‘The only man in Paris’

Eugenia de Montijo was born in a tent, during an earthquake, in Granada in 1826. Her father, a Liberal minor grandee, had joined the French army, been wounded at Trafalgar, and welcomed the replacement of the Bourbons by the mediocre Joseph Bonaparte in 1808. Threatened by the Carlist wars, in 1833 he sent his wife and two daughters to Paris, where Eugénie, as she became, grew up in the world of Stendhal and Mérimée (both of whom became close family friends), Balzac and Chopin. Her ambitious mother sent her to learn English at a school in Bristol, which she disliked so much that she and another girl tried to stow away and sail off to India. This fierce spirit of independence was never to leave her.

In 1852 she married the Prince-President Napoleon and gained influence on a vast scale when after becoming emperor he was often guided by her on foreign policy. Mérimée strongly advised against the marriage, considering Napoleon an incorrigible womaniser, sure to make her unhappy, and believing that his regime contained too many adventurers and opportunists to last. All, in the end, true; but Eugénie gained 17 years as the most powerful woman in Europe at a time when power for women was virtually unobtainable. While lamenting her loss of freedom, she wrote to her sister that she would be saved by two things: ‘my faith in God and my desire to help the unlucky classes who are deprived of everything, even work’. Offered a diamond necklace worth 600,000 francs by the city of Paris, she asked for the money to be used to endow an orphanage for girls instead. Yet whenever anything went wrong, the French, with characteristic chauvinism, blamed it on ‘L’Espagnole’, just as Marie-Antoinette had been blamed for being Austrian, and before her Catherine de Médicis for being Floren- tine.