discretion at the Tuileries, St. Cloud, Compiègne, and Fontainebleau over the next several months, much to the chagrin of the new mother, Empress Eugénie.
Ambassador Cowley, for one, was as perplexed by the emperor’s senseless indiscretions as he was troubled by the harm this could do his reputation in France and the international community. Moreover, following the peace talks, he found Louis Napoléon run down. He was shocked by his “apathy, irritation [and] caprice,” the result of “an exhausted nervous system and diseased organs. The political consequences,” the ambassador considered, “might be fearful.” Discussing “the beauteous Castiglione” with Lord Clarendon, Cowley explained, this liaison “will do his nerves no good,” referring to Louis Napoléon’s near breakdown following the birth of his son and the conclusion of the Congress of Paris.
After his “last rendezvous” with La Castiglione, there was a hysterical row by Eugénie at Compiègne, Mérimée reported, as the maids fled for shelter, and Louis Napoléon promised “never again,” once again. “All Paris is in an émoi at an escapade of the Emperor … He isn’t too discreet,” Cowley sighed. “The poor empress is in very low spirits. She talked to me a long time about him—with tears in her eyes the whole time.”29 “I have tried everything, even to make him jealous,” Eugénie confided to the Walewskis, of all people! “It’s made no difference … I can’t take any more,” and hereafter she would disappear without explanation from Paris on long sojourns to German and Swiss spas, even to England and Scotland.30
* * *
The implications of this first peace treaty signed at Paris during Louis Napoléon’s newly established Second Empire were at once great. He had reestablished France as a major player on the European stage again, and himself as a highly respected spokesman on behalf of world peace, unlike his uncle, the perpetual war machine. Moreover, the Treaty of Paris had avenged the destruction of the Grande Armée in Russia and the humiliating collapse of the First Empire. As a result of the Crimean victory, he had also helped to break up the old coalition and balance of power aligned against France at the Congress of Vienna. Russia seemed isolated. Louis Napoléon was now no longer the nephew of a defeated tyrant, but the most prestigious head of state on the Continent of Europe. And then he made a laughingstock of himself by having to bed every silk skirt in Paris.
No sooner was one major problem resolved, however, than another emerged. The cirrus preceding the inevitable cumulonimbus was emerging over the southern Alps, the warning of a building Italian tempest. “The Italians are still complaining [about the Austrian occupation],” Horace de Viel-Castel noted. And nothing is done to stop “Mazzini who dispatches his political assassins [e.g., Pianori],” and not content “with bloodying their own country,” Viel-Castel continued, now they come here “with the purpose of killing Napoléon!” This wretched Italy, he continued, “is a festering sore,” and something must be done about it.31
No sooner had the conflict in Russia come to an end, than “the government is already preparing to send a new expedition of forty thousand men to the Kabyle region,” Viel-Castel also observed, referring to the major campaign against rebellious Berber tribesmen in the mountains of northeastern Algeria that had been interrupted in 1855 in order to send General Randon and several divisions of his Zouaves to the Crimea. “Steam transports are now being assembled” near Toulon and Marseilles. There were also rumors that Louis Napoléon personally would head this new expedition, and that “he intends to form a Regency Council” to rule France during his absence, that council to be presided over by none other than Prince Jérôme, the hero of Crimea. And that idea terrified everyone, Viel-Castel included.32 In fact, the newly promoted Marshal Randon, as the governor general of Algeria—not Louis Napoléon—would launch this campaign, ordering General MacMahon “to pacify” the Kabyle in 1857, resulting in a few thousand more French casualties, although the Algerians suffered far worse. Fortunately Louis Napoléon was dissuaded from leading his troops.33
For a gentleman with a reputation as a frivolous social climber, Horace de Viel-Castel certainly seemed to be very aware of the realities around him, and he was right on the mark. If not a religious man, and despite his anxieties, he continued to strongly support Napoléon III, and even offered a prayer of his own. “France is now enjoying peace and calm once again, a right she richly earned. May God will and grant us a long reign under the guidance of Louis Napoléon!”34