In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Alison Mcqueen
  • Richard Hobbs
Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century. By Alison Mcqueen. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. xx + 348 pp., ill.

On just three brief occasions (in 1859in 1865, and 1870) Empress Eugénie held direct political power as regent during Napoleon III’s foreign policy crises. Alison McQueen’s book relates how Eugénie also exercised indirect political power and influence throughout the Second Empire in ways that have hitherto been underestimated: through her constant involvement in visual culture and cultural patronage. In researching this topic, McQueen has undertaken ambitious investigation of primary sources and archival information. Existing misinformation is corrected, familiar topics are fleshed out, and new material is introduced. The documentation is supported by numerous illustrations, including photographs taken by McQueen herself. Underlying her account is an argument for the rehabilitation of Eugénie, who was widely vilified in her time and has been neglected since. When Eugénie (1826–1920) married Napoleon III in January 1853, she needed to effect a rapid transition from her Spanish past to the Parisian present. McQueen explains how she did this initially through charitable works and foundations, chiefly the construction in 1853–55 of the Fondation Eugène Napoléon, which was created to improve education and counter social injustice. McQueen then turns to the transformation of Eugénie herself into an imperial icon through public and private portraits of her, in which official portraits by Franz Xaver Winterhalter are central but where sculptural portraits and photographs also figure. She follows this with a survey of Eugénie’s collecting of works of art, including a programme of purchases from the Salon. Widening her scope to international politics, McQueen devotes a chapter to ‘International Diplomacy and Transnationalism’ and addresses projects that tend towards the imperialist: from the Musée chinois at Fontainebleau to the opening of the Suez Canal. The narrative moves finally beyond the Second Empire to Eugénie’s exile after 1871, with emphasis on her installation of Bonapartist and Catholic monuments and memorials at Chislehirst and Farnborough in southern England. A brief Epilogue takes us to her death in 1920 and to a final evaluation of her achievements in terms of her exemplary moral commitment and integrity, a unified identity underlying her public personae. This evaluation will seem problematic to some in that it emphasizes Eugénie’s personal morality at the expense of wider ideological issues concerning political values. Only once does McQueen truly criticize Eugénie’s moral stance, providing a postcolonialist critique of her acceptance of French colonialist expansion. Further debate about evaluation of Empress Eugénie, therefore, remains open, and possible developments in this sphere of evaluation also come quickly to mind, for example comparisons between Eugénie and Princess Mathilde, who was a member of the Imperial Court by virtue of being Napoleon III’s cousin and who was involved in artistic life in a way quite distinct from that of the Empress. Yet these potential debates and possible developments lie outside McQueen’s approach and run the risk of distorting its value. By concentrating [End Page 263] with strong focus and enlightening documentation on the particularities of Eugénie’s case, she opens new perspectives regarding the profound symbiosis of visual culture and the political under the Second Empire.

Richard Hobbs
University of Bristol
...

pdf

Share