Eugénie: the Empress & Her Empire
“No other country in western Europe possessed such a large population as France. If England was richer, her army was tiny, and in any case her ruler was a constitutional monarch. There were other absolute rulers, but their countries were not so prosperous or so centralised – the Austrian Empire was a ramshackle collection of peoples, the Russian barbarous and inefficient.From the very beginning, Eugénie was determined to help her husband, a contribution that became more and more throughout the r...eign until she began to influence policy-making. To appreciate her increasingly important role in the Second Empire, one has to understand both the political system and the emperor himself.In marrying Napoleon III, she had of course married Bonapartism incarnate. This was never easy to define as a political creed, even at the time, and historians are still unable to agree on precisely what it meant under Napoleon III. Most of them disapprove of it for being authoritarian and undemocratic and for eventually ending in disaster.MoreLess
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