Queen Victoria and the Bonapartes by Theo Aronson
"What do you say to the wonderful proceedings in Paris, which really seem like a story in a book or a play?" wrote Queen Victoria to her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, in December 1851. Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great Napoleon Bonaparte, had made himself dictator of France, stealing the limelight of the European stage to open the first act of a play that would last for more than thirty years-and in which Queen Victoria was herself to play a major role. Into the Queen's staid, predictable and circumscribed life, the Second Empire Bonapartes brought a breath of another world. Adventurers, parvenus, exotics, they radiated an aura of romanticism to which Victoria's ardent nature was quick to respond.
But in the second act came disenchantment: Napoleon's Italian war disgusted his former ally, and its end brought little improvement in the relations between the two countries. The Queen and her ministers suspected that Napoleon's former intention of avenging Waterloo had only lain dormant, and not died away. The Franco-Prussian war, however, brought a dramatic turn of fortune's wheel: in six short weeks the Empire had fallen and Napoleon had surrendered at the battle of Sedan.
In the long twilight of the tragedy, the friendship between Victoria and Eugenie developed until the Empress became almost an honorary member of the British Royal Family. The Queen's unwavering championship of the dethroned, exiled and bereaved Eugenie revealed her at her most admirable: compassionate, practical, loyal, and stubborn in her determination to put persons before politics. Eugenie herself lived to see the defeat at Sedan avenged by the Allied victory of 1918;
Theo Aronson is the author of over twenty works of royal historical biography including Grandmama of Europe, The King in Love, Napoleon and Josephine and a biography of Princess Margaret.
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