Napoleon III: the other Napoleon and his Empire - Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2002 by Christopher Forbes

With surprising eclecticism, the Empress mixed genuine eighteenth-century pieces and those of the first Empire, both with contemporary pieces which were pastiches of earlier styles and more 'modern' pieces....These ensembles were judged to be in perfect taste. (8)

Eugenie also collected paintings, and the sale of her estate in 1927 included old master paintings by Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Jean Baptiste Greuze, David Teniers the Younger, and Anthony van Dyck, as well as contemporary works by William Adolphe Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, Alfred de Dreux, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and numerous portraits by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. (9)

The prince imperial was a talented draftsman, but his only recorded foray into collecting occurred at the Salon of 1869, where he persuaded his father to buy for him Alexandre Protais's painting of French soldiers clearing a right of way for the laying of a railway line (Pl. VI). Given the heir's passion for the military it is an unsurprising choice. His taste at the age of thirteen was as conventional as that of his parents.

The only member of the imperial family credited with a genuine interest in the arts was the emperor's first cousin and one-time fiancee, Princess Mathilde. Among the artists whom she received and to whom she gave her patronage were Eugene Louis Lami, Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier, Jean Leon Gerome, Gustave Dore, Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran, Ferdinand Roybet, and Jean Baptiste Edouard Detaille. Even she drew the line at controversial artists such as Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet.

While Napoleon III was not a devotee of the arts, he appreciated the value of a good show, and the seasonal progression from various imperial residences--the Tuilleries, Compiegne, Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau, and Biarritz--included balls, performances, sporting events, and other lavish entertainments (see Pls. XV, XVI). One of the most splendid occasions early in the reign, was the state visit of Queen Victoria (r. 1837-1901) to Paris in August 1855 accompanied by Prince Albert (1819-1861) and their two oldest children, Victoria (1840-1901; the future empress of Germany) and Albert Edward (1841-1910), Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII). The program included tours of the Exposition Universelle and of the tomb of Napoleon I (Pl. XIV). In her journal, Victoria noted:

The coffin is in a small side chapel, de St. Jerome....Into this the Emperor led me, and there I stood, at the arm of Napoleon III, his nephew, before the coffin of our bitterest foe, I, the granddaughter of that King who hated him most and who most vigorously opposed him, and this very nephew who bears his name, being my nearest and dearest ally! {10)

The purpose of the state visit was to further strengthen and popularize the Franco-British Alliance as the two nations battled with Turkey against Russia in the Crimea.

Sadly for Napoleon III, the alliance came undone by the time France most needed friends in 1870. Six weeks after his defeat at Sedan, Napoleon III was a prisoner at the Wilhelmshohe Palace in Kassel, and the empress, forced to flee Paris in the carriage of her American dentist, Dr. Thomas Evans (1823-1897), was in exile in England with the prince imperial. In March 1871 the emperor was finally permitted to join them. Two years later, on the morning of January 9, 1873, France's last sovereign died of complications from a gallstone operation. While his uncle lies in a porphyry sarcophagus under the dome of the Hotel National des Invalides in the heart of Paris, the other Napoleon is entombed in exile in a church his widow had built in Farnborough, England.