“As I look beyond our frontiers, I am pleased in seeing foreign powers intent on maintaining friendly relations with us.” 1
—LOUIS NAPOLÉON ADDRESSING THE OPENINGS OF THE CHAMBERS, NOVEMBER 29, 1869
“Everything I have done has been inspired by a desire to
promote the interests and greatness of France.” 2
—LOUIS NAPOLÉON OPENING THE CHAMBERS, JANUARY 18, 1869
During the First Empire Napoléon Bonaparte was called “the Troublemaker of Europe.” Today, in the 1860s, that title was accorded to Prussia’s intimidating chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. News of Austria’s totally unexpected defeat by Prussia at Sadowa in July 1866, leaving the victor to scoop up the former Danish provinces of Schleswig and Holstein, resounded through the chancelleries of Vienna, London, and Paris. “There has never yet … been recorded in history such a collapse as that of [Habsburg] Austria,” an astonished Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon declared.3 Just a month before that battle, on June 12, 1866, Austria had signed a secret agreement with Louis Napoléon, ensuring French neutrality in the conflict between Austria and Prussia. Should Austria win the war, Franz Josef would carve a new Rhineland state (out of German territory) for the French. In the event of defeat, nevertheless, Austria would cede Venice to Italy, via Louis Napoléon’s good offices. If Louis Napoléon had been dismayed and troubled by the future implications of that remarkable Prussian victory, at least Austria kept her word, transferring Venice to King Victor Emmanuel’s Italy the following year. But as a result of the conflict in the Crimea and the break with Russia, and now this recent Austro-Prussian war, the balance of power in Europe recognized in 1815 was irrevocably shattered.
The dramatic transformation of Wilhelm I’s formerly inconsequential provincial Prussian army into a powerful, modern, well-trained, elite 700,000-man fighting machine came as a shock to everyone. Bismarck’s sudden aggressive intrusion into international politics was equally disturbing. If the chancellor’s first priority was to unify “Germany,” his second objective was to divide the allies by isolating France, separating her from England and Italy. He also intended to prevent any future alliance between France and Russia, which he successfully did by strengthening the close family relationship between Russia’s tsar Alexander II and his Prussian uncle, Wilhelm I.
Bismarck first dangled the prospects of a French historical reunification with Belgium. But Louis Napoléon had his own priorities, and as Morny had earlier emphasized time and again, France must never jeopardize her relationship with England, and thus Leopold’s Belgium (with its family ties to Victoria’s England) would remain untouchable. As Louis Napoléon frankly explained to Ambassador Cowley, he was not after fresh European territorial conquests for the traditional gloire de la France, but rather for French national security: secure national frontiers against the undisguised menace of a rapidly expanding militaristic Prussia and her confederation of German states.
Thanks to Bismarck, “the Prussians [had become] the most swaggering robbers who were allowed to despoil their neighbours,” Lord Clarendon declared, fully sharing Louis Napoléon’s anxieties. “I have no faith in the friendship of Prussia,” Cowley concurred. And unfortunately, as Clarendon pointed out, in July 1866, and Louis Napoléon himself so blindly failed to see, “France is no longer the first Military Power [on the Continent].”4 Empress Eugénie was equally despondent, by 1866 fearing “the beginning of the end of our dynasty.” Her pessimism was echoed by her husband, privately acknowledging at least that France was suffering from “a malaise and general discontent.”5
On July 27, 1866, Louis Napoléon summoned Prussia’s ambassador, Count von der Goltz, to the Tuileries, to present him with a list of demands, real estate to be ceded to France to provide her with a security buffer, including the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the district of Saarbrücken, the Palatinate, the fortress of Mainz, and a “track of the Rhine” belonging to Hesse-Darmstadt. In exchange, France would accept Bismarck’s incorporating the northern German states into a confederation (but not the southern ones or Bavaria as well).6 Bismarck rejected this out of hand, however, and discussions continued amid an atmosphere of saber-rattling both in Paris and Berlin. By the spring of 1867, buffeted by loud calls by the French “to march on Berlin,” a most reluctant Louis Napoléon, pushed by Eugénie, seriously considered invading Prussia to salve his national pride and teach the Prussians a lesson. Bismarck had insulted France!
Even as the Great International Exhibition opened in Paris in April 1867, the threat of imminent war between Prussia and France was so acute that a by now desperate Ambassador Cowley intervened, suggesting an immediate peaceful resolution of this “problem” by convening a conference at London. Quickly expedited, an accord was signed by Paris and Berlin on the twelfth of May of 1867, eliminating from discussion all the other areas—with the exception of Luxembourg—demanded by Louis Napoléon. In fact Bismarck agreed to only one concession, to evacuate the Prussian forces from that Grand Duchy and to demolish its powerful fortress, and Louis Napoléon walked away with a defused time bomb, but without obtaining one inch of German or Dutch (Luxembourg was under Dutch sovereignty) territory. The hostile Teutonic wall facing the northern French frontier remained intact. At best this was a truce, a minor Munich Pact, for in reality the fuse was still burning.7 The northeastern French Rhineland remained heavily fortified with the French on continued alert at Metz, Strasbourg, Belfort, and Lyon, and the Franco-Prussian cold war lingered on. But at least they had narrowly avoided another “senseless—and therefore abominable war,” a much relieved Clarendon sighed.8 Meanwhile in Austria, Franz Josef continued to find himself even more isolated by a “swaggering” Prussia and an undisguised, ever ravenous Russia encroaching from the east.
Nor in fact were relations much better between the new Kingdom of Italy and France. Louis Napoléon wanted Victor Emmanuel to maintain an army along his northern frontier. In exchange the Italian king wanted all French troops out of Italy and to move the current capital from Florence to Rome (still occupied by those same French troops, protecting the Vatican and opposing the threat of Garibaldi’s republican forces). Louis Napoléon, again under pressure from the old aristocracy, the Vatican, and Eugénie, dithered, and it was not until December 1866 that all French troops were eventually withdrawn from Rome, leaving Louis Napoléon criticized from all sides.
“The fact is I find myself in an invidious position. For eighteen years I have been the Pope’s mainstay and now I am accused of abandoning him,” he lamented. Pius IX for his part rejected Louis Napoléon’s insistence on the Vatican’s renunciation of its secular political control of the Papal States.9 That the French emperor had succeeded in liberating Italy from Austrian occupation and returning Venetia to that country apparently did nothing to mollify Victor Emmanuel’s hostility toward France, egged on by his new son-in-law, Plon-Plon, as well as by Bismarck. But when Garibaldi later attacked Rome and the Vatican in September 1867, Louis Napoléon would be obliged to dispatch a fresh expedition to Italy to recover the Holy See, thereby intensifying King Victor Emmanuel’s resentment of the French emperor. No matter what he did, a stymied Louis Napoléon was denounced, by one side or the other.
* * *
Such was the situation as the new year introduced 1867. It began with the lingering standoff with Prussia over Luxembourg. Louis Napoléon was also preoccupied with the health of his thirteen-year-old son, Prince Louis, who had to undergo surgery for a crippling “abscess” on his thigh that March. “Today it was found necessary to repeat the operation,” Cowley reported to Clarendon in April 1867. “The Emperor is in a great state of mind about it.”10 For Louis Napoléon, who was always much closer to his son than Eugénie was, it was difficult to tear himself away from the boy’s bed and concentrate on the affairs of state.
As if he did not have enough on his plate with the ever threatening Bismarck, his son’s illness, his personal health problems, and the anticipated arrival of heads of state for the opening of the Paris World Exhibition on the first of April, Algeria, swept by grasshopper infestation, cholera, drought, and famine, accompanied by renewed fighting, once again became a growing concern, as more and more French casualties were landed at Toulon.
At this critical hour in 1867, as head of state Louis Napoléon would now be called upon to receive the monarchs of Europe at the Paris Exhibition with charm and a smile, while he was eating his heart out with his anxieties of state, and his health suffered as a result. But to his detractors, like Victor Hugo, Henri Rochefort, and a young Émile Zola, he was just a frivolous host enjoying the endless state banquets, the elegant balls, beautiful ladies, and glittering champagne receptions at the Tuileries.
* * *
The longest lasting and certainly the most complex conflict of the Second Empire was the battle between Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the follower of Saint-Simon, and the Emperor Napoléon III, the leader of his country, the struggle for a liberal constitution finally emerging in open battle after the mid-1860s. He also renewed his sympathies with the working classes now by creating a type of state-guaranteed annuity that would protect workers in old age and in case of accident, for which they would have to contribute only a modest sum. At the same time he suppressed the very onerous national identity “passport” that Napoléon I had created for the working classes, that all workmen were always required to carry with them, attesting to their character, type of work, and any military or criminal record. The bearers of these identity passports had also been required to inform the police of their whereabouts and were restricted both in their movement and the type of work they performed.11 Louis Napoléon also sent a delegation of workers, all expenses paid, to attend a trade fair in London. This he considered to be positive practical education.
Amid increasing criticism of the authoritarian nature of his regime, and demands for a loosening of the reins of power, combined with a fresh independence of spirit brought about by this new prosperity, Louis Napoléon decided to take a few initial steps. He had already allowed the Senate and the assembly to publish their debates, and to discuss and reply to the emperor’s annual throne, or “state of the empire,” speech. The Legislative Body was then permitted to debate and vote on a line-item budget for the first time. Republican politicians demanded a greater transfer of power to elected officials, and following the introduction of unpopular free-trade legislation and fears of a slowing economy, national elections had revealed some two million voters supporting his opponents to the right or left.
Under the influence of Émile Ollivier, who broke with his fellow Republicans, Louis Napoléon revised a Revolutionary law to allow organized strikes, although permanent labor unions remained illegal until 1868. With the earlier appointment of Victor Duruy as minister of education, free compulsory primary education, adult education, and an attempt at equal education for girls (with Eugénie’s blessing) were introduced. Duruy was also responsible for lifting the restrictions on teaching and discussing current history—current affairs, including the revolutions of 1830 and 1848—in the high schools, or lycées. Historical plays, however, remained subject to severe censorship. Although Duruy was highly unpopular with many politicians, he was a decided favorite of Louis Napoléon, who also selected him as his principal collaborator in the preparation of his biography of Julius Caesar.
* * *
In January of the critical year 1867, while still on a collision course with Prussia, Louis Napoléon remained preoccupied with internal affairs, assuring a reluctant prime minister Eugène Rouher that he now intended to introduce more liberal policies, “to develop further the institutions of the Empire and extend all public freedoms and participation in government.”12 This included the problem of state censorship, which took many forms, including control of the nation’s press. Prior to this, no newspaper or magazine could be published without the prior approval of Louis Napoléon, who could also issue an official “warning.” Those restrictions were now dropped, although papers still had to deposit a bond, and the courts could and did still pursue publishers, from Émile de Girardin to Henri Rochefort.
By January 18, 1869, however, Louis Napoléon was having second thoughts about the new liberties he had granted, due to a growing highly critical press, and the boisterous demands of the newly created labor unions. “The press and public meetings have created … an unhealthy agitation across the land,” he acknowledged as strikes broke out and political criticism grew more disruptive. A few of the members of the newly unshackled press made no attempt at moderation, inciting the public against the Tuileries. Louis Napoléon was sincere about wanting a liberal empire so long as it respected “my insistence on maintaining order.” With every step forward, he stopped to look back, anxious that he was going too far, too quickly.13
Further changes were in the wind, and at the insistence of Émile Ollivier, in July 1869, Louis Napoléon sacrificed his loyal, uncompromising premier, Eugène Rouher, demanding his resignation, to be followed by that of an equally loyal Georges Haussmann a few months later. With even more sweeping reforms under consideration, reforms handing over more power to Parliament, one impatient senator bitterly quipped: “It would appear the best way to avoid being overthrown by a coup d’état is by overthrowing one’s self!” And Adolphe de Forcade La Roquette agreed. “France is not a country made for “liberté,” he asserted. A wavering Louis Napoléon appealed to Parliament, “France wants its freedoms, but with Order. Gentlemen, help me establish our freedoms.” More and more uncertain of himself, with Morny gone and his own health failing, it was almost a plea for help. He now cautiously espoused a constitutional monarchy, but feared its constraints. He was in fact no longer in control of his own destiny. His solution was a balance between no change at all and the sweeping away of everything now in place—an impossible compromise that would forever escape him.14
* * *
Ever since his successful Universal Exhibition, held along the Champs-Élysées in 1855, scientific and industrial advances had been developing at a rapid rate, thanks to the infusion of vast new wealth in the empire, Louis Napoléon’s firm commitment to the improvement of education and research facilities, and his continued belief in and support of progress and a better world. He was also the first French head of state to develop a full-scale program for the improvement of the environment, including agriculture and the protection of forests.15 Moreover, the colonial empire had been expanding, making available to the economy new products and natural resources. Inspired by the original English Crystal Palace Exhibition held in Hyde Park in 1851, Louis Napoléon now desired to display the proud achievements of his France in all fields, from the traditional fine arts to industry.
And the world literally came to its doorstep, to the Great Paris Exhibition, flooding the French capital from all points of the compass, from the United States and South America, the whole of Europe, and as far as China and Japan. A hundred thousand people queued up at the entrance at the Champs de Mars for the grand opening on the first of April, 1867. A veritable world’s fair, there was a tangible air of excitement and curiosity as Gioachino Rossini conducted his new composition, “L’Hymne à Napoléon III et à Son Vaillant Peuple,” and the emperor welcomed the visitors to some 50,000 exhibits to be found in every corner of the 119-acre Champs de Mars, from the banks of the Seine where the Eiffel Tower now stands all the way to the guns of the École Militaire. Most of the exhibits were to be found in the 1,600-foot-long ovular structure enclosing four smaller galleries, barely completed on time after two intensive years’ work by some 26,000 men. Another fifty-two acres of agricultural and horticultural products were on display on the nearby island of Billancourt.16
Forty-two countries displayed their wares in the main ovular galleries and in the surrounding lush, freshly planted gardens, dotted with dozens of specially commissioned statues—including two of Napoléon I and one of Empress Joséphine—and kiosks, national pavilions, international restaurants and cafés, fountains, and even a lighthouse. A towering Chinese pavilion boasted the silks and wares of that kingdom, and similar full-scale Moorish and Siamese pavilions offered the products of North Africa and Asia, in addition to national exhibits by every country in Europe.17
A specially built railway brought visitors to the exhibits of their choice, where one could find anything from the most modern French locomotive to Prussia’s latest Krupp cannon, the American Charles Otis’s new elevator, complete with a safety brake, an American pressurized diving suit, a ten-foot-high French conical pendulum clock, and Professor Plazanet’s argyrometric “scales” for weighing the properties of precious metals. Louis Napoléon was personally interested in the recent English Bessemer converter, permitting mass production of steel for the first time, an invention that was to revolutionize the engineering world, from shipbuilding to industrial construction. Next there was the new refined zinc processing system, which Morny had earlier encouraged, and the latest in engine designs, while not forgetting the presentation of the new lightweight metal, aluminum, that was to create a whole new industry.
The might of the new French empire was on view in the Colonial Pavilion, displaying the products and architecture of all the new French colonies, from West Africa, Algeria, Indochina, and New Caledonia, which drew some of the biggest crowds, thanks to a fascination with a world most French men and women had only read about in newspapers and novels. And it was imposing, as were the visitors it drew, including the ubiquitous Goncourt brothers, who were captivated by “this monster of an exhibition,” and the “Egyptology Park” in particular, with its artifacts, model temples, and recently excavated mummies.18 Even the reclusive expatriate Victor Hugo finally returned to France after an absence of fifteen years just for this event. Others included Ernest Renan, a youthful Émile Zola, Charles Sainte-Beuve, Hans Christian Andersen, Théophile Gautier, Alexandre Dumas, fils, a very young Anatole France, and Jules Verne, Hector Berlioz, Georges Bizet, Charles Gounod, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Cobden, Pierre Berthelot, Louis Pasteur, and Lords Granville and Malmesbury. Thousands of visitors came from England via special boat trains laid on just for this event. Louis Napoléon made arrangements for many thousands of French schoolchildren to see the exhibition gratis. The Goncourt brothers braved the fresh air and sunlight for this event, finding the whole spectacle delightfully bewildering. “I am leaving the Exhibition with the impression as if I had just visited the future, one that left our present day Paris looking like some sort of curiosity preserved out of the past.”19 With the sight of Empress Eugénie rising over the city in an immense helium-filled balloon, the future had indeed arrived.
On leaving the Champs de Mars, visitors found a flotilla of the first thirty newly constructed steam-powered bateaux-mouche, providing a relaxing excursion along the Seine and a survey of Haussmann’s new Paris.20 Back on shore, Offenbach, who had first performed his Ba-Ta-Clan for the 1855 fair, now directed his latest sensation, the Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein. Never had Paris and the Second Empire seemed more vibrant and glorious.
* * *
“It is going to be raining kings,” Edmond Goncourt had predicted.21 And international royalty of Europe did indeed cascade in, complete with their numerous retinues; Italy’s sulking king Victor Emmanuel I alone declined Louis Napoléon’s personal invitation. Most of them began arriving in May and June, including the Austrian emperor Franz Josef, Russia’s Alexander II and his two sons, who were put up at the Élysée Palace, Prussia’s Wilhelm I and his inevitable shadows, Bismarck and Field Marshal von Moltke, sword-by-sword, assigned to the Marsala wing of the Louvre, Queen Maria of Portugal, the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII), King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the Japanese crown prince, Tokugawa Aitake, Prince Henry of Holland, Prince Oscar of Sweden, the Ottoman sultan, Abdul Aziz, Khedive Ismail of Egypt, the former Algerian rebel leader Abd el-Kader, and dozens of lesser German dukes and princes.
The month of June proved to be the high, and low, point of this summer of festivities and balls held at the Tuileries, St. Cloud, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Quai d’Orsay, with boating on the lakes of the Bois de Boulogne and the races at Morny’s new Longchamp racecourse popular daily attractions. On June 6, 1867, Louis Napoléon with his eleven-year-old son Prince Louis and Tsar Alexander II looked on as 30,000 French troops representing every regiment of the army passed in review at Longchamp, followed by a cavalry charge with a loud “Vive l’Empereur!”
Afterward, the various heads of state returned to their carriages and started back to Paris through the Bois de Boulogne. Suddenly a young Polish student fired a pistol at the tsar. Thanks to an alert equerry, the Marquis de Caux, charging forward, the shot hit his horse instead of Alexander, as Lord Cowley, an eyewitness, explained to Clarendon. Four years earlier this same tsar had ordered a bloody suppression of a Polish nationalist uprising, resulting in the deaths of thousands. “The scene was … terrible, for both the Emperor [Alexander], and particularly the Grand Dukes [his sons, who] were covered with the blood of the wounded horse, and each thought that the other had been shot.” The tsar blamed the whole thing on Louis Napoléon, Cowley noted, because of “the encouragement the Emperor Napoléon had given to the Poles.” As for the tsar, the English ambassador found him most unpopular and “haughty.” Wilhelm I and Bismarck, on the other hand, surprisingly, were well received during these festivities. After dinner that evening, Bismarck related to Cowley that “he had expected to be treated like ‘a mangy dog,’ as he says, but instead has been shown the greatest respect,” particularly by a fascinated Eugénie and Prosper Mérimée, who found him “most pleasing” and “very polite.”22 In any event, the tsar kept to himself, cutting short his visit and with it what little friendship remained between France and Russia.
And then the news of the execution in Mexico of Austrian emperor Franz Josef’s brother, Maximilian, reached Paris on the thirtieth of June. Louis Napoléon had earlier personally conceded that his Mexican venture was a grave error, advising “Emperor Maximilian” back in August 1866 to abandon that chimera and return to Europe. This was reinforced by a warning from President Andrew Johnson, regarding the French violation of the Monroe Doctrine.23 Louis Napoléon was fond of Maximilian and close to his brother, the Austrian emperor, and the responsibility for his military and financial support of the entire fiasco weighed heavily on him. Nevertheless, the Great Paris Exhibition had a life of its own and continued to draw capacity crowds. By the time it closed in October 1867, nearly eleven million visitors had passed through its portals.
* * *
The strain of events in 1867 and 1868, including the continuing tension with Prussia, the haunting guilt over the death of Maximilian, and Eugénie’s angry jealous scenes—“Spanish blood and Spanish jealousy have often begotten imprudences,” as Lord Cowley put it—were taking their toll on Louis Napoléon, not to mention aggravating problems with his health. “He says he feels very old and is terribly depressed and discouraged,” Marshal Vaillant noted. “He told me straight out that if ‘they’ continue to harry and pester him with these unrelenting [political] problems and if there were to continue to be too many more difficulties … then he would abdicate.”
He was simply overwhelmed and had no one with whom to share the burden of office. More and more he missed his half brother. “People may say what they please, but Morny is a great loss to the Emperor,” Ambassador Cowley confided to Foreign Secretary Clarendon, and he was “much cut up [by his death]. In critical moments Morny had great calmness and firmness, and even his enemies admit that his judgment in political affairs was sound.” The ambassador also felt that he had “made a very good and impartial President of the Legislative Body.… Peace be to his ashes!”24 But there was never anyone to replace him. Then came the most disappointing elections to date in June 1869.
Louis Napoléon could take no more, and on August 9, 1867, he collapsed. When he failed to appear for the long-awaited celebration of the centenary of the birth of Napoléon I on the fifteenth, wild rumors spread through court circles, the Assembly, foreign embassies, and the Bourse, where stocks and shares plunged. Would the emperor survive? Was it the end of the newly developing constitutional government, or even of the Second Empire itself? Eugénie herself asked these same questions, indeed worrying more about her son than her husband. Would Prince Louis have a crown to inherit? Meanwhile the pain from his gallstone became so acute that Louis Napoléon could only move about in a wheelchair. Henri Conneau treated him with opium, and he became delirious, the Tuileries issuing daily reports on his health. By the end of the month the crisis had passed, however, and he was again able to walk without support, and just in time, for there was much agitation across the land.
The nation’s new prosperity and Louis Napoléon himself had driven up everyone’s expectations, including those of the workers, who rightly complained about their conditions, while also demanding a sharp increase in wages that had remained unchanged for at least a generation. Most were living in, or near, poverty. In the first week of October there were strikes and even riots across much of the country, in the Loire region, at St. Étienne, Carmeaux, Vienne, Rouen, Elbeuf, and Aubin, followed by those at Eugène Schneider’s Le Creusot Works. Resentment was particularly great in mining regions, where mine managers and engineers were physically attacked and severely beaten and company property smashed and looted by angry men having to work under notoriously dangerous conditions. Clashes with the police led to hundreds of arrests and some deaths, and editor Henri Rochefort had a field day: “The Empire continues to extinguish poverty. Twenty-seven dead, forty-eight wounded.”25
Louis Napoléon had regained his strength sufficiently by 1868 only to face a new barrage of attacks against his regime by the press, Adolphe Thiers, and especially by Jules Ferry, if indirectly aimed at Prefect Haussmann, falsely accusing him of blatant corruption. And then in August 1868 at an important ceremony at the Sorbonne, General Cavaignac’s son turned his back on Napoléon III’s son, Louis, refusing to accept a prestigious award from his hands. General Cavaignac had deliberately insulted the emperor. It was a serious sign of the growing opposition to Louis Napoléon’s regime. Ever since the untimely death of Auguste de Morny in 1865, followed by that of Achille Fould two years later, Louis Napoléon had been virtually without guidance, wavering more and more, and he had already put considerable distance between himself and Gilbert Persigny.
By 1869 Louis Napoléon decided to call for new national elections for the Legislative Body, but the results that May proved a further shock, his government receiving only 4.4 million votes against the swelling opposition of 3.3 million, followed by more violent industrial strikes. Prince Jérôme, Persigny, Maupas, Fleury, Ollivier, and the president of the Legislative Body Conti had demanded that Louis Napoléon sacrifice Prime Minister Rouher. The political crisis continued throughout August and September, Louis Napoléon failing to appear in public due to acute pain from the crippling gallstone. A regency council was again established just in case.
Even as Louis Napoléon was again appealing to the Legislative Body, renewing the call for “our freedoms, but with order,” Empress Eugénie was preparing to set out for the long-awaited opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal. Crippled by his gallstone and unable to make a nearly six-thousand-mile round-trip journey with Eugénie, and hardly in a position to leave his politically volatile capital, Louis Napoléon had no choice but to remain in France at this critical hour.
* * *
Eugénie and her entourage, forty strong, including her thirteen-year-old son, the Prince Imperial, Louis, her confessor, Monsignor Bauer, the American dentist Thomas Evans, and Eugenie’s late sister Paca’s two daughters, set out from St. Cloud by train for Egypt on September 30, 1869. Stopping at Venice, she was greeted by King Victor Emmanuel, a floating orchestra, and large, enthusiastic crowds. Now boarding the sleek 295-foot imperial yacht L’Aigle, they proceeded to the Piraeus and Athens, where Eugénie was received by King George I and again by very large friendly crowds. As she was now discovering, despite strikes and troubles in France, Napoléon III’s magnificent Second Empire was greatly admired across much of the world. Next, as they anchored off the Asiatic shore of Constantinople, Ottoman sultan Abdul Aziz himself came out to fetch Eugénie on his lavish imperial barge.26 As one of Turkey’s few major European allies against the Russians, this state visit also took on full diplomatic dimensions, though no one forgot the great difficulty Lesseps and Khedive Ismail of Egypt had had in obtaining the approval and authorization of Abdul Aziz to build the new canal.27
L’Aigle finally steamed into the ancient Egyptian port of Alexandria on the fifth of November, shortly after the Khedive Ismail had drowned ninety-seven shackled criminals offshore.28 A special English train then took the entire imperial party to a specially illuminated Cairo, which Eugénie visited “incognito” in a jewel-encrusted Egyptian dress, visiting a souk, a wedding, the pyramids, and later the Luxor-Karnak temple complex, where she sailed on the Nile in a traditional lateen-rigged dhow. Returning to Alexandria, L’Aigle took the party to the new partially completed city of Ismailia, at the mouth of the Nile.
Here the Khedive and Ferdinand de Lesseps welcomed Empress Eugénie for the opening ceremony of the canal held on a high lavishly decorated platform under the Egyptian, Ottoman, and French flags. The khedive and Lesseps addressed a largely European audience of several thousand, including the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, German Egyptologist Richard Lepsius, and the French artist Jean Léon Gérôme. This was followed by a banquet prepared by 500 chefs for 6,000 guests in Ismail’s nearly completed local palace. During the day fire-eaters, snake charmers, Egyptian singers, “whirling dervishes,” Arab horsemen displaying their skills, camel rides, and the inevitable belly dancers entertained the guests. The first of several balls followed at Ismailia under a shower of fireworks to celebrate the opening of this 433-million-franc ($43 billion) engineering feat.
The thirty-nine-year-old Ismail, the grandson of Muhammad Ali, the founder of modern Egypt, was the most Western-looking ruler of Egypt. Like many of his Mamluke predecessors, Ismail was of Albanian descent, and after completing his studies in France at the École d’État-Major, he had returned to Egypt, succeeding his uncle Said as khedive six years ago. He intended to make Egypt a progressive country, with new schools, a developing economy, an impressive railway system, a vast building program including an entirely new suburb for Cairo, while not forgetting the construction of fifty palaces for his guests along the Nile for today’s event. “My country is no longer in Africa,” he proclaimed, “we are now part of Europe.” His recent visit to the Paris Exhibition had been a great success, but this opening of the Suez Canal now greatly increased the swelling state debt. He would eventually be obliged to sell his shares in the canal to England in 1875 for £3,976,582, ($395 million today), leading to his own deposition by the Sublime Port and exile with his fourteen wives four years later.29
A very proud Lesseps also received Eugénie, his cousin, at his large house here, where he had been working for many years. Across from Ismail’s new palace, some 1,200 luxurious multicolored tents were prepared like a scene out of the Arabian Nights to accommodate the visitors, most of whose transport to and from Egypt had been paid by the khedive. In addition to a theater, Ismail had built an 850-seat opera house, where Verdi’s popular Rigoletto was produced before an audience of gentlemen in white tie and ladies in tiaras and the latest Parisian gowns. Although paid 150,000 francs (over half a million dollars today) to compose Aïda for tonight’s performance, Verdi, who never visited Egypt, was not to complete that opera for another two years.
“The ceremonial opening of the canal took place at eight o’clock in the morning of 17 November,” Eugénie recalled many years later. “Fifty vessels, all flying their flags, were waiting for me at the entrance to Lake Timsa. My yacht, L’Aigle, took the head of this flotilla, and the yachts of the Khedive, the Emperor Franz-Joseph, the Crown Prince of Prussia and Prince Henry of the Netherlands followed.… The night was one of such magnificence, proclaiming the grandeur of the French Empire so eloquently that I could scarcely contain myself—I rejoiced, triumphantly … For the last time I was convinced that a wonderful future lay in store for my son. And I prayed to God that He would help me with the crushing burden which I might soon have to shoulder if the emperor’s health showed no improvement.”30 Never had the Second Empire seemed more powerful and influential, as crowned heads and future monarchs of Europe followed Empress Eugénie through the 103-mile-long Suez Canal to Port Suez and the Red Sea. With the result of the labor of more than one million men, Ferdinand de Lesseps had achieved his dream and Napoléon III’s Second Empire the admiration of the world.
* * *
Back in Paris, Louis Napoléon concluded the year 1869 addressing the Chambers on a note of hope. “As I look beyond our frontiers today I am pleased in seeing foreign powers engaged in advancing civilization, intent in maintaining friendly relations with us.”31 Meanwhile in Berlin, at 76 Wilhelmstrasse, Chancellor von Bismarck, War Minister von Roon, and Field Marshal von Moltke were meeting to finalize their methodical plans for unleashing their armies across the French frontier and seizing Paris.