Free Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire by Desmond Seward Page A

of someone who had been not just an obscure Napoleonic officer on half-pay, but one of Spain’s great feudal magnates: ‘Don Cipriano Guzmán y Palafox Fernandez de Cordoba, Layos y la Cerda, Viscount of la Calzada, of Palencia de la Valduerna; Count of Teba, of Banos, of Mora, of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, of Fuentiduena, of Ablitas, of San Esteban de Gormas and of Casarubios del Monte; Marquis of Moya, of Ardales, of Osera, of Barcarotta, of la Algaba, of la Baneza, of Villanueva del Fresno, of Valdunquillo, of Mirallo and of Valderrabano; and Duke of Peñaranda.’ The certificate stressed that the late Don Cipriano had been three times a Grandee of Spain of the First Class, and the hereditary Grand Marshal of Castile. Irrelevant as this string of archaic titles might seem today, they meant a surprising amount in romantic, mid-nineteenth-century France, to the innumerable readers of Alexandre Dumas’s novels, with their thirst for a chivalrous past. They inspired respect even among the Legitimist and Orleanist noblemen whom the emperor hoped to win over.
    Meanwhile, a pornographic smear campaign was mounted against the bride to be, of the sort once launched at Marie-Antoinette. Cowley mentions rumours ‘it would be impossible to put to paper’. Eugenia ‘has played her game with him so well, that he can get her in no other way but marriage, and it is to gratify his passions that he marries her,’ says the ambassador. ‘People are already speculating on their divorce.’
    The day before the civil wedding the Senate, Council of State and Assembly were summoned to the Tuileries, to hear a speech by Napoleon III, copies of which were distributed throughout France. He explained that as ‘a parvenu’ among monarchs – ‘a glorioustitle when bestowed by the votes of a great nation’ – he preferred to marry ‘a woman whom I love and respect’ rather than some unknown princess. His future wife, he told them, was of high birth, French by education and a devout Catholic. He promised she would bring back ‘the virtues’ of his grandmother, Empress Josephine. Many foreign ambassadors were alarmed, nervous of anything that might weaken this brittle new régime. Even if they distrusted the emperor, they recognised his achievement in taming the revolution of 1848, which had undermined almost every European government. Should he fall, it would break out again, spreading through the continent. ‘News of the marriage has had a bad effect in the départements ’, Hübner reported nervously to Vienna, despite his high opinion of Eugenia. ‘However democratic people may be, they would have preferred a princess.’
    On the day Napoleon made his speech, Cowley informed London that the emperor ‘has been captured by an adventuress’. The few Bonapartists who approved of the marriage, ‘wish to keep the Court in a degraded state because they profit by it’ – implying that Eugenia could corrupt it further. The foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, wrote back, ‘A marriage to a well-behaved young Frenchwoman would, I think, have been very politic, but to put this “intrigante” on the throne is a lowering of the Imperial dignity with a vengeance.’ ‘The emperor’s foolish marriage has done him an infinity of harm in the country’, Cowley claimed soon after. ‘It was, of course, ill received at Paris, even by the emperor’s friends, and it has set all the women against him. Clergy and army disapprove.’ ‘The emperor’s selection of a private individual to share his throne has caused, in the female portion of society, a degree of jealousy it is really difficult to conceive’, reported the Illustrated London News , ‘and, alas for the gallantry of Frenchmen of the nineteenth century, they find nothing better to do than repeat the scandals originating in the boudoirs of the fairer part of creation.’
    We know how Eugenia felt from a letter she wrote to Paca. ‘Soon I shall be alone here, without any friends,’