Overlooked Britain
French flamboyance flies into the skies at Farnborough in Hampshire. After mile upon tedious military mile, beside a roaring roundabout and behind a garish garage forecourt, you suddenly find yourself in green and perfect peace, loomed over, furthermore, by Gallic Gothicary at its most glorious.
It is St Michael’s Abbey, the vast chapel of a mausoleum that shelters the last Emperor and Empress of France, as well as their son, the Prince Imperial, who was slain by the Zulus in 1879.
The Empress – who in only eight years, between 1871 and1879, had lost an Empire, her husband and her son – built this mighty monument to her grief in 1887. The mausoleum was designed by the pleasing-to-enunciate Hippolyte Alexandre Gabriele Walter Destalleur. (Curiously incongruously, he was also the architect of the whopping great Rothschild pile of Waddesdon in Buckinghamshire.)
It was Eugénie’s husband, Napoleon III, who, with Prefect Baron Haussman, had been responsible for the great – I fear mistaken – transformation of Paris. They rebuilt what one witness called ‘the nightmare cut-throat alleys of the Cité, the unkept and unlighted Champs- Élysées… the undrained and filthy, fever- haunted byways and dusty neglected Bois. These were the excrescences and plague spots through which the Emperor drew his pencil.’ Paris was gouged out and gorged with new buildings; not to its eternal glory.
Napoleon III was the founder of the Second Empire, who had first hauled the country into an ecstasy of pride, only to then participate in its downfall after the humiliating defeat in the FrancoPrussian War at Sedan in 1870.
The Empress Eugénie had been the perfect wife, even acting as regent through countless emergencies.
Their lives can be grasped in the palm of your hand, as it were, when you see the sending-you-shivering-with-excitement assembly of objects that have survived. They belong to St Michael’s Abbey but are temporarily on loan to the Aldershot Military Museum.
In 1858, there was an attempt to assassinate the Emperor, by the Italian anarchist Felice Orsini. But Napoleon III only got a scratched nose and a hole in his hat, which is still to be seen in Hampshire today. Of the number of bombs thrown outside the Paris Opéra, one was somehow saved and here it is in England’s Home Counties; smothered with spikes and as heavy as lead. Made in Birmingham; thrown in Paris; now safe and sound in Hampshire. Most remarkable of all, are the shells that were fired and the crumbs of bread that were left, during the terrible siege of Paris.
As the Tuileries Garden was stormed, the Empress was forced to flee, racing through the galleries of the Louvre and into the improbable arms of Mr Evans, an American dentist who was to smuggle her to Deauville. He described the scene as the Empress left France, perhaps forever: ‘With no flags, no cries of Vive L’imperatrice… only the clouds in their black masses spread over the heavens like a mourning drapery.’
The Prince Imperial’s death, extinguishing the final embers of hope for the return of the French Empire, had sent shockwaves throughout Europe. He had always determined to fight in the field and it was thanks to the efforts of ‘two obstinate old women’, as Disraeli described the Queen and the Empress, that he was to participate in the AngloZulu War.
His end was a grim one, done to death by 17 plunges of assegais – the mark of one through his eye is to be seen on his death mask, the most poignant memento of all. His body was found naked, save for Napoleon’s seal on a chain around his neck. A sock embroidered with the royal N lay nearby.