Empress Eugénie’s shrine to the Bonapartes

The empress Eugénie – the Spanish-born last empress-consort of France, wife of Napoleon III, mother of the prince imperial – lived for the last 40 years of her life in Farnborough, between the military towns of Aldershot and Sandhurst. There she created a home, museum, mausoleum and chantry in commemoration of the first and second French empires.  Farnborough Hill was the place she chose ‘après que tout fut fini’ (after it was all over). 

In 1870, Eugénie had accompanied her husband into exile in England, following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War.  Together with their teenage son, they lived in Camden Place, a large country house in Chislehurst. Three years later, Napoleon III died after an operation to remove a bladder stone, and all hopes for an imperial restoration were concentrated on their son. Desperate to prove his military prowess in the Bonaparte family tradition, the prince imperial persuaded his mother to let him go to South Africa with the British army, where he was killed on a reconnaissance expedition in 1879.