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French politicians want Napoleon III returned from English abbey

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French politicians want Napoleon III returned from English abbey

The emperor was forced into exile after his defeat at the 1870 Battle of Sedan and died three years later in Chislehurst

Do not take too seriously the demand of Roger Karoutchi, a Républicain who rejoices in the title of deputy speaker of the French Senate, that the mortal remains of Napoleon III, the last Emperor of France, be repatriated from Farnborough, in Hampshire, where they have lain in an immense sarcophagus since 1879, to Metropolitan France itself. ‘He is the only reigning sovereign who is buried abroad,’ Karoutchi complains.

This business of moving Napoleon comes up from time to time, but there is no chance of it happening. The body, which is guarded by fierce Benedictine monks who have never forgotten or forgiven the murder of the Carmelite nuns beheaded by French revolutionaries in 1794, will stay put, no matter how many French senators make it their project.

I am well enough informed on this subject because I have actually visited Napoleon at St Michael’s Abbey, in what was once an isolated site in a tranquil corner of Hampshire that is forever France. The eternal rest of the late Emperor presently rocks a little to the comings and goings of the oligarchs’ Gulfstream and Boeing Business private jets, as they fly in and out of the executive airport.

When I showed up, Cuthbert Brogan, the abbot of St Michael’s Abbey, was icily contemptuous of the suggestion that Napoleon should be repatriated.

He ushered me into the chilly crypt that the Emperor shares with his wife Eugénie de Montijo and their son, Napoleon Eugene, the prince imperial. It was a somewhat torturous but momentous journey to this exile, and if Karoutchi gets his way, Napoleon will be on the move again.

After the disastrous conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war, Napoleon III and his entourage were held in captivity in Germany for several months before he was released by Bismarck and made his way to England, where he was joined by Eugenie. 

Sarcophagus of Emperor Napoleon III of France, Saint Michael's Abbey, Farnborough

They settled first at Chislehurst in Kent, where the Emperor died in 1873. He was buried at St Mary’s Catholic church. When their son, Napoleon Eugene, who would have been Napoleon IV, died in 1879, Eugenie moved the bodies to the abbey she built in their memory. She installed herself in a nearby mansion, now a Catholic girls’ school, and plotted against her enemies. 

The pair are entombed in sarcophagi donated by Queen Victoria, very similar to those of the British royal family at the Frogmore mausoleum at Windsor, with some added Catholic iconography. 

Napoleon is not a major tourist attraction, his custodians accepting visitors only once a week and attracting, one suspects by design, only a handful. The second empire has in any case been largely expunged from French historiography, although it had a lot going for it, and remains influential.

The exiled Napoleon was a rare Catholic friend of Queen Victoria. In her diaries she expressed great admiration for the Emperor.

‘If we compare him with poor King Louis-Philippe, I should say that the latter was possessed of vast knowledge upon all and every subject, of immense experience in public affairs, and of great activity of mind; whereas the Emperor possesses greater judgment and much greater firmness of purpose, but no experience of public affairs, nor mental application; he is endowed, as was the late King, with much fertility of imagination. Another great difference is that the poor King was thoroughly French in character, possessing all the liveliness and talkativeness of that people, whereas the Emperor is as unlike a Frenchman as possible, being much more German than French in character.’

For many years, French politicians have demanded that the Emperor’s remains be returned to France but Father Brogan dismissed these suggestions with contempt. 

He recalled that when Queen Victoria was criticised by the French press in 1871 for entertaining Napoleon and his wife Eugenie to dinner, she described the French in her diary as ‘incomprehensible and impertinent,’ a sentiment with which he is plainly in accord. ‘The French seem to think we are some kind of insurrectionist Bonapartist cult,’ he told me. ‘Frankly, I am more concerned with chickens, bees and bookbinding. We have to earn a living. The best we can do for the Emperor is to pray every day for his eternal soul, which is the only thing that will do him any good.’

Napoleon III presided over the industrialisation of France and the ascendance of the bourgeoisie. Elected the first president of the second Republic in 1848, then denied a second term, in December 1851 he seized power in a coup (with considerable popular support). The next year he engineered a referendum in which an implausible 97 per cent voted to name him emperor. Victor Hugo famously loathed him, and was forced into exile in the Channel Islands. The catastrophic military campaign and disaster of Napoleon’s Franco-Prussian war is pitifully rendered by Zola in his novel La Débâcle. Yet it was the second empire that ushered France into the modern age. There are still Bonapartists in France but they are a tiny, indeed almost invisible minority. The best claimant to the Bonapartist legacy, Jean-Christophe Bonaparte, 36, is the great-great-great-grand-nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and lives in London, like so many of his compatriots. He works as an investment banker and although he attended the 200th anniversary commemorations of the Battle of Waterloo, has never pretended to the imperial throne, being comfortably installed in Sloane Square.

A bizarre sidebar to this story is that after she was widowed, Eugenie hired one James Mortimer, an Englishman who had lived in Paris and was a friend of her family, to pursue a literary feud against her enemy Henri Rochefort, journalist and communard, who had conducted a vicious campaign against her husband including the allegation that their son was fathered by another man. Mortimer subcontracted the job to Ambrose Bierce, the brilliant American journalist, who was at the time living in Leamington. This he did with great style, noting among other acidic insults that Rochefort was ‘suffering from an unhealed wound. It is his mouth.’ Bierce was subsequently ‘commanded’ to the presence of the princess to receive her thanks. ‘My republican independence took alarm and I had the incivility to disobey; I still think it a sufficient distinction to be probably the only American journalist who was ever employed by an Empress in so congenial a pursuit as the pursuit of another journalist.’

So, ‘no’ would appear to be the answer to any French politicians yearning to repatriate the Imperial tomb to Paris, somewhere. Napoleon is bien tombé in Hampshire. 

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