The year is 1855 and a procession of luxury carriages crosses Paris. An enthusiastic crowd lining the boulevards greets Queen Victoria with her husband Prince Albert in the company of the French imperial couple, Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie. It is the first visit of a British ruler since 1431 and it has been a tremendous success on several levels. Both monarchs have become firm allies in the Crimean War, the term “entente cordiale” has been coined between them, and lasting personal friendships have formed.
Albert is very impressed with Eugenie’s poise and elegance. “Altogether I’m delighted to see how much he likes her and admires her,” Victoria notes in her diary, “as it is so seldom that I see him do so with any woman.” Victoria herself is experiencing a pleasant electric current each time Napoleon III whispers endearments into her ear, compliments her on her dress, or tickles the back of her hand with his mustache. No man has ever dared to flirt with her, and it is all so very French!
If the ten-day visit made such a good impression on the parents, the two children Victoria and Albert brought along were smitten. When the visit approached its end, Vicky, the Princess Royal, broke down in tears and pleaded for more time in France. Her 13-year-old brother Bertie, the future King Edward VII, acted more directly. The day he found himself alone with the emperor, he said: “You have a nice country and I would like to be your son.” When his proposal failed, he tried again, this time with Eugenie.
“You parents cannot do without you,” she replied.
“Not do without us?” Bertie exclaimed. “Don’t fancy that, for there are six more of us, and they don’t want us.”
To his parents’ chagrin, the unloved Bertie became a playboy. The Prince des Galles, as he was known in France, returned many times, enthusiastically sampling all the vices Paris had to offer.
Revolutionaries ransacking the Tuileries Palace in 1848
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The recent unrest across France reminded me why this blog could not be called anything other than Victorian Paris. I remember one reader objecting to the title, asking what had Victoria to do with Paris? Well, the queen visited Paris with her husband and their oldest children, Vicky and Bertie. The family had a fantastic time and bonded quickly with Napoleon III and his wife, Eugenie. Bertie liked them so much that he begged to be adopted. Even though his wish was not granted, Paris became his lifelong playground.
Other than that, Victoria’s link to Paris is weak, indeed. But consider this: what else is on offer? Given Paris’ tumultuous 19th-century history, what could replace the Victorian period in readers’ minds? At any given time, there were various French monarchs and pretenders exiled in England. They were either taking tea with the queen, or plotting the overthrow of the current regime in France.
Here is a brief overview of Paris during Victoria’s long reign:
1837 (England) – On June 20th, Victoria, aged 18, becomes Queen of England, succeeding her uncle William IV.
1837 (France) After the brief July Revolution in 1830, Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans, was proclaimed King. He was the reigning monarch during Victoria’s throne ascent.
1848 (England) Princess Louise Caroline Alberta is born – Queen Victoria’s sixth child.
1848 (France) The February Revolution. After two days’ fighting, Louis Philippe flees to England, and the Second Republic is proclaimed. Crossing the Channel in the opposite direction is Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. He is the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland and the nephew of the brilliant Corsican, the emperor Napoleon. After a successful electoral campaign, financed by an English courtesan, he is elected President of the French Republic.
1852 (England) The queen is pregnant with Prince Leopold George Duncan, her eighth child.
1852 (France) In December, Louis Napoleon stages a coup d’état to be elected emperor by universal suffrage. He adopts the title Napoleon III. A regime known as the Second Empire is established.
1870 (England) The queen actively mourns her husband, Prince Albert, who died of typhoid fever in 1861, aged 42.
1870 (France) The Franco-Prussian war rages. The Second Empire falls after the decisive defeat of the French army in Sedan. The emperor surrenders to the enemy. His wife, Empress Eugenie, flees to England, where she is later joined by her husband and son. The Third Republic is proclaimed. The French feel humiliated as the victorious Prussians celebrate the birth of the German Empire in Versailles, the traditional seat of French royalty.
1871 (England) The queen still mourns her husband.
1871 (France) Paris is surrounded, shelled, and starved by the enemy army. Unlike France’s legitimate government, seated at Versailles, the city does not accept an armistice. The Commune erupts – the greatest revolution since 1789. In May, while the German army still surrounds Paris, the French government troops storm the city. This is followed by a massacre of thousands. The Commune is defeated.
1901 (England) Queen Victoria dies, aged 81.
1901 (France) The country enjoys a prosperity period known as the Belle Époque.
Paris destroyed by arson during the Commune in 1871. In the foreground is the Palace of Tuilleries
The pension reform that has been at the core of the violent protests in France has to be dealt with by other aging EU countries. Many governments fear the French scenario. They shouldn’t. There is no other nation that enjoys revolutions and stormy protests to this extent.
You Might Be Able to Swim in Paris’ Seine River by 2024
Paris is taking the plunge to make the Seine River squeaky clean, and if you believe in mermaids like I do, they’re about to get a real upgrade in real estate! But, more importantly, residents and tourists alike will be able to splash around and romanticize their life in the City of Love by 2024. The Seine River, a cherished and well-known natural landmark of Paris, has never been known as an ideal swimming spot, but significant progress has been made to fulfill Paris’s promise of clean water for the 2024 Summer Olympics. The city’s workers have made progress in improving the water quality of the 483-mile-long river, which is a huge undertaking in itself. So, how will the river be cleaned? Paris has developed the Swimming Plan for 2024, using an underground network of pipes, tanks, and pumps to prevent bacteria from entering the river. With over $1.53 billion from the Games, improved water quality could allow both Olympic swimmers and locals to enjoy the river, but they will have to wait until next year for safe swimming access to approximately 20 designated swimming areas along the Seine.
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Napoleon the Fourth? Was there ever such an emperor? Strangely enough, the Zulus in South Africa can tell you more about this personage than an average Frenchman. The Zulus know him as Prince Imperial and, each year, they celebrate his anniversary with the local version of pomp and circumstance. And why wouldn’t they if there is good tourist money in it?
Follow the road sign and you can visit the Prince Imperial’s museum, his memorial financed by Queen Victoria, and the battlefields of the Zulu War. You’ll be retracing Empress Eugenie’s pilgrimage the year after her son’s death. If you happen to be on this road on the first Sunday in June, you can participate in a mass for his soul celebrated in French, English, and Latin.
Except for a few die-hard Bonapartists, Napoleon the Fourth may be forgotten in his homeland. For most of his short life, he was known as Prince Imperial, the heir to the French throne. In his childhood, he was the darling of the nation and, as he grew into a handsome young man, he became the treasured secret of many a young girl’s heart. He was to the French what John Kennedy Jr. was to the Americans, and it is easy to understand that his premature death at the age of twenty-three caused consternation and grief for the whole nation.
Marie Bashkirtsheff, a Russian art student in Paris, tells us about this somber day in her diary:
As I was about to leave the studio at noon yesterday, Julian called to the servant through the speaking tube; she put her ear to the tube, and she said to us with some emotion:
“Ladies, M. Julian desires me to tell you that the Prince Imperial is dead.”
I gave a cry and sat down on the coal-box. Then, as everyone began to talk at once, Rosalie said:
“A moment of silence, if you please, ladies. The news is official; a telegram has just been received. He has been killed by the Zulus; this is was M. Julian says.”
The news had already begun to spread; so that when they brought me the Estafette with the words in capital letters, “Death Of Prince Imperial,” I cannot express how much I was shocked.
And then, no matter to what party one may belong, whether one be a Frenchman or a foreigner, it is impossible to avoid sharing in the feeling o consternation with which the news has been everywhere received.
One thing I will say, however, which none of the papers has said, and that is that the English are cowards and assassins. There is something mysterious about this death: there must be both treachery and crime at the bottom of it. Was it natural that a prince on whom all the hopes of his party were fixed should be thus exposed to danger, an only son?
I think there is no one devoid of feeling as not to be moved at the thought of his mother’s anguish. The most dire misfortune, the crudest of losses, may still leave some gleam of hope in the future, some possibility of consolation. This leaves none. One may say with truth that this is a grief like no other. It was because of her [Empress Eugenie] that he went; she gave him no peace; she tormented him; she allowed him no more than five hundred francs a month, a sum upon which he could hardly contrive to live. The mother and son parted on bad terms with each other. Do you perceive the horror of the thing? Can you understand how his mother must feel?
England has treated the Bonapartes shamefully on every occasion when they were so blind as to ask the help of that ignoble country, and it fills me with rage and hatred when I think of it.”
Thus spoke Marie in her youthful grief. That she seemed well-informed of the tensions between mother and son, tells us that she was an avid reader of the gossipy newspapers which began to bloom in that era. As for England’s bad treatment of the exiled Bonapartes, she could not be more wrong. There was a solid friendship between the British royalty and the Bonapartes that was born during Victoria and Albert’s visit to France in 1855. You can read about it in The Prince of Wales in Paris: Please Adopt Me! published here. Queen Victoria figured in Prince Imperial’s life on many occasions. To begin with, when Eugenie complained about the difficulty of getting pregnant, it was her good friend Victoria, mother of a large family, who gave her a valid advice which resulted in the prince’s birth.
Several sources reveal that Victoria reserved for him her youngest daughter Beatrice as a spouse regardless of the fact that after the Second Empire’s collapse in 1870 he became an heir without a throne. Like the Bonapartes, Victoria believed that her dear Loulou would reconquer his lost empire. So did the still strong Bonapartist party in the now Republican France. Upon his father’s death in 1873, the young prince became Emperor Napoleon IV by the Bonapartists’ acclamation. It was—they hoped—only a question of time for the rightful ruler to claim his throne.
Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, or Loulou to his family, was born March 16, 1856, and spent his early days in this splendid crib donated by the City of Paris. His godparents were Queen Victoria and Pope Pius IX. As the only child, he had no one to play with and his main entertainment was watching the guard maneuvering in front of the palace windows. His love for the military was born there. Sometimes, he would also play at governing. Sitting at his father’s desk, he would seize important documents and fold them into animal forms. His adoring father would not dare to protest. As an aside, had he lived and cultivated his talent for sculpture, Loulou could have become a brilliant artist. There were many promises in the boy’s life, all of them unfulfilled.
The following six-minute video records the young man’s life from birth to death. We see the delightful child growing into a Prince Charming, we follow him to exile in England, and from there to South Africa, and witness his heroic death at the hand of the Zulu warriors. We assist at his funeral in England and see his mother’s grief. The old empress then remembers happier times.
Marie was also wrong about the conspiracy regarding the prince’s death in South Africa. On the contrary, the British Army and the government freaked out at the idea of taking responsibility for the young man’s life. They wanted nothing to do with him and it took the joibt effort of Eugenie and Victoria, with the special order from the latter, for him to be enlisted for the war in Zululand. Even at that, he was scrupulously kept away from the real action. Both women believed that the prince needed to cover himself with glory in order to succeed in his conquest of the crown. As for the man himself, he did not need any encouragement. Eager to become a worthy heir of his famous great-uncle, Napoleon I, he studiously sought danger to the chagrin of his British “baby-sitters”. He found his death in a seemingly deserted kraal where he decided it was time for a coffee break during a reconnaissance ride. In the video that follows, the event is reconstructed based on the statements given the following day by the members of the patrol.
There remain many what-if questions. What would have happened had the uncrowned Napoleon IV not lost his life that day? Would he have recovered his throne and brought back the Empire? How would that have changed France’s and, to some degree, Europe’s destiny? Queen Victoria might have hoped to establish her youngest daughter as the Empress of France, but would the French have gone for it? That remains doubtful. Would they have unanimously accepted an emperor who had been schooled in England, served in the British army and married a British Protestant princess? Questions, questions…
Photographic portraiture in the mid 19th century was a slow and expensive process until a clever man invented the carte de visite format. The inventor, André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, juxtaposed multiple shots on the same negative, forming a mosaic comparable to that of the photo booth camera. The process, patented in 1854, reduced the cost of production of each photograph, and made this kind of portraiture more popular. The visit card portrait took its final shape when each image was pasted on a slightly larger rigid cardboard bearing the name and address of the photographer.
A plate with eight portraits of Princess Lizaveta Trubetzkaya posing with different fashion accessories, 1858
At first, the portrait card was limited to the narrow circle of the aristocracy and business in the studio was slow. Then, in 1858, the emperor, Napoleon III, dropped in on his way to a military campaign in Italy. His portrait was immediately sold by the hundreds throughout Paris. Celebrities, who instantly understood the value of the process, wanted in turn to see their image immortalized in the form of a portrait-card and displayed behind the windows of the souvenir shops on the main boulevards. Political leaders, men of letters, stars of the theater and opera, clowns and acrobats, dancers and women of the demimonde, all joined in. The phenomenon, far from being confined to the capital, quickly won over major provincial cities. It spread throughout France, Europe, and later the United States. The images of Queen Victoria, President Lincoln, or Sarah Bernhardt were sold by hundreds of thousands. Following the lead, the bourgeois, too, got on board. Smaller studios opened their doors to produce family portraits.
The emperor became a loyal customer along with his son, wife, and numerous mistresses
Queen Victoria, too, posed for several portraits
So did Cora Pearl, one of the most rapacious of all leading courtesans
Performers considered the visit card an essential self-promoting tool. Here is Monsieur Léotard with his trapeze c.1865
The evolution of photography brought social changes. The living room now contained a heavy album with portraits of family members, to which were added albums containing collections of now immediately identifiable celebrities, of art, curiosities, and faraway places. Hidden in secret drawers were new gentlemen’s treasures: the first pornographic photographs.
Was it Disdéri’s assistant or the Master himself who spent considerable time creating this photo montage of ballerinas’ legs? It was, no doubt, a bestseller. A woman’s ankle was rarely seen, let alone a knee!
Fashionable legs were rather on the heavy side. Thin wasn’t in
Disdéri’s carte de visite offered a direct view of society, of its rulers, artists, and other personalities of the Second Empire. It helped to forge new connections between people and enriched social and cultural knowledge.
To visit a 19th century photography studio, click on the image below. It will take you to the Camera Museum.
The Boarding House transports you back to Paris during the enchanting Belle Époque period with a diverse ensemble of players: young and old, servants and socialites, French and foreign, polite and ill-mannered. It’s delicious, devious, and delightful. Iva Polansky writes with a style and authenticity you might wonder if she was there in another life.
NEW!
One for All
Madelon-la-Belle left Paris twenty years ago to escape her damaged reputation. She abandoned her infant daughter, Louise, in the care of her sister. Now she is back, a wealthy widow, and she plans to be a caring mother. Her idea of caring motherhood is to make Louise a high-born heiress. It only needs a little deception.This does not sit well with Louise’s father, Captain d’Artagnan of the Royal Musketeers, who finds Madelon’s plan unsound. He wants to see Louise married as soon as possible, before she becomes a slut like her mother, and has already found a good husband for her. Unfortunately, the formidable Madelon does not agree with d’Artagnan’s choice. A battle of wills ensues, involving d’Artagnan’s long-lost friends, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. A comedy based on Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel The Three Musketeers.
Fame and Infamy / Adventures of an American Maid in Paris
Otto von Bismarck, German secret police, celebrated French artists and Miss Nelly McKay of Butte, Montana, come together in this lively mystery set in 1870’s Paris.
Print or ebook, 410 pages
He was right. She was right. Together they were wrong
THE WAR OF THE TOLSTOYS
Leo Tolstoy’s last days: In 1910, newspapers around the world reported the tribulations of Russia’s most famous writer. The War of the Tolstoys tells it all.
Screenplay, 110 pages
Passion and Wit and Ménage à Trois ( a true story)
Our Divine Emilie
Two of the brightest minds of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire and Emilie du Châtelet, meet the poet Saint-Lambert in a dangerous liaison. Court intrigue, conspiracy, and betrayal are in abundance in this comedy/drama. (A Screenplay)
Follow the road sign and you can visit the Prince Imperial’s museum, his memorial financed by Queen Victoria, and the battlefields of the Zulu War. You’ll be retracing Empress Eugenie’s pilgrimage the year after her son’s death. If you happen to be on this road on the first Sunday in June, you can participate in a mass for his soul celebrated in French, English, and Latin.
Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, or Loulou to his family, was born March 16, 1856, and spent his early days in this splendid crib donated by the City of Paris. His godparents were Queen Victoria and Pope Pius IX. As the only child, he had no one to play with and his main entertainment was watching the guard maneuvering in front of the palace windows. His love for the military was born there. Sometimes, he would also play at governing. Sitting at his father’s desk, he would seize important documents and fold them into animal forms. His adoring father would not dare to protest. As an aside, had he lived and cultivated his talent for sculpture, Loulou could have become a brilliant artist. There were many promises in the boy’s life, all of them unfulfilled.
There remain many what-if questions. What would have happened had the uncrowned Napoleon IV not lost his life that day? Would he have recovered his throne and brought back the Empire? How would that have changed France’s and, to some degree, Europe’s destiny? Queen Victoria might have hoped to establish her youngest daughter as the Empress of France, but would the French have gone for it? That remains doubtful. Would they have unanimously accepted an emperor who had been schooled in England, served in the British army and married a British Protestant princess? Questions, questions…
Victorian Paris 