Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Alison McQueen (review)

Alison McQueen’s rich and beautifully-illustrated study, Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, presents a revealing new look at the role played by Eugenia de Guzmán, Napoleon III’s Spanish-born consort, in the political and artistic realms of Second Empire France. Best known today for her staunch Catholicism and fashionable crinolines, Empress Eugénie has generally been relegated to the sidelines of cultural history as a latter-day Marie Antoinette: beautiful, foreign, modish and mistrusted. McQueen sets out to prove, however, that the Empress was actively engaged in constructing a far more modern identity and “used art to define herself as empress, for the citizens of France and the international community” (4). Consulting a wide variety of archival texts, McQueen traces Eugénie’s patronage of artists and causes from her marriage to the French emperor in 1853 until her death in 1920 and makes a compelling case for reading the empress as one of the more important female figures of the nineteenth century.

Chapter one, “Shaping a Nation-State: The Politics of Piety, Charity and Education,” examines Eugénie’s early attempts to construct her political persona through the support of public charities and imperial commissions that were in turn represented in print culture and the emerging mass media. Paintings and prints of her work with maternal societies, orphanages, nurseries, hospitals and prisons established Eugénie’s efforts on behalf of France’s most vulnerable citizens and solidified her position as the nation’s matriarch while aligning her with progressive causes not often associated with imperial politics. While these charities might be considered conventionally “feminine” in their focus, McQueen insists on the empress’s active agency in working for women’s causes in a more political sense. Most notably, her life-long commitment “to improve the status of women through increased education and political autonomy” (10) is manifested throughout the Second Empire, from her work on the Fondation Eugène Napoléon (1853–1856), a boarding school for impoverished girls which she personally designed, oversaw and funded, to her collaborations with Victor Duruy on reforms for girls’ instruction primaire, enseignement secondaire, and even a proposal for a women’s medical school in Paris. As an advocate for social reform, Eugénie was an unexpectedly-powerful voice for progressive policies protecting women, children and the poor.

Chapter two, “Imperial Identities: The ‘Ornament of the Throne,’” investigates the ways in which Eugénie’s myriad portraits in various media presented a consciously-constructed persona both to the French and to the rest of the world. McQueen’s analyses of this series of images highlights the transition from Dubufe’s Portrait of Empress Eugénie (1853), which shows an unmistakably Spanish-looking subject with the medal of the Order of Maria Luisa draped across her breast, to the later Winter-halter portraits that emphasize pale porcelain skin and fashionable Parisian gowns. Where the widely-circulated public portraits present Eugénie as the idealized embodiment of the culture of luxury and consumption in Second Empire France, Mc-Queen asks us to reconsider these representations of the empress in a “passive and decorative role” (97) by examining the fascinating private images that the empress herself commissioned in a variety of exotic costumes and poses. These paintings and photographs capture Eugénie en travestie performing Otherness in “Persian, Circassian, Algerian, and Spanish costumes, in the eighteenth-century styles of Louis XV, Louis XVI, and Watteau, and dressed as Queen Marie Antoinette and an Odalisque” (129), and give us a far more complex sense of the empress’s understanding of and even resistance to her manufactured identity. In “Collecting an Imperial Persona: Collecting Practices and Intimate Spaces” (Chapter three), McQueen contends that “Eugénie was among the most important collectors of her time” (149) and used her patronage of French artists...