Eugénie: The Empress and her Empire by Seward Desmond

Author:Seward, Desmond [Seward, Desmond]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0750929804
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2013-07-07T23:00:00+00:00

SIX

Clouds

THE MEXICAN ADVENTURE

Augustin Filon, the Prince Imperial’s tutor and a man who understood the empress better than most people, said in his memoirs that she took all her political ideas from Napoleon III, ‘in whose political judgment she possessed unquestioning confidence’. The emperor, he added, had unbounded respect for Eugénie’s political intuition, consulting her again and again, although Filon commented that in his own view this high opinion was not quite borne out by events. Yet whatever Filon may have thought, her politics did not always mirror those of her husband, who often teased her for her Legitimist or at any rate conservative sympathies. And it was partly because of these very un-Bonapartist sympathies that Eugénie encouraged him to make one of the Second Empire’s biggest mistakes.

She had been shocked by the fate of Italian sovereigns – banishment and confiscation of their property. For Austria this added insult to injury since the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Duke of Modena were Habsburgs while the King of Naples was Franz-Joseph’s brother-in-law. Something must be done to mollify the Austrian Emperor.

Eugénie always insisted that it was her idea to create a Mexican Empire and that she first suggested it to Napoleon in September 1861 when a young Spanish diplomat, José Manuel Hidalgo (a friend since childhood) was staying at the Villa Eugénie. For some time Hidalgo had been begging her to persuade her husband to send an army and save the Mexican upper classes from the godless revolution that was confiscating their estates. In fact Napoleon had already made up his mind to give Mexico a monarchy – pathologically secretive, he concealed it from Eugénie.

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